Mural Grant Selection Process
We want to be transparent and share our selection process for our 2022 mural grant. Please note that we work with a third party to help narrow down our selections so that we are not bias in anyway. We are just two artists and not a large company that has the ability to form a committee so we want to be as fair as possible! The criteria may vary year to year based on our learnings and readjustments to better align with our mission. If you were not awarded, please do not lose hope for future applications! Please see the following criteria used to make our selection this this year’s grant.
Criteria 1- Applicants by State
This year, we had an overwhelming majority of applicants from the state of Oregon! We felt that our goal of helping bring tourism to an area would be best utilized in a strong geographic area of need and appreciation from the applications received. Therefore, we narrowed down our selection to applicants from this state. Hopefully, we can try to maximize our impact by contributing to more than one community (TBD) since we will be in proximity of several applicants!
Note: “Other” indicates applicants from states that were not eligible per our grant terms as well as Non-US territories (Canada & Reservation Lands)
criteria 2 - Impact by Population
From the cities that applied within Oregon, we wanted to try to create as much of a positive impact as possible for their local economy. We always promote responsible travel and encourage those who are visiting our murals to support local businesses in the area. That said, we took a look at the populations of the applicant cities into consideration. Firstly, we had to eliminate any large metropolitan areas that already had a large number of tourist attractions and existing mural programs. Their population numbers would have skewed our selection as we are looking to help out some smaller/mid sized cities who could benefit more from a Greetings Tour mural. Next, we had to eliminate any cities that were at or below the median.
Eligible Oregon Applicants’ City Populations (2019)
Mean (Average) City Population: 22,729
Median City Population: 6,122
*Excludes large metropolitan cities such as Portland
Source: 2019 Census
Criteria 3 - Applicant Geographic Relation
From the narrowed down cities, we looked at their geographic locations in relation to all applicants in the state. Our goal was to get people to visit a location that was in fair proximity to the other applicant cities. This way, we can still try to encourage travel to these other cities. The image shows a geographic central point of the applicant cities from the most extreme north, east, south & west locations. Most importantly, this helps position us to potentially create more than one mural since we are already in the area!
Final selection
From the three criteria above, it was already narrowed down to a clear winner. However, we still wanted to make a final decision based on the economic and cultural situations of the remaining cities. We reached out to the 3 finalists to ask some follow up questions about how they envisioned the mural could best benefit their communities.
We have to look at our project on a national scale when it comes to how we can create the most value from our artwork. That’s why it’s always been a goal of ours to spread our murals across the country to create this larger scale hunt to “collect” our works just like a modern day postcard. You can see from our wall-of-fame page and past testimonials that it’s been proven to help drive tourism. It’s one of the reasons why we strive to offer the grants to states we haven’t painted in yet. The larger of a network of spread out murals we can create, the more we can build on this value that we offer as road trip incentives.
According to the latest monthly travel data report in October (US travel association), travel spending improved to 9% below 2019 levels in September, after falling for the first time since January in August. Hotel booking windows are starting to extend somewhat in October—bookings greater than one month out are now just 3% below 2019 levels and bookings within one week are 6% above Two-thirds of business travel suppliers and planners reported their companies allow non-essential domestic business travel, up from 61% in September. This is all great news and we are confident that travel may pickup greatly in 2022 with a lot of pent up demand. Therefore, we also wanted to focus on areas that appeal more to our existing demographic of followers. This means any cities within close distance to national parks and outdoor recreation!
Finally, we wanted to thank everyone who took the time to apply. We work hard to make sure we create a fair selection process. While we would love to paint a mural for all of you, there’s only so much time we have per year. Please do check back at the end of 2022 for the next available grant opportunity!