ORANGE BEACH, Ala. – Talk about your early Christmas presents.

The staff at the Coastal Art Center of Orange Beach has an early holiday glow after learning its support group, Friends of the Art, was included in the announcement of $57 million in BP grants.

To the tune of $500,000.

“It is a lot,” center Coordinator Wanda Price said. “I was not expecting it.”

The thick proposal prepared by Price and Juli Jordan brought in $500,000 to the Friends group, part of a total of $1.5 million awarded in Orange Beach. The city was awarded two $500,000 grants, one for each of the next two years.

Gulf Shores and the Alabama Gulf Chamber of Commerce were also each awarded two of the grants. Gulf Shores and Orange Beach Tourism was awarded one of the grants.

There were 350 applicants for the grants and 110 were awarded. The limit for the grants was $500,000. The Hugh S. Branyon Backcountry Trail received a $226,430. The city of Foley also received some grant money.

The awards are part of the tourism and seafood promotion grants awarded by BP as part of proposed settlement following the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster.

For the Art Center, the bulk of its grant went to help with funding to improve and expand the annual Festival of Art. Just more than $180,000 will be used for the festival for the next two years.

Other improvements will include the bayside improvements to add a stage to promote concerts, weddings and corporate events ($133,000), improvements to the Clay Studio ($79,500), expanding the Scarecrow Festival ($47,000), adding a fulltime graphics artist ($23,970), improvements to the Hot Shop ($18,500) and improvements to the Gallery ($18,000).

“I didn’t know what they were looking for so I tried to be diverse hoping they would find something they liked,” Price said. “And they chose it all.”

Much of the money, Price said, will go towards promotions of the new events and facilities at the center.

“A lot of the money is marketing, venue enhancement, bigger-name musicians, authors,” Price said of the Festival portion of the grant. “Upgrading it, but a lot of it is about marketing, billboards, advertisements, brochures, pamphlets.

A marketing position is paid for in the grant to promote the new outdoor stage and venue. Also, the hiring of a graphics artist, also in the grant, will give the center an in-house talent to help with those promotions.

“There are actually a couple of positions within the grant and because the grant involves so much marketing,” she said. “Having a paid graphics artist on staff will be a big asset to get those things up and going.

“There’s also a marketing job included in the stage monies because once that stage is there, we want somebody to keep that think booked. We really want to market it.”

Price hopes the marketing and expanding events and venues bring new visitors who’ll want to return again and again.

“Leveraging this money for the future,” she said. “If we can every get people here the first time, they will come every time as part of their vacation and these experiences. We feel like if we can generate enough buzz and get people here it’s going to feed itself for the future.”

The mood at the center is downright giddy now, but during the process of writing the grant, Price and Jordan were quite nervous.

“My thoughts were every business from Louisiana to the tip of Florida would be applying for this money and municipalities and I just thought the odds were against us,” Price said.

Plus, the pair had little experience writing grants. Most of the writing fell to Jordan while Price focused on what projects to fund and presenting those projects with graphics.

“The grant itself was very pretty,” Price said. “We’re art people. If nothing else, it’s going to look good.”

Their inexperience at writing grants was still a concern.

“Grant writing is an art form in itself and we are amateurs,” Price said. “Again, so much money and not having a professional grant writer do it added to my skepticism.

“It was very difficult and what we do know about grant writing is you want to tailor your grant to what they want to spend the money and what they are looking to fund. It was very vague in the description, it was just three or four sentences.”

It may seem like an early Christmas gift, but this gift will be giving back to the Art Center for a long time.

“I don’t know why they chose us, I’m really happy they did,” Price said. “It’s going to be a really exciting year.”