 Hi, welcome to this webinar. I love it when Grant Stations here. If you missed the one last week, you have to go back to TechSoup's YouTube channel and watch that one. It was amazing, but today we're going to be looking behind Grant Station. If you're writing grants, you're a grant writer. You're thinking about writing grants. You don't know where to begin. This is the place to be. I'm Aretha Simons. I'm the webinar producer here at TechSoup. I want to show you how you can engage today. If this is your first time, please type your question in the Q&A section. I know a lot of people will be typing in the chat room. Grant Station has some people behind the scenes. I will probably be able to grab them, but we prefer you to put them in the Q&A section. If you need the closed caption, tap on that CC button right at the bottom of your screen. If you don't need it, please don't click on it because people say, I clicked on it. Now I can't close it. So if you need the closed caption, please just click on that at the bottom of your screen. Check your email within 48 hours. We'll email you the video replay and the slides from today. And so now I'm going to move out of the way because you're not here to see me. You're here to see Jeremy. He's the director of communication of technology at Grant Station, and he has so many other hats that he wears. Are you going to find more about that in just a moment? So Jeremy, take it away. Oh, thank you. And I turned off my camera so you're not distracted by how good looking I am. But once you stop sharing, I can go ahead and start sharing, Aretha. And then I will let everybody see my screen. It should be just one moment as long as everything decides not to crash on me at this one moment. And it does. Yeah, it's all good. It's all good. So we'll be sharing the screen in just a moment. Jeremy, he's going to be behind the scenes sharing all the wonderful ways you can access Grant Station, where to find a funder, putting your keywords. There's so much more. Kevin, can you share some other things that we're going to learn? Oh, here we go. We're going live now. Look at that. Look at that. I see even in the face of adversity with my computer not wanting me to present this today, I'm still here. But that's why we have Kevin. That's why you also have Kerry Glouser here, and they will be able to help me in case everything falls apart. But quick introductions, hello. My name is Jeremy Smith. I'm with Grant Station. I am, as Aretha said, the communication technology director. Also joining me is Kerry Glouser, one of our lead research specialists, as well as Kevin Peters. And Kevin, what's your current title for Grant Station? I'm the Vice President of Research here. So he is the guy who makes sure all the records are in place, carries the person who actually does all the research. Well, they both do. But anyway, we'll be talking with both of them multiple times throughout the tour today. And one of the key things that I want you to keep in mind is if you have questions to ask, your best bet for putting them in is the Q&A section. So if it's specifically related to searches or finding something, put that in the Q&A section, then we can go ahead and get to that question. If we can't get to your question, which is a possibility we have a lot of people on today, you can always email us directly at info at grantstation.com. We'll be more than happy to answer your question that way. So with that said, welcome everyone to today's webinar. I am glad that you can see my screen, which I'm assuming you can see my screen. Just want to make sure on that before I start going off. Is that true? Can my screen be seen? Yes. Yes. Yes. Thank you. I like that, that direct human confirmation there. So before we get started with all the searches we're going to do today and handling all the questions that come in, I'm going to tell you a little bit about what Grant Station is. Now, Grant Station features a set of searchable databases filled with current grant opportunities. We also provide tools and tutorials on grant seeking and writing, and we also keep you up to date on the latest philanthropic trends. Now, all the grantmaker profiles on Grant Station, both government and private, are actively accepting requests. This is very important. I'm putting emphasis on that, or letters of inquiry from a variety of organizations. Now, you may have used some other services, maybe our competition, where you do your research, you get hundreds of returns, leaving you with this really long list of potential funders that you have to screen without really knowing how relevant they are to your specific need, or if you can, or more importantly, even should apply to them. What we do at Grant Station, our job is to pre-screen these grantmakers. So the time that you spend researching generates a list of grantmakers that may truly accept a request to fund your organization's programmer project. So really, think of us as your backroom research team. We're pre-screening funders, and then we're feeding you the most relevant ones for your program or project. Again, everything you find on Grant Station is open for request or letters of inquiry. Now, I would be remiss if I didn't mention it, but we do have a sale, and that's the whole reason you're all here. I'm hoping you're all members of TechSoup because it's a fantastic value. There are so many things you get from TechSoup if you're not currently a member. If you are a member, which I'm assuming many of you are, stember 20th, stember 21st, for $99, you can get a year of access to Grant Station. If you currently have access, this will stack on top of that. So let's say you already have four years of Grant Station. If you buy another year, you now have five years of Grant Station. That's how we do it. We stack all of our memberships. So that's a common question that comes in, and all this information is available by visiting the TechSoup site, of course, which you will find that link. I'm sure you think about that in the chat, and we'll also send information about that to you when you have access to the recording as well. But you can always come to GrantStation.com and then click this link right here to find out more about this specific offer, which is unique just to TechSoup members. If you say, but Jeremy, I'm not a TechSoup member, well, guess what? You could go to TechSoup and figure out how to become a member, and there's still time to do that because you have until September 20th and 21st, and that's what you can pick up a year of GrantStation for this great price. But you say to me, Jeremy, again, what is GrantStation? What's the point? Why should I spend my $99 on GrantStation? Well, I'm going to show you. So besides the Rich Grant research information we have on our databases, we also publish three different newsletters. Now you can find them right over here in our public resource section. Now that's the GrantStation Insider, the Canadian Insider, and the International Insider. Let me go ahead and click on the GrantStation Insider right now. This particular newsletter goes out weekly and features 10 distinct funding opportunities for U.S.-based nonprofit organizations. And here's a quick summary. You can see clicking this link will show you all the full records with links to all the funding opportunities in it. This is available for free. You can sign up for it right here at this link, even if you don't get a GrantStation membership, you can always get free access to the insider. That's a pro tip that Aretha had mentioned earlier. So if you don't want to buy a GrantStation, that's fine. Sign up for our newsletters and you can get access to free funding opportunities. We also have our Canadian Insider. I didn't see Aretha. Did we have any Canadian folks on today? I wasn't positive if we did or not. Did you see any? I didn't notice. If you're here, put it in the chat room. Let us know, please. Yeah, let us know if you're here from Canada. That'd be great to know because we have you covered as well. If you are based in Canada, we also have our Canadian Insider. This goes out monthly and again, features 10 distinct funding opportunities focused on Canadian provinces and Canadian-based organizations. Finally, if you are doing work internationally and say perhaps you are based in the US or based in Canada and you're also doing outreach work in say, I don't know, Dubai, as some people will be traveling to eventually, or maybe in Africa or a different country, maybe something in India, something outside the US, we have our international insider. Now, this focuses again, goes out monthly and has 10 distinct funding opportunities broken down into global, regional, and government sections. And just to throw this in right here, many people say, Jeremy, we use this a lot today, so I hope that doesn't bother you too much. My surrogate Jeremy questioning. I am based in the US. I do work outside the US. Why would I use the international database? Why wouldn't I just use the US-based database? Well, the thing is, is you can use both because the international database focuses on funders that give internationally. So if you are doing work in a certain country, you can then narrow it down to a specific country or a specific region within that country, and then find another source of funding, which isn't available if you specifically serve the US. So that's the great thing about our databases. Based on where you're doing work, you can use multiple databases to help you find the funding that you specifically need. Now, as you saw, all of our newsletters are based right here in our public resources section. Everything in this section, you can access without even having a membership. And we'll come back a little bit later on to look at these in greater detail. But for now, I'm going to go ahead and click on our big logo. That'll take you back to the home page of GrantStation, another quick tip for you. I'm going to tell you sort of the breakdown of what GrantStation offers. So we have three key areas. We have the find grant makers section, the build strategy section, and the write proposal section. So under find grant makers, this is where you'll open the search section where all of our databases are located at. Then you have build strategy. This section provides a complete walkthrough of articles that will help you build a solid grant seeking strategy, including our interactive tool to help you visually lay out where your funding needs to come from, how to do primary research, how to do secondary research, what questions do you ask the funder even before you've applied? And there's a whole process to grant strategy that I encourage and we'll be talking about today as we go over all the different tools that we have at your disposal with a membership of GrantStation. And finally, we have our write proposals section. This is where you can break down everything to do when you are writing that proposal. It gives you how to get started. What's the letter of inquiry? What goes into it? What are the components of a full grant proposal? How do you put them together? What are examples of that? And really important and a unique thing to GrantStation that I'm going to point out right here is our award-winning proposal section. Now, what we have at GrantStation is every two years or so, we have the winning grant proposal competition. And what we do is we ask people to send in their grant proposals that were awarded funding and we then go through them and find the best one. We go through those proposals, discover which one we feel is the best one, the best exemplification of a great proposal, what to expect, and then we make it available here for you to download. So you can see what's currently working. So all these are from the 2021 contest that we have, you can download all of these proposals. They're broken down into government and private-based funding needs. So you can see specifically what's working and then you can model what you're doing off of what's already working out there. This is a very powerful feature that's hidden within GrantStation and we have three different years of proposals you can go through just to see what was working and what has worked in the past. So if you are confused, you're not really sure what's going on, maybe you're new to grant writing completely. This is how you can see what a grant proposal looks like. And if you're experienced, you can see why did they get funding and you can read these proposals in their entirety and see why they got the funding and you'll understand why we gave them the top awards as well. So hidden feature, not really hidden, but a feature often overlooked that's a part of GrantStation. So again, I'll click on the logo, take us back to the home page. What we're going to do now is take a quick look at our online education section. This is an area that I spend a lot of time in. We offer four distinct types of learning. We have live webinars, we have target ed, we have recorded webinars, and we have online courses. So live webinars, these are all the webinars that we offer. We offer quite a few, often two or three a week. Here's one featuring yours truly. In case you wanted another tour of GrantStation, would you sign up for that for free right here on September 20th? But I think you'll be, you'll have more than enough Jeremy after today's tour. So thank you very much for being with us today and sitting through this. But everything that we have on here is available to take. It is not included with your membership. So it is a separate charge for attending any of these webinars, but you can take them as a group. That's another option. So it can be a really great way to have affordable training for a group of people within your organization. Now we also offer targeted ed. This is a brand new type of funding that we're offering. Well, actually a brand new type of education we're offering that covers various funding options. And specifically, they're bite-sized 45-minute webinars that cover basic information. We actually have a free one coming up, our very first one on October 10th. It's building your toolkit, the GrantStation resources to help grant professionals, and then advancing your mission through fiscal sponsorship, what to do about indirect costs, evidence-based practices for programs and projects, enhancer funding through partnerships, all taught by our president, Alice Runke, and they'll be very, very practical and also very affordable ways to get some quick training that can help you find a great win as you're doing your grant research. Now an important part of your membership that we'll probably come back to a couple times today. I'm sure I'll mention it again and I know Kerry mentioned again. So I want to familiarize you with it. Is your dashboard? You can find that right up here next to your name. You click on my dashboard and click on introduction just for a quick overview. So each of these sections is where you'll find various access to your tools, to your saved grant makers, to projects you've made, any saved search criteria, any specifically saved grant makers, also find access to your orders, change your password, any courses you've purchased, anything you've purchased on GrantStation will be listed on your dashboard. And this is also where we have my plan. I'm not going to go into that right now, but we will later on in the tour. This is where you can add your saved grant makers into a list format and then prioritize your requests and then track their progress as well. Lots of powerful tools in the dashboard. So we'll come back later to look at this in much greater detail. Again, click on the main logo, takes us back to the home page of GrantStation. So let's go ahead and take a look at what a funding record actually looks like on GrantStation. So here I am on the homepage. I'm going to scroll down it. And I think I'm actually going to hand off now to Kerry Glauser. All right. Thanks, Jeremy. So here is our national funding alert this week. And this is the Class 6 for Kids Foundation. So the funding alerts change weekly. And these grant maker profiles are carefully curated to provide you with the most current information about specific grant opportunities. So you'll see that this is what one of our GrantStation funder profiles looks like. On the left here is a brief narrative about that grant maker, which includes their specific areas of interest and then application procedures are towards the bottom. And on the right hand side, you'll see a link to email the profile to yourself or save it to your dashboard, which we'll talk about later. Then there's the funders contact information along with some other pertinent information. And then at the bottom here is the date when this profile was last updated. But a question that we're often asked is how are these records made? So as Jeremy mentioned, we frequently go through the records and our database to update information. So each record is looked at on at least a yearly basis, although some of them are reviewed more often, especially funders that have multiple funding cycles or programs available. And after we've updated a record, if you have that funders saved in your dashboard, the system will email you a notification about any important changes that were made. That ensures that you won't miss out on things like new deadlines or changes to areas of interest. So we start by doing as much internet based research as we can. That involves looking at funders websites for their current information for things like deadlines, areas of interest, application procedures, contact information. And if that information is incomplete, we'll then reach out to that funder for clarification. Because of that process, we'll sometimes have more complete information than is currently available on the funder's website. And we'll even occasionally have deadlines listed before they go live on the funder's website. And for those funders that don't currently have a website, we often update from the most current IRS form 990. And then we try to contact that funder via email or even letter. Oftentimes, the funder will respond to specific questions that we send them if we ask them questions about their deadlines or their application procedures. So the main factor that differentiates GrantStation from other funding databases is our policy of only listing active funders. That is funders are only listed if they accept unsolicited applications or letters of inquiry or some other type of unsolicited communication. And if a funder indicates to us that they don't accept unsolicited requests, we'll then remove them from our active listings so that members won't waste their time applying to unresponsive organizations. But then you may ask yourself, or me, Jeremy, what if there is a funding organization that gives to me that's not in your database? Well, we have that covered as well. And I'll show you that a little bit later when we get to our dashboard. So don't worry about that. And now let's go ahead and let you know, well, I want to let you know specifically that our researchers really focus on publishing that quality information. This will make your job easier. I promise. Hence the idea of thinking of GrantStation as your very own research team. But what I want to focus on now is turning to the process of finding funding for an organization. How do you go about identifying the best grant makers to approach? What is a grant seeking strategy? So again, click on the main logo, jump back to the homepage. We're going to start by going into our Build Strategy section. We're going to spend a lot of time in here. I'll click on Overview just to get us started and let you know sort of how we have the setup. This section will help you create a grant strategy, which is really just a way to approach your research, a way to find the right funder, to put them through primary research, which is really finding the leads and then going through secondary research, which is investigating the leads, finding the ones that work best for you. And we have all those tools at your disposal right here in GrantStation. So specifically, we like to start off by having you set your grant program objectives. Now, this is where you can take a look at our R3 project. And I'm going to go ahead and jump into that right now. Right now, actually, this is a specific tool that we have, which is a newer tool. And it allows you to really sort of see what's going on with your grant revenue and how can you broaden your mix of funding. Now, the way to run this is you'll need a copy of your operating budget, maybe a breakdown of grant awards you have coming in, and maybe about 10 minutes of time. You'll put in your specific date, say when you're starting to your projected date in the future, put in your grants revenue for now, then your grants revenue for the future or what you expect. You don't have to do them both because you can do one or the other, you can run them combined, you can run them currently or just run the projected. And I'm going to show you one that I actually made up. You can find it amazingly enough within your dashboard. So if you're ever wondering where exactly something you saved from your report is, it's right here in your dashboard under reports. I'm going to go ahead and view this one that I did a little while ago, actually. And you can see what it is. I put in my grant revenue for local business, put in my grant revenue projected for the future, corporate giving programs, etc. If I'm not sure what any of these are, you can click any of these links, it'll break down specifically what they are. You can also put in your non-grant revenue, such as gifts, major donor income, maybe earned income you have, plan giving income, all that information could go in there. What you end up with is this nice, visual representation that you can print out, showing you where your current revenue is, where your projected revenue is, where your current grant revenue is, where your projected grant revenue is, and then looking at your current versus projected non-grant revenue. And the most important thing you receive after you've done this is a full focused recommendation based on the numbers you've entered. So for instance, if you look at local business, it says, this is what you should be doing with local business based on the numbers you've entered above. This is what you should be doing with independent foundations based on the information you've entered above. This is a really valuable tool. It's a great planning tool that lets you know where you are and where you should be moving in the future. It also lets you know if the majority of your funding is coming from one grant source, you might want to diversify just in case you lose that one funding source. It's always good, like they say, to have a diverse portfolio if you're trying to fund your organization, having a diverse source of grants helps you a lot more and helps increase your longevity as an organization. Now, this is a great tool that we have that you have full access to as a member of GrantStation. It was the R3 or the revenue review and report. And this is a part of that build strategy process where you come in here, you figure out what your grant program objective is, then you can create your infrastructure, develop your grant program policies. What are you trying to accomplish? Put together a grants team. What's a grants team? I'm just one person. How do I do that? This walks you through how to create a team of people, so it's not just you trying to do something. Talks about assembling that specific team and then preparing for grant management. Once you receive a grant, who's going to take care of it? Who's going to deal with that? We have all these steps lined out for you as a part of our build strategy section. But for today, we're going to spend a lot of our time focusing on find the right grant makers. This is where you're going to find primary and secondary research. And specifically, this is also where you're going to find the project description worksheet. This is going to help you define your funding needs, focus your research and tell you and show you which is going to lead you to a more efficient and effective process and which leads you should follow to give you the best possible results. Now, we have a whole article that breaks down how to complete a project description worksheet, but I'm going to jump into one really quick right here through the dashboard. And I'm sorry for going a little out of order on this, Kerry, but I think this will work the best. If we go up to our dashboard, I'll click on introduction. We're going to jump into project. And all I'm going to do Kerry is ask you questions. So I hope you're ready for it. You're ready for it, right? Kerry, I know you're ready for this. Well, we'll see. Okay. So right here under project name, we've already made a specific project. And this is one that's near and dear to Kerry's heart and it's saved the chinchillas. So just as a quick background, Kerry, why is this important to you? Why do you want to save the chinchillas? Well, chinchillas are wonderful and they're very soft, but I also happen to have a pet chinchilla. Her name is Chewy. And so I would like to help all of her little friends. Now, one thing that's really great about Grant Station, about this project description sheet is you can put in the name of your project you need funding for. You put in your description. This is just a high level explanation of the product or program. Then we have more specific information. This is the statement of need. Why should the funder invest in this? For example, too many people buy chinchillas and they abandon them. This is the budget summary. This is where you put in your line items, put in a specific brand if you have it. This is your scratch sheet for all that information you're going to need when you're putting together your actual grant proposal. This helps you organize all those thoughts. It gets you beyond the I need a grant. It's like, well, what you need a grant for. This is that step that fills in all those blanks for you. You can also put in your geographic scope, your specific focus, what areas of interest are important to you, any other specific items that fit what you're targeting to population, what type of support do you need? You're looking for equipment, general operating funds, looking for funds for travel or to putting on a conference, and then any other keywords as well. All of this is what we strongly encourage you to do every time you're putting together a project because it organizes you, keeps you grounded, and prevents you from sort of just going off, trying to find funding for any specific reason. This is built into GrantStation for a reason to help you stay focused as you're putting together your specific needs and your specific search for funding. I'm going to go ahead and exit out of this right now. I think what we're going to do now is take a look at a real important part of doing research. This is another place you can put down tips. Aretha, get your pen out. This is a note area. I'm going to click on Find Grantmakers, and we're going to go ahead and jump on down to search terms at this point. Occasionally, you'll be doing a search either at GrantStation or on the web or on any of our competitors' websites, and you won't yield any practical results. Often, that's caused by not having the right search term. All of our search terms on GrantStation contain descriptions of the key terminology that's used on our website. This is the same terminology that's used by the Grantmakers themselves, and it really serves as a great guide when you're doing your keyword research. Now, to use this area, you simply enter a keyword to see which categories you'll want to check when you're searching. You make a note of this on your product description worksheet like I showed you, and now you know you're on the same page as the Grantmaker. I put together a couple scenarios for today, but of course, we will have time for some searches later on. Maybe you can stump me or stump Kevin or Kerry. We'll see what happens. Maybe not. Let's say we're in the Twin Cities area of Minnesota, which I do know, and we're seeking funds to support an animal rescue organization that interacts with seniors at a local retirement home. So that's one scenario. Another, we're based in California, but we do work across the border in Nevada. We want to provide schools with information about the importance of activity, hygiene, and obesity prevention. So at this point, we want to go ahead and use the keyword area down here to figure out what sections we should search within our database. Now, again, these are the exact same search terms that the funders use. So we'll go ahead and start with animal and click on apply and see what pops up. So using animal as our keyword, looking at all of our specific actual terms comes up with health and wellness category, which includes animal assisted therapy and service dogs. That's a good one for us, guide dogs, search and rescue, and canine equine assisted therapy. And this is a really good note and something that we added here, equine assisted therapy. We had someone who was using our database and they kept looking for horse therapy, horse therapy, horse therapy, and nothing was showing up. And just like, well, no one wants to fund horse therapy, grant station, why don't you have any horse therapy listed? And that's because that's not what the funders call it. They call it equine assisted therapy. Once you're on the same page as the funder, you're going to find more results. So always make sure you're looking for all the possible permutations of your search term. So I'm starting more general with the word animal, and I can see all the different options available to me. So animal also pulls up a new species. That's not for our needs. But animal welfare, well, that includes animal protection programs, companion animal programs, humane societies, you know, this is a good fit for us. Also, we have the general category, anything involving environment and animals, that's another option you have when you're clicking through and choosing what specifically you want to search for. These are all potential areas. I'd make a note of this on my project description worksheet. I want to search animal welfare within environment and animals. I also want to search animal assisted therapy and service dogs, which is available under health and wellness. So these are two ways to look up search terms. Let's look at our second one. Again, we're focusing on obesity. I'm going to go ahead and type that one in. We're going to see what pops up with that. So typing in obesity, we see that there is actually a category name, healthy lifestyles and obesity prevention. That includes active lifestyle programs, obesity prevention programs, and physical fitness and exercise programs. That's a good fit for us. Also under health and wellness. Great. I'll make a note of it. My project description worksheet. Now I am on the same page as the funder. So this is a very important thing to do, an important part of the process as you're going about getting your search for funding. And since we're going to look for funding now, well, now we can do it right from this page. So as you see, I clicked on a find grant makers and went down to search terms. You can access things in lots of different ways on Grant Station. I'm just showing you one way to do it. You can also click directly on where you want to search. For instance, U.S. Charitable, Canadian government. But we're going to go ahead and take a look right now at U.S. state government. So I'm going to go ahead and click on this one right now. I'm going to click on our specific state. Again, we're in Minnesota. I'll click on that one. And now you pull up this full page of all the resources available, grants and loans available within that specific state. We have this available for all 50 states and the District of Columbia that offer financial and technical assistance programs. All of these links take you directly to the agency or department pages, which deal with funding or information or miscellaneous support or training and technical assistance, maybe contracts or RFPs. And right up here, we have some journal resources. These are all really helpful when you're putting together your need statement, demographics and information about small businesses, ways to see what's available. And again, looking down this list, you can see what works, what's available in specific categories and you can save them to your dashboard. So if we thought one of these looked like a good fit for us, we'd go ahead and click the save button. And now that is reflected on our dashboard as a saved option. So we will be able to then add in specific information, assign it to our project. First say in this case, it's save the chinchillas. I can give it a specific priority, saying it's high priority. What's my status? I haven't started yet. How much have I requested? What are my application deadlines? When do I need my draft submit expected decision date by? And what specific notes do I have as well? So we're really about helping you streamline that process of getting all the information you need and then having it available at your fingertips, not only by searching on Grand Station, but also through your own custom dashboard. So for the next step in this primary research, again, we're identifying the different options that we have. I'm going to go ahead and click back a button and we're going to go back into find grant makers now. And we're going to take a look at the US federal listings again, just showing you a different way to access it. From here, you can search through all the offerings available through the US federal government that are listed on grants.gov. Now you can search for this by choosing eligible applicants, areas of interest, funding agencies, entering a specific keyword. You can search by funding opportunity number or even by CFDA number. So click on eligible applicants. You can see it's broken down into all the different types of applicants that are currently available. I'll just click this top one just so we can get an idea of what's going to show up as results. You can then add in more specific search terms. What are your areas of interest? What specific funding agencies you want to focus in on? And then all that information will filter down to a specific need that fits your purpose. So here under items per page, you can display multiple items if you want at a given time. You can of course save anything you want your dashboard anytime. Click the link to learn more about it. Sort it by clicking this underlying link at the very top. You sort it by post date or by close date. You can also sort by agency as well. Now the funding information, excuse me, that are available within the US state and federal government sections are important information to collect because when you do apply to private funders, you can say that you've done your federal and state research. And in case you don't find any options, which may actually be the case, you can say at this time there are no federal programs that can help us with our need. That way the private funder knows you've done your homework. And this again speaks to your credibility as an organization. And that private funding is the only option now. And the funders do know if there's a federal program available. So it's good to do your research and you can do all of it right here on Grant Station. So once you've completed your federal research, you've looked at the states, looked at what's available on the federal level, you can move on to our US charitable database. I'm going to go and click on that right now. And I'm going to hand off once again the lovely Carrie. All right, thanks Jeremy. So here we are in the US charitable giving database. And this database lists thousands of funder profiles. And that includes independent family community and corporate foundations. There's corporate giving programs, faith based grant makers, giving circles, and even associations that have grant making programs. So the profiles in here are searchable by geographic scope, areas of interest, types of support by name and by keyword. And in the content area on the left up at the top there, you'll see a guide that'll help you through the search process. And then on the right hand side is the navigation area where you can enter your specific criteria. So under geographic scope, you can choose to search for global grant makers giving to US organizations, which will increase our collection of options even more. But for now, we're going to click on Minnesota, and then choose national grant makers. And Kevin, can you tell us about the Boolean operator functions of the search sections here? I know that tends to be an area of confusion sometimes for some folks. Yeah, so for those of you not well versed in computer programming, these Boolean operators that Carrie mentioned are the and or or function. So is it completely inclusive of everything you entered, or is it in either or situation. So with our geographic scope, the geoscope is going to be an or function. So if we select Minnesota, and we also select national, it's going to be Minnesota specifically, or a funder that funds throughout the US. We do this for the geoscope to broaden your options. I mean, if funders that fund nationally and Minnesota won't really work out. So that is an or function. However, for the rest of the searches you're going to do, it is going to be an and function. So that means it is only going to bring up funders that fund every search term you've selected. So let's see, do we have anything selected so far Jeremy and Carrie? Nothing selected so far. Okay, so let's go education since you had that open already. And let's click after school. So here we'll see we have 70 results. So let's go back down to education. And let's go by cultural by the link. Now you'll notice our results went from 70 down to three. So it's not an or search here. If we had added by cultural and it was an or search or number number would have went up, it went down. So what we're seeing here is we're only getting funders that fund both of these topics at the same time. So if you don't have, if you're looking at this and you think, okay, three results isn't enough, Jeremy, what happens if we remove after school out of school programs? Okay, now it goes back up to 44. So we have 70 funders that focus on after school. We have 44 that focus on by cultural bilingual. But the the Venn diagram bind those two is just those three funders. So if you don't get enough results, try deleting some of your search terms run the search terms individually, because otherwise you're going to get the funders that specifically say, Hey, we fund all of these things. We have an interest in all of these topics. All right. Thank you, Kevin. So I think we're ready to go back to our previous search scenario. Okay, let me go ahead and get back in there. I remember what they are. It's Minnesota. And then we're going to go ahead and click on national grant makers across all states. So we created our universe. We see how big it is. And now Kerry will allow us to narrow it. Okay, so let's pick the area of interest of animal welfare and see what that does to our search results number. Okay, so now we're at 89 results. And let's see what happens if we choose a type of support. How about general operating support? Okay, so that narrows our number down to 29 results. And then if we want to see, let's see how many results we could get for equipment instead of general operating. So if you click on the minus sign there, we'll clear that out. Okay, and that brings us to 19 results. And if you want to narrow this search even more, we can remove national from the geographic search area by also clicking that minus sign next to USA, and then focus on those funders that specifically given Minnesota, which gives us five results. And then, of course, as we talked about earlier, there's the keyword search towards the bottom of the page. Well, that's a powerful way to narrow your searches. We suggest that you exercise caution so that you don't narrow your searches down too much. Remember the key words that you enter aren't necessarily the words that the funder would use. That's a really good point. And one way you can use this section, though, is in case you are searching in a large metropolitan area, say somewhere within New York, and you're focusing in a one specific borough of New York, you can use this to narrow down the searches to focus on one specific area that's mentioned specifically by the funder. So this is a way that you could use the keyword area effectively, as opposed to typing in words like animal, welfare, support, children, you know, outreach, that would probably let you know results, because no one's using all those specific terms in their description. And those aren't the specific funder terms that we talked about earlier, the funders are using. So again, as Carrie mentioned, powerful section, exercise caution in this area. But with that, I think it's a good time to move into a deeper discussion of the dashboard. And Carrie, will you walk us through that? And I will just happily turn the letters as we do this. Yes, definitely. So we will navigate to the dashboard section. Here we are. And as we talked about earlier, you can develop project descriptions, you can save your search criteria, you can save individual funders, and you can even track the status of your application process all through your custom dashboard. So I'm going to have Jeremy pull up each of the sections in here so that you can get an idea of what to expect. So Jeremy, I know you went over the project section a bit earlier. Do you want me to briefly recover that? Let's cover it again, just to be sure. And in fact, let's actually use our animal welfare project as our example here. So I'm going to go ahead and click on this one. And that'll go ahead and open it up. This is where we can do the editing for the specific option, which as you can see, I did no editing. This is me being incredibly prepared for what we're doing. But this is great. I can show you how easy this to work. So yes, here we are, Carrie. Okay, so here we are in the animal welfare project. And at the top here is the name of the effort, which is animal welfare project. Then there's a description of the project or program, why the funders should support this program, your statement of need. Then there's a budget summary, where the work will be occurring, and then any search terms that you think you'll need as you continue to do your grant station database research. Jeremy, is there anything additional about the project section that you'd like to cover? What's nice is we already went over it once, but it's really important step. I just want to emphasize this. This is something that our original founder, Cynthia Adams, did. And it just made things so much easier. Having this developed for each project you need funding for allows you to really focus your time and energy where it's best spent. As opposed to just trying to find funding for all these different purposes, you need funding for this project, you need funding for general operating, you need funding to do a special training session that you're doing. This is a really powerful way to stay focused, stay organized, and quickly let other people know what you're trying to do so they can help you out. This is a big key of part of that building your own grants writing team. Having this, spending the time, the five minutes to put this together, five, 10 minutes to get the information in place will really have you grounded moving forward. All right. So now let's hop on over to the saved criteria tab in the middle there. So you can select some search criteria and then name and save your search. Once it's in your dashboard, you can click the name you gave it to rerun that search. This allows you to remember the terms that were most effective in finding funders for your programs so that you can run it again in the future to see if there are any new opportunities available. Anything additional you'd like to add here, Jeremy? There is. And one thing that happens a lot at Granization is a lot of our users will say, will not say, but I'll pretend they do. Jeremy, this needs to do X, Y, Z. Why doesn't it? And we'll look at it and go, that's a really good point. Let's add that. So we added in this ability to create a set of criteria and then assign it to a specific project. So if you happen to be like one or maybe two people in your organization that are using the account and you're like, we need to go ahead and look for funding available for our after school health program project, you can rerun that search based on what project it's connected to. So it's a really powerful little feature that we added in saves you a mess of time as you're going about looking for new funding. And just to show you really quickly, when you jump in here, it looks just like the other section that I showed you. All you have to do is enter in what your specific search criteria is. You can even change that from here. You can add in your geographic scope, your areas of interest, your target of population, what type of support you're looking for, what type of grant maker if you want to. But again, as Kevin said, these are all or based searches. Is that right? Or is this and based? This is and based, right? Kevin, is this and or or? Sorry, Jeremy, I was answering some questions in the chat. Are we talking about a search term search or a geographic search? Search term search. Yep. Our search terms are going to be and. So outside of geography, as I add more terms, my number of results is going to go down. So this or whatever for geographic scope, this and whatever narrows it down. So this is how you can just narrow all those specific things down by adding in type of grant maker, adding in location of grant maker, etc. All these options you have when you're saving a specific search. And I want to pretend that that was planned, but it wasn't because I genuinely forgot for a second. So thank you, Kevin. I'm going to go ahead and close out of this and I'm going to hand it back to you, Gary. All right. Thank you. So now we're going to go into the save grant makers tab here. So when you're looking at grant makers in the search, you'll see that you can now save a funder to your dashboard, either from your list of results or directly from the profile itself. So this table show you all the grant makers that you've saved to your dashboard. You can see their name, the project you've assigned it to, the priority you've assigned it, their application deadlines, if they have any, along with any specific notes you need to make about that. Additionally, you can add a grant maker to my plan. And from that interface, you can plan out your application process with the grant makers that you've identified in your research. So, Jeremy, I see the decision matrix button there. Could you tell us a bit more about that? Sure. Let's go ahead and open up this particular grant makers decision matrix to talk about this. So as part of the process, this primary research of seeing if a funder works for you, when you're doing that research into the funder, we've created the easy to use tool, called the decision matrix, that lets you prioritize who you're going to spend your time researching. Now it's based on a simple scoring system. I think it's basically zero to three. Zero is least favorable. Three is most favorable. And then based on your score you receive, lets you know if you should save it for later, pass on it completely, or get going on those applications. So it starts off with some mandatory criteria. Do we meet the eligibility requirements? Yes. Is it consistent with our mission, the funding? Yes. These both have to be yes. If they aren't, not even worth your time. If they are both yes, then we get into our scored criteria. And we have a breakdown of what each of these means, but it's really sort of a breakdown of do we serve their target population? Are we in their geographic giving area? What's our credibility with this funder? Do we have a relationship with them? Are the project plan and budget plan already developed? How complex is the application? Does the funder require a match? How complex are their project evaluation requirements? We've gone through and figured out the most common questions that'll be really helpful to answer. And all of this is done as part of that primary research as you're looking into and researching and finding out more about a specific funder. It also then dovetails nicely into secondary research where you're proving the veracity of the specific funder and if it works for your need. When you end up with that specific number and you know to move forward, that's when you can move on to actually applying to the funder. But we added this as a feature to the dashboard so you can quickly see at a glance what's a good fit and what's not a good fit. And I've actually gone through and done a couple of these. We have a couple that are really high priority. Again, you can assign the priority by going into the edit feature here. You can also see if someone's a low priority and assign them as a low priority. And having these numbers there is incredibly helpful. So again, you can see at a glance who's going to be a good fit and who's not going to be a good fit as you're going through. And of course, I'll say this probably a couple of times, you can always export all the information you've put in here to your own specific CSV program and then import it into any form you want, maybe using Grand Hub or some other organization like that. A common question though, before we go to our next section, which is my plan, can I import my own documents? And the answer is currently no. We don't have an import feature yet because our real focus isn't on storing documents. It's just allowing you to collect information in our database and then making it work for you and then getting it out into a format you can use. It is something we are looking into, but you currently don't have a way to import your own documents into GrantStation. It's a common question that comes up. So I want to go ahead and let people know that before we moved on into my plan. Okay, so here we are in one of the last tabs, my plan. So my plan section is for when you decide to actually apply for a specific grant opportunity. So let's go into one of these plans to get a look around. I'll open up M-Core Cares because I've been playing with them a lot today. Okay, so here we are in M-Core Cares. We have the name of the funder at the top there. The status such as LOI, this is full app in progress. Then we have the amount of request below that. So that's 21,000. Then the application deadline if there is any. And then when your draft submit or expected decision date is. And on the main my plan page, you can export dates to your calendar software. And as Jeremy mentioned, you can export all of the data as a CSV file for use in your favorite spreadsheet program. I know we all have a favorite. And you can export data from your various dashboard sections at any time as well. And we're always adding and incorporating member's feedback. So new features may appear in the dashboard at any time. And did you have anything additional about the my plan section that you'd like to go over, Jeremy? I did. That thing I promised before, if you have a grantmaker who works just for you, you can add that right here with add a private grantmaker. And that will, of course, then go directly to my plan because you're already going to move on this one. It's already a good fit. You know the information. You enter the specific name, assign it to that specific project that you want to assign your priority status and the amount requested, etc. So you can track something not in our database, which could then specifically show up on your list. Now you may be asking yourself, because you've already forgotten, Jeremy, why isn't it listed in your database? So Carrie, I'm going to put you on the spot for a second. Why would something not be listed in our database? I know you mentioned it before, but just this is a quick reminder. Why wouldn't it be listed in our database? More than likely probably because they're closed to unsolicited applications. So we've either removed them from our active listings or haven't added them because they reach out to their own entities for their funding. So that's exactly it. So keep that in mind. If it's not listed, that's usually the reason. There are times though, when we don't have something listed, because we just haven't found it yet, because one thing that's important, and Carrie mentioned it, and I'll say it again, we're not robots. We're not scraping. Every single record is looked at by a human being that knows how to research. So the information, again, is as up to date or even more up to date than what the funders have on their own website. And if you can't find it and you think it's a good fit and you're wondering why it's not listed, let us know. We'll go and look into it for you. That's something very unique to Grant Station. We're very approachable. And speaking of that, I'm going to take over Carrie and do another search. So I'm going to move into Find Grantmakers and jump into U.S. Charitable. And remember that second scenario I put together, everybody? Maybe you don't. Maybe you do. Quick refresher, we're in California. We do work across the border in Nevada. We provide schools with information about the importance of activity, hygiene, and obesity prevention. So we're here under geographic scope. We're going to start by clicking California. We're going to see how big our grant universe is. I just like saying it that way. We're also going to add in another state. In this case, we're going to add in Nevada. It's right down here at the bottom. As you can see, our results are going up. We're going to add in National Grantmakers. We have across all states as well. Okay, now we're at 2,000 results. Our universe is huge. That's way too many to dig through. Let's narrow it down. Let's add in some specific areas of interest. So we know from doing our keyword research, if we go into health and wellness, we can go down and click on healthy lifestyles and obesity prevention. Oh, but look, here's one, health and eating nutrition. But what does that cover? Well, click this little I right here. This is a note moment. If you click and hover over the I, it tells you exactly what topics are included, but not limited to within each of these various topics. This is available for every single search term. And since I love putting you on the spot, Carrie, how many search terms do we currently have in our database? I believe at last count, there were over 230. It may have changed since then, because we're always adding new ones. So there's quite a few. So there are many, many different search terms in here. So it's okay if you don't have them all memorized. And it's also okay if you're like, Jeremy, I don't want to go through everything you're showing me. I just want to find funders. I know exactly what I'm doing. Great. So then you can simply come right in here and start clicking boxes and find the results that work for your specific needs. So I'm going to start by clicking this one, healthy lifestyles and obesity prevention down to 53 results. Let's go ahead and add in another type of support. Let's actually add in another let's go in back up to here to health and wellness. I'm going to click that second option, healthy eating and nutrition. Now we're at 24 results. Still too many. I like about 10 results. That's just for me. Some people like to have more. So I'm going to add some more areas to narrow this down. And this is where we can play with targeted populations. So we can narrow it down to funders that specifically mentioned they want to support a specific population. Again, this is focused on a school program. So we could click on children and youth to further narrow this down. We could also narrow it down to other specific areas. If you notice, though, there are some areas that are grayed out. And as you select and check various boxes, various options will disappear from your listing. And that's because there is no one currently listing any support for LGBTQ or just general target population support that also mentioned, they have an area of interest in health, eating nutrition and healthy lifestyles and obesity prevention. Again, anything in areas of interest is and based. Anything in geographic scope is or based. So this shows you how big your world is. Everything else narrows it down to your specific need. So if we go into a type of support, which we mentioned earlier, we can narrow it even further. Say we're looking for just general operating support. We're narrowing it down to five results. That's enough for me that I think I could probably find something there that would work for me. But if not, I could even narrow it down to a specific type of grant maker. So maybe I'm only looking for giving circles or only looking for a corporate foundation or religious organization. These are the type of grant maker it is, not who they give to, just who the grant maker is. It's another option that we allowed into the search based on customer feedback. And also here under location of grant maker, you can narrow it down to where the grant maker is based. So of those five funders above, they are based in these three specific states. You can see everybody who's based in California, everybody who's based in Texas. It's a good way to see who's giving in your own backyard. So it's another way you can narrow down your results. But again, if you say five results, none of these work for me. In fact, this one's marked in A and that's something you can do with any of these funders. Not only can you save them and send a copy to yourself, you can also mark it as not applicable to your specific need. So as you're going through and doing your searches, if it's not going to work for you, you'll know at a glance this isn't the right one for you. And as Kerry mentioned earlier, if something is new to the database within the last month, you'll see a little N-E-W right here, a little new and green. So you know, oh, that's been added recently. I should look at that. This is something that you can also find when you're running your saved criteria searches, run it again every month. You can see something new that pops up. It will be marked as new. So it's a really handy, handy feature. But I'm looking at these results and saying, oh my gosh, five results, that's not enough. Well, let's go ahead and start removing options. Again, these are funders who specifically mentioned general operating support. If we drop that, we'll go back to 24 results. What if we're looking for people who give to just obesity prevention, but we'll drop healthy nutrition. Now we're at 53 results. This is how you can take a step back, narrow in as close as you want, then take a step back and then see how it can fit for your specific project or program. That's how our database works. You're just clicking on and off various little boxes and finding the funders that fit your specific need. So I don't want to spend all my time in here, but just we will come back to this when we answer some questions a little bit later on. Just want to show you this is how you do searches on Grand Station. And we also have a couple other areas you can do searches within. One I want to mention specifically right now is our international charitable database. Again, I told you earlier how you can use this section, but you can again start with continental grant makers and give on a specific continent. Let's say we're focused on Europe and let's say we're also looking for a national grant maker who gives specifically within let's say Norway and then we can add in at this point a specific area of interest. And this is where it's really handy and not just in this database, but any database. If you're not quite sure how your project will line up with things, you can always choose the general option. That's a funder who is more of a general description of what they'll give to. So this is a way to skit even more funders that might fit for your need before you narrow it down. Just seeing, well, what's the not really the market, but are there people giving funding, you know, for education purposes within Norway so we can click on the general and see, oh, there's 34 results. Yes, it looks like it's pretty popular. There's a chance to find funding here, especially if my organization does outreach. Maybe we do a geographic program after school or something like that. This is a way that you can use the general tab define funding for your specific need. Related to this, we also have our Canadian charitable database. It functions exactly the same way broken down into specific province, let's say Manitoba, then you can add in national grant makers across all the provinces of Canada, and then you can further narrow it down to a specific area of interest. You can use a general, you can use targeted populations, you can use type of support, you can use type of grant maker, everything I've shown you before, you can use in all of our databases. So once you know how to search one place, you can search everywhere. And in addition, we also have a Canadian government section, which is just like our US state government section, broken down in specific provinces to really see what's available within Canada and with all the various Canadian provinces as well. So with that, I wanted to go ahead and turn to a couple other areas of grant station. And you've now assembled this list, I'm assuming, of potential funders. This is when we can jump back into build strategy. And this is where we can go into investigating the leads. This is the secondary research. This is where we're taking a look at what questions can we ask the funder? What are some of the things that we need to do to prepare for it? Let's look at the funder's website. Let's look at the IRS 990 form. What is that? We break that down and explain what that is. What questions do you ask the funder? All of this is included in the build your grant strategy section. So if you do need to put together a basic strategy or a way of finding how to approach funders, it's all here in the build strategy section here on grant station. But then once you're done with that, you found the right funder, you're ready to go. This is the one you want to apply to. I've never applied for a grant before. What do I do? Jump into right proposals. The overview will walk you through everything we have listed, which is a soup to nuts approach of everything we've got here. From your IRS tax status to the budget to your board of directors, everything needs to be in place. And again, as I mentioned earlier, all those award-winning proposals to see what is currently working. And all that's available in the right proposals, in addition to a section called editing and revision. So just in case you aren't funded, maybe you need to do some editing. Maybe you need to do some revising. This is something written by our very own Kevin Peters, which breaks down what to do when you're not funded and how to revise and edit your proposal to make it more attractive when you resubmit. So let me take a quick breath there. Hope you're all processing through all of this. Before we go any further though, I wanted to go ahead and show you just a couple other tools that we have within our public resources section. So again, again, this is a tool talk that we're focusing on today at Grand Station. And we have so much content here. I could talk for a very long time going over everything we have. But today you're getting a much longer tour, which covers everything we have in at least some detail. And that can be found specifically here in our Pathfinder section. This is a really powerful tool that we have. If you want to really develop your career path as a grant professional, this is the way to do it. This is a library of top quality resources, the areas of grant research, writing and management, as well as strategic planning. And all these resources are listed and linked out from here. They're not all from Grand Station. They're from all over the web. Our researchers and specifically Diana, one of our researchers goes through this and adds new features on a regular basis. We have featured resources that go up every week. We have a Grand Station specific resource listed as well. It's broken down into all the different articles and reports we have listed, blogs, conferences we found, workshops and trainings, newsletters and magazines, record webinars and podcast tools. You can even search by them directly if you want based on your experience level. Or you can use an interactive tool. You simply answer a few quick questions and it will give you a customized curriculum. And again, this is available for free to find all these different resources. If you're trying to find a conference to go to, maybe your executive director says, hey, find out more about grant research. You need to do that. And you don't know where to go to find that information. You can jump into Pathfinder, don't even need a Grand Station membership. Find what's available based on your level, based on your specific topic. And then you can go ahead and say, hey, I found something. Here it is and look like a million bucks. So Grand Station helping you look a million bucks since 1999. In addition to Pathfinder, we also have another great tool available in public resources. And that's the benchmarker. This lets you compare your grant seeking to similar organizations. This comes from our annual survey. Last year, we had over 1,700 nonprofit leaders respond to it. And this is where you can see what's your budget, what's your mission focus. And then you can see a report based on what's happening with your peers. How are their funding going about? What sort of grants are they receiving? And it can broken, spoken down into the age of your organization, how many employees you have, where's your funding coming from? What sources of funding are you having? These all give you a customized report, again, available for free within our specific section, which is right here under public resources. This is our benchmarker tool. And it's a very powerful tool and a great way to see what's going on in the industry. Are big awards happening? Are they mainly smaller awards right now? What's the main area they're giving to? That's all available through the benchmarker. And finally, grant station is always interested in what's going on in the world of philanthropy. And to that end, we have our trend track section. This is where you can find three specific things. First is our state of grant seeking survey, our insights blog, and track success. So first off, track success. This is a collection of magazine style articles that go in depth into a various philanthropic trend or features an interview with a grant professional somewhere around the world in various different topics. We also have our blog, which everyone has a blog, but ours is written by guest writers, as well as our very own researchers. Kevin is in here quite often. You can find many of his articles in here. He often has very fun ones. This one is about Whale Watcher, Grant Seeker, which is a very fun one. And also I mentioned Diana earlier, she has a whole article here about civil society under attack, but there's a ton of great articles available here. Again, all available free and all available in our trend track section under public resources. And finally, I mentioned it earlier with a benchmarker, the state of grant seeking is an actual survey that you can download the full report. You can see what the key findings are. You can again get the full report. And of course you can benchmark your organization against others as well. We have a little webinar right here that goes in depth into how it works and how you can use it for your specific needs. So with that, I'm going to jump back to the homepage of the website and just want to leave you with one last thing in case you are completely filled to the brim with information. One thing to remember is that if you're doing a search for funding for any kind of project, it's important to identify the best grant makers to approach. Using Grant Station allows you to apply your time where it's most effective and efficient in your specific search for funding. So with that, I think we can open it to questions. We have a lot of time we can use for questions here and we'll probably find some other things I forgot to cover because again, there's so much here. So I'm going to let Kevin go ahead and figure out what to answer. I know he's been really busy in the chat answering things and really busy also dealing with Q&A questions. So Kevin, whenever you're ready, I am ready to be asked questions. Okay, Jeremy, I got a great one to start here. I'm intrigued that I've never seen this specific question before because I like it a lot. So for those who have very limited time to spend on Grant Station, what would you say are the top three tools to focus on? Ooh, that's that's really good. That's good. Okay, so let's say you purchased your membership for $99 from September 20th to 21st. That's my hard pitch. Okay, the first thing I recommend you do go to Build Strategy and do product description worksheet. The reason why you're like, Jeremy, that's not a surgeon for grants. No, this is the first thing you do because then if you are limited in time, at least you have this information down. This will be the basis of your grant proposal. This is the basis of your letter of inquiry. This is the basis of everything. This is your firm ground you're building your grant house on. Do the project worksheet. That's the first thing you should do. That's the top thing I recommend you do. Then once you've done that worksheet, you will know, okay, you'll have a better idea of what you need funding for. What's your purpose? What are your specific needs? Then you can jump in and do your research. Now I'm going to put research as one thing. I recommend you do state, federal and U.S. charitable. I know that may seem like four separate things so far, but that's one thing because you want to do state. You want to see what's available at the state level. Often those funds are unclaimed. The money will roll over to a new year because people don't realize it. They're not aware of it. We have the research and it's available for you. One stop shopping here. Second thing, check your federal just so it doesn't have to be long. Again, it can be like maybe five minutes. You may not find it, especially if you're a smaller organization. They don't support making custom benches for the homeless. That's probably not something that has a federal grant connected to it at least at first glance, but that may be something you need to at least see what's out there. Just see if there's anything there. Again, that's that credibility thing that's really important. Then you hit U.S. charitable. That's where you go ahead and check your boxes based on the information you've entered already in your project description worksheet. That's why it's such a good thing. So project description worksheet, searching those three areas and then the fourth thing, well, the third thing I suppose is in build strategy. You need to investigate the leads. You need to see if it's worth it. That's going to be decision matrix. That's going to be talking to the funder. I know I'm combining stuff together, but these are very important steps to do because otherwise you're going to be like, well, I got the grant, but the funder says they don't accept because I didn't look at the due dates or I talked to the funder and they won't give it to us. I already wrote the application. You never want to be in that situation, especially if you're a one-person grant shop. This allows you to make your time focused and clear and you can go ahead and say, look, this is where I'm at. This is where I am. You can print out everything you've put in your dashboard. You can show it to your executive director. You can show it to anyone else in your organization. Show them what you're focusing on. Maybe they can say, oh, hey, I can help with this. And this is something where I'd recommend, especially if it's one person, assembling a grants team, there's a way to do that to find people to help you to make it a reality. So it's not just you against the world trying to write grants, but I completely understand you're not able to do that. I'm talking ideal world versus real world, but those are the three things that I think you should do. Everything else will make your life easier, and it seems like a lot of work, but the key, I think, is just read through this section. That's it. Just read through it. You will walk away knowing what you need to do, and you'll be able to decide what's the most important thing for your specific needs. But based on my years of experience, and I've been with GrantStation for a very, very long time, that is the best way to do it. All right. Thanks, Jeremy. Now we're moving on to one of our classic questions, so I know you'll have an answer down pat here. Right. So when I subscribe to GrantStation, can more than one person from my organization use that membership, or do I have to have bold memberships or logins? Totally understand. Common question that comes up. There's a couple answers here. One, of course, we want you to have multiple memberships, and for $99, great. That's an amazing price. You can pick up a membership, but we understand maybe there's just you and executive director. Maybe it's just you and one other person. If it's just you and one other person, that's fine. But if it's you and five other people, that's where there's kind of a bit of a confusion there. But guess what? We have you covered. If there's a situation where you need to have multiple people access and you already have a membership, contact us directly at infograntStation.com. Let us know. And we can work out an arrangement that is affordable to giving you multiple access, giving multiple accounts for your account. If it's within the same organization, that's very key. Keep that in mind. And the one big reason I strongly encourage you to have your own is you can have your own dashboard. So maybe you're in charge of project A, and Kerry is in charge of project B. Well, you can have your own results completely separate if you want to. Flip side, if you're a grant researcher and you're a grant writer, you're working for multiple organizations, you can use the dashboard to create multiple projects that are assigned to each of your organizations you're working for. So you can track them accordingly. You can even archive old ones and pull them back when you need them. So either way, it works. But if you do need to have multiple people with access, we have an option for that. Just email us at infograntStation.com if it's more than one other person. All right. Thanks, Jeremy. This next one is a question I know Kerry gets very passionate about. So we'll see what she has to say about this one. So Kerry, how is grant station different from Foundation Center's online directory? If we were only going to invest in one, why would I go with grant station? Oh, I love this question. Okay. So first I would say a major difference is our policy of only listing active funders, which I know we covered many times. But another thing would be we only have one tier. So we only have one price, one database. Another great thing about grant station is we touched on this too, our personal touch. So we're personally looking at the websites, sort of putting that into a more digestible form for users. We are even contacting funders by email and letter and sometimes we'll call them to verify information. So yeah, I think those are some important differences. Anything either of you would like to add? I'd say the price is a pretty big difference because I know that Foundation Center offers different ranges of memberships. But grant station, again, as Kerry said, is one price. And if you buy it through TechSoup, it's $99. It's not going to suddenly jump up. It's not going to be some amazing change or whatnot in the price. It'll say it $99. Yeah, you took the words right out of my mouth, Jeremy, because I've purchased both and the price is what keeps me at grant station because it's the same grant information, but the price keeps me coming back to grant station. And that's why TechSoup membership, I strongly encourage it. I mean, who doesn't like Microsoft Word? Everybody does. You can get that with TechSoup. I can do a webinar on TechSoup. That'll be my next thing that we talk about, Aretha. You and I will figure out a TechSoup webinar where grant station talks about it. But that's why TechSoup membership is great. You get this discount. And this price is really, really hard to beat. We don't even offer this price. It's only offered through TechSoup at this price. Okay, excellent. And since we're talking about TechSoup, someone asked how often are the GrantStation TechSoup sales? Oh, no, it happens. It happens at least once a year. I believe we're doing it twice, Aretha. I'm not positive on that. It changes a little bit the specific dates. But if you're a member of TechSoup, you will see a GrantStation sale. So let's say you purchase now, and you're like, oh, no, my membership's about to come out, and it's about to lapse. What do I do? There's a good chance there'll be another GrantStation sale coming around. Okay. And then someone asked if I buy it $99 for a year, will renewal also be for $99? I mean, I guess the renewal would be at whatever the current deal is at that time, correct? Right. And this is a really key thing about GrantStation. That also separates us from all the competition. We do not auto charge you. There is no subscription. You pay for a year, we give you a year. That's it. We don't auto charge you. There's no subscription. There's no sneaky stuff happening. You're suddenly paying $3,000. It's not like that. Basically every year, whatever the price is, that's what it is. We also offer opportunities to renew separately through GrantStation. If you no longer become a member of TechSoup, which I don't recommend, stay a member of TechSoup, and you can keep taking advantage of this opportunity every year it's offered. So as long as TechSoup offers it for $99, you'll be able to purchase it for $99 every year. All right. One more membership question, then we'll get back to the nuts and bolts stuff. So let's say I, you know, I don't have the auto pay. So my membership expires. Does all my information disappear or is it hang out there if I want to like rejoin like say six months later? That's a good question. In general, it does. I'm not sure of the exact time we keep it. We've recently, this is way more tech than I usually get into these webinars because I also spend a lot of time with the tech side of GrantStation. We can store your data. And last I saw, we were storing it for at least a year before we would purge it. But that changes. You know, the more people we have, the more data we have to save for it, you can always export all of your data anytime. So I strongly encourage you though, if you're like, you know what, GrantStation is not right for me. Totally get it. Export everything. You can export everything you've entered to GrantStation, all of your lists, all of your specific information entered by plan and save that. And then you'll be able to use it in the future if you decide to come back to GrantStation. All right. Thanks, Jeremy. Okay. Back to the nuts and bolts here. Someone wants to know what is the best browser to use with GrantStation or does it work equally well across platforms? I haven't had any issues with any specific browser acting up with GrantStation. Maybe back in the days of Internet Explorer, like four, we had problems. That's all I've been with GrantStation. But anything today, I've worked. The Brave browser works. You know, Chrome works, of course. I use Chrome. Firefox works. Edge works great because Edge is a version of Chrome. I haven't had any issues using it with any browser except a weird one-off browser on the Android, which is known as Samsung Internet Browser. It's the only one that's been a little odd, and it's just because it doesn't render the page quite right. So you have to scroll left and right a little bit more. It still works. It's just not nicely adjusting to the size of the phone. It's the only one I've found issues with. All right. So next question, Jeremy, for you and Kerry. I know where to go for this information, but I'm testing you guys. So are you ready? Okay. Let's do this. Let's do this. Let's do this. This attendee wants to know, is there anything you can say about the multi-year trend of giving, such as is more money now coming from small private versus public grant makers or moving more towards smaller or larger organizations? Oh, I mean, would we touch on that in the state of grant seeking report? We do definitely touch on it in there. That's the answer. Jeremy, you want to take us through to the state of grant seeking one more time? I stopped sweating. That's good. I was nervous for a second there. So public resources. There was quite a pause. Yeah, there was. State of grant seeking is where we go to. And then from here, you can download the full report or actually let's look at the key findings. I'm going to pop that up right here. And going through here, you can see what the main trends are, what's going on. Like for instance, applying for at least, this is, I like this one, applying for at least three grant awards, increase the frequency of winning an award, which is obvious, of course. Now 25% of organizations that submitted one application, won no awards. However, the percentage of organizations that won at least one award was high if you submitted at least three to five applications. So applying for grants is a busy thing. Apply for three, you have a 91% chance of being awarded that specific grant. So all this type of information is available right here in the state of grant seeking. Yep. And also, Jeremy, I was deep in questions. You did cover the benchmarker tool earlier. I did. And I can actually take another quick look at it just to show you what's there. And again, we have, we usually don't have this much time for these webinars. So I like being able to spend time here. So let's say I'm a small budget organization and I'm focused on arts, culture and humanities. Look at a basic report here. And you can, of course, print this out or export it or view it on your dashboard, which is a lovely thing about GrantStation, but it's broken down into what the average is based on what you said, based on what other people are saying. And it's for all those different metrics we were talking about. Like what was the dollar amount the largest your organization received in 2021? And you can see what the median is for each of them based on the specific information around the top, based on whether it's arts, culture, humanities, a small budget under 100%, under $100,000 and all respondents on top of that. So it's a great way to see at a glance what's going on in the world. This is the custom report. Again, this is a basic report. The custom report is three times as long as this. You just have to answer some questions to get that information. But here's an interesting note, which you're probably all aware of. What in your opinion is the greatest challenge to successful grant seeking? Well, for small organizations under $100,000, it is a lack of time and or staff. Right. Thanks, Jeremy. Let's see here. My organization has accomplished grant researchers and writers. We really want a platform that will help us manage the deadlines and applications for our grant cycles year over year. So the question is, will my plan or save grants help us keep track of those annual deadlines? I actually don't know the question. What happens the next year if something's in my plan? Like it goes past the application deadline for that year. What happens in the my plan section? Well, the information actually stays there. And what you can do, I have two answers for this, what you can do, and I'm going to jump into my plan just to show you how this works, you can always archive a specific one. So like, yep, this, this deadline's past, you know, is August 31st, I'm going to go ahead and archive this one. And you can enter in the specific year you want to archive it is. So go ahead and archive it. So then it wouldn't be showing up under your specific my plan. It'd be your list of all the archived ones that you have. Like here's all the ones I've archived specifically. But it sounds like what you need something a little bit more robust than what we're offering. This is really just getting you started, getting you organized. If you want to track your funding year end, track it, you know, from date to date or whatnot, you should probably look, I think closer at Grant Hub. It's one of our partners that I recommend, they have a complete system for tracking and managing funding across multiple years. So if you are doing more than say five or six grants a year, I'd really encourage you to look at a platform like that to probably give you a lot more functionality than something you'd be able to locate through GrantStation, which really gets you started, gets you organized, you know, but it's not, it's like the trapper keeper to a filing cabinet. And I'm definitely a kid of the 80s, but anyway, that's the difference there. All right, now we seem to have a ton of new organizations on board today. Yeah, I just want to walk through this. So if I'm a new organization, what can I do to find funding? So we don't specifically say we focus, you know, this funder focuses on first year organizations, but if I'm a new organization, how do I find funding for my organization? Sure. Again, Projects and Worksheets, I think is your best friend. But you know what, Jeremy, you say, I don't want to do that. I need to do it a different way. That's fine. This is how you can do it. Again, figure out where you're at. For instance, I'm in Alaska. So you start with your state, then you check on nationals to everyone who gives across all the states, figure out how big your world is. What's your focus? What's your organization do? Well, we do something, you know, with social sciences, you know, we do an economic outreach of some sort. Great. Well, actually, I would be the wrong place for it. But then that's the way you do search terms. Anyway, you can click the general option. It'll show you everything available in that main category. Then you can narrow it down. Well, I'm actually doing outreach focused on, you know, immigrants or refugees. Oh, okay. Great. Well, let's narrow it down to that. Okay. So this is what their areas of interest are. That's target of population. That's the scope. You need to know what you need funding for. That's the whole reason. Again, the Projects and Worksheets. Once you have that, everything starts falling into place. You know, you need funding for wages. You need funding to keep the lights on. You need funding for a new truck. You need funding for deliveries. You need funding for food. You need funding for X. You need funding for Y. Once you have that information, then you can easily use everything at Granitation to the best of your ability. And let's say you're new. You're like, Jeremy, I still don't know what's going on. Guess what? Info at Granitation.com. You'll be able to talk with myself or possibly Nancy or David in our Member Services Department. And we will be happy to help you get organized. But again, if you're new, go to Build Strategy and just go through this. This will answer probably 90% of your questions. We rewrote this for a reason to make it easy to follow and very clear. If you have any questions, info at Granitation.com. Right. Excellent, Jeremy. And then we're going to test your recall of things you said earlier. So when we had that question about three best tips, someone was like, wait a minute, what was the third tip? Do you remember what that was? Yeah, the third tip, well, it's rough. But the third tip is under Build Strategy. And it's really that investigating the leads. That's the whole focus. It's being able to project description worksheet, finding your funding, and then investigating it. You need to investigate if it's a good fit. Because if you just know what you need funding for, that's great. It's not enough. Then you need to find the funders and make sure they're a good fit. That's the secondary research. That's the decision matrix. That's asking the funder questions. That's looking at the IRS 990. That's doing what the IRS 990 is and why it's important. It's basically like the hidden cheat sheet of what all major funding organizations do. So if you understand how that works, you basically have a hidden feature, you know, a hidden tool in your back pocket that you can pull out at any second and impress people. Like, oh, yeah, it's a great foundation. But they only gave money to Jeremy's Left-Handed Foundation for the last 20 years. They're not going to work for our specific needs. All right. So we got a minute left here, but we just have two questions left. So can we tackle those, you think? Aretha, can we go a little long if people need to? Like maybe three minutes? Three minutes. Okay. We have three minutes. Okay. Okay. Okay. One person just wants to know, is Grant Hub a CRM? Yes. Well, sort of. I'm not a grant. I don't work for Grant Hub, so I'm not positive. But a lot of what they do gives you a lot of CRM type of features or, you know, content management type of features built in. So it's very, it's very, it works well. It's effective. And your best bet is actually to go to Grant Hub. They do offer free tours on a regular basis, and they even offer free trials as well. So I'd encourage you to look at that if you're looking for more advanced ways to track grants. All right. Now, one last question, if we somehow missed your question, because it looks like I answered about 70 plus of them, reach out to us at info at GrantStation.com, or you can go to our staff page, reach out to Jeremy directly. So Jeremy, last question. So this person says, this isn't really about the technology, but they want to know if they are struggling nonprofits, such as a school with falling enrollment, how do they present themselves in a positive light to be seen as worthy of funding? Do we have any training for that type of question? We do. A lot of that comes down to this is me putting on my multiple years of hosting webinars hat, but a lot of that comes down to understanding what your story is. What's the story of your organization? And maybe you've heard this term before. What's your elevator pitch? I mean, you are struggling school, but you are a school. Why, what is your purpose? What are you doing? What, how are you serving? How are you helping people? What is your story? How do you tell people what you do for a living kind of thing? Once you have that basic thing in place, that basic story, then you can start playing with it and say, okay, how have we helped people with our school? Who has been a successful alumni of our school? Is there anyone in the community who has gone on to bigger and better things who came from our school? Can we have them help tell a story of how the school affected them? All of this type of these ideas, this building, sort of figuring out how things branch out and connect, this bigger learning, we offer this type of training through our various webinars. We have quite a few that talk about images and branding. We actually have one coming out, which is, this is not a plant question, which is kind of where this is a perfect fit. There's one coming up called Building a Nonprofit Brand being hosted by Mindy Mueller. And it's all about what to do if you're new, what to do if you're old, how do you recycle your brand, how do you improve your brand? Because as a nonprofit, you are a brand. You are an item people see. How do you do that as a nonprofit? This is a webinar that talks exactly about how to do that. Thanks, Jeremy. And I also recommend going through that section about how to write a grant proposal. There's ideas in there to help you present yourself in the best light. And also earlier, we mentioned those examples of previous winning proposals. If you can read through some of those and try to emulate those, that will give you an idea of what funders are looking for in a successful proposal. So we do have tons of examples to help you get off on the right foot if your organization is struggling or if you're new to the grant seeking process. And otherwise, if you're still having trouble, reach out to us and we can direct you in the correct direction. Look at that. Exactly three minutes, Aretha. Thank you, guys. You guys rock. Thank you so much for being here today. And everybody will get the recording within 48 hours. Have a wonderful day, everybody. Good bye, everyone. Goodbye. Thank you.