Find Funders Faster Inside GrantStation's New Platform

here today. We hope to help you find funders faster inside Grant Station's new platform. I know many of you be been here, but for the sake of the video, I'm going to show you how you can engage. The main thing is there are no slides to share with you. You are going to get the recording with a demonstration of how to go through Grant Station's um new platform and it's going to be amazing. If you need the closed caption, just go ahead and click on CC. If you have a question, please put it in the Q&A. A lot of times there's a lot of long intense questions about grant writing. So please put it in the Q&A. We have lots of team members from Tech Soup and Grant Station here to answer your question. On the next slide, this is a one I'm going to put a link in there throughout the webinar. Grant Station big sale, 40% off. It's only on two days, September 15th and 16th. We'll remind you later in the webinar, but we want you to sign up to get the email reminder. So we'll be dropping that link in there. And now I'm gonna move out of the way and turn this over to Jeremy Smith from Grant Station. He is a person that wears multiple hats, but today he's going to be the learning and engagement specialist. How about that, Jeremy? Over to you. Thanks for being here. >> Of course. Thank you for letting me be here. And I love your glasses, Artha. I would never be one to make fun of glasses because, as you can see, I wear glasses a lot, too. And when I don't wear them, I'm not really doing much work. So, let me go ahead and share my screen to get started so we can go ahead and see Grand Station. So, give me one moment and I'll get that up for everybody. And once it's there and you can see it, go and give me a thumbs up in the chat, somebody just so I can know that it is there. And uh, fantastic. It can be seen. Great. So, this is Grandstation's website. Let me give you a little bit information about me before we start. My name is Jeremy Smith. I'm Grandstation's learning engagement specialist all the time. I'm also joined today by Nancy Vargo from our member services team and Lauren Tuning from our research team who'll be here to answer all your questions. Both of them here to help you out. Um, we're going to keep things focused and hands-on and we're going to leave time at the end for specific questions. And again, as Retha said, enter your questions in the Q&A box so they don't get lost in the chat. And if you do think of anything later, reach out to us directly at emailinfogation.com. We're more than happy to help. So, let's take a look at how Grant Station works and decide if it's really a good fit for you. You log in over here in the top right side the website and once you logged in, this is what the homepage looks like. And what our session today is really focused on is really to be practical. By the end of this hour, you'll know how to find funders that match your work. You can do that through our find grant makers section. You'll also know how to refine your search results. You'll know how to save and track funding opportunities effectively on your dashboard, which you can see right up here. We'll also cover areas that explain how to build a grant-seeking strategy. That's here in the build strategy section. How to access guides and examples that'll help you and have you writing winning grant proposals and write proposals section. And along with our tools, tutorials, and resources that can help and support your organization, they're all located right here under public resources. So, I'm going to go ahead and move a couple things on my screen that are getting in the way. And I think I'll go ahead and hide that. So, as long as everyone can still see my screen, we'll go ahead and get started. So, this is the simplest way to think about Grant Station as your prospecting tool. First, you set up a project to organize your work. Next, you search for funding opportunities. I know that seems counterintuitive, but this is the best way to approach it we found. Third, you refine and save your searches. Then finally, you evaluate and track the best matches. So, let's go ahead and start with creating a project. To create a project, you go up to my dashboard once you've logged in and go to projects and save funders. And once we've opened this up, we go ahead and click on add new project. So, we'll start off by giving it a name. And really a project is just a centralized workspace where you can organize your funding research. Now from your project you can save funders, you can save your search criteria, and you can also track your progress. So again, I'm going to create a really quick project by clicking on that add project button. And that gets me to the add new project popup right here. And our scenario today includes a project that focus on expanding pet adoption, spaying and neutering, and animal cruelty interventions. So some of the animals in our organization have been rehabilitated and traalot support animals for seniors independent centers in the community. So we'll call this our animal welfare project. So I'll go ahead and type that in. And there we go. At this point, we can enter in our budget. We always update this later, but let's say our budget for this project is $150,000. And quick note for people who are new, if you are looking for funding, it's best to think of funding as a projectbased approach as opposed to finding funding specifically for your everything organization does. Find funding for a project. It really helps organize and focus when you get started. So if you're looking for funding for say a food bank, rather than say I need money for a food bank, you can say I need money to purchase a vehicle to move food from point A to point B or I need to purchase new platters or new delivery types of things. Think of it as a project based funding as opposed to just funding for the entire organization. You can spec specify what areas you want funding for on Grant Station, but it makes it much more efficient when you can find funding from a couple different sources that help you support your specific goal by doing project-based funding. So that's what we encourage here with our project-based approach. So next up, where's your work being done? Is it being done in the US, Canada, internationally? Well, for this project, we're doing it in Pennsylvania. So let's say we're in the US. And let's go ahead and add in our state. In this case, it's Pennsylvania. And if it has a national scope, we can add that here as well. But our project doesn't have a national scope. So we'll uncheck that. Then at this point, we can click create project. And we've now made our project. I mean, that's it. That's all it takes to make a project. It's doesn't need to overthink this part. It's really the goal here is just to give you those research funders that you find a place to live. So now that we know how to set up a project, you're ready for the most important part, and that's actually finding funders. Now, there are two ways to search. There's the assisted search, which I'll show you. There's also the manual search, which we'll show you in just a couple moments. So, we'll start with the assisted search. With an assisted search, you want to paste in a short description of your work and maybe add in your organization's URL, and our system will parse that content to find search terms that fit. This can also create your project at the same time. So, let's go ahead and click on help me search. We can enter in information about our project and I actually am prepared this time. So all the information I read earlier about our project for pet adoption, spaying and neutering went ahead and paste it in right here. Again, this is where you can enter in your website and it will go out there and it will get search terms that are a good fit based on your information and based on your website. So this can take you no more than 15 seconds to have the best search terms that work for you. And this is based on information that we have in our website and from our search terms that we have. And I'm sure Lauren can correct me on this, but I think we have over 200 maybe 220 different search terms. There's a lot of different ways to search when you go about doing your research. And this helps you save your time by giving you the best areas to start based on the information you've just entered. So, we've put in the information and now we have our terms. Now, from the results screen here, there's two different groups of terms. We have our primary terms. We have our secondary terms. And primary, of course, is your core matches. And secondary terms are more related ideas and approaches that you can use when you're going about doing your research. And we can hover over the information tab right here. It lets us know why a specific term was selected and how it fits in with our specific information. And we can keep what fits and remove anything that doesn't. So for instance, animal welfare. Well, that's a good fit because it matches our core activities, which is pet adoption, spaying, and neutering. Animals of the Therapy and Service Dogs. Of course, that's a good fit for us. Environment animals general, and this is an interesting idea to keep in mind if you're doing searches, and this is not just on grantation, but anywhere for finding funding. General categories can be really handy if what you're doing can't easily be specified. But in this situation, general gives will give us too many options because general includes everything that doesn't quite fit. Now, if we don't have enough results, we can always check and add this box to our search. But I'm actually going to uncheck this one because I don't think the general category is a good one for our specific needs. So I'll uncheck that box right here. We also have seniors in the aging as a selected primary term and they're the primary beneficiary group because emotional support animals are provided to older adults in independent centers. So that's a good one, too. Also, here's another one, health and wellness general, which again, it's a general term. I don't like using general terms just because they're so big. It's great to use them for narrow things down, but we can have multiple search terms as we're going through this. So, I'm going to remove some of these. We don't have quite as many. So, now let's look at the secondary terms. We have mental health, which actually I think is a more important category because emotional support animals often used to address loneliness, anxiety, etc. Let's go ahead and check that as another search area. Another general option here. Now, we have caregivers, caregiving, and respite. and emotional support animals can and directly ease burdens on family and inh home caregivers of aging adults. So that might be one we could check too as well. So we'll check that box. At this point, we can go ahead and save our project. We could re add new words to use for searching, put in our URL and whatnot. But at this point, we're going to go ahead and save a project. So that will go ahead and save these search terms to the project I made. And again, that project is the animal welf animal welfare project. So, I have a project and I have search results. So, let's go ahead and see what we have. So, if I close that, we can look at our actual search page. You can see we're in the US charitable search. We have a GS verified tab and we currently have 518 matches. Over here on the left hand side, you can see all of our filters. We're looking across Pennsylvania. We're using animal welfare, animal assisted therapy service dogs, seniors and aging, mental health, and caregivers, caregiving risk fight. Also, we're doing a national search. We can click any of these X's to remove them. We can, of course, clear it all out at any point. We can save our criteria as we go through this. So, as we remove things, when we find a good set of filters that gives us good results, we can save that. We can run criteria we've saved in the past, rerun it, and get results we want. We can also hide funders that we've already saved. We can hide ones we've decided aren't a good fit for us. We can also search by funder or opportunity and lots of other areas. We'll talk specifically about searching through in just a second. You can also sort your funders right over here under the sort category. You can sort them A to Z or Z to A. You can also sort them by deadline closest and also deadline latest. And you can also save them directly to your dashboard by clicking the little bookmark icon right here. And you can also click the eye icon right here. If it's not a good fit for you, it'll go ahead and mark it as not being a fit, not being applicable. We can say that say this specific project animal welfare project we're going to update that means that on this project this one isn't a good fit but I could have another project where it is a good fit. So this is a great way to control what you see and what you don't see as you go about doing your research. Hiding funders maybe you already worked with ones that aren't a good fit you've already researched. This is a way that you can approach that. But even more effectively is being able to save it to your dashboard and then working with it from there. Before I go too much more into it, as you can see, this really gives us a good starting list. So, we have a good selection of funders to start with. Now, if you want to have more control over your search terms, you can also build a search manually. And so, the next process is really going to show you how to fine-tune an assisted search. So, at this point, while I'm getting Lauren all ready to start talking about this, I'm going to go ahead and save this criteria just uh just so I have it. And then we'll start brand new. I'm going to call this my animal welfare mental health seniors and add it to my specific project, animal welfare project. And I'll click on save criteria. So at this point, I have this saved. Lauren, let's go through this section, the US charitable database. >> All right. I apologize in advance, everyone. I've been a little sick, so if my voice isn't super easy to understand, please forgive me. Okay. Uh so as Jeremy said, we are right now in the US charitable database. Um and this database includes tens of thousands of fun profiles that represent a wide range of grant-making entities including independent family, community and corporate foundations, corporate giving programs, giving circles and associations as well as some other various sources. Now we do have two types of profiles in the US charitable database which is our GS verified records which we've been looking at right now. Um and we also have profiles built using 9990 information. So GS verified records which we can find under this GS verified tab are funer profiles created and maintained by our in-house research team. So we gather uh information directly from reliable sources such as funders websites, annual reports, audited financial statements, sometimes 990s as well, available uh tax filings. Um, we also often uh directly contact funders to confirm any missing information or sort of confusing things on their website so that we can make sure our profiles are as accurate and helpful as possible. So, the research team is at work updating this database continuously. So, that's adding new records and reviewing existing records. Um, so every workday we're in there uh keeping it up to date as best as possible so that you can always have access to the most current information. Uh so not every funer out there does have a GSV verified uh profile. Uh a lot of funders for example don't have any online presence. So there isn't as much of a way for us to verify information. Um in those cases you can search 9990 records instead which are under the 990 information tab. And these records are made directly from public IRS tax filings. On these profiles, information is presented exactly as it appears in those filings, and it reflects the most recent data available from those public sources. So, while these profiles will typically be less detailed than the GS verified records, they're still a really valuable way to find and research potential funders. So, there may be instances where a funer is not included in the GS verified records. And in this case, you can search for them using the 990 information. We always recommend searching GSPified first before expanding your search to the 990 information because those records will be um you know looked at by a researcher's eyes, everything confirmed um and everything usually uh more recent as well. Uh so let's go back to GS verified and let's try building and refining a search. Okay. So in GS verified you can search using a few main cate categories excuse me. Uh first geographic scope. So this is any geographic region that a funder has indicated that they will give in or historically has given in whether that's exclusive or just a preference. Uh we have areas of interest which are somewhat self-explanatory. You know these are the focus areas that a funder has supported or indicates they want to support. Um we have types of support which refers to what kind of funding or other support a funder is willing to provide. So common grant types would be program support, project support, general operating cap capacity building grants, sometimes uh capital funds. Um and sometimes they have more specific things they're interested in like equipment purchases, event sponsorships, um advocacy and so forth. So there's a lot of options in there as well. Uh and then a last main search term is uh application deadline information. So this is where you can filter for funders that are um accepting applications now or in the near future. Uh whether they have an active application cycle or accept submissions on a rolling basis. And we have a couple options here. We have next 30 days. So that's going to be open now or open very soon. 31 to 90 days. 91 to what is it? 180 days. So you can really try to uh find the right timeline for the uh project that you're looking for funding for. So we do have a few additional filters that you can use to refine your search, but these ones are best to use sparingly. Um they frequently rely on exact matches, so they can narrow your results too much if you're not careful. And these include keywords, searching by EIN, searching by grantee, or searching by key leader. So these can be helpful if you're looking for something very specific. Uh but for general searching, you'll usually get better results using the broader filters. Okay. Now, let's try selecting some filters to match our project, our animal welfare project. Okay. First things first, let's go to geographic scope. Let's get that out of the way. And we can select Pennsylvania under the states list. And we can select national as well, just as we did in our AI assisted search. Uh we recently also added the ability to search by county or city. Uh this is a really great feature, but not all funders specifically specify a county or city. So make sure to review all matches from your state and only use this if you're uh really looking for some more specific local funding. Okay. Now, while using your search filters, you have the option to search using match all or match any. Match any will search for opportunities that fit one or more of the areas of interest you have selected. And this is the broadest searching option. Changing this to match all will narrow the results where the funder must match every single one of the areas of interest you've selected. This is great if you want a shorter list of opportunities that are most likely to be a good fit for you. But it can also mean you might miss other funders that may still be interested in your project. Um so let's start with match any and let's move on to areas of interest. So first things first we can go to environment and animals which we looked at before as well. And let's go for animal welfare. Thank you Jeremy. It's a great fit for this project we're working with. Uh we can also search by target population. See where is that? down towards the bottom and we can select seniors and let's just see what we get with these. Let's click submit. Okay, what have we got? 298 matches. Okay, it's not bad. Let's save this search criteria as a new criteria. So, you can do that by clicking that drop-own menu right there and hitting new. Um, and then naming your search criteria. What do we want to call this? Animal welfare. >> Just going to call it animal welfare. Yeah, animal welfare >> the sequel. That's what we'll call this one. That way we know it. And again, setting that project. >> Animal welfare project. Yep. >> And we can go ahead and hit click save criteria. >> Yep. Save criteria. And we also have the opportunity to save um when you save criteria like this, you can save them to a new project as well. There was a little button to do that. But for this, we already have our project. So, this is perfect. Okay. Um >> and let me show one quick thing before we move to the next section. Remember that save criteria we did earlier? So, here's the one that I made. Um here's a Yeah, here's the one that we just Yeah, let's run this one right here. So this is the save criteria we already had. This is the one I made earlier with 518 matches. So we can pull it right up. Now again, this is why it's important once you have that specific saved criteria just to save it if it works for you. So we'll go back to the SQL that we just did. So now we are back in 298 matches. >> Thank you, Jeremy. Um let's take a look at the project in our dashboard. Can we do that? Sure. Um, should we add a funer to that first? >> Oh, absolutely. Let's do that. Okay. Um, let's look at an actual funer. Uh, Jeremy, can you clear the search filters and search for we had just to make this process quicker, we have a funer that we'd found earlier that's a great fit for this, uh, the Bissell Foundation. >> Perfect. >> So, here we can just pop that right in there. >> Let me go ahead and click on submit. Okay, there we go. Bissell Pet Foundation. All right, so we can see already uh we have a little bit of information given to us on the the profile as it's displayed here in the database, application deadlines, geographic scope, the areas of interest. Um but there's a lot more information available if we open that profile up and take a good look at it. So, let's hit view profile. Okay, there we go. This is what a GR station verified profile looks like. Um, so we can see up at the top there, we've got the name, Bissell Pet Foundation. And under the name, we have a couple tabs uh that show you different information about the profile. We've got the profile itself, and then we've got some um grant history developed from 990s as well. So key things to look for in the profile. First things first, the description. So description is pretty much what it sounds like. It is going to provide a description of the funer um or the funding opportunity and what they are looking to support. Um if we scroll down a bit, uh we can see that we have opportunity information as well. So this is going to include any application deadlines. It's going to include geographic scope as well as additional details for the geographic scope if they're already available. It will also include areas of interest and types of support. Um, this will also include specific um grant amounts or grant information if a funer has multiple funding opportunities or if they uh provide different grant information than their 990 might reflect. Okay. So then on the side of this we have fun information. Um, and this is going to reflect information that we get from 990s or if we're in maybe our Canadian database from CRA returns. Um, and so this has total annual giving. It's going to have calculated grant ranges, average grant, median grant, etc., etc. It'll tell you the type of funer that you're looking at. Um, and it will also provide any information on application procedures. It's available. Um, let's scroll down here. We have our big requirements section. Under this section, we have two things. We have eligibility details. So that's going to include the types of organizations that a funder is looking to support. Occasionally, additional information if there is any available. And then we have our restriction details. So that's going to include anything that the funder is not willing or is generally unwilling um to support. So, that's a very important box to check out just to make sure that you don't want to rule rule out any funders right away because there might be some specific thing that you're looking for that they do not want to support and you don't want to waste your time with those funders. Okay. Uh we can scroll down. Contact information. This is going to include the general fun information. So it'll be any addresses, any primary email addresses, phone numbers, etc. And then we also on the side of that have a primary contact. So this is um any specific individuals that you should reach out to um if you're looking to contact the funer. This sometimes also includes additional contact information that we think should be reflected on the record. Um and then way down at the bottom here, we have our grants history section. So, here is where you can um go to the records um or I'm sorry, you can go to the funders's um profile on ProPublica by clicking on that 990s box. So, we just link directly to their um profile on ProPublica, which includes all of their um tax information that has been filed with IRS. Um, if there is a a page on the grant makers website that reflects any programs they've given to in the past or any lists of past grants awarded, then we will uh link that page as well. And lastly, there's not one for this record, but um if they have a page dedicated to annual reports, we also will link that on our records. Okay, so that is what the profile looks like. Um, should we look at the grants awarded tab up here? So, this is, like I said, this is going to be drawn from recent 990s. Um, and this is going to reflect exactly what they um what the funer is reporting to the IRS. So, here you can search by tax year. Uh you can search by specific grantees, you can search by specific cities that the grantees are located in and you can look through these lists and get a good sense of um specific programs or areas that the funer has supported in the past as well as grant amounts. Um so if you want a more in-depth look than just our uh calculated averages and medians on the profile, uh we also have grant stats. So this we have a map of giving. You can look at where the funer has given. Just a really lovely quick visualization tool. Um, we should have total giving across years, median, average, etc., etc. Just a couple of really nice quick graphs that you can look at to get a sense of a funer's giving history. Um, and lastly, we have the key leaders page, and that's available just in case you're looking for somebody who's associated with an organization. All right. So, now that we've looked through this whole fun, we have to decide whether or not we think it's a good fit. Do we think this is a good fit, Jeremy? >> I think this is a great fit for anyone. >> Awesome. So, this is where you can save uh you can save a funer to your project on your dashboard so you can return to it later very very easily. So, you want to click that ribbon icon up in the corner under profile tab to save. And then it'll give you the option to save it to a project. Got the animal welfare project. Or you can create a new project if that's something you want to do. But we already have our project. And then just hit update. And there you go. It's saved. Should we see what that looks like? >> We should. And actually, at this point, you can of course email it to yourself. You can print it out if you want. You can email it to someone else if you need to to have them take a look at it. Especially once everything's in your your in your dashboard, you have full control over all this data and no one else sees it except you and your account. So, if we go to my dashboard, click on projects and save funders, we go to our project, and we have our saved fun, the Bissell Pet Foundation. And this is really your central hub for managing your grant strategy. This is where you move from the research portion that we just went through to that strategy. So this is where you can use a decision matrix. You can set your priorities. You can track your status not started in progress submitted. You can add in any specific notes as well. So we'll take each of these one by one. So the decision matrix which you can find right here where it says matrix. This really helps you quickly evaluate if a funding opportunity is a will really give you a good return on your time investment. It's a simple point system from 0 to three to answer easy questions like how aligned are you with the funders's priorities? What's your credibility with the funer and your internal grant readiness? How much effort will it take to complete the application? What's the timing of the award? How much work will I have to put into this? And once you've gone through these questions, and I'll show you really quickly what they look like. Once you answer yes to both of them, which are mandatory, you can move forward. Then you can take a look at the funers priorities, credibility, and readiness, effort, and timing. And again, answer putting in those specific little numbers. And as you put in the numbers, your score will tally. And what you're looking for is anywhere from 31 or higher. These are good fits for you. This is when someone says, "Hey, I saw this this uh grant. You should apply for it." You can say, "Great. Let me run it through the matrix and see if it's a good use of our time and our time investment." This is a very easy, quick tool to use. You can learn more about how it functions. And there's actually, you can do this on your own. It's very easy to make, but we have it built in as something you receive as a member here at Grant Station. Once you've gone through, you'll receive your number. You'll figure out it's a good fit or it's not a good fit. Maybe it could be a backup funer or maybe it's not even worth your time. This is one you should just go ahead and remove from your research list. This is a way to take that research you've done and move it into action. And this is something that's really important to us at Grand Station. You don't waste your time, like Lauren said, applying to a funer that's not going to fund what your specific need is. This is where you can really go in and hone that down and have information that you can show to your management and show to any supervisors or just show to your organization. this is why we're not pursuing this or more importantly, this is why we're pursuing it because it matches so strongly with our specific goals. So once we're done, we'll go ahead and click on done at this. We have our little matrix number right there. Let's pretend this is above 31. So it's a good one to move forward with. So now we can set our priority. We're going to give this a high priority because we know everything in that profile was a good fit for our need. So this is an at a glance view. You can see, oh, this is one of my high priority funders. I'm going to look into this one first. Next, we can go into our status. This is where we can choose whether it's on hold or not started or the LOI has been submitted or the full lab's been submitted or we've been declined or approved. You can go ahead and select that status and change it as needed. You can then add in specific dates such as when you want your draft by your submit date or your expected decision. These can then be exported into a CSV file and then imported into any kind of grant management software or directly into Excel if you want to track it that way. But of course, you can also track it right here on Grant Station. You can also set the amount requested. You can add in any specific notes if you need to. You can move this particular funder to another project if you have another project that this is a good fit for. Or you can copy it. And if it's not a good fit, you can go ahead and click the trash barrel. That'll go ahead and delete that save funder. And again, here's that export information right here. But what's important to note is when you're going around and making changes on this page, it says you have unsaved changes, and it pops up this pretty bright little purple thing down here letting you know you should save your changes. If you don't save your changes, everything you did will be out the window. So, always remember to save your changes. So, we'll go ahead and save changes at this point. Now, we have the Bissell Pet Foundation saved to our animal welfare project. Now, I mentioned earlier that maybe you have a funer that's specific to you. Or maybe I didn't mention that. I think I didn't, but I meant to. So, let's say you have a funer who's unique just to you. Maybe it's a local funer, an organization that always gives you maybe $5,000 or maybe a $500 gift for Christmas they do on a regular basis. You can create a private funer. And again, this is just for you. No one sees this information, but you can then track that as one of your funders here on Grant Station. and that can be right here in your create private fund section. So before I go forward, just want to go ahead and uh take a quick pause here and before we go any further, I just want to go ahead and cover a couple questions people have had that's come in periodically about how to qualify for a grant station membership through Tech Soup. So I know that we have someone here who's very excited to tell me all about how this will work. So, let's say that I am a new organization and I want to go ahead and take advantage of this deal coming up to pick up Grandst Station for $119. Normal price is $6.99 through Grand Station. So, you save quite a bit of money with this. What are the next steps that I would take to go ahead and make sure that I'm able to, you know, take advantage of this particular opportunity? >> Hi, Jeremy. Yes. So, you will need to sign up through the Tech Tube website. I will go ahead and throw that link into the chat. Once you do sign up, there is a qualification period. Go ahead and request the ground station promotion directly after you sign up. This will help speed up your qualification period time. And then from there, you will have until the 24th for your uh techup account that needs to be qualified by that time to be able to get that grant station offer. So, I just put the links for the US and Canada into the chat. Cool. >> So, it's a great way to uh realize if you aren't currently member, that's what you can do. But if you are a member and you're still weighing whether Grantation is a good fit for you, don't worry. I have more to show you. And of course, we'll do a couple searches a little bit later on, too. And one thing I wanted to mention though is not only do we have searches available for across the US and all the territories, we also have other databases that focus internationally and on Canada. So if we go into our find grant makers section, you can see all the different databases you can search through. We've been just spending some time in the US charitable database, but we also have a couple other areas you can look at. So first we have our US federal and US state government database right here. And these are really powerful resources that we have here. This section of the of our website gives you as a member a listing of agencies that provide support in the form of grants, loans, contracts, technical assistance, and more. And to use this section, you simply start by clicking on it. So we'll click on US state government to begin with. And then we'll go ahead and click on our specific state. So we are focusing on Pennsylvania. And from here we'll get a list of funders that provides well not funders we'll actually get a list of support available within the state of Pennsylvania that includes funding as well as information and loans training technical assistance broken down into specific areas. And also if we have a searchable database listing of grant opportunities available within a given state we have that link here too that takes you directly to that state's listing of funding opportunities. Not every state does this, as I'm sure Lauren can attest to as she's gone through these records on a daily basis and knows some people do better jobs than others, but this is where we have the information here to save you time as you go about doing your research. So, you can see here under environment and animals, again, that's one of our main search categories. You can see all the various opportunities available. So, you can know at a glance there's anything available on the state level that fits your specific need. And you can also use Grant Station to do your research specifically within the federal section. Now, right now, the federal the federal offerings are a bit confusing. So, this is a feature we've had for years here on Grand Station, but there's not quite as many opportunities that may fit for a lot of people's needs. And just doing a quick search here using eligible applicants of 501c3. Yeah, there's been a recent group that was just taken offline. Um, yeah. So, we're not going to spend too much time on this, but the point is is you can do your research here on Grant Station. You can look for funders not only on the state level, but on the federal level and see what's out there. And in the case of, you know, our specific need, we can know at a glance that, you know, there is nothing that really fits our specific need. So this is something that you can keep in mind moving forward and use it with your need statement saying there is nothing currently available you know from a state or federal government to help us with our need. That's why we're turning to you to provide you with the support for our specific purpose. We also have that funding available on the Canadian basis that I mentioned earlier. You can go to our Canadian government section and that functions just like our US federal section. You go ahead and choose your specific province. let's say Alberta. And then you can break it down into those various funding sections that I showed you earlier. You can also, if we go back one more, we can take a look at our Canadian charitable section. And this functions just like our US charitable database, but the only difference here is you go ahead and um search the provinces of Canada. You start by choosing your province. So whether you're doing global support or national across all of Canada, adding in your province, then adding in your various search terms and areas of interest. And also we have our international charitable database. Let's say you're an organization that does work internationally. Maybe you work across uh country lines. This is a great place to find funding for your need. Again, you start by choosing your geographic scope. Break it down into grant makers who are maybe giving globally or maybe in a specific country. And then you can break it down to a specific continent. Let's say Latin America. Then break it down to a specific country. Let's say Haiti. And then you can add in your specific areas of interest that you saw before. Let's say, and this is where the general category comes in handy. We're doing something involving arts, culture, humanities. We're just more of a general as our approach. What's out there? What's available? Let's go ahead and click on submit and then see the funders pull up. And it functions just like our US charitable database. You have your areas of interest highlighted. You have this basic information available here of the application data, geographic scope, and any additional clarification as well. So that covers all of our search sections. We also have our search tips area if you're interested in figuring out how to do better searches. And also if you want to see a breakdown of all of our search terms, and we have quite a few, you can find that in our search terms section. So, I'm going to pause again for another second. I know Nancy has been watching the questions that come in. So, Nancy, is there anything specific we should address before we go on to the other areas here at Grant Station? >> I think you covered uh because there's been some interest in the Canadian and international databases. >> Sure. Um, so and maybe just reference like the US has the 990 info and Canada has uh something that's a little different and maybe that's excuse me something Lauren can uh the Canada CRA information how that might be a little different. >> Yeah. Um so we are going to link to CRA um profiles on the on their government website um on all of the Canadian uh funders where that information is available. Uh one thing that is different is we don't currently have that uh automatically generated data um from their returns that we do from 990 returns. Um, so you're not going to see those same uh grants awarded uh tabs that we have on the US charitable records, but you are going to be able to go directly to um any funders website or any funers profile on the CRA website. >> Was there anyone specifically, Nancy, who uh maybe happened to say their geographic location or maybe what they're interested in? Uh they did not specifically in either of those. Um >> well, let's pretend that they're in British Columbia and that they are interested in doing an afterchool radio program that works with children. And let's go ahead and submit and see what we have that pops up here. Okay, so 339 matches based on that search. You can then of course narrow it down by doing a match all versus match any but again here's where you see the results. Let's take a look at the uh 4 Canada fund view that profile and this is what Lauren was saying. You don't have those same tabs that we had in US charitable but we do have the same type of information available here and you can email it to yourself at any given time. Does that take us up to date with questions Nancy? Um, have you gone over the matrix? I'm sorry. Not sure if you've gone over the decision. >> I did. I covered the decision matrix. We can go over it again a little bit later if someone wanted more clarification. >> Yeah, if you could just uh there's a couple questions on there. Uh, they're saying they're not seeing anything. So, maybe if you could just briefly go over those again. >> Yeah, that's not a problem. Let's say that let's pretend that 4 Canada is a good fit for us. Or maybe we're doing another project. Let's go ahead and save this to our dashboard and let's play that game where we want to go ahead and save this as a new project. I'm going to call this my Canada project or just call it Canada. I'll click on update and now I've saved it to my dashboard. I'll go into my dashboard into projects and save funders. I'm going to go onto my Canada project that I just made. And now we're going to go ahead and look at the decision matrix really quickly. So decision matrix is really to help you organize your time so you're not wasting it on a funer that's not a good fit for you. So you start off by answering this criteria. Are you eligible to apply? Yes or no? And you should be able to tell that. Is the funer a fit for organization type. Do they give funding for our specific need? Yes or no. And this is something you can identify by looking at their profile, looking at their website, looking at their 990 files. And then once you have that information and you're sure this is a good fit, you click on continue. At this point, you go through answering these questions. Are you in the fun geographic giving area? Let's say the answer is yes. We give that a three. Do we address the fun's area of interest? They specifically mention it. Let's give that a three. Do we serve their target population? Well, they don't specifically mention one, so I'm going to go ahead and give this a one. It could be a one or two. Again, it's somewhat subjective, but this is how you can go through with your feel based on what you've read of the profile and what you know from your research of that specific funer. Does it provide the type of support we needed? We need funding that's in cash and they provide cash. Perfect. Then you go through credibility and readiness. The same thing. And then as you go through, you'll get this number. And once you hit that sort of that breaking point, once you hit 16, they could be a backup funer. Once you hit 31 points, these are a good fit. get going on those applications. I hope that clarifies how this works, but we do have a video that goes into even greater detail of how this works. And you can of course always learn more here about decision matrix guide as part of our build strategy section which I could go into which I will be going into actually next once we finish this area. So any other questions Nancy or do you think I should go on? >> You can go on. >> Okay, perfect. >> Interrupt very briefly. >> Yeah, please. I just see one of the questions we had about the decision matrix specifically talking about the effort and timing section. Um I think I hope this answers the question. A lot of uh grant makers you'll be able to look at their um application forms before actually filling anything out. So if you're trying to figure out how much time or effort it's going to take you to do an application, I would say just look at their forms and look at their guidelines. See how complicated it is. Are they asking generally, hey, give us one big paragraph about your program, or do they want you breaking down, we're going to impact this many people and we're going to spend this much money on we're going to do these or that demographics. Um, just so just look at the details of what they're looking for and that's how you can take a guess at how long that application might take for you. So, it's not perfect. Um, but it's more of a prediction. Um, so you can determine maybe which funders you need to start earlier and which applications you can start later because it'll be easier. That's exactly right. It really gives you a foundation to start from because otherwise you'd say, "Well, I found 581 funders. I should apply to all of them." No, you should not. You should go through and figure out what's the best fit. And one of the ways to do that is using a decision matrix tool like this to allow you to really narrow down and see what's worth your time, what's worth your investment. And this tool itself doesn't take that long to do once you've done your research. So, I'm going to go ahead and say this one's done. And oops, I made changes. Going to make sure I save them. And this is where we'll actually go into the next section that we just mentioned. And that's our build strategy section. And this is really sort of that next step in what you need to do when you're building your strategy. It's basically everything we're telling you today. You know, how to go about doing your searches, how to go about, you know, finding the right funders. Once you have them, what do you do? Position your opportunities with a funding strategy. Create a grants calendar. Establishing grant seeeking goals and objectives. Evaluating your grant seeeking success. These are those next steps that you take before you go ahead and do the application or preparing the application in that process. This walks you through what to do and how to go through it. How to make your infrastructure. How to build a grant-seeking team even if you're just one person. How do you prepare for managing a grant when it comes in? The build section is all about how to do that. And there's various tools in here we'll talk about in just a second you can use as well. We also have our write proposal section. This is where you can basically learn how to write a proposal. There are a couple people I noticed in the chat who have not done any or haven't received any yet. Well, this is the section for you because it breaks down everything you need to do. how to get started, how to organize your documents, how to know your audience, how do you deal with a federal grant, um proposal development, developing a plan, writing compelling needs section, um how do you build an approach that gets noticed by funders, how do you craft process and outcome evaluation, what does that even mean? All of that is explained here in our write section. and it gives you a whole section all about how to write effectively and gives you tips to how to activate your writing, how to be specific, how to revise your revisions. This is all available to you as a member of Grant Station. And most importantly, you receive access to our award-winning proposals. And award-winning proposals are proposals that have been submitted through our winning grant proposal competition. We run this every other year. We've been doing this since 2013. And what you can find here are proposals that have won awards that are currently working that you can download and see what is the right type of proposal for you, what's going to make a proposal a winner. And you can see which worked within specific sectors. And you can download them and have full access to them as well. And you can also look at all of our historic samples of award-winning proposals. You can search through them by area of interest and then you can view that proposal. Then you can go ahead and download it and you can see what they're doing. How does it compare to what you're doing and then know that all these proposals you're seeing are ones that are currently working. So you can really get on the same page as other winning grant writers to make sure you're doing the right work and you're investing your time effectively and efficiently. So, this is another feature that's available to you as a member of Grand Station and it is included as part of that 119. Everything I'm showing you, you have full access to. So, another section that we have which um I haven't spent a lot of time on and we do have a finite amount of time so I can't cover everything is in our build section. And if I go back to our build section, I can show you that is our grantiscation assessment. And what this is is it's a tool that lets you see where your funding is now and where it needs to be in the future. Now, we have a video that goes in depth into how to use this. And uh you can find that in our how-to page, which I'll show you in just a little bit. Just letting you know, you can go through this by entering in your specific amounts of funding that you have available coming from local businesses, corporate foundations, family foundations, etc. And you'll end up with a visual representation of where your funding is coming from. And then you'll get mod you'll get ideas of what to do next. Modifications to approach your plan so you're not putting all your eggs in one basket. And just to show you, you can save this to your dashboard. So if I go to my dashboard and I click on reports, I already did a report for this just last month. And I'm going to go ahead and show you this report that I made. That's part of our grant diversification assessment. Go ahead and click on view. Let's say I entered all that information in. And again, I end up with that visual representation of where my current revenue is, where my projected revenue will be next year, where my current grant revenue is, where it'll be next year, where my current non-grant revenue is, where it'll be next year, and then here's those recommendations based on my portfolio. These change based on the numbers you enter. This is a tool available only to members. You have full access to this as a member here at Grant Station. It's called our grant diversification assessment. Another area that we have that I wanted to show you, this is a new feature that we have is under write proposals, we have our proposal reviewer. Now, what this is, this allows you to really, you know, figure out what's going on with your proposal, how to make it stronger, how to, you know, really wow those funders out there. It evaluates your proposal using the same rubric that we have of our grant station's winning grant proposal competition and it applies AI analysis to that. This is not used for any training. It's not going to be put out there and used by anything else. It's only used for this specific purpose. It's compared to our information that we have here in Grant Station, how we grade proposals, and it then allows you to search and compare each of those sections based on our rubric. So you can see how your organizational description holds up. How's your partnership level? What's your sustainability? What's your budget budget narrative look like compared to what we're expecting for an award-winning grant proposal? Then you can choose your proposal, upload it, and then you'll get a custom feedback form from our AI that lets you know this is what you could do to improve your proposal. This is for people who are in a situation where again you're a oneperson shop. You want to have another person take a look at this. You're not really sure what to do. This is a feature available just to members that reviews your proposal for you. It's not trained any other AI sections. It's just for your usage. No one else sees it except you. And you can actually save that information again to your dashboard. So, if I go to my report section, again, this is a fancy area in our dashboard. Go a proposal reviews. Well, I did a sample proposal review and I can go ahead and view those results that I received. And again, it broke down all my strengths, my weaknesses, and and then it gives me a guidance. And then here's my need problem statement, my strengths, my weaknesses. Here's some guidance. The same thing in project design, the work plan, timeline, all those sections and areas and boxes you can check. You can have our rubric go through and compare and see areas to strengthen it, areas where it's already strong, see areas that you need some guidance in to move forward. So this is another unique feature just available to members of grantation as well and that's within our write proposal section and that's called proposal reviewer. Now in addition to the build strategy and write proposals we also have our online education. This is separate from a membership. So this is not included with the money you spend in tech soup but this is a great way to get extra training. It's a great way to do group training and it includes a wide range of training available to you if you learn well through webinars. If you learn well through other people talking with you, you can do that through this section. This is where we have things covering your budget, how to deal with logic models. Here's one coming up on solo shop fundraising. We have free ones that come up periodically as well. Here's one shifting from traditional giving to strategic investment that's coming up. Of course, there is a webinar that I give that you can find here where we go over all the features grantation has to offer, but they cover a wide range of topics and ideas and ideas. Some of them are 15 to 15 minutes of questions, 30 minutes of learning. Those are our target ed series. You can find out about all the different types of learning that we offer here in our online education section. And we also offer the online learning academy which gives you access to all the webinars we offer over a given year. You can take all of them. You can review them again once they're finished. That's something you can also get separate from your membership to Tech Soup. So, I'm not going to spend too much time on that, but let you know that that's an option as well. If you like webinar learning and you want access to everything we have to offer, we offer over a hundred webinars a year. This will give you access to all hundred of them. And finally, we have our public resources section. This is where you can find all of our newsletters. We offer a weekly newsletter, that's the grantation insider, and two monthly newsletters focused on Canada and international giving. We also have our GS insights blog. We also have our grant writing with AI starter kit. This is a new feature. If you're interested in learning more about how to use AI effectively and efficiently and ethically, we have a whole kit that walks you through what to do and how you can do it. You can run it on your own computer. You don't have to worry about any information being saved. It's something just for you to walk you through that process. We also have our state of grant seeking. This is a survey we do every year which really gives you a look at the philanthropic environment, what's happening, where funding is going, where it's being given. And then also we have our benchmarker tool. This is one that goes in depth into comparing your organization to other organizations based on what's going on in the state of grants seeeking. So you're able to compare yourself to other organizations in similar areas, similar speeds. All these are free tools available to you under our public resources section. So with that said, I'm going to go and click on our main logo and go back to the homepage of Grant Station. And just to really, you know, sort of wrap it up, Grant Station process is really simple and straightforward. First, you set up a project to organize your work. Next, you search for funding opportunities either manually or assisted. Third, you refine and save your searches. And finally, you evaluate and track those matches. you know, following that workflow supported by all of our tools and our resources, and you move from really this scattered searching or Googlebased searching to a clear strategic approach to funding. So, you're not just finding grants, you're pursuing the right ones. So, we've got a good 5 minutes left that we can go ahead and answer any questions. And Nancy, I'm going to go ahead and hand it over to you. See if there's anything we should go ahead and cover now. Um, let's see. There's some in here that are very specific to things. So, I would just say if you have any questions, please reach out to us at info@grantstation.com. If we can't get to your question today, I'll put that in the chat box. Um, but one that is very interesting and maybe we can just uh touch base again too is maybe why would you use the AI assisted versus going through the manual search? >> That's a good one and it's actually one that we we've internally stressed with a lot here at Grant Station because we've always firmly believed in our over oh man how many years Nancy? Is it 25 26 years? >> I think we're at almost 27. Oh yeah, we are 20. Time goes fly. I've been here for a lot of those years. So, one of the thing that we started with here at Grant Station was giving you that granular control to be able to do a search. You know, you go into your US charitable database, you go ahead and select each of these one at a time. So, you know, you're choosing Alaska, you're choosing national. That's where I'm based at is Alaska. And I know my area of interest is going to be education and charter schools because I've researched this and I know the specific topic. But we know people don't have all the time in the world. So they're not able to, you know, research all 230 odd search terms that we have to know what's the best one. That's why we have the assisted search. But there are also people like myself who may not be 100% sold on AI or maybe want to have that granular control at any point. That's why we offer both ways. You can use the assisted search to go ahead and get those specific search terms to save you time or you can go in and do it manually yourself. or one of the best ways is do an assisted search and then manually fine-tune it and then save those results to your dashboard and then rerun them in the future once you found funders that fit your specific need. So, it's really uh we wanted to give people the opportunity to do both. It was really important to us. So, that's why we have both ways of doing it here at Grant Station. >> Thank you. And I think there was a question. I think Kayla was going to answer it live. Um >> I sent a message directly. >> Oh, you did? Okay, >> perfect. Um otherwise, I would say just please reach out to us at info@grantstation.com. And if there's one thing I could just add to um after the sale is completed, um if you have any questions or you know, maybe you missed the um you had some issues with the uh transaction, we do stay open late uh the last day of the sale at Grant Station just so we can cover the same time as the hours that Tech Soup has. So, we do have coverage at Grant Station. So feel free to contact us um if you need to via email or phone number. And then the following week after the sale is done, that is when you will receive your notification from Grant Station that the membership has been completed. We start receiving the enrollment information from Tech Soup on Monday after the sale. >> And once you've done that, you can come into Grant Station. You can sign in, go to our help section, and then go to our how-to videos or quick start guide. Quick start guide will walk you through that initial process of getting started with projects and research. Everything we covered today, that's what this is. This is the step one through four, how to go about finding funders, make a project, and whatnot. Then once you've done that, under our how-to video section, this is where you can learn more. Specifically, watch a guide to Grant Station hosted by myself. Also, you can learn more about our online learning academy that I mentioned. Here's how-to videos for how to search the US travel database, searching our US government database, various tools we have. Here's proposal reviewer and the benchmarker I mentioned earlier. And we even have mission focused searches. So, if you're focused on animal welfare, you can here's a quick search that's focusing just on that. Here's something on education. Here's one on a religious organization that focuses on veteran housing. This is a great way to understand how grant stationation can work better for you. So, I hope you take advantage of this opportunity. It is the lowest price we offer at any point during the years through Grand Station and it's always brought to brought to you by those great folks we have at Tech Soup and also from the excellent folks who run this webinar from TechUp which is Artha. So, Artha, thank you so much for giving us this opportunity today. I really appreciate it. >> Thank you. Great job. Have a great day everybody. Look for this email later today or early in the morning. Bye-bye.