 Welcome to the non-profit show. We're so glad you're here to start your Mun Yay, as I like to call it, because Friday gets all the fun, and I think Monday, and actually all of the day, should get all of the fun, and we should end every day with a Yay. But today, I am very excited, because we have Dr. Beverly A. Browning. We will refer to her as Dr. Bev, or Bev simply, during today's conversation, and she's here to talk to us about grants and all the strings attached to those grants. So stay with us. We're gonna dive deep in this conversation, and she has a lot to share with us. But before we do, we want to remind you who we are, if we have not had the pleasure of meeting you yet. Perhaps this is your first time joining us, or perhaps it's not. But hello to you, Julia Patrick. I'm so glad you're here, CEO of the American Nonprofit Academy, and I am so glad that you created this platform four years ago now for us to come, to be of service in our community and in our sector truly around the world to provide this information. I'm Jarrett Ransom. I get to play alongside as your co-host and extremely honored for that. Also known as Nonprofit Nerd and CEO of the Raven Group, we have helped to produce now over 800 episodes marching towards that 900th episode this year. We will certainly hit that milestone, and we wouldn't be able to do it if it weren't for our amazing presenting sponsors. So a huge shout out of gratitude to our friends at Bloomerang American Nonprofit Academy, your part-time controller, non-profit thought leader, and Fundraising Academy at National University, also to Staffing Boutique Nonprofit Nerd, as well as Nonprofit Tech Talk. These companies, many of them, in fact, most of them have been with us for this four-year journey, again, helping us to produce so many episodes of so many different topics as it relates to the non-profit sector. And if you missed any of those episodes, you are in luck, my friend. You can go ahead and pull out your phone right now and scan the QR code to download the app, the latest and greatest. And in just a couple of hours after our conversation we're having with Feb, you will see that you will receive a notification letting you know that the episode has been uploaded. We're also on your streaming broadcast and your podcast platform. So go ahead and tune in wherever you choose. We do not charge monthly, like some of those streaming subscribers that I know we're all very aware of and might have gotten kicked out. I just got kicked out of the household account for it might start with an N and end with an X. But anyway, I've got to figure that out. Yeah, I've got to figure that out, but you'll never get kicked out here of the non-profit show. And we never asked for a subscription. Again, we are so honored to have with us today Dr. Beverly A Browning. She is known across the world. She serves in so many different communities. The Grant Writing Training Doctor and also Grant Writing Training Foundation. Welcome to you. Thank you so much. I really am honored to be on the show. So I want to thank all of you including the production staff. Thank you, that's lovely. You know, Dr. Bev, I feel like you've been on such a trajectory of helping and educating so many people about grants and how they work and kind of the mysteries. You also talked about something that I think is really interesting and that is the bad advice or maybe the myths that we buy into or they get recirculated and that you see this day in and day out. I'm fascinated that you have this lens and I also want to bring up and maybe have you chat for just a moment. You're an accomplished author and you've really been able to articulate your knowledge into the book form. Talk to us about Grant Writing for Dummies. Was that your first book? Actually, no. Before Grant Writing for Dummies, I had my own self-publishing company called Bev Browning and Associates and I used that to get a lot of content out there. It was very simplified. It didn't have fancy covers or titles like the ones that are on the screen today. However, I did publish quite a number of books under my own company before I approached major publishing firms. Wonderful. Good for you. Well, it's such an important thing to get this knowledge and I can't wait to dig in. I have one quick question for you and that is it seems to me, and maybe I'm off base here, but it's hard to get advice about Grant sometimes from the nonprofit sector because in essence, we're asking our competitive set. Is that why sometimes we don't get the best information because people are afraid to share. They don't wanna lose the grant. Well, it's more than just the nonprofit grant applicant or grantee that has received grants and doesn't wanna compete with any other nonprofit organizations for a small pot of money because in their mind, they don't see the vast resources financially in all the funders. They only know that they get their grant award every year and they don't wanna jeopardize that by sharing information. But there's another closed mouth sector in this entire grant seeking grant resource sharing venue and that is those of us who label ourselves as grant writers or grant writing professionals. And what happens there is at least I found this happening back in 2001 was my first encounter. And that is when I first received the contract with Wiley to write grant writing for dummies the very first edition, I was approached by a national group to invite me to their annual conference. And I asked, why, why me? And it's because you published a book with all of our secrets. You gave away everything that we charge fees for and you make it look like anyone can do it by associating yourself with a group that uses books that are called dummies. And we are really a secretive professional group and we keep this information internally. We don't want competition. We don't want everyone to know how to do this. And to me, I was shocked. I'm not even sure what the look on my face was at the time that I heard that. It was way before we had video calls like this. So I had the chance to at least express my shock and disbelief through a telephone. That was the best way. And I couldn't believe that everything was so small-minded back then. So yeah, I just kept producing the books and I kept getting the information out there and I kept defending the fact that everyone deserves to learn, know and understand because there were just too many lies or misbeliefs or misconceptions or wrong information out there. And it's important to understand everything openly and then make one self responsible for how the information will be shared and the accuracy and the validity of the information. Amazing, amazing. Yeah, well let's dive into this because I know we have a lot of viewers that are probably asking this question now or at some point, can grant awards come string free? What does that look like? Well, you see me putting my hands up to my neck. The answer is no. And thinking that the money is free, no strings attached is really the suicidal approach to dealing with grant awards. Grant awards come with grant agreements. They come with contracts. If it's not just an informal agreement, it's a formal contract. And that contract is related to the financial management of grant funds that are awarded because they are invested by grant makers who have to report back the results of these investments to their trustees, their governing board members as well as their funders. Of course, foundations have funders that they go to to help enlarge their pot of grant making. But in addition to that, there are reporting requirements financially as well as did you achieve your goals? Did you attain your smart objectives? And if not, then what percent did you attain? So when you write those grant requests, you are writing your promise, your promise, not your dream, your promise, not your begging tool, your promise. And whatever you put into that promise is what's going to end up in a grant agreement or a formal grant contract in order to receive the transference of funds, whether in the form of a check or electronic deposit. And you are responsible from day one to monitor and manage those funds prudently and with transparency, funders count on you. And the worst thing you can do is spend that money willy nilly any way you want to ignoring all of your promised budget, budget expense line item parameters that you had in your grant requests because you're committing grant seeking suicide. And the relationship isn't over when you get the money. The relationship is just beginning. So let's talk about that because I find that that is a great way to move into this. And that is you're advising us to keep up on our grant reporting and our measurements. Talk to us a little bit more about that because I love that you use the word promise that you're promising to deliver on something. I'm assuming this is how we all know that we're marching towards that promise. Absolutely and I wanna do a sidebar just for a minute. If your nonprofit does not use internal staff members to write your grant requests and you're using an outside third party, it is still your duty, your mandatory requirement that you read every word that's being written before you hit submit that you understand everything that's been promised. Don't be that animal that goes down into a ground hole, a hole, I think it's called a groundhog. Don't be that person with your head in the sand or down deep in the hole, just waiting on the money and not knowing what you have to do when you get the money because you must keep up on grant reporting requirements. And that is tracking the expenditure of every dollar, assigning it to the correct line item. Know what you've put in your grant application narrative and budget as far as full-time equivalents for all of the staff that will be paid either part-time or full-time out of the grant funding, track the percentage of dollars that are coming from various funding sources so you're not funding anybody over 1.0 FTE or 100%, which equates to 40 hours a week. And in some nonprofit venues you may call full-time 30 hours or 35 hours a week, but nevertheless, you cannot overextend a staff position that's being funded in part or in whole by one grant or multiple grants. Everything has to be kept up. Also, your smart objectives. And here's an example, by the end of year one, increase the percentage of single head of households who are enrolled in continuing education by 25% or more as demonstrated by the number of applicants interviewed, the number of applicants accepted, the number of applicants becoming clients and getting educational attainment plans, the number of applicants in academic counseling. Okay, that's a smart objective. And that's what you have to measure. How many did you accept? How many were actually enrolled? How many completed competencies? How many are moving into some type of employment or other training that will give them a gainful and sustainable wage? You talked about this, you wrote about this and now you have to prove that it happens and you can't just make this stuff up. People who make things up, especially with government grant monies, are now serving time in federal penitentiaries. People who make this stuff up in the nonprofit sector are former nonprofits that have had to close their doors for failing to be truthful, failing to track, failing to be accountable, failing to be transparent and failing to keep their boards informed of their financial fiduciary when it comes to receiving grant awards or even applying for grants. There are so many red flags. There is not free money. What you think or perceive as free money will result in you never getting another grant award again because potential funders and actual funders, they talk to each other. They talk about the good, the bad and the ugly among the grant applicants and the grantees that receive these funds. Oh, they never reported. Oh, they never got back to us. Oh, we tried to schedule a site visit and they kept putting it off because they weren't ready. They hadn't implemented the program yet. You can't be a halfway grant applicant and you certainly can't be a halfway grantee when the money is awarded. Yeah, you use the phrase willy-nilly and from the south, that is something that I definitely appreciate, right? And it really does speak to the fact that nothing within grants can be done willy-nilly, right? Like these are contractual agreements. You spoke about the board of directors, especially if you're using a third-party grant writer. Like the organization is still held liable for everything written in this proposal. So let's talk about now the issues as we see here of transparency and grants. What are you seeing in that arena and what are some things that we need to be aware of? As a nonprofit speaking from that perspective, you have to have documents on your website that show transparency. You should be able to put up your annual report that should be going to the board no more than 60 days after the end of your IRS approved fiscal year. You should also be posting your partners in the grant funding arena, letting people know who gives you grant awards. It's not a secret, folks. You're not out there trying to hide this from the competition. Also, if you accidentally spend more for a grant funded expense line item, then you indicated in your grant application, while it's not traditional with private sector funders, foundations and corporations, that you have to call and ask for permission or write for permission with a dollar amount transfer from one line item to the other to support the one that's short or the one that had the wrong expenditure. But at the federal or state or local government level, you need approval in writing before you can move one penny from one line item to another. This is not your money to do what you want to and then fill out a report and make fake receipts up in order to make it look like you actually adhere to it. I can't tell you how many grant applicants have gone bad and how many grant writers are serving time. Yeah. A lot of what you say, and I know because I too have been in the sector, I started my business as a grant writer. I no longer do that anymore, but I love people that do because we need professional grant writers. There is so much unknown, and I feel like a lot of nonprofits and board of directors, they think, oh, we will apply for grants or we will hire a grant writer and all of a sudden money starts falling in our lap. Like it happens overnight. And that is so not the case. And everything you're sharing here with us is really like so, it's so important that we understand and professionalize this service within our sector because back to that willy-nilly, right? Like it's really not something that you submit and you forget about like there is management, there's reporting, there's compliance, there's legal references, right? Like all of this that goes into it, have you seen, not intended as a curveball question, but again, over the four years recently, right? We've seen a lot of changes. We've seen a lot of staff turnover. We've seen a lot of budgets, you know, tipsy-turvy. Are you seeing that grant reporting and management and compliance is getting better or worse over these four years? Because I do have concerns and I've seen it where especially with the turnover of staff, there's an incomplete transference of knowledge, right? And so can you speak to us about this of what you're seeing? I'm seeing when people who have handled grant management as well as grant writing, grant research for an organization, when they finally have it up to here with low pay, high expectations, too many all hands on board meetings and days on the weekend and fundraisers that they're not being compensated for, they either give notice or just don't show up and nobody else has the password or login to any of the information related to grants. No copies of what's submitted, nothing about what's pending or any of the above. And I think it's done purposeful as well as for the sake of their sanity, they just want out and they want out quick. So a nonprofit executive director as well as all the administrators there should know how to access everything. Everything should be on a shared server. Small nonprofits that are less than three years old, they typically don't even know to do this. They finally come up with a fundraiser that gives them the dollars to bring in a grant writer. Either in house part time or to pay a stipend to someone to do it for a few hours a week or they get lucky and they get a capacity building grant right away because their board member knows somebody and now they can actually contract with a grant writing consultant. But what they don't realize is that everybody in charge, including the board needs to know what's going on, the process, how to do it, what's expected, building relationships with potential funders. You can't be lazy and experienced sustainability with a nonprofit organization. It requires due diligence on everything, including the grant writer, the content that's being written, the source of the research, the communication flow between direct service staff and the grant writer. And again, the upward flow of accountability and transparency to the board, to the external and internal stakeholders in addition to the board, so that everybody is ready to jump in when the grant writer gives up, throws their hands up in the air and doesn't show up or walks out the door. Yeah, thank you for addressing that. Again, I just, I see it in my community, I see it online, I see a lot of burnout, a lot of people, as you said, it's just there's a lot and there's a lot in our community, in our world, completely at large, but let's move into the cost because I really want you to help understand the cost of a grant for all of our viewers and listeners as they've learned so much already if you would talk to us about understanding the cost related. So there are costs related to accepting and implementing a grant funded program, accepting grant funds coming into a nonprofit organization. And you should be thinking about those costs before you finalize the project, which is 12 months or less, or the program, which is more than 12 months, understand the terminology. Anything that's 12 months or less, you are looking at a project. Don't mistake it and call it a program regardless of it's existing or not. Funders know this terminology and that's how they recognize a project, short-term, a program, long-term. And what are the costs? You need somebody to do the data input, to be able to take all of the evaluation data that's being fed back in, that's related to your smart objectives, your outcomes, your outputs. All of that has to be tracked to make sure that you're hitting the target because if you're not, you want to know literally within 45 to 60 days of receiving that grant award that everything you propose is not where you thought it would be at the time where you thought it would be. So that's called a red flag and you need a corrective action plan and you also need to reach out to the funder that is trusting their dollars with you to say we're falling behind on our metrics and if you can give us some advice or do you have a consultant on loan that you can provide at no charge to us that could help us get back on track and work with our internal and external evaluation team. And then there is also the cost of the evaluation. When you're writing these grant requests, if you're going to have to bring in an outsider third-party evaluator, you can include up to 15% of your entire project or program budget for the evaluation but you have to write that in as a cost. So you're only thinking about I want to get my program up and going or I want to get my project up and going and you don't think about what it's going to take once the money comes in. So you need the data person, you also need the evaluation consultant up to 15%. You may need dollars for additional technology. You may need to have some kind of an evaluation tracking software that your direct service staff feeds the metrics into and automatically does tables and charts and spins out reports so that you can have a comprehensive narrative. This is not a nickel and dime K-mart blue light special accountability process. This is upscale and it's expensive and those expenses need to be in the grant budget. Managing grants is costly, it is not free. And typically the executive director is or the founder, you're too busy running all over the place like a chicken with your head cut off, doing trying to do everything on your own because you didn't think about it at the time you were writing the grant requests but that's the very time to say what will it cost to implement everything that we are writing here in this application? What are the dollars attached to and are these dollars an allowable request with this particular funder or do we need another grant request to help us with general operating capacity building in order to actually implement this grant program successfully? Think outside the box, stop staying in the box because it's safe. I love it. I think that's a marvelous way to kind of start to wrap up our time with you and we warned you it goes by fast because this is such a big topic. It's a changing topic. I feel like Jarrett in the beginning, it was just more trust philanthropy, in the beginning of the pandemic, get funds out, try and get people whole, try and get things moved along. Now we're saying, okay, take a deep breath, funders want more information, want more measurables and for some nonprofits, this is gonna be a time of great change and somewhat of duress because they're gonna have to, as Dr. Bev said, figure this out. You know, it's not an easy thing. And I loved what you said, it's not free money. No, it's not free money. And I also wanna add it as we begin to wrap up is really looking at maintaining those relationships with the funders, right? With the foundations. I know that there's funders in our community that have changed their guidelines because of previous COVID money, right? Where like, perhaps you had to wait out a year before you could submit and they've taken that away. So maintaining relationships with funders, don't be afraid, right? To really dig into getting to know them, them getting to know you, having that reciprocal conversation because they're here to help us. They really are here to help the community. And Dr. Bev, thank you again for coming on and sharing your wealth of knowledge with us today. I'm so very grateful to have you on and I know you have a very busy schedule. So thank you for your time. Thank you for the invitation to join the show. I'm very appreciative and thank you audience for tuning in. I really appreciate that worldwide. Well, it's really been fun. You know, Dr. Beverly A. Browning, the grant writing training doctor, grant writing training foundation, you can find her at bevbrowning.com and you will be stunned when you go to her website to see the number of books and really deep dives she's taken in across the sector. And we are so grateful. Again, if we hadn't met before, I'm Julia Patrick, CEO of the American Nonprofit Academy, been joined today by the nonprofit nurse herself, Jarrett R. Ransom, CEO of the Raven Group. Again, as Jarrett mentioned at the top of the show, we are here now in year four because of the largesse of our funders, if you will. They are our sponsors and they include Bloomerang, American Nonprofit Academy, your part-time controller, nonprofit thought leader, fundraising academy at National University, staffing boutique, nonprofit nerd and nonprofit tech talk. These folks join us day in and day out so we can get experts on the nonprofit show such as Dr. Bev, which has been just a delight. It's really cool for me, Dr. Bev, to know that I've seen your book in the bookstore and I've seen, you know, it's like, wow, this is really a cool thing and the service that you bring to our is just remarkable. And so I say thank you very, very much for being a good steward of this. It's really been amazing. Hey everybody, as we like to end every episode of the nonprofit show, whether it's a Monday or a Friday, it's always a yay. We like to end each episode with this mantra, if you will. And it goes like this, to stay well, so you can do well. We'll see you back here tomorrow. Dr. Bev, thank you so much. Thank you.