Rachel: Okay. I'm going to go ahead and get us rolling with our final session. Can we believe it? Kind of crazy.
As a reminder again, we're so glad you're here. We probably already know who you are. You've probably already said hello in the chat box. If you want to say hi again, if you're just joining us, welcome.
And that last kind of quick highlight, we do have a few of those launch discounts remaining. I'll ask my team to give me an update on how many of those are left in just a second. But if you haven't already, you can discover your next great grant strategy opportunity with a three-minute quiz logo in the chat. Super easy and help you identify some of those next opportunities.
Cool.
So our final session for today. I'm actually very excited for this one because this feels a little more -- a little more creative, a little more of leaning into where we're taking all of this brainstorm this -- these thoughts that may be running through our heads and putting it down on paper.
We're going to be working to create a vision board for your nonprofit. If you haven't met me yet, I'm Rachel. I'm with Instrumentl and I'm a former museum professional based in Los Angeles who now helps make educational events like this one for our grant seeker community.
I'm also going to be joined by my colleague, Will. And Will, if you want to hop on and do a little quick intro, you're welcome to.
Will: Yeah. Definitely. Good to see so many folks coming out for day two too. Hopefully, you're able to join me and Gauri for session one yesterday. I'm Will, part of Instrumentl as well.
In the past, I ran a lot of these events working with different grant workshops and educators and best-selling authors. And my favorite part is really helping you all unlock your nonprofits true grant potential. And what I will say is this is session six of six, everybody. So if you have not dropped an emoticon in the chat I need this energy to go up because we're going to be kicking things off with like a real bang in terms of the activity we're going to do as well as tying it all together. So take a moment in the Zoom chat right now.
I want to see that blow up right now.
Rachel: Love that. Will knows how to get the chat box hyped. I appreciate that energy.
Our usual spiel, we know the drill probably by now. But as Will mentioned, this is our last 55 minutes together. Let's make it count. Let's spend time intentionally together. Those Slack messages, those Microsoft Teams pings that you've been getting, let them wait for the next 55 minutes so you can leave this session feeling really strong about where you want to take your grant strategy next.
You'll get the recording and slides like I mentioned that'll all come to your inbox later this week. We've got a lot of people who are really busy. And we're so grateful that you've spent these two days with us. So bring what you need to stick it out for this next 55 minute session. Don't miss the chance to win. I'll do another little raffle moment in the middle here, get us excited about doing some of those key actions that we've done throughout the course of these two days. And you can toggle on those closed captions if you want to read as well as listen. You're almost there.
We have almost earned six CFRE credits over these course of these two days. So this is our last session. This is our sixth point towards your initial certification or recertification for CFRE. You'll submit all of those secret words for a signed participation certificate and we'll be revealing this last secret word at the end of the session.
Finally, I'll say the mystery of our secret sentence will be revealed. Is anyone really curious to see what we might be saying in our secret phrase? I want to see it all come together. We've given off a couple of awesome prizes already. Reema just won our professional learning bundle. We had some folks win yesterday with our meditation app. We've got those surprise extra fund prizes that have been coming your way.
We still have to raffle off a special prize for funds for a nonprofit in the room. So make sure you are sharing on LinkedIn that you're filling out those quizzes. We're keeping track of who's submitting those forms and entering you all into our raffles as we go today. Just like yesterday, I did a little bonus session. Calling it office hours. If there are things that are really sticking for you and you want to stick around for 15 minutes after today, would love to hang, continue the conversation, get excited about what we're working on.
Also, if you need to go, no problem. No pressure to stick around. But I'd love to be with you all and hear a little more. So if you have those extra 15 minutes, hang back and chill with us and hear what we're talking about.
Okay. Final reminder, this is your time. Let's make it count. Jot down those notes. We've got a final prompt session in our workbook today. This is what we'll be using actually to build some of our brainstorming for the vision board. So if you haven't already, make sure you're making your workbook copy or bring a piece of paper, bring a journal in front of you. You're going to want a pen and paper or an open document ready to go so that you can brainstorm for your organization today.
You can continue to add questions in the chat. And we're just going to stay on mute, make this a great learning environment for everybody.
Okay. Just a quick recap of what we learned from the last session. We heard from Linda. We heard from Amalie. Some key tips that we heard from these case studies keeping everything in one place, that idea of a one source of truth. This is a phrase that you can use when you're talking about investing in systems for your nonprofit. It can lead to measurable improvements in grant success. It is always essential to be aligning on priorities. That means priorities across your team, across your leadership, and across the organization at large on when you're pursuing certain opportunities.
And lastly, it takes hard work to make big changes. We know that. But they are worth the effort. And some of those case studies, some of what Linda was explaining, I'm sure it took her many weeks to come up with those strategies in order to make those changes. But she was able to prove to her boss, to her leadership that those were worth the effort.
So those were some key lessons learned. Is there anything sticking for you from our grant success stories? Feel free to share in the chat. Reina has a guess of what our secret phrase is. I'm not going to spoil it because we got to get to the end. But, yeah, anything that's sticking with you, any, like, lessons learned?
Anything that you are going to walk away and say, "I'm going to share this with my boss right after this call." Share it in the chat. While we think about that, you know, you can share your learning and win prizes. I'm actually just going to go ahead and raffle off another prize to someone in the room because we've got some great sharing happening online.
Let's see who we've got next. We've got -- ooh, okay. Denette, Lloren. I see you're in the room. Denette, you've won a coffee on us. We'll see if Denette is here. She can do a little shout out in the chat. I'm seeing some folks share the lessons learned. I love that. Cecilia says, "I am the boss. LOL." Yes, you are the boss. You are the quarterback. Oh, yay. Danette, congratulations. Thanks for sharing your learnings.
If you haven't already, like Will mentioned yesterday, a way for you to cement some of the learnings that we've had over these two days is to literally write it down. Write it down and post it on LinkedIn. Have other folks in your network learn something too. Renee says ability to customize filters. Yep, Victoria says systems, systems in place. They take work we know. But they are so, so important.
Awesome.
Continue to share as those ideas flow. I'm just going to take us through a quick view of the road ahead for this session so we can get a sense of what we're getting into. We'll start with a little brainstorming session. We're going to talk about your vision for your nonprofit. Then we're going to get creative.
I'm going to give you some tools so that you can create your own vision board. If you're a more visual learner, I think this is a great way to express the hopes and dreams that you have for your grant strategy in this new year. We have however many months left of 2024, right? So use this as an opportunity to dream big and think about what you might want to do in the remainder of this year.
We're going to share out on some of our strategies that we've been developing over this session so that we can win together. Will's going to help with a wrap up. We're going to talk about all the things that we learned over the course of these two days that you can take that with you and carry it into the remainder of your week, of your quarter, of your year.
So I want us to start. We're going to go into this brainstorming space. I want to give us a moment to think a little bit about what do we dream for our organization. And you can share in the chat if you'd like. You can also just maybe jot down some ideas or just quietly sit and think for a second. The organization is doing a lot of amazing work.
I'm sure a lot of you could probably tell me the mission statement by heart. What do you dream for your organization? This week, this quarter, this year, in five years, in 10 years. What would you like to see your organization accomplishing? And you can jot down thoughts.
Yeah, Michelle shared some already in the chat. Financial security. Kathy says stability. Arnold, I dream for my organization to be a highly successful one. Denette says, "More capacity." Sora, "Not always chasing funding." Yes, I'm going to emoji that one. Stephanie, that we are funded and we don't have to worry that stress of feeling like, "Are we going to be able to keep the lights on?" Reema, "I wish that our general operating support annual fund efforts would all be covered by grants." Yeah, I feel you. Teresa is hoping for greater impact. Daphne is saying, "Higher capacity with skilled and trained teams."
Yes, that capacity building piece is so valuable. Cassandra says, "More investment in staff to support sustainable operations." These are the big dreams. Yeah. Lean into the big dream space because this is where your organization could go. Christa, "A more student body." Nikki says, "Funds for infrastructure. Staffing." Tina, "Capital funds and a full development staff." Yes. Kelsey, "Aligned staff across many departments on grant strategy." Oh, I love these.
Dale, a new modern building with a way to cover all vet costs for animal forever homes. These are amazing. I mean these are beautiful dreams. So I want us to all step into that dream space. I know that there are going to be the "what ifs" or the "That's not possible right now." Let's remove those filters. We carry a lot of that every day.
And I want us to use this time to let go of the logistics, of the challenges that we know we will face when trying to get to that dream space, and actually just lean into where we feel like our organization could really go if we had everything in place ready to go with our strategy. So we're going to think about the ways we can connect the dream to our strategy.
I'm going to take us through a quick brainstorm. So if you haven't already, make sure to grab a piece of paper, whatever you just wrote into the chat, you can also, like, copy paste that into a Google Doc, copy paste that into a draft email, somewhere where you can save this, and jot down your ideas.
I'll give folks a second. Maybe, like, 15 seconds here to just jot something down, in front of you on your computer. We're leaning into the dream space. What can we dream about our organization. I see some continued engagement in the chat Lisa saying we can replace CMSD friends in our after school time with a grant. Yeah, Jason. Shift in mindset from.
But we've always done this way of survival mode to willingness to grow and adapt for the greater good. Love that. Drop that down. Save this on a Post-It note and have it in front of you at your computer so you can remember when you're feeling down, a little beaten down by the process, that this is your dream for your organization.
All right. So what I want to do, we're going to open up our workbooks. We're going to start to jot down some of these ideas. I'm not going to make you copy paste your mission statement into a document because I feel like that might be a little -- we don't need to do that in this moment. We do that enough in our day-to-day. But what I do want you to do is jot down a couple of key words that you think of when you think of your mission statement. I'll give you some examples in just a second so you can see what I'm talking about. Or just a moment jot down a couple of keywords that come to mind for your mission statement.
You can do that on a piece of paper. You can do that on a Google Doc. You can do that in your workbook that we've shared with you. And once you've done that, once you've jot out a few keywords down, I also want you to think about your funding goals for this year.
So think about, okay, our big dreams. We've got maybe big dreams in place for years from now. For this year, maybe we already know, like, "Okay, there is a capital campaign project that I'm going to be working on." We want to be investing in infrastructure in our building so that we can serve the animals in need that our organization works towards. Think about those funding goals. You can include amounts. You also can just next that for now and just focus on the key areas of need.
So we're going to take a moment. Jot down your mission statement keywords, jot down your funding goals. While folks are doing that, I'll share an example so you can see kind of what I'm talking about and what I'm hoping you'll do here. So my organization that I've created, I live in Highland Park in Los Angeles. And so, for this example, I created the Highland Park History Museum. And I didn't write the whole mission down. I just took some chunks that I think would really help me brainstorm the strategy around our mission.
So I wrote down that we're empowering community to connect with a rich local heritage. We have engaging exhibits for education and our archives are accessible both to the public and researchers. So just a couple key words that are helping me to narrow down my mission, identify some of those.
Oh, I love that, Louis. Yeah, some folks always are like, "Oh, Highland Park Midwest." It's also Highland Park out in LA. Oh, some folks are asking for the workbook link again. Ryan or Will. Would someone mind dropping that in the chat so we can make sure folks can fill that out?
There's going to be a box in the workbook that literally asks you these exact same questions. If you scroll down to the last page, Session 6. There's a box on your mission statement. There's a box on funding goals. Thanks, Ryan.
Cool.
For my next example here, I kept it pretty simple. For this, I was just focusing on building out our museum education program. I'm going to highlight a little more about what that actually meant what that looks like.
If you want to take a second, fill out your workbook. I'll give folks maybe 30 seconds to work on their mission statement and funding goals before we move forward.
Think about those key words. Some of the action words in your mission statement might be most helpful. Some of the descriptive language about who you're actually serving. And then for funding goals, maybe focus down on two to three that you're addressing in the immediate future.
Awesome. Of course, Anita. Thank you for your patience there.
When you have finished completing this section, will folks give me a little, like, thumbs up or -- you can raise your hand using the Zoom raise hand feature in the chat. Just give me an indication that you're ready to move forward so I don't leave anyone behind.
Awesome. Christy, Amanda. Great. Love it. Chris is ready to go. Daphne, Teresa. Amazing. Okay.
You probably already are like, "I know the mission statement," by, like, the back of my hand. I finished this ages ago. Great. We are good to go. Okay. You will already be able to move ahead in your workbook. If you've seen this ahead, if you're writing this down on paper in front of you, the next thing we're going to do is a quick reflection on our last year's efforts.
The reason for this is we just want to look back at some of our wins. What were some really successful grant outcomes that we had in the last year or funding outcomes and maybe where are some areas for improvement. So this is again just using a moment of reflection. We don't get a lot of time to think critically about how things went before we're moving on to the next thing.
And I want to give us a moment to think about two to three key successes from your grant seeking journey last year. Two to three areas for improvement. I'll share a quick example here as well.
Last year, the Highland Park History Museum won a small $10,000 grant from a newly cultivated local funder. That was awesome for this fictional museum. And they opened up a new sponsored education classroom. So think about some of your successes what grant wins were you really excited about last year, what are some ways the funds directly impacted your organization? And write those down in your key successes.
For areas of improvement, we talked a little about bit about this when we were sharing some of our dreams, right? Maybe we need more funds around capacity building. I wrote here that the museum had limited funding opportunities for staff development. Maybe you noticed that you opened this new lovely sponsored education classroom like this museum did and that the programming that we actually were able to provide in that classroom was lacking.
There wasn't enough staff. Maybe the curriculum hadn't been invested in and designed yet. So this is where I'm kind of starting to narrow down my focus on how I'm going to vision board for this remaining year. Same with last time. If you're ready to go, you can raise your hand or give me a thumbs up in Zoom.
And I'll use that as an indication that we can move right along. Great, Aaron. Thank you. Sora, I see you there. Amanda. Awesome. Monica. I'll give folks another, like, 10 to 15 seconds in case they're still thinking. I don't want to rush anyone on this brainstorming moment. Great, Teresa.
Hmm. Dale, that's a good question. If you right click the boxes, sometimes you can copy them. I see some folks are adding some comments there too. Great. I'm going to take this as an indication that we're ready to move forward. You can always come back and tweak this.
Awesome. Seeing some thumbs up. I love it. Okay. If you're already in the workbook, you've seen this next section. What I'm going to do is basically help you focus on a dream matchmaking scenario. So we're thinking big. We're dreaming about our organization.
Let's think about one program or project area focus that we can center our brainstorm around today. You know, there's probably many ways that your organization needs funding right now. But let's focus in on one specific program or project. So you can detail the funding needs of that specific program. You can think about maybe the elements that need to be included in an application for that. Like, what you might be seeking if you are applying for that opportunity what kind of key words would you need to be including in there.
And then I want us to think of the ideal funder profile for this project. So if you had yours rather, if you could be like, "I'm going to matchmake my program with the perfect funder." This is what they would be funding, their geographic preferences for funding and their funder interests.
So again, we can be quick with this. We can do, like, little keywords. It doesn't need to be a long phrase. I'll share my example for the Highland Park History Museum. I mentioned that one of our areas of improvement was that we didn't have substantial programming in this newly opened sponsored education classroom.
So I centered the funding needs that I was brainstorming today around our museum education program. We need funding for curriculum development, evaluation with pilot student groups and training for staff.
So this is my example for one programmer project. Now for the ideal funder profile, who I would want to match with if we were picking our perfect funder for this program, I'd want someone that's interested in providing grants for arts culture organizations or museums or informal education, right?
So outside of school education programming. I would hope that they are giving already in California, and maybe even giving specifically in Los Angeles. That would be even more ideal. And lastly, I'd want the funder interest to be focused on education, community, or history. So again, think of some of these keyword that's going to help you with some of the visuals for your vision board as well.
Try to keep it to something that can be visually represented on your board. I'll talk in just a second about how you're going to do that. I'll give folks another 30 seconds or so. Again, last time I'll do this if you don't mind just give me a little thumbs up in the chat, raise your hand, tell me when you're ready to move on. And then I'll show you how we can get those creative flows going.
Chris is ready. Chris you're on top of it. Thank you. Lende, Karen, Simone, Vicky. Love it.
Stephanie. I like this. We're ready to roll.
Cool.
I'm going to give folks another 10 to 15 seconds. I'm waiting for a few more to give us a thumbs up in the chat before I move us forward. I'm curious for you all that are done, that have worked on this. Do you feel like you really easily were like, "Yeah, I know exactly what I'm going to write in this document"? Or did it take you a second to think like, "Hmmm. I wonder, what should we be funding right now?
Where were you at on this with your brainstorm? Easy peasy
Vicky says it took a second Okay. Love that, Mickey. Yeah, Kelsey. This was my struggle when I was writing this worksheet. It took me time to pick one. We have a lot of areas.
And what I want to emphasize for this is that I know there's probably many different directions you could have taken this. You could even copy and paste the program, this program blurb that I have in your workbook and just do it for multiple projects if you find that this exercise is help helpful in articulating some of these needs and funder interests.
Good, Angela. I'm so glad. Okay. Awesome, Janet. Yeah. Chris and Kelsey, I encourage you to make copies and, like, use this for other programs and projects. I'm going to I'm going to start us moving forward on the actual creation of our vision boards which I think will be fun. Let's get our creative flow going And one sec. I'm going to bring us up with this next slide.
Before I do that, because people have been so on it, just doing so many things in the chat and sharing everything and just doing amazing work. I'm going to -- I'm going to work on pulling raffle prize in the background.
So while we get started on our vision board, we'll work on doing that. So what I've done here here is I've essentially made you all a Google slide template. And I'll share the link to that in just a second. But basically, I have these blank spaces where you can put in images related to all of these things that we just brainstormed. So you'll write in your organization title.
You'll have a space for images related to your mission statement and your funding goals for the year, and then you'll also have a separate page that focuses on this first project that that we were brainstorming for. So you'll think about the funny needs for project number one and the ideal funder profile for project one.
Ugh. Yay, Jennifer! I'm so, so glad. Yes, do it with your team. This is great team building and thinking about how you can creatively express some of these wants and needs and strategy around your grant management.
So I'll share my example. This is what I created for the Highland Park History Museum. I mentioned already that our mission was about connecting with community with a rich local history that we had engaging exhibits and we had accessible archives.
So I've selected images. I'll show you how to pull stock images that are related to these. I've even pulled some for you to have some examples if you just want to copy paste what I found. But I looked for, you know, kids engaging in exhibits. I looked for archives and research in archives.
For our funding goals, I'm focusing on that museum education program. So I looked up images related to staff learning, how to teach certain education programs in museum. And we've got that kind of like teacher connecting with students. So bringing in that element of youth connecting with museum content.
And then here's my vision board for this project. I could have probably gone way crazier too. And you can take this to a whole another level if you want to add a million more images or get really fancy. I know we've probably got some fun, like, visually graphic design folks in the room.
I focused on the three things that were really important for my project, for those funding needs, the curriculum development, the developing an evaluation system so that we could test those pilot student groups, and then a staff training piece. So this is this image that's related to staff training, making sure everyone is up to speed on what we're actually doing with the program.
And then for my funder profile, I picked some fun images related to arts and culture organizations, teaching and learning. We've got kind of an education lens here, youth in museums, youth in arts and culture movements. And then I was looking at LA-based organizations. So I found an image of Los Angeles to highlight that. Yeah, I'll share that in just a second.
So when you get your copy of your vision board, you'll see that there's these initial slides. And I have the examples I just shared in here too. If you scroll down to slides five through -- I think it's eight in here, I have stock images related to each of these boxes. So for example, in this example here, I'm taking an image that I had a stock image of a soup kitchen for my mission statement stock image examples.
I've just hit rightclick copy, and I just hit rightclick paste. So you can do this in your own. Again, we'll give you that link in just a second so you can get in there. You can also find your own. I found a couple -- I was looking for some specific. I tried to look across sectors so folks could find images related to their specific work. But obviously, we have folks coming from many different diverse organizations. So think about the keywords that you were using in your brainstorm notes.
Narrow it down to those keywords. You can find your own images. We'll drop the links to these in the chat so you can access them as well. These are all, like, royalty free images that you can use stock images that will come up when you put in those related keywords.
Awesome. So I'll share those links. So I want to encourage everybody to try it out themselves and get a chance to create your own vision board. We'll drop a link in the chat to how you can do that. It'll ask you to make a copy just like it did with the workbook. And you'll open up your own version of the Google Slides so that you can edit it much as you'd like.
We'll spend a little moment letting folks get that open, exploring the document. I'll go back and explain again how you can format your document once you've got that open.
Yeah, Tina. Love that. I think that's a great idea. And please feel free to, like, replicate this as much as you'd like. We'd love for this to be shared. Add in your own images. As a reminder, if you share your vision board, you might be eligible for extra fund grant prize or ruffle prize.
So, yeah, we'd love to see what you create. While folks are getting that open, I'm just going to backtrack a quick sec so that you can remind ourselves of how we want to set this up. So this is what you're going to open up when you get to your Google Slides. Sounds good, Rema. Thank you.
You're going to have your own template here. You're going to fill out your organization title and then these boxes are where you'll be adding images related to your mission statement and images related to your funding goals.
The next box here will be those funding needs. So images related to those funding needs for that one project we're focusing on for this board and the ideal funder profile for that project. Oh, my gosh. Due to heavy traffic. Woo.
I guess I've never tried to open a Google Doc with 250 people at the same time. Let's give it a sec. Oh my gosh. Let's give it a sec.
Okay. While people are doing that, again, I'm just going to highlight that this is another way you can win another raffle prize because I still have more raffle prizes to give.
Feel like Will is going to be helping me with some of those end of session raffles that we're going to be wrapping up on. But if you haven't already take that two-minute quiz. If you're a customer or get in there and find out how you can find new good fit funders?
There's a quick and easy link for you to fill out to do that. Oh, thank you, Will. We broke the internet. Oopsy! I'll have someone drop these links in the chat. Again, just as a reminder, you're in this room right now. If you have a second and you haven't already, fill it out.
It'll help you get to that next stage of strategy so that we break that cycle of survival mode and get us into a stronger grant strategy mode.
Thanks, Ryan.
Thanks, Will.
The chat box is full of links today. Cool. So, yeah, open up your own. This is something that I think folks will also spend their own time working on. It's not something I imagine that we will spend asynchronously together. But if you'd like, please do share that screenshot with us.
You can use LinkedIn to post an image your vision board. I would love, love, love to see what everybody is working on. So please do share. You can email your picture to us. I would love to see the fruits of -- your hard effort, your labor over this past two-day workshop.
Yeah.
And as Will is reminding, thank you, Will. Please tag us on LinkedIn. You can use the #grantrevolution24. That's what we're using to also help us organize some of our raffle prizes.
No worries, Ruby. And if you're having any trouble opening this up, don't worry you'll get all these links in the follow up. We'll have a second for folks to make their vision board and then I'm going to move us into our wrap-up phase.
So take a second. Start moving around those images. Let me know what you think in the chat. If you're like, "Oh, I'm looking for this image or I'm having trouble thinking of how to visually illustrate our mission." I'll go back to my examples as well so you can take a quick peek.
Yeah. So really making sure you're narrowing down on those key words like I mentioned. That'll help you think of a visual. Hmm. Ruby, that's a good idea. I'd be curious. I mean I think that there's definitely some elements of this that you could use to illustrate your grant strategy visually.
Maybe there's a way you could build this in with some of your reports that you might already be sending to funders. I love that. Hmm. No worries, Anita. Understood. But use it yourself. And use it as something that you can kind of keep to remind you of your dreams and hopes for your organization.
Oh, Delila, thank you. The follow-up email will be sent out later this week. I'm hoping to get to it by tomorrow. I'm going to try my darnest. But if it doesn't come through tomorrow, don't panic. I promise I will get everybody everything by the end of this week.
Love it, Chris.
Yeah. Just breaking down some of the ways that we might be usually thinking about our grant strategy and making it a little more visual. I had a lot of fun thinking about this for my organization. All right, folks.
I'm going to let us continue to work on that on the side. Keep that tab open. I want to get us through the final slides for today. Before we do that, I have a big raffle reveal to announce. So our winner of our $250 donation to a nonprofit is going to be Eleanor Oidna?
I hope I'm pronouncing that last name correctly. Elanor, are you in the room? If so, will you just give a shout out in the chat? We're very excited to to donate $250 to your nonprofit organization of choice.
Yay!
Thank you, Eleanor.
You've been so involved in the chat as well. I've loved seeing all of your questions. Congrats, and thank you for participating. Love it.
If you haven't already, this last slide, I'm going to just remind us to take action right now. Use this moment to better your grant strategy to better your organization and take one of these actions. If you're a customer, get on that strategy call with our customer success team. If you're thinking of how do I find the best fit funders, how do I make sure that my matchmaker funder profile that I'm vision boarding make sense with the applications that I need to be submitting?
Fill out that form. You'll get a consultation with one of our grand advisors and you'll literally be able to look through new good fit funder opportunities 100% free. So take this moment. We are excited to see you and hear from you and learn from you. And I'm going to go ahead and pass it on to Will to help us wrap things up.
Will: Awesome. Thank you so much, Rachel. If you all found that really inspiring in terms of having that vision board exercise, drop an emoticon in the chat right now because we're about to get into the wrap-up section of the last two days.
First, let's talk about where we're going next. So in the next few minutes, it's not going to take too long. But we're first going to explore what's the journey been like over the last two days, what have we discovered, learned together. We're going to reflect on a couple key takeaways that we can gather from this.
We're actually going to cement this moment as well. So that's something that we did yesterday. And the last thing that we're going to do is we're going to do a cheer together which going to be complete chaos.
But we're here for a chaos because this is a revolution after all. And so, let's first kick things off by talking about the journey we've been on together. And in order to do that, it starts going all the way back to day one. Day one ultimately wasn't that long ago. In fact, it was just a little over 24 hours ago.
We started things off with a quick session on what we've learned talking to 500 plus nonprofits per week. There we also learned about some of the five main issues that nonprofits struggle with as well as the Instrumentl story in case you didn't know a little -- a few of the tidbits in terms of how we came to be the first full life cycle solution for grant seekers.
From there, we jumped off from that launch point into the second session, which was It's Not Just You: 3 Ways That Your Grant Search is Being Sabotaged. During that session, Angela and Rachel did a phenomenal job of just explaining some of the most common challenges that nonprofits are facing when it comes to identifying the right opportunities for them, as well as to how to address those challenges. And then we wrapped up yesterday on point number three, which was how do how we went from chaos to clarity? What was the actual three-step pathway When it came to having a little bit more of a seamless grant management experience.
And this is where we started to hear from different folks in terms of the chat, just sharing their experiences while also getting a little bit of clarity in terms of how we should be thinking about the overall tracking and managing process. And then we took it back to literally two and a half hours ago. Can you believe that? Two and a half hours ago, we started off day two.
This is when we looked at, you know, those amazing new features and developments that we've released from the presentations of Ishita and Hope. We also told you guys, you know, you folks are the only ones to really know about this submissions tool that we've been hard at work with on the AI side. I'll drop a link in the chat as well one last time in terms of folks who may be interested in that.
But really, this is, you know, putting it all together in terms of how we've intentionally been approaching the full grant life cycle. And as we then kind of wrapped up that post award grant management side of things, we then started talking about bringing it all together to showing you that it's actually been done. If you remember back in session number one, we had this slide where, you know, it essentially referenced this world. This better world does exist. In fact, this better world is here.
And the reason why you know that's true is because we had Linda on live. We had other customer story on live as well. Other people have been taking, you know, taking note of this better world and joining us in this better world. And that's really what this ultimate event is for you.
It's an opportunity for you to join us in this new world. It's an opportunity for us to say goodbye to that broken world. And as we thought about those inspirational stories, it really catapulted us then into this session.
In which now we've had this live grant strategy workshop. You're creating your vision boards. You might not be done today. In fact, there's still work cut out ahead of you. Copy that, you know, that worksheet.
And from there, continue to work through that, use those stock images that you can find out there to help visualize your story. And what I want to hear from the chat right now is what has been your number one takeaway?
There have been six sessions. Tons of learnings. But the one thing that really sticks out to you -- and I just want to see that in the chat and I'll read out a couple of them right now. So let's take a look at this.
Oh my gosh.
Before he gets some responses, Jennifer is asking if we're going to host regional or national Instrumentl conferences with training and workshops. That is a great question, Jennifer. And that is definitely an idea of high interest to us. So if you are interested in something like that, we would love for you to keep the fire going there.
All right. Some key takeaways. How everyone can be so supportive of one another in each of our grant seek stages? Love that, from Rachel who's been guiding us through many of these sessions. For Kelsey. "Higher volume output does always equal a higher win rate."
Catherine, "Streamlining the grants workflow is so important." Chuck, "The importance of just getting organized." Victoria, "Everything is a learning curve." Felona, "I'm not alone. And there are others who believe, think, and want to change things." I love that. And, you know, Eleanor talking about how impressive Instrumentl is expanding to meet the changing needs of grant management. We're really excited you see that vision with us because that's something that we've been making progressive steps and listening to you in terms of our development there.
Teresa, "The need for a system." Dale, "It's an investment, not an expense." Love that. You know, Aaron, "One of the biggest obstacles with grants is time and organization." So as you all are typing this into the chat, I honestly can't even keep up right now because all of you guys are so excited with me. I want you to take that takeaway and I want you to actually just go ahead and share that LinkedIn. You just did half the work in terms of, like, sharing a takeaway. And if you remember what I mentioned in session number one, there's a statistic out there that if you go ahead and share what you learned or the insight that you're gathering from a lesson, you cement the retention by 90% as opposed to if you just listen to us and don't do anything, you only are going to retain 5%. So what that really means is that, you know, if we had six sessions, you're maybe going to remember a couple minutes and feel really good than if you don't do that.
But now you have this moment where you can share that takeaway on LinkedIn. I want to see those stories and lessons. And our team is excited to read those afterwards in this event because you all inspire us on a daily basis in the work that we do. And that leads me to the second part of this wrap up, which is where we really want to remember this moment together Because ultimately, you know, it's really, really important for us to have this moment where you see that there are still hundreds of you joining us in our six of six and in captivating and entering this new world. And so, what I would ask of everybody is we're going to stop the screen share for a bit.
I'm going to channel my inner Rachel here and have everybody come off camera. Rachel, if you want to lead us in terms of this sort of class photo. This is day two.
Rachel: Oh, yeah. -- of two. This is my favorite activity.
Ishita Lucita: Yeah, I'll let you lead this part. But I want us to commemorate this moment. And then from there, we'll kick back into the presentation.
Awesome. Okay.
I'm going to have anyone that's willing to smile on camera. I love capturing this yesterday We will post it so that you can show that you were there. I will ask folks to hold their smile for maybe, like, 10 seconds just big, big smiles. And I'll countdown in a second because I'm going to go through all our pages of folks today.
Okay. We got ready, one, two, three, smiles.
Page two. I see you Stephanie, Gary, thank you. Tim, thank you so much.
All right. Page three, smiles.
I love Louis.
That was great.
All right. And we've got our last page.
One more. One, two, three.
Wow.
We did it.
I love that so much. Okay.
I'm going back to our slide share.
Will: Sounds great. If your mouth is not hurting a little bit from the smiling, then you all did not smile hard enough. So just remember that moment.
But that's -- what's really amazing here is in this next slide, this is what I want you to also take away. And I think this was something that I saw in the chat, which is this importance of remembering that you in this moment are not alone. We had that moment in session one where there are hundreds of you in the room, there still are hundreds of you in the room, and we have to realize is that you all are seeing each other. You all are uniting through each other's work. And there's a couple great quotes that, You know, I wanted to pull from some of the sentiments of day one that I want you to remember as you kind of leave the session and continue to go about your work and championing your cause for your organization.
One person stated, "I've never felt so seen seeing others have the same struggles as me gives me renewed energy." If you can, you know, if you can relate with that right now, give me some snaps in the chat or some sort of emoticon. The other thing that I've read is the frustrations of endless searching and spreadsheets are just not sustainable. You all recognizing that has made me feel seen and heard.
You know, this is not the world that we should live in in terms of having to have these disparate systems doing different pieces of the grant process.
Again if you're being -- if you're feeling seen in this moment right now, I want you to give me an emoticon in the chat. This is your last moment. We're in the last 10 minutes of this live event. So any energy should go into this moment because the next quote is the energy was palpable even in Zoom. We just did something amazing, like incredible if you think about that, right? And that even though we are all across the United States, this is a moment where we are finding some way to connect with one another, with each other as well and with our own personal causes. And another person stated, "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 are in, you work in." So this is something in which you've seen it, you see in the chat right now. And it leads us to this final statement which is this helped me feel very seen and not alone.
I didn't realize that these were challenges. I was experiencing until I saw the quotes from other professionals in the slides and in the chat. And that's why I want you all to continue to be engaged in, you know, these future workshops are running as well as in these future opportunities when you're connecting with other grant professionals. Because in what other profession is, there a world where folks are willing to hop into a Zoom for several hours, learn together, grow together, win together.
And that is an amazing thing in which, you know, it really just speaks the testament of some of the work that you all do, which actually leads me to the teaser, the final word of the infamous sentence here, which some people guessed it, but some other ones had some great guesses in terms of Instrumentl. But word number six is tougher. And so, together what that really means is our secret phrase collectively for your six CFRE credits is "Grants are tough. You are tougher."
And so, where I want to leave us as we start to wrap up is I think it's time for a cheer. And to give you a little bit of a teaser as to where this comes from for us as a company, you know, every other hall hands every two weeks, what we essentially do to wrap up our our work and lead us into the next two weeks of work as we work on, you know, bi-weekly sprints is we come together off mute and we essentially unite for this moment of this cheer where we say this word "fired up." And then from there, we have some sortof phrase that we're going for.
And so, this is a moment that I want to create since we just had that class moment. Imagine that you're -- you know, take it back to when you were when you're kind of graduating from any program or some sort of great accomplishment that you had. What I want us to is I want us to have the chair where we're going to all come off mute. We're actually going to, like, at this time, I think what we'll probably do is I think we're going to probably stop the screen share.
But I'll show you what the chant is and we'll come back to the screen share. But it's going to be a total moment of, you know, a little bit of chaos, a little bit of fun. Everybody's going to see each other's faces as well. But the phrase is going to be -- I'm going to go fired up. And then you all will repeat fired up after me. And then after that, the second phrase is going to be, "We're tougher together."
All right? Does everybody feel like you understand what's going to happen in the next minute or so? So if you do, give me a thumbs up right now. We're going to start preparing for this in terms of this moment. Rachel will stop the screen share.
Once we see, you know, a bunch of folks on the screen, we will come off mute and we'll start to create this moment. And again, this is going to be super toughness. But it's going to be super fun and we're going to have this moment together. All right?
So when everybody feels like they have a chance to unmute, I see about half the room is unmuted right now. All right? Let's keep it going. There's a couple more folks. Awesome. I'm going to give it about 15 more seconds for your opportunity to come off mute. Again, the phrase in the chat is going to be fired up. And then after fired up, you'll repeat.
And then from there, it's going to be we're tougher together. All right? All right. - We're ready.
Participant: All right. You're all ready.
Participant: Go. - Let's go.
Will: All right. Everybody, your hands in. And what I want you to say is fired up.
Participant: Fired up! Fired up!
[crosstalk]
Participant: We're tougher together!
Participant: We're tougher together!
Participant: We're tougher together! - Fired up!
Participant: Fired up!
Participant: We are tougher together!
Participant: We're tougher together.
[crosstalk]
Will: All right.
Participant: Yes.
Will: All right. Rachel, take us back to the presentation.
Rachel: Awesome. Hold on one sec. If folks can go back on mute just to make sure we don't have too much more chaos as we wrap up. That was awesome though. And I love that because you're literally taking part in what we do, as Will mentioned.
Every single other week at our All Hands, we're a remote first company. So getting to connect with you all like that was, yeah. Just, like, made my day. And I've had so much fun over the past two days. So that's hard to hard to beat.
Okay. As we've done at every other session, share your feedback with us. We want to hear about what was so exciting what you really loved about this experience. You'll also be able to add in that last secret word like we mentioned. So share your feedback.
We'll drop that link in the chat. And then we also have a way for you to submit your workbook. This is what we're going to help us to use, to get those signed certificates and your CFRE credits so that you can make sure you have physical documentation of your participation in this program over the past six hours, over two days.
So, Ryan will help drop that in the chat as well. It'll go out in the followup if you miss it. So don't stress. You'll have a way to submit your workbook. This is also just a place -- if you don't want to submit your workbook, you don't have to. It can be something that's personal to you and I totally respect that you might want to have your own notes in there, maybe you have information about your nonprofit that you've been jotting down over these course of these two days. Feel free to keep that personal to yourself. You don't have to submit the workbook. But if you submit the form, it will give us an indication that you would like to receive that signed certificate.
So please submit the form. You'll also be able to sign up for some of our upcoming events. If you had fun with me in these programs, and Will, and Amalie, all the folks that work at Instrumentl, we had do a lot of these events almost every week.
And I've got a really cool grant seeker growth course coming up at the -- actually next Thursday. We're starting off with our first session. This grant seeker growth course is designed specifically for grant writers, consultants, nonprofit professionals who are looking to level up on their grant writing, their prospecting, and management. So that first session that's next Thursday, 11: pm.
I'm sorry 11:00 a.m. Pacific 2 p.m. Eastern. That's going to focus on kind of taking some of the grant strategy stuff we talked about over these two days. And making sure you're saving time and hopefully winning more grants. So I'll be doing that next Thursday. And then the following Thursday, the second session of this series is going to be focused on funder engagement. So very excited.
We're going to be highlighting some partner expert tips in these. You'll have an option in the form that's in the chat to indicate your interest in joining these sessions. I will personally add you into the registration for those. So just check off with the check box in the same form that you're going to be submitting your workbook in.
Or just indicating that you have interest in following up on certificate. I'm sticking around. It's 11:57 Pacific Time. So we're ending right on schedule. But I'll be here for the next 15 minutes if folks have questions the same way we did yesterday. If you are ready to move on with the rest of your Wednesdays, thank you so much. We are filled with gratitude for you spending the past two days with us.
And I've loved meeting each and every one of you. Send us a note. Tell us your learnings on LinkedIn and carry this good energy with you throughout the rest of your week and throughout the rest of your year.
Thank you, everybody.
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