 Hey, welcome everybody to this TechSoup Hosted Webinar. I'm so excited that you are here today. We're gonna be talking about enhancing your fundraising success through partnership. And you know how important that is, right? I'm Aretha Simons. I'm the webinar producer here. I'm gonna show you how you can engage because I'm gonna quickly move out of the way so you can get into this webinar. It might, my mouth will work. So of course you know you are on mute. We would love for you to use the Q&A chat feature. Excuse me, not the Q&A chat feature, the Q&A to put your questions. But if you want to put it in the chat, we will probably grab them and be able to answer your questions as well. We're going to email you the slides and the video replay probably about tomorrow. And somebody's already talking about the closed captions. If you love closed captions, if you need the closed captions, go ahead and tap on the CC button at the bottom of your screen. I'm gonna show you one quick thing and then I'll move out of the way. I don't know if you've heard of Quad. I'm gonna put a link for Quad in the chat, but it's something new here at TechSoup. And there's gonna be a hyperlink on this slide too when we send the slides to you. But this is a peer-to-peer community, much like what we're doing here, but it's a little different. You're gonna have exclusive events just for your group, expert technical support, access to the course catalog for the courses, and so much more. Again, I'm gonna put the link in here, but you didn't come to hear me talk. You came to see Alison. And I don't know why this slide is not working, but that's okay. I'm gonna go ahead and stop sharing my screen because Alison is here. She's the president of GrantStation and she's gonna go ahead and put up her slides and she'll be presenting today. I'm so glad you're all right here and looking forward to learning myself over to you, Alice. Thank you. All right, well, welcome everybody. We have a nice large crowd, little bit of a chilly crowd, but that's all right. We can huddle together here this afternoon or this morning or wherever your time zone is. So what we're going to do today is talk a little bit about kind of what the benefits of partnering are. Aretha said at the very beginning, you know that's important, right? And it really is important. It's important to funders. It's important to donors, but it's so important to our nonprofits. And there's a lot of benefits to that. So I wanna kind of talk through different ways that you can benefit. And then there are just different terms that get a little confusing around partnerships and things like that. So I wanna talk about those definitions and how they're not exactly set in stone things. And then spend most of our time talking about how we can create, find partners, how we can create meaningful partnerships for everyone involved. Things we need to consider as we're developing those partnerships. And then the other part of just then managing that partnership that partnerships have a life cycle, but it's not just the beginning and once it starts, you never have to revisit. So kind of how can we manage that to make it work for everyone? And then we'll do question and answers at the end. But like they said, feel free to just put those in the Q&A as we're going through and then we'll be able to take those questions. So quite simply, you know, we're better together when we're working together. When we're pooling our resources and our talents and our treasures, we really can have a greater impact on whatever it is that we're trying to impact, whatever our missions are or our focus areas are. We can do better when we're sharing those scarce resources than when we're trying to be in silos doing our own thing. And some real specific benefits of partnering are just the increased efficiencies that go on by having that expertise of multiple people and groups and having the resources to do more things. We can really expand our reach by increasing those that are cross-promoting with us, those that we're connecting with and really extend to more people. Obviously we can share our knowledge and what we know and learn from one another and then just have that greater impact by working together. And as we talk about how just these partnerships or ways to create that, I have some tips in a little bit about how we can look at our issues and look at them more broadly so that we can find out how to create that bigger impact. And then when we partner with those that are really awesome partners, just the entire group together really enhances credibility of having a lot of support. And then it also just improves coordination between a system of care. So if you're working with your target population and that target population might need multiple steps to get to a better place, then those partnerships can really improve that and help people move from one level to the next level that they may need. So there's lots of benefits for us as nonprofits in addition to just the fact that funders really like to see it and donors really like to see us collaborating. And so it also just helps us raise money as well. So here's where I was talking about no set word for the definitions. So you can go out and look on the internet and do some reading and you'll see that associations and coalitions and collaboratives and alliances and consortiums, there is no one set definition for those or any of these. So you'll always kind of want to look at how if you're looking at a funder, how is the funder defining a coalition, for example, or if you get together with a group of people, what you want to call that group, do we wanna call it a consortium or do we wanna call it a partnership and those kinds of things? And so here's just like one quick example of a grant that I wrote for the, it was from the Health Resources and Services Administration, HRSA. And they have this funding opportunity that's Rural Community Opioid Response Program and then Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome. So that was the funding opportunity name. But in order to get this funding, the organization had to build the consortium and HRSA defined that consortium as an organizational arrangement among four or more separately owned entities, including the applicant, with established working relationships and a history of collaborating on SUD or OUD which is Substance Use Disorder or Opioid Use Disorder. So this was their particular definition, but you could find that you open up an application instructions or another funder would say we want to fund a consortium, they may define that very differently of what that looks like. So I think you really want to be really looking at the purpose of what you're doing, what if you're doing it for a funding opportunity, how that funder is defining it, and then also just that overall realization that these things don't really have a set definition. So I'm just gonna use partnerships as we kind of go through this, but there's lots of different types of partnerships. So here's just kind of a spectrum, a way that we can think of types of models for partnering. And so this goes from the least formal on the left to the most formal arrangement on the right. It doesn't mean that one is better than the other. If they meet the intended purpose, that that's fine. A merger is not better than a collaborative. It's just how you're meeting the needs of whatever it is you're trying to address. So just some different examples, you may find that you have health associations that do work in your community, or you may have a nonprofit association that does work in your state. And so they bring together the nonprofits, they share expertise, they share knowledge, those kinds of things. I was just part, before I joined Grand Station, I was part of a harm reduction coalition here in West Virginia. And so that harm reduction program was just any organization that wanted to develop a harm reduction program, and they got together in this collaborative to work to, or coalition they called it, to work together and they shared resources, they shared their manuals, they shared how they developed. And it was really nice because as new people would come in, then those who kind of already had programs or had lessons learned, they would share really valuable information and like I said, manuals and things that help the new people develop. And then also the groups could collaborate across county lines and do different things that way. So these are usually looser groups that work together. The next level up would be joint programs. I don't know if any of you have ever like applied to a funder as a joint program. I did work with a group one time that was doing a prisoner reentry program. And also it was a joint project, joint program between the prisoner reentry initiative and then another nonprofit organization that did like mental health, and substance use counseling. So they applied as a 50-50 partnership and they submitted that application together using the strengths of both of their organizations and then sharing the responsibilities, sharing the money, sharing the reporting, everything that went on from there. So that would be an example of a joint program. Another example kind of moving up that spectrum is just sharing support functions. So you may have two organizations that share office space. And now with, you know, after the pandemic and less people going into a physical office or going in on different days of the week, you know, this could be even more of a really financial, you know, really financial boom to nonprofits because if you can share that rent and utility costs and the furniture costs and those kinds of things and share that space, pay half, you know, two organizations paying half, it just saved you a lot of money that you don't have to spend elsewhere. It could also be shared functions of taking two organizations that don't potentially need a full-time bookkeeper or a full-time administrative person to answer phones and direct mail and direct people around or perhaps they don't need a full-time person to do a human resources component. So you could take positions like that and share them among two different nonprofits to again, save those dollars and to, you know, get the people that get the people that could do a full-time position where you maybe get more consistency in the in value for your money. So those are just some different ways that that shared support function work. And then kind of the biggest, most complex model would be actually merging two organizations and or more, two or more. So there's an organization called Journey Care that GrantStation has every other year, a winning grant proposal competition and one year Journey Care was the winner. And but they were a merger of three different hospice organizations in the Chicago area, I believe, and they came together to form Journey Care. And so they merged all their organizations into one. I was also part of another organization. I'm in West Virginia and it was two organizations that were doing capacity building work. One was called the Community Collaborative and they were doing more work around the development of people and the development of leaders and those kinds of things in the nonprofit sector. Then there was another organization called the Community Development Partnership and they were doing more of the organizational capacity building. As time went on as resources got scarcer, they merged those two organizations together to provide both of those services and created the West Virginia Nonprofit Association. So those kinds of things, again, they can help with bringing together again the skills and talents with sharing those scarce resources and then with helping to serve more people and serve people more effectively or better. But again, it's not that one is better than the other. The coalitions are fine for their purpose, mergers are fine if that's what's needed, but they do have different levels of work and different levels of things that you need to consider as you're developing them. And we'll talk about a few of those in a bit. Just some other ways that collaborating together with nonprofits would be through different cross promotion. I'm sure you probably are already doing that in your community where you're connecting with other nonprofits to help advertise what you do or provide those warm handoffs for the target population to get needed services, lots of opportunities to cross promote. Decentralized fundraising is kind of something I will be incredibly honest, I don't completely understand, but it's kind of like the crowdsourcing without having an intermediary. So it's a little bit beyond my understanding, but it's fundraising across organizations and getting funding from a lot of different areas without having that intermediary in a crowdfunding situation. And then there's lots of different, just opportunities to create reports together, to create, to do data analysis, to look at the impact that you're having collectively or look at the problems that you're addressing collectively. And then learning from one another and having shared webinars, shared resources, shared conferences. I know a lot of people that have done that over the years that I've worked with them where their conference used to be their own two-day conference, they partnered with another larger organization and it became a three-day conference, but it helped both organizations to merge those conferences together, again, pooling those resources and pooling those funding sources to support it. It also helps, when you look at the nonprofits that might benefit from those combined conferences or webinars, a lot of times it's the same people showing up. So it helps them have that opportunity to work collectively as well. And then it just different coordination of how you provide those services. So I think a lot about programs in our community, in my community right here, where all of the food pantries work together, they report out together information. And so they can refer people to different services as necessary or work up the level of care together to move people from the food pantries to let's say to healthy food nutrition programs or something like that. So it can really help out with that kind of progression that people go through as they learn new things and do different things because of what they're learning with our nonprofits. So how do we do it, right? So I got an exhaustive amount of the benefits there. And so I have a couple of different tools that I wanna show you in different ways that I've worked to develop partnerships. The first step is gonna be looking at our partnership identification tool which is on the next few slides and talk through that and how you can brainstorm some of those partnerships and what we do as we're brainstorming or thinking about those partnerships. And one of the things that we do is look at their motivations and their self-interest, what would benefit them and then looking at what we're looking to be benefited from. So what resources are we looking from that organization in this partnership or this coalition or this collaborative or whatever word or this joint program that you're doing? So here's just the partnership identification tool as kind of a first step in really starting that brainstorming process. And so it starts off with looking at different businesses and corporations that could provide support to our organization. And because I live in a really rural community where we don't have a lot of businesses and corporations in our community, sometimes we have to think outside of the box so to speak and think about that in a broader term. So again, obviously when you're looking at those partnerships you'd want to look at your local community what kinds of businesses and corporations there could support you. But if there's not a lot, looking at your different stakeholders, the companies where your stakeholders work. So it could be your board of directors and your volunteers and your participants and starting to collect that information on those companies and reaching out to those companies because a lot of times companies give out by their employees, where their employees are giving their time and treasures they will give money to follow up with that time and treasure. So that can really expand your network of either funding support, volunteer support, anything else that you'd be looking for from the companies. You can also look at companies that sell to those stakeholders that even if they're not in your community that they serve your community. So even though this particular Exxon isn't in my city it does serve this other city does come to this city to buy their gas and so they sell to that community. Then also just looking at vendor corporations, anyone that you already buy from as a potential partner in your area or not. And then affinity corporations are just corporations they can be anywhere but they're the for-profit version of your non-profit. So you really align. So let's say you do work with individuals with developmental disabilities. And so maybe you go to a corporation that might sell wheelchairs or assistance equipment and things like that because you're both serving the same target population. So that's a good thing to do. You're both serving the same target population. So those are just ways to kind of think in the business community a little bit broader and as you're doing it with the possible motivations. I think with businesses and corporations it's a little different than nonprofits if you're partnering with nonprofits. Usually their motivations are to have that advertising that they're providing support to your nonprofit. They're looking to increase people buying from them. So increase their own sales. They're looking for good PR that shows that they're good citizens. So as you're coming to these organizations to start to develop those partnerships you want to always think of how you can benefit them from that ER marketing perspective ahead of time so that you're providing that something that they really see as a benefit to partnering with you. And then identifying specifically what is it that you're looking for from them? So is it education that we're trying to provide education to the community? Is it that we're looking for volunteers from your business? Are we looking for money? Are we looking for support, just in kind support of getting space in your business to provide our workshops? So there's a lot of different potential resources that you may be asking for. And so kind of having that idea brainstorming what it is so that when you do that first initial outreach again, you're pitching to them the benefit to them and what you're asking for. So that's kind of the business side of it. The other part of the partnership tool is just looking at different community assets and looking at that very broadly as well because there are a lot of different assets in our community. And so it could be social service agencies which are run the gamut of services. You have educational institutions from K through 12 on to higher ed. So where are the resources there or the support that you might need from those entities? Communities of faith provide a lot of volunteers, a lot of financial support to nonprofits, elected officials. How can you engage with them to provide something to support your organization? All the government entities, all the state agencies, county commissions, groups like that. There's lots of civic groups like your Lions Club, your Roa Tans, groups like that who love to support and give back to different projects. Community gatekeepers, I just consider those they're the people that have the influence. So once you get Aretha Simmons to sign on to this project, all of a sudden you've opened the door to 20 other people who want to join because they follow Aretha. Go like an influencer almost. And who are those gatekeepers that could really provide that extra help to your organization? Then you have healthcare organizations that do a lot in the community. You have the media. You obviously have funders. And then the different public resources that we have of our streams, our hiking trails, oceans depending on where you are, those kinds of things that can be used to help support our projects. So again, with all of these, I just encourage just this mind dumping of brainstorming ideas of ways that these organizations could help you and who they are and what you would be looking for specifically from them and then how they would benefit from partnering with you. And that really puts you coming from a position of strength instead of just coming from a position of a handout of I need something. It says, I have access to this many participants for you as well, or I have access to resources that you may need. And I'm happy to provide that in return. So this is just, again, a great brainstorming tool to use as a way to start generating those ideas for who you could connect with. Another really great way to identify potential partners is through the planning of your projects. And so at GrantStation, whenever I'm teaching a grant writing workshop, I'm always talking about developing proposals. And this framework is what we use as our foundation for how to develop proposals. So I'm not gonna go through this in great detail, but here in this part of the need that you're addressing, you're starting to identify the target population that you're serving or want to serve, really providing the data and statistics on how many people are homeless, how many people have low incomes, how many students are dropping out of school, how many people that have diabetes or poor health outcomes. And so you really spend that time in a proposal coming up, discovering that data and presenting that data to the funder. But the next step of that, once you have that data, the next step is to do that root cause analysis of why are people homeless? Why are people unemployed? Why are people having these poor health outcomes? Those kinds of things, the reasons behind that need. And when you do that analysis, you're gonna find very likely that there is multiple root causes of the problems that you're dealing with. Most things are pretty complex. And with unemployment, it could be that there's no jobs and that's why people are unemployed. Or it could be that there's no training programs. So people can't get the education they need to get the jobs. Or it could be that people don't have transportation or childcare for when they have a job. And so you can see the spectrum on that. And again, there probably will be multiple reasons why. But when you do that analysis, and let's say your organization was the organization doing the training program, you can partner with job developers as well. You can partner with people who provide that childcare or the driving assistance or transportation sorts of things to augment your program, to show how you're partnering with other people to address this problem in a bigger way. And this is a really good place to start to look for those partnerships. And again, how you can benefit them and how they can benefit you and how if you work together, you're gonna make a better approach to address an issue on a bigger scale. And again, that's where funders are always interested in how you're doing that, how you're sharing those resources, how the transportation grant is being used and how it benefits this other job training program, those sorts of things. So I do believe that this step is one of the most missed steps in the planning for nonprofit organizations that we tend to be able to identify the needs, but we often don't do that analysis here, which can then lead us to either creating programs that won't make a difference or going at it alone and just thinking that I have this new answer that nobody's ever thought of before, which probably isn't true. So this is just another way to identify those partnerships to develop. When I'm working with proposals and writing information about those partners or when you're just putting information on your website, say about the different partners that you work with, just having the basics of who they are and what they do, who they serve, what areas, geographic areas they serve, things like that. And then always sharing with the funder what specific role they're gonna have in your projects. What are they bringing to the table to support the work that you're doing? That's a really key piece of it to really outline that. And if you're looking at a basic, let's say a basic just partnership where two groups are collaborating together, that's usually sufficient. You might have to have a letter of support that you provide to a funder or you develop between the two organizations. But as you start to further integrate some of the things that you might wanna think about ahead of time and presenting to the funder is in an organizational chart form, how you're connecting with that other organization or what your communication plan is between the two or more organizations. So we have a coalition of 10 organizations that meet monthly and communicate X, Y, Z. How you're collecting data and reporting out on that data are things that a funder is always interested in hearing about. So developing that process is really important. Maybe how often you're meeting or how that's working out. So just as it goes on, it just be as the relationship gets more in depth then you have to start developing it more and more with different integrations of communications and reporting and things like that. And then we'll talk a little bit more about this in a few slides. But as again, you go up that food chain of partnerships then you might start with a letter of support and then move up to a MOA, a Memorand of Agreement or an MOU, a Memorand of Understanding or Partnership Agreements or anything like that. We'll talk a little bit more about those. So here's just a quick example and I'm not gonna read this out loud so you can read while I'm talking over it. But it's two examples of things that I've seen in applications as a grant reviewer. And when I see the first one, well, let's just start here. Which scored higher, looking at this, hopefully very obviously it's number two. You see that number two scored higher from the funder's perspective. And the first bullet, it really does not tell the funder that there's an actual partnership. Just saying I partner with anybody. It just doesn't mean a lot because I don't see it in action. Whereas in the second paragraph, you are seeing the action, you're seeing what each partner is bringing to the table. You know that indeed this organization has sat down with partners and developed how this was gonna work. And so again, in a grant application it could be just as simple as this paragraph. In a larger application, you might put more information on that and it might go all the way up to if you had money exchanging hands, you'd go to that formal MOA or MOU type situation. But the key is really showing what the partners are, what their role is in your project and what they're bringing to the table. Just a couple of things as you're out there developing these partnerships, don't force the fit. If it doesn't work, then it doesn't work. If you start out with things that aren't aligning, then down the road, you're probably gonna run into problems. And one of the things that we do at Grand Station a lot with our partner programs and we're a for-profit organization, but when people are coming to us, we never want to push a program on them. We wanna make sure that the programs that they're investing in benefit their organization and us. Because if we do it that way from the beginning, then we can have a long lasting partnership. But if we try to upsell or do something that doesn't match who they are, then we know it's just gonna fall apart later on and we don't want that to happen. There's a lot of time investment. So none of these happen fast. So you do have to have that patience, realizing that in the beginning, you might be sowing seeds and seeing what grows before the harvest comes in. So it takes some time. So make sure that that's part of your plan to invest your time in the partnership. Then some other things again to consider. We talked about a few of these on the other slide, but again, as partnerships become more complex, as you start to move from a loose association to a more formal, let's say, joint project, you want to really hash out these things before the partnership even starts. Again, roles and responsibilities. Who's gonna be doing what and when are they required to do things? How is this group going to make decisions? Is it going to be consensus all the way? Is one organization going to have more of a governance role? Is it majority role? What is that decision making process that you're going to use? If there's a financial relationship, you need to make that sure that's very well spelled out of who's contributing what and when and the process of the flow of the dollars. So it could be that money is exchanged hands at the beginning of a joint project. It could be that one organization has to spend the money, then submit reimbursements to the other organization. So figuring that out ahead of time will solve you a lot of headache and problems in the long run. What is that communication plan? How are you going to connect? What are those shared goals that both of you are working towards? What's the planning process for your project? How are you going to develop strategically as two or more organizations coming together? And then even possibly talking about how you will resolve conflicts and identifying that ahead of time so that in the event of a conflict, you have a roadmap to go to that everyone's already agreed upon which will help reduce some of that conflict moving forward, hopefully. So just some things that you need to consider that you would put into a more formal MOU or MOA as those relationships become stronger. Another thing to really, every partnership has a risk, it's just that's inherent. You want to manage those risks. So again, starting that process and being open and transparent from the beginning of the process. If there's an ulterior motive, get that ulterior motive upfront, get that said. So that again, everyone's on the same page, you're not starting a relationship off in a bad sort of way. There's life cycles of partnerships, the beginning, the kind of coupling, if you will, coming together, there's going to be conflict as the groups work together. So realizing that that's a normal part of the process. But again, if you can work out the process ahead of time through those agreements, partnership agreements or MOUs or MOAs, then that's just benefits you most in the long term. So really realizing that while everything does have a risk, you want to minimize that as much as possible. Now, this is a little bit hard to see, but this tool has been so useful for me as when I was a consultant, because quite often I would get brought in to a group and to ask to facilitate a project, a meeting, a program, something like that with community members. And sometimes I would come into those groups and things weren't necessarily working. And which is usually why they ask a consultant to come in, usually because something's not working. And so sometimes I would just have to really blatantly ask, how are people feeling to start to realize where potential problems are? And this chart just was so helpful for me. So basically what it says is that a project or a community change needs all of these things. It needs leadership and vision and inclusiveness, action plans, skills, resources, incentives, and communication. And when you have all of those things well-developed and working together, then you have success. But when you have distrust within the group, probably what's missing is that communication piece, because people aren't feeling like they know what's going on and they feel like people are doing things behind their back because they haven't heard anything and those sorts of issues. Or when people are really frustrated, it's like, well, why is everybody frustrated? Usually you can tie that back to resources not being available. So people can't get their work done, can't get their jobs done because they don't have enough resources, human or physical resources to get the work done. And so they're very frustrated. Everybody can relate to that, right? Looking at anxiety, the group is just really anxious about what's going on. And it's probably because they don't have the skills to do the work that they're proposing to do. So this is just a great chart that I just keep handy when working in groups because it does help me start to pinpoint where some of those areas are that might need to be fixed or enhanced because the group is not working well. And it just was a really, really valuable tool for me. So I think it could be for you as well or even with your staff or within your own organization. I think all of these principles really come into play. So I'm gonna end with some different resources to help you with developing, oops, sorry, with developing any sort of memorandum of understanding. Now with these words as well, what I am finding is that there isn't a set definition. So one source will tell me that an MOU is not legally binding and an MOA is legally binding. And another source is gonna tell me that that's not necessarily the case, they're the same things, right? So again, realizing that the definitions may change depending on what source you're going to, but here are just resources to help you create that memorandum of understanding, things again that you need to be thinking of and addressing before you start the partnership, similar to things that we've talked about in this webinar. This resource is just a toolkit to help you write it. Here, you can kind of see how they say the typical, what's in a typical MOU and how you can write that. Another one is from the contracts council and here now they're saying that an MOA is different from an MOU, right? So you're gonna find that conflicting information around. Usually what it is about from what I understand is that it's really about the language that's put into them and you can create legally binding MOAs or MOUs. So again, we will want to work with an attorney or somebody to help you draft these things, especially if you're starting to exchange money, starting to do joint programs, those sorts of things to make sure that the language is what you need it to be. Again, at a beginning level, it's not that important that it's a legally binding document but once you start with the shared resources and shared space and those sorts of things, you're gonna want a document that's legally binding or even a joint program. And then finally, just another resource with just a template that you can use and just fill in the blanks about whatever kind of partnership that you're trying to develop. So just some resources to help you because I know that that is often the confusing part is how do you develop those contracts and things like that. So I'm going to take a drink. I'm gonna see what questions we have. I do wanna point out that we do have the TechSoup sale coming up. It's two days only, February 13th and 14th, where you can purchase a GrantStation membership from TechSoup for $99. Cheap as you're gonna find it. So mark that if you want a GrantStation membership, those two days will be your two days to get that sale. So I'm gonna take a drink and then we can get to your questions. So again, thank you everyone for being with us. We have question and answer time. This is Jeremy with GrantStation. I host a lot of our online education offerings that we have there. But again, $99 for a year of GrantStation. You'll be able to hear my voice, your Alice's voice and see all the wonderful things that we have available at GrantStation. And yes, Patricia, $99 is very reasonable. I agree with that very much. And you can see there's a link in there to sign up to find out more. If you aren't currently member of TechSoup, maybe you should think about becoming a member of TechSoup. Lots of great offers there, especially if you happen to use technology, which right now I'm assuming all of us are doing. So that's pretty good. So Alice, let's do some questions. One question that came in earlier, just maybe for just a little bit of a recap. Could you explain again how a coalition or association would apply for a grant together or would it just be one organization doing it? I think just for clarification purposes. Yep, great question, Jeannie. Usually what happens is there's one applicant and they would be the person or the organization that receives the dollars. So with that example from the HRSA grant that I was talking about on a previous slide, the West Virginia Perinatal Partnership was the lead organization. And they worked within the coalition and the coalition, all those folks received money through the grant, but it flowed from the federal government to the one lead applicant and then to the partners. And then, but that doesn't necessarily mean that that lead applicant has to make every decision or whatever, you could still have a collaborative model of making decisions, which is how they did actually operate, but that one organization, actually that's where the money flowed through that one organization and then reported back up through that organization. So one will have to take the lead. They can't just be like, hold the door open for the other person to go through. Someone has to go through first to be the front. Yep. Just to answer a couple of questions that came in, you will be receiving recording, you will be receiving a copy of the slides. A little bit about GrantStation. We do have a lot of grants for Canada and a lot of information about Canadian federal grants and private grant makers as available on our website. And a slide said, the summary of what GrantStation membership includes, we could spend a lot of time going into that, but your best bet is actually to head to GrantStation.com and we have a page basically called What Does Your Membership Include? And it shows you everything that comes with GrantStation. It includes everything from finding grants to how to write grants, how to prepare to write grants, how do I find time to write grants? How do I get alerts sent to me automatically when something new that fits my specific specifications comes in? How do I see what winning grants worked in the future? How do I find newsletters, all that great stuff? It's all on our website, GrantStation.com, and you can find it just by clicking on the information about What Is GrantStation? And it explains all this information. So I don't wanna waste our time here talking about that. So GrantStation.com though, $99, not a bad deal. And again, one last mention, February 13th and 14th. That's what it'll be. Next question. And Sherry, I'm gonna interrupt you actually for a second. We're also having TechSoup is hosting a tour of some of the tools that GrantStation has. And so you can also go to the TechSoup site and sign up for that. It's, I don't have the date off the top of my head, but it's our next one. And Jeremy's going to show you the tools and how to use them. And that's a free webinar. Yeah, I guess I was overlooking the fact that I'll be giving a whole tour talking about everything that we're talking about right now. But back to today's topic. So, Grisma had an interesting question. This is more of a philosophical kind of approach. Her org provides shoes to those in need. And they're asking orgs that serve the clients they serve to write us into grants, provide shoes to them on a consistent basis. And the question, coming up, talking about contracts and MOUs, she says a contract really seems so scary and binding. I just wanna make sure that we both understand that there are dual reporting responsibilities that's required of you and of me. And of course, the agreed upon amount gets to them. And they asked a law firm to draft a contract, but is there a step below that, but maybe a step above an MOU? I mean, like MOU plus plus or something like that. Let me think here. So I totally get what you're saying that and how a project like that works. I've been around those projects. So if another organizations, they could treat you as what would be called like a sub awardee or usually not a contractor, that usually not that, but usually a sub awardee. And so the money comes to them, but then you actually provide the shoes, then the money comes back to you. So with something like that, I mean, I think that it's fine just to have an MOU or an MOU and just how the process is gonna work laid out. Either it's gonna be a set number of pair of shoes or transactions or it's going to be as needed. This is how the process will work. They will contact us, we will do this. We'll get our money back within 10 business days, and just show how it works back and forth. I wouldn't worry. Again, I know that an attorney could maybe say that there is a formal difference between a contract and an MOU and an MOU and probably legally with legal ease. I think they could all be the same depending on how they were written. But anyway, so I just, I think you wanna have something written whenever there's money exchanging hands. So having that just lays out the process and it doesn't have to be super scary and have a ton of legal ease in it. It's just what are your responsibilities? What are their responsibilities? How is the money gonna flow back and forth and how are you gonna deal with conflicts? And I think that that should be sufficient. Oh, that sounds really good and makes a lot of sense too. So speaking of scary, here's a scary question, ready? You ready for this? Should a nonprofit form a partnership with a for-profit organization? Absolutely, and a great example of that is TechSoup, which is a nonprofit organization and Grand Station, which is a for-profit organization. And we both are here to provide resources to nonprofits. And we partner together for this TechSoup promotion every year, twice a year. So yeah, there's lots of great opportunities to partner with for-profits and nonprofits. You wanna make sure that you have that mission alignment that you're all working towards rowing in the same direction, serving potentially the same people or trying to reach out to the same people. But it's a really great thing to partner with your for-profits and nonprofits together. Lots of opportunities. So don't be scared, basically. No, don't be scared of that. It's a good thing. I mean, again, you want to get that trust out there. You wanna be transparent in your financials and what's going on in different things like that. Not that they have to literally comb through your books, but you wanna really understand who you're, and this would have to do with any nonprofit as well, nonprofits, partnering with nonprofits. You wanna make sure that whoever you are connecting with that they're very reputable as well. Because if something happens bad on one hand, then you're gonna get your reputation tarnished. So develop that partnership, take your time, be patient, really think through it. But yeah, that's nothing wrong with that. Jennifer asks, you mentioned a letter of support. What is that? Yeah, so a letter of support is usually written for a grant application when usually a funder will ask for that. And if they ask for that, you go to your partners and the things that I always put in a letter of support, what I like to do as a writer, I like to rewrite these letters of support so that the partnering organization could read it, make any edits to it, but just put it on their letterhead and send it back, and sign it and send it back because that was the fastest way to get the letters of support instead of just saying, well, you write us a letter of support. And then the things I would include in those letters are information about the organization, the partnering organization, who they are, who they serve, what they do, and then put the role that they're participating, what they're doing as part of your project, how they're gonna support you. And then putting just some information about, about how working together will help address the issue. So if we partner together, just really trying to tie it together as to why this partnership is important. So it's essentially, it's like a written handshake that we're gonna work together, we're gonna do these things to support each other. And again, in that letter of support, it has the roles from that partner. And speaking of support, you can actually support your organization with a membership to GrantStation on February 13th and 14th for $99 only through techsoup.org. Make sure you're a member. Aretha put that in the chat. And just like all of our webinars, GrantStation is on time and has one minute remaining. So Aretha, if you'd like, feel free to come back on and give everyone the parting thoughts and views of what they need to know. Amazing as always, Alice. I could sit here this all day and there was lots of thank yous in the chat. Again, we can't say enough about the promotion because it happens once a year. So come on board so you can find those grants. Thank you GrantStation, Jeremy and Alison Yee in the background from Techsoup. Thank you for being here today. Bye-bye everybody. Bye-bye.