Rachel: Awesome. Hi, everyone. Wow. That was thrilling. I mean, I was just trying to keep up in the chat. Lots going on. I know some folks were saying, like, "Goodness, there's a lot to catch up on." And I told someone in the chat, I can't remember who it was, but I'll send a transcript of the live chat so that you can actually see and go back and look at all the links that were shared, all the little tidbits that folks were talking about those little kind of like golden nuggets of wisdom that were shared. You'll have a chance to review those.
We'll give folks about 60 seconds or so to kind of get back settled, grab your coffee, your water, a little snack, whatever you need. And I'll get us rolling on our next session. Thanks so much for being here. I hope some folks are ready to win some prizes because I've seen some really amazing LinkedIn posts. Thanks to the folks who have already shared just a few little highlights of the fun we've been having. And hopefully, everyone can get a little FOMO, a little fear missing out on not joining the event today. Maybe we can get some folks to join us later today or on day two.
I'm going to start off by just going ahead and raffling off some fun little prizes here. Our first winner, Mary Cornelson, won a coffee on us. We're going to send you a $10 Starbucks gift card. Mary, if you're in the room, just give us a little shout out in the chat. Yay, Mary! You won our first coffee on us. Oh, yay! Awesome. Mary, we'll reach out to you with your prize.
Okay. I'm going to go ahead and pull our next raffle winner. Delila Valdez Len. Delila, I saw you in the chat. You are our next winner. Coffee on us. You're also going to get a $10 Starbucks gift card. Delila, are you out there in the chat? Oh, yay! Thanks for being here.
Okay. And I'm going to pull one more. We have a 25 Amazon -- $25 Amazon gift card. Let's see who our winner is. Drum roll. We've got Becky Jas Kovak. I hope I pronounced your last name right. Becky, are you in the room? You can give us a little shout in the chat. You've won a $25 gift card to Amazon. Thanks for posting, Becky. Hopefully, she comes forward. Maybe she's coming back to the room. Becky, if you give us a shout, we'll make sure to get you that gift card. Thanks so much everybody for joining. I'll do another raffle poll in just a little bit. But for now, I'm going to go ahead and get it started so we can get rolling with our learning today.
We will be launching a real quick poll just to get us engaged again on who's in the room today. We're just kind of curious, how are you feeling about your current grant prospecting strategy? You'll see this poll pop up. Maybe you're feeling not so great. Maybe it's getting there. Maybe you're feeling pretty solid, or you're somewhere in the middle. And then the last one kind of "I have no idea what I'm doing" with that, like, shaky head emoji. It's one of my faves. I'll give folks a few seconds to fill that out while we kind of get our next presentation rolling here.
Awesome. Oh, good. Okay. So, we've got a lot of folks participating. Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I'll leave that up for a second while we get to our next slide here. If you are new to this room, welcome. We're so glad you're here for the grant revolution.
If you haven't already introduced yourself in the chat, we love to hear where you're coming from and where you're streaming in from. Today, we're going to be talking about three ways your grant search is being sabotaged. Kind of intimidating language there. But we're going to talk a little bit about how we can improve on that and identify those saboteurs so that we can address those challenges head on. Thanks so much for being here today.
For those of you who don't know me, I see a lot of familiar faces in the Zoom room. And thank you for joining us. My name is Rachel, and I'm one of the newest team members at Instrumentl. My job is developing educational events like this one to share with our Instrumentl community. And I come from the nonprofit world, so I feel a lot of the challenges and some of the stresses that you all are experiencing and we're sharing in the chat. I have a decade plus of experience in the informal education field, specifically in museums. And I'm based in Los Angeles California. Hey to my SoCal friends out there in the room. Howler in the chat.
I'm also really excited to be joined by one of my colleagues today, Angela. Angela, do you want to hop on real quick and do a quick intro?
Angela: Hi, everyone. I'm Angela from Instrumentl, one of Instrumentl's co-founders, along with Gauri and Kat. And I'm fired up to be here today. Nothing gets me more fired up than being with all of you and hearing about your challenges. That's what inspires me and us, our team, to keep building solutions. So founded Instrumentl back in 2015 with Gauri and Kat. After working as a, you know, grant seeker and a variety of different nonprofits and then on the grant making side, I spent the last nine months incubating Instrumentl's newest solution. It's AI for grant writing. And Ryan's going to post a link in the chat. You all can get early access to our very new product.
And my favorite part of my job, of course, is hearing your excitement when we deliver solutions that truly solve your challenges.
Rachel: Love it. Thanks, Angela. You'll hear a little bit more about some of those highlights she was sharing, including that AI for grant writing tool. Very cool. We're very excited.
So as a reminder, for those who are just hopping into the room, we're going to spend about 55 minutes together. This is going to be a combo of a fun conversation, some dialogue in the chat. I'll be presenting a bit, so will Angela. And then we'll have time for Q&A if we have questions that have come up for folks during the presentation.
Each session is being recorded. You can see the recording is running right now. So keep your eyes peeled on your inbox to get these recordings afterwards. Again, if you need to step away, take care of your personal needs, we are here. We're just excited that you're spending your busy days with us. So bring that snack with you, stay hydrated. We're going to have a lot of fun over this next 55-minute session. Make sure you're back here for the Q&A. And I'll also be ending with another raffle. So make sure you don't want to miss that. Very excited to raffle off. We all need that kind of Oprah moment in our day today.
And to follow along, a reminder that closed captions are turned on so you can toggle that setting on in your own Zoom settings to listen as well as read along with the speakers today. As a reminder, not only are you having fun learning alongside the almost 500 other grant professionals that are here, and getting the scoop on all things grants, but you're also earning credits.
If you are a CFRE professional, you'll be eligible for those six CFRE points towards your initial certification or recertification. All you'll need to do is join each session and save that secret word, which I'll share a little more about in a second. And you can submit that in your end of session feedback form. If you submit all those words, you'll get these points and a signed certificate to essentially prove that you attended the sessions today. As a reminder, I'll reveal the secret word right at the end of our session. There's a place in your workbook to jot that down. There's also an entry box in our session feedback form.
So at the end of the session, you'll have a place to drop that in. Yes. Exactly, Will. Thank you for catching my Oprah reference. And because learning and fun should go together, we have some pretty great prizes for those who fill out their feedback forms, share their learnings on LinkedIn, all those fun things that we've already shared about in our last session. So we've got that professional learning bundle, which is going to be really cool, $100 to Amazon, a LinkedIn professional headshot session, an office supplies kit, that one sounds really fun.
We've got a meditation app subscription to keep you calm and carrying on as you're doing all your important grant work. We're going to be donating $250 to a lucky nonprofit of choice today. And some bonus surprises like our free coffee that we're handing out, things like that at the beginning of each session.
Easiest way to earn those extra entries, tag us on LinkedIn. We're @Instrumentl, and include the #grantrevolution24 so we can find your post. A reminder again of how to participate, this is your time. We don't get a lot of time as adults to spend time deep diving on our own learning. So I really encourage you to be present with us as much as possible.
You'll see a lot of folks in the chat want to engage. They want to connect. They're talking about how they really relate to some of the things that we're talking about here. So use this time to do that. We'll gather your questions using those three hashtags. So if you are typing a question in the chat, just put those three hashtags at the front. That'll help us keep organized. And we'll just stay on mute during today so we can make the best environment for learning. And thanks for helping to create that with us.
Okay. So to get us started, I saw a lot of folks that stuck around from the last session. So I know some people are going to have some answers here. We chatted about what we've learned from talking to over 500 nonprofits every week, and there were some really good nuggets of wisdom and lessons learned. What was your number one takeaway from the previous sesh?
Love to hear it in the chat. I'll give folks a moment to ponder and add some thoughts. And if you want to get real fancy, you can take literally what you just wrote in the chat and drop it on LinkedIn, add that hashtag and you'll get an extra raffle entry just for doing that. Oh, awesome. Mary is saying that I'm not alone in my frustrations with grant writing. Absolutely. Yep, burnout is real. Melanie, be the quarterback. Yes. Use that to empower you. You are the quarterback. You're keeping your team on track. Yep.
Katherine, we need to be using the right tools for grants. And Carrie, it is a lot of work. We hope we can kind of build in some support here together to talk about how we can start winning grants without spending time on duplicative work, spending time chasing down funders, all those things that add to our busy weeks that we need more time in. Yeah, Teresa, being in survival mode is an issue for everyone. Absolutely. Debbie, not alone in the soul-sucking grant searches. It's nice to not feel alone, right? This is something that we all can relate to. Yeah. And Dolores, that different grants are harder than and easier than others. Absolutely.
So I'll let folks keep chiming in here. I love hearing about that. Just as kind of a recap, right? We talked about how problem awareness is connected to the annual operating revenue. So, you know, around 50% of grant professionals we talk with typically already know what's blocking them from scaling and securing more funding. And bigger organizations are inevitably going to have more resources for understanding those challenges.
So taking the time like you're doing today to understand your challenges will help you build, hopefully, the skills and planning to improve awareness of your problems and help your organization build more strategy around your grants. Many nonprofits are still operating in that survival mode. I saw already some people were mentioning that in the chat. The survival mode struggle is real and smaller budget organizations are just laser focused on securing grants and may be equally frustrated by the lack of opportunity that's coming up, right?
So needing to balance those urgent financial needs with investments and things that are more sustainable, partnerships, varied funding, planning for future growth, all those things that will break the survival mode cycle.
And lastly, that you need funding to improve how you work. Kind of a no du. But that's something that really is important to recognize here. Those operating on bigger budgets are going to have more time to optimize the way they work since they know how their work profoundly impacts their success rate. Right?
So, we're going to talk a little bit more. We're going to dive deeper on some of these topics today. I'm going to take you through the road ahead for this session. As I mentioned, we'll be together for the next 40 minutes, 45 minutes or so. First, we're going to talk about the three ways your grant searches are being sabotaged. Da da. We'll get a little more into that.
We'll talk about some lessons learned from our grant chats. I had some real fun times meeting with some folks. And I hope I have some grant chat folks in the room who can shout out in the chat. We'll talk a little bit more about some of the great things we learned from that experience, some of the challenges with prospecting Angela will take us through some of the nitty-gritty here. And then we'll talk about three ways you can level up. Taking the sabotage to a more seamless and just more organized prospecting strategy.
So let's get started. Who's ready? I see a lot of great comments in the chat. And I really appreciate everyone engaging with me. Thank you.
Okay. So searching for grants can be soul-sucking. We talked about this in the last session, and the endless Google searching, scouring the newsletters, and list serves, wearily reading the RFP of a grant that your board member sent you, that you know you won't apply to but you have to read it anyway. Right? It can feel a little overwhelming. I feel like this gift really just about sums it up. This is fine. Who can relate to this?
You can use the raise hand feature or you can write to me in the chat. I can definitely feel that sense of overwhelm. Oh, yeah, Chrisy, Kate, yep. Seeing some hands. Alyssa. Totally. It's a lot. And we should be able to just just survive. But, you know, it's not fine. I hear you. I see you. It's a problem. That's where we lead to the challenges, folks, specifically in the nonprofit sector. They're the brunt of the most, right, leading to burnout and feeling defeated. We know that's an issue in our sector. And at the end of the day, some things are just beyond your control and you might not be set up for success, which can really add to the challenges.
So let's think critically about where our grant prospecting work is getting sabotaged so we can conquer those saboteurs. Yeah, totally fine. Right, Laura? Just like, "We're fine. We're totally fine." Okay. So there are three ways that your grant search is being sabotaged and you might not be aware of it at all. Number one, you don't have the luxury to think two steps ahead. This is, again, something we talked about in the last session in survival mode. The survival mode doesn't allow you to build internal capacity. You're floating from grant to grant. And this doesn't just impact your financial resources, right? But also, your ability to train yourself and your team, if you have one. Leveling up skills in grant writing, fundraising strategy, financial management, things like programming valuation.
When you have the time and strategy to think ahead, organizations improve their grants success rate. As we've seen from our conversations with nonprofits, they manage funds more effectively and they enhance -- and honestly enhance their appeal to funders breaking that cycle of survival mode. Right? So building in our time so that we make sure that we're not operating on this, like, constant chasing, feeling -- this feeling that we're, like, constantly just seeking out funds for the next thing.
Number two, your tools are maybe not setting you up for success. We've got a time-consuming prospecting process, which can sometimes be fun. I saw some folks in the chat saying, "Oh, I like searching for grants." And honestly, I think it's really fun too. But building in those things so you have extra time not feeling like you're constantly pushing up against deadlines will help make sure that you are more successful when you're using these tools.
When every grant or funder search requires you to manually filter or narrow down your best fit opportunities, you're going to be losing precious time on the other important things that need to get done. Not to mention if we ever want to break that survival mode cycle, right?
In the year 2024, we are at a wonderful time where you, hopefully, will never again have to physically scour periodicals or funder publications or physically published grant opportunities. Is there anyone in the room who has had to do that? When I heard folks used to have to do that, it truly blew my mind. I'm sure there's some -- yep, I see some raise hands. Some veteran grant writers in the room who have scoured physically looking for -- yep, Cindy. For sure.
You know, we're in a great age of technology where prospecting tools are becoming better and faster. And it's only going to get better from here. I'm looking at you Angela with your AI submissions beta tool. So, like, let's use this tech to the full advantage and make sure that it's helping us. It should be aiding us in our searches not being detrimental to our success. Oh my gosh, yeah, the fundraising booklets. Goodness gracious.
Okay. And lastly, you end up barking at the wrong trees, right? So funders can play a little hard to get. There's no, you know, dating profile, for example, for The Parsons Foundation that says, like, "Oh, their likes and their dislikes and their hobbies," an easy way to message and say like, "Hey, what's up? Are you open for applications?" Maybe that should be our next product idea.
The point is each funder is unique and each funder has different wants, needs, and desires. They may not always tell you what they're interested in funding at that moment, which means you're left deciding if you want to spend hours writing an application because the idea of a grant win is just too good to pass up.
Did you know that more than 80% of grant writers we surveyed spend over 10 hours on one application. 10 hours. I'm sure some of you have spent many more hours on an application. How many hours in the chat do you think you spend writing one application? I think, yeah, probably more. On average, yep, Sarah says 20. Yeah, 10 to 15, that's every application. That's a lot of time. Oh, yeah. Yep, I'm seeing a lot of similarities here in the chat. And it makes sense. They're tough. I had a lot of fun picking out some gifts that truly illustrate these feels. How are you? I don't know.
In most cases, you don't even have the time to stop and think, like, "How am I feeling about all this? Where am I? What am I doing?" You're constantly deprioritizing yourself, maybe your own professional growth because the pressure to get funding is just so strong. We kind of asked some of our partners, some of our folks who work with us to share a little bit about these experiences and what they feel like. I feel like I'm searching in the dark. It's really disheartening to spend so much time searching for funders when you know you should be spending more time on sending applications out and making an impact.
That's part of what your job is trying to do, right? It's just that constant fundraising. You constantly need to share. This is our mission. This is the depth of our work, etc. I saw someone post earlier like, "I am the queen of copy paste," right? Are you so sick of posting the same , the same exact narrative that you've had to write a million times, right? It's this never-ending loop of fundraising. You win one grant. But what about the next? How are you keeping the lights on when that funding inevitably ends? Kind of this, again, cycle of survival mode.
And this philanthropy director was saying, "It was nerve-wracking. A lot of young fundraisers feel this way -- having a goal attached to you is intimidating." This is stressful. It puts a lot of undue pressure on the fundraising advancement development teams or the one person responsible for all of that, plus, their other duties and responsibilities. I see you one person out there. I know there's some executive directors in the room, or one person grants teams that are working hard to make sure their organization is funded.
It can be disheartening to spend so much time searching for funders when you know you should be spending more time on sending applications and making an impact. So, yeah. We know there's a lot going on. We know there's a lot of challenges. And I see you all. I hear you all. I know it's a lot. We're going to try and focus on the better ways that we can find grants.
And I'm here to tell you that, like, we did find a better way. And when I say "we," I don't mean just Instrumentl. I mean the entire grant community that we've reached so far, and our team that's working hard to build things that will make your life easier, and that you actually need to make an impact. As Gauri shared at the beginning, this whole process is all about actually making things that help you in your job, in your day-to-day, in all the things that you need to get done to make sure your organizations can continue doing the amazing work that you're doing in our communities.
So I got to host a really fun pilot section session with a group of 50 grant professionals last month. Was anyone in the room that attended grants grant chats in March? Say hi in the chat. If so, I love having the 50 of you test out this really cool program with me. Oh, thanks, Analise. It's so good to see you. Hi, Dimitri. Thank you for being here.
So we brought together a diverse group of grant seekers who were in various roles and sectors, and basically just chatted about grants. I've compiled a little summary report of findings from that session. And I have a few little tidbits to share with you today. Our conversation centered around pre-award and post award. But I'm going to focus on pre-award takeaways for the purposes of this presentation since we're talking about prospecting here. And let's see if we can identify some of the potential solutions to our grant seek -- grantseeking saboteurs in these answers that our grant chats kind of brought up in our conversations.
Okay. Our first topic of deliberation, time management. How do we stay sane when we are inevitably working on a tight timeline? I think as much as we want to always be planning ahead, as much as we want to have months of lead time in order to prepare an application, we inevitably will have a tight deadline that we need to work under. What are some of those takeaways that we should remember?
Prepare, as much as possible, in advance. One of the things that folks talked about was utilizing templates. This is often where we hear about the term boilerplate, like boilerplate templates, or having something like a grant toolkit. Your template or toolkit should ideally be up-to-date with those very important blurbs that we are always asked about.
Your mission, impact, key stats, your stakeholders or partners evaluation, reports, budgets, needs statements, historical organization information, board stats and board information, all that jazz. This should be kind of your copy/paste guide for must-have responses for every application. If you work on building your boilerplate or grant toolkit template, you will inevitably end up saving time when you have to rewrite those same responses that are often very similar across grant applications.
And just a reminder to keep the info centry located. I thought this was a great recommendation, things like your audit information, like, that should be available to you, your organization's 990, things like board stats and details. You should get all that information in advance and try to centralize it. Anyone that's looking for that information can find it. Yep, for sure, Jennifer.
Setting internal deadlines before the actual submission date. So planning in the best case scenario that we actually are ready to submit, two or three days before the application is even due. This means that you might need to play that quarterback role, a little more heavily, a little more heavy-handed. That's managing the steps that other people are doing, that must come first, maybe there's accounting that needs to be done, rounding up letters in advance, letters of support, or signatures from partners. Line all of this up before you even write anything. And then I love this little sneaky tip, give false deadlines of five days before for community partners. Absolutely. Give yourself a little leeway. You can hold that secret. It's okay.
I don't think anyone would be too upset if you gave a -- give yourself a few extra days to make sure everything's pulled together. Yeah, Daphney says, "Absolutely." And then canceling non-essential meetings. This is just like clearing your calendar, folks will understand. But do set time to make those kickoff meetings to get all players involved, you know, on the same page with your application. This might mean meeting with the manager of the program staff to make sure they know, "Hey, we are committing to doing an evaluation report for this grant."
That means that at some point during your programming series, we need to set up an evaluation plan. And let's talk about what that might look like at this point in the game, rather than scrambling to do that after the grants have been awarded or trying to come up with a plan when a fan comes back to you and says, "What's your evil plan?" Make that time beforehand so everyone's on the same page. Love to hear that, Lois.
Okay. My last tip from the grant chats folks, remember, it's okay to say no. Be okay saying no if the organization is not equipped to submit a competitive proposal in a crunched amount of time. If it's just not a good fit, it's not a good fit. We'll share a funder eval scorecard in a little bit that can help you kind of practice flexing that no muscle with some more quantitative measures to back it up. And that'll help show your border leadership like, "Hey, I went through this scorecard and I saw that this actually wasn't a great opportunity for us, so. I'll share that template when we get into Angela's section.
Okay. Our second focus area was about leadership and board engagement. So how to best engage that board and leadership in the pre-award process, setting expectations clearly for your board ahead of time to know the plan for the year, and educating your board on the grants process so they understand all those moving parts. I think that's a really great thing to do. Also something that might take extra time, but may end up being a great investment of your time to make sure they understand the process, developing some sort of structured approach like a project request form or a list of rules for communication.
I thought a project request form was a great idea to help your board determine which applications we actually are going to apply for help answer questions of what the organization's greatest needs are. And this actually one of the folks was saying that they're working on building up a project committee that reviews these forms and then makes recommendations to their board on funding. I thought that was really cool. And having something like a key contact that can handle all the communications between board and leadership and your grant's team.
Okay. And our last thing, how to best manage stress while you're waiting to hear from that funder or if you won the grant. I thought this was a good little topic to discuss with everybody. While you're waiting or between grants, cultivate your funders and bring them in for visits. So keep an eye on your programming team's calendar and see if there's a great event coming up that you can invite the funder to shadow. Just keeping busy with the next opportunity and focusing on your wins here. General consensus was to keep calm and carry on, right?
And lastly, give yourselves a pat on the back and acknowledge that you, plus your team, or any collaborators worked really hard to make that application possible. One group shared that they ring a cowbell when they sip in a grant. I thought that was really cool. Or maybe it's just honoring the hard work with a well-deserved happy hour. Whatever it is, give yourselves a breather.
Another grant in the mailbox. We're really grateful to provide that kind of safe space for grant professionals to connect how we need more of these opportunities, like, everyone was sharing like, "I want to do this again." And so, I'm actually going to have a grant chance occurring every month this spring. I'll share a little more in our follow-up about how you can sign up for those. But, yeah, keep your eyes peeled to join us and learn some of these fun tidbits together. It's really an engaging space.
Angela, I'm going to pass it over to you so you can talk a little bit about how we can prevail against the challenges of prospecting.
Angela: Thanks, Rachel. This is something Instrumentl has been studying for the past going on 10 years now. Why is grant prospecting broken? I'm going to list off five top challenges that we hear about. And while I'm doing so, I'd love to hear from you all. What do you think is so complicated and challenging about grant prospecting for you? So feel free to sound off in the chat. What we hear pretty commonly from our customers is, one, the nonprofit sector is generally technology underserved.
Well, there are a ton of new technology companies being built every day to serve organizations in the traditional capital markets. That's not the case in the philanthropic sector, especially when it comes to grants. That's one of the things that really fires us up at Instrumentl. Unfortunately, it can be a luxury to think about introducing new tools because of lack of time and resources, especially as we've seen there's some one person here where they're the executive director and the grants manager and so much more. So thinking about introducing new tools and applying for grants and running your programs, all of that overwhelm can put us into survival mode.
And thirdly, of course, getting buy-in from your executive director if you're not the ED for a paid tool is not super easy, right? We've heard in the chat you really have to prove the value of a tool before you can invest. So often, we're in these situations of chicken or the egg first. I need to win some grants so I can prove that investing in a grant tool is a valuable resource.
And then fourth, we often hear that change management and adopting new tools is a challenge. Some of us work in larger teams, and it's hard often to solicit our colleagues and get them on board with using one more brand-new tool no matter how helpful it is. And then the fifth thing that we hear a lot about is often the return on investment for grant management platforms, it can be unclear.
And so, a few more things that I've been seeing in the chat that is a reason why grant prospecting is broken and things get a bit more challenging is sometimes funder preferences are a bit opaque. They can have explicit preferences, of course, and you'll see those on their RFPs. But they can also have a ton of implicit preferences. And sometimes you can look at their 990 to do some detective work and figure out what those are.
Other challenges are relationship building can be tricky, especially for those organizations that say they're invite only. All right. So what if there was a new world where the challenges that we face in prospecting disappear? It's how you get your time back and create room for a more proactive prospecting process.
So in this new world, instead of searching for grants, grants come to you, grants get delivered to you. And instead of wasting time, you get your time back. Instead of guessing if a funder is right for you, you know which funders are a good fit for your programs. This is how you get out of survival mode. This is how you set yourself up for success and connect the dots between prospecting and grant management. And this is how you'll be able to evaluate funders faster.
Speaking of Ryan, if you wouldn't mind dropping over in the chat, how folks can get our free funder evaluation cheat sheet. That'd be great. Sophie, I think you were looking for this evaluation tool. So you can use this cheat sheet to vet opportunities. It will cut your go, no-go decision time in half and help you decide if a funder is actually worth your time and a good fit for your organization. So I want to take a moment to explain the behind the scenes of how our grant matching actually works and why it's a game changer.
When Gauri, Kat, and I started Instrumentl almost 10 years ago now we imagined a world where finding grants worked just like online dating. Tell Instrumentl what you're looking for And we'll scour the world looking for the most eligible grants and then send them to your inbox. That was our vision. In fact, that was the first vision of Instrumentl back in those early days as you probably heard from Gauri in session one. Gauri and I would comb through page 25, 26, 27 on Google finding the right grant for your program and then we'd personally email you and highlight why that grant was a great fit with reminders not to miss the deadline.
Imagine how many deadlines Gauri, Kat, and I were tracking. Through hand-matching thousands of nonprofits and researchers to grants, we develop our own sense of what made a great fit between a grant and a grant seeker and through that, we were able to develop a highly customized grant matching algorithm that wasn't based off NTE codes or some other external classification of nonprofits.
It was actually based on real world learnings that the three of us had in terms of what makes programs and funders compatible. And because we were personally emailing you, emailing the funder, and hearing your feedback day over day, it became an algorithm, a taxonomy that was handbuilt through your feedback. And today, we still use that algorithm and that taxonomy. And it's now owned and maintained by a special 12-person swat team at Instrumentl who make changes to it as the market evolves. And so, what you can see on this next slide is those details, it's why Instrumentl asks you when you first sign up or when you're creating a new project.
Tell us about what you're fundraising for, where's your organization based, where are your programs going to have an impact, what will you spend the funds on, how much are you looking for, all of these important questions to understand better what's the right funding for you. Those are the same questions we used to ask back when the three of us were personally emailing, calling each nonprofit that wanted our help. And just like this animation here shows, we scour the Earth and send new opportunities to your matches, inbox directly.
So just like in those old days when you're using Instrumentl, you can let us do the work for you. We're going to find the best fit opportunities and send them to your matches inbox. And over the years, we've built much more than grant prospecting. You'll stay focused and save time by having the grant prospecting component and grant and funder tracking and grant management, all in one place. You'll also have access to the best options with our database of over 15,000.
I think it's 177,000 now active public and private funding sources for 501(c)(3)s. We hear from folks who do grant prospecting that switching to Instrumentl help them save an average of 10 to 30 hours per week. That's a tremendous amount of time for those folks who are doing grant prospecting as a large part of their jobs. And if you're an Instrumentl customer or user and you've used our matches, I would love to hear in the chat. Hopefully, I can keep up.
Let us know what you think about our matches in the chat. I would love to hear your personal opinion. Are we good at finding the right matches for you?
Okay. You can go to the next slide, Rachel. Thank you. So one piece of feedback that we've definitely been hearing a lot from Instrumentl grant seekers is, you know, on the one hand, I don't want to miss any funders that could be a good fit for my program. And I want Instrumentl to continue sending those funders my way. But then on the other hand, sometimes during a grant prospecting session on Instrumentl I just want to drill down into a particular location of our field of work.
So last week, we launched new filters to help you zero in on your funders. And you can see them here in this slide. So how you're going to get to those new filters is you're going to go to your matches tab, click on funder matches and you'll see the new field of work and location of project and residency filters. So here's an example of when and why you'd want to use one of these new filters.
So let's say you're a nonprofit and you run stem education programs for kids K through five across the San Francisco Bay area. On Instrumentl, you'd probably have your project setup to consider funders who give across the Bay Area, funders who give within SF County, San Mateo County, Alameda County, Marin County. But you learned that actually K through five stem giving is pretty popular with the San Mateo County funders. You don't want to miss out on any of those Bay Area funders, of course. Instrumentl should keep sending those good fit funders your way. But for today, for this session on Instrumentl, you just want to drill down into the San Mateo County funders.
Perfect. So just click on that location of the project or location of residency filter to see good fit funders who specifically give to programs operating in Sano County, for example. And keeping up with my example, if you run that stem education program for kids K through five across the SF Bay Area, you probably have fields of work selected on Instrumentl, like, academic success and enrichment, education, elementary school, and STEM and STEAM education.
And while funders who give to any of those fields could be interested in giving to your program for today, for this session on Instrumentl, you only want to look at your STEM and STEAM education, grant or funding opportunities.
Perfect. You can do that on Instrumentl now by using this new filter under field of work. Just select the field of work that you want to drill down into for your session. So these filters live on the funder matches tab so you can drill down into funders who are the right fit for you. But these filters also live on the funding opportunity matches tab too. So you can drill down into location of project, residency, and field of work for both your grant opportunities and your funders.
So today, we've talked a lot about this first super cute GIF here. Prospecting, helping you find your needle in the haystack a lot quicker.
In the next session and in tomorrow's sessions, you'll hear more about how Instrumentl is now a full life cycle solution for all things grants. Research and management, applying and writing proposals. Ryan, if you'd like to drop that link in the chat again? Instrumentl has a brand new AI grant writing tool that helps you apply to grants a lot faster. It's in a beta early access version. But please, sign up and we can talk more. And then, of course, the post award and financial tracking aspect of grants.
Instrumentl can help you there too. Nonprofits tell us they spend 40% of their week trying to find apply to and manage grants. Our goal is to get that down to as close to zero as possible. Back to you, Rachel.
Rachel: Awesome. Thank you, Angela.
That was so exciting. How are folks feeling in the chat? I want to hear some people sharing some thoughts. I also have been seeing some really great highlights on LinkedIn. And I'm just going to go ahead and do a little raffle because why not? We want to have fun while we're learning, and I love a raffle moment.
So, I want to give a shout out. Deborah Banks, are you in the room? We want to treat you to some coffee. And, Deborah, you're our next raffle winner. If you can give us a little woot woot in the chat. Deborah, you've won a coffee on us. Yay, Deborah. I also have -- oh, yay! Deborah, congrats! Enjoy a moment where you can enjoy your tea or your morning brew while you're looking through all your next grant opportunities.
And then our next one. Let's see, is Ashley. In the room, Ashley Gonzalez, Gai Asingh? I hope I pronounced your last name right. Ashley, we want to give you a $25 Amazon gift card. Maybe you can use that to buy a grant writing book or or just something fun for yourself to treat yourself a little bit. Ah, thank you, Ashley. And I appreciate that so much. Yes. Okay. Thank you. Congrats on winning and thank you for sharing your learnings.
I'll just shout it out again and continue to share. I am scouring our LinkedIn page. And we love seeing all the things that you're taking away from this experience. So thank you for doing that.
Okay. I'm going to wrap up this session here with some focus on three ways you can level up your prospecting. We're kind of, like, summarizing all these things we've learned. Obviously there's some challenges. We know it's tough out there. But let's think about the ways that we can actually subvert some of those challenges and use the skills that we have, the community that we have around us to learn from each other and level up on our prospecting.
So the first thing here is just understanding the tradeoff of using DIY tools for grant management. This just means that we're kind of working to think back on maybe the ways that our tools that we've used in the past for grant management may not be setting us up for success.
Sure, they might be what works for now. But at a certain point when your organization is looking to move out of that survival mode loop, you might need to upgrade your systems in place in order to see more success, right? Because the longer that these DIY tools keep your kind of maybe bad habits of not only yourself, but maybe some of your colleagues who are not great at updating the documents, you need or staying on top of tracking your grant opportunities, tracking information about your funder relationships and your CRM. All those things, right?
That might keep you from getting to that next stage of your organizational development. So using the best tools that are available in order to help take your grant management to the next level. Second here, this is a tough one. And I find just coming from the nonprofit world, I get it. Changing the mindset from "this is an expense" to "this is an investment," it can be a really hard conversation to have with leadership or your board. But it's something that will help continue to, again, break that cycle.
We were trying to revolutionize our grant management systems here. So we're going to have to take some big steps, and that might mean investing in ourselves and our organization and validating that, okay, this might be worth the money and the time in order to train everyone on the system so that we can get to the next stage. Absolutely.
Okay. And this last step here, taking those incremental steps to learn and improve just by being here in this room today. And again, I just want to shout out. We're with almost 400 other grant professionals that all are sharing in your similar challenges. We saw that everybody is feeling the same, right? Hashtag, I feel fine. But it's not fine. There's a lot out there.
You're taking steps right now to improve your systems, to improve your learning and your skillset, and hopefully improve your organization strategy around getting more funding, winning more grants and making more amazing impact in your communities. So I encourage you to continue to stay curious.
There's a lot of ways to connect with the resources that not only we have on our website, but also those that we share from our expert partners. If you actually visit the blog, Ryan, if you want to do something like a quick blog shout out in the chat, that's always helpful.
We have a ton of helpful resources in there for those who are trying to get started. There's some recordings to free programming that we do. I run events almost every week. Just continuing to stay curious and learn together. I think that's such an important way to level up. I'd love to hear in the chat.
Do you have the number one tip when it comes to grant prospecting? We shared a lot of little tidbits today, and I'd be curious if there's some experts in the room. I know. I see you. What's your number one tip when it comes to grant prospecting? I'll give folks a second to noodle on that. Just think about what they might want to share. Maybe there's a newbie grant writer in the room who could really benefit from hearing some good tips. I love hearing these.
Donette use Instrumentl. Always helpful. I think that's a great way to start. Yes. Jill, looking at funds who funds similar organizations? We have a really great reverse search tool in Instrumentl. You can also do this by looking at the funders 9990 and seeing what organizations are they funding? Are they similar to yours? Reach out to those organizations and say, "Hey, what was it like working with that funder? Did you enjoy that experience? Do you do similar work to us? We can help each other win together, right? That's kind of an emphasis on our programming today. Yep. We've got a lot of great tips. Oh, my gosh.
I'm going to have to save all of these. Lisa, if you aren't awarded one year, still apply again next year and the year after. That's so true. Don't lose hope. You might just be in that kind of, like, little sweet spot where you might have missed that last round. But they're looking at you again for the next time. Maybe even reaching out to the funder and seeing what you could do to improve your application for the next round. These are, like, seriously golden nuggets of wisdom. I hope folks are jotting them down.
And again, I will share the chat box transcript. There's a lot going on in the chat. It's pretty wild out there. So you'll be able to look through these and kind of internalize some of these tips so you can take them with you to your next grant writing endeavor.
Awesome. I'm going to let folks continue to share. If you want to share these on LinkedIn, Maybe you'll be the next winner of a coffee with us. Or I'm going to start raffling off some slightly bigger prizes. So you'll see those in just a second. A quick little tidbit from Dr. Bev, one of our wonderful partners. She shared this really great little review and I just wanted to highlight. Seems like she's having a great time. She's talking about what I'm going to do with all my extra time? Bliss! Satisfaction! Timesaving! On target! A package full of miracles for grant writers. Dr Bev shares a really great little tidbit about the time she's saving and just the ease that she has using Instrumentl, just not spending hours on multiple grant research websites, all the things that we are trying to alleviate with the grant prospecting challenge as we talked about earlier in this session. So thank you, Dr Bev. We love you and appreciate you.
So our whole, you know, takeaway here is that we should be revolutionizing how our grant prospecting is working. So we want to make sure that we're finding relevant funders even faster. We have new prospecting improvements that Angela shared, and we've got customer training in order to help make sure this happens. I'll share how you can join those in just a second because I see some customers in the room.
And you can track what actually matters to you, which is so important when we're thinking about narrowing down our relevance for grants and why we should be spending time working on applications or not. So I'll talk a little bit about that in just a moment.
Before I do that, if you are a customer, I want to make sure you have an opportunity to get access to your one-on-one strategic consultation. Amily, Rebecca, and Tracy who are just my amazing colleagues. And I actually saw Becca in the room earlier. I don't know if she's still here. But thank you for joining and supporting me. They are here to give personalized recommendations for you and talk about how you can optimize your grant workflows, essentially maximize your efficiency with your grant prospecting. There are a few spots available. We're a small team.
So Brian's going to drop the link in the chat in order to sign up for those. It's a quick two-minute quiz. It'll basically assess where you're at in your grant strategy and go from there. So I encourage you to fill that out. Take it today and see if you can get a spot with one of our amazing customer success folks. And I'll talk to you about how to optimize your grant workflows.
If you're not an Instrumentl user yet, you can sign up now. You'll get a really easy little form that you can fill out that just tells us a little bit more about your organization and what you're seeking. And you'll even get a special launch discount as a thank you for spending time with us and being a part of this glorious event that we have going on. So Ryan will drop that link in the chat as well. Take your time.
You can think about it, join the link whenever you have a chance and we'll hope to see you in your grant tracker. Okay. I'll give folks just a minute.
We've been going through a lot. We have about five more minutes left of the session. We're going to do another little quick coffee stretch break. I might do some of my exercises to stretch. How's everyone feeling? If you want to share one word in the chat about how you might be feeling right now, love to hear it.
I don't get to be physically in the room with you all, but I can, like, sense all the energy from you all and I just love hearing this hopeful, encouraged, seen, happy. It's a lot. I know. Dr. Sandy, it is. But the thing is we're all here together to support one another. That is something that I want to continue to emphasize over the course of these sessions today. We are in this together. It may seem like we are working alone. But we are in this together. Oh, I'm so glad. Informed, encouraged, supported. That makes me so happy. Awesome, you all. Let's carry those good feelings forward.
We have a little more to do today. One more session. Before I wrap us up, a quick plug. If you are working with the university, we have updated some filters to make grant prospecting even easier for universities specifically. So I do want to highlight that that's something that's coming out with our spring launch. The university plan basically will help focus on research grants and opportunities for university specifically. It'll help with some of that collaboration piece that is challenging, especially at larger institutions.
So you'll have all of the information that you need in one place. You'll also be able to integrate with other workflows through our API access. So if you have integrations that you need to have in place that all is available to you, and you get awesome dedicated support and training. Those, like, strategic consultations with our customer success team, they are truly amazing at what they do. And they're always so responsive and present. So that's really something that is super exciting for our university folks in the room.
If you know of a researcher or a faculty member who would really benefit from this plan, you can reach out to us at hello@instrumentl.com. And you'll even earn a little referral bonus. Ryan, I'll drop that in the chat too so you can reference that. You can use the coffee break time to send us that email, which I'll get to you in just a moment. If you were paying attention, you might remember that we had a secret word at the end of each session.
So the secret word for today's session two is R-A-R-E. The secret word can be jotted down in your workbook if you want to remember it. I also will have a place for you to drop the secret word in for our session feedback form. As a reminder, you can share. This is like the same form that you filled out for the last session. But just indicate that you're giving feedback for this session. We love to hear what you have to say. So use that link in the chat. Share your feedback, add in your secret word.
And if there's tidbits of feedback that might be helpful for you to share on LinkedIn, you can do that too at the same time. So go ahead and add that feedback. Oh, Rachel missed the secret word. I'll go back for a second. The secret word is R-A-R-E.
I'm excited for you all to see the secret sentence that we have. Kind of fun to build it piece by piece. Of course, Rachel. Great name, by the way. All right. Make sure to share that feedback.
Coming up next. We're back again. Hopefully, you haven't had enough of us. Angela and Rachel will be sharing from Chaos to Clarity: The Proven 3-Step Path to Seamless Grant Management. I am very excited about this. I will take a few seconds here. We're ending a little early. So we've got about 7 minutes or so for you to stretch, take a bio break, grab a coffee, grab a snack. We are heading into our last session for the day. Thank you so much.
I will see you back here at the top of the hour.
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