 Welcome everybody. Thanks for joining this webinar today, putting your best foot forward, how to incorporate strength in your grant proposal. This is going to be a great webinar. I said before we started, I was getting my pen and paper ready because I knew there's going to be something that I need to write down. I don't want to wait and say, I'll remember. No, I need to write it down now. So you're going to learn today how to infuse in your grant proposals with strength and solutions to boost your credibility. And to establish trust with your potential donors. My name is Aretha Simons. I'm the webinar producer here at TechSoup. I want to show you how you can engage today if this is your first time. Somebody has already turned on the closed caption. You can turn on the closed caption by clicking on the CC button at the bottom of your screen. We are recording this. You'll get the recording probably tomorrow along with the slides so you can get some more insights from this video replay. It's going to be amazing. We would love if you would type your questions in the Q&A section. Alice, our future speaker, she has tons of members here to answer your questions and we're also going to be answering your question at the end. So I'm going to get ready to move out the way and introduce our speaker. She's no stranger here at TechSoup. She is the president of Grant Station and she's joined the team after 20 years of working in or with nonprofits. She's raised over $45 million working with hundreds of organizations to help them increase their capacity to raise funds. I'm so excited that you're here with us, Alice. I'm going to turn this over to you and have a great webinar. Thank you so much, Aretha. And thank you all for being here. We do have a nice crowd. And so I'm very excited about that. And what we're going to do and we have a busy time. So I'm just going to go ahead, pull my slides up and get right into it. So what we're going to do today is start with the place I always like to start, which is just the fundamentals of kind of what's going on with the grant writing and with our strengths and get some of the language and terminology and concepts down. And then we will take this and take the information and figure out how to apply it to our organizations to first identify those strengths that we want to communicate to our donors and funders and partners and others. And then how after we've kind of mined these strengths from our organization, then how do we include them in our grant proposals to make them as strong as possible and to really stand out from the crowd. And that will probably take us about 45 minutes and then we'll have time for those questions and answers. So again, feel free to put those in the Q&A box. Jeremy is behind the scenes from Grant Station. And if you have questions specific to Grant Station, he's there to help you answer those and Aretha with texts. So they're both in the background and can answer those more technical questions for both organizations. So one of the things that happens to me a lot when I'm doing a workshop or about grant writing is somebody will ask me, you know, where in my proposal do I show how needy my organization is? And, you know, that if we don't get the money, we're going to go out of business or that we're really struggling and we really need these dollars. And my answer to that is absolutely nowhere. Am I presenting myself as an organization that's needy or, you know, that doesn't have those strengths? You know, I'm always focusing on the strengths and solutions that my organization provides to the community and to its participants. Your budget when you submit your application is going to show that you, you know, have $5,000, but you need $50,000. It's going to show your need for the money that you're requesting. So in your applications, I always want you to go with putting those those again that best foot forward and really showing the funder all the strengths of your organizations and the solutions that you provide to challenges in the community. So that's kind of where we're starting from. A number of years ago, probably about more than 10 years ago, I started really hearing the term, you know, strength based grant writing or asset based grant writing and those kinds of terms. And as a person who at the time had a grant writing business, I, you know, really wondered what it is that people are talking about when they say, you know, strength based grant writing or asset based grant writing. And what do they mean practically in that. And I did a lot of research and I really came across really just changes in language that, you know, kind of promoted the strengths. But it really wasn't anything different than just writing a grant and highlighting the strengths kinds of things. And so at the same time, I was a colleague of mine was was really engaged with this process called appreciative inquiry. And as we go through the webinar today, it has a I there and when in this webinar, I'm not talking about artificial intelligence, which is a hot topic, but I'm talking about appreciative inquiry in this particular webinar when I use that term. And what appreciative inquiry is, is a positive approach to community change. So it's not a deficit based model where we're solving yesterday's problems, but a positive movement where we're designing together an ideal future. And within this process, you know, it really kind of originated in a business environment for profit business environment. And as I heard more about it, I was I just really really struck me as how the nonprofit community really, you know, embraces this or could embrace this. This kind of idea of again that positive community change. One example that I'll give you about kind of what appreciative inquiry is kind of about is in a deficit based model, let's say your organization has core employee morale. And so your staff is not getting, you know, working together well, there's lots of conflict, all those kinds of things. And in a deficit based model, you would say, Okay, let's get together, let's study this bad morale. Okay, let's figure out what's going on. And let's try to develop a system to fix it. And when you do that, you will very likely get less bad employee morale. But appreciative inquiry would say, you know, you're not really just looking to decrease bad employee morale. What you really want to inquire into is creating great thriving teams. Right. And so when you start to inquire into great, you know, things and start to create that how do we create great teams. That's a completely different process than just reducing bad things. So appreciative inquiry is really always looking at how we co create into the future together. And it always engages all the stakeholders in your organization, internal and external. So as you're doing some of these things that will go through on some of the slides, how do we mine this information, right. But you're engaging all stakeholders, your participants, your board members, your volunteers, your staff, maybe some of your partners, maybe some of your funders you're bringing in, and you're inquiring into, you know, what you can create into the future. Because nothing can really be changed by solving yesterday's problems. You know, that as moving forward, you want to, you know, create a new what you're looking for. Right. And if you spend your time, kind of spinning your wheels with yesterday's problems, then you're never creating what you really want to create. So another thing with with strength based kind of approaches is that builds on other things that exist in the community. So looking really broadly at your community and what other assets exist that you could incorporate into your projects to more holistically deal with the problem. And then finally, one of the things that I really, really believe in with different strength based approaches and especially appreciative inquiry is that it really builds the energy in the room. It's a completely different vibe and different feeling when people are working together to create thing. Again, instead of, you know, rehashing the problems of the past, because we get stuck there, and we, you know, you know, really start to really drill down into all the problems and we never get to that part of creating what we want to into the future. So those are just some kind of fundamentals that we'll talk about about appreciative inquiry in particular and how you can use that information in your grant applications. So before we get into that, I do just want to go over a real quick outline. And if you've taken any grant station webinars. In the last couple of years about grant writing this framework pop stuff, and it's what I use to develop every application I wrote. And it takes all the pieces of a grant application and lays them out and helps you to connect all the pieces together. So when you do start to write your applications, you know it's all laid out and connected and you're telling a really coherent and consistent story. So we have webinars about, you know, using this framework, all the time at Grant station, but I'm just going to give you a really high level overview of what it is. So one, the first part is that organizational background, where you're establishing your credibility as an organization, really showing the reviewer and the funder, what your strengths are, how you've impacted the target population, the different programs that you offer and the impact that you have had through those projects. The next part is the need section where we talk about first kind of defining our geographic area or scope that we serve so that the reviewer again understands where we're serving and providing some of that context about our geography. So, you know, is it an urban community with a lot of young families in it, or is your community a rural community that's aging and those kinds of things so you're kind of describing and providing context of area that you serve. And then you're spending a lot of time talking about the people that you serve and what they're struggling with right now. So you're using the data that you can find at a lot of different sources to really describing what your target population is struggling with right now. So once you have that data, then what you want to do is kind of do that root cause analysis of saying okay now that I know how many people, you know, are, you know, how many kids are dropping out of high school now that I know how many people are unemployed now that I know how many people who don't have homes in my service area. So we need to identify the reasons why that occurs. Okay, so what are some of those root causes, which once we know why it occurs, then we can develop an approach to meet those root causes. So here we have the, the, the, we were establishing the baseline of what's going on with our target population. And when we move over to here to our outcomes we're starting to determine how do we want to see those, those participants change over time. Okay, so how, you know, why, how are they going to, you know, change in their knowledge and skills and behaviors and that we're talking about. And so in the outcomes we're developing what those, what we anticipate saying changed. And then our indicators provide that specific measurable achievable realistic kind of indicators of how we're going to measure those outcomes. So going back to here again, we looked at what our target population was struggling with and why they were having those problems. We then develop an approach to address what those root causes are. And then our outputs are where we measure what we did so that we have some of that data to come back to in the event that we didn't achieve those outcomes and indicators that we were looking for. Or anything like anything else like that we can come back and look at what we did and determine if we have to do more of something or less of something or do something differently. Or scrap something or whatever. And then our budget really aligns with our approach. So our approach section and our budget are the same. The budget has the numbers. The approach outlines how we're going to spend all the things we talked about in the budget. So if we have staff members in our budget, what the staff members are going to do are in our approach. We have technology in our budget. We're going to talk about how people are going to use that technology in our approach. So this is a, again, a high level quick glance at the planning framework, but these are in the grant writing world, even though all funders use different terms to mean the same things. 95% of all of your applications are going to be these components of your strengths of your organization and what you do and what impact you've made, what need your survey, what you want to see changed, what you're going to do and your budget. So the hard kind of part comes in with how is each funder using the different terminology. But these are the major components. These are what you're going to kind of work with in every single funder's applications or RFPs. So looking at this, right, and then connecting it to appreciative inquiry for a second. I really, again, I was a grant writer before I kind of learned the appreciative inquiry process. But I really, as I was learning appreciative inquiry, I was like, you know, these almost connect to a grant application, you know. And so, you know, in the discover phase of appreciative inquiry, you know, what are you doing, you know, you're bringing in all your stakeholders to figure out what the positive core of your organization is what are those strengths that bring your organization to life. How you align those strengths to meet community needs. And then kind of sharing best practices and helping others along with you kind of is also, you know, something that we do in that process because we can share our successes with others. When we looked at those needs and outcomes from the project planning framework, to me, that's really when we get into the dream stage of an appreciative inquiry. Where you're taking all those stakeholders and you're creating those images of what this better world is going to be after you, you know, develop and implement your programs. They're very strategic in, you know, what you're going to do with your outcomes and what you want to see changed and things like that. But what we're kind of co creating together is this better world. Then the design phase comes in an appreciative inquiry and that again to me just completely aligned with an approach section and an application of what are those strategies that you're going to implement to achieve those those outcomes are the dream that you envisioned. And, you know, what's the plan, what's the plan of action. And then finally, in an appreciative inquiry, kind of process, the last one is destiny, where you're looking at, you know, kind of what you did. And, you know, real, you know, doing that evaluation component to know if you're achieving what you meant to achieve, and kind of celebrating accomplishments along the way. I think it's really important because, you know, with a lot of the work that you're doing out there in the community, you know, there is no bullpost, you know, there's no place that you can just throw the football down and say, done, we, you know, we did it. And a lot of times the things that we're doing and working with continue to go on and on. So I think as part of that process celebrating those successes is important to save your staff from burnout and and all those kinds of things that that can happen. So, again, you saw a big picture of grant writing with the project planning framework. A big picture of appreciative inquiry, you know, looking at how we connect the two together. So the next slides, what I have for you are ways to take each of those four sections, you know, discover dream design and destiny, and how you can engage your stakeholders to start to mine this information. And after doing this, again, it's a very question based kind of process where you're bringing people together. And the first step is usually, you know, answering the question of what works well in our organization, you know, everything might not work the best. Right, but starting to identify those things that do work well, because probably something has to work well, even if it's a disaster, right. So what are some of the things working. So what is it that's working in the process. So asking your team, any kind of combinations of any of these questions, you know, you know, what are our greatest accomplishments or product achievements. And how do they represent the strengths of the organization, you know, what are the things that make us unique, without bashing other organizations right what what's the strengths of our organization that we're bringing to the table. What we can be the best at in our own, you know, worlds. How do we use our strengths, you know, what's changed because of the work that we do. And then kind of what are the core factors that give life to our organization when we're operating at its best. So these are questions again you can take back work with a broad, you know, kind of contingency of stakeholders. Like I said you want to include your participants in these conversations and your board and your staff and volunteers and I've had I've done this with a lot of organizations where, you know, they brought in their strengths and during the day we went through all of these questions and did activities around how do we pull out of this organization to be able to communicate that then to funders and donors and then also realize how do we identify those strengths and then how can we use them in our projects and our programs. Okay, so first is kind of identifying those strengths to use. The second set is in the dream stage. And so it really answers the questions, you know, how can we use our strengths, then that we just identified to meet community needs. You know, how can system different questions you can think about how can we best meet the needs of all of our stakeholders. Including our participants and our community and our employees and our board members and our volunteers, and all of those kinds of things making sure we're putting those folks in the process and making sure we're working to identify and and and use their strengths and and addressing their needs as well. And how can we use our greatest strengths to meet community needs. Looking at those, those strengths and what we've done and the impact that we've had in the community, you know, is, are there new services we can offer are there new clients that we can start to market to to engage more people in the in in our work. So we have three opportunities that we can focus our efforts on looking out at the community and seeing, you know, different needs as opportunities to address through our programs. And then finally, how can we refrain challenges to be seen as actually exciting opportunities. And I have a cute little story that I want to share and it's just a little analogy and so it's that this the sale these two salesman, they go to a new country. And they were shoe salesman, and one of the sales person and sell the salesman comes back, and he says to his, his folks he's like, Oh, it was terrible, because nobody wore shoes. You know, and so in the other office, the salesman comes back, and he says to the staff, he says, was the best, nobody wears shoes. Right. And so it's like, how do we reframe that the different challenges that our community experiences to be things that we can provide our expertise to, and things that we can actually move the needle on and make a difference. So again, good things to have discussions with with your team. The third set of questions that you can take is all about our dreams are outcomes of what we're trying to see change. So, you know, what do we want to see changed in so far as people's skills and knowledge and attitudes are or motivations, those kinds of things. What do we expect people to change in behaviorally, because they've learned these new skills or new knowledge or new attitudes or motivations. And then finally, what do we expect to see changed ultimately, which usually ties right back to our need that we were addressing in the first place. So if it was low, you know, if it was high unemployment, then we want to see people employed. If it was high, high high school dropout rates, we want to see those rates reduced. So really, you know, looking at what you want to see changed by the work that you do. The next set is our design or our approach. Again, fun questions to work with your team on how we will actually get it done and how we'll meet those needs. So kind of asking yourself what actions you're going to take to facilitate that change. How can we involve all of our stakeholders, including our participants in the design of the program, which is something else that I teach a lot when I'm teaching grant writing, because it's really important that we do that root cause analysis. And find out why people are having those struggles so that we know when we do something, we're going to actually do something that makes a difference. And how can we encourage, you know, engagement commitment and enthusiasm for the program. Again, I think that this is part of that whole kind of strength based process. But it is an energy builder and always being aware that you kind of have to continue to, you know, it's not a one and done that you always have to keep that up of keeping that engagement with all of your stakeholders to keep them moving forward with your projects. You need to do it, obviously an important question that you'll, you'll ask yourself. And then how can we engage the positive potential of all employees to change the organization or to offer the programs that we're offering. So again, good questions to take back to your team, start to see what filters up start to see what you can co create together as a way to really make that that positive change in your community. And then the last one is our destiny or or evaluation. So we're looking a little bit more at kind of traditional evaluation in this component. But what some questions are, you know, what meaningful measures would indicate that we're on track to achieve those outcomes. What are three to five indicators that would create a scorecard, you know that that we know then the changes that we're having in our participants. Again, keeping that celebrating our accomplishments along the way to keep that motivation and energy up for all your staff and your participants to continue working forward. You know, what can we learn from our efforts, you know, kind of tying back to that process evaluation of looking at what we did and and how we might make things better or different or changed. And then how can we then communicate what we do to the public, if it's for fundraising or if it's for to get a talented staff pool or get volunteers to join your organization or to advertise for new participants. All those kinds of things. There's a lot of things that you can really uncover through this process and then using it is the most important part right to really show to the community. Again, that you're a viable strong organization that gets things done, and people start to understand it and start to really feel it along with you. Those are questions that you can just take back work with your participants. You don't, you know, there's there is a process of appreciative inquiry like I said with the four D's and all that that kind of thing. There's resources out there, but simply taking these questions back to your organization and working on them, you know, in staff meetings or, you know, with your participants or in a special retreat or anything like that is really going to help you lift up all the strengths that you have to then incorporate them into your proposals when you're actually writing them. So I just kind of highlighting some of the different things that, you know, ways and places that you can use it. So I talked about that organizational background section or that organizational capacity section in the in the planning framework. And really again here, this is where you're taking all that mining of the strengths of your organization, the positive core of your organization, the impact that you've had or outcomes that you've had whatever term you want to use on participants in the past, and really shining a light on that so that the funder or the reviewer or the donor really knows that you know how to, you know, work with the target population that you're proposing to work with. Then in the need section, some different ways to make sure that your need section is as strong as possible is to make sure that your data is as local as possible. And so, you know, if you serve a county, and let's say you serve homeless veterans in a county, then you want to be able to identify as much as you can how many homeless veterans are in your county. It's okay to compare that data to say statewide data or national data that can be very strong to show that you have like a bigger problem, if you will in your community versus the state and the nation and things like that. You always want to drill down as local as possible so that then once you're moving from that need section to your outcomes, you have some data to kind of, you know, go along with that. You want your need to be relevant to the project. So sometimes I think that people just throw in every bad indicator they can think of in their community. Just thinking if I just throw all the bad stuff out I'll just look really needy. If it's not related to your application, it really only just confuses the reader. So be strategic in the things that you're talking about and the, you know, the challenges that your target population is having, and don't just, you know, throw in the whole kitchen sink kind of idea, and think that that that will like provide you with more a better score, because if it's just not relevant to your project, then it is just confusing. Data sources to be cited in your application so that the reviewer and the funder knows where the data came from, and then making it as up to date as possible, which is a lot easier than it used to be as more sources have gone online. And my kind of standard rule of thumb is like a three year, you know, I try not to make anything over three years old as much as I possibly can to keep things as up to date as possible. Some of the things in your approach that that make your program strong. First off, if I see this at a lot of government levels. And so if you're not at the government level it's something you probably don't have to worry about. But there are things called evidence based practices. And these are practices that have been studied very rigorously and then determined to be effective in certain geographies with certain demographics. So there's evidence based practices around healthcare and mental health and substance abuse and criminal justice and education and, you know, all sorts of things. And these are different either programs or processes that have again been studied and been determined to be effective. And so, as I was saying earlier, like, I'm seeing it more in the government sphere of them saying, okay, what evidence based practices are you using. And so you need to like have some familiarity with what those evidence based practices are. And so one of the things that Grad Station does have on our website that's free for anybody to use is a tool called Pathfinder. And the Pathfinder has different evidence based practice registries in it. So you can go and just click on evidence based practices and find all the different registries that you can then click into to find out maybe what are some evidence based practices that you might want to adopt. Maybe some that you're already using that you never heard that term so you didn't know it was called an evidence based practice. But if you're using those, I would really highlight that because these are, you know, again, tried and true and really evaluated processes and programs that have been determined to be effective. So I think that really makes your application strong. And then incorporating the strengths of your partners and what they're bringing to the table and how you're addressing the issue more holistically with your partners is a really good idea. Funders love to see that it's a big strength in the process and especially if you've done all your homework and you're really bringing information to the funder showing what that organization is going to provide to your programs, what they're going to bring to strengthen your approach and things like that. And I'm going to come back to that in just one more second. And then the key staff really highlighting their credentials, their personal strengths, you know, their experience, their education levels, all the kinds of things that make your staff, you know, up for the job and really qualified to do the work that you're doing. So those are different places where, you know, you can really highlight strengths. I do want to just bring this to your attention. I do have this as a handout. It's a longer document than this. And you're going to get it with your slides and along with the program planning framework from the earlier slide. But it's just a tool that I use and kind of breaking it down into two different groups. So I have businesses and corporations as one major group and then different community assets as another group. And these go on longer than what you're seeing here. But it's really taking a good critical look at what else is going on in your community and how you can provide something for them and how they could provide something to you to help with your projects. So, you know, starting with the businesses and corporations, I'm not going to go through all of these and, you know, in detail, but really looking at those in your communities. I live in a really rural community without a lot of businesses. So sometimes you have to expand out. So looking at companies where your stakeholders work. So, you know, where are your board of directors work? Where do your volunteers work? Where do your participants work? Those kinds of things, companies that maybe sell to your stakeholders or sell to you as a vendor organization. And usually those organizations, those businesses are looking for you to kind of advertise for them, right? To show that they're good community citizens and they're looking for that goodwill advertising that you're doing for them. So that's usually the motivation there. And then what are you asking them for? You know, again, is it money? Is it donations? Is it volunteers? Whatever you're looking for. And then on the community assets part, again, this goes on a lot longer, but really trying to scour your community and look at, you know, how could possibly you interact with different educational institutions from, you know, from pre-K all the way up to college? How can you work with different communities of faith in your community to help with the work that you do? Looking at elected officials, looking at government entities, looking at civic groups, looking at natural resources that we may have in our communities. So again, it's just another tool to kind of use to start to kind of mine where you could be partnering with others to just add more to your projects and programs by using, you know, the assets of what those organizations have. So again, you'll get that. Just checking to see if Alice froze for everyone. Just let me know in the chat if that happened to you. I'm seeing some hands up there. Okay, that's excellent. Let's give it just one moment. I know she didn't literally freeze like some people have been freezing in the media lately. She just froze because of, you know, technical issues connected to the internet. So hopefully this will be here in just a moment, everyone. So please hold on. Oh, you're back now, Alice. Am I okay? I did not know what was going on. So any time that you can identify the changes that you're hoping to make in your target population, the better. So really showing, you know, that you've identified those outcomes and you're going to be tracking how your participants will change is really a key piece to, you know, having a strong proposal. So just simply by having them and communicating that to the reviewer, it makes your proposals a lot stronger and connected with that is that evaluation component then how are you going to measure that. Then looking at your budget again, you know, that sometimes, you know, showing how, you know, that you've in your budget narratives as they're called, showing how that your approach is very cost effective, showing any sort if you're able to any sort of cost savings that you're going to be providing to society. So let's say you take individuals and you work with, let's just say the unemployed. So, you know, by moving people from unemployment to an employment situation, it helps them out personally, but it also helps, you know, the community with not having to pay unemployment benefits and things like that. So kind of showing that, listen, if we invest this upfront, then it's going to save us money in the long run. So if there's any way to make that connection of cost savings, that I think that that really makes your budgets very strong as well. So I have just kind of as a final little thing for those of you I know some of you said that you were very new to the process, some of you have done it before and maybe have all of these things together. But these are just some different things that I think that you could work with your team, not necessarily related to appreciative inquiry. Exactly. But just things that you can kind of start to create on your own to make sure that you're as ready for grant seeking as you can be. So having I broke it down into three different things of organizational documents, you know, just things that you might have to have either for the funder or just to be a legal, you know, nonprofit organization. But having these things all, you know, lined up and operating every year. These could be things that you do and you have a volunteer do or, you know, a staff member can do but just every year you want to make sure everything's up to date so that you just have it all to go at your fingertips. And every time you're writing a grant you don't have to scurry around looking for all of these documents and getting them updated. So having it proposal development documents, you're going to really start to see the program planning framework, the project planning framework, and how it's all kind of outlined in here. So having these different things of what that data is having those project outcomes, your approach, your timeline, all those kinds of things and then having on on hand again job descriptions or resumes of the key staff to really help you. The funder is requesting those kinds of documents. And then the last kind of group is just financial documents of, you know, having an annual organizational budget that's updated every year. You know, do you have any matching funds that can support your projects, either real dollars or in kind donations, and, and then having those policies and procedures online and ready for you. You don't have to be online but having them working and operating. And then these would be more systems that you'd want to make sure that you have ready if you're looking at federal grants and that sort of thing. So just some things again that that you can also kind of pause and and put as part of your overall plan to help you develop these different components so that you have time then to write as strong as an application as you possibly can. So I'm going to pause for a moment and allow Jeremy to look through some of the questions and we can get through some of the questions. Yeah, no, definitely take a drink of water there. Unfreeze yourself 100% Alice. That's fantastic. We do have a promotion coming up with TechSoup that's September 19th and 20th, 99 dollars. You can get everything that you will ever need as a starting grant seeker. We have a divided up into very easy sections where you build and then you can write and you can learn to get awards. All broken down. Everything Alice talked about today, you'll be able to find pretty much all of it on our website with transition membership at its most pretty much lowest price. You can find it here through TechSoup. And as Reeta put there in the chat, that's a direct link to sign up for reminder to be reminded to do that. If you have questions about TechSoup signing up for that, Reeta can answer them for you. Of course, you can also use find that information on TechSoup.org. But to get to some questions, we've got some good ones coming already. So we're going to go back towards the beginning of your presentation, maybe do a little bit of a little bit of reminding but also expanding a little bit. Kathy asks, what does the output look like if you are a new program? Is it what you want the output to be? Yes. Kathy, that is exactly correct. So really for anybody, your outputs, how much you're going to do, how many people you're going to serve, how many hours of services you're going to provide to your participants, all those kinds of things. When you're writing a grant, you're writing it for the future. So what do you anticipate you're going to achieve? It's the same with the outcomes and the indicators. It's forward thinking and how many people are going to achieve this and that. So if you are a new organization that has never done an evaluation like that and you don't know what kinds of things that you're going to have, I would just include that as part of when you're writing about your outcomes or your outputs. This is our first time of setting these target numbers. And so we're making an educated guess based on national statistics or based on our experience over here in this sphere or whatever or based on the input we got from the community or wherever you're kind of getting those anticipated numbers from. And then just by letting the funder know that that it's your first time, usually, you know, they're pretty good about understanding as long as you do all the things that you said you were going to do and you do your plan as you, as you laid it out. If you don't achieve those, you know, usually come back to them and talk about why you didn't achieve those. But if you've done it before, then you can kind of use, you know, how many students graduated from high school last time, you know, what percentage of people move from having no home to having a home, you know, in our programs previous. So if you're brand new, it's going to be an educated guess. I would look again at other organizations kind of like yourself to try to get some realistic target numbers that you're going to present to the funder. Excellent. Those next question comes from Larry. His nonprofits model seems to make it hard to get foundations to understand what they do and how it benefits the public. I've heard this before and we don't even get into big deals with his specific situation. But that's comes up often, but they don't directly serve the public. So they're doing lots of what they call upstream. As a result, getting grants, of course, difficult. How do you effectively make cases in these situations, Alice, when you're trying to do that sort of non tangible sort of I'm not directly helping someone, but I am helping them, but I'm not directly helping them. Absolutely. So that's a really great question. And a lot of times organization like yours is called like an intermediary organization where, you know, you're getting resources and you're passing them through, or you're in the middle using those resources and you're not directly affecting, you know, the target population is the people that you're providing the resources to that are directly affecting them. So I think the really important thing with that is to talk about to figure out some metrics that you can use about how you're helping to build the capacity of those organizations. And getting from them, any sort of feedback about how then what you did for them helped them serve people better or serve more people or offer more programs, or whatever it is that they did so try to get some feedback loop from those organizations that you directly serve. This shows that what you're doing is having a positive impact down the line. And an example of that was one time I was also an intermediary organization, and so I was providing capacity building work to nonprofits. So I wasn't serving anybody except for the nonprofit organization. So I had set up some metrics about, you know, how many more programs were you able to offer how many more people were you able to serve, you know, different things like that to get from those nonprofits to show, you know, that the capacity that I was providing was ultimately helping the community. But it is a bit more of a challenge, not going to lie it is because you're one step away from the actual target population. So I think you have to be creative in how you do that, but you do want that feedback loop, coming from those organizations that you're serving back to you so that you know what you're doing with them is helping them provide again services, more services, better services, different services, whatever it is that that they're doing. Next question comes from one cool person that's Emily cool, I just like that middle name so I decided Emily. In the intro Alice we're talking about not highlighting how needier org is. What should they do with questions like what will you be able to do. What will you not be able to do without this grant or how will you ensure sustainability after this grant is over, because Emily feels like grantors want them to highlight neediness. They don't necessarily, they're not going to cancel a program if they don't get the grant, they'll just work harder to look at other funding sources. So she ends up doing a lot of boilerplate answers like diversifying funding streams as I'm sure many of you have done, but maybe there's a way to leverage that a little bit more effectively. Yeah, absolutely. So this is you guys are asking the hard questions today. So you're exactly right it is like that sustainability question is really like the hardest question I found to write in most grant applications because a lot of my clients didn't have a sustainability plan it was like well we're just going to you know the there's always going to be a need for the food and we're going to have to raise dollars for the food, that kind of thing so you know I did use some of that you know exactly what you're saying of you know we're going to diversify funding sources we're going to add new things into the mix or, you know use some of our partners resources and things like that. But another thing that I would really encourage you to do is start to answer that sustainability question, more about your organization, then about just your project. So, start to take those strengths that you mine. When you, you know, look, then you took that slide and went back and you found out all these different strengths and it could be this really dedicated board of directors who have a lot of connections it could be. You know, a founder who has an amazing vision, it could be the approach that you use I mean there could be lots of strengths that you mine and start to present those strengths as how your organization is still going to be, you know, here tomorrow. You're still going to be working, you know, to address these needs ongoing you're committed to this idea and start to work the angle a little bit more as an organization than a program. Because a lot of, you know, because a lot of times the program again it's just like well, we're still going to have hungry people tomorrow I'm still you know as I'm not there's no way I can, you know, get around that and I'm still going to have to raise the money for tomorrow and that kind of thing and so some of these things just really, you know, aren't going away. So, I think if you really incorporate that that that information about, you know, just the strengths of your organization overall, and how you just have that stability. You know, maybe it's your strategic plan maybe it's your, you know, I don't know there could be a lot of different things but highlighting those things to show that your organization has its staying power, and you can show that through the strengths. Just one little question to go with that. Would that include the idea of, let's say, with with your granting with you giving us these funds we can serve 100 people. But without that will normally serve 20 I'm not saying this is something that you would report, but you would be able to reach more people. So you would highlight how much you could help with the money, whereas you wouldn't help as many without the money you infer through the writing is that a possibility. Yeah, yeah, and you could even write it that way Jeremy I mean that's a great idea as well I mean just kind of saying listen if you know if we don't get your dollars. You know, then we can only serve this many people if we get, you know, we can, you know, whatever like if we don't get your money we won't be able to have as much impact as we want. But we'll still be here to do it. Right. So, yeah, right okay. Yep, yep, you got it. Well, it looks like I'm in the right business then. Yeah, our next question is sort of a combination of two and sort of a tips approach. Best tips for how to provide the budget information that grants asked for about how funds will be spent. Really, how detailed does that have to be. So that's a great question Karen, and I pretty detail. So, you know, when you break down those funds, you're going to have different categories of things like salary and French benefits and supplies and travel and consultants and contractual and you know different things that and again every funder is going to have different terms for that. But you want to lay it out where the reviewer knows exactly how that money is spent. So, you know, line by line of the staff, how much do they get paid, how what percentage of their time, are they spending on this project, how much are you asking for how much do you already have. All those kinds of things you do want that budget to be completely just seamless with what you're doing that. And a lot of reviewers, I wasn't one of them but most, a lot of reviewers look at budgets first. And then they start reading your application for all those components that were in the budget. So, if you ask for this money for, you know, technology or something like that, then they're kind of looking for where's that technology going to be used. Where am I seeing it being used in your programs. So, you want that to be detailed kind of a line by line with an explanation of how that's usually what a budget narrative is. That is usually just, you know, salary, $20,000 fringe benefits $2,000, just the numbers, but your budget narrative is where you're explaining those numbers and how you calculated it. So it's like, I want 10% of the executive director's time. She gets paid $100,000. So I need $10,000 like so you're exactly spelling out the calculation of how you came up with it. So a lot of, a lot of detail in the budget to make it as transparent as possible for how you're spending the money. Let's say that I am a new nonprofit organization. And my name is Ramona Jackson. And when it comes to grants and successfully obtaining one. I don't have a lot of experience. And I'm just really wondering what are the best tips and practices to to keep in mind. I hope I'd like to Ramona. So, that's a great question. I guess you guys are asking all the I'm only I'm only asking you the great ones which I know. It's so easy today. Yeah, we're playing softball and you're hitting home runs. This is great. So, with a brand new organization again you're not going to have that track record when we talked about the organizational background, because you're brand new. So I would start to bring in more more details on on things about like, how did you get started, you know, why do you think your approach is going to be more effective than than what exists in the community. What are those strengths of those concerned citizens that got together to, you know, lift up your community. And you're going to talk up more about kind of the process of how you developed and more about why you think you're going to be successful in it, because if you just don't have a track record you just don't have it. Right. So, however, I've worked with a lot of organizations also that have done the work on a volunteer basis, you know, without any funding, and then they go to apply for grants. And I'm still bringing their successes from their volunteer work, like over. So like we've served this many, you know, at risk youth and got them job skills and got them into construction jobs, even though it was all volunteer and no grant money. But then when I'm trying to get money for that same project, I'm going to bring those successes over to show that hey, you know, we have done the work we've never gotten paid for it but we have done the work. So if you've done it before included even if it was not paid. And number two, you know, you're going to talk more about the strengths of this organization that you built and why you think it's going to be so successful. Excellent. And there is some really good information going in the chat too. So I hope people are take attention to that in there. Leslie asked a question and I think this might be the last one we were able to hit. There's another question asked about AI but we do not have enough time today to deal with that specific question. The other AI. The other AI. That's the other one. We're not even at that point yet. But Leslie asked this question that she serves school children and there's a layer of privacy. That's important. They tried surveys. But are there any other suggestions for how to measure effectiveness of a program. I know that we recently had a webinar where you came up with some interesting ideas. I wasn't sure if you had anything specific you wanted to share. Yep. So a couple of things Leslie I'm not I'm not 100% sure on your question but if, if you're collecting like anonymous surveys, then privacy isn't something so much that you have to worry about because because they're anonymous. So whenever you're doing them that way, you know, then then you shouldn't have to worry too much because you're just taking information you don't know where it came from, you know, in particular. And so that's, that's a good way to do that. If you can't. If I give you can't get access to the people that you want to serve. You know, the old tried and trues of, you know, having maybe a focus group where you bring together as many families that would show up to an event you serve food, you know you have activities for the kids. And you get people together where you can pull information out of them about how things have changed or, you know, what have you done well what you know bring them into your appreciative inquiry right and you're starting to mine that information. So, you know, I think that those two would be kind of things that I would explore. And, and then again if the, you know, surveys if you can do them electronically or if you can, you know, do them in different ways, and they're not tied to anybody's name you shouldn't have really that privacy issue because it's just not tied to any one person. The anonymous is the is the approach you can use at that approach. Okay. I think with that we reached the end of our time today I want to go over too much, but there have been a couple questions that popped up in the chat now on dimension. As I said a little bit earlier on Grant station as part of your membership, we have a build strategy section a right proposal section, and a way of course to locate and find grant makers. If you have specific questions about how Grant station can work for you be aware that we have a webinar coming up look at that September 14. That's going to be hosted by myself as well as my hardcore search crew will be with me and we'll be spending an hour and of course lovely wreath will be with us as well will be going over all of the great things that you can do with Grant station, how it works, how to use pathfinder to enhance yourself as a grand professional, how to use our various sections to put together your basic information. All the different information Grant station has for you and everything we've covered today. You can find a lot of that also on Grant station dot com or part of our webinars that we offer we offer lots of webinars as well. We offer lots of resources for people available on Grant station dot com. Even if you're not a member, although at this price I recommend it, you can find lots of great value. So keep that in mind, it's a value for you that we try to provide to you here at and I think there's another webinar coming up on the 19th, and that's how to use a grant scorecard to create winning proposals and that's what I don't know a lot about, but do you want to mention that really quickly Alice. Okay, it's a yes that's a new one. So we're going to take we just finished our winning grant proposal competition. And, and so if you are a member of Grant station you get access to all to a lot of winning grant applications to kind of look at what works, and that sort of thing. So in the process we created like a grant scorecard but it's just ways to really look at different sections that we've already talked about in the project planning framework, and, and how, you know, little things could move you from being really strong to medium to low and things that you might want to work with as you're revising and developing and editing your applications to just get them stronger and stronger and stronger so it's the first one first time we've done that one but you'll get this little scorecard that you can use to kind of evaluate your different proposals and see if you can make them stronger. That's going to be a very interesting one I'm looking forward to that. That'll be coming up on September 19. And with that, I don't want to keep anyone any longer than possible Aretha any final parting notes to give to people before we end up today's a wonderful webinar presentation. This was amazing how to recommend you register for the upcoming webinars I'll send the link out in the video replay. Have a great day everybody. Goodbye. Goodbye, everyone.