 Hello everyone, and welcome to today's TechSoup webinar, Got Grants, Finding Funding with the Foundation Center. We're fortunate to have two guest presenters from the Foundation Center who will share their expertise about grant funding with us today. We are using ReadyTalk or our webinar platform, and you can use chat to send in your questions and comments. That will come directly to us, and we will be tracking them. We'll respond to questions at a few points throughout the webinar, so go ahead and include them there. And we will keep track of them and get back to you. If you are disconnected during the webinar, you can rejoin the webinar using the same link you received in your confirmation email. And if you're having trouble listening to the audio through your computer speakers, you can call in with the number on the bottom of your screen if you would prefer to use a phone audio connection. Now this webinar is being recorded, and it will be archived on the TechSoup.org website. You will receive a link to the archive including PowerPoint slides and links following the webinar. We will also include in that email a link to a community forum for this webinar. You can ask follow-up questions there, and continue the conversation. And if we have any unanswered questions at the end of the webinar, we'll post the answers there as well. Now if you'll be tweeting today's event, please use the hashtag pound techsoup. And so with that, we're ready to begin. Again, welcome to today's TechSoup webinar, Got Grants, Binding Funding with the Foundation Center. My name is Crystal, and I'll be facilitating today's webinar. With us we have two guests from the Foundation Center. The Foundation Center connects nonprofits and libraries to funding and philanthropic resources and has over 450 worldwide information centers. George Ford manages subscription services including the Foundation Directory online which he will tell you about in just a minute. Kim Patton is a training coordinator with the Foundation Center and creates, manages, and delivers training programs regularly. Assisting with chat we have Kevin Lowe from TechSoup. So thanks everyone for joining us today. Now today in our webinar we'll be covering two main topics, and we hope you learn a few new things about grant funding. First, George will give us a tour of the Foundation Directory online, and he'll share tips for searching for grants through this resource. He'll let you know how you can access it for free as well in addition to the subscription-based service. Next, Kim will share some training resources available on the Grants Space website, and will show you how you can learn more about finding grant funding. We'll have two times for questions and answers, so again please put your questions into the chat as they come up, and we will keep track of them. Also, I'll let you know we will be having a survey at the end of the webinar, so stay tuned for that so you can let us know what you thought of the presentation. So now I'd like to hand things over to George so he can tell you all about the Foundation Directory online. George? Hello everyone. My name is George Ford, and as Crystal mentioned, I manage our online subscription services including Foundation Directory online. The Foundation Center is an organization. We're headquartered in New York, but we have field offices in four other cities including Atlanta where Kim is joining us from. We are the leading source of information about philanthropy, and our mission is to strengthen the social sector by advancing knowledge about philanthropy in the U.S. and around the world. I'll be speaking to you today about Foundation Directory online, an online searchable database of over 100,000 U.S. grant makers, including private foundations, community foundations, as well as corporate giving. The database also includes over 2.8 million grants that currently date back to 2003. There are databases to search companies that sponsor foundations as well as corporate giving programs, and a keyword searchable 990 database. The first thing we'll look at actually is Power Search, which is a federated search that allows you to search 9 different databases at once. We'll take a look at a couple of other features including interactive maps and charts, and some other features of the FDO profile. In terms of creating a strategy for using Foundation Directory online, we really base it around the idea of looking for a match based on areas of interest, geographic areas, type of support, and finding funders that have supported organizations like yours using the grants database. With that, I'll go ahead and show you the Foundation Directory online application. You should be seeing that now. This is the welcome screen when you log in to Foundation Directory online. I'll just state briefly up front about getting access to Foundation Directory online, although we'll talk a little bit more at the end. Basically, this is a subscription product. You can subscribe to it monthly or annually, but we really want to stress that it's also something that's available free for use at a large network of not only our own Foundation Center library learning centers, but also a large network of over 450 cooperating collections. You can get access to this even if you're not a subscriber at this professional level, which is the highest plan level. With FDO professional, there are several ways to get started searching. What we're looking at now is the power search screen. You can see you can search by grandmakers, companies, grants, 990s, our database of news, jobs, requests for proposals, as well as Foundation-sponsored research reports, and our library catalog of nonprofit literature. In addition, you can go straight to one of these four other tabs at the top and begin searching just that database, grandmakers, companies, grants, or 990s to create a very targeted search for specifically what you're looking for. But first, I thought I would introduce this by taking you through an example of how to use power search, and the example I'll use is for a literacy or reading program. To start with maybe is a couple of variations of keywords. We're going to look for either literacy or reading, and then after we get some results, then we'll take a look at how to continue to refine them. I've used the Boolean operator OR and capitalized it to show that we're going to be looking for any results that include either one of these words. They don't necessarily have to include both. You could also use as well as not or near to using those Boolean operators to customize your search, but I'm going to do literacy or reading. Running that search, that's returned over 81,000 total results. Well, what are those results? I can take a look at this preview window in the center results list, and what you get is a preview of the first five results from each database. Also, as a sort of thumbnail, I can just add a glance that I've gotten over 1,500 grandmakers, 29,000 grants, et cetera, 990s news, RFPs. And if I want to see the full set of all of these, I can just click through to see all of those. But if I want to refine this a little more, I can either start a new search or I can search within results to create a narrower, maybe more targeted set of results. And let's say I'm interested specifically in research on literacy programs. If I just use research as another keyword and just add that to over 50,000, and with some confidence I can say these results are all going to have to do with research on literacy or related topics. If we took a look at the grandmakers that came back with this, I can see there's going to be 488 of them. They're listed alphabetically by default. Resort them. And the last thing I want to point out here is that, and I can broaden my search back out again by deleting any one of these. So you're reading keyword results and get rid of the research part of it. I can just delete that. And now I'll be looking at a larger set of grandmakers that includes these search criteria. Most people using Foundation Directory online really begins and ends with the search grantmaker screen that we're looking at now. This is again, it's that database of over 100,000 grandmakers. And you can use a combination of different search criteria to customize your search. And we generally get started with three of these fields in particular, although they're all useful. Most commonly people will start with a field of interest, possibly a type of support, and then a grantmaker geographic focus. You could also search by where your grantmakers, where certain grantmakers are located to find those who are in your state. But we usually recommend that we start using geographic focus to find out where they're interested in giving rather than necessarily where they're located. And I'm looking for, I'm running some kind of programs that work with poverty or people who are economically disadvantaged, and I'm looking for a specific type of support. The way I would create this search, I have geographic focus open, so I'll just go ahead and start there. I'm going to select Illinois, and you can see the search term is automatically added. And then I'm also going to say national as well. That way I'm making sure to capture grantmakers that while they might not specifically state Illinois, if they give nationally, there's at least a good chance that they wouldn't exclude Illinois from their grantmaking. Next I'll go back up to fields of interest. I believe the heart of a lot of what's in Foundation Directory Online is this taxonomy. These are based on the NTEE, which is the National Taxonomy of Exempt Entities. And then we have some supplemental codes that we've added and edited over time. So of interest as well as population groups, and in this case based on sort of these use cases of an organization that works in poverty, I'm going to select the term economically disadvantaged to specify that this is the audience that I work with. There is a term under poverty, but it's actually a poverty, sort of a poverty studies term that relates a little more to academic type of research. So that doesn't really fit what I'm looking for as much as this broad population group term economically disadvantaged. The next thing I'm going to do is add a type of support. My organization runs programs for the economically disadvantaged, but I'm not looking specifically for program support. I want to look for general operating support. That's what I'm in particular searching for this time. So I'll choose types of support and then scroll down to general operating support and select that. Types of support, there's actually a full list of what they all are and their definitions. Basically there's two types of, there's two kinds of types of support. One would be what the grant is intended for specifically, and general operating support is a good example of that as is program development, capital campaigns, that sort of thing. The other kind of type of support would be what form the grant takes. So you can choose in kind giving as a type of support or donated equipment or donated land. That's the form that the award takes rather than what it's intended for. So both of those are included in the type of support category. I'll point out, these are all the search terms I'm going to use now, but I want to point out a few of the other search fields. As I mentioned earlier, you can be very specific about where, if you want to look for grant makers in a really specific location, you can choose metro area, congressional district zip code as well as state, county, and city. You can also just look for a specific foundation in this grant maker name index. Obviously you can type your search term directly into these search fields. We usually recommend people go ahead and use the indexes, especially where spelling or punctuation is a concern where you don't know if they spell out the word street or use the abbreviation, for example. So the index is helpful for that reason. We have an index of trustees, officers, and donors. So you can find a match with somebody who perhaps if somebody on your board knows somebody on the board of another organization, you can use this search field to find those sorts of connections. And lastly, type of grant maker, if you want to, you can specifically look at community foundations, foundations and giving programs, as well as grant making public charities or independent foundations, results by total giving, and then go ahead and see what I get back for this search that I constructed. I've got 153 here, 100 at a time. And again, I can always re-sort these results by total assets alphabetically or by city. Before we tools and features, you can see I've selected all of these results. I can also select certain results and then print and save those full records to PDF, print and save just this list of records also to PDF, export it to a spreadsheet which will include these categories as well as several other categories from the foundation profile or I can save the search, create a name for it and save it, and then after I do that I can always go to this MyFDO area and see all of my saved searches. What I'm going to do from here actually is be a little more specific in what I'm looking for. So I want to take a look at this list of search facets on the left to see how I can continue refining my results without having to go back to the main search screen. And if I look at, you know, I can choose a particular grant and total giving. I can look just at those that state that they accept unsolicited applications. But what I'm going to do is go ahead and look at just these 50 foundations from my results list that are located in Illinois, which is the Chicago Community Trust. And now I'm going to take just a couple of minutes and show you the way you can learn from a Foundation Directory online grantmaker profile. The Chicago Community Trust, in this case you have at a glance information including contact information, a URL, basic financial data, and here links to all of their 990s, in this case dating back to 2002. Using these links on the left-hand side I can go to much more detailed information. If I want to go right to their program areas and learn more about what sort of giving they do, here I can start to see how good a match this is for the search terms that I selected. And scrolling down a little bit I'll see there's a couple of program areas in particular, one around hunger, one around poverty, their other housing is another. So learn more about program areas they have that would likely support the audience that I selected of economically disadvantaged. Scrolling down further, I just want to point out a couple of things. One is search terms that I chose are highlighted in red here so I can see why any given result was part of my results list. And then scrolling down further still, in this case on their executive committee I can see who's there as well as many of the, a lot of these individuals have which is another way to find, to sort of make connections between your organization and these grantmakers. Their application information, their board meeting dates, and a couple more things in this area just to take a look at. There are a lot of ways of looking at the grants that this particular foundation has made. You can search the grants or see a full list of them, but what I'm going to share really quick is just math. Not surprisingly, since it's a community foundation in Chicago, the bulk of their grantmaking is in Illinois. If I click Illinois, I can take a look at the distribution of that giving, but I can also switch that due to city, zip code, or congressional districts. And then if I continue clicking through from here, I'll see a list of results and then I can take a look at a grant record. So you can do that with a map. You can also do that with a chart that's based on recipient type or grant subject. And you can see a lot of other information about this foundation including news, including how to connect with them on social media. There's a lot of Facebook feed for them and a link to their Twitter feed. But most pertinent information you'll have is right here on this main profile information tab. The last thing I want to point out about grantmaker profiles is you can of course email these to colleagues or print and save them. You can also create a poll to make sure that if there's new information to this profile, if this grantmaker has made new grants that we've indexed, you'll get an email alerting you to that. They've released their annual report, their new 990, whatever it is, you'll get an email saying that the Chicago Community Trust has this or that. Look at the other databases that you can search. Now as I mentioned, search grantmakers is the most commonly used of those. That's where you're really looking for the funders that sit in. But you can also do a few other things. Here you can search companies. These are the profiles of for-profit companies that have either a giving program or a company-sponsored foundation. So you can search by what type of business it is or by where they're located. I mentioned earlier of course the search 990s database. You can go by keyword and just search across the scanned PDF documents, the actual IRS tax filings. And then for search grants, I'll do another search example here just to show you how this works. Search grant is useful for finding funders that fund organizations like yours, either organizations located where you're located or that do a similar sort of work. So the example I can give is similar to the one taking off from the example of search grant makers if I want to look for funders that have funded other organizations in Chicago that work with the economically disadvantaged. Here I can say maybe the Chicago metropolitan area, the sort of greater Chicago area. And then choose economically disadvantaged grants first. I'll sort by year author. And what I get back from this search is 22,000 grants. But if I want to start to make sense of this information quickly, I can just take a look at this list of grant maker names over here which is sorted by the number of grants each has given. So at a glance right here I have the top 10 foundations that fund organizations working in with the economically disadvantaged in Chicago. And I can keep clicking through and seeing more and more of them. And if I want to see just for example city foundations grants in this area, I'll just select them. And now I'm looking at all the city foundation grants to Chicago area organizations for the economically disadvantaged. So right there I can see whose funding, what amount of funding are they getting to organizations similar to mine. Our overview of using Foundation Directory online, what you can learn in a foundation profile. We use a couple of the different search databases. Subscribe at foundationcenter.org slash FDO. There are five different plan levels. They're available monthly, annual, two year subscriptions. And for larger organizations like universities we offer site-wide, what we call institution-wide access. And there are a variety of different subscription rates depending on what selections, single or multi-user, monthly or annual, etc. But I'll let you guys explore that on your own at that website. And I really do again want to stress that free access is available at our foundation center libraries in New York, Atlanta, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, and San Francisco, as well as at our network of cooperating collections which are nationwide. And actually we have a couple outside of the U.S. as well. And I think that Kim might be showing you where to find where those are located in a minute. So you can always go to one of those locations and use Foundation Directory online. That's my time for the first part of our presentation. So I think we're going to break for a few minutes of questions. Yeah, thank you, George. That was a really helpful overview I think to see how powerful the search tools are in the Foundation Directory online. And what you just said about there being free access locations, especially throughout the United States, but also internationally, we did have a question come through about that asking about a map. And I think Kim might talk about this a little bit as well. But I just wanted everyone to know that the links that were on the last slide will be included in the follow-up email that will also include an archived recording of this. So if this went at a pace that was a little bit too fast to follow, we'll have that archived and you can watch and pause so you can actually compare it to what you're doing on your screen and take a little bit more time with that overview. So we did have actually one or two questions though that we wanted to see if you could answer. You mentioned that you can create alerts for specific searches or also that you can email specific records or searches to other people. And for those things, do you need to be a subscriber in order to access those results? You do not need to be a subscriber to email a record. In fact, that's actually pretty useful if you are using it at a library because you can just email it to yourself to save you having to print something out or save something to a flash drive which I know some libraries aren't fond of people using flash drives. So you can definitely email a record to yourself or to colleagues regardless of where you're using it. The email alerts on the other hand where you create an alert to be sent to you, you do have to be a subscriber to use that feature. The MyFDO area where you store your saved searches and where you manage your alerts, that's a subscriber-only feature and it sort of has to be because if you're setting that kind of thing up within the library setting, it's too complicated with a lot of general users coming in and using those features. So that is a subscriber-only feature. I believe that MyFDO is the only subscriber-only feature. I think you can take advantage of everything else using it in the library. Great, that's fantastic. Thank you. And then also earlier on you were talking about the fields of interest and I think also the different subjects and as you can narrow down by those different topics. And the one you used as an example was economically disadvantaged. And you said that that's different from poverty because they refer to two different kind of directions or different perspectives of how you look at those topics. So as a user, how do you know the difference between economically disadvantaged and poverty? Is there a description that you can read of those topics? There is, and actually I can show that real quick. Actually that example, I may have been going a little quickly, the example was poverty studies. So in that case it would be actually pretty clear that that was a term more useful for like an academic research kind of context. But I'm just going to really quickly go back to sharing the application just because I want to show where this is. Help section, there's a list right here, a PDF that has all of the fields of interest, the grant subject terms, and the recipient types. So right here from this link you'll get a full list. It's several pages long. It just lists all of them out in their broader categories that they fit into. So that you always have access to that as you're using FDO to kind of help guide you through that a little bit. Great, and then someone was also asking, so can they print those indexes as well? And is that easy to do? How does it download for example? You can print that PDF that I was just showing. I think it would be sort of difficult to print out of that search menu index in the application itself. I mean I guess you could try to copy paste out of it, but they're really too long. I recommend just keeping a copy of that PDF as you're using FDO so you can refer to it. Great, and I see we might be having a few more questions coming in. I think Kim is actually going to talk about this again. How do you search for access points? So I think I'm just going to ask Kim to try and address that one through the grant space site because we are getting questions about how to actually search for access points for Foundation Directory online. And if you have any other questions that come up, go ahead and add those into the chat and we will either try to address them at the end of the webinar or we will post the answers in the community forum because at this point I think we do need to move on to hear about the grant space website and the training resources that are available. So I'm going to hand things over to Kim who will tell us about those things. Kim? Thank you so much, Crystal. I am going to bring up our website, Grantspace.org so that you all can see it. I think you all should be able to see it now. My name again is Kim Patton and I'm the training coordinator here in the D.C. office and I just wanted to sort of pick up where my colleague in New York left off. I like these webinars because he's in New York and I'm in D.C. So the question is, what do you do with all of that information that you can easily get from Foundation Directory online? We have a lot of things available for you free of charge at Grantspace.org that I'm going to be going over with you really quickly. If you see at the top here you can see where it says Join and so that just means that it's sort of like a Facebook community in that way where you can network with people who are members of Grantspace in a social kind of way. You can post questions and people in the Grantspace community can respond to your questions. I'll show you some examples of that as we go along. So if you want to join, you can join and then you can log in and have chats with people in your network that way, but you don't have to. So it's free of charge that just gives you an opportunity to open up your networks a little bit. So picking up where George left off, you can do searches on Grantspace.org by subject, skill, classroom, and tools. I'll go through each one of those quickly. Subject is just where you can find all of the available resources that we have, books, podcasts, interviews, requests for proposals, which is a way that some foundations put out that they're looking for grant proposals. It's not like the government grant process where they have to put out requests for proposals. Foundations typically don't because they don't have to ask you for proposals. They get them all the time. But sometimes when they have initiatives, special initiatives, and they want to put it out there so people will know about them, they will put out requests for proposals. There's several ways you can find out about them, but if you go to the subjects area, you can just search based on whatever particular subject you work in. You can also go to more subjects here and pull up a variety of other different subjects. But for now, I'm going to go to Human Services just to give you an example of what you can find there. And there's a lot on here. So you see there is a conversation that we're having with Daniel Stid, who is reporting from a recent report called The View from the Clifft. Governmental funded nonprofits are looking out on the steep cuts and uncertain futures. So we're really talking about what that report is all about as it relates to Human Services. We also have a chat with Jim King on collaborations which is a very important aspect of looking for money. Certainly in this competitive environment people are looking for partnerships and collaborations that can give them a little more bang for their buck in terms of what funders are looking to fund. So a grant is an investment as I always say. So they want to have a high rate of return on their investment which is what you can give them in terms of your impact and outcome. So collaborations is really a hot topic these days. But back to requests for proposals. Right here where you see the RFP section is where we list requests for proposals in a specific subject area. So you can click on those links and find out where there is funding opportunities in your specific subject area. So I like that a lot. You can also look for jobs and things like that on the side. Also, forum where you see forum here is where people have posted different questions. So when I talked earlier about joining the Foundation Center Grant Space family, this is some questions that people have posted like what can nonprofits learn from the for-profit world or do you have any good ideas on free accounting software? So if you click on that you can find various responses that people have posted in regard to that. There is also news related to your specific subject area and where you can get answers. So these are some of our frequently asked questions as it relates to your specific subject area. So in the area of human services, for example, there is a question about where can I find information about funding for individuals with disabilities. So we have that. There also I want to point out that we have these digital guides. So basically it's the information that we pull from Grant Space. I mean, I'm sorry, from Foundation Directory online that George just told you, but we put them in volumes or books related to your specific subject area. So that way we just pull all of the grant opportunities based on your subject area into one volume. And they are really inexpensive but they are digital now so you don't have to carry around the big books that we used to have. And you can just click on there and just download that for $39.95. This one deals with homelessness and the other one deals with housing for example. So those are some things there. We also have facts and figures on things related to housing and human services in general. So for example, you could get the top 50 U.S. Foundations awarding grants for mental health or grants for human services. So we just make all of that stuff readily available for you and most of it is free. Also here you were asking how to access more information about Foundation Directory online. We usually have a link to it on almost every page because one thing that people are most interested in is finding support for their nonprofits so you can just click on here and find out subscription rates and all that kind of thing. I also like here that we have tweets that funders have put out about different resources and studies and initiatives. And so it's good to really just keep an eye on that particularly as it relates to your subject area to find out what are on the minds of funders. So that's what you can do by subject. Skill is where you can look based on a specific skill set. So fundraising, planning, finding funders, developing proposals, managing nonprofits. And if you click on more skills it will give you a whole list of skills over here on the side that you can click on related to running your nonprofit and fundraising and things of that nature. So if we click on finding funders for example that will also give you more information on what George was talking about. Also if you want, we have webinars recorded, webinars as well. So if you want a little slower paced version of what George had to go through rather quickly, you can just click on here. It's one of our webinars called Introduction to Finding Funders and it goes into a little bit more detail about how to use Foundation Directory online and you can just either do it live or watch a recorded version of that. We also have some great live chats, how to contact grant makers and get results, applications not accepted, how to get on their radar. A lot of times you will pull up results that say only giving to preselected organizations or organizations that have been invited to apply. And so that can be kind of frustrating. So this can tell you how to get on their radar. You can also rule them out through the database. There is a button that you can push that says accepting applications or not and so you can only look at the ones that are or the ones that aren't accepting. We have them in there because it's important in terms of building relationships with those funders and there are ways that you can do that. So I think that's really a good thing to take a look at. Also just going down a little further, fundraising planning is a really important aspect of fundraising. I have read over some of you all's discussion topics, things that were on your mind that you row in to Crystal when you were registering for this webinar. One of them was how to diversify your fundraising vehicles, how to get more resources from different sources. So this is where you can find out all that information. We have a good class, a free class called Introduction to Fundraising Planning that I just taught this morning here in the D.C. Office for Free. You can also do a live webinar for that or watch a recorded version of that as well. We have lots of books that we publish ourselves or that you can get out of any of our libraries or other funding resource centers where you can go to use the database for free. We also have a core collection of our books and so a really good book for that is Securing Your Organization's Future, a guide to, a complete guide to fundraising strategies. And it goes into each of the various funding streams. So it would be individuals, corporations, foundations, government support, as well as earned income. And by the way of all those sources, individuals is the biggest category, believe it or not, of where the money comes from to support nonprofit organizations, specifically private sources. And earned income is very high as well. So the breakdown of that is about 52% of funding comes from earned income for nonprofit organizations, about 31% from government grants and fees for goods and services, and about 13% from private contributions which come from corporations, individuals, and foundations. So the biggest category is going to be earned income or individuals. And so this book sort of goes into detail about those various categories and how to develop strategies in each of those areas. Also, relationship building is a very big part of fundraising. In this book, After the Grant, The Nonprofit's Guide to Good Stewardship gives you some good information on that. I talked a little bit about collaboration and the importance of that earlier. And so this is a podcast, actually a chat that you can take a look at called, Can Collaborative Fundraising Work for You? So it's a good way to think about fundraising too in terms of programming as well as fundraising, partnering, and collaboration is a good approach. We actually just developed a new class on that called Understanding Collaborations because it is so important. So that's Fundraising Planning, Developing Proposals. So once you have a fundraising plan and you've done your research, you know who you're going to go to now where you sit down and write your proposal. So we have a whole section on proposal writing here. I particularly like this interview it's a live interview of a panel of people from a community foundation, Ford Foundation, the Tiger Foundation, and the American Express Foundation talking about what are potential red flags when you are reviewing proposals. And I often like to see things from the grant makers point of view because having been on both sides myself as both a grant maker and a grant seeker for many, many years before I started training, it's quite eye-opening to get a perspective from the grant maker's point of view. And we can't always do that because grant makers are hard to reach sometimes. So I think this gives you an opportunity to get an insight into what they are looking for. What else? Books that we have on that are grant seekers' guides to winning proposals. That's one of our books as well. What I like about it is it's a collection of grant proposals that have won the grants. We went to our funders and said, give us an example of a proposal you really liked. And they gave us one. And so these were the ones that were successful. And what I like most about it is it gives the funders comments about what they liked about the proposal. So if you're looking for some good examples and you want to know like how do they get the grant, this is a good book to take a look at. Also the Foundation Center's Guide to Proposal Writing is an excellent sort of how-to-step-by-step approach to how to write a grant proposal. Here are some other frequently asked questions related to that. So how do I find grants for my nonprofit? How do I write a grant proposal? Where can I find information on corporate giving, for example? So those are some of our frequently asked questions under that topic. My favorite part of this is the samples. You can either get it through those books or you can get them right here, Samples Documents. There actually are a lot of the samples that are in the books that we talked about plus many more. You can either click on it and get the link to it here or you can look over here and get samples of all of these other things too. It covers letters, letters of inquiry, proposals, budgets, so all kinds of good stuff you can get here, samples and examples of proposals. Skipping over to Classroom really quickly, this will give you a list of our courses. We offer a variety of different courses in a variety of different subject areas from fundraising planning to proposal writing to cultivating grantmaker relationships to what to do after you've gotten the grant which deals with the idea of stewardship. So lots of things here. Our training calendar, if you click on it, will give you our live in-person classes, our free classes as well as our fee-based classes. This is for all of us from New York, D.C., San Francisco, and Cleveland. If you just want one of the particular offices, you can just click on one of these. So if you're going to be in any of the areas particularly Washington, D.C., you can click on here and see what classes we have offering so you can come and say hello to me. I also want to point out where you can find the live webinars. So if you click on this, this will give you our live webinar calendar for the next three months, September, October, and November. We always have them up here. All of these are free. You can click on any of these classes, a lot of them that I talked about already, and get a link to them and have a live presenter at that time. Sometimes I teach them too. So if you recognize my voice, do say hello to me. I do those webinars as well, some of them. Also, the last category I want to point out is the Tools category. So Knowledge Base is one of my favorite areas here. If you click on that, you can get our top 15 most frequently asked questions. So you might want to go through that list. How do I approach a foundation and build a successful grant-seaf-under-relationship is a good one. How to start a nonprofit, if you're thinking about doing that yourself. How do I learn about researching and cultivating individual donors? So lots of good stuff that you can just click on there. And then you can just type in anything you want here and find answers to that. So for example, if I put in consultants in there, I can get some good information on consultants. We get asked that question a lot too. So how to hire consultants, how to find a consultant, do I need a consultant, paying a fundraiser, and even how to become one yourself. So you can do there just a keyword search on anything that you think that you might want to know, how to develop a case statement, all that good stuff. Last but not least, because I do want to save time for questions, the Find Us link takes you to a map of where you can find our resources, both our books as well as the database that George was telling you about. And so you just go to Tools on Grantspace.org, Find Us, and then just type in your zip code. It's that simple. I am going to type in mine, and you just do a search. And it will bring up the locations that are closest to you. And then you can just click on the link. It will tell you even how far it is away from you. So I'm going to click on the one here in Northern Virginia, and it will give you their hours of operation, their address, their phone number, and their website. So you can just go in and tell them that you are interested in the Foundation Center resources, and they will direct you to them. I am going to put up my contact information so that you can have my email address. Feel free to email me if you have any questions that you want to ask me directly. It's totally fine. My email is there. And for all the informational resources that I just showed you, you can go to Grantspace.org. So I am going to turn things back over to Crystal and see if you all have any specific questions that you want me to answer. All right. Well, thank you, Kim. And that was a great overview of all of the free training resources you have and informational resources. And also it's great to know that you have some books available and those face-to-face training. Sometimes it's just really nice if you are in an area where you can do a face-to-face training that can be a really nice benefit as well. So thank you for sharing those. And we do have just a couple of questions that either you or George may be able to answer. And I do just want to let everybody know to stay on the line as well. We've got these questions and we'll also do a little survey at the end. So hopefully you stay on the line for that. So one person asked if you could clarify what the difference is between the Foundation Center and the Foundation Directory online. And of course now we've also added in Grantspace. So how do these all fit together? And what specifically has the separate fee for access? I know it's so much there. So Foundation Center, we are just a resource center for grant seekers and grant makers as well. And so we have a lot of in-person and online resources that are available. All of our resources are available for free as well as for purchase. So the database is just one of the things that we offer as a resource to help grant seekers. Some people have referred to us as match.com. Because we hook grant seekers up with grant makers through our database. I hope George doesn't mind that sleazy little analogy. But that's what people have said to me. And I think that that's true. So that's just one of our resources that help people find grants. And then the books that we publish you can get through our libraries or you can purchase. So a lot of our resources are just part of what we do. Grantspace actually just came about. It's a recent upgrade that we did to our website. Our old website as you can see from my email address was foundationcenter.org. It still exists. But when you've been around as long as we've been, people have said, oh it's just so much there. I can't really find it. I love all the stuff you have. But I mean you get kind of buried in it. So we developed Grantspace to kind of pull all of the information that we have at foundationcenter.org in a more user-friendly way. That's why you see it so clearly delineated now by subject and skills and classroom and tools so that people could easily find stuff. So almost everything is really free even though some people want the convenience of being able to have a subscription to FDO. So a lot of that information is free also. So I hope that answered your question. Absolutely. Thank you. And it's also great to know that public libraries not only have the Foundation Directory online, some of them have that, but also having the print collection as well as a nice resource to take advantage of if there's a center in your area. So thank you. So then there was another question related to this. What is the difference between free access and the special membership? And so I think George maybe mentioned that earlier. I don't know Kim if you want to take this now or if we should defer to George on this. But what is the main difference between free access and the membership? George, you want me to answer it or you? No, I can answer it. Basically they are very much the same except as I mentioned earlier if you're using Foundation Directory online in our library or one of the cooperating collections there's just a couple of tools that are hidden that you can't use. So saving searches to go back to later as well as the email alerts for different funders aren't available to you because it's not your own subscription with your own login. Other than that, the one that's freely available in libraries is Foundation Directory Online Professional which is the highest level. If you subscribe there's five different plan levels you can choose from and they all have different amounts of content. And one of the links that you guys are going to get after this is a link to sort of a comparison chart that has all the different plan levels. So that can all be kind of cleared up for you when you take a look at that. And I just want to add since I get that question a lot too, people think you have to be a member of the Foundation Center because to access the database online you have to have a username and password. So a lot of people get confused so I think it was a great question. They think you have to be a member but you actually don't have to be a member at all. It's only to access it online anytime, anywhere you want and so you're really paying for the convenience of it. But if not you can come into any of our offices at any time. Here in D.C. we're open to 10 to 5 Monday through Friday, 8 o'clock on Tuesdays and so you never need a reservation or an appointment or anything like that. You can just follow into any of the locations and tell them you want to use the database and there will be a library resource person there that can help you. Great. Well that's a fantastic resource to have available. And to know that there are so many locations and you can use that zip code search in order to find one close to you. So one quick question about Grant Space, is there an alert feature on Grant Space to find out when new content is added? You know we don't add, wouldn't that be nice? I think I'm going to have to take that to our suggestion bank. No, there's not. And I was going to say we don't add information to that but we do actually on a pretty consistent basis. So no, unfortunately there's not only when you're looking for grants do we have that alert feature. But I think that I'm going to take that back to the powers that be. It's a good idea actually. But in the meantime you just have to go and poke around and see what you can find on there. Great. Great. Well I have one last question I think that we have time for. And that is somebody wrote in that they have started a new nonprofit that are in the process of applying for a 501c3 and they're wondering if you have any suggestions for when you're in the infancy phase and seeking funding. Oh I do. I have a class. You can also take it as a webinar too by the way. Call before you seek a grant, a checklist for new nonprofits. It first kind of sets out how you start a nonprofit but probably most importantly it talks about what you need to have in place as you're seeking money from foundations. So it gives you some things to work toward. But as a brand new nonprofit the two things that I would say is one you have to have your 501c3 first because foundations only give grants to people who are legally qualified as a nonprofit so they always ask for your letter of determination. So you have to have that first before you seek funding from foundations and corporations. However you can seek money from individuals before you have your 501c3 because they are under no legal responsibility. They can give money to whoever they want to give it to. And once you get your 501c3 status it's retroactive for 27 months. So within that 27 month period you can let them know that you've gotten your 501c3 and then they can get a tax deduction. But prior to that they cannot. And then George was talking about the type of support that you can look for once you have your 501c3 seed money is startup money for new nonprofits. And you can do a specific search and the database under type of support that identifies seed money. So that's where I would start and I would definitely recommend that you take the class before you seek a grant. Great. Well I think those are a great bit of advice to leave us with today. I'm afraid we are out of time. And if we did not get to your question we will post an answer in the community forum and you'll get a link to that as well as to the archive of this presentation and an email which should come sometime in the next day or so in the next 24 hours. And I just want to say thank you to George and Kim for sharing all of your expertise with us today. It is really a wonderful resource that the Foundation Center offers and it's great to know a little bit more about it. In just a minute we will be asking you to take a brief survey. So please stay on the line if you are available and you don't have to run off to another meeting. And just to remind you TechSoup is a 501c3 nonprofit organization that serves other nonprofits and libraries by providing technology and technology resources. So if you would like to find out more about that or explore what TechSoup has to offer please visit TechSoup.org. And there you can learn about product donations, read the TechSoup blog, and have a conversation with other nonprofits in the community forum pages. Just would like to say thank you to ReadyTalked, our webinar sponsor today. And thank you again to our guests for sharing what they know about grants and grant funding, and to Kevin who has been on the line with chat from TechSoup and the rest of the TechSoup staff who worked in the background to make these webinars happen. So at this point now I just would like to ask you to take a minute to complete a brief survey about your webinar experience. It should pop up as soon as the meeting has ended. Thank you all and have a great day.