Will: And with that, I'm going to go ahead and kick things off. Hello, everyone, and welcome to Partnership Pays five ways that partnering builds more grants success faster. This workshop is being recorded and slides will be shared afterwards. So keep your eyes peeled for a follow up email later, in case you want to review anything from today. In case it is your first time here, this free grants workshop is an Instrumentl Partner workshop. These are collaborations between Instrumentl and Community Partners to provide free educational workshops for grant professionals. Our goal is to tackle a problem that grant professionals often have to solve while sharing different ways that Instrumentl’s platform can help grant writers win work grants. Instrumentl is the institutional fundraising platform. If you want to bring grant prospecting, tracking, and management to one place, we can help you do that. And you can set up your own personalized grant recommendations using Maryn's link on the screen here. Lastly, be sure to stick around for today's entire presentation. At the end, we're going to be sharing with you some prizes we'll be raffling away. Maryn has a really exciting course coming out in a few weeks. And so that'll be something to stay tuned for. But more details to come at the conclusion of the presentation. We ask that you hold off questions until the very end. If it's your first time here, the way we do it here is you, throw in three hashtags in front of your question. That way, it's easy to pull out your question and ask during the Q&A section towards the end.
Now that that housekeeping's out of the way, I'm very excited today to introduce Maryn Boess. Over her twenty five plus year career and nonprofit world. She has seen it all as a grant writer, independent grants, consultant grants, project manager, trainer, reviewer and grant maker. Her background gives her a unique insider's perspective, successful grantsmanship that she's been blessed to share with thousands of nonprofits of every size. And she runs the GrantsMagic U Community, which is a virtual academy for anybody with over six thousand students. We had a ton of fun with Maryn a few months ago and that's why we brought her back today. So, Maryn, why don't you go ahead and take it away?
Maryn: I would love to and I'm wondering why my slides. There we go. Slides are advancing. Yay! Hey, thank you for that wonderful introduction, Will, and it's terrific to partner with Instrumentl on this particular program. What I love about my Instrumentl programs is these are trainings that I've never shared in this particular way before. So the topic is a little different than I've ever shared before and so is the focus. So those of you who are joining with me here, this is material that I'm going to be completely new to you. And it's certainly not new to me in terms of material, but it's new in the way that I'm sharing it with you. So in terms of my introduction, yes, I've been in the grants world for a long, long time and I've probably seen and done everything. What's really important for you to know right now, today are two things. Number one, I have been a grant maker myself starting in 2006. And number two, I am a total partnership nerd. You have to know that. I preach partnership and collaboration up one side and down the other. And I am so excited to share with you some pretty powerful and high-level thinking about how partnering and navigating successfully through grants world actually support each other moving forward.
Partnership is five ways. Partnership builds more grants success faster. So this is not going to be one of the trainings where I share a lot of on the ground tactics. We are really known at GrantsMagic U for our trainings that are loaded up with step by step worksheets and templates and fill-in-the-blanks planning tools and very, very tactical information. This is going to be more high level, more conceptual with a lot of great takeaways, I promise you. But the most important way to open up the frame that I want you to bring in the energy and I want you to be bringing to our time together here today is that perspective is everything. We all have experience with partnering. We all have experience with collaborating. It may not be in the context of our grants work. It may not even be in the context of our nonprofit work. But we have all been team members. We all have families that we've tried to bring together for Thanksgiving dinners. We've all been part of study groups in school. We all have experience with what partnering is like. Partnering brings us together with other people who can have very different perspectives than we do. So the frame to open up is that we also have our own beliefs that's about what partnering is like based on our own experience. So I'm going to be sharing some thoughts and ideas with you here today that may challenge your current perspective. And it's not that your perspective is wrong, it's that I'm going to offer you a different position from which to look at the ideas of partnering and collaborating. And that's what this graphic on the screen is all about. It's showing you those two very different shapes that are projected on the back wall. And if I'm super duper attached to the blue shape and I'm saying "no, the blue round is true" and you're super duper attached to the orange square and you're saying, "no, the orange square is true." The reality is these are both reflections of the same core shape, that same truth at the middle, just looking differently based on our own experience and based on where we're standing. So be prepared, come with an open mind, and I'm going to be sharing with you some ideas that I hope will open up and expand your perspective and give you lots of great tools for going back to your own organization and doing the same for the people that you work with there.
So where we're aiming, what we promised you coming in, is that you're going to learn why I call partnering and collaborating the single most powerful amplifier and accelerator of your grants success period. In all the years that I've been doing grants work, including many years working in large collaborations, I have never found and I have never taught anything that can get your grants success moving faster and bigger than becoming very skilled at thinking about partnering and collaboration, leveraging the power of partnering and collaboration for our grants success. We're going to take a deep dive into what I call the competition math. This is where I'm really going to start to challenge your thinking and give you some tools to take back into your organization. And take a look at what happens if we're able to shift our perspective away from thinking about grant seeking as a competitive process and open up to maybe another way of thinking about what grant seeking might be like in the grants world. My slide advances are not moving. There we go. I won't mention that again. And in that regard, I'm not going to leave you at that high conceptual level. I am going to be sharing with you five very clear power strategies that you can start using right away to leverage the power of partnership in your own grants program. All right. So you'll have powerful takeaways in the form of these five specific strategies. And then we're planning on having plenty of time for Q&A and coaching. Because you're going to have your own questions about how to maybe apply what I'm sharing with you here in your own world, and I would love to have the time to take up as many of your questions about that as we possibly can.
So the big picture of where we're aiming is that in this short hour, I want you to leave prepared with some new ideas, new perspectives, and new resources to do what? To inspire, to facilitate, and to lead collaborative efforts to support your grants success. How's that sound? That's not bad for a one hour webinar. So let's take a step back and get real. We have to be perfectly honest, right? I said all of us have experience in partnering, collaborating, and being on a team. We know it ain't easy. There are issues, there are barriers, there are challenges involved in working with partnerships or teams. And we need to acknowledge that. And we're not going to get anywhere. We live in a world of reality. We have to be real about what we're talking about here. So I'm going to ask you now to go ahead and jot down and or chat in what are the first three issues or barriers that you've experienced or observed in your own work with partnerships or teams that kind of get in the way, that maybe make it hard. Issues or barriers. Just a couple of words each. You can go ahead and chat them into the chat box and you'll see what other people are sharing as well. And Will maybe you can call some of them out and we're going to invite everybody to chat in three. But you can chat them out, call them out for us, Will, so I can see what you're seeing.
Will: Sure. So Katie mentions workload. Fran was mentioning managing expectations, responsibility. Deborah's talking about closed minds to new ideas. Sheila's talking about time management. Accountability is being mentioned, not knowing where to start or who to partner with, capacity of the organization. Chasing grants, closed minds as well coming up again. Dividing responsibilities, communication, different motivations, and different agendas. So buy-in is also coming up quite commonly.
Maryn: Wow. All right. Keep chatting in. If you're still doing that, I'm going to share with you just about everything that you have shared here. Probably shows up in some shape or form on this little short list. Let's be perfectly honest. It's hard work. It gets very messy. We're dealing with other people. That's messy by design. It takes time. People don't trust each other. I heard the issue of trust come up. How about that agenda issue? We have our own agendas. That also fills into what we call turfism. Do we know what we're talking about in terms of turfism in our organizational realm? You have that experience where people don't follow through. People that are part of the work plan don't necessarily follow through. This is a really big one. This next one in the grants world, everyone wants a piece of the pie. If there is money on the line, there's a sense of sort of scrambling to get part of the pie. Is the pie limited? Does everybody get a slice? How big a slice do people get? Lots of questions around that. And bottom line, a lot of people think, and I was one of those people on those college study groups who thought in the end it was just easier and faster to do it myself. And that said, I am now a total partnership nerd and I want to let you know why. Why do it? If it's so dang hard, why even do it? I'll tell you why, my friends, because working together at any level anywhere in our lives is not a good idea. It probably was not always a good idea. But now more than ever, it's not a good idea. It's way beyond that. It's what I call an imperative.
So I want to share with you this framework that we teach at GrantsMagic U. And those of you and those of you who are part of the GrantsMagic U community, you know this, the Grantsmanship Gameboard. It's kind of like the basic roadmap that I use to describe what I call the grants world and how we navigate through it by following a set of very powerful rules. OK, so the Grantsmanship Game Playing to Win. Thinking about grantsmanship as a game doesn't mean it's frivolous at all. In fact, it's a very serious business. But there are some things about the analogy that can really be useful.
Number one, we are operating in a unique environment. There is an ecosystem with lots of moving parts. That's what we call the gameboard. That's unique to the grants world, right? If you're playing checkers, you play checkers on a checkers board. You don't play checkers on a hockey field. If you're playing basketball, you're doing basketball on the basketball court and not on a Monopoly board. So every game has its own unique operating environment or ecosystem.
Every game also has rules. We know that. It's really important to understand rules are non-negotiables. Rules aren't suggestions. Rules aren't something that it would be good for us to consider doing if the time is right. Rules are those things about which you can say, hey, guys, if you don't do this, not only will you not win, you might even get kicked out of the game entirely.
And thinking about how we play a game beyond rules, there's the whole idea of strategies. Strategy is what we learn about experience and how we bring that wisdom and that learned experience to making decisions about the unexpected challenges that we encounter on our way around the game board. So that's our accumulated wisdom, that's tapping into our training, that's tapping into the knowledge of our partners and the folks that we're working with as well. Strategies, how we apply our wisdom to moving through the gameboard.
And then in any game at super duper important, and I know this is something that I preach so hard to my grants folks, is there so much that we can control. And because it's an ecosystem, there is a lot that we cannot control as well. And it's so helpful for our sanity in the grants world to focus everything we've got on what we can control and understand what we can't and let go and let it be. All right. So that's a quick little peek at the gameboard and why we think about grants as a game.
Way down there at the very bottom corner, there are only five rules, five imperatives of the grantsmanship game. In the entire grants landscape, there are five founding principles that I have chosen to govern the entire process. And the second one is to build true partnership. I call it collaborating for success, and I also call it the partnership imperative. Now, just think I've been teaching the Grantsmanship Gameboard for years and years now. Five rules and one of them is about partnership. That should tell you something about how important I understand partnership and collaboration to be in our ongoing healthy and sustainable grants success. So where we're going today is we're going to take there's a lot that I teach about partnership. And a little bit later on, I'm going to share with you one of our video courses that you're going to be able to access for free through our partnership with Instrumentl that will give you more detail about what partnerships are all about, how to put them together, what are the dynamics, and how to figure out what's going wrong when you're having problems, and fix it. So the mechanics of good partnership, that's not our focus today. Our focus today is just giving you the tools to understand the connection between partnering and grantsmanship and begin to leverage that power in your own organization. So our two focuses are really going to be taking a dive into what I call the competition myth. It's a competitive process. And then sharing those five specific ways that partnering and collaboration amplify and accelerate our grants success.
So I want to do a poll now and Will is going to open the poll when I--not yet. Just click. Can you close that back for right now? I want to introduce that first before you vote, because I want to make sure you understand what I'm asking you to do. And this is on a scale of one to five. I want you to think about your organizational culture. This isn't your personal belief. This is the people that you're working with in your organization, your nonprofit, your partnerships, the clients that you work with just broadly and generally. To what degree does your organizational culture agree or disagree with this statement? OK, five means that's totally this and one means not at all this. So be careful because there's a bit of a twist here. This statement says, in the grants world, there's only so much to go around. Either you win or you lose. If someone else wins, you lose and vice versa. In other words, in the grants world, it's all about the competition. It's a zero-sum game. There's only so much pie. If somebody else gets that pie, you don't get it. In the grants world, there's only so much to go around. To what degree does your organizational culture agree or seem to agree with that. No matter what the talk is, what is your experience of how your culture operates in terms of your grants? OK, you can go ahead and open the portal now, Will. And remember, five means your organization is all about competition, competition, competition. One means no. We understand it is not that way. OK, so go ahead and vote and we'll wait until we get the majority of folks voting in. Totally anonymous. That's why we set this up as a poll so you can be really honest about what you're experiencing in your own organizational environment. All right.
Will: I've got about sixty seven percent of the vote and I feel like I'm doing an election.
Maryn: No, let's give it--I can't see the results, so I'm dying to see them--but let's give it a little more time there as people are still thinking about that's a big question. But I wouldn't be doing us any service at all if we weren't honest about what we're actually dealing with in our own real world. All right, I think that's probably about enough time. Will, what do you think? Let's take a look and see what we've got. Can you share that?
Will: Yep. Can you see now?
Maryn: Wow, look at that. All right. So we've got a large group in the middle that are pretty evenly split around the neutral, like, I don't know, maybe sometimes and maybe not other times. But we also have a large number that agree, about a quarter say, yes, that's really what the predominant belief system is in our organization. And then we've got sort of--it's a real clear split right across the middle, I would say. Just looking at those numbers, half of you are in organizations where that is a dominant belief and half of you are in organizations where that's not a dominant belief. Well, the good news is that those of you who have the organizational belief in competition is strong, will have good tools to take back to begin to leverage a more enlightened belief system. And those of you who come from an organization where you already are leaning toward collaboration will have great tools to take back to support continuing to move in that direction. So thank you for that. I'd said that's awfully honest, I've never done that poll before in a group, and it's really enlightening to see really how even the split was.
So we're going to bust that myth. I am absolutely OK. Stop, I don't know what you can see, but. There we go. So I'm going to bust that myth and we're going to do this by backing away from the specifics of grants. And I'm going to tell you what I think one of the most powerful skills that we can develop is grants leaders in our organization is the ability to shift between ant view and eagle view. What does that have to do with grants? What does that have to do with partnership? You will find out.
So think about ants. Think about that tiny little ant on the ground and think about how that ant's perspective differs from the perspective of the eagle who's soaring way up above the horizon. All right. So we know that the ant is very linear. It can only focus on the next thing going forward, whereas the eagle at that higher level is omnidirectional. The ant can only move in one direction at a time, focusing just on that, about that next task that needs to be done. And the eagle can move any direction it wants, moving up, down, all around. The ant is very tactical. We call that task and detail focus, whereas the eagle can see more landscape and can more easily see the relationships of all the moving parts in that landscape. So the ant is exquisitely adapted to fine detail. Is right there on the ground with that piece of sand or that breadcrumb right in front of its nose. It gets right down to breadcrumb level, just like we all need to do in the grants world. When we're managing all of the infinitude of details of the grants process, we need to have that focus right? But we also need to be able to pull out of that focus like the eagle and be able to see and hold the big picture at exactly the same time. So what I'm talking about is the ability to zoom in to ant view when it's the attention to find tactical task, focus detail that's required and zoom out to eagle view when we need to have that relational big picture. And we need to see the entire ecosystem, all the players, all the moving parts in that ecosystem, and then zoom back in again to ant view and zoom out again to eagle view, again at the appropriate time. This is such an important skill through everything we're doing in grants world. And it's really important when we're talking about what's our relationship with partnering and collaboration.
Another way that I think about this, and those of you who've been through my ultimate grant proposal blueprint program will remember this from all the way back in session one. One of my frameworks that I love is this weird triangle that if you look at it carefully, you'll realize it couldn't really exist in the three dimensional world. It doesn't actually work, but it's another way of thinking of ant view, eagle view, and then something else.
So the tactical side is ant view. That's all about what are the levers we need to pull and the buttons we need to push to get what we want. OK, that's the focus of tactical. What are the levers we need to pull and the buttons we need to push to get what we want. Relational moves us up into eagle view where we can say, hey, there are other people out there that are also doing work. I wonder what they're up to. I wonder what their relationship is with us. I wonder how we might be able to, I don't know, connect and work together. But there's another level even higher than that that we don't live at. We usually don't talk about that. I think it's important for us to understand it and be able to touch into it at the right time. That's what I call transcendent. Transcendent is where we can hold the entire human experience in our scope of vision and just really understand that there's always so much, something so much bigger going on than even the eagle view gives us access to.
So hold those ideas. I told you this was going to be pretty conceptual and I'm giving you three different perspectives here, because what I want to do now is run that belief about when it comes to getting grants is a competitive process. I want to run that belief through the lens of each of these perspectives and show you how it changes. OK, so we've got our perspectives and this is the belief we're going to be looking at when it comes to getting grants, it's a competitive process. It's dog-eat-dog, zero sum, limited resources. You get it. We don't. We have to fight for what we get. You know how that all goes.
So let's take a look at what that looks like as we run it through our lenses. Let's just call that bottom belief old school. That's where we started with the poll question that I asked you. There's only so much to go around. Either you win or you lose. If someone else wins, you lose and vice versa. You have to know how to play the game. I know executive directors who believe that. I know executive directors who talk that way. If you have a leadership team that believes that, you're going to be really excited about what I share when we come to the tactical level.
The tactical level hits right at the heart of our focal point for today. And that's where we say, you know what, we're all about getting grants. So we want to get grants. We want to get them faster. We want to get more of them. Partnership and collaboration is a powerful way to do exactly that. In fact, Maryn says it's the single most powerful way to amplify, to get more, and accelerate, get faster our grant success. That's very tactical. What do we need to do to get what we want? OK, that's ant view.
So let's take it up to the next level. Let's go up to relational now. All right, now we're able to see all the moving parts and we go, hold on just a second. Collaborating with others isn't just the way that we can get more grants. Collaborating with others is good for our community as a whole. We can share resources. We can support each other's success. And in the end, we can all get what we need. Wow. See how relational that is? So can you feel the difference between the tactical level, which is very powerful, and moving up to the relational level that says, yeah, that can help us get more grants, but actually it's good for everyone. All right. So we can really feel the difference there.
But there's that other level that we call transcendent. And again, remember, this is even bigger than an eagle view. This is really the deepest beliefs that we hold about how life works. And so this is my statement of belief about how the world works. And I actually post this at GrantsMagic U on our about page, because this is so central to the way I approach all the work we're doing together in the community. And it goes like this: There is already more than enough of everything we need to create the world we want to see. There's already more than enough of everything we need to create the world we want to see. If we believe that, we can create it. Then we also have to believe that somehow or other everything we need is already there. It may not be where we need it to be. We may not know where it is just yet, but this big, huge, profound belief that says whatever the world is that we want to see, everything already exists to make that happen. Right. That's the transcendent belief.
OK, so that's taking that old school belief about it's dog-eat-dog competition, we win, we lose zero sum game and just kind of elevating it one step at a time through the tactical that says, no, we want to partner and collaborate because that's going to help us get more grants to the relational that says, hey, you know, we're part of an ecosystem. We can all get what we need if we work together, add it to that transcendent level that says everything we need is here. At the highest level, it's an abundant world and it's our place to be leaders in that world.
So let's pretend that we've got one of those executive directors who's very old school. I want you to take these tactical tools back to that director. And this actually came up in, one of my blueprint ultimate grant proposal blueprints students came back to me after the session in the blueprint course on partnership and said, you know, I am all over collaboration and partnership, man. I totally believe it. But the problem is my executive director thinks that it's a fool's game. I took what we learned in the course to him and he said, I don't understand why you're even talking to me about this. It's foolish to even contemplate it. Nobody collaborates. And all you do when you do is just give stuff away and not get anything back. I went, oh my gosh. I said, so here is what you need to share with him. Five key ways that you leverage the power of partnership and collaboration to amplify and accelerate our grants success. This is tactical, right? There's that tactical thing we're going to go right down to. How do we make it work for us? What are the levers we pull on the buttons we push to get what we want? If we want more grants and we want them faster, here's what we do.
Number one. And there's going to be beautiful pictures for you here. We can tuck up under a partner's credibility or experience to get traction in the grants world. If your organization is new or you're new to grants, it's really difficult to get traction as a newbie, just like it can be difficult if you don't have a credit record or a credit history to get that first loan. Once you get that first loan, then other lenders are more willing to look to lend to you. Do you notice that? It's that first one that makes all the difference. How do you get that first loan if you don't have a credit record of your own? You get a co-borrower or you get a cosigner, you get somebody who does have that experience and credibility to sign off to back you up. So there are ways that organizations can work together to give the new ones, the younger ones, the smaller ones, like her adorable baby elephant there. She looks so tiny, but she weighs four hundred pounds. She was born weighing 400 pounds. Oh, my gosh. That number one, a sponsorship, for instance, a full fiscal sponsorship can be a really powerful way to tuck up under a more experienced partner's credibility. Bringing a more experienced partner onto a grants project with you as the lead organization is a great way to borrow a partner's credibility and move forward in the grants world. Finding a way, and this is all part of this, it's all conversation. We need to talk it through, make it happen. It's not snap your fingers and it'll happen. But it's all part of our relationships. Finding a more experienced partner with the project ongoing that you can come on board their project. It can go either way. They can come on board yours or you can come on board theirs. Either way gets you a grant record. You are part of a grant-funded project. And that will be the traction that you need to get going in grants world. So there are lots of details we could include about how that works in the mechanics--that's outside the scope of what we're doing today. But I just want to offer that for you. If you are a new organization or if you haven't yet really gotten going in the grants world or even if you're struggling to get going in the grants world and you wonder if there is a way that you can get traction, get an on ramp, this is something for you to think about. OK, mama elephant and baby elephant. Beautiful picture. My favorite picture.
How about this one? An unexpected or unusual partnership can intrigue the grant reviewers. Wow. So what does that have to do with chocolate-covered pretzels, chocolate salty, crunchy pretzels? Can you imagine a time when chocolate-covered pretzels did not exist? There was no such thing. And then on one magical day, somehow, somewhere, somebody said, what would happen if we put chocolate on pretzels and voila, the world was forever changed. That same kind of unique combination showing up in a grant proposal in the stack of proposals that the grant review needs to get through before he or she can call it quits for the day, can spark that interest that makes them go, wow, this is something we haven't seen before. Let me tell you a quick story, the example I like to use. If we are a literacy organization--we're a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and we help adult learners improve their reading and writing skills, we're a 501(c)(3) literacy organization. Let's say we're applying for a grant, a literacy grant for an organization that's just funding literacy right now. So now you're the reviewer in that process, OK, and you got a stack of grant proposals. They're all about literacy programs. And you find that some of them have partnerships and some of them don't. It's not a requirement, but you're sort of mentally sorting them. And it's like here is the pile of those that aren't partnering with anybody. And here's the pile of those that are partnering with somebody. And you notice that the ones that are partnering with somebody, it's like, that's great. I actually think we ought to support the ones that are partnering because you'll find out why a little in one of our next tactics. But you notice that it's like these are partnering with school. These are partnering with a library. Here's another school. Here's another school. Here's another library. Here's another library. They're all partnering with schools and libraries. Totally makes sense. Literacy program. Right. Then you turn over proposal number twenty one and it's like this is a 501(c)(3) and they're partnering with what, churches? Wow, that's different. I wonder what that's all about, and suddenly you're awake in a way that you weren't before because you're seeing something you haven't seen before, a literacy program in churches. Chocolate and salty pretzels. Really interesting there. And that can be just the spark that sets your proposal apart from all the others. OK, grant reviewers love to see something they haven't seen before, as long as it's authentic in the partnership. All right. So chocolate covered pretzels. Let's continue with the theme of food and talk about chocolate chip cookies.
Partnering can bring in resources we would otherwise need grant dollars to cover. This is power strategy number three. Partnering can bring in resources we would otherwise need grant dollars to cover. You've got your project recipe. You've got all the ingredients that you need to make that recipe work. Some of the ingredients you may already have in your organization, but everything else you need to get, right? So you either put everything on the shopping list for the grant store. Or you say, you know what, we may not need to go to the grant store to get eggs. If I can go next door to my neighbor, i.e. your partner, if we can bring a partner in who is able to provide this resource, if Tracy, my next door neighbor, can provide two eggs and in return I can give her six beautiful chocolate chip cookies when we're all done, in return, she can gain, her organization can gain something from the project, then I don't need to use grant dollars to get that resource and that frees those grant dollars up for something else. Right. It's leveraging your resources from grants with partner resources. And by the way, funders love it. It's called in kind contribution, and they love to see that you're matching what you're asking them to invest with resources that are being provided, not only by your own organization, but by your partners in the community as well. All right. So the grants store.
All right. So a little bit and this is very tactical, this is my favorite one. I love these all. I really do. Strategic partnering, thinking strategically about our partnership can dramatically expand our pool of prospective grantmakers. Hmm. So when you go out looking for grantmakers who would be a good match for the project that you're offering, one of the things that you're looking for is making sure that you're matching with who makes grants to the kind of organization you represent. They need to be a good match for the work you're doing, but they also need to clearly make grants to the kind of organization that you represent. All right let's go back to our literacy example. I'm a 501(c)(3) nonprofit literacy. I am not going to be able to draw down dollars from an organization, from a funder that only supports church-affiliated organizations. They don't support 501(c)(3)s, they specifically want their dollars to support church-affiliated projects, right? I'm not going to apply to that. Unless, I'm partnering with churches. And in fact, remember the example of the reviewer reading through the proposals, partnering with churches, what's that all about? In fact, we're going to be partnering with churches to recruit our volunteer tutors from among their members. So churches in the target community become key partners with us because they're helping us recruit the people from their own membership that we're going to train to become volunteer reading tutors to support our reading program. Aha. Not only does that instantly intrigue the reviewers who've been slogging through one proposal after another, but also, now those funders that only support church-affiliated projects potentially become interested in this project. They couldn't have taken a look at it. We couldn't have applied to them before. But now, because churches are our partners, there is a church connection there that could open up the possibility that they would now want to be interested in funding us. I'm super excited about that one and that goes on in infinitum. So anything that gives us access to a bigger pool of prospective grantmakers is definitely a super power strategy in the grants world. And stay tuned because I think Will has a demo lined up for you that'll show you how that works in Instrumentl.
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And finally, the fifth strategy, the fifth tactical strategy is simply knowing that authentic partnering shows that we are serious players in the grantsmanship game. Program makers, funders, and reviewers see it all. They really do, whether there are small family foundations or very large multinational organizations, they've seen it all. And when we show up without demonstrating that, we understand there are others in our ecosystem that are also working on the same challenges that we're working on, they know that because they see the whole ecosystem. And they see us show up and say, as far as we know, we're the only ones doing this, you should fund us, they're saying, no, you're not. We know you're not. I think you need to go back and get serious about learning more about your own ecosystem. Showing up with strong partnerships, supporting our projects clearly demonstrates to these funders that we're serious. We know our way around. We've matured. We're not newbies. We may be newbies, but we're not naive, let's put it that way. And that really is a powerful position to come from in our grants world. Nothing I'm saying here is saying that every project needs a partnership or would even work, or that partnerships would be appropriate in every grant proposal, not at all. But I think we can learn more in the direction of wondering what's possible, what could be possible if we opened up our partnership thinking here. Who out there has something to bring to this process and something potentially to gain from being a part of this process with us and be more lean, but more of our strategic way into thinking and getting curious and being explorers in partnership possibilities in our grants work going forward.
So there is a lot more about partnership successes I shared with you. And I'm just going to share a couple of really quick high level things here to kind of get your thinking oriented. And then we're going to turn right to some resources to support you going forward. Perspectives on partnership. Partnership and collaboration. I've been using the analogy from the beginning that it's all about relationships, right? It is substantively no different than you trying to bring a diverse extended family together around the Thanksgiving table, right? Some people are bringing this, some are that, some people aren't bringing anything. Some people show up with the wrong thing. How do we make sure everybody gets where they need to be? How does everybody know what's the--can be all of that, the relationship piece of it, the moving parts in our ecosystem.
And one thing that can really help us to understand that those relationships can take place at a continuum of levels. Partnership doesn't mean getting married. Partnership doesn't mean you're giving up all your autonomy. Partnership simply means somewhere on this continuum, you're actually opening up to engaging with someone else in some way. Maybe we're just meeting for coffee, metaphorically. Maybe we're just getting to know each other. Or maybe we are all the way at the top of that continuum, and it's time for a full merger as if we're getting married. But there are all these possibilities in between. Partnerships don't need to be forever. They can be very task specific. One time, one month, one year, or they can be continued and ongoing ad infinitum. All right. So this is helpful as well. We've got lots and lots of flexibility in how we think about engaging with other organizations in our grant proposals and our work in the community as a whole.
All right. So the number one reason collaborations succeed where others falter or fail, I was going to ask this in the opposite direction. I was going to ask you, what do you think is the number one reason collaborations fail or others succeed? But I'm going to ask you instead, what do you think is the number one reason collaborations succeed where others falter or fail? Remember all these problems we came up with? This was your list as well as my list. This is not all inclusive, but this pretty much hits the high points out of that list or out of your own experience. What do you think is the number one reason that healthy collaborations succeed? What makes a healthy collaboration healthy, where others falter or fail? Go ahead and chat it, and Will, as you see the responses coming in, go ahead and call them out. Let's see we've got.
Will: Sure, someone mentioned communication, collaborations. There's a lot of messages coming at once. Collaborations failed due to miscommunications or unmet expectations, the relationship, having the same goals, respect for partners, respect for expertise of either partner. Communication; clear boundaries; clear, transparent, honest communication; misaligned interests. Eco, common goals, authentic relationships, a lot more references to communication and loyalty. Expectations, hubris. Yeah. Fair exchange. No robbery. Hundreds of other submissions.
Maryn: Oh my gosh. You guys are great. Those are all fantastic answers. And if I had to boil it all down, that's the thing. You're all exactly right. These are all elements of partnership success and in the resource I'm going to share with you next, you'll find out how you can actually do an assessment in your own organization about how many of these factors are actually working for you in your own partnerships. The number one reason, when you boil it all down, if I asked, why do you think relationships are healthy, relationships between people, I would go like this. I would say that a healthy relationship is built on a constantly renewing foundation of what--I heard these words--mutual trust, respect, and understanding among the participants. Think about that. Mutual trust, respect, and understanding among the participants. And it just makes sense when you think about your own personal relationships. Every relationship brings its own challenges. There is no relationship without its challenges. And challenges show up in all kinds of shapes and forms. Miscommunication is going to happen, OK? There is no way that we can ever have completely clear, free, and open communication because we are going to miscommunicate. But if we miscommunicate and there is a constant renewing foundation of mutual trust, respect, and understanding, we can deal with that miscommunication in a healthy way. If there isn't, we may not be able to deal with that miscommunication in a healthy way. That's just a short, long way of saying all the other partnership challenges can be dealt with in a healthy way as long as there is a constantly renewing foundation of mutual trust, respect, and understanding among the participants. Without it, it's a crapshoot. The partnership is vulnerable to anything that comes along with it. And I have to say, I saw the photos recently that Jimmy Carter, President Jimmy Carter and Rosalyn Carter just celebrated their seventy fifth wedding anniversary. I'm getting chills just thinking about that. Do you imagine that they never had any challenges in their seventy five years of marriage ever? Now, can you imagine that all those challenges they were able to get through to build on and move beyond because there was this abiding mutual trust, respect, and understanding at the heart of their entire marriage. Just going to say that very timely. All right.
So what I want to do now is, again, just kind of share with you resources--two resources. Number one, we've got a video course at GrantsMagic U called Partnership RX, Partnership Prescription, right? Figure out what's slowing your collaboration down and fix it. It's a really powerful presentation that basically says, hey, there are a lot of things that happen to make a collaboration falter that may not be actual dysfunction. They may simply be a natural feature of the evolving process of a developing partnership. And so I give you three power tools for diagnosing what could be going on and helping you get a handle on what you need to do to fix it if it looks like your partnership or collaboration is driving you crazy because it's just not working, something is not working. So, that's free to you as a guest of GrantsMagic U and Instrumentl. It's normally thirty seven dollars for the video course. That link to enroll for free as a guest of GrantsMagic U and Instrumentl is going to be in the follow up email that Will sends out to you. So don't miss that opportunity. If you are really into learning more about the partnership mechanics, I think you really enjoy that program. And what I'm excited about right now is handing things over to Will because Will is coming up with three ways, I think maybe even more, that Instrumentl can support and help you in finding, creating, and sustaining quality partnerships. So this is the point where I get to say Will go ahead and take it over.
Will: Awesome. So thank you so much, Maryn. I'm going to quickly go over a few ideas that you guys can keep in mind as you're using Instrumentl as a high level overview. If you are not familiar with Instrumentl, we are the grant prospecting, tracking, and management platform that brings all your grant work into one place. Maryn has a link that we'll share at the end of this presentation if you haven't created your account. But the first topic I want to actually talk about was the earlier example of the literacy program in which you might be looking for grant opportunities just for your literacy program. And you might set up a project on Instrumentl where you've selected for things like the tutoring and mentoring side of things, the after school summer educational programs, as well as academic success, enrichment. And you might be thinking to yourself, well, this is it. Like I can't necessarily add in some church-related funders and things like that. But as Maryn mentioned, if you were to partner with somebody for a church-related project, you would be able to edit your project to then include that into your fields of work, which would expand your potential funders. So in this case, what you can see is my preliminary search is one hundred and sixty two results. But what you can actually do is you can actually go back into your edit project. And this time if we were partnering with a church, we might select, yes for faith-based organizations. And by doing that we could essentially include some faith-based and secular programs. Maybe it's related to Christianity and then we'd go ahead and select next. And that is going to open up the pool of funders as well. And maybe from that, there might be some new fields of work that you can also introduce. So that would be something to keep in mind as you are thinking about your projects and you're setting it up for potential partnerships, as you can always expand out the scope of your fields of work as you are setting up your grants searches. And for those of you that have never seen this panel before, essentially what we are doing at Instrumentl is that we're setting up a custom search for active grant opportunities that your nonprofit can potentially seek funding for. So from here, what we're going to do is we're going to go ahead and save and exit this. Maybe we'll even add in education and outreach into this program now or this project. And then when we click that save an exit button, what we'll end up doing is we'll end up filtering even further down for faith-based organizations. And that will cut things down even further, where if I were to even search for Christianity, for example, we might end up being able to find one that has that intersection of some of the things that we previously were doing in the literacy side of things, as well as the Christianity side of things with this church partnership.
The other idea in terms of using Instrumentl comes in the concept of looking at funder and recipient profiles to dig into key people, as well as to identify past awards received from different foundations as well as nonprofit organizations. So what you can do in Instrumentl is you can actually look up any funder or recipient by their EIN or by their name in the top left with the click find. And then what you can do is you can look in the section called Key People, and from here you can quickly identify who might be the important people that we need to potentially begin to establish relationships with, both at either a nonprofit that is receiving grants, as well as potential foundations, depending on where you're going with your partnerships. The other thing that I would recommend you do is in this section where you are in a recipient profile, there's something called past awards received. And this is really helpful because maybe you want to work your way back and look at prior funding history for another organization and see whether or not there are potential relationships that overlap with your existing funders so that you can potentially identify good fit partners to work with, as opposed to just somebody that's completely tangential to what your organization is working on. So I always recommend looking through the past awards received section because that can be a great way for you as well to really hammer down on that question of the alignment question that some people are bringing up as often being a challenge when it comes to finding the right partners.
The final thing that I would mention is when it comes to actually tracking and managing things, something that I would recommend you do is you make use of your task manager as well as uploading your existing trackers into Instrumentl by clicking the add new button and then clicking upload many. And the reason why you might want to do this is because, as some people were mentioning in the chat, how you renew partnerships, how you ensure that funders are continuing over multi-year horizons. A great way to do that in terms of the tracking side of things is in your Instrumentl tracker. And the reason why is because if you were to, for example, work on this fund or opportunity for twenty twenty one and you plan to do it for twenty twenty two, it's really easy to duplicate that instance in your grant tracker, which will save you the hassle of potentially your old school tracker where you're having to manually duplicate over rows in your Excel spreadsheet or whatever format that you're currently doing things. So the easy way to do this is if you already know that a partnership is going to continue as well with an existing funder, you can always just click the duplicate button and you can actually set that up multiple years in advance and essentially have that all ready to go. I can make this for twenty twenty three, in fact, and then just go ahead and set the submission goal to maybe twenty twenty three and maybe I'll do nine three zero nine zero three twenty twenty. I do it here. Twenty twenty three. And then save that. And when I do that, you'll see that the instance now shows for the next three years of planning in terms of all that grant management and tracking. And then the other thing you can do with your team, as well as because Instrumentl accounts do support more than one user, you can potentially bring in one of your partners and actually add them to your team and then assign different tasks for those partners as you are rolling through things. So those are just some of the many ways that you can potentially used Instrumentl as you are doing your due diligence and finding the right alignment to partners. And then from there, starting your actual work from a tactical level of applying the overview of what Maryn has covered today. Maryn, I'm going to pass it back to you to wrap things up and then we can open up the questions and go from there.
Maryn: Perfect. I wonder where I need to go now. Here I go. And I know that I was supposed to seamlessly go through these lines while you were doing that, but I couldn't figure out how to do it. So there we go. So just to wrap up, guys, we're just coming back again to our opening slide. Perspective is everything. I sincerely hope that something that I shared with you today has shifted your own perspective, opened up your own perspective, and given you some very powerful and specific tools, resources, and insights that you can take back to your own team, your own organization, your own leadership, and your own collaborators in the community to really leverage the power of partnership in your grants success.
Big takeaways today. You understand why I say partnering and collaboration is the single most powerful amplifier and accelerator of your grants success period. Partnership gets you started, keeps you going, gets you there faster, gets bigger than anything else I've ever taught in my twenty five plus years in the grants world. We've taken a good hard look at the competition myth, and I hope we begin to crack that open a little bit. For those of you whose organizations are sort of on the competition side of the poll that I shared, and take a look at what happens if we can just let go a little bit of thinking of grants seeking as a competitive process and open up to a more collaborative mindset. And then I gave you, as promised, five specific tactical strategies that you can start using right away to really powerfully leverage partnership in your own grants program. You don't need to wait a single minute to get that started. So in short, you now have new ideas, new perspectives and new resources to what? To inspire, facilitate, and lead collaborative efforts to support your grants success.\
So we're going to wrap up now. We're going to segue back over. Will has a couple of next steps for you and then we'll have a few minutes of Q&A. I will be here as long as well as willing to keep the room open for Q&A. But I wonder if you could just stop and chat in while we're making that segue. What's one simple action out of something that you heard today that you can do right away to give you a quick wind--help you build momentum in a powerful new direction? One simple thing, you don't need anybody else's permission for, one simple thing you can do right away. It could just be sign up for Maryn's Partnership RX. That would certainly be a simple thing, or it could be any of the things that Will is about to share with you right now as your next steps. So Will back to you.
Will: Awesome. So thank you so much, everybody, for attending live today. As promised, we have a raffle today for everybody that attended. All you need to do is click the link that's in the zoom chat right there. And it'll also be sent in the follow up message with the slides, as well as the link to enter the Partnership RX course. But essentially, all you need to do is start your Instrumentl trial with Maryn's link on the screen. It's Instrumentl dot com slash grants magic. And with that, you'll get a fourteen day trial. And what you can also do is you can complete your webinar feedback form. Let us know what you found most helpful or valuable on social media. And that is the third way that you can actually enter. And then what we'll do is we will announce the winner to the raffle on Monday, July twelfth. And if you're looking for what those prizes are, essentially what we are raffling away is two spots to Maryn's upcoming course. She only opens this a handful of times in the entire year. Correct me if I'm wrong. Once or twice, correct?
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Maryn: Twice. This is time number two. This is the last time for twenty twenty one.
Will: So this is the best time to enter that course for sure. You'll also obviously join our community in that process. And Instrumentl will also be raffling away one month's subscription to Instrumentl to a person that joins us. So that is it in terms of the raffle details. If you enjoyed this grant workshop, you'll love our next one. It's on getting stellar support letters for your grants on July twenty eighth at one p.m. You can register for that in our events calendar and then we're going to go ahead and open up to questions. I know we're going to run a little bit over than normal, but the first thing I want to cover, Maryn, is you mentioned how the overall--there was a ton of chat comments over the course of today that was talking about how messy and hard partnerships can be, but they're clearly worth it. So I know the how-to’s of collaboration are beyond the scope of what we're covering today, but do you have any top tips or resources that you can share to support people as they're starting to create and maintain these sorts of healthy and workable partnerships?
Maryn: Yeah, thank you for that. I so much do. And I'm glad sort of at the last minute I built the Partnership RX course into this offering for you, for those of you who really want to get going on this in a deeper way. And the biggest tip, and I saw this question come up in the chat as well, I'll just touch on it right now. The biggest tip is don't wait. Don't wait until you've got a grant proposal on the line. Don't wait until there's a deadline that you're working for. Open up the conversation with your prospective partners now. Start to do the scouting, the prospecting. Talk to the people that you're already working with in some way, shape, or form. Just let them know that you're looking for opportunities to potentially work together without having an agenda yet. Without even knowing what might come up. The most powerful partnerships that I've ever worked with--I've done it both ways. I'll put it that way. I have done it where you go, oh, my gosh, I'm being contracted by the community college system to put a federal grant proposal together. It's due in three weeks. A partnership is required. We have nothing. We've got to go from zero to sixty partnership and get that proposal in three weeks. I've done it that way. I call it the shotgun wedding. I do not recommend it. The most powerful way is to have the conversations, have the connections, and be engaging with other organizations on an ongoing basis so that if and when a specific opportunity does pop up, it will always have a time frame on it, but you won't be starting from zero. You'll be starting from wow, we've got a deep understanding with at least three other organizations of what we are all about and how we could potentially work together. Let's huddle up and see if this grant proposal would be a great opportunity for us to do exactly that. So that would be my number one tip, is don't wait to go shopping for partners when there is a grant proposal deadline looming. It's a relationship, right? The shotgun wedding is not optimal. It's stressful for everyone. So let's get to know each other. Let's work with each other and let's have those partnership conversations. Let's build, in other words, the mutual trust, respect, and understanding well ahead of the pressures that come with putting a grant proposal together myself.
Will: Awesome. And I know that we also went over that example of a nonprofit partnering with the church. We obviously showed that as well in Instrumentl. I'm wondering if you could say a little bit more in terms of how grant reviewers actually look at proposals, in terms of partnerships in general. Give a sense that grantmakers maybe prefer to fund partnership projects or how strong that preference might be.
Maryn: Yeah, you know, I grew up in the world of federal grants, and a lot of times partnerships were required. In the grant making that I do, I'm managing a stream of federal funding that comes through a state office, and it all goes out through my office. About a million and a half dollars a year goes out through my office in the form of competitive grants to the community. And the federal statutes designate specifically the kind of collaboration that every single project that those dollars fund need to have. So that was right up my alley. But so sometimes the partnership is mandated, OK, but not always. And I will tell you this, in my experience with all of the reviewers that I've worked with, I have yet to find one who says, you know, give me two proposals that are equally well qualified in every respect, except that one has a partnership and the other one doesn't. I will take the partnership one every single time. And if I said that backwards, let me clarify. I have yet to find one who doesn't choose the partnership, all other things being equal. Because why? Because it demonstrates that we're serious players in the grantsmanship game. We're not naive. We know the ecosystem. That's the important part. Funders know the ecosystem because they see proposals from the entire ecosystem. And if we want to really show up as serious players in the grantsmanship game, we need to demonstrate that we understand the ecosystem as well. And any proposal that comes across as we're the only ones in any way, shape, or form doesn't demonstrate that. So demonstrating that you know the other players is step one. Showing that you've got strong partnerships with some of those other players is step two. That really does uplevel it. And again, I have yet to see a single grant maker get grumpy that a proposal has a partnership, and unless that apparently is a slap together shotgun wedding kind of proposal in name only, because we're pretty sensitive to when that's coming through as well. I hope that helps. If it's an authentic partnership, it's never the wrong thing to do.
Will: Richard asked earlier, can you suggest strategies on timing for building the partnership. When the RFP is released is maybe six weeks before a deadline and so it can lead to it being a bit tight in terms of timeline for partnership exploration.
Maryn: Yeah, and that goes back. That's a great question. Thank you. That's a very real world question, because three six weeks can be kind of a long time frame. A lot of RFD, you don't find out until you've got three weeks left. And so, you know, in the way we teach things at GrantsMagic U, we always say, you know, when you see the RFP, that's not the time to start planning your program and that is not the time to start working on your partnerships. All of that groundwork needs to be done before you ever get the RFP. And that groundwork is the planning for the program, what we call a master proposal blueprint, which is what we teach you how to build in the ultimate grant proposal blueprint course from A to Z. But also, as I was saying earlier, having those conversations so that you're already connecting with other players in your ecosystem and you may not have a specific project put together yet, but when that RFP comes out, it's like you can get on the phone right away and say, hey, Margie, did you see this thing coming through from the ADA? What do you think? This looks like something that we might be able to work on. It's that much faster to get things up and running because the foundations of the relationship are already in place. And I actually had a process that I developed and designed to get from zero to sixty in three weeks flat in terms of large partnerships. It was a partnership meeting facilitation process. It was very specific at how to quickly get a large group of people who represent organizations, who maybe have never even worked together before, on the same page so we can move forward with planning beyond what I can share with you today. But you're making me think maybe I should bring that particular process out and maybe do a training around it.
Will: Yeah, Cheryl asked--so she mentioned that she's a grant consultant, so she often counsels clients and or employers on the importance of grant readiness with a lot of documentation. She was wondering if you could address the importance of readiness with respect to partnerships. And the reason why is because it typically takes two or three weeks at minimum to secure meaningful documentation to partnerships and then demonstrating leveraging strategic partnerships through LOIs for submission. And so she finds that in a very time sensitive situation to respond to funding opportunities, that it's not an ideal time to getting an introductory, getting to know each other, to learn each other's capabilities and whatnot, while also designing a collaborative program.
Maryn: Yes, exactly. So another affirmation from the field that the whole notion of wait until you get the RFP and then start hunting for your partners is not the strategy that we want. There's some very real and practical reasons that that just simply doesn't work. So I hope I've covered a lot of that for you, Cheryl, and I'm with you because most of my work in that area was also as a consultant. So I was working, you know, working through other agencies, multiple agencies. And I didn't always have complete control over how things moved forward, right? As grant writers, we seldom have complete control over how things move forward for sure. But where--let me see if I've got anything I can add to what I already shared about the grants readiness in particular. Thank you so much. You know, and let's just go back with that grants readiness idea to, I know we're always advising organizations who come to us as nonprofits. They're brand new and they say, how do I get grants ready? I don't know that we always talk about the possibility of tucking up under a more experienced partner as a way of ramping into grants world. All the things we have to do to become grants ready, oh, my gosh. Y'all need to join the GrantsMagic U community, because I've got another free webinar coming up next week that addresses the whole grants readiness question that I can't talk about it right now. I was like, oh, my head is just swimming with that whole idea.
One of the most important and powerful elements that we can share with our clients that are new to grants world is now's the time to start making those connections in the community, whether it's to look for a potential fiscal sponsor or whether it is to tuck up with an organization that's already got some experience as partners on a grant proposal, or whether it's just simply to get more exposure to how the more veteran organizations navigate grants world. That needs to be, I think that's a tremendously important part of sort of the orientation process, orientation to grants world. The realities of the grants world. There's grants readiness. That's sort of like what you pack to get started. It's like going to university for the first time. There's everything you pack to get there, but once you get there, it's like I need an orientation. And so the orientation process can certainly be let's spend time with other organizations and track what they're doing, benchmark what they're doing, maybe tag along with them or even tuck up under them if the opportunity presents itself. So it's a long term strategy. It's not a quick one and done. We're building over time for long term, sustainable, healthy partnerships and long term sustainable, healthy grant success.
Will: Sure. We’ll take two more questions today. One of them is from William, which is I'm going to reword the question a little bit, which is how would you partner with people who previously have maybe not wanted to partner with you? Or how would you reopen the door from another angle with respect to that?
Maryn: Wow, my gosh. How do you reconnect with somebody that broke up with you? I don't know. There are so many different ways to answer that question. So much has to do with thinking about the dynamics of why. And there are so many reasons why. A lot of them can have to do with the individuals that were involved. It just wasn't the right chemistry between the individuals. And partnerships are never with organizations, partnerships are always with the individuals who represent those organizations. So I think some some internal examination first and just asking some questions of the people that were part of that is saying, can we get some insight as to why this partnership, you know, didn't move forward or why we weren't able to get traction on this partnership and see if we can back up a ways and take a run at it from a different direction. There's so many reasons that that could have happened. And I cover a ton of them in our Partnership RX course of why partnerships go wrong and what we can do about that. But, you know, you can always start over again and you can always explore from a perspective of building mutual trust, respect, and understanding. And it's possible that somebody violated a trust or somebody busted a boundary or somebody failed an expectation. You know, all those kinds of people issues. It could have been something structural with the way the partnership was organized. It could have had to do with the flow of communication, just 100 different reasons. And I can't say why or what to do other than to say back up, take a look at it. If there are amends to be made, if there are bridges that need to be rebuilt, if it looks like it's a valuable potential partnership, spend time on the relationship versus spending time on, you know, sometimes when we get where it's like, OK, you are one of my tactics. You are a lever that I need to pull and a button that I need to push in order to get this grant. Nobody wants to be a lever or a button. We all want to be part of a relationship. So if there's been that kind of manipulative energy around it, you might need to back up and do some bridge building around the relationship piece of it. I don't honestly know but it's a wonderful question to be investigating, isn't it?
Will: Sure. And then Richard asked are funders increasing the amount of grant awards to cover both partners.
Maryn: As a generic answer to the question, I would say I don't know. I do know for sure that some funders do. I have been definitely involved in grant proposals to funders that when they see the partnership, they come back and say, we're going to give you more money. And of course, your proposal needs to include everything that's required to support all of the partners. So don't ever pare back your proposal and try to, you know, try to jam more partners in than the resources the proposal will support. Because one of the ways that partnerships fall apart is when one partner simply doesn't get the resources they need to support their participation going forward. So every grant proposal needs to be that recipe. We looked at the chocolate chip cookie recipe. Every grant proposal needs to be the recipe that supports all of the elements, all of the partners and the work that they're doing that I have definitely seen. There are funders who will specifically, they'll even say, you know, up to ten thousand dollars for a single organization. But, man, if you've got a partnership, we'll award twenty five thousand, maybe even thirty thousand. It's rare. It's not common. But that does show you the way that some funders are thinking about really wanting to support collaborations. And that was actually a strategy I took in my own grant making where we would make much larger awards. Our awards were one hundred thousand to three hundred thousand dollars each large institutional awards, and we would always reserve the higher dollar awards for partnerships.
Will: Awesome, well that will wrap up our Q&A for today. Two final reminders, you're going to get a follow up email with the recording, the slides, the invitation to Partnership RX, as well as everything else you need to enter the raffle shortly after this, and also join us for our next workshop at the final week of July. You can check out our events calendar for that as well, and feel free to bring a friend as well. All right. Take it easy. Bye now.
Maryn: Thanks Will. Thanks, everybody. Bye bye.
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