 Welcome everyone. Welcome to our webinar today, Get to Know GrantStation. I'm Susan Hope-Bart here at TechSoup, and I'm going to be your host today. Before I turn it over to Jeremy and Sarah at GrantStation, I'd just like to navigate through our platform that we use to deliver our webinars. It's called ReadyTalk. What you are seeing on your screen right now is a slide about using ReadyTalk. And on the far left there should be a column that is your chat box. You've probably seen a few chats from me already as the chairperson just letting you know that if you have any audio problems you can use a phone or Skype to call in. On the chat box is there for you to ask your questions. You don't need to raise your hand. You can simply chat your questions in. Jeremy, Sarah, and I are monitoring the chat box, and we will queue up your questions for responses during our question and answer session. Also if you have any tech problems you can't hear, you've tried calling in, or you have a problem viewing the slides, or the live screen sharing, let us know in that particular chat box. And then we can work with you to help you on the tech end. If you lose your Internet connection you can reconnect using the link emailed to you. All the lines are muted so we can get a good clear recording. We do post this recording on our archives. The webinar will be available on our TechSoup website in a few days, www.techsoup.com, community, events, webinars, or on our YouTube site. You will receive an email with the very short slideshow. Mostly this is going to be live screen sharing where Jeremy and Sarah will take you to the GrantStation website and show you the amazing things that GrantStation can do for your organization. But you will get this PowerPoint and a link to the recording. You can also tweet using our hashtag T.S. Webinars. A brief introduction to Jeremy and Sarah from GrantStation. They do all of our GrantStation tours where they navigate through the platform and show you the many features. And there's actually a new site so they're going to be showing us all the new features which is super exciting. And I'm here with TechSoup on the Training and Education Manager. And just to get a sense from where you're from, right now I am joining from San Francisco, California. And Sarah is joining from Alaska. And I believe Jeremy, you are too? I am. We're just in slightly different locations around the Fairbanks area. Great, great. Thanks. So tell us everybody on the webinar right now, chat in. So check your fastest fingers. Let us know where you're joining us from, city, state, or country that you're joining us from. And as you do that, I'm going to tell you about the special that we have. It's the GrantStation special offer that we run. It's May 16th through 17th. And what it is is this gives you the opportunity to get a discounted one year membership for only $99. That's $200 less than the regular discounted fee that we have at TechSoup, and $600 less than retail. Now the caveat is everybody is that you want to wait until May 16th and 17th to place this order. So to put it in your cart and then check out to get the discounted offer. And you can go to http://info.techsoup.org slash GrantStation. And I will chat that out to everyone so you can log into that. And you can put it in your email and you'll get a reminder when the promo goes live. So without any further ado, I do wish to turn this over to Jeremy and Sarah, and I know you're going to enjoy this as much as I have during the past GrantStation tours. Jeremy and Sarah, it's all yours. Take it away. Well thank you so much Susan. This is Sarah Kennedy. And I want to welcome everyone to the new GrantStation.com. You'll be glad to know we still have the same great content and the same high quality listings of GrantMakers. However, with the new system, your searches will be more responsive so you'll get results just seconds after you click the criteria. We'll show you how this new system works in just a few minutes. And I know you already answered your city and state into the chat box, but if you do it one more time some of you with just a few keywords that describe your organization's mission, we'll show you how easy it is to use GrantStation as your research tool. In the meantime, we have a new look on our home page which highlights specific terms of interest for you each week. And during this time together that we have today, we want to show you how you can do all your research on GrantStation from identifying the right funders to building a grant seeking strategy that you and other members of your organization can use in the coming year. Now for those of you who are TechSoup members who don't know when your expiration date is on your membership, you can log in to GrantStation and it'll tell you right after you log in it will give you your account information. Jeremy's going to show you how to do this. But for right now, I'm going to turn this over to Jeremy Smith and he's going to tell you a whole lot more. I am. I'm going to tell you so much you won't even know what to do with yourself. My name is Jeremy Smith. I'm GrantStation's Communications Technology Director. And what I focus on here at GrantStation is making sure our website works and it's efficient and it's really helpful when you're trying to do all of your grant research for your organization or for your specific project. Now, GrantStation itself is a set of tools and resources that helps organizations identify and secure grant dollars. GrantStation itself is a publishing company. Research and writing are our skill sets and we really pride ourselves in publishing current and forward-looking information about grant makers. Now all the grant maker profiles on GrantStation, both government and private, are for lack of a better description what we call in the game. Now that means these profiles reflect grant makers who are actively accepting requests or letters of inquiry from a variety of nonprofits. Now you may have used some other services where you do your research, you get hundreds of returns, leaving you with a really long list of potential funders that you have to screen without really knowing how relevant they are to your specific needs. Our job at GrantStation is to pre-screen grant makers. So the time that you spend researching generates a list of grant makers that may truly accept a request to fund your organization's program or project. So really think of GrantStation as your back room research team, pre-screening funders, so we're feeding you the most relevant funders for your program or project. Now for those of you joining us today who are not yet members or considering a membership, you can actually preview the number of results in the charitable giving databases prior to login. This is a new feature at GrantStation. And I'll show you more about how to do this in just a second, so I'm going to move around a little quickly right now. But if we simply go into our U.S. charitable, and again I'm not logged in yet, and if I simply click on National Grant Makers who give across all the states, I can quickly see how many results there are. There are 914 results listed right here. And now I can't see them until I log in, but I can also add further things, further criteria for instance. Let's say I'm based in California. I saw many people were in California taking today's tour. If I click California, instantly what happens, you see how many results we can now look through. Right now we have a listing of all the funders who give across the U.S. and specifically within California. What if I'm also working in New York as well? Well I simply click New York, and now that's added to my search criteria and you see my results keep expanding. So this is a really quick way. Without even being a member or logging into GrantStation, you can simply see how many results are available. But it's not just where you're located geographically. There's also all the further ways you can search by specific areas of interest, the target population, what type of support you're looking for, the type of grant maker, or even where the grant maker is located. And we'll talk more about how to do more in-depth searches. But you can basically do searches without seeing results without being a member of GrantStation. This is a great way for you to see if GrantStation is the right product for you without having to spend your money. And if it looks like you're getting results for the right amount for your specific needs, then by all means, take advantage of this very, very special promotion that we have going on. Now in addition, you can also preview all of our tutorials as well. If you go over to our Help section, and then you click on Tours, you can actually see the different tours we have available, which include an overview tour that cover everything, and then two specific focus tours, one that covers U.S. Charitable Giving Database that we'll spend time in today, as well as our Canadian Charitable Database and our Canadian Government Listings. We have quite a few features here at GrantStation, and these tours are a great way to go at your own speed and see how they work for you. And for those of you who are current members of GrantStation, you can quickly log into the website right over here by clicking on Login, and then you can enter in your specific login information. Now this is also where you can log in to see when your subscription expires. So once you've logged in, you can actually go ahead and click on My Profile, and it will tell you when your specific subscription or your membership actually expires. And mine is good until 2018, but what you can also do with any purchase you make for TechSoup, this will actually add a year to your existing membership. So if you already are a member, you can quickly just add a year to whenever your current year ends. So you're not going to lose anything. You'll just gain an extra year from the end of your current membership. So right now I'm going to go ahead and back up a little bit. And since Sarah had everybody go ahead and put in some specific information about their projects and what their specific focus is at their organization, let's do one really quick sample search. Okay, sounds good. Donald is looking for support for music in Oregon. In Oregon, perfect. This is actually going to let me show you a couple cool things. And we have many searches we're going to show today. But first of all, under Geographic Scope, we're going to go ahead and choose National Grantmakers and also click on Oregon as well. Then we're going to go ahead and once it's updated we can see we have 984 results that we can go through. We're going to slide on down now to our area of interest. And I'm not exactly sure what music would fall under. I'm betting it's under Arts, Culture, and Humanities. And I'll tell you why that's important. So right here we have Music. I'm going to go ahead and click on that one. And then see we now have 80 specific results that popped up. This is probably my favorite feature of the new website that we have. You can actually change the number that show on a given page. So you can actually see 50 results, or 100 results, or 20 results all on one page. So you can quickly go through everything that's shown up that fits your specific need and criteria. Now we will spill in a little bit more time doing more searches later on, but we have a lot we want to go ahead and cover in today's site. But I'm just showing you how easy it is to see what's available. Now besides the rich grant information that we have on our website, we also published two specific newsletters which highlight various upcoming funding opportunities. You can find both of them under the Public Resources section, and that's the GrantStation Insider and the GrantStation International Insider. The GrantStation Insider is a weekly newsletter that focuses on 10 distinct opportunities for U.S. nonprofit organizations. And we also have the monthly GrantStation International Insider. This feature is 16 international funding opportunities including a number of opportunities for Canadian neighbors. And all of the listings that are in these newsletters are also all listed in our databases as well. So if it's in the newsletter, you can definitely find that in our database. Now all these newsletters are posted, as I mentioned, under the Public Resources section of our website. You'll also find links to Trend Track here, Pathfinder, and our online education section here as well. Now I'll come back to these areas a little bit later in the tour and explore these resources more. Now near the top of the page are links to all of our key features. And GrantStation has always had a certain way we're set up. And it's just an easy way to quickly understand where you are and what you need to do. We've basically divided up into three main sections. We have Find, Build, and Write. Now under our Find section, it will open up to the Search section where all the databases are located. And when you click on, for instance, Build Strategy which is right next to it, you'll access tools that will help you build a solid grant seeking strategy. And then when you go ahead and click on Write Proposals, this is where you'll find step-by-step tutorials that you can use to write compelling grant proposals. Now if we go ahead and scroll down, here on our front page, we can actually come across our online education section. And this is the area that Sarah is pretty much, she knows this area forward and backward. Do you want to quickly mention what our online education section is for, Sarah? Sure. This is open to the public as well as GrantStation members. And it's fee-based for everyone. But we have some excellent opportunities. You can take it as an individual or you can take these webinars as a group from two to ten people who are in different locations and on different devices. So you don't even have to be in one room to take it. And our presenters, excuse me, are from all over the country with different areas of expertise in grantsmanship. So this change is constantly, so if you're interested in your career development and you want some more information on writing grants or all different aspects of grant writing, you might want to check this out from time to time. So I'm going to scroll a little bit further down on our page. And for people who have been to GrantStation before, things have changed a little bit. We have a couple cool little interactive slides here, which I'm going to slowly let them go ahead and register so you can see what they do. Sort of our GWIS feature we have on the front page of our website. We also have lots of great information here, but for our tour we're going to focus in on specific funding alerts. So if we scroll down on our front page, we can go to our Funding Alerts section. Now these alerts in our Funding Alerts section change weekly, and as with all of our announcements here at GrantStation, this information is carefully curated, providing you with the most current information about specific grant opportunities. So we'll go ahead and click on this National Funding Alert right here for Project Learning Tree. Now all of our database profiles are written in a narrative format. This really allows us to provide you with detailed information about the grant makers and their specific program. So here's a grant makers profile over here on the left-hand side. This includes the specific areas of interest and any application procedures. Now on the right-hand side, you'll see the following information about the grant maker. You'll see their website link right here at the very top, where they give, in this case their geographic scope is within the USA, any specific content information along with the grant maker information below that, any financial information, application information. And right down here at the very bottom, we have the date when it was last updated. Now when we create and update these records, and we're constantly going through and modifying, removing, and adding records, we gather as much information as we can from the web, from their IRS 990 form, and from other databases. And then our researcher drafts a profile which we send directly to the grant maker for their review. The question that we ask the grant maker when they review their record is not just is this information correct, but also are we capturing not only what they will fund now, but what they plan to fund in the next year? And we do this because although it's interesting to know what they've funded in the past, it's much more helpful to know what they will fund today, tomorrow, and into the future. In short, the real question is will they consider funding your organization right now? The grant maker reviews this profile, they often make changes, and then send it back to us. We do a final edit, and then we publish it in our database. So this process results in grant maker profiles that are unlike anything else to read on the web, not even on their own website. Our researchers focus on publishing quality information that will make your job easier, hence the idea of thinking of GrantStation as your Backroom Research Team. Now before we get into our searches, I just want to explain our main sections in a little bit greater detail and show you how they can aid you in your search for funding. Now I quickly went over them before, but I'm just going to go in a little bit more depth right now. In our Build Strategy section, we have an interactive tool called Grants 2020. Now this can provide a clear picture of where your organization's grant program is today, and more importantly, how it needs to grow in the next several years. In addition, GrantSeeking Calendar and Creating Time, these are tutorials that focus on how to design and develop GrantSeeking strategies, and they really work hand-in-hand when creating a strategy that works for you and your organization. And we'll come back later to GrantSeeking Calendar in today's tour. Under the Write Proposals section, you can find tools that help you write and submit compelling letters of inquiry, or even a full grant proposal. We have Getting Started. This outlines all the documentation you should have at your fingertips before you begin writing grant requests. We also have a short tutorial on writing a letter of inquiry. This is really helpful when trying to consider what should and should not be included when you're putting together an LOI. And we also have the full proposal. I'm going to go ahead and click on that one right now. This is a step-by-step approach to writing a grant, which includes downloadable samples of award-winning grant proposals followed by a series of articles for editing and revision your full proposals. Now don't underestimate the value of reviewing these award-winning grant proposals that we have. And if we go ahead and scroll down here on the full grant proposal, you can see all the parts of this particular article that we have. As I mentioned earlier, we also have downloadable samples of award-winning proposals. If you click on award-winning proposals and then you click on samples of award-winning grant proposals, these are all downloadable grant proposals that we've collected over the years. This is a really valuable thing to have because you'll get tons of ideas on how to present your own case for support by reviewing these truly well-developed examples. And just a side note, each year we run a contest for the best-written grant proposals. Now all these contestants are then judged by panel organized by Grant's Professional Association and the award winners are then used as examples on Grant's Station. So at this point, I think we should conduct a few thorough searches that really show how useful our site is for your grant research needs. So the big question that many people ask us is how do you go about it to find the best grant makers to approach? Or how do you even create a grant seeking strategy for that matter? So first, here are a couple scenarios for today. We're seeking funding for animal welfare in the state of Minnesota, and we also want to start an after-school program which deals with obesity and youth. So we recommend that you begin by doing two specific types of research, primary and secondary research, and we'll explain what each of them is and how to do them. Once you've gone through both of these research steps, you'll really have the foundation for your grant seeking strategy. So prior to preparing your searches, we recommend clicking on Find Grant Makers and then looking at our preparation section. We can go ahead and click on Overview right now. Within this section, you will find the project description worksheet as well as our search terms. Now using the project description worksheet which is a word-based download, this will help you organize your approach, flesh out your budget, and really serve as a solid foundation for your grant seeking strategy. This is a document that you can save, and then you can add pertinent information related to your search, and this can then be handed off to other members of your team for further research or stored and referenced at a later date. Now we also encourage our members to familiarize themselves with our search terms. I'll go ahead and click on that right now. The search terms, this is the key terminology used on our website, and this really serves as a great guide when doing your keyword research. To use this area, you would Ctrl-F or Command-F on your keyboard and it pops up a search box, and then you go ahead and enter in a specific keyword to see which categories you want to check when you're searching. Earlier I was trying to find music, so if I type in music for instance, I can see that music itself, which includes specific topics, commissioning new work, educational programs, and production support is specifically under the heading of Arts, Culture, and Humanities. I would make a note of this on my project description worksheet so I'd know what to search in the future. So using our earlier example of Animal Welfare, let's go ahead and type that in quickly, and it will actually jump to the first instance of Animal, but since I'm focusing on Animal Welfare, you can see that Animal Welfare has its very own heading under Environment and Animals. So I'd make a note of this on my project description worksheet. And the reason I do this is these are the actual keywords, these are the actual terms that the grant makers use. Sometimes an organization uses different words from the grant maker. What this search term section does, it allows you to find the exact same terms, which will make your searches much, much more fruitful. So let's go ahead and begin our grant search, also known as primary research, by moving into our US state government section. I'm going to go ahead and click back to top. And then if I click search here, it'll give me a listing of all the different areas I can search through. So we're going to go ahead and start off, as I mentioned, in our US state government section. And again, looking at our scenario, we're based in Minnesota, so we'll go ahead and click on Minnesota. Now GrantStation offers listings of US federal and state funded agencies, state funded agencies, and state departments for each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia that offer financial and technical assistance programs. Now all the links that you see here will take you directly to the agency or department pages, which deal specifically with funding. Now for the next step in our primary research, we can look at what's offered by the US government in our US federal section. So if I go ahead and click back, and click on US federal, I can search through federal grants and loans. Now you can search through this section using eligible applicants, funding agencies, areas of interest, funding opportunity number, and CFDA number, along by searching by specific keywords. Now the funding options available within the US state and federal government sections are important information to collect. Because when you apply to private funders, you can say that you've done your federal and state research. And in case you don't find any options, you can also say at this time there are no federal programs that can help us with our need. That way the private funder knows that you've done your homework, that speaks to your credibility as an organization, and that private funding is the only option for now. So once you've completed your federal research, you can now move on to the US charitable database. So I'm going to go ahead and close these windows that open. We're going to click on US charitable at this point. Now this particular database which I showed you earlier lists thousands of funder profiles including independent, family, community, and corporate foundations, corporate giving programs, faith-based grant makers, and really any association with a grant making program. Now all these profiles are searchable by geographic scope, area of interest, type of support, name, and by keywords. Now in the content area, which is right here in the middle, you'll find a handy guide to help you through the search process. Now on the right-hand side is the navigation area. This is where you enter in your specific criteria. Now under geographic scope, you can choose to search for global grant makers giving to US-based organizations, but for now let's choose national grant makers. And then let's click on Minnesota from the drop-down menu. So once I click on national, it'll immediately update the number of options for me. And then from selecting my state grant maker, I'm going to choose Minnesota. Now you'll notice how each criteria is listed right here at the top as we make our selection. And with each new selection, the results are instantly displayed. We also want to point out that you can click on and off each option. This is so you can be more creative and thoughtful in your searches. As each new criteria is added or subtracted, it will broaden or narrow the funding opportunities being displayed. So this initial process of choosing our geographic scope allows us to cast our net as wide as possible, combining national opportunities with state or even region-based ones to really see just how broad our grant universe is. Now once we start selecting other criteria, our results will begin to narrow to funding opportunities that are a perfect fit for our needs. And what's that ready now to select our area of interest, which we researched earlier and I'm assuming made a note on our project description worksheet and that's under environment and animals and animal welfare. So if I go down to area of interest and I go down to environment and animals and I go ahead and check the box animal welfare. So right now you can see at the very top I have 53 results available. So let's add another criteria at this point. This time it's going to be a specific type of support and we're going to go ahead and choose under type of support. We'll simply go for general operating support. So now we're down to 22 specific results. And let's go ahead and follow this with a change again but only in the support type. So if we go down to type of support and we uncheck general operating support it will update automatically. We'll scroll down again and under type of support we're going to choose, excuse me, a specific type of support in this case equipment. So we're looking for equipment donations. So those 22 results have now dropped to 13 specific results. Now if you want to narrow this a bit more we can go ahead and remove national from the geographic search area by clicking the minus button right here. And then we can focus on funders who specifically give just a Minnesota. I'd really recommend this route just to get the strongest potential funders up front. So under our current search criteria if we look just within Minnesota with a specific area of interest of animal welfare a specific type of support of equipment we have five specific results. I also like to point out here near the bottom of the page we have a keyword search as well. Now this is a really powerful way to narrow your searches. We really suggest that you exercise caution in this area. You do not want to narrow your searches down too much because remember the keywords you enter are not necessarily the words that the funder uses. For example if we add rescue here we'll go ahead and type that in and hit click on submit. It's narrowing results down to one specific result. Let's go ahead and remove this. As you can see keyword is right here. We can click the little check box next to it which removes rescue. And now we're back up to five specific results. Now as I mentioned earlier if your organization is working in a few different states you also have the option of selecting another state to broaden your search at any point in the search process. This is a big change from our previous site. So if we scroll down here to our state section let's say that our animal welfare organization is working in a tri-state area Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa. So we'll go ahead and click on Iowa at this point and it will update and increase our results from five to ten. And we're going to go ahead and add in another one, in this case Wisconsin. And now that's increased our results from 10 specific results to 12 results. Now you're also going to want to search for funders that might be a bit outside the box. For example in Minnesota you might want to research some vendors such as whomever you bank with or the local or regional utility company. But at this point let's turn to our second search that I have an after school program that educates students regarding obesity. So we'll clear out all these sections, click clear all, and start anew. We can go ahead and start with national grant makers to give across all the states. And we could add a specific state if necessary just to broaden our search as much as possible. And I saw a couple of people here who were in Kansas so I will go ahead and use Kansas as our example. So looking at my keyword research I did earlier I know that I have two good options for my specific scenario. Again my scenario is for an obesity and healthy eating nutrition after school program. So if I go down to our types of support or actually areas of interest and I go ahead and take a look at our health and wellness category. There are two specific options here. I have healthy eating nutrition and healthy lifestyles and obesity prevention. Now if I select two of them it will really narrow my results. So I'll just select one for now and I'll click on healthy lifestyles and obesity prevention. So right now we're looking at 44 specific results. Let's add in my specific target population. Again it's an after school program so if I go into my target population I can choose just children and youth. Of course this area is really powerful as well. You can focus on just specific populations such as minorities, seniors, veterans, etc. But for our search this time we'll click on children and youth. And now we're looking at 31 total results. We can now narrow this down by searching only within a specific state. In this case it's going to be Kansas. So drop your results to 17. And then of course we can see all of them on one page by clicking on that drop down box. This is an excellent number that we can quickly look through and see if the profiles are a match to our specific mission or project. And again as I mentioned you can start your searches in any order and add or subtract the criteria to refine your search results. Now in addition to these US based grant maker listings we also have three other unique areas to search through, our international and Canadian charitable databases along with our Canadian government section. You can simply find them from right up here. Clicking on our international charitable link here this database contains grant listings that are beneficial to organizations working outside the US. Let's say for instance we're focusing on addressing the issue of hunger in Kenya. So we'll simply start with grant makers who focus on developing countries. Oh sorry, not developing countries. We're actually going to click the one right below that. Again it's a new site. I'm learning a little bit here and there. Clicking on continental grant makers who have given specific continents. Again we're focusing on Kenya which is in Africa. So I click on Africa. Then I can add a national grant maker who gives specifically within Kenya which is again my focus. So we're looking at 205 results at this point and you can see our current search criteria is within Africa and Kenya. Then we can add in a specific search term or keyword. In this case it is hunger. When we click submit we'll see the results narrow down to 16. And we can also see the geographic scope of each of these grant makers as well. I'm also going to show you quickly our Canadian Charitable Database. This has profiles of grant makers who provide support specifically within Canada. So let's say we're working on a health related project in British Columbia. Again we'll click on national grant makers who give across all provinces. Then we can narrow that down to a specific province. In this case it's British Columbia. And again our focus is going to be on health or health related project. So we'll simply enter in health at this point and click submit. So we're looking at 232 results. We can always narrow this by focusing only on organizations that give specifically within British Columbia. By clicking the little box next to Canada we can narrow that down to 89 results. We can further narrow this down by adding more search criteria. Now in addition we also have listings in our Canadian government section for national and provincial funded agencies provincial funded agencies, and provincial departments for each of the provinces and territories of Canada that offer financial and technical assistance programs. So once you've done all this primary research you'll really have an extensive list of potential funding sources. As I stated earlier in the build strategy section of GrantStation we have a step-by-step tutorial called creating a grant seeking calendar which is just grant seeking calendar shortened right here. So really help you with your next steps which we refer to as secondary research. At this point Sarah has some information to share. Thanks Jeremy. So in this section I'm going to show you the decision matrix. And this is a tool to build a grant seeking calendar. The decision matrix will help you establish an annual grant seeking calendar that will keep your grant seeking focused on those programs and projects that need the funds. So Jeremy showed you earlier how you fill out the project description worksheet and you identify the funders. Well now you're going to want to establish basic criteria for judging whether a grant opportunity is worth your organization's investment of time and energy. This is a real true time saver here. So say that you have 15 identified 15 different funders whether they're federal, state or private or international. And now you're going to start doing your secondary research. So what you want to do is create this decision matrix and we've given you a real good start here. It's not set in concrete. You can add your own criteria as well for your organization. But what you're going to want to do, this matrix, this will establish a set of criteria. It's going to be rows and each are assigned a weight in the column and when you apply this it will influence your decision on whether to add this particular grant maker to your grants calendar. So the numbers go from 1 to 5 for positive and negative 1 to negative 5 for negative. So as you go through this different criteria you're going to assign a number. Then scroll down just a little bit more Jeremy because it's hard to show this all on one screen. You're going to have a number. You're going to use 34 for right now. So if you take each funder and you come up with a number, the ones that score 34 are lower for whatever reason. Set them aside and you can come back to that later whether it's deadlines or not enough funds or for whatever reason. And the ones with the score of 35 and above you can now start even doing more secondary research but you can put it into a calendar form. And this may seem complicated but it's not because when you have a membership to GrantStation we're going to walk you through all these steps. So Jeremy let's show them what a grant seeking calendar would look like. So say I found you know 10 out of those 15 that look good. You can now list that grant maker, the amount you're going to request, and the deadline. And you start developing a grant strategy for your organization. You can share this strategy with your co-workers, with your executive director, with your board of directors. And it's a way for you to go forward knowing full well that you are still in the vetting process of vetting these funders. And one of the really nice things about this is if someone comes to you and says, oh I have this great funding opportunity, we should apply for it. You now have a tool that you can use that decision matrix. You can just say I'm going to run it through the matrix and then you're going to vet that funding opportunity and see if it does fit into your overall strategy. So we have all those five different steps of how to develop that decision matrix and how to create that grant seeking calendar. But even with this you're not done with your secondary research. So we've got all these tools on the website that you can use for your additional research. One of them is the IRS Form 990. Now, GuideStar posts the IRS Form 990. That is a free service to anyone. All you need to do is create a username and password to access GuideStar. We have a direct link into here so that when you identify a funder and you want to look up their 990, you can do so right from the GrantStation website. We also have questions that you might want to ask the funder, whether you ask them via email or you want to call them. Our CEO, Cynthia Adams, has written a guide of questions that are good questions that you can ask funders when you are thinking about applying to either a letter of inquiry or a full proposal to be submitted. So this is where you want to do all your additional research to continuing to vet those funders. And then we still have a few more parts of the website we want to show you in this time together. We have a very short amount of time so we're kind of trying to squeeze it all into one to give you a taste of what GrantStation can do for you. So Jeremy, let's take them up to those resources they can access in the public resource area. Oh, not a problem, Sarah. So as I mentioned earlier, we have two specific areas here. We have TrendTrack which is our blog section that we have as well as Pathfinder. And as I mentioned earlier, if you're interested in learning more about developing yourself in the Grant's area, you can use our Pathfinder website. And this is really developed and designed to help you develop your career path as a Grant's professional. You can browse through our library of resources which have focuses on Grant research, writing, and management, as well as strategic planning. We have an interactive Find Your Path tool which is really fun to use to really give yourself some customized curriculum for your learning plan. And in addition, we're also really interested in what's happening in the world, in the philanthropic world specifically. So under public resources, you can also find a direct link to our TrendTrack website. And this is where you can find information including our reports under state of Grant seeking, our blog entries which go up every week under GS Insights, and of course our podcast featuring yours truly which allows us to cover various trends in philanthropy as well as specific grant makers to address various issues. Now the most important thing to remember though is that when you're doing a search for funding for any kind of project, it's important to have a Grant strategy, a strategic approach using primary and secondary research, and Grant station's tools that I've shown you today really allows you to apply your time where it's most effective and efficient in your search for funding. So at this point, we have some time left I believe and I didn't know if we wanted to go ahead and deal with some questions. We do Jeremy. So I have a couple of questions I flagged that I know is probably on a number of people's mind. Stacey asked, how many people can access the service from one organization? I have a remote board member who helps with grant writing and searching. Can they access the database and information? Do you want me to feel that one Jeremy? Sarah you are the most qualified to feel that question. Okay. Well under our terms of agreement, our licensing agreement, it states one username and password per membership. However, we do understand that you might want to share this, your login credentials with another in your organization. And that's okay with us. You can share it with one other in your organization. However, if you're interested in multiple memberships and logins, you would just need to contact us directly for more information on that. So we have another good question here Jeremy. Hang on, we've got so many questions coming in. Oh sure. So Anne asked, what are the total number of grant, what are the total number of grantors that are in the GrantStation database and how does this compare to the number of funders in the Foundation Center's database? Well this is a question that comes up often and it's one of those apples-to-oranges comparisons. The big difference, and I mentioned this earlier in the tour, GrantStation only lists grant-making organizations that are accepting unsolicited requests or letters of inquiry. And every single grant-maker is actively accepting them. Whereas Foundation Center or any other service will have listings that go back, you know, tens or decades, tens of years, tens of years which is a decade, that could go back decades or maybe five to ten years. They may no longer be offering grants for that matter. Everything you find on GrantStation is actively accepting requests. So everything that you find here is what we call in the game. So it's really an apples-to-oranges comparison. And the number that we have fluctuates on a regular basis. Now last full count I had was roughly 10,000, but then that number changed. Within two days that number was then 12,000. Then the next day it dropped down to 9,000 because everything is constantly changing in our database which is why it's really imperative when you're doing your searches to save your search criteria and repeat the search. If you're doing your research now and you're going to apply in three months, that's not the best approach. Your best approach is to go ahead and do your research, find the grant-makers you want to apply for, and then go forward with them because things change very quickly especially in today's climate. So it's really important that you find the grant-maker who will accept your information and will fund your need today as opposed to spend your time chasing a grant-maker who may no longer even be offering money. Which brings me to a question that a number of folks asked Jeremy. They asked the difference between the Foundation Center and GrantStation. And Jeremy just highlighted the difference in that we list only those funders who are currently requesting proposals or letters of inquiry. You know, we also include the federal deadlines as well as state funding opportunity so you can do all your research in one place. It's imperative that you do your federal and state research as Jeremy mentioned earlier because you can state that when you then go to the private funder that you have indeed done your due diligence in your research. So Jeremy Karen asked, and I'm going to kind of thumbnail this, if we know in advance we're looking for fundings to assist with operational costs for an organization, go back down to the criteria we have listed because we do have where you can search for different kinds of support. So let's just talk about that for a minute because this is really powerful. So there it is, types of support. So if you're looking for those operations costs, you're looking for general operating support, you can click that. However, we have capacity building funds. So if you're looking for capacity building funders, you have that as well. If you're looking for just equipment and you really would like to isolate these, this is the perfect opportunity. You just click on equipment and it pulls up those funders who are supporting with equipment. There are matching funders, the matching grants program, there's all different types of support. So this column on the right where you've got all these different things that you can collect, you've got targeted populations if you're working with the aging or you're working with children. And Jeremy, I know we have a lot of organizations here and they've asked some questions so I'm just going to sum it up. We do have religious types of support. We do have where you can look up religious-based funders. You do have, oh it's not in types of support, it's in one of the other ones. Sorry, it's right here under type of grant record. There you are. You can click on religious. Now we don't always recommend searching if you're a faith-based organization under religious because there may be a lot of other opportunities there if you are serving the public such as I like to use the example of Habitat for Humanity which is a faith-based organization but they get their funding from, they get their funding from the federal government, from the state government and from private funders. So while you definitely want to look in there you also want to not check that box say if you're a food bank or building housing or doing anything in the social service area. So with that Jeremy I think we pretty much covered most of what folks are interested in. Susan are you there? I am. Thank you so much. Wow. Thank you for taking the time to answer all of those questions. And if you do see any more that pop in that you wish to answer there is still time. And while you're doing that I'm just going to take us through just a couple of slides and if we need to go back to the Grand Station site we can do that. But I wanted to ask everyone on this webinar to share with us one thing that you learned today or one thing that you might try to implement. So take a minute to do that and also as a quick reminder we do ask for your feedback at the end of this event for most of you as soon as you X out there will be a pop-up that comes up with a survey. We do ask that you complete the survey. This helps us know if we've met your expectations. And also you can provide us with corrective feedback and suggestions as to how we can improve our webinars both the content and the delivery. A couple of quick reminders. Again the special offer is happening on May 16th and 17th. If you go to info.techsoup.org slash Grand Station you can go ahead and plug in your email address and you will actually receive a reminder when the offer goes live on the 16th. But we want you to make sure you take advantage of that either for renewal or if it's your first time getting a Grand Station order. A couple of other things. We do have online courses that you can access. We've got lots of free courses in TechSoup courses and that's techsoup.course.tc slash catalog. You can look at the courses that are available. We also have other upcoming webinars and events. Next week we've got copywriting for the web, today's best practices. You can register for that at any time. These are all free. On the 25th we have combating nonprofit burnout and managing tech and email overload. And then we have one at the end of this month's libraries as innovation hubs, community driven design. So before I say thank you to Sarah and Jeremy, I want to make sure that if there are any other questions you guys would like to address we have about 4 minutes to do that. Well I would like to just add a comment. They're going by so quickly. It's hard for me to identify the person who said it but they said at times it seems very complicated and watching this Grand Station tour it makes it seem possible. And so that's the whole idea. You can do this. It takes time and it takes thoughtfulness but you have a lot of tools at your disposal to identify those funders who align most closely with your organization's mission as well. And it's always our pleasure to share this with you. So we're grateful that we had the opportunity. Jeremy? Yeah, Sarah did, oh Sarah. I'm done. Actually I also wanted to mention specifically under right proposals I've seen a lot of questions about well how do I do this, how do I do that, what's the best way to do this. Right proposals getting started is an excellent guide and we only have so much time so we can't cover everything. But this is a 12 part article series written by our CEO that goes into everything you need to do about writing a proposal. What to collect, how to collect, what questions to ask, what's the best way to do it, and then has downloadable samples of the budget, the operating plan, the board of directors, what to do with the administration and staff. And in addition to that we also have I really can't stop saying how much I like this, it's the full grant proposal. And it breaks down every single aspect of that grant proposal and what you need to do, what you need to consider, and this is the nice thing, throughout the entire article how your relationship with the grant maker is important when you are writing the proposal because it's better to have some relationship even if it's a matter of just calling up someone and saying, hi, I'm so-and-so with X organization. I'm interested in applying for this particular grant. What can you tell me about your organization, etc., etc. Having just one, anything that separates you from every other 30 page proposal that comes on their desk is going to give you that leg up. And this is something that's covered in all of our articles that we have here on GrantStation that's available to you as a member. Great. Thank you both so much. A quick reminder to everyone that we do send out an email notifying you when the archive is available. We do update our GrantStation tours on our website so that you can view this exact tour that we've recorded today. It usually comes out in a few days. I'm going to try to produce this today so you guys can have access to the recording. And I see a couple questions came in about TechSoup courses, just not to confuse the two. Our TechSoup courses is something run by TechSoup here. And those courses, the majority of those are free. You just need to create an account to get in to access those. So I think at this point I want to thank Jeremy and Sarah. I've watched this tour probably four times. And each time it gets better, and I also feel more confident with the information I learn from Jeremy and Sarah. So I'm better able to both listen and answer questions when I'm able, when I'm not chatting out other things. So thank you both. And we are so privileged to have GrantStation as a partner and to offer this to our nonprofits. We hope you take advantage of the special coming up next week. And if you have any other questions, you can feel free to email us at webinars at TechSoup.org. And we can find the answer for you, or we can refer you to GrantStation. So thanks Jeremy and Sarah. And of course a special thanks to our sponsor of webinars, ReadyTalk. And most importantly, thank you to you who've spent an hour of your time with us. We know in nonprofit land an hour is a lot of time, and it is your most valuable asset. So thank you so much. That's it for today. We look forward to seeing you on our next webinar. Thanks so much. Bye-bye.