 All right, good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Burns, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the commission's weekly online event, is it our webinar, our webcast, whatever terminology you want to do, we do it weekly and we do it online. The show is, we cover everything that may be of interest to libraries, any library topics, activities. The show is free and open to anyone to watch, both our live shows and our recordings. We do the show live on Wednesday mornings at 10 a.m. central time, but if you're unable to join us on Wednesdays, that's fine. All of our show recordings, going back to the very beginning, are available on our website as well. We were just talking about that before we started. This is our sixth year of doing this, actually, 2014. We started, the first week of January 2009, so all those recordings are out there, if you ever want to go way back and see what we did in the beginning. We do a variety of things here. We do any training sessions, presentations, book reviews, basically anything, as I said, library related we put on the show. We bring in guest speakers sometimes, but sometimes we have Nebraska Library Commission staff on, and that's what we have this morning. Next to me is Sally Snyder, first. She's our coordinator of children and young adult library services. And then on the other side there, Debra Draco, our technology and access services director, and they're both involved in the youth grants for excellence that we do here. And so we're going to go through about them, what they're all about, and how you can apply and get some money to help do some cool things at your library. Sounds good. Hopefully, yeah. So I'll just hand over to you to take over Sally and Debra and take it away. Thank you. I would like to point out at the very beginning here that while we will be addressing specifically the application that went live today for Nebraska Public Libraries to get to apply for a grant from the Library Commission, a lot of what we're going to talk about can be universally applied to all kinds of grant situations, because I have found that the things that we're going to point out are things that other granting sources say, yeah, I had that same problem. So I'm hoping that this will help you wherever you're applying for whatever type of grant you're hoping for. First off, I'm going to show you how to get to the grant application, which went live this morning. So talk about timely. Yeah, if you scroll down just a little bit, you'll see on our webpage, we have this little yellow post-it note on the graphic on the left-hand side and the very last item there just added. Wait, did it change? Oh, it was there. Now it's gone. See? They change sometimes. They do change. It was there. However, the way I usually go to look at the grant application information is I go over here to children and YA services, and that always does that to me, because I, and right here under more, see where it says youth grants for excellence. You can just click right on that and go to the introduction section. But I'm also going to show you up here in our search box. If you type in youth grants, now see the pop-down things. There could be youth advisory board, youth grants, youth library services. Let's just click on youth grants and see where it takes us. I'm hoping it takes us somewhere. I might have to pull this over. I hit enter, but that didn't seem good. So we'll hit the search button, and there's the grant schedule. So if you want to know when are the grants going to become available, there's our database. Janet told me it was going to be way up high, but they haven't switched it around yet. So here it is. Grants for excellence. So you can find it this way, too. Now we have an introduction, three pages, because I just can't stop talking, which explains a lot about the program. And if you've never applied or never thought about the Nebraska program for grants, you might want to look through here and read some information that'll give you some guidance starting right off with when are they due? They're due October 1st of this year. Our plan is that you will be notified by November 4th. Notice how I said our plan is? Because sometimes things happen. But hopefully we'll hit that date. And actually, this due date is a little bit later, isn't it? Is it later than last year? It's later than a few years ago. I think it's earlier this year. I don't remember. We'd have to go look. I'm sorry. You're right. It's late. It's early the, yeah. Because sometimes it's been almost Thanksgiving before we announced the answer. I remember taking, yeah, grant applications long. Thanksgiving vacation to read. That was really fun, wasn't it? We're all here this year. And Debra is one of my several committee members who read all the grant applications, and then we have a meeting. We've written notes. Sometimes we call the libraries and say, did you, what did you mean by this? Because sometimes it's not fair to us. But generally, and most of the time, we go by whatever it is that you wrote and sent in, and that's important. We'll be hitting that a lot today. Okay, so here's some good information. Who's eligible? It's public libraries. Public libraries can apply. However, public, and that means accredited public libraries in Nebraska. An accredited public library can partner with an unaccredited library or with a school library if they have a project that makes sense for them to work together on. And you can partner with more than one. And it can be the school in your town and you, or it can be another accredited library. One year we had applications to bring Hink the Cow Dog author to Valentine and to, I wanna say Holdridge, but I think, so not next door to each other, but they shared the expenses of bringing the author to the state and then transporting him from the north part of Nebraska to the more southern part of Nebraska. So all these things can happen. And if two people bring in an author, that's a better shared expense than just one author for one place. So I wanted to emphasize that partnerships are encouraged and give you a little bit of a boost up in the priority scale. Especially if it is going to be an expensive project, if it affects more than one town or one institution, that's a big plus. Right. And along with that, I'll just mention that if, along with bringing an author or whatever other projects you're doing, there are items purchased to be placed in libraries, the rule with our grants is that more than 50% have to go in the public library. So 49% of whatever you buy, if there are books to share with kids for a book discussion group, or if there are other items, 49% could go in the school library or the unaccredited library, but 51% need to go in the accredited public library. And that's all written in there somewhere, just sure of it. And you can call me and ask me these things, that's just fine. So then there's, shall we talk about matching funds now or later? The big change. Oh, sure. Big change. Let's wait till we're at there on the grant form, because otherwise it's just babble. Another big change that's coming about under here, what will not be allowed? We have some rules, and something that we just added this year is a number of libraries have purchased the off. Workstations, off stands for something that I can't remember what it is. But for younger kids, they're self-standing, they don't connect to the internet usually, and they have lots of learning gains and things on them. And we have been approving grant applications for those, and I'm just notifying you that they are available, allowed this year for 2014 applications, and next year for 2015 applications, and then they will no longer be eligible, because generally we have a statement that computers are not eligible, and then we have, in the green there, we have an exception about, particularly for teens, that often involves computer needs, so we recognize that. And we've been providing funding for all workstations, and that's just gonna be coming to an end here pretty soon, so this is your heads up for anyone who might be thinking about that. I looked at, oh, and I'll put the link in our show notes after it stands for Advanced Workstations in Education. Thank you. I should have asked for that, but anyway. Okay, so then there's some more information. What is required? Where can I find help? Okay, call me, or email me at the Library Commission, and also there are some other staff members who are willing to answer questions and help you. Go ahead. Oh, and I was just gonna say, and maybe you were going to say this, in addition to answering specific questions that you might have about the grant, if you write up a grant early enough, you could send it in to have someone who's not on the committee review it and give you suggestions on how to improve a grant application too. And your system administrator would do that for you as well, if you would prefer to send it to your system administrator, that's fine. They'll look through it. And what helps is either the system administrator or somebody here has not been involved in writing your application, and that's the person that can spot things that aren't quite clear, whereas you have written it and it makes perfect sense in your head, I've written things like that before, and then people say, well, what does this mean? Truth reading is a good thing. It is. It's like a pair of eyes. And assumption, don't assume that we know anything. Pretend we know nothing about you guys, and that'll help a lot too. And then of course, there's going to be a report due later, but that's not till next year. Hope you send me one though, because otherwise you could not be eligible for any more grants. That would be sad. Now in the years past, I've had areas of priority. That's not what I call, areas of focus. And I took that out because earlier on when we had teen spaces as a big area of focus and then early childhood learning, that those are all still important, but I thought it's up to you to tell us what's happening in your community and why is this important, and we'll talk about that when we get to the grant form, and tell us why one of these or another one that's not listed, because it says up there, not limited to, here are some of the types of projects that you might think about if you're working on a plan. Hopefully you're working on a plan. And then there's a number of criteria here to follow. And if you, whoops, I did that on purpose. If you hit all of these, you're in pretty good shape. But I'm not gonna read through all of them today because you can read them if you're interested. And here's that little thing. Please note that before anyone can apply for a youth grant or any other grant from us, if you have unresolved issues with any previous grants, you may not be eligible. Generally that means you forgot to send in the report and I haven't called you about that yet. So yeah, there's time. These aren't due until October 1st. You can get your report in and if you had a grant last year and you're applying again for this year, your due date isn't till September 12th, I believe, of this year for that last year's grant, if that makes sense, I hope so. Okay, and we do ask that you acknowledge the State of Nebraska and the Nebraska Library Commission. And if you tell the newspaper reporter and they don't put it in the paper, that's not under your control and we understand that, but we really hope that when there's some kind of advertising, like the newspaper comes to take pictures of the kids doing something that is pretty fun, that you give recognition to the State of Nebraska for the funding. And we do have some exemplary sample applications so if you wanna see, well, what have people sent in that was funded and you guys think they did a pretty good job? You can look at those. There's more information about how to get in touch with me and again, when they're due. Now down here at the bottom of the introductory section, this is important, here is where you'll find, there's back to the introduction, the online form for the short form and the online form for the long form and that's the one we're gonna talk about today because we wanna talk about everything that's on the form and the other items. The short form is just missing a couple, three of those. And why can they do one and not the other? Yeah. Hey, that's a good point. Use the short form if you're asking for $1,000 in the grant funding or less and use the long form if you're asking for more than $1,000 up to, I think I have $25,000 this year is my total amount. If you're asking for $25,000, you better have a really good application because it's probably not all gonna get funded. We don't have an upper limit except of how much money we have because I think that puts limits on what it is you're trying to plan. And so yes, we have approximately $25,000 that we can give out last year, we gave it out to the penny. But it depends on what it is you wanna do and how much that will probably cost because we know when you fill out this form now and then when you start your project in January or February next year, something may have changed. We realize that. There is a lower limit though of $250, right? You're so good, that's why you're here. That's true. The smallest amount of grant funding you can request is $250 and if you ask for that then your local match, which we'll talk about in a little bit, will bring your total project cost to $313. $250 from us and $63 from you will get you a funding for that grant if you have a really good idea and tell us about it really well. Shall we just go on now? Sure. Okay. We'll go on to the online form. Let's see. If you need to make it full-size, you can. We don't have to have the camera view if that would be easier. Just go ahead. Well, when we scroll down, I think we're going to be okay. But thank you. So there's some basic information here and I should emphasize that not, see that not in red. The online form will not allow you to enter information on part of the form and then leave and turn off the computer or anything like that and then come back later. It will be blank. That's how it's designed. So you have to do it all in one sitting. Make sure you have all your information gathered, everything you want to enter in. Exactly. So we recommend that you write your narrative in a word processing program like Word or whatever you're using and then copy and paste it into the different sections in this one. Then you can just know you've read through it, somebody reviewed it for you and helped you with suggestions for changes and you're feeling pretty good. Then you can fill out this form but you can sure look at it and play around with it and then leave and say, well, I didn't send dribble to them because it didn't save it. So thank you. Okay, obvious things at the top. Name, your position, your library, et cetera. It won't let you submit this unless you fill all those in, aren't we mean? Yeah, we are, we are. And tell us about project titles, Deborah. Oh, we were joking before we went live here this morning that it would be neat if you could come up with a really fun but descriptive title for your project. And that has happened in the past though, I'm pressed to think of what they are right now. We've had some cleverly titled projects before. Like, oh, I almost had to do with the Wii. The Wii gaming program, we want to game or something like that, something like that. Anyway, and then we gave you all kinds of space here for your selected category of grant project and that was that list I showed you earlier where it might have been encourage reading, celebrate reading, early childhood reading programs, teen spaces, by the way. Another knot is we will not buy furniture with grant funds. You can use that as your match. If your friends group or something wants to buy a table for the teen space, that can be part of your local match but the grant funding from us cannot be used for furniture or computers except under certain circumstances and we cannot use it for food which is really a bummer. But again, your local funds can be used for the food. See, I got off on that already, didn't I? That's okay. Select the category of grant project. So say what it is and anything else you might want to say there. The next are goals and I should move this so I can see my notes. One thing I really want to emphasize is that, excuse me, more goals do not mean better chance for funding. If you have five goals and they really are important to your project, fine. But really one, two or three is more likely where you're going to be and that's great. If you only have one goal, fine. I hope you can really accomplish it. They're really good goals. And yeah, if it's really what's needed in your community, we'll get to that in a minute. That'll be great. And if you have two goals, fine, three. But when you get too many goals, then it begins to look like more difficult to accomplish everything. We're not gonna count off points if you have five or 10 goals, but we'll just start thinking how many of these do you think they can really accomplish in this amount of time? You have a limited amount of time. And you have to measure those goals too. So keep that in mind because in your report, you have to say what you met those goals or not. Good point. So be specific. Thank you. You'll hear me use that word a lot. Specific and also details. Debra says that S word and I say details because I can't pronounce specific. There we go. Okay, and so yes, be specific under there. What is your goal? And then as you write your goal, you need to be thinking about how you're going to measure it, like she said. So write it in a way that it can be measured. Is that fair? Sure. And it can be quantitative as in numbers, how many children will do this or that or the other thing, but it can also be outcome based. It doesn't have to be one or the other. It can be one or the other or both. But. It can. So you can come up with some examples of outcomes. I'll do that later when we get to the report, know the evaluations. Okay. That'll give me some time because I was coming up with a really dumb one and I think I'll wait on that. But some people goals work really well. And other people like me have trouble writing goals because I tend to write activities which are more what am I really gonna do? A goal is, we're not gonna count off points if you write an activity statement instead of a goal statement. But we'll try to help you get to the goal statement. So you might wanna say, fewer children run in terror from a spider. See, I told you it was dumb. Okay. How many last? 20% fewer of the children and then you do a spider program where they find out that spiders are our friends. They're not bad. I like spiders myself. So that's a change in attitude and behavior. Exactly. Oh, that's your outcome. See, but see, I would be writing. My goal is to have a spider program. No, that's not a goal. That's how you're going to accomplish your goal. So was that really a bad athlete? Sorry. Okay. So we'll go down to, here we go. This is the meat of the application in many ways. Description of program or activities. First off, I'd like to point out that for our grant program, you need to plan for at least one program geared to the targeted youth that you hold probably in the library, but it could be outside and it could be somewhere else. That is part of your overall goal or activities you're hoping to accomplish. So it isn't just to get something in the library that people can play with when they're in the mood. Like the OSTation, people would have a story time where they introduced the OSTation to the parents, to the kids, show them how it worked. That's a program that related to, because really the OSTation is built to be individual. So they only had one program. I'm hoping that you're going to have more than one, but it depends again on what your project is. And you make the case for what your project is and why you're doing it this way. And here's one big section where you do that. So show us you have a plan by giving us details. And be specific. Exactly, thanks. Identify presenters. It is best if you have already contacted them and know their fee if they're charging anything and their approach to the topic. So you can say, we have an art teacher in town who this summer would love to work with the kids on watercolor art for three weeks. Tell us about it. Don't just say, our teacher will teach art. That's nice. I'm glad. I think that's a good idea. Tell us more about it than that. Once one afternoon a week for three weeks, two hours every Wednesday for three weeks, all of this helps us understand what it is you're trying to accomplish and how you're going to go about it. And if you're then tying it to something in the library that they can keep coming back to. So if you, one of the days when they're there for an art class, talk about the books that you have about artists or the books that you have on how to draw or how to paint or how to do some artistic activity so that you keep those kids coming back and you relate it to other resources that you have in the library. Thank you. Very good. Another thing I want to point out is you're putting a lot of your plan right here in this section. And as I said earlier, we do know that things change. Your presenter moved out of town. Now what are you gonna do? You're gonna round up somebody else who's gonna change things slightly. All you need to do is send me an email saying whatever happened, our art teacher broke her leg or moved out of town. So instead, the art teacher from the elementary school because I live in a fantasy world where elementary schools still have our teachers. The art teacher from the elementary school is going to come and do this. And instead of watercolors, we're going to do sketching or anything like that. Let me know. 99.9% of the time I'll email you back and say, oh, that sounds great. Yes, go ahead with that. Whatever that was 0.01% of the time, I'll say, this is outside of the purpose of the grant. If you instead of an art teacher want to have rodeo writers, great. That wasn't your grant application though. So we need to work on that. I'm not 100% saying no. I'm saying how does this fit with what you started with? So I think rodeo writers would be fun program to have. I don't know, but you'd have to write a program for that. Yes, or write a request for reconsideration. Oh, that'd be just awful. We don't want that, do we? I just made that up, we don't want that. Anyway, this is my biggest thing I'm gonna say right now. This section right here, number three, is the most often skimped over section of the application. If you want to get your grant, tell us a lot of things right in here. We've had this discussion too in the past on the fact that maybe one or two of the people on the committee who is reviewing your grant know you and know what a wonderful job you could do, but the rest of the committee, if they don't know you and you don't tell them a lot about how you plan on doing this, they're gonna say, oh, there's not enough detail or specifics here, and we're really a little bit doubtful about the particular project. So be sure you know that you're writing to a wider audience that probably doesn't know you and really lay out everything that you're going to do. Which- And that will work really well for librarians who are new to their library, and so we don't know you as well, or librarians who are in a community where we haven't visited as much, I'm so sorry. Tell us a lot about what it is you're gonna do and why you think this is all going to really accomplish your goal, so we know that you have made some plans and you have some good projects underway. And it really helps to think through everything ahead of time so that if you do get that grant, you're ready to implement it. Exactly, now I was going to go back and look, but I didn't get it done. I received a report from a librarian whose library received a grant, oh at least five or six years ago, and she was very honest and she wrote on the report, man, I really didn't like filling out that application because you made me do so much work, but then when I got the money, I knew what I was doing and it was easy. And I said, yes, that's what we want. Basically, we want you to have a plan. And I'm gonna throw this in here and I know you said you might mention it later too, but depending on what your project is, think through things like safety and precautions. We have one library do a science fair type project and they were working with heat and other things and you really need, it would be good just to at least let us know that you've thought about safety precautions and if insurance covers things and things like that. And you could say something like, I will have an adult volunteer always manning the hot wax station or whatever it is you might be doing. And we don't need to know that person's name because we know you trust that person, but it just shows us like Debra said that you've thought of this already and are making considerations for being sure the kids are safe. Okay. And again, I'm just gonna say here too, you could reach out to community partners. I know you mentioned earlier Sally, I'm writing a grant together with maybe another library or with the school, but there could also be businesses in town who would be willing to work with you as a partner. They could provide things that could be used as match or they could provide activities for the kids which could really benefit your program. Good point. And I know you go to your community businesses fairly often like a lot of libraries ask for summer reading support, but there might be one project that really does tailor itself to a particular business and they might really be thrilled to step out and help you with that, with the local match or with prizes or like you said, activities. Riding the go-karts, ooh. Bowling. I don't know how that'll work, oh bowling is safer, but I want to ride the go-karts, okay. Well I don't know if they dropped the ball on their toe that might be. That's true. Moving down, we have a detailed timeline for completion of the project. And there we say your very word, be very specific with dates in what you plan to accomplish. This kind of goes along with having a plan. If you're gonna start working on your project in January because we're notifying you in November and then there's Thanksgiving and Christmas and we know how that goes and maybe you want to start in January on your activities or however you're lining it up, let us know that. For example, you might say January 6th, contact presenters and verify dates. January 15th, complete purchase orders for library materials and supplies for the project. These are particular dates and particular activities associated with each date. Some people have put in like January, get started. March, double check calendar or something. And that's something, but if you can really be a little more specific, see that word is hard. That will help us know that you have a plan in place. Anything else? Okay, identify youth service need on which this project is based. Why are you planning to do this project? It's really what we're asking here. How does it address a need or needs in your community? And how do you know that? Maybe parents have come in and asked for something or maybe there's been an article in the newspaper saying our local youth don't have anywhere to go after school, something I've just been very general, I know. And also say who the targeted audience is. Don't just say all the kids in our town, okay, is there a specific group within those kids that you're targeting this program to? Good point. Because we know how projects that include preschoolers through teens generally self exclude certain portions of that group, they don't come. An example I was gonna use on this was a couple years ago, we gave a grant to, I think it was Wahoo, because they wanted to know it was more than a couple years because they wanted to do a science fair activity. And we asked them, well, doesn't your school do that? No, the school had not done a science fair for several years. And the kids were interested and they didn't have anywhere to really do this. And so they received, this was before the summer reading program topic, of course. And so they had a great time trying all different kinds of science fair things at this library, sometimes inside, sometimes outside. So just let us know that the school hasn't had a science fair in so long. Okay then, that makes sense to us that you might want to do that. Then there's background information. You might think, didn't you already ask me that? Kind of, but not a hundred percent. It's related to the previous one, exactly. So under background information, it's fine if you want to include some national statistics. So many kids don't, whatever, aren't strong leaders or whatever you're talking about. But we also want you to talk about your local information. So if you say 70% of teens across the country don't something, but we've discovered that whatever, 65% in our community don't do this, that's why we want to have this program. Then we know, yes, you've looked at the national trends, you've looked at what people are talking about in the journals, but you've also found some information about your local community. And why now you want to try this? And I don't think we've mentioned this yet, but this could be a project that you've never done before, some kind of programming that you've never done before that you want to try out. You're not sure if it will succeed, but you want to try it out. So you're looking for some extra funding. But hey, if it's a success, and here I'm having problems with the words, then hopefully it's something that you'll continue beyond this grant year with funding from local sources. Good point. Yes, we really want to fund something that's new and different for your library. Maybe 12 libraries did it last year, that doesn't matter for your library, you've never done it, so it would be new there. And the other thing I do want to point out is, if you try something new and different and you have the best plan you could possibly have and you have all the stuff you think you need and it doesn't work, we don't hold that against you. Next year you can apply for something else. And what we say is, well, you gave it a try, because that's all you can really do. Even if you gather the information, this many kids in our community don't, whatever, here's a chance for them to, but whatever happened so that they didn't come is sometimes inexplicable, but you gave it a try. And that's what you need to do, because how are you gonna find something that's gonna be really successful if you don't try a few things? And if it is really successful, like Deborah said, we're hoping that your local funding will keep it going. Okay, so targeted number of youth who will be impacted by this project. I was, I forgot to rephrase this, it was supposed to change and say, where is it? Targeted number of youth you hope to impact by this project. That's exactly it. We want you to be realistic. So if you have 500 kids of a certain age, ages seven to 10 in your community, and that's who you're targeting, how many of them do you really think you will have come to your program and be involved in your project? What are you hoping for? Because I don't think you really believe 500 kids will come, it's just not likely. Because there's circumstances and so. So if you give us a real, a realistic idea of say, okay, out of the 500 kids in the target audience, you have 30 come to attend the program on a regular basis. Hey, that's a success, that's a success. I'll try to say that word for you later on. Thanks. So while a project that will reach 1,000 kids is great, we also are aware that those 30 kids, or those 10 kids that come to this art class or whatever it is, will also be impacted. And so the number isn't the whole thing. We don't go, oh, 1,000 here, we'll fund that one 10, never mind. We don't do that. By the same token, we don't say, wow, she put this information in the wrong category, and they're done, we don't do that either. We go, oh look, here's where they say that. Here's that information we were hoping to find. So try to put it in the right place, but some funding sources immediately discount and toss to the side your application if you make any little tiny mistake. And they do that because they have so many applications, they have to find reasons not to fund some of them. We're looking for reasons to fund your project. We're looking to see that you have a plan, that it makes sense that you wanna do this based on community needs, as far as you see them now. And you don't know everything, we don't know everything. So it sounds like a good idea. That's what we're looking for. So if you put the wrong data in a different spot, at least we got the data. Then down a little bit, a personnel who will be involved. This is just kind of our way to find out if, this is important particularly if you're using a staff person's wages as part of your in-kind match, because we know if you have a full-time children's librarian and now they're going to be doing so many hours on this project, something's gotta give because they're already working full-time. So we know that something is being held back. That's just how things are. So sometimes people will say things like, well, story time does not meet the month of May. So the children's librarian will work on this project instead, that's a good explanation for how you're gonna work this out. And even if you're not using it as in-kind funding, we're still curious. How are you gonna get everything done? But you get one more thing to do. And if it's a really big program, hey, maybe you're having volunteers help out, we'll indicate that, that you do have volunteers. And you could even say our team volunteers are going to be helping out with this program. Just so that we have some more details. We'd like you to name the staff person or people who are going to be involved, but we don't expect you to name the volunteers. Just say four adult volunteers or five team volunteers, however you expect it to be. That helps us know how you're working on it. And then, you know, so I talked about that there. And then really number nine is kind of the same answer about how you're gonna make, I kind of jumped down to nine when I was answering eight. Because eight's just the names and if you're having volunteers and nine's really the, how are you gonna make this work with the staff time you have now. Then we come to one of our favorite categories, means of evaluation, measures of success, where we talk again about numbers. If you were hoping to have 20 kids come to your program and you had 30, woo-hoo, that was great. And then also, so numbers are fine. Numbers are great. Numbers tell us some things. But there's some other things we'd like to know that we talked about before, which is changes in attitude or behavior, knowledge acquired or skills acquired. And so you can write some of your means of evaluations to those things too. This many students who attend will be able to use a keyboard. I know, I'm old, but I'm trying to come up with examples. I should have written some examples earlier. Then that's skill. If they hadn't used, been using a keyboard and now they can, then they've acquired a skill. If they learn about something, how do volcanoes really work? And they've acquired knowledge. Plus maybe a change in attitude. Volcanoes are cool, long as they aren't hurting anybody. Or if there are enough knowledge that if they're ordered to evacuate because the volcano is due to erupt, maybe they will actually divide it away. Good point. Yes, because sometimes we think it won't get here. So I don't want to skimp over this section because this is where you look back at your goals. What were your goals that you wanted to accomplish? And how are you going to measure that? So you might decide that you're going to use a survey. I'm going to give a survey to the kids or the parents of the kids who came to this program and asked them about changes in any of these or what they thought of the program. If you're planning on doing that, please send us a draft of your survey along with your application. Because as we talk on a little longer, you'll find out that we're happy to receive additional pieces of information besides what you write in these spaces. Another commonly used approach is to use a pre-test and a post-test. Like before we learned about volcanoes, what do you know? Now that we've learned about volcanoes, what do you know to show that you've acquired knowledge? And we'd also like to see drafts of those if you're planning to do that. We know that those might change, both the survey and the pre-test, post-test might change as you learn more about what you're going to be working with. And you can certainly send us updates. But it's another one of those things that shows us that you've thought through the process and hey, when you get your grant, you're ready to go. Right, because we will be sending you or having you fill out a report form. And this could so much help you with that. Approximate date to begin the project. I was pondering why I have that there, but there we are. So just say January 6th, 2014. Number 12 is very important to me. If you say no, it's not an automatic. You are getting your grant. There might be a good reason to say no. Privacy or something, depending on your project. You might say, no, I just can't do that. But hopefully you'll say yes. And at some point in time, I might say, I might call you and say, hey, how about doing an Encompass Live with us about this project and how it went? You could be on Encompass Live, if that's always been your call. I'm sure it is, I'm sure they've been wondering, what could I do to be on Encompass Live? And this is gonna be your chance. So hopefully you'll have a very well-written application. You'll get funded, you'll have an extremely successful program and then you'll come and tell everybody else all about what happened. That will be great. Now we get to the proposed project budget form. And here are some major changes. Yay for major changes. I'm happy because I have dreams that it will make my life easier when I really know it won't. But it'll be different. So this top part is still the same. Contracted services or if you have a contract with someone to do something, not an honorarium. Honorariums would go under other. But contract where they specifically ask you to sign this and you're providing a fee and expenses, travel, et cetera. So that may not be used very often. Library materials, we can hit this now or later. Yeah, and the box is below. Why don't we hit the boxes below while we ask for the narrative? So you've made an estimate on what you think all these things will cost. So you type it in. Oh, I forgot I put this over here. So let's say $100 in library materials. And program materials, that will be 350. And the famous other will probably be another 100. Okay, so now this, let's click over here. This has added all of that up for you. So now you know what your total estimated project cost is. And out of that, you've already decided, I think I have this much local funding, so I need to ask the library commission. Well, let's do the lowest $250. That's the least amount you can ask for us. Whoops. Oh yeah, I forgot. See, I'm just a bad, this is our reminder. I'm on the long form, I forgot. Okay, so backing up, you know, what we're buying, we have 10 speakers, each getting $100 on Arrarium under others, so things are gonna really add up now. Okay, there we go. These speakers are wonderful. Okay, so now what are you gonna ask from the library commission? Out of this, let's say 900. Okay, oh yeah. I forgot the total record. It must be 1,000. No, it has to be 1,001. Okay, now I'm better. This is why we have these reminders, and obviously I don't fill this form out very often. Now, we've changed so that the total local match has to be at least 25% of the grant amount. So your local match has to be at least, I'm gonna go with 251, because I didn't figure this out ahead of time. Oh wait, oh that has to be under cash. You have to have at least 10% of this. 15% can be the in kind, and 10% has to be the other. Okay, now does this add up to my total? No. So this does not care. I will care. I will call you, say, hey great, but you're not quite getting up to your total project amount to accomplish this. So let's rework some math. So, okay, what should my local be? Quick, 449, let's try that. Oh, it'll come up with 1450? Oh, I did too much, didn't I? No, that was right. It's hard to do it on here. 449 plus 1,001. So do you- 449, yeah. Yay. Okay, so pay attention to that when you're filling it out. This has to be at least 25% of the grant amount, but it can certainly be more. And your funding can come from your budget, if you have some money in your budget for your project. It can come from your friends group, from your foundation, from a business who wants to donate. That could be some of the in kind, or it could be they wanna donate $100, or from a community member who says, wow, I'm so glad you're doing this science project. Here's $200, yay for them. So double check yourself, that you've accounted for all the funding that's in this total project budget between the grant amount and your local amount. And if you don't have as much trouble as I did, good for you. Now, you've said, you picked things out at the top, like the contract of services. And I kind of explained what those were for. So maybe you don't have anybody under contract, but now down here, you've said up there that you're spending $100 on library materials, is that what I said? Here's where we want some information. And it can go in this box, or you can add a list that you send in separately with some other, maybe your draft survey, et cetera. You can email or US post it, mail it separately. So now you tell me specific titles. Okay, you're buying where spot. I don't know what project this relates to, but you're buying it. And it's $9.95 and you're buying, yeah. This is what we're talking about. Now we also realize that the list that you send us might change. But again, this gives us a sense of, why are you buying these library materials for this project? Maybe you're doing a, well I'm not even gonna guess, because I picked a bad sample. But it also tells us you've been thinking, we don't have these books in our collection, these books would really help kids who are working on this science project, or for the little younger kids, they want to play with these things, and this will help bring that all together. And that's why we want a list of what it is you're gonna buy. If you tell us you wanna buy 10 books about dogs, then we're gonna go, well, but do you mean nonfiction? Do you mean fiction? Do you mean for little baby kids or older kids? That's why we want more specifics. And it's that, back to the, you thought this through. Back to details. Yes. 15, is the personnel cost, if you're paying any person on the payroll, on your payroll, for their time that's directly related, then you can say something like, 20 hours, children's librarian, and then what that'll approximately be, and I'm not gonna figure that out. 20 times 10, that's hard. 200. That's what I thought. For example. For example. I should have brought my calculator. That's the only time you'll use this number 15, is if you're paying someone on the payroll. So then we have program materials and supplies. Okay, so you're going to have the kids make paper plate clocks, fun. Then you're gonna need paper plates and brads, and, you know, construction paper and colors, and if you need more of those for this particular project. You can list all of these here, if you wanted as part of the, oh, that reminds me. On here you're listing everything you're going to buy for the project, so that means the grant amount, plus the local match. So you're listing everything, and I want that in the report too. Everything that you've spent for the grant, money, and the local match, because that shows that you did actually match it. So that'll help there. Training doesn't come around that often, generally for youth grant items. The only things I can think of that we've done recently were the Every Child Ready to Read project that was training for librarians, and that does qualify for a youth grant, but it doesn't come around that much. And one of the things I also emphasize with this is if you get training to offer it to other people in your area, other librarians in your area, and also to share it via Encompass Live or something for other librarians in Nebraska to benefit from the training that you received. Here's a good one, equipment. Particularly for teen programs, people have asked for we gaming systems and other gaming systems for television. They've asked for whiteboards. They've asked for DVD players. They've asked for light or equipment. Yeah, stand equipment. Yeah, stand equipment. Headphones. Headphones, those all qualify. But what we want you to do, no, lots of times I'll say DVD player, whoops, $400. Okay, what DVD player? And why are you spending $400? We don't know what one you're getting. Why are you getting that one? Maybe we know a one that's better that only costs $200. So you need to know down the brand and the model number and all that information. Exactly, give us the brand, the model number and the amount you expect to spend on each item. So DVD player, headphones. I'm gonna get 10 headphones at, 10 of these headphones at this much per headphone. And if you have found these via a catalog or a website, photocopier, print out that information so that we can see where you went to find that particular piece of equipment. And that often gives the brand the specifics about that particular item. Yes, and I forgot to say that's also very helpful with your program materials and with your library materials to do a list or to print out the page. Sometimes people have done programs for younger kids and they want a story time rug and they want story time pillows to sit on and they photocopy it out of that particular vendor's web page or catalog. So we can see exactly what it is they're thinking of and the price right there. So DVD player isn't really enough information. You might have some promotion, we hope you advertise. There's less paper involved in these anymore with web pages and Facebook and emails and all of that. But you might be doing maybe you're designing posters for this event or something or a bookmark or a bookmark. Anything that you're going to spend either the grant money or your local money on to promote this event would be great. And it says there right there items of little value meant as advertising should be included here. So bookmarks or maybe you're doing a little disc button, something like that if you're handing those out. Here's my favorite category, other. Because people call me on the phone and explain what they're planning to do and they're not sure where to put their, whatever this part of the project is and I invariably answer, put it in other because so you put the amount that it costs up in the in the budget grid and then here you say, what is this other? That's $200. Then you explain it. And again, details and specifics are greatly appreciated because we want to know what it is and in your program explanation, you probably already told us how you expect to use it but here's where you explain more details about what it is, where you're getting it and what you're spending on it. Okay, so now it's time to just remember that page. We get down here, when you've entered all of the information and you save and submit the application, it will tell you that you've missed something. So if I click this right now, the first thing I missed was I didn't fill out any of that top stuff and it's gonna do this one at a time. The first thing on that list is name, I didn't fill it so it's saying enter your name. If I just enter my name and try again, it'll say, what's your address or what's your position? And it'll just... That's nice that it has that check for you. You can't really miss submitting something that's required. Exactly. So it'll keep doing that until you've actually filled out and then it pops you there to where it is. So when you've filled out everything and you look down through it, see, I only typed in a few bad examples, but then you can submit it and then you can print your own copy of it too. Separately is the signature page. See, I'm gonna leave our page. It's not going to be saved, just like we said, we know you're not done, we know you haven't submitted but you're leaving the page. And here's the signature page. This is something that you'll mail in. The grant applications are due on October 1st. The supplemental information is what I call this, the signature page, any photocopies of catalogs or other items like that that you want to send to support your application. You can mail those in separately, US mail, or you can scan and email them in if you want to. And this is where you have the project director, if that's the children's librarian, then a signature of the library director, if it's not, the library director's not the person who's delivering the project. And then the board president, just so that we know everybody's approved of this project. And then you'll send that in, okay, I have to go back. So the application itself is done online, but then you've got to mail in an actual physical copy of the signature page right there. Mail or scan and send in. So now we jump back to the information, the introduction page. There is a report form here. Before we jump on this. No, okay, I just want to say, if anyone's online, it has hit 11 o'clock, which is our normal time for ending, but we never cut people off on the show here. We can go as long as needed. So just so you know, we're going to keep going until we're done going through all the application, everything that Sally and Debra need to share. If you need to go, you can't stay longer, that's fine, it's all being recorded. So that you'll be able to watch the end that you might have to miss later, not a problem. Thank you. So we have just a bit more to go. Just a bit more. Okay, so the final report for anybody applying this year for a grant is September 14th of 2015. So let's click on the PDF version. And this is a pretty straightforward. Who are you? What did you have in mind? What did you accomplish? But the important thing here is in this box in bold, please include with this report copies of all invoices or receipts that relate to expenditures for this project. And again, here I mean both the funds you spent from the grant and the local funds that you spent to show that you spent the total grant amount. And that's to show us that your match did indeed come through as you had said. And by the way, how much you spend might change. As long as your local amount spent is 25% or more of the grant amount and you spent your grant amount, then you're okay. If you had proposed that you were going to spend more than the grant amount that you didn't quite, but you still meet your match, that's okay. Things change. So this just goes through a little bit about how did things go? Did you accomplish your goals? Do you have other things you see that you need? Pretty standard. And you can write this, you don't have to use this much space if you need more, you can make it longer. You can use the word version. Yes, thank you. Also in here, we have a few other things that might help you. We have some FAQs which are pretty basic, not as much information as will be shared right now. We're going to add a link to this presentation when it's available. So that'll go on this list. Here's again the sample exemplary applications that you can look at. Here's some tips that were written by a staff person here at the Library Commission. And this I think will change a little bit how this looks, but just got put up this morning. This is an article called Why and When to Turn to Grantsaking and maybe Deborah wants to talk a little bit about this. Oh, we had been talking about doing this webinar and how we could help people improve their application completion last fall and public libraries just happened to print an article by Wendy and I can't see what you're asking about there. Thank you, Wendy Bolin. The title of it is Why and When to Turn to Grant Seeking and a little bit of how. But actually she goes into quite a lot on how to actually fill out an application. So if you're not an audio learner and can't quite get everything from a webinar where everybody's just talking, this is a good print source. But she also covers organization information, need or situation, activities, goals and objectives, timeline and personnel. So everything that we talked about, she talks about also, but more from a general view on applying for grants. And as we said down here, if you have IP recognition in our Nebraska Library, just clicking on that link took us to the article. But if not, and you have access to electronic copies of journal articles, you can find this by the information we've given about the title and the, it's in public libraries and the dates and everything. So we're hoping that that can be helpful too. What did we forget? That's your joke. Take pictures. All right, if you are able, if you're having an event that lends itself to photography, then take some pictures and add those along with your report form because that really makes your whole project come alive to us, then we know. Look what they did, that's great. And if you happen to tell us how you promoted your, how you promoted your event or your activities, that's nice to know too, because we'll share that with other people. Hey, well yeah, they promoted it on Twitter and it was really successful, for example. I'm such a terrible Twitter user. I've been successful in those times that you have used it. Yes, it has worked well for me when I figured it out. Now, I guess we asked if there were any questions. Yes, anybody have any questions about anything, the grant application, anything about it? You can type into the question section of your GoToWeb and our interface or if you have a microphone, just say unmute me please. And we can do that. And I would like to emphasize again to give me a call anytime and ask questions or send me an email. I'm thinking about applying for this, would it qualify or how do I answer this question again? I don't quite get this part of it. I'll be happy to talk with you about that section or email back to you. And once again, because I can talk again, please consider getting your application draft written fairly early and share it with somebody else who hasn't been involved in putting the application together. It makes such a big difference. I can't emphasize that enough. So if you have any questions in the question section of your GoToWebinar, you can type right in there. Maybe we just did such a wonderful job in going through everything that no one has any questions. I like that better than the roll of sleep. If you can't think of anything now, that's fine. You can always contact anyone here. And I know you said there are other people that are on the committee, but really Sally, you'd be the one to choose the call, yeah. So if you have questions about the grant call, Sally, you guys know how to find her. Share your information's on the page or on our website. Call her email and she can answer any of your questions and get you going on the grant. And we'd really love to see some fun grant applications come in, fun programs. And they've been a nice variety in the past. So I have every reason to believe people are gonna come up with some new and different ideas that they can try out and then share with other libraries. Sure, who might wanna try it themselves. And make it hard for us to decide which grants actually get funded. That is hard. Yeah, I don't see any questions coming in. Just one comment saying, good job, no questions. Oh, thank you. Thank you so much and thank you, Deborah, for being my partner in presenting today. Thank you, Krista. Yeah, not a problem, thank you. All right, that will wrap it up for this week's Encompass Live. Thank you very much, Sally and Deborah for being here to share about the youth grants. Hopefully we'll get some good applications coming in, like you said, some fun things. The show has been recorded and will be available maybe later today. And as you said, link to from the page there, from the grant page. So that wrap it up for this week's Encompass Live. Next week on the show is our monthly tech talk with Michael Sowers, the Technology Innovation Librarian here at the Library Commission comes out once a month to give the tech news of the month. And he usually does have a guest speaker this week. He has David Lee King, who is the Digital Services Director at Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library, just south of us down in Kansas. And he's gonna be talking about how they did an RFID conversion and a whole bunch of the changes at their library all at once, just earlier this year in May, not good news there. So if you're interested in that, seeing how another library did it, if you're thinking about doing it at your library, sign up for that one. And send it for any of our other topics we have coming up, just recently added resource description and what? RDA for non-catalogers. If you're hearing about this RDA stuff and you're not a cataloger and you wanna know what's going on, we'll have a session on that and broadband coverage in Nebraska. Also, if you are a Facebook user, Encompass Live is on Facebook, so you can like our page here and you get notifications of when our new sessions are coming up and recordings are available. Reminders, like right here, reminders of today's show are on there as well. Other than that, that wraps it up for this morning. Thank you very much. And we will see you next time on Encompass Live. Bye. Bye.