 My name is Joy Banks, and I'm the Project Coordinator for the Clear Strategies for Advancing Hidden Collections 6-Part Webinar Series. Welcome to our second webinar, Building Resources and Relationships, Determining What and Who You Need. This series is offered through the generous support of the Andrew W. Bellin Foundation. It is my pleasure to introduce our speaker for today, Rosemary Pleva Flynn. Rosemary is the Principal Vibrarian and Teen Lead Library and Information Services at the Energy and Environmental Research Center at the University of North Dakota. Prior to working at the EERC, she was the Electronic Records Project Archivist for Phase 2 of the Indiana University Electronic Records Project. An active member of many professional organizations, Rosemary also currently chairs the Society of American Archivists Dictionary Working Group, tasked with creating the new Dictionary of Archives terminology. Rosemary has presented papers, been a panel participant, and moderated programs at several conferences. She is an instructor for several Society of American Archivists Continuing Education workshops. Rosemary holds an MLS from Indiana University and an MA in Social Sciences and BS in History with a minor in American Studies from Ball State University. She attended the First Archives Leadership Institute in 2008 at the University of Wisconsin. Please welcome Rosemary. Thank you, Joy, and welcome to all of you. I see a lot of names that I'm familiar with, but a lot of new places as well, too. I'm very excited to be with you today. Now, since we updated the objectives a bit for this webinar a couple of weeks ago, I wanted to briefly state them in case you signed up before they had changed. By the end of the webinar today, you should first know how to develop a budget to support goals, know what questions to ask in advance, know who to talk to about funding and support, and know how to adjust the project message to various audiences. Now, I just want to return us out to that lobby area again where you guys came in and take a quick look at those polls that you were doing. One of the things that I do when I ask these kinds of questions is it helps me gauge your experience and know what kinds of questions you might have during the webinar. I see that there's a really good mix on what your financial management experience is. Many of you have managed some budgets, but others of you have no experience at all with this. So we're going to kind of keep it pretty general today, but I'm more than happy to answer any questions along the way. And also, my contact information is at the end, and I'm more than happy for you to contact me if you would like to continue the conversation. The second poll was on how many grants or other funding opportunities have you applied for. It looks to me like a lot of you have done one or two here or there, the range there is one to five, and some of you have done more than that. And that's great because unless you get yourself out there and apply for one of these funding opportunities, you're not going to get one to receive, which is the next question, how many of you received? The numbers are pretty close, which I think is really good. That means that you're having a pretty good success with what you've been doing so far. And I hope today you can learn some more things to help you become even more successful. Now as we return back into our classroom, I just want to share one caveat. We simply cannot cover all topics related to resources, budgets, and other aspects of financial management today. There are books galore about this, articles about this, and even with what we are covering, we're probably not going to be able to go deep enough as we might desire. We all come from a variety of institutions of different sizes, different sectors, different cultures, different needs, and there's no one size fits all budget solution that's going to cover everybody. Now to ease us into the webinar, I've got a couple questions for you. First, how would you describe your approach to your own fiscal resources? Now if you are risk averse down here at the one end of the continuum, you will do whatever you can to decrease uncertainty, so you don't want to take any risks. All the way at the other end are those risk-seekers. That means you are willing to take risks to get to potential but not certain outcomes. You notice here in the middle is the risk-neutral. Risk-neutral suggests some indifference to outcomes. Now nobody is truly risk-neutral, but you may find yourself more towards the center mark, or you may be more risk averse or risk-seeking depending on the decision that has to be made. Now Joy is going to turn on the drawing tool, and I would like you to grab the marker tool there on the side and scribble a line on the continuum for where you think you are. And if you are watching as part of the group, I encourage everybody in the group to respond to this, to give an idea of where you would be. Much as we suspected, we are all over the place, and some of us are more comfortable with risk and some of us are not. Okay, next question. How would you describe your approach to your own fiscal resources? A person who is fiscally liberal generally supports higher levels of government spending. I mean, these are not political theory. But while the definition of a fiscal conservative has been evolving in the recent years, generally today it means that a person opposes tax increases and supports limited government spending. So I think these are showing kind of the same thing, that we're, as a group, we're really all over the place. So what I really want to emphasize here as we move on to our next slide, is that we're not going to get into a discussion on political and economic theory, but what you need to understand is that your belief and your personal approaches to money and its management will influence the way you approach developing budgets and seeking funding. However, sometimes your attitude towards risk can dictate, can be dictated by the circumstances you are currently in. For example, you may be a risk averse person, but due to ongoing budget concerns, you may take riskier actions than you would normally prefer in an effort to save your project or your organization. All these things are things that you need to remember as you go into the budget preparation process. While we're not going to discuss specific, or discuss politics, we are going to discuss our current situation. And we're going to move into our first discussion room for today, where we're going to share about what you are doing now. So our first question here is, how do you currently justify the existence of your organization? Or to phrase it a little differently, if someone would ask you what your organization does and why it needs funding, what do you say to them? Now, I'm going to change that and offer another question to you. What metrics do you gather to support your justification? And I think it's a good time to head back out to our classroom. Just like I said, there's a lot of things that we're doing to justify the existence of our organizations right now. And we are, sounds like many of you are gathering stats and some of you are using them as part of your efforts to talk to your funding sources or potential funding sources, which is really good. Now, I will be honest with you, even though there has been a recovery in many sectors of the economy for cultural institutions, the political and business environment continues to necessitate the frugal use of budget resources. Really, it's a dollar and cents world. We're seeing this everywhere. And we are in the uncomfortable position of often needing to justify our existence by boiling it down into dollar terms. Now, this is difficult for us to do because statements of cash flow usually underestimate what's referred to as the social return of an organization's existence. Now, from the poll, we already know that some of you may have already have experience with budget creation and monitoring, while others of you may be using this webinar series as the help that you need to prepare all elements of your very first project. Regardless of where you're at, all of us will benefit from reviewing the basic steps for creating a budget. Whether it is for a project to catalog a hidden collection or for your entire department or your unit, developing a budget is as much about forecasting as anything else with some prioritization thrown in. During the planning and preparation phases, you must predict changes in future funding levels, wage increases, price inflation for goods and services. The more information you have, the better your forecast will be. What we will be doing today is giving you some tools to help you in this process. So let's begin with just a review of the basic steps for creating the budget. The number of steps and the details of any sub-steps in the budget process depends on your organization's funding sources and sometimes what is required by law. The basic steps we will be discussing today are assess needs and goals in terms of the organization's overall mission and goals, forecast anticipated revenues and expenses, analyze data from inside and outside the organization, prepare the budget, present the budget, and adopt the budget. Because of the length of the webinar, we are not going to be math intensive or talk about specific formats for budgets, but there are a number of resources that can help you that are listed in the Wiki that was created to accompany the webinar series. Let's look at these steps a little bit more from the perspective of preparing a budget for a hidden collections project. So the first step is to assess needs and goals in terms of the organization's overall mission and goals. Okay, you think you've identified the perfect collection for a grant funded project, but before moving forward with your budget preparation activities and your grant application, be sure that the collection and your ultimate goals for it fit with your organization's missions and goals. When a collection was accessioned, the organization may have had a different focus. Well, it may be a really, really cool collection. It does not fit with what your organization is doing now. You will have a hard time getting approval to even do the project. As a funded budget is a statement of priorities, awareness of your organization's mission and goals, and how the collections and your project impact them is also extremely important when discussing sustainability. Next, you will forecast anticipated revenues and expenses. A common misconception about the budget planning process is that it is only about the money going out or your expenses. During this step, you will need to anticipate where the money is coming from to do your project and what your expenses will be. Revenue is the money coming in that you have to work with. The questions you are asking here as part of the budget planning process are what are your current sources of revenue and what other sources are available to you for funding. We will discuss later in the webinar a little bit more about identifying funding sources. Your project expenses may involve more than you think. You need to know things like, who is working on this project? How much time do you think they will need to complete it? Do you need to hire additional staff? And you also need to be thinking about what the staff will be paid, and will they be long-term staff members or on staff just for the duration of the project? Will you need to work with other departments? How much will they charge for their time or services? Equipment and supplies. What do we need? How much will they cost? And some funding sources may not pay for major equipment purchases. Will you need to travel? Many times a stipulation of federal grant funding is presentation of your project findings. If this is to be done at conferences or other professional meetings, you should be planning travel money into your budget. Other travel expenses may be incurred if you are working as part of a partnership, and you need to provide travel back and forth as part of those activities. Other things that you need to be looking at is what metrics will you need to put together, use to put together the budget and to advocate to potential funders. This is where thinking about what you're already gathering and what else you might need to gather are important. If your collection is going to need ongoing funds for maintenance activities related to keeping the collections available, you need to identify this early on in the budget process and decide if it is part of this particular budget or part of the organization's total budget and discussion on long-term sustainability. So when thinking about a cataloging project, what do you think is the biggest expense? Or are there other things that we haven't listed yet? And some of you have already done some of these projects already, so feel free to fill in in the chat window some of those things that you have found that were the biggest expenses. My experience so far? Staff. Exactly. Jamie, thank you. Training. Yes, and supplies. Sometimes anticipating supply costs is very difficult, especially if it's a project you don't have a good handle on how big it really is. Vendors. Good. Licenses for software. Really good. Specialized shelving. Digital storage space. Computing needs can be something we don't necessarily think about. Project management software. Angela will be happy to hear that that one made the list. Sustainability is very important to think about. We've unhidden the collections. We don't want to hide them again, correct? Feel free to add anything else to the list as we go along. But now that we've identified some of these expenses, how do we figure out how much our project is going to cost? For our example today, let's look at some of the equations from the technical pamphlet computing the total cost of archival processing by Thomas Wolstead. The link is in that resource wiki, but I'm only going to highlight a couple of the equations in discussion from that. The most simplistic equation is what you see on your screen right now. Hours spent processing divided by the cubic feet of archives so that then you know how many hours per cubic foot. But that doesn't really help our full budget discussion in figuring that out. We know there's a lot more to processing a collection and we need to put it into a dollar figure. So this next equation takes into account labor costs and the cost of shelving and supplies. So you have your cost per hour times the hour spent processing. And to that you're going to add the cost of shelving and supplies divided by the cubic feet of your archives. And then you're going to come up with the cost per cubic foot. Even though that equation looks like a lot more, there's a lot that goes into each of these various parts of the equation. So let's first look at the cost per hour. When you're figuring out the cost per hour, you must remember to figure in not only just the salary that you're paying a person, but you have to figure in social security, other taxes and benefits, holidays. And just like when you're having to plan your project and that there's time off and sick leave that you must make into your project plan, you also have to figure it into your overall cost for that person. And then the other thing to remember is that all staff are, that you have to include all of the staff involved with the project. You may have multiple employees that are in different positions. You will have supervisory time. You will have administrative time. All these things need to go added into there. And the rates for each of these will likely be different. So you cannot just figure out one cost per hour and use that across all of your staff. Let's move to looking at the cost per shelving, supplies, et cetera. Now this part of the equation will vary greatly based on what your project is. So I cannot tell you exactly what to include here. But make sure you are including all of the activities related to your project. So if your project's collection care, all the activities for that. Computing resources. Computing resources was one of those expenses that ended up on the list that you needed to make sure that you were keeping track of. Digitization, same thing. So, again, that is all lumped into that one line that the equation has presented. And then finally, let's look at the cubic feet of archives. Now this equation was developed for processing archival collections 30 years ago. If you're processing physical collections, then it is still an accurate metric to be concerned about. If not, there are various other metrics that you could be using in the equation. For example, you could be looking at the volume catalog, images scanned, number of records converted. Now if you notice, though, about the equation that we presented, our final number was the cost per cubic foot. Is that a number that is going to resonate with your funders? For some, yes, it will be a number that resonates. They know what a cubic foot is, and they can use it for comparison purposes. Other funders will only want to know what is the bottom line number or the grand total. The cost per cubic foot may be exactly the same, but the bottom line will be vastly different between a 50 cubic foot project and a 500 cubic foot project. A question you need to ask yourself is, what number does your funder want to hear? And make sure that you can answer that. For those of you who have done projects, we've already talked about some of the metrics we utilized. Are there any others from that initial list that would be ones that you think would be important for somebody at this point who is trying to start with their very first grant budget proposal? If you have anything, please just kind of briefly type it into the chat window. Now is a really great time though to talk about free resources. Free resources are not truly free. For example, a volunteer workforce still requires supervision and training, or open source software may come with less support. Free resources are great, and I'm not saying don't use them. You just need to make sure you are planning for any additional aspects that might not be readily apparent as far as your expenses. The next part of creating the budget is analyzing the data both from inside and outside your organization that you have been gathering. The equations presented earlier may or may not be applicable to your situation like we talked about, but they give you a place to start. Your answers to all of the expense questions that we've been talking about and any others applicable to your situation will help you determine how much money you will need to complete the project and how your budget will need to be structured. Sometimes you still will need information from other sources to help you better understand your budgeting needs. For example, if you need to contract for some of the work, knowing the average cost for potential contractors will help you create the line item for that service, even if it is something that will not be determined until after you receive the grant. I want to emphasize here that you have a tremendous amount of information available to you from your colleagues. Connect with your colleagues who have completed hidden collections projects and with others who are also in the planning phase. Your colleagues are one of your biggest resources. Preparing the budget is about actually putting the information you have gathered along with your analysis into a budget format that best suits your needs. Be aware that sometimes a format is mandated by your organization or a funding source. That format does not make sense to you or does not provide you with an overall picture because you are working with multiple funding sources. By all means, create a budget format that works for the situation. If you do need to do this, be sure you are planning enough time to switch the information into any required format. And please, please, please, please, please do not wait for the last minute to see what the budget and format requirements are, especially if you are applying for grant funding. I will be really sad but probably not as sad or as disappointed as you will be if you don't get the money you were hoping to get because you forgot to do something. This next step is about putting your final budget out to the potential funders. At the risk of sounding like I'm repeating myself, which I am, when you are presenting your budget, know your intended recipients and know what is the acceptable budget format. Certain grants will want very specific budget forms or formats. Others may just want a paragraph description with a short spreadsheet and others want that executive summary along with a ream of documentation that they will never look at. But that doesn't mean you don't provide it. In some cases, you may actually need to do a presentation about the key points from your budget. Read all of the submittal instructions and get clarification if there is something you don't understand. If there is repeating here, know your recipients. For example, a board will get a different budget scenario than a grantee agency. Where I work, we run completely on contracts with and putting bids and submitting proposals for all of the science work that we do. And our proposals and budgets run the gamut of what is available and out there. And you really have to pay attention to what those funders are looking for in giving them the budget numbers. Now the final step is to adopt the budget. Adopting the budget is really out of your control in most cases. Your board, your potential funding source, others are the ones who adopt the budget. And they can make changes as part of their process. When the final budget is adopted, you will need to examine your work plan to make sure that what you've requested is there. If not, you will need to adjust your work plan. This gets into some of the project planning tools and monitoring that Angela talked with you about last week. And Christine also mentioned down here that when preparing budgets, sometimes there are in-kind costs that meatwood can get calculated into there too. And so you need to be aware of all the different aspects that can go into the budget. So during our first discussion period where we moved, we shared what we were currently doing to justify the existence of our organization. Now we're going to move into a second discussion. And based on what you've learned so far in the webinar series, what would you do differently as you're trying to get funding for your project to justify what your budget is, the collection, your organization? Okay, a second question here just to kind of follow up on that. Are there things that you would remove from what you're currently doing that you think you probably shouldn't do anymore based on what you've heard these first two weeks so far? Well, let's go ahead and move back into our classroom. And let's move into a discussion about funding sources. Here's a short list and we'll go through it. Grants are one of the first things we think of when we are trying to fund a project. The money available through grants runs the gamut from very small to very large. Now, caution, do not spend more money or time on a grant application than what you will get out of it. There are some exceptions to this but you must be a good steward of the resources that you already have. One of the exceptions that I can think of is if you are trying to cultivate a relationship with somebody that they might have potential future funding that is of significance and you're trying to get your foot in the door, it might be worth spending some extra time on that type of application. But if it's just a one-time, can't get another one for five years from this organization and it's only worth $5,000, it's really more likely not going to be worth your time to spend trying to apply for that grant. Now, donations and contributions can come from individuals and corporations. Well, great when you can get it. Don't think that the only donations and contributions you can take are money. One thing to note, donors often make their contributions with the expectation that they will be able to deduct it on their taxes. You need to make sure that you are in compliance with all applicable federal and state laws. Endowments are a specialized form of donations. There are variations for how endowments are set up, but typically you would only be getting funding from a set amount of any dividend earnings. Unless you have a sizable endowment fund, you are unlikely to fund your entire project through the endowment. Now, we do have a variety of institutions represented in our group today and there are some institutions that will have that type of endowment money that they can draw on. But again, you really just have to know where things stand and be very cognizant of what is available to you. Appropriated funds are typically public funds that are set aside for a particular purpose through legislation. Your organization might automatically get these funds or you might need to apply for them. Membership fees are often unrestricted funds and income from them can be a very stable revenue. Charging membership fees will not work for everyone and may even be prohibited. So again, know your situation. And then fees for services or contracts are not likely a big source of income for us, but can be a source of income. And charging fees for services can be part of an overall funding plan because having multiple revenue streams are better for your overall financial health of an organization. Also, it could potentially free up other internal funds for your project. So these are the things like if you have scanning equipment or preservation facilities or I should say conservation facilities and you can help your local community or your region with some of these activities by charging a fee that can bring some money in and help pay for other activities that you want to do. And then another funding source are internal reallocations. You are probably already doing this as part of your annual operations budget. A small project is often handled by switching an employee's job duties for a short period of time. And I have found this to be an effective way to fund small pilot projects that can eventually result in broader organizational buy-in. And since I put this slide together, a couple other things that I thought of as far as sources that may be possible as revenue sources are events requiring ticket purchases. Some of you might be able to do that. And sometimes you might be able to work with businesses for sponsorships and things. So those are ones that you might want to explore as well. Now, when you are at a smaller organization, you may feel like you don't stand a chance when competing with bigger organizations for funding. And I'm not going to lie to you, it is more difficult, but it is doable. You may need to look at funding opportunities that are specifically directed to smaller entities or to collaborations. For example, the National Endowment for the Humanities recently announced in November a new grant program called Creating Humanities Communities. It's a quote that it stated it supports grassroots humanities programs by encouraging partnerships and collaborations between multiple institutions or organizations in a town, county, region, or area. Now, working with partnerships has its pros and cons. From the financial perspective, working in a partnership can give you access to more people and more resources. It can also lead to a more efficient use of existing resources. However, differences between organizational cultures, systems, and procedures may negate the positives of the partnership if they are not managed well. Role delineation and careful monitoring of the budget and work plans are also very important. Approaching potential funders is really about advocacy. One of the biggest challenges with advocacy is identifying who you hope to influence and then deliver the right message to them. Without effective advocacy, commanding resources is more difficult. Budget numbers are only numbers until you explain how they relate to the business of your archives and what it will mean for the funder. So now we're going to move into our third discussion about approaching funding sources. Let's start out by sharing some funding sources that are not typical grant funding organizations other than, you know, those organizations other than Mellon Foundation, IMLS, NEH, NHPRC. And is there anything off the wall that you have tried? What are some of the potential sources? There is one more question. What is your experience with external funders and the application process? All right. Well, let's move back in for a couple last things in our classroom before we head to our final Q&A. First thing is a brief note about monitoring budgets. Monitoring your budget after it's been adopted is as important as creating it. Throughout the budget year, you must be ready to meet challenges like budget cuts, like we were just discussing. There are a few forms or reports that you may use to help monitor your budget. Particularly important are the statement of cash flow or a monthly summary report. These are excellent ways to monitor your budget. When you get your statement or report, review it just like you would reconcile your checkbook. Look at it to see if your purchase requests match up, if things have been deducted or added properly. You want to make sure it is as accurate as possible. Mistakes do happen, but they must be caught as quickly as possible to not cause problems in future account audits. A month report can also help you spot revenue and expense trends. For example, a sharp increase in photocopier fees or scan requests during the month of June could signal increased reading room usage during that month. Ask yourself, is this because people are hearing about the new collection that we made available? If you can honestly say yes, then you can use that as a talking point to get more funding. It's those stories that goes along with the metrics. Always remember that the reports you are looking at are only a reflection of a moment in time. Maybe you had more expenses that month or quarter because you got the bill from a vendor you had hired. Or maybe you are waiting for someone to pay you for some prints that you produced for them. Now, what if you lose funding for your project or need to make budget cuts? This is never an easy time even if you know it's coming. But having a solid budget plan monthly reports and excellent project documentation, you will be able to respond to the situation in the most appropriate manner. Have an idea of the must have and would be nice in your budget plan. It makes it easier to cope with cuts or stand your ground if you feel your project becomes meaningless because of them. And this really does happen. I mean, we've heard about it in our last discussion. And in the last seven years, I have had to make multiple budget reductions to my operating budget. My overall budget is 50 percent. And this is my operating budget, not any kind of project budget or anything of what it's 50 percent of what it was at the end of 2011. And I'm currently having to make another $10,000 in cuts because a roof, not even in my area, but a roof in our complex has to be replaced. So these things really do happen and you really have to know what your priorities are. And how do we figure out those priorities? That gets us into a discussion about sustainability. Like so many other topics that we've covered today in the webinar, sustainability can easily be a class on its own. And I know it was brought up in some questions about in last week's webinar. And I think it was Thomas who brought up sustainability as well. The basic components of sustainability have you combine your finances with impact and your mission to determine what actions you need to take or not take. We will typically see three areas of concern related to sustainability. Financial sustainability is measuring the resources it takes to provide support. This is often talked about in a not profitable to a profitable continuum. But you can also think in terms of the resources needed when you're looking at starting something new so that your continuum is a low amount of resources to a higher amount of resources. Programmatic sustainability is concerned with how your program or project fits within the overall mission of your organization and the impact that it has on it. Typically it follows a low impact to a high impact continuum. Environmental sustainability means different things to different organizations. There could be climate, location or functionality concerns to name a few. These environmental factors could affect your project or program. For example, if you do not have a sufficient climate controlled storage location for a collection, you may need to think about what new resources are needed to get them in the place, to get them in place before you start. A good way to analyze sustainability of your overall department organization is to map your multiple projects and programs. To do this, you're going to create a map with four quadrants, one, two, three, four. The two axes will be the two areas of sustainability that are most important to you. For today, we're going to say that the X-axis is your financial sustainability and the Y-axis is your impact or your programmatic sustainability. If you are looking at a project to catalog one of the hidden collections, but it will have low – I'm going to switch to the draw tool – but it will have low impact and use a lot of resources. So say somewhere down in here, you should more likely want to turn your focus to a project that has higher impact for the same or less resources, either here or here. Mapping each of your projects and programs can help you identify your priorities and how to direct funding. So if you have – you can have here, you can have here, you can have here, here, here. The ones that you are going to want to be looking at more in funding are the ones that are above and have the higher impact. And they may cost a lot of money, but if they have a very high impact and are very important to your organization, that's how you help set your priorities. Now be sure to, while you're mapping these, involve multiple perspectives in this process to get the most complete picture. Those on your board and in executive positions may have a very different view from the rest of the staff. So sustainability, like I said, is an extremely important thing and I think it's something that you really would want to spend more time on. We just recently added some additional book resources to the resource list for this webinar on nonprofit sustainability that I've found that I think really resonate with our sector of the nonprofit world. And even if you are working within a university setting where it's kind of that different mix of not exactly a not-for-profit, but different settings, I think you will really find these to be very useful books. So that's the end of our overview of budgets and resources and relationships. I hope this really helps formulate some new ways and new things to think about as you're trying to put together your budget. And your questions today and your sharing have been phenomenal. I couldn't be more pleased with the way this webinar went. And before I hand everything off back to Joy, I wanted to thank you for spending the time with me today. And I also want to encourage you not to be afraid to think outside of the box when it comes to building your resources and relationships. Unconventional funding sources and rethinking your approach to creating budgets may be just the thing you need to get the resources to open up all of those hidden collections.