 Welcome everyone to today's webinar. This is going to be a tour of the Grand Station website done in conjunction with TechSoup. I just want to let you know that my name is Jeremy Smith, I'm Grant Stations Communications and Technology Director, and joining me today is Julie, and Julie, I apologize, I'm going to mess up your name. It's Julie Neveas. I'm Vejas. Neveas. I almost had it right. From TechSoup who's with us today, also Kerry Gloucester and Kevin Peters from Grand Station will be here. We'll talk a bit more about that in a second. But I want to let everyone know that we do have a very special purchase price coming up, and Julie's going to talk a little bit about that. As you can see, this is going to be offered through TechSoup, and I'm going to go ahead and move us forward a slide, I believe. Julie, let's talk a little bit about the special we have coming up, I believe. Hi, everybody. Thank you for having me today. Yes, September 21st and 22nd only. You can get an annual Grant Station membership for $99. You will need to join TechSoup as an individual if you haven't already, and then register your organization or associate with your organization if it's already registered. Once your organization has been verified and qualified, or your association to the organization has been verified, you'll be ready to place the order. This process could take a week, so join and register today. It's very easy at techsoup.org, and I will be on the chat to answer any questions TechSoup related during the webinar. Thank you. Excellent. Thank you, Julie. So I'm going to go ahead and move us to our website, and this is going to be a lovely chance for us to meet another member of today's presentation, and that's going to be Kerry Glauser. Kerry, are you there right now? Yes. Hi, Jeremy. Hi, Kerry. So Kerry is one of our research specialists, and she lives on the Oregon coast, and she works within our U.S. charitable giving database. She updates various records and researches new funders, and also joining us is going to be Kevin Peters, one of our lead researchers here at Grant Station, who knows just about everything about research and grants, and he'll be answering your questions directly in the chat. So if you have any questions, you can type them directly in the chat box, and Kevin can answer them that way. If you have questions about TechSoup, Julie will be able to answer those questions for you. So basically, if you have questions, we'll be able to answer them for you. If, by some chance, it does happen occasionally, we are not able to get to your question, don't fret, don't be afraid. Simply email us at info-grantstation.com, and we'll be happy to answer that question directly to you. So if you have any further questions after today's webinar, you can email us directly at info-grantstation.com. Now, my name, again, as I mentioned was Jeremy Smith. I'm our Communications and Knowledge Director here at Grant Station, and I handle all of our internal and external tech issues and also host all of our online education offerings, and I'm way up north in the heart of Alaska. Now, together, what we're going to be doing today is providing you with an overview of everything Grant Station has to offer, along with a look at how you can do your grant research on our website. Now, we'll be walking you through how to use Grant Station and Kerry will be giving me insight and background into the different features and options we have here at Grant Station, going in-depth into our dashboard, how our records are made, and really just helping you understand what Grant Station can offer you and your given organization. Now, before we get started with the grant searches, I want to tell you a little bit about Grant Station itself. Now, Grant Station features a set of searchable databases filled with current grant opportunities. We also provide tools and tutorials on grant seeking and writing, and we also keep you up to date on the latest philanthropic trends. Now, all the grant maker profiles here on Grant Station, both government and private listings, are actively accepting requests or letters of inquiry. I'm slowing that down on purpose from a variety of organizations. Now, you may have used some other services where you do your research and you get hundreds of returns, leaving you with a really long list of potential funders that you have to sort through and screen without really knowing how relevant they are to your specific needs, or if you can, or even should apply to them. Now, our job at Grant Station is to pre-screen grant makers. So that the time you spend researching generates a list of grant makers that may truly accept requests to fund your organization's program or project. So think of us as your backroom research team for pre-screening funders so that we're feeding you the most relevant ones for your program or project. Again, everything you find on Grant Station is open for request or letters of inquiry. That's one of the biggest things that separates us from the various other organizations that provide you ways to search for grants. Everything you find on our website is actionable and applyable. I think that's a word, applicable. In addition to all the grant research information that we have, we also publish three different newsletters which highlight upcoming funding opportunities. Now, you can find those right here under public resources and then under newsletters are three different newsletters we offer. These are free. You sign up for them right now if you like. We have our weekly Grant Station Insider. This features 10 distinct opportunities for U.S.-based nonprofit organizations. We also have the monthly Canadian Insider. That's 10 unique funding opportunities geared towards Canadian organizations. And then we have the monthly International Insider. That features 10 international funding opportunities broken down into global, regional, and government sections. Now, as I mentioned, all of our newsletters are right here. They're in our public resources section. This is also where you'll find links to TrendTrack and the Pathfinder which we'll talk about a little bit later on in today's tour. So here at the very top of our page, you can see it echoed here in this image but also here at the very top are the main sections Grant Station has broken down into. We have Find Grant Makers, Build Strategy, and Write Proposals. These are all features you'll have access to as a member of Grant Station. So when you click on Find Grant Makers, this will open you up to the search section. This is where all the databases are located along with some additional research articles. Under the Build Strategy section, this allows you to access tools that'll help you build a solid grant seeking strategy, including an interactive tool that'll really visually lay out where your funding needs to come from. And then when you click on Write Proposals, this is where you're gonna find step-by-step tutorials that you can use to write compelling letters of inquiry and full grant proposals and even view successful grant proposals so you can see what's currently working. And just a little side note, we just completed our most recent contest for the winning grant proposal and we have brand new proposals that you can download for 2021. And these are available broken down by our grant prize winner and then into specific sectors. So you can see government awards that worked, private applications that worked, as well as a host of different ones. These are all available for download as a member of Grant Station. So I'm gonna jump back to our homepage. You can get there by clicking on our logo and it will take you right back there. If we scroll down the homepage though, I'm gonna go all the way down to our funding alert section and we're gonna take a look at what a sample record looks like here on Grant Station. So right down here, this National Funding Alert, this is the 1954 project, the Luminary Award. So let's click on this and we'll get an idea of what a profile looks like on Grant Station. And on a side note, these alerts here on our main homepage, they change weekly and these grantmaker profiles are carefully curated by Kevin and Kerry and all of our other researchers providing you with really the most current information about specific grant opportunities. Now, all database profiles are written in a narrative format. This really allows us to provide you with detailed information about the grantmaker and their specific program or programs. So on the left here, this is the grantmaker's profile and over here on the right hand side, this is where you're gonna find more specific information such as links to visit their website. You could save this to your dashboard. We'll talk about that later. We can mark it as not the right kind of grant for us. We'll talk more about that later as well. We can also print the profile or email it and then find even more specific information, contact info, who the primary contact is, any financial information, the application information, maybe the type of grantmaker it is and then when this particular profile was last updated. Now, a question that comes up often is, not directly to me, but to all of us here at GrantStation, is what happens, I mean, has anyone ever used this particular grantmaker before? Has anyone been familiar with it? Well, that's how we had this little feature here called member insights. This is something that was brought to our attention by a member wanting to share their experience with a grantmaker. So we created a really quick, easy to do, just a little insight questionnaire here. You can anonymously put in specific information if you work with this grantmaker and share this information with the entire grant seeking community so they can see what your experience was like working with this grantmaker and more and more people are providing us with insights into specific grantmakers they work with just to get an idea if it was a good fit, if they were responsive, basic questions like that. And that's our member insights area which directly came about by interaction with our membership. So if you do have a question or an idea or a thought we're always interested in hearing it at infograntstation.com. But more importantly, another question that comes in often is how are these made? How do we make these records in the first place? And this is why Carrie is the perfect person to talk to because she will go ahead and explain that entire process in a little bit greater detail. Yes, thank you, Jeremy. So as Jeremy mentioned, we frequently go through the records that we have in the grant station database to update information. So each record that we have is looked at on at least a yearly basis, although some of them are reviewed more often, especially if funders have multiple funding cycles or programs available. So we'll start by doing as much internet-based research as we can. And this involves looking at funders' websites for current information, for things like their deadlines, their areas of interest, application procedures, contact info. And if the information is incomplete, we'll then reach out to the funder for clarification. Because of that process, we'll sometimes have more complete information than is available on a funder's website and we'll even occasionally have deadlines listed before they go live on the funder's website. So for those funders that don't currently have a website, we'll often update from the most current IRS Form 990 and we'll then try to contact the funder via email or letter. Oftentimes a funder will respond to specific questions that we send them if we ask them questions about things like their deadlines or their application procedures. So the main factor that differentiates grant station from other funding databases is our policy of only listing active funders. That is funders are only listed if they accept unsolicited applications or letters of inquiry or some other type of unsolicited communication. And if a funder indicates to us that they don't accept unsolicited requests, we'll then remove them from our active listings so that members won't waste their time applying to unresponsive organizations. And what's interesting about that is this also came about from a member request. We have this option to mark as not applicable or not something that will work for us. This will remove this particular result from your search results. So this one won't show up anymore. So people have said, this one's not a good fit for me. I know that I don't wanna see it show up every time I do a search. Well, you can mark it as NA and then it will no longer show up as you're doing your research. So this is a way to really save you time and lets you know that the information that we have published here is quality information that'll make your job easier and faster. So that's really the idea of thinking of GrantStation as your very own research team. So I'm also gonna show you another section. That's our online education area somewhere I spend a lot of time. I'm gonna go ahead and click on live webinars and broadcast training at this point. You can also reach us from the homepage of our website but I'll just show you the quick way which is just going by this menu right up here. All of our webinars are open to the public. You do not need to be a member of GrantStation to take our webinars. They are a separate price from your membership. Membership does not include access to all the webinars. So webinars are a separate thing but what's great is you can take our webinars individually or as a group and there's a really wide variety of topics covered and group prices are fairly low. So if you had three or four people who wanted to take this particular webinar such as Power Riding for Grants posted by MarinBase, you could go ahead and pay one fee and get access to five, 10, up to 10 people can take a given webinar from different locations. So there's an option to get some really great training available here. We spend a lot of time going through this and offering specific types of training and webinars that are really beneficial to people seeking grants and people working within the grant seeking world. Now we also have a few other options. We have on-demand learning and these are various courses that you can take that delve in deep to all kinds of different ideas such as things along the lines of how to build an annual grant strategy or the art of raising funds from local businesses or the golden key to successful grant writing. These are interactive courses with quizzes. You can take them as many times as you want and do learning at your own pace. And we also have a few webinars that are already prerecorded namely two that two series that actually break down the concept of putting together a capital campaign and another walking you through the grant writing process sort of from the start to the end offered by two of our different webinar presenters. So those are all available under online education you wanna learn more about them. These do not require membership to explore them. These are just there so you can look through, see what they are and maybe find a training that's a good fit for your specific need. So one other thing I wanted to mention is under public resources we're gonna take a look at the Pathfinder and Benchmarker a little bit later on. These are two tools that we have that are available free that are really beneficial as you're going about either A, trying to build yourself within your grant seeking world increase your skill set and two understand what's happening trend-wise as with everyone who's doing grant seeking or applying for grants at this point. We'll talk more about that later on in the tour but for now let's turn to the reason most of you are here and that's to find funding for an organization. How do you go about identifying the best grant makers to approach? So here from the front page what I recommend prior to starting your searches is you click on find grant makers right here and then you go into our preparation section I'll click on overview at this point and this will go ahead and break down two specific things the project description worksheet and search terms. So the project description worksheet this will help you organize your approach flesh out your budget and will serve as a solid foundation for your grant seeking strategy. Now this right here is a downloadable Word document where you can save any pertinent information related to your search but you can also do this from your personal dashboard now that's a feature that I'm gonna show you a little bit later in the tour and a quick note I may say feature a lot or this is related to your membership everything I'm showing you outside of webinars is what you receive access to as a grant station member so just keep that in mind. So in addition to project description worksheet I'm gonna show you our search terms section. Occasionally you'll do a search and it won't yield any practical results and often that's gonna be caused by not having the right search term. So this section contains descriptions of the key terminology as used on our website and it's the same terminology that's used by the grant makers themselves and this really serves as a great guide when you're doing your keyword research. Now to use this area you simply enter in your keyword that you call something right here and then you'll know where you want to check when you're doing your searching on grant stations website. Now remember all the keyword and search terms we use on our website are the same things the grant maker uses. So this will put you on the same page as the grant maker. An example I bring up often if you've ever taken a tour with me I always bring this up. We've had someone contact us in the past saying I cannot find any funding at all for therapy I do for children. They come to my farm and they ride horses I'm looking for funding for horse therapy there's no money for horse therapy why is that not on your website? The trick is is the funders don't call it horse therapy they call it equine therapy. So the trick is if you use the keyword section you put in a horse you realize that should be under equine that's how this section works. So for today's webinar put together a couple scenarios and we might have time to do another scenario at the end of today's tour as well. Let's say that we're in the Twin Cities area of Minnesota and we're seeking funds to support an animal rescue organization that interacts with seniors at a local retirement home. So that's one scenario that we're gonna use. And our second scenario is that we're in California but we do work across the border in Nevada to provide schools with information about the importance of activity, hygiene and obesity prevention. So let's go ahead and start by doing a keyword search. So I'm gonna start by entering in let's say animal rescue and then we can actually just start by entering an animal. I typed in animal and then I click apply. And then I can see that animal pulls up a couple different areas of interest. So the main heading as you can see is environment and animals then the subcategory is right here. So by typing an animal we know that that includes animal welfare. Animal welfare specifically involves animal shelter programs animal protection, oh companion animal programs. That might be a good fit. So animal welfare is something I would make a note of on my project description worksheet knowing that's a good search term. If I scroll down a little bit more I see endangered species also involves animals but you know what? We're not dealing with endangered species that's not a problem. But also under the main category of health and wellness we see that oh animal assisted therapy service dogs. That's exactly what we're doing. Oh, canine assisted therapy. Oh, look at that equine assisted therapy. It says if my example was completely planned. So anyway, this is where you can see guide dogs or rescue dogs. Okay, animal assisted therapy service dogs and animal welfare. These are two key areas I need to do my research in as I'm going about doing my searches. So let's say we're also looking for that second search situation or scenario I set up. We're gonna go ahead and type in obesity and then we're gonna type, click apply at this point. And we can see that, okay under health and wellness the main category, we have healthy lifestyles and obesity prevention. And that includes active lifestyle programs, obesity prevention programs and physical fitness and exercise programs. So at this point I like to always put Carrie on the spot because I'm a horrible person. And I like to say Carrie, how many different areas of interest do we have access to? I think there are around 230, I believe and that's inclusive of types of support also. Now, what's the difference of type of support versus say a healthy lifestyle, obesity prevention? So types of support would be the specific support that you were looking for like general operating, project support, sponsorships events, things like that. I can't stump you, Carrie. You are too good for me to stump. So yes, that's right. And we have all those types of support listed here as well if you wanna read more about them to understand how you can do your searches and find specific funding that way. So this is a great way to identify all those specific keywords you need, what type of support you're looking for and even if you want another option you have under search terms is to look at a specific target of population. So in our situation, I'm simply typing in the category and then clicking apply. You can break down your searches by a specific target of population. So since we're focusing on a group of seniors, there is a specific category you can select. So it will pull up everything involving seniors or the aging, but you can also focus on minorities or people who are low income, possibly children and youth or maybe even Alaska Natives. There's lots of options that you have here as far as choosing a specific target of population and it helps you narrow down your searches to that specific need that you're trying to find support for. So at this point, we've got our search terms. We've got our keywords. Let's move into actually looking for funding. We can begin our searches. And to begin, you can of course click find grant makers but I'm going to use right here another location. There's multiple ways to do it here. I'm showing you how I like to do it. We'll click on search at this point. So now we're getting into our search databases. We're gonna go ahead and begin by taking a look at our US state government section which is right here. Now Grantation offers listings of US federal and state funded agencies, state funded agencies and state departments for each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia that offer financial and technical assistance programs. So we're gonna go ahead and take a look at our specific states, which I believe is in Minnesota. So I'm gonna click on Minnesota at this point. And as you can see, it pulls up here. Here's the breakdown. You have a group of general resources here on the left hand side which includes procurement and contracting and surplus links, even ways to get more demographic for your statement of need. You have a date stamp here and the breakdown of the type of support available on the state level. And you can of course save these to your dashboard which we'll talk more about in a second and come back and look at it later. And you can quickly see at a glance what major categories are currently being offered as support within this specific state. And again, we have this for all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Now, after you've taken a look at some of the state offerings, we can take a look specifically at what's offered in some of the other areas. So I'm gonna go ahead and click on Find Grantmakers Now to show another way to get access to it. We're gonna take a look at our US federal section. So this is the next step in that the first step of finding funders. This is known as primary research. So this is the first step, the primary step in finding funding. We're doing primary research at this point. So here we are in our federal database. This is searchable by eligible applicants, areas of interest, the funding agency specifically, by keywords, the funding opportunity number, and even by CFDA number. Now all of these funders, and I'm gonna go ahead and just pull up a couple just to let you know what this looks like at a glance. All of these funding opportunities are coming to us from grants.gov. Grants.gov is a government-based website. This provides you with a front end to using grants.gov. If you wanted to, you can of course save it to your dashboard. Let's take a look at this top one right here just to see what it looks like. You can then save it. Mark is not good for you. See the direct link on grants.gov. You can print it out, email yourself. And again, you see the breakdown of our funding. Left-hand side is a breakdown of the narrative format. Right-hand side, specific information, contact, financial giving, specific application information, any specific additional eligibility information. Very important for federal-based grants and even more specific grantmaker information. If you use grants.gov, you may have had difficulty trying to make it work for you. And this provides you a front end of being able to organize all of your research within one location and then access it from one place. And only when you need to, which is basically to apply, you would go do that on grants.gov specifically. So you can do your state and your federal research right here on GrantStation. Now, the funding that's available though on the US state and federal government sections here on GrantStation is important information to collect because when you apply to private funders, you can say that you've done your federal and state research. And in case you don't find any options, you can say at this time, there are no federal programs that can help us with our need. This way, the private funder knows you've done your homework, which of course speaks to your credibility as an organization and that private funding is the only option for you now. So once you've completed your federal research, you can move on to the US Charitable Database. And to get access to that, if we click on Find Grantmakers, we can go down and click on US Charitable. Now I'm showing you different ways to access things. So once you know there's lots of ways to get access, you can simply click these links here. You can click the links up here as well. There's lots of ways to find what you need here on GrantStation. So our US Charitable Giving Database lists thousands of funder profiles, including independent family, community and corporate foundations, corporate giving programs, faith-based grantmakers, and associations of grant making programs. Now these profiles are searchable with geographic scope by areas of interest that we were showing you earlier, type of support that I showed you earlier, name and buy keywords. So in the content area here on the left-hand side, you'll see a brief how-to do searches. On the right-hand side is where you enter in all your specific search criteria. Since you have me guiding you today, you don't need to worry about this. You can focus on just the criteria we're gonna enter next. So under geographic scope, which is where we always begin, you always want to start by seeing who gives within your specific place. One thing that was taught to be early on by our CEO, was always see who will give in their own backyard, who will offer you support within your state, within your region, and then you can branch out into national and then into global options if you want. If you're not finding the results you need locally, then you can expand. The last thing you wanna do, in addition to the work you're trying to do as a nonprofit organization or as a grant seeking organization, you don't wanna spend your time having to drill through thousands of funding opportunities. What we do is drill down for you by simply clicking on and off various check boxes. So again, think back to our scenario. We're doing animal assisted therapy with seniors in Minnesota. That's our basic breakdown. I'll start by clicking on Minnesota. So we'll see how many results are available just within Minnesota. So let's add in more criteria. We're gonna add in national grant makers who have across all states as well. Okay, so now we're up to 1,500 results. We could of course, I said, add in global grant makers, but 1,500 is a lot to go through already. So let's just start with that. Now we can add in specific additional criteria. This will narrow it down. So our geographic scope shows us how wide our universe is and our areas of interest, our target population, all of our criteria narrows us down to the specific planet we wanna get to. That's a new space analogy. I'll have to start using that one more often. So under areas of interest, we're gonna go ahead and scroll down here and we did our keyword research. We know where to go. So we're gonna jump into environment and animals and then we're gonna click on animal welfare. But Jeremy, you say in your head, or maybe out loud, what if I don't wanna do what you just showed me? What if I wanna search my way? You can't control me, Jeremy. You're right, I can't, but we can offer you help. So if you don't wanna go ahead and type in your keyword search, you can simply come here and hover over these little eyes and they will tell you exactly information-wise what each specific category includes and what the focus is. So you can do it your way without requiring it to do it my way. I'm just showing you a way that works really well for me. So we're gonna go ahead and click on our specific search term, just animal welfare. As you can see that narrows us down to 78 results now. So as we add in criteria, it will narrow things down to our specific need. I like to get it down to about 20, maybe 15 records. I can go through that, 10's even better because you can quickly at a glance see what works. So we're gonna scroll down a little bit further. We're gonna add in another specific focus and again, targeted population. If you notice some of them are grayed out, well, that's because in this situation, there is no specific funding focused on these specific targeted populations. But our focus is seniors in the aging. So we're gonna click that box right now. Now we're looking at eight specific results. At this point, I could completely use these eight and see what's available. And this is where Grant Station's second difference comes in from all the other competitors that we have out there. We break it down by geographic scope and geographic focus. This is something that all of our researchers do and it's an incredibly valuable thing because you can see at a glance if this particular funder is right for you. So here's the AARP purpose prize. They give across all the U.S. with no specific geographic focus. But here's the Henry W. Bull Foundation. They give across all the U.S. but they have a specific focus. Their focus is California with an emphasis on the central coast. Well, I'm in Minnesota. This may not be one that I wanna spend much time on. So then I can go to the next one. So at a glance, I know that the Henry W. Bull Foundation may not be the best fit for my specific need. And this just saved me time just by knowing what the scope of their giving is followed by their specific focus. And here's a really good one. The Inspirity Corporate Contributions Program. They give across a wide variety of states but they have a focus on communities within the company's district markets. Well, am I in their market? You would click the link, go to their particular profile and find out if you have something available in your specific market. This is where we save you time as you're doing your grant research. Here's another one, the Cop Family Foundation. They're focused on Minnesota. Well, that's a real good plus. And this is in Twin Cities area. Well, guess what? I'm in Twin Cities area. This is a great one for me. As you can see, it's already been saved. So I can unsave it. This already saved to our dashboard. We'll talk more about in just a second. But if we scroll down more of our criteria here on the right-hand side, we can narrow this down even further if we want to. We can add as many different checkboxes as we want. But the more checkboxes we add, the more narrowed our results become. So sometimes you can narrow yourself out of having results by adding in this, and this, and this. When you're doing your research, whether you're on GrantStation or even just typing it into Google, know that you're trying to find funding not necessarily for your organization specifically. You're trying to find funding for a specific project. You're looking for money that will support you in your specific project. Now, if you do need something like say operating funds or you're looking for startup costs or something, that's where, as Carrie was saying, you have options under type support. You could do a brand new search, which is focused just on say general operating support. You know, keep the lights on, keep the lights running or maybe looking for loans or maybe you're putting together a real big project. You need funding for project planning or research or scholarships. Maybe you need some computers or something, which is actually a pro tip. If you are not a member of TechSoup, I highly recommend it because you can get very, very well-priced software available directly through TechSoup. So keep that in mind if you're not a member of TechSoup. I highly encourage it. If you scroll up and check these more and more of these boxes, it will narrow your results even further. But just remember, if you are not getting results, uncheck a few boxes and I bet results will start popping up as you're going through. So one thing I wanted to do as I scroll back up here to the top, is show you another option and that's where you can clear everything. So you clear that, you can start over and do a brand new search. So one thing that I did want to do at this point though is take a look at another specific area within our search criteria, which I actually just skipped over. That's right down here, blow type of support. And that's the type of grant maker. This is a new feature that was actually offered and requested by one of our members. They wanted to be able to break down everything being offered just by community foundations or everything available to, that's being offered by corporate foundation or maybe just a giving circle or maybe I'm only looking for religious grant makers. You can narrow everything down by that and pull up all the funders that only give within that specific section. And all you have to do is check at least one checkbox. That's it. The more checkboxes you check, the better results you'll receive as you do your searches. But just keep that in mind. You have to check at least one thing and that will pull up results at that point. So from here, what I wanted to do is take a look at the thing I've been mentioning a lot and that's our dashboard. And I'm gonna have Carrie walk us through it as I sort of navigate around on the site. It's probably a good time to talk about that, Carrie. So if you could walk us through the dashboard, I would be very appreciative. Yeah, that'd be great. Thank you, Jeremy. So we're gonna go to the main dashboard area here. And as we mentioned earlier, in here you can develop project descriptions, save your search criteria, you can save individual funders and you can even track the status of your application process all through this custom dashboard. So I'm gonna have Jeremy pull up each of the sections in here so you can get an idea of what to expect. So first we'll navigate to the projects tab and the project section lets you track the specific efforts that you need funding for. This section is sort of the digital equivalent of the project description worksheet that we talked about earlier. And at the top is the name for this effort. There we are, the name for this effort, a description of the project or program, why the funders should support this program, a budget summary, where the work will be occurring and any search terms that you think you'll need as you do your GrantStation database research. Okay, so now we'll navigate to the saved criteria tab and in here you can select some search criteria and then name and save your search. Once it's in your dashboard, you can click the name you gave it to rerun the search. This allows you to remember the terms that were most effective in finding funders for your programs so that you can run it again in the future to see if there are any new opportunities available. So now we'll navigate to the saved GrantMakers tab and when you're looking at GrantMakers in the search you'll see that you can now save a funder to your dashboard either from your list of results or directly from the profile itself. And in this tab, it'll show you all the GrantMakers that you've saved to your dashboard. You can see their name, their application deadlines, if any, when their profile was updated and when you saved that profile. Additionally, you can add a GrantMaker to my plan and from that interface, you can plan out your application process with the GrantMakers that you've identified through your research. So now we'll navigate to the My Plan tab. So the My Plan section is for when you decide to actually apply for a specific grant opportunity. Let's go into one of these plans so you can get an idea. So in here, we have the name of the funder. Which project this funder fits? The priority of this application, the status such as if an LOI has been submitted or the application is in progress. Then we have the amount of the request, the application deadline and profile updated date taken directly from the GrantStation record and some additional fields to track when you want to complete certain tasks. And then there's some, an area for some notes right there. So on the main My Plan page, you can export dates to your calendar software and you can export data from your various dashboard sections at any time as well. And we're always adding and incorporating members feedback. So new features may appear in the dashboard at any time. One of the newest features is this one right here and it's the Add Private GrantMaker. This was requested by people who have said, well, you have lots of funding opportunities but there's one I specifically work with that's local, that's not in your database. How can I track that? Well, you can add your own specific GrantMaker right here through all the steps we've just shown you and it can then be incorporated into your plan as part of your grant seeking strategy. So at this point, I think we should probably go back and do another search. So I'm gonna go ahead and scroll back up a little bit, click on Find GrantMakers and go back into our US Charitable Database. So again, we're in California but we do work across the border in Nevada. We provide schools with information about the importance of activity, hygiene and obesity prevention. So let's go ahead and start by doing our geographic scope. We're gonna click on Nevada and also we'll click on California. We're again seeing how big our universe is. Going to give it a second, click on that, click on California. So now we have our results for those two states. Let's go ahead and add in National GrantMakers across all states now. Now we'll narrow it down to our specific areas of interest. Again, we identified them earlier. We go down into health and wellness. We're looking at our list. Okay, here's one healthy eating nutrition but also healthy lifestyle and obesity prevention. Well, this is more directly what we're offering. So we'll click on that but we can always click the other box as well as we're doing our research. If at any point you want to remove that simply come up here into your search criteria section, click the minus sign and that will then remove it from your search and bring you back to your full list of results. Now, what's kind of handy is if you look right here, if you have, for instance, saved this specific search, you found this criteria is perfect for you and you saved it. If something is new, it will pop up right here with a little new based on the last time you did a search. So something to keep in mind, we'll keep you up to date on what's happening. And another thing that I didn't mention and often we should is whenever there's a major change made to a record or a change of some sort done to a given record, you can also turn on email alerts and those email alerts will let you know, hey, the record that you're following on your, in your dashboard has been changed. There has been a modification to it. This is the modification or you can go to your dashboard and view the changes that happened to that specific record. That was another request that came in from members. So again, we're very responsive if you find something that would be handy or helpful for you. So keep in mind infograntation.com is always open. So feel free to email us anytime. Let's go back and continue our search. We're gonna go down to our, let me see, I need to add back in that specific search term under health and wellness. Actually, I'm gonna click on healthy eating and nutrition at this point. So we're looking at 86 results. Let's add in a couple more search terms. Our targeted population of course is children and youth. That's 48 results, that's still too many. But I'm doing programs and outreach, that's my focus. So what if I go down to my type of support and we're gonna do a health fair, well, that's gonna be an event of some sort. So I'm gonna go ahead and click on events. So this is pulling up three specific types of funding focused on our target population of children with a specific area of interest, specific type of support giving across the US and California. And I can quickly see at a glance if these work for my specific needs based on where I am doing the majority of my work. So this is how you use our database. You simply click on and off various boxes and allows you to pull up the various results. Now, in addition to our US databases, we also have an international database. It functions just like our US database. You break it down into a specific country. And this is for organizations who are doing work or from the US and doing work in a given country. So if you're in the US and you're doing work across borders, this is where you can find funding available for that. So if you are doing work within a given country or international database has a whole another list of particular funders available for you based on where you're doing your work. And that's also true for our Canadian database, which we also have right here under Canadian charitable. You can then break it down by a specific province, add in a specific national grant maker, give across all the provinces and then add in all your specific search terms. And finally, we have our Canadian government section. And this is just like our US state government section, but broken down into all the specific provinces of Canada. Let's take a look at Manitoba really quick. And you can see what's offered as far as contracts and grants and information and loans and trading and technical assistance as well as some specific general resources as well. So all of these different areas that I've shown you are all part of the research aspect of finding funders and putting them together. This is all primary research. The next step after you've collected your funders is what to do with them. So under Find Grantmakers, we have additional research. This is what to do next. This breaks down into things such as the IRS Form 990, it explains what it is, how it works and why it's important. If we had more time, we'd spend more time on this, but of course we never have quite enough time for these tours because we have a lot of information here at GrantStation. But this is a whole article that explains what the IRS 990 is, how to use it, how to view it in the IRS website and how we have it incorporated into our website on various records as well. We also have an article on questions that you would ask the funder before you actually apply, ways to approach them, things to talk about, ways to ask them questions without being annoying, which is very important. And we also have an article here on in-kind gifts. And this is a really handy way to discover matching funds that might be necessary for a given private or federal grant, but you may not realize you actually have. So these are all great things to do as part of secondary research, which is putting everything together and preparing for that actual grant application. So at this point, you may be thinking, well, great, I know what to apply for, but what do I do next? Well, we have a section for that called Write Proposals. And there is a section called Getting Started that breaks down everything you need step by step. Basically it's 12 steps. You know, what's your tax status, what's your organizational history, what's your operating plan and what's the budget. These all break down everything you need, but also in addition to this, Underwrite Proposals, we have the letter of inquiry, what is it? How do I write it? What's the important part of it? And then beyond that, we have the full grant proposal. This is how to write it, what you're gonna write about, what are the different things to keep in mind? This is all included as part of your membership. You can go through this anytime. And of course, as I mentioned earlier, you can then download award-winning proposals that have already won so you can see what is currently working. So in addition to these resources, one thing I wanna show you really quickly is underbuild strategy, and that's our R3. And I'm going to take a break and have Carrie discuss this actually. Sounds great. So the R3, or also known as the Revenue Review and Report, is an interactive tool that will help provide you with a quick analysis of your current and projected income. It's quick and easy to use. All you'll need is a copy of your operating budget in about 10 or 15 minutes, and it will present you with a printable report that you can share with your leadership that clearly shows via pie charts and percentages where your revenue is coming from, as well as any projected revenue. It even provides specific advice and guidance on how to build out your grants revenue. And you can see that right here. This is one that I ran earlier, but it can break down. Again, as Carrie said, your current revenue, also your projected revenue, and then even your current grants revenue, and more specifically projected grants revenue. But this is also new in something that was added based on what our members said. We also included non-grant revenue, such as direct donations, a special event you're offering, maybe a gala of some sort, or maybe even a plan giving income. You can track all of that, and as Carrie mentioned, you will get those specific recommendations based on the numbers you've entered within this specific section. This is a very powerful area, and even just visually seeing where money is coming from, projected versus current, and handing that to your board is an incredibly valuable tool that comes with your membership to GrantStation. And as mentioned earlier, if you are interested in learning more about developing your career path as a grant professional, you'd wanna go to public resources and click on Pathfinder. This is a freely accessible library that does not require membership, but it provides profiles on top quality resources in the areas of grant research, writing, and management, as well as strategic planning. And I guess you can just browse through all the different resources that we have available here, or you can create a custom curriculum, actually, by clicking the Find Your Path tool, answer a few easy questions, and then it will provide you with a list of various resources that you can use. Not all of them are located on GrantStation's website. Some of them are on our other websites. Some of them have costs connected to them that isn't through GrantStation, but this is a great way to see what training is out there and what's available for you based on your specific need. And the last thing I wanted to go ahead and show you right now is our benchmarker tool, and that's currently available in the public resources, and it's right here below State of Grant Seeking. And we do offer also various articles on grant makers and philanthropic trends, and we also have a blog that features various thoughts and observations, but State of Grant Seeking is our annual report of the survey results from our grant seeking community. The benchmarker is a way to mine that information. So you can enter in specific information like what's your annual budget range and what's your main mission focus, say art, culture and humanities, and we can take a look at a basic report. And all this information can then be printed or exported as a CSV, but you can see what's the average age of organizations. What's the organization's average paid staff size based on these information? Now, I did a simple one. You can enter a bunch of different check boxes which will then give you a custom report based on that. Now you can see based on the organization's size, what percentage of the organization's funding is coming specifically from grants. You can of course break that down and see the majority of responses. So you can really get an idea of what's happening with other organizations and what trends are happening within people who are applying for grants and ideas. There's more information you can find out about this and then you can save these all directly to your dashboard. So I'm gonna jump back to the homepage of Grant Station and just sort of leave you with one thing is that if you are doing a search for funding for any kind of project, it's important to be able to identify the best grant makers to approach. Using Grant Station really allows you to apply your time where it's most effective and efficient in your search for funding from primary research to secondary research to the process of actually applying for the grant yourself and then seeing what's working and what to do as you move forward with that grant by tracking it all through my dashboard. So with that, I know that we have had at least one question come in. I think that's accurate, Kerry. I think one question has come in, possibly two questions have come in. Yeah, maybe three. Maybe three, maybe three questions. We are joking. We know there's more than three questions but I know that Kevin's been answering a lot of them and I'm sure Julie's also been answering questions as well. So Kevin, were there any specific questions that you think that it might be a good idea that we tackle at this point? I mean, I think we handle most of them. You've done a great job explaining the website and everything. Could you go over a little bit more, like is this just what we have right now is what the, is there permanently or are we constantly adding like new funders and resources? That's a good question. Also a common one that comes in is people ask, is this just a static database? And if we were our competition, in some cases that answer is yes. But what's different about Grant Station? There's many things that's different about us other than our sense of humor because we're really funny. The biggest thing that I think separates us is there is a constant changing of funders. Funders will come on, funders will go off because, and I'm sure this is something Kerry and Kevin could speak more to and probably at length about but what'll happen is a funder will change. Maybe they are focused only on one specific project now. Maybe the main head says we're only giving to three organizations, not everyone else. We won't list them in our database anymore but we are constantly finding new funders and adding more to our database. And the big difference is we're not scraping websites. As Kerry explained, our process is done by humans, reading it, entering in human information that's been interpreted through humans. So everything here is not scraped, everything here is actionable, everything here is applicable, not applicable. You can apply to it at any time based on the listings here. So keep that in mind. That's what separates our database. It's been touched by humans if we're gonna get away from the robotic element and it's also accurate and up to date. So you're not gonna find out of date information because that's why we had the date stamp on all of our records. So you know when it was last accessed, when we last talked with the grant maker, when we last had access to the report, the RS990 and we spoke with the grants manager, that's what Grantation offers you when you are a member of our databases. Excellent, thank you, Jeremy. No problem. And for people that didn't know, that was Kevin. So he has been answering your questions in the chat and we have about five minutes left. So Carrie, I want to do something since we do this periodically. I try to put you on the spot. Oh no. Yeah, but it's easy, it's easy. So we're gonna go to the dashboard and we're gonna go to projects. And I saw a project be made, which is Save the Chinchillas. Oh yeah. Which I think we've talked about before. People who don't know, Carrie loves Chinchillas and we thought, okay, let's make a whole project focused on Chinchillas. So we're gonna find new homes for abandoned. Do people abandon Chinchillas really? You know, they really do, it's sad. I think they are a bit more work than most people realize. I think they think that it's just a pet living in a cage but they take a bit of work, so. Got it. So here's our project, the description is in, the statement of need is there. Here's the budget summary of what's needed. The geographic scope of giving is Oregon, specifically the coast is the focus. I think you're putting yourself in this, but that's great. Yeah. So then we have our specific areas of interest. Okay, excellent. So now we're gonna go ahead and exit out of this. Let's go ahead and do a search then. So we have our project together. We're ready to do a search. Do we have any Chinchilla based search save criteria? I don't see any. So let's just do a search. So we're gonna go into find grant makers. We're gonna jump into our U.S. charitable at this point. How should we do the search to find a funding for Chinchillas? I would start with doing an animal welfare search. Okay. So I'm gonna start by actually clicking Oregon to begin with, but that's our great, that's our search term is gonna be that. And I'm gonna then add in national. So we see how big our universe is. Let's narrow it down to a specific planet. And we're gonna go down to areas of interest. We're gonna jump into environment and animals and we'll click on animal welfare. So now we're looking at 78 results. But now I'm wondering if we can use our specific area, which I didn't use earlier, which I'll just show people really quickly. And that's right down here, we're gonna enter in a keyword. Now remember, you can narrow yourself out of a search term or out of results actually by entering in an extra thing here, but since we're focused on Chinchillas, did I spell that correctly? The Chinchilla? Yes, you did. Let's submit and see what we've got here. Oh my goodness. Aha! So the Oxbow Animal Rescue Grant Program, which gives across Canada and the US, has the keyword Chinchilla in their profile. Let's verify this. So we're taking a look. Grants are limited to projects benefiting small animals, rabbits, guinea pigs, Chinchillas. So there we go. So we've just done a grant search. We did some primary research. We put together what we were looking for. We put together that information. We didn't have to find our specific search terms. We found it. We're gonna go ahead and save this now. I'm gonna go ahead and it's in our dashboard. I'm gonna jump into our dashboard now. And we're gonna find that, save the Chinchillas, okay? And that's connected to that project. But the one we just added, and we can then look at the date saved. In fact, we can even click on date saved. And that will sort by that. Well, I think we already have it in there, don't we? Oh yeah. Oh yeah, we do. We're super effective. Well anyway, we could then add this to our specific plan to save the Chinchillas project. So that's how you can use this whole section as you go about and do your research here on GrantStation. And just a quick reminder. I'm gonna go ahead and jump back to this slide really quickly. On September 21st and 22nd only, you can pick up GrantStation for just $99. That's over $600 off our normal price. And that's $100 off the regular TechSoup price. That's why TechSoup is such a good deal. It's only available for two days. So you need to register. If you aren't a registered member of TechSoup now, so you can take advantage of this on September 21st and 22nd only. And a quick reminder, you'll be receiving a copy of this tour probably by early next week. So be on the lookout for that. And again, any further questions that you have about GrantStation, feel free to email us directly at infoatgrantstation.com. And with that, I wanna thank everyone for joining us today. That's all the time we have. But again, as I mentioned, if you did want to contact us, you can of course always go to our website. If you go ahead and click on our about section at GrantStation, actually it's our help section, it's even better. You can click on contact us and then you can give us a call toll free. You can mail us directly or you can even fax us if you want. Probably the best way is email us infograntstation.com and you can learn more about all the people who work here at GrantStation. We'll be happy to help you with any questions you may have. And with that, we wish you happy grant seeking and hope to see you as a future member of GrantStation. Have a great day, everyone. 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