Rachel: Hi, folks. Welcome back. Oh, I'm so excited to see so many friendly faces and names back for a second day. We have a really great schedule plan for you today and I'm excited to get into it. We'll give folks a few minutes. We're still a little ahead of the hour. So take a second, reintroduce yourself in the chat. We want to see who's back again for day two.
You can answer our poll question. Today I'm asking a little bit more about how many grants your organizations won this year so far. Let's celebrate some of those wins. And hear a little bit about the grant's -- that we're already succeeding and winning. We'll be talking a little bit more about the post award process in this session today. So I'm really excited to dive in a little more on that and share more with some of my colleagues.
If you are not a customer yet, we've got a really cool way for you to find five new good fit funders. We, like, guarantee you'll walk away with five of them right away. And if you don't, coffee is on me, or a super strong Martini, whatever your fancy. I promise you'll find those five new good fit funders. So Ryan's going to drop a link in the chat for you to find out how you can do that. And otherwise, we'll just hang out for a little bit, get ourselves ready for the morning and hop on in about 60 seconds.
Hi, Ann. Oh, it's so good to see you again. Hi, Terry. Hi, Leah. Arnold, great to see you as always. Hi, Amy. Oh, awesome. I love that Amy dropped her links in if you want to connect with her. Hi, Kate. Hi, Reema. Hi, Nicky. It's so good to see you. Oh. Thanks, Louise. I saw your message. I was glad to connect with a few folks on LinkedIn. That was really fun seeing everybody post their learnings and get excited. Really such a blast. Hi, Louis. I loved your chat box engagement yesterday. It really gave me a chuckle. I hope you all have some good zingers today again. Oh, Reema. I know. We're all -- we're definitely in the same boat here. Agreed, Louis. We got to have fun. That's part of the joy of learning.
All right, folks. I'm going to make sure everyone has done these three things on the slide here. You've answered our intro prompt. You've said hello in the chat. I've loved seeing everybody back again. And if you're not a customer, you've had a chance to fill out that quick quiz. That'll give you an idea of how you can find -- immediately find five new fit funders right into your inbox. So we'll talk a little bit how you can get access to that. And I'm going to end our poll. Thanks for sharing a little bit today.
I'm going to share the results actually so folks can see what grant wins we're having in the community today. I asked you a little bit about how many grants your organization or yourself, if you're a consultant working with multiple organizations have won this year. So far some of you said one to two. We've got about 20% that said three to five. 28% said more than five. That's awesome. We need to, like, ring the cow bell. Next time I'll bring that so we can have something to celebrate.
Some of you are waiting to hear or maybe none yet. Keeping our fingers crossed for those next to come in. And some of you haven't yet applied. That's okay. We're still early on in 2024. We're going to be doing a lot of learning today and seeing how we can get some of those applications in for those wins coming up.
I'm going to go ahead and jump us into our day today. So as I mentioned, our first session this morning, From Fragmented to Unified: The Blueprint to Full-Cycle Grant Management. That's going to be our first session. We're going to focus a little bit on the post award process today. And if you're not in the post-award phase yet, don't stress. Yesterday was a lot about the kind of pre-award world, and today we're talking about the whole grant life cycle, the whole story. So if some of you are not in the post- award phase yet, that's okay. Don't stress. You might have a few moments where you are learning something new.
And I think it's great that you have an understanding of the whole life cycle. You'll be able to learn a little bit from your colleagues who maybe have had experience winning grants and managing them after they've been awarded. And you won't want to miss our next session which focuses on grant success secrets, how three nonprofits turn the tide. This is a really great session where I have my colleague Amalie jumping in with a very special guest of ours, one of our customers, Linda, who's going to talk a little bit about how they actually worked to turn the tide in their organization to win more grants.
We'll talk about some of the tangible benefits that they saw from applying some of those lessons learned that we talked about yesterday. And lastly, we're wrapping up the day, getting our creative juices flowing. We're going to be doing a live grant strategy workshop. Will and I will be leading a vision board kind of creation session for your nonprofit. So we'll try and kind of, like, marinate on all the things that we've taken from these past two days. Put it into something that we can carry with us that can inspire us, and hopefully keep us energized and excited just like we all are in the chat. Carry that with us to our work that happens over this next year. So we're starting off.
As I mentioned From Fragmented Unified: The Blueprint to Full-Cycle Grant Management. For those of you who weren't here yesterday or haven't met me yet, my name is Rachel. I'm one of the newest team members at Instrumentl and I help to create educational events like this one to share with the community. I have a background in nonprofit specifically in the arts and culture sector. I worked in museums for the past decade. And I love working with grant seekers to help them celebrate their wins and learn from their challenges. So I'm really excited to be with you all today.
As a reminder, this session is about 55 minutes. Just like our previous sessions yesterday, we'll be doing some fun conversations and dialogue in the chat box. I'll be presenting a bit with some of my colleagues and we'll have time for live Q&A. This session is being recorded right now. And we do have closed captions on. I'm going to make sure those are toggled on my side so that everyone can have an option to toggle them on.
Looks like we've got them there. Perfect. I know we're all really busy. So make sure you've got your hydration, your snacks, all those things, and take care of yourselves as needed. But make sure you're back in your seat for those live Q&A moments. I will be doing a few Oprah raffle moments as well because we all need that on a Wednesday.
So don't miss those. Make sure you're here for that. And, yeah, those closed captions are on. So if you need to read as well as listen along, please do toggle those on in your Zoom settings. As a quick reminder, not only are you having fun learning alongside, the almost 300 other people in this room right now. But you also are earning CFRE credits.
So by attending each session, you'll be getting six credits towards your initial certification or recertification of CFRE. All you'll need to do is save those secret words that we're having at the end of each session. And you'll be able to submit those to get your points and earn a certificate. Kind of fun. So stay till the end. I'll be revealing the secret word. And finally at the end of session six, we'll see what our secret sentence has revealed. Very exciting.
Lastly, a quick reminder of how you can participate. This is your time to learn and grow. If you haven't had a chance to make a copy of the workbook yet, my colleague Ryan can drop that in the chat again for you. If you already made a copy yesterday, please open that up in your Google Drive.
That way you can continue to add to it and not have to start over with each question. But Ryan will drop that in again if you need to start from the beginning and make your new copy. We also will be able to take questions in the chat. So add those three hashtags at the front. And we'll stay on mute unless we're called on to speak just to create that best environment for learning.
Okay. A quick recap on day one. We covered a lot. But most of what we talked about was that the world of grants is broken. There are some problems. But we're not going to accept that status quo. We can change the tides. We can think about better ways to approach our grant-seeking systems.
You might not be set up for success when it comes to grant prospecting. But there are better ways. And we talked about some of those better ways. We talked about ways to identify your saboteurs so that you can actually move towards a clear and more cohesive grant strategy. And lastly, that you're in control. You're the quarterback, right? You're the one leading the team. And your grant management system should adapt to you not the other way around.
So thinking about the ways that you are working hard to adapt to a system that may not be working for you. Instead, looking for systems that adapt to your way of working and that help you carry your team. Because you're awesome and you do that every day. I'd love to hear in the chat. Maybe some folks have some ideas of the most surprising thing they learned on day one. I'd love to hear just anything that kind of is like sticking with you. Maybe you were, you know, eating dinner last night, or you left the Zoom room yesterday and you're like, "Wow, like, this piece is really staying with me." I'd love to hear any of those in the chat.
I'll give folks a few seconds to think about -- oh, yeah, David, how much easier prospecting can be with a great tool? Absolutely. Ruby, giving yourself five extra days to submit a grant. Yes. Amanda, I learned everyone is in survival mode. We are. Let's break that cycle.
We talked about those ways that survival mode keeps us in that kind of grant chasing cycle. Kimberly, I was feeling alone and way behind before yesterday. Now I know many of us are writing a learning curve together. Yeah. Grant professionals who learn together, win together. We can support each other and hold each other up. I know that it can feel very siloed in our organization sometimes when we're the only ones kind of pushing forward on some of these things. And let's use this time to support one another.
I love that, Delilah. Being the quarterback of the team. We had some other good kind of feels coming through. Our feedback form on day one and I wanted to share some of those thoughts. I have never felt so seen seeing others have the same struggles as me gives me renewed energy. I already have seen a couple folks reflect similar sentiments in the chat. It was very valuable in terms of letting me know that I am not alone out there.
The problems are similar no matter what part of the country you work in. So true. Truly enjoyed the session. It discussed a lot of the issues that I have faced in my role as a grant writer and reminded me of the importance of celebrating wins. Yes, we have wins. We just talked about even folks who have won grants this year already. Let's make sure to celebrate those and honor the hard work that we've been doing.
And lastly, this opened my eyes to how my grant search is lacking. I also felt affirmed with needing to acknowledge my hard work. Yes, and submitting grants -- when submitting grants and to take some time for self-care. So, yeah, making sure that we are taking that special time for ourselves. I want to make sure that everyone honors the hard work that we've been doing. I'm going to go ahead and just bring us to this slide.
I see some really fun some fun faces here that all were sharing their joy yesterday. Thank you for taking part of our class photo. That was so much fun.
I'm going on to talk to us a little bit about the road ahead today. So this session, we're focused on the the post award process like I mentioned. We're going to share a little bit about those mixed emotions that you might feel of winning that grant. I'm sure some of you have maybe felt that way. We'll talk a little bit about what that feels like and how to manage that. Challenges of post-award management, which are some of the things that continue to come up that we struggle with post award and how we can maybe address those.
The magic of new spenddown tracking. Hope is going to talk a little bit about the ways that that has been designed and what you should look for in your spenddown tracking system. And bringing everything together, all those Integrations that need to be in place. Then I'll talk a little bit where we're going next, what we're going to cover in the next session. Are we ready to do this? Are we bringing the energy?
I saw it again in the Zoom chat as we started this session. I want to hear some noise. If people want to put some fire emojis in the chat, if they want to put their, like, muscle strong arm up, we're ready to do this. Yes, Ruby, thank you. Stacy. Oh, thanks, Mickey. Love it. Let's make some magic together.
I'm really excited to introduce my colleague, another one of our newest Instrumentl team members. So show Ishita some love. Ishita is going to hop on and share a little bit about the mixed emotions of the spenddown and post award process.
Ishita: Thanks, Rachel, for such a great intro.
Hi, everyone. I'm Ishita, the head of product at Instrumentl. I'm really excited to be here. I actually joined Instrumentl just a couple of months ago. And it's been a really wonderful journey to get to know the nonprofit world better and really a privilege to support all of you who are helping the make -- the world a better place.
So this first slide is going to look a little familiar if you were around for the sessions yesterday. We'll do a quick review of these top five problems we see across nonprofits. And then in today's conversation, we are going to really be digging into the latter two.
So we talk to over 500 nonprofits every week, and we found that even across nonprofits with various different sizes and missions, a lot of the same challenges come up over and over again. So that first challenge is it's just -- there's that sheer amount of time it takes to find grants to apply to and funders to cultivate relationships with. And doing it manually with tools that aren't built for grant managers can feel like being lost with no map.
That second challenge is that stress of keeping up with deadlines. And, of course, it's not just your own deadlines, but also making sure that your teammates are all aware of all the things that need to get done to ensure that the overall effort is a success. And then the third is the fact that it's a team effort means that there's a lot of different moving pieces, which means that it can be hard to know at any given time what the exact state of things are and that lack of visibility can feel really unsettling.
That fourth challenge is feeling like you're doing things over and over again, the same thing. Whether that's because you are using different systems that don't integrate with each other. So you're finding yourself copying stuff from one system to the other, or you're collaborating with many different subgroups of folks. So you're repeating the same message over and over again on different email chains. And then lastly, that stress around finances, specifically spenddown and reporting.
We know that these are high stakes elements to your relationships with funders. And it's important to get them right to ensure those, like, long-term successful high trust relationships. And it can be even more challenging if you don't have, let's say a finance contact at your organization to even be a partner with you through this process.
So we'll be focusing on these last two challenges because, you know, your time is valuable and we want to make sure that you're spending it on things that really matter. So that brings me to the next question.
Have you ever felt mixed emotions when receiving a grant? Curious if this resonates. And if so, would love to see it in the chat. Mary says, "Yes!!" I see lots of yeses. Lisa, Nicole. Grace, also saying yes. Okay. So definitely a shared emotion. And, you know, I want to acknowledge that -- we can go to the next slide, by the way, Rachel. I want to acknowledge that it may seem a little odd saying it aloud when so much of our time is also spent prospecting for these opportunities cultivating those funder relationships applying for grants. So you'd think that when we win that grant, it's, you know, just pure positive emotions. But, of course, the reality is that things are a lot more complicated.
And even when that best possible outcome happens and you win that grant, the work isn't over. And in fact, a big portion of the work is just beginning. And there's a lot of complexity that comes along with it.
So for the next couple of slides, we pulled a couple of quotes from customer conversations we've recently had that captured these mixed emotions well. So from a director of grant management, it's hard to keep the information flowing from one department to another to the program team and their implementation. Then from, I believe, the next quote is from a deputy director. Oh, it's grant reporting time. Six months later I have to go back and try and recreate and look through all of our books saying, "Okay, which expense went where?" And then the next quote from a CFO working at a nonprofit.
I'm looking for a solution where I can send to my operations teams, not finance, to a platform where they can get this information without looking at our accounting system. So a lot of similar themes in these quotes about being in that post-award stage. There's the manual work and the tum that comes with mapping expenses to awards, the challenges of keeping multiple stakeholders on the same page, and then in general ensuring that information is flowing in the right places in your organization.
So that brings me to the next question. Why does -- well, yeah. I know there's a lot of folks relating in the chat. So it's, you know, it's very much a common experience and I think that's been a theme in the summit. And so, I'm excited to talk through why it has to be hard and then talk about what a new world could look like where some of these challenges are easier to tackle.
So in the old world of post- award grant management, there's a couple of big challenges. One, it can often be really difficult to have that unified view of the state of post award grants because there's just so many teams and different tools involved. You might feel like you're spending more time managing the work around work versus spending time on high impact work on grants. There was someone in one of the sessions yesterday which mentioned -- who mentioned that they're the queen of copy and paste. And I thought that that was such a great way to encapsulate one of the challenges of working in such a fragmented workspace.
It can also feel like you're reliant on other teams like finance for critical pieces of information to get your job done. Or maybe you don't have a finance team at all and you're navigating a domain that's entirely new to you in addition to, of course, your full-time job as a grant manager. And that's also another sentiment that I feel like we heard a lot yesterday.
There were folks chiming in in the chat wishing they had a bigger team or also just commenting on, you know, "You're not just a grant manager, you're also managing so many other aspects." Beyond that, you know, you're working closely with program teams who have their own objectives and goals. But, of course, are really key partners to you as well. So programs teams have some information that you need to do your job more effectively and then you have information that program teams need to do their jobs effectively. So there is that, like, really important relationship to cultivate. But that can also generate a lot of work.
So you're in this messy middle of coordination, of tools and systems, and teams. And it can feel like you're standing in the middle of like a hurricane of chaos. And unfortunately, sometimes it also feels like technology is not a friend to you in these moments. And in fact, it can feel sometimes like tech -- the technology you're using is even creating more work. And beyond having the personal consequences on your workload, and stress, and burnout, there's also organizational consequences of this old world. You know, for example, having to return unspent funds to funders because the program grant teams and finance teams were misaligned.
And so, that's really frustrating, right? You're spending all your time trying to find that right grant, applying for it, winning it. And so, you really want to make sure those funds are used to the fullest extent. So I'm curious, if you had a magic wand, what would be, in your ideal world, of post-award grant management? Feel free to chime in on the chat and I can call out a couple of answers.
And I can also share that -- Louis says, "No reports. A dedicated reporting team." Cindy says, "Cooperation from stakeholders." Simone says fully integrated programs with finance that everything would be in one place. So a lot of common themes here and a big theme I've heard as I've chatted with customers is really just having more confidence and having more clarity. So good news.
We believe that there's definitely a better way. We can also go to the next slide. And we believe that there is a better way for grant management that there is this new world.
Next slide?
In this new world, there's -- one, there's trust around the tools you're using and you have that single source of truth. And the one that's not just helpful for you but something that you're confident also sharing with other teammates. You should also feel that positive, like, excited emotion around winning grants versus the dread of all the manual work that comes along with managing awards. And feeling that full sense of control across the entire grant life cycle even when finances are included.
And I want to stress that this new world is not just a product of our thinking. But it's actually been -- it's been a product of co-creation with grant managers.
Next slide?
We were able to connect the dots for you and imagine a better world because you've showed us and shared what needs to be connected and what are the biggest challenges on your plate.
Next slide?
Oh, I love these gifs as well. Just the prospecting, the research, and grant management, the applying and then the post-award, and really connecting this entire life cycle. A really quick history lesson. You know, Instrumentl started really focused on that prospecting part of the grant management life cycle because that was -- the hair on fire challenge for many of you. But over the years, we've, you know -- of course, we know that that's not where the grant journey ends. In fact, that's really just the beginning. And grant managers deserve to have that great delightful seamless experience across the entire grant management process, not simply just the beginning.
Next slide?
We can go on to one more slide. Cool. So now, I want to get into the specifics around managing expenses and spenddown. I already saw a lot of sort of discussion in the chat and some of the questions and challenges that come along with this. So we've spent the last six months chatting with almost a hundred folks across user -- research sessions and beta tests.
And I want to share some of the similar challenges that came across from these conversations. First, there's this challenge around coordination between the finance teams, the program managers, and the grant managers. And oftentimes, organizations will not have cultural norms as to how we want to even treat spenddown and managing budgets. So for example, we spoke with a grant manager who mentioned that, you know, in their ideal world, every month, it is clear which expenses are being attached to which grant. And that's being kept up on a monthly basis.
But, you know, because other stakeholders are involved, it often ends up happening every three months or every six months. Another challenge we heard is it can often be really challenging to obtain the right information and the right format, which once again just ends up creating a lot of work for you deep in Excel.
But because this data lives in accounting software that you may or may not have access to you're reliant on someone else. And there was a really -- there was another interesting insight that came up, which was, you know, when we started sharing some of our vision of what a spenddown feature could look like some grant managers were curious how finance in their companies would feel about this feature, would finance be okay with expense data living in Instrumentl. And then when we went ahead and spoke with some CFOs and finance managers, what we found was actually really surprising, they also had a pain point, which is, you know, they would get ad hoc emails from program managers from grant managers asking about the prog -- like, how we were tracking towards spending on a grant.
And, you know, for them having a place that they could just direct folks to at any given time to have that source of truth was really exciting. So that was actually one of our learnings is, you know, we want to make our spenddown solution, one that is really valuable to a bunch of different folks in different roles at an organization.
Another challenge that we found is hearing about the fact that you're not just managing, you know, the post award process for one grant, but you're actually managing it for many grants with many different grant periods.
And sometimes you want that bird's eye view of where are we as an organization in terms of spenddown across many different awards. Just last week, we were chatting with a customer who had 70 active awards, which is really mind-boggling to think about all of the work that needs to go into ensuring you have a clear view of the state of the world. And so, that was another input is how we started thinking about how we wanted to design this feature.
And then lastly, you know, we had conversations around the risks as to what happens if you don't manage spenddown well, as well as some of the benefits that can come along with having a really clear view of the financial state of grants. So one positive story we heard was a customer sharing that they were able to go back to a funder and request additional funds because they were able to show clearly how they had been using the money so far. And it was easy to share, well-documented.
And then on the flip side, we also heard stories about organizations having to return some amount of unspent funds at the end of the grant period because there was misalignment between program teams and finance teams. So it -- all of these insights really fed into how we thought about designing and building the spenddown feature.
Next slide?
At a high level, we wanted to build something that makes managing spenddown less stressful. And that meant giving you a holistic view of spenddown at whatever level you needed it at. So for example, you may want different levels of visibility and granularity based on, you know, what's on your plate that given day. So we thought about how do you get the view of spenddown across all your grants and making sure you have that 10,000 foot view of what's happening. But then you may want to drill down a level and you may want to look at for a given grant, is it on track, is it off track, how are we tracking towards the grant period are we at risk of, you know, overspending under spending and showing that really clearly.
And then the third level we wanted to support is really getting into the nitty-gritty granular level. So if you want to drill down into a particular expense and see that, "Okay, we're mapping this expense to a particular expense category, and this category is tracking to this percentage of utilization."
Instrumentl could also enable you to do that because we know that each of these three views are important. But you don't need to see them all the time. And you may need them at different points of the journey of grant management. So before we show you a demo of spenddown, I want to bring up Hope to the stage. Hope is a product designer at Instrumentl and a product design lead and she has been in those conversations with nearly a 100 grant managers. So I'm excited for you to share a bit more about what we learned and how it's informed, how we designed the feature.
Hope: Hello. It's so exciting to see so many familiar names in the chat. I know. I had to do some factchecking when Ishita said it's been over a 100 people because I was like, "Is that reality? Like, have we really talked to 100 people?"
And I think it might even be more because we've been talking with folks about post award for the past two years in Earnest. And just more recently been zooming into the spenddown piece. So, yeah, I've had the privilege to learn from all of you all about this wild world of grants.
This was totally new to me as well when I started in Instrumentl three years ago, and I'm still continuing to learn from you all for, you know, your workflows and what tools you need. So, yeah, I'm happy to share a couple different learnings from this journey into building an amazing grant spenddown tool for you all.
Next slide.
Yeah. So when we started out, we weren't quite sure what to build. But the thing that was immediately obvious to me is I did not want to create this big table of numbers for you all. Like, I feel like we could do a lot better than that. So when I was looking at the current state of tooling, you know, we have accounting tools that kind of look like this.
They are probably really great for accountants and auditing purposes. And certainly, there's a time and place for accounting tools. And I do not wish to replace accounting tools. But they're not really great for the average Joe's like myself to look at and understand at a glance, especially when you're a busy grant manager who's having to manage, like, 50 different grants. Like, you want to see out of glance what is going on with this grant, is it on or off track.
And another thing that we noticed that there's there was this really difficult translation of these financials into the grants world. So it was great about, you know, like, the chart of accounts and, like, peers out a glance, like, the financial health of the org. But it didn't have a great view into, okay, for a given grant or program, what's the health of this fund looking like?
So a lot of times they were having to export into spreadsheets and then finagle in the spreadsheets to make it have this grant level view that would help the grant and the finance team and the program team be able to understand at the glance what's going on. And so, kind of relatedly to, you know, these being built for accountants. It was just, like, complicated to set up, you know.
There's a steep learning curve that you have to be trained how to use it. And this was, by the way, not just unique to accounting tools. Some even grant management tools that we looked at that have accounting pieces to it or financial layers seemed like they were still mimicking these accounting tools. And I just felt like there was some better way to just, like, raise the quality bar and build something even more awesome for you all.
And what we kept hearing in user interviews was that, yeah, I just want a high-level overview. Like, don't give me all these numbers, all this TDM. Like, I just want to see at a high-level glance if these grants are on or off track. So what we ended up going towards is a much more simple and clear high-level overview of how your programs and grants are on or off track.
So next little bullet point please?
Yeah, super clear, concise, simple and next bullet point. Thank you.
So, yeah, really clear indicators of how you're tracking with your spending according to the grant period. So you can see here this is one award that we've gotten and it's spanning one year. And you can see the spending is roughly tracking along with the march of time.
So this is great. We have, you know, $800,000. We have 82% remaining. This is a great place to be in. And then, of course, this is organized by grant. So you can see all of your expenses are rolling up for this given grant. So you can see at a glance all the financials as they pertain to each award. This is super simple to set up. All you have to do is plug in those budget numbers that you already have from your grant proposal when you submitted the application. So just plug in those numbers and then get an export from your accounting tool of all of the line item expenses.
And then it's just a couple minutes. You just import it, ECSFE and then they automatically just kind of funnel into the associated grants. So this is really easy for anyone to understand. Anyone across your org. Whether they're, you know, leaders across your org or programs folks on the field or anyone on the grant team.
So you don't have to be like an accountant and love looking at numbers on a table. And then I'll just leave you with this one quote that stood out to me. This is something that someone said in a user interview. So this is a grant manager who really saw this broader vision even in the early stages when we were talking about this as a concept.
So, yeah, she said it really well, you know. It's making it easy for people in the field, you know. Like, all this program people that are carrying out all the efforts of these amazing grants that you all are working on, making it really easy for them to just, like, pop in and out and, like, see how they're spending is tracking against the budgets.
So, yeah, we will continue to keep making it super user friendly. We know that you all have a lot of things that you're working on. And we just want to simplify spenddown so that way you can focus on what matters. And with that I'll leave you all with a demo of the feature so you can see it in action.
Tracy: Hello. It's Tracy from Instrumentl's customer success team to share our and spenddown tracking. Have you struggled to know how much is left of a grant allocation? Or track where the money has gone without having to dig through disparate spreadsheets or reports? Part of our post-award management improvement's budget and spenddown gives you a clear and concise view of your awards so you never have to return unspent funds or wonder how much is left of your award.
Once you've changed a grant to awarded status, budget and spenddown tracking will be available in your financials tab. You can find an upload template here. Once you've completed your template, you'll upload your template and map your expenses.
Next, you'll set your budgets. Now you can view all of your expenses. Now all of your expenses have been captured and you can easily track how much is left to spend.
This visibility empowers you and your team to stay on top of your post-award management so you never leave money on the table again.
Hello. It's Tracy from Instrumentl's customer success team.
Ishita: Awesome.
Thank you so much for sharing, Hope. I hope you guys are as excited about spenddown as we are. And like Hope mentioned, we're continuing to improve the feature and add additional stuff. So excited to hear your feedback, you know, if you end up using it.
But this talk is not just about budget management. I also want to preview something that I'm super excited about.
And, you know, it's something that we haven't spoke about. We haven't spoken about publicly, except for our summit. So, you know, between yesterday and today, you all are the only folks who are hearing about it, which is pretty exciting. But we have been working on a new AI grant writing tool which makes submitting high-quality applications much faster. We can also go to the next slide.
While you're writing proposals, we will surface existing content from a past proposal right in line where you need it the most. And the idea here is we don't want you sort of rewriting stuff that you've already rewritten before. And the goal is to save you -- save you time and take care of the more annoying parts of applying to a grant and the less creative parts so you can spend your time on higher value things like building relationships and being more strategic.
So I believe Ryan will put a link in the chat to sign up for early access and to get on the wait list. And Angela will reach out to you to see how the tool could be helpful for you. But it's super exciting. I feel like this goes back to the theme around really making sure that technology is working for us versus against us.
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So another area of challenge around all the activities related to managing a grant is around actually seeing how -- what is the state of your opportunities, your post-award grants. So if you currently use Instrumentl today, you're probably familiar with the tracker. It gives you an add a glance view of all of the opportunities with an ability to dive into whichever ones you need more detail on.
If you're new to Instrumentl or if you haven't used the product, you can think of it like a spreadsheet that you probably already have in your org, but with a lot more superpowers. And we know that different organizations have different workflows around managing grants. So it's not one-size-fits-all.
So this past quarter, we really added a lot more customization to the tracker.
Next slide? Yeah.
So giving you the ability to add what's most important to you with custom fields, it's been really cool to see how a variety of different customers are using custom fields. We've seen people use create a priority field, we've had consultants use custom fields to track the number of hours they're using, they've spent on a given grant for a particular client, or even creating like a review or an informal workflow process with an Instrumentl through custom fields.
Next slide?
Next slide?
And so, beyond Instrumentl, the Instrumentl tracker, we also know that there's a lot of other products and systems that you're using alongside Instrumentl to get your work done. And remember, in this new world that we want to live in, we want to make sure that we're integrating these tools so you can work smarter and you're not copying and pasting a bunch of data.
So this quarter, we expanded the CRMs that we support integrations with. So in addition to our existing CRMs of Razor's Edge and Salesforce, we now also integrate with Virtuous. And I also want to remind folks that if you're using products or tools that we don't have a native integration with, we also have an API that will help you create that custom workflow that matches your organization's needs.
So let's take a look at The Virtuous CRM Integration.
Tracy: Hi there. It's Tracy from the Instrumentl Customer Success Team to announce our latest integration with Virtuous. This powerful integration is a one-way sync of opportunities, funders, funder notes, and custom fields from Instrumentl to Virtuous. Reducing duplicative data entry keeping deadlines up to date and showing a holistic view of fundraising across institutional and individual giving in the org CRM.
This is especially helpful for organizations where the entire team does not have access to Instrumentl. Now, you don't have to duplicate your data entry and everyone has visibility. When records and Virtuous are linked Instrumentl, Instrumentl makes it easy to know when a deadline or other funding opportunity information has changed.
So you can update The Virtuous app with one click. Once you've mapped your integration and made your initial record sync, all future changes will be updated in real time. This integration helps you stay in the tool you love while also keeping everyone in sync with your efforts.
Ready to learn more? You can reach out to our team in the chat bubble or at hello@instrumentl.com.
Ishita: Awesome. I have one more thing and then I will pass it back to Rachel. But we heard that reports -- and the reporting was a big theme in the chat.
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We know that coordinating and managing, you know, different folks and getting them aligned on a project takes a lot of work. And if you use Instrumentl already, you know that we have a really robust support for tasks. You can assign tasks, set deadlines, folks can see what tasks are assigned to them on their calendar.
But recently in this quarter, we also supported much more robust reporting on tasks. So now with Instrumentl, you can answer really specific questions, like, what are all the incomplete tasks that my team has on their plate that are due this week? Or what are all of the tasks I've assigned to a particular individual? Or maybe you are putting together a report for the board and you want to showcase everything you completed last month.
So as you can see, we've been really focused on making sure that Instrumentl can support you in every part of that grant journey regardless of where you are. And I'm really excited about, you know, everything that we have built this past quarter and excited to also, you know, for the stuff that's coming up.
And with that, I'll hand it back over to Rachel to start our wrap up.
Rachel: Yay! Thank you, Ishita. Thank you, Hope. We can give them some love in the chat.
That was -- I mean just a great overview of some really cool in-depth research that the product team has been doing talking with you all, learning from you all, and hearing more about the ways that we can make post-award management a little less stressful. So thank you so much.
Such exciting features, yeah. I saw so much, like, major stoked feelings in the chat about these developments. For those who are working in the post awards space, it's a struggle. And these will help so much. So, yay! Thank you.
As a reminder, just these things that we're talking about this -- over these past two days have hopefully identified some of the ways that you can improve all these little strategy pieces that make your grant-seeking journey that much more strategic, that much more intentional and will hopefully lead to a higher success rate on your grants that you have coming up.
Right? So first, we've got those finding relevant funders even faster. We talked a little bit about some of those prospecting improvements, some of those filter features that we've added in, and the customer training that are involved in that. I'll talk a little more about how you can get yourself in one of those.
You can track what matters to you by just having more flexible grant tracking. Those custom fields are so valuable. And Hope I know you worked so hard on making those a reality. So thank you for your efforts there. I've seen people using them and be so excited about them. So get in there and test out those custom fields if you haven't already.
You can help manage your budget spend down a little less stressfully, a little more stress free with this visual visually pleasing tracker. I love the intentionality there, just focusing on staying on top of our finances, making sure we have a bird's eye view of what's going on with each grant opportunity. And lastly, removing that duplicative work.
With all of these integrations, I saw some folks asking about Salesforce about Razor's Edge. Those are all integrations that we have in place. Now we have Virtuous as well, if you're working with that platform. Get in there and see how you can integrate these systems so that you're not having to duplicate work and can spend time working on more fun stuff, writing grants, finding grants, talking with funders.
We're trying to move from that fragmented place, that survival mode cycle that we talked about yesterday, to a unified space where everything is in one place.
We're getting there. We'll get there together. How is everyone feeling? You can give me a little, like, heart in the chat. Maybe you're sipping on some coffee just like taking it all in right now. Any feelings that we're having, you can share in the chat, share with each other.
Yeah, I love that. Drop an emoji for what you're feeling right now.
These are great. Renee, I love the partying face emoji. That's a really great one. I'll give us all a minute to share something that they're feeling right now. Just sitting with this, thinking about how we might influence our post-award management and how that might make our lives a little bit easier.
I love seeing all these emojis. Almost lunchtime. Perfect, Louis.
We'll bring our snacks with us to our next session. As we wrap up, so we started the sessions yesterday with 25 launch discounts. We're down to 15 now. I really want to encourage everybody. If you are not a customer, take a second to take this grant strategy quiz. Since we're talking about ways to improve our strategy, this is an awesome moment for you to just take a second, think about the ways that again, your saboteurs may be working against you and the ways you can identify those. This quiz will help you narrow some of those down.
It'll take two to three minutes max. I'm going to start a 30- second timer and just give folks a second to pull that up. Ryan's going to help me drop in the chat the link to that. And I encourage you to do it while you can. There's these launch discounts that we will run out of.
I assume by the end of our sessions today. I'll keep you posted on how many are remaining. So, go ahead and take the quiz.
Let me know what you hear. Let me know what you think about your strategy as it stands so far. Have about five more seconds. We'll make sure that link is in the chat for everybody. Ryan's dropped it in there.
Awesome. Thanks, folks.
And if you are a customer, which I know there is a lot of folks in the room, you still have that opportunity to schedule a one-on-one strategic consultation with some of the awesome folks, some of whom are in the room right now. So you can take their quiz and get some personalized recommendations. This will help our awesome customer success team identify ways you can optimize your grant workflows.
So those consultations are filling up as well. We've had a lot of interest there. So I want to make sure that our current customers get a chance to sign up. Ryan will help me drop that link in the chat as well. Take a second to do that.
We have a few minutes before our next session. And I encourage you to take those key actions while we're on the topic, while we're thinking about it. Where we're going next today as mentioned, we just did our first session talking about the full cycle of grant management.
Next, we'll be talking about some of those grant success secrets. Very excited again to talk about some case studies of real nonprofits and the work that they've done to improve their grant management systems.
And lastly, we'll do that live grant strategy workshop together. Will and I will host a vision board creation workshop and that'll be fun to kind of wrap up our day take everything we learned and put it down on paper.
Our secret word for this session for folks that are keeping their eyes peeled for that is going to be YOU. Y-O-U. The place that you can drop your secret word in is going to be our feedback form, which Ryan's going to help -- again, thank you, Ryan, for all the links in the chat. You're going to share your secret word, which is you, in our feedback form. You can also jot that down in your workbook if you need to remember it for later.
As a reminder, this is a real quick feedback form for each session. So we just get a sense of what you thought of the session today. Any other tidbits that you think the team should hear about, we read every response. So thank you for spending time doing that.
Coming up next. We know the drill. We're talking with some customers about their success stories and highlighting the ways that you can apply some of their lessons learned to your own organizations. We'll use this time to take a little break. We've got about seven minutes. So I'll start our timer in just a moment and grab your coffees, get a snack. I'll go through some questions in the chat, and we'll get started again at the top of the hour.
Thanks again for being here.
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