 This is, it was originally everything you need to know about the TIG and TIP grants program, we're kind of changing that down to some things you need to know about TIG and TIP grants, we didn't want to over deliver this afternoon, but hopefully we will be able to provide you some helpful information about this grant program and just have a good discussion overall with you today. So it's kind of the usual suspects in terms of the TIG team presenting, it's the three program staff with the TIG program. So Jane Ribbidenera, Glen Rodden, and myself, David Bonebrake. I should mention too that we have two other great members of the TIG team. Eric Matheson is our grants coordinator, and a lot of you know him, he works behind the scene to help make the grant program work. And we also have Ron Kay Hughes, who is our, she's a deputy director in the Office of Program Performance at LSE. I know many of you know Ron Kay as well, she oversees the TIG team. But for today, you have the three of us. So in terms of what we're going to cover today, I won't read through the whole agenda, but we will do an overview really quick of the 2022 TIG cycle. Just so you're aware of some important dates and information about that. We'll talk about successful parts of how to, you know, develop a successful TIG application, also some of the common mistakes from TIG applications as well. So you're aware of that information. And there are a few other things that it was, sort of, we received a request to talk about today and we'll be happy to cover those. I do want to mention too, we are going to try something a little different, which will hopefully be helpful to you all. Man, I am quick on the trigger here on these slides. All right. So, well, interesting. So I'm missing a slide, but what I did in the chat box was I typed in a link to a form. And if you all have two screens available, if you don't mind just going ahead and opening up that link, it's a very simple form. We made it in Microsoft forms. What it does is it allows you to provide us feedback or ask us questions and do so completely anonymously. So it gets no information about you. On our side, it just says anonymous respondent four or anonymous respondent five. And it allows you to, you know, basically give us any feedback that you have. And if I have the slide here, what it would say was that our hope is today that folks can kind of share with us, sort of, how they're feeling about the TIG program, what we're doing well, areas we could improve, how you're feeling about the application process and any other questions that you have that maybe you don't want to ask, you know, in a webinar with your name associated with them. It's an opportunity for you to ask those questions anonymously. So hopefully everybody's seeing that chat link within their, link within their chat. And if you do click on that, and if you do submit anything through it too, it'll immediately allow you to kind of click back and do more information as well. So you can submit two or three things if you want to. And my hope is as we sort of wrap up the presentation portion of this, we can turn, make things a little more interactive, but also sort of read through sort of any feedback that folks had and answer any questions as well. So again, sorry that slide's not there, but that's sort of the plan that we had about feedback this time. The TIG program has been a technology grant program at LSE for over 20 years. I know a lot of you are familiar with it. If you're not familiar with it, if you go to the LSE section of the website and you go to grants in technology initiative grants, you can learn all about the history of the program, sort of what our focus is. I won't go into that today because I think a lot of you are already familiar with it. But if you are entirely new to TIG, we're glad you're here and we encourage you to go to the website to learn more about it. All right. I do just want to provide a quick update on where things stand with the 2022 TIG cycle. First of all, in the last week, we got some fairly good news and that's that we do have a final appropriation for the year and the appropriation, it's $4.5 million, which is actually a little bit more than it was in the previous year. I know there was some hope, particularly with the field funding that we would see more of an increase, but we did receive more of a modest increase, but more money is still more money. So we're hopeful that'll allow us to fund a few more projects a cycle. I do want to point out for the general projects, so those that are not the assessment projects, but the general projects, which is a lot of the TIGs that we fund, those do require pre-applications and hopefully if you're planning on putting one of those together, you're aware that the deadline for the pre-applications is this Friday at 11.59 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time. For the improvement projects, the smaller tech assessment projects that I think some of you are aware of, those are now handled through a separate application process. There's no pre-application for those. The system for applying for those launches in mid-April and all the accompanying guidance documents and things like that that come out that we produce and share with applicants, those will be coming in mid-April as well, and the deadline there is May 20th for the TIP applications. On the general projects, we go from a pre-application, we invite full proposals, we'll do that next month, and then the full proposal deadline will be Friday, June 3rd of this year, and then we will make award notifications to you all in September. Quickly, I just want to go over a couple of changes that you should be aware of for 2022. Nothing really ground or earth-shattering here. Basically, we have a little bit more funding, so we're happy about that. We also simplified the maximum amount available through the TIP program. So in previous years, there was some confusion about whether it was 25 or 35, depending on whether you had an information security piece. We just decided to simplify that. Anybody can apply for the eligible, which is most programs, can apply for a TIP up to $35,000. We encourage you to look at the security component of any TIP project. We think that's supported, but that's not required, and it doesn't impact whether you can apply for the full 35 now. Finally, I'll note that we have a new area of interest for the 2022 cycle. Most years, we do have a new area of interest. This year is no different. This year, it is legal action plans for self-represented litigants. I won't get into that unless folks have questions about it, in which case we'd be happy to discuss it more. It's a fairly self-explanatory area, but if you want to learn more about it, if you go to the website and look at our application resources, specifically the Pre-Application Guide, you can learn more specifically about what that is focused on. All right, so we're going to go ahead and move away from the application cycle, get into the substance of how you go about submitting a strong application. Before we do that, though, I just want to note one final thing. The information that we're going to be sharing with you over the course of this webinar is all information that you can also find in our official webinars that we do through LSC. You can also find that information in things like the TIG website or the Pre-Application Guide or the Full Application Guide. We are repackaging information. I think we're doing so in a way that's going to be helpful and will hopefully be a good use of your time, but I do just want to know in case there's any concerns that we're not providing you sort of new information or new insights that we're not sharing outside of this LSC TAP webinar. This is all information that we have previously shared. We're just sort of repackaging it for you here today and hopefully it will be useful to you. All right, so with that, let me go ahead and turn things over. Jane, I guess you're going to start and talk a little bit now about technology improvement projects in more detail. Yeah, thanks, David. I just wanted to mention to, you know, most of this, most of the items and things we'll be talking about today will refer to our bigger, what we call now our general TIG category, but I did want to just let people know and mention that we do have another category, which is our technology improvement projects or TIPS, as we call them for short. These do not have a pre-application requirement, so you don't have to worry about this Friday's deadline. They will open up and be available in mid-April, as David said, and are due on May 20th. These are smaller projects. You can request funding anywhere up to $35,000. They're normally, you know, anywhere from six months to 18-month projects. For things like doing some type of assessment of your technology systems, IT security audit, doing kind of a planning or business process improvement type of project. So, you know, we just want to encourage anybody who might be, you know, just kind of make people aware there isn't any LSE-funded program is eligible for this, you know, as long as you're not on short basic field funding, anyone's eligible, and, you know, as long as you're up to date on any other TIG projects. And these applications, you know, they're shorter than the generals. You know, they're fairly simple. You do a budget. You kind of provide a description of what you want to do, the rationale behind it, you know, how you'll do it. You know, most of the time, these are projects to hire a third-party consultant to come in and kind of help you go through, whether it's a BPI or some type of an assessment process. And that's about it. So it's kind of, we've saw a lot more people take advantage of it when we opened up eligibility last year. Just want to reiterate that for this year as well. And then I'm going to pass it over to Glenn, who's going to start talking about the general applications sometimes. Thanks, Jane, David. Many times people ask us, what can we do to make our applications for TIG better? And so we've come up with some kind of general guidelines on things that we've seen that really make the applications more fundable, which is what you're really interested in. The first thing is partnerships. And partnerships are really important, so important that I'm going to be talking to them a little bit fuller later. So I'm going to skip over that part now. The next one is an achievable and practical plan. And so when we look at what you are thinking about doing, we want to make sure that it's feasible. This is a threshold criteria for us. It must be just as feasible if we're going to fund it. And what we're going to look at is basically three things, your technical approach, how well you've thought out the technology that's going to be needed to do what you want to do, whether that technology is available, whether that technology is going to be something that you can deploy. Another thing that we're looking at is whether you have a realistic budget, did you actually put enough money in there for the staffing that you're going to need to implement this? Do you have the money in there that you're going to need to do outreach so that people know about the new project? Have you actually looked at what the technology might cost you to be sure you budgeted enough? Because we don't want to give you a grant for one amount and have you find out that you didn't have enough in there to actually complete the implementation of the plan. And then we're going to look at your work plan. Have you been realistic in the staffing that you've provided, the staff that you provided to have the expertise that is needed to be able to accomplish the project? We really want to see that you've thought through all of those different things. Another thing is we want to look and see if you're taking an innovative approach and see if it's something that's got a potential to be replicated in other areas of the country. One of the things with TIG, even with the $4.5 million that we have, that means that we can't give large amounts of money to everybody that wants to do a project. And so one way that we've actually extended that money is by making sure that what you do, if it works, is something that another program can implement and replicate across this. And so we're looking that you've looked at new ways of doing things that have really good potential. Another thing is we want to look at the available resources. Like I mentioned, we want to look at the qualifications of your project team. We'll access the extent to which you and your partners have the resources, expertise, and experience to undertake the project and successfully complete it. Also we want to provide more access, not new barriers. One of the things that we look at is kind of a guidance for us is what they call the Technology Bill of Rights, which was passed in first in 2004 by the Washington State Supreme Court and they updated that again in 2020. And so we have published that link to that document. But the idea is technology should improve access to justice. It shouldn't put up additional barriers. An illustration would be something around an e-filing system. You know, if a court went to an all e-filing system, we'd want to be sure that they looked at how that could be used by self-represented litigants. That is not something that is so complicated and takes so much training that only an attorney could do, or that it requires a credit card because so many of our clients may not have credit cards. So we want you to look at things like that. So we want to be sure that the new technology must not reduce the access, that there's openness to all and it provides for privacy. Also it ensures a neutral forum so that we're not doing something that favors one side of the case over another. And another thing that we really look for is that you're going to have outreach because I've never really listened to Kevin Costner and when he said, if you build it, they will come. One thing that we've learned is that people have to know about your systems to actually find it. So we want you to be able to maximize public awareness than they use. And then we want you to utilize best practices, especially out of things about using data standards and such like that to make these where they are more replicable. And then finally, one of the most important things is the sustainability approach that you have. Because what we don't want to do is to fund a new project, find out it works really well, but then the project goes away because the program doesn't invest the money that it needs to keep that project running, that they don't devote staff to it. If it's a new website or a new automated document that they don't have anybody there that's going to be able to keep these up to date. And when we say a sustainability plan, we don't mean to say that when the team funding runs out, we're going to look for new funders to sustain this. That may be a hope, but it's certainly not a plan for sustainability. So we really want you to tell us in the application that after we stand up the project, we see it successful, how are you going to make sure that that stays part of your delivery system? Jane, I think the next one's yours. Well, I was going to just, Jane, any other thoughts on sort of these elements or should we move on to the next slide here? I think that's right. And I think one thing I just wanted to add too is that David and Glenn and I are all available for technical assistance. And if you have questions about anything, if you have an idea, you want to run by, reach out, we'll have our contact information at the end. We all have conversations with folks and so you can get our reactions. We can put you in touch with other organizations that maybe have done similar types of projects and that sort of thing too. Yeah. And I think some of these sometimes conceptually make sense to folks, but then actually trying to put them into a proposal and make sure that's reflected can be more challenging to do. And also sometimes something like resources and expertise, this might be a new initiative for folks and being able to locate just who those resources are, who should I be talking to? I think the three of us can be a really good resource there. This is an LSNTAP webinar series, so being able to talk with LSNTAP, having them available as a resource and then your colleagues in the field through something like the LSNTAP email list are always to sort of, you might sort of understand sort of what we're looking for, but then actually putting that together into a proposal can be challenging and relying on those sort of outside folks and that outside expertise is a good way to kind of to be able to make that happen. So, all right, Jane, you're going to go through the application. Yeah, just to reiterate, I had a few more best practices. You know, some of these seem pretty straightforward, but, you know, just be succinct and clear, you know, make sure you follow the review criteria. We do publish it in the guides, you know, we'll go over this again in the in the application webinar, but, you know, just tell us, tell us what you want to do, how you want to do it, and what impact it will have. You know, is it one cohesive project? Again, if you're not sure, reach out and check in with us. So, that's, you know, I always kind of advise folks to once you have a draft done, you know, give it to somebody who doesn't know anything about it, hasn't been involved in the planning at all, you know, ask them to read your narrative and see if they understand it. You know, sometimes you get kind of too close to the planning of a project and you don't even realize you might be, you know, leaving a piece out that helps us understand and translate what it is you want to do. You can use attachments, you know, we encourage, provide some supporting materials. If you've talked to some potential vendors and gotten some, you know, scopes of work outlines from them, I always think it's helpful to use that as an attachment, because sometimes you, you know, we do look at those supporting materials and that helps, you know, further explain what it is you want to do. You know, if there's, if there's, you know, something that's going to address a challenging area, you know, obviously letters of support from any potential partners, things like that. And, you know, just the same thing, you know, make sure you've got somebody to look through it, make sure it all makes sense and everything's complete. So, Glenn, in your 20 plus years, hopefully that's okay for me to share of reviewing technology proposals. Which one of these sticks out to you is the most important? I think the beast is synced and to be clear, because what I've always hated is reading through their description of the project and getting to the end and having no idea what they want to do. And so, you know, to me, that's just, you know, it's so much better if it's really clear, and that's why I think it's important what Jane was talking about, is maybe get somebody else to read it for you to make sure you may understand something so well that it all makes perfect sense to you, but, you know, give it to somebody else, give it to a stranger, and make sure they really understand what it is you're trying to do and how you're going to do it. You know, I can tell you, David, I've had a lot of these applications, I'll read through it, and I'll read through it again, and I still can't tell what they want to do, and those are not something I'm going to recommend for funding. Yeah, no, I hear you, and I think the three of us have definitely seen a fair amount of that. It's really important to focus on communicating what you're trying to actually accomplish there. All right, well, I'm going to cover just, I think, two more considerations that, particularly in recent cycles, have emerged as things that we tend to really focus on, and it's helpful to see within your proposal. The first one of these, it's kind of throwing together a few concepts here, but it's, you know, usability, user experience, and accessibility, I'm talking particularly about web and other sort of technical accessibility, and I really do feel like these sort of all do blend together. The challenge that we have, I mean, so many of the projects that TIG funds are client self-help projects, they're facing the public, they're intended for people who are representing themselves or are only getting a limited amount of legal assistance from a provider, and folks have to be able to use those tools, and we know for a lot of reasons why that's really challenging for people. We know the court system and the legal system is quite complex. We know that our users, you know, do sometimes have challenges around literacy or other things that make it more challenging to use these tools, too, and really figuring out those ways that you can make the project that you're developing, the platform, whatever it is, more usable for your intended audience, and I think the good news here is there's been a real discipline that's developed around things like co-design, where you get users involved very early in the process and get their input on designing a specific application. Same with user testing, how you do rigorous user testing, how you do user testing at the prototype stage. Generally, just user experience principles. There's things that sort of work on the web, we know that, and how do you incorporate those, and then web accessibility as well. I'm thinking specifically of WCAG 2.0AA, which I think is the prevailing standard that's out there. We want to see projects and products that meet that standard. I think that's really important to LSD and something that should be incorporated into any project you're thinking. I realize, too, that your team may not have these skills, your organization may not have these skills existing within your staff. These are things that you may have to look for a potential vendor to help you with, but when you are choosing a partner, making sure you have a vendor that's familiar with these concepts, that has experience working with them and can actually guide you through them, so that you can meet and ultimately make a product that works well for as many of your users as possible. The other one that's coming up a lot, and this is no secret, security and privacy concerns. In the field, we've seen several cyber attacks, and they're really difficult, they're really overwhelming. I think to the extent that you can show that you're going to follow security, information security best practices. You're going to work with vendors and other partners that are aware of information security best practices and can apply those to the project. Then I would even add to it, maybe think about an information security audit as part of your project, particularly if you're proposing something that's pretty ambitious, that's public facing. I think in a lot of those cases, it might make sense to bring in somebody outside your organization to just assess the security piece of it and make sure that it is secure and that the privacy of your users is being protected. We know there's no such thing, particularly in 2022, of a 100% secure product or platform, but there are things that you can do to mitigate some of the risks that are out there, and we encourage you to look into that as part of your project planning. Kunjain, any other thoughts on those, or should we move on to the bad side, why projects aren't funded? That's great. I dropped a link in the chat just for some of the resources that have been developed on usability and usability testing that's on the LSNTAP site, too. It could us to the LSNTAP team for the really great information security toolkit. That's a way I think you could start really understanding these concepts and thinking about how they apply, even to a TIG project, which may be a little different than your internal operation security, but still a lot of that can apply and be useful. David, I wouldn't call these the bad part. I mean, these are some of the reasons that things haven't been funded, but if this doesn't apply to you, if you listen to this part, then you can turn this into the good part by avoiding these pitfalls. Now, one of them you can't do anything about, and that's the limited resources, because we have $4.5 million and past experience is known that we're going to get pre-applications probably in the $8 to $9 million request rate. So that means that essentially half of the projects that are proposed can't be funded, but it doesn't mean that they're necessarily a bad project. It doesn't mean that you can't turn around next year and ask us to fund those types of things, but just be realistic that you may be turned down through no fault of your own. It's just that we actually run out of money. The next one is a failure to specify how the projects will improve services for clients. It isn't that we don't care about you and making your life easier, but that's not really why we've got the TIG funds. It's to actually improve things for clients. So one of the things that you really want you to do is when you ask us to do something, tell us how that's going to be an improvement for client services. It may be a purely internal thing. It may be something to do with a brief bank, and it may be that the clients never see this, but you're going to be able to relate to us how having that resource available to you as a staff attorney is going to improve your ability to help clients. So that's something that you want to do. Another one is the lack of state coordination. As an example, we had three different programs that did an application one year to LSC, and they all said that they had the cooperation of the other programs, and yet the other programs didn't have any literacy support. They weren't mentioned. We don't want you just paying lip service to this. We really want you to talk to the other people in your state you're going to be working with, and I'll talk a little bit more to that in the next slide when I talk about the partners. Unwarranted request for staff support. TIG is for technology, and they help you implement the technology. That doesn't mean that we don't ever fund staff, because obviously if you're going to stand up a new website, you're going to automate documents, somebody's going to have to actually build those sites, somebody's going to have to automate those documents. What we're talking about is we don't want to do the programmatic staffing for that. For instance, if we helped you build an online intake system, we could work through all the questionnaires, getting the technology right, making sure the user testing is done, like David mentioned, to make sure that it's user-friendly. But when it comes to the day to day taking the intakes and responding to those people, that's something we do not staff. That's not what TIG funds for for. Another thing that's very similar to that is request update baseline technology infrastructure. In case you don't know, LSE published the technologies that should be in place in the legal aid office today. That gives a very comprehensive list of what we think your program at a bare minimum should have for technology. And TIG was never designed to bring you up to those baselines. This is something that you're supposed to use your own funding for, your basic field grants and all, to have this in place. Now that would be things like getting you a new case management system, buying you a new phone system. All these things are something that you should have in place, just like you would have a copier. You wouldn't ask for the TIG program to buy you a copier or a printer. But that doesn't mean we don't do enhancements to those systems by adding new features or new integrations that have never been there. If you've got any question is about what you want to do comes under this particular one, talk to Jane, David or myself about it and just run it by us and see what we think. Another thing is the duplication of initiatives. You might have heard of another project that's going on somewhere and you want to do it in your state. Now that could be a replication project like we talk about, but it might also be something that we're funding but it hasn't been completed yet and we want to see how it works before we replicate it somewhere else. So that's again is something that just because someplace else is doing it doesn't mean that we want to do a second one until we're sure whether or not the first one was successful. Inadequate planning and preparation are unrealistic goals. That's something too that we want to look at when we talked about feasibility. This ties in very much to that. You might propose something to us that just really doesn't sound like it will work. It might be some initiative that's going to depend on some third party but we don't have anything in the application that shows that third party is on board with this or that somebody else has tried this approach and it's failed for different reasons unless you can show us how you're going to overcome those other failures. That's something we probably wouldn't do. And then also we want to be sure that it's innovative. I mentioned that before in successful applications. If you're just doing something mundane that somebody else has done over and over again, it may have been innovative five years ago when somebody did it for the first time but now it's not necessarily innovative. With the limited funding we have, we want to be trying new approaches and that's one thing that we said too and I don't know that we mentioned it here is we understand sometimes projects are going to fail. When you try new things you can't always be sure that it's going to be successful. That doesn't mean you shouldn't try it and we don't hold it against people as long as they put out their best efforts as well. That's something we want to encourage innovation even if it means some of the things that we try don't work. And I would just add too on top of that. That doesn't mean we don't want to see replication of successful projects. If you are doing a replication project, maybe there's like one piece of it. You can take it one more step and add something to it that's new to what's been done previously. But you don't have to think of something totally brand new either. So I don't want to make people think just because oh, this isn't innovative enough. I can't apply for it because it's a document. We want to automate some documents that's going to improve our staff efficiency. There can still be an innovative piece of it and it's a successful replication. It doesn't mean we're not going to consider that too. And sometimes, Jane, we see this is innovative in a certain name of state here. And it may be innovative in your state, especially with the next slide that we're going to talk about. Yeah. That's what I was going to add, too, that sometimes we get to this question. I think it's great if you're proposing a replication. I think if you're presenting this as this is an entirely new project, if we get to the question of, well, is this innovative for state X? That's maybe not necessarily where you want us to be when we're reviewing the proposal. I think sort of beginning things with how, because we ask this for every proposal we review, like how is this creative and innovative? And I think that really is sort of a threshold consideration for all the projects. And if there's a clear answer there, the program makes a compelling case, then I think they're in a really good place to potentially get funding. And then when it's a replication, we do want to know why is it innovative for, well, why was it innovative generally? But as Jane said, why is it innovative for your specific service area? And how is that going to improve things for you? But I think just make the best case you can on the innovation piece. But if you're saying this is exciting and new and going to really change things, you want to make that case that that is a truly innovative. And it may make sense, again, like we said before, reach out to the TIG team to sort of bounce that idea off us to make sure there's some alignment in terms of how we view a particular idea or piece of technology. And David, it goes a lot too back to the inadequate planning bullet that we've got here, because we want to see that you actually looked around the country and saw what other programs were doing something like this. We want to be sure that you did your research and that if you want to do something like that, and it didn't work too well, how you plan to overcome that. So show us that you looked at other projects that did this and tell us how that's going to be helpful to you and your planning. All right. So another area we were asked to focus on today was the area of partnerships and the importance of those. And Glenn, I think we're turning back to you. Do you want to kind of provide an overview of that and talk a little bit about these different types of partnerships we see on TIG? Exactly. Earlier, I talked about the statewide planning efforts. And so this is something that we learned early on at LSE is there are lots of other players in access to justice in the state, besides just the LSE funded legal aid programs. And so we want to be sure that you are working within that space to partner with you can with other people. Now, only LSE grantees can apply for a TIG, but that doesn't mean that you can't contract and work with the courts, other technology providers, work with the state bar, non-ellicency funded providers, nonprofits, libraries, law schools, private foundations, all of these are available to you to work with on different projects. We just had a really good medical legal project that finished in Montana and Iowa. And they work with the medical providers there on transferring the data back and forth. So it doesn't even have to be some of the usual partners. This was one way they were able to further the medical legal partnerships, especially when we're looking to do outreach on new projects. We want to be sure you've talked to the libraries about that, to do training for your local librarians so they know about your website so that they know about the automated documents. This is something that can be very useful. We've done projects with the courts where we've actually worked with them on e-filing so that automated documents from law health interactive were able to go directly into the Minnesota courts e-filing system. And so there are all kinds of partnerships that are out there and a more successful application that's going to show us how you're working with these others because that expands the reach. A lot of people come to legal aid for help with their legal problem, but a lot go to libraries, a lot go to the courts, a lot go to the private bar. And so if you make them aware of this and involve them in this, that's going to make a better application for me. And that's something we're going to look at to see that you've done the planning. And we're talking about partnerships and Jane will talk a little bit more about partnerships after the project gets going. But we're not just talking about a letter support that you sent them and had them put their letterhead on. We're talking about real partnerships where there's actual participation in this so that they're going to be really essential to moving this forward for you. So that's something we really want to encourage. Yeah. And Jane's going to talk a little bit about turning partnerships into kind of, you know, if a project's funded, making them stakeholders and how that can be done effectively. It may have some other points about partnerships too. The one thing I just want to point out before we move on from the slide is the top bullet right there, which is other LSE grantees within the state. This was kind of mentioned, I'm going to the last slide with the issue of insufficient coordination with the state justice community. But one of the sort of the obvious things we occasionally see is a particular LSE grantee in a multi-grantee state will apply for a project. And sometimes there's no mention of the other LSE funded providers within the state. And, you know, I think from our perspective, that is particularly if it's a public-facing type of thing, if it's a statewide website project or public-facing document assembly that can be used for the entire state. The absence of those other LSE grantees is often a problem. And so I think if you are one of those many grantees that are in a state with other LSE funded organizations, I think just sort of as a default sort of going to that and asking it's like, should we have the other grantees involved in this project? And if the answer is no for a particular reason, maybe it's just an internal project or maybe there's some other compelling reason. I think, you know, mentioning that in your proposal can be helpful. But I can tell you many times we've looked at a proposal and we've asked it's like, well, where's the other LSE grantees? Like that this is only half the state and don't we want the impact to also be felt in the other part of the state? So just if that's your circumstances, make sure you're thinking about that. Jane, I'll turn things over to you in case you have any other thoughts on partnerships. And then I know we're going to go into stakeholders right after that. Yeah, I think we can, you know, I'll address it in the stakeholders talking. You know, one of the things about partnerships I would add to start off on this is that if you are like Glenn said, it's important that you have substantive participation as a partner. You know, we find it's really important to make sure there's actually some monetary incentive for those partners that helps them participate. You know, so include a contract for those partners that you expect to, you know, be involved in reviewing substantive content to, you know, be giving you substantive feedback to be participating in project meetings. You know, that's all time, you know, that that they have to contribute. And while, you know, it's great if you have those partners that are interested and say, oh, yeah, we'll do this in kind, you know, we just find that oftentimes when it's just in kind contributions, you know, it kind of lowers their priority of participation. So if there's an actual contract, if there's a memo, you know, an MOU with them that outlines here's exactly what our expectations are, what, you know, it kind of keeps everybody accountable. You know, it's something to kind of if there's a staffing change, if there's a leadership change, it allows you to go back and say here's, you know, what we agreed to what the participation is going to be, you know, and helps kind of move those partnerships forward. You know, and then think about, you know, you have internal stakeholders, your external stakeholders, you know, make sure everyone's included from the beginning planning stages. You know, I think sometimes grantee might get an award and then contact people and say, hey, we got this, we got this award, we'd like you to participate. It's much better buy in, you know, for everything if you can get them on board right at the planning stage, you know, as you're preparing the application, get their feedback, make sure they're aware of what you're doing in case, you know, there's something they're working on and, you know, you don't want to find any conflicts with things other stakeholders are doing in your state. So, you know, that's kind of my, what I have to say about stakeholders. Just a couple things also about, you know, one of the things we've seen where projects can, you know, kind of get hung up on is, you know, if there's not someone inside the program that's, you know, a really good project manager and can help move these along, you know, consider if you need to have an external project manager, you know, do you need to hire a consultant for this? Is it, you know, or is it a big enough project that you need a new full-time position for it? You know, don't assume that, oh, just our existing staff has the capacity to take on another project. You have to consider everybody's workload, what their skill sets are, you know, are they a good project manager? Are they good at kind of, you know, you have to kind of keep everybody, you know, herding cats, you know, be a task master, you know, without kind of, you know, being overbearing. So, you know, be a task master with a smile and be a good communicator to make sure everybody's aware of what's happening and what the expectations are. Somebody who can create a good project plan, you know, what everyone's roles are and who's responsible for doing what, by what deadline. And I think one of the things that we've discussed, I think fair amount recently, so if you look at the median funding amount of our, the project grants that we fund now, it's pretty significant. I don't have an exact figure, but I believe it's over $150,000 at this point, which, you know, maybe isn't huge in other worlds, but given where TIG was and some of the smaller projects we used to fund, it is a bit of a change for us. But I think, you know, these sort of areas now, when you think about adding in a bit more to your funding request so you can bring in a professional project manager, you know, I think that's something we generally look pretty favorably upon, because, you know, we know that this is a more high stakes project. It's costing more. It is something that has multiple stakeholders. And, you know, maybe that professional project management or such an experienced project manager is going to be what's going to put this project over and actually allow it to be successful. So those type of pieces, you know, I completely agree that looking at adding those, even if it does, you know, not telling you to, you know, completely balloon the size of your funding request, but, you know, if those type of things add a little bit of cost to your request, those are things that are critical to the success of the project. And that can often, you know, I think our reviewers often view it that way. And that could actually help you get funded. And then ultimately, if you are funded, help the project be successful. So related concept, and Jane, I think you're covering this too, is sort of this teamwork and communication, which something is when these projects go awry, that's to be one of the top issues, this lack of communication it seems like. Yeah, that's, you know, it's the role of the project manager is make sure, you know, you get have good communication, that everybody knows what's going on. You know, that's, that's, that's often a primary reason you see breakdowns and, you know, things kind of stalling. And, you know, somebody assumes someone else is doing something. And that's just, you know, there's kind of that lack of communication. So it's just another reason, you know, behind the role of the project manager, the project lead, that we, you know, that's, that's what we see in successful projects is the importance of good teamwork, communication and project management. This is just some resources of different tools. I know there's a lot out there. There's others that aren't on this list. But, you know, some of these cost a little bit. Some of them have free services for doing project management. It's really just kind of personal preference of what works well for your organization. And then, I think that the final thing that we, we often see kind of overlooked on some of these projects I wanted to add is, is kind of a lack of thought around marketing, communications and outreach. You know, you're going to be, you know, if these are outward facing tools, you know, for, for self-help, for instance, you know, the projects about building the tool, it's good to do the, you know, make sure you have usability testing and all that. But how will people find out about it? You know, you can post on your websites or the, you know, you can build it. Will they come? You know, you can be doing press releases, social media strategy, you know, even, you know, bus advertising, you know, billboards. It's, it's, it's, it just depends on what it is and who your target audience is. And I think a lot of organizations maybe don't have their own internal communications expertise on staff. So this is another area where, you know, if you add a small amount for a contract with a, you know, communications marketing expert, they can, you know, line up, they have the media contacts, they can get you some good press around the project, you know, help you develop a strategy to promote it and, you know, get good use out of it. And it should be noted that all of us on the TIG team deeply regret the $250,000 that was spent on those blank billboards that were put up across the country. So that's, that that is not true at all. In case we got folks on compliance or IG of this call. But yeah, marketing and outreach is important. I think you're going to talk about evaluation a bit. I am. Until last year, we had required an evaluation plan for every new TIG grant. And while we eliminated that requirement, that's not because we don't think that having an evaluation plan is a good idea for your project. And basically an evaluation plan consists of your goal, you know, what is it that you really want to accomplish, then the strategies that you're going to use to achieve those goals, the activities that you're going to do to actually implement those strategies, and then data points. What are you going to collect to help you see whether or not your project was successful. And as you can see, this is a really good way to work out a project plan. Because if you do all this, you will have seen what you want to accomplish, what activities you've got to do, you can set that out, you can assign staff to those. So this is something that is really very helpful for you to do. And we think that this might even be the place that you start for your project plan is to put this into place. We want to be sure that you don't think that evaluation is something you do at the end of the project. You may be doing an evaluation at the end of the project, but you have to start at the very beginning. Because if you want to collect certain data so that you can see if you've improved something, if you're getting more intakes, if you've got a shorter amount of time, you're doing something, you need to have those baseline data at the very beginning. And I've heard you've heard about agile process and coding, the ability to change directions. This is something that if you do these evaluations as you go along, you may see that something's not working in time to switch over and try a different approach so that it actually will work. And I can tell you that one thing that we found it in 20 years of TIG is people normally under budget for evaluation, we think that you ought to really look hard at getting an outside evaluator. These can be very helpful to bring in at the very beginning of the project to help you do the plan, to help you look at the data elements to give you a fresh set of eyes, maybe some new approaches, they will have worked with other programs, then they may be able to tell you this program did this this way and this really worked out for them for this team approach, something like that. So we want to encourage you to really think about as part of your budget having this evaluation in there for an outside evaluator to help you with a project. And Neil, just because we don't require it doesn't mean that we don't think it's a good idea and it's not something you're going to really need to help you out. So be sure that you think about evaluation. Yeah, I don't think I've ever heard a program, you know, either formally in their report maybe because the evaluator's working on it, but even just sort of informally to me, say that they regretted getting an evaluator in there early. Like it seems like it's a piece that always adds value. And certainly from our perspective, it adds, we feel like we get a higher quality, final evaluation report at the end of the project, but we always view it favorably. And it just seems like it generally has been a very good thing for the programs that have done it. Yeah, you always see programs once they have an outside evaluator, it's like they will always include them on future projects again, because of their experience and what they've learned about working with them. Yeah. And we should note too, like things like this, if you're preparing a pre-application and you're about to hit submit and grantees, and you hear this, you can add these pieces in without identifying somebody, particularly at the pre-application stage. So if you're hearing something, you're like, yeah, we should probably have that in our 2022 proposal. Feel free to work that in the next 48 hours here. All right, so what we're going to do now, shift gears a little bit and talk about three of the projects that we funded last cycle that we thought, I think one, we're excited about these. We think they're good initiatives. We want to make sure you're aware of them, but also talk about why we found them compelling as proposals and maybe a little bit about why we sort of made the funding decision that we did. And so we'll do these quick. Jane goes first, and I've noticed typical Jane fashion, she has updated her slide to make it like really graphical and impressive. And then you get big walls of text for me and Glenn here in a couple of minutes. So Jane, please go ahead with your very well-designed presentation. Sorry, I thought it was a little text heavy. Oh, it is. Yeah, you'll see. So this is a project, 2021 project was awarded Southern Minnesota Legal Services. And we've done versions of this with the Law Help Interactive integrations with case management systems in the past. This is kind of similar to those except it's looking to integrate their legal server case management system with document assembly platform so that their client data can flow directly from legal server into these, you know, the document system. And they can, it's kind of a low code platform that they can build out, you know, to, and this is really, this is for their internal staff use and for use in some clinics. So it's, they're focusing on kind of some high volume areas for their family law unit and then also for SSI, SSDI forms. And what, you know, the thing that's going to be nice about this is that all the other programs, all the other LSE programs in Minnesota are also on legal server. So these forms will be available for them to easily start using as well. And then also the SSI, SSDI are federal forms. So those would be available to any other program in the country that's on legal server and wants to do this, you know, kind of replicate this integration. And, you know, it's one of those areas where we've seen some really good evidence of efficiency. And when forms, form packages that might take a paralegal over an hour to get everything together for a clinic or for a client, you know, they can do it with an automated form in 20 minutes. So it's, you know, significant time saving for folks. So we're pretty excited about this to kind of add another integration with a case management system for an option for doing these types of automated documents. Absolutely. All right. So the next project is from Neighborhood Legal Services in D.C. And you can see here's the wall of text that you get from me. I think we found this really exciting because there was this huge opportunity within the district. D.C.'s special in the sense that there are around 50 independent legal service providers that exist that are serving residents. And that's a really great thing. It means there's a lot of options for legal aid that are available to low-income people who live in D.C. But at the same time, it's also very difficult to navigate because who knows, you know, particularly if you're not in the legal community, you don't know which of these 50 organizations is often going to be the one that's best able to serve you. And so Neighborhood took the lead in partnership with the D.C. bar to propose this project to create a centralized web application. There's also going to be a hotline component to this that's going to be staffed by trained legal navigators, so kind of like paraprofessionals, which is, you know, we were excited about that trend and they incorporated that very well into this project. But it's a high-quality web application. It does intakes and referrals. It connects people to the organization that's most likely to meet their needs. These are more warm referrals, information is shared. And then it also is sort of like a classic triage concept, but information is then shared back with the system, too, about how many people are able to replace and things like that. So they use a lot of data and hopefully to refine this and improve it over time. But going back to a few concepts that were mentioned earlier in the webinar, this was a project where a proposal where they had already engaged the project manager that was helping with some of the planning and I think they were able to use some D.C. bar foundation funds to do that. But there was a project manager that was already on board and then, you know, they've now been selected to be the project manager for the full effort, but they have it outside experienced technology-focused project manager that's going to help oversee a lot of these pieces. And then they also engaged a evaluator very early in the project, actually at the application stage. But that was all written into the proposal and that evaluator is helping them come up with frameworks for sort of evaluating the system, not only at the end of this grant, but sort of going throughout it. And as the referral system comes up and those referrals are made, ensuring that they're working effectively and things like that. So it ties in a lot with some of those things we mentioned earlier in the webinar. And it was I think because of that and because of just the potential here was a pretty easy call for something we were, you know, going to find last cycle. And Glenn, I think this is the Ohio project. It is. And it's another one that is the text heavy that I didn't go in and change before this either. So this is a project that we'll be working with the pro bono attorneys in Ohio using their statewide legal information portal. In a prior TIG, we fund them to do some document assembly for clients that they can go in and actually prepare documents that they're going to need for court. And this is going to take this one step further so that a pro bono attorney is going to be able to volunteer to help a client with that paperwork. This is something that's going to really expand the reach of a pro bono panel in Ohio because instead of just having to take a full bespoke representation of someone, they're going to be able to actually come in and provide what I call assisted pro say. I can look at the provision of legal services as kind of an upside down triangle at the very bottom. You've got the people that if you provide them with the forms and information, they can help themselves. That's all they're going to need. And at the next level that the triangle as you go up are those people that they're going to need some assistance to help them. They can get a lot of it done, but then they need some get some some assistance from some expert like a legal aid attorney or a pro bono attorney. And then those are the people that need the full representation. And the idea of building something like this in Ohio, the more of those people that we can put in the bottom two thirds of the triangle, the more time we have for the legal aid attorneys to help those people who cannot help themselves. So this is something when we talk about access, we're not trying to build systems that are only accessible to certain people, we're trying to build systems that will help the people that can help themselves or with some assistance can help themselves so that those that cannot, we have the resources to help them, we don't have to turn them down. So that's something that we're really we're really proud of, of building these types of tools that build on each other from year to year. So this isn't just a placement platform. This is actually something where one on one client services are going to be able to provide through this portal in Ohio. Excellent. Well, great. So I'm going to now go back. I'm going to bear with me for just a second. I'm going to chat out this link one more time. That concludes our presentation portion of this. And the one thing that we were hoping to do is to get some feedback from you all on TIG. And so maybe some of you had a chance to do this during the presentation. Feel free to the link is in the chat. It's the last thing that was chatted there. So you can go to it now if you want to go ahead and start putting some information in there. This can include questions you have for us that you don't want to ask if you don't want associated with your name that you just want to ask anonymously. So you can do that if you want to. But we also, you know, we just love to hear your feedback on, you know, there's been some changes with the TIG program, certainly the move to grantees. But also, you know, substantively, I think we're doing a few things different too. What do you think? What's working well? What's most challenging? What could be improved? What do you think of the application process or anything else? So, yeah, go there. No, that's completely anonymous. If you want to, if you just have a regular question that you want to ask to resume chat, we're happy to review those too. And we'll just take a look to see kind of what's come in here. I know one question came in about the recording itself. And this recording, the session is being recorded. LSNTAP is going to handle that. You know, I think they're pretty quick in getting those up online. I don't want to promise a specific number of days. But within the near future here, this will be, the recording will be available on the LSNTAP feed for anyone to access it. Oh, we got to note that the link wasn't working. Let me try it again. Oh, yeah. That's a double link, David. I realized I had put it on earlier somehow in your notes. It got repeated, I think. Okay. So, I put the right one up. Here, I'll do it again. Okay. It's actually, and it's in there now. I took care of it. So, okay. Sorry about the long URL, everybody, but that will, or Jane's much where URL also works. All right. And let me go ahead and just open up here. I think we had any other questions through the chat, other than just noting that we're on link there. Let's see. And people can also, you know, just raise your hand or just unmute yourself. Feel free. It's a pretty small group. If you want to take this opportunity to ask us any other questions or feedback. I'm a little scared to open the responses to the form. But I don't think I should be because there's not many. So, you know, I will say, I think this is something time permitting in the future. We're hoping to maybe do a little more formally about the program. You know, and I think part of that is to move the grantees and getting your input on how that can be improved. But, you know, also just with a grant program like this, it often makes sense to have the type of feedback from applicants. And we want to make it a program that works well for you and an application process that's, you know, not too time consuming or anything like that. So, you know, the link will stay up. And if folks want to provide us feedback through that, I'll make sure to make a note to check that a few times. And, you know, we'd love to hear it. And hopefully in the future, you know, we can do a few things to, you know, whether it's a focus group or a survey or something like that, get more sort of formal input on, you know, what's going well.