 Hi everyone. Thank you so much for joining us today for our webinar, Capacity Building Foundations, Creatively Using Technology to Solve Problems. Before we get started, I just want to go over a few housekeeping items so just so you guys know, all callers will be muted. If you have questions, you should see a chat box on the left-hand side of your screen. You can ask any questions that you have along the way, and we will try to answer them as we go along, or towards the end when we have a Q&A with the presenters. If you lose your Internet connection, you can just refresh your browser, or you can reconnect using the link that was emailed to you. If you have to drop off, or you want to watch the webinar again, it's going to be posted on our website at techsoup.org slash community slash events dash webinars. You'll also receive an email with the presentation, the recordings, and the links. If you're on social media and you want to send us a tweet, you can tweet at us at TechSoup using hashtag TSWebinars. But like I said, we're going to be paying more attention to the Q&A that's within the Reddit Talk platform. So just a little bit about TechSoup. We are located in 236 countries and territories. We work with technology partners like Adobe, Intuit, Microsoft, Symantec. They help make our mission possible, and we're able to provide technology solutions for either discounted or donated. So just to make sure you guys can hear me, I want to ask you guys where you're calling in from. So if you want to just try out the chat box and tell me where you're calling in from, and I can read out a few of them. All right, so we have San Diego, Cedar, Michigan, Jacksonville, Florida, Chicago, Minneapolis, LA, Indiana, great, Boston, so a lot of Midwestern folks. In addition, Dubuque, okay, we have people from Dubuque who are tuning in, which is great, which leads me to the next slide which is a little bit about TechSoup. So we offer several products, and if you want to find out which products that we offer, you can just go to TechSoup.org to get more information about the products that we offer. And now I would like to introduce our presenters for today. So with us we have Katie Decker. She is the Grants Management Coordinator for the Community Foundation of Greater Dubuque. She's been with the Foundation for five years, and she manages the grant processes of the Community Foundation. It's eight affiliate foundations, and it's two corporate grant making processes. She handles all of the donor advice and endowment payouts through the Foundation, and works with the scholarship funds through the Foundation as well. And then we also have Faye Finnegan, who is the Director of Donor Relations. She works to connect community members in the Dubuque area with causes they care about. She came to the Foundation from Lawrence College where she served most recently as Internships and Career Services Coordinator, and previously as Development Director. So I'm going to go ahead and pass it off to Katie, I believe. Thank you, Seymour. Well, welcome everyone to our capacity building webinar. We're happy to be with you today. Just for Katie and I to have an understanding of now we know where you're out there at, can you tell us a little bit about the audience we're talking about? We're going to have a few questions for you. We're wondering what the size of your community is that you are living in. The Dubuque, Iowa, where our Foundation is, is in a community of about 55,000 to 60,000, and that then involves our affiliates, which would be a larger number, and those are primarily rural areas. So we're just looking at what kind of community size you're in. We're also wondering if your organization does offer capacity building grants. If not, maybe you don't even know what those are, but we will be talking about capacity building in this webinar and exploring it. So just seeing what's out there, how many people do offer capacity building grants. You may not be sure if you don't offer them in your organization. And then we're interested in does your organization fund technology, requests from nonprofits. We are able to do that, so we're wondering if others do that. So think about where you fall into line with that. So you're probably wondering why Community Foundation, why are we posed to offer technology opportunities for people. We think that as a Community Foundation, we are able to create partnerships. A couple of reasons why we think that is we have flexible resources. We have staff that we can work together with, Katie and I are a classic example of donor relations and grant making. We have funding possibilities for organizations to apply for. We feel like we have credibility in our community. And a couple of reasons why we feel we have credibility is our organization has close to 100,000 in assets. We are known for bringing community leaders together to tackle an issue. That doesn't mean the issue remains with us. The hope is that as community leaders come together, they see where it fits in. Is it in the school system? Is it within a healthcare facility here in town? Is it with a youth program or a poverty program? And we know that and have been recognized for moving the needle on some of the issues that we've tackled. So that's why we believe that we have some credibility and that helps. When it comes to the partnerships piece, we have multiple colleges and universities in our town. So we tapped into those. We work very closely with over 200 nonprofits in our community. So they're very familiar with us. It might be through our 24-hour online giving program. We offer endowment toolkit workshops. We offer board workshops so people in the area know about us. And then we obviously, particularly that's my role, is working with donors and connecting with them, helping them be philanthropic in a manner that works best for them around their causes and around tax opportunities that will be helpful to them. So that's how we connect our donors and our nonprofits together. And this comes back to our mission, which is to inspire giving and strengthen our community. So the title of our presentation is Capacity Building. So we thought we may want to get a definition to define that a bit further. We define capacity as a wide range of capabilities, knowledge, and resources that nonprofits need to be effective. So we use CFGD's annual grant-making funds as capacity-building funding for local nonprofit organizations. In that program, locally known as the Community Impact Grants, we fund four categories. Training and Development, proposals that build the staff and board capacity at nonprofits through training, education, and professional development opportunities. The second is Collaboration and Coaching. Those are proposals that build collaborative efforts with other local nonprofits, community groups, and peer organizations. Research and Planning are proposals that support research, data collection, assessment, and planning to support organizations in understanding community needs and determining their best strategies. And Operational Strategy. These are proposals that support building the operational capacity within the organization to do their good work. So before the development of Grants for Tech, which is the program we will highlight in this webinar, the operational strategy piece of this program is where we were seeing the most of our technology requests. So on to Grants for Tech. Grants for Tech is a program that we've been facilitating in Dubuque for about three years now. It's based off the successful implementation of a program known locally as Grants to Green that funded energy efficiency improvements for nonprofits. This program ran from 2014 to 2016 and granted over a million dollars to local nonprofits. Grants to Green was a two-step process with a research phase and then an implementation phase. The program had demonstrated results in providing increased energy efficiency for nonprofits and in turn saved them dollars on their energy costs that were put back into the organizations in their overall mission. We had donors and national foundations come around the table to fund the pilot of Grants for Tech which aimed to bring technology resources and efficiency to local nonprofits. The Grants for Tech program is a partnership locally with the University of Dubuque and the Community Foundation. A class of junior and senior level information and technology students at UD use this opportunity as their years project. Nonprofits apply in the fall to be selected for the Grants for Tech cohort for the year. They share some of their technology concerns and their willingness to prioritize technology in their upcoming years. The students complete a grant selection process using a rubric and our online grant system to select which nonprofits they will work with for the year. Once the nonprofits are selected, the students form working groups and perform assessments of the nonprofits' current technology. They're looking at their current hardware and software, uncovering training needs, and they're really discussing what the technology level is in each of these nonprofits. They discuss with the executive director and staff what technology needs they have, whether it's software, training, hardware, etc. Once the students have met with the nonprofit and assessed their technology, they're researching the best options for nonprofit upgrades. This includes connecting nonprofits to resources such as TechStube to make sure they are accessing the best value and selection of their purchases. Students are putting all of this research into a report that they will then present to the nonprofit organization. The students are instructed to think about this with a three to five year scope of work and then rank the upgrades in order of importance so the nonprofit can use the assessment information to form a three to five year technology upgrade plan. Once the nonprofit has had time to share the assessment report with their board and their staff, they decide what they would like to pursue and complete an implementation grant request. If the nonprofit would like to continue their relationship with RUD students, they are invited to assist in the implementation of the technology upgrades. This is ranged from helping the nonprofit install new computers and printers to assisting them in a move to an online email platform or an online backup program. Once the nonprofit has completed their project, they are invited to share their learnings and outcomes of the project through a short grant follow-up. To date, we have been able to deploy almost $100,000 to local nonprofits for their technology upgrades including hardware, software, and training resources. We have increased technology in 17 organizations who now have three to five year technology plans to work with going forward in their organization. Our average grant size has been about $6,000 and this is a matching grant program so the investments are even larger. So this comes back to the building capacity conversation. So to tie a ribbon around what we've been doing, we want to look at all the areas that capacity has happened. With nonprofits, they have been served and their clients have been served. Again, our foundation has strengthened the community by supporting the nonprofits and giving them funding and opportunities to increase their service to their clients. Capacity for the university, we feel really good about. We actually approached two of the institutions here in town and the University of Dubuque was the one that said they wanted to involve their students. So through that, we've connected the students with the community. The students learn about the community and needs that they have. The nonprofits have an opportunity to interact with students and in this particular case, many of the students were international. So it was even more of a learning experience on both sides with the nonprofits as well as with the international students. And of course, there was a lot of student learning going on. The students learned that what happens in the textbook doesn't always play out in real life. When I visited with them, they said in addition to the technology piece, they had to learn to communicate professionally, something always a challenge on a college campus, whether it was email-wise or in a face-to-face conversation. And they also had to learn to be flexible as well as troubleshoot. Again, something all of us involved in today's webinar probably do every day. And it also increased their professionalism as they go out and start looking for positions in their careers. We also think that this opportunity helps the students to understand that they have expertise that they can offer in whatever community they decide to live and work in. So we know it was a capacity building in a lot of areas. And back to our foundation, again, we built capacity by strengthening the nonprofits and also serving the donors. On the donor relations side that I work on, what a wonderful opportunity for me to go back and sit down and talk with the donors about the impact they have made, which we have done with the two individuals who made this happen here in our community. It has also been a great leverage in conversations with other people who are philanthropic in our community. It helped them understand they can have a vision and they can help fulfill it when we start saying this was something somebody else in the community saw did not come from the community foundation but through the eyes of the donors. So really have built capacity around our donors. At this time we just want to show you the video that we use to share this vision and how it has come to be and the individuals who made it happen. The door is because this was organizations ranging from the Dubuque Rescue Mission to Dubuque County Right to Life, Dave and Liz noticed many nonprofits faced a similar challenge. Liz has been involved in small nonprofits. I've been involved with a lot of small nonprofits. All of them lack the same base. They're a wonderful job doing what they are meant to do but they're not in technology at all. So I was just mentioned to Liz one day. I said, you know what? We should just start doing something for small nonprofits. The Krushman Sports Foundation developed their idea into Grant for Tech, a grant program that funds technology assessments and improvements for nonprofits. As you become more financial secure it's time to start giving back your dollars to not just your time but your money that you've earned from the community. So there is kind of the outline of what we do with the Grant for Tech and the community foundation of Greater Dubuque. We are interested now to hear if there are other foundations who have found creative solutions to problems that they have had, that their community has had, that nonprofits have been challenged with. All right. So if you guys have responses you can feel free to use the chat box and I can read them to Faye and Katie. It looks like no questions yet. So if you guys want to move forward and then we can save it for the Q&A if they come in later. So that leads us to a question within our walls here at the Community Foundation of Greater Dubuque is what's next? And one of the pieces that we know we have been fortunate with the assets that we have but we also know that we need to build an unrestricted fund here. Our community has been very generous in funding organizations that they care about which is important at the same time we need to poise ourselves like many foundations for the future or something that would happen tomorrow, a disaster. We do not have funds for something like that to relocate individuals in their homes, relocate businesses and who knows what we might be dealing with in 25 years around health care issues, around poverty, around education. So we have implemented really as of last week a new fund called Dubuque Forever Fund with the idea that we will be asking people similar to what you heard on the video the individuals who have raised their families here, run successful businesses and what do they give back to the community? Asking them to consider gifts to an unrestricted fund. This is allowing a lot more flexibility for the future and for a community foundation to act on emerging needs as they come to be. We also want to continue to educate our donors on nonprofit needs and challenges. No difference than probably many of your foundations that you may work for. There is always the education component and we are always surprised but part of it is because of the world we work in when people say really there are hungry children in our community. We would love to be able to say no but that is not the reality of it. So always looking for opportunities to visit with community members and educating them on the challenges that are their neighbors and up and down their streets that they might not be aware of. So at this time we would like to open up to questions. Any questions about the presentation or questions for us? So we have one question that has come in. So does your assessment go beyond infrastructure slash tools into functional areas such as implementing a constituent management system? Yes, it does go beyond infrastructure and tools. Our students are really looking at anything that the nonprofit is looking to upgrade. So they have done an implementation of a CRM platform for a nonprofit here locally and that took a lot of research on the students and to really navigate what CRM was appropriate and what they could financially afford and all of that going forward. So they have done something of that sort. Got it. Okay. We have another question here. So if you don't mind sharing some of the challenges you guys had when starting this up. I would say the biggest challenge is just getting kind of the model right. When we initially started this project we started with one student intern and tasked them with going in and doing assessments on at least four nonprofits. And we learned very quickly that that was a big task for that one student intern. So the program has kind of flexed and changed a little bit going forward. We've also learned the kinds of organizations that are right for this kind of program and investment. We've now kind of shifted to working with nonprofits that do not have internal IT staff. And we found that just because if the organization already has their own IT staff there was just kind of an overlap with what the students were able to assess and then implement. So they're still eligible for a grant through those capacity building grants. They're just not working in this program, this kind of comprehensive program. I do want to add in here, this is Faye on the donor relations side. One of the pieces that, no surprise coming from me in donor relations, that's critical for, well maybe not critical to the right word, but is important to think about in your organization what kind of relationships do you have within the community. Not saying that people you've never met wouldn't be open to this. I was lucky after many years in higher education to actually know a particular professor in the technology world. And so if you think about who do we know that does something that we can partner with, much more likely to get yeses. So talk about it in your organization. Just like Katie and I are lucky to be able to partner together donor relations and grant making. So really maximize who you know and who might know somebody in the community. We did see the questions our students compensated. The students are not financially compensated. They're receiving credit for it and that's because of the partnership with this particular university and the professor. Perfect. So we got another question in that's pretty interesting. So what type of questions do you ask to nonprofits about their technology proposals? Sure. So there's two steps to the application process. The assessment application is first. So when they're asking for an assessment we ask them pretty high level about their technology just because organizations are in all different places of even the questions that they're able to answer. So we ask about what kind of technology they have on site. So we're asking if they have computers, if they have a networked system, things like that. We do ask them about their most recent technology purchase. That gives us kind of a good idea of where they're at in their life cycle. If they're purchasing computers we know they're probably at the beginning of a larger project. So it just kind of depends on the organization. And then the students are also encouraged to contact the organization if they have additional questions. So if they read through and say we are understanding this but maybe it's a bit different, they're having conversations with those directors before the process kind of starts. Got it. Okay. And then another question that we have is did your development staff approach the donors with this idea or how did this idea kind of come to be? And I know you maybe touched upon this earlier. Yeah, actually because the foundation had been working with these donors who had gifted through the causes that they cared for but they actually were the ones who were one day talking about their frustrations. Both of them sit on nonprofit boards in our community. And so when their board is trying to make decisions financially just on running the organization they would ask for reports to help them make wise financial decisions and decisions on just the operations of the nonprofit. During that process they heard more than once, we don't have the technology to generate what you're asking. And in that context they shared that information with us out of frustration. And it was out of that conversation that like what could we do? How can we help these nonprofits build the capacity to make good operational decisions and in that conversation we said they need funding. They need funding for that. So the donors were actually the ones who were expressing frustration and the combination of that and how do we fix this? We need to start an endowment. Could we raise money to do that? If in the meantime while we're working on that what's something that could be implemented right away which then the idea was born out of what about college students? Could we partner with an institution? So that's really how organically it came to be. Got it. Okay. Yeah, I think that was one of the other questions that we got in terms of how you decided who to partner with. Somebody's asking did you seek help or support from the tech field or tech companies in your area? Is that something you guys considered in addition to? Yeah, we convened a group of local technology providers here in Dubuque at the initial stages of this when we were just kind of trying to think through what we could really do. And they all came around the table with great support for what we were trying to do and really getting students out in the community to get experience because it really is kind of a pipeline for those technology companies then for these students who have community experience. So they were very supportive in the beginning. They actually helped us draft our first assessment application, those technology providers, where they said, you know, you want to ask them about your server and your computers and your network and all of that. So they were very supportive. What we have not been able to do yet is receive funding to help this endowment grow from the technology organizations, but that's not off the table yet. It will be helpful as we continue to share the successes because at the time of sharing these successes, we can say this is a small percentage of what the needs are. Got it. And we have another question that is pretty interesting. Do you find, are most of the needs hardware or software? You know, they are all over the board. We've had many requests for computers. We had one organization that was working with a 100% donated technology. So they were getting the computers from businesses after they had upgraded. So all of their system was donated. So they knew that it was working as it was, and they were really looking to kind of go beyond that. So we did a full computer system for them. They upgraded, I think, 12 or 15 just computers in their space. But we've done servers. We've done system upgrades and cloud backups. Online hosted email has been a pretty common theme through this. Most nonprofits are working on something that's just not reliable. So we've done a lot of the switch to an online email platform. We've done donor management software and volunteer management software. And those have been very well received by those nonprofits and very well implemented. So it's been all over the board, a little bit of everything. And some training needs as well. So we had one organization express that they needed some training in their financial management system. So they were granted dollars to put their one financial person through training for that system. Okay, cool. So we have – I just want to make sure we still – I think we slotted an hour for this webinar. So we have a couple more questions coming in if you guys don't mind answering them. So Larkin is asking, do you have trained technical staff review the proposal? So the professor that works with that class is a trained IT professional. She is working very closely with those students and those proposals and the assessment reports. And also local technology companies are being called in kind of on the front end for quotes and is this feasible. Those sorts of things are being done up front. Fay and I are not doing the technical evaluation of those proposals, but they are being done from that end, from the university's end. They're being vetted. Okay, and they also do the implementation as well? Yeah, the students are invited to help with the implementation if it's appropriate and necessary. So they've done – if it's a new computer, they're able to kind of go in and help them through that process. If it's a little more extensive then they're calling in local technical professionals, IT companies establishing relationships with nonprofits and IT companies so that those new computers and new servers are being serviced going forward too. Perfect, okay. So it seems like people are pretty interested in the assessment that you used. Is that something that's available to the audience or not? Absolutely, I'd be happy to share that. Okay, perfect. Yeah, if you want to send that over and we can include it in the follow-up. I can share the assessment application that we use and I can see if the university would provide an overview of what their – when the students go in with their assessment what that looks like because that's done on the university side. I can see if I can get a copy of that too. Okay, perfect. All right, I think we are out of questions. So thank you for answering all of those. Do you guys want to add anything else or I can go ahead and close out the webinar? I don't think so. I did see a question or a comment about looking at the model that they'd like to use in Chicago. I think I saw that. So I just wanted to mention to that person, Katie and I love Chicago. Up to visit, yeah. And please feel free to reach out to us after this webinar. Say in my contact information is up on the screen now and as well as our website. So please reach out if you have follow-up questions following the webinar. Yes, you can connect either LinkedIn and email. Perfect, okay, yeah. And we're also going to be sending out a follow-up email to this with everyone's information. So thank you so much to Katie and Fay for your presentation. That was super helpful. And thank you to the audience for being engaged and asking really good questions. Just one more time if you guys have any questions about the products that are available through TechSoup. We have hardware and software available. So you can just visit techsoup.org for more information. We also have TechSoup courses. So if there's a particular area of interest, we have things like Google Analytics, Facebook Advertising, Design. So we want to make as many resources available to you as possible in addition to the hardware and software. So just real quick, if you guys don't mind, before you go if you can just chat one thing that you learned in today's webinar. It's always really fun for us to kind of see what you walked away with. So if you want to take a second and use the Q&A box to share with Katie, Fay, and myself what you learned in today's webinar. Also, we have a post-event survey. So if you have a couple extra minutes, it's always nice for us to hear your feedback and it helps us dictate future content. So anything that you learned or want to learn, please share with us in the survey once the webinar is over. Also, if you're on social media, we're on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and we love social media love. Just a like or tweet or I think it's a heart on Instagram. And we also have a blog at blog techsoup.org where we post a lot of tips and tricks and how-tos and things like that. So we publish about two to three blogs per week. So feel free to visit us there as well. And then lastly, we have a few upcoming webinars. So on Thursday, we have a privacy policy webinar. So just educating nonprofits on the type of privacy policies that you need to have in place. Next week, we have video storytelling with Adobe Spark. And then we also have a nonprofit cloud-ready webinar. Five steps to getting your nonprofit ready for the cloud on 5.31. And lastly, once again, I want to thank our presenters today, Katie and Faye, and then also LaChica. You probably saw her name on the chat for helping us out with the technical assistance. And then also to our webinar sponsor, ReadyTalk. Thank you so much and have a good day.