But this is going to be a great webinar. I'll always learn when GrantStations is here, especially how to navigate using their website. And we're gonna have a special guest with GrantStations to show you how to do that and more. My name is Aretha Simons. I'm the webinar producer here at TechSoup. If this is your first time, I'm gonna show you how you can engage today. I see somebody's already turned on the closed caption. Thank you for doing that. And let me go up one more. Sorry about that. If you have a question, please put it in the Q&A. But Jeremy had lots of team members here. So I'm sure people who type in the chat will be able to grab those and answer it. He is an excellent speaker. So I'm sure he's probably gonna stop for a moment and grab your question. So just keep those questions coming. We do have a special that's coming out. We'll be talking about that throughout this webinar about the GrantStation promo with TechSoup for just $9 for a year. More about that later. Again, this is being recorded. You're gonna get the recording along with the slides within 48 hours. I'm gonna move out of the way and turn this over to Jeremy. Smith, he is the host of live events for online education. He's administrative, he does the newsletters, the audio, the video, everything for GrantStation. Jeremy, thank you so much for being here. I'm looking forward to this webinar. Have a great one. Over to you. Thanks a lot, Aretha. I appreciate that. And I have to say, it's not just me doing all that work. I often have a lot of other people do the work. I just like to take the credit for it. But I'm upfront about sharing and taking all of that credit for myself. So speaking of sharing, let me go ahead and share my screen. And I'm gonna go show ahead and show you what GrantStation looks like. So let me go ahead and get that up there for you. And also joining me today is Kerry Glauser is here along with Kevin Peters. Kerry is our senior research specialist and Kevin is our vice president of research. So I brought in the big guns today to answer any questions you may have about research or finding things on GrantStation if it's good. And since Kerry is here, Kerry, can you see my screen? And do I in fact, you know, am I doing the right thing by sharing my screen? Is it the right thing to be seeing on my screen right now, I suppose? Yes, your screen looks great. And hi, everyone. You'll be hearing more from Kerry and more from Kevin as well during our sort of walk through everything you can do here at GrantStation, showing you all the tools we have here, all the research features, all the wonderful things that GrantStation has. And just to go ahead and start things off really quick. And I know, Arita, just mentioned this, you can pick up a year of access to GrantStation for only $99 on September 19th through September 20th. That's a very short two-day window that you can go ahead and pick it up. And people have always asked this question. I'm gonna hit it in the nip it in the bud right now. What if you already have a membership? Well, it stacks. So let's say your membership ends in, you know, September of 2023, which is now you, or let's say it ends in January of 2024. If you purchased a year of GrantStation through TechSoup, it would then end in January of 2025. So it's not simultaneous, it stacks. So you can actually stack and extend your membership at an incredibly low price. And hopefully, if I do my job correctly, you will see the value GrantStation has to offer you as we go through everything here on the website. And just to quickly remind you, what we're gonna do today is really an overview of everything we have here at GrantStation. Now, Kevin is here to answer your questions and you'll hear from him later on. He'll definitely pop in with questions periodically if he needs to, but we'll probably go ahead and take some big chunk of time at the end and handle all the questions that you wanna have answered. But if for some reason we don't get to your question, maybe it's too specific, maybe we just don't have enough time to deal with it correctly, you can email us directly at anytime, info at GrantStation.com, we'll get an answer directly out to you. And also a quick note, since this is a webinar, the best way for us to deal with questions as they come in is to put them into the Q&A section. I'm sure Kevin's checking the chat, but if it goes in the Q&A section, especially if it's a longer question, we can track it and then we can ask it. So long question, Q&A, short question, just wanna say hi to people, put that in the chat section. So before we get started with our grant searches and looking specifically at our tools here on GrantStation, I'm gonna tell you a little bit about what GrantStation is. So GrantStation features a set of searchable databases filled with current grant opportunities. We also provide those tools and tutorials on grant seeking that you need, especially on writing. And we also keep you up to date on the latest philanthropic trends. So in short, this is a little thing you can see here, you can find funding opportunities to build a strong grant seeking program, write a powerful proposal, and then when grant awards to fund your specific mission.  Now, another question that comes up often, what makes you different than XYZ company? One thing that differentiates us, other than me and Kerry and Kevin being employed here, from other databases is our policy of only listing active funders. Now that is funders are only listed if they accept unsolicited applications, letters of inquiry, or some sort of unsolicited communication. Now also a GrantStation membership includes not only technically advanced tools that we'll be showing you in a second, but also a handcrafted funder profiles that still have the human touch. And all of our profiles are updated yearly at a minimum by our research team, and most of which are joining me today here on this call. So please feel free to ask them any questions you like. This way when you use GrantStation, you know you're getting a hot list of funding sources that have been vetted by our researchers and are actively accepting requests. That's very important. It's all about saving you time. So think of us as your backers, as you're sort of like your personal backroom research team where pre-screening funders and then feeding you the most relevant ones for your program or project. So with that, let's turn to the process of finding funding for our organization. How do we go about identifying the best grant makers to approach? So an important part of your membership here at GrantStation and something that's sort of a key for everything we do here at GrantStation is your custom dashboard that you receive as a member of GrantStation. And you can find that right up here at the very top where it says my dashboard. So I'm gonna go ahead and go in here really quickly and just show you a quick overview. We'll come back in later and look at everything in greater detail. We're gonna look at one area specifically right now. So this is the dashboard where you can change your password. You can see anything you've purchased historically. And you can also find anything you've saved from using our tools in the report section. Also any specific projects that you've created, any saved criteria for your searches, any specific saved grant makers. You have my plan, which we'll go into depth a little bit later on of how to organize everything visually. And also you can see any online courses you've purchased as well. So I wanna go ahead and take a look right now at the projects tab. And you can click the link here, of course, click the tab right up here. We'll click on projects. So we're gonna talk about how to prepare to do your research. And we encourage anyone looking for funding to always do a little bit of preparation before diving into the research. If you're gonna find grants, you wanna just go in blind and type grants into Google. I mean, you can, but there's a better way to do it. You only have so much time in the day. You don't wanna spend it just trying to find grants all the time, especially if you have an inexpensive tool you can pick up through TechSoup at a discount for a limited time to do it for you. So if we're looking here at projects, we're gonna open one I already made, which is the Animal Welfare Project. Now this is what we call our Project Description Worksheet. And this will really help you be more effective and efficient in your research. So I'm gonna go ahead and click on edit so we can see what this one looks like right now. Now as this one opens, you sort of see how it's broken down. And before we get into looking at this, here's our scenario. This is our setting that we're in right now. So I have a project that focuses on expanding pet adoption, humane education, spaying and neutering and animal cruelty interventions. Some of the animals in my organization are let's say the rehabilitated and they're trained as emotional support animals for seniors at independent and assisted living centers in the local community. And again, let's say I'm based in Pennsylvania too. I'll throw that in there just to make that a little bit easier. So your Project Description Worksheet right here doesn't need to be fancy. It's gonna be used to help identify keywords to guide your research. And the description that you can see right down here, this is really a sort of a high level overview of what you're gonna be doing with your specific project. Then when you click right here under statement of need, you can see specifically what you need to do and this will help you feed your keywords for searching. So every year millions of unwanted dogs and cats, our euthanized spaying and neutering pets will help produce pet euthanization. So okay, spaying and neutering, that's definitely going to be one of our keywords. Also individuals suffering from emotional or mental disabilities. They may need help with an emotional support animal, also known as an ESA. Adding this information in here helps you stay grounded and lets you know specifically, okay, these are the keywords I'm gonna use when I do my research. Then we have our budget tab right here. This is where we're gonna, what do we need our money for and what's it gonna go towards and do we have any brand names? So for instance, we have veterinary expenses, we have crates, bedding and food supplies, we added in a name we know which is PetSmart. We need rescue and training, staffing and marketing materials. This is all good information to do for every project. Now, some people will say every project, Jeremy, that's too much. Well, you can do this however you like. I'm showing you one way that you can do it, but when you organize it by project, you can often find various ways that you can work with other projects that you're working on. So money that goes to project A could also work for project B and that's if you divide it up this way. And again, this is all in your custom dashboard. This is just for you. So only you have access to this information. So looking at the next tab, we have our geographic scope. This is where we get into our specific search terms, which we'll look at a little bit closer later on. From here, we can see where we're based at and add in that information. So if I click on North America, and I add in North America, across all the U.S. and Pennsylvania as my interest. But then you can break this down to wherever you're based. I know we have a couple of people here from Canada as well. You can do the exact same thing for Canada. I saw we have someone I think from Africa who's doing or doing outreach work within Africa through an international based organization or maybe you're in the U.S. doing work in Africa. The same thing, you can set this up by adding in those specific areas. You can also add in your geographic focus. This will come in handy later on. We talk about doing specialized searches for locations. But if we move back up to the top, we can also take a look at our areas of interest. This is where it gets much more nitty gritty of what we're looking for. So Carrie, since I love putting you on the spot, area of interest covers all of the different ways you can search through our database. How many different areas of interest do we currently have access to? I believe we have around 230 and I think that's inclusive of types of support too. So we have a lot of different ways you can search. If you're thinking, well, that's way too many. I don't know how it works. It's really straightforward. It's broken down into main categories. Then if you're still not sure how it works, you can go to our glossary of search terms. You can actually search through that to find the search terms which match your specific search terms that of course you pulled from your statement of need. You see how this is all working together. So we've gone through this and added from an environment in animals, environment in animals general, animal welfare, animal assisted therapy and service dogs, and also mental health. These are all potential search terms that we can use to go through. We can also add in target populations. This is who we're going to be serving with our work. In this case, we're focused on seniors and the aging, but of course you could click on say children and youth or maybe Alaska natives or maybe veterans or maybe folks who are minorities or low income. These are all the different options you can click on to make set as your target population. And also if you look at this little eye icon, if you hover over it, it lets you know what's included within that specific category. It's the same thing on our areas of interest. So if you're not sure who's included within a specific category or if your search term falls under that, that's another way you can quickly see if it works. And finally, as Carrie mentioned, we have types of support and this is where you can see all the different types of support you can search for. This is whether you want awards or prizes or maybe you're looking for challenge grants or in our case, we need some equipment. We're looking for journal operating support. We're also looking for product donations and also money for a training program as well. Now, why would you do all this, Jeremy? This is so much work to do. And of course you can also add in the specific keywords if you have any that work specifically for you. Why would you do all this? If you intern this information, then you have now set yourself up for failure. No, I'm just kidding. You've set yourself up to receive actual notices whenever we add anything to database that fits these search terms. So you receive an email which says, hey, based on this project you have set up, this new funder matches everything you have specified. Go ahead and take a look at this. We recommend it. It may be a good one for you to look at. That's why we recommend doing this process. This is another feature, one of those tools that Grand Station has that's built into your specific dashboard. So let's say that we're all good with this. We've done our project. We're gonna go ahead and save this one and we're back at our dashboard and our main page. And keep in mind, as you're going through this, you'll wanna think strategically about your project and the impact it'll make. Think about, in our case, for instance, the animals with initial beneficiaries, but also seniors will benefit from the project.  So these are all different areas that we can go through. And that's what's so nice about this setup and why I recommend doing a project, description worksheet for every single one, just to really organize your thoughts. So you really know what you're looking for funding for. And it gives you that, you know, five minute elevator speech in case anyone ever asks, well, what are you really doing with your organization? This is what I'm focused on. These are the main areas. Are you able to help out in these areas? So once we've gone through this, we made our project description worksheet. We're now ready to go ahead and dive into doing research using our searchable databases. And again, we always encourage grant seekers to start their research by looking at government funding sources. As these sources can offer and provide most, if not all the funding that you need. So to find grant makers on GrantStation, you simply click on find grant makers and then go to the specific category you're interested in. In our case, we're gonna go ahead and start with US state government. Now we have a tremendous resource for the nonprofit community and our state database. Now, while some states have a central repository of state grants, many do not. So usually you have to know what state agency is responsible for what topics and then how to find a connection to each one individually, which can be kind of challenging. What we've done here at GrantStation is we've done that work for you. You just click on your state and you can be linked to the funding page for each state agency that provides grants. So our projects in Pennsylvania, so we'll go ahead and click on Pennsylvania right here. And then you can see all the different categories of funding that are available throughout the Commonwealth. And this is where you can break it down to contracts offered, information loans, Michelinia support, maybe training technical assistance that can help you out, as well as actual all specific grants being offered. You have links up here to lots of different general resources and then you have it broken down into all the different major categories. And again, each of these links can be saved to your dashboard. So you come back later and look at it in greater detail once you click the link to see if it's a good fit for your specific needs. Now, another area that you can search through is our US government section. And that's our US federal section, which again, you can find from clicking on fine grant makers and go into US federal. And this particular area can be searched by eligible applicants, areas of interest, funding agencies, keywords, the funding opportunity number and the catalog of federal domestic assistance or CFDA number. Also information is available on grants.gov. We've just created a very easy to use interface that you can then save to your specific dashboard and then use it as part of your research. So you'll start by clicking on whether you're a 501c3, for instance. And this is all based on what's available on the national level through the US government. Then you can add in your specific areas of interest. And then let's say we're just doing something for arts at this point. Then you can add in any other specific funding agencies or that CFDA number I mentioned or any specific keywords. And you can see with the breakdown here, you can save it to your dashboard. You can click this link, learn more about the opportunity, see which agencies are offering it, when was it posted and when will it close. Now, all the information in the US state and the federal government sections is really important to collect because when you apply to private funders, you can say that you've done your federal and state research. And in case you don't have any options, you can say at this time, there are no federal or state programs that can help us with our need. That way, the private funder knows you've done your homework, which really speaks to your credibility as an organization and that private funding is the only option. And just in case someone may realize, hey, have you looked into this yet? Like, no, I haven't even seen that one yet. And there's a chance you can then look it up right here on Grant Station, in case you didn't find it when you're doing your research. Now, once you've completed your government research, you can now move on to the US Charitable Database. And again, to get there, you simply click on US Charitable and it'll take you right to the US Charitable Database. And at this point, I'm gonna hand it off to Carrie, so she can walk you through how this section works, but I'm gonna go ahead and man the mouse and find things for her as she speaks. All right, thanks, Jeremy. So the US Charitable Giving Database has thousands of funder profiles, and this includes independent family, community, and corporate foundations. There's corporate giving programs, faith-based grant makers, giving circles. There's associations that have grant-making programs. And then we even have some that are categorized as other sources. So the profiles are searchable by geographic scope, by areas of interest, types of support, by the funder's name, and by keywords. In the content area on the left here, you'll find a brief guide that'll help you through the search process. And then on the right-hand side is the navigation area where you can enter your own search criteria. So under geographic scope, you can choose to search for global grant makers that give to US organizations, which will increase our collection of options. But for now, how about we click on Pennsylvania, which was, I believe, our area. There we are. And then let's choose national grant makers. So we'll click that, and that brings our search results up to 2056, which is quite a bit. So as each criteria is added or subtracted, it will either broaden or narrow the funding opportunities that are being displayed. This initial process of choosing our geographic scope allows us to cast our search net as wide as possible, combining national opportunities with state-based ones to really see just how many funders might be able to support our need. And then once we start selecting other criteria, the results will begin to narrow to funding opportunities that are hopefully a more perfect fit for our needs. And if you want more information on how the search operates, you can click on the, why am I seeing these results in the green language in the upper right corner there, and that'll give you a brief explanation. Oh, it's not in green anymore. We actually had, we left the reference to green, this very recent as a change in the last, approximately one day this has changed. So now we made it a simple learn more. And this is the only thing that reminds us of green. We used to have green text language here, but now it just learned more. All right, my mistake. At least some of it's still green. And with that, I think we're ready to select our areas of interest from our earlier search terms that Jeremy was talking about. And I believe that was animal welfare, which we will find under the environment and animals category. I couldn't even trick you on that. I knew you would know where that is. I didn't even have to pretend. And it's the third one down, animal welfare. Wow, you have it memorized. You know exactly where it is. Yeah, I could just see it. Okay, so clicking on that brings us to 131 results, which is definitely much more manageable. So let's add another criteria to this specific search here. And how about we go from types of support? And let's say we're looking for general operating support. Okay, so if we add that, that narrows us to 41 results, which is great. And if you want to narrow the search even more, we can remove national from the geographic scope that we selected earlier by clicking the minus button right next to USA. And then we can focus on those funders that are specifically giving in Pennsylvania. So that gives us 18 results. And then I'd also like to point out the keyword search at the bottom of the page here. Well, that's a powerful way to narrow your searches. Say if you're looking for funding in a specific county or borough. We suggest that you exercise caution when using that so that you don't narrow your searches down too much. Remember that the keywords that you enter might not necessarily be the words that a funder would use. And what I wanted to mention here, and this is something Kevin has brought up a couple of times in the past, is that if you do want to use the keyword search area, the best way to use this is to use it to narrow down your search results. So in our case, we only have 18 results, which is very easy to go through. But say we still had 131 results at this point. If you notice when you're looking at the results here, you see the geographic scope of a particular funder's giving, in this case, Pennsylvania, but they all tend to have, or many do, have a geographic focus. For instance, they're interested in Adams County or they're interested in the Philadelphia area or these people are interested in Erie or Pittsburgh, et cetera. You can add in those specific counties or that specific region you're in as a keyword search, which will then narrow the results just to that. So if you are working, say in New York metropolitan area and you want to narrow that down more without seeing all these different results that aren't a good fit for you, well, then that's how you can do it. You can go ahead and enter that keyword search and then you can find specifically what's gonna fit for you based on that. But what's also nice is since it's a very simple check and uncheck option, you can add something back in really easy. So I'm gonna go ahead and add back in national grant makers to across all states. Again, just check the box and we're gonna go back to 41 specific results. And I'm gonna take a look at one of these funders in particular and that's gonna be the American Fundraising Foundation, the Golden Pear Award Grants. They give across the US, they have no specific focus. So let's just see how they fit with our specific needs. So when you open up the actual record, what you'll find, of course, is the title of it at the very top, the left-hand side, sort of a breakdown of our profile, which includes our specific areas of interest and any specific application procedures. And then on the right-hand side, this is where you can go ahead and find their website. You can go ahead and visit any of their social media links. You can save this particular funder to your database. You can also mark it as NA.  Well, you mark it as NA, so when you're doing your searches, you'll know at a glance, nope, this is the one not to look at, go on to the next one. You can also print the profile and of course email it to yourself as well. And member insights right here is what other members have experienced using a particular funder. Sometimes we have some results there and then you can see what their experience was like when they were interacting with this particular funder. And you can see the specific breakdown information, direct contact info, with the financial giving ranges of a grant, who's eligible to apply, what type of grant maker it is, what's their history, in this case, we can see all the grant they've awarded. We can even view their 990 forms on ProPublica, by clicking this link right here. The very bottom, we can also see when this particular profile was last updated here on our website too. So let's say looking through this, they give specifically to Animal Welfare. So you know what? I'm gonna go ahead and add this. So I'm gonna go ahead and save this to my dashboard. So once I click save, oh, I have some options, I've saved this funder. So I can add it to a project. Well, I'm gonna add to my Animal Welfare project, which I made. I can even assign a priority. You know what? I'm gonna give it a high priority to look at it later. And notes, I'll leave that blank for now. So I'm gonna go ahead and save this. And now I've saved this specific funder to my dashboard, and I can click here to assign it to a project that I just did. And I can also add it to my plan. Well, what's my plan? You know what? If we go any further, let's learn about what my plan is and all the other features we have at the dashboard. So keep in mind, we're looking at the American Fundraising Foundation. So we'll use that as our guide as we go through these next steps as we look at our dashboard. So I'll go ahead and open up the dashboard. And Carrie, have you walk us through it again? All right, thanks again, Jeremy. So here we are in the dashboard section. And as we mentioned earlier, you can develop project descriptions, you can save your search criteria, you can save individual funders, and you can even track the status of your application process all through your own custom dashboard. So I'm gonna have Jeremy pull up each of the sections in here so that you can get an idea of what to expect when you're doing your own research. So I believe we covered the projects tab earlier. So we will next go to the Saved Criteria tab. Okay, you can select some search criteria and then name and save your searches. Once that's in your dashboard, you can click the name you gave it to rerun that search. This allows you to remember those terms that were most effective in finding funders for your programs so that you can run those again in the future to see if there are any new opportunities available. Okay, so let's X out of that and go to the Saved Grantmakers tab in the middle here. Do you remember what our Saved Grantmaker is? Yes, the American Fundraising Golden Pair Awards. Excellent, okay. Just a quick test, I'm done. Did I pass? Yes, you did. When you're looking at Grantmakers in the searches, you'll see that you can save a funder to your dashboard, which we did earlier, either from your list of results or from a profile. So this tab here shows you all the Grantmakers that you've saved to your dashboard. You can see their name, the project you've assigned it to, the priority you've assigned it, their application deadlines, if they have any, along with any specific notes that you'd like to make. You'll also see something called the decision matrix in the middle there. So the decision matrix is a tool that'll help you prioritize your leads so that you're focusing on those with the likeliest possibility of success and the least amount of effort. And Jeremy, would you like to cover that briefly? Yeah, and this is another of the tools that we mentioned that you're learning as part of our all the board imagery that we have for today's webinar. So as Kerry said, the decision matrix really just helps you prioritize what to do. Is this funder worth your time? Should you drop them? Should you drop everything and work on them right now? This helps you decide what to do. You start off by answering some easy questions or some mandatory questions. Do we meet their eligibility requirements? You can of course click this to learn what that means if you're not sure. So we'll say yes, we meet it and is the funding consistent with our mission? It's animal welfare. So yes, it is. So if you can answer yes to both of these then proceed. If you answer no to either of them, put it aside. Go on to something else. So now we add in the scored criteria. Zero is least favorable, three is most favorable. Are we in the footers? Do you have a giving area? Do you have across all the US? So yes, that's a good one. Do you address their funder area of interest? Animal welfare? Yes, that's definitely good. Do you reserve their target population? Okay, I'm not positive on that. I might need to go and take a closer look at their actual webpage to see if they have a specific thing they offer. So let's just say yes for now. And rather than go through each of these with you, you can actually go through all of them and read them yourself, learn more about each of them. But let's go ahead and just give ourselves some random scores. And for the most part, I think this will be a good fit for us based on the research I did with the grants they've awarded historically and the other information they've offered. So let's just say a lot of this stuff is gonna be threes. And I'm just gonna put the threes in here. And once they're all in, I'm gonna go ahead and save it. So now if we come back here, we can see that our American Fund Raising Foundation has a decision-matrix score of 34. What does that mean? We'll have to click on the 34. We can see that if it's between 31 and 45, they get going on those applications. And to do that, let's go ahead and get going by looking at the next section we have, which is my plan. So I'm gonna add this to my plan and have Carrie walk us through what we do next. Okay, so here we are going to navigate to the my plan section, right in the middle there. So the my plan section of the dashboard is a list of those grant opportunities that you've saved for a visual overview of the dates that you need to monitor so that you can stay on track of your grant application submissions. You can track the progress of each opportunity which will then allow you to take your research and move it into action. So let's go into one of these plans and have a look around. How about this? I suggest this one, yeah. Yeah, there we are. Okay, so we have the name of the funder, which project this funder fits, the priority of this application, then we have the status such as if an LOI has been submitted or the application is in progress or not started, the amount of the request, and then there are multiple date fields below that to keep you on track when working on your application. So think of the my plan section as your grant central station, if you will, of keeping a visual look at the comings and goings of your grants. And on the main my plan page, you can export dates to your calendar software or you can export all of the data as a CSV file for use in your favorite spreadsheet program. And you can export data from your various dashboard sections at any time as well. And was there something you wanted to add about this section, Jeremy? Yeah, just that you can also, once you've gone through this and you've done it a few times and let's say done this bunch of projects and one product is done, you don't need it for a while, you can actually archive it. So you can simply click on the one you've been working on, we can archive it, we can enter the archive year. Once it's archived, we can then pull it up at a later date. So we can pull all the information that we've used from the American Fundraising Foundation 2024. So the information has been saved, we can come back into it and then see what's going on with that particular process. And you can see here's multiple versions of what we've added. We've added one in 2023, but then you can see the specific dates that we've done the searches for too. So at any point, you can put information into your archive and then pull it back out. So you can have it fairly uncluttered. If you like it that way, I like to have a very clean desktop or maybe you like to have everything all at once, you can do that as well. There's lots of options for how to approach that here at Grantation when you're doing your research and finding various information through the my plan sections. All right, and I'll just make one more quick mention of the dashboard here. We're always adding and incorporating members feedback. So new features may appear in the dashboard at any time, which is pretty exciting. And that's why we really encourage you to contact us if you have any questions or you have an idea. Maybe you're wondering, well, how could I go about using this? I'm a grant writer and I have multiple clients. How would I approach this to go ahead and add in a specific grant maker that's just for my particular client that's not in your database? Well, you can always add your own private grant maker as well as something that was requested that we added into our dashboard. So you can add in something who is unique just to you and then track it using all the tools I've shown you within our dashboard section. So lots you can do here just within dashboard section, but let's go back and do another search. So I'm gonna go ahead and scroll back up to the top here. The trick, if I ever wanna get to the homepage, click the big logo, takes me back to the homepage of GrantStation. If I can click on find grant makers, click on US charitable one more time and do another quick search. So let's go into our saved criteria actually, which I actually did that earlier. So I'm gonna go ahead and click a save search to run. And again, you can see these can be searched in various categories as well, not just US charitable, but also within all the various options that we have here as far as databases go. So we'll do a search for animal welfare at this point. And it pulled up all the things I put in earlier, US, Pennsylvania, animal welfare, general operating support, scrolling down this list. I'm seeing some that look interesting, some that may be a good fit, but some, I know that there is something offered by the Purina Corporation. So I'm gonna enter in Purina right here and I'll click on submit. And okay, here we go. The Purina Corporate Giving Program. I'm gonna go ahead and click on this one right now. So looking at this right off the bat, you can see that they give in specific organizations located mainly in the Greater St. Louis, Missouri area, but also cities where they have operating or where they're operating manufacturing facilities. It's very common among many various corporate grant makers. So they give in specific areas. I'm not seeing Pennsylvania. Oh, Allentown and Mechanicsburg. Ah, that's not where I am. So it doesn't really fit. Okay, I'm going down the list looking, oh, here we go, product donations. So the company donates products to pet welfare organizations throughout the country. Oh, I'm Purina makes dog food. I need dog food. I need to add them to my list. So I'd go ahead and add this to my, I actually have it already added here in fact, but I just simply add it to my dashboard and then go through the process I just showed you. So now we've added something by just doing a keyword search or doing a funder name search. And that's how you can access our database. It's very easy to use, simply clicking on and off various boxes and entering in specific searches as necessary. So in addition though, to these US based grant maker listings, we also have three other unique areas to search through. So again, click on our big logo, click on find grant makers. You don't have to click on the logo, but I just do it all the time just through default. You can also search through our Canadian charitable database, our Canadian government database and our international charitable database. So our international database contains grant listings that are beneficial to US based on profits doing work overseas. So let's say for instance, you're addressing the issue of education in Nicaragua. We'll go ahead and start by choosing a specific continent. Then we'll add in a specific national grant maker. Then we'll add in our specific areas of interest. And here's a pro tip. If you are just looking for general support in a specific area, you can simply go into any of the major areas of interest includes the very top one, which is just general, which for the most part includes a focus on general education that's not specific to the areas listed or the focus is just on general education issues. But if you have something specific, that's even better because you'll get something more tailored to your specific need. So we'll click on education general at this point. And then just like you saw in our other database functions the same way of 29 results, then we can go through them accordingly, save them, learn more about them. In addition to this, we also have our Canadian charitable database. Again, functions the exact same way. You simply start by choosing provincial grant maker gives in the Pacific region, let's say Manitoba. And then we can add in national grant makers of across all the different provinces as well. And then add in the specific areas of interest and so on. And if you are doing work in Canada as well, you can also check our Canadian government section. This is where we've broken it down just like our state section to all the different provincial opportunities continuing with Manitoba. If we click on that, you can see everything broken down into those major categories, focus on all the different types of funding you can receive throughout the Canadian provinces and areas. So another thing I wanna do is head back to our homepage. And say that let's say we've assembled this list of potential funders now and this is known as primary research. We're ready to begin that secondary research. And that's when you research the grant maker and create our detail, generate questions to ask them to help determine if they're really the best fit for your project. And that's where the build section comes in that we have here. And that's what this is all about. We really pride ourselves on leveling the playing field through easy to use time-saving searches for funders that are actively engaged. But we also offer this in-depth long-term guide for building your grants program. So you can find articles here explaining the type of web research to do along with how the IRS 990 form fits in the secondary research. We also have guides covering in-kind gifts and many more things, how to find time, what are the different types of grant makers out there and how do I create time to do this in the first place? But we have two specific tools that will really aid you in your search for funding. Now, the first is the R3 as we call it and that's the revenue review and report that allows you to set grants program objectives and really defines how much to pursue and from which types of grant makers. And I actually went ahead and ran through one already. So if I go to my dashboard, again, this is where everything is saved and I click on reports, you can pull up a report that I actually ran already. And the way this works, it takes maybe 10 minutes of your time and a copy of your budget. You'll enter in the specific amount of funding that you have coming in from each specific grant source, say money coming from a local business, from corporate giving programs, from corporate foundations, et cetera. And you can put it in currently what you have receiving or and what you are projected to receive in the future can do either or for that. Then you can also enter in funds that are coming not from grants, maybe money from individual gifts or major donor income, maybe a special event you had, any earned income, earned income, interest, plenty of income, even a Michelinia source if you're not sure how it fits to that category. Once you've entered that in, you'll get a visual representation of where your current revenue is. And in this case, where the projected revenue is gonna be coming from, it's broken down into really snazzy little pie chart. You can of course print this out and put it on your wall, hand it to your board, let them see where you're at with your grant situation. You can see where you are with current grant revenue specifically, how much is coming from family-based foundations versus how much is gonna be coming from a family-based foundation in the future. You can also see your current non-grant revenue and your projected non-grant revenue. Where is that money coming from? Where is it going? And then most importantly, you then receive recommendations based on the numbers you entered. So it tells you what you should do within each section to diversify this portfolio of sources of where you receive your funding from. So if you're working with local businesses or you have nothing for local businesses, these are some steps to take. For instance, although corporations businesses typically contribute just over 5% of all philanthropic dollars, much more is given through in-kind gifts or corporate sponsorships and personal donations of individual corporate leaders. This is very true for local businesses. So this is a rule of thumb to keep in mind as you're going through. And this is one of the tools that we have here in Gran Station. We have more information available on this when you go to the main section of the R3 tool. But we also have another tool I wanna show you and that's available and reachable through our right side. We're in our build section right now. We also have one called the Benchmarker. And the Benchmarker is based on information that's pulled from our annual state of grants you can survey. The Benchmarker is a resource that can strengthen your ability to secure grant awards by providing a realistic framework for your grant seeking plans and goals. So this is where you can see what everyone else is doing. How are things working? How do they stack up compared to you? So you start by putting in your annual budget range. What's your primary mission focus? And then you can look at a basic report where you can add in more specific information. How old is your organization? What's your organization's paid staff size? What's the dollar amount that you have coming in? The more information you add the more customized report can have. If you like numbers and you like statistics and you want to learn that if I apply for three grants I'm more likely to receive at least one based on the size of my organization, the age of it. This is the area for you. This is a static or a static Titian, statistician. I don't want to say the person who works on hands or if that's an aesthetician. Anyway, if you like statistics, this is your section. This is where you can find all the statistics and information based on our most recent report, which was done from over 2,500 different nonprofit leaders. And that's our benchmarker, another great tool that we have here at GrantStation. So let's say, great Jeremy, I'm building strategy and I found funders and all that. What's next? Well, now you're getting close to writing the proposal. So if you click on write a proposal this is where you can find all of the information you need about how to write a proposal including award winning proposals. What's worked? We can actually download samples of winning grant proposals from our last four years or last four years we've ran this program. We run it every other year. We just posted 2023. You can download a full proposal, see what it looks like. That's exclusive to members. We have a history of over 50 different proposals available for download based on whether it's a federal proposal, a private proposal and all states in between. But within the right section you can also learn about your mission statement. What's the tax status about? What's my budget? What's the operating plan? What are all the things I need to have in place? That's what the getting started section is about. We also have a section all about the letter of inquiry. How do you understand it? What's the title page about? What is it? What's it for? What's a project narrative? This gives you samples and examples of how to do all those different steps. Then when you get to the full grant proposal how do I write this? What's my approach? What's my introduction? All of this is broken down in a soup to nuts approach with examples of how to write that full grant proposal and we even have a section all about editing and revising how to deal with your tone and style, how to streamline your writing. It's all available here in our right section on our website. In addition to the right section we also have our on education section. So we offer all of our various live webinars. We also have our short form webinars with your target at only 30 minutes long. And we even have recorded webinars and online courses as well available here. Clicking on live webinars you can see all the different webinars we offer. Just like the one you're taking now with TechSoup you can take webinars with us covering various specific topics from modest to major grants, developing project budgets, what's effective grants management. Here's a free one building your toolkit which the Grantation Resources for grant proposal writers that's coming up on October 2. We also have another one coming up here in TechSoup very shortly. So there's lots of opportunities to get extra learning and learn more about specific aspects of Grantation not only through our website but also through our online education section. In addition to that we have another section available and that's our public resource section. So where you can find all of our newsletters. We have a weekly newsletter that sends out 10 different distinct funding opportunities that goes out to US based non-profit organizations that's our Grantation Insider. And we have two various monthly insiders once focused on Canadian funders those on international funders. These are all free to sign up for and I encourage you to sign up for them today and you'll receive 10 different funding opportunities each month for Canadian based organizations and the same for internationally focused organizations as well. And in addition to our newsletters we also have our trend track section. This is where you can find various articles that we've written which includes things like track success which is a collection of feature articles that focus on a particular grant maker or a philanthropic trend. We also have the state of grant sticking which I mentioned so where you can download that annual report of the survey results from the grant sticking community is currently available for 2023 and also where you can find GS Insights. This is a blog that features the thoughts and observations of our staff, CEO and numerous guest writers. And lastly you can find our Pathfinders section so I'll click on here right here. This is a freely accessible library provides profiles on top quality resources in grant research, writing and management as well as strategic planning. You can simply choose a main topic of interest to you then choose the format you want to look at that in and then you will receive a really long list. Let's do fundraising and say I'm only looking for blogs on fundraising. So here's a great big link and of course you can save all of them to your dashboard as well and come back later to learn more about that. And each of these links will take you to a direct write up on each of these various profiles that are available. And as you can see, lots of different topics and lots of different formats to find that information in. So I'm gonna click our logo one last time and take you back to the homepage of our website. And the thing to remember though is that if you're doing a search for funding for any kind of project it's really important to identify the best grant makers to approach and have the right tools to make it easy for you to do that. Using GrantStation really allows you to apply your time or it's most effective and efficient in your search for funding. And I am right on time today. I don't know how I do this. Sometimes I even amaze myself. But we have a lot of time for questions. So hopefully there are a few that have come in that may be of interest. And of course, if they're not in yet now is a great time to go ahead and start writing those in. But also now is a great time to remind you if everything I showed you today looks interesting if you want to save over $600 on a regular membership it's normally $699. You can pick up GrantStation for only $99 and that will be two days only September 19th at 9 a.m. and September 20th all the way to 8 p.m. So you got that little window to go ahead and pick it up through TechSoup. If you aren't a member of TechSoup I encourage you to apply and become a member of TechSoup. If you have questions about that definitely enter that into the Q&A section or the chat area as well. But other than that, I'm ready to answer questions and now it's Kevin's turn to take the stage and answer questions or point out things or tell me what to do next. All right, Jeremy, you want to go back to that write proposals page? I do very much so. All right, Julie was asking about any help we have about grant application budgets. Can you do a control F for the word budget here? I think we got like three different pages. Oh, we do at least I think, yeah that focus on just the budgets. Let's see the budget, budget summary, budget and budget narrative justification. So quite a few options here. Of course, I recommend that you get started ha ha with getting started and the budget. All right, and then she also was asking about templates. One good spot to go for that is those winning grant proposals that Jeremy mentioned. All of those will have the way they've laid out their budget included. So if you don't know what a budget's supposed to look like you can go into these grant applications and see what people have won a grant before what their grant proposal, the budget section looks like and that'll give you a lot of good guidance. So if you're new to grant seeking these winning grant proposals are really like a great tool to let you see what those look like if you are completely new to that. Anything else you wanna add about budgets or winning grant proposals, Jeremy? No, that's pretty much covers a lot of it. And what's great is again, you have this history of grant proposals that you can search through and just click on the sample section. Here is all the different grant proposals that you can download as a member of GrantStation going all the way back to 2013 which I wouldn't recommend using these as the basis because that's over 10 years ago but taking a look at all of this year's listing and we have quite a few available here just to see what it looks like, what's working and what should you do as well? All right, thanks Jeremy. And then most of our costs are all inclusive with your membership fee but what might not be included with that membership fee? The only thing not included with the membership fee is webinars. Webinars are a separate cost and the same thing with any kinds of online courses that we offer as well. But what's unique about webinars is you can use them as really cost effective group training. We have group rates. So if you wanted to have 10 people attend a session and save quite a bit of money on that you can definitely do that by taking a webinar and setting up for the group rate and then have over to up to 10 people attend that given webinar. But otherwise you can find the listing of the webinars and their specific costs available on each individual webinar page. And we also have free webinars. Okay, Jeremy. Quite a few actually and we make sure they're very clearly marked with a big fat free. So you know that there is a free thing offered. We offer at least one free webinar a month including one just like this one directly through Grand Station. So if you wanted to go ahead and learn even more about Grand Station or you love the sound of Kerry's voice or Kevin's voice, it's not my voice. Then you could sign up and take one of these free tours that we offer on a monthly basis as well. Excellent. And are any of those online courses free? I can't remember if any of the... We periodically go through and offer free ones here. There's one of them we're actually redoing this entire section. We're adding new courses to it. And since I work with the OLED team here at Grand Station we will be adding a sample course that you can go through and see what it's like and understand what you're receiving. But we'll be adding new ones and changing this entire page and the whole layout. So within the next few weeks if you come back to online courses you'll see, oh, here we go. See it's small, we're gonna change this. Here's a free module creating time. So you can go ahead and take this one right now for free and see what it's like in connection to the paid modules that we offer here on Grand Station. All right. And I know I messaged Carrie about two minutes ago saying I didn't have a whole lot of questions targeted towards her, but Carrie, are you ready for me to put you on the spot? One came in. Yeah, sure, hit me with it. Okay. So Lyle's asking for a new nonprofit. How difficult is it to get grants versus more established organizations? Yeah, I feel like it's gonna be a bit more difficult. We do have a click box for startup funding which may help, that'll definitely bring up some options. I think the options are gonna be limited but there are some out there. Yep, we've seen quite a few funders where they say you have to have been in existence for at least three years, but there's also other funders that are willing to take a chance on new organizations. We've even been adding inter-eligibility funders that fund organizations with fiscal sponsorships. And there are quite a few of those out there. So there is funding even if you're not in officially established 501c3 yet. So as Carrie mentioned, that startup funding will help you find those organizations that have a specific interest in new organizations but also some of those other organizations that don't specifically target startup organizations may consider new organizations. You'll just have to check their eligibility as you go through those opportunities. Jeremy, are you ready for some nuts and bolts thing? Yeah, real soon. But actually a related thing to that is if you are in a situation where you are a newer organization, you're trying to establish, as Kevin said, a lot of funders do like seeing that you have a proven track record and that you're working and whatnot. Another option to finding some resources for a new one is to look at your US state government page or Canadian if that's where your focus is and choose your specific state and take a look at what's available within your main focused area. If you take a look at the website, you may be able to find a group or a committee of some sort that advises people within your given area. It may not necessarily be there but it's often a resource that's overlooked and it's also qualified as training or technical assistance. So if you are in that boat, take a look at training and technical assistance offers that we have that may be able to provide you with some support, maybe some approaches that can help establish you as a newer nonprofit or even help you form a partnership with a more established one so that you can both benefit from a grant application. Yep, that's a good point at being there. One trend we've seen in the grants field in the last couple of years is this push towards collaboration. So if you're a newer organization, you can join forces with an established organization and we do have a search term specifically for those collaborative opportunities, those funders who specifically want to fund those type of partnerships.  All right, nuts and bolts questions now, Jeremy. We got the classic and more than one person used this grant station account at my organization. I really encourage you to have a separate account for each person just to deal with the specific dashboard information and you can also always export all the information you've put in there. You can send in the email if you need to have a specific funder as well. But if you are saying, Jeremy, I have to have two people to access this, then just give us a call or call or send us an email infograntation.com. Let us know your situation, be able to find something that works out for you. All right, thanks. Next one is, are you able to start using grant station on the day of purchase? Now it's probably a little bit different through the TechSoup one here, right Jeremy? Since we usually have about 4,000 signups. Yeah, it takes a while to activate all of them. So usually I believe, and I'd have to pull in our customer management expert to go ahead and tell us exactly how that works. But once you've purchased during the sale, you're usually activated within a week. So you'll have full access within a week to grant station. And if not, you simply email us, let us know. But that information will be conveyed to you when you go ahead and sign up through TechSoup for the grant station membership for $99. So let's say you buy at September 19th, you will not have access on September 19th. We have to activate everyone. So I'd say by September 29th. Well, no, that's 10 days, sorry. Whatever 19 plus seven is, that's roughly how long it will take. All right, thanks Jeremy. And is the $99, can people buy more than one at a time through this TechSoup membership? I don't believe so unless they have separate organizations that's more of a TechSoup administration type question. But I believe it's based on the single organization. So the Jeremy Smith organization can buy one grant station at $99. Whereas the Kevin organization can also buy one at $99. So that's sort of how that setup is. But just throwing that out there, if you do need more memberships or you want to offer a grant station to all of your constituent organizations and you get it through TechSoup, I highly encourage you to do that. But if you need more, if you need more, you can always find us under partner programs. We have various programs that allow you to purchase multiple memberships for an organization, especially if you need more than like 10 or 20 different memberships within a given organization. So we have those options available too. But we're focused today on $99 through TechSoup. All right, and the $99 is only available to TechSoup members, is that correct? That is correct. And that's why you need to get signed up and connected with TechSoup first before you purchase this. So you've got a little bit of time. You've got five days to get that in place. So I think that's enough time to be ready to take advantage of this amazing offer that TechSoup offers. All right, and we have two linked questions. Is this offer, is this discount offered annually? And then are you required to pay more after the one year expiration of the $99 special? That's an excellent question because it's funny because I've been with GrantStation for so long and I know how we work at GrantStation. We don't trick you. We don't lock you into anything. We don't try to over bill you. We don't sneak in any special charges or any zingers. We don't do that. So it's so funny when someone asks that. So once you've paid $99 for this, we're not gonna charge you again. And what's great about TechSoup is since we have such a good relationship with them, we offer this every year. So if you want to plan ahead, here's a pro tip. You purchase GrantStation through TechSoup in September and then next time they offer it again in September, you buy it again and you keep saving money on GrantStation by buying it through TechSoup every year because we offer this yearly through TechSoup. So long as our relationship doesn't sour, I don't think it ever will. But I'm just saying, you can buy through TechSoup on a yearly basis and once you've paid, you do not have to worry about ever being charged for anything else. Once you've paid, that's it. Once your membership ends, it's over. You can always spend more to add to that membership. You can always add on and you can stack if we have another deal, simply on GrantStation, you can add on top of your GrantStation, on top of your TechSoup purchase of GrantStation. You can always stack on top of that, but you will never be given a secret or unnecessary bill. All right, and with your stacking that, kind of answers our next question here. If we already have the membership through TechSoup, does the $99 still apply as a renewal? Definitely. It'll just stack right on top of your existing membership. All right, excellent. Let me see here. So I think we've answered all the questions either via text or talking here. Let me just make sure that I'm not missing something that a bunch of people would like to know. Jeremy, did you go over the state of GrantSeeking? I did, but if you want to find more about that, go to Public Resources, hit the state of GrantSeeking, and this is where you can download that full report. Remember the benchmarker is how to delve into the statistics of it. This gives you the overview of the whole report. This is where you can find stuff such as applying for at least three grant awards and increase their frequency of winning an award. This is also where you can find out median largest awards, the median size of largest individual awards. This is all the different data together, whereas the benchmarker lets you delve into it to get unique just for your organization. Yep, and I did want to point out, we never want to turn away a sale, but for some of you folks, Jeremy mentioned, if you want to provide access to GrantStation to groups that you're working with, we also do have many partners that provide access to GrantStation already. So those of you folks, we have Lyle who is subscribed to the Chronicle of Philanthropy. They are one of our partners. If you are a grants professional association membership, you already get GrantStation through them. So just be aware that some of these partnerships, you can get GrantStation already through them. However, if you want to give us another $99, we'll gladly take it. And if you are a member of a grants organization that we aren't currently a partner with, you can reach out to your membership leaders and tell them, hey, I think it would be great if you guys offered this as a benefit to all of us, since these other organizations are doing that as well. And then Jeremy, the reason I was asking about the state of grant seeking is Michelle was asking earlier, what percent success with GrantStation do you have on a grant request versus not using the system? Now, we don't have any data about that, but do you remember what the state of grant seeking tells us about success rates for grant applications? On average, it's three. So if you apply for three, you're guaranteed to get one. If the question is, how is GrantStation helping me get that grant better? It's more a matter of providing you with the time you need to quickly get that information out to and connect with that grant maker. The system I'm showing you isn't exactly like, it's not a secret. This is information that's available out there, but what we've done and we've created a way for it to all be in one place to save you time. Cause the last thing you wanna do is spend your time writing grants, they're doing the work for why you need the grants in the first place. So GrantStation is about saving you time when you're doing all of that type of information. That's why we've added all these different tools, all these different features and made them streamlined and uniform in one location as well as having our large collection of funders you can look through. But it really comes down to the more you apply for the more you're likely to get. And of course, if you go in the state of GrantStation you can narrow that down and find out more specific information about what it is. But on average, apply for three, they'll receive one. Excellent, thank you, Jeremy. And then we have a couple of quick questions before we head out here. We did have a couple of people asking about those webinars again. So everything's inclusive with your membership except for the online education, correct? Correct. That's why we have a little separate green color here. This is the visual delineation. Membership includes all of this, hopefully we don't have too many colorblind people here but this orange reddish color this is all with your membership. Public resources is free, partner programs is separate and online education is its own thing. All right, and then Aretha put the end time. So that's second date, the 20th, you wanna make sure you do your purchase by 5 p.m. Pacific she has in there. And I believe in our promos it opens someone wanted to know when it goes live. I believe that's at 9 a.m. Eastern on September 19th. If you want to brag to your friends that you got the first TechSoup GrantStation membership, be waiting online to purchase that right away. That starts at 9 a.m. You know, if anyone does that, if anyone does that and sends me a screenshot that they ordered it directly to me, I will, I will, I'll be very happy. I'll be very happy if someone did that. Here I thought you'd mail them like some random gift. Yeah, I should have said something like that. Maybe I will. But yeah, if you do, if you're one of the first people to do it and you attended this webinar, then yeah, I can definitely, no, I just, I'd be amused by that. So yeah, definitely. All right. And I think we have answered all the questions. If anything else comes up, feel free to go to our homepage under that little help in the upper right. There's a dropdown to contact us. And in there you can either call some live people, send us an email or even shoot us a fax. Only one person has ever taken us up on the fax offer there. Jeremy and Aretha, do you folks have anything else to add? Well, I'm good to go. Hopefully this has been helpful for you, but any further questions, infograntstation.com, Aretha, I will let you take us out. This was so excellent. There is nothing more to say.  Grant station, you're amazing. I'll see everybody on the September 19th and 20th for the Grant station sale. Bye-bye everybody.


I'm Ryan. And I'm Allie. After falling in love, we decided to ride bikes across America, collecting love advice along the way. This is Love Cycles. No flatties, no wannies, no crannies. Pretty cool, we're over there packing up camp and I start hearing noises over here at the lock and it's actually working. We're seeing a boat come through here. So how many boats a day come through here? Let's see this time of year three or four. Oh, that's it? Okay. This is a slow time. After Labor Day, they'll start heading back. It's fun to see this thing come to life. Wow, so these are the original photos. From 1914, 1916. This was this lock, lock 20. 1915. All right, we are all packed up, ready to go. And it's crazy to think about this, but we only have three riding days to get to New Paltz and then another day to New York. Four days left of riding. For so long, the trip has been like, oh, we're so far from New York. We're in Moorgate. We're in Idaho. We're in Wyoming. New York seemed like it was impossible. Now we're really, really close. Feels amazing. It's a mixed feelings. It's really, really exciting to be getting so close to New York and to the end of the trip because it's a big thing to bike all the way across the country. But it's also kind of sad. I don't know what I'm going to do when I wake up in the morning and I'm not going out to ride my bike and it's going to be sad to be sleeping inside all the time again. So it's, yeah, it's mixed feelings. It's been such an incredible experience. Some parts of the canal path look like you're riding through a fairy tale and this is definitely one of them. There we go. Let's go a little bit faster. So faster, we were not going to fall over. Fuck, we're so close. Okay, we got this. We got this. Our first riding kiss and we're very excited about it. We've been talking about it since day one and we just haven't, you know, thought it was a good idea because we didn't want to crash and break our bikes and break our bodies, but now we're so close to the goal. We're like, let's give it a shot. We did it. We rolled and we touched tongues. It was beautiful. We camped at a lock yesterday. This is also a lock, but it is gigantic.  The dam is making a lot of noise. Damn. It's like we have a waterfall, except it's actually a dam. Yeah. Thank you, Planet Earth for another beautiful day. Very canal trail and it has been such an incredible trail. We're going to be sad to leave it and we are going to keep on going down to New Paul to spend a couple days in my family before making the final 100 mile push down to the city. Here we canal trail.  We have made it to Albany, the capital of New York and it is really pretty. We are crossing the Hudson River now.  It's kind of surreal to be this close. We are celebrating our arrival on the Hudson River with a little bit of chocolate fudge browning. They didn't have fish food. So close to your hometown. We are. Yeah. It's going to be awesome to see my family. You know what we're doing right now? Something we haven't done in a long time. Riding up a hill. We've been on rail trails for the past 500 miles. And before that, like just flat farmland. This is the first hills we've felt in a while. It's good. Explain what's going on here. Well, our new friend. We've been stalking you for the past two months. We've been stalking us for two months. Brought us down this amazing feast. Since you were complaining in one of your midwestern towns that you didn't have beans. So what would make you want to drive two hours to find us? Because your adventures are something we've always wanted to do, but we work all the time.  I'm retiring next year. So it's given me ideas. I have a friend that's not, well, she's around 10 years younger than I am. But my other friend is retiring also. And your Cuba trip, we want to go to Cuba. So this is how you do it too. You use that camera. Yes, that's how I did. This is how it happens. All I do is hold up this camera and put it on YouTube. Wow, this food looks incredible. Can't thank you enough for the effort you put into this. Let's have a cheers to new friends and new adventurers. And to making it. This right here is the definition of road magic. You know, we're here in the city park in the middle of nowhere. Patty contacts us on Instagram and says, hey, I'd love to come meet you. She drives two hours, brings us a meal. And now we have a new friend and life is beautiful. That was really special and two incredible women too. Yeah, absolutely. We got to hear all their stories in life and they want to get after it. And I love it. People who want to get after are my kind of people. Yeah, such a sense of adventure.  Yeah, she made this special taco salad and brought all of our favorite stuff.  So here's a root beer. And she really paid attention to detail. This is, this is a great last night before new faults. Yeah, reminder, just reinforcement of all the beautiful things that we've been remembering, recalling, learning about, about our fellow humans out here, about how the amazing people that we're surrounded by. With Patty and Connie in the city park and when they left it was dark. So we hid ourselves in this little cubby hole over here. It's wet. It's like a swamp. Time for the cuddle monster. It's the last day. Go to new falls. You do not smell very good. We are sticky. Gotta look good for Allie's family. We're riding to your hometown today. How do you feel about that? I am super excited for us to be cruising towards the new falls. We're going to be riding in on the rail trail where I learned to ride a bike and that you see my major mode of transportation, like my friend's houses and into town and stuff because I didn't have a car. So I bike there on the rail trail. It really does feel like home to be in a place that's just so fertile and so green and so lush and the rolling old hills and the old Victorian architecture. I just love the beautiful buildings. My family is amazing. There's a lot of them and it is so much fun when we're all together. We did it to the last 20 miles of trail into new falls and that is my beloved rail trail. It's got black dirt which is different than any of the other rail trails that we've ridden on. Here to greet us is my brother-in-law Jason and he's going to ride this last 20 miles into town with us. We're going to go buy my childhood home. We're going to go buy actually three homes that I lived in once upon a time and it'll take us all the way into new falls. I haven't been home in a year and gosh I've pretty much never introduced boys to them. There are these really cool caves in this area. A lot of the area has been mined out for the limestone but some of the trails grow through the caves and we used to throw some raging parties in the caves. Bands would come and play in them and they'd be like these crazy rave things. It's really fun. Hello!  The beginning of my family. Diane was my neighbor growing up. Still lives here. Elaine's my godmother and Bruce is one of my, probably one of my father. Allie where are we going to go now? We're going to go on a little tour of where I grew up. So my stepfather named this road after me because well I lived in both the houses. My mom built a house on this road and my father built a house on this road. My mom and my stepdad built this when I was about 10 and my mom made the garden as big as the house. So when I was just a sparkle in my daddy's eye my parents decided to get together with a group of friends six families and buy this property. They bought 200 acres and most of that was communal land but each family got a couple acres for their own private plot. So a lot of the people who created this community together are still here. This is the first house that I lived in here and my mother my father built it together and it is still a really special place for me. This land will always feel like home to me. The community here, the people, the cliffs, the pond, the river, all the houses that I lived in officially and unofficially but again most importantly the people. It'll always feel like home no matter how long I'm away when I come back. It's still my land. Welcome to my brother Wyatt's house. We're here for a big family celebration and though my family is really tight there's not a lot of opportunities for us all to get together like this because my mom and my dad and my sister live in Colorado so do I. So they're all here and we are going to have a super fun time tonight before we do the last 100 miles in Blue City. Well you guys should recognize this one. This is my mother. How's it feel to see us at the end of the trip? I am very happy but it's not quite the end. We've got 100 miles and I keep my fingers crossed and say my prayers every morning. No crashes, no smashing, no sliding. You gotta make it that 100 miles. Get that wheel in the Atlantic Ocean and then I'll be relaxed all the more.  Who is this lovely lady? This is my sister Jeffy. This is my aunt Mary Ellen and she was one of the first people who greeted me when I came into this world. That's true. These are some of my nieces and nephews and some other ones we just acquire kids in this family. Hey guys. Can we introduce you on camera dad? Am I presentable? I'm getting you presentable. You may recognize this one. This is my very own father Peter. Yeah I think the one and only. The one and only. What would make you want to drive three full days to New York to come and see Allie in New Falls? Well, so I had to see the end of the trip. It's such an amazing adventure. Size order. Oh size order. Wait a second. I should be on time. Oh no, Leah's taller. What are my very own sisters? Leah, Shiloh and Jesse. And you can tell they were sisters because we all have the same.  Well that's okay.  Look at that. She's your little baby sister. Yep and I cried every time I watched one of the films. I cried every single time. Sorry I keep stepping on your toes. Yeah it's awesome. It's amazing. It's beautiful. It's such an amazing experience. It's an amazing experience for you and Ryan to do together. You know like most people never have an experience like that together. Really interesting. But if there's anyone who's gonna do it, it's gonna be Allie. If there's anyone who says would you actually like to bike from one coast to another like in two weeks, you'd be like sure yeah that's fine. Most other of us probably wouldn't have made that decision. So we weren't surprised but we're so happy and so proud of us. Nice job. Look at that.  There's nothing I love more in life than launching kids on swings. It brings joy to them and to me right? This is my dear sister-in-law Marissa. Thanks for having us. You are so welcome. Here we have my brother Morgan and my sister-in-law Megan and I hardly ever get to see these two so this is a very special occasion. Hi. Hi.  It's maybe from their garden and it turns into a big gourmet party. What's going on here ladies? We have our special cake here. How long did it take you to make that? Two days. Two days of what what are all the ingredients and what's it called? It's a chocolate truffle strawberry cake. Yeah. Wonderful to see all the friends and family.  That cake was good. It's been really fun to get to know your whole family and spend some time here in New Paltz. Thank you for letting me be part of your family. Yeah. Thanks for coming here and spending time with them. I really can't tell you how much it's meant to me to have a few days here just to like chill and relax and introduce you to them so you can know you know what you're getting into. This trip has been so long and so short in so many ways but we have one night we wake up tomorrow and we have 100 miles exactly to New York City our final day of riding. We got this. No crashies, no whammies, no flatties, no flatties.


Right. There's this thing on. Great. Well, I hope you're ready for this talk. I'm certainly not. This is usually a speech that I give half drunk in a bar somewhere to a potential consulting client. I'm hoping it'll work here as well. So five dev cons in five minutes. Why am I qualified to give this talk? I'm not very prominent. I haven't accomplished any great thing, but I have been to almost every dev con except the one that was in Gavin Woods living room. So you can see here proof of t-shirts. I did think the obvious thing of just like stripping through them on stage. That idea did not survive beta testing. You wouldn't appreciate that. So as with everything in the short story, I'm going to impose a narrative arc on what I'm doing. So this is as much perception. My perception is any reality, but I would see the dev cons are after going like this. Nerds met Bitcoin. That was the very beginning. We were then a grown-up technology. Very respectable. We were rich and fabulous. Does anyone remember 2017? It's not a point of honor, but it was fun. Followed by cry and build, I would describe that stage as, but it's still a time when a lot of progress was made. And then people discovering society. So Devcoin one was really small. It was basically the size of this room except reasonably full. It had one line for coffee. That was the only catering that we had. Casper, proof of stake was first mooted here. A lot of stuff was said about the benefits of smart contracts and they had a sort of nice academic feel. The Dow was proposed there, I think in a side event. And Ethereum was denial of service attack. You'll notice a theme on that. And here is an example slide. You can see it was a very, very, very nice hall. Dev con too is my favorite dev con because I seemed artificially cool, because Shanghai is a confusing and artificial and scary environment and I'd already been there five or six times before. So I looked like I knew what I was doing. This is when it really became respectable. IBM was there. People had stalls. People from Chinese local government showed up. It was great. For very obvious reasons, safety and security were big things. Formal methods came in. It was still very much bring your own nightlife. People just hung around the hotel or said they were going to certain bars. Vitalik was in I think the sheep's head pub it translated to quite often. And it was very small. You could just go up and talk to Joseph Levine. It was very communal. Ethereum Classic were there. If you want that story, get me a beer later. The Dow was informally post-mortem quite a bit. And in accordance with what was then tradition, Ethereum was denial of service attack in the middle of the event. But it was a lot of fun, as you can see. And the catering was good. It's also where Pookie Boobah's string games started, which have been a constant feature. I'm not sure if he's doing them these years, but if you see people with just bits of string and sticks bits of string and stuff stuck to themselves, that's because of him. DevCon 3. If I want to leave you with one image from this talk, my time has stopped. That's probably good. If I want to leave you with one image from this talk, it's me on the pontoon. That's a golf club at a party. I've been there for two hours without figuring out who is actually paying for it. Talking about mortgage security is while being brought whiskey. Everything was going to be great. There were lots of people who used to work in multiple-level marketing. The corporates were a bit more quiet. A lot of stuff was focused on use cases. There were also a lot of zero knowledge side events. Dexes came along. It was all pretty good. Prague, the money went away, but there were lots of developer tools. Prague is great. The beer was excellent. It's probably the first time I felt that we had proper tooling for what we were doing. On the whole, there were a lot of paper dies everywhere. Blockchain's LLC was quite an event. There was a huge haul with this girl as a hologram. I still don't know who she is. How am I doing for time? Two minutes. Good. I'm okay. Osaka, I think Osaka was a point where actually the money hadn't quite come back, but if anything, that was a good thing. A lot of people looked at Ethereum 2.0. There's a lot of talk about crypto law, and that was actually something people were starting to think about. Society law, the general world, that was good. ERC721 came along foreshadowing the NFT boom, generalization of crypto kitties, which is, previously when you did these things, you had to refer to them as something kitties. I did climate kitties for common credits at one point, and Ava and Libra came along, which was cool, and Japan is generally beautiful. I skived off a lot to go to the castle and stuff like that. Devcom Bogota is, of course, whatever we make of it. Everything is still to be announced. Even the beer. The coffee's been very good so far. You'll notice I've comment on that a bit. Here are many thanks to people on Twitter who help me with things. The pictures you see that are not mine are from them, and you can see that in the speakers notes, which I think will go up online. I'll redact them in a minute. Here are some really good articles about things that went on there that I would very much suggest if you enjoyed this talk. Thank you very much.