 Hi everyone. Thank you so much for joining us for our webinar today, Get to Know Grand Station with Jeremy Smith and Sarah Kennedy. Before we get started, I just have a few housekeeping items to go over, so all the callers will be muted. If you have questions, you should see a Q&A chat box on the left-hand side of your screen. So feel free to ask questions as we go along, and we'll try to address them at the end. If you lose your Internet connection, I recommend refreshing your browser and re-logging in. If you want to watch the webinar after it's over, we will be hosting it on our website, techsoup.org, slash community, slash events, dash webinar. And you'll also receive an email with a link to the recording and the presentation also. If you are on social and you want to engage with us on Twitter, feel free to tweet at us at TechSoup and use hashtag TSwebinars, and we'll try and answer questions on there as well. So as you may or may not know, we have a promotion going on right now with Grand Station, so the promotion will be running on February 6th, 7th, and 8th. If you are interested in signing up for a notification, you should see a URL at the bottom where you can enter your email. And we'll send you a reminder on February 6th to notify you when the promotion is live. So just a little bit about TechSoup before we get started, so we are in 226 countries and territories. We serve over a million organizations, so you can see here on the map that we're located in many places. We're a little bit curious to know where you guys are calling in from today, and this will give you a chance to use the chat box on the left. So if you have a second, just feel free to tell us where you're calling in from today. Okay, so we have Chicago, Connecticut. It's going really fast, but I'll try and read it. Los Angeles, Cupertino, Portland, I think we had somebody calling in from Jerusalem. So we're calling in from all over. That's really, really good to see. So thanks for sharing that. We also work with a lot of corporations, so Adobe, Intuit, Microsoft, Symantec, Grand Station obviously. So these are the corporations that help make our work possible. So here's a list of some of the organizations that we currently partner with. And I'm going to go ahead now and get the presentation started. So I'd like to introduce Jeremy Smith who's the Communication and Technology Director at Grand Station, and also Sarah Kennedy who's the Director of Online Education. My name is Seema. I'll be on the Q&A along with my colleague LaChica. So again, if you have questions along the way, we'll try and answer them. And there will be a Q&A towards the end also where Sarah and Jeremy will be answering some of your questions. So without further ado, I'm going to pass it off to Jeremy and Sarah. Thank you so much Seema. Welcome everyone. We are really glad you're able to join us today. It's always our pleasure sharing this information with you. So Jeremy, are you going to take us to the website? I am definitely going to do that Sarah. So give me one moment and I will go ahead and share my desktop. Well, while Jeremy is setting us up on Grand Station, I want to let you know that during this time we have together today, we want to show you how you can do all your research on Grand Station from identifying the right funders to building a grant seeking strategy that you and other members of your organization can use in the coming year. And so with that said, I am going to turn this over to Jeremy. Thanks a lot Sarah. And to serve one nose, Sarah will be coming back in today's tour. So I'm not going to miss her too much. And again, I am Grand Station's communications and technology director. My name is Jeremy Smith. And before we get started with the searches and really showing you everything about Grand Station, I wanted to let you know a little bit about us. Now, Grand Station itself is a set of tools and resources to help organizations identify and secure grant dollars. So Grand Station is a publishing company. Research and writing are our skill sets. And what we really do is pride ourselves in publishing current and forward-looking information about grant makers. Now all the grant maker profiles on Grand Station, both government and private, are for lack of a better description what we call in the game. Now these are profiles that reflect grant makers who are actively accepting requests or letters of inquiry from a variety of nonprofits. Now you may have used some other services where you do your research, you get hundreds of returns, leaving you with a really long list of potential funders that you have to screen through without really knowing how relevant they are to your specific needs. Now our job at Grand Station is to pre-screen grant makers. So the time you spend researching generates a list of grant makers that may truly accept a request to fund your organization's program or project. So really think of us as your backroom research team, pre-screening funders. So we're feeding you the most relevant ones for your program or project. So I'm going to go ahead and log in now so we can go ahead and see what Grand Station looks like once you log in. And if you do sign up with Grand Station through the TechSoup promotion, you'll have your very own username and password. And as we're logging in, I also want to let you know that I was looking at some of the different names that we had, different places that we had interested in learning more about how they can find funding for their specific area. And it looks as though. I'm going to go ahead and show you some of those things here in just a second. I saw that there were some people who were in Oregon. We also had a few people who were located in Michigan I saw, and California popped up as well. And also I think I even saw Wisconsin in there and even Indiana. So there are quite a few places in all these locations actually have listings within our specific database. So as you log in to Grand Station, I had to log in again because I had to use the wrong account to log in. But now I'm actually logging into Grand Station. And this is what you can expect when you do log in. So in addition to all the grant research that we have here on Grand Station, we also have two different newsletters that we are known for. And we published them on a regular basis, and they both highlight upcoming funding opportunities. You can find them in our public resources section here on Grand Station. The first is the Grand Station Insider which we are pretty well known for. This focuses on 10 distinct opportunities for U.S. nonprofit organizations. But we also have another newsletter which goes out monthly, and that's called the Grand Station International Insider. Now this features 16 international funding opportunities including a number of opportunities for our Canadian neighbors. As I mentioned, all of these two newsletters and other resources are located under our public resources section here on our website. You'll also find links to TrendTrack, Pathfinder, and even our online education section here as well. And we'll come back to these areas a little bit later in the tour and explore them and see how they can help you out. So if I click on our main logo here, that takes us back to the main page of the website. I want to go ahead and tell you about our key features here at Grand Station. So we have about three main areas here. We have Find Grantmakers, Write Proposals, and Build Strategy. Now when you click on Find Grantmakers, it will open you up to our search section where all of our different databases are located. When you click on Build Strategy, this will access tools that will help you build a solid grant seeking strategy. And then when you click on Write Proposals, you'll find step-by-step tutorials that you can use to write compelling grant proposals. Now if we go ahead and scroll down the main page here on Grand Station, it will take us to our Funding Alerts section. And these are alerts that change weekly. And with all of our different announcements here at Grand Station, this information is really carefully curated providing you with the most current information about specific grant opportunities. So taking a look at one of our most recent ones we added here, it's National Funding Alert from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Culture of Health Leaders. We'll go ahead and click on that and I'll show you what an actual profile looks like. Now all the profiles here on Grand Station are written in a narrative format. This allows us to provide you with detailed information about the grantmakers and their specific programs. So here on the left-hand side is the grantmakers profile. This includes specific areas of interest and any other kind of specific application procedures. On the right-hand side, you'll find the following information about the grantmaker which includes how or where you can visit their website. You can email the profile to yourself, any social media links that we may have, a geographic scope, direct contact information, who their primary contact is, any other specific application information, and then at the very bottom, a little date here for when this particular profile was last updated. Now what's important to note is that when we create and update these records and we are constantly going through and modifying, removing, and adding records to our database, we gather up as much information as we can from the web, from their IRS 990 form, and from other sources. And then we draft a profile made by our researchers which we send directly to the grantmaker for their review. So the question that we ask the grantmaker when they review their record is not just is this information correct, but also are we capturing not only what they will fund now, but what they plan to fund in the next year? And we do this because although it's really interesting to know what they've funded in the past, it's much, much more helpful to know what they will fund today, tomorrow, and into the future. In short, the real question is will they consider funding your organization right now? So the grantmaker reviews this profile. They often make changes. Then they send it back to us. We do a final edit, and then we publish it in our database. So this process results in grantmaker profiles that are unlike anything else you read about in the web, not even on their own website. Our researchers are really focused on publishing quality information that will make your job easier. Hence the idea of thinking of Grand Station as your Backroom Research Team. So I'm going to go back to our main site again, and the way to do that is simply clicking on the big logo at the top. I want to show you our online education section. And this is one of Sarah's expertise. So I'm going to have Sarah talk a little bit about online education at Grand Station. Thanks, Jeremy. I want to let folks know that our webinars are open to the public as well as members. So you don't need to be a member of Grand Station to take any of the webinars. You can take them individually, or you can take them as a group. If you look – oh, Jeremy, go back up. Go back up a little bit where it says free. Tell your story with data. This is a free webinar. We have free webinars from time to time that will be held on February 15th. And this is a sneak preview at a number of webinars that are coming up over the next couple of months on how to use data visualization to tell your story. Analyzing or crunching your organization's numbers, then finding the right graphs and charts and dashboards to tell your story. So you can join us for that free one for sure if you're interested in learning about data visualization. But these webinars change all the time, so you can come back and check that menu from time to time to see if there's anything there that will be of interest to you. Now I wanted to go back into some of our specific areas before we get into our specific searches. And I wanted to talk about Build Strategy a little bit, because we're going to revisit this later on. We have an interactive tool in here called Grants 2020. This can really provide you with a clear picture of where your organization's grant program is today. And more importantly, how it needs to grow in the next several years. You simply get a copy of your budget, then any potential grants you may be receiving. You enter in numbers, and it spits out a visual representation of where your funding is coming from. Then you can print that out and share it with your board. It's a really excellent tool that you can learn more about by looking at Grants 2020 once you log into GrantStation. Now in addition, we have two specific former webinars that have become tutorials called Grant Seeking Calendar and Creating Time. And they really focus on how to design and develop Grant Seeking strategies. And they work hand in hand when you're creating a strategy that works for you and your organization. And we'll come back a little bit later in the tour to the Grant Seeking Calendar actually. Now also under Write Proposals, this is where you can find those tools to help you write and submit compelling letters of inquiry, or even full grant proposals. For instance, we have Getting Started, which I'll click on right here. This outlines all the documentation you should have at your fingertips before you begin writing grant requests. We also have a really nice tutorial on how to write a letter of inquiry. This is really helpful when you're trying to consider what should and should not be included when you're putting together an LOI. Then we also have the full grant proposal. I'm going to click on that right here. It's a step-by-step approach to writing a grant, which also includes downloadable samples of award-winning grant proposals. And you can actually find them right here under Write Proposals, Award-Winning Grant Proposals. And we even have another section here called Editing and Revision, which is what you should do when you need to edit and revise your particular grant proposal. Now I want to click on the Award-Winning Proposals here just for a second. It's important that you don't underestimate the value of reviewing these award-winning grant proposals. You will get tons of ideas on how to present your own case for support by just reviewing these truly well-developed examples. And just a side note, each year a grant station runs a contest for the best-written grant proposals. The contestants are judged by a panel organized by the Grants Professional Association. And the award winners are what you see right here and store it on GrantStation.com. So at this point I think we should conduct a few really thorough searches that show how useful our site is when you're doing your grant research. So the first question that you have to ask yourself is how do you go about identifying the best grant makers to approach? Or even creating a basic grant seeking strategy for that matter? So first, here's a couple scenarios that Sarah and I came up with for today. The first is that we're seeking funding for animal welfare in the state of Minnesota. And we also want to start our second scenario an after-school program which deals with obesity in youth. So we recommend that you always begin your searches no matter where you're doing your research by doing two types of research, primary and secondary research. We'll explain what it is to them and how to do them. Now once you've gone through both of those research steps you'll really have that foundation for your grant seeking strategy. Now prior to starting any searches we recommend that you go ahead and click on Find Grant Makers and then take a look at our preparation section. In this area you'll find a project description worksheet as well as our search terms. Now the project description worksheet will really help you organize your approach, flesh out your budget, and serve as a solid foundation for your grant seeking strategy. This is a downloadable Word document that you can save any pertinent information that's related to your search too, and can then be headed off to other members of your team for further research or stored and then referenced at a later date. And again, this is simply something you can download. It doesn't take too long to figure out, but it really becomes that first step in primary research which is really the research phase. Now the second area we recommend you take a look at is our search term section. Now this is the key terminology that's used on our website and it serves as a great guide when doing your keyword research. What's important to note is what you sometimes call something is not the same thing the grant maker calls it. So you could be looking for one specific search term and you're finding nothing and you don't know why your particular area isn't being funded. It might just be as simple as using the right terminology because sometimes someone will call it one thing when the grant maker calls it something else. Now to use this section currently, you hit Ctrl F or Command F on your keyboard at the very bottom of your screen or based on your browser. It'll pop up a little search box right here. And then in this search box you'll enter in a keyword which will let you know what category you have to search through. So it'll basically take your keyword and translate it into the same thing that the grant maker calls it. So in our situation using our example of animal welfare, let's go ahead and type in animal welfare. And as you can see, it jumps to that instance of animal welfare. But animal welfare according to all of our research also includes animal shelter programs. It includes humane societies, no kill philosophy programs. And even veterinary programs too. So all of those are included under animal welfare. So since animal welfare is what we want to do, we'll make a note of animal welfare which is located under the main area of environment in animals. We make a note of this on our project description worksheet. Then we can go on to doing specific searches. So I'm going to go ahead and click back to top. It takes us back to the top of the webpage. And I'm going to go ahead and begin our grant search which is also known as primary research by moving into our US state government section. So if I go ahead and click on search right here, and there's lots of different ways to navigate GrantStation. So if you get confused, you can always come back and watch the video again and learn about how you can access things. But note that you can always click on search, or you can click on find grant makers to locate all of our databases. So as I said, we're going to go ahead and start with our state government section. And I'm going to click on that right here. And we're going to choose our specific state for our search. And in this case, it's going to be Minnesota. Now GrantStation itself offers listings of US federal and state funded agencies, state funded agencies, and state departments for each of the 50 states and a district of Columbia that offer financial and technical assistance programs. All of these links that you see right here will take you directly to that agency or department's pages which deals specifically with grants or funding. And that's what you can find in the state section. Now for the next step in our primary research, we can take a look at what's offered by the US government. And that's in our US federal section. And to access that, we can simply click on find grant makers, and then we can go ahead and click on US federal. And then from here, we can go ahead and search our federal grants and loans. Now this particular area acts as a front end to Grants.gov. So all the information that you can find at Grants.gov is being filtered through this in a much easier to use and tighter interface. You can search through this by looking at eligible applicants, funding agencies, areas of interest, funding opportunity, and even using CFDA number along with using specific keywords for research. So you could go ahead and start by changing your eligible applicants to let's say nonprofits for the 501C3 status. We could choose specific agencies from the drop-down list, or we could even choose a specific area of interest. And again, these areas of interest are based on those earlier ones that we were looking at when we were doing research terms. Then we can add in specific keywords. So we'll go ahead and type in animal welfare here as an example. And once we type in our keyword, we click on submit. Then we can see that we have nothing that really showed up. And that's okay because this particular information is really important to collect because when you apply to private funders, you can say that you've done your federal and state research. And in case in this example we didn't find anything that worked for our specific need, we can specifically say at this time there are no federal programs that can help us with our need. That way the private funder knows that you've done your homework, which speaks to your credibility as an organization. And that private funding is the only option right now. And this does happen. You won't always find federal funding, and you won't always find state-based funding. And occasionally you may find things. And that's why it's important to look just to see what's available. And just as an example to show you what it would look like, we'll go ahead and click on this opportunity right here from the Fish and Wildlife Service to Scott River Water Trust. What you receive is then a breakdown of everything available on Grants.gov, including the contact, when it was posted, description of it, and then a link to get more details and apply for it specifically through Grants.gov. And all of this is available on GrantStation. So it really gives you sort of a one-stop shop for doing all your grant research needs on a federal and state level. And that is something that really separates us from our competition out there as well. So once you've completed your federal research, which we will say we just did, we can move on to the U.S. Charitable Database, which we'll go ahead and click on. From our search section, we'll click on U.S. Charitable. Now the U.S. Charitable Database is where you will find thousands of funder profiles including independent, family, community, and corporate foundations, corporate giving programs, faith-based grant makers, and basically any associations we have listed with grant-making programs. Now all these profiles are searchable by Geographic Scope. They're also searchable by areas of interest, type of support, name, and by keywords. So here in the content area on the left-hand side, which is right over here, this is where you'll find a guide to help you through the research process. Now on the right-hand side is a navigation area where you can enter in your specific criteria. So here in Geographic Scope, we can choose a search for global grant makers giving to U.S. organizations. Or for now, let's go ahead and choose National Grant Makers, and then choose a specific state. So as we go ahead and click the boxes, you'll see our results automatically update. I'm going to add a specific state. And again, our focus was going to be on Minnesota. So I'll go ahead and click on that one right now. Then as this updates, you'll notice how each criteria is listed at the top as we make our selection. And with each new selection, the results are instantly displayed over here on the left-hand side. We also want to point out that you can click on and off of each option, so you can be more creative and thoughtful in your searches. Now as each new criteria is added or subtracted, it will broaden or narrow the funding opportunities being displayed. So this initial process of choosing our Geographic Scope allows us to cast our net as wide as possible, combining national opportunities with state or region-based ones to really see just how broad our grant universe is. Now once we start selecting other criteria, our results begin to narrow the funding opportunities that are a perfect fit for our needs. And with that, we're now ready to select our first area of interest. And based on our research, we know that if we go down here to area of interest and looking at our project description worksheet, we'll take click on Environment and Animals, and then we'll go ahead and click on Animal Welfare. And just in case we're not sure what each of these areas qualifies for, we can simply click on the little I next to the name. They'll give us a breakdown of what topics are included in that section. So you don't even really have to go into the search terms area, but it's just really handy and lets you organize yourself as you move forward. But you are welcome to come in here and just start clicking on boxes left and right as well. But if you have a more thoughtful search, you'll get better results in a much shorter amount of time. So we'll go ahead and click on Animal Welfare at this point. And once we click that, we see our results have updated to 63 specific results. And we're going to go ahead and add another criteria at this point. And we're going to go down to a specific type of support for our need. And right here under type of support, we're going to go ahead and click on General Support. Now in this section, you can also find links for emergency funds, equipment, capital or building funds, challenge grants, infrastructure, internships, and kind gifts. You can really narrow everything down to the specific type of support you're looking for. So we'll go ahead and click on again General Operating Support at this point and see what our results are. So now we're looking at 28 specific results. And if we take a look at our specific search criteria, we're searching within the U.S. and Minnesota, our specific area of interest is Animal Welfare. And our type of support is General Operating Support. Now if we want to narrow this a little bit more, we can go ahead and remove the national portion from the geographic search area. And we'll go ahead and click that minus button right there. This will focus on those funders who specifically give within Minnesota. I'd recommend that route just to get the strongest pension funders up front. So now we've narrowed this down to eight specific results. Now I also want to point out right here towards the bottom of the page, we also have the keyword search. And this is a really powerful way to narrow your searches, but I really suggest you exercise caution using this area so you don't narrow your searches down too much. Because remember, the keywords you enter are not necessarily the words the funder uses. For example, if you add rescue to the criteria, we'll go ahead and type that in right now and then click on submit. We've narrowed ourselves out of any results at all completely. So this is a really good possibility of actually losing and missing out possible funding opportunities by using those specific keywords that don't match what the funders name it. So let's go ahead and remove that from our search options here. And again we just click the minus sign next to the name under keyword. And now we're back to eight specific results that we can go through. I also want to point out when you have lots of results, you can also show multiple items per page. You can show 10 per page, 20, 50, or even 100 per page if you want. And then looking at the actual results that pull up, you have the name of the grant maker followed by their specific geographic scope. And then if they have a specific geographic focus as well, this allows you to quickly go through and see if something works within your specific area. So let's say the COPS Family Foundation which gives specifically within Minnesota which is great, but their emphasis is on the Twin Cities area. Well I'm not in a Twin Cities area. So I may want to go ahead and look at something else and come back to this one a little bit later on. It gives you a way to quickly categorize and know what will work for you saving you time as you're doing your grant research. Now if your organization is also working in a few states, you have the option of selecting another state to broaden your search at any point as you're doing your research. So let's say that this Animal Welfare Organization is working in a tri-state area, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa. So we can go ahead and add those states and pull up additional funders. And just as a quick note, we currently have eight results right here at the very top of the page. So let's add those extra states here. So I'm going to go ahead and scroll down and I'll start by adding Wisconsin. So now we're up to 11 specific results. And now let's go ahead and add Iowa. So we'll scroll down again and click on Iowa. So we've gone from 8 results to 10 results, and now to 14 specific results. So I hope you see as we add more and a broader geographic scope, more options in that area, we get more results. As we add in specific areas of interest and types of support, we can narrow our results down to our specific need. And you're also going to want to do searches and look for funders who might be a bit outside the box. For example, in Minnesota, you might want to research some vendors, such as whoever you bank with, or the local or regional utility company. So at this point though, let's turn to our second search because we do have limited time today. And that's of an after-school program that actually educates children regarding obesity. So we're going to go ahead and start by clearing out everything. So it's going to remove all of our search criteria. And a question may have come up. I just want to go ahead and address that right now. People have said, well, how do I save my searches? What's important to note is I mentioned earlier, we're constantly going in and modifying and changing our specific results available. One day you may have 20 results, the next day you may have 25 results. What's the most important thing to save actually is your search criteria. And if you copy your search criteria and put that on your project description worksheet, you'll always be able to come back and see what was the best fit for that search that you were looking for. And then you can always email a specific profile to yourself if you find that grantmaker that's a perfect fit for your specific need that day. So you have two different ways to move about this. But I strongly encourage you to save your search criteria and then revisit that right up until the point you're ready to apply because new and different funders will pop in there on a regular basis. So we're going to go ahead and start on this search with a national search. So we'll click on National Grantmakers to give across all states. And then we can broaden our search as much as possible by choosing a specific state. So let's just go ahead and grab New York at this point. So looking at my keyword research that I did earlier today, I noted that I have two good options in the health and wellness category. So if I go down to areas of interest, when I go into specifically health and wellness, I want to go ahead and click on two specific areas. The first is healthy eating and nutrition. And the other is healthy lifestyles and obesity prevention. So starting with healthy lifestyles and obesity prevention, I'm going to go ahead and click on that particular box right here. So now we're looking at 51 results. I'm going to go ahead and add another search term. And that's the one right next to it, healthy eating and nutrition. And you can check and add as many boxes as you like. But I hope you see it does narrow your results down. So if you narrow yourself out of results, you'll want to take a step back, maybe remove a search term, and see what's available before you really drill down into one or two specific results for your specific need. So at this point we're going to add a new area, and that's actually right below areas of interest. It's our targeted population section. This allows us to take a specific targeted population and include that into our search so we can focus on say Alaskan natives or immigrants and refugees, potentially minorities, seniors and the aging or veterans, or in this case, children and youth. And that's our focus for this particular search. So now we're looking at 18 specific results. Again, we can go ahead and narrow this down by searching only within one state. So remove USA from our geographic scope. And now we're looking at 11 specific results. We can display them all on one page at once by changing our items per page to 20. Then we can quickly go on this list and see what works for us. And we can see right off the bat, if our community doesn't have an Aldi store, then we don't want to go ahead and take a look at the Aldi Smart Kids program. If we don't have an Anthem Foundation in our specific area, we probably don't want to look at that one either. If we don't have a Cathay Bank Foundation in our specific area, we probably don't want to look at this one either. So we've already quickly narrowed ourselves out of three specific grants that wouldn't work for us just based on the information available on this quick results page. So this is really an excellent number that we can go through and really see if the profiles are a match to our specific mission or project. And again, you can start your searches in any order and add or subtract criteria to refine your search results. Now in addition to these US based grantmaker listings, we also have three other unique areas to search through. We have our international and Canadian charitable databases along with our Canadian government section. So I'll go ahead and click on our international charitable at this point. This convenience grant listing is beneficial to organizations working outside the US or based outside the US. So let's go ahead and I saw earlier that we do have someone who is joining us today from Jerusalem. So we'll go ahead and start by choosing our geographic scope. And in this case it's Global Grantmakers. And we'll go ahead and choose a specific continental grantmaker in this case and we'll focus on Asia to begin with. And then from there we can drill down to a specific national grantmaker. It gives them a specific country. And in this case we're going to go ahead and choose Israel. And then we can narrow this even further by adding in a specific keyword or even choosing funders that only give within a specific national location. So say we're focusing on health as our big focus. So we'll enter in our keyword of health here and click on Submit. We can see our results are down to 206 results. We can further narrow this down by sort of removing our geographic scope and focusing only on let's say Israel as our big focus and see our results start dropping down. So we can quickly narrow it down to our specific need based on that magical keyword. Now also our Canadian database which I'm going to show you now has profiles of grantmakers that provide support within Canada and also provide support globally as well. So let's go ahead and start off with national grantmakers who give across all provinces. So we'll see everything we have available there. Then we can narrow this down to provincial grantmakers who give in specific regions. And let's say we're focusing on British Columbia for this search. And then we can go one step further by adding in a specific area of interest. Let's say we're focusing on health again. So from our drop-down menu we'll click on health, wellness, and general. Just a quick note, every single one of our main categories has a general option. So if you're not sure of the exact specific search term and you don't want to go in and find that right search term, although I strongly encourage you to do that, you can always just look in the general category and see everything related under that main general topic. And we can even further narrow this down and say we're focusing on, you know, just a target population again and just children and youth. And we can go ahead and click that box as well. And again, we can keep narrowing our results to our specific need. In fact, we can focus on just British Columbia if we wanted to. But again, we have limited time today so I can't spend all my time just doing searches left and right. But one other area I did want to show you is we have listings for national and provincial funded agencies, provincial funded agencies, and excuse me, for provincial departments and provincial funded agencies along with federal funded institutions will support each of the different provinces of Canada. And you can also find all those links within our Canadian government grants and loans section. So all of this information here, all of this is considered a part of our primary research. And as we've gone through this, we've probably developed a really big, extensive list of potential funding sources. Now as I said previously, in the Build Strategy section here at Grant Station, we have a step-by-step tutorial that really walks you through this process called Creating a Grant Seeking Calendar. This will help you with the next steps which we also refer to as secondary research. And at this point, Sarah will step in and let you know how this can be done. Thanks, Jeremy. So Jeremy showed you earlier where you begin your research by filling out the Project Description Worksheet. So now you have a list of possible funders. In this section, I'm going to show you the Decision Matrix. This is a tool to build a grant seeking calendar. The Decision Matrix will help you establish an annual grant seeking calendar that will keep your grant seeking focused on those programs and projects that need funds. Establishing basic criteria for judging whether a grant opportunity is worth your organization's investment of time and energy. That's a true time saver. So before you begin to create a grant seeking calendar, you'll need to develop an analytical tool that can help you make decisions about which grant makers you should pursue and which ones you should put aside. This tool does not cost any money. It just takes a little time. So you can refer to this tool as the Decision Matrix. This matrix can be applied for requests for proposals or grant application guidelines. You can use Excel or Smartsheet or any other spreadsheet program. The matrix is comprised of rows and columns and relies on simple addition and subtraction to reach a conclusion or a score. The matrix will establish a set of criteria, that's the rows, each assigned a weight, that's the columns, which when applied will influence your decision on whether to add this particular grant maker to your grant's calendar. Now this is somewhat subjective but less so than you might imagine if you give careful thought to each criteria, the weight it carries, and the final score. It will look something like this, and Jeremy has a sample one up here that you can use. And by the way, you have access to all this information, so I'm just going to show you right now. We got a total score of 37. So for whatever reason you want to set any grant makers you identify with a score of 34 or lower, set those aside for now and now you're going to continue on with ones that have a higher score. So and if this seems complicated you can see this tutorial. We provide you with all the steps in building a grant seeking calendar. So then you have your list of say out of 15 funders, you have a list of about eight funders that have a score of 37 or higher. Now you can start creating a calendar, and this calendar is an organic document. You can build this calendar going 12 to 18 months out, and it's always going to be changing as the deadlines come and go. But this grant seeking calendar you can share with your co-workers, with your executive director, the resource development committee, your board of directors, everyone involved in the fundraising arm of your organization. This just works really, really well as the feedback we have gotten from many, many organizations. So after you've come up with a final list, you have drafted your grant strategy. However, that's not the end of your secondary research. You still have more research to do. You'll want to generate questions. You'll be asking the grant maker to help you determine if they're really the best fit for your project. So in this section you'll just go to additional research and you'll want to go to the grant maker website. We also have the IRS Form 990. Now GuideStar offers this free service. We have a link right there. You go to guidestar.com. You create a username and password for yourself. It's free. And then you can do your research on where the money has been given in the past, how much, and to who. So that's a really, really good resource. We also have the Ask a Funder here. And you can use this as a guide for the appropriate questions that you can use when you contact a funder. And we also have a little article here on in-kind gifts where you can learn to leverage those in-kind donations in your grant awards. So with that we even have more information we'd like to share with you that are public resources. And Jeremy do you want to show folks that section? Yeah, I'll try to fit this in pretty quickly. And again we only have a limited amount of time today and we'll try to get to your questions as well. But I wanted to show you under public resources which does not require membership at all. We have quite a few really handy areas. The first one I want to show you is Pathfinder. Now as I mentioned earlier if you're interested in learning more about developing yourself in the Grants arena you should utilize this part of the Grants station website I suppose. It's really here to help develop your career path as a Grants professional. Now this library of resources is covering the areas of Grants research, writing, and management as well as strategic planning. And to get started you can just browse through all the different listings that we have, search through the specific listings, or even use our find your path interactive tool to get a customized curriculum for your specific learning plan. And this is available to you simply by visiting GrantsStation.com. Another important to note about Grants station is that we're very interested in what's happening and what are the trends that are occurring all over the philanthropic world. And to that end we have our trend track site which I'll go ahead and go to right now. Now our goal is really for you to make the most of your Grants thinking time and to get the most from your grant requests. So as we perform research for all of our grant listings and talk with nonprofit organizations we get exposure to new practices and ideas. And we share those with you through trend track. See the Grants thinking is our semi-annual report of survey results from our Grants thinking community. GS Insights is our blog that features the thoughts and observations of our staff, CEO, and guest writers. And then Talk 2020 is our podcast which focuses on significant trends in philanthropy as well as highlighting specific grant makers addressing various issues. Now the important thing to remember though, as you're going about and doing your research and as you're looking for funding for any kind of project, it's always important to have some kind of a grant strategy. So a strategic approach using primary and secondary research along with Grants stations tools really allows you to apply your time words most effective and efficient in your search for funding. So with that I think we are right on the money, Sarah. And I'm sure we probably have a couple of questions that we should try to fit in before we have to sort of call it a day, but what you think we should go ahead and begin with. And I can even probably fit in an extra search if you think it might be helpful. Okay. Well Linda says, can you import search results into an Excel spreadsheet? That's a really good question. And currently at this point you can't export them directly into an Excel spreadsheet. There is a way to get the information in and we're currently experimenting with a quicker way to do that. But the best way to get the search results in is to really just copy and paste. The great thing is is everything follows a basic database structure within our website. And I know I'm getting a little too technical. But basically if you select it and do a copy and paste, it will copy and paste directly into Excel. But the best way again, I'm going to encourage you to do this, save your search criteria, and when you're ready to apply, email the profile directly to yourself. Excellent advice. Denise asks, so does one subscription cover the entire org? How do multiple people log in and share the info? Does every individual need a subscription? How about if I field that Jeremy? That is all for you, Sarah. So when you purchase a GrantStation membership, you are purchasing access for one username and password. However, we understand many organizations are small and we don't have any problem if you want to share your login credentials with one other person in your organization, but you can't share it with everyone in the organization. So if you have a number of people in your organization that want a membership, you can buy through TechSoup, through this upcoming promotion, multiple memberships. You just put two GrantStation memberships in your cart or three if that's how many you would like. So you do have that opportunity. Mary asks, do GrantStation and the Foundation Directory include the same U.S. charitable grant makers, or does one organization have a bigger database of charitable grant makers than the other? I love this question because it does come up often. And it's one of those great questions because we both have Foundation Center and GrantStation are two different organizations, and we approach research in two very different ways. One thing that's really important to note about what's here on GrantStation and what really separates us from other organizations that archive and collect its information is everything that we have listed in our database is currently active and accepting letters of inquiry or unsolicited requests. So it's one thing to have, let's say you have 25,000 results. That's great. But how many of those expired in 2007? How many of them are no longer accepting requests as of 2014? How many of them are only giving to local organizations and won't accept your request? That's time you have to spend researching. We take care of that for you here at GrantStation. What you find listed is what's currently accepting unsolicited requests or letters of inquiry. Okay, we have a couple of really good questions. Lisa asked, help me justify the cost to my boss. Besides the ease of searching, what sets GrantStation apart from Grants.gov? Well, we're so much more than Grants.gov. But Jeremy, I'll let you answer that. But Grants.gov specifically? Is that an example? Okay, well, yeah, besides the ease of searching, what sets GrantStation apart from Grants.gov? Well, okay, just one quick thing. Grants.gov is a free resource that you have full access to. You don't have to pay money to access Grants.gov because that's provided by the government itself. The good problem with Grants.gov is it's a little complicated to deal with. And at times you can get lost within it. What we provide is a front end for accessing Grants.gov. So you can access Grants.gov without Grants.ation completely. Grants.gov is an excellent resource, and it's basically how you apply for federal grants is through Grants.gov. So I think you probably meant someone like Foundation Center or another organization that provides specific grant resources. And to answer that question, the better way to think of it is we provide research within the areas of state-based funding and also federal-based funding as well as actively accepting requests grant listings is what we have. And that's what really sets us apart on top of our other areas that we have that walks into the process of writing grants and then how to build strategy and along with our interactive tools on top of that. So that really separates us. And with this current promotion with TechSoup, it's pretty much the lowest you're ever going to find a membership. So $99 is a pretty good price for getting access to all this information. Well, and Mary asked, is the grants seeking calendar part of the special deal offered on February 6th, 7th, and 8th? And we should reiterate, Jeremy, that when you purchase a Grants.ation membership, you have access to all this information to find grant makers, build strategy, write proposals. The only additional fee are the Grants.ation online webinars which are open to the public as well as members. That's your only additional cost if you want to join in a 90-minute live event. Otherwise, you have access to everything here on the website that we just pointed out. And one thing to keep in mind is we always, Sarah and I have been doing this tour for a long time and there are so many different areas of Grants.ation we can tell you about, but we have a finite amount of time to do that. So we are highlighting just the ones we think are the most beneficial for getting in, doing a search, putting together a grant strategy and moving forward. But there are so many other resources that we have and that we highlight once you're a member of Grants.ation. So we are cherry picking the ones we think will be the most beneficial today but there is a lot more that we have under the hood. And if you do want to do a little bit more research and you are still not quite sure, you can simply take a look at the member benefits when you log in to Grants.ation or even just go to the Grants.ation website, don't even log in. There is a member benefits option. You click on that. It shows you all the different member benefits you receive as a member of Grants.ation. Okay, we're coming to near the end, but we have time for just a few more quick questions. Norma asks, is this membership ongoing or is it a yearly membership fee? And Norma, this is a yearly membership fee. It's $99. It's a special promotion for one year. So that's one username and password to access the Grants.ation website. So that is a yearly fee. And Karen asks, is Grants.ation appropriate for a new nonprofit who has never received a grant before? You betcha. Jeremy, why don't you tell her some of the resources she might be able to access? Oh Karen, it's almost as if we were built for you. That's the best thing about Grants.ation. So if we go ahead and take a look at our U.S. Charitable really quickly. And again, we're going to have a lot of time. I'm going to try to do this really fast. But let's go ahead and just do national grant makers. You have across all states. And let's say, we don't really know a lot about your specific organization, but I'm doing a quick and dirty search here. This is something Sarah taught me, which I really love. We can go into specific types of support. And which area would I want to look in, Sarah? This is one that you always know exactly where to go, and I always forget slightly. Sorry, I was answering a question. What are we looking for here? She's new, so what's the type of support we want to start for her to look under? It's the infrastructure, right? Startup, that's right. Startup. So right here, we're clicking Startup Funding, and we're just looking nationally. That's all we're looking for. So there, 123 results. This is like, okay, I'm brand new. What do I do? Okay, well now let's add specific areas of interest to our startup funding that we need. Grants.ation, if you are new to grant seeking, and you have not received any grants before, Grants.ation is probably going to be a boon for you. You could simply just go through Build Strategy and then go through our Getting Started, which is how to put together everything you need for applying for grants, how to write a letter of inquiry, which is that first step when you're talking to an organization that will provide you with funding, and then a step-by-step grant proposal of how to write it with downloadable examples for each category. So Grants.ation is probably very appropriate for your needs. Okay, well we have just lots of questions. Unfortunately, we'd have to extend it another hour to answer them all. So hopefully this has provided a good deal of information. This webinar is being recorded, and so you'll have time to review it as well before the sale comes around. I really want to thank everyone for joining us today. I want to thank TechSoup for hosting this. It's always our pleasure sharing this with folks. And with that said, Seema, I'm going to turn this back over to you. Thank you so much, Jeremy and Sarah, for presenting today. I know you guys had a lot of questions, so we're going to do our best to answer them after the webinar. All of you guys should be receiving an email and everything will be posted to the blog. So before we go, it's really helpful for us to know in terms of content, if you enjoy the presentation. So if you want to just chat one thing that you learned in today's webinar in the Q&A section, that would be really great to hear if you have a couple extra seconds. And then after the webinar is over, you're going to get a post-event survey where we have a few questions. I think there's about 10 questions on there. Again, your feedback really helps us dictate content for the future, so any feedback that you have for us is extremely helpful. We are on social media, so Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. If you want to stay up-to-date on anything that's happening in terms of blog posts or upcoming webinars, feel free to follow us on social media where we post all of that information. We have a blog that we update a couple of times a week, so we try to post a lot of useful tips and things like that over there. So you can find that at blog.techsoup.org. And we have another webinar that's coming up actually this Thursday called Build a Grant Writing Framework for Success. So we'll be going into more detail about grant writing. So if you have the time and are interested, that's happening this Thursday. And then on 2.13 and 2.15, we have a couple of QuickBooks webinars that are happening, so that's also on our website. Again, the Grand Station promo, I know we talked about it in a lot of detail already, but it's $99, February 6th, 7th, and 8th. There's the URL at the bottom. If you want an email notification, we can send that to you so you don't forget about it. And just again, I want to thank Jeremy and Sarah, the presentation was super detailed and helpful, so I hope you guys really enjoyed it. And then also to our webinar sponsor, ReadyTalk. So yes, thank you all for joining and we hope to see you on Thursday.