 Well, welcome everybody to this webinar. You know it's grant month, right? It's time to write these grants and so this course training resources for better grant management and fundraising, you're in the right place. My name is Amita Soms. I'm the webinar producer here and if this is your first time, I'm going to go over a few housekeeping before I turn it over to the speakers. Everybody you know that you are on mute. So if we can go to the next slide, you'll see how you can engage today. You can use the Q&A section to type in your questions in the Q&A sections and we'll get to them. Probably break it up or maybe at the end they'll let you know. This is being recorded. You're going to get the recording and the slides within 48 hours, probably later today because I'm really going to try to get this out to you. I know sometimes you need to get it when it's red hot. If you need the Q&A, excuse me, the closed caption, go ahead and tap on that CC button and you'll be able to use the closed caption. This is what happens when you're in a hurry and I'm seeing all the chat come through. I'm excited to introduce to you two ladies that are part of our education team that is going to share with you. We have Celia who is here. She's a manager in instructional design and production and then Mauna Reina, she's a senior director. You've probably seen her before for a news service development here at TechSoup. I'm going to let them introduce themselves so they can tell you a lot more about themselves. Take it away ladies. I'm looking forward to this. Hi, everyone. I'm very glad to be here with you today. Nice to meet you all. I'm Shuya Shu. I am leading the instructional design and production site in TechSoup courses team. Hi, everyone. My name is Mauna Reina. I'm senior director with news services development at TechSoup and some of the services I work on are training and other assessment services for nonprofits. I'm very excited to be here. Great. Thank you, Mauna. So today we're going to introduce our training resources on grant writing with you all. Apologize ahead of time that I will be with you for the first half of the webinar. I have to jump off to another live event that our team is delivering and Mauna will be with you for the later half of the webinar and answer your questions. So let's get started. So we will give you a brief introduction to our program, our team and how we develop the courses and training. And then we will dive into the grant writing resources and show you around the course. And then Mauna is going to introduce a little bit more other resources to you as well. So to get to know a little bit more about our program, first of all, Aritha, can you help launch the poll so we can get to know people if they have any experience with our courses program before? Absolutely. Maybe a minute or so. So have you ever heard of us before or have you ever taken any training with us before? Well, I see Betsy, you are an old friend of us. We have the results here. So one third of you are new to us and one third of you haven't taken trainings with us. Another third, one third, who are familiar with us before, cool. So welcome everyone, new and old friends. I'll introduce a little bit of our program just so you know. Our program is supporting the overall mission of TechSoup by providing the training resources that non-perfect organizations need. So you can digitally transform your organization and be more resilient and so you are better supported for your mission delivery and your social impact. Our program was launched in 2017 and we have ever since then developed more than 200 original courses. Now we have over 80,000 learners registered on our platform. I'll briefly show you around our course catalog page about what we are offering. So you can see different categories here. Are you all seeing my screen? Fine. Yeah, sure. Yeah, we can see your screen. Cool. Thank you. We have courses in different languages, courses in English, in Spanish, French, and some courses are bundled in tracks so you can enroll in the whole track if you want. And we also have courses under Microsoft Digital Skills Center. And we also offer video and other resources, mostly free, so you can check out this tab and you can also check out our special offers and events for the upcoming weeks or months in this special offers tab here. Okay, back to our slide here. Our training is in different formats for you to choose from so we offer live events that are usually around one hour long, similar to the format of webinars or seminars and sometimes it's purely Q&A session for experts to answer any of the questions we have related to the topic. We also have on-demand training that you can go through at your own pace to learn from some interactive presentations, activities, and exercises. We also offer blended programs that invites a cohort of learners together in a program that ranges from four to eight weeks, typically six weeks. You meet with the instructor live each week and with the peers. There's also engagement outside the course, outside of live sessions in the discussion forum and there's on-demand content to go through as well. And we also have micro-learning contents, usually in the format of short videos, guides, and manuals. Sometimes we offer workshops as well, both online and in person, but not as many as other types of learning. And I wanted to share with you some examples of topics that we cover. So in support of digital transformation, we're covering a wide range of topics like non-profit digital transformation strategies, change management, to technology training, to the things that help improve the effectiveness and efficiency of operations, marketing, and data management from the perspectives of technology process and people. So our training is available for individuals and also we offer for the training for the whole organization. And we try to bring cohorts and community of purpose together so you can learn together and share your experience. And another section to introduce a little bit about how we develop our courses and training. Engaging effective and impactful is our goal. We work really hard to try to achieve that in our training. Our training is mostly delivered online in a learning management system. And we work very closely with experts with years of non-profit experiences to make sure that training is contextualized for our non-profit audience. And we are using an instructional approach called behavior change focused learning design. And we're using the process called ADDI to produce our courses. All these terms don't matter. What they really mean is that we take the time to learn about our learners, what are your backgrounds, what are your learning needs. And so we design the course and training materials accordingly. And we also incorporate evaluation into the training so we get your feedback and to improve the, keep improving the offerings over time. Okay, so let's dive right into the grant writing training resources that we have. And before I show you around, we have poll question here again to get to know you a little bit more. Your training needs a little bit more. What is your grant seeking background? None? Or I have heard of, oh, I think this is, the options are from the first poll. Maybe can we jump to the next poll? It looks like this, right? It says what is your grant seeking background on the poll and they're answering them? The options are with experience with texts and courses. I see, yeah, you're right, you're right. I think it's okay, we can skip this one and we have the next one. So to know, yeah, what aspect of grant writing and management are you interested in learning? Great overview of what to expect from the whole process? Or you want to know the essential capacity and resources you need from your organization? Or do you actually want to know the hands-on part of how to prepare and write a grant proposal or how to target your grant proposal to the right founder? Or if you have other aspects you want to learn, feel free to type in the chat. Well, we are seeing the results here. So a lot of you want to know about the actual aspect of how to prepare and write a grant proposal and how to target it for the right founder. Also you also want to know about an overview and the essential requirements for grant seeking. So it looks like all of these, okay, cool. And the track, the training resources we are offering on our platform actually covers all those. So this is a track available on our TechSoup courses catalog. It consists of five individual courses. There are two 100 level courses at a more basic beginning level covering the overall process of grant writing and management and help you assess whether your organization is ready for the whole grant seeking process. So we can actually jump to the catalog page of this course to see a little bit more details here. And I mentioned the first two courses. The next 200 level courses give you more hands-on guidance on how to actually write the narrative part of the proposal and then the budget and administrative pieces part of the proposal. And the last course is to help you target your package to the right founder so how you can tweak your package for a different audience and also how to narrate, nurture your relationship with potential founders. If you're interested, you can, I'm going to share the link in the chat so you can browse through the details. And this track is designed for beginners who are getting started with grant writing. And this is the whole grant roadmap that's being covered in this course track. You'll see different steps here. Not all steps are necessarily the actions you need to take. So the course track is focusing on the major action steps you will need to do like one, two, three research founders, cultivate relationships, draft your proposal and then submit to your proposal. And of the last three steps of managing, implementing, reporting and exploring opportunities for new that's touched on a little bit as well. So this is the whole entire experience for the roadmap. So that's why we recommend to take all the five courses as a track instead of taking individual courses. And the expert behind all these content is Dalia Massaji. She is very experienced writer, editor, training coach for nonprofit grant writing and management. And she has worked with a lot of nonprofit organizations, helping them raise a lot of grant money. So she has made a lot of effort to writing her experience into this course. And she also created a fictitious example in the course to demonstrate all the steps involved. A little bit of facts about our development. So the first two courses, 100 level courses was developed before the pandemic. We were able to go into the studio and the video records Dalia for some of the content. So that's the picture you see on the screen. The 200 level courses are developed during the pandemic. So we were not able to go into the studio. And so if you ever take the course, you'll see that there's more audio and motion graphics used in the content rather than Dalia's video. I also want to share a little bit of what we the feedback we get from learners who have already took the course. They are pretty satisfied with the course, finding the training worth their time and useful to their work and inclined to recommend this course track to a colleague. So there's a request for you to close your closed captioning dialogue that's on your screen. Oh, OK, I'm sorry about that. I didn't know people are seeing that. Thank you. So let's get a closer look at those courses rather than me talking about what they are about and just looking at the catalog page. I'm going to show you around in two of the courses to see what your learning experience might be. I'll go ahead and open up my browser window. So let's go to the first course. This is the on-demand course track. So this is for you to finish at your own pace at the time convenient for you. After you go into the course, you'll get to a welcome module, which gives you an overview of what this course is about and what to expect. Also, you will complete a self-assessment here. So you know what you already know about this topic. And then you'll get to know the expert and in the actual content modules. You in the first course, you actually get a warm-up activity. This is for you to evaluate how you are motivated for taking this training. For example, I'm curious about the opportunity. And that's the feedback from Dalia for your choice. And for these interactive elements, usually after you are done, click on the mark complete button and it will give you the tech points you need for certificate or completion of the course. And in the module of content, you'll go through some interactive presentations to learn about the content, the concepts. A grant is simply a financial gift from an institution or organization for a specific purpose that is deemed charitable. So this is narrated with visualizations. And you'll have a few presentations to go through covering different aspects. And at the end of the module, we will have quizzes or activities to help check you have to understand everything in this module. So for example, this one is a quiz. You'll answer that and get the feedback. And in another module, we might have an activity for you to complete like this one. It's helping you measure your prior experience of all the different steps in the Grunge World Map. So you can select and submit and you'll get feedback. And go through all the steps, answer all of those. And in the end, you'll be able to get a summary of your responses. And there's a quiz for this module as well. So 100 level courses are relatively short, usually in both of them are two modules. You'll get to the wrap up and evaluation module after those two modules. So you'll see a link to the self assessment evaluation form here. You can assess yourself again to see how much you have improved compared to the assessment you did at the beginning of the course. And also we gather your feedback for the experience part of this course. So we appreciate your feedback from this. After you have completed the modules, get the necessary tech points and completed the evaluation form. You will be able to download a certificate for course completion if you want. So in case you want to show your proof of completion, if your organization sponsored your training or in some other situation. And for the whole course series, Dalia also provided a glossary for writing and management covering all the terms that's covered in the five courses to help you understand the content. And also additional resources for you to go through if you want to take the learning to the next level. So this is the 100 level that's more basic and overview. I also wanted to show you the 200 level, which is a bit more hands on. You'll see the major component or structure of the course is similar. You'll get an overview of the course in the welcome module and go through similar presentations and activities in the content modules. What's different, the biggest difference in 200 level courses are that you are starting to do some hands-on writing and proposal preparation. And now so you'll see a fictitious example here that Dalia prepared. Also some worksheets that you can download and fill out on your own. So you finish the components that you need for your proposal writing. And after all these steps, finally, you will be able to put together the narrative. So PDFs that you can download. Some worksheets are in Word format or Google Doc format. So you are able to edit our additional resources as well. Like frequently asked questions, related resources and glossary and additional resources are there for all the courses. So that is our course and that actually comes to the end of my part. Of the presentation. We're doing good on time and I would like to hand this over to Mona for other resources. Thank you so much Shuiya. Thank you everyone for still being here with us. I see that we have a question in the Q&A channel. I have a question. Sorry I came in late. How do I get to these modules? So the modules that Shuiya was sharing on her screen are part of the grant writing management track that we have. So anytime, you know, if you want to access those courses, once you get enrolled into those courses, you will be able to see those modules. If you've come in late to this webinar, please don't worry. We share the recording of this webinar. We will share our deck so you can take a look at the recording even before you get into or you choose to enroll in the course. So I will quickly share my screen so I can take on the presentation. Okay, so Shuiya did a really good job of going over the grant writing management track. It's one of our best courses in my opinion. We get amazing feedback and results as you saw from Shuiya's presentation. However, we do have other fundraising trainings that are available on TechSoup courses. So what we did was we went through our catalog and we kind of put them in buckets. We have training resources for fundraising technologies, mainly dealing with fundraising software that's available to small nonprofits. We have a tech forward fundraising toolkit, which is actually a free kit that is available for everyone. We have another course on mastering the CRM. We know a lot of nonprofits struggle with migration to a new CRM or understanding what's a CRM if they're looking to buy one. So this is a really great course to get started with that. We also have courses on design because fundraising needs, you know, when you have events you might want to be designing for your events. So we have a bunch of great Adobe courses and these are really good because we also have a discounts program through TechSoup to get Adobe for nonprofits. And then I really want to also mention that we've just done this new course on Premiere Rush, which is Adobe's video editing software. It's a phenomenal course. We have done these courses because of a generous grant from Adobe that recognize that we are able to contextualize a lot of the trainings for nonprofits. So I would highly recommend if you're looking to edit videos, which I think a lot of you now are doing for your websites for fundraising. This is a really great starting course to start using Adobe Premiere Rush. And then we have marketing courses for social media, email marketing and utilizing your Google Ad Grants. And then finally, we added a bunch of courses in the last two years, which are around remote fundraising, mainly to do with organizing and managing remote events, engaging communities online. So a great course many nonprofits don't think about, you know, online communities and what are the new things and different things you have to do to engage those communities online, especially as you cannot have in person conferences, and reach out the way that you would before. So again, there's tons of content, there's a lot of other courses for you to review and to look at. So we are sharing the links to all of these courses so you know please don't worry when you when you get an email from us at the end of this webinar we will have all of these links in there so you can find these much more easily. If you don't get that email, you can always go to the TechSoup courses catalog we have a search bar you can simply search by keywords, and you will find these courses. There was a lot of questions I think I saw a question about how expensive the grant writing track is the track itself is for $250, but because, as Aretha said this is grant station and grant writing week at TechSoup. So we have a special promo for everyone in this webinar. If you wanted to purchase this grant writing track, please use the code that we have in here web grant 20 to get 20% off of the grant writing track so that's $50 off of the $250 course. Okay, so we also have a bunch of upcoming courses. Shuiya's team is always producing amazing courses. You know it seems like every week. We have a bunch of courses what I really want to bring to your attention is that we have courses that range in prices from $10 all the way to 50 and then we have special courses. As Shuiya mentioned which are blended training courses that are six week training that are $350. We also do free events every month. So if you ever want to visit our catalog, you would find in our events tab there are always free events available for you to come in and try us out. I know this is a long list. These are all the upcoming courses that we have between February and April. We are focusing a lot on Adobe on cybersecurity on data and on website. So if you find any of this interesting. Please reach out to us. I want to bring your attention to these two highlighted courses you will notice that the six week training on cybersecurity and data privacy. We do have a promo running currently it's actually a $350 course but we have a promo running for $250 for this week. Similarly for nonprofit website strategy if any of you are looking to update your website for better fundraising for better storytelling. This is a great course. And you know what's really great about the six week training courses is that we restrict the cohort to between 50 to 75 nonprofits. So it's not a very big class, but it's a class that comes together once a week for six weeks to learn together online on our platform to share experiences to share homeworks as questions of each other so it ends up being a pretty engaging collaborative and intense learning experience that is specific for nonprofits. And we always enjoy bringing these breeze to you. All right, so one thing I know I just gave you a whole bunch of resources. One thing I do want to say is we have over 200 courses, and we do a course a week so we have a very big catalog. And any time that you are interested in taking a course, or a bunch of courses, please reach out to us. We are email is very easy, we are learn at tech soup dot org. If you reached out to us, we will be very happy to put together a package for you to help you understand you know the time that it would take you to complete all the courses that you want. We are here to facilitate, you know your training so we're happy to consider providing discounts. We are also happy to help you prepare a package that you can present to your organization if you're looking for them to sponsor you or to reimburse you. And for organizations, we are happy to provide a big bulk discounts if you're looking to have a whole bunch of staff take courses with us. And our objective is to bring contextualized training for nonprofits that helps you with your mission and impact. So please please reach out to us, we are here to help. We will do everything in our power to make sure that you have these trainings available to you. Maybe some points to remember this is a question I'm always asked. So, you can get a tech soup courses account for free, simply register yourself. The tech soup courses accounts are for individuals because it's individuals that are taking trainings. So when you get a tech soup account you get your own dashboard you can download your own certificates. So go ahead and get your own account. These accounts are not the same as your tech soup member account. So you don't need to use tech soup member credentials for your tech soup courses account, it's a new account. Please treat it as such. And then, again, if you have any questions at all, or any trouble accessing anything, please reach out to us we are learn at tech soup.org. Okay, so I do see that there are a bunch of questions. Up in chat. Okay, so thumbs up reading says if any of the attendees is focusing on early reading for k five students happy to connect. They're providing a tutoring type program. So everyone who needs this thank you thumbs up reading for that. And I have some questions in the q&a. There's a question about the promo code. So let me share that again I'll bring it up. It's web grant 20 all one word. We will be sharing the promo code in the email that you will get at the end of this as well. So, if you don't get it here don't worry about it. Does the 20% off for the grant modules expire by a specific time. Yes they do I believe they expire by the end of February. So you will have to get it before February 28. And then another thing I want to mention is that you can actually use the 20% for the entire track so I think someone had that question. And then Macri wants to know what course would you recommend, once you have received multiple grants, and you need to manage the related tasks deadline reporting requirements etc. So we do have. So that's a good question we don't actually have a course that helps you manage specifically grant proposals and deadlines, but we have a really good basic course on project management. So, you know what I can recommend is if you can go in and see the overview of project management courses. That provides you a lot of basic guideline on how to manage your deadlines and your tasks and, you know, I would imagine it's the same as if you were managing grant deadlines versus project deadline so we don't have something specific. But highly recommend that you just take a look at the overview of the project management courses. And then Michael Hornstein wants to know if I'm currently an affiliated with a nonprofit, can I still take advantage of the grant writing management, and or fundraising courses as an individual. This is a great question Michael thank you so much for it. And the answer is yes. Tech soup courses is specifically built for tech for nonprofit staff and volunteers. And a lot of nonprofits have volunteers that need training. So there is no eligibility requirement on tech soup courses. So if any of you even if you feel that you're unaffiliated or you're volunteering and you don't really have a nonprofit account or email, you can go ahead and get your, get your account and take courses with us. And Heather Haining wants to know. Can you post the links to register in the chat. The links on the slides are not accessible to us. Absolutely Heather, we will post it in chat, and I will make sure that you get those in our email that will go out to you at the end of this webinar as well. All right, so I think I have answered all the questions. All right, Rita take it away that's that's what I have.