 We are so glad that you're here for another episode. Today we have back by popular demand Colton Strosser and Colton's going to talk to us about are you really ready for government grants and Colton is with Colton Strosser Consulting and we'll hear more directly from you here momentarily. Before that we want to remind our viewers and our listeners around the globe who we are. So Julia Patrick is here and serves as the CEO of the American Nonprofit Academy. I'm Jarrett Ransom her favorite non-profit nerd and only but CEO of the Raven Group and I like to remind everyone plenty of nerdiness to go around so you know always happy to be here in conversation with you Julia and with our esteemed guest who as we always say we learn so much from every single day but we couldn't do this without our sponsors so thank you to our besties over at Bloomerang, American Nonprofit Academy, Fundraising Academy at National University, Nonprofit Thought Leader, Your Part-Time Controller, Staffing Boutique, Nonprofit Nerd as well as Nonprofit Tech Talk. These companies keep us going and growing but they're here yes round of applause for you they're here for your mission and they're here to better support your community so do us a favor do yourself a favor but do them a favor and check out these companies they are they are truly amazing and actually Colton and I had a sidebar the other day when we were on a chat about your part-time controller so that was that was fun yeah good we we've produced nearly 800 episodes you can find us on you know streaming for broadcast you can find us on podcast if you're auditory and want to listen to us that way and you can also now download the app thank you Vanna White who is showing us her her phone Julia thank you for that yeah make sure you download the app it's on both all smartphones but droid as well as iphone and it will of course give you that notification each and every day including today letting you know that Colton's episode is now up and on the app so plenty of places you can find us and again for today's conversation I'm just so glad to have you back Colton again those of you watching and listening Colton Strasser CEO at Colton Strasser Consulting joins us from the big state of Texas welcome yeah thanks for having me back it's exciting to talk about government grants and the good the bad and the somewhat ugly well tell us a little bit Colton I know what you do but tell those that are watching and listening that might not be familiar with you and your work really where your niche market is yeah so at Colton Strasser Consulting we help nonprofits develop the data funding and leadership skills necessary to create change and in terms of the funding aspect I am a former fundraiser I still do some of that I got my CFRE I'm an AFP master trainer but my niche is government grants and as I say it's government grants only nothing more nothing less and so I can do all the other stuff but you know having a phd comes in handy every once in a while and when reading 48 pages of instructions for a government grant my attention span can hold on for that long so you know that's kind of the niche I found it's you know I'll probably talk more about this but grant writing for foundations and other writing for philanthropy is often persuasive and creative writing kind of blended together government grant writing is technical writing it's very straightforward they don't care about the love like squeeze all that out of your application it doesn't belong there you can use that creativity somewhere else but it's a lot of technical writing which is what I really enjoy doing and so that's kind of how I wound it up doing government grants for different nonprofits and we're at 25 million and counting congratulations yeah that's really cool I love that you started it has started us off with technical versus emotional writing and persuasive writing really interesting because to me Colton that frames up so much of what we're going to talk about with with you today and the first thing we got to ask and this is like start here before we go anywhere else our government grant grants plentiful I mean I feel like sometimes it's like weak you know the government saying we need more people to apply and then other times I'm like I hear it seems like I hear you'll never get one so where where are we in between us that in that spectrum on that spectrum well you're correct in that it's a spectrum there's a lot of funding for certain things and not so much others and I always say is it worth jumping through a flaming hoop or is there a better way to get money to answer the question if it's plentiful you know as the academic I had to bring you some data fresh off the presses so I did some analysis last night of all the nonprofits in the state of Texas and we have revenue that's you know sort of your philanthropic or your contributed revenue so philanthropy makes up 48.7% of that revenue government grants makes up 40.1% of that revenue so it's very interesting nugget of the overall revenue now then to share some more data philanthropic contributions make up 21% of you know a certain chunk of revenue while program service revenue the things we charge for make up 79% so you know when I tell nonprofits that come into me and say hey I want more money and I'm like okay well what's fundraising working like that well we're doing fine I'm like well have you looked at government grants and have you looked at charging for something yet and they're like oh no we haven't considered that I'm like yeah that's where your money's sitting you know there's there's ways nonprofits can do that but the short answer to your very short question is yes they are plentiful but government grants aren't for everyone they're kind of like banks not everyone can rock a bank so you know like government grants just aren't for everyone so it's just it's they're good but you know there's some people love government grants some people love to hate them you know they're they're also time-bound so you have three to five years to maybe figure it out and you know before we started we talked about we you know Jared and you know Julia you were talking about some you know nonprofits that you've worked with I got grants and they're like we grew and I was talking about this morning with a potential client and they're like yeah we have about two more years before that water runway just stops and and so sustainability is a huge thing when talking about government grants as well yeah spot on right like that runway there is they are time-bound and so if we grow as an organization what does that look like for future you know and how do we equate that in our budget how do we equate that within our workforce there's a lot of moving pieces to this but I know who I'm going to call the next time I need to read a dissertation it's going to be you Colton because I don't have that energy or the attention like to sit down and read those details but technical writing and so I love that you're like you know all that creativity all the fluff all the love set that aside that can be used elsewhere yeah absolutely I think that's just such an amazing lens to start with because I know that early in my career I was successful with grants in one way and then totally not successful in another way and and it took me a long time to realize that difference that difference between how you communicate and and how you put forth the information to build that engagement so a big part of that is figuring out if your organization is even ready for this and so I love that you've given us this like entire umbrella where we need to stand under and look at first but what are some of the other things to know if we're even going to be good candidates yeah so we actually offer a service called the government grants readiness assessment because nonprofits were asking us this exact thing and so what we do it's different for everybody but we look at making sure you have the organizational infrastructure in place to take on a government grant you know 2.5 million dollars sounds lovely over the next five years and I know nonprofits could think of ways to spend that but you know in order to be ready to apply for that in some cases your organization has to be around for a certain number of years so I love a good startup things they're going to get government grants right away that's like step number five on your fundraising journey and then government grants are a lot more complicated than foundation grants but they're a lot larger so sometimes if you put the work you will figure out what you can get and what you can't get the government likes to fund things that are going to get results or that you're going to meet metrics so if your organization has not invested anything in program evaluation you're going to have a hard time keeping up the other thing is a lot of government grants are reimbursement based and this is what rules a lot of people out you know if you get a 2.5 million dollar grant as a 200 000 a year nonprofit you're not going to have the capital to cover things so my piece of advice you know during the government grants rate assessment we see what type of money do you have is an unrestricted money you know what's your cash flow look like how many months of liquidity do you have because if you have to wait 60 to 90 days for a payment you can't do that you can't pay your mortgage with your mission and so you got to be careful and then what we always recommend is that clients look at getting a line of credit and you can get a line of credit from pretty much any bank but you know however your nonprofits banking with checking with the line of credit generally speaking it's not something you have to pay for or if you do it's like maybe 200 a year but my good banker friend said banks don't give you a line of credit when you need it they give it to you when you don't need it that's so when you're applying for these government grants I always say do you have a line credit they're like no I'm like great get one today whether you use it or not you want to have that in your back pocket because who knows what's going to happen and you might need to pay payroll in between two little reimbursements or two grants getting you know hitting the bank and having that line of credit can really almost make or break an organization so it's good for anyone to have Colton let me ask you this question you brought something about up about the reimbursement piece of this what is what are you seeing in terms of government reimbursement time is it is it running you know to the 120 days or is it really back more to the 60 to 90 what is that looking like I think it's 60 to 90 at the most um if you're on top of it um I heard of organizations that are multi months behind I heard of one recently that's like four years behind on their billing so yeah I can't know whatever uh so like I can't help you at this point you're too far in the arrears um but you know you're looking at 60 to 90 days I think that's an average plan um but you know being on top of like making sure your accounting is really good making sure especially if you're getting paid like per client served that you have all that data because if you don't have the data collected like the pre and post or whatever you're supposed to collect you're not going to get paid and so I'm not going to say you did that work for nothing but you did that work for free so yeah you're not going to get paid for it um so I'm just being mindful of you know having someone in your organization that can keep track of things I don't recommend using spreadsheets to keep track of this stuff but hey you got to start somewhere and it's better than a tally sheet so you know just keep in track of what you're doing and how you're doing it and making sure you're billing for um the full extent that you can bill for yeah you know I think they're very tedious I think they're tedious to write and then they're tedious to manage and that management piece is really what we're talking about at this current moment is you know many most probably are reimbursement and you have to track and you have to track your receipts right the money but you also have to track those measurements as you were just sharing colton and that is a big piece and one thing that I've witnessed over the last three years is a lot of turnover with a lot of different staff and so really seeing some uh discrepancy right between tracking whether it's the money or the data piece um any benefit any um suggestions on how we can maintain consistency so we don't become an organization four years behind and pick up the phone and say I think I need colton like how do we prevent some of this so I think part of it's just getting a good process and procedure in place um a lot of larger organizations that have multiple grants have um you know they have a data analyst or they have you know internal program evaluator who's separate from your private foundation community foundation grant writer um so they're really more you know government grants is really more of a data nerd thing uh rather than a um regular fundraiser whatever that means uh so a generalized fundraiser um so it's really having someone that can keep on track of those things and then keeping a process and procedure like on this date we report this on that date we report that and then it just kind of becomes um a habit you know if you have a bunch of people that are new to an organization you know having maybe like a consultant come in and help you understand like okay this is the requirements of this grant are you following that or if you have an auditor you know having them come in and educate you I'm like okay this is this this is that um is really you know it might be the most boring two-hour training you've ever been in but um it's also going to make sure that uh you can keep your job uh so it's a meeting worth attending so yeah we have to make sure those eyes are dotted the T's are crossed and I could even foresee where you know a new staff member comes in that's part of their onboarding you know they need to really understand the funding and what they're required to do as it pertains to their you know uh position and what they're responsible for so thank you for answering that let's move into because I'm sure we have some viewers and listeners saying okay how and where do I find these extremely lucrative government grants so where do we even start well so that's the million dollar literally question you know the normal place to start if you're looking for federal funding it's all on grants.gov you know except grants.gov will start to link out to other places but it's a good search place if you don't have a grants to grants.gov account you know sign up for one you can subscribe to get updates and alerts you know I get them all the time and if they come through and you know it's just kind of the title a little description I'm like ooh so-and-so am I like this and I'll just forward it to them and say hey here you go um but you know you can follow whatever your issue area is to get updates and if you're looking for state and uh sort of county and local grants uh some states are better organized than others um and you have to go to like the grants and contracting office or the procurement office or different things on some states and they'll put them all there other states will make you go to each agency so what we do with like our grants rating assessments we figure out well what do you do as an organization and who actually might be interested in funding that as a health and human services is the department education and then we identify all those different areas of which the mission fits and then we figure out okay now where do they post all their grants um sometimes there's a um subscribe list and you can get updated sometimes you just have to put a little tickle on your calendar to go check the first of the month to see what's available so um it sometimes is a hunt and gather um type of thing and you know generally counties and cities are a little better about putting everything in the same place um state agencies are not um you know there's like softwares out there that say they do the searching for you um you know they kind of do they kind of don't um they sort of pull in all random types of things and so I just think it's better to have them just bookmarked and then just kind of flip through whether it's you know once a month every two weeks whatever you know and subscribe to the ones you can subscribe to and if you have to come through the other ones by hand you know every couple weeks then you know that's that's just the the price you pay when you have to work with the government they still use fax machines so we can't expect them all to have an email list so a what they use a web machine yeah weird advice uh I've only used like three times in my life you know Colton when I hear you describing this it makes me think and and this is kind of like the reverse psychology of it but if it's that challenging to do it means that maybe there's more opportunity because how many people are going to be disciplined enough and structured enough to really manage this in in this discovery way and so you know um not only is it incumbent upon us to set up some of these tracking systems and and really make sure that we're actively engaged in the process but I gotta believe as hard as we have to work in the nonprofit sector this is just not getting done in many cases I think people avoid government grants because they're like oh it's complicated like it is um you know but it's not rocket science but you know if you've never flown a rocket then it is rocket science so you know for a lot of folks they're like ooh government grants no there's a lot of instructions for that I'm like there is um you know but once you kind of get through that the information they're asking for isn't that complicated you know they want to know who you're serving how you're serving them how you're going to track it um how do you know what you do um achieves results like what's the data or the literature that's backing up you know whatever like they want you to write a strong need statement um that includes data and so in essence it's things that any good nonprofit should be able to do um but you know government grants take between 80 to 120 hours to write um and so you know if you're looking at it from that perspective then yes it's a huge time suck but you know if you get the you know 2.5 million you're like okay that was worth 100 hours uh you know the ROI is good on that um but the benefit you know uh government grants is if you don't get the grant um they also give you some really good feedback oftentimes and they give you a score the best tip I have for writing a government grant is to write to the test uh the government grants have a rubric in there and they give you a rubric for a reason they're like this is what we're looking for like if anything you include in there does not earn you a bonus point check it out you have about 10 pages to answer 300 questions and so make it easy on the reviewers section by section like make it hard for them not to give you a point you know they're like ah dang they have everything in here um because I've scored government grants I'm not reading it for like oh this is so cute I'm like I have 10 points to give do they earn the 10 points oh this is a lovely answer zero they don't answer the question uh and that happens all the time they're like let me tell you why you should love me and I'm like no I'm here for points not for love so you get zero because you told me a nice story if I were on the community foundation grant review committee I'd be like oh that's lovely they should get the money um on governments like you didn't answer the question next very different yeah and I highly recommend engaging with a specialist especially if you've not ever submitted you know a government grant the nuances are extremely different as Colton's been sharing and I think it's well worth you know the time and the money invested uh for this because you know every time I've been a part of a government grant submission it is a project management endeavor right and there's typically been one person who's in charge of of you know making sure it gets across the finish line doesn't mean that they are responsible for dotting all the i's and crossing all the t's but they parse out these different sections they pull it all together they do make sure that everyone dotted their own i's and t's right but it's a huge again as I say tedious like it's a big project to manage and as you said I mean it's multiple pages multiple questions but it often comes with multiple zeros at the end of a number yeah I love it you know you've given us some really great advice and I I'm really I'm just I'm fascinated by the this lens with which you work Colton when we're thinking about this for our own nonprofits and maybe we haven't really gone down this path before talk to us about what we need to apply I'm I love the idea of starting before you do anything with an assessment I think that's just genius because that's going to save everyone a lot of anxiety and heartbreak it seems like but what are some of the other things that we really should be looking at so some of the things that I look for and you're right like doing an assessment to begin like are we even ready it's going to save you so much time and it can also help you fix what's wrong or what you don't have before the next grant comes around because government grants are usually out for about 45 to 60 days if you're lucky so when it hits the books you got to hit the ground so I always say readiness is half the battle but the things that you need are you know like you need an organizational chart the number of nonprofits I know that don't have one is extreme and so get an org chart you also need to have an evaluation plan like how do you evaluate your programs and can you put that into like writing in a paragraph or so you know the whole week count the number of people that show up step isn't going to work here specifically for like you know larger types of grants you have the more zeros the more evaluation they want you to do and in many cases they want you to budget like 10 towards evaluation which is a great learning opportunity for your organization but when you write the application you need to have that plan in place ahead of time and then also you know really thinking about what's the next couple of years going to look like for this program because once you sign a contract with the government that is a contract and so I'm working with a nonprofit right now where one of their subcontractors decided we're going to do something different and we're like no you're not so you're either not going to do anything or you're going to have to do this if you want paid so yeah everything you do that you change or want to change needs to go through a permission acceptance process and the thing that they want to do different is vastly different so it's just important to be aware that like when you're making a commitment for three years you know you're making you're making a commitment so just kind of being aware of what the future looks like and then also having all your finances together you know making sure your bookkeeping is caught up and then also making sure that your financial statements are actually nonprofit financial statements not for profit there's a difference and so you know there's all those little documents in place can help you like you know the attachments can be like where you spend most of your time and it shouldn't be you should have all those ready you know the resumes of your staff the organizational chart the you know the financial stuff so then it's just like oh yeah we got that you know that's the easy part then not the where do we have this you know kind of thing or have to recreate it so you mentioned the the readiness is that on your website I'm curious um yes uh somewhere we're switching websites so okay you know it's something that we offer it actually is on our website it's a little hidden um but it's on our fundraising and philanthropy page under services and so folks can check that out or they can just send us an email and we're happy to share some additional information about you know sort of our readiness assessment and it takes a couple weeks to do you know we kind of send you on a scavenger hunt to make sure you're ready and you know if you find the scavenger hunts taking too long then it might not be ready to do a government grant so that's why we have that little component in there too if you're scrambling to find basic documents I was like you're not quite ready yet not ready yeah I love it I but I think the brilliance of this I mean Jared you and I talked about this is understanding if this is even a path you want to go down that's right as opposed to getting in the middle of it and then just finding it's a disaster yeah yeah well and as I mentioned in the green room chatter right like once you spend I believe the threshold cold in the 750 000 um is it spend or receive I'm not I'm not sure which I think it's received um then you have to do a single file audit and that's above and beyond your annual audit and that in and of itself you know has a different price tag to it and so if that's not even you know part of your budget like these are the things to consider um similarly I was working with another client Colton and you know they were talking about their budget and I was like okay well I know you've received a million dollars in government but there's no line item here for your audit they're like oh we didn't know about that and so just like knowing it's not just applying for these grants it's that managing it's the reporting and the compliance right that compliance is a big piece of that um let's bring up Colton's contact because I want everyone uh to know how to reach Colton Strosser as well as um his lovely team at coltonstrosser.com um also active on LinkedIn which I appreciate so much and uh yeah there there's a lot going on Colton you work across the nation is that right I know you live in Texas but yeah no I'm I'm here there and everywhere okay yeah I I really appreciate that and again you know shameless plug here for Colton his team and others that you know if you are looking to take on this endeavor and this is a new endeavor for you you don't have to do this alone you can absolutely have an expert on your team and in fact leading the charge of this to make sure that you're pulling everything and you're getting points not love on your on your rubrics right that's what's important and if uh I'll just add another shameless plug if folks sign up for our newsletter we have an intro to government grants training uh once a quarter uh so you can get some of the in-depth you know how-tos and yeah sometimes people attend that training like yep nope don't want to do this myself and other times they're like I need this to shot so yeah we're happy to help people um where they are and um sometimes we just review the grants too so if they write it we can review it and score it you know it's cheaper that way because we're not spending the time writing it but um I'm a tough grader so you'll get good feedback so I love it I think that is brilliant and what an amazing uh collaboration to to do hey Colton Strasser CEO Colton Strasser consulting um it's just been fabulous I I love your energy and I always love hearing what you have to say again I'm Julia Patrick CEO of the American Nonprofit Academy I've been joined by the non-profit nerd herself Jarrett Ransom CEO of the Raven Group and again we want to make sure that we extend our gratitude to all of our sponsors from Bloomerang to American Nonprofit Academy your part-time controller non-profit thought leader fundraising academy at national university staffing boutique non-profit nerd and non-profit tech talk these are the folks that join us day in and day out um and it's just an amazing partnership that we have it's really important to note Jarrett and I like I don't say this enough but you know our sponsors don't control any of our editorial decisions um so we meet and talk with people that sometimes are direct competitors of theirs um that might have different opinions um and so it's really powerful that these people trust us to navigate now nearly 800 episodes of the non-profit show Colton Strasser hey your rock star go out there and get more money for our sector my friend well thanks for having me I appreciate you thanks Colton it's been a lot of fun hey everybody as we like to end every episode of the non-profit show we like to remind ourselves our viewers our listeners our guests to stay well so you can do well we'll see you back here tomorrow everyone