Rachel: Awesome. I'm going to go ahead and get us started so that we can get on with our busy Thursdays. Thanks again for being here. I'm going to go ahead and end our intro poll and move us along to our next section here.
Hi, Paul. Good to see you. Thanks for continuing to introduce yourself in the chat. Today, we are talking about The Mysterious Thunder: How to Decode 990s with 7 Expert Tricks.
I definitely see some familiar faces and names in the Zoom room. Thanks so much for being here today. For any of our first-timers, this free grant workshop is one of our Instrumentl educational webinars in our grant seeker growth course. So the intention here is that you'll have kind of an educational session over the next 55 minutes, which I'll talk a little bit more about in just a second.
For those of you who are new to Instrumentl, we're the most loved all-in-one grants platform for grant tracking, management and prospecting. And we currently help almost 4,000 nonprofits and grant consultants save time in finding and applying for more grants.
I think many of you know who I am by this point. But just in case you're new here, my name is Rachel. I'm the events and community manager at Instrumentl. And my job is to develop helpful and educational events for our grant seeker community, just like this one. I have a decade plus of experience in the informal education field. Most recently at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. So I have about a decade plus of experience in museums and cultural centers and I'm based in Los Angeles California.
Some quick FYI for folks to prepare themselves for today. I mentioned that this event is about an hour long, and it's going to be an instructional course. So we'll have some individual work time that I will kind of point out as we go through the program today. And I'll encourage a lot of peer-to-peer dialogue.
We love to use the chat in our Instrumentl program. So as those of you who are familiar, please feel free to drop in your thoughts, your reactions, your feelings, your challenges, your wins, all the things that help make our grantseeking community so special. We'll use that to help inform each other and learn from each other as we go through this program today.
This workshop is being recorded and slides are being shared. So take a look for your inbox, you know, after the program. about 24 hours to 48 hours after the program. I know we're all super busy. So honor your personal needs, bring those snacks, bring your water, whatever you might need in order to enjoy the program today. But don't miss the chance to win. Make sure you're back in your seats. I'll go through a little of a way we can do a raffle today. And we've got our closed captions on, so you can toggle those on in your own Zoom settings on your computer.
Okay. So as a reminder of what we'll leave this workshop with today, we've got a customized course workbook for you. I'm going to drop that link in the chat one more time for anyone that joined us a little bit late here. I'll drop that there. This is designed to help and you brainstorm and document specific takeaways for today. So I've arranged it so that you can walk away with some practical tips to take back to your leadership or your organization. You'll also have access to our events resources page.
Those of you who have done events with us before know the drill. But this is a special page where I compile all of the information that we've gone over during the session today, including links, the chat box in its entirety so you can review the transcript if there's anything in there that you really want to get back to and take a look at. So bookmark this page. Currently, it's going to have a lot of blank spaces. And I'll go back in after our event today and fill it in with all the cool things we learned from each other.
And lastly, we're talking about 990s today. So we're going to walk away with some highlights of 990s and some easy to use insights. So I'm going to give you some access to some of the best resources for digging deep around 990s in addition to just covering some of the kind of initial content that we want to know about our 990 forms.
Hey, Rachel, good to see you again. Okay. Cool. So with all those details out of the way. I'm really excited to kind of get you on board here and talk a little bit about where we're headed with this program. Today, we're going to start with a kind of general blanket understanding of what form 990s entail and some of the important features of them. Some of this might be more familiar to our experts in the room.
I saw we have a couple experts who are here. So some of that might be a refresher, but there might be some things that we need, some quick reminders of those 990 forms are quite dense. So we'll talk a little bit about some of the highlights there. We'll also do a funder analysis with a case study that I've set up for us all to review today. We'll do some of our own funder research.
And then I have got some expert tips to leave us with, some ideas for using 990s that you may have not heard of before, something to give you some little extra kind of Easter eggs in the 990s that you might find compelling. And we'll wrap up with a Q&A and general reflection of our time together today.
As a reminder, this course is CFRE certified. So if you are already certified or interested in getting certified for CRE, you can use this course towards your points for initial certification or recertification. So when you submit the feedback form at the end, that basically just means you've done the course, you've gone through the entire hour with us and you've earned one point.
You can submit those points to CFRE directly and they will be able to track your certifications there. Plus, if you submit your feedback form at the end, I'm running a little raffle where you could win a $50 gift card to bookshop.org. So you might be interested in diving deep on some grant writing resources, or you might have some personal reading goals for the year.
I know we're in June now and I'm a little behind on my yearly reading goal. So I could use a gift card like this. But I'll be raffling that off as well. So please do share your feedback at the end of the program. You can also earn raffle entries by sharing your learning on LinkedIn.
You can tag Instrumentl. If you include the #GrantseekerGrowth, that's just a way for me to track engagement with the specific course and see who's getting a lot out of their learnings from these programs. So I really appreciate seeing all those fun tidbits on LinkedIn. Thanks to those who have shared. Lastly, I'll do a little post event session. So if you have questions, if you're like, "Rachel, that was a lot or I need more information on something."
I'll stick around and you can ask questions to me as we go through the program. If you have thoughts that are kind of bubbling up for you that you want to save for the end, drop those down in your workbook, and I'm happy to go over those during my office hours.
Okay. I had a lot of housekeeping to get through. So let's get to the actual meat of our program today. I want to start us off with maybe a bit of a tricky question. But I'm curious to hear from you all. 990s, right? They're quite a beast to bear sometimes. And I'm curious to hear from the group in the room, what's the biggest challenge that you faced when reviewing form 990s? I have a couple of ideas here. So you need to pick one, which might be a little tricky, I admit. But I hope you can kind of narrow down what's your biggest challenge when you are reviewing form 990s? Is it interpreting financial data correctly? Identifying the most relevant information? Or maybe you're feeling a bit of data overload when you're looking at these forms.
Actually, finding the form 990 for a particular funder, connecting your insights that you find from the form 990 with your grant strategy or something else, share in the chat. I love to hear what other folks are experiencing so that we can reflect together. I will give folks a few moments to think about it, answer their thoughts. I see a lot of participants answering our poll and some great comments coming into the chat that I'll read aloud in just a sec.
Awesome. I'll let some folks continue to add in some poll responses here. A few folks shared some tidbits in the chat. Lee was saying they're often missing vital information. And Cindy said the 990s are often outdated with a lot of emojis coming in there. I love when people react and kind of add their thoughts here too.
So it sounds like this is a common problem across our grantseeking community. Kia was saying, "It's disappointing when previous grantees are not listed." Yeah, that can absolutely be kind of a hit or miss when it comes to 990s. Yeah, Annie is reflecting on a similar thing. Same with Monica and Michael. Don't worry, Victoria, we'll get to that in just a second. For some of our newbies who are not as familiar with form 990s, we'll talk a little bit about what those are.
But I'm going to go ahead and end our poll and share our results so we can learn from each other and see what challenges we're facing with 990s. Okay. So it looks like our winner by quite a bit, almost half of you, said that identifying the most relevant information, slash, feeling that sense of data overload is the biggest challenge we face when we're reviewing form 990s. I think that is something that many of us could struggle with, even some of our expert 990 reviewers in the room. There's a lot of info on there. And it's not always consistent funder to funder, right? Kind of a tie for second place here. We've got interpreting the financial data correctly.
For some of us that may be not as familiar with reviewing financial data to this kind of level of detail, this might be a bit of a challenge to review. And we've got kind of the connecting your insights into the grant strategy. So thinking about what information is actually relevant in the 990 and then how we're using that to inform which grants we want to go for.
And then a couple folks said that actually finding the 990 form, that seems to not be as big of a challenge for some folks. And then we got other folks sharing ideas in the chat. I will definitely copy and paste everything that's coming in from the chat so folks can review that also after the event.
Okay. Thank you for sharing those insights, folks.
Let's think about how we can maybe approach some of these challenges that we're facing with 990 evaluation today and see how we can overcome some of those challenges together. I want to start from just the basics, right?
Let's understand what the form 990s are, and we're going to start with a definition here. So the form 990 is going to be an annual information return that all tax exempt organizations in the United States must file with the Internal Revenue Service, the IRS, right?
So this form is mandatory for any nonprofit organizations with annual revenues of $200,000 or more, or with assets totaling $500,000 or more. This document is going to provide a comprehensive overview of the organization's financial status, their governance, and activities over the prior year, if we are getting all that information right. Sometimes we're seeing that. Maybe not all of that is included in there.
This form is publicly available making it a really valuable resource for grant seekers. And so, there are a few other versions of the form 990. Some of you might have heard of the 990 EZ, the 990(n). It's also referred to as the e-postcard. And the 990 PF.
I'm not going to focus on those three today. I'm just going to focus on the general form 990. But if you hear those terms and you want to do a little more digging, maybe they apply to your situation or something that you'd like to look into more if you're an expert reviewer here. I have put in a couple of recommended resources in your workbook that do define those terms a little more clearly. I put a little sparkle with our form 990 today because -- well, this seems like maybe -- might be a dry topic.
I think that we can find a lot of little treasures in our form 990s. So we're going to kind of make it shiny, make it fun. I want to also remind us of who fills out those form 990s, right? So the IRS is mandating that most tax exempt organizations must file the form 990 annually. So here are the main types of organizations that are going to be required to file. These are any nonprofit organizations that include public charities and private foundations. And these are 501(c)(3), (c)(4), or (c)(6) organizations. So you might have some of those even apply to your organizations that you are representing today as well.
A little pop quiz for some of you that might already be familiar with 990s, who is not required to fill out form 990s? Does anyone have any ideas? You can share your thoughts in the chat. Yeah, we've got churches. So religious organizations. Packs. Absolutely.
For profit organizations. That's right, Caley. And I have a little caveat there that I'll explain in just a second. Yeah, corporations and for profit entities. Lisa and Arnold have got it. Actually, Catherine 501 C4s are required, but it does depend on a budget requirement. So as a reminder for folks, if you're like, "Why isn't this 990 available to me? I don't quite understand." These are organizations that are not required to fill out 990 forms. That includes internationally based organizations and entities for profit entities or corporations.
Now, I'll caveat that this does not include foundations formed under for-profit entities. So an example would be Walmart versus the Walmart Foundation, right? The foundation is going to be required to fill out and submit a form 990. Walmart would not. Almost every government entity, including university, state, local government, federal government. That's why you won't necessarily see those insights when you're looking for kind of some of the narrowed down details for some of those government or federal grants. Organizations that are at 500k or less in gross receipts, they're going to fill out something else. So you might have some of those examples that you've been familiar with in the past.
In addition, some associations and societies or some subsidiaries of larger nonprofits. So an example might be United Way Chapters, Girl Scout Chapters. They're not necessarily required to fill out the form 990s as well. So again, some of this might even apply to the organizations that are in this room right now because you are going to be filling out 990s as well. But this also applies for our funders. So I want to make sure that's super clear when we're looking at foundations where we're going to find these 990s and when we won't find them.
Yeah. Annie, that's true. I think that some specific chapters maybe. I don't know about the size of chapters. You might have more insight there as I see you're from United Way. So why are form 990s important?
We want to look at what the basis of these are and why they're relevant to the funders that we're pursuing. So first off we're going to look at the transparency and accountability, right? So form 990 is going to ensure that there is transparency and accountability for nonprofits allowing the stakeholders, including potential donors and grant makers who might be interested in funding your organization if you're submitting your 990 to assess the organization's operations and financial health.
And you can do the same with foundations that you're looking into as well. This is also a way to see the financial health assessment of an organization. So it's going to provide detailed info about an organization's revenue, expenses, assets and liabilities. And it's going to help you gauge the financial stability of a potential grant recipient or partner or funder as well. We've got program insights. So you might be able to see a description of the organization's major programs and accomplishments offering insights into their impact and alignment with your funding opportunities and priorities, which we might -- we're going to dive in a little deeper on today so we can make sure those program insights are actually aligning with our strategy here.
And lastly, one of the key aspects of the 990 is going to be the governance and policies. So we're going to see information about the organization's governance, their board members, and key employees. This can help us navigate maybe potential connections that we have with the organization, and also assess their management and leadership structure for the organization too. So, what's in a form 990? There is a lot. There's a lot in there.
And typically, it's divided into these 12 different parts with 16 different subsections. It's going to include information that is included, but not limited to things like the organization's mission, their use of resources, their programs, their accomplishments, their personnel, where their funds might be going. So the 990 is really can -- you know, can be this treasure trove of information. But it's essential to know what to look for and where to find it.
So in the next couple sections, I'm going to do a little in-depth look at some of the more critical line items in the form 990. I'm not going to go through every single line item here. That would honestly be a little bit of a drag and not super helpful. But I am going to highlight a few critical elements. So one of the highlights in the form 990 is who's on their board. So in part eight, you're going to find a listing of foundation trustees. The average amount of time they spend each week on the foundation-related activities and compensation, if any, they're receiving for serving on the foundation's board.
So you'll definitely want to review this list and identify any connections your nonprofit might have. There are opportunities to share this with leadership and see if there are networking opportunities that can help personalize your request for funding and ensure your proposal gets seen by their board. This is also a helpful way if your request doesn't necessarily indicate who your proposal should be addressed to. You could also look into this key people list here on the form 990 and see who might be the president of the board, someone that you might want to address your proposal to make it more personal. So they also will include usually their mission and projects they support.
So what kinds of programs or services they're awarding grants to and how it might align with their mission. So this part of the form is going to provide a quick snapshot of the organization's operations and financial health. Also, just a good starting point for understanding the 990 form kind of what they are giving currently.
If their past grantees are listed and there are some caveats that I'll talk about in a bit that include why they may not have past grantees listed. This list of recipients can also provide leads on potential partners who have successfully secured funding from this organization, right? So you might use that to do some matchmaking and see if those organizations align with your mission and can elevate that in your proposal. They will also include the size of grant awards. This will help you know if this particular funder is worth pursuing.
So grant ranges will identify the range and amount of grants provided allowing you to gauge whether your funding needs align with what the organization typically funds. And you'll also be able to understand a little bit more about their funding priorities. So that can hopefully help you tailor your proposals accordingly.
If you're seeing that most of their award sizes are $5,000 and you're looking for a $100,000 funding opportunity, this might not be the best fit for right now, or it might apply to a different program you're looking funding for. You'll also be able to see locations of past grantees if those grantees are listed the specific geographic locations, will also help you see if they're giving in your area. And that can depend on if it's a nationally based organization that's providing services across the country or if they're providing local services or local support for foundations that are -- or organizations that are located in your region. So you can do a little digging there.
And lastly, one of the most important highlights I think is openness new grantees. To see whether or not you kind of have a chance with this funder, you can look back across years of 990s to assess if they are generally giving to recurring grantees year over year, or if they tend to be adding in a certain percentage of new grantees. And I'll talk a little bit about how we calculate that and how you might want to approach that when you're determining if a grant is a go or no go for yourself.
So I'm curious just as a sense from everybody in the room. I know there's a lot of info here and you might be using all of the information I just shared in order to determine which is a good fit funder for you. But if you could narrow it down to the most valuable information that you find from 990s or research that you're doing on the funder, what would that be like for you and your organization?
I have quite a few options here. So it might be the type of grants awarded, the average grant range and size. And I'll launch this poll so folks can respond here. Geographic focus of grant making, the list of past grantees, the missions and value statements that they may include, the names of those key staff and board members, or maybe it's something else. And you can share that in the chat. I already see some ideas here. Oh, yeah, this is great.
So Chris is saying whether they are invitations- only, yes. That is also indicated in the 990. That's a great little insight there too. Karen says, "The chance of winning the grant." Yeah. Dean says "Listed pastor grantees." And so does Katherine. Same with Celia.
Awesome. I'll give folks another moment because this is hard to narrow down. I know. But I'm curious to hear from you all, what information do you find is most valuable when you're determining if you're going to move forward with a funder? Tiffany says all the above. Plus, what Chris said. Yeah. Absolutely.
Beth has some good insight here as folks finish their poll responses who they have funded and the level. This gives me an idea of what to ask for. Sometimes it appears very different from what they have on their website. That's absolutely true.
It's going to give you a level of detail that they might not be highlighting in uh other public information that you might have access to. So going in deep on those details can help you get a real sense of who and how they're funding.
Awesome. I'm going to end this poll and the results. It looks like it's spread kind of across a couple of key valuable info insights. But the two that are tied for first is the types of grants awarded and the list of past grantees. Yeah, those are going to be super valuable. And we'll explain a little bit more about what we want to kind of pull out of that information as we move forward here. But these are great insights and I love hearing some of the additional kind of lessons learned that are happening in the chat.
So I want to take us through a quick little funder analysis. I've done a case study example. And for folks that have been in a program with me before, you'll recognize this example, this is a museum that I have created that I have generated for a historical museum in my neighborhood. And what I'm going to do first is I'm going to explain the background of the funding project I'm working on so we can get a little bit of context for this organization and what funding they're looking for.
And then we're going to take a look at a real funder's 990. I'm going to go through some of the key aspects of valuable information that we want to have a sense of, what we want to understand about the funder from the 990, and we're going to determine if this grant is -- or I'm sorry, this funding opportunity is kind of a go or no go based on those parameters. So you all ready to do a little case study? We'll dive in and look at this example together.
Okay. So my example here is going to be the Highland Park History Museum to give you some background context on this organization so that we can best decide if this funder that I'm going to dive in on you with is a good fit. I've got my mission statement here. The mission of this museum is to empower community to connect with a rich local heritage. They also have engaging exhibits for education and accessible archives both for the public and for researchers.
The funding goal, the specific funding goal that have identified for this example, which I will invite you all to do as well in your workbooks coming up is thinking about building out a museum education program with a goal of funds raised of $50,000 for this program to cover expenses. I've identified this specific program or project like I mentioned. And so, the funding needs for this are this museum education program. I've identified the specific needs of that program.
So here, I've clarified that we need funding to support curriculum development evaluation with pilot student groups and training for staff. So I might be looking for specific grant types based on those parameters there. And then the ideal funder profile that I'm looking for. So I've brainstormed a little bit about who might be the best fit for this type of funding. I'm looking for grants for arts and culture organizations or museums or informal education, right? I'm looking for funders who are giving in California and even better maybe they're giving in Los Angeles specifically.
Oh, thanks, Catherine.
And lastly, I want to make sure the funders have focus, maybe their values mention things like education, community, or history. So we're going to dive a little bit in on this today. We're going to look at a foundation that I have found. This is a real foundation called The Max and Victoria Dreyfus Foundation. And I want us to look at a couple of different categories. These are some of the key highlights of the 990 that I want to evaluate with us today. So we're going to go through these together. And what I'm going to invite us to do at the next stage is we're going to actually look through our workbook.
But before we get there, I want to actually take a look at their 990 together. So let's do this. This is my first time doing this live. So let's see how this goes. Okay. So I'm in Instrumentl right now. This is actually -- I've set up a search for my history education program. So actually, one of the grants that was matched with me was the Max and Victoria Dreyfus Foundation Grant.
It was over here in my matches tab, and I added it to my tracker because it aligned really well, I thought with my parameters here. But I want us to assess that based on the 990. So I click here and I'm going to go ahead and take a quick look at the funder profile. And I want to make sure before I move forward, can everyone see my screen? They can see the Instrumentl funder profile here.
Okay. Cool. Just want to make sure it wasn't my slides. And then you'd be like, "What is happening over there?" Okay. So I can take a look at the funder profile. Now, I'll show you how Instrumentl breaks out this information in a bit. But what I actually want to do is look at the 990 with you all. So you can see here we have 990 forms as PDFs.
I'm going to open up 2022s because that's the latest tax year that we have access to. We'll have 2023s probably coming up pretty soon. But this is going to be a rendering, an e-file rendering of the 990 form. So in Instrumentl, we're literally pulling the exact information that the IRS provides and directly inputting it into the Instrumentl portal and take a look at a couple of key things in here. So you can see on this first page, this is going to be that summary of the organization. Some of you who are familiar with 990s probably have seen this a million times. Some of the things I want to take a look for here, I'm going to scroll down.
We're looking for some of the key categories that I wanted to highlight today. One of them being key people. So if you look at part seven here, you're going to actually see the list of officers, directors, trustees, foundation managers and their compensation. So I want to take a quick look at some of these key people. We've got Mary Surrey, Elizabeth Brown. And for some context for this case study, I'm going to say that we actually shared already this key list with our executive director. And they actually have a potential connection to the vice president, Elizabeth Brown. So that's a cool neat connection for my case study organization for the Highland Park History Museum.
We've looked through and seen this key person here. We also want to take a look at the projects they're currently supporting. So I'm going to scroll down here. We're going to skip through some of the nitty-gritty here and we're going to take a look at the grants and contributions paid during the year or approved for future payment.
This is going to be where we get into a lot of the nitty-gritty of the past grantees. Oh, yeah. I can magnify. Thank you for asking. Is that better? Yeah. I didn't realize how small these words would be. So here you can take a look at the grants that have been awarded. So this is going to give me a lot of insight into who the foundation is currently awarding grants to and if they might align with my organization. So it looks like from a quick perusal here and I've done some review of these organizations, that many of their past grants, I can actually look and see what the purpose of the grant or contribution was. And I can see that many of them included general operating support, or things like program support, or even.
I'm going to scroll down till I can find it here. I think there was cultural grant support here as well that I specifically kind of highlighted. Yeah. All the way down here, cultural programming. So all of this would align with something that my history museum might be looking for, right? There's also I noticed a significant number of past grantees that are in arts and culture organization. Again, aligning with my funding priorities when I kind of set up my initial brainstorm here.
Additionally, I can also take a quick peek at the size of grants awarded. You'll notice in this last column here that all of these are indicating the award amounts, right? When I did a quick appraisal, you could actually -- if you wanted to get really wild, you could copy and paste this information. I could literally copy this table and place it into chat GPT and ask them to average out the amounts for me if you didn't want to be doing that work manually. But I went through and I kind of looked and scanned and said, "Okay. It looks like the average is around 8 to 10K-ish when I was going kind of scrolling through the amounts. So it's lower than the requested program support I was looking for. I initially drafted that $50,000 request.
But maybe I've set a minimum for myself as the grant writing for my organization and said, "I'll apply to anything over 5K," right? Maybe that's my parameter for whether or not this grant will be a go or no go. The second to last thing is looking at locations of grantees. So I went ahead and actually looked at how many were located in California because I was specifically looking for funders here. So I did kind of a search and find here on California or Los Angeles-related grantees, which also helped me identify if they were giving funding in California. It looks like they were. My last thing here is the openness to new grantees.
Now, this might take a little bit of math and a little bit of digging. But I can go back to the different 990 forms, all the way. And Instrumentl has them all the way through 2009 for this particular foundation. And I can look back and see how many of the organizations were consistent year over year, or which new ones were going to be added over time.
So this is going to give me insight. It looks like they have actually steadily increased their percentage of new grantees so that gave me a good sense that they might be a good fit funder for me. So I'm going to scroll back over here and I want us to -- I just did kind a really brief overview of that 990.
I want us each to go into our workbooks I'll drop that link in the chat again. And if you notice on page four of your workbook, you have an opportunity to score that example. So I've written down in the notes section. I wrote down everything I just said verbally basically that kind of where this organization is at with this funder. The assessment that they did. I'll drop that in the chat.
And, yes, Steve, I see your question. I will definitely take a closer look at that. And I want you all to take a couple moments here on page four, and I have a column on the right-hand side. You can see right here. That I'm calling a point. You can basically just be checking off this box if you feel like the example funder that I showed you matches kind of the needs that I specifically set for this funding project example. And then you can score that at the bottom here.
So we're going to have one, two, three, four, five, six. We want to see if we can get to a six out of six. But maybe we'll see what we get to. So I'd be curious if everyone spends 20 seconds or so scoring this example in their workbook. And let me know what your score is in the chat. That's how I'll know we're ready to move on.
As a reminder for folks who haven't opened up their workbook yet, it's going to be this link here. We're scrolling down to page four. We're looking through and seeing if this example funder that I shared matches the parameters of the case study that I've set up for us.
Yeah. I'm seeing kind of like some fives, some sixes. Yeah. A five. Yep. And that I'll keep track of your question and we'll get to it when we get to our Q&A. Thank you for asking that. Yeah. Arnold, the way I've set this up is essentially to kind of break out some category of key highlights of the 990.
And then when I was thinking about from the context of that organization I had set up the example for, I jotted down some notes and then determined if whether or not kind of this felt like I was meeting that category maybe it felt compelling in order to apply. Yeah.
Okay. Great. I'm seeing lots of scores come through. If folks have thoughts, you know, were there any categories where you were like, "Mmm. I'm not really sure actually if this is a good fit," or something that maybe didn't quite align but you thought kind of maybe we're thinking on a little bit more. Any other kind of insights that came up? Yeah. Bob, I see your question.
So the openness to new grantees, that's actually going to be based on other years of IRS 990 filings. So you're going to have to be going through and looking for consistency across year over year. I'll show you how to make that a little easier on yourself. But for that example, you'd have to be going back and looking through the 980 forms from other years to get a sense of -- if they're funding the same organizations over and over again.
Awesome. So we had a lot of information in here. But it was definitely a lot to tackle, right? And I want us to think about how we might approach this for ourselves when we're looking through our own 990s.
And I want to give us all a chance to apply some of these lessons that I just talked about with our own organizations. So I want to start. Let's get into a little bit of the brain space where we're brainstorming a little bit about our organizations and what funding projects we might be working directly on right now so that we can help find our best fit funders.
First, I want to talk a little bit about where are you finding information form about form 990s right now? Where are you accessing that? How are you diving deeper on some of the funder information? Oh, yep, Annie's got Grantmakers IO. Christine is using Instrumentl. GuideStar, yes. Absolutely. Dean's using a Google Search. Elizabeth says Foundation Directory and ProPublica. Yes. Absolutely. Yeah, GuideStar, 100%. Instrumentl. Going to the funder's website. Yes, Monica, that's a great shout out. Funders will sometimes list their 990s right on their website. Yep, Candid as well. Yes, and a Google Search of 990. 100%. Yeah.
So there's a lot of different sources for that. Finding this info can be a little challenging. I sometimes when I'm looking at 990s, I look like this because there's a lot of info. And as we've mentioned in the chat, there are some challenges in finding all of this information.
Where you can find this information? A lot of them were mentioned in the chat already. I'm probably biased. But I think one of the easiest ways is Instrumentl. And I'll show you how you can in a little bit deeper on that if you're curious to see how easy it is. Some alternatives here we're going to include the IRS website.
So you can actually use the IRS exempt organizations select check tool. So this tool is going to allow you to search for those tax exempt organizations and view their form 990 filings. You can also do bulk data downloads from the IRS which can be useful maybe for those larger scale research projects if you have a team of folks who are supporting you on doing some deep dives on funders.
You can also be using GuideStar. So you can create an account to access kind of the basic information and subscribe for more detailed reports there. There's also Foundation Center. That's going to be subscription-based as well. And ProPublica mentioned, some of the folks in this room mentioned this as well. I'm just looking at the chat to make sure I'm not missing any questions here. Yes. For the question about, isn't there a place where they indicate if they take unsolicited requests? Yes, there is a box that you can look at on the form 990 that will indicate whether or not they take unsolicited requests or not.
So in order to make sure that everyone can leave with kind of a quicker overview, maybe an easy insights way to get into your 990 highlights. I'm going to show you how fun it can be. And some of you might already have access ACC to Instrumentl, and you can take a look at that. If you're curious to explore a little bit more, you can actually access that with the special link I'm going to drop in the chat. This link is just for this event. So it's going to give you a -- kind of a like a speed run through. You won't have to wait and schedule any meetings with folks at Instrumentl, you can jump right into creating your first project and finding funders right away.
So when you click that link for those of you who haven't tried Instrumentl before, they'll ask you to fill out your information first. And so, you'll start with quick trial fill out and then it will have you go into your project creation. So for folks that are already in Instrumentl, you can go ahead and open up your account. For folks that are filling out your info, you can do so just like I'm doing right here. Super simple stuff.
I've set up this example to be for the Highland Park History Museum so we can kind of follow along on that case study and see how it might apply in Instrumentl. You're going to indicate what type of organization you are, the organization name. And it should actually match you up if you already -- if you are kind of filling out your organization name, you'd be able to fill it out right there and it'll auto match you. And your organizational revenue, your 501c3 status, and how many grants you've won in the past year. By clicking that, you'll be able to start right away. It'll jump you into this screen, as I mentioned since we're in this special event right now.
You can make a call, a strategy call scheduled with one of our grant advisors. But if you want to just jump ahead, you can click skip down here at the bottom. And everyone should be on this page if you're filling this out for the first time. Oh, that's a great question. If you've done a trial before and you want to get back in for a few days of access, all I ask is that you drop your email that you use to sign up for Instrumentl in the chat.
You can direct message it to me if you don't want to have that out to the public across this room, and I will go in the back end of Instrumentl and give you a couple more days of access. I will caveat though. I will probably need to do that right after this event end so that I can make sure everyone else can move forward with their accounts. So for folks that haven't filled out a project before, this will prompt you to do your first project fill out.
Thanks, Melissa. I see your message. You'll be setting up your project based on the funding parameters that you're looking for. So I'll be able to select where my funding or organization is located. The fiscal year that we follow. And then I'll get into the specifics of the project. This is going to help Instrumentl's matching algorithm, basically assess all of the information that we get from those form 990s and match them to your specific funding project.
So for this example, I'm looking for funding for that history education program. I'll fill out information about the applicant type. I'm also, for this example, maybe going to work with a school. So I've indicated that I might be interested in seeing grants for schools as well. For this example, I'm not a faith-based organization.
But if you are, you can indicate that here. And I'll indicate where the project location is being served. So for this example, it's in Los Angeles County as I mentioned. You could also share that you're national in scope and look for funders that are providing funding nationally.
Awesome, folks. And I just want to call out that I see folks messaging me in the chat and I've got you all on my list. So no worries, I will get to you as soon as I can there.
One of the most important things here is your field of work. These are going to be the parameters that again set up your search for funding. So for this example, I'm looking for arts and culture funding opportunities for museum and cultural institutions and youth involvement in the arts. This will just help me narrow down based on funders NTEE codes and there are other past grantees making sure that there's alignment there when Instrumentl is pulling my grants for me.
The last couple questions it's going to ask here is the size of grants I'm looking for, how I'm using those funds. So this is going to be those grant types that we were talking about earlier and the types of funders we want to see grants from. And once I've done that, the last step here it's going to ask me if I want to invite anyone from my team. You can absolutely do that right now if you want or you can skip that and come back to it later and Instrumentl is going to automatically start pulling in grants for me.
So I'm going to be able to see -- this example it found 316 grants across three different kind of funder types. And I was able to dive in a little bit deeper and look at a particular funder. So I'm going to pause for a second. I know that was a quick, quick, quick overview.
For those of you who are may be trying Instrumentl for the first time, it might take you a second to get those funding parameters set up. For those of you who are already users, give me a little thumbs up in the chat if you're ready for me to move on. And I'll talk a little bit about how some of those funder insights can be kind of highlighted in Instrumentl here.
Awesome. Getting some thumbs ups. Thanks, folks. Okay. Great. Feel free to continue noodling on your project. If you are creating it for the first time, you can always go back and edit it later. I know some folks have talked about kind of needing to reassess some of the parameters that they set up in their project from its initial creation. So you can always do that afterwards if you want to kind of come back to it.
So I'm going to go through the key info for the funders of one of my matches. This is the one that we took a look at and we actually looked at the form 990. But I want to show you how Instrumentls database essentially kind of highlights that information for me.
So as mentioned, this grant opportunity came up in my matches. I'm able to see the fields of work that I indicated when I was setting up my project. And it's gone ahead and match some of those to the alignment of my funding project. It's also going to give me a little snapshot of the 990. It's going to give me an overview from the foundation's website and information about eligibility for this particular grant. I can dive in a little deeper with the funder insights page.
So this is going to give me basically everything that's pulled from the 990 in one easy to read place. Again, take a look. You've got those key people. Remember, I mentioned that we had that connection in this history museum to the Vice President Elizabeth Brown, right? So we've got those key people listed here.
It's also breaking out the given year over year so we can see the total assets of the organization and their averages and medians on that. It's also taking all of the information from all the 911 grants that were rewarded for past -- the past three years and giving me a median of the grant amount, which is helpful to just get a sense of if it's aligned with my funding priorities. Here's where they're basically compiling information about where the past grantees are located And actually, you can see -- oops, I jumped back.
Here's that list. There we go. Here's that list of past grantees that is actually pulled directly from the 990s. So you can see those below. And I can do a little more digging. I can see the amounts listed there. And I can see some key info about where they're located. This is probably one of my favorite features is the openness to new grantees because it takes a lot of manual work to be going back through all the 990s and looking year over year and seeing if they are giving again to the same organizations.
Instrumentl basically automates that for you. So they'll look back and see how many grantees are new year over year as each IRS form is added and they'll be able to average that amount for you. So it looks like for this particular foundation, 35% of the awards have gone to new grantees. That's a pretty good amount. We usually say anything over -- or under 20% is going to be really competitive or more competitive. So that's a great indication for us.
Lastly, I've got some NTEE codes here listed, which are in alignment with my organization's priorities. And I'm including a little opportunity note for myself and saving this to my trackers so that I remember why we thought this opportunity was a great fit in the first place. So I want to give folks an opportunity. If you want to take a chance to take a look at one particular funder, you can actually do this in your workbook.
So I'm not going to spend too much time diving in on this right now because I want to give folks a little time to explore on their own. Each of us have such different parameters for our funders. So what I would suggest you do is in page five of your workbook. You'll actually see a blank space for you to be filling out your own information about a funding project.
You'll see I've broken out the mission statement and funding goals for a particular project and those needs and ideal funder profile. And then below that, you'll be able to see kind of a blank space for you to fill out information about the funder.
This could be from a 990 that you're pulling. It could also be from insights and Instrumentl. That totally depends on kind of how you want to find information about your funders. So save that for later. Come back to it.
Make sure you get a chance to dive in and assess that for your own organization. So I want to kind of wrap with -- I know that folks are really appreciative of the way that Instrumentl lays out the funders 990 and basically making sure that all those dozens of pages that you need to weed through are a lot easier to understand.
I know that we said we would share some -- a little expert tips for you all today. So I want to leave us with that as well. We've got some seven expert tips. These are compiled from folks on our expert council and some ways to maybe dive a little deeper on our 990s, regardless if we're using Instrumentl or not, give us a little bit of some creative edge on the ways we might use the information in our form 990s.
So a couple of seven expert tips I've compiled here. The first being when we look at our form 990s, we want to identify those major revenue sources so we can recognize primary sources of funding for these foundations. That might give us insight into the organizational health of the funder, and also where they're getting their revenue sources from.
We can also analyze expense ratios for the organizations through those 990s so you can evaluate the program versus administrative costs. This will just give you a general sense of the organizational health as well. You can spot growth trends through 990 form. So looking year over year at financial growth, you can also take a look at how their giving might grow year over year, and what areas of giving they might be prioritizing in give you kind of a little expert edge into what areas they might be interested in pursuing moving forward.
You can also take a look at understanding the grant distribution. So kind of by analyzing how much they're giving, that'll give you a sense of if you have kind of good foot in the door with your proposal. And also, make sure that you're aligning with their priorities for giving.
You can evaluate the program descriptions that are listed in the form 990. So assessing alignment with your projects essentially making sure that they match up with the funding that you're looking for so you're not wasting time applying to grants that don't necessarily fit in your alignment here. You can also take a look at that board composition like I mentioned, right?
So maybe investigate and identify influential board members. I love using LinkedIn for this. I know some people have asked for like an integration tool with LinkedIn and Instrumentl, which I think would be a really cool idea to just see if you already have potential second or third degree connections with members of the board. Use that research to your advance and dive a little deeper with your leadership on who might be connected to the organization. And you can even actually track some donor lists. So you might be able to look deeper at the donor contributions that are happening for this foundation and understand their interests as well. So that just will give you a little bit of expert insight into the organization and how they're approaching their funding.
So we've covered a lot. We talked a little bit about just basic form 990s understanding their background. We did a little bit of a funder analysis and case study based on highlights from the form 990. I invite you all to do some funder research in your workbooks. This is something you can go back to and use as you figure out your priorities for your organization.
And we talked a little bit a few expert tips for us today. I know we're getting a little close on time. So I want to make sure I get to any questions folks might have. I'm going to go back through the chat. And if folks had a question that would came up much earlier in the -- or in the presentation that they want to kind of copy and paste back in there, that would help me immensely just to make sure I don't miss anything.
Beth had a great question here. I love this. What are funders looking at on the 990s of grantees? Yes, so this is a really great little tidbit, a reminder that your organizations are often filling out 990s as well, right? And funders can actually look into your organizations 990s to get a sense of all the things that you're also gleaning from funders. So things like organizational health might give them a sense of how your expense to revenue ratio is looking. Maybe could give you a sense of what programs you have been offering and how successful those have been. So they might be using that as a way to assess your viability as a potential grantee. And it's actually a great tip for you as the grant seeker of organization to fully understand your own organization's 990. So I encourage you all.
If you don't know where that is, if you've never looked at it before, take a look at it right now. Pull it up and make sure you fully understand what your organization is submitting because funders can and often do look at nonprofits 990s.
Yes, Annie. Absolutely. Our leadership and board members too. Yeah. Okay. This is a great question. Why are some 990s for some organizations filled out more comprehensively than others? Yeah. This is a really tough one. And it's really organization-dependent. Some of the examples I can think of off the top of my head. One example that comes up sometimes for folks that are even using Instrumentl and asking like, "Why isn't this information available?"
We had a customer reach out to us very recently and say, "You know, what is happening with the Johnson and Johnson Foundation? There isn't a list of past grantees." And sometimes what will happen is for really large foundations where they have a significant number of pass grantees. They'll list kind of like a blanket statement of, like, individuals of need that we provided services to and list -- and say that they're going to add an addendum.
But that addendum doesn't necessarily get processed through the IRS form and uploaded publicly. So some of that information just gets kind of lost in the wayside. That's one example I was thinking of very recently. But it really is kind of funder dependent. And I'm happy to share some follow-up resources with you all about why that might happen and kind of how to navigate that if so.
I'm taking a look here. Oh, yeah. Kate says, "Also a fun time looking at your local competitors 990s to see where their funding comes from." Wow, that's a real sneaky tip. I love that. So diving in on maybe some of the organizations that are also receiving funding from local funders and taking a look at where they're getting their funding from.
Yeah. I'm trying to make sure I get to all these questions here. If there's any others that are super relevant -- Monica, I'll follow up with that information. She asked, "Can you show where to find the new versus repeat recipients in Instrumentl?" That information is going to be in that openness to new grantees section. So if you go into the funder profile and scroll down there you'll be able to see the list there. Yeah, this is a great question.
Beth asked, "How many 990s does your database have access to for your users?" We have literally every 990 that is publicly documented on the IRS website. I will look for that particular specific number and update it on our event resources page so you can get a little more insight there. But, yeah, all of that is essentially available. It's a ton of information. The number is very large and I want to make sure I get it right. So I'm going to look back and make sure that's correct.
All right, folks, we're getting a little close to our time. So I want to make sure we get to some of our last things. I want to make sure everyone has an opportunity to share their feedback. So I'm going to drop in the link to the feedback form. This is going to be a way for you to share what you thought of the program today and any other things you'd like to see coming up. I'm going to make sure I have this link for you all and drop that in the chat.
Let's see. Here we go. Thank you, folks. It was really great spending time with you today. I also want to make sure. If you want to join us for any other upcoming events -- oh, my little images didn't come through here. I'm not sure why.
But I'll drop that link in the chat as well. You can sign up for upcoming events. Next Thursday, we're talking about bringing your board on board and talking about advocating for your grantseeking budget with your board. And then on Friday June 21st, we also have our -- let me see if -- that doesn't pop up. That's our grant chats event. So that's a special invite only program that we would really love for you to attend.
It's a great moment for personal connections between grant seekers. That's Friday, June 21st. And that one is listed in this link as well. Thanks as always for joining me for these programs. If you'd like to stick around and ask questions, I know there were others that I didn't get to at this time. There was a lot of content that we covered. And I'm happy to chat with anybody further.
You can always reach out to me via email, connect with me on LinkedIn, and stick around for office hours. If you have questions, I'll stay around for a second. Have a great rest of your days, everyone. It was so nice being with you.
Thanks, Annie. Thanks, Rebecca. I'll see you all next time. Bye, everybody.
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