Leverage the power of Foundation Directory and LinkedIn for fundraising

- Welcome to today's webinar, Leveraging the Power of LinkedIn for Fundraising. My name is Dorothy Ho, the senior marketing director here at Candid. My pronouns are she and her. I'm joined by stellar team today, two of Candids top training experts, David Holmes and Tracy Kaufman. And we have Kyle who is managing the backend chat with Diana, Joyce, Mony and Stephanie. There are over 2000 of you registered for this webinar today. So we have a team of experts on hand to help you with any questions,

but please bear with them because there's a lot of you and there's only really four of them. So, to some of you, Candid might sound familiar or you may have heard of Foundation Center and GuideStar. Well, in 2019 we came together to form Candid. For those who don’t know who Candid is, we’re actually a nonprofit. We are a data and tech infrastructure nonprofit. Our mission is focused on ensuring those working in the social sector or working with partners in the social sector get access to data a

nd resources they need to succeed. And for nonprofits, this is flat out funding. As a nonprofit ourselves, we know that fundraising is a very important activity. We go through the same challenges as you all and we live and breathe a space with you all. Some of those challenges on this slide may sound very familiar. Donors don't know we exist or I don't know any rich people to raise money from or simply, I'm new to this fundraising gig and I don't know where to start. Well good news is Candid has

a lot of resources that you can tap into to help answer these challenges. In today's session, we we will be focusing on how you can leverage LinkedIn to help you boost your fundraising efforts. We'll go through a three step process. The first is starting with Candid's Foundation Directory to help you pinpoint who the organizations you should go after and who those key decision makers are at these institutions. Then we are gonna take you through how you can build those connections through Linked

In and share some best practices. The aim is at the end of this session, you're gonna walk away with some tactical actions that you can implement at your nonprofit and also understand what are the resources you have at Candid that you can tap into to help you with your fundraising efforts. So, let's get started with Foundation Directory. It's a great starting point if you're just out there wondering who are some funders that I should focus on? We can tell you which funders are dedicated to your

mission because we can tell you if they funded the type of mission in the past. That way you know that they are aligned to your objectives. We know that fundraising is hard, it's not easy, but that's why we have built, Candid has built a lot of resources to help make it easier. You can leverage Foundation Directory and we'll help you take the guesswork out. We'll tell you which funders are the key ones that you should focus on and we will show you who the key decision makers are at these institu

tions. People resources is always strapped at nonprofits. That is why focusing your time on fruitful prospects is important and knowing who the key target people are. Once you have this, you're gonna be way more efficient and you're gonna prime your organization for success. We follow this three step process and it's a good outline for anyone that's looking for guidance on how to get started or fine tune their fundraising. First, you wanna search smarter, you do wanna focus on what your nonprofi

t does by subject area and potentially where you are based. These are great places to start. Another great place to start is tap your past supporters. Past funders have funded your nonprofit in the past, therefore they know who you are and are warmed up to your mission area and therefore there's no reason why they shouldn't fund you in the future. The good news is if you connect your EIN to Foundation Directory, we will tell you or who your past supporters are so you don't have to look. Next is

you're gonna wanna build better prospect lists. We know people resources is a hot commodity at any nonprofit, so you're gonna wanna focus your time. You won't need to troll through 990s Candid distills all, this information for you and in the demo coming up we'll show you how you can use it to prioritize key funders. Next is fundraising doesn't stop at just finding an institution. You're gonna wanna know who to contact. Well the good news is Foundation Directory has an integration with LinkedIn

where we can show you who the key decision makers are and then how you can connect to them on LinkedIn. So let's walk through how to build a robust prospect list. This is where I'm gonna pass it on to Dave now who'll introduce himself and he'll walk you through how you build a robust prospect list in Foundation Directory. - Thanks Dorothy. Hi, I am Dave Holmes. I am educational programming manager at Candid. I'm joined also with Tracy Kaufman who is also an educational programming manager at Can

did. So the two of us are gonna show you how to use Foundation Directory and if you've never used it to use Foundation Directory and if you've never used it before, this will give you a little kind of introduction to it. It's the main tool that we use to help people find potential sources of funding. And it's really meant to be as easy as possible to use. When you see this, if you go to one of our partner community Candid community partners or if you subscribe to it and you see this interface, y

ou should know that you can just type in whatever it is that you are looking to find. That's a good way to start. So this is the interface and I'm just gonna type in, I'm gonna imagine that I have an afterschool program that's in Virginia and it works with kids and I'm looking for as much funding as I can find so I don't have to do anything really special. I'm just gonna type in words that describe that. So afterschool sports and teens and Virginia, let's do Richmond, Virginia, but it can be any

thing just to get yourself started, especially if you've never done this before. This is the the blank and I'm just gonna fill it in and hit find funders and what I get is what Foundation Directory has, how they've interpreted what I've typed in. So, it assigns specific terms that are linked to what we've just searched. And I would say that about half the time, Tracy, I don't know if this is your case, but about half the time I start this way sometimes just to find out what are the terms that ar

e commonly used? Because you don't wanna just use random keywords. You wanna get focused on the funders. - Yeah, I often like to start broad like this with just a simple search and see what happens and sometimes you'll be happy with what you see in the results and you can go with that and sometimes you wanna take that as just a jumping off point and either broaden or narrow your search from there. And like I always tell everyone when they're starting out with the Foundation Directory, if you get

bad results on your first search, it's not a big deal. You can just back up and try again because the computer's not going to burst into flames. - Oh no no, everything's gonna be fine. The other thing about this is that once I do the search, I look at the terms that are up here that we have assigned and I think, oh these are good match. These seem to be pretty close to what I was originally searching. It gives me a list of 566 grant makers and that's an awful lot. But, what I can do to narrow i

t down is to go into the advanced search and filters and then go in here and decide well do I really want to be this broad? Is it all of these terms that describe what we do? Maybe I want to add some other limiters so I can say I only want to see funders that give for capital and infrastructure or I only wanna see funders that have given in the last five years or so and I can move the little slider here. Maybe there's a particular amount I wanna raise. All of these things are ways that you can l

imit that list so you don't have to look at all 566. Down here is the list of the different results and I am doing this kind of quickly, I should say, if you wanna learn this in depth, we have an intro to Foundation Directory class that you can take. We also have quite a number of tutorials in the Foundation Directory site. But this gives me a list of funders and you can see the first list here is just the first five and it gives me a sense of which ones have given the most specifically to this

idea. If you look over at the grant count, we know that the community foundation for grant Richmond has given 568 grants related to the topics I just searched. So what I'm gonna do is take a look at a little bit longer version of that list and show you some things you can do with it. The ideal situation is you're finding as many funders that are interested in what you do as you can and then finding out how to approach them. So I can look at this list, I can sort it a lot of different ways. If I'

m more interested in the amount that they've funded, I can re-sort by that. I can look at it alphabetically, I can look at it a lot of different ways, but this is really sorted by the ones who've given the most grants and in the order of priority. I would say that a lot of the times the first hundred and Tracy, I don't know what your feeling is. I like to get at least a hundred to go through. - Yeah, I usually do as well, but I'm even happy with a list of 50. But if you end up with a list of say

thousands of results, that is often more than you need. And also I see a question that someone submitted asking why do areas outside of a chosen geographic focus appear? Which I think means for instance you see funders that are based in say Charlotte, North Carolina or Boston, Massachusetts. Is that a problem? Does that mean something went wrong with the search? And I would say no. That is just showing you where the funder is located, which is not always the same thing as where they fund. Some

funders are local funders and they will fund only in the area of Richmond, Virginia and some are national funders and they fund all over the country and some are international funders and fund all over the world. So don't worry what it says under city, the search knows that you want funders who fund in Richmond, Virginia. - And let's take a look at one of those. Let's look at Bank of America Charitable Foundation. This is a corporate funder out of Bank of America and they're headquartered in Cha

rlotte, North Carolina. But you can see by looking at this, which is their profile. So anytime you go and do a search and you click on the name of the funder, you get a profile list. And this is the profile for Bank of America, which you can email to yourself or print out. It tells you first of all what they've given in the last five years. And you can see Bank of America, though they're in North Carolina, have given all across the country to every state probably where any Bank of America locati

on is. They really focus on education and human services. As you scroll down you can see their grants are of a particular size. That gives you an idea of how much you much you might wanna ask for. And down further it starts showing you specifically which grants have they given that are directly related to what you're interested in. And it's tells you what the grant was for. Who it went to, the year it was given and the subject area. And each one of these you can open up and look at and find out

more. All of this is ammunition. All of this is when I'm gonna try and decide who I'm gonna approach. I wanna find funders that have given to organizations like mine that have given the kind of money, the money that's used for the things that I need it to be used for. That's what you're using this to research. As you look through this record and there's a little guide on the left hand side that'll take you all the way through the profile. You can find out what the main subjects for their giving

are and Bank of America has a lot and it goes through a lot of different things that they focus on. What kind of money they give, how they give their money and who they give to. It will tell you about the related organization. So it comes out of Bank of America Corporation. Tells you about their program areas and gives you details on them. So if you were looking to connect to them, you probably will have to see how you fit within all of these. That word fit, if you're not familiar with it, is a

word that funders use an awful lot and I think that sometimes that's the hardest thing. People look and say, well they should be interested in what I do, but it isn't always. Tracy, is that your situation too? You've seen this? - Yeah, just like any individual people have the things that are near and dear to their hearts and the things that even if they're still important aren't necessarily something you're going to donate your life savings towards. Funders are the same way. They have their spec

ific focus we give to this, that and the other thing, and if you fit, wonderful. And if you don't fit, then no matter how important it is, the issue that you're working on, it's just not necessarily a match with them. - So it's always a good idea to look in the applications part, look at their giving limitations where they say what they do and do not fund. You can see they give where Bank of America has a presence. So if you don't have a Bank of America around you, you probably wouldn't approach

them. If you wanna learn more about their financials, you can do that. And there's a lot of information about who's who with the organization. And I'm gonna let Dorothy talk a little bit more about this in just a little bit because the LinkedIn connections are ways to get into these funders. You're always looking for a way to make a connection. You can find out how they communicate. You can go down to the very bottom of this, get a telephone number and a website and who the main contact is. But

, if you've done foundation fundraising and you know that it is relationship based like any fundraising is, you know that you have to find as many connections as possible and we're gonna talk about how LinkedIn really helps that in the next section here. But remember that for all of these funders, you will have a profile that you can take a look at, you can save. If you say, well this isn't really a good one, you can go back to your list and think about some of the other funders that you might a

pproach. There are federal funders, community foundations, private foundations, charities that give money away and as Dorothy was saying, they get added to all the time. Tracy and Dorothy, is there anything I should mention before I finish up with this section? - I would add one more thing because I saw multiple people submitted questions in the Q&A about how do I filter out funders who are not taking unsolicited applications? - Oh. - First of all, yes, that is something you can do. You can filt

er out people who are not taking unsolicited applications. When you are in your list of grantmaker results, there will be a box that you can check that says, see exclude grantmakers not accepting applications. So number one, you can do that. However, I would not get overly committed to restricting your list that much because there are quite a few funders who are not taking unsolicited applications quite a lot. A lot of them are small family foundations in many cases that have a lot of reasons wh

y they don't have the capacity to take many, many unsolicited applications. However, all of those foundations are still bound by the same regulations as any foundation. They're all required to give out roughly 5% of their assets each year. So if they're not giving to you, they're giving to someone else. So it doesn't mean you can't apply to those funders who aren't taking unsolicited applications. It means you have to get in the door first and network your way in first I think is a very good seg

ue. - I think that's a perfect segue. I was gonna say. So I'm gonna stop sharing my screen, but you can find out lots more about the Foundation Directory if you want. We'll make sure that you get in the follow-up information on where to locate it. - Thanks Tracy and Dave, and that's great that you mentioned that because we actually did some analysis last year and I can tell you that out of the total funding, open RFPs equate for less than 1%. So therefore if you are only checking, if you're only

looking for funders with that checkbox, you are limiting yourself to less than 1% of the funding opportunities out there. So I'm gonna take you through some hints and tips of how you can bypass that. So now you have a list of funders you wanna target, that's awesome. As Tracy and Dave mentioned, the next step is building that connection and networking. And as Tracy mentioned, this is where you have to be resourceful as a nonprofit. But being resourceful as a nonprofit is not a trait that I need

to preach. It's pretty much a mandatory skillset for anyone working in the social sector. This is pretty much fact. So Dave showed you a grantmaker profile. Here's an example of another one, Bill and Melinda Gates. If you see a little LinkedIn icon at the top of that org, you'll know that this organization also has a LinkedIn profile. Simply click on that icon, make sure you're logged into your own LinkedIn account and that profile, their LinkedIn profile will open up. And this is a great way t

o see how you might be connected to this organization. It could be someone that you used to work with, that's great, definitely tap them for that introduction. It could be someone you currently work with that's also great. These warm introductions are gonna go much further than a cold outreach. It may be someone that went to your alumni that's also great. You may not know them directly, but that alumni connection is a great conversation starter. Be resourceful. Leverage what you have to try and

make that connection. Another great tip is in your LinkedIn profile, make sure you're connected to your exec team, your board members, because they could be potentially the connection to this org and you should leverage them. Dave showed you in the example, the who's who section in the grantmaker profile. Here you'll see a list of people working at the organization that you're trying to target. Once you pinpoint the key decision makers that you're interested in focusing on, if there is a LinkedI

n icon next to their name, you can open up their profile on your LinkedIn profile. This is a great integration that we have with Foundation Directory. Here are some examples. You can see that you might have a direct connection that's great. It might be someone you used to work with. That's also great. Leverage these connections. Don't be bashful to help you make that introduction. These warm introductions are goldmines. They're gonna go much further in a cold outreach. But, we do recognize that

this utopia world is not always. There are scenarios where you don't have that connection to this person. That is okay, don't give up. This is where you have to be resourceful. These are some tips from our own development team. They also have faced the same challenge throughout the fundraising year that you need to find ways to network and connect with this person. Some tactics you can implement is inviting them to join your newsletter or follow your social handles so that they can get organic u

pdates on the work your nonprofit is doing and the impact that you have on the community. Definitely, if they don't wanna join, that's okay. Consider sending them periodically interesting articles that you're featured in or blog articles that you have written. These are all great ways to help build your story with funders and if you can invite them on an onsite visit. So we talked a lot about how Foundation Directory and LinkedIn can work well together to help you fundraise. These are great tact

ics that you can implement. Next I'm gonna share with you something you can do in just LinkedIn on its own. I would consider LinkedIn as an extension of your marketing communications team. You can of course activate paid advertising to build outreach and engage users out there. But don't forget, you can also do organic social posts. These are great ways for you to engage the people following your organization page. These active posts will help you build your story with potential prospects. Think

about your own giving behaviors. When was the last time you gave to a nonprofit that you never heard of? You never seen? It's probably very rare, right? Funders are also the same. You need to warm them up. You can't just like post after post asking for donations. They're gonna wanna know your story, your impact so that when it comes time to give, they're familiar with your organization. In the next slide, I'm gonna share with you some creative examples that you can leverage to help tell your st

ory. But I would also consider posting about grants that you've received or key accomplishments such as earning your Candid Seal of Transparency. All of these add to your credibility and show a potential funder your potential. It also, if they can see that a peer funder has given to your org, it gives them the reassurance that you're a good bet and that you're good and that they should also be opening their checkbook and funding your organization. Here are some examples of creative. Definitely t

ell your story through some numbers. The impact that you have through numbers can be very compelling and this is a very simple graphic that you can implement. You can see that a lot of these photos and examples are live shots. If you have any events, definitely allocate one or two people as the photo takers. These days, photos taken on smartphones are very high quality and you should leverage them in any content that you produce. They're gonna look much better than any stock photography that you

like get online. Another great leverage thing you can leverage is if you have any real life stories or testimonials from people that you have impacted, definitely leverage them. This really brings to life your program or work to prospect funders. I spoke a little bit about how LinkedIn can be leveraged to help your fundraising. I only just covered some basics in my short time with you. I hope you gathered some key tactics that you can implement at your nonprofit. Next, I'm gonna share with you

some awesome resources that we have at Candid that you can also leverage to help you with your fundraising needs. First is some of, I've seen some questions about where you can access Foundation Directory. Dave also mentioned it previously. You can buy subscriptions for $50 and then you can access Foundation Directory at home or in your office and leverage functionality such as saving your searches, favoriting your key foundations that you wanna keep an eye on or leveraging a workspace to manage

your projects. However, we do understand you might not want to invest in Foundation Directory immediately. That is okay. We have over a thousand partners in our network where you can go in to these library locations and access Foundation Directory Professional for free. That's right. You can go in and use it on your own. If you go to candid.org/find-us and type in a zip code, city or state, you'll find your nearest location. At Candid, we do understand a lot of nonprofits need and are seeking l

earning resources. To help them get started or fine tune their fundraising skills. And we believe training shouldn't be a barrier for fundraising success. That is why this year Candid is now offering our training for free, all except our multi-day proposal writing bootcamp. So I invite you all to go to learning.candid.org to register for free and take any of our on-demand or live training where you'll probably see Dave and Tracy presenting. I've also highlighted two resources that you might find

helpful. We have a handy help guide that you can access anywhere you don't need a subscription to help you get started with Foundation Directory. And here is an on demand course that you can participate, which is introduction to finding grants, but we have plenty more in our catalog that you can select from. So, thank you for being with me today. I'm gonna throw it over now to Kyle. If there are any questions from the audience that you wanna ask, Dave or I or Tracy. - [Kyle] Hi, yes, we have lo

ads of questions. So thanks to everyone for submitting a question. We really wish we can get to them all, but if we can't, I'd just like to say you can send your questions over to customersuccess@candid.org. We really encourage you to send your questions to this team. They have dedicated members that are there to help you. So why don't we start with Dave, here's a really great question for you. Is Foundation Directory helpful for new nonprofits who don't have a history of funders? - Oh yeah, abs

olutely. There's a lot of different ways you can search it. One of the best things about it is you can see the funders that are most likely to fund you and you're not just trying to go randomly. You might know the most famous funder in your area, but that might not be the best one for you. It might not fit with what you do. There are funders out there that concentrate on school or concentrate on equestrian programs or whatever your program is. So you need to know who's out there that does it and

that's what Foundation Directory can do for you. It is always good to see about making connections. We try to publish a phone number if they publish a phone number, but if they don't, making those connections the way that Dorothy talked about using LinkedIn, it's a great way to introduce yourself. Maybe you won't get a grant from the best funder or the perfect funder the first time, but they need to know who you are and that's how you find out who they are. - [Kyle] Fantastic. Now Dorothy, I ha

ve a question for you from Paula. For funders who don't accept unsolicited applications, how do we break through this barrier? How do we get on their list to apply? How can we contact them and get the funder to know us? - Yeah, great question. This is where you have to be resourceful. You need to try and make that connection so you can, I would definitely use LinkedIn, do your research about this person, find a common connection. It could be that you went to the same university or you like belon

g to the same area or you have a common interest. Finding the common interest is a great way to start building that connection. I'll also look at the grantmaker profile in Foundation Directory to see if there's any insights that you can pull out because ultimately we've done the research about the person and you and you like use some of these for the outreach. That person's more likely gonna stop and read your message. If you just give them a very generic, hi, my name is, I'm looking for money.

Full stop. I will guess that that's probably not gonna go very far. Think about your own experiences in your working life you're probably being tapped from people trying to sell you things and what are the messages that stop you and get you to read? That's the type of techniques tactics that I would use when you're reaching out to a funder that says that they're not accepting unsolicited funding applications, but we know from the statistics that they're still giving, 99% of them still give. So d

on't let that be the thing that stops you. - [Kyle] That's great. I was actually gonna tee up another question along those lines from Tierney, they were asking, can Candid search filter out funders who do not accept unsolicited applications? And is this something that you would recommend? - I'll let Tracy answer that. She did. (chuckles) (Kyle chuckles) - Yeah, so I did mention earlier, yes, you can filter out those who are not accepting applications. After you run a search and it gives you a li

st of grantmaker results. If you click to see the full list of grantmaker results, it will bring up a checkbox that will say something like, exclude grantmakers not accepting applications. However, you will probably notice if you do that, that your list of potential funders will shrink substantially. So on the one hand, yes, you will have just the funders who are open to applications, great, but those funders are not necessarily better funders for you because like I said before and like Dorothy

said, like these funders are still beholden to the rules of the IRS. They have to give out money every year. The reasons why they're not taking unsolicited applications are often things like they're a small family foundation with a very small staff or sometimes no staff at all. They're not necessarily as big as the Ford Foundation, which has capacity to accept thousands of applications every year. But even if someone is not taking unsolicited applications, there's no rule that says you can't cal

l these people on the phone. You can call these people on the phone. Just use your conversation wisely. Be polite, be respectful, maybe script yourself a little bit, come up with a couple of good questions you wanna ask them or like look for someone who can make an introduction for you. And that's where the LinkedIn issue becomes helpful. Again, if you see that you have a connection in common, whether it's someone on your staff or your board or if there is an organization that you know in common

, like maybe there's another nonprofit that you're friendly with that you collaborate with, sometimes that could be your way in. That could be who makes an introduction for you or I've heard that sometimes the very best connection to a new funder who's not necessarily taking applications is an existing funder. If you already have funders who are giving you grants, if you're lucky enough to be in that position, use that in your networking. 'Cause it's a small world in funders. They know each othe

r, they talk to each other and they can be the one to make the introduction too. - And those kind of introductions are fantastic. People that you know on LinkedIn that are second connections to somebody that you wanna talk to, that's a great way to do it. I was a grant writer and I was always doing research for funders and I did not just, I mean I would say a good 40% of the funders I applied to regularly and got funding from said on their profile, we don't accept unsolicited applications, but i

t meant different things to each one. So you really don't know until you start trying to make connections, so do that. - [Kyle] Awesome. Thanks for all those tips for relationship building really great. I have another question, maybe Dave, you can answer this one. Does Foundation Directory show how frequently a funder gives to new organizations versus the same organizations each year? - That is a good, it's a good idea to look at the history of the giving of the funder because there are some fun

ds that are very small. Oftentimes they give to two or three organizations regularly and that's how they do their giving and it's just set in stone that way. But normally what I do is go into some of the giving searches and look at funders who have funded seed money as a type of support that they've given. And if you look at that, you're finding funders that are giving to new programs and possibly to new organizations. The nice thing about Foundation Directory is that you can look and see the hi

story of giving from that particular funder. You can just look up one funder or open their page and you can see who all they've given to that we know of since 2003 essentially. And if they've only given to one organization that whole time, that tells you one thing. And if they've given to 80 or 90 or a thousand different organizations and it tells you completely different thing. So yeah, just it's not that hard to get that research really quickly. You don't have to look at every single 990 to ge

t that idea. - [Kyle] Thanks Dave. We're coming up on time so I think I'm just gonna have time for one more question. We had some people wondering what you were referring to when you were talking about the gold, platinum, et cetera rankings. Dorothy, do you wanna explain what you guys were referring to? - Yeah, so Candid Seals of Transparency is a program available to any nonprofit. It's free to participate. Candid's profiles power give over 200 partner giving platforms such as Facebook, Network

for Good, donor-advised funds. They are literally leveraging our Candid profiles to power the giving platforms. So if you do anything at the end of this call, I do urge you all to go to guidestar.org, look up your nonprofit and see what your profile looks like. The one thing I do ask you to do is claim your profile and at least check that the address is correct. We hear a lot back from our partners that they send money and they're going to incorrect locations. So that really is painful because

ultimately we want the funding going to you all as quickly and as efficiently as possible. Once you claim your profile, you can fill in the information, you can start earning Candid Seals of Transparency. Starts with bronze, goes all the way to platinum. These show funders, you know how updated your profile is and is a great way to show your achievements. Once you earn your seal, your first seal, which is bronze, you can actually unlock a lot of benefits such as you'll be eligible for Apple Pay

for donations. You'll also be able to access a link that's unique to you that you can share to any of your funders or donors and they can get unlimited access to your profile plus many, many other benefits. But ultimately, you wanna use this profile to showcase the work you do and the impact that you have in the community. And it's a free program that's any nonprofit can participate in. If you have any more questions with that, we do have a page which I'll ask one of my colleagues to drop into t

he chat that you can look up more information about how to earn your first seal of transparency. So we're coming up to time. I wanna thank everyone. Stop the share it. I wanna thank everyone for joining me today. It was great to have you all on this webinar. I wanna thank my colleagues who participated with me. Without you, we couldn't have done this. So as we mentioned, there is a follow-up email with the recording coming out soon. But if you have any other questions, there is a little chat box

at the bottom of Foundation Directory. Please utilize that. That's actually a real person. Chat with someone from our team, it's not a robot. But if you have any other questions outside of the times they are available, you can drop an email to customersuccess@candid.org. Thank you.