 Welcome to Toolkit Essentials, Finding Funders for Your Cause. My name is Kyla Hunt and I'm going to be your facilitator today. I'm the Webinar Program Manager from TechSoup with me today. Our David Holmes from the Foundation Center and Bobby Loos from One Place and also assisting with chat is Becky Weekend who is also from TechSoup so you might see her name pop up in the chat box. A little bit about today's agenda before I hand it over to David first. David's going to be talking to us a little bit about Foundation Center and about just general funding resources and tools that you can use to find funding. And then we're going to take a little bit of a break and take some questions from the audience. Then Bobby's going to be talking to us about One Place which is at the Kalamazoo Public Library and talking to us about cooperating collections which are offered through Foundation Center where you can access things such as Foundation Directory online for free from the library. And then we're going to be handling more questions from the audience as time allows at the end. So with that I'm going to go ahead and give presenter control over to David. Alright, thank you very much. Welcome everybody. I'm Dave Holmes. I'm the Regional Training Coordinator from the Foundation Center in our Cleveland office. And what I'm going to talk about today is about the Foundation Center itself and then a little bit about how you can access our resources across the country. It's something that I can turn over to Bobby to talk about our cooperating collections and the different services you can find there. But mainly what we do at the Foundation Center is collect information on the world of philanthropy. This is our mission to strengthen the social sector by advancing knowledge about philanthropy in the United States and throughout the world. And we do it a lot of different ways. One of the things that we're known for is collecting, organizing, and communicating information on United States philanthropy by which we mean we survey and collect information on private foundations, on corporations, charities that give money away all across the country. And we put that information together in a lot of different resources, some of which I'll share with you today. But we now have a database called the Foundation Directory which I will share that has over 100,000 grant makers in it. We also collect a lot of information that goes into research we do on how Foundation funding operates throughout the United States and we publish regular studies of that philanthropy and how it goes. We do trainings all across the country. We do fee-based trainings at different locations and free trainings in our offices. We have five main offices across the country, one in Cleveland where I am, one in San Francisco, one in D.C., one in Atlanta, and our headquarters in New York. And then we have over 450 cooperating collections, locations throughout the country, usually in public libraries or nonprofit centers, where you can come and use our resources, use some of the books that we publish, use our databases for free, and get assistance from librarians and other people who have been trained in using those resources. So we provide a lot of information through that. We also have lots and lots of free information available through our websites, foundationcenter.org and grantspace.org. So what I'm going to talk about today is addressing that idea about how you are going to find funders interested in your cause and the resources that we have available for you to do that. I'm going to start with the idea of finding funders themselves and give you a little demonstration of the Foundation Directory online and some of the other places where you can find information on where funders are. And we try and make that and we try and keep it as up to date as possible. So I want to make sure that you know about all those different places. The other things that I'm going to talk about are where you can get answers to help you with this finding funders. If you've never written a grant proposal before or if you don't know how to do fundraising planning and where to find fundraising information, we have a number of different places that are very useful. And I will go through our grantspace.org website, which is a totally free website available from anywhere you have internet access, where you can find lots and lots of good training information. And I'm going to talk about those things and then talk a little bit about our libraries and cooperating collections and then turn it over to Bobby Loos from the Kalamazoo Public Library who is going to talk about their services and the kind of things that you're liable to find at a library near you. So let me get started with this. And first thing I want to talk about is the Foundation Directory online. This is a database that we kind of consider our pride and joy and it really is the first answer to the question, how do I find funders? Because we have spent so much time making sure that all of the good information we gather on private givers, private foundations, corporations, and charities across the country is all included in one place in the Foundation Directory online. And we've organized it and updated over the years and kept it so that now it's updated weekly with the latest information on grant makers. It has four different ways to search it. You can search grant makers to find funders interested in what you're doing. You can search specific companies to find which companies have a grant making program in your area giving for the kind of things that you're interested in. You can also go in and search grants that have been given. In addition to cataloging what grant makers say they give and the kind of things they're interested in, we also have cataloged over 3 million grants that have been awarded from one grant maker to a non-profit. So you can find examples of who's funded organizations in your area or projects similar to yours. And finally, we catalog 990s. If you're familiar with foundation fundraising at all, you know that one of the places where you can find good information about a funder's giving is in their 990 PF, 990 of a private foundation. Those are IRS documents and they're freely available in a number of places, but they're difficult to use because you can't really search within them. What we've also done is added in, in our Foundation Directory online, a way to search within those 990s and find who has been listed in those, who has been listed as a grant recipient from different grant makers. All of this is what I'm going to show you with the Foundation Directory online, but before I go directly to that and show you how it works, I wanted to mention that I am also going to be showing you grant space. I mentioned this already as our learning community that talks about the social sector, talks about all of the things that we get asked questions about. We've had a website for years, foundationcenter.org, that has lots of great information on who we are and what we do, but grantspace.org is a response to people's questions about where can I find it easily? Where can I get multimedia training? If I want to know web-based training, if I want to watch a webinar on a specific type of thing related to fundraising or related to nonprofit management or working with my board, where can I find this information? So a lot of it is going to complement the Foundation Directory and help you access information that you would get by searching the directory. So I'm going to go through and show you these different resources and then we're going to come back and talk about any questions that you might have. So let me just get out of this just for a second here. I'm going to bring this down here and bring up, there we go. This is thefoundationscenter.org. This is our main website for the Foundation Center. And this will give you information about how we run and different information that's related to what we do. But thefoundationscenter.org is really the place where you'd start to get to our different databases. And the one I want to show you right now is the Foundation Directory online. Now this is a subscription database, and if you walk into our libraries and our cooperating collections, which I'll show you in a little bit, where you can find them. The Foundation Directory is where people are going to take you to do your initial searching. What I do a lot of my time is spend time with people to talk to them about what are you looking to find funding for? Who are you serving in what area? What specific subjects are you doing work with? So when I work with somebody who's trying to find funder, I generally start here. You can see from this that this has a little search in the middle that enables you to search a whole bunch of databases at once. It enables you to search for grant makers, companies, grants in 990s, which I mentioned already, and also five other databases. Our database of news, of jobs in the nonprofit sector, our short-term funding opportunities, or RFPs, reports from the world of philanthropy, which we call our public reports, and nonprofit literature. You can search all of those things. And if you're interested in a particular topic such as let's just type in green building, you can do a search and bring up results that are specific to this. So make sure this search is going to go through here. And I hope everybody can see this. This is the results from our search on green building. And you can see over here on the left a list of the different databases and sources of information. And 227 grant makers that mentioned green building and 829 grants that have been awarded. There are a number of RFPs listed. And if we click on any one of these in the window, it will bring up what the latest resource is. So this is the RFP, for example, that mentions green building, that mentions that as a particular issue. So what I can do is just open this up and find who is it that is accepting grant applications for things related to green building. And I can open this up and it's the original request for proposals, the RFP. These are short-term funding opportunities that aren't available for everybody. You can see they have a very quick turnaround. And it tells you about something that you might not know about. Grants for $3,000 to $8,000 related to this issue. But what a lot of people are looking for instead are specifics to what they're doing, where they're doing it. And that's when we go beyond the power search, which is what I just did, and go into searching grant makers themselves and searching specifically for a match. Let's imagine that you are working with youth and you are looking for funding for a specific issue that you're dealing with. Say you are interested in youth development. Maybe you want to even fund something related to youth development work, maybe research that you're doing. You can search in this database and get a match for funders that are interested in youth or youth development or children in youth services. Search for the funders that are specifically interested in those things and narrow it down to a geographic focus. So say you're working in New York and you want to see which funders are specifically focused on New York state. And maybe you're in the metro area of New York and you want to know of funders that are in that region. Who is concentrating on this? Children youth services, youth development, and who might give the type of support that I need? So if I want to do research, I want to see what funders are interested in these subjects, giving for research and that are located and giving in New York. And finally, you can narrow it down to the ones that will accept applications. If you've begun looking for potential foundation sources of funding, you may find that there's a lot of funders out there that don't give, don't ask for unsolicited requests, but you can narrow it down to just the ones that do. And here are 33 foundations, 33 ones that match up with all of these different priorities that are listed on the left-hand side of the screen. They give for research that are interested in children and youths that are giving in New York. Each one of these is a profile that you can open up. So you can open up this outline and see a profile of this foundation, what they like to fund, who they are, a link to their 990s if you want to look at the original documents. And if you read further down, limitations where they narrow their giving primarily, giving primarily in Westchester, not in New York City, but see their purpose and activities, children and youth services, they give specifically for research as well as other things, and how to apply to them, including how to approach them first. We work with people all the time that are looking to match up, looking to find the funders that most share what they are interested in, so that this search will enable you to find a number of prospects that you can email to yourself, print out, or save or export. Now, I wanted to mention, I want to underline before I get to it, that this is a database that we charge for, that we keep the foundation center going by selling access to. However, it is freely available at different locations, our cooperating collections, and libraries across the country. And in a little bit, I'll tell you where you can find out where there's one near you if you've never done this. You want to use this for free first, if you've never used it before, to see how does it work and is it work for you. If you want to subscribe to it, there's easy ways to do that on the foundation center website in our shop section, and there are several levels of subscription anywhere from $20 a month to $180 a month. But if you go to our libraries and cooperating collections, you can use this database that I'm using for free at the highest level. There's a lot of different ways to search it. I don't want to belabor this and go into this for too long, but one other way I want to mention just for anybody who's joining us from a rural area or an area with not a lot of grant makers in, you may want to look and search our database not based on what the grant makers say they fund, which is what a lot of people start with, but instead based on where they're giving. You can decide I want to see who is giving in a particular city, for example, who has given grants to that particular city. We'll just do Akron, Ohio, as an example. You can put in the name of a city and state and see who has given for any organizations in that state or for any subjects of any grants. So maybe you're researching who's giving to seniors in Akron, Ohio. You can search the subject of aging, do a search, and pull up a list of grants given, one grant from one organization to one recipient, and see who is all given. And it will not just be grant makers that necessarily are located in that city, but grant makers from all across the country that might be doing it. I'm seeing we're having a little bit of a slowness on the results page here, but we'll give it a second or two and see if it catches up to us. This is a database that is very easy to use, very easy to sit down and begin to try and practice with. And I just seem to be having a little bit of a glitch here. But what I can do here is just back up a little bit to where we were and know that you can use this for free at any of these cooperating libraries. You can search within 990s using this database. You can also search to see who is giving for funding from a particular company for a particular issue in a particular city where the company might have a particular location. Companies tend to give in the areas where they have a presence. Or if you see which companies are giving in-kind gifts, which ones make a particular product that you might want to get donated. The database is very flexible, very easy to use, and very easy to send home the results from. So this is a great way to find information about foundations and other givers. I showed you that when you search this, you can search and find RFPs that are being offered. I want to mention just before I go over to GrantSpace that through our foundationcenter.org website, we also have access to newsletters of different funding opportunities. So you can sign up for any newsletters related to funding. Our RFP Bulletin will send you regular email newsletters about requests for proposals. There's also jobs and other non-profit news. That's available through the foundationcenter.org. The foundation directory, as I said, is something that you would have to pay for from home, but you can get for free at all of our different libraries and cooperating collections. And where you find those is to go in and look at GrantSpace. GrantSpace has a search specifically for a location near you, which will have free access to this database. And I'll come back to this in just a second. What GrantSpace also does is collect the information that's going to help you move forward with this. Once you find these funders and collect different possible funders for your program, the question that we always get is, what do I do next? How do I write a grant proposal? How do I find out what's the best process? What if I need to do other kinds of fundraising? So what we've done is assemble ingrantspace.org a free website. And everything I'm going to show you here on GrantSpace is free and accessible from anywhere in the United States that you have access to the internet. We have assembled materials that are going to be useful for finding answers to questions. The first place I tend to send people in GrantSpace is the tools section, because there's so many wonderful free tools that we offer, and they're all assembled here in the tools section with free databases. Some of them are simply free listings of grant makers. If you're looking to find a foundation and you know the name or the location or a zip code of one, you will find basic information, contact information, websites, basic structural information, not what they fund, but who they are. You can just look at them up for free on the foundation finder. If you're looking to find a 990-PF for a foundation or a 990 report for any nonprofit, you can search that here by the name of the organization or the state or location and download that. But I think what most people use our tools section for are some of the free databases that are in the center. And the ones that are most attractive to grant seekers and people looking to get funding for their cause is the finance section here in the Knowledge Base. So say you're trying to write and acquire funding for a program and they say send in a letter of inquiry and you don't know what that is. You can go in here to the Knowledge Base, search the term letter of inquiry and what you'll come up with are results and here's eight results related to that search. The answer that you get in our Knowledge Base, which is kind of like our database of frequently asked questions, is the answer what should be included in a letter of inquiry and it will tell you. Here's what it should include, here's how they go and here's where you can get samples. We've taken from our own publications, this is our grant seekers guide for winning proposals, a place where you can search to find potential, find example, sample documents that show you how to write a letter of inquiry, sample letters of inquiry, there's a whole section on that. Further down there are websites that we have weeded out from all the things that are available on the internet, the best resources that we've found related to the topic. This is just on letters of inquiry but if you look on the right hand side, there are many other categories, if you're looking for government funding, individual donors, if you're looking to fundraise from corporations, any of these funding resources are available. You want to start getting into online virtual fundraising. You can look and see all of the questions and answers related to that, mobile giving, online fundraising, interacting with the media, all the things that are related to that, there's answers to questions and free links to good resources that are available out there. Also information on funding research, on non-profit management and individual fundraising. If you're a student or an artist or someone working to try and secure funding in a fiscal sponsorship relationship, that material is there and it's available both in English and Spanish. Also in the tools are a number of different databases that we're very proud of and we keep adding more and more. There's a full database of sample documents, sample budgets and cover letters and grant proposals. There's a catalogue of our literature, our five libraries, the catalogue of our holdings there with abstracts and links to full text documents on every subject related to non-profits and fundraising. Further down, there's our brand new database of collaborations. Somebody says we want you to collaborate, you don't know how to do that. You can search in here for good models with detailed information on the best ways to do all sorts of types of collaborations. And finally there's a database of tools that measure change, ways of assessing your ability, ways of assessing the quality of your programs, and how well your programs have impacted the community to free database of tools. Startup resources for those of you who want to start a non-profit, start up resources by state are available in this. There's so much available in the tools section, you may find that that's where you can find all of the answers that you need. I will do want to mention before I finish out my section, you're just saying that there is a skills section as well where instead of using just as simple tools you can concentrate and find training materials, websites, webinars, podcasts and other audio and video related to how to do a particular topic. This is all about developing proposals. There's live chat discussions and forums, online classes, many of which are free training events, many free sample documents, answers. It's all available through GrantsBased.org. I want to go back to the main page GrantsBased.org because there's one thing that I want to draw your attention to that's on this page and actually on every page. It's our chat now reference. We, in addition to providing this information and trying to help you find the sources of funding that you need, we also collect, we have people standing by that can help you answer the questions that you have. I showed a whole bunch of things on this webinar. If you can't remember something that you saw, you can click on the chat now button and talk to a librarian in person. This is an all day resource, something that's available into the evening on the East Coast because we have our West Coast office covering this as well. When the chat now is not there, the ask us button is always there for free email reference. Send in your question. We'll get back to you. We take this very seriously. You don't skip any questions or skip any possibilities. We try and respond directly to everything that is asked of us. Well, this is if you want to try and get some resources and help online. But as I mentioned, the Foundation Directory is a great resource. You'd want to try it out in a library or cooperating collection near you. What you can do is go, and I'm showing you here on the GrantsBased home page where you can find this, but it's at a number of different places throughout GrantsBased, is a place where you can find us our over 450 locations. This is the Find Us map for the United States, and I'm hoping this will load up here. If not, I can do the search and show you exactly. Let's see. It looks like the map is having a little issue today. Well, that doesn't matter because we can always do a search to find who's nearest to you. So if you have a location, let's say you're in the Pittsburgh area and you want to find out what is the nearest cooperating collection to you, you can do a search and find a list of the nearby Foundation cooperating collections and libraries. It will tell you the name of the collection, the distance from where you are, and a link to them to find out more information. All of these places that are listed here and all the places that will be listed will offer free access to the Foundation directory and assistance by somebody who's been trained as an expert in providing the kind of resource work and the kind of fundraising assistance that you need. And what I'm going to do is just end there, go back to the slides and just ask if anybody has any questions, and then I'm going to turn it over to Bobby to tell you more about how that works from the cooperating collection perspective. Does anybody have any questions based on anything that I talked about? Thanks, David. It does look like we have a few questions here for you. Tim was wondering, do you have any advice or resources for a startup nonprofit that is looking to get operations off the ground? Are you aware of any foundations that tailor specifically for startup organizations? Well, I will say that with Foundation funding it's not usually the first place you go for startup for a nonprofit. However, we do categorize the foundations listed in the Foundation directory and categorize them as ones that will offer seed money as a type of support or not. What I would do is if I was looking to get that kind of startup money from a foundation, I would look for the ones that are interested in providing seed money, first money, and you can narrow your search that way. Other suggestions are in the grants-based section, the knowledge base, under establishing a nonprofit organization where there's lots of information about best ways to get a nonprofit started, the legal questions, but also the different funding questions. So I would work in there to see, in addition to foundations, what you can use. Okay, great. Thanks. And it looks like we have a question from Justin. Do you have any research or publications coming out in the near future regarding direct charitable activities and foundation staffing related to employment trends, such as, wait one second, I'm going to make some based on what we did. There we go. Let me go back to that question. Such as the number of employees by type of foundation and giving levels? We do do studies of foundations and how they operate. We don't always duplicate anything that the Council on Foundations would do as a study, but we do regular studies all the time, and we have done things related to staffing and the administrative needs of foundations. The place to find that would be to go to thefoundationscenter.org, and I think maybe I'll just bring that up again if I can here. Let's see. I'm just going to bring up foundationscenter.org real quickly. The place to go is the gain knowledge section. And in our research studies, you will find national trends, regional trends, and special topic trends. So anytime that we are doing a special study related to foundations and how they do their funding and how they administer different programs, that's where you'll find it. Okay, great. Thanks. And then Julian had a question. She says, I'm working on starting up a new nonprofit organization, and she's finding a ton of it grants, but thus far most require 501c3 status. Are there any good resources for startup nonprofits looking for startup money prior to 501c3 status? Well, part of the problem is that in order for a grant to be legal, it has to go for charitable purposes, and so a lot of foundations will not give grants to organizations that are not 501c3 or some type of nonprofit. However, you are in the startups phase. There are organizations that will give grants to you if you are working with a fiscal sponsor, somebody who will serve to be the official legal administrator of the money that you can partner with. They will get the grant and they will pass it through to you. So it's an agreement that you have with an existing nonprofit. And in our knowledge base, Foundation Center through grantsbase.org and the tools, the knowledge base, there's a whole section on fiscal sponsorship and how it can work, some of the pitfalls, some of the places where you can find assistance for that. There are other organizations sometimes that will assist you and give you grants, even though you're just in the process of getting a 501c3 because of the way the law is, it is retroactive when you start the process. But I would take a look at the fiscal sponsorship material there and see if maybe that might be the right choice for you. Okay, great. Thanks. I just want to take a couple of more questions, and we do have a lot of questions coming in and then we'll hand it over to Bobby. Rabina was asking, are there sliding scales for nonprofits based on their budget and assuming for a foundation directory online? For the cost of the foundation directory online, it is pretty much for the different levels of what you would like to get. And actually for a nonprofit that's not sure that they would want to pay the full $179.95 a month, you might want to consider getting a less comprehensive collection of just the largest foundations, say the basic collection, which is $19.95 a month, just to get started. There's not a sliding scale based on the size of your organization, but we do recommend that you find and try out the foundation directory and see what it is that you actually need. And we can help you out at any of our cooperative collections to decide which might be the best level for you. Okay, great, thank you. And then I'm going to handle one more question, and then the rest of the questions we'll get to after Bobby's section, because I do want to make sure Bobby has time. Halo was asking, how do I generate a comprehensive list of funders for my cause and not just one or two? A comprehensive. Well, the best way to think about it is to not focus just solely on the funders that are mentioning your cause. Say you're doing a program specifically related to autism. You can find funders that have a field of interest that is autism, and you'll find several hundred that are interested in funding autism-related programs. But there are several thousand or more that are most likely interested in funding programs related to your topic. You just can't think of it too narrowly. So instead of just looking for funders that are targeting autism, you might look for funders that are interested in children or children in health or health in general as well. Most of the time the private funders are going to be more general about what they say they fund rather than more specific. So you can find the specific funders and get connected to them, but then start thinking more broadly, what categories do my programs fit in? Am I working with youth? I find the youth-related funders, but I also want to find funders that are interested in the economically disadvantaged because that's most of the youth I work with are economically disadvantaged or African-American or girls, if it's focused on girls. So you can go a lot of different directions to match up with funders. The important thing is to not think narrowly about what you do. Think of all the different ways that you can connect to a potential funder and that that will help you. Okay, great. Thank you. And then with that, I think I'm going to go ahead and give the control over to Bobby and some of the questions that came in that we didn't just get to. Well, try to get to those near the end and like I said, if we don't get to everything, I can forward to the presenters afterwards. So thank you, David, for that. Bobby, I'm going to go ahead and give you control. Let me know if... I unmuted you, so go ahead and let me know if you can speak. Can you hear me? I can hear you. You're a little bit quiet, so you might want to turn that volume up on the phone again. Okay, everybody. If you can hear me well, I'm here in Kalamazoo, Michigan. There really is a Kalamazoo, Michigan. And I'm delighted to be with you all this afternoon and have the opportunity to tell you about one place, which we believe to be a unique nonprofit resource center and hopefully tell you how you could either get connected with one in your area or potentially start one in your area because nonprofits seem to have the need for resource centers around the country. One place is an externally funded nonprofit management support organization commonly called an MSO. You may have heard them called MSOs, and it is located at and operated by the Kalamazoo Public Library. We've been opened a little over three years, and so I wanted to give you a little history of how this came about because it is quite unique to even the sector of MSOs across the country. We have seven different MSOs in the state of Michigan, and they are all unique to their organizations and to their funding models. We are the only one that is free and open to the public. Everything that happens here is at the public library, and it is under public library policies of being free and have open access. So there's no prerequisites. People who are involved in nonprofits and not involved in nonprofits can come for our services and programs, but they are very much geared toward all of our nonprofit sector. We also are the cooperating collection manager here at KPL. The Kalamazoo Public Library was a cooperating collection before we started one place here at the library, but since we have our own place, we actually have a place and an office and utilize the entire library. I am now the supervisor of the cooperating collection, and unlike a lot of the places David was talking about, I am not a librarian. I am an entrepreneur and nonprofit consultant by my profession, and having the resources of the foundation center here are just a monumental benefit to us at one place in the totality of what we offer. Just to build, again, a little history. This came about because our two major funding sources, the Irving S. Gilmore Foundation and the Community Foundation here in Kalamazoo, initiated a task force in late 2007, early 2008 to see if such a one-stop shopping place would be important and valuable to our nonprofit sector. They definitely found that it was, and they initiated the proposals to fund the first three-year pilot of this program. They asked the library to be the operating unit and to be the source of in-kind infrastructure for one place, and that has proven to be an enormously beneficial model for us here in Kalamazoo. Our library is known to be collaborative, known to be neutral, it's centrally located, and it's open and free so many hours of the week. So the goals of one place are two. One is to be the one place for nonprofits to get resources, instructions, and referrals, and two, for everyone who leads, manages, and donates to nonprofits in Kalamazoo County to come together for new ideas, resources, and each other. As I tell you about how we accomplish those goals, you'll really get a sense of how important the connecting with each other is to our service. We have what I call a school model here at one place. We have a large circulating collection, the second largest in the state of Michigan, of nonprofit resources. So if your library that you are close to doesn't have the latest best practice book, you may want to be asking them to bring them in and having a nonprofit section or collection so that you can have open and free access to those things. So all of these things that you're seeing on your slide, professional development, organizational systems development, are all meant to help build the capacity both of individuals and systems in our organizations locally. We have circulating and in our reference section all of the Foundation Center books and resources because as a cooperating collection, we do subscribe to their highest level of membership. And so we get a very updated, continually updated source of resources both online and through hard cover books. I just got it for you more yesterday. They offer education and training, and these are in four different models or modes that we operate here. The workshops are online or in person, on site, and they are facilitator led. They're led by experts in whatever field the topic is, and they run anywhere from an hour and a half to five days. We have a five part series on supervision and management in the nonprofit sector that we've done twice and are going to repeat again next fall. And then we back up to as little as an hour and a half or two hours. Then we have a whole series of webinars, much like this one we bring in the experts from all over the country through associations and centers of nonprofits to provide in person, on site, the group setting webinars on everything from risk management to technology, much as this one, the foundation center webinars, the association of fundraising professional webinars. And we bring these folks together that are interested in that topic, and we have a discussion after the webinar is done to see how they are implementing these things they learned or how they plan to. I always ask for what pearls they got that day to take away, and they share among themselves. So this is another way that they are meeting each other and developing their networks. In addition, we have an ongoing series of peer networks. We call them round tables because they're over the lunch hour. And every month, most of them come together with a topic that they would like some skill development in and how, again, they're implementing those or what questions and challenges they have in their organization. We had one just at noon time today here in Michigan with our fundraising development professionals. And we talked about a number of different topics. How to engage your board and fund development is a very common topic, as I'm sure it is for many of you. We have a board leadership round table for board presidents and assistant presidents, a new executive director round table for people in the job for the first time, less than three years. And then we cover all of the other functional areas in nonprofits in their own peer network. So, again, they get to say what their challenges are. They get to talk about what other people's challenges are and how they could help them with an idea or a tip. And they learn who else is out there doing what they're doing in the community. I had over 30 years of consulting here in Kalamazoo with nonprofits prior to coming to the library to build up one place. And I was very well aware that in most cases, people working in nonprofits never had the opportunity to get out and very often have no opportunity for their own professional development. So we are really adding a lot of value to our organization. This year, we added a very special leadership academy that I had been had in the planning for year three. I knew we had to be established by the time that I offered this. It is a 10-day executive director training academy. We currently have 19 middle and upper management professionals that are in our larger organizations here in Kalamazoo. And we are building a pool of leaders and executives to take over as the rising wave of baby boomers retiring, leaving a leadership gap. So we're aware of that, and we plan to do that every year. This current one, then in January and end of June 1st, they're all very excited. They have a mentor in following with them and the leadership academy days are taught by experts in whatever the topic is. And the whole goal of that is that they'll be prepared. I do step in leadership to not be surprised by all of the breadth and depth that it takes to run an organization from the executive chair. In addition, we offer ongoing one-on-one and small group assistance. Oftentimes, since all of you are in nonprofits, it's called technical assistance. And we are so busy here at one place that I call it triage. I'm the primary person that does that work by email, phone, or in person. And as you'll see by a few stats at the end, the volume of what we do here does not allow me to do long-term counseling. So for that, we have a consultant and trainer network that's been going for over three years now and an online searchable directory by keyword that they apply to be a part of and we check their references so they are vetted. But the consultant and trainer network is people that are in the directory and additional people and they come together once a month for their own ongoing professional development and to find out what other people are doing. One place could not do what it does without the folks that are in this network and in the directory because they support us 100%. They teach many of our on-site workshops, they are a part of the Leadership Academy and leading all of that, and they are just an invaluable part of one place. So if you don't have that kind of thing in your community, just having a way to draw on and having a list of available consultants would be very handy to you, I believe. What do we do as a part of being a cooperating collection? As I noted, the library was a cooperating collection before I got here, and there are requirements that come along with being that that David didn't quite talk about, but one of them is we're required to stay on top of their resources and we have our own webinars and we have our own conferences to continue to learn what they have available for us. In addition, we are required to promote the fact that we have them here and that wouldn't be a problem at all because we really value and use their services all the time. So we have them promoted in our library through posters. We have them noted in our eNewsletter that goes out every other week. You also can subscribe to that if you are interested at any time. And in every other way that we have a workshop or something, we always promote that the Foundation Center resources are available, both the ones that are only available on site with the directory and the ones that are available free of charge. We provide access in one place and really throughout the entire central library to the directory online. We have two dedicated machines in one place that are only available to the nonprofit organization and we make sure that they are available all the time that people can come in and once you get used to it, if you haven't used it already, David did a great job of showing you some basics. But once you get used to it, you can really get absorbed into it and spend a whole lot of time what if-ing and seeing different things that are available to you out there. We provide about once every six weeks. We provide a grant writing basics class that's six hours long and about every six weeks in between. We offer a grant research tools class and that's about an hour and a half to two hours long. And we do very much in the grant research tools what David did earlier in this webinar. And we have people looking at topics and going out and talking about how you think about the topics and the key words in the database because the database has key words that we recommend. People go to those-to view the topics and not type in those boxes because you want to communicate with the directory online in a way that it understands. And you want to look at those categories like David talked about that are more long-term is how I say what your goal is. For instance, one of our people came in looking for capital to build a shed for a historic car that they were being given and he kept looking for capital, building, all that kind of thing. I said, what do you want to do with it? He said, well, it's to preserve this car. So we looked under historical preservation and there were a whole lot more sources of funding opportunities than there were looking under building a garage. So think about what you want the outcome to be when you look for key words. So in addition to those workshops, utilizing the Foundation Center resources throughout all of those workshops, we also offer individual and group tutoring in one place on an as-needed basis, especially if people can't get to one of those workshops. And this is the level of service that we provide in one place every year. We offer 160 or more workshops, webinars, and peer networks that are attended by over 1,500 people. And in addition, we have over 8,000 service points with people in those phone calls, emails, and in-person meetings with people. And that's all with 1.75 FTEs. And that has been going ever since we opened. I had the privilege of having five months behind the scenes to get everything in order so that when we opened in March of 2009, we hit the ground running and we've been running at this level ever since. And that proves, along with the wonderful feedback that we get that this is really valuable to our community, our county. We're working with over 400 501C3s and about 1,400 organizations altogether and all the people that work in and with them in our community. We just did our annual survey of satisfaction in which we send a separate survey to each of the service and program areas, and we have an overall average of 94%. So I'm pretty happy with that. So that's what we have. And what I would like to do is just show you our opening web. We have a very, very dynamic website. And before we close to have questions here at the end, I'd just like to go out and show you that. I'm not going to flip around a lot in it because there's way too much there. But this is the Kalamazoo Public Library's website. And one place is right here, nonprofit. And this is our website, and I hope that you'll go out and find it. It's on your slide in my contact information. It shows our upcoming workshops and events, our services, our resources. And we have a blog that I do on a regular basis. We just hired our assistant. We had an assistant for almost three years, and she went on to work for another organization. And we have a new assistant, Bailey Mead, and her picture will be up here shortly. And we do blogs on topical issues of timely matters in the nonprofit sector. We also have an Ask One Place where people can just send in their questions. We offer a nonprofit event calendar and an external regional training calendar and all these different resources online and out of line. The spotlight on nonprofits is us catching nonprofits doing good work and putting a little story about them up there. And here's where you can subscribe to our e-news and alerts whenever you wish. And then down under Resources are where the Foundation Center Grant Space and all of those wonderful places are. So I hope you will take advantage of that and go out and check out our website and what we have to offer here. And I'd be very happy to talk with anyone or answer any questions right now. Great. Thank you, Bobby. Really quick, I'm going to go ahead and well, actually, if you and I put up your contact information really fast and then after a couple of questions, I'll go ahead and take control back up the screen. We have had a few questions about nonprofits. I'm wanting to access some of the resources that you provide if they don't live in Michigan. So I was just wondering if your webinars or some of your other resources are available for those outside of the state. They really are not. We offered the webinars only on-site as a group setting and all of the other things are on-site as well. We have had people from as far away as Flint, Michigan, and Lansing come to our things. But our target area is Kalamazoo County. Okay. What the person might want to do is check to see what is the nearby cooperating collection for them for their area because Bobby has an exemplary cooperating collection and they do so many different activities. But you should check to see which ones, what cooperating collection in your area might have similar types of programs. Right. That's exactly what I was going to say. And I just put the cooperating collections link into the chat pane so if anybody wants to check out the closest one nearest to them, that would be a good way to do so. Again, Bobby's example is just a really great example that hopefully all of those collections strive to meet. So let's take a look at what other things... The other thing I would do is check in your area to see if you have a management support organization in addition to or as a part of the cooperating collection. Some are actually statewide. In Michigan, we have seven organizations similar to this. They are different in that they have a membership and a fee base, but they are there to assist. So I know around the country there are other organizations like ours that would again provide the cooperating collection and also these additional workshops and services. Okay, great. And we had a question from Patricia who wanted to know a little bit more about establishing a resource one-stop organization like this. Well, I can at least address it if you were interested in becoming a cooperating collection of the Foundation Center. The Foundation Center is always looking for additional places to have a presence. We try and have one in every major city in the United States and a lot of smaller cities as well and rural areas. So if you were interested in establishing one place that I would suggest you go, I don't know if I can get control of the screen just for a second here. Oh, sure. Yeah. Yeah, and then we can put Bobby's information back up here, but one place you might want to go if you're interested in doing that is to go to the Foundation Center's website, foundationcenter.org. You click on the Locations button there at the top of every screen. So foundationcenter.org. Click on Locations. Down at the bottom, you will find a list of locations that are the cooperating collections and a page that will tell you about becoming one. There's a little video that you can watch and a link to find even more information. So if you know of a place that wants to become a cooperating collection or if you are interested in your own organization becoming one, you can read about what the benefits are, how you apply, and we'll get in touch with you and we'll take you through the process. There is a fee, but the benefits for a library or other organization is exciting to be one. You get a lot more material than you actually wind up paying for. And we like to have a presence everywhere so that people don't have to drive a long distance. Great, thank you. And really quick, what I'm going to do is I'm going to actually take control of the screen and Bobby, I'll just pull up that last slide with your contact information so everybody can see it from my screen. And while I'm doing that, a few people asked, do you encourage for any of your events or things like that? Everything here is absolutely free and that's why we think we are probably unique in the country. I know we're unique in Michigan. All of the other similar organizations and including our statewide Michigan Nonprofit Association are all membership and fee-based. So we are unique in that our funders and the library want us to be free and open to the public. And so we get people... There's a new wave of professional development in our nonprofit sector in releasing people to come to one place that is unprecedented. I mean, it just wouldn't happen if we had to charge something. Okay, thank you for that. And then this question I think would be for David. Does access membership to Grantspace.org also come at a cost? I know you said it was free, but I don't know if there's any cost. Yeah, Grantspace.org is completely free. Access to that is available from anywhere you have. Internet links and most of the information, the training classes, the webinars, additional tutorials, most of the information that you get directly from there. And on all of the answers to questions through the knowledge base and the downloadable materials, that's all free. Okay, thank you. We try to keep as much completely free as we can. Okay, great. And then a little bit ago, Justin had asked, is there a way to find out what publications Foundation Center has coming out in the future? He says that he's already gone through the documents and research that is already present in the section that you refer to. We do occasionally announce things that are on the way, but sometimes it depends on when we're going to be publishing. We're not always certain about the publication date. A good place to look is foundationcenter.org in the shop section. They will highlight the latest things. But if you want to find out when things are announced and when new publications are suddenly available, I encourage you to subscribe to one of the newsletters that the Foundation Center puts together. So you go to foundationcenter.org and you click on newsletters. There will be five newsletters for the five main libraries across the country, plus newsletters that are related to the latest technological information, the latest philanthropy information, the latest jobs. You can find a lot of things as early as humanly possible through those. I really encourage you to do that. Okay, great. And I'll send out a link directly to those newsletters in the follow-up information. And then I was going to go ahead and just ask one more question before we finish up. And for anybody who didn't get the question answered again, I'm going to be forwarding these questions to the presenters. This is kind of a combination of questions. We had several questions asking how to search for, the best way to search for, either technology needs or computer funding or things like that in nonprofits. I didn't know if you could talk about that. I could definitely talk about it. I don't know if Bobby, if you have any additional tips. But the thing is that you're not going to find funders that are going to say, I want to fund technology. Or very few of them are going to step up and say, boy, I wish I could buy you all computers. That's not what they like to fund. They like to fund the particular thing that they care most about. So if you need computers to do a particular service to respond to your mission, I need computers so that I can provide patient care more effectively. I need computers because we're instructing people on literacy skills or computer use skills. If it's related to education, related to health, related to what you do, then requesting funding for that equipment to further your mission. You concentrate on the mission rather than on the computers. It's like people coming in and saying, well, I can't fund any funders that want to pay for staff. Well, you're not going to find funders that are going to say, we want to pay for staff. What you're going to find funders saying is we want to pay for what you are doing. And we understand that staff are necessary to carry out the projects. You will, however, find some funders that do, if it is a technologically based organization where you are the specific thing that you're instructing people on is technology use or multimedia. You will find occasionally funders that will do that. My best way of knowing one way or another whether a funder is going to pay for computers is to search in our grants database and see who has purchased computers. You can do a search and concentrate on the funders that have provided support for technology and computer services and see where they were and where they gave. Fantastic. Thank you. So thank you both, David and Bobby, for this great presentation. It's really, really helpful. We'll be sending out all the resources and the recording of this webinar after the event. It probably will get to all the registrants within a week. And so we'll be looking for that. Again, a little bit about who the Foundation Center is. They are a leading source of information about philanthropy worldwide. Through data analysis and training, they connect people who want to change the world to the resources they need to succeed. And then a little bit about who TechSoup is, which is where I'm from. We're a 51c3 nonprofit organization, like so many of you out there. And we really are trying to provide technology and technology resources for you to be able to fulfill your mission. And a little bit about our website and how you can find some of those resources. If you go to TechSoup.org, you can read articles in our Learning Center. You can go ahead and read our blog. You can make sure to find products through our product donation program. And if you wanted to go ahead and see what you're eligible for, there's a check eligibility tool. It's under that where the Learning Center on blog is. There's a check eligibility button. And then also, don't forget to go ahead and subscribe to our newsletter as well by the Cup and New Product Donation Alert. And so again, thank you, Bobby, David, and thank you, Becky, on the back end to your TechSoup. I thank everybody for being here with us. I really appreciate that the Foundation Center has allowed us to do this two-part webinar series. And finally, one last thank you to Citrix Online who does provide our go-to webinar donation so we can provide these webinars for you. And again, I will talk to you all later and be expecting a follow-up email with the recording as well as additional resources. Thank you, everybody. Thanks a lot. And if you could all take a couple of seconds to fill out the survey that will pop up on your screen when you leave the webinar, that will help us provide better and fancier webinars in the future. All right. Thank you, everybody.