 Thank you so much, Aretha. She is absolutely the best. I wanna get that on recording. So a good morning, a good afternoon, a good evening to those of you who are joining us today. My name is Kevin Mulhall. I am the Senior Technical Customer Success Manager here at TechSoup today in our virtual office hour session and grant writing with a purpose. We have the privilege of having Lindsay Jordan, Lindsay Jordan, the founder of Right On Fundraising with us today. I cannot say how excited I am. Lindsay and I have been talking since I lived in Oklahoma. So that's been like a year about getting her to come in and speak on this topic. This is something that we know is absolutely paramount to you and as somebody who engages with organizations specifically around the onboarding and adoption of technology, we know that the number one issue and the number two issue and sometimes the number three and four are funding. So with that, I'm gonna go ahead and start sharing my screen here and we can get the presentation going. So for those of us that are joining us, I saw that some people are very familiar with Zoom and very familiar with closed captions. So on how to engage us today during this webinar, questions, please use the Q&A session section within the application. We would ask that you reserve the chat for other items other than questions when possible. Please check your inbox. We're going to email you the replay, the slides that you're seeing and the resource links within the next couple of days. Closed captioning is available to turn on with the closed caption button located in your Zoom menu. So with that, please allow me to hand this over to Lindsay. Thanks, Kevin. Hello, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us today. So before I get started, Kevin, are you advancing my slides or am I advancing my slides? I can advance the slides for you. Perfect, all right. Well, let's move on to the next one here. This is just, of course, our beautiful cover page. I want to share just a little bit with you about who I am, what I'm doing here today. Like Kevin mentioned, I'm Lindsay Jordan. I'm the founder and CEO of Right On Fundraising. And you can see here a couple of the different things that we focus on. We are a fundraising firm that helps nonprofits across the United States. We are really focused on what we call philanthropic equity, which is what we define as providing as many access points to funding as possible, no matter an organization's developmental size or anything else that you have going on. And we really want to be what we consider a bridge between old-school fundraising methodologies and new-school ideas, which are sometimes called community-centric fundraising. And if you haven't had a chance to check out Community-Centric Fundraising yet, I can't plug them enough. Check out their website. It's communitycentricfundraising.org, also a nonprofit. Thanks, Aretha. And that was really a focus of who we are, is trying to not only raise funding for nonprofits that need funding, but also to do so in a more equitable way that distributes more funding across more organizations. All right, we can move on. Lindsay, I'm gonna actually hand it back over to you if you wanted to share. I realize it was you that we encountered. So I'm gonna go ahead and stop sharing. Okay. Thank you all for standing by for our technical difficulties. It wouldn't be a webinar without them, right? Give me two seconds to start presenting here and we will move forward. Okay. So why grant writing? And why right now? Grant writing is really a kind of calm in the hurricane right now. For those of you who saw the GivingUSA data that came out, I think it's been about two weeks ago now, GivingUSA basically does the annual report for the entire nonprofit sector. And they tell us every year how fundraising is performing, how much we've raised, where the money has gone to. And unfortunately the data from the most recent report shared that we had a 10% drop in giving last year in overall giving. And that is really, really significant. It was actually only the fourth time on record since GivingUSA started calculating all of this stuff back in like the 1950s. It's only the fourth time we've had a drop of this significance. And that said, grants actually still maintained and performed pretty well. So grants represent right now 21% of all giving. That's about $105 billion. One of the other reasons that we like to talk to our clients about grants is because grants have consistent year over year growth in a way that no other area of philanthropy does. And when I say other areas of philanthropy, I'm talking about the big four that GivingUSA tracks. That is foundation grants, bequests, corporate gifts and individual giving. Individual giving, as you can see here, really took a nose dive in 2022. That 13.4% decrease was worse than what we saw happen in the Great Recession. So 10% overall loss in giving in 2022, but individual giving was actually worse than that. Buid brought up a little bit by some of the successes and foundation grants in other places. All in the nonprofit sector last year, if you felt like you were having to tighten your belt, if you felt like things were just a little bit tighter than usual, there was a $50 billion loss, $50 billion with a B. That's a really big deal for a lot of organizations. One of the other reasons why we talk about grants, more so than some other areas, is corporate giving can be really unpredictable. Right now, corporate giving is relatively strong, but we're hearing a lot of indicators. We actually just did a webinar yesterday about corporate giving, where we had some corporate social responsibility executives say, hey, I've got a nice big pot of cash I can give out this year, but I'm already being told to not count on that much money for next year. Corporate giving is driven by changes in the marketplace, which is really dynamic and therefore lends itself to greater unpredictability. And we also have seen the quests as a giving mechanism fall pretty drastically and pretty consistently, I would say over the past four to five years. So out of the big four, grants continue to be a more sustainable way for folks to try to scale their programs, to build new things, to try out new ideas, to innovate, to fail even, and to move forward and figure out what you wanna do with your programming. Grant writing as a, I know we have a lot of grant writers on here today, so you guys are gonna totally tune out during this part, and that is absolutely fine. I wanna make sure that everybody has the same language and is on the same page with what grant writing typically entails, because I know we also have a lot of folks on the call today who are wearing a lot of hats and might need a quick primer. So there's five quick steps to grant writing, identifying the need, doing your research, cultivating that donor, soliciting or writing the application and then the reporting and stewardship component. So we're gonna spend just a little bit of time talking about these and then we're gonna move on to some big fun steps today. But identifying the need. So the first step in grant writing is figuring out what you're writing the grant for, and I know that sounds really simple, but I'm pretty sure there's some of you on the call today that maybe had a really well-meaning board member or even a CEO or an executive director say, hey, we raised 100,000 last year, let's just do 110 this year, 10% increase. Let's just get that done. Yeah, that's not a great way to go about winning grants or fundraising. Most of the time to win the grant, you need a very specific need. Now, if you've had exactly 10% increase in your programmatic expenses, absolutely, increase that ask by 10%. But make sure whatever you're asking for can be precisely nailed down in your budget and that you can show and clarify why you're asking for what you're asking for. This gets back into community-centric fundraising, which is what I mentioned earlier, which is that our budgets and our programs and what we do in the fundraising world is driven by the programs and driven by the people who actually need our services and not any external factors like, hey, I know we can go raise $25,000 more this year, let's go do it. Typically, identifying the need does include scaling. If you wanna scale up your programs, if you're wanting to grow, it includes restricted program expenses such as hats off to tech, soup, new technology, new hardware, new software, a new CRM, even new methodologies or protocols or ways of doing things, all of that is included in the need. And of course, you can see here, capital expenditures, capital needs and general operations are also included. After you figured out what your specific need is, then you're gonna conduct some prospect research. We could probably do a whole series just on prospect research because there's a lot that goes into making sure that you are identifying the right prospect and that you're in alignment with what they're doing. But there's a couple of really good databases out there. You can see here, we recommend Candid, Instrumental, GrantStation, GrantWatch. We also have on our website at rideonfundraising.com a prospecting tool that is a digital download that will actually help walk you through how to determine whether or not a given prospect is a good fit. And the reason we really wanna spend some time in making sure we're doing good prospect research is there is nothing, nothing more frustrating. I'm sure all the grant writers out there are gonna aim into this. Then thinking you are a good fit and finding out after you've written the grant that you're not in alignment or that there's something really simple that bumped your application out of the running, figuring out lots of key performance indicators around the prospect research, making sure they're the right fit for you, the geography is right, you're making the right ask, the number is right, the program is right, all of those things are part of conducting good prospect research. Also cultivating donor relationships, I gotta tell you this is the one that everybody overlooks. One of the things that we tell all of our clients is that this team, of which I should have introduced earlier, I'm gonna take a second to do it now. So today on this call, I have Patty Sullivan answering questions for you, one of our relationship managers, Dylan Williams, one of our relationship managers, Michael Hirshorn, and I'm not sure if Monica was able to join us or not, Monica Pierce, all answering questions for you in the Q and A. One of the things that we tell all of our clients is we can write you the best grant in the whole wide world. It will have outcomes and measurements and be beautiful and have the best narrative in the world. But if you don't have a relationship with the foundation, the likelihood of that grant being funded goes down significantly because it is not about the skill of the grant writer, it is about the strength of the relationship, especially in 2023 and 2024, which we're gonna talk about some more today. But spending time to reach out to your foundations to learn more about what they're giving to right now, not last year, we are in a dynamic, ever-changing world where grant priorities shift and change pretty drastically, pretty quickly. Take time to get to know these folks by doubt what they're about. The larger foundations have reps who will sit down and meet with you, smaller foundations. You have to try and get ahold of a trustee or someone else who's engaged. But do what you can to try to cultivate these relationships because it significantly increases the likelihood of winning a grant. Submitting letters and applications. This is where Robert meets the road. Carefully follow foundation guidelines. We're gonna talk a little bit more about this today. For private foundations that do not have submission guidelines, make sure you have a really solid cover letter and case for support that you're submitting. If you don't have these tools and materials, these are definitely worth spending some time to develop. A well-presented case for support answers every single question that a foundation is gonna have about you and goes a long way in not only describing what your need is, but in letting that foundation know who you are as a nonprofit and what problem it is that you are working to solve. Lastly, here we have Steward the Gift. This includes, of course, reporting. You wanna comply with any terms of the award that you get. I do wanna say, so this is Steward the Gift, but I wanna change this to Steward the Relationship because whether you win a gift or not, the stewardship component is still really, really important. We know of a number of foundations nationwide who will turn down your first grant application that you ever write them because they wanna see how you're going to Steward them and come back for the second ask. You would not believe how many nonprofit organizations out there go to a foundation one time, make one ask, get turned down and never go back. Those are exactly the kind of folks who foundations are looking to weed out of the process. So take some time to follow up on all of your applications. Again, be aware of those relationships, continue to cultivate them. And if you want an award and it doesn't come with any particular requirements, take the initiative to produce a mid-year report that you can send out to all of your foundation friends. This is a really quick front and back report. It's not as in depth as an annual report, but not only does it thank them for what they've done so far, it gives them a really nice exclusive look at what's going on in your programs at the mid-year point. All right, so that is in a nutshell the entire grant writing process. Sorry, I'm checking our time real fast. I wanna make sure we're doing all right. Well, we're gonna spend a little bit of time on today. So the title of this session is grant writing with a purpose. What does that mean? What is the purpose, right? Well, the purpose of grant writing is to scale your programs and to win a grant. But there are actually some common things that we all do that decrease our odds of getting that win. And what I wanna spend some time on today is really talking about because we're in such a competitive market right now for fundraising for dollars, is the things that you can do to make sure that you are leveling up your grant applications and that you're making sure you are in consideration and you don't have any little things that are bumping you out of contention. So earlier this year, we conducted a survey with more than 50 private foundations all around the country and asked them to rank 25 different grant rate, grant writing missteps or errors on a Likert scale. So we could learn more about what the foundations view as the 10 most common grant writing mistakes. And here are the first four. So coming in at number 10, one of the most common grant writing mistakes is that the proposal lacks outcomes, qualitative or quantitative. I wanna take just a second to talk here about the difference between outcomes and outputs. After we did this entire survey, we did another webinar where we had a couple of those foundation representatives come on and give us some context about, well, what do you mean when you say that a proposal lacks outcomes? And one of the things we heard here that was really interesting is that typically a grant application may include something that says, well, this year we served 100 meals, right? Or we served 100 people meals. That's a number, but it is not an outcome. It's actually an output. It's a thing that you did in the community. The outcome would be how those 100 meals impacted the lives of the people who received them. So there's a big difference between, I think what a lot of folks typically put in applications which are your outputs, these are the things you're doing in your programs and the outcomes which is, and those things had X, Y, and Z impact on the people we serve. So foundations wanna see that you have both qualitative outcomes and quantitative outcomes. So that's both stories and numbers, but they don't wanna hear just about, hey, we had 50,000 people come through our door last year. They wanna know, and what change happened in 10% of those 50,000 people because they came and visited your facility? So really think about your outcomes and how they are connecting with the foundation priorities. Number nine here, we have the proposal or application lacks strong evaluation metrics. This ties right back to number 10. How are you measuring your outcomes? There are all kinds of evaluation metrics out there. Some of them are as simple as surveys and some of them get really detailed and require their own software system that you could partner with TechSoup on or write a grant for, but knowing that you have evaluation metrics, being able to clearly articulate your methodology and talk about why that evaluation metric is the right fit for that population and what you're trying to measure goes a really long way with foundations. Number eight, the proposal or application is overly ambitious. I gotta tell you, I am a forever optimist and when I saw that this was ranked number eight, I had like some kind of reaction in me. I think it's like my anti-authority thing that pops out here. But my first thought was, why is it a foundation's job to tell a nonprofit how ambitious to be with their programs? Don't you want a nonprofit to be innovative in how they're trying to solve problems? Don't you want them to swing for the fences in trying to help the people they wanna help? So we put this question directly back to the foundations who gave us this feedback and it was fascinating the way that they viewed this. It wasn't that they didn't want nonprofits to swing for the fences. It's that they wanted to see nonprofits be more realistic in their innovation. For example, if last year you served 20,000 people and you believe that this year you have a plan to serve 100,000 people, they would wanna know in very clear terms how on earth you were gonna grow by 80,000. That might be perceived by some foundations as unrealistic and it was the unrealistic piece that they didn't wanna see in there. It wasn't that they didn't wanna see innovation, it wasn't that they didn't wanna see nonprofits taking risk, they just wanted them to do so in a way that was easy to articulate, easy to understand and had a very clear plan of action, the right people on the bus, the right tools to actually get that thing done, basically that the nonprofit could walk the walk, right? And that they weren't just dreaming of a big, hairy, audacious goal or program that they wanna attempt. Number seven, seven most common great right mistake the narrative assumes that the reader already knows all about the nonprofit, isn't that interesting? So when we dove a little deeper into this one as well, one of the things we found and when you think about it, this makes perfect sense but I think that we all want to believe that once we have taken the time to cultivate a relationship and we know a foundation representative by their first name and we're like follow them on Facebook and we've done our job from a cultivation standpoint, right? We wanna believe that that program officer, that attention and care is reflected back in the other way. What we're hearing from foundations is no matter how much they love you and how much they think you're really cool and they love your mission, they're still seeing hundreds and hundreds of applications and many, many nonprofits and they would really appreciate if we talk to them as if they don't know anything about the program because chances are we're gonna need to remind them of the certain program details or nuance. God forbid that thing you spent a whole meeting trying to explain to them that they just don't quite remember now and you're gonna have to explain it again. I think that as nonprofits, we want to know that our cultivation efforts are rewarded and they are but we need to assume not that everybody knows us but assume that everybody doesn't and start from there and move forward. So the next three most common grant writing mistakes, number six is that the application focuses on the needs of the nonprofit instead of the needs of the people served by the nonprofit. This one is really fascinating as well because I think a lot of us, when we sit down, we write an application, we write a lot about the people who we serve and what they need but we also write a lot about the needs of the nonprofit. So this is nuance and you could think of this as in saying, I'm gonna attack overhead here because I think overhead is one of the more challenging things to write for. So let's say you need a new, let's say it's a CRM, you're writing a grant for a new CRM. Well, it's very clear how the staff would benefit from having a new CRM but that's not what the foundation wants to know. The foundation wants to know how that CRM is actually going to impact the people served by your nonprofit. And some of you may have just laughed and said, well, that's the silliest thing I've ever heard, but they really do wanna know that. So you're gonna have to sit down and think of, if it's not a CRM, if it's a copy machine, if it's whatever, think of, well, it's gonna reduce the amount of time we have to spend in the administrative function and it's gonna increase our efficiency, which means we have more time to spend out in the field or we are able to direct more of our resources to our people in the field because we have to spend less time duplicating records or handwriting things out. There is a way in which overhead, and we all know it like intrinsically inside of us. We know how critical overhead is to us being able to do our jobs in the field. We're not great at articulating it and that's what this number six is about. Sit down and make sure that when you're writing your applications, you are fully focused on how the thing you're asking for impacts the people you serve, not necessarily the nonprofit itself. Number five, overuse of industry jargon, buzzwords and abbreviations. Do I have a soapbox about abbreviations? My staff on the call right now are probably really laughing because we don't use them whenever we can. Let me tell you what, do you have a really complicated name or I don't know, whatever it is. And let's say that you use an abbreviation and the abbreviation is JQPY, whatever. That means nothing to anyone. And I know that as grant writers we have to worry about word counts. It's like a thing that keeps us up at night. But the more you use an abbreviation the lower the reader comprehension of your grant application goes, which means every single time you use an abbreviation to describe you or the people you serve or the work that you're doing, the affinity level, meaning how much the funder cares about what you're writing goes down every single time they see it because they need to see your name. Most of us have what we do or who we serve in our name. So every single time you write the whole thing out you are reinforcing the narrative. You're building up your reader comprehension rather than bringing it down. One of the things that was also interesting around number five is we had some foundation representatives give us some context saying, hey, you know what actually sometimes though buzzwords can be okay. And I think the caveat here was is it a buzzword that the foundation frequently uses? Let's see, let me think of one. Like food deserts, for example, if you have a foundation that specifically is working with food scarcity and you see that there's certain words that they're using over and over again on their website those words are probably safe to use in your application but if you are using language that you don't see the nonprofit using or sorry that you don't see the foundation using in their materials, chances are you're using some jargon or some buzzwords that they're not familiar with and that is specifically what number five is about. They wanna see less of that in applications. Number four seems simple enough, right? Careless editing. I asked a little bit further about this one because I wanted to know specifically what does that mean? Editing is a broad term and in today's day and age there is so much available to us. Not only do we have a spell check inside Word and inside our Google suite but we have tools like Grammarly that can make us better writers and catch things beyond basic grammar and spelling errors. The foundation talking about basic spelling errors here which I was also glad to see that I was glad to see that. What they're talking about is word salad is fluff, is sentences that go on forever and ever and ever and don't actually say anything. When they are thinking of careless editing they're not necessarily thinking of simple misspellings and simple grammar, they're gonna let those things slide I'm sure as long as it's not like rampant in your application. They're not demanding that we all be perfect every single time, which is great. They are saying that there are some applications they get where the narrative doesn't make sense, where the writer is kind of talking in circles or again using too many buzzwords, abbreviations, things like that. That's more what they're talking about when they mean careless editing. All right, drum roll please. The top three most common grant writing mistakes. At number three, we have answers to questions that are incomplete or missing key information. This one was almost across the board and is heartbreaking because the way to combat that is just to slow down to read the question all the way through to make sure you're answering specifically what the foundation is asking. I've definitely seen some folks we've even had some writers on our team do it and it's something that we have to work through too. Sometimes there's something we want to say, right? We really wanna get it across. So we pick up that block of copy or that block of narrative and we drop it into the question and we say, yeah, it basically answers their question. Do not try to insert your own narrative into a question. The foundations really want to see you answering the specific question they're asking and again, making sure that there's no missing key information. If they're asking you for a certain number or a certain zip code or any certain piece of data, make sure that you're providing that as part of the answer to the question. Number two, I don't think anyone will be surprised by this. The budget, oh, the budget. The budget contains errors, unexplained items or dun-dun-dun inflated costs. The budget is by far outside of the narrative itself the most important part of your grant. If you do not feel completely confident in a program budget that you're putting forward or a budget narrative, take a step back, get a second set of eyes, visit with the executive director or the program director or whoever's doing the programming and make sure that your budget is airtight. Unexplained items definitely, definitely get kicked back from foundations and they can tell inflated costs guys. They know what things cost. They can see when you've got inflated salaries or that's silly, we're not inflating salaries. They're deflating salaries, right? Let's back that one up a little bit Lindsay. So not inflated salaries, but other inflated costs. They know how much marketing material or books or construction costs, things like that. They have a pretty good idea what those things cost. And if they see something wonky in the budget they're gonna call it out and they're gonna bump you out of the process. And that is a heartbreaking reason to lose out on an opportunity. The number one reason grant writing mistake is not to following instructions. I don't know what else I can even say about that one other than slow down, read, make sure you have a comprehensive understanding of what is being asked of you and follow instructions, right? All right, so a couple more things that we're gonna spend some time on today. Navigating the now. As I've mentioned a couple of times on this call we are in a really unique landscape when it comes to not only grant writing but fundraising at large. And there was a couple of really important things that I think you should be aware of if you're trying to win grant funding both 2023 and into 2024. And the first one is understanding how market priorities have shifted. And when I say market priorities I'm specifically talking about not grant writing, not nonprofit to nonprofit I mean in your specific sector. I wrote a couple of things down from the recent GivingUSA report that I mentioned. It's important to know for example what's happening inside arts and humanities, what's happening inside health and human services. So you are aware of what other people in your industry are experiencing. And so that sometimes you can work together to try and overcome some of those barriers. So culture, this is what's happening. This is what's going on in your market. I'm gonna run through them really quickly. In 2022 arts, humanities and cultures experienced a 2.9% increase in grants. However, when that was adjusted for inflation it goes down to negative 4.7%. Education in 2022 experienced a drop of 3.6% and when adjusted for inflation that goes down to negative 10.7% in grants. Animal and the environment experienced a drop of 1.6% in 2022 adjusted for inflation, negative 8.9%. Foundations, this is primarily donor advised funds had increases of 10.1% when adjusted for inflation. They were still positive by 1.9%. Health had growth of 5.1% in 2022 but when adjusted for inflation lost 2.6% in grants. Human services was down 0.6% in 2022 when adjusted for inflation that went to negative 8%. International affairs was not a big year plus 10.9% in 2022 when adjusted for inflation plus 2.7%. Public and society benefit was down 8.4% in 2022 when adjusted for inflation negative 15.2% in grants. Religion was up 5.2% in giving in 2022 when adjusted for inflation negative 2.6% in grants. So when I talk about this being a difficult time for grants for fundraising for anything in the nonprofit philanthropic side this is specifically what I'm talking about. All of the gains last year with the exception of those in foundations and international affairs were wiped out due to inflation. And that has caused a big shift in how foundations are looking at their giving this year. Candid just did a study. They do a study about mid point of the year every year and they found that foundations, many of the foundations that reported to their study were planning to give 30% less for the rest of 2023. So what does that mean if you need grants or if you have a specific tech project coming up and you wanna win something for it? Well, again, I'm gonna go back to cultivation. You can write the prettiest grant in the whole wide world that has none of those 10 mistakes on it but if you don't have a relationship with the foundation the likelihood of it being funded goes down pretty significantly. Also some of the things that we're talking to our clients about this year this is the year for asks in program needs. If you are out there making new asks please, please, please, please, please make sure it is restricted to a program to a need to a tech need to a capital need. This is not the year to go after new general operating asks. There are a couple of scenarios in which general operating asks are good and important. And I just wanna caveat this by saying, yes, I know we all want more general operating funding. It is community centric. We wish all foundations would just stop with the restricted stuff and give more general operating. This is not the year that that miracle is going to happen. In general, if you have a very good relationship with the foundation, there's a lot of trust built up there. You've done a good job of stewarding funds year over year. That is a foundation that you could go to in a normal year and make a general operating request and you probably have a pretty good shot at getting it. I would not make any assumptions about 2023 even if you've won general operating support from foundations before, because foundations are looking at a smaller pot and they're looking at restricting those gifts. So even if there's an annual gift that you get that is typically a general operating gift, I'd be going back to that funder and asking if that's still the game plan, if you should still make that ask if they want you to do something else this year. I would not be taking anything for granted in a year where 30% of foundations are already thinking they're gonna give out less. This is nothing here at all whatsoever to make a general operating request to a foundation with which you have no relationship. That would be risky in a good year. It's a total non-starter in 2023 and probably into 2024. Make sure operating costs are included in program budgets. So one of the things that we see with a lot of nonprofits is that they have a really nice sound tight budget but there are things that are actually programmatic costs that are listed in administrative overhead. Take a second to go back through and look at your programmatic costs in your administrative overhead and do an analysis on if there are things. You know, does your executive director actually spend 20% of her time a month doing programmatic stuff? Get that out of your overhead. Get it into your program costs. That's one easy way to help move some of what would be a general operating ask over into a more restricted area and get it funded. Set realistic goals. This is one to take back to your board. If you have a board member who believes that this is the year that your grants program should go gangbusters and have 150% growth, please give him my email address because we need to have a conversation. This is the year to sustain what you have, to get real serious about restricted asks and to try and deepen relationships you already have. It's going to be a tough year to break in to a whole plethora of new funding. That doesn't mean you're not gonna get new grants this year. Please don't hear me saying that. You can definitely still get new grants this year but if you have someone on your team who is expecting astronomical growth this year in grants, that's probably pretty unrealistic unless you have some kind of ace up your sleeve and if you do power to you, I'm super excited. Focus on stewardship. So this gets right back into the cultivation piece we talked about earlier. Again, there's gonna be fewer grants that are getting awarded which means it's even more important to follow up after your application. Make sure they got it. Make sure they understood it. Ask if they have any questions. You know all those answers already. Yeah, of course they got it. No, they don't have any questions. That's not the point. The point is not to get the information. The point is to make the contact so that they know and understand that you are very interested. You are serious about this funding and that you are available to talk to anybody on their team about your application. Lastly, leverage partnerships and collaborative grant opportunities. Recently we had, this was super cool. We had a grant that was written and it was declined but the client went out of their way to go find out who did win that grant. And then what they did is they turned around and scheduled a meeting with that nonprofit and said, hey, what you're doing is actually really similar to what we wanted to do in this area. Is there any way that we can support you in this work? As it turns out, the other nonprofit had very little capacity to pull off the thing that they had won the grant for. So they sub-awarded the grant to our client. So our client ended up getting a big infusion of cash from a grant that was declined. So definitely think creatively about how you can partner and how you can tap into funding sources this year. Where are we on time? All right, we're doing well. Last thing for you today and then we'll get into some questions here. Well, I don't know if we're gonna get into some questions or not. I'm gonna go through and try and read some and see how we're doing. But if this has been a value to you, we do a monthly or excuse me, every other month masterclass and podcast that you're welcome to jump on. And we also have a pretty killer newsletter that you can sign up for at rideonfundraising.com all fundraising, nothing but the fundraising. And our sessions or first discovery sessions are always complimentary. So if you wanna jump on and talk about grant writing or capital campaigns or individual giving, my email address is here on the screen. You're welcome to shoot me an email and schedule some time and we can get together and chat about what your fundraising challenges are. Okay, there are over 99 chats on my screen. So I'm gonna take just a second here to try and click on some Q and A and see where we are. Okay, I see a couple of open questions here. So matching tool for funders. I'm not entirely sure what that is referring to. If you want to jump in and give us a little bit of extra context, I would be happy to answer that question. That was from Gavin about 30 minutes ago. Let's see here, special focus for international human aid support for peace. We work globally, but mostly for past three years in public education in Ukraine, which is growing so fast. I think that's probably a comment about the different areas of giving and understanding your market. Absolutely international affairs is not one of, it is the fastest growing area of grant support. It goes for the past three years. It has seen tremendous growth, which is awesome. Adrienne McHugh says, how can we get more earned donations? We so need help with this since we can't get general right now. We need staff, earned donations. Are you, I'm not sure if you're talking about restricted gifts or individual giving. As far as restricted gifts, that's gonna be going back and figuring out the need. This is actually a great year to focus in on restricted dollars. As far as individual gifts, if you do not have an annual fund, as I mentioned earlier, individual fundraising took a huge hit in 2022. The mile markers, the milestones in 2023 don't look better, they actually look worse. So we think that there's actually gonna be a continued decrease in individual giving, as there has been for some time, but at some more significant levels. So if individual giving is an area of specific interest, I would definitely recommend thinking about an annual fund, which is basically a comprehensive fundraising plan for your organization, which is something that we can help out with. You can also find a lot of really good resources online and I know TechSoup has got some webinars coming up about things like cultivation soon, which are a very important part of it. See, in the Q and A, I really, really appreciate everyone's time today. Like Aretha said, this will be coming out to you. You're welcome to reach out to anyone on my team. I really do. We love this topic. We love talking about grants. We could talk about this all day. So if there's other things you wanna chat with us about, please let us know. We're happy to schedule some time with you. Like I said, I think TechSoup has something coming up here soon around cultivation and some other really awesome fundraising trainings. So don't miss those. Don't forget to sign up for those and have a wonderful rest of your day. Thank you so much for being with us.