 Welcome. Thank you for joining us for today's TechSoup for Libraries webinar. Today's topic is Libraries Supporting Social Good Tools and Tips for Outreach to Non-profits. My name is Crystal and I'll be your host. Today we have two guests joining us to share their knowledge and experience on this topic. We have a lot of great information to share, but first I have just a few announcements. We'll be using the ReadyTalk platform for our meeting today. Please use the chat in the lower left corner to send questions and comments to the presenters. We will be tracking your questions throughout the webinar and we'll answer them at the designated Q&A section at the end. All of your chat comments will only come to the presenters, but if you have comments or ideas to share, we will forward them back out with the entire group. You do not need to raise your hand to ask a question, simply type it into the chat box. 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TechSoup was founded in 1987 with a global network of partners. We connect libraries and nonprofits to the technology, resources, and support they need so that you can operate at your full potential to more effectively deliver your programs and services and better achieve your missions. TechSoup has helped to distribute over 14 million software and hardware donations to date through our product donation program. We offer a wide range of software, hardware, and services including refurbished computers and Microsoft Office products. And they're both cost effective and environmentally friendly. For more information about TechSoup product donations or services, please visit TechSoup.org and click on Get Products and Services. For today's webinar we're joined by two guests. Kate Tachik leads the Direction, Growth, and Deeper Engagement of the Funding Information Network at the Foundation Center. Previously, Kate worked as the eResources Librarian for Foundation Center West and as a business librarian for an investment bank in Chicago. She discovered her passion for connecting people to resources that can help them succeed at a nonprofit residential treatment facility for young adults in Chicago where she developed the in-house library and learning center. Jennifer Begins is head of the Regional Foundation Center at the Free Library of Philadelphia's Business Resource and Innovation Center where she provides resources and over 70 programs to greater Philadelphia nonprofits each year. Previously, she ran the Paschalville Neighborhood Library in Southwest Philadelphia known for its Thai library and began her career as a business librarian with the Free Library of Philadelphia. My name is Crystal Schimpf and I'll be your host for today's webinar. In assisting us with chat we have Susan Hope-Bard from the TechSoup team. We'll have time for Q&A at the end and we'll be tracking your questions throughout. So please share your questions in the chat as they arise. Kate will start off by talking about what we mean when we talk about the social sector. And then she'll talk about how libraries can support the social sector and share some information and some training resources and some informational resources. We'll also hear about Jennifer's work at the Free Library of Philadelphia and that will include some specific tactics for outreach to nonprofits. Now I know that we have a lot of public libraries here in the audience today but I also want to welcome other organizations that may be joining us including some academic libraries, some special libraries and also some nonprofit organizations. So we hope you'll all walk away with some new ideas today. So now I'm going to hand things over to Kate and she's going to start us off. Kate? Thanks so much, Crystal. And I want to say thank you again to you and TechSoup and to everybody who's joining us today. It's really great that you're giving us a valuable hour of your time so close to holiday and end of year deadlines. Nice to see some familiar names in the list of participants as well. So again, I'm very happy to be here. And just to clarify, for those of you who aren't familiar with Foundation Center, we are a nonprofit. We're based in New York but we also have offices in Washington, D.C., Atlanta, Cleveland and San Francisco. Our mission is to strengthen the social sector by advancing knowledge about philanthropy in the U.S. and around the world. And the primary ways in which we really do that is by collecting and sharing data through our databases and then also creating lots of learning opportunities for both the grant-seeking audience and the grant-making audience. And that plays out in forms of knowledge, landscapes, foundation maps, other tools and trainings. And you can learn more about us at FoundationCenter.org as well. But today's topic is really focused on libraries conducting outreach to the nonprofit community. So I wanted to start things off with a quick poll to see where you all might be at. Obviously, you're probably interested in engaging with your nonprofit community but I'm curious as to some of the things you might be up to already. If you aren't supporting nonprofits in any formal way right now, that's totally fine. So you can see the polls in front of you. You have all the options. You can select multiple options there if you're doing a combination of outreach and programming or resources and something different that you want to share in the chat. Go ahead and fill that in now. You can make your selections and then hit submit or you can actually skip right to the results to see what other folks are putting in. And as I'm seeing the results coming in, it's looking like it's pretty even across the board with a combination of outreach, resources, and programming. And then a few of you are not supporting nonprofits at this time which is great because that's why we want you to be on this call today. So I'll give you just another moment or so to add your results or to add your submissions. Okay, it looks like things are slowing down. So I think I'm going to go ahead and close the poll here in just a couple seconds. So it looks like a number of you are already doing a number of things to support your nonprofit community. So what we're going to talk about today and what I'm specifically going to be doing is sharing some of those tools. And then Jen is really going to be talking about once you have those tools what are some of the tactics that you can take to really deeply engage this community. So before we actually start talking specifically about nonprofits I want to really actually zoom out away from that term and talk about how nonprofits fit in what we refer to as the broader social sector. So I think it's really important to just fully define this who when we're thinking about conducting outreach to this community. So of course for starters the social sector does include the traditional nonprofit community. So these are the folks that are in your community providing those critical social services. They're running animal shelters. They're tackling the tough issues like homelessness. They might be partnering with your schools to provide after school programming. I'm sure many of you know these organizations. Some of you are these organizations and seeing that there are indeed some folks on here that are nonprofits. And then many of you, library professionals, you're probably either working with nonprofits as volunteers or connecting with them on programming for your library. So these organizations can really run the gamut of size and tenure. Some might be a brand new organization that's operating with only a director and maybe a handful of volunteer board members. Others of course might be decades or even century old charities that have a large staff and really deep ties in your communities. Either way you're probably finding a number of nonprofits one way or another in your neighborhood. I think it's really important to point out the traditional charities and social service nonprofits are not the only social good organizations that are in your backyard. Increasingly businesses and entrepreneurs have an interest in more than the traditional bottom line. So we're seeing these different sort of organizations pop up around the country and around the world and that includes social enterprises, decors, all sorts of corporate giving programs. And all of these organizations are also a part of the social sector. And they're some of the organizations that you'll want to consider in this outreach. So beyond the nonprofits and businesses, the other super significant player in the social sector obviously are donors. So the social sector is really unique because it really finds shape and meets the needs somewhere between government services and the private sector. So funders, both individual funders and institutional funders are really a significant part of that community and they're a key group that you're going to want to think about how you can conduct outreach too. So just a little bit of recap. The social sector is a really big place. It includes more organizations and individuals in the traditional nonprofits but there are even more stakeholders than those that I listed. So many of these organizations can also include churches, association groups, other informal networks of volunteers or funders, and the whole variety of nonprofit tax-exempt organizations. The image that I actually shared here comes from Lucy Bernold. She's an academic and consultant of philanthropy. She's at Stanford actually. She publishes an annual forecast of the social sector that's called Blueprints. This image is actually from Blueprint 2015. But incidentally Blueprint 2017 actually launched today. We actually helped Lucy produce the forecast. It's really great, an easy way to find it is to search hashtag Blueprint17 on Twitter or just Google for Lucy Bernold and Blueprint and you'll find that there. But it's definitely worth checking out. So now that we've kind of defined who the social sector is, why should libraries spend time and resources, valuable time and resources reaching out to the sector? Well for starters it's just a huge contributor to the economy at a national and local level. Both through revenue generation and through private giving the social sector is a major contributor as you can clearly see by the numbers here. And then beyond that non-profit employment accounts for over 10% of all private sector employment. So this is also a big contributor to the job market either in your local area or in your state and region. And then of course at the more practical level you should be reaching out to the social sector because of course they're a critical part of your community. Non-profits especially the ones providing social services can become and probably already are a part of your referral network that you offer to other patrons who are seeking assistance for different issues. And you're probably also finding a natural programming partner with non-profits and I know Jen will talk about that a little bit later as well. Finally you always want to connect with local organizations as they can become important advocates and stakeholders for the library. And beyond that as you engage with this group you might even be able to secure some new funding opportunities as you connect with those local funders and donors. So now that we've defined sort of who the social sector is and why we want to spend time reaching out to them let's talk about what their needs are and how the libraries can actually meet those needs. So like pretty much all different patron groups, non-profit library users have information needs, training needs, and programming or networking needs. So when it comes to the information needs this is probably where you might have some of the most questions and where you might have already fueled some of these questions from folks that are coming into your libraries. So one of the most important issues that non-profit users might have is a lack of opportunity to access prospect research. So prospect research is the research that helps development professionals or volunteer fundraisers identify funders who might be interested in supporting their organization. Some of you might be more familiar with government grants when we're talking about grant funding and you've probably used grants.gov. But research beyond that for private donors can get a bit more complicated. So in the U.S. there are a little over 85,000 private grant-making foundations but only 10% of these organizations have a website. So that means you cannot Google this. It makes prospect research really hard to do. That also makes the necessity of having databases and other resources available to these users at your libraries really important. So Foundation Center publishes the Foundation Directory online which helps fundraisers find the funders that fit their mission in the community. When you use FDO, and some of you might be familiar with FDO, you can search by subject or location to get in-depth profiles on foundations and get the details on the grants they've given. Fundraising is a really research-intensive process. In a lot of ways it's like job speaking or dating. You have to find the organization and the individual that makes the right fit. So one of the things that's really great about FDO is it helps nonprofits to make sure that they're finding the donors that are a good fit so they can be successful when they're putting out their proposals and they can be asked. Beyond grants, most nonprofits are actually more primarily supported by individual donors. But again, it can be very difficult to find information about wealthy individuals. But there are a few resources out there that can help and resources that you could include in your library. A couple of those include donor search. That's the tool that we actually use in our libraries here at Foundation Center and make those available to our public patrons. And Wealth Engine is another example. Basically these tools help you look at a donor's past giving and their assets to help a fundraiser make a really informed ask to know that they're asking the right person for the right sort of money and the right amount of money. And then finally nonprofits are going to want to know about their peer landscape. So it's really important that especially when you have a nonprofit or somebody that comes in the library and say, hey, you know, I'm really interested in starting a project. I want to help serve veterans. And you can probably already think of your head of a handful of organizations in your area that are serving veterans. So it's really crucial for these nonprofit startups to know who's doing similar work for the sake of collaboration or for the sake of maybe saying, you know, maybe I don't need to start a nonprofit. Maybe I just need to see if these nonprofits are interested in supporting my project. GuideStar is a great resource for this. It's a really nice counterpart to Foundation Directory. While we provide those profiles and details on foundations, GuideStar provides that profile information on nonprofits. And nonprofits can create their own profiles, which is really great because that makes them findable to one another as well as to donors. So the second area of real information need for nonprofits is startup and legal research. One thing I want to point you to right away is some localized startup support. So one of our sites called grantspace.org, and I'll talk about it in a little more depth later on here. We provide a nonprofit startup map. So you can actually see state by state resources on how to legally start up a nonprofit in your state. So if you just Google nonprofit startup map, it will actually come right to the top of the list. And that's just a really nice place to get started, and it's a free resource, and it's an easy place to point people to. When it comes to really specific legal and tax questions, I would really recommend that you collect some tax and legal referrals, organizations in your community, and direct patrons to those organizations to handle those questions that you aren't prepared to answer. Even here at Foundation Center, we won't field technical legal or tax specific questions. We're not a consultant in that way either, but what we've done is we put together lists for all of our field offices to make sure that we have local referrals for our patrons and they come in. That's a really great place to start. So one of the last, of course there are many more, information needs for nonprofits is subject specific research for preparing proposals and developing fundraising plans and even creating bright programs. So I'm sure that there are plenty of resources that you already have in your library to help with this sort of subject specific research. But one tool that we have here at Foundation Center that I wanted to point you to is issuelab.org. It's Foundation Center's online collection of publications from the social sector. It includes white papers and grants reports and a wealth of other issues specific research. Again, it's free. It's open access. You can also add information to that as well. If you've worked on a project. So it's a really great, it's a really fantastic resource and it got a facelift this past June. So it has a much nicer usability and design as well. So once we've gotten past the information needs and we feel like we're really providing the resources in the library to meet our patrons' information needs when they come in, there's also the issue of programming. So in programming we're thinking about nonprofits and really thinking of the training and networking needs. So many nonprofit professionals are going to have a fairly similar set of things. They're probably going to be looking for help with the grant seeking and proposal writing process, but they might have some more advanced needs as well where it gets into board development, maybe crowd sourcing or crowdfunding, evaluation for programs, strategic planning, putting together annual reports, all these sort of things. And then on the networking side, again, they're going to want to be connecting and learning their local landscape. They want to be meeting with each other for referrals and to make connections. And then of course importantly, they're going to want to connect with stakeholders as they're looking for board members, funders, and major donors in the community. And the library is really well positioned to help with all of these needs. On the training side, one of the first places I want to point you to, especially as you're initially talking about how to offer training at your library, is again, GrantsBased.org. So this is Foundation Center's online portal for grant seekers. Under the training and tools tab, which you would see are on the far left side of the navigation menu, you're going to be able to access so much in person and online class content there. It's a great starting point for your nonprofit users. There they can access pre-recorded webinars or live webinars. We also have a number of self-paced e-learning courses on anything from proposal writing to project budgets to collaborating with local funders. There's all sorts of things to explore on GrantsBased. So I definitely suggest you check it out and keep it bookmarked for when you're working with your patrons. Another great aspect of GrantsBased is that green in the upper right hand corner, you'll see that green chat now button. Chat now is amazing. It is staffed by all of our social sector librarians here at Foundation Center. Our online librarian service, I'm not able to do that in my current capacity anymore, but it is a really great resource and our whole team there provides really great assistance, whether it's with navigating GrantsBased or helping find the right content. The chat now feature is also included on all of our databases. So if a user is in Foundation Directory Online or in one of our tools and they get stuck in their search, they can always chat us. You can always click the Ask Us in the very top menu there and you can leave us an email and we respond within 24 hours. So it's a really great service you should definitely be aware of. So getting back to the in-person programming, there might be a few existing resources that are already in your neighborhood that you're aware of. If you do have a local nonprofit resource center, that's a great organization to start your outreach to because those folks will help provide nonprofits or connect you with folks that can help provide programming and training in the library. You might also have some local chapters or consultants in your neighborhood. This is just an example of a few of the many chapters that might exist. But the Young Nonprofit Professionals Network, YMPN, is a really great organization and it's in all sorts of cities across the U.S. as well as ASP and GPA. We also have fundraising professionals and grants professionals. So you should definitely look up on these websites to see if you do have a local chapter and that can be a great starting place for your outreach. And don't forget to connect with your local funders. So if your library cares about supporting nonprofits, that's really good news for you because that's what your funder is interested in doing too. Funders in your area are interested in doing it. It means that you have a shared interest. Community foundations are a really great place to start for this sort of outreach. So you can find your community foundation either by Googling or using the Community Foundation Locator that I've linked here. And just as a reminder, all of these links are going to be included in an archive that Crystal will send out. So don't worry about remembering all of these links either. You can also look up to see who is included in your regional association of grant makers. There are a number of funders across the country that are sort of clustered in these different groups that are just really focused on serving a specific geography. And then you can also look up private family and corporate grant makers using our FTO Quick Start tool. So that's actually our free lookup tool. So if you just go to fdo.foundationcenter.org, you do a quick registration, and then you can actually see what grant makers are in your neighborhood beyond those community foundations. And again, that's a great place to start for outreach. Many foundations have staff or budget for capacity building in their community. And I think the library is really a natural partner for that. And again, once you're interested in serving the nonprofit community, that can only help ally you with those funders as well, because that's what they're interested in doing as well. So if you feel like you are really ready to start formal outreach to your community and you have the staff and resources and the funding information network might be a really great fit for you. So as Crystal said, I am the manager of the funding information network. This is what I get to do for my job is to work with this network of more than 450. It's actually more than 460 today. Libraries and nonprofit resource centers and community foundations, all of these organizations are providing free access to nonprofit resources and trainings for their local communities. So as a part of that network, you would need for out-of-the-box outreach and programming to nonprofits, starting with those information resources. So included in the partnership package is Foundation Directory Online, Foundation Maps, Grants to Individuals Online. Those are three core databases. I talked a little bit about Foundation Directory Online. The Foundation Maps is a really amazing mapping tool that allows you to see what funders are funding, what issues and what area and to be able to look at networked relationships. It's a really powerful visualization tool. And then Grants to Individuals Online is a smaller database, but that actually shows foundations that offer grants to individuals, which is very rare. If you do know, foundations typically donate only to established nonprofits, but some foundations are interested in supporting things like artists, residencies, graduate school, things like that. You also get access to Grants to Individuals Online. And then you also get access to our core collection of publications, which includes Foundation Directory and Print, as well as some of our books related to proposal writing and grant-seeking, forming your nonprofit, things like that. So my favorite part about the program is that you get access to Foundation Center's training resources. So this includes our entire introductory training curriculum. So you're able to teach these classes yourself. So you're actually given the slides and the scripts for all of these classes. So our introduction to finding grants, intro to proposal writing, intro to corporate giving, intro to fundraising planning, and intro to project budgets. It's a really great, really starting point to start to be able to offer some training to your community and a way for you to develop as well as to kind of learn maybe one class to teach at a time. It can be a really great resource. And then finally, you know, what I love, I guess, best besides the training component is the network component. So each of our funding information network locations, we have what we call our FIM supervisor. So they're the point person that's really responsible for this outreach specific to nonprofits at their library. And so we have this wonderful network of all of our FIM supervisors and non-profit resource centers that are doing the shared work of serving the social sector. And we really make sure that you're connected as best as we can have you connected. We like to provide a lot of professional development support and also network exclusive learning opportunities which includes an annual conference that's hosted in October. It's called Network Days. It's really great. Jen was able to come this year as well which was great to see her and, you know, 50 other of our FIM partners from across the country and a couple of our global friends have attended in the past as well. We have a dedicated network intranet so it's just a site fully dedicated to our FIM supervisors making sure you have all the tools to deliver the program successfully in your community. So if you're ready to jump in or learn a bit more about the funding information network you can head to the link I shared here www.foundationcenter.org.fin to learn more about all that. But if you're still determining what your capacity is to take on this work, that's no problem also. I definitely encourage you to check out the resources that are available for free on Grants Space and also to get in contact with us at any time. For the FIM information network program we do have some, you know, some things that we ask of our partners as well. Most of the things that libraries are already naturally set up to do which is provide free and open access 24 hours a week to have a point person that we can reach out to and that's delivering these resources to the community. If you're not quite there yet whether it's resource capacity or person capacity that's totally fine but I wanted to just offer this up as an example. So now I am going to turn things over to one of our very best funding information network partners Jennifer Beggin is at the Free Library of Philadelphia and she is going to follow up on you know how to make the best use once you have all the right tools with some of the real tips on how to do this outreach. Take it away Jen. Thanks Kate. So just to recap, here's a little background of the Regional Foundation Center. We are located in the newly minted business resource and innovation center at the Free Library of Philadelphia at our main location. So I run the RFC and the BRIC at the FLP for those of you who like acronyms. We are a large organization. We have 54 locations but all of our resources are accessible only at our main central location. The Regional Foundation Center has been around for over 40 years and we are lucky that we have two dedicated staff members myself and a research librarian. We are also unique in the sense that being in the business resource and innovation center we are able to work with our business or for-profit counterparts to serve all different types of business structures. And we also have an operating foundation that serves all of the Free Library of Philadelphia which is a wealth of funding and also advice. We do have an advisory council for the Regional Foundation Center made up of local funders and the Philanthropy Network of Greater Philadelphia. They meet about once or twice a year. They do provide the funding for our resources and they also help us with some guidance. It was mentioned earlier that we do about 70 programs every year. So I want to be clear and up front we don't do it all ourselves and neither do you. The Foundation Center classes are really easy but that's not all of the programs that we do. We have taken those introductory classes and added a little bit of interactive elements when we became comfortable with the material. But those are classes that are a little more labor intensive on our end. The other part of the classes that we offer are free or hired speakers and we find a lot of our free speakers through different area professional organizations. For instance, recently we met with the Arts and Business Council of Greater Philadelphia which led to them asking us to do resource orientations for all of the Chamber of Commerce for Philadelphia. In turn they asked us to table at their volunteer fair for their young professionals. And there we met a wonderful woman who just recently gave a free program for us all about being prepared to apply for grants and budgeting. In other words, I really wouldn't have met her and it's a great way of finding free speakers. And the last thing we do is we host other organizations. So for instance, we have the Nonprofit Development Meetup otherwise known as the Nonprofit Nerds and they focus on technical issues and nonprofits. It's great because we literally just host them and they bring a whole new audience to us. So be on the A and look out for those types of relationships. The second thing I want to talk about is data. So it would be great if all we had to do was just keep a count of who shows up to our programs. We do that but in this day and age for our funders our advisory council members and for our administration gather more information about who we're reaching and who we're serving. So keeping track of all of our contacts, visitors, and organizations is wonderful. Having a list of speakers, I started in February in this role and I had a complete list of past speakers whether they were role received, what they cost, and what their areas of expertise were. So it's also good to keep that kind of information in mind because as we all know that our roles often change and people take over different sections and it's great to be able to have resource lists available for your predecessor. I'm sorry, your successor. The other part is to analyze the trends of the people that are visiting you and using your services. By knowing how old the nonprofit is that is visiting you most often we skew how much programming we provide for introductory classes versus more advanced classes. We also keep in mind what they're asking for on their evaluation forms and we also look at who they're serving. If we can make the courses that we offer as specific to the audience we're reaching, that's great. We also want to look and see who's not coming to see us and how we do it. So we have a lot of forms that include the same questions. We use paper forms and we use digital forms. We're a really big fan here and their analysis it gives you immediate analysis and I'll show you some images from the forms that we use a little later on. We're also cognizant of security issues so we do download a lot of our information regularly out of Google and hold it in Excel and we try and stay current in LinkedIn so I'm a little bad at keeping up with that. But it is a way of keeping in contact with our speakers and area organizations to. So that brings in mind researching your audience. You need to know who's in your area, what do they do, who's visiting you, who's not coming to you. Who else is providing programming in your library? So if another department is offering a legal clinic for I don't know, just legal questions, they might be a resource for having a nonprofit legal clinic. We're lucky here we have Philly VIP in the area that does legal clinics twice a year. They also offer legal clinics for the business for-profit side as well. You also want to see who's in your own organization that has a side job or had a past career. We're lucky that we have an operating foundation so I have in the past asked our director of corporate relations to come in at the end of our introduction to corporate giving to answer questions. It's great to have an actual grant writer be able to answer questions at the end of introduction to proposal writing. They have a wealth of knowledge that I don't have and sometimes they just like to get out of their own office and do something different. Ethical stalking, that is a term that we use as a business resource innovation center as well as in the RFC because that is how we find a lot of our speakers. We go to things, we go to events for our side, the local fundraising groups, we send them information. We just flat out ask them if they will come and do a program for us at the library. We ask if we can participate in programs that they're having. On the right you'll see a picture of my research librarian participating at the Meet the Funders panel at Cabrini College. That was held by RSVP which is in Montgomery County, the county over from us and that has led to what will be in the spring a series called Expert Office Hours. We also want to look at who your competitors are and what they're doing. You want to really do some research and see what they offer versus what you can offer and then you want to identify what areas you're not competing for customers. If your competitors charge for their programs and you don't then you may have some leeway as to whether or not they consider you a true competitor. And sometimes they are looking to expand their audience just like you are and it's in their best interest to partner up with you on a program. For doing research we use Foundation Directory Online and GuardStar as Kate listed earlier. We also use LinkedIn to connect with staff and organizations. I would advise that you get a pro account if you want to stock some of your speakers. We use constant contact for our newsletter. That's primarily how we get attendees to our programs. Our newsletter is also forwarded out by other organizations. I always love it when libraries join our newsletter so feel free. And then also community calendars. You want to see what else is going on in your area and even if it's slightly applicable go to the program because you never know who you're going to meet. Lastly you want to make it as easy as possible for yourself. So before we used to sit down with nonprofits whenever they came in and would provide them with an orientation to our resources. And then I decided I wanted to have lunch on occasion. So we moved to an appointment based process. That doesn't mean you have to have an appointment to use the resources. It just means that if you need someone to sit with you and show you how to use them then you need to make an appointment. This is great because sometimes an appointment is not the next best step. And sometimes organizations are asking things that really I can't help you with. Like Kate said as far as legal questions and some technical questions, I'm a civil servant and I legally cannot answer your legal questions. So let's not waste any time and I will refer you to FLEVIP or another organization. It also gives us some space to say no if they're not ready. If someone says that they want to start a nonprofit we have a whole host of resources and we ask them to review first rather than just sit down with us. And this form also allows individuals to request group orientations. Now this is a snapshot of the back end of why we like Google because this shows you right away, and this is I think from a couple of days ago that 70% of the organizations that request one-on-one appointments have 501c3 status. It also shows that 32% are staff members versus 26% being the executive director. In this day and age it's wonderful to be able to quickly and easily give some information as to who's coming in your door. And that brings us to our visitor form. I would love to do this with digital and hopefully someday it will, but right now we take this information and we put it into a Google form that I'm going to show you. All of the same information that we a lot of the same information that we ask in the appointment request form and on our program evaluations. It's a very boring looking form here I know but this is the back end. It captures all of the visitor information as well as our program evaluations. So we can keep track of repeat visitors and new visitors who's coming to our programs but not using our resources. And we also have a running tally of all of the wonderful praise from our customers and other comments. And because Google makes those great charts and synthesizes all that data for us I can spend time making pretty little infographics like this that we made with PictoCharts. So I kind of sped through this. Some takeaways. Kate mentioned the area associations and fundraising professionals go out, meet them, have meetings with them, say hello, offer to host them. At the end of the day if you don't feel comfortable in teaching your own class you can always offer to host other organizations. Go out to local schools not only because public schools and private schools are always looking for grant funds themselves but universities. We teach orientations just for artists on how to find funding for themselves. Find your competitors. Research them, meet, collaborate, and repeat over and over again. Your area service providers like Philly VIP and consulting groups those are potential partners. Just go out, meet organizations, hand out your business card or material. You're looking to create mutual beneficial relationships. If you convince somebody to come and do a program once but you're not offering them anything it's an incited relationship and it's probably going to end. But you really want to create these long lasting relationships where people keep wanting to come back. Because at the end of the day just about everybody loves the library and so you have a built-in marketing plan right there and space. So that's it for me. Great. Jennifer thanks for sharing your experience from your library's perspective and say thanks to Kate. Kate will bring you back in a few minutes for some questions. I'm going to start Jennifer with some questions for you. But before I start asking those I just want to remind everybody I know there's been a lot of information shared so far, a lot of information rich slides, and also a lot of things that will have links. And we will include all of those in the archives. You'll be receiving that within a couple of days to get all of this in greater detail. Jennifer we had a few questions really specific to your presentation right now. And I'm just going to go to Phil's question about wondering if you conduct long-term evaluations. For example, do you follow up say six months after interacting with a nonprofit or an organization or after they've attended a program to see if any change has happened? Do you do anything like that? So I took over in February and that's about the time we started keeping a lot of this data. Previously my predecessor was not technologically inclined and didn't keep this sort of information. So we're a little bit of a disadvantage in sort of the long-term effects of our programs and resources. But recently we received 48-hour passes to a foundation directory online from the network days and were able to conduct a survey and give out prizes to those who participated in the survey. So we were able to get some insight for Snapshot for about six months back. Most of the individuals that came to our programs found them to be useful in their jobs. And I think it was about 60% of the respondents found funding opportunities or we're still waiting to find out. Great, great. Well it's good to see at least some things you're trying in that direction and thanks for sharing that. Now we also got a question about partnering with certain types of nonprofits and I'm just going to paraphrase this question and I'm wondering Jennifer if you've had any experience with nonprofits that might seem a bit territorial or in competition with some of the library's programs. For example, youth education programs or other nonprofits with a similar mission. And if so, do you have any recommendations for how to approach nonprofits with those similar goals or ways that you maybe have brought them in or partnered with them in a perhaps less threatening sort of way? I think the first thing is if you can sit down and talk with the people who are leading those organizations and show them what you have to offer. Being a fin gives us that database full of funding opportunities. So most people are willing to sit down and talk to you if you can give them access to funds. The other thing is is that an education program in a certain part of the city or town may have a different audience than you have and it's always good to at least start by soft promoting each other's resources and if they're willing to do that you can slowly make inroads with them. Like I said, you want to look at your competitors and see if there's avenues within what they do that you guys don't compete but could be complementary to each other. And at the end of the day, libraries tend to have meeting room spaces and if you allow them to use that space for free, for partnering with you, then that might be a resource Great. Those are some great suggestions to start with and I hope that answers the person's question a little bit. And actually, Kate, I'm going to bring you in at this point and see if you might also have some input on that question about partnering with nonprofits with similar missions or similar goals or at least providing some outreach and support for them. Have you seen any other examples of this that you might be able to share some advice or some ideas? I definitely think that I think a word that can be better to use sometimes is a comparator between a competitor and a collaborator. So I understand there can be sort of territories for audiences but I think there's definitely enough room at the table. I know that we have a number of funding information network partners that work directly there with their local community foundation or even the local nonprofit resource center to collaborate on different programming. So I think there's a lot of opportunity there and a lot of chance to share resources. So it really depends on the needs of your community also. And I think that's important for libraries when they're kind of self-assessing what do we want to spend our time and resources on and maybe it's just providing the venue for another organization to offer this outreach. So you're still bringing that audience into your library that you're not necessarily dedicating your own time and collection resources to developing and and adding databases and resources and things like that. So I think it's kind of individualized for your community and part of that assessment that Jen was talking about about kind of getting to know who your community is when it comes to the nonprofit and social sector is important. Excellent. All right, so Jennifer one more question back to you and actually this question was asked early on but I think you might have going to pitch this question to you first because I think you might have some good insight. So Elena asked many social sector organizations have activities in the evening. Do you find is your library, so she said do you find most libraries open to partnering on activities in the evening? So Jennifer will start and ask you if you've done any evening activities with your community and then Kate will come back to you and see if you know any other examples. Jennifer? Sure. Our meetup is an evening program. Our introductory how to start a nonprofit that we do once a year is an evening program. Most of our other programs are during the day only because that seems to be most convenient for the nonprofit that we reach. However there are thousands of programs at just the Central Library here, our main branch every evening. Thousands of programs each year I should say. As long as the library is open just in the evening they're willing to have programs in my experience. Excellent. And Kate anything to add to that? No, I think Jen covered it. Yeah. Alright. So Kate I have a few questions kind of specific to your part of the presentation. So let's take care of a few of those now and for those of you joining us we still will have time for some more questions so you're welcome to continue to add your questions into the chat. Kate one of the questions we got was about some of the resources you shared and if the prospect or the research also includes any Canadian profiles. So I'm not sure if that's specific to perhaps the funding networks, but do you serve Canadian nonprofits and libraries as well? If you're talking about the scope of the data which is I think how I'm reading how I'm reading this is where if prospect research also includes Canadian profiles for funders and grants given in Canada. I will say yes, I'll say the scope of our data is becoming increasingly international. The majority of it is based on the 990 tax forms that are submitted by US based foundations because the US has this nice process of collecting this data on an annual basis, we're able to easily upload that to our databases on the back end. Of course that gets more complicated once you leave the US. So we are finding more and more ways to add that data to our databases. There's definitely a good bit of Canadian information in there as well. We actually do have a funding information network partner at the University of Toronto. So they're one of our partners as well. So they're using our resources. We have about a dozen partners outside of the US that are providing these resources. Foundation maps is actually really the best resource right now for that international perspective as well. Excellent. We also had a question about some of the training resources you shared. The training resources, the slides and the scripts to be used for professional development in the community through the funding information network, are they available to all online and are there any copyright issues regarding their use or can they be used freely? So could you talk a little bit more about that? Sure. So the training resources, the slides and scripts are exactly as you say here. They're supposed to be used in the community as a SIN. So that's part of what you get access to is you're basically getting access to the license to use those trainings yourselves and you can use those freely offsite onsite as long as you're delivering them or obviously you're not sharing them out with other organizations so that they're getting access to the full scripts and curriculum. But that's exactly what they're there for is so that you can then leave those trainings for organizations and individuals in your community. You also get access to the webinars that are hosted on GrantsBase so you can either broadcast a live webinar to a viewing party at your library or you can even just share those links with your users and encourage folks to sign on as well. Great. Kate, just one more question for you and then we'll go back to Jennifer for another question before we wrap up. And actually we may have time for even a few more questions but Kate, I want to go to a question that we had on Twitter that goes back to your definition of the social sector and the inclusion of some for-profit businesses in the social sector. And one of the businesses that was called out was Tom and of course if you look at their profit they make a very big profit. So can you talk about why some businesses might be included in that social sector definition and give us a little more insight there? Sure. Well there's two things here when we're talking about sort of the social economy or the social sector we really are talking more than the traditional tax-exempt organizations and I think you'll see this everywhere that every increasingly businesses and startups, especially many of those that are coming out of Silicon Valley and elsewhere, tend to put forth that they are interested in the public good and that their bottom line is interested in more than just revenue. Whether or not that means they ultimately do make a large revenue is one thing but they are a part of that social economy and when we're talking about social economy we're talking about when private resources are used for public benefit and so I think they're, you know, love or hate Tom they're a part of that social economy in the, you know get one, give one, sort of campaign and model that they have but shared by now many organizations. I also would always push back on the thought that a nonprofit organization means a no-profit organization and that's simply not true and I know that there is always a wide debate in the nonprofit sector about you know, salaries and revenue and that sort of thing and I think it's important to note that a nonprofit doesn't have to be, you know, starving and paying their employees nothing also. The nonprofit is a major contributor to the economy and we saw that in the numbers earlier in the presentation. It's a huge hiring force so we should definitely encourage our nonprofits to be robust and to be contributors to the economy and also keeping in mind that that definition of the social sector and you know, private dollars helping with the public good is always growing. There are a lot of new models out there. I'd encourage you to look up the BCOR model which exists in some states right now it's a new model for businesses that basically you can get, basically certified to say that you know your business is benefiting more than just the company itself businesses are held accountable to a set of standards so it's really an evolving world and I think it's really good to especially when you are talking to a patron or a user that comes from the library and they say they have a really good idea for a new service or a new product and maybe the right fit isn't to become a 501c3 and so becoming familiar with these different structures and the accountability that comes with them can be really great because sometimes the right idea, the right enterprise might be a better for-profit business than a non-profit business so that's another part of providing outreach and education to this community so it's just taking a bigger look but of course many of the resources and the funding information network really more strictly benefit those non-profits 501c3s but when you're thinking about conducting that broader outreach it's good to have that wide lens. Great, thanks for your clarifications on that and further explanation I think it's something we all have more. Alright, I think we have time maybe one, maybe two more questions we'll see how this next one goes and Jennifer, I'm going to pitch this one back to you being from a physical library, we have a question so Evelyn says we talked a lot about digital resources but what about physical resources what physical resources would you recommend to have on hand so maybe you could talk a little bit about what you have on hand and what works for you in the physical library of Philadelphia? In our space we have we have a small collection it's not a huge collection of print materials we have the print versions of Foundation Director Online and several other similar directories, corporate giving and such we have a small section on social enterprises as well as books on how to start non-profits and then we really spend a lot of time on fundraising and non-profit management material we subscribe to about 10 magazines, periodicals and we are constantly unfortunately printing out a lot of case studies that are applicable and of interest to our area for perusal by our patrons so we do have a fair amount of physical material and books in addition to our databases and our online tools. Great, great. A lot of digital resources out there but also some physical print resources as well. I'm going to squeeze one last question in here and I'm going to bring this one back to Kate actually because we have always in our audience some smaller libraries and we have a question from one that says what would you say are the top resources for small libraries or small towns an example given of say 8,000 or less in our population or service area that have of course smaller budgets as well so what would you recommend there and Kate, oh if you're able to take this one or have any ideas on it. So top resources I mean I would say starting with that starting at Grant Space I think it's easy to use like Jen said connecting with folks in your community to do some of this programming for free so and keeping that running list going so that could be really helpful as well. So there are a whole slew of free resources out there and actually when you go through Grant Space if you go under let's see if you go under that tools tab it links you to our knowledge based articles and that links out to even more free resources so I think there's a lot there to get you started but even the fact that we have that you can point your users to our online chat which is again another free resource so that can be hopefully a helpful starting point. I will say when it comes to the prospect research the smaller your region the more you know there's always going to be a greater struggle when you're dealing with fewer and fewer funders so I would say really connecting directly with those funders trying to do a bit of research on your own to see who's out in the field maybe you know just trying out FTO for free to see what works so there was a number of resources and you'll get those links in the archives as well. Excellent. Alright so yeah we will share all of those links mentioned in the archive also for those of you who had questions we didn't have time to get to we will follow up with you via email thank you for asking all of your questions today and for those of you who are on Twitter with us I have just a few announcements before we sign off and I'll just ask everybody to stay on the line. We have a brief survey at the top of the hour that you'll be able to take but we will get you out of here on time. Jennifer and Kate thanks for sharing all of this and for answering all of the questions that came in today so just a few announcements before we sign off one is that I wanted to just let you know about another TechSoup product which is TechSoup Boost this is an annual subscription program that unlocks additional benefits for TechSoup users and includes discounts on admin fees for TechSoup product donations and additional products only available to boost members and you can learn more about that at techsoup.org slash boost so it's a little bit of an extra bonus on the regular TechSoup offerings. Also we have some upcoming webinars just to let you know about on December 20 we have our last webinar of the year I think letting you know how to take advantage of TechSoup product donations before the end of the year we do have a full slate of TechSoup webinars in January and that will be announced soon but our next library specific webinar will be on February 8 and will feature a curriculum from the Texas State Library for IT training for library staff and no prior IT experience is required. Registration for that will open in early January so save the date of February 8 for now and you can view past webinars archives of past webinars on our website at TechSoup.org and also you may want to check out the TechSoup for Libraries website for more library specific information and blog posts and webinar archives. Alright that's all we have time for today so I just want to say thank you to ReadyTalk for being our webinar sponsor. Thanks again to Kate and Jennifer for sharing their expertise in this area of supporting nonprofits and supporting social good through library work and thanks to all of you for joining us today and have a great afternoon. Alright thanks, bye bye.