 Hi, everyone, welcome to the third session, as Mike said. And I'll just quickly run through my slides. Remember, if you need to reset your password, you can send a note to Info at Cultural Heritage. If you have any other problem, you can contact me at ctc.c.culturalheritage.org. And if you have a question about course content, put it in the discussion. And to receive a credly badge, you need to listen to all the webinars and complete the assignment. You don't need to listen to the webinars live. The recordings will be posted usually the next day, sometimes later in the same day. So just keep an eye on that. And there's no webinar next week. The next webinar is August 7. And your homework is due by July 31. So Samantha will go over that, but I'm just reminding you. If you have questions about care of collections, you can post them in the Connecting to Collections Care Community. And for instructions on how to join that, look in our website under discussion. And if you need assistance because of a disaster, this is the 24-hour hotline for the National Heritage Responders in the US. And we have two free webinars coming up. One end of August called Don't Fan the Flames About Fires. And another one in the beginning of September on archival processing. So if you're interested in those, you can register for them at our website. And I'm going to turn it over to Samantha. Great, thank you. All right, we're moving right along with our course webinar three. So we've talked a lot about the different types of assessments that are out there and what they might be useful for, what they're going to cover. And after institutions receive these assessments, there's going to be many recommendations in there. And we'll talk more about how to prioritize them. But a lot of the recommendations will require funding to become a reality. So this webinar is going to discuss using the assessments as supporting documents and grant applications and how to fundraise and make the case for those collections care initiatives that you have identified through your assessments. So we'll be discussing what big funders such as the NEH and IMLS are looking for in applications and how recommendations from assessments can be used to strengthen the proposals. And I am joined today by my colleague, Lee Price. Lee is the Director of Development here at the Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts. And he's been here since 2001. He is responsible for direct fundraising for CCHA, as well as for assisting cultural institutions with project development and grant applications. He has assisted with successful grant requests for the HBCU Library Alliance, the New Jersey State Library, from the Pennsylvania State Archives, the University of Pennsylvania, the Franklin Institute, and many, many other cultural institutions. Lee served as a data analyst and lead writer on IMLS Connecting to Collections Preservation Plans for New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia, and is currently serving as a strategic planning consultant for the New York State Collecting Institutions. Through both staff and consulting positions, Lee has worked in the fields of public relations and fundraising since 1984. So we'll welcome Lee over. I'm going to pass it over to him. And it will be him leading the show for most of the rest of today. Thank you, Samantha. I guess I'll start out with a little panicked apology here. And that's one of the things I frequently do when preparing a webinar or a workshop is to go over the staff list to see who's going to be attending and where they're all from. And so I didn't do that this time. And I'm sitting here looking at the general chat, and I see that Claire is up in Canada. And all my examples are almost all federal funding from the United States. So apologies to Claire right off the back. You're just going to have to extrapolate a little bit. Most of this is very easy material, too, extrapolate. And it holds through anywhere in the world. But OK, Claire says it's understood. So that's my first apology for the day. And we'll launch into this now. We're starting with an old school low-tech table of content to give you some idea of what structure we're following as we move through this hour. It's what I like with a webinar. I like to know where I am. The first section will be the long gift. It's the intro on four essential perspectives. And some of it will be pretty basic material. We'll be just providing some necessary context. And after that, I'll be offering some advice on working with your consultant while you're developing the assessment. But that's through a fundraising lens, a little different way of looking at it than was covered in the two previous webinars. And that's followed by a hypothetical case study. Hypothetical, but it is based on some real places that I've worked with. And finally, some grant opportunities for everyone to consider, except maybe Claire, with time at the end for questions and comments where you can toss things out. It's Samantha and I can both attempt the field. We can throw the headset back and forth between us to answer your questions as best we can. If you do have questions as we go along, go right ahead and enter them in the chat box. And it sometimes takes me a little time to notice. I can be a little low on the uptake at times. I just get involved in babbling on here. But just go ahead and post them. And if possible, we'll try and get to them as the webinar goes along. If not, we'll definitely be able to get to them as we reach the end for our something fundraiser and preservation specialist section. In order for you to make the most strategic use of your general preservation assessment, I'm going to propose that you look at the world for this brief portion from four different perspectives today. Starting with what's probably the easiest one for you, it's probably your own perspective going into this. That would be the perspective of the Collections Care Professional, which is our broad term here for, you know, you might be a collections manager and archivist, the librarian, the conservator, any job that has duties focused with preserving the collection and keeping it accessible. And then secondly, we'll be looking from the perspective of a board member, looking at the entire organization, rather than just that one facet of it. Third, from the perspective of a fundraising professional, whether a member of a development department or a fundraising consultant. And last, from the perspective of a funder. And the times as we go through these, we'll be switching back and forth a little between the perspectives. So we're starting with the first one. If you are a collections care professional, you're probably going to be interested in maximizing your ability to address the following areas. Inventory, emergency planning, which is, of course, emergency planning for the collection. The general preservation assessment. Collection management, and that's something of a catch-all that covers your, well, we use it to cover board-approved collection management policies, developing them or updating them, plus all types of cataloging and the development of finding aids, plus rehousing. So we've stuffed a lot in this category of collection management there. Then environment, meaning the physical environment, temperature, humidity, light exposure, et cetera, all those concerns within the collection storage and the exhibition areas. Conservation surveys of collection items done by a professional conservator. Conservation treatment. And at the bottom, we have digitization. I'm sure those don't cover all your concerns as a collection care professional, but I hope it covers many of them. And now we're moving on to the second perspective. Let's say that you're a board member or even on the staff but in finance or in a high-level administration position in the organization. And OK, I'm going to stereotype a little with this category, but for some important chief stakeholders, your organization may look something like this. This is a typical mall museum operating budget broken down into common nonprofit categories. Note that it's not all, it's not that revealing of a museum's actual basic functions. After all, it's people in that 74% of staff costs that huge B of blue on the screen that are doing the work of the educational program work or the curatorial exhibition work. But the breakdown only reflects those areas with small little areas for purchase of supplies in those areas. Lately, I've been doing strategic planning for organizations in New York State, as Martha mentioned. And with strategic planning, we're frequently looking at budgets like this that don't really adequately capture what the organization is. And so instead of using a model like this one, I've begun using a model that I've cobbled together using some very useful categories from the Federal Institute of Museum and Library Services, IMLS. Under there, it's a particular grant category that I really like that they have. They have their IMLS Museums for America grant program. And within Museums for America, IMLS funds three basic museum functions. And I just find these categories extremely useful for thinking about how museums and really the whole range of collecting organizations, libraries, archives, historic sites, museums, how they all operate as organizations. So what they did, they have three basic museum functions that they will fund through the Museums for America program. First, they fund lifelong learning, which is the primary ways that you share with your target audience is could be with them exhibitions or school programs, tours. Second, community anchors and catalysts. And that's an IMLS definition, how you function as a neighbor in your community. And community can be interpreted very broadly in this case. That's how you do outreach and how you work to build partnerships. Third, collection stewardship and public access. Obviously, this is our focus today. But you have to keep in mind, we're in the board member perspective now. And from a board member perspective, it's just one piece of the puzzle of your organization's complete identity of the organization's mission. And then for my personal strategic planning purposes, I've added a fourth quadrant, which is a bit of a catch all infrastructure category. And it's not an IMLS category. They don't fund this. But I use it to cover the basic operating functions like facility maintenance and your administrative, financial, and development staffing. I like to use this model because it divides the rest of the not administrative staff functions among these, in my opinion, more useful categories. The director of education, instead of just being staffing, can go where it belongs into lifelong learning. And a position like curator, well, we can split it between two categories. A position like curator might be split between collection stewardship and lifelong learning with a lifelong learning component being the outward-facing task, like exhibition development. So here's our reformatted operating budget. Same budget, really. Same size as before. It's just a portion differently. Now, from a board member's perspective, the top priority is going to be to cover the most basic public-facing needs. The top priority is to keep the building safe, to keep your staff paid, to keep the door open. After that, lifelong learning really tends to take precedence, once again, from the board member's perspective. And here on our chart, I've got it at 50% here. Community anchor role may or may not be a strong presence on these budgets. Some organizations, it's important, others much less. IMLS is the one pushing here, that they like the more organization being involved as a community anchor. So it's a good idea, but it's not everyone is really fully going in that direction yet. Collection stewardship, next. Our category, well, yeah, sure, it's important. It should be here. This is board member perspective. It's important, says the board member, but you just have to remember, we have to keep the door open, the staff paid, and the school groups coming through next week. And those things can't be deferred. Collection stewardship, that can become the category that maybe we can put it off a year or two. And that attitude could. I could see that could be a problem for the dedicated collection care professional. And that's where some conflict enters into our story today. And it's a subject that I do plan on getting back to later to discuss, well, who should address this conflict or should you just learn to live with it? And I'd like to point out a couple of ways that maybe you can address the conflict. But we're not there yet, because we're going to move on right now to the third perspective. Third perspective's next. And that's our friendly development department or the fundraising guy. So that's me. I'll be playing the role of the fundraising guy today. Truthfully, I usually answer to the board or the administration, not to the collections care people. But if you wrote me into being an advocate for collections care, which I actually really enjoy being, this is how I'd work with you. First, I want to know what you think your greatest needs are. And ideally, what I'll be hearing are projects that fall neatly into one of those categories that I already mentioned. What the sophisticated funders. And by sophisticated funders, I mean the decision makers at larger private foundations and at state and federal government programs. What these funders want to see is a thoughtful planning process in operation. So you're midway through a process. That's what they want to see. You're going from point A to point B, and you're somewhere around B or C, and their funding can help you move forward on the chart. And they want to see where your organization is within that process. That's what I was just saying. And to visualize that process, what I do is I just take the common needs of collections stewardship that are on the slide right now and insert them into a flow chart coming out, something like this, our collection stewardship flow chart. It's not something that is written on stone tablets. No real ironclad rules here. You should never feel like you have to follow the chart exactly. And I've recommended a number of places to divert from the chart on occasion. But I just think that if you significantly deviate from a process that basically is like this, you should have a very good idea of why you are deviating from it. This chart shows the basic order of a long-term planning process that sophisticated funders intuitively like to see in practice. It may not be written in their guidelines, but it's sort of intuitively there. And peer reviewers tend to intuitively grasp it. You start at the top of the chart and flow chart style. You slow your way down. So now, please note where assessment is. According to this chart, you can't get to all the fund projects without going through the assessment. You really shouldn't be jumping down to the bottom and starting that sexy digitization project we're requesting conservation treatment without getting your general preservation assessment first. So my first question is a fundraising professional. To a collections care person is do you have an up-to-date general preservation assessment? If their answer is no, that's where I'm going to be sending. I'm going to be sending them back for funding for the general preservation assessment because that's going to be my tool for moving on further down the chart. If the answer is yes, then we're in business. I'm building here on something that you may remember that Samantha said in the first webinar, conducting a general needs assessment. There she is. And that is I'm quoting Samantha, who's in the room here with me. You said, I can tell you from firsthand experience applications that include a general preservation assessment are always much stronger and looked upon much more favorably by the reviewers than those that don't. So that's our mic drop moment there. Samantha gets the mic drop moment. Your needs assessment could very well be the determining element in whether you get a $5,000, a $10,000, $100,000, or even a great deal more dollar-sized grants. So now I, that's me, the fundraising guy, I've asked you if you have your general preservation assessment and you, being a good pupil of Samantha's, you've answered yes. At this point, I can move to matching up your needs. There are stewardship needs with the potential funding strategies, which are our usual suspects, at least in my profession, these are the usual suspects. To a great degree, fundraising is about the art of matching column A with column B. If we want to raise funding to address an environmental need, they environmental monitoring equipment and training. The question is what their best option in column B for tapping some money for that? And some of these would be good prospects and some of these would be not good prospects. Places that we could very well raise money in for some other reason, but probably not for environmental monitoring, they're just not going to be too interested. So I'm going to take them one by one at this point. Individuals, your organization can raise money from individuals through annual appeal, special appeal. And for your board members, cornering major donors and elevators with specially prepared elevator speeches. Collection stewardship typically doesn't fare well in this arena. Appeals tend to be aimed at a general lay audience. They're not for your peers. While some of the lay audience out there may have an interest in the behind the scenes nature of flexing stewardship, the majority will probably be most interested in the outward looking world of exhibitions, tours, and school programs. The general assessment probably won't provide much benefit there. So businesses and corporations, these are places that, well, they like some quid pro quo. They're in it for, they like to help you, but they're in it for themselves, too. They like to support places that get their name out, not your name, their name, to the general public. And that puts you back in that outward looking part of your organization, the world of exhibitions, tours, school programs, and maybe even naming an auditorium or conference room after them. Except in rare cases, the general preservation assessment probably won't be much benefit in this category. Online fundraising. I like online fundraising a lot. I've done some, and it is fun. I do like online fundraising. So here's the bad news. The bad news is you only hear about the online campaigns that work, not the hundreds that typically sink without a trace. For these, immediate recognition and strong hooks work. If you have a Neil Armstrong space suit, you can raise money to have it conserved. In fact, in that case, I don't even think you really need the general preservation assessment to do it. Just go for it. If you don't have Neil Armstrong space suit, or if you don't have Judy Garland's Ruby slippers, after that collection stewardship becomes a much more difficult spell for online fundraising. And just like the two above it, the general preservation assessment really won't provide much benefit there. Next is special events, big special events. That's how you usually think of these, that swap the staff for weeks in advance. Aim generally at the general public. Usually, these aren't effective avenues for collection stewardship campaigns. On the other hand, I like small-scale events, more aimed at targeted major donors, offering opportunities where you take them behind the scenes. I love behind the scenes, small-scale events. And these do have some potential to work. And when you're pitching to a major donor, references to the general preservation assessments, recommendations, to show that you've done your work and everything, yeah, they can stink in your pits. So they don't get a line through them. I'm not ruling them out. There's some potential there. They get a maybe sometime. Next on the list is the internal sources. You really want dedicated line items or preservation in your operating budget. And the general preservation assessment is a great place to advocate for them. You want the individual board members to understand your collection stewardship needs. And the general preservation assessment offers you a really fantastic way to educate them. Lots of opportunity here to communicate, lots of potential benefit. So they get a yes on that. That's a good place to be looking for funding source internally. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Private foundations, well, this is a big yes. Even for local, non-professional family foundations, that before I was talking about sophisticated funders, you're talking about local family foundations. Well, they'll gather around the table and look at a number of requests on a Sunday. It's still not a bad place to go. You can sell these projects as preserving the heart of the community fabric. You're writing for an audience that's used to receiving their arguments and writing. So they're used to reading an argument. So even though it's not for a peer review audience that you're writing for, you still have the space to make a clear argument. And it only strengthens your argument if you can explain how you're following a process showing that you've done the advanced work and you have the outside validation of a general preservation assessment. And that puts you in a pretty good place with your ass. And finally, on the bottom, we have the government funders. And that is strongly the biggest yes of all. It gets the three exclamation points. This is where you have the biggest potential bang for the time put in on trying to get the funding. Because the general preservation assessment is written for a museum or library professional. And government funders usually use peer reviewers who are museum or library professionals. So it's written in their language. The peer reviewers get it. For the next perspective and our last of the four perspectives, this should be the easy one for everyone. Because the funder I'm asking you to think like is the peer reviewer. Now if you haven't volunteered to be a peer reviewer for IMLS NEH or the equivalent Canadian agency's name, I won't come up with it at this moment. Or some other agency yet. If you have an opportunity to be a peer reviewer for an agency, please jump at the first opportunity that comes to law. In most cases, it's the peer reviewer who will actually, really they'll have the most say about what gets funded and what doesn't. It's a collective decision, but each of them individually probably has the most say in the process of anyone about what's going to get funded. So when you read your draft grant request like a funder, you read it like a peer reviewer. What you are looking for, what you want to be reading in the narrative that you're putting together is a naturally unfolding story that tells what the organization has done to date in chronological order. You just don't want to throw them off. You want to be very clear about the order, leading up to what you should naturally do next, say on the flow chart, to achieve dramatic results. And then you describe the dramatic result. So basically, when you read the grant, you want to see a thoughtful and coherent planning process in action. Through your recommendation for funding as a peer reviewer, you'll be adding to the next chapter in this organization, Unfolding Story. So that brings us back to that earlier slide. That thoughtful planning process, the one that centers on your general preservation assessment. The peer reviewer wants to see how you're working the process in story form. If you have that up-to-date general preservation assessment that recommends the project that you are selling, if you've got that, then you're in a pretty good position to get funding for your sexy digitization project or for conservation treatment. But without that assessment, it's a much, much deeper climb to convince the peer reviewer that you really are following a thoughtful process and not just applying for the next Chinese thing. So that's the end of chapter one, our longest chapter. Just offering some context on these important four perspectives to understand and look at when you're looking at whether you should invest time in a funding process. So now we'll take a closer look at the process of working with your consultant on your assessment but through the lens of fundraising this time. Notice I said working with your consultant and outside consultant. And this is one area where I'm going to disagree with Samantha from the first webinar, where I thought she waffled a little on whether to do the assessment using internal staff or whether to hire outsiders. And so just know that Samantha is approaching the assessment with a lot more concern than fundraising. She's not approaching it through the fundraising lens necessarily. It's just one out of many lenses that she needs to use. And a lot of those concerns that she's concerned about can be adequately addressed by an internal assessment. That's completely true. But my focus is the fundraising guy is on how you're going to use the document to raise money. And for fundraising purposes, you want that outside consultant because it's giving you very important outside validation. And seriously, anyway, there are funding sources for getting general preservation assessments done by an outside consultant. A number of them are available. So why not go that route? That's the fundraiser perspective. An internal approach may look cheaper in the short run, but you lose potential fundraising in the long run in the old British phase. It's penny-wise but pound foolish. Go into the process knowing this, that your general preservation assessment is going to be your key fundraising document or collection stewardship for as long as the next 10 years. Ideally, the process of creating it should be collaborative. It's not just the consulting coming in and telling you what you should do. It's just as much of an opportunity for you to help shape the document that can be instrumental in helping you reach the goals that you care most about. When the consultant arrives on the site visit to learn about your collections and the collection care environment firsthand, you should have already given thought to the possible fundraising projects that you'd ideally like to implement, not just over the next couple of years but over the next 10 years. So share your vision for these future projects, your vision with the consultant as clearly as possible. Even better, share them in conversation while they're on site and then share them in a follow-up email afterward. As things move forward, you get to look at the draft and provide feedback. When reading a draft of your general preservation assessment, please read it at least once, thinking like a funder, like a peer reviewer. You want to see sentences or short paragraphs that can stand on their own that you can pull out of this assessment and put into a grant. You want to see language that will be able to strengthen a future grant application statement of need, one of the most important parts of one of these applications. You want clear descriptions for that statement of need. You want clear descriptions of the problems that your proposed grant project will endeavor to address. So don't ask the consultant to downplay problems that they see, particularly problems that can be addressed with a reasonable amount of funding. Make sure they state the problems clearly. I do have a question here. I don't know. Like I said, I'm a little slow on the uptake on checking the general chapter. I do have a question here. So I'm just going to take a little break here and read this aloud and see if we can tackle it a moment. We have a visiting conservator. This is from Veronica. We have a visiting conservator from another institution here for about a year, helping us with an assessment. From a fundraising perspective, would she be considered an external or internal consultant? I'm looking at Samantha, because Samantha, are they being paid through the institution if they're on the staff payroll? Veronica's typing right now. If she's being paid through a home institution and her home institution, I assume another institution. So then you're fine. You're in good shape there. In fact, I would say in a situation like that where the person has a year to get to know the institution, the problems, the collections, the environment, probably a great situation for getting a good assessment from that. So yeah, Samantha and I are smiling now. We're happy if we're understanding the situation. It's not really a typical situation. It sounds like it's a situation that you're very lucky to have. I don't think many others are probably going to be in a situation where I get lucky enough to be able to access something like that. I'm just going to just hold on for another minute because Joanna is typing at the moment. I just want to say if there's something else that you want. OK, just continuing on here, you want to see and clear one-sentence statements to recommend projects and purchases and whatever it is that you may want to request from a funder. Be thinking ahead on the timeline, not only for the projects that you might want to do in the next three years, be sure to think long term. Not just the project, but what is the project you'd like to do after that and the project you'd like to do after that? Because on a 10-year time frame, you can do three three-year projects. And those could be three significant projects over that. Each of those three-year projects would be pretty significant. So you're looking at how you can build on projects leveraging one project after another to address a lot of the recommendations. OK, we do have Joanna's comment up here. What kind of assessment should an institution do when applying for funding to have a general preservation assessment done? Yeah, you don't need to. Samantha's saying you don't need an assessment to do an assessment. OK, when you're looking at that flow chart in the beginning, the only real document that I have above the general preservation assessment, and lots of places do not do this before the general preservation, but I do put it above because ideally, I think, where it belongs is the emergency planning. I do think that the emergency planning and response document goes hand in hand with the inventory. It's just classic collection care that you should know where things are, and you should know how to rescue them in case of an emergency. So that's the one preservation planning document that I put first before the general preservation assessment. But very frequently in the general preservation assessment, we're recommending you get the emergency preparedness plan. That's very typical of recommendation in the assessment. I'm going to put Samantha on for one minute. Hi, I just wanted to jump on and say that usually with that general assessment, when you are applying for funding for them, people know that this is the first step. They're not typically going to be needing documentation that you should do this. This is a generally recommended thing that you should be pursuing. And we did talk in the first webinar about funding options for the general preservation needs assessment, so make sure to go back and check that out. All right, back to Lee. Yeah, funding options there being NEH preservation assistance grants and IMLS TAP, the collection assessment program grants, are wonderful for these. There are a few others, too, that I've listed at the end of today's webinar. In some instances, you may go into the assessment. Yeah, Susan wrote down MAP and TAP. MAP is absolutely fantastic, but really, I don't think anybody's probably going for, yeah, you might be going for MAP. If MAP, I just usually consider MAP to be, I was kind of aiming this for a little bit more basic than, yeah, oh, MAP, MAP collection stewardship. You have the collection stewardship portion of MAP. So yeah, Susan is quite correctly pointing out to look at both the MAP and TAP that are available. And I do think, yeah, people, good advice. In some instances, you may go into the assessment process thinking that you'd like to do projects A, B, and C, and maybe they'll lead to projects D, E, and S. So it's going to be a nice straightforward movement here, but then when you read the first draft of your general preservation assessment, you suddenly get a new perspective out of the consultant. And the new perspective is important. That's why outside consultants are so valuable. And this can help you realize what you really should start by implementing our project A, B, and G, a project that wasn't even on your radar before, say that you really need cold storage for your film or something unexpected like that. So then it's initially projects A, B, and G to be followed later by D, H, and I. So it's not, you may get some new ideas for projects that you'd like to do from that initial draft that you get from the assessment. And this is good. This is a time to be maximally open-minded and flexible when reviewing drafts and just being ready to change gears here and revise your dreams and to think, well, maybe that would be a good project to go for. I will add this new set of dream projects on. And I just think it's a very rewarding process. Now, I want to return to that conflict that I mentioned earlier in the board perspective. Specifically, the difficulty of providing appropriate internal budgeting for collection care. I see. I'm here. Sorry about that. We are underway again. OK. The general preservation assessment can serve as outside validation for requests or increased internal funding through the budget. The assessment offers an opportunity to remind the board that collection stewardship is not a peripheral concern of a collecting organization, but rather a primary responsibility. The work of collection stewardship should not be deferred for years to add into an item. And this is actually an ethical problem. Because if an organization has the words collect and preserve in its mission, the organization then does have a mandate to do that work of preservation. It just can't be ignored or deferred forever. Or here's the way that the Heritage Health Index Report put it. I just love this. I've had this in my workshops for a long time. How they express the role of collection stewardship. The Heritage Health Index Report expressed the role of collection stewardship in their main report around 15 years ago. Just a wonderful report that ultimately led to many projects, including this C2C community that we're in today. And their advice is still completely on the mark. Providing a safe environment and proper care for collections is a fundamental responsibility of all institutions and individuals who care about our heritage. So this gets us back to a consideration of the organization's operating budget and how much should be invested here. Remembering that collection stewardship is a fundamental responsibility, possibly even a mandate of their mission. While the board does have much latitude allowed in setting priorities, the reality is that those day-to-day choices on budget and resource allocation, these are the things that really determine who you are and who you are becoming as an organization. And ultimately, I'm afraid it is up to the collection stewardship people on the staff to serve as the primary advocate for an appropriate slice of the pie chart. Furthermore, the general preservation assessment may just happen to be your best tool for advocating for those increased resources. Here's how the assessment can help you make that argument. This is pulled directly from a general preservation assessment that we did here. In this case, advocating for a line item in the budget specifically to support the ongoing work of preservation is clearly advocate for increased internal funding over and above the pursuit of grants. They request dedicated budget line items. If your assessment draft doesn't address this subject, I really recommend that you ask for it. This is a rare opportunity for you to directly address your needs to board members or to high-level administration. And so at this point, we reached Chapter 3. We're at 3 out of 4 now on our table of content. We're reaching our hypothetical case study, where I'm going to put all this into practice, starting with my favorite of all federal grant categories. And that is the NEH Preservation Assistance Grant for smaller institutions. It's my favorite for reasons first, because these grants are available for all types of collecting organizations. Unlike, unfortunately, most IMLS categories that are either only for museums or only for libraries, the NEH Preservation Assistance Grants are for the whole gamut. Therefore, museums, historic sites, libraries, and archives, they're not just open to nonprofits either. If you are with a state or local or a Native American tribal government archive, historic site, or museum, you're eligible here too. The only limit besides if you're in Canada, the only limit here is size. They are for quote, mauler, unquote, institutions. But they don't really define smaller within their eligibility. They leave it a rather slippery term. And they clearly state that libraries and museums located within larger organizations, this can be a library, archive, or museum within a university, can apply a small, distinct unit. So they aren't quite available to everyone. They're not available in Canada and probably not for the Getty and not the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But they're potentially available to thousands upon thousands of American collecting institutions. And here's the big one. There's no match required. I really could make a convoluted argument for why matching requirements are not the bay in the fundraising. I could do that. They do serve a purpose. And challenge grants can be helpful to an institution. And really, they can increase the number of funders out there that are supporting an organization. So they do good. They do good. But internally, it's hard to sell a grant that has a large matching component. Matches are hard. They're really challenging. So any government program or foundation that offers a fully fund, a small project, no match required, which is what they're doing here, if they offer to do that, that is gold. They are generous. In the 20 years that I've been pushing applications in this program, I've seen the amount available go from 5,000 to 6,000. And now last year, they raised it to 10,000. And that's 10,000, no match required. And they give plenty of them. And finally, they're pretty easy to prepare by federal grant standards. I mean, if you've never done a grant before, it might be a bit of a challenge. But generally, I would say this is a really good place to start. OK, so we have this great grant category that I think everybody should be going for. So what do they fund? As it turns out, this category was conceived by people who truly had a deep understanding of how to incrementally improve standards at collecting institutions because what do they fund? First item on the laundry list is, yeah, they fund general preservation assessments. And while it doesn't explicitly say this, everything that follows that they fund, the consultations, the emergency plans, the purchase of storage furniture and preservation supplies, the purchase of environmental monitoring equipment, education and training for your staff, all these things, your arguments for getting any of those things will be so much stronger if you start at the top of the list and have that up-to-date preservation assessment and can directly quote from it that you need these other items. The general preservation assessment comes first because it is the best of all possible starting places. NEH knows this, IMLS knows this, state programs know this. When they're available, state programs know this. Now, I'm not the director of development at a collecting organization. I work for the Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts, which is an art service organization without collections of its own. But if I were in administration at a collecting organization that isn't the Met or the Getty or in Canada, I would go for these grants every year religiously. While NEH tends to only fund around a third of the applications in this category annually, my experience is that if you play your cards right, your chances of getting funding are more around 50%. So picture it this way. If you go for these every year and you manage to get awarded grants 50% of the time, that means in 10 years, you're getting $5,000 to $10,000 grants. And note, this isn't an unusual approach to result. I work with the organizations that do this. So first year, you apply and you get your general preservation assessment through the NEH preservation assistant grants for small institutions. They send a number of them every year. And we work on a number of them every year. Nancy's nodding her head. Yeah, we work on these. It's good for about 10 years provided there aren't any significant changes to the environment or management within your organization. Second year, you ask for a disaster preparedness and response plan as it's recommended in your general preservation assessment. First year, that's in 2021, you're turned down, but you don't get discouraged. You just resubmit. You resubmit in the third year and it's funded this time because that's the nature of fundraising. Sometimes you get it and sometimes you don't get funded. And the best thing to do is to stay the course and simply resubmit. So you get your disaster preparedness and response plan when you resubmit. And that's the third year in our time here. They moved to the next thing, an application for purchase of environmental monitoring equipment and training and how to use it. You combine them together. I mean, they offer training and they offer purchase of environmental monitoring equipment. And it's really best to get a combination of the two if you're getting it. The $10,000 can easily accommodate purchase and training. They're turned down the first year. They go back, resubmit, and get it second year. So hypothetical case studies, sixth and seventh years. An application for $10,000, that's what these are all approximately for with no match required. So going for $10,000 is time for an internal housing project, including training of staff and volunteers and purchase of rehousing supplies. Once again, it's pulling from several different places. You can do the purchase of rehousing supplies, but you can also get the outside training too, which is very valuable in a housing project. We'd like to have a conservator come out frequently to take a look to give guidelines to the staff and volunteers on what to look like for a piece that's particularly fragile, as they might want to put aside and not be handling. So it's nice to look at that as an opportunity for training too when you're doing a rehousing project. But usually the rehousing projects can be done largely internally within the project. So turned down here again, resubmitted, and funded the next time. And now for our ninth years, we'll look at a request for a collection survey by a professional conservator. This should be an item by item survey. And one of your most important collections. And I go with the drill by the spot. And it turned down the first year. You're not discouraged, you resubmit, and you get funded with the resubmission. So with this case study in 10 years, you've now raised $50,000 for a project that it would be really tight to try and draw out of your standard smaller institution operating budget. But instead, by doing this, you've gone outside and brought in $50,000 over and above general operating to jump start your preservation initiatives. 10 years of steady incremental improvement. Plus, you've established credibility with a federal agency. And don't underestimate the importance of establishing a federal track record like that. And internally, that's the external benefit. Internally, the administration, the board, even the fundraising guy, or the development department, they are falling in love with the collection side of your organization because you are bringing in money that they can take credit for. And they're not even having to worry about raising the match, which is always the big concern, especially with the development department. So then, when you do have a project that may require a match, they're going to be that much more friendly. They're going to be that much more apt to listen to you. This is a great way of building internal advocacy. So let's take that timeline a bit further into the future, starting where we left off in 2028. So where we were, we had the collection survey was funded and in 2029, you implemented it. You sent the report in to the NEH preservation assistance people. And so in 2030, then, you flipped that collection survey into a $50,000 IMLS Museum Square America request for $100,000 project to implement recommended conservation treatment from the collection survey and to digitize the collection. So you're stabilizing and digitizing. Yeah, OK. You'll need matching funds for this one because you apply from $50,000 to Museum Square America, and they need that $50,000. That would make it a $100,000 project. But you've got nine years of internal advocacy paying off now with internal enthusiasm within your organization for this pursuit of a large matching grant. And that brings us to a final fourth chapter, really just an epilogue, because what I had here, this is the happy ending. And the rest here is just some advice on some places to be looking, sort of an appendix to what I've been presenting here. Here are some places where you can leverage funding for some of your dream projects in the way that I just proposed for an IMLS Museum Square America grant for treatment and digitization. A few notes and ideas based on this. This webinar is for a national audience, so I'm only looking at national funders. State will be able to fund some of these categories. I do a lot of work here in the Mid-Atlantic, where Pennsylvania actually has the least. We have our Pennsylvania Historical Museum Commission funding, which provides some categories, but so you can't get a general preservation assessment from their current categories. Way back in the past, you could, but in 2008, Pennsylvania, as with many states, took a real hit from the economic crisis. And we lost a lot of the funding categories at that time, and they aren't fully recovered yet. But New Jersey has the CAPES program, which is absolutely fantastic for getting assessments from. And New York has their DHPSNY program. They document heritage and preservation services for a New York program, which also offers preservation assessments. So a lot of the states have these types of programs, but not all of them. So that's up to you to do the further research. We can't go through all 50. Those are just the three right in my neighborhood that I'm particularly acquainted with. Regarding projects for cataloging, arranging, and describing, which can be tough cells or some type of thing you go out there, individuals with. And I placed those earlier under collection management. In these days, with digitization still being a pretty hot item in the collection stewardship world, high-level cataloging and the development of finding aid can go really nicely with digitization project. And so you can get a lot combined into a combination project here with the best, the worst, for this type of combined project being the NEH humanities collections and reference resources category, which is referred to up above there as HCRR. And I think I defined it once there and then used the acronym from that point on. You manage questions and reference resources, first going there for a foundation planning grant, up to $50,000, with only minimal match required, followed by an implementation grant, for you can go up to $350,000. Your general preservation assessment recommendation is your bedrock foundation for pursuing these. OK, I have a question here from Joanna. What are usually the chances of getting grants for recurring services, such as fine art collection surveys every one to two years? I would not be going back for the same thing every time, certainly, but varying and off and going for different things the way I said, with a rehousing project and like that, your reviewers each time are generally different. Yeah, I would be going back for the collection survey. If you have a fine art collection survey that is going to be, if you want to cover more than $10,000, say it's a $35,000 survey, I am the last, if you're a museum, I'm not sure if you are. But if you're representing a museum, I am the last that started new category last year called Inspire. And these are grants that you can go for a $35,000 collection stewardship grant for a number of questions stewardship items. Oh yeah, so you're fine. You can go for, if you qualify as a smaller institution, if I'm thinking you probably do, I hope you squeak in there. If you qualify as a smaller institution, you can go for Inspire for like a $35,000 one. Or you can go up to $50,000 one under the Inspire category. But definitely be checking out the Inspire category. It's an inspiring category. I love it, and I'm really pushing organizations to be looking at it this year. Jan is typing. I'm just waiting to see. Only nine employees. Yeah, you're a smaller institution, no problem at all. Please check out the Inspire category. It's wonderful. I think they made it for you. I want to talk about a couple more categories here before I finish up. NEH has a similar category to the humanities collection, some reference resources categories that's for funding major environmental improvements to collection storage areas. And that's the NEH, the Staining Cultural Heritage Grant Program. And it's a great place to go for the big projects like a new HVAC system. Your general preservation assessment recommendations would be, once again, the Bedrock Foundation for pursuing a larger project like this. And they generally want engineering plans from like that in advance, too. Although they do have a, it's not called foundations, but they do have a planning grant for $50,000, where you can do a number of those smaller plans they're like to see in place. So we're addressing the environmental needs involved with collection stewardship. The Staining Cultural Heritage Grant Program is a really excellent place to look for smaller environmental needs, like the environmental monitoring systems, as I referred to them before, the NEH Preservation Assistance Grants for smaller institutions, they're ideal. And for surveys, and these are collection or conservation surveys, the often item-by-item surveys that are done by professional conservators, you can get a small one funded through NEH Preservation Assistance Grants. Or if you are a museum or historic site, a larger one funded through Museums for America program, you can tie your collection survey and treatment needs within a digital accessibility project. And that's once again, OK, I'm talking about NEH humanities collections and reference resources can be used to do treatment as well. If it's treatment that's leading to the stability of the object in order to prepare it for digital imaging and then just being put into long-term storage, probably, it's basically the cut down on handling of the item. You digitize it so that it will rarely need to be handled by researchers from that point. So I just did want to mention that HDRR, if you are a library or an archive and you don't have that many opportunities for going to treatment grants, because IMLS is very good with treatment grants for museums and historic sites, but not so good for libraries and archives. If you're looking for a place to go for treatment, if you can tie it in with a digitization project, suddenly, NEH humanities collections and reference resources becomes a very, very good source for that instead. This is all about leveraging. Fundraising is very much the art of leveraging. And in the world of funding for collection stewardship, it really all begins with the general preservation assessment. Remember, it's up on the chart, circled up. You have to go through it. It demonstrates your commitment to the thing that peer reviewers most want to see, that thoughtful planning process. And with a good general preservation assessment, you can strategically raise a lot of money. I moved my arrow, so we've reached the questions portion. And well, we've been taking a couple of questions since we've gone along, but if there are any questions or comments, and Samantha's right here with me, and I'm happy to just look at her blankly until she answers the question, that would be fine, too. OK, well again, I don't see anybody typing right now. If anybody would like to type, go right ahead. And we'll take it as it goes on. But it looks like we're probably going to be closing up shop here from now. I guess I'll put Samantha on. I'll put Samantha on to close. All right, thank you, Lee. Really appreciate that. I did want to remind people about the homework assignment that is due next week. We are not having a class on the 31st, but instead, your homework will be due. As a reminder, your homework is to fill out that pre-survey, as if you were starting that general preservation needs assessment process. If you have any questions about that homework, now would be a good time to ask them. I will be checking to see that they come in. Susan will be helping me out there. That they come in next week on the 31st. And then I will get comments back to you. We'll be using them in our final webinar, which as a reminder is on August 7. We'll be using them to pull out our biggest priority project and beginning to map them into a preservation plan. So if there aren't any questions about that, I'm going to go ahead and close out for the day. Thank you, guys. Thank you, Lee. It was a great webinar. And I look forward to seeing you all virtually in two weeks and looking at your pre-surveys on the 31st. All right, thanks, everyone. So on everyone who's left, I want to remind you when you put in your homework, put it in as one document. It is one document that you're filling out. But if you miss that contact man, I'll make sure that we get you caught up. So thank you, Samantha. Thank you, Lee, very much. And thank you, Mike. We'll see you in two weeks. And we'll look forward to your homework next week. All right, bye-bye. Bye, everyone.