 This is best for nonprofits that have at least 90K in operating revenue and 501C3 status. That's not to say you won't learn something new during this workshop with if you don't meet these criteria, but it is to say that, you know, the tools that we're gonna be sharing as well as just the process when it comes to grants are usually for folks at the stage because if you're too early in your nonprofit journey, most funders are not gonna be looking to give you grants, mainly just because they have sustainability questions to ask of you and there's just other things ahead of you in terms of establishing yourself as a nonprofit before you get started. But getting us right kicked off today's session is how to go from zero to hero with your grant strategy. So it'd be great to hear from you guys in the Zoom chat what your name is, your organization, what title you do for your nonprofit. I think I saw earlier, Marilyn was saying she's the executive director of the Women's Veterans Business Center in Houston, Texas. So it'd be great to hear where everyone else is coming in from as well as your biggest challenge related to grants. And while you guys are typing that in, I'm gonna go ahead and introduce myself. My name is Will, I host bi-weekly grant workshops with expert educators as well as best-selling authors and my company Instrumental helps provide finding, tracking and management services for grant seekers. And so we help over 1,500 nonprofits as well as grant writers and consultancies in accomplishing that task. So every day what that leads to is a situation where we hear about the different challenges that nonprofits are often facing in their grant seeking needs. And so as a starting poll question as you're typing in your introductions, it'd be also great for you to give me a number one through four as to which of these you find to be the most challenging around grants. Is it number one, finding good fit funders, number two, finding the time to write them, number three, winning them or number four, staying organized with dev lines. So I'm gonna give folks a second. It looks like I'm getting some responses both individually as well as in private that I've seen finding good fit funders. I'm seeing finding the time to write them. I'm seeing winning them. And yeah, it looks like I also saw a hello from Susanna, she's one of the organizers for the nonprofit tech club, excellent. And so this could be you, it could resonate with you in which sometimes you might feel ill-prepared about your organization's ability to consistently find good fit funders and apply for grants. Usually when I run this workshop, pretty much 50% of the audience always tells me that number one, finding good fit funders is one of the biggest challenges for them in their pursuit of grants. But you might also feel overwhelmed by the number of things you have to do when it comes to grant seeking. There's simply many steps to the process. And if you find yourself in a small nonprofit team, that can mean that most of those steps are falling under your shoulders. And then you might also have a case of writer's block in which like some of you said, you're struggling to find the time to write them. You've carved out the time and you actually have Microsoft Word opened up but you're actually staring at a blank screen and it's just something challenging to really get the ball rolling for you. And so you probably think to yourself, are grants worth all the effort? And the answer to this question is yes, there's actually 87,000 grant making foundations and 11,000 plus active opportunities on instrumental loan. Every single week we're adding about 100 or so as well. And so what this leads to is a case where this doesn't have to be you in which 49% of nonprofit employees have expected cost cuts due to COVID and 54% of nonprofit leaders have implemented changes to their organizational goals and activities. And there are some estimates from Candid that between 11 to 38% of nonprofits may have to close from COVID-19 impact when this darn thing is said and done. And so that leads us to our agenda for today. And so our agenda for today is we are first gonna just do a quick primer on why grants are so powerful. We are then going to explore what is prospect research and what are some key questions that you can ask yourself when trying to evaluate good fit funders? How can you prepare your organization for grant success? And then we're gonna wrap things up by talking about how to start finding good fit funders with instrumental. I'll have two freebies for everybody who sticks with me until the very end today. And another freebie for you guys is anybody that wants to create an account today will be able to do so and get leave with a personalized list of good fit funders for their nonprofit as well. So that will hopefully help you in that pursuit of finding good fit funders. Let's first dig into why grants are so powerful. Well, the first reason why grants are so powerful is because there simply are broad funding possibilities. You can use grants for a lot of different purposes including but not limited to education, outreach, project programs, general operating expenses, capital projects as well as training or capacity building. As you guys look at the slide, what I want you guys to do in the back of your head is I want you guys to think about a particular initiative that your nonprofit is working on in 2022 and stored in the back of your head and think about how you might categorize that. Would that be a project program? Would that be a capital project? Whatever it is, just keep that in mind because in that second component when we start to set up our projects together on instrumental, you will also be able to use that in the setup of your project. But there's other reasons why grants are so powerful including but not limited to the fact that foundations have to give every single year. There is a rule known as the minimum distribution rule which states that foundations have to give 5% of the average market value of its net investment assets. And so the bulk of these distributions will go out in the form of grants. If you have been following the stock market in the last year the S&P 500 just returned 28% in the last year. And what that means is that these foundations are sitting on more cash than they were sitting on the year before. And that leads us to the situation in which if you are looking for a particular foundation what you can do is you can look up their 990 report or you can pull it up on something like instrumental here. And what you can see is the total assets of this organization multiply that number by 0.05 which represents 5% and that will give you a quick back of the envelope approach to finding how much they're giving. In this case, my estimate for the New York community trust using this sort of little trick tells me that they're giving around $146 million and actually to the right of the total assets number you can see what the actual giving amount was $173 million. So they're giving a little bit higher than that 5% but it's always a good back of the envelope method for you. If you're ever referencing those IRS forms and things like that to figure out exactly how much they might be giving in their grants. Some other reasons why grants are so powerful though is that foundations actually have to be consistent in their giving. So a lot of times foundations have multi-year horizons as to the sort of initiatives that they are trying to fund and so they like the idea of sustaining impact. And so they like to keep funding projects that keep getting results. And so if you are able to have a consistent program or initiative that nonprofits working on and secure the right funders then that can be the backbone of a strong fundraising strategy over a multi-year time horizon. And I'll give a few examples of that later on in this presentation but it's always really helpful to think about what sort of initiatives of yours have a clear beginning, middle and end because by having those beginning, middle and ends you make it easier for a funder to make that decision to want to fund you year in and year out. Another reason why grants are so powerful is because grants can actually be systemized. There are clear steps that you have to take when it comes to submitting a grant. We'll go over some of those in terms of the grant life cycle but in general what's nice about grants as opposed to something where you for example are relying on individual donors and things like that is that grants are something in which you can do it over and over again and pretty much start to form a recipe to the madness as opposed to kind of having to consistently create different individual donor events that may or may not work in the community and do trial by fire in that case. And then the last situation the reason why grants are so powerful is because they can actually help with your organizational accountability. The fact that grants are so systemizable and they can be created into a core process means that when it comes to those reporting requirements that those can actually be good feedback loops for your organization to actually be held accountable to some of the outcomes that you guys have intended to set yourself up for when you are starting these programs and initiatives. So now that we've gone over why grants are so powerful let's dig into what is prospect research. So prospect research in case you're new to this field is the process of finding, assessing and qualifying public, private and corporate foundations to pursue more strategic and planned giving. On the grant lifecycle on the right hand side of your screen we have the case in which in the bottom right it's that find your funding option. That's what we're talking about here. And so like I said before, grants are systemizable. So in this case you can see the typical grant lifecycle in which you're gonna have some sort of idea you're gonna identify the funding for that idea you're gonna develop a proposal, submit that proposal and then you're gonna have an award that you're gonna wanna manage at that point before you then repeat the process again. And this is pretty much the five core steps of the grant lifecycle that you will find regardless of how small or large the opportunity may be that you're pursuing. The reason why prospect research is so, so important is because virtually every nonprofit has high capacity donors hiding in plain sight. In fact, a whopping 40% of donors in a recent study admitted that they could be giving more than they currently are. So our job as fundraisers is to identify those prospects so that we can start moving them up to greater levels of giving. The story I like to tell is that when I run those bi-weekly grant workshops I get to hear a lot of stories. And one of the stories I heard was a woman who essentially had been volunteering for a community foundation for the last four or five years. And she had recently been starting her own nonprofit and she realized by looking up that foundation on instrumental that that foundation had a grant making side of that foundation that she did not know about for the last five years that she'd been volunteering for that organization. And so while she had great relationships with all the key people that she needed to at this community foundation, she had never thought to actually just look at this relationship she already had as a starting ground for some of the funding for her new nonprofit. So from this exploration realization that somebody that she had an existing relationship with was also a grant maker, she simply had to send a quick message scheduled time and in the next week, they essentially let her skip the line in terms of their funding cycle and become part of the short list of the next funding cycle and when she was able to receive funding. And so that kind of really speaks to this quote from Iris Sutcliffe, which is there's a lot of donors in your backyard that you may or may not be aware of that are more than willing to fund your causes. It's just a matter of knowing how to find them. And that leads me to some of the key information that you might go to find on funders. So there's a lot of information out there, but I'm gonna distill what I think are some of the most important ones for you so that you can save time in your own search. There's information like key stats on assets and giving patterns. There's information on the names of key people. Why is that important? Well, in this story, I just told you if you had known that this foundation was a grant maker as well, then you could have just pulled up the key individuals in either the board of directors or within the organization and realized that you've had an existing relationship. You might also be able to identify things like giving trends and cycles over the years. Why is that important? Well, the reason why is because if you are trying to pursue funding from a grant maker, but they have no actual consistent history of giving towards a cost similar to yours, what is the point of actually investing your limited bandwidth towards that opportunity as opposed to another one where there's a clear track record? And then you also find things like the list of past grantees and funded projects. And the reason why that's so helpful is because again, if you can identify a clear trend or pattern of giving towards your nonprofit's focus area or the similar projects and programs to what you're fundraising for, then you can find that very niche funder alignment to the grant opportunity. And then you're also gonna wanna look at things like geographic areas of focus as well as overall grant eligibility requirements. When you look at these things, there's many ways you can look at it. I'm just giving you an example here on how you might look in instrumental, but you can essentially see here, we've got the Cliff Bar Family Foundation and we're gonna see information such as the total assets and giving, contact information, example, their phone number, website, key people, like I mentioned. And then you're also gonna see things that are unique within different tools. All sorts of different tools have different benefits here. One of the strongest points of instrumental is we bring some of the data insights to you. And so for example here, what you see is the openness to new grantees. So what we are doing is we are digging through the hundreds of past grantees. We are identifying for you, who is a new grantee versus a returning grantee and are there any differences between what a new grantee is getting versus a returning grantee? Why is that important? Well, let's say for example, I'm Brett and in the audience here and I've got a foundation that's been funding me for 15K for the last three years. And what I realized when I look up that foundation is that repeat grantees actually on a medium basis have been receiving 30K in funding. That means I've been leaving 15K on the table every single year compared to other repeat grantees just because I didn't have that data insight. And so that's why having data, having valuable information like this can be so helpful to you. And that's where we're then gonna go into next, which is 16 questions that can help you evaluate good fit funders. I'm gonna go through these questions pretty quickly. That said, I do have a freebie at the end, like I mentioned at the beginning of this presentation, where if you want a more detailed breakdown to this, it is essentially like a 41 page document that goes through this more in depth. Obviously for the sake of time and respecting your time, I'm gonna go through these questions just to give you a high level overview. As I go over these, what I want you guys to think about is not necessarily to remember every single question I go over, but I want you to think about the themes of what I'm asking as you kind of think about opportunities that you've maybe in recent weeks been reviewing for your own nonprofit or just in general in thinking about your nonprofit's grant seeking strategy. So the first thing I'm gonna go into are some grant RFP overview questions that you're gonna wanna ask. Whenever you are looking through grant opportunities, these are a few of the questions that you're going to wanna look into. You're gonna wanna ask yourself things like what is the grant makers mission and doesn't align to your initiatives? For example, let's say you're a food shelter and you find a grant opportunity where they're actually funding a ton of literacy initiatives. Well, literacy and food shelters don't really go hand in hand all the time. And so that's something in which maybe there's not that much alignment, but on the flip side of things, maybe there's something in which there's a funder that's working on social equity initiatives and things like that. And so in that situation, there might be closer alignment. Having that sort of alignment is so important because that can often just be the most simplistic form of overlap in terms of what you're doing and what they're doing and what you're trying to accomplish. You also wanna look at what are the specific goals of the grant RFP? A lot of times in these RFPs, they're gonna tell you what they're trying to fund. They'll tell you if they're doing things like funding food access and equity or if they're actually focusing more on that literacy side or education side and things like that. You're also gonna look at things like their eligibility requirements. Do you actually meet them? And that can be something as simple as having 501C3 status. Sometimes people don't have that or maybe you'll need a fiscal sponsorship in order to be eligible for this particular grant. And then you're also gonna look at the grant and the size of grants being made. So does this align with your budget needs? Why is this so important? Well, let's say you found a grant opportunity, it's a grant, but your overall fundraising goal for the year is 250K. Well, in that situation, you might have another opportunity that's five grand and it might actually be more of a better use of your time to pursue that five grand opportunity than the one grand opportunity just from a pure time standpoint of the value of your time and giving your nonprofit the best shot of hitting its fundraising goal. And so you're gonna wanna think about what are the size of the grants that are being offered here in terms of some of the opportunities that you're identifying. And then lastly, what type of grants is this opportunity for? That really goes back to some of those key things that I told you a few slides ago in which you might have project programs, you might have general operating expenses, you might have capital projects. There's all sorts of different things, but what you wanna make sure is that there's some core alignment in terms of what the RFP is saying and what you're trying to pursue as well. When it comes to giving median questions, there's a few more questions you wanna answer in terms of what is the median grant size from this funder and how has this median grant amount changed over the last three years? Here's why I asked that second question. The reason why is because if you have something in which there's a black swan event like there was in 2020 and you see the long tail effects of COVID-19 at this point, well, you've got the situation in which you might actually notice in the funder giving patterns that impacted how they gave in 2020 as well as 2021 in which maybe somebody that was previously funding a lot of different performing arts things and whatnot actually had to shift their focus in the last two years to more direct basic needs and the other first responder organizations. And so you'll notice maybe that there's a shift in terms of the fundraising approach of that foundation. And so when you can look at what the median grant amounts have been over the last few years, you can also look for particular changes that might be occurring from the foundation. There might also be initiatives in which you'll notice, for example, when we start digging into things ourselves that you're gonna see cases where the percentage of new grantees have gone down from a funder. Well, in that case, what that might tell you is that they are not actually as open to new grantees than they might be saying or they might have shifted their focus to just focus on their existing relationships as opposed to wanting to initiate new relationships with new organizations. When you're looking into this, there's a few funder giving history questions that you're gonna wanna ask. You're gonna wanna ask yourself questions like, can you identify at least three previously funded organizations that are similar to yours? So when you open up that 9-9 report and you go through all the different past recipients, what you'll wanna identify is a few organizations that do similar work to yours. The reason why is because if there is a history of giving, then there's likely going to be a grant for you in terms of an opportunity. And on the flip side of things, if you can't find an organization that's similar to yours, then it might be an uphill battle where you might have to rely a little bit more on your relationship building, your charisma and establishing yourself, getting your foot in the door with that organization. You also wanna check out if your organization's geographic location has been represented historically. If you found a great opportunity, but all of their past grantees are coming out of California and you're based out of Florida, well, you're probably not gonna have all that great of odds in terms of getting funded. And then also you're gonna look at some of the things that I mentioned like what percentage are new grantees? Has the funder been giving to new grantees more over time or more to repeat grantees? Does the meeting grant amount for new grantees align with your project budget? That's just a good assessment as to whether or not it's worth your time. And then also, does your organization's impact areas align with the funder's three-year historical giving patterns? So just taking that example again with a food shelter, is human services or community services a top-giving area for that foundation? Or are they potentially funding other areas more? And the last three questions that I like to tell folks to look at when it comes to assessing funders are these three internal consideration questions. So people always, you know, there's a ton of different workshops out there and people always focus on the things that you can look at in terms of grant opportunities from the outside, but I also like to look internally. And one of the questions I like to ask is, does your nonprofit even have the bandwidth to take on this application? We are all strapped on time. We're all on small teams. And so it's something in which if it's the case where you cannot clearly map out every single stage of the process of the grant lifecycle and know that you guys are going to address every single one of those reporting requirements, then maybe you shouldn't pursue that opportunity. The reason why is because even in the case where you do win that opportunity, but you don't meet the criteria when it comes to reporting, well it's gonna become an uphill battle for you to renew that opportunity. And you're just gonna have built yourself a new area where you're gonna need to fill that gap in your fundraising goals as a whole. And then lastly, does this RFP have parts where your nonprofit can repurpose past grant proposals? The beauty of grant proposals, like I've said before, is they're systemizable. So there are many parts that you can kind of use the component parts. It's kind of like going to a bicycle shop and kind of switching out some wheels, switching out some frames. And once you have a core project that you're fundraising for, you can start to reuse and repurpose some of the different things. So now we've gone over prospect research as well as some questions to ask yourself when it comes to evaluating good fit funders. Let's now explore how to prepare for grants. We're gonna go over five steps. We're then going to dig into the more interactive component of today's workshop. Before I dig into this section, I like to pull up this quote from James Clear's book, Atomic Habits. The quote reads, you do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. Your goal is your desired outcome, whereas your system is this collection of daily habits that will get you there. This year, spend less time focusing on outcomes and more time focusing on the habits that precede the results. And this is a fitting satellite for us as we look at it on January 3rd of 2022 because we can all be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed towards the year and how we're looking at it, but essentially what this is so powerful about when you look at it in the context of grants is a lot of times fundraisers are always looking at things from the fundraising goal standpoint. They're saying, hey, my fundraising goal is a half a million dollars for the organization. As opposed to really asking themselves, have we set up our system in a position in which we know how many grant applications we're gonna be able to put out this year? Are we gonna be able to double our output? Are we gonna be able to apply to enough opportunities and prospect enough opportunities to even make 500K a possible goal? So instead of focusing just on the end result, focus on the steps and the component parts to get there. That's why they often say, if you wanna lose weight, it's not about actually setting the goal around losing weight, it's saying I'm gonna go for a walk for 15 minutes for three times a week or something like that. And so the same thing applies when it comes to preparing for grants. So let's dig into five steps we can take when it comes to preparing for grants so that we can better prepare our organizations. The first thing that you can do is just make sure that you are discoverable. So what I like to tell folks here is is it clear within a minute of visiting your website, what your mission is and how you measure your impact? Is it easy for you to find detailed case studies along with contact information? Story I like to tell here is I was running a series of interviews with different community foundations just to learn a little bit more about their grant making strategy and how they approached which nonprofits to fund and which ones to pass on. And there was this one time that I was trying to create the pre-roll for the introduction to that foundation. And I was trying to find the mission statement of this community foundation and I couldn't find it. And so when I jumped on this call with the executive director of this community foundation, I asked her before we started the interview, hey, what exactly is the mission statement? She was like, well, that's on our website. And I was like, I'm not sure I could find that. And then what she realized that she shared her screen with me is that she couldn't find the mission statement of their community foundation. So it goes both ways in which not just from the grant seeker standpoint but from the grant maker standpoint, you got to make sure that you actually have made it clear and abundantly clear what your mission is and how you measure impact. Use numbers whenever you can and your detailed case studies provide actual deliverable outcomes around the impact that you've left on your community. That was the number one thing that always came up in terms of my interviews with these foundations is that they always said that when it came down to it, it's the act of just trying to measure your impact more so than how precise you might be sometimes, just because they also understand that nonprofits are usually strapped for bandwidth, strapped for time as well. And so it's having these sorts of core pieces of information in place that they can really trust you when it comes to being stewards of capital. The second step that you can take is ask your board and for your community's help. So referrals, like we mentioned, are often the lowest hanging fruit when it comes to finding prospects at a local level. So what I like to tell folks to do is if you are new to grants today and you're at the early stages of your grant strategy, focus on local opportunities first and then when you feel like you've got the grasp of those, pursue the regional opportunities and then once you've graduated there, you wanna go to the national opportunities but you do not wanna go out of order in this sequence of events. The reason why is because those local opportunities usually have the lowest barriers of entry in terms of the actual applications themselves and they'll get you the reps that you need to actually feel confident about how you position yourself, how you're writing about your mission statement, your programs and initiatives. So you can gradually level up and from there increase the amount you're asking for as well. If for example, right now today, your nonprofit is receiving less than 10 grand in grants, well, that's something in which you can set your goal to be local based and from there, just gradually level up year over year as opposed to just trying to swing for the fences for a national opportunity. The problem with that is when you're going to the national stage too soon too fast, you're essentially competing against experienced folks who have much more established grant seeking efforts. And so it's much better to just kind of play in the right sandbox as I like to say when you are starting to your approach here and think about considering two field requests for introductions from your board, staff, volunteers and community. A lot of times good funding opportunities also come from board members who are sitting on the boards of several organizations. And so they might be part of not just your organization but also another one that's doing a similar cause just cause they really care about that cause and so they can facilitate an introduction for you. The third step you can take is strategically outline your funding strategy. So this is a really great time to do so cause we're at the beginning of the year but in case you didn't do so yet, what you can do is you can just carve out a few hours in your team schedule and then set that time aside to ask these sorts of questions. What are our biggest resource needs for the year? What are our goals and priorities? How are we gonna track how these things are going in? What outcomes can we actually report? And then finally, when will we be able to report these outcomes? So the way that you might do this it can be super simple. This is just an example for you but what you might do on a whiteboard or you might do an Excel or a Google doc that you share across your team is you might have a column where you have your fundraising sources. You then will outline how much you raised last year in 2021 and then set a baseline goal that represents some form of growth in 2022. And then from there set another goal that's maybe 20 to 30% higher than that that you're gonna call your stretch goal. And then lastly, think about all the initiatives that your nonprofit works on within the course of a year and put those in the electrical projects in the accompanying section for what the fundraising source will be. That way in the case where you potentially have somebody leave your team and have somebody new come in you can essentially share this kind of high level strategy document with them to help them align with just what you guys are focusing on as an organization. Fourth tip, fourth step think about your programs in projects. So projects are typically temporary initiatives with the clear beginning and end that lead to a specific outcome whereas programs are ongoing efforts and typically include projects. So what you'll often find are that programs often fulfill your nonprofits mission. So the example I like to give is every single Monday I'm skipping it actually today for the sake of this presentation but every single Monday I tutor a sixth grader through a local nonprofit and we provide after-school tutoring assistance. And so the problem that this organization this nonprofit often faces is getting sufficient funding for general operating expenses. So the solution to this and they actually find a lot of their funding from grants just if you had reviewed their annual report is to position from the perspective of a project with clear goals. So instead of just saying we have a online tutoring program every single week you can position the ask around something like wanting to double the capacity of weekly online tutoring programs in other words supporting double the amount of students. There's a clear beginning middle end here in which maybe I'm supporting a hundred students today but next year it's gonna be 200 with the support of this funding. Or secondly, you might have something in which you have a reading drive to gift a book to a kid twice a year. What is the difference between this and just stating or describing the program that is already going on? Well, it's making it abundantly clear to the funder how you're gonna use the money and how they can measure success with you, right? And so this is why it goes back to that point of what I was saying earlier of thinking about how can you demonstrate that you are a potential great steward of capital because ultimately that is what grants are. It's a grant maker that's making a somewhat of a calculation that, hey, I think this nonprofit is doing good in this community and that the dollars we put here are going to have a meaningful impact on the community in X by Z way. And so when you're able to position your programs as projects, you're making it so much more clear for a funder to realize, oh, this is a nonprofit that gets how to actually implement capital and how to deploy that capital in an effective way. So once you've done that, the last thing you're gonna wanna do when it comes to preparing for grants is you want to create a weighted decision matrix. So these are a few example criteria that I tell folks to consider. Yours will look different though, depending on your organization. So wherever your organization is at and whatever you guys care about is going to be different, but here are just a few considerations that you might think about. So you're gonna think about things like the alignment of the opportunity to the areas of interest, the number of past grantees, what the award amounts are, the estimated time it might take you to complete that proposal, what is the competition like relative to all their opportunities? For example, if you have a great local opportunity where it's only gonna take you two days to complete that application versus the regional opportunity that's gonna take you two weeks, you might wanna finish that local opportunity first to get that out of the way. And then lastly, what are some existing relationships? So there's a ton of different criteria and you might end up reflecting on some of the 16 questions I posed earlier, but the point of the weighted decision matrix is just to give your organization a foundation, a bedrock for what you guys are going to think about every single time that you apply for grants. Remember the slide that we started the section on was about thinking in systems, thinking about the habits, not the outcomes. And so when you create a weighted decision matrix, what your goal is, is to create some sort of framework in which you have, think about it like a pie, you've got a hundred percent and you can allocate different percentages to these different bullet points that you're gonna create in your own decision matrix. Maybe for example, you're gonna wait the number of past grantees at 20% as opposed to the award amounts at 10% and so on. But essentially over time, you're gonna create this weighted decision matrix and then you're going to run the last three to five opportunities that you either actually apply to or that you were planning to apply to through this weighted decision matrix. And from there, what you should come out with, not only from yourself, but across your team is some sort of evaluation criteria that makes you guys say, yes, we're pursuing this opportunity or no, we are not. And when you've gotten to the point where you've calibrated this sort of decision matrix in which it's consistent and you pretty much can count on it time in and time out, you're in a really good place because at this point, what that means is that whenever there is a new grant opportunity for your organization, you can just run it through the decision matrix to evaluate whether or not it's worth pursuing. So it's really important for you to have this because a lot of the organizations that we often talk to that are earlier stage in their grants game do not have this sort of framework. And so it is incredibly frustrating for them because the people that end up actually working on the applications never know which opportunities the organization's actually gonna pursue versus not pursue because there is no clear common ground as to determining that criteria. So those are some five steps. Now let's dig into how we might find good fit funders. So when it comes to finding good fit funders, the easiest way is with instrumental but I do wanna be fair and offer some alternatives as well. You might find it helpful to use things like Google, ProPublica, there are tons of listservs or you can sign up for free and get some updates. Charity Navigator as well as GuideStar Foundation directory online. And there's a few reasons though why instrumental is the easiest to use. The first reason is because we are built specifically to bring grant prospecting, tracking and management to one place. So we are the institutional fundraising platform. We include active public and private funding opportunities for 501C3s. And we also have 990 reports and foundation reports at your fingertips. We have a unique matching algorithm that shows you good fit funders for your projects and deadlines are automatically updated. So in the case where a opportunity you're pursuing maybe changes the deadline instrumental automatically updates that in your tracker for you. And then task notes and documents are also stored year over year. So that makes it really great for the case where you might have turnover in your organization because essentially all of your past work will be stored in a place where a new person to your team can get ramped up much quicker than somebody who has to dig through a Google Drive or a Dropbox folder to kind of find where everything is organized. And what that leads to is an outcome in which we save folks three hours a week on average and we increase grant application output by 78%. And so there's a few different ways that you can use instrumental but the best way to kind of show it to you guys is I'm gonna put a link in the chat. We're gonna create a projects together and then we're gonna create them for each individual. So you're gonna follow along with me as we create projects but you're gonna go ahead and click that link when you do so you're gonna land here and then we're gonna then create our projects together. So go ahead and fill this out and then when you're done click Next. So I'm gonna fill it out with you guys as well. So go ahead and go into the chat in the Zoom, click there and then I'm gonna create my account along with you guys. And when you are getting through this you're gonna select what your operating revenue is whether you have 501 C3 status which I presume all of you do. So when you're there click the Next button and when you get to the Next button what you'll lead to is this is for a strategy consultation. This is something in which what I tell folks when you're in this workshop go ahead and choose a time later in the week that way after this workshop you can sync up with somebody on our team and essentially get somebody to review your project with them just to make sure you set it up properly. In my case I'm just gonna select a time a little bit later in the month that way. I don't take one of your guys's time. When you get that you're going to get to this page which is let's help you find new funders. When you're there go ahead and go to the Zoom chat and then give me a thumbs up so that I know that everyone's in the same place. I'm gonna pause for a second to let folks catch up. And if you're having any difficulties along the way feel free to let me know. But again we're gonna end up on this page and when you get to this page I'm gonna be looking in the Zoom chat for a few more folks to give me the thumbs up before I continue. Marilyn gave me a thumbs up. Great I'm just gonna keep waiting for a few more folks and then from there we will get underway. All right so I'm gonna wait for one more thumbs up so if you haven't already and you are taking your time there when you're ready for it and you're on this page for let's help you find new funders. Go ahead and type into the Zoom chat or you can use the Zoom thumbs up to let me know that you are ready for us to keep going. And again that link is in the Zoom chat in case you are struggling to get there. All right and then for the folks that are there on the first step here we're gonna go ahead and select where our organization is registered. So in this situation you're gonna wanna select wherever your organization is registered. It's honestly not as important as the second and third steps but I'm just gonna go ahead and select Miami-Dade County here. Click save and continue. When you get to the second step for project overview this is where you're going to want to think about a particular initiative that you're working on and name it after that. So usually in these situations I like to tell folks to be specific as opposed to general. So for example if I was doing my after school tutoring program I might call it our literacy program for middle school and then select your applicant type. In this case I am selecting non-profit and then here's where you're gonna wanna answer whether or not you are looking for grants specifically for faith based organizations or for programs. And in this case I'm gonna show you what I would do in both situations and then you're gonna take the appropriate action with whatever your setup is. If yes you're gonna select yes and then from here select your religious affiliation. If no just select no and then click save and continue. From here I'm gonna go ahead and select which areas my project serves. These are the actual communities of impact. Again just going to use the example of Miami-Dade County in this situation. So I'm gonna search Miami. Maybe I'll also search like Osceola County. So those are two that I've selected in the next section for fields of work. This is where we're gonna wanna think about some of the keywords that you would typically search in Google or some other place around grants. And in this case I'm gonna search for the word literacy. That will give me that. I'm gonna search for after school. I'm gonna search for middle school. And then if you are kind of drawing a blank when it comes to certain things to search for you can always just not search anything click the browse all categories button. And from here expand out the area where you are focusing your work on. And then from here you can just select things that might be interesting to you. I tell folks to select three to seven different fields of work. So in this case I'm gonna look for something like educational access and equity. I might do tutoring and mentoring as well. And yeah I think that will get us to a good place. Academic success and enrichment will be another one. Now I've got six fields of work so I'm ready to move on. Again if you are kind of trying to figure things out here go for three to seven. That's typically a good place to start for your matches. From here what you're gonna wanna do is select the size of grants. If you have a minimum then you might set that. In my case I'm a small team so maybe I set my minimum to five grand and then I set no maximum. And then this is where we really have that callback to what I talked about earlier which is thinking about what your project or program is really working on. In this case I have project program, I have general operating expenses and that's what's gonna encapsulate most of what these funds will be used for. So when I'm ready I'm gonna click the save and exit button and from here instrumentals gonna go ahead and conduct that search for me. So I'm gonna go ahead and wait a minute or so for folks to catch up here in the case where you are still playing catch up you can take that time to set up your project and again, give me a thumbs up using either the zoom thing or the zoom chat to let me know when I can continue for folks. And in the case where you missed the link earlier I'm gonna go ahead and put that into the zoom chat as well for folks there. All right, so while folks are setting that up the other thing that's gonna happen is here we see that instrumentals found 230 grants for me. I'm gonna click the let's go button and what I'm gonna be led to is what we call the matches tab. This is a really cool tab because essentially if you were to have a personalized list a short list of active grant opportunities that are good fits for your organization. So in this case I've got two filters that are really nice here. You can have the best match deadline amount in newness. I tell folks when you're new to the site stick to best match because that will rely on the matching algorithm. However, as you get more familiar with things you might end up starting to sort things by deadline because maybe for example you've got something in which you could actually be applying for it in the next two days and get that out on time. But in this case I'm gonna stick to best match. In the second dropdown you're gonna see a filter. Here you can essentially sort things based off of funding uses as well as funder types. So if for example that you know that your organization is better at private foundations than public foundations and things like that you might end up choosing to filter that down. The other thing that's useful is the search bar. This is where you can search for particular phrases. In this case I might search for after school. And what you can see is that it isolates the six that have the clear case of the spelling of after school out of the 230 opportunities. Or if I were to remove the space I might find another one here in the aim high grant program. So on the right hand side here you can see why this is being shown to me. So it's being shown to me because it's related to after school summer educational programs, nonprofit location of project is in the United States and it fits my funding uses. So this kind of addresses some of those key questions I told you guys to think about when assessing good fit funders. But also what you wanna figure out is what other data points can confirm my initial intuition. So in this case when it's possible instrumental is gonna actually show you snapshots of information about these funders. So in this case you can see past grantees have actually come from all 50 states median grant amounts have been $500. If I start scrolling down I can actually see what they're trying to fund. So they are inviting out of time school programs to apply for competitive grant opportunity for after school summer learning programs to help prepare middle school students for success in high school and college and life. So this is already a really good promising start for me because again I work, I tutor for a after school program that helps middle schoolers. And so in this case what I've got is a situation which these folks are giving around $21 million a year average grant amount 14 grand median is $500. But there's different things here that might suggest to me that it might be worth for me to pursue as a small opportunity especially since 150 past grantees have come from the state of Florida. So in this case if you wanna dig deeper you can look into the particular state as well. And then essentially isolate for what they are funding in the past to see whether or not there's anything interesting to you. In this case though I'm gonna say review at Friday meeting because what this is going to signal to me is that I've done an initial pass or screen through through this opportunity and I think it's interesting. So from here what I've done is I've saved that and I'm gonna go ahead and continue this process for other opportunities as well. So I'm gonna search for after school now and when I do that I can see I've got a few other opportunities here is to sign a K through eight grant it's supporting literacy past grantees are in Pennsylvania though so I'm a little concerned about that since it might not really be as applicable to me being based out of Florida. In this case they are after school programs they're supporting literacy let's see what else there is here. So in this situation I don't see all that much of interest outside of Philadelphia so I choose to hide this from the project and move on to the next one. So essentially I'm working through my criteria that I've already established for myself and my program that might be interesting to me what might not be interesting to me and I'm essentially being able to parse this data really quickly because instrumental is doing some of the heavy lifting for me on that side of things. So here I can see the hops foundation grant after school summer educational programs tutoring and mentoring. What I can see is that there is a record of past grantees in Florida median grant amount of 15K. In this case they are encouraging a path for academic achievement. They are also supporting education. And so here I see that there is some interest here as I start scrolling through average grant amounts 16 grand I can see giving averages are trending up over the years that's great to see. I can see that grant amounts have been 10K at a median basis and I can see the distribution which I can probably count on these guys for a decent amount of funding. And I can also see there's a great concentration in Florida so I can filter for Florida. And you can see some of the past organizations that have been funded like big brothers, big sisters that's great alignment with the work that I'm doing. And so in this case I have a situation where I probably want to learn more here. So I'm gonna say review at Friday meeting. And what you're gonna wanna do as you're doing this on your own project is you're gonna wanna take this similar approach. You're gonna wanna think about is there a history or is there a pattern of giving here that would be interesting to me to continue to explore and research further on this opportunity. The next thing you wanna do if you get to it is review your funder matches. So these are actually private foundations that may be invite only or may not have an active grant opportunity but because of what you've told us we're able to essentially look at their funding history and try to potentially identify new relationships that might be good fits for you. And so in this situation, what you're gonna wanna do is you're gonna wanna go through this after you've exhausted your opportunity matches because these will tell you some of the folks that you might wanna build relationships with over the next six to 12 months. So these are the folks who they may or may not be open to opportunities but they are definitely good to kind of put on your radar in terms of, in terms of potentially starting to establish some relationships. So what's gonna happen either way is every single week instrumental is gonna be updating your opportunity matches whenever there is a situation where you have new good fit funders. So you'll see here I've got this one project for literacy program but I could create a second project for just my math initiatives and another one for my science initiatives and essentially have three different projects and searches going for different initiatives. And that's what's really cool about instrumentals as opposed to any other tool out there. I'm able to concurrently run multiple searches and have it all done for me so that it's organized in one workspace. And when I do that, what I get to is I get this case where I now have a tracker. And so once I've saved opportunities everything will go into this tracker. And the reason why this is powerful is because in the case where you're ready where you're actually ready to start working on it I can do things like writing notes for myself or for a teammate, I can change the status. So pretty much if you have used any form of a CRM or you're using a Google Excel tracker, things like that all of this is consolidated with instrumental. And you're also able to create tasks and store documents in the same place too. So as I start to move along in this process I might start moving it to in progress when I start to do that start to put my amount requested and everything gets stored in the same place. I can also add tasks for myself or for a teammate. And so in the case where I wanna do that I can do so. And so I might be able to do something where it's like review at meeting, deadline, Friday. I'm gonna get a notification for that one that is happening. And then if I wanna upload my final proposals I can also upload them all here in the document section. In the case where I have some local, regional or national opportunities that I often have to renew all I have to do is click the more options button and then click the duplicate button and then start setting it up for the next year. So why is this powerful is because everything is organized in one place. So you see everything across the spectrum in one place as opposed to having to go to 10 different folders to try to find everything that you're looking for. So after a while, what your project will look like is something like this in which you have a ton of really interesting projects here you can see in this other account of mine I've got tons of different projects I've got air quality projects, environmental projects things like that. And I've essentially got these different trackers for each of these different initiatives. And what I can do is I can filter them down really quickly if I wanna just filter for the things that I have in researching, I can do that. And essentially everything I need is in one place. And this includes all these things where I've left a note for example, saying Julie can you take a look at this opportunity and so on. And in the case where I have an opportunity I wanna add that's already existing I can click the add new button and then either add it individually or I can upload many and go ahead and just download a template to essentially import all of my existing trackers into instrumental as well. The benefit of doing this is that once I do so once a week instrumental is gonna roll up all the tasks and all the deadlines I have coming up for me so that I never miss another deadline related to grants. Again, it's about creating a system for you in your grant process to actually be able to repeatedly apply for the next grant and the next opportunity. And that's exactly what this sort of factor is happening to. So the other thing that you can do is you can go ahead and you can download a report. And in the case where you wanna generate a report for a particular initiative, you can do that and you can select the different ranges. You won't be able to do it on your account since you are on free accounts for now but all you need to know is that you do have the ability to have PDFs and CSVs ready to download that are customized to whatever it is that you need to look at for your team meeting. So that's what's really useful in terms of that side of things. But the last thing I'll go over in the context of this is also look up a funder or grant opportunity by name. So what I like to tell folks to do here is look up an organization similar to yours so that you can identify other good fit funders. So I can look for things like tutoring and then from here start to go through past recipient profiles because if I go into their recipient profile it will show me who has previously given to them. Did you have something to say, Carolyn? Oh, I was just gonna say, well, we're kind of full power and I wondered if that link you provided could keep that anybody who sees it forward maybe for a little while to attach it. I can tell Eli to attach and let people play. Yeah, absolutely. So what's gonna happen is in my presentation I've got another, I've got the link in the slides that you like to use and then they can definitely go from there. I've got about two more minutes. I can go ahead and start wrapping things up from here. So if that sounds good, I can take it away from there. So, awesome. So for learning takeaways, there are really three key learning takeaways. The first one is grants are a great way to diversify your funding. So in case it hasn't been clear to you yet, what you can find are tons of different funding uses for your grants. The second thing is you can follow the five steps we reviewed when it comes to preparing for grants. And then the third thing is you can use the instrumental to turbocharge your grants and feel free to join us for more free grant trainings. In the case where you wanna follow up with me, my email is will at instrumental.com. Our website is www.instrumental.com. If you wanna save $50 off your first month, there's code that I've created for this workshop. It's TS-Texas50. And so you'll wanna use that in the case where you do decide to sign up. You'll have two weeks to continue to play around with your account though from today. We are giving away a freebie like I promised. All you need to do is in the chat, I have a feedback form that is useful for me just to continue to make this presentation better and better. And so if you go ahead and click that link, I will put that in the Zoom chat. Now, essentially what's gonna happen is you can give me some feedback for this workshop and then you'll be redirected to get this freebie. This is the ultimate go versus no-go grant evaluation or key tool. This is about 40 pages of content that essentially goes over the 16 questions in a step-by-step fashion. So you can download it, print it and use it to follow along in your own opportunities. And then the last thing is in the case where you want another freebie, I've got the 10 best lessons from 10 grant writing experts. This is 28 pages featuring some of the best-selling authors we've featured in our grant workshop series, such as Dr. Bev Browning and Meredith Noble. It summarizes more than 10 hours worth of educational content and stills just like the five best minutes from each of these hours and essentially gives it to you in an succinct way. And so if you wanna get that, all you need to do is save three grants from your tracker of the instrumental account you created today. Take a screenshot and let me know me at will at instrumental.com and I'll send you that freebie. I'll send you the email me at. Yay, that was amazing. That was a great presentation. Very tired. It made me want it on there right away. I'm not ready quite yet, but I definitely want it so. I wonder if anybody has an answer in the chat there or you've given so you'll share the slides and we'll get the recording and kind of point people to that, to these funds that follow up. Yep, slides will be shared with you via email that we can send you to folks. Marilyn asked the question of how much is instrumental monthly. We start at 149 a month on the annual 162 a month on the monthly and we also have a plus plan. The plus plan essentially gives you some more detailed insights and you can access all of that in your instrumental account when you go to instrumental.com slash pricing. That's also a public page too. So in the case where you didn't get an account during today's workshop, you can also check that out on our website. Great. Thank you. That was great. It's like real people struggle so much in the nonprofit sector with finding the right funds, spending all the time and the right, and it just really helps you organize your thoughts. So thank you very much. Of course. Awesome. Well, thanks so much for having me. It's been great to be on this. And yeah, also follow us via email with the slides and you can go to some folks. Yeah, with the slides and you can go to some folks. Okay, great. And do I?