Will: Hello and welcome, everybody. As you hop on in, we are so glad you're here. And while you're waiting, you're going to see an intro poll. If you can go ahead and answer a couple of those questions. Say hi in the chat box.
I'd love to hear from you, in terms of your name, your role, what organization you're part of as well. And in the case where you've got a couple minutes before we get started, feel free to create your Instrumentl account if you're new as well. Throughout today's workshop and tomorrow, we're going to have multiple prizes and raffles to give away. And one of the easiest ways that you can do so is by sharing what you're learning to win prizes. All you need to do is go on LinkedIn, tag Instrumentl as well as use the #grantrevolution24 so that we can spot it.
And my colleague, Ryan, will be keeping his eyes peeled for those posts. So even if you're just excited right now and you want to get started, go ahead and do so. We'll get started in about 3 minutes or so, 2 minutes after the top of the hour.
Awesome. Kathy, Sahar, Mary, good to see you. Angela. And tell me where you guys are coming in from as well. I think we've got -- we're going to have a lot of representation across the United States today. I got Victoria from the Salvation Army. Ryan, Chicago. I'm in Chicago too. I'm in the North Center. Good to see you. We got Jacqueline. Community engagement specialist over in St. Petersburg. Awesome. Melba from Texas. We were actually just in Texas. We were in Austin for our company retreat a week or so ago. Such a great city. Daphne, always a classic customer of ours to see. I love to see you, Daphne. Thanks for coming out. Kathy.
For folks just joining in, if you are just joining us, feel free to answer the poll question that you'll see as you enter. It's just a little ice breaker for us to get to know you as you're coming on in. And say in the Zoom chat your name, organization, as well as your role. And in the case where you're new to Instrumentl, feel free to create your account at that time as well. And we'll get started in about 2 minutes or so. Victoria, Nicole, great to see you. Stacy. Awesome. Kathy, also Chicago.
Man, we got some representation in the west. Let's go! Monica, we've got from Boon Philanthropy, a nonprofit literacy organization. I love that. Christian from San Diego. Awesome. Boys and Girls Clubs. We love working with them. Kathleen. Jacksonville, Florida. My sister was actually born in Jacksonville. And we've got Becky, Indiana -- from Indiana. Victoria from Atlantic, Georgia. Awesome. Love the representation today.
We're going to get started in a minute or so. So if you haven't already started chiming in in the chat, I love to see. I'm struggling to, honestly, keep up with the Zoom chat. I love how excited you guys are all today. I'm super stoked. And we got a great program for you in the next two days. I've got 80% participation on the Zoom poll. That means that 20% of you, guys, have not entered your answers yet. So, I'd love to hear from you before we close this out in a minute or so. And share more about where you guys are coming from. Folks, right now, we've got 9% freelance grant writers, 8% grant consultants, 34% in-house grant writers, 38% nonprofit staff and leadership. Not grant specific. And then also, general nonprofit consultants, 3%, and then something else in the 8%. If you're something else, I also would love to hear from you in the chat as well.
All right. I see two minutes after the top of the hour. I want to make sure we get this program on the road. And so, again, if you haven't already done so, feel free to introduce yourself in the chat box. But also, we can go ahead and get started. Welcome to day one of the Grant Revolution. This is our Spring 2024 launch for Instrumentl. But more importantly, it's about you talking about some of the challenges that you all are facing in terms of the grants world and how we can make it better together. And so, this is our intro session.
As a reminder for folks, I will go over this along with some other details. But we're kicking things off today with our intro section on what we learned talking to 500 plus nonprofits per week. And then later on my colleague, Rachel, as well as our other co-founder Angela will be talking about -- it's not just you, three ways. Your grant search is being sabotaged. And then we'll also dig into how to go from Chaos to Clarity: The Proven 3-Step Plan to Seamless Grant Management.
This is a jam-pack schedule for the day. We're really excited you're here with us. It's amazing to see all 333 of you and growing right now. I'm sure we'll get a couple more as we are trickling in. Welcome to what we've learned from talking to 500 plus nonprofits per week.
In the case where you are just joining in, feel free to share where you're coming in from. But in the meantime, I'll do a quick introduction to myself as well. I'm Will from Instrumentl. And our company Instrumentl helps over 3,500 nonprofits in building sustainable grantseeking strategies.
In the past, I've hosted over a 100 grant writing workshops with different expert educators and bestselling authors. And so it's always a blast to see hundreds of you all coming in, learning with us together, growing together as well. And a favorite part of my job is helping grant seekers like you unlock your nonprofit's true grant potential.
As an FYI, this session is going to be 55 minutes or so. We'll have some good conversations along the way. Presentations, usually some Q&As, this will be the structure of all six of the sessions. You will get recordings and slides. And so, feel free to keep your eyes peeled on your inboxes afterwards because we'll send those shortly afterwards.
And it's really important for me to flag for you all that you are more than welcome to honor your personal needs throughout this, you know, this number of sessions. I know it's going to be six different sessions. There's a lot of information that's going to be happening. So, feel free to step away as necessary. We're going to be here and, you know, we'll be waiting for you to come on back whenever you can. And don't miss out on a chance to win. There's going to be tons of opportunities to win different raffle prizes. I believe close captions are on right now for folks as well, in case I need those. But I'll share a little bit more about how you can win in these raffles among other things in just a little bit.
Also, new to a lot of these Instrumentl events this year, including this event, this is CFRE certified. So if you are a certified fundraising executive and you are participating in all six sessions over both days, you will get six credits or points towards category 1B, which is education of the CFRE international application, for initial certification and/or recertification.
So in order to get credit for this, what we ask in return is essentially to submit the six secret words for a signed participation certificate from our CEO, Gauri. And that will be shared at some point in each of the respective session. So you'll definitely want to make sure that you're staying attentive throughout so that you can jot down that word for submitting that. Make sure you stay until the end, as I just mentioned, because after every single one of these sessions, we have a secret word. It's going to form a fun little sentence as well.
So if you don't already have the summit workbook, be sure to make a copy of that. I think that'll go in the Zoom chat. But pretty much also really important for you to know that you can enter to win tons of prizes. We got tons of prizes for you all.
I had to, like, take a separate Notes app and jot it down because I just couldn't keep track of how many prizes we're giving away. But there's a couple things like a professional learning bundle, which has a bunch of different office supplies for you, a LinkedIn headshot as well as a $100 Amazon gift card.
We've got three-month subscriptions to Headspace, a meditation app. We've got donations to nonprofits coming together, as well as tons of Starbucks and Amazon gift cards. The easiest way that you can enter the raffle is by sharing your learnings or just your overall thoughts about this event, your excitement, what you're thinking about on LinkedIn. So just tag us at Instrumentl and include #grantrevolution24.
And we have multiple colleagues of ours. Ryan in the chat is going to be keeping an eye out for that. We're actually going to do a drawing at the end of this session as well. And so, it's going to be great. Make sure that you're participating throughout. It's all about participation throughout this journey. In fact, before this workshop, I had this thought to look up some important statistics. And I found that according to the association for talent development, learners retain up to 90% of what they learn when they teach someone else or use something that they immediately learned, compared to 5% from just a lecture.
So literally, by going on LinkedIn and sharing, "Hey, this was something that I kind of thought about or learned from each of these sessions throughout can be a great way for you to drastically change your attention over the course of some of the things that we'll cover in all these sessions.
All right. So if you're thinking about how you can participate, the easiest way to do so is, you know, obviously showing up as you all have. Right now, there's 413 of you so we've already grown by 80 more folks. And it's all about this being your time to learn and grow. If you have any questions along the way, the easiest way that you can flag that for us is if you throw three hashtags in front of your question. The reason why is because there's a bunch going on in the chat right now. You can see, like, I honestly have not been able to keep track with all the things going on right now in that thread.
But it's really easy for our team to then kind of take that question and then add it to a question-and-answer log that our team can then review in terms of going through Q&A. Make sure you stay on mute as well, unless you're called upon to speak. That just makes it easier since we do have several hundred folks on right now.
All right. Now that we have all that housekeeping out of the way, let's talk about the road ahead, what we're going to cover in this session. And then get things kicked off. So the first thing we're going to talk about in this session is we're going to explore, you know, the broken world of grants. And then from there, we're going to explore what is the better world of grants.
We're going to hear from our CEO, Gauri, in terms of the Instrumentl story and how we view ourselves in the overall space and how we're contributing to the space and thinking about how we build that better world together. We're going to explore a couple things we've learned talking to 500 plus nonprofits a week, and then we're going to also go over where we're going next.
This is just session number one. So, we're going to be kicking things off into session number two and three where there's going to be even more value packed throughout the rest of the day on specific problems spaced areas that you might be familiar with.
All right. So, let's go ahead and kick things off with the broken world of grants. What I want to hear from folks in the chat right now, prepare your, you know, your mouse cursors to the Zoom chat. I want to hear from you, what is the single greatest challenge you're facing in your grant work? And go ahead and type that in. And I'll start reading out some responses as that comes in. All right. We've got capacity issues. We've got capacity issues from Chris and Emily.
We've got Victoria with capacity issues finding funders from Mary. We've got, you know, standing out getting denied from funders, from the AJ Foundation, Adimon Canyon Ranch. Let's see here. We've got invite only cultivation efforts, finding time to both manage and write grants. Caroline Grant Management. You're starting to see there's a ton of interesting problems coming up. There's a lack of relationship with agents. So many things that are now applying for different grants, finding additional funding. You can tell as I read off some of these responses. Some of them, there's definitely some themes, like, finding opportunities.
But there's also, you know, some things that just span the entire grant life cycle. And that's something that's going to be really common as we explore this over the next few sessions. Too much work, competition, building relationships, capacity issues. So, there's definitely a lot of things here, right? And as we think about this, it might come up in the form of finding grants. As some folks have mentioned, it might come in the form of aside from finding the grants, identifying good fit opportunities that are great for you as well as for the funder. It might come down to grant writing skills. You know, a lot of times what we find in running a ton of grant workshops is that folks often need some sort of primer or frameworks of how they want to approach these applications to be set up for success.
We'll talk about some of the ways that, you know, you can bolster those throughout the next few sessions. There might be some challenges in terms of submitting applications. That's something in which, you know, there's multiple moving pieces. There's potentially other stakeholders as well. And it's just something in which it can be hard to stay on top of all the applications while also doing everything else in terms of finding opportunities and managing those. There are some points made in terms of capacity. So that's, like, limited resources, how I'd bucket that. You know, it's something -- there are sometimes challenges around creating budgets.
What does that process look like? If you are creating a new funding opportunity for a program that you haven't previously created, what does that actually look like in terms of how you want to slot that out or, you know, framework that budget request in your grant application? Even post that, there's also some challenges around maintaining budgets. How can you maintain an active budget when you also have to define the grants, track the grants, write the grants, and all these other things?
I noticed a couple people referencing the need for building funder relationships that can be so challenging and important in terms of that.
And then there's also some things that came up in the chat that I noticed around reporting and compliance, in which what happens after we win the grant? So, you know, there's -- we're actually great on the pre-award. But when it comes to the post award side of things, it can be really challenging because I actually have to collaborate with a number of my different peers. And, you know, sometimes those peers are not actually grant writers or experienced in grant.
So, there's other context and things that I have to bring into these conversations. And so, what that ultimately leads us to is also one other problem being burnout. In fact, you know, I found that 36% in one grant writer study found that grant writers are working over 50 hours a week during busy grant cycles. And that spans most of the year. And only 39% feel that their organization provides adequate professional development opportunities despite their own desires to advance. And what that, you know, really leads to is the situation where I think of this movie from Office Space where, you know, this employee has to fill out this TPS report every single week for his boss. And his boss comes down the hall and essentially asks him, "Hey, you know, could you fill that TPS report? If you could just go ahead and do that, that would be great."
If you ever had that moment too, then in that moment you might be feeling something of overwhelm, you know. You might feel a little bit powerless, stretched, fatigued. These are things in which it's normal in terms of, like, the grant process. But it's unfortunate because it really draws upon the strain that's coming in terms of all these different grant teams and all the impressive work that you all are having to do as well. What's really important in this moment though is for you all to realize that, you know, ultimately, you are not alone.
In fact, if you take a look at the Zoom chat right now, there are 460 of you from all corners of the country that are united in this moment, each investing precious time into your education around grants. That's actually crazy. If you think about that, how many other industries or professions can you think of where people are tuning into a Zoom meeting to learn about their craft, build on that, improve it? And this collective commitment is not just impressive, but it's really inspiring to not only, you know, hopefully you, but also to us because it's something in which together what we've noticed is that all 460 of you are navigating through strikingly similar challenges.
When you look in the chat right now, a lot of you are saying the same things. And in this often isolated world of, you know -- in this often isolated world of working on grants, it's to feel alone. But what you're really battling are things in which, you know, it's -- other people also facing this opportunity and, like, if through building this community together, we are able to take this courageous moment to invest in both our professional and our overall organizational development in the communities we serve. So, it's really inspiring to me and it's really inspiring hopefully to you as well. I'm really excited that you're all here. And that's really going to naturally lead us to -- let's think about, "Okay, as we move from the broken world of grants, what does the better world of grants actually look like?"
All right? So the better world of grants. Let's talk about it and what that might look like. Well, ultimately, what's really important for us to communicate to you is that, you know, we see you in terms of being there and supporting you in every step of the grant's life cycle. Instrumentl is designed ultimately for tackling the prospecting, the pre-award and the post-award side of things. And what I'd like you all to think about over the course of this event is that this two-day event is your call to adventure.
So if you think about the classic Hero's Journey, whether you're thinking about, you know, Star Wars, Luke Skywalker going on his journey against the empire, or Harry Potter, you know, going through his journey in his fight against Baltimore, you're at this moment in which we're at this called to adventure together in this starting section. And this is going to be an opportunity for us to talk about what is the better way to work on grants. Because ultimately, there is a better way to work on grants. And in fact, many people have already transitioned to this world and never looked back.
What's most important here is that you and your team should be excited about making an impact instead of feeling panic when thinking about how to get there. So, what we're going to do is we're going to move away from moving -- wasting time on finding grants and letting grants come to you. We're going to reclaim mental peace and maintain your grant spend down stress-free and stay on top of it all versus, you know, chasing tasks and deadlines.
All right. So this is a moment where I want to hear if you are fired up. If you are fired up in the Zoom chat, I want you to type in "Fired up." Show me some fire emojis in general. If you're ready to go, I want to hear from you right now in terms of the chat.
All right. We've got -- oh my gosh, somebody told me to call a firefighter. Okay. We've got a bunch of folks. I don't know though, I really need to hear you guys because the next person I'm going to introduce at this stage is a big figure in terms of where we're going next. We got Michael, Shannon, Kenny is -- they're all fired up.
All right. Everybody's fired up. Then I'm really stoked because in the next section, I'm going to have us hear some words from our CEO, Gauri, as she shares more about the Instrumentl story and what we are working towards in this better world.
Gauri: Wow. Thanks, Will. I am fired up. So excited to be here and tell you about our team's journey to really understand the world of grants over the years and how we came to be here where we are today. I've probably met some before on product, you know, feedback calls. I hope that I have.
For those of you I haven't met, as Will mentioned I'm the CEO and one of the three co-founders of Instrumentl. I'm very excited to share with you our journey so you can see how all the dots came together for our focus on hopefully transforming the world of grants for good.
So it all started in 2015 when my three co-founders and I came together. That's a three of us here. You can see us in this picture looking out imagining figuring out how we can make an impact together. I'm in the middle. Angela is to my right. Kat is to my left. Kat and Angela spent a ton of time seeking grants themselves within the world of universities, as well as nonprofits.
Angela also worked at a grantmaking organization, and they had this, like, full, you know, multiple perspective view on the world of grants. And then I came from a very different background of like product and technology.
And so, Cat and Angela really had the true pain and the insight from their direct experience working on grants. They felt like there -- it was just hugely inefficient overall. You know, of course, how long it takes to find grants. It's just the overall burden across the life cycle. And then also, unfortunately, how much of the burden there is on the grant seeker.
You know, ideally, we could just make those direct connections and we wouldn't even have grants to begin with. But here we are. So, there's a hugely inefficient grants process. And I was working at Airbnb at that time. I was working with some of the best. I was working as a product manager working with some of the best, you know, product engineering design talent. And we were all looking at these existing solutions in the grants world together. And it felt like there was a lot that we could do to streamline this process. So, we joined forces and came together and tried to make this happen. So this is the summer of 2016. We actually all lived in a house together, really, just focusing on the first area that we thought was, you know, the real pain point which was helping folks get matched to grants.
We felt like there was a clear need there for a better experience. And actually, it all -- one of the first things we did, we put out a Facebook post I remember on some communities, some grant communities, and we were just like, "Hey, would it be cool if we help you, if we help folks get matched to grants?" And we got, like, hundreds of replies saying, "Yes." Like, we would really appreciate that help. So we were like, okay, this is a, you know, we're on the right track here.
The original grant database of Instrumentl was actually a spreadsheet. It was like a giant Google sheet. We would just keep adding to that spreadsheet. And initially, you know, when we started to have initial folks that wanted to work with us, we would manually match people to grants and send them personalized emails. It's not automated. It was, like, you know, Cat and Angela, myself, we would, like, write these emails of, like, here are the two to three grants that you should consider this week.
We wanted to make sure that it was really, like, these were actually really high-quality matches. We got feedback that this was useful. So we felt like we were on, you know, continuing on the right track. And then we needed to build this into a product so that it wasn't, you know, three of us actually writing these emails so we could serve more folks.
And I like to say that we essentially, like, automated Cat's brain. Cat is there on the -- in the red shirt on -- in the white chair. And what we would do is we built an initial version of our, like, matching algorithm, like, the logic. And Cat would, like, look at all the results.
And she would mark it up. She would say, "This is a good fit," you know. This is good. This is a bad fit. This is why. Here's an okay fit. And she would review these results and we would take that constructive feedback, and we would make changes to the logic. And we did that over and over and over again, like, you know, probably 20, 30, 40 times this summer, until we felt like -- until she felt like the results were actually good, that a person working within a nonprofit working on grants would look at these results and, like, be actually happy with them.
So, he finally got to a place that felt acceptable. So we, you know, built this more automated way to match you with grants. And -- but we still, you know, wanted to make sure that the matches were as high quality as possible. Some of you may have had this experience where you submit a project on Instrumentl and it gets flagged for manual review, which get -- which can happen when you get too few or too many matches because we want to make sure you're having a good experience.
And there was actually a time where when you submitted a project to Instrumentl, we would review every single project before it got turned live because we really wanted to make sure it was set up well so that we could make sure that you were getting good matches. And we were really obsessed with making sure that what we were building was actually useful.
And I'm working very, very closely with you all to make sure that was the case. And we were also willing to do things that other folks, other companies weren't. You have, you know, companies that really want to focus on the technology piece, like, the scalable things that can be automated. And then you have some companies that are really great at building people-based operations. And we found that if you can combine both of those aspects, you can really create some magical experiences.
And I like to say that we have, I have, and the team has a healthy degree of paranoia that we might build something that's not really useful, that's like sort of, you know, the thing that we're trying to avoid is that happening. And I think part of that comes from me not being from the nonprofit space and really wanting to understand from Cat and Angela and from you all what is actually going to be really valuable. So we built this matching algorithm. You know, we're a couple of years in and we're getting really good feedback.
But we are not growing as fast as we thought we would. And we're starting to wonder, you know, in the nonprofit world, there are lots of problems to solve. Our grants, really, the problem we should be solving. You know, in the Bay Area, in the startup world, you don't really hear that much about the grants market.
And so, we started to take a step back and say, "Okay, we're in the, you know, working with nonprofits we're getting good feedback. But is there something more impactful that we could be working on?" So we -- you can see me pondering that here. We had like, you know, dozens of whiteboard sessions, so many stickies, and we were thinking about, you know, different ideas. We wanted to pitch nonprofits other things.
We sort of put Instrumentl on hold as it was. And we saw that there were quite a lot of platforms out there that helped with individual fundraising, managing donors, and other parts of the nonprofits process but not as much in grants. And so, I wanted to see if there was something, you know, bigger and better. And we pitched you all, all these different things could work on.
And what was really funny and interesting was that we were, like, "Hey, like, here's some new, cool things we could build. Maybe they would be more impactful." And we wanted to get folks
excited about these new ideas. And every single time, you know -- basically every single time, when we would talk to folks, folks were like, "No. Actually, that grant, you know, thing that you're working on, that's what I want to talk to you about. And we started to realize that even though from the outside, it's maybe not so obvious that grants are a huge pain point. When we actually listened very closely and clearly from you all from our from our customers and from the community, we saw that there was a ton of pain here.
And that, yes, it is actually a really big problem and a big enough problem. And so, through these conversations, we were starting to learn about what is unique about grants? What's unique about grants that makes it so that you really need to have dedicated tooling to make that process much more efficient. So I want to share three things with you that I've learned. I'm sure all of these will sound very, you know, they're going to be very obvious to you.
But I think it's helpful to share because this really informs how we're thinking about our product. So the first is that grants are so different. They have such unique properties depending on where they come from. You all know, there's corporate, you know, grants that come from corporations, that come from the federal government, that come from family foundation.
These all look totally different. They have different places that you need to go to find those grants. You need to apply differently. They all have totally different websites, totally different application forms, totally different systems. The funders care about different things. You need to get to know their incentives and their motivations differently. Each funder has a totally different website, if you can even find it. Some funders have 990 info, some funders don't. And it can take a ton of time to get a holistic view of all of your options in a streamlined way. Sometimes on calls, folks will ask, "What database did you get all this from?"
And because it seems amazing to have all this in one place. And the reality is there isn't one. We have to build it because it's so fragmented. The second thing that we find to be really unique about grants, again as you all know, is that grants are often restricted and have reporting requirements, which make them harder to manage. You need to do a good job tying the money that you spent to a specific program outcome and be able to communicate that effectively back to the funder. And if you have one grant, that's probably not a big deal. But when you're managing 10, 15, 50 grants, that's a lot to manage.
And we're starting to talk to organizations now where they get to a place where the bottleneck is actually not finding grants, but it's actually managing these grants. And they can't win any more grants until they actually have a better system for managing them.
So the fact that grants are restricted, that you need to submit an application, you need to submit reports just makes it so that the management process can be quite a lot. And to manage that, it -- you have to actually be quite collaborative, which leads me to the third thing that's pretty unique about grants, which you may not be able to see from the outside. But the grants person acts as the quarterback, the relationship manager to make sure that the grants are being submitted and reports are being submitted. But that grant person really needs to work very closely with finance, programs, and other fundraising staff to be successful.
I know some folks have really great systems, you know, to collaborate effectively across the team. I know some of you feel like that, you know, you're unfortunately working in a silo and it's really hard to manage coordinating across all of those teams. And it can be a real problem if your system -- whether through technology or not, isn't well-designed. It -- there can be issues with understanding how grants are being spent and managed.
It can be challenging to get information you need, like, putting together your proposals. And it can be confusing to understand how and when to best collaborate with folks on the fundraising side. So because of all of this, there really is a need to understand grant specific workflows so that we can make this collaboration easier, and with guardrails to not accidentally drop the ball.
And so with all of these realities that are unique to grants, we saw the need for building something that really helped end to end across the grant life cycle. And we started with, as you saw, with matching, with the pre-award process, with prospecting. And we wanted to build an up-to-date comprehensive database where grants are in a consistent format where you know where the website is, you know who funded, who in the past and not only that you -- not only do you have a comprehensive database, but you also are being connected to grants effectively and very quickly.
So it's not just that you have to fill through thousands of results, but we can actually tell you which grants you should be pursuing. And the third part of this pre-award process is the prospecting process, is that you don't want to come in and re-research things, right? If you have researched a similar project or a program in the past, you don't want to come in and start from scratch. Ideally, you want to build on all of your past work.
Now, the next step is applying. And with the application process, you need to put it together. You need to collaborate across all of it. You want to make use of your previous language more easily. You want to get all your formatting right, work through all those different you know clunky funder portals. And historically, we haven't done much here until now. So, I won't go into a ton of detail. More is going to be shared in session for tomorrow, the session -- the first session tomorrow.
But just to give you a sneak peek, I'm very excited to share that we are working on a way to help you create your proposals leveraging your past awarded grants and materials using AI. Ryan is going to drop a chat to join our wait list if you'd like. And like I said, you're going to be hearing much more about it in tomorrow's session. So we're starting to really help with this part of the process as well.
Now, the third step is managing your grants. You've won grants, now, you need to actually manage them. Work with your team, understand how the grant is being spent, know what needs to happen to actually be successful with the outcomes you'd like to have with this grant. And ideally, you have things in one place so that you can again build institutional knowledge year-over-year. So when you're applying to a funder in next year or in three years, you can build on your previous work instead of starting from scratch.
And the fourth and final step of the process that is really like a cycle is reporting back to the funder. You want to let them know what happened with this grant, continue to build that long-term relationship, help your team know what all needs to be included in that grant, and all of this feeds into that cycle of building a successful grants program.
And all this put together brings you from Instrumentl, the first full life cycle grant solution for grant seekers. And hopefully, what's been evident as I've, you know, shared a bit about the journey of Instrumentl and how we got here is that it's-- we're in it for more than just building software for software sake. We're really curious, deeply curious about how we can understand your challenges, your needs and make a real tangible difference in your work.
From the very beginning, we've been very connected to our customers and the community to build stuff that's really actually valuable. And I'm so excited to say that we're really just getting started. There's a lot that we're going to share over the next couple of days. The next two days. But -- and there's also a lot that the team is working on that will be shared in the coming months. And I'm personally very excited to work with you all to build tools that help you and your team so that you can help your organization further its mission.
So I'm going to pass the baton back to Will. Go over what we've learned talking to 500 plus nonprofits and where we're going next over today's event. So, Will, over to you.
Will: Awesome. Thanks, Gauri.
What an amazing story in terms of just how far it's taken us in terms of all the different journeys and chapters. I'd love to hear in the chat right now. If you're part of the early journey, when did you join us? And also, if you haven't yet, what's holding you back? And while you guys are typing that in, I will proceed by covering some of the things that we've learned in talking to 500 plus nonprofit every single week.
All right. So the first thing that I think is an interesting insight to share with folks is that problem awareness is highly connected to annual operating revenue. Through the years of talking with a number of nonprofits, what we found is that around 50% of grant professionals we talk with typically actually know what's blocking them from scaling or securing more funding.
And what we find is that they're -- they tend to be in the 500k or more operating revenue sort of bucket. And I think from this, there's really two key takeaways that you can gather from this sort of insight. The first one is that organizations that are actively engaging and diagnosing their challenges are better positioned to seek out targeted grants and funding opportunities that align with their needs and strategic goals. And that makes sense because they're able to not just look at the immediate problems in front of them, but also what has to come down the road in the next three months, six months, or 12 months.
And the second takeaway from this is that larger organizations typically have more resources to dedicate to the analysis and understanding of their operational challenges, whereas smaller organizations are tending to invest more on the capacity building efforts and strategic planning to enhance their overall problem awareness. And you actually probably saw that in terms of some of the chats earlier today when some folks were mentioning some potential capacity challenges, and things like that.
And so, it's something where as we've grown involved and thought through these different challenges, I'm finding the space to actually create this is something that's really challenging. And as we look at the later sessions over the next two days, we're going to talk about how to create that space for you or how to start outlining the blueprint or the pathways to do that. So, be sure to check out some of the later sessions when we explore that a bit deeper.
The second point is that, really, a lot of nonprofits are still operating in survival mode. Smaller organizations are laser focused on securing grants and equally frustrated by the lack of funding. I noticed that in the chat a couple points earlier on when we were talking about the biggest challenge you're facing in your grant work.
And from that, there's really two key takeaways that you can think about. The first one is that nonprofits really need to balance the immediate financial pressures and investing in activities that promote sustainability, such as partnerships, diversifying funding sources, and developing a strategic plan that includes a vision for the future beyond the immediate, you know, financial survival side of things. And this is something which makes sense because ultimately you saw that in terms of some of the folks in the chat that are referencing building relationships. Like, how do I get the time to build these relationships when I have to do these other sides of things?
And so, this is something where leaving that survival mode requires a lot of blueprint planning and working backwards on how do we create the space or how do we find tools that allow us to do that? And that's going to be one of the takeaways as well as I go into point number three in just a little bit. But the second takeaway is that it's not just financial resources, but also planning and foundational skills. Like, grant writing, fundraising strategy, financial management, as well as program evaluation.
By building internal capacity, organizations are then able to better improve their grant success rate. And when they are able to improve their grant success rate, they're able to manage their funds more effectively. And therefore, enhance their appeal to funders. So, this is how we ultimately break this cycle of survival mode by creating the systems in which we can build for that capacity, then improve the overall effectiveness of our process in the life cycle to then enhance our appeal to overall funders, and remove some of the administrative blocks that sometimes we face. That leads us to the third insight, which is, really, that you need funding to improve how you work. Right?
This is, again, like, something that should probably be -- should resonate with you and that list operating on bigger budgets often are focusing on optimizing the ways they work since they know that how they work profoundly impacts their success rate. This is going to be a recurring theme over the next few sessions as we talk about how to shift towards the idea of, you know, thinking about respective tools from an expense standpoint to an investment standpoint.
And there's really two takeaways from this overall point. The first one is that investing in tools and training as well as technologies enhance operational efficiency. And that's crucial because for grant professionals it means advocating for and utilizing grant management softwares, project management tools, and other technologies that streamline grantseeking and administrative processes. It's not uncommon for us as we're speaking to different profits where folks are sharing that the way that they're handling things right now is a lot of implicit knowledge where it's a really experienced grant writer who has everything logged in their head or maybe it's in an old school Excel spreadsheet.
It might even be on pen and paper in some situations. And that's something in which as you are scaling or thinking about scaling your efforts, it can be really hard to remove yourself from those silos of the work and make it easier for you to really be that quarterback to Gauri's earlier point. And that leads us to the second takeaway, which is not just about spending on program delivery, but also investing in supporting sustainability and growth, such as fundraising capabilities, staff development, and infrastructure.
Ultimately, you all play a highly critical role when it comes to ensuring grants are aligned with strategic priorities, and that the funded projects are integrated seamlessly into the broader efforts of your organization. So it's really important as you are thinking about this and you're investing your days and your time in the next upcoming sessions in these areas to think about some of these points and then think about how it really takes us back to the importance of problem awareness. Because once we understand that, especially in the context of where you might be with your organization, whether you're on the smaller side or on the larger side.
At the end of the day, there's this critical need for large and small organizations to focus on operational efficiency as well as strategic planning, and investing in areas around program delivery is really essential to our collective growth as well as sustainability, which emphasizes the critical role that grant professionals play. As we think about how do we move from the world of just, like, survival into something of, you know, greater impact or scalability. It all comes back to that reality that Gauri was sharing where grant teams are often having to work in some form of silos, which leads to inefficiencies and a lack of cohesive strategy.
And from that silo dynamic, you know, we really have to -- that silo dynamic prevents the team from being able to leverage the collective strengths and resources of the rest of the organization. And this is kind of the broken world that we've grown accustomed to where we don't have systems to help us leave these silos. When ultimately, your role is to be that orchestrator, to be that conductor to lead that integrated approach and serve as that quarterback for your team members as you have more of a unified strategy.
So overcoming that fragmented work is essential, and it's becoming really ever more increasingly important as, you know, organizations are scaling up from that early stage to that medium and longer stage of development. So, as we assess the operational dynamics and the expectations that, you know, you all are holding for your organizations, Instrumentl is that first full life cycle solution for grant seekers to tackle this problem.
Okay. So as we think about that, you know, what I want to hear from you on is, which of these takeaways or what are you taking away right now at this moment? In the Zoom chat, feel free to type that into the chat, and then we'll talk about five common challenges that nonprofits face. These will be some common themes that you'll see in other presentations later on throughout the day.
And so, these will be some sort of recurring themes that you can turn back to when you jot things down here. And as you are looking at these next issues in just a little bit, I want you to write down, "Oh, yeah, that definitely resonates with me. I want to bring that up, or I definitely want to attend that session." And then go back to the session side of things and start that so that you make sure you're attending in that respective case.
All right. So a couple folks -- some of the takeaways, things around getting out of survival mode. Let me go back a slide so folks -- so you all can see that process from Monica. We've got the concept of scaling and streamlining grant seeking from Amanda quarterbacking their team to be less fragmented from Analise.
Awesome. All right. So as you think about that, what we'll think about and build on in later sessions is how do we unblock ourselves from some of those respective cases. But the first thing that we should do from looking at these insights is we should then look at how this manifests in terms of the problems that nonprofits often face. All right. So there's really five core issues that we often see nonprofits face. And in order to prepare for these slides, what we've actually done is we've pulled literal quotes from different customers and prospects who've, you know, talked to us to really highlight how this might show up in your work.
The first one is time consuming grant searches. Maybe you've felt something to the effect of, you know, finding grants with Google search is soul sucking. Has anybody ever felt that way in terms of it being soul sucking? Or just in general, what's been your sentiment when it comes to a non -- a more complicated way of finding grants?
Time consuming grant searches can be really, really soul sucking. It's a rabbit trail, Sarah says. 100%, Erica. This is because too many tabs are open. Luis is just, you know, giving me some emoticons of his state. Yeah, it's definitely something that's challenging. That's actually the wedge of why we started the way we did when we go back to the story of first focusing on the finding grants problem, because that's obviously where, you know, when you think about the classic grant life cycle, it's where we all begin. We all start with this idea where we need to find a grant so that we can then apply for that grant, win that grant, and then, you know, steward those funds and so on. So, that's one of the biggest issues that nonprofits face.
But there's actually four other ones. The second one is that grant deadlines might creep up on you. The way that one customer shared this with us is I used to wake up in the middle of the night stressing about missing deadlines. Have you ever felt this way? Maybe it was as recently as last night. You know, let me know. Deadline creep. Oh, that's a great phrase in terms of, you know, what Tracy shared there. Sharon's relating to this. This is something that's really important, right?
Two weeks ago. So it happens on a regular basis in terms of this experience of what we have. I love this chat. I love how engaged you are. Everybody, keep this up through the rest of the day. It's going to be so important as you learn together and grow together. And another problem that comes up is the lack of visibility. Not knowing who is doing what. So this is something in which when we look at this, the phrase that came up is, you know, keeping multiple programs and grant writers in step is so challenging.
If you have to work with other folks on other teams, it can be really taxing to have to wrangle them to their respective working styles, as well as their respective workflows. And in some cases, their respective platforms as well, which naturally leads me to, you know, the fourth takeaway or the fourth main issue, which is that duplicative work takes a toll, keeping various spreadsheets and our CRM in sync requires a ton of copying and pasting. This is something that we'll directly talk more about in tomorrow's sessions as we think about how we're solving that problem more directly.
But it's something in which it's not uncommon for folks to have to actually take work from one place, whether that's a spreadsheet, whether that's Instrumentl, or some other tool. And then copy and paste that into some other CRM because, you know, their board or their executive director is requiring them to push stuff back into the software so that they can have it ready for a team meeting. If that's ever been the case, that's a huge part of your day. You know, I'd love to hear from folks in the chat. If you're just to estimate how many hours are you spending every single week or every single day on duplicative work? Because at the end of the day that time is time that could be spent on, you know, really focusing on scaling your grants, applying for more grants, winning them, researching more grants. And instead we have to spend it on this sort of administrative work, which is not positioning you for success in terms of your talents.
So I'm seeing some references to, you know, five hours a week, three hours, five hours. That's insane. That's an amazing amount of time that we could be allocating towards something more directly focused around grants. And the fifth challenge that we often find from talking to folks is the importance of management of spend down and reporting. This is something that actually came up later in our journey of working on this problem in which, you know, the way it's expressed sometimes is we don't have a full-time financial team member. It's hard to stay on top of it all.
And I think there was somebody in the chat earlier that was saying, "What staff?" Question mark. Right? And in many cases, when we talk about the post award process, it comes back to some form of somebody in the grants team or in the grants world being responsible as well for that spend down and reporting. And so, that's something that definitely is, you know, relevant as we think about -- think about all the challenges that you're facing right now. So, as you look at these five challenges, what I'd love you to do -- for you to do is if you haven't already made a copy of the workbook, step one make a copy of that workbook. It'll be super helpful.
We've got some helpful reflection prompts for you as we wrap up each of these respective sessions. Step two though is I'd love for you to either, you know jot down or just, like, star for yourself, which of these you really find as, like, the top two or three issues that your organization is facing? And the reason why is because from there, as you explore some of the later sessions, you'll be able to think back to this respective slide and then think about the things that our team will be teaching you over the next few sessions to then build off of how you unblock yourself in those situations.
Fortunately, some folks have been referring to it over time in terms of the Zoom chat. But there is a better way in terms of managing all of this, whether it's, you know, the time consuming grant search, whether it's grant deadlines, the lack of visibility or collaboration across the team, duplicative work taking a toll, or stress around managing spend down and reporting. And that better way is ultimately going to lead you to these outcomes.
It's going to help you have grants come to you. It's going to help you reclaim your time. It's going to help you unsilo your grant team so that you can be the amazing quarterback or conductor for your organization in terms of its overall grant efforts. It's going to help you, you know, stop the need for copying and pasting grant data so getting five hours outback based on what some folks are saying in the Zoom chat. And it's going to help you regain mental peace. And most importantly, feel amazing about your work.
So here is where we are going next. As a reminder, this is day one of our 2024 Spring Grant Revolution. This was Session One in terms of what we've learned talking to 500 plus nonprofits per week. In the next session, we're going to explore It's Not Just You: 3 Ways Your Grant Search is Being Sabotaged. In this situation, you're going to learn specific tactics that you can take to, you know, unblock yourself and also some of the common pain points that people are experiencing. The beautiful thing about this experience is right now, we've grown to 500 grant professionals in this room learning together, growing together, sharing each other's experiences.
And we're going to wrap up this day later today with talking about clarity, how to go From Chaos to Clarity: The Proven 3-Step Pathway to Seamless Grant Management. But that's not all. We're going to then transition in the next day into kicking things off with a blueprint for full cycle grant management, in case you've never explored that side of things or you are just in the early stages of doing so. And then we're going to actually bring it all back back to, actually, sharing examples of other nonprofits just like you that have already entered this new world, and what they did to enter that new world, what they're experiencing now because they've put in this sort of effort in terms of entering the new world with us.
And then the beautiful thing about this two-day event and how we've structured it is that it's all going to wrap up with a live grant strategy workshop where you'll create a vision board for your nonprofit. That way you'll be able to take all the different things you're -- you're experiencing throughout this event and put it to your own world. Apply it to your own world and share that with your organization or share that with your grant team and kind of go from there. And so that's going to be really, really fun for you all to do. It's going to be a great interactive session that my colleague, Rachel, will run tomorrow. So be sure to stay tuned for that.
With that, we are now at the point of Session 1's Secret Word. For those that joined us a little bit late, these two -- these six sessions are all eligible for CFRE credits. So if you would like to get six points worth of credit from CF -- from the Certified Fundraising Executive Program, the first secret word to jot down is grants.
So if you have not already jotted that down or made a copy of a worksheet, I think my colleague, Ryan, will share in the Zoom chat. Another request for you to just go ahead and set that up. But essentially -- so Rachel, my colleague, just set that up. So jot down grants in that spot of the first section for session one.
Again, you're going to have five more words after this. And the other thing that we'd love for you to do is share your feedback in terms of, you know, this first session. It's also going to be a great way for you to enter our raffle. So there's a couple ways you can enter. First thing is just, like, keep on participating. We're saving these chat logs. We're going to pull out winners from there. And also, in general, if you share the feedback form, you'll get bonus entries there. And then the other thing you can do is you can actually share on LinkedIn, you know, you're most excited about, what was the one takeaway you had. Tag Instrumentl and then use the #grantrevolution24.
As I shared earlier in today's presentation, according to the Association for Talent Development, learners retain up to 90% of what they learn when they teach someone else or share it with somebody and use it immediately as opposed to just 5% from a lecture. So in order to retain that and lock in those learnings for yourself, you know, share with the world, share with others. And we look forward to making a drawing in just a little bit. With that, coming up next in my next session, we're going to be passing o it over to our colleague, my colleague, Rachel, as well as our other co-founder, Angela, to talk about It's Not Just You: 3 Ways That Your Grant Search Is Being Sabotaged.
As I leave you all in terms of getting a little break in place, what I ask you all is keep the energy up. Like, it's going to be really easy to kind of as the second or third session comes in every day kind of you'd be less engaged in terms of the Zoom chat. But I want to see the same energy through the rest of the day. So if you can hold to that, you know. We'll give you a ton of raffles as a result as well as you will learn a bunch of things because you'll retain things up to 90%. And so, keep that energy up and let's go ahead and take a little bit of a break. Don't forget to share and we'll kick things off in the next 9 minutes or so at the top of the hour.
.svg)
%201.png)
