Rachel: We're getting into our final session for the day. Thank you for sticking it out with us. I love seeing a group of grant professionals spending their mornings learning together. It is so special. I'll give folks about 60 more seconds to come back into the room and get settled. We have another final session that we're going to focus on today.
In the meantime, I have a quick little poll. Again, just like learning a little bit more about who's in the room. This one focuses on your grant seeking expertise. Are you brand new? Are you a newbie to the grant seeking world? Are you getting the hang of it? Are you kind of in that intermediate like, "I know what I'm doing, but I still have more to learn"? Or are you a pro?
Are you one of our experts in the room who's been doing this for decades and knows all the ins and outs? You might not be sure either. You're welcome to kind of answer that as well. So give me your thoughts. I'll give folks another 30 seconds to get settled in before we start again.
All right. Let's get started so that we can continue on and wrap up in a timely manner, get back to our workday/whatever. You might have fun going on this Tuesday. Thank you for adding your thoughts. I see some folks are still participating in our chat -- or, I'm sorry, our poll. I'll leave that up for just a second.
If this is your first session for the day, welcome. We are so glad to have you. You can introduce yourself in the chat if you haven't already. Just share where you're coming in from, your role, your organization. I love to see where across the country or across the world we have folks joining us in from. Please share. We're also getting some like contacts across grant professionals. I love that too.
And then if you want to start trying things out at Instrumentl, I encourage you to do so. Ryan will drop a link in the chat so you can start your own account and just start messing around, see what's going on in there, see if you can apply some of these things that we've talked about in the previous sessions to your work.
Awesome. Let's get rolling. Before we do that, I'm going to raffle off another prize because we've got some great LinkedIn posts. Thank you to those who have been sharing and submitting their feedback. I love seeing this feedback come through. And we read literally every response. So thank you for spending the time to do that. It is incredibly valued.
Our next prize winner, let me see. I'm going to pull up my raffle here. Renee Johnson. You've won a coffee on us. $10 to Starbucks. Renee, if you're still in the room, which I see you in here. You! Yes. Renee. Yes, thank you. You have won a coffee or beverage of choice on us. Yay! Thank you. We will reach out to you. I've got another bigger prize coming your way. Let's see. We've got Francine Rico Francine Rico, are you in the room still? I think I see you in here. You have won a $25 Amazon gift card. If you were in the room, make a little shout out in the chat. I see you're here. Well, we'll give you some info on how you can take advantage of that. Yay! Love it.
Awesome. It's not too late. If you're like, "Hey, I want to get in on this fun," join the LinkedIn train. Get your learnings up there. We're looking at it. We're liking and sharing the things that you all are taking away from this day. So take advantage of it. We encourage you to share your learnings. All right. Welcome to our last session of today's amazing Grant Revolution.
We're talking about how you can move From Chaos to Clarity: The Proven 3-Step Path for Seamless Grant Management. Thanks for sticking around friends. I'm excited to talk a little more about how we're actually managing grants during events. We've talked a lot about how we're prospecting, a lot of the challenges. We're going to focus on how we can actually manage our grants better.
As a reminder, if you haven't met me yet, my name is Rachel. I'm one of the newest team members at Instrumentl and my job is to focus on developing educational events for our grant seeking audience. I have a decade plus of experience in the informal education field, specifically in museums. And I'm based in Los Angeles.
Hello to my Pacific Time folks out there. Angela is joining me today, and I'm going to invite her to come on and share a little bit about herself for folks that may have missed that intro in the last session.
Angela: Hi, everyone. Thanks, Rachel. Great to be here with all of you. In case you missed my intro in the earlier session. I'm Angela, co-founder of Instrumentl. I founded Instrumentl in 2015 after a career as a grant seeker in a variety of nonprofits and then later as a grant maker.
So I spent the last nine months incubating Instrumentl's newest solution. It's AI for grant writing. And Ryan's going to drop a link in the chat. If you want to get early access, I invite you to. We can chat more about my favorite part of my job, hands down is hearing your excitement when we deliver solutions that truly solve your challenges.
Rachel: Awesome. Thanks, Angela. We'll hear more from her in just a little bit. But as a reminder again, we're together for about the next 50 minutes or so. We're going to have a super engaging conversation. The chat's probably going to go off again, which I love hearing from everybody.
We'll share a little bit more learnings that we have working with grant professionals day in and day out and have some time for Q&A at the end if there are lingering questions from anybody. The session is being recorded right now. And you can keep your eyes peeled in your inbox. We'll make sure to send the recording.
I'll send this whole chat transcript so you can review back and look back at some of those tips that people were sharing in there. Again, take care of your personal needs. We've got our waters. I've got my coffee. I'm double fisting the beverages right now. Bring that with you and stick around. We'll step away at the end of the session and wrap up our day today. But don't miss the chance to win. I'm raffling off things as we go. So try and stick around to the end. I'll raffle off a bigger prize as we wrap up our session today. Make sure you can follow along with me and Angela by turning on those closed captions. You can toggle those on in your own Zoom settings.
And as a fun reminder, not only are we having fun together, we're also earning credits towards our CFRE certification. So these secret words that we've been sharing at the end of each session will come together to form this fun little sentence. And each secret word will get you access to that kind of one point towards your CFRE certification. So attending all six sessions over these two days will give you six points towards your initial application or recertification for CFRE certification there.
We'll reveal the secret word at the end of the session. Don't worry, you haven't missed it yet. So stick around. I will give you the word to add into your feedback form. Plus, as a reminder, these are the fun things I'm raffling off. Very excited to see all the engagement on LinkedIn. Thank you folks for sharing your learning.
I'm going to remind folks of that stat too that will share that literally, like, sharing what you've learned helps you retain that precious information that we're trying to take in today. This is a lot of content coming your way. So share what your key takeaways are. Use that summit workbook to write down some notes. This is really a learning moment for you. So take this time and really, really keep it precious. This is a precious moment that we're having together to learn and grow.
If you haven't gotten enough of me today, you're welcome to join me for a special bonus session after this. I'll spend about 15, 20 minutes just hanging around in this Zoom room for any "office hours," quote, unquote. Anyone can stick around and ask me questions.
I might have missed some stuff in the chat while I've been sharing. So, yeah, hang around if you have the time. There's no pressure of course. You've earned your keep for today. But if you want to chat with me a little bit more, I'll be here to hang out around with everybody. We'd love to also hear what's sticking with us, any feedback or thoughts, maybe reflections that you have that you want to speak out loud with other professionals in the room.
All right. And we know the drill. But as a reminder, this is your time to learn. Use that workbook like I said, or just have a pen and paper in front of you, jot down the things that are standing out. You can add questions in the chat with those three hashtags at the front. And we'll stay on mute, unless you're called on to speak. This will just help us create the best learning environment. We know how Zoom goes these days.
Okay. What we learned in the previous section -- session was we all were together for that. We talked about how prospecting can be painful. But there are tips and tricks that we can do to help. Right?
Your tools may not be setting you up for success. But we can fix that. We can help make sure that we're investing in tools that are helping our organization break the survival mode cycle. And it does take truly an institutional mindset shift from expense to investment, which is a challenging position to be in. I totally understand that. But it will take your organization from that next level. From that kind of, like, chasing grant after grant to actually building a grant seeking strategy.
What's one emotion that folks are feeling when they're prospecting? I'm curious. We had some ideas for, like, some people find it fun. What's your feeling when you're prospecting? When you're looking for grants, what's the emotion that you feel when you're looking? Love to share in the chat. Hopeful, overwhelmed, discouraged, powerful. I like that.
Let's lean into that power. We should be empowered when we're seeking out funding for organizations that are doing incredible work. It's a fun challenge, says Cindy. Yeah. It can be. Stephanie says frustrated. Yeah, there can be elements that are extremely frustrating. Sarah said self- advocacy. I love that. And making sure you're articulating, exactly right, what you're able to advocate for yourself. All the above feelings says Mona. Yeah. I get that. Excited.
You know, it's a roller coaster of emotions. I'll tell you that. It can be great some days and really a struggle the others. What could be great is just making this a little more of a calm and, you know, flowing feeling where you're feeling like you're really on top of your prospecting. So we're going to talk about how that fits into our overall grant management strategy because that's something that will help us feel cool, calm, collected when we're seeking out those grant opportunities. We're going to talk a little bit about our current grant management workflows, what they look like, how they're helping us, or maybe how they might be impacting the way that we are seeking grants currently.
We'll talk a little bit about challenges with Grant Management Systems, the existing work that we have to do in order to keep all those things pulled together. I'll share three proposed solutions to make you take your grant management from maybe novice to expert, really show your boss like, "Hey, I've got this strategy in place to manage grants." Think they'll be very impressed with what you have to share. You'll also show -- I'll also show you how you can create your own grant tracker.
Giving you the opportunity to kind of flex those muscles that we've talked about in some of the previous sessions and actually see how it might apply to the funds that you're looking for. And we'll end with the three-step path to seamless grant management. Doesn't that sound nice? Seamless grant management. So just pondering here. This is more of a rhetorical question.
What do you do when you want to search something online? Right? Pretty, pretty easy. You open a browser. When you want to surf the Internet, you open up your Google Chrome or your Safari and you search the internet. But what do you do when you want to check the status of your grants? I bet it's not quite as simple.
Maybe some folks have a grant management system in place that they're feeling really excited about. And if you do, I'd love to hear it in the chat. But it might be a little trickier to find exactly what the status is of funding opportunities across your organization, especially if you have grants that are in different stages, different statuses.
You might have one person that has one application in process, and maybe you're working on another. It could be a little scattered. Check your spreadsheet. Yeah, ctrl F in the spreadsheet and look for exactly what you're looking for. Right, Lionel? Oh, no, Chris. It's okay. It's okay. We understand. That's why we're here.
We talked earlier about this, right? When we were talking to grant professionals like yourself, we realized how complex and challenging grant management really is. That's because you're not just keeping track of where you're at with a certain grant. I mean that would be nice if that was it. Right?
But you're also managing deadlines, managing your other team members. Or if you're a solo team member, maybe you're working with partners or organizations that you also serve. You're managing your tasks, your calendar, which needs to be up to date so you can make sure you have deadlines all in place and that you have meetings with funders, all those fun things that you need to get done. You need to have documents that you regularly use.
We talked about our grant toolkit or our boilerplate templates. Those need to be created and updated and managed. You need to have your deliverables, your finances, your reports. And also just managing other people's expectations. I heard a couple people talk about in the chat and the struggle that they have as a grant seeker in their organization managing their board's expectations or leadership's expectations on funding.
It's tough. It's tough out there. I really loved this sad baby because that's beyond stressful. That's just, like, straightforward chaos, right, especially you have to do it while switching your focus from one tool to another, chasing down email threads, chasing documents across multiple folders, maybe physical files, your sticky notes that are surrounding you in your office, squinting your eyes at spreadsheets, putting those reminders across your desk and just also resolving miscommunications that come up, maybe you said like, "I thought someone else was going to handle that piece, and they haven't done the thing that I need that's due tomorrow, right? That's a lot. So I feel this little baby feeling overwhelmed by that.
So you're thinking maybe that you're stuck with that. Like, that's what you need to adjust to is the chaos. Make the most of it and just find a workaround. But I say no. We in this group, let's say no. We are flipping the script. You really deserve clarity. And when we talk about grant management, we should see that you have a grant management system that adapts to you, not the other way around. And, Angela, I know you talk with grant professionals a lot and you notice some patterns in terms of grant management challenges. Could you share a little bit about that so we can kind of dive in deeper on what these challenges are?
Angela: Yeah, I'd love to. And, Rachel, oh my God, that exhausted baby GIF, I have a toddler at home. She can definitely get into that chaos mode. We definitely want to avoid it.
Rachel: Totally.
Angela: But, yeah. It's important to me and our team that we're talking and hearing from our customers and users daily. That is a major goal and value of ours. Just so we're on the same page about what grant management is, let's take a look together. So Rachel, you can move us to the next slide. So grant management is overseeing a grant's entire journey. It's from research and applications, to funding milestones and final reporting.
So starting back in pre-award, which we were just chatting about in the earlier session and is shown here in the left column, we're doing the search for best fit funders and grants. We're cultivating funder relationships. We're submitting applications to the ones we do find. And, of course, following up on our pending submissions, how did we do?
And then once we've scored the funds, yay, go us, we still have a lot of work to do. We still have to track across the post award life cycle. So showing over here on the right side with financial monitoring on our spend down from funds we were given, tracking all of those reporting deadlines and writing and submitting reports, ensuring we comply with all of the grant terms and evaluating the impact that these funds had on our projects.
So back to -- what do we hear in terms of patterns in grant management challenges? I think Lovel said it really well here. She said, "I used an Excel spreadsheet to track submission dates and amounts awarded, but it became very inconvenient and tedious to try and track five years of submissions on a spreadsheet."
And then Eloise said, "We relied on separate Excel spreadsheets to manage our grant schedules and to keep track or keep a status report of all the grants that we've applied for, were received or denied." And, of course, that turned out to be pretty messy. And then Cynthia, shout out to Cynthia, "When we keep information in spreadsheets the data gets scattered across multiple rows and columns." So it can be hard to achieve a unified view on your history with funders. So what do you all think?
Would love to hear from you in the chat. What are some challenges you personally experience when it comes to grant management? I love to hear your shout out about your struggles. And let's take a look to see what folks are saying.
So Cindy Johnson, the company I work for, still uses spreadsheets to track, and yet has access to Instrumentl. Mmm. Tricky. I want to turn the tide and work smarter, not harder. Absolutely. Spreadsheets, while amazing and super powerful, can easily fall out of date much better if, you know, you can have fresh, clean, data coming into your tracker and staying updated, which is what we've built on Instrumentl.
So many submissions makes it tricky. Of course, I can imagine you're having multiple tabs and huge spreadsheets at the end of the day. Just keeping all the data up to date, 100% I agree. And, yeah, "Excel spreadsheets can become a nightmare," says John.
Well, thanks everybody for sharing in the chat. I would love to hear more of your complaints when it comes to grant management, working with trackers. Some other things that we hear, Rachel, if you want to go to the next slide? We hear a lot that folks use spreadsheets, Excel being a common one, or Google Sheets.
Maybe they're using collaborative Google Docs or files, or even the dreaded physical files back in my first job ever for a foundation. It was my job as the new person to organize all of the physical files. And I think I spent a whole summer doing that. It can be fun to use tangible stuff, of course. I love to mark up a document on real paper. But it can, of course, make grant tracking a little complicated, especially if you got a lot of irons in the fire.
So Will brought this up in the very first session. But I wonder if folks can relate to this quote. I certainly can because I actually track a lot of your deadlines as some of my research projects. But I love this quote. That's kind of in this second um bullet here by the calendar. I used to wake up in the middle of the night stressing about missing deadlines. Yes, I think someone mentioned earlier or called it deadline creep. It can be a scary feeling to think that you might be missing your deadlines. But the five main issues that nonprofit face we found are one incredibly time consuming grant search.
Finding grants with Google search is soul sucking. It takes so long. You can get to page 25, 26, 27 of Google and continue searching grant deadlines creep up on you, and, of course, cause nightmares. Three, there's a lack of visibility. Sometimes, especially with teams, you don't really know who's doing what, keeping multiple programs and grant writers in step and on the same page can be super challenging, especially when it comes to what are we spending this funder's money on, and how are we doing in terms of our spend down.
Duplicative work taking a toll, keeping various spreadsheets and our CRM in sync requires a lot of copy pasting. I definitely have felt that problem myself just tracking a lot of things on my end with a variety of spreadsheets, and then stressing about managing spend down and reporting.
This is high stakes, right? So we do not have a full-time financial team member. It's hard to stay on top of all of it. Yes. Absolutely. I agree.
So myself, Rachel, the whole team at Instrumentl is studying, obsessing over and building solutions to what can expert grant management looks like. And, Rachel, there is a better way, right?
Rachel: Yes. I want us to feel encouraged, not discouraged. And by talking about the challenges, really, we're trying to emphasize that, like, again, everyone is facing similar challenges. Even at super large organizations, right?
They're not necessarily immune to some of the challenges that we have with prospecting, with managing, tracking spend down. If we actually got the grant, evaluation reports, making sure -- I saw someone mention, like, getting impact reports from the team members who are actually helping to serve the population that has been helped by the grant. Like, that is so important. That's literally probably what the funder wants to hear most.
And oftentimes that information is, like, somewhere with some person, and it doesn't happen in a timely manner, it just doesn't get done. And then you're asking the night before, like, where is that impact report that I need from this person? There's a lot, right?
But the point being that we can do better. I loved this slide from our first session. "A better way to work on grants, there is." Yes, Yoda there is. We know it can be discouraging to feel hindered rather than helped by technology. There's a lot out there, and that can feel a little overwhelming.
But you deserve a better way to work on grants. Your boss should know how brilliant you are. As a grant professional, you and your team should be super excited about making an impact instead of feeling panic when you're thinking about how to get there, which I think we can all, again, relate to that feeling of stress of, like, constantly seeking that next funding opportunity. So I'm going to run through just a couple of suggestions that we have used to essentially build our grant tracking system in Instrumentl.
These tips, these solutions to help create expert grant management are something you can apply with or without Instrumentl. But I'm going to show you how essentially we built in all these solutions so that you can get to that seamless grant management place and be calm and organized with all of your grant opportunities.
So a reminder, this is kind of the first problem I'm going to focus on here. Funding opportunity updates project statuses, so where an application is in the process or the award is in the process and background context about a grand opportunity lives in one person's inbox, one person's spreadsheet, or one person's brain.
How many of you have had to, like, hunt down your leadership and say, like, remind me again how we know this funder, like, what's the context here? I know we have more information about them, but like where does that live? Please help me out here, right?
Yes, Delila is saying. I cannot tell you how many times I've had to do that. So the solution here, what you should be aiming to get to in order to have an expert grant management solution for all your grants is that you should have clear documentation procedures in place as much as possible. This includes things like standardized status updates and context notes. Things like, "Hey, if we heard that a funder is the neighbor of one of our board members, that should live in one place so that when we're looking at this opportunity, we know that we already have that lovely personal connection with a board member. And that will help create this seamless collaboration.
So I'm going to dive in a little more about how you can do this and some of the ways that I think you should kind of jot down creating these documentation procedures. The first tip being that you should organize your status categories by grant seeking phase. This might seem obvious. But the point being that there's a lot of different phases of grant applications, which we probably know all too well. You've got your pre-award researching, cultivating phase, you've got your in-progress grants. Maybe you plan to submit. Maybe you already submitted an LOI. That's, like, one phase of the application process, right?
And then for post award, maybe you won the grant, making sure that it's notified that it's active or that you have reports due on that grant. Or that it's all said and done, it's been closed, we're good to go. All that information should be organized by grant seeking phase. Again, I cannot emphasize how important it is to standardize those context notes that you're going to want to have about each opportunity when should someone leave context notes or an opportunity note on their grant. And this is -- I took a screenshot from what we have in Instrumentl. But use this in your grant management system, like, have a note that says someone talked to a funder or heard about a networking connection or found a past grantee from that funder that aligns with your mission.
All that information should live in one place, and your team or anyone that's involved in the grantseeking process, should be aware of what the format of those notes should look like and when they should happen. I always say things like, "Add your initials and a date for multi-person grant teams on those contact notes so you know who said this and when they were noting that down." Again, sounds simple.
But you'd be surprised at how some of these most simple effective solutions can be hard to get us all in the habit of, right? And again, embracing that quarterback mentality, you're the leader, you're the team gatherer, you're helping make sure everybody stays on track. And this will make your life so much easier as well. A little expert tip, we love using an Instrumentl -- we use a platform called Loom a lot. This is just like a screen recording platform that you can download and use in your browser.
It literally will just record like an audio overview of you saying, "Hey, team, here's how I want everybody to be writing down their context notes. You should be doing this when you talk to a funder, when you do blah, blah, blah." Love writing like, you know, recording a quick Loom or writing a brief. We talked about maybe having some kind of, like, project documentation in place.
This is something that you could share with your board so that we're always aware of how documentation is happening and what conventions everybody should use. It'll take a little work to get there. But I promise you it'll be worth the time in investing in smarter grant tracking. It'll just help your management make it so -- make it so much easier.
Okay. Another quick problem here that we are going to solve, our tasks and our deadlines are not centralized leading to some confusion and stress as key milestones approach. How many of you have had to literally chase someone down the hallway And be like, "I told you this grant was due this Friday. I haven't gotten the budget that I need in order to submit." I have been there. I have been chasing people down. It doesn't feel great.
You want to be able to feel like you're on top of it and you know what's going on. So let's get to that solution. Yeah. Trish says yes, 100%. I love -- I mean sometimes it's fun to be the person chasing everyone down. But sometimes it's not fun to take on that role, being the camp counselor. So the solution here is that you need to have one place where all your tasks for each grant opportunity are clearly articulated. They're prioritized, which is super important.
If you have multiple people involved in the grant writing process or grant application process. And assign with key deadlines, maybe even before the actual deadline for the grant so everyone can take ownership of the grant's life cycle. This is again helping just set up that out-of-survival mode cycle. We're trying to get from, like, chasing everything down, always feeling behind to getting ahead of our grants so that we can truly take ownership of the grant's life cycle. So a couple of solutions here, some ideas. In Instrumentl, you can draft opportunity-specific tasks for each milestone.
Again, I encourage you to employ this in your grant management system. What are the ways that you can build in opportunity-specific tasks? And even duplicate them across opportunities so that everyone is aware of what's going on. That might be finalizing a budget for application, inviting a funder for a site visit, or compiling an impact report for review.
All things we know that have to happen that often are the thing that is maybe forgotten about until the last minute, or just not not addressed ahead of the curve. Similarly, we need to make sure we're bringing in our key stakeholders, right?
So thinking ahead about who has the data you need for an application, when should the application be reviewed by? Maybe you need to have board approval in order to submit, or you need to have your boss take a look at it before it's submitted. You should have a review by date that's well before the deadlines so that you have time to go back and review their edits and assign them with deadlines ahead of time.
I probably mentioned that a million times. But just getting ahead of yourself and making sure you know, like, here's what's happening, here's what's doing what. I've shared an example of how tasks are organized in Instrumentl. And you can actually see here that they have the deadlines listed, what the actual stage or, like, status of this task is, what it's related to so you can see some of these are related to the reporting phase, some of the cultivation.
And then the people that are in the Instrumentl account can be tagged in and assigned a task. So you could be the manager of a project, but then be able to have multiple people involved in the actual tasks that need to happen with a grant. And if you come from a large team, you know that there's multiple stakeholders that need to be involved in making that come to life.
Always need those new impact statements or testimonials from folks who have been the beneficiaries of the amazing funding you've received from a funder. Make sure to set a quarterly reminder. This is a task that can be duplicated in Instrumentl or on your calendar. It could be integrated across your calendar if you're using Instrumentl to provide your program teams with new prompts for impact reports or testimonials.
Make that just a part of your workflow. Don't have that be something that you're like, "Gosh, we've used the same impact report or, like, the same quote from this participant for the past two years. Maybe we should be refreshing that more regularly. Put that into your workflow and get into the habit of trying to get ahead of that.
If you give your program teams more time, hopefully, you'll set them up for success so that you're not chasing them down the hall for that quote. Oh, thank you Karen. That's so sweet. Go educators. I know there's a lot of folks who were previously educators in the room who have moved into the grant seeking world. And I love seeing you all out there.
Oh, Jesse. Yeah, love it. So, okay, our last problem that I want to help us solve here we can solve together is that relationship building with funders is so important. I've seen a lot of people talk about that being one of the biggest challenges that they face in grant management and grant seeking in general.
But these efforts can feel a little fragmented and a little hairy-carry, a little disorganized when there's no repository for that information. Some of you, I'm sure, maybe have a CRM, some sort of system where you're keeping track of funder relations, people who have donated before, some of you may not. And you might be at smaller organizations that haven't taken that investment. Again, thinking about how we can invest in our organizations, invest in ourselves, and upgrade our technology in order to make sure we are breaking those cycles and revolutionizing our grants.
But it needs to be something that's across your systems that every time you're applying for that funder, you understand the background context. So the solution here, ideally, every touch point with funders, including any background research that you're spending time doing, or those networking connections that I talked about earlier through your board or leadership are tracked all in one place. That'll make your life so much easier.
You can document the background research on the funder. I've pulled some screenshots from our funder profiles in Instrumentl. This is where we take information from 990s, and essentially make it a little easier to read. Those documents are --ugh, they're rough. And I know many of you have probably spent many, many an hour reviewing through those 990s.
We've taken a little bit more of a visual approach here to centralize this information so that you can quickly review where grants are being awarded. Their average giving year-over-year, the number of grants that they give on average, their openness to new grantees. That's a huge one, right?
For this example with the Ford Foundation, it looks like over the past seven years, 55% of awards have gone to new grantees. That's a pretty good stat there, right? If you're looking at an opportunity that maybe only 5% of awards have gone to new grantees and you don't know anyone at that foundation, back to our noggo, like, it's to say no list, that's something that you should kind of keep in mind, right? And go back to your board and say like, "Hey, I looked up the stats here.
This is not going to be an opportunity that's worth our time because x, y, z." So Instrumentl makes it easy to kind of identify that really quickly. You can also ask yourself four key questions and I'm actually going to drop this in the chat because I feel like this is so important.
Four key questions you should always be looking at when you're reviewing funders. What are their giving priorities and history? What's the average size of their grant? Who and where do they typically fund? And what have given trends been like in the last three years?
This is information that is available to you. You can use this information. That's the crazy thing. And make an informed decision about your funding opportunities. So jot those questions down. That is something you should always be asking yourself. And actually, it's implemented into that funder, your eval scorecard, that we shared in the last session. I'll make sure that resource gets shared again at some point. Build that into your process.
Okay. Another thing that we can do, create those scheduled tasks. So back to kind of our task management and how we're getting ahead of the curve and not ending up feeling always behind is adding funder cultivation to our workflow.
I know that some of the experts in the room are going to say, "I always do that." Like, "I know that. That's at the top of my list." But sometimes for folks that are chasing down grants, it can feel like an extra lift because it is. It's a lot of work. So make sure that you're adding things like adding them to your physical mailing list. Do you have an annual report that gets mailed out or emailed out to your members of your organization or your board like gets an annual report every year, add the funder to that mailing list, making sure they're seeing the work that you're doing and help alleviating that constant feeling, like, you need them to be updated on what's going on.
Got a great program coming up that you want to showcase, make sure to invite them for a site visit, get ahead of that so you feel like they're in the know on what you have going on as an organization. A quick expert tip as you review those key foundation contacts that you can actually see in Instrumentl, it'll list board members, trustees.
You can, like, literally see who those folks are. I always cross reference like Den to check for mutual connections with your board. It is a small world. I think maybe even we realized that in the chat today. So use that to your advantage. We've got technology. Use LinkedIn. Take a look and see if you have any third degree connections with someone at that foundation that might give you a little foot in the door.
Okay. To sum it all up, I know that was a lot. If we're going to focus on three solutions to making sure we have an expert grant management system in place, one, everyone's following that clear organizational system, the standardized workflows are in place, from the pre-award prospecting phase all the way through post award reporting. Your must-do tasks and important dates are added ahead of deadlines so you always know who is doing what for that transparency, accountability, and ownership so it's not all on you.
And then lastly, that critical relationship building with funders is documented clearly, including the who, what, why of each touch point with key people. That sounds like a great world to be in. So let's get to that place. I'll show you a little bit how you can do that. If you want to have that powerful feeling of the bird's eye view of all your grant efforts, you've got your grants all clear in front of you, you want to know who's doing what.
You want to have control over the way you track progress on grants. You can enjoy all of that by organizing your grant tracker in a way that works for you and your team. So I'll invite Ryan to drop some links in the chat for us.
If you want to get yours started, you don't have to wait for me. You can go ahead and click that now. If you're already a custom customer, again, just reminding you that we do actually have a few spots left for our strategic consultations with the team. So if you're feeling like you could benefit from a one-on-one time with Amelie, Becca, or Tracie, they're here for you. They want to help you succeed and they want to make sure you're getting the most out of our 17,000 grant database.
So take that quiz. It'll give you a quick idea of kind of where you're at in your grant workflows, and they'll help you optimize, make you a little more efficient, save time. We love that.
And if you don't have an Instrumentl account, you can sign up now. There's a little sign up bonus, just an extra perk and a thank you with lots of gratitude from the team here. If you want to check that out, you can start your grant tracker right away. I'm going to give a little preview of just what that looks like so you can see what you're getting into and how you might organize it yourself. I just love the tracker.
As Gauri shared at the very beginning, Instrumentl was originally a grant matchmaker system and a specialized grant search engine. So we've come a long way since then and we've built pretty robust tracking and collaboration capabilities, which I showed you a little bit about earlier. But I want to kind of show you a little more here. Laying the bricks for this kind of new world of grants a different way to be doing our grant seeking process.
The way we work is equally as important as the actual work we do. And the better we can improve the way we work, the better we can improve the actual work we're getting done. So as you hear more real-life examples tomorrow in our next sessions, the way you track and manage grants can literally impact your success rates with grants. And we're going to talk a little bit about that.
It's tangible and quantifiable. A boost of over 20% is what we've seen from other grant seekers out there in similar shoes to you. So this is just a little quick overview of our tracker.
Just some highlights. These are, again, things that you can implement in your grants management. You can see that we've got the deadlines automatically updated in the tracker. So you can see when deadlines are predicted, like this one for example. It's a little squiggly line here. We've used information on past years with this funder to guess the date that we think the application might be due in the future. And then it will be updated when that date is released. You can also see the status.
So I've adjusted different statuses based on if I want to pursue something or not. You can see that the general amount that I'm looking for that is being awarded is here in the tracker. You can also see my tasks that are related to each funding opportunity. Just making it really easy to see, like, "Oh, Gabe Sinkin is drafting an opportunity report for the Sphinx Venture Fund. That's awesome. And I'm following up with a board member on a potential connection for the Max and Victoria Dreyfus Foundation. Good to know, right?
You can also see I've included opportunity notes here. So when I was going through my matches and I was saying like, "Hey, I actually need to look at this a little bit more," that all shows up that all gives us context for the background information that we need to make sure this grant application is awesome. The other fun thing that I want to highlight, we recently launched custom fields.
I know Hope was in the room earlier and she was a major player in that. Tracie created these great slides to kind of show what custom fields are like. Some of you might have really specific fields that you track when you're trying to decide, maybe it's like a priority on a grant, maybe it's a contact information box or notes from your leadership that you want to continue to track.
For some of you consultants, maybe you have a specific tracking system that you're using to keep track of which grant opportunities are for which clients, right? So the custom fields can give you more versatility there. You can literally create as many as you'd like to add into your system and build out a custom tracker that really really is adapted to you back to the, like, the system should work for you.
You're not working for the system. You can see some other examples here of different ideas for custom fields that we've seen from other folks just gives you some sense of, like, how folks are using the tracker communication preferences with funders, for example. Love having that in there. Maybe the likelihood of winning if you want to have like a real quick review.
This is great too when you're printing out your report from Instrumentl and you want to give it to leadership. They get a real quick review of everything that you've compiled. You've worked hard to put together this information. So making sure it's usable, readable, shareable, all that stuff. It's going to help you.
Okay. We're almost done. I'm so, so thrilled that we had so much time together today. I've really enjoyed every minute of it. And we've got about 10 minutes left. I'm just going to walk us through the three-step path that we've learned from talking to over 500 nonprofits per week and kind of give you some ideas to take with you to ruminate on. Think about how you might apply them in your organizations and carry this energy that we have with us today into the work that you do literally this afternoon, what you're working on right after this.
Step one, unifying your grant efforts, working on kind of demanding that visibility. You deserve to have that word's eye view of your pipeline. It's going to help you better serve your organization. It's going to help you avoid burnout, all the things that will make your job so much easier. It should be the norm, not the nice to have.
So reminding your teams that are working with you that we have standards in place. This is going to help us be a stronger organization. It's going to help us break that survival mode cycle, and we're going to be able to see a quantifiable impact in our success rate if we start building in these processes now.
And lastly, just saving time by centralizing everything -- centralizing everything grants related. So again, I know there's millions of spreadsheets out there. I've seen it. I know the email threads get crazy. How are you keeping all of that information centralized? And getting ahead of that, spending time doing that so that you can invest in yourself, invest in your organization and not feel like you're constantly chasing the funds.
Okay. Step two here, establishing those workflows and an internal consensus. So work with your team to define the best way to collaborate. Maybe you have some folks that really need specific collaboration direction, right? And I know that we work with a diverse group of folks. Maybe your leadership is not really interested in reading any of the emails that you send them about. Here's what we're doing. But think about a way that you can define how you best want to collaborate so that they can see the impact, they can see the success that you're going to have if you start to work towards establishing these workflows together.
And that again our grant management system is adapting to your needs, not the other way around. You shouldn't have to be chasing down information because that's a waste of everybody's time.
Making sure that your system is clearly made for you. It's the best way to help us keep calm and carry on. And the last step here is unsiloing your team and collaborating in one place. It can feel very hard. The silos are real. They exist. They are challenging to overcome.
But helping make sure if you can collaborate together in one place, you'll break down those silos even more naturally. It won't be such an uphill battle. Things like trying not to scatter you or your team's focus with dozens of open tabs and dozens of different tools or documents, right?
I'm guilty of the tabs too. That's something that I probably will never get around. Who else has like 25 tabs open right now? Because I definitely do. Oh, yeah, Delila, thank you. Thank you for the recognition there. And trying not to -- you know, we talked about how we're often copying and pasting data from other tools and trying to, like, build the system as we're going.
Why not have that information all in one place? It will make our life so much easier. It will make all the information present. Yes, all the tabs all the time, Tracie. And Trish. I know. I just don't want to close them. I feel sad for them. I want them to stay with me. And then I'll forget.
We can get better. We can get better. And we can also save that information somewhere so we don't panic when we inevitably close the window with our 50 tabs and scramble to find the history of what we were talking about or what we were looking at.
And then finally, just tracking what matters to you in a single source of truth. This is really the baseline of this seamless grant management. It's that single source of truth. You don't want to be the one that keeps saying like you're using the old document, you put in the wrong impact report that's from 2023. We have a new one for 2024. Have all that information live in one place. Just make your life so much easier.
Hoo. Okay. Tabs, two laptops. Oh, my gosh. I love that, Louis. I envy you the second laptop. That might be helpful, actually.
Okay, y'all. How are we feeling? I hope we're feeling encouraged. There's a lot here that we can run with. We are not stuck with this. We can fix this. And we can help each other get better at our grant management systems. Some just quick learnings that I want to make sure to highlight from today.
Oh, I'm so glad to hear it, Chris. We talked about what we've learned by talking with 500 plus nonprofits a week. That's a really cool perk that we get at Instrumentl is we get to talk to all the time. So we get to learn from each other. Oh, thank you for sharing everybody. We get to learn from each other. We get to hear about the challenges and the wins. And we get to share those with you all.
We also talked about the ways that your grant search is being sabotaged. Some of the ways that we can identify those saboteurs and then immediately kind of address them head on breaking that survival mode cycle. And then we're almost done with this session. We covered the challenges of grant management, including that lack of visibility and that duplicative work. And I proposed a three-step solution just to kind of keep us centered and on track with our North Star of emphasizing the importance of transitioning to a streamlined approach.
So, cool. Not only have you hopefully had fun and connected with each other and engage on this content. But you've also earned three CFRE credits. Woohoo! Got three to go. You'll want to submit those secret words. I'll tell you the secret word for the session in just a second.
As a reminder of what we have tomorrow, I hope you'll be back with us starting at 9:00 a.m. Pacific or 12:00 p.m. Eastern. We're talking about from fragmented to unified, the blueprint to full cycle grant management. We're also talking about grant success secrets. Amalie will be sharing how three nonprofits turned the tide. This is really fun. We actually have a special guest joining us for this one who will talk a little bit about their journey. So I hope you'll join us for that.
And then lastly, I'm going to be running a grant strategy workshop at the end of the day, creating a vision for if for you're nonprofit. This will be fun, creative. Just also help kind of like centralize all this information we've been trying to share each day and put it into something that you can share with your leadership, help inspire you and take you to that next level.
I'm so glad to hear it, Mary. Yay! Delila, I can't wait. It's going to be fun. Okay. So our session secret word. This one is tough. Make sure to jot that down. You're going to be adding it into your feedback form in just a second. I'll type it in the chat to make sure everybody saw it. Secret word for session three is tough.
Thanks, Renee.
All right. And share your feedback. This is where you'll drop in that secret word. This is where you'll share any notes for me. Maybe there are some learnings that you were like, "Hey, I love this but I really would have enjoyed hearing about this as well." We're going to take that information. We're going to run with it for tomorrow. We've got a lot more time together, continued learning to be had, all that good stuff. Oh, I'm so glad to hear it. Thank you, Britney.
We have so much fun with you all and, like, that's actually why I'm sticking around because I don't want this event to end. I'll be here for another 15 minutes.
Before we go, couple quick things. Just to keep the excitement going, don't leave yet because you might just happen to be a winner for our next raffle prize. Very, very exciting. Let's see who we've got here. Give me one sec. Drum roll for our next one. Tina Eldridge. I see you in the room. You have won a $25 Amazon gift card. Tina, yay! Awesome. Congrats. Thank you for being here. Thanks for sharing your learning. So much fun seeing what's happening on LinkedIn.
If you aren't there yet, take a peek. It's a fun time. Let's see. I've got another one coming up.
All right. I'm going to be raffling off a bigger prize here. Beth Anne Johnson, you've won a three-month subscription to Headspace, which is a meditation app. Beth Anne, are you in the room? Beth Anne Johnson. Let's see if she's here. She's here. Yay! You've won three months to Headspace. We'll share a little more about that. It's a really cool mindfulness app. Since we're focusing on centering ourselves, getting calm in our grant work, all that fun stuff.
Okay. And one more just for kicks. Let's see. Pulling this last one here. Victoria Ravenel. I think I see you in the room. You've won a coffee on us. Yay, Victoria R! Woohoo! Go, Victoria!
Okay. Last thing, the last thing I'm going to ask you all to do. I think we should take a quick little group photo. And Angela says double thumbs up. I know it may be a little bit of pressure to go off camera. But if you want to show your beautiful face, we would love to see you. We've all spent three hours together, and I'd love to see all your faces so I can see who's in the room with me. If you wouldn't mind turning on your camera for a quick sec, we're going to take a little photo to highlight the wins that we had today.
Oh, yay! Lisa, Christie, Mary, Stephanie, thank you all.
Okay. I'll do a quick little countdown so that we can make sure we're ready, we're picture ready. I see Anne. You're here again too. You participated in my class photo for the last one. So you've had a -- you've seen this in action.
All right, folks. If you're not on camera yet, you have about five seconds to go on camera. And we're going to just do a quick smile. You could do a little wave. You could do a fun thing. Three, two, one. Awesome. Smile. I'm going to do another page because we've got so many people here. Three, two, one. Thanks, Monica. I appreciate the big smiles. Genevive, thank you. Smiles everyone.
Ah! Wow! I have, like, literally I think eight pages of folks. Oh my goodness. I'm trying to capture everybody. We should make a photo album. Thanks everybody.
All right. We're back again on day two. If you need to hop off, totally fine. I'll hang around for a second. I'm going to play some tunes while we wrap up. And if you have questions for me, the easiest way to organize this is just use the raise hand feature. So use that in your Zoom room to let me know if you have a question. And I will go through in order of hand raise. Also, if you just have things to share and want to chat, you can just add some thoughts in the chat. I'll kind of moderate out loud so we can hear what people are stewing on. All that good stuff.
Thanks for being here, everybody.
.svg)
%201.png)
