 Hi everyone, thank you so much for joining us today for the session on grant writing. My name is Shelly Reed. I'm the manager of the Legal Services National Technology Assistance Project. We all just call it LZNTAP because it's much easier to say and I'm going to turn the session over today to Kelly Shaw Sutherland who is our new project manager with Just Tech and she's going to lead off the session. Hi everyone. Thanks Shelly. As I said, I'm Kelly Shaw Sutherland. I'm the senior project manager here with Just Tech. I'm going to kind of go through our agenda for today and then we're going to do some introductions and we'll kind of hit the ground running. So after we do the introductions, we're going to focus on a few things. We're going to look at funding considerations and project planning and then the writing process. And even though the focus of this webinar is mostly on the writing process for grants, we wanted to take some time to spend on the things that are really important prior to getting to the actual writing process. So we'll be touching on that. We're going to try to make this session a little bit interactive. If at any point you have any questions or anything like that, please feel free to put them in the chat and I'll be monitoring that. Actually, Jessica and Katie are going to be our gurus and I'm going to be doing a bit of moderating. So I will hand it over to, well, I guess I'll give you a little bit about my background first. Like I said, I'm with Just Tech as a senior project manager, but prior to joining here back at the beginning of December, I was at Legal Aid of Nebraska for a little over eight years. I was the director of research and evaluation. My background is in policy and program evaluation, data analysis. And along with that, a lot of project planning over the years came kind of as a natural fit with that. And so I've worked with a number of technology projects as well. And so I am the main project manager for the LSN TAP project with Just Tech. So if you have any questions about that or anything, feel free to hit me up at any time. And I will hand it over to Katie to introduce herself. Hi, everyone. My name is Katie Palau and I am the grant writer for Michigan Advocacy Program, the Michigan Advocacy Program, the legal aid provider in Michigan. The LSN TAP is actually a project of Michigan Advocacy Program, but we also provided legal services on a statewide and local level. And beyond working with Michigan Advocacy Program, I have lots of experience in a number of different nonprofits doing development and administrative work. Hi, and I'm Jessica Hood. I'm a senior consultant at Just Tech. I joined in January of this year, but prior to that, I was at Texas Bureau of Grand Legal Aid for almost five years where I was most recently the director of grants and had a variety of roles in our grants management and development departments. And I have had a decade-long career in nonprofit development and grants with a variety of different organizations, but lots of different roles, but primarily working with institutional grant makers such as government and private foundations. Thanks, Jessica and Katie. Before we jump into the topics that we're going to discuss, we have a couple of questions we'd like you all to take a second to respond to that will help kind of gauge where we go for this discussion. The first one being grant writing, what is, what's your role? Go ahead and fill that in. I don't know if everybody, can everybody see the results? I don't see it on the screen. It looks like a good number of you are in grants management staff. Pretty much everyone who's online has responded. It looks like about a quarter of grants management staff followed by project directors, managers and development staff. So a pretty good mix and we've got some legal program staff and executive directors online. So that's a pretty good mix. You can probably go to the next one. We just want to know your level of experience with grant writing. That'll help kind of gauge some of us as well. Okay. For those of you that are a little bit more experienced, definitely feel free to chime in on the conversation as we go throughout. Because like we said, this is going to be kind of a reciprocal knowledge sharing kind of deal. At least that's what we hope. It looks like most have five plus years. And so 50-50 is what we look like, looks like what we're at for Jessica and Katie's knowledge. Okay. So we can jump right in to the first topic at hand. So considering considerations, I will let Jessica start us off. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks, Kelly. So when you're looking at doing grant writing, really there's a couple of main buckets of how I kind of think of where grants fall into. One of those would be government grants and that seems to be pretty common for legal services agencies. And I would include within that like any, even if it might be coming through a foundation, that like a state foundation that administers, IOLA or IOLTA funding or legal services corporation, you know, not technically a government agency, but an organization that administers funding that's allocated by the government for legal services. And that primarily what's going to distinguish these from private foundations, that might be a family foundation or a corporate foundation, is these government grants are going to be pretty prescriptive about what they're asking you for. So it's more like you're having to submit your specific qualifications to carry out a program, whereas a private foundation might be a little more free form, sometimes very free form, sometimes, you know, write, you know, five to six pages. We're going to share some resources at the end for some stuff about private foundations, but in my experience, most of the grant writing for legal aid is within the government grant. So that's what we're focusing on. Yeah, so another thing that you want to think about at the beginning, or maybe even before you're looking at proposals or RFPs is to think about the scope of the project. So thinking about how big this project is going to be and if that matches up with the possible funding options or if this is going to be a new or existing program. So it depends on what type of, you know, funding you're going to go after. If you are looking at an existing program, you might be looking for more operating support for that program that already exists. And if you're looking for a new program, you might be looking for more of a project-based grant or some sort of innovative grant focused on, you know, bringing in something new to the organization. And that can also, you know, help to dictate what the long-term kind of more down towards the sustainability which we'll talk about. Yeah. Yeah, it's the next step of kind of that consideration is looking at your capacity. On one hand, this is your capacity to even complete the grant application. Sometimes you find about things last minute and it's, you know, what does your team have on their plate or what do you have on your plate and can we get a good quality grant proposal out to the funder in time. But really the bulk of this is the capacity assessment for the organization to carry out the grant. Do you, like, do you have the program staffing to carry out the grant? Will you need to hire? Can you make those hires within a time frame to be able to, you know, complete these tasks? And not only for program staff, but administrative staff looking at how cumbersome the grant is going to be to administer for your finance or accounting departments, what kind of turnaround time or frequency they'll have to do, invoicing, how complicated the client eligibility process will be, what you have to create new systems to that, or will you be able to modify your existing processes and systems. And then along with that, you also want to look at, you know, how this grant fits within your goals and your mission as an organization. Is this advancing your mission, your goals that you already have set out? If it's changing in a little bit, is that, you know, are you running into mission creep, or is this, like, a natural evolution of your project? Yeah, and I think that kind of brings us to the end here where we're looking at sustainability. So, like, what your organization is focused on in the long term, what, you know, your funding streams look like in the long term. A lot of funders, especially the larger government grants, will ask you, you know, how do you plan to sustain this program or are there other funding, other funding options you're using or looking into to support this program in addition to the funding that you would receive if awarded. And so, thinking about those types of things, because funders often, not only are you thinking about, you know, answering the questions, but they also have to think about where they're putting their money and how they're accountable to the people who, you know, they're getting the funding from depending on whether or not, you know, in the Senate or, you know, a community foundation, no matter what, they're accountable to something that's giving them the money. And so, yeah, as you are working with your colleagues, maybe the leadership in your organization, the staff that are going to actually carry out this grant project, you want to make sure that you're considering these questions, right? It's some of them that we, you know, think that you should go through or does this funder align with our mission, vision and values? Will this funding cover the project or additional funds needed and what is the long-term vision for the project and could that be sustained? Great. Thanks, Katie and Jessica. So one of the things that we wanted to do, at least at this stage in the webinar, we wanted to have a little bit of a discussion about some of these things. And so I'm going to pose some of these questions to Jessica and Katie. And for those of you who especially have significant experience, please feel free to chime in in the chat and I'll try to kind of bring that up as we discuss this, but we're going to start with the first question. So for both of you, and we'll start with Katie, what is the role of collaboration and partnerships in accessing funding opportunities for grant projects? What do you think is like the most significant thing for you, in your experience? Yeah, so I think one of the things was really building networks and learning about funding opportunities. So a lot of the different ways that you can learn about these new networks online, you know, different resources and stuff that we'll talk about later, but even just word of mouth, like I was at a funding meeting a few weeks ago and I heard some of the other community partners like talking about a different funding, you know, a different funders that they were talking about. And right there was just opening the door to a different stream that I hadn't thought about before. So really just opening the door and kind of creating relationships as well as part of the development, you know, team and the project goals. It'll really help to open up the door to new opportunities. And Jessica, what do you think? Yeah, yeah. And I think partnerships and collaborations can also like kind of more literally unlock funding opportunities, especially when you think about government grants and the requirements. You know, sometimes you'll see federal grants that the main applicant has to be like a local unit of government, a city or a county, but legal services can be part of the grant program. And so maybe you can work with local government agency to be the service provider, but be a sub grantee or the main grantee, or maybe there will be like required services in the RFP that your organization doesn't do. And it doesn't make sense for you to do, but there are community partners that you could sub grant out to that can handle that. Or if you have restrictions on who you can serve with like those LSE funded orgs that, you know, maybe you could work with partners who can handle the non-eligible population that might be served by this grant. You know, and that can look, that's looked very different way throughout my career. Sometimes it's been a very collaborative back and forth process and we're working on a grant program together. Sometimes it's kind of like, hey, yeah, if you want to, you know, be the, you know, main project leader on that will, will be the main applicant and then like it's been my team that's mainly done the grant and then it gets like submitted for approval for the, the prime grantee on it. So, you know, everything's going to look different depending on the exact partners and how much work they're all doing in the project, but it can be a great way to access opportunities that otherwise wouldn't be available to your organization. Great. Okay, so let's go to the second question and, and Shelly, thanks for posting that. I think we can touch on that a little bit. We'll be touching on some of those things about she just brought up are there resources to that are listed for different funding opportunities specifically for legal aid or other nonprofits. And so we're going to be talking a little bit about resources a little bit later. So we'll, we'll touch on that. But for our next question, Katie and Jessica, what strategies do you use for researching and evaluating whether or not you're going to go after a particular grant opportunity or have you used in the past? Maybe some pitfalls you've run into lessons learned for how to do things that maybe you just started changing up things because of that. Kind of feel free to chime in wherever. Then we'll start with you, Katie. Yeah, so I think one of the strategies for researching and evaluating so obviously just like looking just Googling something is going to bring you a lot of results. So trying to use some of the some of the grant foundation websites. So we'll talk about handed a little bit or like grant sector, which I think Jessica will talk a little bit more about. And I think one of the things that's really helpful for me in researching and evaluating reports is looking at those past their history of funding. So a lot of funders will have or like they'll have annual reports and so you can look at what kind of projects that they've been interested in and look at their how their priorities align with the projects to kind of draft and make your grant align with those priorities as well. And also accessing any information that you can publicly like around that kind of information that they don't have in your report. So tax information and stuff like that can be publicly accessed. Or even I mean, depending on the funder, there's even news reports sometimes about the grants being awarded, especially governmental grants. So just kind of watching those funding streams. Great, thanks. Yeah, and as Katie mentioned, grants.gov is like the you know be all surging in for federal grants. So having, you know, someone reviewing or having someone on your team review that regularly to see any potential opportunities. And then like local government will often like have like maybe an email list what they'll publish request for proposals that they're releasing or a website where they're doing that as well. So you kind of just need to learn like what your local community, what their processes are. But one thing that's really important when you're evaluating grants is making sure you're closing the loop with, you know, whoever is actually like running the grant programs afterwards, right. And that's how you start to learn potential pitfalls when you're evaluating an RFP to see if this something we want to go to. So sometimes you have like you're doing the grant reporting within the same people who are you know doing the grant application. Sometimes I've seen that as different departments and where you see a breakdown in that communication of like these are the challenges we had. And this is the stuff that like we knew up front would be a challenge that just builds experience over time of like, you know what are potential issues. But when you're doing an RFP you know I'm old school I'll like print it off like highlight anything that's like a potential issue or question if you're not even sure if your organization you know has this like cybersecurity policy that's required or things like that. You know when you're just newer to an organization your markup of the RFP will be a lot longer you'll have a lot more questions to ask but over time you'll start to you know learn and get more information just under your own belt. But you know making sure that you're flagging anything that could be a potential issue and talking to the your colleagues that have expertise in that area to figure out is this you know a complete barrier to us doing this application is this something that you know we're gonna have to modify what we do or is this fine. Another thing within that is you know as a legal legal provider right we have a different relationship with our clients we have attorney client privilege and that might kind of change what information that you can share with funders in the past we've had you know requirements that we weren't able to meet in terms of like how we reported information back to the funder but you also can like ask questions during the RFP process usually there will be like a specific instructions of like deadline to submit questions or an email to submit them to and we've sometimes had success in being able to get them to change that or understand why the process has to be a little different for legal services provider versus a different service provider. I've just as a an aside I can tell you that bringing up the program officers or the technical assistance folks are a great resource especially if you're kind of on the fence on whether or not you want to go after something because a lot of times maybe the language in the RFP isn't all that clear I mean I've been on both ends writing the RFP and you know kind of responding to an RFP and you know you can think the language is as precise and clear as all day long and it's not going to be to somebody and so that's one thing that I would definitely concur using those resources when you have the time and the ability to do so don't take them for granted definitely reach out as much and as often as possible because that's what they are there for. Okay so for those of you that are online right now take a second this will help us with some of the discussion coming up we want to know what grant management tools you are using they can be anything from like instrumental to a case management system to like razor's edge anything like that anything that you have used now or maybe in the past. Oh thanks Liz I will make sure we'll get this copied out and we'll add these to the resources as well. That's a great point does anybody use any grant management tools? I don't see any okay that means it's going to be wide open for discussion guys. I'll see planner okay for grant tasks okay that makes sense I've played around with that a little bit in the past perfect virtuous air table razor's edge thanks Shelly etap legal server oh that's okay we won't count it against you Lacey second day here we'll give you a break no problem all right I think we can that kind of gives you guys an idea we've got kind of a little bit of a mix I think so hopefully that'll give you guys a little bit of what to go on and I don't remember is it Jessica are you going to start us off with that? Yeah I can I mean I think we're going to go through the team first but okay yeah so I think one of the things we were talking about with project planning is first thinking about again like capacity back to who you have on your team assembling a team thinking about all of the people in your organization that will be needed to carry out that grant not only put together the application but also like sustain the grant throughout whether that is reporting like programmatic reporting or financial reporting or whether that's sometimes funders will require visits during the grant period so making sure that there is staff available for that as well as making sure that this is going to fit within that plan within your long-term plan yeah I think that's what I have for assembling a team I don't know Jessica you have anything else to add to that point but Yeah I think that's good but you know for management software it sounds like people are kind of using maybe a few tools legal server has some grant limited grants management tools Airtable you know and I have seen different like setups at different places in my career like when before I was with legal services I was with an organization that used Salesforce both for its client management as well as for fundraising so that was like super nice of we could have like dashboards with like you know both program things and fundraising things in the same place but that you know often doesn't exist right so it seems like other people are in the spot of like maybe you don't have a tool that does everything that you need for grants you know and like in my more recent role at legal aid you know we have been through a lot of different system transitions while I was there our CMS system our HR system our finance system was all changed over the space of a few years and you know you really have to assess like do we have the capacity to you know start using a new system and best the time at it to manage it if you if your IT team is going to manage it or if someone from your development or grants team has to and you know because you can spend a lot of time designing a system and trying to put it in place but if you don't have the capacity to train and maintain it and make sure everyone's using it in that transition period that's not you know the best use of your time so we you know we didn't transition we were still using a combination of like a spreadsheet of all of our grants listed with information about them and then had legal server you know had our reports our obviously our grants list was in there and tracking the the filters to have like the client restrictions for grants and then used like Outlook calendar to track the deadlines of the head of shared calendar and where you can send invites to project team members that would need to participate in those deadlines so you know sometimes you can if you have the capacity you can invest time and having a really great system set up but there's also like other simpler tools that you can use to do what you need if you don't have that capacity to have a big new tech roll out yeah I would just to add on to that for what we're doing at Michigan advocacy program like I think we're kind of in that that spot right now we're trying to figure out if we have the capacity and what capacity like what capacity we have and what what systems would actually work well with that so I know we're working with our in-house IT team and talking about trying to use our justice server or I'm not sure if that's the same as the legal server but like our justice server which is our CRM to be able to help with grant management right now we only use that for a very basic like case reporting stuff or I guess the other option is possibly windows 365 I guess has some sort of they have potential for using grant management which could be an option for people who already have like office suite technology the one thing that I will add just from a project management and planning kind of perspective and even going back to like just being straight up focused on research and evaluation projects it doesn't really matter the focus whether you're doing you know trying to go after a grant or not is you know that planning the intersection between the technology and the platforms there are tools that you use to plan I really resonate with what Jessica's saying and Katie are saying because if you don't have the capacity or the understanding or experience with something that maybe is a little bit more complicated to use that's all in good it could you know well and good to be able to use something like that but if you're not prepared to take that step don't go after the shiny new toy like use something that's more simplistic that will work well with your current capacity and knowledge and skill set and that should help you identify where there are gaps of where you want to go potentially and so if you want to move up to something like a little bit more complicated you can plan towards that you can look into things take the time don't put the you know cart before the horse type of deal that's what I would kind of chime in with and then I think that takes us into the next section but before we start this since we have a little bit of time I want to make sure the rest of the time is going to be mostly focused on the writing process and I want to make sure that there aren't any questions about stuff that comes up prior to actually getting into the meat of writing grants I want to make sure I haven't missed anybody okay feel free to put stuff in the chat itself I'm going to throw it to Jessica yes or Katie we'll check for one I think I'm taking this one so yeah we're going to talk about leveraging the resources that we already have so a lot of times it can be daunting to look at these requests for proposals that are like you know up to 20 30 pages long and so trying to pull on the data that you already have in-house so whether that is you know information that you have from previous grant proposals or just organizational documents that you can pull on and also pulling on the data that you can access locally whether that's other community organizations or other governmental organizations that are publishing data about the needs in your area or you know even census data I know currently I'm working on a grant with the the BA and so I'm looking at their data to be able to talk about veterans and veterans needs in Michigan or even pulling on yeah like local knowledge so talking to your staff especially the staff that works directly with the clients understanding what kind of barriers they're experiencing to getting to your care or you know whatever your project is focused on because those people have really great information and insight as to what needs to be worked on to you know help that problem and reviewing past proposals so either proposals you submitted or if you have access to past projects that they have funded like I've mentioned before there's a lot of really great places to kind of mine that information so that you don't have to feel like you have to make it all up on the spot or you know you're writing a brand new 20-page application yeah and you know one thing that I found helpful in the past is you know if you're the sole grant writer your organization or you're you know reviewing all the grants that go out you might remember okay we have this language and this proposal and this had like a really great section here but you know you want to think about making things as sustainable as possible and my first development job we had a just a grants like best language document that was like a shared Google doc that was like all table of context and indexed you could do it with Microsoft Office as well if you use that but it's a big daunting thing to do and you don't have that put together but our development director had a summer intern get it started and then we had myself in another development associate that were onboarding and that was the first thing that we did was to work on that and that was like a great onboarding experience because I was reading all of these old grant documents that we had and learning about the different programs that we had and the different funders that we had and putting together this resource that was useful for us for years from that point and so just keeping it updated as you have like new grants and you have you know new sections that you have or better like oh the section was better than this old one but that was super helpful but one thing you want to be consider consider it of when you are writing your grant is the type of funder that you're writing to write if you are applying to a you know like the LSC or your state legal foundation they're going to be very familiar with legal services and legal aid and what that looks like but if you're applying to you know a government agency that's not exclusively funding legal services and maybe it's it's an RFP for a larger social services project not specifically just legal services or you're applying to a private foundation that you know you think that your project fits their mission but they're not exclusively in the legal space you know in some foundations of like Unitedways have like maybe a community panel that's reviewing grants so how you write and how you explain your services is really going to vary based if you're you know writing to someone that's like an expert in legal services as well or someone that's might necessarily not have a background in that and you're having to lay more of the groundwork and explain you know what the legal process is for like that specific area as well and you know you really want to make sure that you're aligning how you're describing the impact of your program with how the funder does as well you know again like this local government agencies are going to be really interested and like the impact that they can say that the program is having on you know their residents other funder like private funders are going to have like their mission and the way that they talk about their mission and so like as much as you can you want to mirror that language and make your argument with that lens yeah so the next part that we're going to talk about is the collaborative part of writing so we've talked a lot about how many people are involved in the project proposal and you know if a grant is awarded how many people are involved in that process so when we're writing the grant it's really important to be in communication with all of the different teams whether it's the people who will be working on the grant whether it's the finance department whether it's your you know IT people that will be supporting the technological part of your project you want to make sure that you are continuing that communication providing reminders that are timely and helpful and being assertive when necessary so sometimes it's easy for I think people who are not particularly development staff to not have this be a focus but you know reminding them and being that kind of support to make sure that the funding is coming in and make sure that we're you know hitting the deadline and I think another thing that's really important in any like development portion with specific project staff is managing expectations expectations so a lot of the times we'll get grants and people get in our project our attorneys will get really excited about you know working on the specific need and it's a great project and it's really it's really important but they're only going to give us fifty thousand dollars and we can't do you know X, Y and Z with that amount of money so thinking on the scale and making sure that we can you know obviously make sure that we're elevating and supporting the work that our project staff are doing and making them feel important but also managing expectations about what we can do with those grants Absolutely and you want to make sure that you're giving yourself enough time to pull everything together as well right for a grant the whole thing needs to be cohesive so the grant narrative should reflect the grant budget should reflect any attachments that you have and you don't want to end up in a situation where you know the last person to review the grant before it goes out has this great idea and changes the narrative and then your scram within like a few hours to like adjust the budget to fit that make sure the attachments all like reflect that as well so you know set internal deadlines and like that's all you know sometimes I would tell my other development folks that that's always say externally to our team right forget the real external deadline the internal deadline is the deadline that gives you time to align anything that you need to and changes that are made in the revision process as well as deal with you know all the troubleshooting that sometimes goes into submitting the grants on government portals you know that can be a fun process for anyone that's done that before knows but you know another thing that's like really important to the writing process is that relationship building internally with the other people that are going to be part of the process I think we all have moments where you know something comes up last minute and we have to send other people scrambling to get something done in time but you want that to be the exception not the rule if you're not being considerate of other people's time of like accounting time to develop budgets of program staff's time to provide any feedback that you need for the program design you know you don't want to be in that situation where you're creating a crisis for your colleagues and so as a part of like the project planning planning process and setting those internal deadlines is knowing your team's capacity of you know when you need how much time maybe at least two or three days to review something before it's finally submitted and then understanding what other staff having going on like does accounting have an audit starting so they won't be able to you know build a new budget from scratch after the state or does the attorney that's going to be the project lead have a big trial coming up and it's not going to be available certain weeks so it's just again just making sure that you're being considerate of everyone's time because you all are going to be you know working on this grant together both from the writing process to the actual execution process I mean I would add one thing in the in my experience with this type of work too is that the communication and the relationship building are what will make for successful collaborative efforts so you know if you're on a development team or doing something you don't want to create opportunities or go after opportunities in a silo being in the roles that I have been in I've had in numerous situations throughout my career where grants have been sought and awarded where there were things that were related to you know administering different surveys or putting on focus groups or things like that but then it's not told to it wasn't like told to me until like well into the process and so there was it wasn't part of the you know the planning process which is one of the reasons why I think we're hitting on those kinds of things today some of the pitfalls to kind of avoid yeah absolutely yeah and then sometimes you know like when you're considering whether to go through to apply for a project again those government grants can be really prescriptive and maybe it's not you know doing something the ideal way that your program would like too but that's we're having that communication in the beginning and to them understanding that may be okay this is not like our preferred thing but we're getting this benefit to our organization this benefit to our clients so we're going to you know deal with that difficulty if you're up front with that communication everyone knows where that's coming from and how that decision is being made it's not just oh why did we apply for this grant like this doesn't make any sense right yeah and and Liz Keith thanks for noting I think it's a good plug for you know project planning kinds of things or communication planning and management but using a tool like Slack to kind of be behind that collaborative effort the herding cats as you said or chimed in on I think that makes great sense having something where you can house all of that communication and effort together does help a lot okay so we're going to dive into a little bit more of a discussion and we have plenty of time so if you all want to chime in I'm gonna start it off with Jessica and Katie to kind of give us some best practices and tips and considerations but once we kind of go off of that feel free to put anything in the chat that maybe we're not touching on or you can go off mute and chime in with your question five if you'd like but I will kick it off with Katie we want to talk a little bit about the best practices tips and considerations that you and your experience would want to get across to everyone that are joining us today yeah I think one of the things that Jessica just mentioned reminded me of one of the basic best tips is to just start early and start you know like preparing as quick as early as you can especially just thinking about those the technological the portals and things like that that every funder has a different one I actually have a few weeks ago I was applying for something and I thought I had finished the application and I thought I was ready to hit submit and I hit the like the enter button and it opened three more sections which were all like full length questions that I had to scramble to get together in two days which thankfully you know I was ready to submit before the deadline but still two days was not fun to get that application together so you know starting early especially when we have the more people you have within a project the more reminders the more you know communication like that you can bring people in on I would rather you know I sometimes feel like I'm overburdening people by telling them everything that's going on with the grant but I think program managers would rather be over informed than under informed you know like Kelly said not knowing that there was these expectations that were in the grant beforehand and yeah just being really clear with communications and the expectations that you have for all the staff once this grant is submitted or while you're working on this grant yeah and and that definitely that I've had that exact same thing happen with so many portals too one thing that I'll like sometimes do is go through all the way to the end of just you know put in like you know just smash your keyboard a little bit to get something in the text box there to make sure that answers aren't triggering additional questions because the UI design of some of these interfaces are not great but kind of along with that just you know starting out on a proposal making sure you're going through every single element of it and identifying all of the pieces that you will need an external party to assist with you want to get those requests out to your colleagues to your partners as soon as possible and then you know you have time for yourself to do any of the parts that you you know you can handle on your own yeah thanks for these these interface um and you know it can be really hard to start from like a blank page and sometimes just getting rid of that blankness is a huge help as well so again going through your past language and just plopping it in there when it's like mostly responsive to the question and then you can come back and edit it later you can go through like all of the questions like that and then you can identify which ones actually we don't have any language about this yet I need to like you know talk to our program director and figure out like you know how we want to describe this here you know and then also like if you don't have language to insert just doing bullet points or just like getting started right like you have time to come back later and sportsmith it and to like you know make it flow well for the reviewer but just get the ideas out there and that's especially important again with the government grants that are so literal and you're graded on a rubric and you want to make sure you're addressing every single point of that question because you can have a beautiful answer written and if it doesn't actually address you know like specific things that are written in the question then you're going to get deducted points there and it's just another thing that definitely has come up with me working in legal aid more than other industries is it's really great working with attorneys that are a lot of them are amazing writers and beautiful writers and that's wonderful as a development person to not have to generate as much of that yourself but a lot of these grants have board limits and some attorneys are pretty long-wanted and I say that marriage to an attorney as well so you know making sure that you have again those internal deadlines set that give you time to edit things down because that that just happened a lot right of a funder will ask you to explain how this project is going to be transformative and like a thousand words right so it's it's that you know a lot of editing editing as much as it is writing yeah just to add on to that I think one of the one of the other things with working with attorneys is also I mean depending on who you're applying to funding through obviously it's just LFC they know the terminology you're you're using but if you're applying like through a county or the state or something like that obviously making it accessible to those parties as well so that the funder knows you know what you're asking for money for yeah absolutely and having you know if you yourself have a legal background maybe trying to have someone who doesn't have that read it regardless I think it's super helpful if you can have someone else look over a proposal you've written just because when you've been working on it a long time you know you can't you can't see it clearly anymore sometimes if you don't have that opportunity to have someone else review it or you just want to look over it yourself again it can be really helpful to read it out loud because sometimes that change from just reading it in your head versus reading out loud will help you realize places where you're using repetitive language or it doesn't flow or anything like that I would add one thing that you know given I guess kind of the variance and where I come from in my background being in public health and then the legal services and I think the opportunities for cross you know sector collaboration are really really great and when you can do that you can learn so much even within the writing process about how we articulate things within the legal aid community to make other sectors really understand the importance of the work that is being done in a way that they will understand the same way that we all might being in the legal aid community or having you know worked directly in that and so that's one thing that I would encourage even if it's just having conversations and not actually going after a grant like utilizing those are all learning experiences that can help inform how you write things and all of that but one thing since we have just a little bit of time you know still focused on the writing process itself what are the common challenges more so than what maybe is there anything else that either of you would identify when you first start writing a grant proposal Jessica you mentioned you know just like a blank page what if you run into a situation where you're just like really struggling getting the team together or whatever how do you how do you pause and kind of regroup if you need to yeah I mean definitely I think just with the constraints that legal aid is often under I think we're in the process of like you know I say we're building the plane as we're flying it a little bit so you know this is kind of the ideal process of what you want to set as the standard with the reality is like that doesn't always happen you know there's been times where we've had to adjust a grant like to like a resubmission and like a really quick turnaround with the funder and you know you don't have a decision yet you know from the leadership of okay this is the direction that we're going to take this now so you kind of have to identify maybe you don't know okay the project director who's that going to be on it or even exactly like what team is going to lead this and you know you need to set like a drop dead like we have to have this you know by this time again kind of like the hurting cats with leadership sometimes and but then just you know get go through what you can right and that's by having um I think regardless of how much time you have you really have to go through every element of the grant application and make sure that you've identified who needs to be involved in that because you need to know like what is like actionable and what's still you need someone else to to chime in on anything to add to that Katie just say again like being sort of and being really clear with your expectations of each of the staff members and you know saying that this this section I need your help on because you know you were the one that worked on this project so knowing that like that's their responsibility and like that trying to be more of a collaborative effort and share the workload that's great yeah and I think you go ahead go ahead oh no and also like I try to you know be flexible too and when you're working with like you know very busy like project directors and stuff that have a lot of their plate I don't think there's like a one size fits all of this is always how we're going to handle it some people want to be like super involved to the grants process so like provide the language be part of the review process some people just want to provide the language and you know some people have had to like you know schedule a call when they're driving in between like you know Texas counties for like court and just like get the information like ask them a bunch of questions and like write it from there so how you get that input I think you need to be flexible with and work with people and their work styles and their their schedules so you know try not to be like too rigid yeah I think that also goes back to like building internal relationship too so like the longer you work on the more you get to learn all you know this colleague really like to draft something first and have us look at it or this colleague is far more interested in just you know the notes at the end making sure that it it looks like something that would work for their office you know things like that that makes a lot of sense um so we can open it up from here if anybody has anything to chime in on at least on this part of it so the writing process if not we can open up for just general questions that maybe folks might have in the time that we have left happy to take any of those questions and you can come off of mute if you want is there anything burning that we have missed going to take your silence as it's all good um not a problem on we will be sending this out and it so that we have some useful links for you all and um also if you have any questions that come up after the fact feel free to contact any of us our contact info will be in the slides but shelly will make sure to get that out yeah and that's pretty much all we've got for you unless anybody has any questions if you have a question you want to stay after and ask it privately you're welcome to do so but we're open to questions we still have some time available so you know this session can be personalized to you to answer your questions so take advantage of it if you like I just want to mention that as you exit you will be asked to fill out a survey about today's webinar having you answer these questions we really do respond and change things in the future based on the feedback that we receive I also have a link to a survey that we have had created for ITC and we didn't get a lot of responses so this is separate from your exit survey if you would like to provide feedback on how Ellison Hap is doing in general feel free to take that link and then provide us some feedback in the future we really do want to hear from you so we know what kind of programming to offer and what kind of resources are needed in the community but we do have time to answer any questions that anyone might have otherwise I will be sending out a link the webinar will be available on our YouTube channel we also will be creating a web page for it on our website so that you can access it there we'll be adding other resources and if there are resources specific to grant writing that you would like to see us develop please let us know we certainly want to be a kind of a not a one-stop shop I mean there are plenty of other great resources out there but if there's something that we can provide on our website let us know thanks Shelley otherwise thank you so much for joining us today