 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Porter, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the commission's weekly webinar series where we cover a variety of topics that may be of interest to libraries. We broadcast the show live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. Central Time. But if you're unable to join us on Wednesdays, that's fine. We do record the show as we are doing today. And it is then posted to our archives for you to watch later at your convenience. And I will show you at the end of today's show where you can access all of our show archives. Both the live show and the recordings are free and open to anyone for anyone to watch. So please do share with your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, anyone you think might be interested in any of the topics we have on Encompass Live. For those of you not from Nebraska, the Nebraska Library Commission is the state agency for libraries. So similar to your state library. So we provide services and training and resources and grants and databases and all sorts of things to all types of libraries in the state. So you'll find shows on Encompass Live for all types of libraries. Public, academic, K-12, museums, archives, corrections, historical societies. Really, it's anything and everything. Really, our only criteria is that something to do with libraries. We have guest speakers that come on the show sometimes from across Nebraska, across the country. We also sometimes library commission staff do presentations. And today we have sort of a mixture of that, I would say. We have a guest speaker coming joining us today, who is a former library commission employee. Yeah, joining us back. So, Catherine Brockmire, good morning, Catherine. Yes, good morning, Krista. Good to be here. Yeah. Since I did an Encompass Live presentation, I've been there, done that. Yeah, yeah. So I was really glad to have you come on and do this. Grants are a big thing that we're always pushing out to our libraries and providing them as best as we can. And I know a lot of people are very nervous about how to do it, how to do it successfully. And so I'm glad that you are here with your expertise and knowledge to tell us how to do that. So I'm going to hand it over to you to take it away. Great. Thank you. And you can see my screen. Is that right, Krista? Yep. When I proceed to the next screen, just let me know I did a good job. Well, welcome everyone. It's so great to see so many Nebraska libraries here. It's my understanding that we have various types of libraries and we have some out of state libraries. And so that's fabulous. So glad you're here today. Glad that you could find Nebraska's Library Commissions Encompass Live. It's a fabulous platform and come back again soon for future ones as well. So if you could please write in the chat what kind of library you're with, because when you registered, we did get some email addresses. And so we did get some .edu's. We got some others. But also when you write in the chat, please also mention whether or not you would be applying for if you're a city agency, if you're an education school agency, if you would be applying on behalf of any kind of PTO or friends circle. So go ahead and put that in the chat and Krista is going to monitor that. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, share with us where you're from, what you're doing, what your grant, you know, how your grant process might work. So we'll use that in a little bit along the way and I will stop periodically and ask for questions and please don't be shy. We can also take more questions at the end. And you can also contact me privately at Catherine.Brockfire at gmail.com with follow up questions as well. I'm happy to connect with you. All right, let's keep moving. So typically when I do a workshop, I give a pre and post survey because that's my background in survey research and methodology. So I want you to think a little bit before this session about how confident are you in your ability to prepare to write a grant. And I'm going to take some moments here and spend a bulk of my time talking about the process of preparing to write a grant. And then also I will give you some examples of what goes into a grant application. I'm going to move through them quite quickly because there's a lot of verbiage in each slide. But it's my understanding is this right, Krista, that these slides will be available to them at a later point that they can go back and refer to me. Yes, I should mention that. Yeah. Yeah. Catherine, if you send me your slides, yeah, but you'll post them up along with the show recording. Yes. So, so definitely do don't try and scribble down everything you see on the slides. You don't have to worry about that. Take your own notes if you want to highlight some things, but you will have the full slide deck available to you later. And yes, and someone's just commenting about the questions section is where you want to type in. Yes, questions box. Yes. Yes, thank you. Thank you. Well, thank you so much for coming. We're going to move slowly through the first startup phase. And then I'm going to again move quickly through some of those slides that you can refer to at a later date. A lot of it I have gathered information online. You can search by keyword into Google and then I would do dot org or dot. Gov for as we're all librarians, we know what's best to search for online and the most reliable sources for information. Dot coms will give you information. But then if you want to access a resource, sometimes you have to pay a fee to play. So, so the objectives today are basically to get you thinking about how to write a grant. And I do I have had the opportunity to provide this to grassroots organizations. And so I don't know how much time we'll have here to connect with other community leaders and write a need statement or connect with other community leaders. For example, but we're going to look at some of your needs and I will probably try to generate a need statement, a goal, an objective and an outcome for you so that you have an idea of what my thought process is. So here's my grant consultation roadmap. And I'll zoom in on each section. I just want you to know that when I work with clients, I don't know that they are prepared to spend the amount of time on the back end of work. There's a lot of back in the work that goes before you actually log into a portal and complete a grant application. Knowing that steps one and two are really, really important because they provide you with narratives that you can use over and over again supporting documentation that you can use over and over again. So the preparation to get to step three, which is the fun part for me, the grant, I'm sorry, step four, the grant writing process, which is the fun part for me. So steps one and two, you get together your information. Step three, you look for matches and then step four is when you start the grant writing. So step one is igniting your passion. This is where you look at your funding goals and you share information with each other. You mobilize and you get a really good understanding of the funding needs that you have and start to formulate some of the things that I'm going to talk about in a little while in terms of goal statements, objectives and outcomes, etc. So to really get started, it's really important to have your administration on board and for them to understand in their budget if they were to have this income where their money would go. So the research that's involved is looking at your landscape around you and that is in order to demonstrate need. This is outside of your organization. So this is it can also be a need that's happening in your community that's happening in your users, etc. And what it's really important to do is for the need statement, your impact statement, your goal statement to be able to demonstrate and show the funder what you're worth and why they should fund you. The grant seeking comes next, actually. So you really need to have a clear idea of what you're seeking funding for. So the igniting the passion and the research is really important to come up with all of that information ahead of time to make sure that you are a match with the funder's goals. The grant writing itself is tedious and can be onerous or onerous. And it's really good to crowd crowdsource that and have individuals work on different sections that know the different sections best. Typically, I use a working document that is available in the cloud so that individuals can go in and edit various aspects and then upload to a grant portal or a grant form. It varies by funder what kind of application format of the application that you fill out. And so having all of that already first during your ignite passion step and having all of that ready to go so that you can copy and paste and then check with word limit character limit, etc. That is all ready to go. Don't forget this step realization and review. So if you get the funding, you will probably have to submit an evaluation report. And so it's really important when you go back into the grant writing and we'll talk about this in a minute is the evaluation plan. So you need to be prepared to have somebody who's going to write your evaluation report at the end. They don't just write you a check in and hope that you do your best. They want you to be good stewards of your funds. And so it's really important that you have somebody on board that can write your evaluation and your reports for you. Also, if you don't get funded, it's okay to contact the grants officer or whoever reviewed your application to learn a little bit about why you weren't successful. This is a really good learning experience for you and most of them are really happy to share with you why you didn't score well, or perhaps they say you actually weren't a fit with what they were saying. And then you can go back and look at what their goals were and decide here I thought I was a match and I just didn't fit with what their priorities were, etc. And so it is important to close the loop so that you can go for the next grant. Speaking of funder match, there are various types of grant providers, types of proposals, their fields of interest, their geographic interests, their current priorities, the amount of funding and also it's really good to look at their recent grants. Oftentimes, who they gave to recently in a short description of who they gave to. So we're going to look at a little bit of these sorts of things because it's just really important for you to capitalize on what little time you may have to find the right funder to apply for so that you're not spinning your wheels or wasting your time. So the types of proposals that they are looking for are for startup programs or projects, emergency funds, capital campaigns, which is basically bricks and mortar equipment. So if you have a STEM programming, are you needing a 3D printer, etc. If you're going to provide conferences and seminars, basically that would be to pay the seminar presenter and perhaps the design of the curriculum and the amount of printing materials that you would need rental for the space. General operating support is administration, basically. So some funders aren't so keen on funding for general operating expenses that's basically like them writing a blank check for you to do lots of things that you need to do to prepare. And so it's really important to look at whether or not they fund for general operating support. Also, it's important to keep track of your in kind gifts and their worth. So volunteer hours, number of volunteers, the number of hours that they put in. If you're receiving in kind donations, what their worth is and the kinds of donations that you're receiving. Another type of proposal that's not listed on here is capacity building. And capacity building is helping your organization grow. So if you wanted to conduct strategic planning, for example, or a community needs assessment, for example, or you want to create a new position, that would be considered capacity building. And so you can also look for those. Does anyone have any questions so far? If you have an example of what you're looking for, go ahead and put it in the chat. And then I think that Chris is going to monitor those and we'll get to those in a second. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, if anybody does any questions about this or any grants you're thinking of applying for or projects you think you might do for a grant, you can put that in there. I think this is actually really important. I know we give out grants here at the library commission, as you know, Catherine over the years. And I think that the first thing that unfortunately we end up sometimes having to deny is because they applied for something that's not eligible for that particular grant. And so very important to read the information for the grant you're applying for to make sure it covers the thing you need to do. We have grant here at the library commission, our library improvement grants which are funded by federal funded money, Library Service Technology Act money from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. And it has some strict ish requirements of what you can and can't use it for. And capital campaigns are just like construction and adding new, you know, building a new library or adding a wing or something around big renovations. You can't do things like that with it. And so we've had to, you know, tell them, you're going to have to find something else to do with the money or maybe this isn't the grant for you. So definitely important to pay attention to the type of grant you're applying for. We do have some people answering your questions at the beginning about what kind of library they're from. Go ahead and throw those out there for me just a little bit. So the first one we have is someone is us as they are from Public Library in Wisconsin and they're not confident at all in doing this so good that they're here. Okay, great to have you. Yeah, and then we have a Public Library director here from our Beaver City Public Library here in Nebraska, who does does have experience. They're currently preparing to apply for a T mobile small community grant to upgrade their computers. They applied for a small grant from Random House to provide books for their Christmas child project locally. And they did in the past get one of those crates Bennett grants that we had here in Nebraska for a Kodak photo kiosk in their library. I remember that one. We had here in Nebraska, there was a grant that was for library specifically with the population served to 3000 or less. And unfortunately, a couple of years ago it wrapped up because it gave away all of its money. And after about 10 years it finally everything was given away, but did some great work for our small libraries. And then we have one more our Lyman Public Library. She says I'm as far from you guys as you can get while still in Nebraska. I've never written a grant so thank you for this. So we've got some a whole mixture of experienced people and newbies I guess we'll say. Yeah, that's great. Thank you so much for for attending today from coming from all across the country or regions. And one of the things that we want to talk about and I'm not sure if it's on the next slide or not so I'm not going to advance it. But a lot of times they will give to libraries and museums. So typically those are governmental agencies. And so they will give to those. Sometimes they only give to nonprofit organization. So if you are partnering with the nonprofit organization, they would be the primary applicant. And so we can talk about that a little bit you would be able to help them write the grant. They would receive the funding disperse the funding, etc. But it is a it is really a great opportunity for libraries and museums. It's typically another category and we'll get to that in just a second. So these are some of the organization categories when you're doing your grant research that they say they will fund health services. And also keep in mind that that means health equity, health equity is improving your well being the well being of the people that you are serving. So it's not just giving dental care free shots or anything like that. It's also helping people with financial literacy, etc. So you can almost also put the under health into services or human services. Fine and performing arts. If you are bringing in a speaker or a performer, etc. If you're looking at applying to your local arts council or humanities council, etc. They are looking for fine and performing arts opportunities. Civic a lot of libraries offer, you know, civic engagement programming and religious is an organization. Some of them will will provide your religious organizations and some of them won't educational. If you're a dot you might look at the educational organization categories. Scientific may not apply as much because you're not going to do research. Sports or recreation. Let's say that you're bringing everybody together for a mobility exercise or you're doing books and movement, etc. For for a kid's book club or a story hour, etc. That might apply. So here are all the fields of interest that you might look that funders say they will apply. On the right hand column and down the right. There are a lot of there's a lot of listings for youth, elderly women, men, families at risk minorities and low income. So what's really, really important is that when you're going back to your need statement that you understand the demographics of the people that you are serving. You can get that from census data. If you're looking at free and reduced lunches, you can get that information. Census data is really very helpful. For smaller libraries you may have to go with a community survey that's a five year projection. And that's okay because they don't gather all the information except for the 10 year census every every 10 years. But you can still gather information on the population that you choose to serve. The population that you already serve it depends on whether or not you gather that data when they sign up for a library card. Or if you conduct some sort of needs assessment and you ask people to respond to a survey and then you do ask demographics questions at that time. You would just say that on your survey these are used for reporting purposes only and would be aggregated with similar responses. Just so they know they're not being single out based off of their responses. So you would just aggregate the demographic information together so that the funder understands that here's who responded to my survey. In general, you know, 15% of the population or 15% of the respondents were Hispanic, for example, or if you can kind of capture that in another way just be creative. So this is really important. The other considerations are what their current priorities are. You might find something that says children and families, but then when you get in the weeds you're going to see no they only want prenatal care. They only want to fund prenatal care. So you're not a good fit for that. Another consideration is how much they're going to fund typically for first time applicants and your first grants it's really good to get some small wins. So it's really important to go for $5,000 grants $2,000 grants $10,000 grants. If you're a first time applicant for a larger grant or even for a smaller grant, it made the who view to approach the funder either they have a grants officer or contact person and just explain what you're looking for in funding and if you're a good match. That is well worth your while because you're not cold calling them just by submitting an application out of the blue you're on the radar. And also it it also prevents you from wasting your time with a complicated grant application. If you're truly not actually a fit, if they say, actually we don't fund libraries, even though it says so, you know, etc. Or we don't provide funding for operational expenses, even though on their website it does say they would fund some operational expenses, for example. Another great thing to do is to go to the foundation's website. Typically they will say what their recent grants awarded were, and oftentimes they give a description of what the kind of grant it was. So if it does say to hire a program director, you're in the right place. If it says to start a program, you're in the right place. If it says capital improvement to renovate an office or office space, you're in the right place. If it says for technology upgrades, you're in the right space, etc. Another thing that you can do and I'll get down to this in a little bit is to actually go into their tax filing. You can go into their 990. Hopefully at the very end, if you scroll down, you will find out who they have awarded for. And sometimes in the second column, they will say what kind of support it was. So it'll say general operating support, program support, etc. So there's quite a bit of homework to do. Just keep that in mind. Oh my goodness. So when I did a training, I learned all the parts of the grant application. Not all of these are required in every grant application. Some of them are simpler, especially hopefully for the smaller grants. Which, like I said, is a good place to get your feet wet. But if you can project some of these and anticipate some of these by preparing these sections, then a lot of it is what I call boilerplate. So you have a narrative. You can basically copy and paste it into their application and then cater it and edit it to match their priorities. So for example, in the narrative, you would say in alignment with your priority to serve children in need or children in poverty, we do this, that, and the other. So it is important in your narratives to go ahead and go back and look at the funder's goals and priorities. Now here's where I'm going to skip through quite a little bit. A letter of inquiry is oftentimes just an introduction of your organization to a foundation. It's very brief. It is typically just one page. Oftentimes you write it up, save it as PDF and email it. Sometimes it's just an online form. And then basically, if they kind of like you, they'll nimble and they'll give back to you and invite you to submit a full proposal, which is where the real work begins. But a lot of times here's the information that goes into a letter of inquiry. Please do know that there are some funders that you will find in your 990, your 990s of them, or as they say on their website, read carefully. The fine print, sometimes they say we're not accepting applications at this time, but if you believe you would like to share your information with us, we're happy to hear from you. So read the fine print very carefully whether or not they're accepting applications. But if you really think that this is a relationship, especially a local relationship, that you think you could build with them over time and ask them to partner with you, et cetera. This is where either a phone call to the program officer or submitting the letter of inquiry is really worth your time. Sometimes there's a cover letter. This is where you introduce your organization, assure the funder that the project has the support of your board of directors or your advisory board. Be specific, state what you're funding, what you're asking for and how much and for what. Not all of these, not all applications require a cover letter. So the abstract executive summary, sometimes I write that last. Sometimes if I look at the application in advance and I see all of the details that they're asking for and all the complexity of the application. Sometimes I go in and summarize all of those and write my narratives and then I'm able to write my abstract and executive summary. I do want to know, want you to know grant writers are turning to chat GPT. And there are pros and cons to using chat GPT. But if you would like to put in some details, there's a word limit length, but then you tell chat GPT to summarize this in so many words. Let's say you have a word limit of 500 words or a word, a character limit of 2000 characters, etc. They might be able to whittle it down. What you get is, you know, it's basically like what you get is what you put in. And so sometimes it's not catered to what you really need. And so you really need to look at it and modify it. Be sure you don't just copy and paste it. Make sure that it's accurate and that you can put in specific examples if you need to. So I think the grant providers are telling you to use it or is that just something that's in the grant consulting world. Some of us are turning to chat GPT. And it's, it's awesome for individuals who are not grant writers. You can ask, you can give what your program is, for example, and say what are some outcomes that would be achieved for children with disabilities, for example. And so they, they call the web. And so you just have to be really careful. It's called, what's that called? Garbage in garbage out. Right. So be careful and then be careful with your results and really look at them carefully and go in copy and paste and wordsmith to your best of your ability. Yeah, don't just take it as is. Definitely read it and, you know, put a human on top of whatever you've gathered to make it. Yeah, before you actually use it. Another thing with chat GPT is you can after you get your results, you can put things like be persuasive or write this in it from a personal tone, for example. So the introduction is to help establish your credibility as a grant applicant. So this talks about the history of your organization. If it's a nonprofit, what your, what date was your tax determination? So basically how long you've been in business and what sorts of things have you achieved? So it's just really, really important for them to see that, for example, that your city trusts you to provide library services that your patrons appreciate you, etc. And so you might want, you can go longer than a sentence. Yes, definitely. I would go up to two paragraphs. Oftentimes this section is pretty short in most applications. Part of the introduction is then, oh, let me go back for a second. So the introduction is if you have a mission statement, if you've done strategic planning and you have a mission and a vision and goals. Some of that can actually just go into the introduction. But let's look at the next slide here real quickly. Yes, yes. So mission and vision and values would go into your introduction, actually. So this is what really grabs their attention. They know that you know who you are. They know that you understand who you are and that you've thought long and hard about it, etc. So if you have a tagline, etc., on your website, use that and expand upon it. Okay, now we'll go to the organizational background, actually. It's a brief overview of the organization. Again, you can include your mission or purpose, who benefits from your work, how many employees you have. If you're looking for program, if you're looking for a program director, for example, or you're trying to create a new position. This is where part of it is where you would say that right now where this person is not being funded, we don't have a position right now. This is being absorbed by other employees right now. So that's where you would put in your organizational background. If you're looking to bring in an author tour presenter or something to that effect, just say, you know, we have people that provide story hours and that sort of thing. And then, well, a lot of the times they'll ask for a some kind of organizational chart. Okay, so here's, here is a really sticky wicket and I want you to keep me on time, Christia, Christa, but the problem statement is not, we need to hire a program director. The need problem statement is we are at capacity and our current employees are unable to dedicate the time or we want to hire somebody who specializes in X, Y, and Z, and we don't have that right now. Or in our community here is a need. So I worked with a capital improvement grant that they didn't have a handicap access accessible elevator or restrooms. So you don't say our patrons need handicap access. You talk about people in general what they benefit from or why it's difficult for them to access public buildings or access buildings that don't have handicap access or handicap accessible elevators, etc. So you talk in general about the problem and need statement in your environment. If your organization has gone through a SWOT analysis, you can definitely look at that. That is strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Outside the environment is the opportunities and threats and threats are where you would find your need problem statement. Also, strengths and weaknesses, you might be able to gather some of that information from your weaknesses. So the need statement is actually, for example, I'm working with an organization right now that serves the homeless veterans. And so basically it's not, you know, we need to serve the homeless veterans. It is homeless veterans suffer from this, this, this and this. So they have a hard time holding a job, etc. And then if you are interested in providing financial literacy, that's where this will come up in just a little bit. The need statement again, put in facts and stories. Can anybody provide a real quick example of what they see as a need in their community that the library specifically would be able to address. Yeah, definitely. Chris, if you can think of a few things, I mean, I mean, you provide, you receive LSTA money, you provide funding to libraries for technology, is that right? Or communications, is that right? So with either the library improvement grant or our youth grants for excellence, if it's something you've sent focused, could both be used for technology, such as computers, networking equipment. We have other funding for that. Sure. So what you would look for is some research on why people without computers are in deficit, for example. Why people in small towns that don't have wireless wireless or computer internet services, you know, they're without internet services, aren't enough coffee shops or they can't afford computers and they can't afford internet access, etc. So it's real general. It's just real general. Did you have anybody chime in? There was actually, I didn't have a question that came up. Well, there was one library said they're applying to upgrade their computers. So definitely talking about, yeah. Yeah, definitely. I just know about getting new shelving in their library. Absolutely. That would be more of a capital campaign kind of application. And that would have to do with navigability. So maybe you want your shelving to be you want more shelving that is more accessible at a lower level for children who are shorter or for people with disabilities that can't reach that high. For example, or you want to or you want to widen your aisles so that people in wheelchairs can get through or people who have mobility issues. So you want you want to get new shelving that better organizes your books so that you can use less fewer shelves and that widen your aisles. And I think this place is going to be doing something about that with accessibility because they actually expanded on it and said the mine were hand built probably in the 1960s and are in pretty sad shape. They definitely probably need. Absolutely. You can talk a little bit about atmosphere and welcoming atmosphere and if things are outdated, you might be able to get some impressions from some of your patrons that say, so what do you think about our library do you think it looks up to date and savvy or do you think it looks outdated. You would get some impressions from your from your library users. And they specifically want to know I think they said would an improvement grant get me new shelving I assume you talking about the library improvement grants we do here at the library commission. And I would have to say it depends. And if you right now, our grants for 2024 through the Nebraska Library Commission, this is just for Nebraska libraries, they've closed because they're being awarded right now the funding my funding to send out now. But in the fall, we'll open them up again for the 2025 specifically for library improvement grants when it comes to construction. If they are free standing shelves, meaning they're not like built into the walls, then yes, you could use our library improvement grant to get them that is one of the restrictions on LSTA funding is it can't be actually with permanently affixed to the library. If it's something that's like a temporary thing that you as a librarian can like screw in a tent, you know, screw in your own bookcase, you know, but if you're buying something that is free standing, or having something built that's free standing, then yes. Otherwise, if you have this more permanent, we just create other instruction type. So it would depend on what your situation is. Yeah. Right. And that's kind of when talking to a grant program or a funding officer is a good idea because they might say well you can apply for a capital improvement grant but it doesn't it doesn't address you can't use furniture, for example. The other thing I want to because we're running short on time it's already 1043 I can't believe this. Another thing I want you to think about with write a need statement. This is your sob story. This is it. This is your sob story. This is where people are struggling and or are falling behind or etc. So this is where your sob story is also it's a really important to address urgency. So if it's if it's an application that they put out quarterly, you know, then, then, you know, you're waiting three, three months to hit the next deadline, etc. If they're just in time grants, which means they're rolling application and that or they're rolling application and you can apply at any time. You might talk about the urgency of the needs for your funding or the urgency of the needs of the people in your community. So, so think about that too. Okay, so project description and methods again this is back end work. It's not, you know, we want to we want to bring in an author for an author tour. It is, you know, what is the vision of our organization what is the mission of our organization what are our goals. So our goal is to introduce children to the love of reading through the presence of an author on an author tour. Etc. So it's not we want to hire. We want to bring in an author for an author tour. It is more than that. And you can look through these a little bit your project description and methods. Also consider your inputs in your outputs. So how much time you're putting into it how much money or you would be putting into it, whether it's grant funded or not. And then your outputs are numbers basically. So the goal statement that I just addressed is broad general intangible and sometimes abstract. That's more of an impact statement, but a goal, a goal can be broad. So like I just said, we want to ignite kids passion for reading by bringing in an author who is going to talk about their writing process or something to that effect. There are really good keywords to use decrease, deliver, develop, establish, improve, increase, produce and provide. Those are great words. You'll get this all in the in the in the handouts. So don't be taking furious notes here. So an objective is smart. And it depends on the grant application and how complex it is. But if they're going to ask for objectives, it's your steps toward accomplishing a goal. And they should be smart, smart objectives. You can Google this. There are so many resources out there on how to write a smart objective, even write smart objectives grant writing for public libraries, for example, and they may come up with some specific. Some someone may be saying, here's how you write a smart objective, or here's what you might actually get some libraries and grant applications that have been posted and you can see what they wrote. But they're specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and time. So outcome statements are kind of touchy feely outputs are really easy. We had this many people attend, we are planning for 100 people to attend this informational session, or we plan for 10 people to go through our financial literacy program, etc. So those are numbers, those are outputs and outcome statement. Remember the question I asked you at the beginning of our presentation, how confident you feel in your ability to prepare to write a grant. That is a knowledge skill or ability and confidence questions are really, really important. And if you do a pre survey, which is what you administer before the intervention, you would ask them that they need to attach their name possibly. And then after the intervention you give a post survey that says now that you've participated in this, how confident are you. So there's some, there is some navigating Excel and running some analysis and reporting, etc. But if you're providing a financial literacy program, or if you install new computers, you could, you know, walk around the computer lab and just ask people for their general impressions. Have you noticed that we have new computers, how has that helped you, etc. And, and that should, that should help you out with outcomes. The evaluation plan, this is needed for more complex grants. For your evaluation plan, always in your narrative, you should always write, we will adhere to any reporting requirements of your foundation of the funder. You should always, always write that we will adhere to any of the evaluation requirements or reporting requirements of your organization or of your foundation. It's really important for them to know that you are doing what's that you are monitoring what you're doing. Is there money being used wisely. Are you being successful. What are your lessons learned. For your evaluation plan. You would write quite a bit of information, especially if you're going for a larger grant. So here's all the different kinds of what you can write into an evaluation plan. You know what you're going to have to understand how much you can handle. So if you just need to keep it simple, based off of the manpower, the woman power or the person power that you have, keep it simple. Grants are really, really important. Sometimes they want your operational budget, so your annual budget, and then they also want a project budget. And so, if you're looking at hiring someone, you need to put that you need to put, you know, the, in a way that that's operational funding, but it's programming funding so it's dedicated to your one program. So the budget, at least here we need to know for some of our grants is a match required. So do you have the budget to handle your part of the match or the grant project is this much. You need to have 25% as a match. Where is that money coming from. Exactly. And one other really important thing to do, and if they don't specify on the website, I would contact the grant officer is whether they allow in kind match. You can go and Google, I'm sorry, I don't remember the website, but find out how much volunteer hours volunteer amount per hour is worth. So you can search by Nebraska you can search by Wisconsin in Nebraska I think I don't remember it's $18 an hour. So if you have people that are providing 100 hours worth of free free assistance, that is worth how much. And so that's considered in kind. If you are receiving books, how much are they worth. You can look at fair market value and just estimate, for example, if people are donating equipment or etc. Then you would estimate how much that is worth and put that is in kind match. Another thing with budgets is they're going to want to know how much you might want to know line item rat breakout of what they're funding. So if you're asking for a $10,000 grant, you may have to break it down by personnel would be $5,000 equipment would be $2,000. Let's say that you're doing a maker space or something to that effect. They may ask you to break it out just by them alone. But sometimes in the grant narrative, you just say we're requesting $10,000 for this, this and this are matches for other things or in addition to those things. How am I doing on time. I've got about 10 minutes, but I will say we don't get cut off right at the top of the hour at 11 o'clock. Our show is officially an hour long. Yes. But if we still need to get through slides, we will make sure everything that Catherine has to present to us this year. And if anyone has questions, we'll make sure we get to them. I did have some people that type some things in here. Where's the one here for it. Well, here's a question about something that was included, which I'll mention now in case, because I know if you all who are attendees in the audience have only a lot of an hour and need to take off right at 11. That's fine. We're recording the whole show. You can always watch the rest of it later. But I want to grab this question while the before we do get that hit that time. They want to know, is it helpful to include photos of the equipment you're going to purchase or the area you want to update. Great question. Sometimes they allow additional uploads. And so basically you would create like a flyer or something to that effect with some information. Just saying, for example, if you've got your space right now and it's in a sad state of disrepair, take a picture of it. If you're looking for, it doesn't have to be the exact furniture that you're hoping to purchase, but if you are budgeting for a certain amount, you might actually put some photos of what you hope to put in. It's, you can also write letters to support those individuals could include photos at the bottom of their letter because you would just save it as PDF and upload it. Sometimes when I write a letter of intent, if it has a two page limit, instead of a one page limit, sometimes at the end, I will write a put in a little photo with a caption. So if it's a success story, or it's a child in a wheelchair that's able to reach, you know, those reaching up to grab a book, or it's kids with special needs in your story hour, you might want to get the backs of their heads, etc. But yes, pictures tell a thousand words. Sometimes they do allow you to upload attachments. And so that's where a flyer would go or before and after picture would go without reaching out to the grants administrator whoever's offering it saying if I want to send more information like here at the library Christian we have an online application form for our grants. We don't ask for anything else as attachments, but if you do want to send something yes you'd email it to whichever one of us here is in charge of that particular grant is different people in charge so I mean I know for ours we would definitely appreciate if you do have like here is the here are the particular shelves shelving we want to purchase from cornhusker state industries and link to it or. Or here is our Amazon wish list of the things that would be part of this maker space we're doing. But in there in there what's really important then sorry to interject but then what's really important is to go in and look at the reviews and copy and paste people's satisfaction with the with what they received. So I wouldn't just insert the pictures I would also explain the pictures it with a caption, etc. Yeah, so definitely yes. Anything extra you can attach is definitely helpful. Just figure out the best allowed if it's allowed read read the instructions very carefully. If they say do not send letters of support then don't send a letter of support. Yeah. Okay. Um, so I thought this was updated. Yeah, I'll remove this slide the funding search resources. What slide is that 31. This is old school. These are print guides back when they were available in libraries and you had to be really creative and how you cold through them. So these actually are not updated I will remove that slide. So the funding search resources candid foundation directory. And if I were to put stars behind it I would give it four stars out of four stars or five stars out of five stars. But if I were to do what you look at with restaurants on Yelp. I would give it $5 signs. So it's very, very, very, very pricey and most small organizations are not going to be able to afford it. And what it is though is that at one point in time the University of Nebraska link and offered it as a database and as long as you had a community user card. You could go in and access the database and do all everything that it had with the bells and whistles they had the premier subscription, etc. And that sort of thing. So right here it does say find us and I do believe that it does show where in your state, you might be able to access it. And a lot of times it's by IP address, so you actually have to go to the physical location where with the computer that accesses it through the IP address. A lot of times you can't remote in. I think you know used to also have it University of Nebraska Omaha, but I think if you go to find us, you might be able to find where there would be free access to it. If you're interested in looking at the price points and all of that good stuff, the link is there, you can just go ahead and look at it. The next one, which I have moved to as a grant consultant is instrumental without the a instrumental TL. And I think similar to Foundation Directory, it has a lot you can do project management. You can move things from researching to plan to applying, etc. And then you can filter. You can do deadlines. It'll give you alerts for when things are due. You can go in and say how much you were awarded. You can leave notes for yourself, etc. So it is more a funder friendly. So I think it would be maybe three dollar signs. I'm not sure. And but I still would give it five stars because it is just as agile as a candidate or Foundation Directory. Okay, what I did is I went in and asked for the 14 day free trial. What they want to do is sit down with you. They're going to want to sit down with you for an hour, introduce you to instrumental, etc. They're trying to sell it. But to be able to get the free trial, you do that. You don't get all the bells and whistles. So you can look at grants that are available. You can start projects, etc. But you can't download Excel spreadsheet. You can't download PDFs, etc. But you can search for some grant leads. And that's a 14 day free subscription. Here's a backend that a lot of grant consultants do. They hear about a foundation and I referred to this earlier. You found a foundation. You found some foundations that you're interested in that you've heard of. You go in and look at their 990. First of all, you scroll down a ways and make sure that the checkbox is not marked. This says we do not fund applications from nonprofits that we haven't already pre-selected. And then you scroll all the way to the bottom and hopefully they're going to have a nice little table. And they're going to show who they funded, the amount, and maybe even details of what kind of grant that they have that they funded. And I guess you a really good idea of what how much to request because sometimes you'll see a grant range. You'll see, you know, they gave $5,000 to libraries. This is old school. This is what I did when I was looking for helping libraries hire interns in their libraries. I found a grant application. I found a funder and I went down and I saw that they had actually funded some libraries. And so that was a big hit for me. And then I saw how much they had funded them at. So I only asked for $10,000 as opposed to $40,000 because the other libraries had received $10,000. So I was modest in my request and it was proof. I think that's a good tip. Look and see what else these organizations have funded. Both to see have they done libraries before so that they are, you know, accepting of you. And to get, if they give a description of what the grant was, get an idea. I'm like, if you're not sure, you know, I want to get money for something, but you don't even know what your project is yet. But you want to find someone that helps libraries, do you want to do something that you can get, see what kind of things these organizations have approved. So you can see what they are really looking for possibly by seeing what they've actually funded. Another fun thing that I've done is if you have community organizations that are doing great things, you might go to them. And if they're playing nice with their funders, they're going to advertise who's giving them support. So it actually might not just be nonprofit organizations or foundations and also might be local businesses or corporations. And they will say we are supported by so and so. So then you can go to those direct websites and have a lead that way. So I am working with a client that is looking for human services funding. So I went to some of their competition in town and I went in and was able to see who they had received, who some of their support came from. And then I went to those funders and looked at the grants that they offer. So and also if libraries play really nice with each other, okay. So if you know of a library, talk with your state agency that did a successful capital improvement grant. They built a new library, they did capital improvement. You might reach out to them and ask them a lot of questions and they even share their applications with you because they're done competing for funding. They've won their awards, they're done with their project, etc. So when I did a capital improvement grant, I found out about a couple of libraries in Nebraska that had already completed their projects that had won their money, etc. And they shared their applications with me. They're happy to help. They want you to succeed. Absolutely. We here at the library, we have a grants database that all of any grants we give out are put in there. So you can see what we've, who we funded and for generally the project description is like a sentence or two. So not an in depth like here's their whole project just, you know, summary, but at least you get an idea of what it was for. And then yeah, definitely contact them and say, hey, how did you do this? Can we, yeah. Here are some more links and they're not hot links, just so you know. So they're here though, Grantsmanship Center, Council on Foundations. I just discovered CauseIQ. They do offer by state foundations in the state that provide funding, but then you have to do a lot of legwork. And they also do more metro areas. So some foundations will only provide grants in Lincoln. Some foundations will only provide grants to counties in western Nebraska or somebody will provide in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, or even the entire county. So if you're not just looking to, you know, supply services to people just from Milwaukee, but you're hoping to bring in people that you haven't expanded to into the county that Milwaukee is in. Go ahead and apply to them because you're going to show them that you are expanding your programming and widening your geography, geographic grant writing support. So I love the University of Kansas Community Toolbox. It's amazing. They have one section on just applying for grants, but they are so much more. They talk about community needs assessments, which is probably one of the first steps you might want to look at to demonstrating need. So go ahead and dig through all of that, but they do offer some specific tips and tricks for applying for grants. The Grantsmanship Center, they offer a book that you could that you could order. There's also grant writing for dummies. Nothing wrong with that one either. But they do offer a page on getting the grant 101, but you can also look through to see what else they offer. Candid Foundation does offer some things. A lot of it's pay to play. You have to have your subscription. But if you go to their topics, some of them are free webinars, free tools, just look to see whether you have to have the subscription or not. They have upcoming webinars that you can attend. A lot of them are just introductory. Well worth your time. Management Library. I love Management Library. They may not necessarily talk about grant writing, but if you go into their strategic planning, they talk about writing goals, vision, mission. They may even get to some details about writing objectives and outcomes and program goals, et cetera. So that is also well worth your time. The first one is the new interface. The second one is the old interface and I'm old school. So I go to the one slash index dot HTML because I know how to use it. Okay, here we are at the end. We're about six minutes over. So that's not a problem. Okay, I did want to provide my email address. I am about empowering. I worked especially with small and burgeoning nonprofits. And I'm all about empowering them. So I usually meet with somebody for an hour just to kind of get to know them and what their fundraising goals are, et cetera. And that sort of thing. So while I'm a paid consultant, I have a soft spot in my heart for libraries. And so if you want to send me having worked at the Nebraska Library Commission and having worked at Hastings Public Library here in Nebraska. So I do have a soft spot in my heart for libraries. And so if you have some directed questions, you would like you would like specificity or clarification on something that I provided to you today. Just shoot me an email, very responsive within one to two business days. I'm happy to get back to you. Great. And so, yeah, there's a summary, there's a summary here. And then here's your post session survey. After this session, how confident are you in your ability to prepare to write a grant? Yeah, go ahead. Just question section again to see what you think now. And if you do have any other questions you want to ask of Catherine right now while we have her here, definitely type that into the questions section of your go to webinar interface. So let's see if anything new comes in. Well, you mentioned some of the resources and I'm going to show something here in our library commission website once I see if any other comments come in. So how confident are you now in doing a composing a grant? Go ahead and let us know in the questions. So we're going to pull the presenter control to my screen while we're waiting to see if anybody has anything. So if you do want to share with how you're feeling right now or any questions you want to ask Catherine, definitely do so. And because I want to show you all there are you seeing my screen now the end comes live website Catherine. All right. I'm going to pop over to this tab which is our main library commission website. I maintain a website of about grants and this is on our website this fly out menu which is for grants funding and E rate. And you can see I talked about the funding recipients database you can search here for any of the different grants we've done and see who's received them libraries in Nebraska. And what they with the grant was our library commission related grants that we have as I said right now ours for 2024 are closed because we're giving them money out now but look in the fall. But then down here grant opportunities for Nebraska libraries I share this link to people all the time because there are things that we don't cover here like I said like full on construction projects. We don't have any funding for that. Or if we don't have enough of a budget that's another thing I was going to mention the beginning when you're talking Catherine about figuring out asking why you didn't get a grant. Sometimes it's the budget limitations of the grant, the amount of money the grant organization has like you're the library commission, our budgets, we never can fund everything that gets submitted to us even if they're all great applications. We just say no and strictly the only wasn't a bad grant application. It was a funding application, a funding restriction on our side. We only get so much money from the federal government and so much money from the state for our grants. And sometimes that is the only decision making as well. We couldn't fund everybody because we ran out of money. Another thing, Krista, that you might mention is that sometimes you can partially fund, right? We do, yes. So I was in a letter of interest and they wanted to know how much you were going for and we said $20,000 and they got back to us and they said, okay, this part of your budget, ask for $10,000. So ask for $10,000 for salaries, example. And so we kind of have an idea that we're going to be partially funded and that's a great start. Yeah, and we do offer partial grant funding for everything. Well, except for internship grants, those are a flat. You either get $500 or $1,000 just to pay salary of an intern. But all of our other grants we do do partial. So sometimes we have learned that if you get part of your fund of your project funded by something like the state of Nebraska, then other grant issuing organizations are more willing to give you money as well because they see, oh, if the state of Nebraska thinks this is a worthwhile or the project, we should probably look more closely at this one and maybe help them get the rest of the money they need. We had definitely had that connection help. And then I do want to mention that I can't speak for the Nebraska Library Association, but as a nonprofit, they may be more eligible to apply for some funding as opposed to government organizations. So you might reach out to the president. Maybe if you or if you talk with your regional library, the regional library systems, they are nonprofits as well. And if you can come together with several libraries in your library system, you might, I can't speak for them, but they may actually apply for a grant on your behalf knowing that they will funnel the money out to you. And we do have someone who did comment. I was just looking at the questions here. I'm much more confident than I was an hour ago. That's for sure. That's great to hear. That is great to hear. Again, I'm all about empowering. So as a grant consultant, if you want to send me a question, like, okay, how do I write an objective statement for this one thing? So I can get you started and give you an idea of here's what your objective statement would look like. Please just reach out to me. I'd love to hear from you. Definitely. So this grant opportunities page that I maintain, it has, as you can see, our library commission grants, but I do list other opportunities for you as well. And I do, you will see things come appear and remove from this page when certain things that have a deadline has passed, I take them off. So you may have seen something on here like a month ago that's no longer there. It's because the deadline passed. So I take it off. But the ones I do keep listed up here permanently, although here's one I've got, I've got some I've got updating. There are some that are like accepted and reviewed throughout the year Humanities, Nebraska. Deadlines vary from the Nebraska Arts Center. Some of these are open year round as Catherine was saying or done. Could you put the link in the messages? Could you put the link in the chat? Yeah. See here. There's some reason I can't see everybody. Why can't I? Oh, maybe because I'm a presenter. Yeah, it's a little different for presenters. If you can send me that link in an email, that'd be fabulous. Yeah. So it's our, it's our website, Nebraska nlc.nebraska.gov slash grants. We'll get you here. I don't see Z pretty short. But you see some of these are quarterly and they have certain dates. Some of these have to update for the 2024 year. Throughout the year throughout the year. So these kind of things I will keep there and I'll update as things change. So there's lots of really like here's when coming up. The Pilgrim Foundation does children's books to rural public libraries. April 1st are coming up with a deadline for their first half of the year. And I'll definitely look into that if you need books for your rural public library. And then I do have resources down here as well. Not as many as you had in years as well. But the Nebraska Children and Families Foundation has a foundation research resource directory so that something libraries could use. I use Grant Station a lot, which you mentioned, which I love. It's there is things that you every time you get an email from that will promote hey sign up for us pay for it. But there's a free weekly newsletter letter of grant opportunities as well. So I use that a lot to keep an eye on things. And then there's a specific library grants blog type thing that is posted things every now and then as well that you can use. So, and this is just your grant opportunities from Nebraska libraries, but it's just a website anyone can go and look and see these you know some of these are obviously Nebraska centric, a lot of these here, but some are not. And there's someone mentioned the T mobile hometown grants this is an ongoing program. We have had libraries get those as well. All right, and what I'm going to do also after this session is done and the recording is available. I will be adding link to it to my grant page here maybe with the resources or something, so that people have this as a quick link. So does anybody have any other questions I don't see anything new that came in. So I think since we're getting a little after almost 1115 here we will wrap things up for today's show. Thank you so much for being here Catherine this is great I'm so glad we were able to get you on the show to talk about this. It was just so happy I'm so happy to be back. Thank you for having me. Absolutely it's good to see you again yeah. And grants you know it's one of the big things I do here at the commission so it's near and dear to my heart. I love giving away money, but it's not my money, my personal money. So anything we can do to help libraries get more funding, happy to do it. So just be tenacious everybody just be tenacious and be courageous be courageous. And you know, sometimes I call myself a terrier. So I bite the ankle and I don't let go even if they're trying to shake me off. You know do not get up give up do not be discouraged. Just keep on keeping on. And think outside the box you'll notice that you might see some things here are that come up that you wouldn't have thought of. But you've got to look for things like 501 C threes your library foundation or your friends you can apply for things things that are for government entities if your library is a government department in your city. Municipality, you fall under that, you know, think beyond don't just look for things that say library in them. All right, so thank you everybody for being here. Thank you Catherine. As I said, the show is being recorded and we posted here. These are upcoming shows, but our archives are right here underneath here and we have the most recent one will be at the top of the page. There is the last one that we did we were off last week we took week off, but our most recent one was last the end of February. Today's will be here. Everyone attended today's show and registered for today show again email from me letting you know when the recordings ready should be by the end of the day tomorrow at the very latest. I will also push it out to we have a Facebook page for encompass live you see we do or here's our reminder to log in today's show me the presenter session and then here is the announcement of last week, the last shows recording. We also post off to our Twitter and Instagram using the end comp live hashtag a little abbreviation. So you'll see it posted out there as well. While we're here I'll show you you can search our show archives you want to see if we've done a show on a particular topic. You can do the whole archive. I'm going to log off now. Okay. Thanks so much for buying it. Right. You can search our full show archives are just most recent 12 months. If you want something really current. This is because this is our full show archives and if you see over here there's a really small scroll bar because this is going back to when and compass live first premiered, which was in January 2009. Yes. So this is our 16th year of and compass live and we have all of our shows here. And so just pay attention when you are watching a recorded show to the original broadcast date they all have a date on here. So you can see when it was originally done. Many of our shows will be fine and they'll stand the test of time and be great resources for you. But some things will become old and outdated databases or websites or links and things may become broken no longer work anymore. Your resources may have changed drastically or no longer exist. People may work at a totally different library organization than they did when they presented for us 10 years ago. So just pay attention to those religion broadcast dates. But this is something that libraries do it keep things for historical purposes and we'll always do that as long as we have a place to host them which right now all of our show archive are on the library commissions YouTube channel. That wraps up for today show. I hope you join us next week. Our topic is no more summertime blues shaking up SRP summer reading programs to make it work for you. This was a session that is actually been re was rescheduled was originally supposed to be part of our big talk from small libraries online conference, which was at the end of February. But the presenter was unable to present at the last minute. So we got her rescheduled to come on to end up a slide instead. And this was also originally a and the conference a 10 minute lightning round session, but she's expanding it to fill our full hours to get even more from her so Chelsea price who's going to be joining us from her public library in Iowa. Well talking about things that you can do for your summer reading program, which I know libraries are it's coming up soon. So if you haven't prepared yet, you want to get some new tips and tricks for that definitely sign up for next week's show. Thanks. You got some other shows here coming up filling in on the schedule as well. So thank you everybody when everyone for being here. And hopefully we'll see you on a future episode of encompass live. Bye bye.