 Welcome everyone to NGO Source, Equivalency Determination Made Easier. My name is Becky Wiegand, and I'm here at TechSoup's headquarters in San Francisco and I'll be your host for today. Before we get started with introductions of our presenters, I want to go ahead and just make sure you understand how to use ReadyTalk, our tool that we're using today to host this webinar. You can chat to us and raise your hand through the duration of the webinar by using this little box on the lower left side of your screen. Feel free to chat questions, let us know if you have any issues with the audio, or tell us how you're doing today in that chat window. If you're hearing an echo with your audio, you may be logged in more than once, and you may need to close one of those windows. We do keep all lines muted today for the duration of the webinar so that we can capture a clear recording so that you can listen and share it with your colleagues after. 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Again, my name is Becky Wiegand and I'm your facilitator for today's event, and I'm an interactive events producer here at TechSoup. I've been with the organization for about six years, having previously worked for around a decade in Washington, D.C. for small nonprofits. And here at TechSoup we help to write and create content and administer donation programs that support the technology needs of nonprofits, public libraries, and foundations. So if you are joining us from any of those types of organizations, please join us at TechSoup.org to see what types of resources are available for you. Also joining us today we'll have Jim Greenbaum, the founder and managing director of the Greenbaum Foundation. He founded and became the CEO of Access Long Distance in 1985 and seven years later at the age of 33 he made the decision to give the corporate world another seven years before then dedicating his life to working on a variety of causes that he feels strongly about including things like ending slavery and working on a variety of foundation support programs. And he'll be speaking with us today about his experience using NGO Source. We'll also be joined by Ken Sunoda who is the general manager of NGO Source at TechSoup Global which is one of our programs. And his team works to build NGO Source which is a leading resource for grant makers to obtain equivalency determinations which we'll talk a bit about in a little while. He's also worked in management for nonprofits, technology startups, and leading global firms. He previously served as executive director of the Sager Family Foundation which incubates startup social ventures in conflict areas. So we'll hear more from them later on in the program. And you'll also see assisting with Chat, Shob Sigmund, and you may also see Megan Hansen who are both joining us from TechSoup and NGO Source. So thank you so much. We'll go ahead and look at our agenda for today. We'll hear from first Jim Greenbaum to talk about his experience as an international grant maker and how using NGO Source has helped him and his organization better serve their organizations overseas. Then we'll hear from Ken who will give us an NGO Source overview. Give us a short tour of NGO Source and talk about how to get started. We'll have ample time for your questions and answers. So at any point during the webinar feel free to chat those into us so we can help field those questions during the webinar and again throughout the Q&A at the end. With that I'd like to welcome to the program our first presenter Jim Greenbaum. Welcome to the program Jim. We're glad to have you. Thank you Becky. And for those of you that aren't aware that was not a pre-recorded conversation by Becky, she actually talked to us before the call so even though she didn't make any mistakes she is alive and well. I want to wish a good morning to all of you out there on the West Coast. I know there are a couple of you and good afternoon or evening to many of the rest of you. I understand we have a mix of foundations and NGOs on the call so welcome to everyone. Let me just give you a brief little history about my story. I've been working full time with my foundation which is a private foundation for about 15 years now. For the first couple of years I avoided making international grants completely. If there weren't NGOs that were US 501C3s I didn't go there. I didn't want the headache. Actually at that time I didn't even know we could even make those types of grants. Then I got a little bit of education and I found some really great organizations that I couldn't help pass up funding. I just needed to find a way. At that time I made a part time career change. I became a beggar. I talked to the various US charities that I was already giving money to and I would beg them to pass through the donations for me to these other international organizations that I wanted to get funding to. That method did work successfully for a couple of years. I felt bad about always begging everybody to do this for me. And at times it seemed I was just having to continue funding some entity that I was already giving money to just so I could get them to agree to pass along the money to the other entities. Not a great way to operate a foundation. So eventually I got a little smarter and I heard about our other options that were out there. First the expenditure responsibility and then the equivalency determinations. There's nothing like adding new words to your vocabulary. Well I'm the kind of guy who likes to avoid audits and legal entanglements with the IRS so there's no way I gave more than a moment's worth of thought about doing the expenditure responsibility method. The liability exposure out there for that just seemed too great. So what was left on the plate, the equivalency determination, whatever that was. So back to Google and research and then I found myself doing a few of those determinations myself. To say it was a pain would be an understatement. The biggest difficulty was is most of the places where I needed these done there was a huge language barrier between me and the NGOs I was working with. My college French and Google Translate just really didn't seem up to the task but I muddled through it. There were a few other reports I worked on doing myself on the equivalency determinations. Those countries, they spoke English. Well, yeah, I think it was English but on top of that there was a lot of difficulty for some of them understanding the concepts about much of what I was requesting for them to get for me for the equivalency determinations. So what does a good manager do in that circumstance? You delegate and I did this gladly. I gave this task to my staff and one year it was to a friend who offered to help. The next year it was my daughter who was about to start graduate school. They did both good jobs with doing it but I was always a bit worried about whether we were doing everything exactly as the IRS required. We're great as foundations at finding funding and working with amazing NGOs but this legal stuff was more than the nuisance and it was a potential liability. So I kept hoping there'd be a solution and then to my delight I learned of NGO source and they've become my hero. I looked at what they were going to charge me to do the equivalency determinations and then when I went back and calculated what we had been spending to do it ourselves it was actually very similar in the numbers. So the choice was simple. Give the headache and the liability to someone else. I went online to their website and to my delight the process was painless taking less than five minutes on my side and there was no potential IRS hassle to worry about. So why am I so enthusiastic about NGO source? Well simply it works. It's simple and it's cost efficient and on top of that if more of us as foundations use NGO source they'll be able to move their prices for services even lower especially the price that they charge for other funders to also fund an NGO for which one of us will have already paid for the initial equivalency determination. That in the end will help the NGOs get more money from funders and getting more funds to them is what we're all about. So simply put from a moral and cost savings viewpoint and worry free sleep at night the choice has been simple for me. NGO source was the answer. And if you're wondering I'm not receiving any compensation for the endorsement of NGO source they're that good. So Ken back to you. Well Jim thank you so much and thank you for being our first grantmaker member when we started our operations about one year ago and for doing several equivalency determinations with us in our first year. I wanted to maybe just start by saying a little bit about my background and how I started with NGO source. Up until about a year ago I was working as executive director of a family foundation based in Boston called Sager Family Foundation. And the Sagers would travel around the world they still do looking at really interesting social entrepreneurs and new startup nonprofits mostly in conflict areas. And sometimes they would call me in the middle of the night from places like Afghanistan and Rwanda and say that they had just found an amazing social entrepreneur wanted to send $10,000 to his or her organization and would ask me to try to make it happen by noon the next day. And when I first started in my role with the Sagers I realized that I needed to do a lot of research about what the different legally compliant mechanisms are for sending money to international grantees so that I could respond to the requests from the Sagers to send them money. So I worked with legal counsel and putting together something that looked like a flowchart. What are the different kinds of questions I should be asking and what are the different ways that I could do a legally compliant international grant depending on their different circumstances. So I learned that the first thing I should find out is if they have an affiliated 501c3 organization in the United States which would make it very easy if they have a friends of organization or an affiliate through which to do the grant here in the US. If they don't have that maybe they have a relationship with an intermediary through which we could do the grant. But in the majority of the cases I was finding that it would better for us to do the grant directly or the organization didn't have a relationship here in the United States. And as Jim mentioned there are two primary ways to do an international grant. One is through expenditure responsibility which requires tracking all of the expenses that the grantee makes and confirming that each has a charitable purpose which is very complex from a bookkeeping standpoint. And as Jim mentioned adds additional liability that we weren't comfortable taking on. And I found that the second alternative equivalency determination often made the most sense. So equivalency determination means evaluating whether or not the organization is equivalent to a 501c3 public charity in compliance with US IRS regulations. And I found if we did an equivalency determination that it often was the easiest way to do it because we only would have to go through the process once and wouldn't have to track expenses. But once I did the decided to go with the equivalency determination approach we'd find that the best way to do it for us as a small foundation was to work with legal counsel. Since the NGO source hadn't been established yet we would work with external legal counsel which often cost us $5,000 to $7,000 for each ED. And so I was in a position of having to tell the Sagers that it was going to cost us $5,000 to $7,000 in legal fees just to do the $10,000 grant which really didn't make any economic sense. And we also found that if we were doing an equivalency determination with an organization in Afghanistan for example that we would have to request all kinds of documents and financial information from the organization and once we had done our equivalency determination if another foundation in the US say Gates Foundation wanted to do a grant to that same organization they would have to go through the same process requesting all the same documents and that the Chief Financial Officer or the accountant at the organization in Afghanistan would have to go through this process multiple times which would make them crazy. Each foundation would have to spend the legal fees to do multiple equivalency determinations and the process was just extremely inefficient. So when I heard about NGO source and its solution I was really, really excited about being part of its mission and really trying to find a way to streamline this international grant making process and equivalency determination. NGO source is a project that was started by the Council on Foundations and TechSoup Global. The Council on Foundations started the project about 7 years ago based on feedback that they were getting from their foundation members that equivalency determination was a process that really had a lot of opportunity to be streamlined and lots of opportunity for new efficiency. And the grant makers that are members of the Council were really eager to try to create a common repository to house all of the equivalency determinations that they were doing in order to save them from having to do duplicated processes. So again, equivalency determination is an evaluation under US tax law of whether a non-US organization is equivalent to a US public charity in compliance with IRS regulations. So what's relevant for equivalency determination is whether the organization meets the standards of a US 501C3 public charity. As I mentioned, without NGO source before NGO source is created as a common repository equivalency determination was an inefficient process with lots of duplicated efforts very inconsistent in the standards that are being applied by different grant makers, complex and expensive with each grant maker using its own legal counsel and a lot of unnecessary and duplicated legal work that's expensive both for the grant maker and complicated for the grantee to comply with. What NGO source is doing is to streamline the process creating a common repository that houses all of the due diligence and equivalency determination work that all of the grant makers that are using our service do so that the equivalency determination only needs to be done once for each NGO. So we simplify the process and we work with our network of global partners around the world to interface with NGOs in language and in time zone. So to give you a quick overview of our process and how it works, a grant maker will request an equivalency determination on our web-based portal and the NGO then submits information on a questionnaire portal that we've created that is available to them in four different languages, English, Spanish, French, and Mandarin Chinese. And they work with our global partners. We have eight of them now in each region of the world so that they can get their questions answered in their language. And the global partners work with them to make sure that they understand the questions if any legal questions come up they can help them with frequently asked questions and coach them through the process. They collect the questionnaire responses, financial information, and governing documents translated into English through the web-based platform, and then send that package to our ED review team of qualified tax practitioners here in San Francisco. So we're fortunate to have on our team two attorneys, Sheila Warren, who is our general counsel and comes from Adler and Colvin where she was an expert in international grant making, legal counsel, and also has lots of experience with equivalency determination. And Megan Hansen who is on the line with us today who worked for nine years at Gates Foundation handling all of their equivalency determinations. So we have a legal team that is our leaders in the field with expertise in international grant making who does the review. And if all of the information is in order and we are able to certify them as equivalent to a 501c3 public charity, our legal team does the certificate and sends a summary legal opinion to the grant maker that they can use for their compliance purposes. So here is a list of some of our member grant makers who have said that we could use their names publicly. We have in our first year been able to get many of the leading international grant makers in the field of the largest 15 international grant makers. We have nine of them on board including Gates Foundation, Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation. We also have some donor advised funds including Schwab Charitable and National Philanthropic Trust as well as corporate foundations, Intel Foundation and MetLife Foundation and some community foundations and also family foundations. So a really terrific mix of different types of grant makers who are really using the system and doing great work helping us build our repository. So so far in our first year we have done equivalency determinations in 55 different countries and our network of partners have made it possible for us to support EDs in every country that they've been requested. So we can handle equivalency determinations anywhere around the world and provide support in language so that the NGO can come to us and help get their questions answered and can get assistance through the process. So I'd say that just thinking about what some of the things are that distinguish NGO Source. So we are endorsed by prominent leaders in the field of philanthropy and international great grant making. We've got a very active advisory council of grant makers who are guiding us in creating and scaling our service. We have terrific unmatched global support through our global partner network of organizations that TechSoup Global has been working with in doing its vetting for organizations through our product donation program for years now and these same organizations who are themselves nonprofits, their capacity building organizations in their regions around the world are supporting us now for NGO Source doing equivalency determination vetting. We've invested a lot in a custom design technology platform and an automated online service both for the grant maker and for the grantee. We've done a lot of work in creating a standardized methodology for equivalency determination developed by legal experts in the field that is compliant both with IRS and Treasury regulations. And we've done a lot of work with Kaplan and Drysdale and had a legal opinion authored that confirms that grant makers can use the results of our equivalency determination for their compliance purposes. And we're the first organization to build a central repository of equivalency determinations to benefit the entire philanthropic sector. We're really happy that in our first year we've got some strong supporters. Pam Foster of Rockefeller Foundation who has been a supporter of ours from the beginning and is now a very active user of the service has said some terrific things about us. And Sasha Abrams also at Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation has been an active user of the service and has been happy with the service that we've been giving to her. So I think now what I'd like to do is to transition into doing a quick demonstration of our system. And I'm just going to show you a couple of the highlights without taking you into too much detail. But if any of you are interested in having a more detailed demonstration later please feel free to reach out to us and we will be really happy to give you a more detailed online demo. So this is our grant maker portal. We just need to wait for just a moment for it to load. It's showing up for me and let us know in your chat window if for some reason it takes a moment to load on your end so that we can slow down or take a second to allow it to render on screen. It's showing up for me Ken so go ahead. Terrific. So as a grant maker when you come into our grant maker portal this is the dashboard that you see. And as you can see it gives you an overview of the equivalency determination requests that you have in process and also the ones that you've completed. So we use this color coded system to show grant makers where we are in terms of status of processing their equivalency determinations. The name of the NGO, where we are in the process whether it's the grant maker or the NGO processing or NGO source that's doing its review or whether it's complete. A detailed status report here and a due date for the equivalency determination. And of course we have a customer service team that's available to answer any more specific questions you have about where equivalency determinations are in the process. We are able to commit to a six week turnaround time in doing equivalency determinations from the time of the request to when it's completed. We actually find that we're able to do it on average in four weeks. And it takes us two weeks from the time that we receive the completed questionnaire and all of the materials from the NGO to do our legal review. It's also possible through our dashboard to get a geographic representation of where the equivalency determinations are. The grant maker portal is also where grant makers request equivalency determinations. So you input here the name of the organization or a key word in the organization's name. Let us know which country the organization is in. And if they are one of the 600,000 organizations that TechSoup Global has in its database, they will come up in the search. If not, there's also a way for you to input new information for an organization that's not yet in our database. Here is some basic information about the grant maker account. We're able to customize it so that grant makers can have different views of the equivalency determination information. For example, if you have different offices around the world who have requested equivalency determinations for grantees in their regions, we're able to customize the view that each of them gets. And here's a more detailed picture of the equivalency determination request that this grant maker has done. So that gives you a high level sense of what's available in terms of web-based tools for the grant maker. And I thought what I would do next is show you quickly what it all looks like from the perspective of the grantee. So we've done a lot of work in creating a web-based wizard that the NGO uses in answering the questionnaires related to the equivalency determination. So this wizard takes the NGO just to the questions that is necessary for it to answer based on the previous responses that they've given to our questions. So information about their charity type, information about their tax exam status, and then information about the public charity test. So for example, we ask organizations to input here five years of financial information, and we use that information to do the public charity test to ensure that they have the required amount of public support to pass the determination. So I've made this as simple as possible for the NGOs to respond to with lots of help windows so that they can get answers to questions about how terms are defined, and try to make it as easy as possible for them to understand what it is that we're asking since they obviously don't have lots of background in international tax issues. So we try to give them here as much information as they need to be able to easily answer the questions. And we've created this wizard in four different languages, so in addition to English, Spanish, French, and Mandarin, Chinese, and this year we're bringing on with support of the Ford Foundation, Portuguese is the fifth language, and we're bringing on our Brazilian partner as a global partner so that we can provide equivalency determinations in Portuguese as well. I thought I would just show you what this all looks like in Mandarin Chinese. So again, trying to make it as easy as possible for NGOs to respond in their language. So again, that's just a very quick look at the web-based tools that we've created. And if any of you are interested in getting a more detailed demo, I'll be very happy to do that with you. Thank you for that Ken. That was really useful to see how that all interacts. We do have a few questions here. I wasn't sure if you wanted to talk a little bit about the Small Organization Special that is happening right now before we move into the Q&A. Yes, so why don't I just say a little bit about what you can do to get started as an NGO source member and how our fees are set up. So we have four different membership levels depending on how many equivalency determinations you're planning to do each year. And for organizations that plan to do more EDs in a year, we have lower pricing. The pricing for a new equivalency determination for an organization that we don't yet have in our repository runs from $1,490 up to $1,760. The equivalency determinations have a validity period which can be anywhere from 1 to 2 years. And if the organization, the grant maker wants to renew an equivalency determination that's an $850 charge for us to do the renewal to bring it current and to extend its period of validity. And for organizations that we already have in our repository that already have an equivalency determination that's certified in our database, other member grant makers of NGO Source can receive a certificate for that organization for just $250. So you really see that the economics of the repository make it so that once an organization is already gone through an equivalency determination with NGO Source, it's much easier for other grant makers to meet their compliance requirements and can get a certificate for just $250. We really believe strongly that this opportunity to do a $250 equivalency determination starts to make it possible for much smaller foundations to get into international grant making and for foundations to start doing smaller international grants. So in the case when I was working at Sager Foundation and the Sagers would ask me to do a $10,000 grant to an organization in Afghanistan, that wouldn't be possible if the cost of doing the legal fees is $5,000 to $7,000, but for a $250 certificate it becomes possible to do smaller grants like that in a much more economically feasible way. One of the things that we're offering now until the end of May is a small foundation special. So we're really eager to get more smaller foundations using NGO Source as a service. And in particular if your organization has an annual grant budget of less than $5 million, we are making it possible for you to join NGO Source without paying the first year membership fee. So it's a $1,000 value and hopefully that will get smaller foundations using the service and seeing how they can take advantage of the equivalency determination repository. And I will just mention also that if you're interested in registering as an NGO Source member, the way to do it is to go to ngosource.org backslash membership. And it's a very short membership questionnaire and you can become a member and get an account set up right away. And again if you're a grant maker with $5 million or less annual giving budget, just select small foundation special and we can get you started right away without a fee. That is terrific news, Ken. And I think it's great to know that smaller organizations, smaller foundations aren't excluded from being able to use things like this that we actually are trying to do more to help include smaller foundations so that they can access the benefits that some of the bigger organizations have funded if they are serving some of the same organizations especially. So we do have a couple of questions. We have Kimberly asked, are you able to provide any support for NGOs that have difficulty or are unable to access the online services due to their own technology barriers? So if somebody can't use that online form or if they don't speak one of those languages that the site is translated into online, how do we deal with that? So we were able to support NGOs who don't have good online access. Our global partners are set up to receive responses to the questionnaire in a paper based form through FACTS. They are very accustomed to working with organizations to get the responses to the question in the way that is most convenient for the grantee. So we are certainly able to help organizations that don't have good online access. Currently the questionnaire is translated only into Spanish, French, and Mandarin Chinese with Portuguese coming online this year. But our global partners are able to in many cases support additional languages as well so can answer questions certainly not in all languages but in additional languages beyond those four as well. And we certainly try to do our best in communicating with the grantees in a language that is comfortable with them. And for the global partners, are those the ones that are listed on the TechSoup Global website as partners? Like our partners that are in 65 or so countries? The NGO Source partners are a subset of that group. So right now we have eight global partners that are set up to support NGO Source with a 9th one coming on this year in Brazil. So they represent all of the major regions and can cross section of languages. So we are supporting grantees across the world through those eight partners. That's great. And good to know that it's expanding. So Annie has a question asking, how often do NGOs need to be recertified? Is there a standard timeline or is that something that just happens when it looks like the info is out of date? There's a number of different scenarios there. And the validity period for equivalency determination certificates can be anywhere from one to two years. Megan, let me ask Megan Hanson, our legal counsel to respond to that. I think she can give you a more detailed answer. Hi Ken, can you hear me? Yes I can. Okay. So Ken, you answered the question pretty specifically. So most EDs are valid for one to two years. We certify EDs based on fiscal year. So depending on the type of organization, most often EDs are valid for two years. But depending on facts and circumstances, sometimes they are valid for one year. And it's valid from the end of the most recent fiscal year in which we have financial information. If it's an organization that does not require financial information, then it's two years from the end of the most current fiscal year. So for example, if it's a university that doesn't require, in which we don't need financial information and it's the year 2013 or that's the end of the most recent fiscal year, the ED would be valid through the end of 2015. If it's a public charity or the equivalent of a public charity and the most recent or the end of the, and we have financials through 2013, the ED would be valid through 2015. The reason we say usually is there are some time situations where for whatever reason we're not comfortable certifying, but that's very rare. Hopefully that answers the question. And we always point out if there's an extraneous circumstance in which we're not able to certify for the full two year period. Very helpful. And I think on the slide that you'd mentioned, the pricing can, it's also a good helpful reminder to know that it is not as expensive as the first time to recertify. So if somebody needs to have their ED revisited and recertified, that doesn't cost quite as much. So that's a good way to go about it. So another question we have, Annie is asking, is it possible to find out if you already have certified EDs on file for some of the organizations we already deal with? So if a foundation is coming to us new and they have a handful of organizations that they want to look up, are they able to search for those? And if they're already in the system, how does that work? So Annie, we can certainly do that. It's possible through the GrantMaker portal to do a search on each of those organizations, but I'd be happy to make it easier for you if you have a list of organizations that you're working with that you'd like to send me, I can go through and do a check against our repository to see how many of them we have in our database already. So I'd be very happy to work with you on that. Ken, so accommodating. We appreciate that. We also have a couple of questions. So how often do EDs get denied? And what would some of the common reasons be that maybe an organization wouldn't achieve their equivalency determination certification? So so far we've been finding that the cases where equivalency determinations are denied is only coming up in about 5% of the cases. And we have a pre-screening questionnaire that we can send to GrantMakers that helps them identify organizations that are more likely or less likely to pass equivalency determination. Megan, why don't I turn it over to you to talk about some of the common reasons that you're seeing why EDs are being denied? Yeah, I'd say the most common reason that EDs are denied is that organizationally they don't meet the strict requirements that are set forth in the IRS regulations and just to give a really high level, as many of you know, to be an equivalent you have to be organized like a public charity, operate like a public charity, and then in most instances meet the public support test. And the IRS has set some really strict requirements around what it has to look like or what the governing documents have to say in order for an equivalent to be equivalent. And so I'd say the most common reasons why EDs aren't or the things that we see is it's usually around dissolution. The dissolution clauses aren't sufficient and just I don't know how much detail you want me to go into Ken, but on dissolution assets have to be used for charitable purposes or in a nutshell that's what has to happen. And in many countries the specificity that we look for just isn't analogous. So that's where we get caught up a lot. In some countries public charities are allowed to lobby and as you may know in the U.S. public charities can't lobby or if they lobby it has to be an insubstantial amount. That's another area where sometimes we see a disconnect. So those are a couple areas where sometimes we either need more information or need to work with organizations to make them a little bit more analogous. Those are a couple of examples. But again, I'd be happy to talk offline to give more specifics. That's great, Megan. Thanks. And I think I'd point out too that in the small number of cases where we've had to deny an equivalency determination there have been cases where we've been able to work with the NGO to give them some guidelines and changes they would need to make to their bylaws in order to become an equivalency determination in order to qualify for the equivalency determination. And we can also help if the grant maker is interested in switching over to an expenditure responsibility grant so that we can take some of the information that we've collected in doing our due diligence and make it available to the grant maker as background for their equivalency determination grant. Excuse me, it's background for their expenditure responsibility grant. Great. And just a follow-up on that. So could you speak to some of the differences between equivalency determination and expenditure responsibility and maybe what Jim alluded to some of the reasons that that was not the road that he wanted to go down with his foundation in using the ER as opposed to the ED. Can you speak a little bit about why one might want to do ED instead? Megan, why don't you take that on? I think you've got a lot of expertise on that one. So I would say that's an entirely different presentation, but in a nutshell, expenditure responsibility, so a private foundation is very restricted or more restricted in the types of organizations that it can give money to and can very well described. It has to track all of the funds or all of the money a private foundation spends has to be accounted for. And so it can give money to anyone, but it has to track it from the day it spends it to the day it spends. So in expenditure responsibility, it can give money to any type of organization. It just has to do a lot of due diligence. So if it gives money to a private or to a public charity, the due diligence is much lessened. So in an expenditure responsibility grant, the IRS has said you can give money to any type of organization, but you're going to have to do these basically four steps. You're going to have to do this due diligence on the organization first, which requires a lot of pre-work, not a lot really, but some extensive due diligence upfront on the organization to ensure that the organization, whether it's a for-profit corporation, another private foundation, or whatever type of entity it is, is going to be able to account for and handle the grant funds to be used for whatever the specific charitable purpose is. You're going to put some specific language in your grant agreement to make sure that the funds are being used specifically for this charitable purpose. You're then going to require some reports back from the organization to make sure the funds are actually being spent for this, and then you're going to report to the IRS. So there's very black and white rules. The regulations are very clear, but it is a process. If you want more information on it, we can circulate some trainings and some guidance on what those are, but it really is a black and white process. Very specific. There's a lot of guidance, but it is some work, and it allows private foundations to basically give money anywhere, but it has to be for very specific charitable projects. ED on the other hand says private foundations can look at an organization and say, hey, this organization, if they applied to the IRS directly, which they could do, but for whatever reason they're not, the IRS would say this organization is like a public charity in the U.S., and you private foundation, you can treat it as if it was a public charity because it meets the operational test, the organizational test, and if needed, the public charity test. So when you give it money, you don't have to follow all those steps I just outlined. You can treat it as if you were giving money to another public charity. So there's more work up front. That's what we do at MGO Source, but it allows more gifting options on the back end. So there are very different mechanisms of giving and allow for different flexibilities and different due diligence on different sites. So hopefully that makes sense. And it's really more geared for private foundations and donor advice funds. I think that's really helpful to sort of define the differences there a little bit more, and I know that could be its own whole topic. So thank you for doing that in a nutshell. If you have a question, go ahead. I was going to say there's an e-learning on LearnFoundationLaw.org that you can go look at that is a whole probably hour overview that you could go watch that does a probably much more succinct job of explaining it if you have time. Okay, and we can try and we'll get that link, and we can include that in the follow-up email that we send out as well in case anybody is interested in learning more about that. We have another question from Kimberly asking, do you also consider private foundation equivalency status, or is it just public charity equivalency versus being declined? So I can probably answer that as well. And we do. And the main difference is when an organization like I just stated applies to be a public charity, again there's the three tests, there's the organizational test, the operational test, and then there's the grounds for public support. And the default is if you don't have the public support, you're a private foundation. And we've been talking internally about how we want to handle this, but we likely have the capacity and ability to do that. And we have had one instance where we have done that so far. So it's definitely something we're working on, and we think we have the capacity to do that. And I have issued one opinion where I have done that today. So we're just trying to figure out how we want to account for that in the system moving forward. Great. And you mentioned an organization that the nonprofit or equivalent public charity in a different country could apply for the same kind of status through the IRS, but for some reason they're not, can, based on the folks that registered for today's event, it looked like some were from nonprofits, probably based in other countries. So if you're at a public charity overseas, can you submit yourself or your own organization to be evaluated for equivalency determination? Or what's the process? If you're joining us on this call and you're from a nonprofit or an organization, can they encourage foundations that want to support them to go through this process and join NGO Source to get equivalency determination for them? That's a great question, Becky. So the way that we are set up currently, it's not possible for the NGO to come to us directly to have us do equivalency determinations for them. And that's because of guidance that we got from the regulators when we established the service. They had a strong preference that we work with grantmakers and to process equivalency determinations based on requests coming from the grantmaker. So right now the best way for an NGO overseas to get into the NGO Source repository would be to work with a U.S.-based grantmaker. If you have a foundation funder or another U.S.-based donor that could work with you in doing the request to NGO Source, we'd be very happy to support that. And if any of you who are NGOs overseas who are interested in pursuing that, please feel free to reach out to me and we can give you a list of our member grantmakers and try to find one that might be interested in working with you on that. That's great. We also have a question from Jim asking, would an operating foundation need to use equivalency determinations or only non-operating foundations? Why don't you take that, Megan? If they're making grants, yes. All right. Well, unless there aren't other questions, if you have any other ones, feel free to post them in the chat window quickly because we are about to wrap up here in just a moment. And I'd like to just make sure that people have seen where they can get more information on ngosource.org and also where they can get information about membership. And then back over here we had information about that small foundation special from now through the end of May where if you have an annual grant budget of less than $5 million that you can join your first year for free, which is a great benefit. And so with no other questions coming in at this point, we can go ahead and wrap it up. Up10 has one other thing he'd like to say so let me bring him back on the line. I would just like to thank you all in closing for being interested in ngosource and for spending this hour with us today. I hope that this has answered a lot of your questions about ngosource. For any of you who are considering becoming an ngosource member but still have a couple of unanswered questions, please don't hesitate to get in touch with me. We'd be really happy to work with you. My email address is ktsunoda at techsoupglobal.org. Please don't hesitate to get in touch if you're interested in speaking to some of our current member grant makers to ask them what their experience has been like. I'd be happy to make those introductions as well. Thank you again, and I look forward to working with you. Thank you for that Ken. And I would like to thank you for your presentation. And I'd also like to thank Jim Greenbaum for his presentation and sharing information about ngosource and how it's been useful for them. Thank you all for participating today. And I'd also like to lastly thank our webinar sponsor ReadyTalk who provides the use of this webinar platform so we can provide these events on a regular basis. You can view other webinars that we present at techsoup.org slash community. And please take a moment to complete the post-event survey that pops up so we can continue to improve our program. Thank you to Megan for also helping answer questions and to Shab for helping field them on the back end. I hope everyone has a terrific day and will join us at ngosource.org. Thanks so much. Bye-bye.