 10 things to know about GrantStation. So what is it? For those of you who are new to GrantStation, it is a set of tools and resources that includes both US and international funder databases to help your organization write and win more grant funding. And don't worry, I don't plan on reading all these slides to you. I just wanted to highlight that because a lot of people think GrantStation, what is this? Is this a place that writes grant proposals for me? Is this a, I just don't know what this is. So to make sure we're clear, it's a bunch of resources and databases where you can seek out funders. When is it happening today and tomorrow? So it started this morning at 9 a.m. Eastern time, ends at 5 p.m. Pacific time tomorrow. So that's 8 p.m. Eastern. You can get this one-year membership for $99 to regularly $6.99 for the general retail public. Normally through TechSoup's discount program with GrantStation, it is $2.99. But for today and tomorrow, you can get it for $99. So it's a great, great deal. If you are looking to do more funder research and look for writing grant opportunities or just expanding your own skill set and capacity internally, you've got a lot of great resources. So which words can get it? Sorry, I think that came through anyway. I tried to cover my cough. I apologize. Woodjurgs can get it. 501c3 U.S. nonprofits and public libraries. Also Canadian nonprofits can get it today and tomorrow, but it's through the TechSoup Canada website. So you don't want to request it through the U.S.-based website, which is TechSoup.org. You want to go to TechSoupCanada.ca. For libraries, it is only available for you to use for your own grant writing purposes. These are not, this membership is not for your public-facing public access computers for the general public to use. So keep that in mind. If you're brand new to TechSoup, you can register today or tomorrow. As long as you complete your registration within nine days of the promotion, you can access this special offer as well. So even if you haven't started with TechSoup yet, you can get it as long as you do it within nine days. And if you are brand new as a C3 and you need seed funding and startup funding, you can access this as well. And they have a whole section that you can use to narrow your research to just look for funders that support startup funds. And if you're an existing member, you can use this to renew your membership, and it extends it based on whatever date your membership is active. So if you have your membership from September, it would give you an additional year tacked on to September. So what's inside? We'll go through some of this in detail, but I wanted to just bullet out some of the things you can find inside of your GrantStation membership. Again, U.S. and international databases of grant makers, lots of grant strategy resources, winning grant proposal samples, and letters of interest, or LOIs as we call them internally here, or in the grant writing world, strategic calendars, and lots of resources on grant trends. What kinds of grants are being won? What kinds of funding is being approved? What kinds of new collaborations are funders looking for? You can learn a lot about what's out there. This is just a look at what their website looks like, and we will show this live in just a minute, a couple of minutes. But I just wanted to highlight on the screen, you know, they have a whole section you can see in that dropdown how deep that is that you've got U.S. Charitable, U.S. Federal, U.S. State and Government, Canadian Charitable, international, that's just in how to find grant makers. And each of those sections is just as rich and deep as that Find Grant Maker section. So if you're needing to learn how to develop your grant-seeking strategy, or how to write proposals, this is a really great resource for you to check out. What kind of funders will you find? I think one of the most important things about fundraising and grant writing in general, when you're looking to find grant funds, is that you don't want to find 50,000 funders. You want to find the three, maybe, that are going to be the right ones for your organization's needs. You want to find the ones that are active, not ones that maybe gave funds to something that's related to your cause five years ago. You want to know which ones are doing it now. So keep that in mind that these are pre-screened, vetted, and active now. They're current funders. And then we also have, you know, these U.S. Federal state-funded agencies and state departments in there. You've got the full U.S. Charitable Giving Database that includes all of your private foundations, family community foundations, corporate giving programs, faith-based grant makers, associations that may have grant making programs, international database, that's for folks who are working outside the U.S. and, again, that Canadian database. Now, if you're joining us from outside the U.S. today and you're not from Canada, keep in mind that the only organizations that can request the grant station membership today and tomorrow are U.S. or Canadian. So if you're joining us from Kenya or if you're joining us from the Philippines or wherever else, grant station is really targeting organizations who are based in the U.S. or Canada. And those international funding databases are for organizations that may be based here but may have work, you know, they may have operations in El Salvador or they may have programs in Kenya, but they aren't based in those countries. So I hope that clarifies a little bit of what kind of funder you'll be able to find in grant stations databases. And I just show here a screenshot of how you can search and we'll show this in real time in just a moment, but that you can, you know, see that there are 80 results that popped up when they searched by scope U.S. and Oregon. So they searched by different geographic regions. They searched by area of interest, music, and they searched national grant-maker database. So you can narrow this scope to find as many or as few as you think is worthwhile. But again, you don't want to be wasting your energy writing grant proposals that are really written for the wrong funder. You know, if it's not a good fit for them, they're not going to give you the funds. So your best result is not going to give you probably 80 results. It's going to give you eight maybe or 15. And then you're going to further narrow that to find the ones that are really worth your investment of time and energy so that you're getting the bang for your buck and hopefully winning those grant proposals. So number six on this list, can I find grant strategy and tips? Well, big yes with the money sign because of course that's what we're hoping that you'll be able to find all of the strategy resources and tips to help you win that money that you need to further run your programs and complete your missions and achieve your missions. And they do that in a variety of different channels and methods on their site. They have a weekly grant station insider newsletter that highlights 10 interesting grant opportunities nationwide each week that comes into your inbox. So you don't even actually have to go and do a search. You can have it come into your inbox. But hey, there are these 10 interesting things and one or two of those might be the perfect fit for your organization each week. They also have a monthly grant station international insider newsletter. So again, for those of you who maybe are based in the U.S. or Canada and have programs overseas where they're going to be highlighting, I think it's 12 that they highlight each month, interesting international grant maker opportunities. They also have a huge section called build strategy where you can find a grant seeking calendar. You can find things like a decision matrix. You can find project planning worksheets resources that you can use to help define what are your project goals? What are the resources you truly need to accomplish those goals? What kind of funding and other materials or staffing or computers or whatever it might be? Do you really need to accomplish that and in what timeframe? And to really figure out what are the right funders that match you in helping you fulfill those that mission? So that section is really deep and rich and I would recommend that people check it out. And also the monthly and weekly newsletters, you can sign up for those whether or not you're a grant station member. So I would recommend whether you plan to proceed with getting a membership or not right now that you check out those newsletters because there's a lot of really interesting stuff that comes out in those. And then the last bullet down here talks about some of their other resources like their talk 2020 podcast. It's something you can listen to while you're commuting. And it's really these people who are true experts in grant writing, who've been doing it for 40, 50 years and who really not just have done it as an individual but have helped others do it, have helped organizations develop their strategies around fundraising and grant writing and listening to them talk about what's successful, what works, what kind of partnerships are kind of in right now when it comes to seeking collaborative grants. GS Insights and the state of grant seeking report are also highlighted here. And the state of grant seeking report we always highlight on the TechSoup blog as well because it's such a great resource because from a high level they're able to see based on the thousands of organizations that are using their their databases and based on the results of those grants that are written they're able to really see and evaluate what kind of grants are getting one. How long are they? When are those grant awards delivered? You know how long does it take once you've written it to hear back? They've got this great resource that they put out so that you can learn really the ins and outs of what to expect especially if you're newer to grant writing. So these are just some great resources on strategy and tips that I would recommend checking out. Number seven, do they write grants for me? And I put this as a big no because we want to make sure that people know what they're getting. They're $99. You're not getting a grant writing team that's going to come to your office and sit down and say well what do you need money for and let me write it for you. They have lots of resources to help you learn how to assemble a great grant seeking team or a grant writing team but they are not actually going to do it for you. That really takes the hard work and thought and pre-planning from your own team whether that's your executives or your board or if you have a development team or maybe you're a party of one and you have to do it all but they will help you by providing you this rich right proposals section of their site that has sample grant proposals templates and samples of letters of inquiry. Excuse me and sorry. The letters of inquiry you know that's if you aren't ready to write a full proposal but you think this one funder seems like a really great match. You can send a letter of inquiry using their template or looking at their samples to say this is the kind of work we're doing. Are you okay with us submitting a grant proposal even if maybe we aren't in the timeframe that you had listed on your website? You know they've done all of the research for you in their database so that you know what the timeframes are when they're accepting grants or you know if it's a rolling timeframe or if they're accepting them all the time so they're there to provide those resources for you on how to get started including things like checklists like what are the actual financial documents you need to have on hand what are the program details you need to have on hand the staffing requirements who's going to be leading things you know they can give you all those checklists so that you know before you sit down to start writing whether it's you or whether it's a team that you've got what you need before you begin and then this is kind of their magic sauce of how to find the right funders and I've listed this out I know it's a wordy slide but I've detailed it out because this is really what they recommend as you know a very loose strategy I'll say you know mine is the shorthand version of you know when you're pre-planning that you really sit down with their project description worksheet which is a downloadable word document that you can use for your own projects to fill that out and really define what is this project what are the goals what are the outcomes how are we going to evaluate it how are we going to measure it what are the keywords and search terms that we need in order to really find the right fit whether it's you know a local bank that might support our work or whether it's an international grant maker or whether it's the federal government what are those things so they talk about this in their process that you've got these pre-planning steps and then you start your searching and you always want to start the search looking at the federal and state databases because even if you don't find anything you can say to those other private foundations I did my due diligence and I searched and there's not a state funded thing or there's not a federal funded thing that's specific to my region or my goals or my project so now we're coming to you corporate funder or private funder or family foundation so you go through and you search and you can search as much as you want over the course of that year of your membership you can search every day if you want to and you really do want to use different keywords and use different search terminology because you may find that you know if you're searching for you know animal animal care that it will come up with different responses than if you search for animal rescue or you know I have a friend who works in you know women's health and she said if she searches for reproductive health she gets very different results than if she searches for like breast cancer or abortion like those terms you may find nothing with some of them and you may find a lot with others so just be conscientious in your pre-planning how you search then you can search through those databases and you can narrow it so that you aren't getting a list of 80 because you're not going to find 80 funders in you know a year that are going to be the perfect fit for your specific project you may find five or seven or you might want to apply for 12 or 18 but you know you want to narrow it by geography the areas of interest what type of support are you looking for you're looking for program support are you looking for general or administrative support are you looking for seed funding those are all options that you can use in their search and you can also search by target population so you can say I work with children or youth or I'm working within you know Hispanic communities or I'm working in low-income housing communities then you can use that strategy section that they have and tools like their decision matrix to really score those funders that you've gotten results on like okay these are the ones that popped up now let's see what is the likelihood that this would be successful if I spend my time writing a grant and they have a whole little matrix that you can just plop those into pretty easily and you can rank them so that you're spending your time or your grant writer's time or your board members or volunteers whoever's actually doing it so that they're spending that time on the top four not the top 18 or not starting with number 18 without realizing it when they should be focused on one two and three so and then you put pen to pad or really fingers to keyboard and start using those samples checklist and templates to write proposals and submit them so where do you get grant station for today and tomorrow we recommend getting it through TechSoup directly so you go to the TechSoup website and I've just highlighted because it is on our home page right now and you click on that get grant station now and that will take you right to the product page where you can put it in your cart request it and have that donation fulfilled once it's once you've gotten through the process and if you're brand new like I said you have to finish your registration process with within nine days of the promo closing tomorrow but if you're already a TechSoup member this should be pretty painless and then you want to look in your organization's email so it's not going to be coming to Jenny at Youth of Tomorrow it might come to info at Youth of Tomorrow or whatever that email address is that your organization uses to receive donations through TechSoup and you'll get a fulfillment email that tells you here's where to start your membership and here's what you need to log in and get started and you can go ahead and just dive in so if you're not ready today or if you're too new if you don't have 501 3c status yet you are not eligible if you are not a c3 non-profit or a public library but I would recommend signing up to their newsletters and TechSoup newsletters so we can let you know the next time we offer this special and it's also a great way to get resources and tips because we have quite a bit of content on our site and across theirs obviously it's all about grant writing where you can learn and grow your own organizational capacity for grant writing we usually have these special offers three times per year it depends a little bit and sometimes changes but we usually have a spring one one in the early fall and one in the middle of winter like january february so know that if you miss it this time you can look for it in the future and you can use those opportunities if you decided to go ahead with the membership today or tomorrow you can use those future promotional opportunities to renew so that you're only ever paying $100 a year or $99 a year so it's a great option and a really deep resource to help you learn how to be the best grant writer and your organization can hopefully win the best grants for your cause so with that I'm going to go ahead and show quickly so I just have a couple of minutes I wanted to go ahead and show oops let me here we go sorry about that let me get over to grant stations website and then I'll have Jim do his recap of the week but you can see on the grant station website you can click to find grand makers and I'll go ahead and click into this and let it take me to finding them a lot of the resources here I'll just go into the US charitable quickly a lot of the resources that you see on their site are behind their firewall essentially that you have to be a member so you have to log in or join to become a member now you can however start a search and see what kind of results you get regardless of whether you're a member you won't actually see the names of the funders but you can see like if I search that I want to look at national grant makers and I could select the state too I can scroll on down here and I can select areas of interest for example and I'll just pick health and wellness and it lets me continue to drill down and I'll say public health because I don't know why I'm just going to select that and it'll show me up at the top let's scroll back up here just in that initial search looking at US public health national grant makers who give across all states it's showing that there are 55 results in here and so you can do that to just get an idea of what kind of funders or what how what volume of funders you'll find in grant stations databases but again look at you've got US charitable US federal US state government Canadian charitable Canadian government international charitable and search tips which again those search tips and thinking about keywords and search terminology is really important in helping make sure that you're finding the ones that best fit your org needs all of these sections building strategy writing proposals you know you can get your full grant proposals and look at those you can look at the award-winning proposals that others have submitted and they have a contest every year where they invite people to submit proposals and then their committee of experts selects the ones that they think are best and these are ones that have already won grants so you know you've got a lot of great resources to start with to really help you get off on the right foot or to just grow your grant writing skills regardless of where you're at and what level you come into it from so with that I'm going to go ahead and stop sharing and I'm going to let Tim come on and take us away with some of the weekly roundup so thank you everybody back to you Jim okay everybody nice to see you Jim Lynch here senior writer TechSoup I'm the guy who is in charge of getting all our content up on our website and our TechSoup for libraries website as well I'm going to screen share here and show you some of the new stuff here we go all right is this coming in okay Becky all right here here's a great day this is actually from GrantStation itself it's a brand brand brand new article that they sent to us for sending to you and getting to you they publish twice a year a state of grant seeking report which is a pretty great thing as more and more organizations use GrantStation they have more and more interesting insights in the big picture of grant making and this is a is a sort of a summary of the grant seeking report and some cool things that I like in here are what are your chances are if you apply for two grants what are your chances of winning something if you do five grant proposals and so on so they've calculated a lot stuff in so you can see what the odds are in addition to that I like I like their their section down here at the bottom on collaborative approach to grant making that's when a bunch of or multiple organizations get together and they submit a proposal the jury's a little bit out on how effective those are but it's something that foundations tend to like and charities tend to find really difficult so anyway this is a very very good article I recommend that let me uh show you what else we have also in the area of fundraising we have this terrific um I would call him our columnist on fundraising his name is Michael Stein uh this is his latest seven practices to engage and retain donors donor retention is an incredibly important and difficult part of fundraising over half of donors go away every year and that's just kind of the nature of the beast Michael gives you some tips on what you can do to improve those odds and this is uh in and about individual donors by the way what else do we have there we go we have a brand new program called the tech soup ambassador program where we're asking really engaged people in our tech soup community to help us make soup make tech soup much much better so if you would like to be more involved with tech soup you'd like to be in the mix with us like crazy would love to have you this explains how you can do that wonderful new program from tech soup um lastly 20 days of adobe I uh feature this page quite a bit and by the way we'll get you all these links that I've made I'm showing you 20 days of adobe is now incredibly incredibly rich with all kinds of free things uh in terms of training and information and how to do things with any kind of and all kinds of different adobe products so there we go that's our roundup back to you Becky thanks Jim well that is it for this week thank you all for joining us for this week's uh Tuesday tech 30 we hope you'll join us again next week where we will be talking about hidden gems of adobe same time next Tuesday at 12 30 pacific 3 30 eastern we also have a whole spate of webinars coming up if you want the full 60 minutes we'll be talking about copywriting for the web this week and next week we'll be talking about avoiding nonprofit tech burnout so helping helping keep your energy up even if you're drowning in email and technology so we hope you'll join us for some of those and while you're in there feel free to check out some of our other t.s tech 30s and courses thanks so much everyone and have a great afternoon bye