 Hi everyone. Thank you so much for joining us today for our webinar, Get to Know Grand Station. Just a few housekeeping items before we get started. If you have questions, you should see a chat box on the left-hand side of your screen. All callers will be muted throughout the presentation, so be sure to use the chat box if you want to interact with the presenters throughout the webinar. If you lose your Internet connection, try refreshing your browser or reconnect using the link that was emailed earlier to you today. If you have to leave the webinar early or you want to watch it again, it's going to be archived on our website, techsoup.org, slash community, slash events, dash webinars. It will be up there for a couple of weeks. You will also receive an email with the presentation, the recording, and any relevant links. If you are on social media, feel free to send us a tweet using hashtag TS webinars. But like I said earlier, please use the chat box that you see on the left-hand side to ask questions. So just a little bit about TechSoup, before we get started, we are located in 236 countries and territories, and we work with over a million nonprofits around the world. We partner with several technology companies like Adobe, Amazon Web Services, Intuit, Microsoft, Symantec, Grand Station we have with us today. They help us make our mission possible to provide either donated or discounted hardware and software to nonprofits around the world. So just to make sure that the chat box works, if you guys want to chat and let me know where you are calling in from, and I can read a few out to everyone. So we have Irvine, California, Nebraska, Austin, Texas, Santa Clara, Indianapolis. I don't see any international folks yet. Phoenix, New York City. Okay, so the chat box works. If you haven't had a chance yet, we have a Tech Marketplace where you can see if your organization qualifies for donated or discounted technology. If you are interested in seeing what is available, you can see the link that is listed here below. And also just so you guys know, we have a $99 Grand Station promo that is happening on September 25th and 26th. It is two days only. If you want to sign up for the reminder email just so you don't miss this deal, it is on the link that you see right there. And we can also chat this out in the chat box so you can register your email and get a reminder. So before we get started, I wanted to go ahead and introduce everyone that is on the call today. So my name is Seema Tucker, and I am the online learning producer here at TechSoup. You probably saw some chats from my colleague LaShika. She will be helping out with the back-end questions that you might have. And then also today from Grand Station we have Jeremy Smith. So he was in the radio industry for 10 years and worked for 6 years as an announcer and program director at a local NPR station. He started a business that specialized in bringing tech support to you. And then he transitioned over to Grand Station in July of 2008 and is the communications director now. And then we also have Sarah Kennedy who is the director of online education at Grand Station. And she has been with Grand Station since February of 2007. And she brings with her the experience of an executive director for a local nonprofit. She also worked with the Veterans Administration as a research assistant for over a decade. So I am going to hand it off to Sarah. Thanks so much Seema. And I want to welcome everyone again. We are really happy you could join us for this short tour today. And during this time we have together we want to show you how you can do all your research on Grand Station from identifying the right funders to building a grant seeking strategy that you and other members of your organization can use in the coming year. And now these are not PowerPoints. This is where we are on the Grand Station website. And so Jeremy, I'm going to turn it over to you. That sounds great. Thanks Sarah. Welcome again everyone. And just to double check, Sarah are you able to see our screen of GrandStation.com? Yes, sir. Well, excellent. So I want to let everybody know a little bit about what Grand Station is in case you are not familiar. Grand Station itself is a set of tools and resources that helps organizations identify and secure grant dollars. Now Grand Station is a publishing company. Research and writing are our skill sets. And we really pride ourselves on publishing current and forward looking information about grant makers. Now all the grant maker profiles that you will see today both government and private are for lack of a better description of what we call in the game. Now that means these profiles reflect grant makers who are actively accepting requests or letters of inquiry from a variety of nonprofits. So these are all live grants. Now you may have used some other services where you do your research and you get hundreds of returns leaving you with a really long list of potential funders to screen without really knowing how relevant they are to your specific needs. Now our job at Grand Station is to pre-screen grant makers. So the time you spend researching generates a list of grant makers that may truly accept a request to fund your organization's programmer project. So really think of us as your backroom research team. We are pre-screening funders so that we are feeding you the most relevant ones for your programmer project. Now besides the rich grant research information on our website that I will show you, we also published two different newsletters that highlight upcoming funding opportunities. And you can find them in our public resources section. The first is the Grand Station Insider. Now this focuses on 10 distinct opportunities for U.S. based nonprofit organizations. And we also have another newsletter which is called the Grand Station International Insider. Now this one features 16 international funding opportunities including a number of opportunities for our Canadian neighbors. Now these newsletters as I hope you've just seen are located in our public resources section. This is where you can also find links to TrendTrack, Pathfinder, and our Island Education section here as well. Now we will come back a little bit later in the tour today to explore these resources just a bit more. So near the top of the page and you can always click on our logo. Take you back to the main page of Grand Station. We have links to sort of our key features. And you can actually see them right here on the top. We have our find grant makers, build strategy, write proposals, and then of course as you just heard, public resources. Now when you click on find grant makers, this is open up to our search section where all the different databases are located. The build strategy area, this is where you can access tools that will help you build a solid grant seeking strategy. And then when you click on write proposals, this is where you're going to find step-by-step tutorials that you can use to write compelling grant proposals. So here on the front page we go ahead and scroll down. We have various announcements and a cool little sliding effect here. But I'm going to go ahead and take you down to one of our recent grant maker profiles. We have a funding alert section. And this is a sample of what you would find in our database. And these alerts all change weekly. And as with all of our announcements, this information is really carefully curated providing you with the most current information about specific grant opportunities. So we'll go ahead and click on this one right here, the Lexus Echo Challenge. So here is this particular grant makers profile. You have the name of the grant maker right here. And then you have links to their website or you can even email the profile directly to yourself. On the left-hand side you'll have a breakdown of all the specific information. And on the right is where you'll find where they're located at as in their contact information, their geographic scope for giving, any specific financial information, along with any important or applicable application information, and at the very bottom a last updated. And of course you can also sometimes see the links of what grants specifically were awarded. This is a new feature we're integrating into our database. And one thing to keep in mind about GrantStation is we're always adding new features. So whenever someone lets us know, hey, it would be great if this was a feature. We always try to find a way to incorporate that into our database. And we've been doing this for, let me see, quite a while, I think since 1999. So we kind of know what we're doing. And we're also able to move pretty quickly and add features as people want them and request them. Now when we are putting together these specific records, and we are again constantly going through and not only modifying our website, but modifying, removing, and adding records to our database, what we do is we gather up as much information as we can from the web, from the organization's IRS 990 form, and from other sources. And then our researchers will draft a profile which we send directly to the grant maker for their review. Now the question we ask the grant maker when they review their record is not just is this information correct, but also are we capturing what they will fund now, but also what they will plan to fund in the next year? And we do this because although it's really interesting to know what they've funded in the past, it's even more helpful to know what they'll fund today, tomorrow, and into the future. So in short, the real question is will they consider funding your organization right now? The grant maker reviews their profile. They often make changes and they send it back to us. We do a final edit and then we publish it in our database. So this process really results in grant maker profiles that are unlike anything else read in the web, not even on their own website. Our researchers really focus on publishing quality information that will make your job easier, hence the idea of thinking of GrantStation as your backroom research team. Now you can also, under our public resource section, and I mentioned this earlier, visit our online education resources section. And this is where you can find links to all kinds of online education resources that we have, but in particular I wanted to go ahead and focus in on our webinars. And this is an area that Sarah happens to know the most about. Thanks, Jeremy. So webinars are open to the public as well as members. So you don't need to be a member of GrantStation to take them. And you can take them two different ways. You can take them individually or as a group. And as a group, it is 2 to 10 people can take the webinar. And they can be on all different devices and all different locations. So it's really an affordable way for a group of people to increase their knowledge in all areas of grantsmanship. So you want to check this menu out frequently as we're always adding new webinars as well as online workshops. Now before we get into our specific searches, I really wanted to explain our main section that I kind of glossed over in greater detail and really show you how they can aid you in your search for funding. Now in our Build Strategies section, which I'll go ahead and click on right here, this is where we have an interactive tool called Grants 2020. This can actually provide you with a visual and clear picture of where your organization's grant program is today, and more importantly how it needs to grow the next several years. You simply put in specific numbers and it gives you this great chart that you can email, and it gives you also information and an analysis based on numbers that you've entered that you can keep in mind moving forward. In addition, we also have the grant seeking calendar and creating time articles. And these are really tutorials that focus on how to design and develop grant seeking strategies. And they work hand in hand when you're creating a strategy that works for you and your organization. Now we'll definitely come back later to the grant seeking calendar in today's tour. Also under Write Proposals, this is where you can find the tools to help you write and submit compelling letters of inquiry or even grant proposals. We have Getting Started and this really outlines all the documentation that you should have at your fingertips before you begin writing your grant requests. And we also have a really nice tutorial on writing a letter of inquiry which is really helpful when you're trying to consider what should and should not be included when you're putting together an LOI or even explaining what a letter of inquiry is if you're not that sure. Then we have one of my favorite areas and this is the full grant proposal. This is a step-by-step approach to writing a grant which includes downloadable samples of award-winning grant proposals. And then we also have a series of articles called Editing and Revision which goes through everything to do when you're editing and revising your grant proposal. One thing to keep in mind is don't ever underestimate the value of reviewing these award-winning grant proposals that we have here on the website. You will get tons of ideas on how to present your own case for support by reviewing these truly well-developed examples. And just a side note, GrantStation runs a contest for the Best Written Grant Proposal and the contestants are judged by a panel organized by the Grant Professional Association and the award winners are then used right here on GrantStation.com. So at this point I'll go back to our home page by clicking on our main logo. I think we should do a few thorough searches that really show how useful our site is for your grant research needs. So the first question, how do you go about identifying the best grant makers to approach? Or even creating a grant seeking strategy for that matter? So first let's put some scenarios in place for today. So we are seeking funding for animal welfare in the state of Minnesota. And also here's another one we want to start an after-school program which deals with youth and obesity. So we always recommend you begin by doing two specific types of research, primary and secondary research. We're going to explain what each of them is and how to do them. Once you've gone through both of these research steps, you'll really have the foundation for your grant seeking strategy. So prior to starting all of your searches, I recommend clicking on Find Grant Makers, then checking out the preparation area and clicking on Overview. This is where you're going to find the Project Description Worksheet along with our search terms. Now using the Project Description Worksheet, this is a downloadable Word document, this will help you organize your approach, flesh out your budget, and really serve as a solid foundation for your grant seeking strategy. It's something that you can save, you can add pertinent information related to your search to it, and then you can hand it off to other members of your team for further research or store it and then reference it at a later date. It's just a simple breakdown of helping you organize your thoughts. And then once that's in place, you can also start doing your research, not only on GrantStation, but anywhere you plan to go forward because now you have that first step, that primary research step in place. I also really encourage our members to familiarize themselves with our search terms, and that's right over here. This is the key terminology that's used on our website, and it serves as a great guide when you're doing your keyword research. Now the reason this is so important is often you'll be looking for funding using certain words, entering them in Google and other search engines, and realizing you're not finding any results. Sometimes the specific keywords you're looking for are not the same keywords that the funder uses. It's not what the funder calls it. So the trick is, this allows you to basically translate between what you're looking for to what the funder specifically calls it. So to use this area, you can enter in your specific idea or keyword right here, and then it will show you where it would be located within our database. And our database is based on industry standard databases. So once you have these specific keywords, you can use them moving forward anywhere you need to to do your research and find the funding that matches your specific project. So for example, using our earlier sample of animal welfare, we'll go ahead and type that in right here, and then we'll go ahead and click Apply. And then it tells us that animal welfare, which also includes humane societies, companion animal programs, animal shelter programs, and animal abuse and cruelty prevention are all located under the animal welfare topic, which is good, which is located under environment and animals. So we go ahead and make a note of this on our project description worksheet so that we know when we go in and start doing our research to look up animal welfare. And you can do this for all types of different search terms. And this is actually a really powerful area just to see what matches with what. Another one that comes up often, and I'll show this really quickly, is people are often just looking for diseases or support for disease-based research. But there's three specific areas you can look under. There's health, diseases general, and then we have specific areas such as Alzheimer's or heart disease, and they're all located under the health diseases category. But there's also a health and wellness category. So this is where it can be confusing. If you're looking in one specific area or trying to find something and not finding results, it's probably a matter of finding the right keyword. And this is something that you can do here at Grand Station is be able to identify the right keyword to use. So let's go ahead and begin our grant search, and also known as primary research by moving into our US State section. And if we go ahead and click on Search, I'll go ahead and show you all the areas you can search through. So we have a US Charitable Database, a US Federal Database, a US State Government Database, then a Canadian Charitable Government Database, as well as an International Charitable Database. For now we're going to go ahead and move, as I said, into the US State Government Database. And our specific state we're focusing on is Minnesota, so we'll go ahead and click on that one right now. So what Grand Station offers is access to listings of the US Federal State Funded Agencies, State Funded Agencies, and State Departments for each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia that offer financial and technical assistance programs. Now all these links you'll see here will take you directly to the agency or department page which deals specifically with the funding. So for the next step in our primary research, we can look at what's offered by the US Government in our US Federal section. So we can go ahead and close this tab and then click on US Federal right here, and now we're in our US Federal section. Now you can search this area by using eligible applicants, funding agencies, areas of interest, funding opportunities, as well as CFDA number, along by using specific keywords as well. And you can easily just click the drop-down boxes, and this is how most of Grand Station functions. You choose what you are. Let's say I'm a nonprofit with 501c3 status. And what this actually offers you is a front end to all the listings on Grants.gov. Now Grants.gov is a great site run by the US Government that allows you to research and find funding. It can be a little confusing at times. This gives you a way to access all the exact same information in an easy to understand and a very fast manner. And you can then easily check other areas of interest. So let's say we're looking for support within the health category. So we click that specific check box and we immediately get results updated. They're organized by Opportunity Title, Agency, Post Date, and then Close Date. So you can see when it was first offered and when we'll be closing that specific option. Then if we scroll down even further, we can add multiple areas of interest by clicking on and off various boxes. Then we can add keywords on top of this or narrow it down to a specific funding agency as well. So it really gives you all the features and functionality of Grants.gov right here in a nice front end. Now there's this store here where I live in Fairbanks, Alaska, which they call One Stop Shopping. Or you can do all your shopping. You can buy your tires, but you can also buy your milk at the same place. That's something that Granitation offers. You can do all of your research, your state-based federal, and of course your organizational research all within one place, including international. But for right now, let's go ahead and take a look at the different funding options that we have in our U.S. Charitable Database. But as I'm moving over there, I just want to let everybody know it's really important to collect this information available on the U.S. federal and state level. Because when you apply to the private funders we're about to look at, you can say that you've done your federal and state research. And in case you don't find any options, which is sometimes the case, you can say specifically at this time there are no federal programs that can help us with our need. That way the private funder knows that you've done your homework, which really speaks to your credibility as an organization, and that private funding is the only option for you right now. So this is the U.S. Charitable Database. This database lists thousands of funder profiles. This includes independent, family, community, and corporate foundations, corporate giving programs, faith-based grant makers, and associations with grant making programs. All these profiles are searchable by geographic scope, areas of interest, and types, support, name, and by keyword. So in the content area right here on the left-hand side, this is where you can find a guide that will help you through the search process. And the right-hand side is a navigation area. And this is where you're going to enter in all your specific criteria. So starting here under geographic scope, we can go ahead and choose a search for global grant makers giving to U.S.-based organizations if we want to. But for now let's choose national grant makers who give across all states. And then we can go ahead and click on and off various options that I mentioned before. This allows you to be more creative and thoughtful as you do your searches. And as each new criteria is added or subtracted, it will broaden or narrow the funding opportunities being displayed. So this initial process of choosing our geographic scope allows us to cast our net as wide as possible, combining national opportunities with, say, state or region-based ones to really see just how broad our grant universe is. So again, for our particular search here, we are based in Minnesota. So we're going to go ahead and click on the Minnesota box right here. And I'm not sure if you noticed it, but before we had about 1,100 results, once we add Minnesota, we now have 1,359 results to go through. We can also adjust the number of results on an individual page if we want as well. But we'll go ahead and stick with 10 for now. Now once we start selecting other criteria, as I mentioned, our results will begin to narrow the funding opportunities that are a perfect fit for our need. And so with that, I'm going to go ahead and scroll down here to our specific area of interest. We already did some research earlier and we know that within environment and animals, we can go ahead and click on Animal Welfare. But if I wasn't sure this was the right one, you always have these little hover boxes right here which give you a quick summary of what is in each category, what's included. So in case you don't want to go through and do search terms, we have you covered. You can also simply come here and click on and off various boxes. Now here's a pro note. Someone has been using Grazation for a long time. This is something you should keep in mind. If you ever want to search a full category and just get everything available, simply click on the Environments and Animals General or just the General tab available at the very top. That lets you search through every subcategory within that. So if you know you're doing something involving education, then simply click on Education General. It will give you everything available below that in your listings. But we're focusing on Animal Welfare. So we'll click on Animal Welfare and we're going to go ahead and get results now. So now we're looking at 68 specific results. So let's go ahead and add another criteria at this point. So we're going to go ahead and go down our list here and all the way down to a type of support. And let's say we wanted a specific type of support and this is another unique feature to Grazation. You can get funding just for emergency funds or for equipment or for fellowships or for capacity building or challenge grants. But for this, we're going to go ahead and just click on General Operating Support for our organization. So now we're looking at 26 specific results. And if we wanted to, we could then simply click off General Operating Support and add a new type of support. Let's say we need equipment for our clinic for Animal Welfare. So I'm going to go ahead and drop General Operating Support. I'm going to scroll back down. And under type Support, I'm going to click on Equipment. So now I'm just getting equipment offerings that are available across the USA and within Minnesota. It's a specific area of interest of Animal Welfare, the specific type of support is equipment. Well, let's go ahead and narrow this a little bit more because 18 results is fine, but I kind of like to hone this down. We can go ahead and remove the national feature. So we're just looking on funders who give within Minnesota. And now we're looking at six specific results. We can organize these results alphabetically by clicking on this top category, or by geographic scope, or by geographic focus. And what you also have is a breakdown of specific funders where they give under geographic scope. And their focus is where they tend to give. So for instance, the Beamus Company Foundation will give within Minnesota. And their geographic focus is communities with company operations. So if there is no Beamus Company in my organization, I might want to put that aside and look at something else. We're really saving you time as you do your research. And that's the whole focus on Grand Station. You can do it all in one place, and we save you time finding the funding that you need for your specific purpose. I'd also like to point out another feature here, the very bottom. This is one that often gets overused and abused in some sections, and that's the keyword area. This is a really powerful way to narrow your searches, but we really suggest you exercise caution so you don't narrow your searches down too much. Because remember the keywords you enter are not necessarily the words the funder uses. So for example, if you add rescue to the criteria, which we'll go ahead and add that right now, and click submit. Now we had six results. So adding that specific keyword, we now only have two results. So we basically narrowed ourselves out of getting results by adding a specific keyword. So this is why it's a good idea to have a specific area of interest and actually know what the search term is. If you know what the funder calls it, you'll have a much better chance of finding funding for your specific need. So we can go ahead and remove that by clicking off the rescue, and get back to our six total results. Now if your organization is working in a few different states, you always have the option of selecting another state to broaden your search. So let's say that this Animal Welfare Organization is working in a tri-state area, Minnesota, but also Wisconsin and Iowa. So we can add those states by selecting here. Let's go ahead and start by clicking on Iowa. And again, we had six results, and now we're up to 14 results. So we're going to add another state, and this one is going to be Wisconsin. And now we're looking at 17 results. So as you can see, as you add to the geographic scope, you increase the number of funding opportunities. As you remove from geographic scope, geographic scope, you remove from the number of funding opportunities. And of course, as you add more areas of interest, you also remove it. So this is what's called an AND-based database. So as you add more and more features, it narrows it down to your specific focus. So at this point, let's go ahead and do another search. We'll clear everything out by clicking Clear All. And the second search, is that of an after-school program that educates students regarding obesity. So we're going to go ahead and start with National. And we can add in a specific state, if necessary. So I'm just trying to think. Let's go ahead and add in, let's do New York. So I think we're looking at about, yep, 1600 results, well 1636 results. Now we're going to go ahead and add in our specific keyword research. Now I did this earlier today, so I know that there are two good options in the health and wellness category. So if I go down to my area of interest, and I click on health and wellness, I can always use the general category. But I know that I can use either healthy eating and nutrition, or healthy lifestyles, and obesity prevention. I'm going to start with obesity prevention. And another feature that you have here at Grand Station, which is also unique to us, is as you scroll down, after areas of interest, you have targeted populations. So this is where you can focus on a specific target population. Say you're looking for just children and youth, which is our situation. Or you want to focus on minorities, or people with disabilities, or veterans, or women. These are all options that are targeted populations. So this will add to our search, our end-based search, honing us down to an even more exact result. So again, I'm going to add children and youth at this point. So I'm looking at 43 results. Let's go ahead and narrow this down to just what's in New York at this point. Now I'm looking at 19 results. Now I can add another area of interest. And again, you can add as many as you want. Of course, the more you add, the fewer results you'll have. So if you want to really narrow it down, you can always do that. So I'm going to add a second one there. And now we're looking at 10 results. And I like 10 results. I think that's a pretty good number that you can quickly look through and see if the profiles are a match to your specific mission or project. Now you can start your searches in any order, add or subtract the criteria to refine your search results as well. Now in addition to these US-based GrantMaker listings, we also have three other unique areas to search through. I'll just be showing these to you really quickly, but we have tours on our website that go through them and explain how to use them more effectively. Our international database, which is right here, this says grant listings are beneficial to organizations working outside the US. You can focus on global grantmakers, you can narrow it down to specific continents, and then down to specific countries from there. The same breakdown though, your areas of interest, using those specific topics, and then adding in a targeted population, and even adding in a keyword as well. Also we have our Canadian Territable Search. This has profiles that grantmakers provide support within Canada. And again, it follows the exact same breakdown. You can choose national grantmakers across all the different provinces, or select provincial grantmakers who give only in a specific region of Canada. And again, you have areas of interest, your targeted populations, and then your types of support. And then finally, we also have our Canadian Government section. This is where we have listings for national and provincial funded agencies, provincial funded agencies, and provincial departments for each of the provinces and territories of Canada that offer financial and technical assistance programs in our Canadian Government section. So once you've gone through this primary research of collecting potential funders, finding things that work for your specific need, you're going to have a pretty extensive list of potential funding sources. Now as I mentioned earlier in the Bill of Strategy section, we have a step-by-step tutorial called Creating a Grants in Calendar. This will really help you with your next steps, which we refer to as secondary research. And I'm going to go ahead and hand the reigns of this webinar over to Sarah to walk you through this process. Thanks, Jeremy. So by now you would have a list of possible funders. So in this section, I'm going to show you the decision matrix. And this is a tool to build a grant seeking calendar. The decision matrix will help you establish an annual grant seeking calendar that will keep your grant seeking focused on those programs and projects that need the funds. Establishing basic criteria for judging whether a grant opportunity is worth your organization's investment of time and energy is a true time saver. And this is what it's going to look like. But before you begin to create a grant seeking calendar, you'll need to develop this analytical tool that can help you make decisions about which grant makers you should pursue and which ones you should put aside. The tool doesn't cost any money, it just takes time. This matrix, this decision matrix you're creating now can be applied to request for proposals or grant application guidelines. You can use Excel, Smartsheet, or any other spreadsheet program you use. The matrix is comprised of rows and columns and relies on simple addition and subtraction to reach a conclusion or a score. Now the matrix will establish a set of criteria, those are the rows, and each assigned a weight, those are the columns, which when applied will influence your decision on whether to add this particular grant maker to your grant's calendar. Now this is somewhat subjective, but less so than you might imagine if you give careful thought to each criteria, the weight it carries and the final score. So it will look like this. How would Jeremy showing you on the website? So now you run each of the grant makers you identified in your research through the decision matrix and you eliminate those that don't meet your basic criteria, whose deadlines may be too close or their requirements are too much for your organization at this time. So then after this, so for whatever reason, those that do not have a score of 35 or higher, you're just going to set those aside. And now you're going to create the calendar. So Jeremy, let's go to part five where now you'll have a final list of the best possible grant makers for your project. And now it's time to draft your strategy. So this calendar, it's an organic document that can take your organization's strategy out 12 to 18 months and you can share this strategy with your coworkers, your executive director, your board members. And what's really nice about this laying out your strategy like this is that if someone comes to you and says, oh, I found this great grant, we should apply for it, you can say, well let me run it through the matrix. You've got a tool now that can help filter all these funding opportunities that are going to come your way. Now this seems complicated. You can see this tutorial we provide you with all the steps you need. It's a five part series and it's really pretty easy to use once you get the hang of it. And now there's even more secondary research you're going to want to use. And Jeremy, let's take them to the, that's where I wanted to go. Here's some additional resources and research you can do. We have the IRS Form 990. Now that's a link to GuideStar. GuideStar posts the 990s for nonprofits. And so it's a free service. You just click that on. You create a username and password and you can do all your research on who the funders have given to in the past. You also have Ask a Funder. And this is, you can just use this as a guide. If you're new to grant writing, these are good questions that you can contact the funder ahead of time and ask them these types of questions. And then of course there's also in kind gifts. And this is often overlooked and you might want to read this as this will show you how you might want to leverage your donations to products and services when applying for funding. So Jeremy, let's take them up to some other additional resources. Let's show them the Pathfinder. Oh, good idea. So that's actually in our public resources section. We have quite a few things in here. And one thing Sarah and I often lament about is whenever we give tours or talk about GrantStation, there's so much data, so much information, so much support, so much education hidden within GrantStation that we can never cover at all. But an area we've been working on to make it more available is the Pathfinder section. Now this website is really designed to help you develop your career path as a Grant's professional. Our library provides you with profiles on top quality resources in the area of Grant research, writing, and management as well as strategic planning. So to get started you can browse through our library, search through our resources, or even use the Find Your Path tool to get a customized curriculum for your specific learning plan. I'm just going to show you that really quickly. You have your Find Your Path. What's your role? Well I'm a Grant Writer and I click on Next. What's my experience level? Well I'm brand new to this, so I'm a novice and I'll click Next. What do I want to learn more about in the Grant Life Cycle? Why do I want to learn more about Grant Management? And I'll click on Get Recommendations. So this is going to bring us down to a collection of resources divided up into three separate areas. The first is Timely Events. And if there is a dollar charge to it, there is a little dollar sign next to it. These are not all offered by GrantStation. These are resources we found all across the web and across the world basically. So sometimes there are charges and fees, but oftentimes there aren't. We also have the Quick Studies section. This is where you can find stuff like a basic guide, a program evaluation, or a glossary of financial terms. If we scroll down a little bit more we have another section, and that's our deep dive. This is the more in-depth information such as the catalog of evolution or evaluation choices, the data playbook, or GrantStation membership of course. We recommend that of course, but we are kind of biased about that. And then we have Measuring Program Outcomes, or nonprofitready.org, or the Philanthropy Career Network. These are all options and resources that are available to you. And this is a great tool, Pathfinder, for really developing yourself and learning more about your chosen field. Now GrantStation is also very interested in sort of the trends and happenings that are occurring all over the philanthropic world. And to that end we have our TrendTrack section, also available in public resources. And within TrendTrack our goal is really for you to make the most of your grant seeking time. I mean I hope you get that theme here. We want to save you time. And to get the most from your grant request, and through that we have this section. So as we perform research for grant listings and we talk with nonprofit organizations we get exposure to new practices and ideas. And we like to share all that information with you in this section. First we have Tracks of Success. This is where you can find featured articles that focus on particular grant maker or philanthropic trends within the world of grant seeking management and philanthropy. Also we have our State of Grant Seeking Reports. This is our semi-annual report of the survey results from our grant seeking community. And then finally we have GS Insights. This is our blog that features the thoughts and observations of our staff, CEO, and guest writers. And we have almost I think about two years worth of information available within our blog alone. And at least, oh man, is it five or six years of State of Grant Seeking. So there is a bunch of great information available here at Grant Station. And the hardest part is just getting in there and finding it. And to that end we have one new resource I wanted to mention quickly. And our public resources, it's our online education resources. This is an area that Sarah and I are very close to. This is where we are slowly going through and we are adding new features and creating actually another newsletter that highlights all the different types of education you can find here on Grant Station that can walk you through the process of finding grants and bettering yourself as a grants professional. Now the thing to remember is that if you are doing a search for funding for any kind of project, it's important to have a grant strategy. A strategic approach using primary and secondary research that we discussed today along with Grant Station's tools really allows you to apply your time where it's most effective and efficient in your search for funding. So with that I've given sort of an overview of Grant Station and I know I haven't been able to cover everything and there's probably a couple questions that we may want to go ahead and answer. So Sarah, if you've got any that you think we should go ahead and directly address, please go right ahead and fire them my way. Okay, well Michael asked, what he asked is there a link on the website that I can get an idea of how many religious or faith-based funders there are because he is with a church. Do we still have that feature where if you are not logged in? Now Michael, you won't be able to see who they are, just how many there are. Is that correct Jeremy? That is correct. So let's try this really quickly. We're going off script now Michael. I hope you like this, being off-road with you. So we're going to go into Find Grant Makers. We're going to go into the U.S. Charitable section. So okay, this is a member feature so you've got to log in. But we're going to go ahead and do National Grant Makers across all states. And as I'm selecting, oh, there's 1,000 results. I can't see them, but I can see there's 1,000 results. Well, what if I go down the areas of interest? And what if I do religion? And just click on General and see what's there. Still not a member, so I have 19 specific results using that category. So this is a way that you can quickly go in and see how many results are available. You don't know how specific they are, and this is just one specific topic. Now the more you offer under a geographic scope, the more you have to pull from. But this is a quick way to go in and see what's available without even having to deal with having a membership. However, $99 is kind of hard to pass up because that's about $600 off our normal price. But I totally understand if you want to see first, but that's a feature you have. And you can go through this without even being a member of GrantStation. I'd like to add, Michael, that when I teach folks how to use the website with faith-based funders, I tell them to also search not for faith-based funders because if you're looking for funds, say they deal with social services like housing, food, clothing, you can look at the other funders because many times they will give, and here's an example, Habitat for Humanity which is a faith-based funding organization, gets lots of funding from non-faith-based organizations because they build homes. So you'll also want to check out religious and faith-based as well as non-religious and faith-based. So I hope that helps you with your question. That's really good advice, Sarah. That's really good advice. And one thing I just wanted to add to that is it's important for everyone when you're doing your searches, don't narrow yourself into what specifically you are. Narrow yourself into what you're trying to do. If you're trying to build something, focus on that, not who you are, who gives funding for building, not what you are as an organization because more than likely you will find lots of funders who give across. It doesn't matter what you are as long as you're working towards the same goal. Okay, and now we have a tricky one here because this goes back to what we were talking about when you were telling them that the words we might use is not the same as the funders. Susan asked, I have a horse rescue. Can you narrow down those organizations that provide grants for just horses? Now here, that's a perfect example, Jeremy. Oh my gosh. It's like she's a plant in the crowd. I don't know how this worked out this well. We're going to go into our search terms glossary and show you how this works. I used to use this example. So I suspect I'm like a con man on the beach trying to sell you some snake oil. But when you type in a horse, the trick here, even though it is horse therapy, whoops, I have this set incorrectly, actually horses under equine therapy. So if we go into animals in this specific example, okay, we added this category and I'm actually going to find the whole thing here while I'm at it. Again, a little off script so I'm not 100% prepared for this. But when you go into environment and animals, you can look at everything we have listed. There's over 161 of these things in here. But when we go down here to animal welfare, environment, and support, I'm not finding it this moment. But the trick is the way this works when you type in horse therapy, it will pull up equine therapy. So you're actually looking for equine therapy when you're doing all of your research. So your keyword is going to be equine therapy, which I know falls under animal welfare just so you know. That's a side note there that I have done this in the past. So yeah. Okay. All right. I hope that helps. Nathan asks, does the U.S. federal tab include a global grant, include global grant making opportunities, say through the State Department for example? It does. That's a really good question. Not a lot of questions always come in from the federal section. And basically all the information I mentioned is on grants.gov. But you can then go through and actually choose the specific funding agency that you want. So if you know what agency it is, that's going to be offering specific global offerings. And I think based on my foggy knowledge, when I used to spend all my time in the federal section, Department of State often gives across all borders. But really it comes down to what your specific organization is as the base and what they're offering. And what's kind of nice is if you look at areas of interest, these areas of interest are based specifically on what's currently available on grants.gov. So if they suddenly add a bunch of new grants that supported video research, you would suddenly see video research pop up here as an area of interest. So all these areas of interest are directly connected to what's currently being offered by the U.S. government. So if your specific topic falls under one of these categories, you can then narrow it down and find the offering. But that's a very good question. Okay, great. Now Christina asks, does the grant management calendar only have three columns, grant or deadline and ask amount? Well, Christina, this is the beauty of this. This is your guide. You can use this as a guide to start your calendar out. You can add those columns that are pertinent to your organization. And also when you're creating the decision matrix, we've given you a guideline of how to start. We certainly want you to add the criteria that is very important and exclusive to your organization. So you're really creating that decision matrix to custom fit your organization as well as your grant calendar strategies that will be custom as well. But I think what we have on the website will help you start out on that path and then you can customize it. So I hope that's helpful. Jeremy, we've got time for one more question. Marita, as a 501C3 organization, is government or private funding easier to get? Now, can I take a stab at this? You can take first stab. I'll take second stab. Then we'll beat this dead horse. Okay, so it doesn't make them easier to get. However, it is imperative that you do your federal funding research and your state funding research when applying to the private grant makers because they know all the funding opportunities that are out there. And you at GrantStation can do your due diligence by researching. And if there are no state and federal funding opportunities, you can state that to the grant maker when you apply. You can say, I've checked it all out. There are no funding opportunities at this time. That really bumps up your credibility and that you have done your research. And you can say, I've done the federal and state and there are none. And that is why I'm now coming to you. So that's my tip. No, that's an excellent tip. And I didn't mean to say a dead horse isn't the question, but it's a thing that we've always been fighting with. If you're looking at the specific ease of application, state is probably one of the easier ones to apply for. Federal is a very, it's a long process. It's not super simple, often multiple pages, multiple things to fill out. But federal government grants can be the most lucrative. So it's something, as Sarah said, you should definitely pay attention to and be aware of. The easiest to apply for though are often private grants. So I would say private, state government, and then federal would be that sort of order of difficulty for applications. But it all depends on the specific grant. I've known of grant makers who only want like a two-page explanation of what you want and they'll cut you a check. I've known of others who want a 30-page application for a $500 gift card to Kmart. So it just really depends on the specific funding organization. But I would say in general, anything you'll find in the US Tribal Database would be one of the easier to apply ones, easier to apply for grants. And I'm just going to add on top of that, that federal grants, the advantage they have, although they can be quite lengthy, is they are often multi-year and quite large. So that's very lucrative. Yes, so there's that little bit. Okay, Seema, I think we are done with the tour today. I'm going to turn this back over to you. Okay, perfect. I am going to go back to the slides. Oh, Jeremy, you didn't tell them where they can – you can just let them know because she's back in the slides. But they can always email us without any questions to infoatgrantstation.com. That's right. And actually on our website, if you go to our About section, you'll be able to find links to all of our employees. So even if you have a question directly for me or for Sarah, you can always ask us directly through there. Perfect. And you said it was infoatgrantstation.com. Is that correct? Correct. Okay, perfect. Yeah, we can include that in the follow-up email as well. Okay, well thank you so much, Sarah and Jeremy, for the presentation. Thank you everyone for attending. If you guys don't mind, just chat one thing that you learned in today's webinar. It's always really fun for us to kind of see what you learned. Also we have a post-event survey that you'll get once you close out of ReadyTalk. So any feedback that you have for us is always really helpful. It helps us dictate future content that we produce. If you're on social media, please give us a follow. We're on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and we're actually also on LinkedIn as well. We have a blog, blog.techsoup.org where we post a bunch of tips and tricks and things like that. So please follow our blog. We post there about three times a week. Again, one more time we have the $99 Grant Station promo which I believe you guys should have seen the link in the Q&A box. But again, if you want to sign up for the reminder email, it's two days only, September 25th and 26th. So you can sign up at the link below to get the reminder email. And then also this Thursday, if you're interested, we have another webinar called Look Before You Leap, what you need to know before you write that grant. So that's happening at 11 a.m. this Thursday. So please feel free to register for that as well. We have a couple of other webinars coming up. We have Security Months, so we're going to be doing a lot of security-related webinars in October. Again, you can find our archived webinars and upcoming webinars on the URL that you see there below. Once again, thank you so much, Sarah and Jeremy and Lashika, for helping on the back end. And thank you all for attending today's webinar. And thank you to our sponsor ReadyTalk.