 I'm Laura S. Quinn. I am an independent consultant focused on strategic websites and technology consulting for nonprofits. In part one, we talked about the idea of finding technology funding, so looking for a funder for a nonprofit technology project. So let's say you found a funder, maybe a foundation or a major donor who's willing to consider a request for that funding. So that's incredibly exciting. So how do you make the most of that opportunity and create something that's really compelling as a proposal? Link it to your mission. So it's probably obvious to you how your project helped your mission, but it's critical to make it clear to the funder as well. So will the technology let you help more people? Will it provide higher quality services, reach out further to actually reach more constituents? Will it make you more sustainable in the long run through potentially more individual donors or more subscribers? So another tip, you want to estimate some numbers. While you're making that link to your mission, try to ballpark some numbers. How much time, for instance, are you wasting due to problems and slowness from your old computers? And how many more constituents could you serve if you had that time back? How many more tickets could you sell if you had a website where you could better showcase your events? And how much revenue does that translate to? These don't need to be pristinely accurate numbers. So just a ballpark is really all that a funder will expect and you can say that they are estimates. You could say possibly as many as or things like that to make it clear that this is not some magic number that you've somehow arrived at. So you want to make it clear as well that you know approximately what the project will require to see it succeed. Truthfully, technology projects seem to fail an awful lot, especially from Foundation's perspective. Doing a bit of research so that you can include a summary of how you'll go about the project can really pay off. So it can make it clear that you know what you're getting into. TechSoup or Tech Impact have a lot of articles or many consultants will talk to you for half an hour or so without charge about how they'd take on a project. So this will also make sure that you have a solid budget to ask for in the project. If you have a complex project and it's really hard to easily say what the process will be to tackle it, you can simply say that your process is going to include a definition phase up front. So basically you show that you have a plan to create a plan, which is a lot better than no plan at all. Make sure you talk about how you will measure the project. Technology projects often have the advantage of being pretty measurable and potentially even making other things, other programs as a whole more measurable. So certainly play that up in your proposal. Talk about how you will maintain it after you build it. So don't forget to estimate the cost for keeping your project running after you roll it out. Nearly every kind of technology project needs maintenance. So a website needs hosting and security updates and hopefully a continuous improvement budget. A constituent relationship management system needs someone at a minimum to oversee the data and work with the vendor. Estimating those costs both help you know what your actual budget should be and helps you communicate to the funder that you have a great handle on all of the costs that need to be considered. And make sure that you ask for enough to succeed. So it's really important not to artificially lower the budget just to make the project seem more palatable. So a funder that has a reviewer who knows technology is likely to simply flag that you won't succeed on that budget and potentially you don't know precisely what you're doing. Frame it instead as a willingness to invest some of your own funds alongside the funders. So if you've decided that you can't ask for more than whatever, 60% of the budget, frame it as okay here's our ask for 60% of the budget and we as an organization will cover the other 40% from our operating funds. This is also really important to the sector as a whole. So if we all as organizations keep pitching funders on technology projects that are too inexpensive then it sets the expectation that somehow it's possible to do technology projects at that cost and we kind of hurt ourselves in the long run. And that's our series first finding a funder in part one and then tips for writing a proposal in this part. Thank you for watching and best of luck with your technologies and thank you so much for the work that you do.