 Hi, friends. Welcome to today's AMA. It's all about fundraising more money with GrantStation, one of the powerful tools we've got in the tech supermarket place. Today, we're bringing in one of our in-house experts, Julie Nevejas, who is a program manager for strategic partnerships. Julie's here to answer your questions about GrantStation, which is a comprehensive set of online grant research tools. Nonprofits can use GrantStation membership to research current sources of grant money and learn how to secure available funding. This event is open to anyone interested in improving their fundraising results and we can't wait to meet you. So thank you so much for joining us here today. I'm Eli. I'm a community manager at TechSoup and I'll be the event host, which means I'll be asking questions of Julie as we start. And once we go through our preset set of about eight questions, we'll then pass the baton over to you in the audience and we get deeper into your questions as well. If you have any questions that have come to mind as we go through this webinar, feel free to just jump right there into the chat and add your question there. And we'll go through that and look at that at the end of the event. And with that, I'm going to pass you over to Julie. For having me, Eli, it's a pleasure to be here. I think you would want me to tell you a bit about GrantStation and how it can help organizations. GrantStation was created by a seasoned grant writer who recognized that she was wasting a lot of time trying to filter doing research and filtering grant opportunities that are actually accepting applications. So she created a database that involves a lot of vetting and researching of open opportunities or funders that are actually accepting new applications. So they have a vast database that provides open opportunities that are constantly being reviewed and vetted by a staff of researchers. Most of GrantStation consists of the researchers, so that's the very, very big importance to what they have to offer. They've also developed some other helpful tools. So you can find a set of funders that are actively looking for fund to fund grantees. And this cuts hours of your research online. Though GrantStation is a company, they work a lot like TechSeq does and they provide a number of helpful avenues to gain information and training. They do an annual survey called the state of grant seeking where the state of the types, what types of organizations are receiving, what types of funds. And this is super valuable information for organizations, different kinds of organizations of different sizes. They create tools for grants to help you create a grant strategy. They create, have tools to help you write better proposals. They do webinars. They have a number of webinars offered regularly and they have valuable courses as well. Courses for writing grants and creating a strategy. You have answered my leading initial question, which is, what is GrantStation and how can it help my nonprofit? I think you've offered a really good overview of just the origins of GrantStation and the core elements. But one thing you talked about is that you have a GrantStation membership. What does that really mean and what's included? The membership is purchased like a subscription. It gives you 12 months of access to their database, the database of open grants that are being vetted by the researchers. So it's the pre-screened grant makers that you get access to. There are also a number of tools, as I mentioned before, that you have access that comes with the membership. They have some newsletters that are available to anybody and a couple of tools. I think the benchmarker might be available to anybody, but the database, which is the main reason you probably want a membership, is only available to people that have paid memberships. Thank you for asking that. One thing I want to figure out here is, how do I actually get this membership? So it's this 12-month thing that gives me access to all these tools. Should I go to the GrantStation website? Should I go to TechSoup's catalog? What's the best way to get into this GrantStation membership? You absolutely can get a membership directly from GrantStation. However, TechSoup offers the memberships at a discount annually. So at any time, however, on two days, twice a year, TechSoup has a very deeply discounted offering of the membership. This year, on February 14th and 15th, TechSoup is offering a full membership for $99 just on these two days. And we'll have another promotion in September. So it just happens two times a year, so it's a good time to try it. So here's my next question. So here I am in GrantStation. And how can I go to the results to find something that's a fit for my organization around my focused area, my budget size? Because there's so many opportunities. How would I avoid getting lost? That's a really good question. I can start very broad, and I probably would as well start as broad as possible, but there are lots of areas that you can narrow your results. Areas of interest, target populations, types of support, type of grantmaker. Maybe you feel you have a better connection with certain types of grantmakers or a location of grantmaker that's important to your store. So there are lots of ways that you can narrow it, but you might also want to start with a broad search. Because that's really helpful to say, yeah, sometimes grants are limited to geographies. And so you can make sure that, oh, I only work in mountains in the Sierras. Then you can make sure you're finding the right opportunity to see you're not wasting your time. Speaking of wasting your time, I am a very busy nonprofit executive. Not true. I'm putting on a roll. But pretend I have a busy nonprofit executive. One of the top three tools I should focus on, because I need to only put my time into the most important things. Yeah. Aren't we all extremely busy? We all need to find ways to save time. I think the fact that the database of opportunities are already vetted will save a tremendous amount of time to save some additional time. You might want to look for proposals that only require two to four pages. That's a big time saver. You think you can filter on the length and effort of the application? There aren't any filters on that, but you would want to look for that. Time is your biggest concern, because some of the grants, some of the funders require a lot more than four pages. If that's your biggest concern, you might want to look for the opportunities that require less paperwork, should I say. I would also say use their dashboards. They put a tremendous amount of research and development into their dashboards to help you keep track of your opportunities, your proposals, and your grant-related projects. So I would say definitely use those and use a framework to plan. This way you're ready to submit the proposal in a way that the grant maker wants to see it, if you have some basic information already gathered in kind of a framework format. I want to jump now into a question coming from the audience. So Tim Turner asks, does Grant Station offer cloud storage for putting my research and my templates in, or is Grant Station really structured more as like a read-only database of opportunities, but I would manage all my research and that within my own tool sets? That's a good question. I believe it's of a form-related storage, not necessarily a cloud storage for actual documents. I've never seen that. I can certainly ask them and get back to you on that. That's not a problem, but I know most of their dashboards are based on more like a form. You would add a funder and you would add a date that you want it to. The date would be on there of when it's due, but I can find out to see if there's cloud storage for say a Word document that has your draft on it. Awesome. Helpful. Thank you. So I'm based in Canada, Julie. Had my multiple nonprofits apply for the Grant Station program, do they cover nonprofits in my country? Absolutely. Grant Station has quite a few researchers that are based in Canada and they are researching specifically Canadian opportunities. They have also expanded tremendously to international markets as well. They have a newsletter called the International... What's it called? Grant Station International Insider. If you're looking for grants that help you internationally, I would recommend signing up for that. That is free for anybody to sign up for. Great. So there are some other countries included as well. That's good to hear. So I have another question. So what are some of the best practices for making the best use of Grant Station? Because as you talked about, there's a number of different tools. There's a couple of different approaches. What are your recommendations for making the best use of Grant Station? All of what I said previously, but in addition, there's a benchmark. This is a tool that they have developed as a result of their state of the grant seeking survey results. You can enter the size of your organization and a number of different points, and it will tell you what other organizations that are similar to yours have been awarded. So you know where your benchmark is or how many applications they have sent in order to get X amount of dollars. That would be a really great way to utilize Grant Station. I would also say just fully utilize the dashboard to stay organized. That's really helpful. I have another question coming here in from the audience, actually, from our friends at quietlyworking.org. So this is a bit more of a technical question, which is there an API, which may feel like a machine to machine talking language or a way to integrate Grant Station in with an existing customer relationship management tool. So we could say, I found this grant added automatically to my donor perfect or my Salesforce CRM. Do you know of any kinds of integrations with other tools using Grant Station? I don't, but I can certainly do some research and talk to them and find out if there is any. I've never heard of that, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. So it's possible. I would have to get back to you on that. I've got another great question coming in this time from Tim Turler again. Then the question here is, what's the process for onboarding once I've went and got my Grant Station membership? So do I need to talk with someone and go through the process or am I just thrown into the database? Is there supports and trainings? What does that onboarding process look like? That's a really good question. When you sign up for membership through TechSoup, we send you some instructions on how to log in and how to create your account. If you need additional help, you can always contact Grant Station through their email or their phone. They're very customer centric, so they love to talk to the nonprofits. Everyone that works there is very passionate about what they do, and I'm sure you would be a really good experience if you just called them. They also have a lot of tour of Grant Station webinars that they have on their website. We also have them archived on our website, so you can search Grant Station and find a Grant Station tour, and that's a really great place to start. And again, if you have any questions about utilizing the database or any other tools, they're fabulous with talking with people. So there's a number of different supports there along the route of onboarding. And then I've also dropped into the chat some links to some of our past webinars. So I've been doing a little bit of poking around Grant Station because I don't have a Grant Station account. It looks like you can run a search on their website and it's going to show you the number of results. You just won't see the content of those results, which is probably a good way for someone who is Grant Station curious to say, does my topic, does my mission, have inclusion in the database? Is that something people can experiment with? Am I reading that correctly that I can get a sense of the volume of support in Grant Station? Yeah, absolutely. They created that because that was probably a big call drive to their customer service, but absolutely I highly recommend utilizing a tool on their website that you can check, you can use the filters and see ahead of time how many grant opportunities, open grant opportunities are available to you. And if you're not finding a volume, that you feel like is acceptable, you can always give them a call and say, ask them if you're doing it right. If there's a different way to filter, because just like when you're Googling something, if you use too many words or too few words, you're going to get different results. If you're having some difficulty finding some results that you feel acceptable, I would never hesitate to give them a call and just see if there's any refinements in your search. And yes, you can do that ahead of time. Even without a membership, yeah. Once I'm in this membership and I get the killer deal that they do in partnership with TechSoup, does this automatically renew at the end of the year? What happens with this membership? It actually, it's good for 12 months. It does not automatically renew. You would want to come back to TechSoup. If you wanted the deeply discounted membership, you would want to come back to TechSoup a year after you get it. If you're getting it in February, you would want to pay attention to find out when the next, or Erin will tell you maybe, find out when the next promo is and get it then. Otherwise you can still get a pretty decent discount at TechSoup regularly if you miss the promo. But we do quite a bit about outreach, so hopefully you'll catch it. I've got another question coming in here from Tim Turner, which says, among those tools within GrantStation, are there any tools in there to help to create a Grant calendar? Basically a way for you to know when should you reapply for some of these recurring grants that happen from fundees or funders? Absolutely. On the dashboard, you can use, utilize the dashboard as a calendar. It might not look like a calendar, but it's set up so that you can keep track of your projects. And that includes dates as well. It was created by people that design grant strategies. So yes. So those kinds of common pain points, they've likely addressed those already. So I've got another question coming in here from our friends at quietlyworking.org, which is if I need to go and ask some of these more technical questions, these more in-depth questions, that maybe are best answered by our friends at GrantStation, what's the best way to reach them? Should I just go to their contact us form on their website? Like what's the best way? There is a phone number published on their website. There's also an email info at grantstation.com. It shouldn't be hard to find. I'll check it now. But yeah, just go to the contact us and their information should be there. Right. So they're making themselves very available because they are here to answer those kinds of questions. Absolutely. They're very customer focused. So I don't think there'll be any problem with that. I correct the question. Just tweak it a little bit. Yeah, I'd go for it. Okay. What I'm looking for is because I'm one of your customers that I've had GrantStation for three years and never used it to a potential. And that's on me. But one of the things I'd like to do is in our technology stack, we have a lot of automation. And so I'd like to integrate it into our CRM and into our sales process stack. So that's when I talk about integration. I'm wondering if there's somebody that I can talk to that because in my web searches, I can't find anything relating to that. Everything that I, when I do a search, it relates to competitors. And so what I'd like to know is who to talk to that could help with how to integrate that either with web hooks or with an API or with currently it doesn't look like there's any Zapier connections or anything like that. So if you could point me to a contact or I can put my contact info into the chat and then just have them reach out, I would greatly appreciate it. I think the latter one would work very seamlessly. I'd be happy to facilitate that. Can you send web hooks or? Any type of how to integrate. So how to connect the data that we have for SAIT when I click on I'm choosing this grant to add into my process to start the sales process or the fundraising process. How do I begin the process? So you want to feel copy and paste everything over. Yeah, it's just basically the back door to connect two different programs so that they can, so we can use it in our current automation process. We'll get somebody to contact you about that. So thank you so much for joining us here today. We're going to take this recording and make sure it's available for both you to review later as well as the rest of the quad members as well.