 Hi everybody, thanks for joining TechSoup today. My name is Aretha Steinman, I'm the webinar producer here at TechSoup. This is being recorded, I know you're going to ask, this is being recorded and it's going to be emailed to everyone who is registered within 48 hours, maybe tomorrow. Today, our topic will be focused on ways to help you generate additional funding requests for nonprofits with a limited staff. So it's grant seeking solo, securing grants with a limited staff. I'm so excited for this because grant writing is like our number one requested topic. If you are new here, you know that you are new, so here's how you can engage today. Please use the Q&A feature to type your questions. We're going to stop during this webinar and answer some questions. Again, we're going to email you this recording and the slides within 48 hours. If you learned something amazing today, you're like, oh my God, I did not know that. Why don't you share it on social media on tag us at TechSoup. Turn on the CC, if you need the CC button by using the CC located at the bottom of your Zoom window. Now, I'm going to move out of the way because we have somebody amazing here. If you have not heard of GrantStation, then you probably have been in a cave somewhere. We have the CEO of GrantStation here with us today. This is Rare. This is Rare. Her name is Cynthia Adams. She has been dedicated to helping nonprofits for over 45 years, okay, 45 years. She founded GrantStation because she believes that grant seeking requires a thorough understanding of the funders and sound knowledge of the philanthropic playing field. I know that's right. Her life's work has meant to level the playing field, creating opportunities for all nonprofit organizations, regardless of their size or the geographical location, to secure grant support. Cynthia, I am so glad you're here. So excited while you're getting ready to share your screen. I want to make one quick announcement, and that is GrantStation. We have the GrantStation special that's coming up in a week and less than a week. It's going to be $99. It's regular $169 as a discount with TechSoup. So make sure you take advantage of that. And welcome, Cynthia. Thank you so much for being here. I'm going to turn it over to you. Thank you very much, Arisa. I really appreciate it. Thank you all for joining me today. So here we are. Welcome to today's webinar. It's presented by Cynthia Adams by a way of Jeremy Smith. Cynthia is the CEO of GrantStation, has been with us for years and years and years. And over 45 years, I believe. She has a wealth of knowledge, and she thought it would be great fun if I presented today. So I'm happy to do that. I've been with GrantStation myself just a hair over 13 years. So I know almost everything, but just through Osmosis, being nearby, hosting all of our webinars that we do at GrantStation. So a lot of this I've seen, and I'll be able to offer my own little insight as we go through this. I know we're a little bit into the time today, but what I'm going to do my best here is to make sure that we can get through this, all the information Cindy has, and also cover the slides and also cover your questions, which are the most important thing that we want to cover today. And of course, and this will be remiss if I don't mention it, think about the importance of purchasing a GrantStation membership. That's my hard sell. Don't worry. I won't say any more than that. So again, thank you for joining us today. And what we're going to do is look at our learning objectives. So they're pretty straightforward. This is going to be as fast-paced as it can be as a webinar, and we're going to cover quite a bit, but we'll be providing you with resources outside of the training so you can really follow up with all those different ideas that really sort of strike you as potentially doable for you and your organization. So here's something to keep in mind. You may decide to adopt one of these approaches, or maybe you can combine one, two, or even all of them. Here's the key. Keep an open mind. Because a solution to your particular problem when it comes to really keeping the Grant pipeline full and running smoothly may be different than someone else's. So let's go ahead and take a look at our agenda. And I'm sure many of you have found that you do not have the time to really do anything, but also to submit as many requests as your organization wants, needs, and really even deserves. So there are three distinct approaches you can take. We're going to cover all these today. These are the three that you can combine and use however you feel fit. So they include creating a proposal, writing efficiencies, establishing a grant seeking team, and building a partnership with another like organization. So let's focus on this idea of streamlining, because even if you do decide to build a grant seeking team or really a partnership with another organization, having these efficiencies I mentioned in place will really allow that team to function seamlessly. So then we'll move on to building a team discussing who should be on this team. And how do you go about building and managing the team? Jeremy, one more thing to deal with. I can't deal with it. Well, we'll tell you how you can deal with it. And it can be done. A little bit of planning can make everything go pretty smoothly. And then we're going to wrap up today by really talking about how a fairly simple partnership can help both your organization, as I mentioned earlier, and your partner organization connect with more funding. So before we dive into details, I'm going to set the stage a little bit. We're not spending a lot of time on statistics, as Cindy mentioned earlier, because we definitely have bigger fish to fry. But I wanted to give you a sense of how other small profits are really faring in the world of philanthropy today. So we're going to take a look at some of the results taken from our Spring 2021 State of Grant Seeking Survey of about 3,500 nonprofits who participate in this survey. And we really have some practical reasons for sharing these statistics with you. It's important to note, as you really establish your own grant seeking objectives, what other organizations accomplish in the way of grant seeking. So organizations with comparable budgets and even missions is what you're looking for. So looking at these specific information we have here, 68% of nonprofits are considered small, one to 24 employees. Quick show of hands. How many of you are small, a small organization? Aretha, is that a we have a lot of small organizations? I'm putting that in air quotes. A lot of I'm saying yes. OK, I agree with that. OK, we have a lack of time and our staff continues to be the greatest challenge. So OK, based on that, who's having trouble with with lack of time and our staff? Raise your hand for that. OK, I see that also being a potential problem. Interesting. Noticing a trend. Interesting. The total grant awards received in a year usually start around $10,000 for small organizations. So by show of hands, has anyone received about $10,000 in awards, maybe in the last year or so? 10,000 or more, I suppose, roughly. OK, looks as though this is a very useful document full of data. So something to keep in mind, it's very handy. So really, that lack of time and staff makes up the greatest challenge for nonprofits. And again, that last number just to quickly mention, don't need to go back to these, you can stay right here. Most nonprofits receive at least 10,000 a year in awards. So that means that if you're raising about 10,000 a year in grant awards, that could be a solid objective for 2022 and into 2023. Is that right, 2022? 2023, yes. OK, sometimes I get my dates wrong. Apologize for that. So look at this first statistic here on this page. The percentage of organizations that won at least one award was high among organizations that submitted three to five applications. And of course, it goes up from there. But knowing this fact means that you may want to set an objective to submit at least three, maybe even five applications this year, knowing that the likelihood of receiving an award is fairly high. So let's look at this third stat down. Knowing that the most frequently reported type of support for the largest award was project or program support, that's 36 percent. That may mean that you want to focus just on project support proposals in 2022. That way you can guarantee to have an increase in funding. So again, this full report has lots of good information that you can use to really help you generate solid objectives for 2022 and into 2023. This report's open to the public. So feel free to browse around in a bit. If you'd like to compare your organization to other like organizations in terms of budget size and mission, there's a free tool on GrantStation.com. It's called the benchmarker that allows you to do this. You can put in your own mission. You can customize a report to share with your board of directors. You're a fundraising committee, if you like. And again, both the survey and the benchmarker are located on our website, GrantStation.com under public resources. So it's very cool. You should try it out. Again, it's free. It's good to see what's happening in the world. And just a quick reminder, that comes from 3,500 other people who have taken this survey. So it's a good combination of nonprofit results. OK, so let's move on and talk about working solo. One of the most time-efficient things that you can do to really cut down on the stress of writing these proposals is to adopt a process. Now, you'll use that every time you undertake research and or begin writing a request, whether it's a letter of intent, excuse me, whether it's a letter of intent or full proposal. So we're going to share some of these efficiencies that Cindy has adopted that really allowed her to keep the proposal pipeline full. And I think this is key, also retainer sanity. So this first step, creating an efficient in-house system. This will take a little bit of time. So we're going to make this as easy as possible for you. There is no need. You can do this. But there is no need to buy a fancy system to manage documents if you are writing and submitting about 10 proposals a year. You're probably just fine using Google Docs. But once you start to exceed that sort of rough magic number against the rule of thumb of 10 submissions a year, you might want to consider a more robust system that can track all these documents. If you want to find and use an efficient funder identification database, such as, oh, I don't know, grandstation.com, to help you identify potential funders quickly and easily, that's going to be a necessary part of the step. If you do use Grand Station, you can track those potential funders. You can manage your searches easily through your own personal dashboard. And there are other systems out there. And this isn't really the webinar to talk specifically about comparing Grand Station with other organizations. But there are other ones out there. I can really only speak to Grand Station today. But whatever you decide to use, it's important to keep your searches efficient. As this is a step in the grant seeking process, that can take a lot of time. That's very important. This is where you can just, this becomes that rabbit hole. You could just keep going down, searching and searching and searching. You may also want to build a decision matrix that allow you to make quick, easy decisions on which funders to pursue and which ones to set aside. So building a matrix can take a little bit of time. But again, if you belong to Grand Station, we already have a built and ready for you to use. But if you prefer to build your own, I'll give you some instructions on how to do so. So this matrix that you're going to have will allow you to build a matrix that will allow you to run potential funding opportunities through it, answering specific questions and determining specific numbers to that. You assemble all these questions together based on how it'll work for your organization, tally it up, you'll end up with a total and that decides whether you apply or don't apply for it specifically. All this information is available directly within a Grand Station dashboard. But the decision matrix is something you can also look up online and find through Google. But we have it all done for you in Grand Station. I'm just showing the differences there. Now, if you can't purchase a Grand Station membership and there is going to be, let me just check, Aretha, what was that price going to be for a Grand Station membership? $99, it starts February 15th and 16th. Okay, excellent. You see, I put in lots of little breaks to mention why we're here in the first place. So it makes it easy for us to mention why we're here. If you can't afford that, Cindy has said you can just email her directly and she'll send you some more specific info on how to set up your very own matrix. So that's our Grand Station gift to you. So let's go ahead and take a look at this slide right here. So, you know, easily managing and updating our basic documents. This is where you're going to have each document date stamped. You're going to have your mission statement. You're going to have bios. It's important of all your board members and staff and highlighting the skills within that. This is another thing many people don't have and it's not hard to do is an organizational chart. You sort of know the start date on each for the staff person, where they are, who they report to, how it all works together. If everyone is on the same line, that may show there's some issues. If there is only one part of your organization, as you said, this whole, many people have said they have a very small amount of staff, that's also fine. It just means you have to really organize your time specifically or maybe look for potentially board members who'd be willing to help out or maybe some volunteers in the community who might be interested in supporting you as well. You'll also need a current operating budget. Now this needs to be sort of a visual with a narrative connected to it, such as why do I need this particular thing? Why do I need this tractor? Why do I need this computer? Why do I need this specific type of, you know, food for purpose, for whatever the purpose is? And along with your actual numbers, the money you need to keep operating. You're also gonna need a copy of your strategic plan. Now it's really important that you note the date of the latest revision. If that revision is 2016, you need to update your strategic plan. And I'm gonna do a little quick aside here, just because there are many people who, and I'm one of them, still think it's 2019. It is not 2019. It is now two years later than 2019. So if you have something that's from 2019, you're like, well, it's just a couple of years old. No, it's two years old. And as we all know, the world has changed drastically. Funding has changed in these last two years. So if your current strategic plan hasn't even been looked at in the last two years, it's a good idea to sit down, spend some time with that. Just keep that in mind. Also important that you have an organizational description. That would include some of your history. What challenges have you faced? What's the current status of your organization? Are you on hiatus due to COVID? Are you doing three times the number of clients that you're supporting now because of COVID? These are all things to have there because this will all help you as you're putting together your grant proposals. Did I cover that, Cindy? I think I did. Did you wanna go to the next slide? Perfect. So if you plan to submit federal requests, there are several accounts that you're going to need to establish to really successfully submit a federal application. You're gonna need a DUNS number and you can get that from dnb.com. If your organization doesn't have a DUNS number, again, this is for federal grants. If you're going through the federal website, grants.gov to find funding and getting a federal request, you have to have a DUNS number. Now, there's lots of organizations out there that say they'll do it for you for a fee. You should not have to pay for this. You just have to go through the steps. So dnb.com gets you a DUNS number. Oh, did you wanna go back? I didn't quite finish that slide. So one more part to cover. You also need a grants.gov account. And also you need to have a SAM account. It's a system for award management. And you can log into that at SAM.gov. Keep in mind, you'll get a copy of these slides. You don't have to take notes for all of this, but these are the three things you're gonna have to have to do a federal application. Okay, sorry. Thank you for going back, I appreciate it. Now, if you're gonna submit federal as in Canadian requests, you don't have to register with the government of Canada before you apply for funding. And if you're a registered charity, you'll have to submit your Canada revenue agency business number. And that has to be ready to submit with the application. So if you don't have that in place, you'll have to secure that, the Canada revenue agency business number. So now we're on to, let me see. I think we're developing a worksheet to guide your research. So on this worksheet, this is what you're gonna do. These are the components. We're giving you the breakdown. These are the building blocks of what you're gonna have to do. You need a description. This is gonna be a high level description of what the funding's for. This is gonna focus you. This is gonna keep you from going down those, that rabbit hole I mentioned earlier. You're gonna need a statement of need. Why should the funder invest in this project? How will this improve the community you're serving? What problems will this solve? Now, the next step is the budget. And this is where sometimes people, they get lost in the budget. You need to include everything. Include as much detail as you can, such as specific line items. I'll give you a reason why in a second. Make note of any brands that are affiliated with your product, with your equipment, or the services that you intend to purchase. And this is really handy to do, because often, actually there's two reasons to do this. One, you can often find a funder. Say you are, I'm gonna do a scenario here off the cuff. Say you're putting together a home heating organization and you're gonna provide people who don't have heat in their homes with Toyo stoves. That's a brand of stove, Toyo. Toyo has a philanthropic giving arm. They do donate stoves. So if you are giving currently people stoves, you could apply to Toyo and receive 10, 15 Toyo stoves to use in your project. Because you had that brand there, you're able to use as part of your research. Also, if you have it down to a specific thing, let's say you use, many of us use QuickBooks. Let's say you have an accountant who is on your board, or maybe you have someone who's a big supporter of your organization, and they know specifically you need QuickBooks. They say, well, I can help you. I'll pay for your QuickBooks subscription. If you know what you need, if you know that specific brand, that can become a point that you use when you are seeking funding. So don't just say, I need paper. No, I need paper by Herman Mills. Well, Herman Mills has a philanthropic arm. They donate reams of paper every year. It's good to know the brand names and have that detail for your budget. So that's my little aside there. So also you need to know the scope of the giving, what communities are gonna be impacted by this project you're putting together. What countries, what states, what provinces, what counties, what boroughs, boroughs are what we use here in Alaska, and I think also in New York. Know who will be impacted by your work. And also you need to know the geographic focus. This is where you can narrow your scope by identifying those specific counties, cities or neighborhoods that you will serve. And we also have a project description worksheet that's available for use in the Grantation dashboard. It actually walks you through the steps of what to put in and all the things that you specifically need. So you're identifying the right grant makers to approach because that's the key to being both a successful grant seeker and an efficient grant seeker. You in any given year, by the way, you may have one or a dozen different project descriptions and you'll be undertaking research for each of these projects. And this may include general operating funds on top of that. And this description that we just went over all should contain these various components that we just covered. When you're identifying funders, that efficiency I mentioned, you need a consistent research process. Now at GrantStation, we've identified indirectly, actually from someone mentioning it to us, we realized this was what we do. We support primary research and secondary research. So the primary research use GrantStation, for example, which I highly recommend for $9, to do the initial search, taking some time to review each funder's profile and all the information we put in there. After primary research, you can now go into your secondary research. And actually just quickly on primary research, this is where you're going to be really just identifying who it is, who is a good fit. Okay, I'm based in Nebraska. I'm providing SKIS for an after-school program for disadvantaged youth. Okay, great. You're going to figure out your keywords, identify the specific ways to approach that's all primary research and finding those initial funders. Let's say you found 10 funding sources that would be perfect for your needs. Once you have them, and you're going to start looking deeper into them, and this is a step many people skip and this is where you run into problems. You need to look into each one as a potential investor in your organization. You need to look at all of their published materials. Look at their website. Look at their annual report because if they do provide funding, they have an annual report. Look at a list of folks that they've supported over the past year or two. This is all secondary research. This will help you eliminate those specific funding organizations who actually won't fit at this time. So you can really focus your energy on those grant makers who truly do fit. So I'm going to take a pause here for an interactive element. How many people have found the perfect funder? They're ready to write it. They start writing the grant. They get halfway through, maybe all the way through and then realize, oh, this isn't going to work. This is awful. How many people have ran into that? You know what? You're lucky. I have to say some of you have, but for the most part, many of you haven't and that's good because I saw a lot more people shoot their hands up earlier. So you got lucky there. That's good. That's probably due to the fact that you have a very limited amount of time and it may be just you doing this. So you want to focus on just the right ones for you, the ones that fit for your need. That's why we mentioned earlier the decision matrix. That's why you really want to use that secondary research to ferret out all these people that aren't a perfect fit. Now this could be because they only give to people who are left-handed and their name is Jeremy. I mean, I'm totally in, but you may not be in. These is where you do that research. You may find the perfect person, but they may not be perfect for you at that moment. So let me see, what was this? I suffer from analysis paralysis. So I don't go until I suspect it's a pretty easy ask. That's actually a really good point. I think many people do that because who wants to be rejected? I don't, no one wants to be rejected. So the goal is to really make sure either it's an easy ask, which we can debate that in a whole different webinar at some point if you want, but you want to make sure your time is worth it. You don't want to put three, four, five, maybe a week worth of time into a funding organization that's not going to work for you. You want one that's going to fit for you? You want one that's going to work? And Marie, you love rejection? That is not me, but I love that for you. So that is excellent. So again, just to harp a little bit more about this secondary research will just help you eliminate those funders who actually won't fit at this time. So you can focus on the ones that truly do fit. So I mentioned the decision matrix. And oh, look, we have it right here. Here's the information of how to do it. And I know Cindy is like, Jeremy, talk about this. So I'm going to do that. So decision matrix is really handy and you can use it for all kinds of things. I sometimes use the decision matrix to figure out what I'm going to eat for dinner. But I like to use it for funding specifically. So the first step or the components really, do you need a criteria? You need to have a breakdown of specific timing for the funder. Is it a good fit? Is this funder going to work for us at this specific time in our need? Are they only funding established projects? Are they only funding new projects? That's the timing aspect of criteria, credible. How credible is this organization? Have they been giving consistently? Have they decided to stop giving funds randomly in the past and they're just starting up again? Can I count on this funder to continue to provide support? Relationship, do I have a relationship with this funder? Are they friends with another organization that I'm aware of? Have I ever heard of them before or is it a complete cold call with this organization? Side note, this is something I would strongly recommend. If you find that funder, who is a good fit, but maybe the timing is wrong or maybe their credibility isn't quite there yet, establish a relationship beyond treating them as an ATM. Reach out to them, tell them what you're doing, ask if what their focus is in the next years, establish that relationship. Once you have a relationship, I'm sure many of you know, it's much easier to get in the door and either do an ask or talk more with them. And it's also very polite. So something to keep in mind, work on a relationship, if you find that perfect funder, that's right for you, but not right now. And also important under the criteria components of decision matrix, how much pre-proposal work is required? Do I have to write a proposal to provide you with a proposal, to do another proposal? It's important to note all these things. You may find the great, perfect funder, but they want four term papers before you can apply. That may not be the one. And we had this cartoon around the Grantation Office for years where it had a picture of a grant writer in a library and they were downloading. They said, well, it took me 10 minutes to download those parameters for the grant, scratch that grant, because there is too much work required to get that funding. Maybe eventually you can work up to that, but again, you're focusing on time and focus. You want easy when, you want a guaranteed when ideally, or you want to at least make sure your work nets something for it. Either you can use it again in the future, or it results in an actual award, maybe a gift of some sort. So the next part of building decision matrix is the weights. So you need to assign a weight to each criteria. Now you can do this very easy one, two, three type of weight to it, and it'll be like, okay, so is this particular, is this the right time for me to apply? Well, they're only funding startups and I've been around for 25 years. Yeah, I'll give that a one. That's how it works. You can also give it a neutral weight of zero. So it doesn't hurt, it doesn't help. And you can also then give it a positive weight. So you can assign negative or positive, just make sure it's consistent across everything. And then the third thing you need to do is the score and that determines if you apply or not. Now this is based on your criteria, the number of questions you have. And it takes a little bit of going back and forth, but oh, look at that, here's an example. And the only reason I sound a little surprised is because I have never given this webinar before. So I don't exactly know what the next slide will be. So it's as much an amazement to me as it is to you, but this is exactly how it would look. So let's look at our criteria. We'll start with subjective. So a column is the grantmaker's goals, or that's a five. It builds on our mission, that's a four. Are we likely to get it? That's a three. Is there a competition? Yeah, I think Aretha wants this one too. So there's competition. I don't know if I can outright her. Do I have a relationship with the grantmaker? Oh, that's a five, because I'm the Godfather of their children. That's the kind of thing, that's how you deal with subjective and objective aspects. So looking at objective specific, do they provide sufficient funding for our need? Are they matching, or do we have to have matching funds to make this work? Oh boy, this could be a problem. Do we have adequate time to apply? Yes, applications are due tomorrow, everyone. You found out about it today. Have fun with that. Do we have a project plan prepared? Oh no, we don't. Do we have audited financials? Oh boy, okay. This is where you're going to adjust those weights. And if you look over at the key on the right-hand side, zero is neutral, one to five is positive, negative one to negative five is surprise negative. So here's our breakdown. We're applying if the score is 40 or higher. And if it requires leadership approval, that's a 35 to 39. If it's below a 34, we're not gonna apply to this because that's just not really worth our time. And we can run a funder back through this matrix when we say run through the matrix. This is exactly what we need, run them through. Here's another thing. Sometimes you'll have someone being very helpful saying, Jeremy, I found the perfect grant for you. They give money to left-handed people in Alaska. Here you go. You're like, oh, great, a grant to research on top of all the work I'm already doing. You know what? Let me run it through the matrix and I'll see if it fits specifically. So let's go ahead and move on to the next slide here and talk about instilling ownership. Gonna make sure that I have everything lined up here. Okay, so you're gonna want to establish ownership. During the grant writing process. Who is in charge and what is their role? I mentioned this earlier with the organization breakdown. So that means you're gonna need to adopt those clear roles and responsibilities that make sense for your organization. Don't toss the questions on this slide aside to go back to, thank you. Really consider each one because it determines the success of your request. What is the writer's role? Why are they writing this? What is their purpose? What are their major responsibilities? Have they participated in setting the grant program objectives? This is the grant writer I'm talking about. Is the writer well-acquainted with the organization? In many of these cases, you are this person. But in some cases, you may hire an outside grant writer. These are considerations to ask yourself. Is the writer knowledgeable about the project needing funding? It's very important. Because the last thing you want is to make it look like you got your grant from a term paper mills, is that what they call them? Where people write term papers for you? You want it to be yours. You don't want it to be something that looks cookie cutter. It needs to represent your organization. So these are all important questions to ask yourself. It all comes down to instilling ownership. I think I finished the slide now. So, yeah, we'll do our best to try to get to questions at the end of the webinar. So and hopefully we'll get Cindy on to answer some of those questions as they come in. And of course, you can always email us infogratiation.com if you have any questions. We're happy to help you out that way. So where are we currently? Okay, well, we have finished adopting a process and now we're going to establish a team. So I'm going to try to not waste too much of your time today. I'm going to try to get out right on time. So we may get to questions a little bit later. We won't break for questions right now, but I want to talk about the importance of establishing a team, because this is a very important part of what you do. And this is that other companion part to how you put together your structures. So let's go to the next slide. This is an option that you're going to want to consider. And this is one that came through Cindy's desperate 45 years of experience need to write and submit more proposals when she worked as development director at a public radio television station. And that's to build a grant seeking team. So in her case, and probably in yours as well, this needed to be all volunteers as there was no staff to draw on. So she learned a lot about herself as a manager really about how volunteers work as she was working through this idea. So the original volunteer team that she had was about four people, but it was quickly learned, as you all know, you can't count on the same volunteers to pour their energy into one proposal and then turn around and ask them to do it again and again, and I don't know, 10 times. So she built sort of an expansive grant writing team to incorporate over a dozen different folks. So what she learned, and much of this was learned the hard way, which just seems to be how we learn lots of things here at Grant Station, is it's important to have a clear idea of how many proposals you're gonna be writing and to whom, how much money you need to raise and by when as well. So in other words, you need a clear idea of the program objectives before you engage the volunteers. So the workload was crystal clear from the get-go. Now, if you don't do this, you will have people showing up and I know many of you have had this or I've had it where someone's like, Jeremy, how can I help? I'm like, I don't have enough bandwidth to teach you to do this. It's faster if I just do it myself because I haven't thought about how I'm going to use you effectively. I don't know how you're gonna fit into this. So actually you helping has made this even more work at this point. I believe some of you have felt that way or I know I have at least in the past. If you have it already set up and you are crystal clear on what you need and what you're focusing on, you can slot people in to what you need them to do, especially volunteers. You don't wanna have a volunteer doing 40 hours of work a week. You want them to spend maybe an hour or two. You wanna have multiple volunteers. So you can sort of spread the load out. So it's not one person carrying it because if that one person gets sick or I don't know their internet connection doesn't work, it's up to one person to do the whole webinar slash, I mean the entire proposal. So what Cindy also learned. Very funny. The hard way is that it's important to have a really clear idea of how many proposals you're gonna be writing and to whom, how much money she needed to raise and by when. So keep that in mind. Also, she wanted to adopt a recruitment process that would not only be of use to set up the original working team, but that could be used whenever we lost someone from that team needed to replace them. Much like today, I was here, I was able to replace the internet. This is the glory of having a team when it's just one person. As you all know, it is so much work, but if you have someone else who can help you, if you have a couple of people who can help you, if you're able to take one person and give them a little bit of a duty, it makes your job just a little bit easier. So you can at least get back to focusing on your work and not on just finding funding. So determining those program objectives, you're gonna research what other organizations of like-sized emission are able to raise through grants. And again, we mentioned that earlier. So the grants seeking report can help you determine those benchmarks using the aptly named the benchmarker tool. This is if we plan this. Look at your budget and determine what percentage you need to receive as grants. It's almost like a commercial for GrantStation. Use R3, it's an interactive tool and that's on our website to help you determine the percentage of your budget that should be grant funded. So the benchmarker, of course, you can use right now. R3 is a more advanced tool. If you're interested in the tools, it's a side note and a self promotion, I will be back here next week. Me and Aretha will be presenting all the tools you can use at GrantStation. So we're gonna go ahead and take a look now at our objectives. So our first objective, let's say, to submit a minimum of 11 applications within an 11, 18 month period. Our second objective, we wanna secure five grant awards within an 18 month period. And our third objective, we are hoping to receive three awards by September of 2022. And I have to say, I am very happy people are talking in the chat because I can't watch that and also do the presentation. So please continue to talk in the chat and share information because this is the best way for all of us to learn more and build more as organizations that wanna support each other and also support everyone out there with our good work. So we're gonna begin by identifying those objectives I mentioned. Now let's say you're starting from scratch. Let's say you don't currently have a grant writing team or you submit very few, if any, grant requests. You're gonna wanna establish a very conservative objective. Don't plan on getting a Gates Foundation or William H. Kellogg grant off the bat if you've never done it before. That's setting yourself up for failure at this point. I mean, maybe you'll get lucky. You hear the stories like I wrote a letter and then the next day I got a check for a million dollars. That's great. But there's a reason you heard that story because it's rare and it was carried by every single news organization as an amazing thing that happened. That doesn't happen every day. That happens rarely. A lot of this is work. A lot of this is relationships and figuring out where things fit in and having people do extra hours. There isn't an Oprah out there saying, you get all your funding, you get all your funding, you get all your funding. That doesn't really happen. If it has happened to you, congratulations. For the rest of us, we have to do a little bit more. And this is when I was mentioning that conservative objective. So you wanna keep your monetary objectives fairly modest if you haven't done this before. If your overall budget is say $75,000, then maybe try to raise five to 10% of that budget. Somewhere between $3,000 and $7,500. To set this realistic objective research, to set this relative to the objectives you need to research what other like organizations are doing. And you need to take a good look at your budget and determine what percentage of your budget needs to be grant awards. Now again, I mentioned the R3 a second ago. It's called revenue review and report, which I think is very snappy. You can use that to help realize the grant potential of your organization. So let's you review where your funding is coming from today, projects where your funding will come from the future, and gives you recommendations on next steps for exploring funding sources. So to run an accurate report, you need a copy of your operating budget. That's how it comes back to your budget. The more information you have, the better it is, the easier it is to do these things. You have your operating budget. You have a breakdown of grant awards, the amount on the source. This exercise maybe takes about let's say 10 minutes. Once you've gone through it, you print off your results. You can then share them with your staff, your board of directors, your fundraising committee, and projections can be particularly helpful when you're setting your grant program objectives. Whew. So obviously, your first step to develop a few concrete objectives is this guide to your grant writing team. So here's a few examples. Make sure each objective is measurable. So for example, number three is pretty clear. Did you do it or did you not? However you go about setting your objectives, just really remember that you want these in place as you build your grant seeking team. Why? Why Jeremy? Why Cindy who isn't going to answer? Why Jeremy? Because you don't want to make the decision about how many proposals you'll submit this year through committee, because we all know doing anything by committee is awful, especially Zoom meetings, especially a new working team that doesn't or understand the organization yet. So if they come in and see everything falling apart, you know, they're like, I don't know if I want to get involved in this. It's important that you have those crystal clear objectives in place. You'll find it easier to recruit to your team because you now have concrete info that not only you can share, but they can share with people that they know. It's like, oh, my friend is a grant writer and they love what you're doing. I'm sure they'd love to help. That's great. We are in need of someone who can do X, Y, Z. They'll work great because you have the objectives, you're good to go. Now, as you begin to think about your team, you're going to want to establish and this team you're establishing, keep in mind that you are looking for those specific skills. This means you're going to be really selective about who you ask to participate. So obviously the first thing you have to do is identify the skills that you need based on the work that you need done. So it's really difficult though to get anyone to really commit, you all know this, to helping unless you've defined their role and responsibilities and they completely understand their level of commitment. Okay, so apparently from my understanding, this is where it gets tricky. So let me look a little closer here. Oh, okay, I remember. Okay, I'm also pulling on my own historical information as I'm going through this. So I'm matching it all up my head. So please give me a moment as I get clear on what I'm doing next. That selectivity I was talking about about who you're going to add in your team, you definitely don't want to pick the low-hanging fruit just because certain people are eager to help. This is where I'm kind of going to go against the idea you have of typical volunteer recruitment because that follows a fairly traditional path. You're going to almost always start with the compelling message that reflects your mission. You then explain why your organization is worthy of a volunteer's time. You craft a message that is short, simple and direct. You communicate the need for the volunteer's service and the good that he or she can do. You often then have a list of volunteer job that could be assigned as people agreed to volunteer their time. And that usually works for almost any sort of volunteering you need. However, for your grants team to be a winning team, you have to go at this recruitment process a bit differently. You will actually, we encourage you to adopt a very targeted approach, focusing on the skills you need to write strong grant requests, almost like a headhunter, just a little bit. The key here is to look for individuals who want to enhance those specific skills that you've identified or have already had significant experience in particular areas. So these individuals can be, say, they're passionate about what you do or they might just be somewhat interested. But again, the key here is to find individuals who want to enhance their own skills or keep their existing skills tuned. These volunteers or individuals who are eager to challenge themselves and may not necessarily be focused on your specific goal. These are people who like what you're doing, but maybe they want, maybe they're working on getting a master's in writing. This is an opportunity for them to hone that craft to really tune up their skills. This is where it's a little different, sort of that atypical volunteer recruitment. Now, this kind of targeted recruitment process is key to developing a successful team. Now, Cindy cannot stress the importance of this part of building a grant seeking team enough. Now, there are numerous ways to find these folks, including connecting with local colleges and universities, say the local job center, maybe using some of the online resources, such as volunteer match. Other options, you could place advertisements and trade press and newspapers on commercial job boards on your organization's website, social networking sites. There's also a possibility, LinkedIn, whatnot. Although truthfully, Cindy has never used any of these resources. Actually, I have never used them either. She just asks everyone she knows if they know someone with the skills she needs. That's funny, Cindy, because that's sort of, that is grandstation into a T. It's who you surround yourself with and who you have available. And also, this is interesting because you mentioned the importance of having that statement, that clear idea of what you do and what you offer and letting someone know exactly what you need them to do in this situation. Jeremy, I wanna hire you because you're good with computers. Bam, that's great. I may not love grant seeking, and I'll tell you what, in 2008, I didn't know anything about grant seeking, but I know a lot more now, and I still am really good with computers. So it seems like it's working out for me. So let's explore what sorts of jobs you're looking to fill. We're looking for researchers. We're looking for writers, copy editors, accountants and bookkeepers, graphic designers, proposal coordinators. A researcher needs to have a good working knowledge of how to uncover information through the internet. That could be just about anyone nowadays. Well, not anyone, but you can definitely find people who are good at finding information on the internet. Your person needs to be focused and able to pull the information you're going to need to build a strong case for support. Basically, this is your statement of need for both full proposals and your letter of inquiries. They'll need to be able to find, read and understand demographic research, the results of census surveys, et cetera, taking that information and stilling it into usable information to help you build your cases for support. So actually a student at the regional university, your community college can be a strong candidate for this job. Looking at the writer position, usually need more than one writer. At least if you're intending to submit maybe five or more proposals in a given year, you can't just rely on one volunteer. As I mentioned earlier to do all that writing, so you wanna recruit a few different writers. Look for people with a degree in English or journalism. And you only want one writer for each project, not multiple writers, one writer per project. You do not want several different writers working on several different proposals for the same project. You want everything to be in one voice. We're back to that slide earlier. What are you trying to convey? What's the writer trying to say? One voice. You're trying to get a project funded and you intend to submit three proposals to three different grant makers. You want the same writer on all three proposals. So the copy editor, they'll make the draft proposal. They'll look for spelling and grammatical errors, make sure every comma is in place, et cetera. They, this may also be one of your volunteer writers, but it's something to keep in mind. You need someone who can read over it, who didn't necessarily write it. You have two writers, one writes it, one edits. They don't both write it. It's important to have someone with clean eyes or clear eyes go over it. Person with a background in accounting or bookkeeping will help develop the budget and the budget narrative. Of course, they need guidance from you, but basically they can take that language and turn it into the numbers you need. Graphic designer invaluable at all points. We'll be looking at the draft proposal, both the narrative and the budget, making suggestions as to where a graphic, maybe a chart or a photograph or an infographic and making an infographic can strengthen the overall request. And of course, we'll also be developing or finding that graphic for you to use. And then finally, you have the proposal coordinator. They keep tabs, the information being collected. They ask other team members for what's missing. The coordinator makes sure all the application guidelines are being followed. They help assemble all the parts for submission. They are in fact the first person to get involved in the process. And they are probably the keystone here because they will make a checklist of every item that needs to be developed for the LOI or full proposal. LOI again, letter of inquiry. And then they monitor it throughout the process to keep everyone on task and meeting deadlines. This is your team. These are the folks you'll be relying on to feed you the information necessary to develop a strong grant request. Your job is to establish these and what those program objectives that we discussed earlier, identifying the grant makers you want to approach for each project or program that needs funding, recruit and monitor the grant writing team and then do a final review of a draft proposal before it's submitted. However, don't jump too fast. You have to give this process some time. Ask, ask and ask again until you unearth the right person for the job. Again, don't settle for the excited person. Settle for the right person in this scenario, which is totally different, I know, but this is how you build a winning grants team. And it's really clear. Asking someone who's just breaking into the field might be your best bet for a good volunteer. So let's take a look at the four keys successfully managing such a team. You determine a proposal needs to be written. You want to walk each volunteer through their assigned task. Be sure that you share a copy of the full application with each person who will be on this particular request. If you detect any hesitation as you go through this work that they'll need to do, you must ask them if they'll need help or if this is too much to ask of them at this time. I have ran into this in my personal life and also my work life. And anytime I've helped up with the grant is whenever I run into someone who says, oh yeah, I can do it. And then they come to me and say, I can't do it. It's all falling apart. If they had told me earlier, it's totally fine. I'd rather know sooner than at the end that they can't finish it. So this is your chance to hone your psychology skills and make sure the person can continue with the task and make sure it's not too much for them at this time. You're gonna want to determine what resources they might need to do this work, figure out how to provide that resource. For example, if someone's doing the research for you, helping you say build a case for support, they need to access a survey tool or maybe they need to purchase a report or attend a webinar to put something together. This is all information that you need to know. They may not know they need this off the bat. So you just have to let them know that if they stumble onto something that has a cost, you're willing to consider it. Or maybe another example, a graphic designer needs a specific software program or maybe access to a database of images to use or to generate the kind of data visualization you have in mind. Then you might have to purchase that software or access to that database or come up with another way of presenting the information. This meeting, it's important to set realistic deadlines taking into account their existing schedule. Communicate with each volunteer regularly and make sure that the deadlines are realistic and also justified because it's the polite thing to do. Making sure you address all those areas, it'll really keep grants development process moving forward. So communication talk, it's imperative you keep the lines of communication open and flowing. I'm pounding my hand, I don't know if you hear that. Let folks know when one of the committee members finishes their work or perhaps when they begin work in a particular section let people know, celebrate that. Regular email updates will keep folks on task. A graphic or two captures their attention on a bad idea to make them read the message. Cindy uses cartoons, as I mentioned a lot to reinforce email messages. And it works, because I remember the cartoons. Maybe not always the message, but I do the message because I read the cartoon. So I think in the end it all works out. Remember to keep the communications really short and to the point and keep them graphically interesting so they'll read them. Now, Cindy's on a board or the executive director is trying to keep everybody in the loop, sends out these long emails every other week which I assume read like, oh gosh, I don't want to assume what they read like. It's just too much information and she doesn't read them in their entirety. I can't believe you admitted that Cindy. Maybe I wasn't supposed to read that part out loud. Anyway, regular communication is really motivating for volunteers. The lack of it is one of the chief reasons volunteers become dissatisfied much like we're telling you exactly how we're doing this webinar. We didn't want to be quiet and just have you wonder what's happening. We want to involve you in the process. You are all volunteering to be here today. We want you to understand what we are doing. So keep them short. So what is your job? Remember, you are the driver. The train ain't going nowhere without you. That's Cindy, that's not me. You can't hand things off and then sit back and wait for the results. You will be waiting a very long time if you approach it that way. Your volunteers will drop the ball. You can count it, not always, not often or they should be dropped from the team but it does happen. When you see someone struggling with a deadline you have to step in and take over the job. You are the red link that you see in this graphic. You keep things connected. This is a crucial role. So keeping a volunteer committee energized is a heck of a task but one that is well worth it in case of such a working team. So you're going to raise the bar. You're reviewing the efforts. You're reviewing committee efforts. You're giving them a break. You're acknowledging work when it's completed. You're reward and celebrate. This is just for your grant seeking group, your grant seeking committee. This is not your overall volunteer approach. This is your winning grant seeking team. That's what this is for. Your volunteers will get tired and you need to schedule breaks without losing momentum. This is tricky. One of the reasons her original team was so large is she wanted two people who could do graphics or work on the budgets, et cetera. So she wasn't too demanding on one set but she did this because they were trying to submit 20 or more proposals each year. Some of them federal. So it was a daunting task. So remember, breaks. Okay. I think we're doing okay on time. Are we okay on time, Aretha? I don't want to go too far. I don't want to go too far. There are a lot of questions in the Q&A and I know that we are... We had a delayed start for sure. We did. If we were on task, we have 15 minutes left. Do you want to answer some questions now? Let me just cover, I'm going to cover this quickly, that curating a partnership. I mentioned this earlier during my tap dancing routine. So I will just revisit it with more tap dancers with me. Well, which is Cindy's script. I'll do it quickly and then we'll get to questions. So I did not want anyone to feel like we're trying to ignore other questions. But I mean, with over 600 people here, we have a lot of questions to go. So we are going to get to them, but this is important. We're talking about getting organized, having your documents, developing a team, that's all important. This is collaboration. Collaborative partnerships rely on participation by at least two parties who agree to share resources, such as finances, knowledge, and people. So organizations in a collaborative partnership almost always share a common vision. The essence of collaborative partnership is for all parties to mutually benefit from working together. In the case of writing and submitting proposals, you're looking for a partner who can bring an experienced proposal writing person or staff to the table. And what they need from you is a specific area in which you excel, or the ability to maybe bring real-time data from the field to help bolster their case for support. You have to bring something to the table. So figure out what it is you can offer and make that part of your pitch when you're trying to secure a partnership. Now, there are a number of good reasons for working in partnership with another organization. Partners almost always result in the stronger request for support. Your partner may have skill sets you can tap into for researching writing and managing different grant awards. So let's take a quick look at physical management. Oops, just because this is going to be something that I'm just going to mention here quickly before we get to the questions and really these three barriers, these common barriers that you're run into is the physical management experience really? I mean, are you having difficulty dealing with the money aspect? I mean, have you been audited? Is there no audit in place? Is there not enough history as an organization or in this area of grants management? Your geographic location doesn't fit with the funder's interests. All of these can be remedied with a fiscal sponsor. So again, if your budget is too small to secure a certificate grant support, you can consider a fiscal sponsor. So the fiscally sponsored project does not become a program belonging to the sponsor. The sponsor does not necessarily maintain ownership of any part of the results of the project's work. The sponsor simply assures the project will use the grant funds received to accomplish the ends described in the grant proposal. So I think what we're going to do now is we're going to go ahead and shift the questions at this point, just because I don't think we can get through the rest of this in the time we have. But what is nice is you will be receiving all these slides as a part of the recording. I would love to do more, but we do not want to keep you extra time. We know how precious your time is. So let's go ahead and shift over to questions at this point. Oh, yes. Let me read some of the Q&A since you've been talking a lot. Oh, thank you so much. I'm going to drink something while you do that. Yes, yes. And Cindy, feel free to chime in. But Pharrella, if I pronounce your name wrong, please forgive me. Pharrella asked about Grant Station, is it for Canadian? Because TechSoup's website said it's for U.S. non-profit eligible organizations only. So how does that work? Actually, can you hear me? Yeah, I can hear you. Oh, thank God. Actually, we have a very strong Canadian database. We have a lot of research on the website. There are others that are based in Canada. And we have thousands of members from Canada. We also have international database and Canadian letter that goes out once a month. So you can apply for it through TechSoup. Go ahead and please take advantage of that next week. So I have to get TechSoup to correct that on the website. Leslie asks about handling restricted grants. Maybe that's something you could talk about for a few seconds. Handling them as far as reporting or handling them as far as dealing with them or organizing them or just in general? Yeah, too vague, Leslie. If you're still there, retype your question in the chat in the Q&A. Wonder what are their options for fiscal sponsorship organizations seeking funding for capacity building and operations in Grant Station? Cindy? If you're speaking, Cindy, we can't hear you. It may have dropped at that moment. So elect when you're doing your research. Oh, it completely cut you off till we just heard the word research, Cindy. Okay, but I see her little note on there. Right on the screen, you guys talk about fiscal sponsors. So she's right on it. Perfect, perfect. There we go. Yeah. Next question. There you go. Glenn says, how does Grant Station differ from the Foundation Center Directorate online? Sure, I'll do that really quickly. Everything we have listed in Grant Station is organizations that are actively accepting either letters of inquiry or proposals. So you won't find information from a funder who is no longer in business. You won't find information for a funder who only takes grants from left-handed Jeremy's in Alaska. Everything you're going to find is available and accessible that very day if you want to apply, if it fits with your organization. And also all of our records are done by hand. So you won't find any kind of weird gobbledygook in there as well. Well, that goes hand with the membership benefits, whether the benefits are joining that we asked about. Well, one of the things, I mean, the problem is that there's not enough time in the day to go over all the features Grant Station has. But we do have a webinar you can take on our website, which covers all the different features. But what you can do on Grant Station, you can research funders. You can find funders that work for you. You can go through articles that tell you how to write an application, walk you through all the features of what you need when you're writing an application, like the narrative, the budget, et cetera. Download examples of winning grant proposals to compare to your own. Have your own dashboard where you can save all your funding research. Set up updates that will remind you when to apply for various funding, as well as search through international, as we mentioned, Canadian, U.S., U.S. federal, state-based grant makers, and access over, oh geez, how long has it been? Almost 20 years worth of backlog of various newsletters that also feature various funding opportunities. So all of that and more is all available with a membership for only $99. And then none of this, Tindy said, can you utilize the upcoming savings to add another year? There are already members of GrantStation through 2023. So how would that work? You can stack. That's the best part of GrantStation. If you wanna buy 50 years, fine. We'll add 50 years to your membership. Awesome. Do you know DCIR? Do you know of any small grants that support operating costs? I think there's a lot of small grants. Oh, sure. And you know, I'll tell you what, if, again, I only have a limited amount of time today and I definitely don't wanna keep people over, but if you go to GrantStation.com, you click on the U.S. charitable and I'm gonna have to do this verbally. You can actually search the database without being a member. It will tell you the number of funders available based on your search terms that you put in. That's something I set up so people can see if it's a good fit for them without purchasing a membership. So you can go there, go to your charitable database and do a search. You can search for funding. It won't show you the results. It'll show you the number of results. So if you're looking for capacity building, that's an option. If you're looking for capacity building in Alaska, that's an option. Looking for capacity building religious organizations based in Alaska who only wanna do organizations that start with the letter F, those are all options in searching. There's lots of ways to search. This webinar, of course, isn't covering searching and finding that stuff. Your best bet for that webinar is to come next week where I'll be going over all the tools of Grand Station along with all the features you can access. And your technology will work. Oh yeah, well, because I'm in Alaska, not this nowhere place of New Mexico, never heard of that place. Angs her head in shame. Funny, funny. So Eleanor wanted to know, she works with a monastery school. Are there any private family foundation listed in Grand Station? Quite a few. I believe, and I'm gonna go ahead and fudge here for a second or not even a fudge, really, I'm actually gonna tap dance for a moment because I'm gonna actually pull up my full script and I have a breakdown of everything that's actually covered in the database. So what you're gonna find, you log into Grand Station and you take a look at all the different funders that we have access to in our database. You can access independent family, community, corporate foundations, corporate giving programs, faith-based grant makers, and basically any and all associations with grant-making programs. So private funders will definitely be listed in there. The only thing I'm gonna say, we tend not to have higher education funders listed. There are separate databases that do much more in depth than us. So if you are a college or university looking for a specific funding, we tend not to have things that cater just to universities, but we have funding that's open, as I mentioned earlier, why we're unique from other organizations that provide search utilities is the ability to have funders who are actively accepting requests and letters of inquiries. Awesome, thank you. So there are a couple of questions in here. I'm gonna ask everybody in the chat room to help me with this because DCIR and Ella asked about finding grant writers. So all the grant writers that are here today, please put your contact information into the chat room and does GrantStation have a list of grant writers in GrantStation? That's a really good... We don't. No, we don't. Actually, our partner, the Grant Professional Association is where you wanna go to find consultants that help with grant writing. It's called gpagrantprofessionalassociation.org. It's a pretty good site and they have a lot of listed information there. But yeah, if you are interested, I mean, as Aretha mentioned, feel free to put it in the chat. And people can access you that way, yeah. Look at all these grant writers. Hey, Melanie. Oh, yeah, I'm Field Makers Academy. How do you receive awards from donors without relationships built prior? Everybody's, you talked about building a relationship earlier. Just touch on that real quick. Oh, sure, yeah, this will probably be our last question. I think we can fit in unless people wanna stay a little bit longer. Just a quick note before I answer it. Aretha, will people receive a copy of the recording of this presentation? They will receive this recording. And I don't mind staying on to answer a few more questions. It's up to you. I am more than happy to stay on longer. I just want everyone to know you're welcome to leave. I don't want you to feel like you have to stay and listen to the melodious sound of my voice forever. I was letting you know I'm more than happy to stay on and answer questions as we go. Yes, Grant Writing Professional Association, that is correct. And I think Aretha, I'm not sure if you can do this. Is there a way that you can pull elements of the chat and send that to people along with the recording? No, no, I'm sorry. Okay, well then here is your opportunity. I will answer questions. This is your chance to go ahead and pull everything out of the chat as we go. So could you ask that question one more time as I drink something? Building the relationships with funders prior to getting the donation. So I'm going to dive in here if you can hear me. First of all, don't feel as if you have to have a relationship with a grant maker. If your proposal is strong and your research was comprehensive, you probably don't need that relationship. If you do feel as if you need to build a relationship, then a good way to start is to not email but mail your latest annual report or just a letter that tells them about who you are. Don't ask for money. Just send them information about your organization. They will not throw it away. They will file it. And every time there's a newspaper story about something you've done or you bring on several new board members or a new board president, you can send them that information. They will get to know your organization through that communication, but don't ask them for money yet. You want to build that relationship. Can you still hear me? Yes, we can hear you. You were perfect. I wish it was like that the whole webinar and I could just quietly answered questions. Yeah, I think there's something really wrong here. I don't know what happened. But anyway, the other thing I wanted to mention about relationships is that you want to, one thing you can do is if you find a grant maker that aligns with your mission, aligns with the work you're trying to do, instead of asking them for money, it's always smart to ask them for advice. We're working in the area of reduction of opioid use in our community. I know you've funded XYZ in this area. Can you, would it be all right if we contacted them? Can you make an introduction to us to do that grantee? Can you give us advice? Asking them for advice and guidance helps create credibility for you and establishes, starts to establish, build that foundation for a real relationship. Okay, great. Thank you so much. What is the best resource for finding grants for the arts? Grantation.com, next question. Yes, love it, love it, love it. Love it. We're a local rule location. We're in a local rule, we're in a very rural location in the Midwest and we are not very diverse. Many of the grants are based on diversity. How can we get around this problem? This is from Lindsey. Lindsey, I think one of the things you need to know is that grant makers who fund in rural areas and that's one of the, as part of the terminology you can use when you're doing your research on GrantStation, you can include rural. Those grant makers almost always understand the issue of diversity because many, many rural communities are, one might be all Latino or one might be mainly Caucasian. And so they understand that the diversity issue can be a problem in rural communities. So it's fine to address it in your proposal if you need to, but in truth, most rural funders understand that issue. Very good. Tim Turner said, what is the best practice for maximizing GrantStation? That's a great one. Oh, Tim, I hope you're ready. Your best bet is to actually attend one of our webinars that we have. Every month we do a webinar which goes over all the features of GrantStation. You can ask me direct questions. I do that with Terry Glauser, one of our research people and Kevin also is the host of that. They know so much about our database. So if you wanna know how to use all the features of GrantStation and get the most out of it, make your $100 investment really shine, take that webinar. Buy a membership, take the webinar. And also just to note, if you become a member of GrantStation, you have your own personal dashboard and that's where you're gonna collect information and any research that you do. But we really give you tutorials on how to go through the research process to identify the most appropriate grantmaker for your project. So we really take you through that primary and that secondary research and give you the links and the way to do that easily using the website. But that personal dashboard, that's gonna be a lifesaver for you, especially for those of you that are grant seeking solo. Thank you. Jane asked, we had a mission to pivot in early 2020 after 30 years just before COVID and all volunteers. I'm the grant writer and we lost many large corporate and family foundation funders because of both being able to pivot. Luckily, we did receive three grants in the past year. How do we keep going? How do we keep going as our challenge? Do you have any suggestions? What kind of organization was it? She didn't say, but she just said that they lost a lot of people because of COVID. They had to pivot and she didn't say what type of organization it was. Well, I think part of what you have to do is you have to, for those organizations that are going through this issue, part of what you have to do is you have to be really transparent and demonstrate what your budget was, who the funders that walked hand in hand with you were and where you're at now. I think that kind of transparency is going to be critical for those of us that really suffered through the pandemic and the nonprofits that are struggling. So that's sort of one thing is don't try to hide it. Put it out front. Don't beg. Don't tell people that, look what happened to us. Don't, the sky is falling, the sky, don't do that. Just be very, state the facts and let the reader draw their own conclusion and they can see what has happened. Awesome. M.M. DeVaux said, can someone please define grants pipeline in a concrete way? What steps are included in this? Or is it just that we call a grant calendar to track these deadlines? So great question. Jeremy, you had mentioned the grant pipeline. Oh, that's true. I had said, well, I said pipeline but I usually use grant seeking calendar. It's almost interchangeable in a way. It really lets you know what happens at what date. What are you doing at this moment? And this is something that Cindy has written multiple articles on and we have it incorporated into our website making that grant calendar, how to make it, how to make time for it and how to organize your time around it effectively. And I think one of the things that happens, one of the ways to keep that grant seeking pipeline full is to every time you receive an award, I was just on the phone with a woman at a medical center a couple of days ago. Every time she receives an award, they just work off that award and then they run out of money and they go for something else. Every time you receive an award, you should use that to leverage the next request. You wanna say, this is our project, it's been funded, we needed $50,000 to do it. We've raised that amount of money. Here's the next phase of that project. You wanna create this, you wanna leverage, leverage, leverage. Never, every time a dollar comes in the door, you should turn it into $5. And whether that's a major donor or a fundraising event or a grant proposal, that's the way you have to think about fundraising. And again, I think, I believe I got my, yeah, here's my email. You guys, if you need assistance that we couldn't answer today because of my technology, feel free to email me directly and I'll help you as much as I can. Okay, there's a couple of questions from international organizations. Amy says, we have a unique situation, our non-profit is in the US, but all of our activities are overseas, which makes finding overseas grants hard. So people wanna know are there grants for Africa? Can you answer that question, Cindy or Jeremy? Yeah, we have an international database. You can do your research. Let's say you have a women's clinic in South Africa and you need equipment. You can put those parameters in our international database and come up with grant makers. Some of those are based in the US and some of those are based outside of the US, but those are the ones that will fund that kind of project. There's also a way to do research in the US database. If you're based in the US, but all of your work is international, you can do your research in the US database as well. So there's both the US database and the international database that can help you find the right grant makers for such projects. Thank you. And a lot of people ask about that decision matrix. Jeremy mentioned that they could get an email to them. How can they find that decision matrix? The decision matrix, if you're part of grant station, we have one built that you can be a part of your membership. We have one built that you can just download and use on a regular basis. We also give you instructions on how to build your own decision matrix. If you do not become a member of grant station, feel free again to email me and I will walk you through it. Okay, I'm just gonna do two more questions. Katie wants to know, can you use grant stations to set up alerts when a funder releases a new RFP? That answer is yes. We have a system that if a funder has, it makes a change or a modification, which in this case would be an RFP, you'll be notified through email. You can also be notified when a funder becomes, when they come back, in case they're no longer offering funds for the year, when they come back into our database, you can be notified by that as well. We have a very robust notification system. Some have said it's a little too robust, but we prefer to err on the side of having too many messages than not enough. But you can always turn them off as well. So yes, that can be done. Great, last question is about audited finances. People wanna know, I've heard lots of grants that you don't have to provide your audited expenses or finances because it's very expensive to have those finances audited. Right, so a couple of things. One is we talked about the fiscal sponsor. You can get a fiscal sponsor that has a legitimate audit. And again, you can take a look at that and decide if you wanna go that route. The other thing you can do, if a grant maker requires an audit and you think you have to take them off of your hit list because you don't have an audit, don't jump too fast because sometimes if you get on the telephone with that grant maker and you let them know that you have, your books are in QuickBooks and you can run a balance sheet and you can run your budget and you're a copy of your P&L, your profit and loss. Sometimes they will make an exception to that rule. They oftentimes put it in their guidelines, almost always put it in their guidelines, but that doesn't mean that they won't fund you. So you need to make that phone call to the grant maker. It's a good question to ask. Also, if you have a separate audit committee that does your own internal audit, it's just a couple of volunteers and maybe one board member and they look at your books every year and they make recommendations and an informal internal audit committee can often suffice as well. Awesome. Everybody in the chat room, can we give and clap some snaps for Jeremy Smith for taking over this webinar. That's why you ought to be here next week when he does this webinar and walk you through Grant Station on February the 15th. You cannot miss it. Make sure you sign up for that webinar. Don't miss it. Cindy, oh, it's been incredible having you here. Thank you so much for your knowledge and expertise for even dreaming of Grant Station. Oh my God, what a lifesaver. Thank you so much. Thank you to everyone who came here today who stuck around with us. Make sure you sign up for all the webinars next week. Make sure you sign up for, put an alarm on your phone for the Grant Station $99 special for February the 15th and 16th. And as you're taking care of everybody else, make sure you take time to take care of yourself. Have a great day, everybody. Bye-bye. Thank you, bye-bye. Bye, everyone. Bye.