 And with that, I want to turn this over to Larry Rieger from IMLS, who is going to continue a little bit of an introduction. Larry? Good. Thanks, Susan. Actually, I'm President of Heritage Preservation, wouldn't mind being of IMLS. I want to, on behalf of Heritage Preservation and the American Association of State and Local History, I just want to welcome everybody and say how much our organizations have felt the privilege of working with IMLS on its Connecting to Collections initiative. I'm confident that today you're going to take away some really valuable lessons from our speakers. Debbie Hesnoris will offer practical strategies for and tips about how you can be successful at fundraising for collections care, no matter the size of your institution. I think you will find her enthusiasm infectious. Lee Price has firsthand experience at successfully working with small, medium-sized museums, libraries, and archives in crafting plans and approaches as to how to raise money for collections care. And Lee has a wealth of experience that he's going to offer. I would like to offer just one piece of advice to you all that has been helpful to me in fundraising, and it's something you've probably heard, but I think it's really important to keep it in mind. People really give to people. And I think the important thing is that you need to make friends and get to know people when you're looking for support. Anyway, speaking of you leads me to ask you to begin participating in our webinar by completing the first two polls, which are up on the screen. The first is, what part of the country are you joining us from? You can do that. And the other is, what kind of institution are you affiliated with? Good. It's beginning to fill out. Now I'm pleased to introduce Marcia Simmel. Marcia is Acting Director of IMLS. She's Deputy Director for Museums and also Director for Strategic Partnerships. Marcia will give us a brief overview of IMLS's multi-faceted Connecting to Collections initiative. As I turn the program over to Marcia and become a participant, I have one last poll question for you. Are you watching this webinar by yourself or with others? And Marcia, I think with that, we can take it away. Thank you very much, Larry, and it's a pleasure to be here on this webinar. And Larry, you can be part of our IMLS family any time. I feel like you and your colleagues have been throughout our Connecting to Collections initiative. So what you're seeing now on the screen is a copy of the cover of our recent report about the Connecting to Collections initiative. And as I proceed, I'd like to know something as well. One is, so I've got two polling questions to raise as well. One, have you or your institution been a participant in the Connecting to Collections initiative? And two, in which of the following IMLS programs or parts of the Connecting to Connections initiative have you been a participant? So those are going to appear even as I'm going to show you a few slides. The Connecting to Collections initiative developed as an IMLS response to the Heritage Health Index report that we are also very proud to help fund. And basically, as the various dimensions of Connecting to Collections have proceeded, we've not only come to see and learn more about the whole nature of the needs of our institutions for up-to-date collections, care, information, and funding, and advocacy around those needs. But we've really feel like we've been part of a growing community of institutions. So that Connecting piece of Connecting to Collections has not only been about the public Connecting to Collections in various museums, libraries, and archives, but also about connecting the individuals, the professionals, the volunteer staff, the trustees, the governing boards of our libraries and museums and archives to understand that they and we are all part of a community that cares about our stewardship. They cares about the issues, the fact that the collections in our institutions really tell the story of communities, of our heritage, and that in the various components of Connecting to Collections, we've tried to address the needs of institutions that may or may not have any professional staff, as well as the institutions that have fairly well-developed conservation activities and organizations and offices. So you're seeing on the screen just the tip, the basic description of the various Connecting to Collections programs, and IMLS, in addition to the forums and the bookshelves and all of that, we're so proud to have supported statewide planning grants that have occurred throughout the United States. So we've gotten together at libraries, museums, archives, and other stakeholders at the state level to learn more about the collection's needs and to become part of a state-based community. In addition to the planning grants, we've now given, I think, five implementation grants and we're poised to give more. So here's something on the national impact and maybe we can, and this is a place where you can learn more about the resources available to you for Connecting to Collections that include this webinar, but so much more. So maybe we can see the results of the poll as I move to introduce our very, very capable moderators for this session. And which poll would you like to see the results of, the programs that people have participated in? Can we show both? Here's the programs. I didn't know whether we could show both, the one side by side. That would be great. So as you're looking at the polls, which show that the majority of the people on the call have participated in some way with the Connecting to Collections initiative, and we welcome those who have not and who are now new members of our Connecting to Collections family. And one of the goals that we have is the hope that those of you who've been part of the initiative but perhaps haven't participated in one of our various grant programs become part of that process as well. So with that, I want to introduce Deborah Hess-Norris, who's the Vice Provost for Graduate and Professional Education, Chair of the Art Conservation Department at the Henry Francis Dupont Chair of Art and Professor of Photographic Conservation at the University of Delaware. And Debbie has been part of this effort from the beginning and has her leadership has been invaluable. And Lee Price is the Director of Development at the Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts and has worked as a fundraising and marketing consultant for many libraries, museums, archives, and historic sites throughout the US. And since 1989, he's raised over $50 million in various forces funding to support the types of work that we're talking about here. So I want to thank Deborah and Lee and turn this over to Deborah, who I think will begin. Yes. Hello all. Thank you very much, Marcia. Thank you, Larry. Thank you all for making this possible. Lee and I are delighted to have an opportunity to share our experiences with all of you on subjects relating to fundraising, development, and advocacy. And anxious to hear from you as well about your experiences. Mutant. From my first slide, perhaps many of you. And if I go to the next one, sorry, my screen just went blank and that's not good. You might get a sense of some of my passions beyond advocacy and fundraising. The title here, there and everywhere, won't be long as I'm a huge Beatles fan. And they may appear from time to time throughout this presentation. But the focus is on fundraising and advocacy. And what Larry said is so true that in the end, this is so much about people. I love fundraising. And I enjoy my work greatly. And I think it's because we are constantly engaging with individuals, engaging with their passion and sharing our passion for collections, care, preservation. And in my case, at the University of Delaware for education and training in conservation as well. We have a number of poll questions. And the first one is open-ended. And that's just to ask you all. And I think, Susan, will you show that? Yeah, what words come to mind when you think of fundraising and development? And in this question, we're going to ask the audience to specifically put their answer in that center box there as opposed to in the regular chat so that these good ideas are all in one place. And we'll just start. It's going to be distracting for me to try to respond to all these. But we want to gather this information, have you guys engaged, and thinking. And all of these are so true, right? It's about donors. It can be scary. It is very much long-term. It's a commitment. But I know that you all are passionate about what you do. And in the end, it takes, I think, passion and commitment and capitalizing on every single opportunity to make this possible. Can I have a seat, Susan? How do I go to the next slide without blocking all this? You can't, actually. I can pull this aside a little bit and let people continue to answer over there on the side. I think you probably enjoyed sort of seeing that. And I want to pay attention to my time. So I'm going to start sort of going through this. And just mentioned here, my point in the slide is that the focus, in terms of fundraising, in this case, is on collections care. And collections care can be varied, as you're well aware. It's focused on preservation plan, which looks at risk assessment and an understanding of the collection. And you may be raising money for a variety of different initiatives, formulating a disaster preparedness plan, evaluating and implementing better environmental conditions for the preservation of your collections, or implementing collection level surveys that will enable you to understand what the next step is in preservation and conservation. My background is photograph conservation. And so you'll see throughout this presentation, perhaps an emphasis on photographic materials. But the commentary is true for all kinds of collections. And in fact, I believe strongly true for fundraising in general. And I've spent quite a bit of time fundraising for graduate education as well. In all cases, it is essential that you prepare some kind of a case statement that identifies your most urgent needs and allows you to prioritize in doing so. This may be done through risk management and developing strategies or involving experts. It's always fabulous, of course, when you can bring in consultants. But in many cases, you're raising money to do so. But if you can involve consultants in the establishment of the case statement, that's very useful. You want to focus on the strength of your institution and link everything back to the mission, because you need to justify connections to your work to the mission of your institution. And you want to demonstrate that this project, these initiatives that you've begun to identify, emerge from a thoughtful planning process that you've developed as a case statement by thinking critically, again, about your urgent needs and prioritizing them. I don't know if you have had an opportunity to prepare a case statement. One of our poll questions is asking that. And so Susan, if you can bring that question up. And at the same time, if you all don't mind also letting us know sort of what is your role in the institution, that will be helpful to us. Are you a director, development officer? I know many of you are conservators, and I'm thrilled to see some of my graduate students also signing on. It's great to see so many friends out there. And we actually have a poll for that in terms of the poll that you pulled out. Yeah, that's going up now, right? Yep. But one of the audience members asked, what is a case statement? And maybe you could clarify that so that they can complete that poll. Yeah, that will be my next slide. So let me move to that. It's hidden a bit by these polls. Susan, maybe you can pull that away. I'm going to try to pull these. Just for the minute, they're going to go over your cat area, folks. But that way, you can finish the poll and Debbie can continue. Yeah, so a case statement begins to sort of articulate the need for collections preservation. In this case, the case statement for graduate education may be why is the education and training of future conservation professionals so essential to the preservation of our nation's cultural heritage. But in this case, the case statement will address the organizational history of the institution, introduce the collection for which preservation needs are focused on, a description of the project that needs to be taken out, what is the scope of work, why is it important, what is its need now and in the future. It will link to, again, the mission of the institution. And it will identify outcomes and benefits. What are the outcomes and the anticipated results of this particular project that you have in mind? For example, you may be interested in rehousing a collection of acetate and nitrate negative that are enormously important to your institution because of their connection to a certain time period, but they are at risk because of the fact that they're acetate and nitrate. And so your case statement revolves around their relationship to your institution, what the project is, why it's important, and what the benefit and impact will be. They can sometimes be very short, and they can sometimes be a page or two pages in length. And Lee actually may address this in a little bit more detail during his presentation. In developing this case statement, there are a number of things to keep in the back of your mind. And one is to always be vigilant and always promote a vision. You want to be sure that in your fundraising, you sort of have this vision in mind. You have a variety of different projects that you may be focused on in collections of care, and that's important as well because you're fundraising from different sources, and you've got to match up the source with the need. But by being vigilant, I mean don't say, oh my gosh, the economic times are such that there's just no funding out there. It's not possible. Every single day, you're thinking about how can you connect that need, that urgent need in your institution to someone, a foundation, an institution, an individual, an organization that may be interested in helping you, secure that support so you can realize a benefit. So you want to always have that vision in the back of your mind. In my case, I feel like I'm fundraising every day for the education and training of future conservation professionals. Always thinking about what are the needs that we have if it's funding for the students, if it's global outreach, partnership projects, bringing in expert speakers, purchasing new equipment, et cetera. So that's what I mean by being vigilant, promoting a vision. Oh, that was my animation. Hope you guys saw that. You want to emphasize the value and significance of that collection. Why is it important? Why should someone invest in it? How is it significant to your institution, to your community, to the nation, perhaps to the world? And value and significance, as we know, varies. And this slide just begins to differentiate all the different kinds of values that you may be addressing. It's not necessarily monetary. It could be artificial or sentimental. And here I show you just to illustrate that. Photograph of my grandmother, Mina Hess, who passed away now almost two years ago at the age of 107. But what she loved doing most of all was looking at her photographs. And the sentimental value, obviously, of that collection to her was magical, really. And so this idea of value, depending on what you're fundraising for and who you are pursuing, is really, really important in linking to them in significant ways. This is an image of one of our graduate students working with a conservator on the de-installation and installation of Neil Armstrong's spacesuit that he wore when he landed on the moon. It doesn't get any more important than this, really. And it's so exciting to be involved in fundraising that will enable an object of this enormous global importance to be preserved for future generations. But linking to that value is essential. It's also important that you verify data and feasibility. In some cases, we can talk about how wonderful these projects are. But if you have some concrete data that can support your initiative, that can be very useful. And here I urge you to review the data from the Heritage Health Index that Marcia and referred to earlier. This was the first comprehensive survey of the preservation needs of our nation's collections. And there's all kinds of data in the survey when you go online that can begin to help you really in fundraising, because it identifies what percentage of collections in the nation are at risk, what percentage of black and white photographic collections in our nation or in this geographic region or in libraries, archives, and museums are at risk. And if you can begin to link to that data by addressing your work, you can then connect your work and your local institution to a national initiative in some way. And that can be very compelling and important. I'm sorry my slides are loading up a little bit slowly. But another important issue in terms of verifying data is understanding issues surrounding the preservation of cultural heritage and the research that's been done. So for example, with photographic materials, if you're focused on the preservation of a collection of contemporary color materials, it would be very useful to connect research that's been done, scientific research, that demonstrates the vulnerability of these materials and how they do fade over time requiring cold storage. You can get dye shifts. And so you connect that to the importance of this collection, the importance to scholars, to society, to the community, and the fact that we have clear scientific research that demonstrates that these materials must be stored in cold storage to minimize and reduce their degradation. Capturing the visceral means that, again, connected people's hearts and minds and the fact that in many cases, this preservation is essential because these materials that are so important to society are prone to degradation, as you see in this collection of cellulose acetate film. Cellulose acetate film was introduced in 1925. And as it's exposed to fluctuating environmental conditions, particularly high relative humidity, it tends to deteriorate. As you see here, the film actually shrinks and the emulsion does not. This deterioration can be prevented or slowed down by storage in a stable environment, particularly cold storage. So showing examples of this can be very compelling. And we use these kinds of examples all the time. This is just some of the information that we use in fundraising for conservation education. Using visuals and social media can be very helpful. And there are many institutions that are using the internet in significant ways. This is just one of many, many examples of the Washington University's library where they have online this opportunity for individuals to purchase book plates that for $50 that will be used to preserve specific books. And so you connect individuals to specific objects and they are preserving the past to protect the future. So you'll find many examples of this. And in my case, in fundraising for conservation education, we're using visuals all the time. This is an 18th century clock face that was treated by one of our students who you can see before and after. And another example here, a painting of after the Medusa copy actually by George Cooke in very poor condition and then following conservation treatment, in this case, treated by graduate and undergraduate students in our program. You know, the change is remarkable and important but using these visuals to address the value and importance of conservation education can be very useful. Similarly, we've been very involved in Katrina response, particularly on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. And so I'm often talking about our work at Bova, for example, which you see here before Katrina and then here after Katrina. These images resonate with individuals and they wanna get involved and they want to help and find ways that they can connect to our work. And at the same time, you wanna identify a whole variety of different preservation projects very in size and in cost because you are always connecting your needs to the capacity of a donor. So you may have a high priority need that is costly and a lower priority need that may serve as a wonderful pilot project that a small family foundation would be interested in supporting. So in the back of your mind, you need to be sure that you have a range of individual projects that may include the conservation treatment of a few seminal photographic images, for example, or a whole collection of glass plate negatives that require re-housing and perhaps digitization. Here's some sample case statements just in terms of these are just one sentence sort of starters that can begin to get people excited. We understand the world through our images and again, I think individuals relate to this. We're at risk of losing our history that defines our community. And here we go, or our era. Here's my reference to the Beatles. I don't have time to get into that, but would love to talk to any of you offline about that work. Photographs expand our understanding of the world. I'm involved in this fabulous project actually with the Arab Image Foundation in Beirut, Lebanon. And we're engaged in educating and training custodians of collections throughout the Middle East in the preservation of their photographic heritage. And this image is from the Arab Image Foundation. Really wonderful organization. We're facing near immediate catastrophic loss of our early 20th century negative collections. This, of course, is caused by exposure to fluctuating temperature and environmental conditions. And without cold storage, our color photographs will continue to fade. So finding sentences and then building on that within your institution that will resonate with funders is really important. Together we'll preserve these extraordinary materials for the education of future generations. That sense of togetherness, I think, is important. And again, relates back to what Larry said, which is it's all about people. It's all about working together to gather that information. Susan, jump in if I'm forgetting any polls because I'm trying to move through this. But the other thing that I would recommend is, again, gather information. There's an awful lot of information out there that's available to you all on fundraising. Fundraising for collections of care, but also fundraising in general, and this slide sort of speaks to a variety of books that you can find. And if we have time during the Q&A, we'll pull up a series of five books that were just recommended. I just received actually a message yesterday online that identified five of the most popular grant writing and development books. And I wanted to share those with you. And we'll do that at the very end so that you have access to those links. But there's an awful lot of really excellent information. But really one of my favorite resources is this, capitalizing on collections care, which is published by Heritage Preservation with help, of course, from the Institute for Museum and Library Services. And it just has a lot of really good basic advice and guidance on how to promote collections care within your institution, how to promote it to the public, and how to use it to increase support. So I urge you all to read that carefully and to contribute to that as we continue to build our collective knowledge and experience and fundraising. You want to pursue a multitude of funding sources. There is money out there. I mean, just yesterday, we secured a $25,000 grant to support our work globally. And you have to just keep thinking creatively from federal agencies to individuals and everything in between. And Lee will talk in more detail about this. But I urge you to think also outside the box so that it's not always organizations that are known to support collections care or art in general. But think of linking to economies and cultural tourism and other avenues of connections that you might have. You want to organize networking lunches, all kinds of events people love behind the scenes tours so they can see your collection storage and understand what your needs are. You want to show them these objects. We are so fortunate really to be raising money for preservation in my formal role overseeing graduate education at the university in addition to our conservation. I was also charged with raising money for all departments. And raising money for philosophy can be much more difficult than collections care. We have these objects. We can connect to people. And we can use that connection in creative ways. Not just behind the scenes tours, but also engaging children and their parents in education and training and going for educational grants, federal grants, state grants, community grants, et cetera. Because we need to use these collections to inspire the next generation. In doing so, we need to preserve them so that that next generation can learn from them. Lee will talk about various federal agencies and various projects that you can connect to. And so I'm not going to do that here except to highlight the Conservation Assessment Program and the NEH Preservation Assistance Grants as two that you might want to start with. These will enable you to hit the ground running. And I think also one thing I've learned in my years of development. Not only do I love it, but it builds on itself. And you build momentum. And securing a small grant, you want to celebrate it. That's just great. And you will build on that and begin to secure more and more funding. You want to be sure that you connect with program officers. They're there to help you. It's their mission to be helpful, follow their advice, always allow plenty of time. Don't shortchange yourself in terms of fundraising. Follow the guidelines carefully. That is essential, right? And success does spiral. So if you receive one grant, you can use that to begin to build this list of funders and supporters and that success and your opportunities to continue to raise money will build. You heard about connecting to collections, and it's great that so many of you have been engaged in this initiative to date. And that also is a wonderful resource. Many of you received the bookshelf. And using that bookshelf to help build your knowledge in collections care will be useful. And as well as all of the videos that are online that may build your knowledge and skills in terms of advocacy and fundraising. So go back to the Connecting to Collections website, and it's really a treasure of fabulous resources. I had the opportunity, this last bullet on this slide is the Salzburg Declaration. I had the opportunity to co-chair a meeting in Salzburg, Austria last year, about this time, actually, which gathered together 62 delegates from 23 countries, I believe, all five continents to talk about the preservation of the world's cultural heritage. And from that, we developed a declaration, which is available online as well. And there may be information there, just a one-page document that resonates with your institution. And you can link to that, and therefore link to the global world in terms of preservation. During the Salzburg Seminar, we talked a lot about development. We talked mostly also about education and training and advocacy and public awareness. And these bullets just began to sort of address some of the issues that we grappled with on the global scale in terms of advocacy. And the need that basically that we need to take initiative. And I believe strongly in all my work that advocacy and public awareness marketing are all closely linked to fundraising and development. And again, that spirals as you are a stronger advocate, as you promote your collections and their value and their importance and their needs for preservation. You'll get people excited about them. They'll begin to contribute to their preservation. You can then talk about what's been accomplished, what needs to be done next, and that will continue to spiral. But it does have an awful lot to do with public awareness and advocacy. Many other funders that you can secure and lead will talk about the ins and outs of foundations, community, and national foundations as well. We've had enormous success working with all of them. They're focused on improving and enhancing society. Debbie? Yes. So you know, I'm putting up polls as you go. And so if you want to come back and refer to any of these, they're sitting, they're ready for you. Oh, okay. All right, let me pull up this one on the, can you pull up the one on the case statement? So you can see, we had asked how many you've prepared a case statement. And it looks like some of you had, but some of you have not. I don't know if you can pull that over, Susan. Yeah, I was. So, Susan, could you pull over the one on the types of funding? Yes. Here's a question that they just finished answering, the types of funding, and then the most successful fundraising or raising is to the left of that. It looks like most people have answered that. A few are still coming in. Yeah, but in terms of, because you all, oh, you all can see the one to the left. So, certainly federal and state grants do provide enormous support as do local foundations may be an opportunity for some of you. Individual donors, of course, is all about collecting to people. And we, and Lee, will talk a little bit about that. But there's varieties, also another opportunity that is noted here is corporate sponsorship. And if I flip to that next slide, gonna skip the making connections, but at some point, we'll talk a little bit about corporate foundations. And they also can be very helpful with in kind, perhaps, support, if not direct foundation grants. Bottom line, because I'm running out of time here, and I wanna turn this over to Lee, and be sure that we have time for questions and answers. But it's really important that you abide by clear grant writing rules, follow the guidelines, articulate your goals, present a clear budget, and engage your audience, if not in person, also in writing. And be sure that your goals and your focus are clear and measurable where that's possible. There is an enormous amount of publications and just really good books on proposal advice and grant writing advice. And in the end, I think it's all about creating enthusiasm and excitement, and working in advance so you don't find yourself in a situation where you're rushing, because it's hard to be as articulate to create as much enthusiasm if you're sort of rushing all the time. So thinking, always thinking, always being strategic and you're thinking, what are your needs? Who can you approach? And sharing your excitement that I know you all have. Don't be boilerplate, but be specific. Talk about the ins and outs of your collection and your needs and how those materials relate to your institution and to their desire to help and assist. These, Susan, they'll be able to see these slides later, right? They will, they'll be able to download them. Some of these, I don't wanna write, read this to you. You can go through these next couple of slides, just provide a couple of quick points on proposal preparation, paying attention to format, using the active voice, et cetera. And another really important point in all this is to be sure that you have a strong budget that's justified and reasonable. You wanna be able to do your project, so that just the project has to be well articulated. The budget has to be appropriate to the project, but just be careful about the budget section of your proposal. And finally, raising money in tough times, always, always thank your donors for their cumulative giving. Individuals who have given to you in the past will give to you in the future. They may not be able to give to you this year, but they certainly want to stay engaged. So the key here is to keep people engaged, tell them what you're doing, and perhaps they will be interested in a challenge grant of some kind, but be flexible and sensitive to their needs as we all sort of deal with the economy, but never, never give up because the funding is there. And it is, again, a matter of having that vision, that enthusiasm, and this fabulous collection that you all are trying to preserve, either the entire collections or parts of it. So finally, demonstrate your relevance, is important, emphasize needs and consequences. What are the results? If you don't conduct this project, what will happen to those materials? How might they deteriorate over time? Always engage funders in decision making to the point where that's possible. At some points, it's not always possible, but they can feel that they have some involvement that's really important. So it may be, we've got these two projects, both of them are important. Which one resonates most with you? What would you like to be involved in? Logical and interesting links between funders and your institution, building on strength. Do not procrastinate, and that's easy to do. In my mind, I'm always fundraising every day, making lists, thinking about who to connect with, who. Don't be afraid, it's actually fabulously fun and rewarding. And it's all about building those partnerships and sharing your passion. So with that, I wanna turn this over to Lee. Is there any reason, were there any polls that I should have brought up? No, I think you, we asked the major ones and during question and answer, if we want to refer back to them, the audience did a great job of saying what some of their obstacles are, and I'll pull this up for now, that time seems to be the major obstacle for them. And it is an obstacle. And I don't know, maybe Lee will have sort of a solution to that. I try to do a little bit every day, and I'm always thinking about fundraising, and again, it's about building those connections. It does take time. And it may be that within your institution, you need to find a way to free up just even a small portion of your time that you can depend on regularly. So you can be having lunches with individuals and reaching out and connecting with those who can help you. So you can be working on case statements and sharing those with others. I have to acknowledge the fact that it takes time, but it is incredibly rewarding. And as you're more and more successful, you might be able to find opportunities to then hire individuals through grants who can help, maybe not with a fundraising, maybe that's best for you to do, because you have a passion, but can help with something else that you're doing to free you up a bit so that you can focus more time on development fundraising. Let me turn this over to Lee. And he can pick up on that and share his enormous experience with all of you. Thank you all for your attention. Thanks, Debbie. One thing that I really love about these webinars is that they go by so fast and so much information is shared, but you can go back to them afterwards because like with Debbie's presentation, there's so much worth going back to and it all went by so fast that learning times mounts them up on I think the Heritage Preservation website right after this. Is that right, Susan? The presentation? The slides, all the slides are available. All that information that Debbie was whizzing through that is so great, you can return to afterwards and spend some quality time with this material. Right, I'll put the URL up for folks as soon as you get going. You can pause on the slides and get their full worth out of them because there's so much valuable material that Debbie was presenting. Susan, can we just go back to the responses to the question that Debbie asked early on? That was the question on words that come to mind when you think of fundraising and development. And let me see, do you have that one? I do and for some reason I'm just having trouble getting this. I was interested in that one because as you see up on the slide here I'm the Director of Development so I want to know what words come to mind when you hear that. And I think I'm the Director of Confusion and Panic. I love some of these answers. They are good. It's the pain in the butt department, the necessary evil department. That's my field of expertise in this world. The words that I think of with development, my favorite word is opportunity because there's this moment that almost always occurs usually early in the development stage when you're still brainstorming about what's possible and the opportunities for a little while just seem limitless as you're deciding where to move, what to ask money for because fundraising and development in those early stages is where you're really dreaming the future and then from there you're working to make that dream real and you have to keep that vision in front of you if you want to move your institution. You're starting at say, you're starting a point A right now and you have a whole series of opportunities to move forward to points B, C, D to point E by 2015. So that's point to go from point A to point E in five years, that takes strategic thinking. And along the way you have to go through the agony of all these things that everybody was mentioning because it is not that easy to raise the money but the reward is that you get to do so many great projects as this goes forward. So we can move that off, we can move the poll off and I'll move on to the first slide. And this is IMLS and Heritage Preservation really did the nation a great favor when they crisply defined the responsibility of collecting institutions in their summary report of public trusted risk where it says up in the corner there providing a safe environment and proper care for collections is a fundamental responsibility. I love the way fundamental responsibility is bolded is a fundamental responsibility of all institutions and individuals who care about their heritage. And it's so vitally important to keep this idea in front of your board members especially because the very a collecting institution your nonprofit status is predicated on your commitment to appropriately care for your collections. And that's why I've said I'd like to see this framed at every meeting room of every board of directors just to always remind them that this is the case this is a fundamental responsibility for them don't get sidetracked, do it, you have to remain in the forefront. So always look for opportunities to remind your board of this. And I mentioned the board frequently because the board is very important in fundraising. I would suggest getting copies of this report having it available at the board meetings even put a post-it note on page two right next to this quote because always look for opportunities to promote stewardship. It's just way too easily overlooked or deferred as you move on to what's generally called the sexier things in fundraising. Stewardship might not always fall into that category but it's also vitally important. So you're going to need buy-in from the board and it's always good to be pushing them in this area and reminding them of their responsibilities. There's a process that we're always promoting here at the Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts. This is the thoughtful process that Debbie mentioned. Here I'm calling it the ideal planning process because well it is normal to depart from this when necessary because we don't live in an ideal world but it's also so important to realize that there is a natural and fairly logical order to strategies for improving collections care. So up at the top you have inventory and basic cataloging. You have to know what you have and where it is before you can move down this chart at all and that's the direction we're moving. We're always moving downward. Disaster planning also up at the top because right from the start you have to be protecting your collections. You need to know your vulnerabilities. Assessment underneath the inventory. I have it there. That's working with outside consultants. That's the CAP survey. The needs assessment survey or the preservation survey where you're getting a written document of recommendations concerning policies, practices and the environment. And necessary fundraising tools as well and essential for moving further down the chart. You can move in two directions here. I'll start with management. This would be the higher level cataloging, the development of written collections care policies, new strategies for pest management and housekeeping. And also on that same level I have environment, mainly concerned with temperature, humidity and light levels. These can be very costly improvements to stabilize the environment like the HVAC system but lots of low cost improvements can be addressed in this area as well. If you go down one level further we're at the survey level where we have the collection surveys or item specific surveys that are actually conducted by a conservator and your institution gets condition reports, treatment plans, cost estimates. And only at the very bottom do you reach the really, what I consider the really fun parts of this where you get to do the conservation treatment and the digitization. When you get to move on to the fundraising for that but you should always be heading down in that direction. Start at the top, work your way to the bottom if you're at point A wrestling with inventory in 2010. You want to be moving towards point E conservation treatment in 2015. That would be your five year strategic plan. I've had digression and this is where I'm gonna be putting up another poll. Susan, the- Our next one is name a favorite item. That's the one, that's one. Name a favorite item, that's my digression. Okay, I'm just inviting everybody to share something absolutely fantastic from their collection that has a value to them, something that they love. I like exemplars too. Okay, I have to see all the places I have to go to in the country now. No kidding. Who in her television camera? I have to hear more about the piece of bread too. If there's like a face in the piece of bread or what is that? I missed the piece of bread, there's a piece of bread? Yeah, Stacey from Indianapolis has a piece of bread. Stacey, get that conserved. Okay, and, oh man, so many great things. Animation from local department store windows. This is fun. Egyptian bread in Boston. Which ones do you like? Fascinating, like you said, I can plan my vacation around these. This is fantastic. Go back to, yeah, when Susan mounts this afterwards, I'm just gonna spend time with this so I can know where to go, that I can go to see the mummies in San Diego. And they have bagels in New York City. That is so fantastic. Well, that's the Tenement Museum. That is a great museum. Okay, I'm going to move on to mine because I get to hog the time here. I'm gonna put this over to the side so they can keep adding. Okay, yes, definitely keep adding. Okay. Interview with Marcela as well. This is my digression. Okay, I'm going to be talking about a very personal collection. This is about as personal, I think, as you can get. This past summer, I discovered 180 courtship letters that were exchanged from 1949 to 1951. When June, my mom was in fashion school in New York City, and my dad, Art, was just out of the Navy and working in South Hampton, Long Island. And that's time for a call out to Brenda and Hampton Bay because we lived there for a while too. And we found these 180 yellowing love letters under the bed, and they were beautifully written and just really great, so evocative of the period. And we had all their artwork. My sister and I had all their artwork and lots of period photography. So we called it the June and Art Collection. And the collection is real. I'm still having trouble navigating here a bit. Let me get these up. Those are all the letters, 180 letters that I've got in there. And what I'm doing is I'm hypothetically putting forward this idea that, oh, we've just formed a nonprofit. We're doing the June and Art Preservation Society. This is entirely hypothetical. This doesn't really exist. But I thought it would be interesting to follow a hypothetical institution through this thoughtful process that Debbie and I have been talking about. And I will add that the blog URLs are real because I am really blogging these real time. I'm blogging the letters right now on June and Art, real time, minus 61 years. And I'm also running a blog on preserving the collection that's preserving a family collection. So please come visit and have fun at my blog. That's my little blog spam there. But the June and Art Preservation Society is hypothetical. But nevertheless, that is what we will be following as we go through the ideal process here, which of course begins with inventory up at the top. But it doesn't necessarily begin there because with a startup organization, you have to invest in planning. There's just no way around it. All smart growth requires an investment in planning. Now, I'm a passionate advocate of strategic planning, not just for startups, but for everybody. You should always be involved in strategic planning. I don't like to hear it disparaged or anything. If you've tried it once and it didn't work, you should try it again. It's essential for effective fundraising. So this is my, what I put up here was strategic planning with a budget for our institution, a $2,400 budget. We went out and found somebody who is willing to help us but required a little money. So we put together the budget, asked the board members for $100 apiece because the board should be invested in this process. And then we went to the local foundations for the first time to raise the money. And even if they turn us down, at least we're getting our name out there for another 1,200, development has to be an optimist game. So I assume we get the money and it's a $2,400 budget. It's completed. We have a $2,400, $2,400 in plan to do the strategic planning. But that's never the end of the process because what you do is you flip the process over into the next project. And we say, well actually the strategic planning was just part of a larger startup project that combines with inventory. We have 2,400 raised to date. Let's match that. Let's go for a $4,800 budget that includes inventory as well. We want $2,400 to buy the software. You want $2,400 to pay for some staff time or consultant time to help do this. So you go for the first time annual appeal for a brand new organization, probably going right around this season because this is the traditional time to do it, although you can truly do an appeal at any time. And there you have strategic planning, inventory being taken care of in just the first few months of the organization with a couple of recommendations here. Couple of recommendations. To treat every contribution as if it's a matching grant. So even if it's not matching your say with that 2,400 you're saying, well we want to match that. Even though there's no legal requirement to match it, you are using it in order to create a sense of urgency. And I think I have another recommendation here. The access to collection items. This really refers to the board members with asking them for contributions in the first place. Don't be afraid to bring some of the items from the collection to the board meeting or have special events where potential major donors have access can be close. Just proximity to a collection item increases its perceived value and they want to be involved with it because these items, these objects have power. So tap into it. Ideal planning process. I want to go through these quickly. All the different places that you can go to for these. We did inventory, starting with the board contributions. See, we tap most of those places and our hypothetical example here, community groups would be like rotary, lions, questers, the daughters of the American Revolution, just getting your name out there to these places. Then we have disaster planning, various places you can go for that. I will say, going back to inventory, if I am a Les Museums for America, I put that up there, but it's not a place for a startup institution to go to. That would be if you were an established institution and you received a special collection that required inventory and you needed additional resources to do that. That would be the time to go for a place like that. With disaster planning, NEH Preservation Assistance Grants will come up frequently. They're a good place to go for so many different things and it's also just good to be involved with places like Alliance, what is it, the Alliance for Preservation. The other organizations that are interested in this as well find out where they've gone for disaster planning so that you can try similar places as well. Needs assessment, you can go for the CAP grant if you're a museum, if you're not a museum, NEH Preservation Assistance Grants are absolutely wonderful, up to $6,000 and that will usually cover all the costs of getting a needs assessment survey and some other places that you can go for as well. Management, those are the various cataloging projects. IMLS Museums for America is a wonderful place for the higher level type cataloging and also with higher level cataloging, the National Archives and Records Administration has both basic and advanced archival grants which are great sources of support. Susan, tell me that I have a poll on funding, where is it? I think I'm doing that just a little bit later. I think I'm gonna go ahead and move the poll over, Susan. We'll go ahead and take a look at that poll now. She's going to, no, holding that one off, okay? Back to the side, Susan, we'll do that one later. Okay, I'm gonna be moving, we've got collections management, some of these are kind of large. NEH Humanities, that's collections management, that's the NEH Humanities Collections and Resources grants. They're fantastic, but they're very challenging to put together. These are difficult grants, therefore the institutions that are very well established and have the resources to really put in the time to do a complex grant. So we've covered four of these so far, four more to go and I do want to go over these fairly quickly, although we'll be returning to them shortly as well. Environmental needs, once again I have board contributions up at the top because this is internal and it's so important for the board to be contributing towards stewardship in this way, especially if you're going for the larger grants like the IMLS Conservation Project Support Grants or the NEH Standing Cultural Collections. These are large federal grants where they want to see that you have the local support as well, so the board contributions become so essential as well as local major donor support. Collection surveys, some places to go, moving on quickly here, we'll also put up treatment. IMLS Conservation Project Support, one of the absolute best places to go, Save America's Treasures, I hope that that is saved and that continues to exist in future years because it's been so beneficial for our collections across the country, so many great collections have been conserved and digitized through this program, still not entirely sure if we'll have it next year or not. NEA Heritage Preservation gets a little bit hidden, they go into the NEA site, go under museums, go under access to artistic excellence and they have Heritage Preservation funding available for preserving, conserving artwork, historic artwork, a wonderful place to go for that and treatment also is very open to special events, for bringing out the object, where having a conservator come in and explain to potential major donors what work needs to be done. And digitization, there are actually less places available for digitization on the federal level but on a local level, it's one of the sexier projects and not all that difficult actually to raise money for. So we've moved down with our hypothetical organization here from inventory, I'm assuming we've done disaster planning, not going into that, but we're moving down to assessment and looking at how we would cover that exactly. One place is just to go for the cap, which is wonderful if you're a museum, then you would qualify, it's the Heritage Preservation IMLS application, it's currently up right now, if you're interested, go for it now. No match required. And there's a deadline on this but it's not like your usual deadlines, if you get in earlier, you probably stand more chance of getting it, so don't wait till the deadline to get in your application for a cap. Now if you're not a museum or for various other reasons, you just need one now and you don't think you'll probably be able to get it through the cap, needs assessment surveys you can go through. One of our favorite grants, the NEH Preservation Assistance Grant, wonderful place to apply for, I just think virtually all these institutions should be going for NEH Preservation Assistance Grants and a budget like that should cover it and the three most beautiful words in fundraising, no match required. A couple of recommendations, fundraising tool, when you're getting your cap, when you're getting your needs assessment survey, be looking at all this language and be thinking about it from a fundraising perspective. Is this going to help you in your applications? Because if that language isn't going to help you working your way down the chart, if it's not going to help you with going for environment grants or a collection survey grants or a grant for digitization and you know you wanna go after them, make sure that that language in these surveys can be just pulled out and quoted in full. Your surveys, you know you can work with your consultant on this to work out language that both of you agree is appropriate for your institution. And don't let your needs assessment survey become out of date because if it's more than 10 years old, if it's 15 years or so, it's not gonna look too good in a request. So this whole process is cyclical to some extent. You have to go back and get another needs assessment survey after a time. And the wonderful thing is that they do have recaps now so you can go for your recap. I think after seven years, you can put in for that. So we have our assessment now. June and our preservation society is moving along wonderfully here. We're moving to addressing environment. And that is not necessarily going to be a large capital campaign. You can put together a wonderful small project, data loggers training, a consultation package. That can be an under $6,000 project and you can go for an NEH preservation assistance grant for that. You can go to a local foundation for that. Or eventually probably with environment when you have to address things like the HVAC system, you'll be hitting the capital campaign and that just takes all the resources of the organization. More recommendations? Don't neglect small projects. The UV light filtering on the windows is a great thing to go for. It's not that expensive. You can go for the small projects and show that you are addressing your environment and still work your way down the chart. For the major environmental improvements, they don't tend to be overly sexy in nature. Therefore, when you see a large capital campaign coming closer and they come like a freight train, you know it's coming, fold the environmental improvements for the collection storage areas into the larger capital campaign. Please don't neglect them. It's a real opportunity to raise money for them. And invest in quality, especially in the early stages, it's good to work with the highest quality consultants possible so that when you're making these requests for the large environmental improvements, they'll be respected. And that may include, especially on the large capital campaigns, working with quality fundraising consultants going outside the box, not working with your internal development department as good as they may be. Federal sources for collections care, we've already mentioned a number of these. I do have American Heritage Preservation grants up here under our IMLS, although this may have been the last year for that. I'm going to hate to see them go because they were a wonderful conservation opportunity for smaller institutions. If they do manage to hold on and come back for another year, don't miss them. It's going for $3,000, no match required for treatment projects and other collections care projects. NEH has some great programs, preservation assistance grants and these larger, more challenging projects like the humanities collections and resources sustaining cultural heritage collections. If you want to go for a larger grant, be in touch with the program officer in advance and also get in a draft of your proposal, six weeks in advance so you can get their comments on it. It's a service they offered. There's no reason not to get it. It's a valuable service. NEA, I mentioned Heritage Preservation grants, great for conserving artwork, historic artwork. NARA has their archival grant, Save America's Treasures. We hope and pray that that just continues to exist because they've been so beneficial across the country. Ideal planning process, we're moving our way down. Here I'm putting some of the Juneen art that you might go to for getting a collection service. A broad range collection. Now NEH preservation assistance grants would be for items specific. That's not for a broad project. IMLS conservation project support is much more for the broad projects. But a chance to address the photos, the work on paper, the work on canvas, the machete from the Philippines, all the fun stuff that you have in there. Information on local foundations, my favorite place to go is the Foundation Center. They have regional locations all throughout the country and you can use this URL here for the Foundation Center to find out where these information collection regional centers are. And I just think that that's so much better than investing lots of money in the books and the databases yourself to just go there and use their systems. I like using libraries. So I recommend using the fundraising libraries, the best ones in the country and that's the Foundation Centers. And then once I've got my potential local foundations that I've targeted through finding them there, I go to GuideStar and I've got the website there. And through that you can look at detailed tax information to find out more about each of these potential funders. And just you should always be keeping an eye out on these other, you know, other like-minded institutions, potential overlap with donating to Watt and a resource of sorts if you'd like to give me a call available. Any conservation treatment for our June in Art collection, it is lots of artwork. So we can go for art. That's an EA heritage preservation. We have a $50,000 budget, so it'd be a $25,000 request plus we'd have to raise the match. Or well, I'd like to think it's an American treasure so I'd like to think I could make that argument. But the one I wanna talk about a little bit to be finishing up here is the IMLS Conservation Project support where you'd go for $25,000 request and then have to cobble together how you're gonna match that and I'm suggesting this would be a normal way of doing it. Board contributions, special events, major donors, board and local foundations. That's pretty typical actually for how you'd be pulling all this together. Writing an IMLS request is that kind for conservation treatment. 12 pointers, I'll try and make this, try and make this fast. Please remember to register on grants.gov. It's a complete tragedy if you put together a foundation request and then find out at the last minute that you're not registered and you can't get it in. So make sure that you register in advance on grants.gov. Contact the program officer, especially for grants of over, you know, the bigger ones, over 7,500 or larger. I'd suggest running it past the program officer to make sure you're understanding the guidelines correctly that this is a good project for them. No creativity with formats, even if you don't like the format that they're recommending in the guidelines, don't play with it. You use their format, you use their language when writing the request. Right for a peer audience with IMLS, with NEH, with NEA, in all these cases, you're not writing for a lay audience. When you're doing the local foundation, then you're writing for the lay audience, but know that you can use a little technical language to show that you know that you're a professional also when writing these federal requests. Use stories whenever possible and it is the stories also that establish the uniqueness of your collection that make it really stand out. Describe past successes and also show that you are using a thoughtful planning process that you have, if you're going for the treatment now, show that you have gone through the assessment, you're quoting the assessment, you've addressed environment within the past five years and now you're moving on to this. Stressing urgency, not just that these items desperately need to be treated because they're falling apart, but also that you have an upcoming exhibit or even better an upcoming anniversary and you want the material to be available for them. So always be keeping track of the centennial, the sesquicentennial, the bicentennial because those add urgency to a request and quoting from professionals whenever possible, not just the needs assessment surveys, but also scholars on the importance of your collection. Always be looking for great quotes about your collection. It drives me crazy when I read a proposal and it's not described chronologically. I wanna know January, February, March, what'll happen, I like to follow first this, then this, then this, that's the way my mind works and that's what I like to see in a proposal. The goals should match the evaluation criteria. It should work together. So you mentioned you give the goals in the beginning, evaluation at the end and they work together and you can brainstorm with other professionals, other staff members on what good evaluation criteria would be for your project. You do all that and I'm confident that you'll be getting the grant. This is my next to last slide. It is obviously my favorite slide, the one I keep referring to and the one that I'm concluding with. There's a single thing that I wanted to stress here. It's that collections care is best as a thoughtful process. So you follow it with building on the last and you'll have much to celebrate as you move from point A to point E steadily improving your collections care. So early happy Thanksgiving to everyone from the June in Art Preservation Society and Susan, I'm sorry that went so long and we can go for questions now. Based on the flurry of chat that was going on, they were hanging right in there with you. Let's see, I was picking out some questions from earlier and also I did wanna ask Lee, if you wanna go back and ask any of your polls, just let me know and I'll put them up on the screen. The audience can answer them while you answer questions. You know, let's just take questions. Okay, here, there was some very brief discussion about the difference between how to write and apply for collections care versus works of art artifacts and et cetera. Lee, can you all hear me, am I back on? You're back on, yes, okay. Lee, do you wanna start with that? Oh, I thought you were coming on to answer that. I was hoping, could I have the question again Susan? Is that operating on the question? This is from Emilio Leary in the Bronx. What are the major differences between how to write and how to apply for collections care for archives versus works of art or artifacts? Well, it depends on the funding source you're going for. With works of art, I've done works of art for the same collection for both NEH and NEA grants. Without, you know, you never let on that you're going to these organizations for essentially the same project, but you have to write it entirely differently if you're writing for your art peers instead of your humanities peers. It's just such a different, such a different way of writing. With the art peers, it's all about how people are actually going to interact with that, with it as a living piece of art. That you're treated, you know, this is being treated and people are going to experience it as art. With the humanities grants, which would be much more on the archive side, you want to see its historic importance. As opposed to that. Debbie, did you have anything to... I don't have anything to add, except that I would go back again to value. What is the importance of that collection and be sure that you have connected the value of that collection to the mission of the organization that you're applying for funding for? In the case of NEH or NEA, that would be very clear. In some cases, if you're working with a foundation, frankly, they may be not so interested or care so much, whether it's archival material or fine art material, but what is its importance? What is its significance? Why must it be preserved? Why is it at risk? You know, answering those bigger questions may allow you to raise funds for archival collections at the same time that you're raising funds for fine art collections. So it's not so limited and I wouldn't be so concerned, but it's vital that you connect to the mission of that institution, which is very clearly outlined with NEH and NEA, for example. Okay. I'd like to just underline a comment from Nancy Rogers for the NEH, be sure to provide information from scholars about the value of the collection. When you're doing those large NEH proposals, you have to, well, I was saying before, you should write them first and send in the draft six weeks in advance and I'll almost guarantee you the response to the draft from the program officers will be to beef up the humanities value of the collection. Give us more information. They want more scholars talking about the humanities value of the collection because that's critical for getting the NEH grant. So I saw the comments from Nancy and I wanted to underline that. Yeah, I think that the whole idea of significance is be sure that you have addressed the significance of that collection to the institution, its connection to the mission, to the community, to the state, to the nation. And that can be done, it's easy for us to say this collection is significant and fabulously important, but it's scholars who are using it for research purposes and sharing it in a broader context who can maybe more clearly articulate its importance. Here's another question. This comes from Amy Schlegel in Boston. Collection conservation fundraising is always secondary to capital campaigns, infrastructure needs, et cetera. How do you get around this? I'll take a stab at that first, Amy, and Lee will probably have something to contribute as well, I mean, that's a good question. And I think the key is for individuals within that institution to be strong advocates so that collections, care, and preservation is part of that capital campaign. That capital campaign has to be more than just building a new building, but it's got to be about ensuring that that building is about the preservation of the collection that that institution is so closely linked with. And so in many cases, my experience in capital campaign at the University of Delaware and beyond really is that you've got to be an advocate. So you've got to be talking about what are the urgent and pressing needs within your collections in terms of our long-term preservation and how can that be part of this initiative? And those who are running the capital campaign also will recognize that including conservation and preservation will broaden the opportunity for funding and will be a way to get individuals, foundations, and other organizations engaged because people will give to that and that will resonate. Some will be happy to give to a new building or the construction of a new educational facility which is all very important and all part of what we're trying to achieve. I think the other thing is to be part of that team to always find a way that you as an advocate for the collection can help others who are trying to raise money for education and other initiatives within the institution. And so suddenly the capital campaign is about preservation in addition to other initiatives. Leigh, did you have anything to say on that? I thought Debbie covered it beautifully. I really like the board should... The reason I was stressing board involvement from the beginning is sometimes it does get lost and stewardship does get lost in the process. If a capital campaign is coming, please try and get the environmental improvements in it because I have talked to institutions who didn't do that and after the capital campaign is over, they're thinking, oh, now we'll go back and address it but instead they've exhausted everybody on this staff and their consultants and they don't have... It's gonna be another five years before they go back to address that now and they have a less, frankly a less sexy thing to raise money for. So get those environmental improvements into the capital campaign. And also just one... Oh, sorry, Leigh, just one other point and all the thing is so key is as you craft that vision, you need to be positive and you can sort of outline what the needs are for your collection but you need to have a bit of a solution too so that it's part of the capital campaign because if this is part of the campaign then it will enable us to do X, Y, and Z. How we'll build on success. Sometimes I think we all, when we're fundraising, you know we're sort of saying we need all these things, we have no idea what to do and you know, you need to have a positive message. We need all these things but here's my plan and I believe that we can secure funds from X, Y, and Z. If this becomes part of the capital campaign, we can match it in this way. It will create opportunities here, there, and everywhere. So it's being in the end a strong advocate and celebrating success and accomplishment and being sure that those who are responsible for that capital campaign are well informed and engaged. I just put up the IMLS site so that people will know where to go for some of those resources. Can you explain and how the Museums for America can be used for needs assessment? One of you must have mentioned that. What if we develop CAP and IMLS? Elaine Hughes asked that. Yeah, I'm going to leave that off because actually, did I have that done as one of the sources there? I probably did. Oh, museums for America for needs assessment. Yes, I should have gone into detail about that. Museums for America is not for needs assessments. I'm sorry, I had that written down. I meant to go into that. It is, you can use it for long range conservation planning. That's a step that I left out on the chart. After the needs assessment, you can do a preservation plan. Here at the Conservation Center, we really recommend that you take the needs assessment survey, which is usually just a list of recommendations in the end. It doesn't put it into a strategic plan. The preservation plan is another document that puts it into usually a five year strategic plan focused on collections. And Museums for America does fund long range conservation planning. You could go there for a preservation plan following your needs assessment. Sorry, I meant to talk about that and I left it up and it gave a false impression, I'm afraid. Susan, can we, I'm just watching. This is really fun, I have to say. I'm gonna pull this over, kind of on top of that. I'm watching everyone and you know, you all are sharing some really great ideas among yourselves in terms of engaging students, engaging volunteers, building teams, using those individuals to help create excitement. But someone asked about the books and so I just wanted to show you, again, these are books that were rated by grant writers and I just was looking at them yesterday and thought I'd be sure to share all of them with you. And Susan, will they be able to find these so they can go to these links? They will, we'll include these in the slides that they can download. If they're really fast on their fingers, if they click on those links, it will open the Amazon site for them. So they can. Well, don't worry about being fast on your fingers. But all five of them are really terrific. In fact, I just ordered all five as a gift for someone as a collection. But be sure to order the more recent edition. Sometimes you can get the later editions cheaper, but in this case, I think probably the more recent editions will be useful. Again, don't forget about the publication from Heritage Preservation and IMLS which really focuses on collections of care. I think there's opportunity to write more about fundraising for collections of care. These books are about fundraising in general, but the rules are clear across the board. Okay, let's take one more question. I just wanna make sure that we cover again. There was a question about, I lost it, it scrolled, making sure, oh, good resources for strategic planning for small organizations. And so many of our audience come from a smaller museum. That's from Stu in Kokomo. I'll start, but I think Lee provided certainly a list, the federal grants that would be most useful, the CAP grant and the NEH grant. But also, don't forget about your state humanities organizations and arts organizations as well, and consult with them, because if you look at their grant-giving guidelines, and they all give grants, they often receive funding federally and also regionally, they may not mention preservation and conservation, but if you can make a case for why an assessment or a study would be essential to ensure that your collection is more available to the community, which is what they're interested in, or it can be used in connection with a lecture series on a subject that would be of interest to the local community, then they too may consider a grant of some kind. So you've gotta always sort of think a little bit outside the box. And for smaller initiatives, I love the way that Lee talked about how to build the funding. Use your board. The board really needs to be engaged in this process. They've got to understand the preservation challenges that we all face, but they've also got to see that they're part of that solution, and by contributing a modest amount of money, they may provide enough funds that you can bring in a consultant who can then provide you with the data and the details that you need to go for another grant. Lee, do you have other things to add? It's best to use an outside consultant for strategic planning. It can be expensive to use an outside consultant for strategic planning. So if you can get a volunteer to do it, especially if you're a very small institution starting out, that's fine. If you're compromising a little bit, and I think the important thing for the smaller institutions is to start strategic planning to do the document as best they can on a timetable. So don't put it off forever because you can't afford a top notch consultant to do it. Get some quotes for a range of consultants that you could do it with. And because you can't start fundraising until you actually have a quote, you need to know what your budget is going to be. This is Larry Rieger. Wouldn't strategic planning be a great fundraising tool to go to a corporation? They all love strategic planning. I think it might be best to go to a corporation to ask them for an in-kind donation of a time from one of their staff members who has experience in it to possibly lead doing it. There you go. Yeah. Also, churches. Higher education too, rightly. Churches, synagogues, religious institutions do this type of planning and might be available, yet the people who've done it may possibly, you might be able to get a volunteer if you go in certain institutions. Find out who's done it in your area, but looking at other institutions, corporations, businesses to get recommendations for planning. Just don't put it off because in the end if your organization wants to move ahead, you really need that document. And you're going to be doing another one in three to five years and you can take it up a notch at that time, but the first thing is to get the first document done. This is Susan again, and as you can see, we just have an abundance of questions, but I put up the recording site because Debbie and Lee will both continue this conversation in the discussion area. So as you go back to that site there and find your way to this particular session, you'll be able to find a discussion area and they can answer some of the questions that they didn't have time to get to during the webinar. So... Yeah, we would be delighted to do that. I wish we had, you guys have some really, not only great questions, but also excellent solutions and it's fun to see people networking in the chat area and in the end, I think another point to be made is the vital importance of collaboration and partnerships because you can't do this fundraising often on your own, but working collaboratively within your communities, within your state or in our case, we're also working around the world can lead to grants that you may not have been able to secure on your own. And I see that happening actually as you all are also wishing each other happy Thanksgiving, but it's really exciting to see this. Okay, great. Well, thank you both so much for sharing your expertise and I know the audience is going to want to say the same and we will continue this conversation and remember that we have another webinar coming up on December 2nd. So we have a fairly loyal audience that will continue to follow up. And that will focus on public outreach and advocacy, right? I believe so. Yeah, so that's really important because it is so directly connected. I urge you all to sign on to that because I think you'll find it very, very helpful. All right, thank you again. Thank you. Thanks.