 whenever you're ready. Thank you so much, Mike. Hi, everyone, and welcome back. Thank you for joining us today. This is our fourth webinar for the Course Fundraising for Collections Care. Today's webinar is Making the Case Writing Successful Proposal. And it's so nice to see so many of you from all over. It looks like right now we have 106 folks logged in and that number is slowly creeping. Please feel free to continue to say hello in the chat box to the left. And throughout this webinar, please feel free to post your questions there as well. As Mike said, we'll hold on to them and ask them during breaks and at the end. If we aren't able to get to them all in this session, we'll make sure to hold on to them and get them answered offline. So as you guys know, this is just one course in our series, Caring for Yesterday's Treasures Today. Five courses have already been archived and are available for viewing. This series really would not have been possible without support from a lower Bush 21st century librarian grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. So we're extremely thankful to them. And we're also really fortunate to have learning times on board as well as Mike for this project for website and webinar support. As I just said, this is the fourth webinar in this five webinar course. And if you don't mind that, we'll meet one more time on Monday, October 7th at 2 p.m. Eastern. And then we're done. Like our other courses, you're more than welcome to earn a certificate of completion and a digital credential from Credly.com for participating. To do that, we just ask that you have already registered so we can email you. We ask that you watched all five webinars in the course and you should be receiving recordings. You're welcome to join us live. You're welcome to keep up with the course, with those recordings. And then finally to complete all five homework assignments no later than Monday, October 14th. As of yesterday, we had about 81 folks who had completed the homework assignment for our last webinar with Kelsey. And there wasn't a lot of turnaround time, so I'm still really pleased with that number. We asked you about your organization's membership program. And it did look like most of you had a program in place, but they did very quite a bit. But there were some of you that did not have a current membership plan in place. And they actually want to steal one of those responses. And I hope you don't mind, but I think it illustrates so well why a membership program can be so helpful. One of you had mentioned that you had personally joined the Museum of the Moving Image and about that membership you said we get wonderful benefits and feel good about supporting the institution. In addition to increasing our attendance, I also do feel that our membership has deepened our appreciation of their collections and helped them grow attendance as we frequently spread the word and invite friends to join us there. We feel likely to give a little more when we renew next year. And isn't that exactly what we all want to hear from our members? So just a really great example of the impact that a membership program can have. And we also ask you to do a little research on donor software and choose one that you preferred. As you can see, these are your responses. Anything that got more than one hit is thrown in here. And donor perfect is clearly the winner. And you guys all had some great reasons for choosing it. So thank you to everyone who already submitted that homework assignment and all the assignments so far. And they look forward to seeing more by October 14th. Just a reminder that the course web pages will where you'll find everything for this course, everything you need. So the resources, the power points, and the links to the homework and also transcripts. And the transcript is now up for Kelsey's course. As always, if you have any questions feel free to email us or call us. And now without further delay, I'd love to introduce to you all Barbara Lily who is our instructor today. Barbara is currently the Program Officer for the New York State Program for the Conservation and Preservation of Library Research Materials at the New York State Library, which provides over 2 million in grants for the preservation of mainly paper based materials. She also provides consultant services regarding preservation throughout the state and Barbara is also the state aid coordinator for approximately 90 million state aid to libraries and library systems. Barbara, thank you so much for joining us today. I am going to go ahead and move this PowerPoint out of the way and you should see yours. Okay, thank you so much Jenny. There you go. And hello everybody. I don't know if they tell you this is my very first time doing a webinar and I've been super nervous and Jenny and Laura have been so great. So thank you guys for sort of holding my hand through this. So today I'm going to talk about writing a proposal and I talked with Susan a little bit beforehand and I'm going to focus a little bit more on government type of proposals as opposed to going to private foundations and so hopefully we won't have too much overlap today but and again feel free to send questions at any time to me and I will let's see. I don't want to hit forward do I Jenny? It's not moving. Sorry Barbara so the bottom left hand you'll see two arrows. Right. And then you should just be able to click on them. I'm seeing four arrows. That's my problem. Okay, there we go. I think. Nope. Okay, let me pull just pull your PowerPoint up a little bit. Oh, there it is. Okay, now I see it. Okay, so here we go. This is supposed to be a chicken but it's really a duck but I looked, tried very hard to try to find an image. So the first step you have to do of course is to define your project. You've decided that you are wanting to do a preservation project and you feel you're ready for it and that's a whole other topic I think but we'll talk about a little bit is are you ready to actually go forward and write your proposal and get a grant and so the question I come up with against a lot of folks sometimes is where do you start? Do you start with a vendor or do you start with what you want to do? And it's a tough question and I think the answer is a little bit of both but you really want to think about what it is that you feel you need to do for your collections. If you're just getting started you might think we need a survey or you may have something very specific in mind that you want to do and then of course you have to find who's going to fund that for you which other people have already talked to you about. But you want to stage to find your project most I would say don't just apply for a grant because someone is offering money. No grant is I say to people sometimes it's not free money grants are not free money they cost you money as well and those of you who have done grants will know that and then look and see have you had any surveys or do you have a preservation plan that's a really good place to start and it's something that gives you a lot of credibility with funders. I've had people come in and say oh we want to do conservation of these three volumes and my response to them is well what else do you have in your collections why are you focusing on expensive treatment of three volumes how has that become your number one priority. So I would say if you haven't had a survey apply for a survey and there are a lot of survey funding out there in New York State we fund surveys but I am a less fund surveys and EH fund surveys some of the regional conservation centers have subsidized surveys they're not expensive to do and I think that they are worth every bit of time and effort that you put into having a survey done so that's where I would suggest you start um I think we have a poll question here Lori ah there we go so I kind of wanted to know if um how many of you have had experience oh cool I'm talking to a vacuum so it's nice to see a response here coming through alright so not a lot of you have had a ton of experience but kind of between so almost half of you have never written a grand proposal before okay that's good for me to know so um I'm going to move on so the first thing once you've identified your funder and I'll talk about that on the next screen a little bit too again it's this chicken and egg thing that I was trying to work out you need to understand the application process most funders I think now have gone to an online application and there may be some work that you need to do to get into their system and you want to do that as soon as possible even if you haven't decided to write the proposal yet because it may get you sort of into their information loop some folks want to have a letter of intent first so you really want to find out what you need to do if you need to sort of put a placeholder in even if you haven't decided for sure you want to get that in place you want to understand what their deadlines are um make sure that you know when things are due um it changes just because you applied last year doesn't mean the process is the same this year so I would say make sure you go on and you get on to their webpage first and then move through all of their information so you understand exactly what it is they want you to do I know for us this year we've suddenly been handed a whole bunch of new rules and regulations for New York State that I'm still trying to work out and I'm trying to let people know oh just because you applied last year you now have to do some additional paperwork and I think that's pretty much true of a lot of governments then you want to understand the review and notification process um you may not um you may not um I'm sorry I'm looking at that and thinking for a second um you may have a date in which you have to apply for and then sometimes they'll tell you oh you're going to hear back from us in a specific date or time period and you know that when you're planning your project it's going to affect your timeline very much um and then you want to make sure you have all your ducks in a row in your institution and by that I mean you have to go through the channels if you're working in an institution most likely you're going to have to get approval within your institution to apply for a grant sometimes you maybe have other parts of your institution that you're not wanting to go to this um grantor for a proposal and that may be okay with them it may not be and you need to make sure you know that because you don't want to find out that you're sent in two applications and they only allow one application per institution in each round of grant applications so you really need to find out that before you really put a lot of work into the project um what I say to people and I'll say over and over again is please read the application thoroughly from start to finish before you even start make sure you understand exactly what um what you have to do to apply um you know I know that for grants.gov there's a lot of information you have to give we do too um so please make sure that you um do that okay I have a question about a survey and one of my polling questions we're going to get to is people's background in preservation there are what we call preservation surveys and if you've ever had like a needs assessment for an archive it's different a preservation survey is usually hiring someone to come in for maybe a day or more and they're looking to look at it's not an item level survey of your collection it's um it's looking at where your collections are stored and how they're stored what kind of materials you have in your collection what's your building structure what's your security arrangements what's the temperature and humidity in your building what's the environment in which your materials are being stored and they make recommendations on those things and we'll often have an executive summary in the beginning that sort of sets some priorities for you so it's a really great way to look at what you can do to preserve your collection and a lot of things in these surveys are things um reports you don't need to apply for grant for they may be some really just simple things you can do like turn off the lights when you leave at night or when no one's in a room don't um be turning your air conditioning off on the weekends during the summer some very you know putting in ultraviolet sleeves on your window so it's a really good place to start and I know for our grant program if you've had a survey we ask you to attach that to the application or at least executive summary because we're going to look at that and say what kind of progress have they made on um addressing these preservation issues and what are they asking for and where does that fall into what the the survey consultant recommended sometimes you may have a survey if you've already done something like that um where you're really looking specifically at a collection and you may be doing more of a random sample or an item level but that usually comes after a general preservation survey and from that survey you can create a preservation plan for your organization so I hope that answers your question um ok so you're going to read through and you're going to really understand what it is that um the the grantor is asking for ok oh here's my question so do you have training or experience in preservation that was the other question I sort of wanted to know I love this like watching the presidential elections rick things come in oh so we're almost slit as far as experience ok that's good to know well that's good I remember to write that so a survey is different from an assessment a survey is a preservation survey is not looking at um a little bit they'll look at your cataloging and maybe finding aids and sometimes they do recommend oh you really need to you know do an inventory before you start preservation um so that's good to know because that's one of the things a lot of vendor um vendors grantors I'm going to keep saying vendors um ask for so before you've been right you're going to want to um call the grantor and I think just about everyone I've ever worked with um either applying for grants um has been open to this sometimes I know that IMLS has had forums where you something like this like a webinar where you sign up and they'll take questions and walk people through the application um I know in my case I do grant writing workshops because I just you know I'm only in one state um but most folks really do um welcome uh on a call and it's really simple there's usually a person who's listed as the program manager and just send them an email and say I have questions do you mind if I send them to you or if we set up a time to talk on the phone and they'll let you know um when you call try to have more than one project to discuss we're still in the sort of the chicken the egg face and you want to figure figure out um what you can apply for and so if you have a couple things in mind if you know you start to talk about one and they say oh no we don't find anything like that okay so maybe there's something else that they do found that you could talk to them about or maybe you just need to call them back another day but be flexible when you call them and if you really set on doing one thing and they say no that's your decision but listen to what they have to say and maybe there is a way you can make your project work um you might decide at this point that you're not ready to apply for a grant in this current round and that's not an uncommon thing you may feel that you're not ready um you're asking me to press five during the break okay I'm not talking loud enough I'll work on that okay so you might decide that you're not ready to apply for a grant um you may need to wait for the next round and I have people who come to my surveys my workshops and say oh my gosh we're totally not ready for that and that's great if you realize that because it means you're going to make a list of what you need to do to get ready to um to apply the next time so that you do have a successful application um another thing you want to ask them is where is this money coming from is it in my case my funds are state funds people they are they assume they're federal funds but that may tell you they may give you a sense of what restrictions they are so it's good to know am I applying for uh a program that's federal money maybe you just know already or is it um somebody is doing a re-grant program we have some different things we were talking before this with Lori Foley and you know Heritage Preservation does some re-granting they get IMLS grants and then they manage them so um that may affect how the grant is managed and you need to know that there may be some restrictions on one type of grant that they're offering that they don't have on another because the funding source is different so it's another thing you just kind of want to have a sense of and talk to them about um the next thing I want to talk about then is you've decided to go ahead and do a project um and so you get to the point where you're designing your project so you need to create a plan um and there are several different things and those of you who did the homework and saw ours we have very specific questions we're asking now some of those questions we ask um are really general questions about the institution and then um we ask some very specific questions so you need to know what it is you want to do and you need to generate the first thing you want to do is start working on a timeline um you'll found out um from looking at the website is this a a six month grant three years one year you really know to do to do that I'm going to try hitting five since people can't hear me is that helping I hope um so you generate um um a plan you start on your timeline to figure out what it is you need to get what you need what you want to get done you're asking for the grantor for certain funds to do something but that may be just part of the overall project so you may need to to describe the overall project and that may be that the part that their funding is three months but the overall project is 18 months so you need to kind of figure that out ahead of time so that you can really address all the different parts and issues of your project you also need to um to find your need why is it that you're applying for a grant I have a lot of folks that will apply and they'll talk very eloquently about the importance of their collection and um they can't tell me though why they need preservation what's wrong with your collection that you need money for it so they'll tell me how great it is how many people use it what's it about but I don't get a sense of like and then they'll talk about what they're going to do but I can't get it I can't pull it together why do they feel they need to treat this this collection they don't say that the paper's brittle or it's torn it's maybe their maps that are rolled up and dirty but you really want to give a physical description of your collection in preservation grants as well as an intellectual description of your collection you want to try to do both um so you're defining that need then you need to identify your cost and again this is your entire project cost it's not just what you're asking the grantor for but you need to be very very clear what things you are going to pay for and what you're asking the grantor to pay for and I always say when you get to this part of the application details lots of details are really important so if you're doing a project in which you're going to maybe have conservation treatment of a collection of 50 maps and you're asking the grantor to pay for that treatment but at the same time you are going to create a catalog record or finding aid for these maps but you are going to pay for that you still want to talk about that because that really strengthens your proposal because it's showing that you're making the collection more accessible but you're paying for that but you want to talk about when is that going to happen who's going to do it so you're talking then also about outcomes everybody is very focused on outcome based evaluation if you haven't run against that yet go to IMLS's web page and they have lots of information about what we call OBE that's really important to know that so you want to say the final outcome of this project is that we're going to have these maps they're going to be conserved maybe they're going to be mylar encapsulated they're going to be rehoused and they're going to have additional cataloging so now researchers can actually use them because right now we don't even sure what we have and they're not usable you also want to identify the rules who's responsible for what in the project if you have staff who are going to be involved in the project you need to name them and you probably are going to need to include their resumes as part of your application and then if you're going to hire vendors or consultants again you need to name them and talk about who's going to do what make that very clear often in the budget you're showing all of those people and I always say to people anything that's in your budget should be explained in your narrative if I see an expense in the budget and I haven't seen it in the narrative it's and they're asking me to pay for it our program to pay for it I'm not going to because I don't really know what it's for so it's really something you want to work through who's doing what are their roles and again if you're doing stuff that's part of your institutional contribution to the program you want to include that again we're talking about identifying staff involved in the project who's going to do this make sure they know that they're going to do this I worked at an institution once where I was hired and right after I got there we got told we were awarded a grant and some of the staff didn't even know that they were they had been put down as doing part of the project for that so it's something you need to make sure your staff know as well and that there's institutional commitment for that depending on the size of your institution it might not be such a big deal if you're from a smaller institution you may be doing a lot of it outside vendors and consultants very important that you reach out and you identify who's going to be your vendors or your consultants anyone that you're hiring for the project I tell people if you're going to be hiring temporary staff and you don't know yet make sure that you have a nice detailed job description that you can include as well so again it's clear to everyone what you're asking these people what you're going to ask them do for this project okay so you have to find vendors and consultants and this is tough sometimes I've never written a preservation proposal before and you're not sort of in the preservation business it's hard to find them you want to make sure first of all that you find someone qualified so there are a couple things that you can do there are things like and I think part of my other document I sent in was things like the America Institute of Conservatives has a finder find a conservator site where you can put in your geographic location and you can find folks like that you can also look at past awards that the granting institution is given so one of the things I know in our online system is we can we allow folks to search by subject area and they can see grants that we've funded in the past so if you're thinking of doing a photograph project you can put those terms in and it'll give you a list of every project we've ever funded that had to do with photographs it tells you who got the grant when the dollar amount and who is the project manager and their I think phone number or email not everybody does it in that detail but you can see look back at past years of who has received the grant award and if you see a project that sounds similar to yours you know see if you can give the project manager a call and just ask them if they're willing to chat with you a few minutes about vendors or consultants that they use most people are more than happy to do that you might have colleagues that you can call people call me sometimes I don't we don't not everybody has lists of vendors consultants because that's a whole vetting process that we don't really want to go through but you could ask them if they can tell you names of what I say is I can tell you names of other folks who've been on projects that were funded and were deemed you know qualified most grantors are looking for the most qualified consultants or vendors so then you want to also get references for these vendors and consultants and be sure to call those references and have a series of questions and you know one of the things you might want to ask them is were there any problems during the project and how did they handle those problems it's not unusual to sometimes have the project not go exactly as you planned so how did how did everyone deal with that how did you know where did they get back to you quickly how did they handle any errors in their work did they give you all the documentation that you asked for all of those kinds of things you would want to do or to know and you want to get bids now we require people to get at least two bids and when I first took over my program that wasn't a requirement but I started to require it because I was seeing bids that came in that were wildly different in prices and you really want to make sure that you give the same information to each person who might put in a bid so that you can compare the cost you might also be comparing their treatment proposals if you're looking to have a conservation grant a conservation grant to do treatment the conservator is going to give you should be giving you a very detailed treatment proposal so you know exactly what they're going to do to your collection for some things like microfilming or digitization there are national standards or best practices I get asked a lot the question well if I'm writing a preservation grant do I need to know anything about preservation and my answer is yes you do you need to know something and that's often why that survey is so important in the beginning because the survey is really a great way to start to educate you about preservation you can't count on your vendor to tell you what you need to do entirely you need to have some idea of what your collection needs and you need to understand some of the terms that they're using so and again there are lots of you know information out there that you can one of the things I gave you with the websites I think for NEDCC and CCHA they have lots of great information on their websites about these topics and so you can at least start to learn the terminology and understand when you get a proposal what it is they're actually saying they're going to do so get those things and then make sure you get the good treatment proposals and that everything is there one of the things I like people to do when they're applying is to send me some before pictures of treatment and then or even rehousing projects to see the after and then when you do a final report send those after you make your before photos as pathetic as possible so it looks like your collection is really a dire need of help so you're trying to make your case there again so you've done all that you've got your group together you've got your idea you've been talking to your vendors you've read the guidelines and you feel like you're ready to write your proposal and then a lot of people will ask me well should I hire a grant writer and I can't really answer that question for people but my experience is most people write their own and they do a really good job so even if you don't have a grant writer on staff and most people don't there are firms out there that do it and you can certainly talk to them I would probably want them to have experience in at least somewhere in the cultural community of writing proposals and not folks that are usually writing grants for say education or medical type topics you want something, somebody used to working in a cultural repository of some sort but I think most people can do it yourself so the first thing you want to do is assemble a team that's probably going to be folks who are going to be working on the project and maybe others maybe they're not going to work on the project but you need their input in order to write your proposal and then I'll say it again you want to read your application and guidelines again just so that you understand what it is that you're going to have to do one of the most important things you need to do is follow the application format I have people sometimes in our grant application or online we allow people to write it in word and copy and paste it into our system so that it's a little easier to sometimes work as a group and you work offline but they'll just upload the whole thing into the first section and if you did the homework and you looked at the reviewer page you see that most reviewers are asking to go forward and they're asking you to follow a certain format and they're asking the reviewers to wait on each section of your proposal so you want your reviewers to find the information they're looking for when they're scoring where they expect it to be the last thing you want to do is annoy a reviewer and I've seen people do that and I've had it happen to me as reviewing you don't want to have have it hard to find you also it's very you know the thing when you're writing this is you want a lot of detail you don't want a lot of words so that's something you're going to have to be balancing at all times. I remember years ago being on a panel for an NEH group of applications and you know some of these were coming in at 200 pages and the first thing we said when we got to the panel was oh my god 200 pages were these people trying to torture us or what so think about that as well if the grad specs don't ask for photos but they allow you to upload them I would go ahead and do it again you can call them and ask them I know we take our application is very clear what formats we allow things to be uploaded in and we do allow photos we do allow JPEG images we do our Excel sheets we allow you to just upload those as appendices so I would check with the with the grantor and make sure but I think that's often something we really most grantors like and then the afters because sometimes we do a little advocacy for our program internally and having those photos is really great for us internally as well the next thing you want to make sure is that you understand what expenses are fundable I've had people send in proposals where I thought did they even raid the guidelines because everything they've asked for we don't fund as a government granting agency we're under very strict what's the word not guidelines but we have very strict rules about how we evaluate and award grants if something is not fundable no matter how good your proposal is we cannot fund it because we have to be fair and equitable to everybody who applies so if we say we don't fund digitization and someone writes this great digitization proposal and we go oh it's so great we're going to fund it we can't do that because we didn't open it up to everyone else to apply for for this so we want to we have to really follow those things strictly find out our staff you know our staff can you put staff wages in sometimes you can sometimes you can't some people will fund equipment or certain types others won't so you want to be very very clear about that and don't ask for something that's clearly not fundable even if they fund your grant they might zero that out and that may make it hard for you if you don't have that money to back it up to actually do the projects I would say if there's sometimes for my folks they will attach another thing to attach to your project is if you have the bids you want to attach the bids from your vendors we ask for them to be attached we ask you to attach all of them to those who you chose and why again we don't make you choose we don't in our program the lowest bid again you might want to ask that of the funder we like to see the treatment proposals from the conservators we want to see everybody who's involved in the project's resume whether they're on staff or someone that you're hiring or a job description so if you're using a consultant we want to see their resume we want to make sure these people are qualified to do the job I don't want to see say a general archivist who's going to come in with no preservation experience and do a preservation survey I want to see a preservation either a conservator or a preservation librarian who's going to do that so those are the kinds of things we're looking for and I think they're really useful if you can attach those we also and more I work we fund a public library construction program and we like pictures of really run down libraries and then we like the brand new ones we like pictures afterwards of their solar panel fields which are bizarre but fun to look at so anything that you think will strengthen that provide that detailed information and a lot of grantors they may have a word limit for the narrative but they don't have limits for your appendices so that's a way sometimes to get in a little bit of extra information we also ask and ours we want to see what your preservation activities are and we want you to have a disaster plan written so I often ask people just to send me like the table of contents of their disaster plan as an attachment so look at what they're asking you for and if there's a way that you can show that instead of just saying it I think that's very helpful oh the format of images is that what you're asking me I'm not quite sure we take TIFF and JPEG images for ours again you want to make sure that if you're sending it in a paper format then you can send in real photographs or just printouts from your computer we do want them done electronically you'd really want to make sure that the vendor the funder can open them that's the main thing our online application is very clear about what formats we accept if it's not clear send them an email and ask that a lot of funders will also have an FAQ page and some of those questions you may find answered there but you definitely do want to find that out and not send them something that can't be opened and then you want to find out is there a match or a cost share and what things are allowable under that match or cost share for a lot of folks you may already have a client and you have a cost share you may have some sort of federally negotiated percentage that you can use or maybe not in my program because we have a lot of small organizations who don't even have paid staff we look at hours sometimes of how many hours they're going to contribute and again but we do have some minimum that we require so you want to make sure you know what those are things are allowable where I work because my salary is paid out of LSTA funds and when we apply for an I am a less grant my time can't be cost shared in because the feds are already paying for it and that would be sort of double dipping so you also want to have those things aware and that's where hopefully someone in your institution if you're big enough can kind of help you through some of those institutional things you know helping you with my federal ID number what's our DUNS number hopefully your institution is helping with that so you want to know that as you go through so that you can make sure that you're meeting that or exceeding it so then you're writing the proposal and you want to sort of introduce yourself who are you and what is your mission what do you collect don't assume that people know who you are and what you do especially if you're applying to a national there are thousands if you've looked at the health heritage index you know how many institutions there are out there and most people may have never heard of you or even if they've heard of you they really don't know maybe a whole lot about you putting in a link to your website is great it allows people to come in and very easily then hopefully they can click the reviewers and the grantors can just click on that link and be connected to your website or at least type it in but it allows them to go there and kind of see what it is that you're all about and that's really fun for me as a funder sometimes I find out about topics I've never heard of but are actually very very interesting so talk about that you know are you a museum an art museum and you have a collection of an archive about the artist that you have there are you local history that you collect and what is your mission again state your need here in the beginning in very clear terms we have a large collection of photographs that are glass plates and are endangered talk a little bit and we want to preserve those by reformatting them you want to demonstrate they're a responsible well run organization again a nice website helps with that you want to talk about usually people are asking maybe a little bit about the size of your institution your budget, your number of staff how long you've been around they may ask for samples of your mission statement or collection policy so you want to make sure you have those already and that's what you have been doing when you were sort of planning the project making sure you have all this stuff if you don't then maybe you're not ready to apply and you want to demonstrate that your collections are important don't assume that people know the collections again I had one proposal that came in once and I don't want to give details but let's just say it was about a sport polo let's say polo because I know nothing about polo except you play it on a horse and you hit a ball right and they had a museum they had created for a polo player and they kept talking about how this great this person was the greatest polo player ever I'd never heard of them and so how would I know they didn't show me how this person was important and why would we need a museum for one person I could go online maybe and see that there are five polo museums in the United States so why should we be helping to support such a narrowly focused collection and at no point did they ever really make the case of why this person was important but they didn't show it so you have to do that you really have to do that and I know in our proposal talk about who uses your collections and why and how much use they get if it can be people who walk through your door or people who come into your door electronically but talk about that demonstrate the I use the word demonstrate a lot here because again we're getting to that outcome based evaluation kind of thing you need to show it and give examples so talk about the long term effects of this project if we do this project what will be the result these collections will be preserved great will they be more accessible will people know about them will they be stop the deterioration will we be also creating a finding aid that's going to be up on our website or that we're putting into a national database tell us about that so that maybe they've never been accessible before because of their collection now they will be so you really want to start to get into again keep with the details here and then you want to keep asking yourself these questions as you go through do we have a clear goal is it clear all the way through is each section of our application sort of building you know on to making our case is your budget realistic you can't just throw money in there oh dear you can't just throw in money and say well and then down the road we're going to do this most people want to see that the project begins and ends during this grant period and is it realistic don't start inflating people's salaries or saying our project manager is going to spend 50% of her time on this project when the reviewers are often experienced they're going to say this project doesn't take 50% of someone's time it's going to take 15% of their time and they're going to know that so they're going to probably that will be a mark against you or you'll get a lower score is your timeline realistic don't try to solve all of your preservation problems in one grant proposal I've seen people try to do this if you've never applied for a grant before starting with the survey is easy not a lot of staff time doesn't take a lot of time and it gives you a sense it starts to give you a sense of what you're going to do most grantors let you come back another year so you've got to grant one year and then you can come back the next year to do something else so maybe the first year you ask for a survey maybe the second year you're asking to re-house a specific manuscript collection the second year you're having a survey a draft collection the next year on and on if you have a plan and you can just slowly work through that plan in chewable bites so that you're not trying to re-house this collection and reformat another collection and oh by the way we're going to upgrade our HVAC this year that's just crazy you're going to set yourself up for failure and probably the grantor and the reviewers aren't going to believe that you can get all that done and the other thing is I know it happens with the feds and with us we don't always get to stick to the timeline that we want we have our delays of course now the federal government is shut down so they're delayed so they may have planned to give you an award notice in January and it turns out it's not until March but guess what you have to do it in the same amount of time you don't get an extra three months to do your project so think about that to try to find out the history of how these work so that you have a sense of oh I've only got one year or really it's nine months or it was supposed to be a two year grant but now I've only got a year and a half can I get the project done so really really look at every step away sometimes people if they're doing a re-housing project and they haven't done it before they just have staff do it for a little bit and they time them if you're working with a vendor make sure you have a schedule if you're sending things out for shipments you've settled ahead of time how many shipments, how long it'll be at the vendor when it comes back what do you need to do what is your role then when it comes back do you have to inspect it do you're doing more cataloging make sure you've again you've identified all those steps and you've hopefully sort of got a sense of the timeline of what you can do because you don't want to find yourself at the end unable to finish the project sometimes folks can give extensions sometimes we can't so don't assume you're going to get an extension the other thing is you know if you run into a problem when you do get your grant make sure you communicate with the grantor and then again is our need and our story compelling are make sure that you you're really making the case again why is this important is it why is there a preservation need why is it important to the cultural community or to researchers or scholars all of those things you kind of want to touch on okay I love this question your future this person that's something that's a good question from Ronnie it's it depends on whether or not they fund staffing for my program we don't fund staffing you don't want to sound like too pathetic because the question then comes up well how viable is this organization if they can't continue without this grant that's really important you know sort of a you're walking type wrote type wrote type wrote there where you're saying we need this money to do all these great things but if we don't get it we're going to fold that's kind of tough one then you might want to say these are the some of the new initiatives that we want to do so let's let's say we're going to you know focus on that what you've done what you can continue to do maybe some new initiatives looking at Lori's answer now for a few of those questions it depends really I think can you the question about can you bring the money get conservation treatment from abroad now in the United States we would say no because we have plenty of professionals to do the work here I'm not familiar with Bolivia so I don't know if that's the case you may have to do that again something to ask your vendor and looking at the cost of all of that I know for my program we do fund travel costs but we are expecting people to use vendors within the northeast part of the United States so that would definitely be something you'd have to ask the program I agree with Lori on that one okay so then we're getting towards the end here you're writing your proposal and I would say the one important thing to do is have someone proofread it look for typos does it make sense does it flow again is the person reading for you are they ready to write you a check if you've been working in writing we've all had this experience whatever you're writing you're working on it you're working on it after a while you can't even read it you are seeing what is in your head so get someone a friend a significant other someone who's totally like outside of your organization even to read the proposal and they can say to you I don't know what I mean they may not say I don't understand the technical part but they may say I really don't understand what you're talking about so make sure that you've done that if you've been doing a lot of cutting and pasting and copying make sure that you copied everything you wanted to you didn't I've had red proposals where suddenly a sentence is cut off because they were obviously cutting and pasting and just didn't quite highlight the whole thing we've all done that so there's lots of little technical things like that even if you have spell check you can't always we all have that where there's two spellings of a word and you've got the wrong one down there okay I'm seeing Lori's answer about brick and mortar so you want to make sure that it's just sort of all there every piece is there some applications like ours if you're missing certain things when you try to submit you'll get an error message back not all of them do that if you have a grants office they're usually helpful with that as well so let's let's you want to make sure that it's all there it's all complete and it makes sense I've read lots of proposals where you know people obviously know their collection they feel very passionate about it but they haven't quite conveyed that and they'll say that to me they'll say well we you know they'll look at the your comments and they'll say well I said that well did you say it in the section you were supposed to or maybe you thought you said it but obviously you didn't communicate it and there's a big difference there so you want to make sure that you've done that and I think having someone outside really is helpful so if you get your grants what do you need to do then and this is just something I wanted to put in here because I think it's really important part of grant writing grant proposals is understanding grants management when I took over my program we had a lot of problems with this and I started to look at the documentation we were sending people and realized it wasn't very clear and spent some time just reorganizing that and clarifying it and that helped a lot I think most people's inclination is to open up the email or the letter and see if it's a yes or a no and I used to tell people it's sort of like applying for colleges there's a lot of emotion at that point and you say yeah we got our grants or oh god no we didn't and that's great you know you have those emotions that's normal but you want to celebrate and then go back and read everything that the grantor just sent you make sure you understand what kind of documentation you're going to have to keep what kind of reports some grantors want interim reports throughout the project some just want a final report they will want certain information in that report make sure you're keeping that information so that you have it at the end of your grants period understand when you're going to receive payments some grantors give you 100% up front some of them dole out the money throughout the time period so you may have to front some money in order to actually start your project and most folks will make you do something like that they will do that because they want to see that you're actually doing the project now if you do have problems during the grant make sure that you handle those problems and or any delays for example you may have applied for a grant and six months later you found out you get this letter saying we gave you a grant maybe you're new and the person who applied for it left and this is news to you and you're having a stroke at this point first of all try to find out if they kept a folder about it if not be honest with the grantor call them up and say I don't know what this is about can you send me a copy of the application that we sent you not a great start but at least it's honest and you're up front if at any time during the project you can't do something that you said you were going to do be sure to let them know right away you may have a vendor who goes out of business we've had people call me and say my consultant passed away you know things happen it's okay it's how you handle it that's important so the important thing is that you're honest with your grantor and that you have a plan for handling those problems or delays you may need an extension you can ask for one you may get it you may not it really depends on who's giving you the money and what the rules are for that grant program I've had people call up and say we applied for it but we're so sorry our director quit and we have nobody here to do it we're going to have to decline do that right away don't just go oh gee I need to do that because in my know in my case I can give that money to somebody else and use it and I at least know that you're a responsible organization because if you're planning to come back again next year then I won't be going oh those are those people we gave a grant to and then they didn't tell me till six months in they weren't going to do it and they didn't tell me again because all part of the grants management of course is to make sure you get your great project done that you get your funding for it but also chances are you may want to go back again and you may want to apply for another grant from them the next round and you want to have a good track record with them so if you've done all the things that suggested like read the guidelines go to their website talk to them and then manage your grant honestly you're going to be in a pretty good place you want to just make sure that you do all of that and handle it if your budget has to change in any way or your staffing who's doing anything you definitely want to let the grantor know that it may be okay with them it may not be don't assume you can make changes you may file your final report and they'll say this is not acceptable to us I mean I've had people again say well we started out with one project they decided for some reason not to do it they want to do a completely different project I can't allow that, that's not what you were evaluated on and you were evaluated on against all these other applicants so you want to be able to it's not fair then to switch your project you weren't evaluated your award wasn't based on that so that would not be acceptable I think to most people also if you have a grant you're probably going or you may have them come and want to do a site visit at some point during the grant project or right at the end of it especially if you've had several of them this is really is sort of an inspection and you can talk to the person who's coming to visit you ahead of time about they'll usually contact you and say I'd like to make a site visit and they're looking for a time and date it's perfectly acceptable to ask lots of questions about what they expect to happen during the site visit so that you can be prepared I've been on both ends of this I do site visits for our grant program and we get site visits from for example IMLS comes in and they're all different depending on your project the site visit might be slightly differently but I know when I visit I want to meet the staff who worked on the project I want to see the collections that were treated or were part of the project I want to see the area in which the collections are stored and the area in which staff are working and the area in which the public may be accessing these collections so I want to see all of that and I'm really assessing you then because I know that maybe you'll be plying again so you know it's kind of like if you're having company for the day you're going to clean the house you're going to make things tidy you're going to have staff ready who can answer the questions that might be asked about the project you could talk about any problems that you had or things that worked particularly well for you and then it's also a chance for you to turn it in sort of an opportunity and show them other collections that you're thinking of preserving and talk about future proposals and a chance for them to see your collections and really get a chance to see what your needs are so you can talk about that and you can show them the collections really really helpful and I find it's my favorite part of my job as a grants manager is site visits I love meeting the staff, we all put faces to names I find that people are often you know are much more honest in person than they would be writing in a proposal so I really like that part of it I get to see parts of institutions that no one else sees and I see these fantastic collections and I hear about really great work that people are doing and it makes me feel like what I'm doing is worthwhile and helping people so it goes both ways and I think it's something that you can really turn to your advantage or you could really hurt yourself if you're not organized your place is messy or your staff can't answer questions about the project those are not things you really want to do when you have a site visit there's a question here about an example of very well written collection descriptions we have on our website which is www.nysled sorry yes .gov here somebody can post that up for you my program website we have a sort of a guide book that has good and bad examples of language for each section of our application and you can look at that and again if you it's just up it's up there full text I think in a pdf format and maybe html and you can look at that it's on the conservation preservation pull down page so if someone could put that up that would be great so again site visits are a great something you should be expecting and find out what level of staff do they want to meet with your finance people do they want to meet with the curators whatever type of project they may want to meet with different folks find out how long they're going to be there all of that kind of stuff make sure you have time for everything that you want to do if there's something specific you want them to see let them know ahead of time if that's going to take longer just so they're no surprises and everyone's aware of what's going to happen that day and then if you get turned down I like to talk about this because again for this is a very can be very sort of feel very personal be a very emotional thing I did a panel for at a conference and I was there talking about the program and then I had someone who two people who'd applied one who got turned down and one who was successful and it was really really interesting for me as well but we talked about what that's like to get turned down and what to do about that so most grantors will give you some feedback about what the reviewers and our panelists had to say either how you scored on each section and comments we make those automatically available for our folks if they don't just ask for them they are very very valuable I think it gives you a sense of what did we where did we fail sometimes we can they'll tell you where you felt like we have sort of a ranking you know and then we just go through and spend money and maybe they were able to fund say they got 60 applications and they were able to fund 30 and you found out you were 31 I always say I don't know if that hurts more or makes you feel better but you want to get a sense of where you fell in the award system sort of where did you not succeed in your application did they did they not when they not convinced of the value of your collection did they not like your plan of work did you leave something out did you think you said something and you didn't this is I think a chance and sometimes it's really simple things that you've maybe forgot to do or didn't communicate but overall they really liked your proposal so you feel like okay we have a chance let's call the grantor and talk about reapplying the next round what do we need to do and they're often willing to do that with you sometimes we can depending on the kinds of questions that you are not but get a sense of is this really worth our applying again if they absolutely hated your collection or hated your project then maybe no I mean we applied for a grant recently and we knew it was kind of an unusual project we wanted to do and it got turned down and we weren't surprised and we had a discussion about what kind of proposal we could write that would get funded and we decided we didn't want to do that again it was that whole question of we didn't want to just apply for the sake of funding we really wanted to do something we felt would be useful so we made the decision not to apply we didn't want to do the other kind of proposal so that's the kind of thing that you kind of want to do submitting early influenced acceptance no not for my program it does not and we don't aren't able to accept draft I know in past some organizations will take a draft and give you comments back I used to do that I'm not allowed to do that anymore but some folks might do that a good question to ask the grantor can you do that for my program there's a due date a time it's 5 p.m. on a certain date because we're online at 501 you're locked out at that point so that's kind of nice for me when they came in paper format it was tough we received them by a certain day but we had problems a couple of times with some of the carriers so this is really crystal clear I would suggest planning and having it done ahead of the deadline just in case something goes wrong either with your computer system or somebody turns out somebody is on vacation who can't sign off on it but you definitely want to give yourself some extra time there I've had people call me the day before grants are due and want the application to start writing it and they're going to write it overnight I think they're nuts but who am I to tell them no if you're going to be getting consultants bids or vendors bids you definitely want to start way ahead of time as soon as you know about the grant application because you want to make sure that they have enough time to write up their bid it may require that you take your collections to a conservator or have them come to you and you want time to schedule that you may have to do your vendor may ask you a bunch of questions that you weren't anticipating that you have to go back to your collection and start doing some counting to make sure that you give yourself plenty of time when writing the proposal to get all of that ready to go and then I would say once you know that you have the grant at that time make sure that you let your consultants and your vendors know that you got the grant and you're planning on using them and discuss the timeline even though you already have a timeline in place just confirm all of that I used to get a lot of calls and Lori will confirm this when her years of working at NADCC is that we would give people their award notice in July and they sometimes wouldn't bother to call the vendor until January because that's when they were ready to start sending the stuff to the vendor and the vendor had thought they didn't get the grant or they didn't chose them and they don't have room in their schedule to do the project before the end of the grant period and now they're scrambling for a new vendor to let them know right away hey we got our grant good news and we want to use you we talked about this timeline before the grant award was a little late we're going to have to adjust it or how does this fit in can you still do the project can we still stick with this timeline just get all of that confirmed again make sure everybody in your institution knows you got the grant and knows their role you may have had some staff changes and they don't know about this make sure that your funding folks know about this, your financial folks they'll probably need to set up a separate account for this grant proposal to manage the money out so you want to make sure you have all of that in place then you get to start all over again you've done your project, you did a great job you filed your family report on time you've got your money and now you can decide we want to do it again we had such a great time now you've got all of this experience and you have a much better sense of what you can accomplish so you might decide oh we can do a little bit more or god that about killed us we need to do less you really have a sense of that make sure that when you're doing all this you keep lots of notes and you keep copies of the application and in our online program if you've applied a previous year you can go into the old one and copy and paste text from the old one into the new one we know people do that so why not just make it easier for you there's a lot of background information that may be in there if you're however if you're applying for a grant that got turned down the year before make sure you go back to your vendors and consultants and make sure those bids are on the basis okay I'm being asked to clarify the difference between getting a survey and getting assessment an assessment and I'm not an archivist but an assessment is often just looking at what is it you have in your collection how many what they're about more about the cataloging and intellectual control the preservation survey is focusing very specifically on the preservation issues with your collection and it's also not an inventory some folks think they're also going to get an inventory and find out what they have they don't do that a general preservation survey is not an item level survey either so a needs assessment will touch on preservation issues but it will give a lot more attention to the arrangement and description of the collection and any finding aids and things like that inventories so it'll have more of that in there than just the preservation they'll not pay as much attention to that they'll really focus almost 90% on preservation issues I hope that's clear it's something we talk about a lot I think in the preservation community I mean the museum, the archives and the library communities we have lots of different terminologies that we use and sometimes we use the same words to mean different things I would if there's not a website for the foundation I would call them I would call them first and I would also look and just Google them so you can find out about the organization you may find out a little bit about the background of it from a newspaper article or something like that but I would definitely make a phone call first I sometimes get letters from folks because I'm a grant or a state I don't tend to get a lot of those but I do respond to them when I get them emails and if there's an email address I would say that's a good place to start too just send an email introduce yourself and your organization and ask a couple questions talk about who you are and why you're contacting them and hopefully they'll get back to pretty quickly and let you know if that's the kind of if you're anything they're interested in I guess online one they don't open it up before a certain date so you have a time period in which you can submit so they may give we try to give at least 8 weeks hopefully 3 months really my goal to have it open to people frankly I don't even look at them until the deadline so it doesn't matter because what I'm doing the day after the grant is due I'm sitting down and I've asked folks I think you saw give like a summary description and I'm assigning reviewers to the grants to start the review process so that's what I'm doing at that point and I'm not going to start doing that until all of them are in and I know exactly how many applications I have and what the subject areas are because we found all kinds of preservation I'm looking to match my proposals up with people in that area of preservation so I'm not going to look at those until I have them all in and during that period when you're applying I'm usually going to my reviewers and saying okay who wants to review this year how many can you do blah blah blah things like that and so that's when I'm ready to go and I'm going to do it all within maybe 2 days I'm going to focus on getting that done I have a deadline for the reviews to come in to me and then I sit down in my case we get a score order list I sit down and I start reading through all the reviewers' comments and looking at what people had to say and making sure that they're good comments and that I understand any of their questions there's any red flags that they raise that I missed that sort of thing so that when you get them I used to have to type them all up it was quite a chore I'm very happy that we're online now but that's what I do and I think that's I don't know if that's what everyone else does I know when I did NEH panels the reviewers got them and then we got as a panelist I got the reviewers sheets and comments as well and then I did it and then we met so it was a little different format usually I think most grantors process is so my reviewers look at electronic copies they don't look at paper copies we used to have to get five copies of every grant proposal and then we had to put together these huge packets and mail them out it was a lot of work for terming budgets for technology or travel get bids it's hard with travel sometimes because the airlines are so up and down and it can change but get a sense of what the average costs are and then kind of go from there look at the hotels in your area sometimes the consultant will tell you that they'll tell you how long they're going to be how many nights and they'll give you a price so you're not actually having to figure that out and they may say my travel costs are going to be $500 that's what you owe them if their travel costs end up being $700 you don't owe them that money probably then so it's not really what you have to deal with if grants are not online you need to ask how they're submitted we don't accept them to be emailed at all because it would probably crash my email system I've had people ask me if they could fax them years ago we never accepted faxes again for the same reason our fax machine would probably crash because most people submit at the last minute I have when we used to accept paper I've had people drive to all the need to hand deliver them quite a distance sometimes but that's what they were doing they were finishing it up all night and they got up in the morning and drove got to me by 5 o'clock so they made it so again that's really something you want to ask the grantor if it's not online how early is too early I think if you can get your grant proposal in at least a couple a week or two before they're due is a great idea just in case something goes wrong one year we had I think it was right after 9-11 with all the anthrax was right at my due date we had this big rule no late applications but I had people calling me in panic they had taken their applications to say the post office or the FedEx office and then they closed down and they couldn't get it back in that case we did have to take late applications that year and we actually had something from our governor that said we could but you never know now we have a strike not a strike a shutdown so I don't know are we getting mail today I don't really know I haven't checked my mailbox so is that an issue if something like that happens I would definitely call the grantor if they're there and say we can't do this if they're not there because they're in a shutdown then probably chances are they're going to make some accommodations too early I'd never heard of anyone putting their proposal in too early I know we certainly make an effort when they start to come in to create when they were coming in a paper to have one specific spot that we knew where they all went and started to get them together so we didn't lose them in our online system I think you get a message back that says that we've received it if you're looking for something like that you might want to send it where you get the postcard back so that you know that they received it you have something in writing that says was that certified mail that says yes they received it or something from FedEx that says that so you have a backup in case there's a problem I would definitely look into something like that so you have documentation that you sent it and you sent it on time Fibre I'm just going to interject here for just a second so if everyone wants to continue asking questions I'm going to have about 11 minutes so feel free to keep typing them while Barbara's here and while you guys are thinking of questions for Barbara I'm going to go ahead and pull over the link to the homework assignment and then also I'm going to pull over our link for our group login again this is just if you've signed in and you're watching with a bunch of people and so all those people you're watching with haven't entered their first and last name whoever signed in go ahead and take an accurate idea of our attendance and we can't do that if you didn't sign in but if you did sign in we've got your name and there's no need to use this chat box at all could I type in my website in here somewhere yeah go ahead Barbara where would I do that over in the left hand side in that chat box and we'll also post that on the course webpage okay let's see I'm not sure how did I click on this little box oh I don't want to do that did I just start typing in it oh I see down here okay I gotcha type in my website page it's because it's sort of buried in our website so I think that would be useful and Laurie has pointed out to me that we have made the deadline for our homework October 14th which is Columbus Day and the Canadian Thanksgiving so just email us if you don't think you'll be able to make that deadline we're happy to extend it just one more day to the 15th but email us to let us know and Barbara let's see we have a question from Krista and it looks like you've got the web link in there yeah I sent the web link I hope our first time proposals I would say that's a tough question to answer I would say the majority of them are successful I would say for my program about half of them do get funded but I've never looked at it from that way I have found that people who come to our grant writing workshops and call me have much more successful proposals than folks I've never ever heard from and I always get one or two where I absolutely think that they never read the guidelines but I have to say that we have sort of a mailbox for the program where people ask questions and then I post most of the questions and answers on our FAQ page and folks who do all of those things I think are much more successful than the ones who just sort of do it on their own without even contacting the program and Barbara can you ask this question because they came up in another webinar someone was curious they have a program or a project in mind can you apply for multiple grants and what happens if you're awarded if you're so lucky to be awarded more than one my program we only allow one application per institution and so we don't allow that and if I do get two well I don't think they could do it in our online system what I did before is I would call them and say which one do you actually want to submit other institutions do allow multiple applications so again it's something you want to ask I think does the grantor allow that and how do they handle it just because we're a small program and we don't want I have very large organizations and very small ones and if I allow multiple I think the really big organizations would be the other thing I didn't mention is you really need to find out what's the maximum grant award amount and the minimum award amount when you're planning your project and don't ask for more than the maximum no matter how great you think it is because they have again these rules and they have to follow them so if they say their grant the maximum award is 100,000 don't ask for 150 stick with what they're saying you can ask for okay and Cindy has a great question she met you earlier at WNY LRC session in Buffalo a few weeks ago oh yes and they're seeking conservation materials for their historical class montages since their alumni are very happy that we're hanging their class photos what a grantor question why they're also seeking funds from the alumni oh so would we ask that question um no I wouldn't ask that I mean sometimes folks will talk about they may be combining our grant and saying well we also have another grant or we're hoping to get another grant but if we don't get it this is our backup plan and you can certainly say that but I'm not going to second guess you on that and I don't think most reviewers would second guess you on that another question was whether it's better to call the project to create an email I like people to start with an email and make sure you include all your contact information and if I feel like I can answer the questions adequately in an email I will if not I'll give the person a call or email them back and say let's set up a time to discuss it just depends and some of the questions are very easy factual kind of things sometimes it needs more of a discussion so for me I find the best way to get started with folks and it also gives me sort of time to really look at it and think about my answer whereas if someone catches me sometimes right when I'm trying to do something else I'm not maybe not giving them 100% of my attention so I like the emails first and Barbara just a quick question you know you have a project would you consider the guidelines for applying to more than one organization would you recommend pinpointing just one organization to apply for that fits best with that project or can people apply to multiple organizations for grant funding I would say that's a no now unless you're asking for a different part of the project so because what if two of them fund you then what are you going to do so I would say no don't do that if however one to one funder for the preservation part and another one to maybe help pay for cataloging that's okay if they're different parts and I have had people do that they'll come to me for the preservation part and then they'll be going to someone else for say to pay to digitize it after the collection's been preserved and I think that's great because it's making the collection even more accessible and cutting down on handling of the collection but it has to be preserved before it can actually be digitized that's fine it's obviously you can't guarantee it but if that's what you're going for or you already know you have that part of it it's great not a problem but not for the same thing okay and Laura also had a question let's see Barbara do you find that grant applications asking for the maximum amount of funding get put on the back burner for other grant proposals that are asking for less I'm assuming that's from the point of view of reviewing them it makes absolutely no difference to us what we're looking for is a good proposal a good project well planned we have a lot of folks coming in for say surveys which are not expensive projects to do and we because we encourage people to start with surveys we definitely try to and these are people who are often very new to preservation we do like to try to fund those if we can so and that's sometimes those are just three thousand dollars that people are asking for so it doesn't matter the amount okay and then Marcia had a question let me say we only have about a couple minutes left so this will be our last question make sure to join us for our last our final webinar for this course which is Monday October 7th at 2 o'clock you'll log in the same exact way so Barbara your last question and I'm finding it hard to believe that this is your first webinar oh thank you thank you it's been fun you guys have been so nice to me so Marcia oh so you see the question there from Marcia I see the question okay great we do fund preservation training in our program unfortunately it's only for New York State so you'd have to move here and your institution here we do fund that we really the one thing we don't like to fund is learning by doing projects where you hire someone to come and train your staff I don't feel like that's a really good use of funding but we have library councils in the state of New York and they will often apply on behalf of their region we've had our museum association apply for grants to do webinars what we have and I think you saw that is a different sort of application for education proposals and I think for why do you need this training and who do you think is going to come do you have some commitment how are you going to let people know what's it going to cost what's the curricula for the class is there a charge for folks that kind of thing we're again looking for a lot of details well planned out I know that in the past other federal funders have funded similar types of education projects I think now it's a little harder maybe because of the internet and things like webinars where you don't have to do all of these things locally that there's so much out there that you'd really probably need to show why you need people to be on site and there certainly are lots of cases where you really do want to be on site with folks in doing training with disaster response or you know helping people to do some sort of hands on project but we used to fund research projects we have funded research projects and educational projects products and now we expect a lot of that stuff to be electronically available as well so you would really want to talk about how you are going to handle that and again talk to the grantor I personally think that preservation education will never end it will always go on in one format or the other and it's just something we all have to make a commitment to keep doing I had a state librarian ask me once when I first took my job well we had all these disaster workshops you know years ago why do we need to keep funding them and I said because people there are always new people people retire and it never ends but you do really want to be able to justify the need for that alright Barbara thank you so much it was a fantastic presentation thank you thank you everyone for coming in I hope you all learned something today thank you everyone and I hope to see you on Monday have a great afternoon