hello everybody how are you hope everyone's having a good Tuesday I'm going to give folks a couple of minutes to trickle in here um as you're joining either heading into your lunch break or your just after breakfast or it's dinner time wherever you are in the world um thank you for joining us if you are here for this week's webinar show me the data uh how to use your organization's data to build a strong case for nonprofit funding you are in the right place my name is Amanda Deonte I'm our senio
r manager of virtual events here at bonara and I will be your moderator today uh I'm joining you live from Washington DC please feel free to write in the chat where you're coming from um what your organization is we always love to see kind of who's here with us uh in each of these webinars uh where you're joining from so feel free to drop that into the chat um and while folks are introducing themselves I wanted to cover a couple of quick housekeeping notes um first and foremost you are are welco
me to use the chat throughout the presentation um we'll keep that on and open so that you can engage with one another you can engage with us I will ask that you put any questions that you have for Tiffany or related to the content in the Q&A section um just because the chat as you can see tends to roll pretty quickly and we don't want your questions to get lost so um please put that in the Q&A it'll be available we will get to those at the end of today's session and get to as many as we can um l
ast point is we are in fact recording today's webinar uh we will email the recording to everybody who is here uh within the next two to four days so if you need to hop early or if you just want to rewatch this and absorb all of this good content over again or you miss something in your notes do not fear uh we will get that over to you um so those are my housekeeping notes before we jump into kind of the wonderful presentation I did want to start us out with a quick introduction to Bona for any n
ew attendees who might not know exactly who we are so wanted to just take a quick moment to share a little bit more about us um bonara makes software for the greatest social good uh propelling you and your mission to its peak impact so that you can raise more match more Grant more help more and really do more good uh We've brought together the powers of social Solutions cyber grants Network for good every action we Spire salsa and more um to really help you achieve that greatest good and and hit
that Peak impact um we've been on a mission to help you deliver life-changing programs for your greatest impact um save time on things like reporting so that you can have more time to serve your mission uh make data back decisions so that your programs perform at the highest level and really make sure nothing falls through the cracks and a whole lot more so if you are curious ious about our tools want to learn a little bit more about Bona as a whole um I encourage you to fill out the poll on th
e screen uh we'd love to hear a little bit more about your program some of the work that you're doing so I'll leave that up and running here for a moment um and then I will introduce our wonderful speaker for today uh we are fortunate enough to be joined by the one and only Tiffany Allen um Tiffany is the CEO of boss on a budget and which is a small firm that teaches communities to form strong nonprofits and obtain funding which I know is why so many of us are here today so you're uh in in for a
treat with an expert here um her passion is working with black Le nonprofits and other new and community-led organizations teaching them to use their skills and talents to get funding um she manages an online network of over 14,000 people from across the world who are seeking grant writing assistance and support that teaches nonprofit startups to a combined audience of over 20,000 followers on YouTube which is awesome and Instagram and so um Tiffany has a great influence here and I've seen Tiff
any grow in that influence so much even in the last year um she's becoming a big name over at bosana a budget and I've seen so many folks go to her for advice go to her for speaking opportunity so we're super lucky to be joined by Tiffany again and I will leave it there and let you take it away all right thank you so much Amanda so happy to be here again thank you all for joining us today I'm G to go ahead and share my screen and present does that look okay everyone good looks great all right so
let's go for it so today everybody we're gonna talk about how you can use and leverage the data you have to make a strong case for funding and what I want you to do is get your pencils out get your pens out because you're going to work alongside me so the way I like to teach I like to give you actionable tips so you can walk away with something so I promise you you're going to walk away with at least one thing you can use today in your organization but let me give you just a little bit of backg
round of who I am Amanda did such a great job um sharing who I am but I have a passion for helping people start their nonprofits and raise money and so when I teach I typically speak from the perspective of a new organization or a very small organization that has very little staff so when you hear me talk I'm going to have you in mind about how you can streamline your processes and how you can be more efficient okay so I teach every Sunday on YouTube so if you want more information about how to
raise money how to start responsibly you can find me on YouTube at Boston the budget I also have um workbooks master classes and I do free challenges to help get you equipped to run your nonprofit and I am starting a new membership community in March called the purpose profit Society to give you motivation encouragement and training as you um seek funding so you're going to see these little QR codes you see that in the right hand corner if you're interested in joining the wait list just take you
r camera out take a picture and a link will pop up but Amanda's also dropping that link in the chat all right I also want to share um because I often talk about startup and fundraising but there's another piece of my story where I started in my career in research so I am a social worker but I worked for a long time for research nonprofit called child Trends so I worked a lot doing program evaluations defining outcomes I was a principal investigator for a national evaluation so I come at this mul
tiple ways so I have the experience of using data analyzing data um developing outcomes and tracking outcomes but I can also speak to you from the perspect perspective of how to raise money and so that's what we're going to do today we're going to pull all of that experience today so I'm going to make this very simple this presentation is divided into three parts how to define success how to examine and leverage your data and then we're going to get to the meat of it how to make your case and my
hope is that we'll have time at the end for questions and answers for you all now I just want to make sure that you're in the right place so this training or this webinar is for you if you are a nonprofit founder and you're doing everything or maybe you're a volunteer or maybe you're a board member and you're trying to get funding for your organization and you don't know what you're doing but you're trying your best you're trying to get more knowledge or you may be somebody who's the grant writ
er at your organization or you're on the marketing team or you're on the development team and you need help pulling together the data to make stronger cases for funding if that describes you say yes in the chat and if that is not you you can also describe yourself so I know who I'm speaking to so I can better tailor the information but I do want to say that this webinar is based on the assumption that you have some data to work with and based on the data you have what do you do okay so my first
question for you is what are the challenges you've experienced with using data to show your impact so I'm going to pull up the chat so so I can see what your your answers are here going to try not to mess up people say yes love it too much data similar data finding the data Gathering it appropriately creating actual items from said data growing too fast to capture it collecting the data not sure where to use what to use where to start all right hopefully we can capture a lot of the issues that y
ou you guys have today so let me tell you what I've heard people say we don't know what to measure so I saw that in the chat you don't know where to start or we don't know how to tell our story so that's kind of related to we have information that we tried to make the case but it's just not hitting well with our donors or with our funders or I've heard this one a lot nobody in the organization cares about the data they don't pay attention to the data they're not making sure it's entered correctl
y right no one cares no one understands the impact of having accurate data or well our participants don't have time for that we don't we have to you know make the best use of our time they don't want to fill out surveys we don't have time for that so how do we collect datas in data in other ways or you may say well we have data we just don't know what to do with it so all those things you you talked about in the chat I'm going to address today but I when I train I like to talk about belief first
because I firmly believe that how you come to this what you believe about this the things that are limiting you will impact your success so if some of you are here and you're saying well we don't have a compelling story or we haven't done enough to have a story I'm here to tell you that every organization has a story to tell you may not have found that story or found your rhythm in telling that story but every organization does have a story to tell you wouldn't have started your organization or
you wouldn't exist unless you address a problem unless you're there to resolve something so you have to believe that you do have a story and you do have a compelling story to tell I also want you to know that data are not the enemy information is not the enemy all data do is put up a mirror about what exists and it gives you a sense of dire of where to go you have the power to change your relationship with data it does not have to be contentious you can change how you look at data how your staf
f look at data how you appreciate data I have seen this for myself and I've seen how this has transformed organizations I want you to know also that you control the narrative you can tell your story so don't let what your funders want or expect of you to control how you tell your story you have to be proactive and you get to control the narrative about the story you tell and the reason why I wanted to start here is because if you don't believe these things then looking at your data becomes frust
rating dealing with your staff becomes frustrating because they don't understand but when you approach this from a perspective of abundance and not lack if you start with what you have what's available instead of what you don't have or what you're not you're going to be way more successful so I know it's going to be hard you know because a lot of times when people talk about data they get very frustrated but I want you to understand you do have a story to tell and you do control the narrative in
your organization so here are three things you can do to pull all of this together to make the case for your organization and I'm going to break down each one for you I like to engage in the chat so please don't mind me so I'm going to be asking you to hey drop this in the chat hey give me your feedback because it helps me keep going so I need your energy right so I want you guys to put success in the chat just to let me know you're here with me just to let me know you're hear me one of the fir
st things you need to do is to Define for yourself what a success look like and too many times you're just going by the default let me let me share what I mean by that sometimes people put together surveys or they're collecting data because they know they need to collect data right they know inherently that I need to collect information but you didn't start from what you wanted to know or what you wanted to understand you just started from oh this organization is collecting or using this survey
so we're going to do this survey if I'm stepping on your toes it's okay we're going to get there right but you don't drive the process you're letting the data collection drive it but you need to start and understand what does success look like for your organization you need to Define that for yourself and there are two ways you can do that first by defining your outcomes and second by defining your outputs so an outcome is simply a change in a behavior a perspective a skill that someone has mayb
e it's their opinion or their knowledge right output is just how much of something is produced number of meals number of clients served things like that you should Define for yourself what the key outcomes are and what the key outputs that are important for your organization what are the things that best describe the work that you do that best describe who you are as an organization because the point of this is you want to Define what makes the best case what makes the best argument for someone
to support you so I want you to think about what are those outcomes what matters the most to you and here are some of the questions you can ask yourself what does success look like for your clients when they win when they succeed what does that look like if you have a reading program for third graders what is success for that third grader that they have a love for reading that they increase their reading scores that their grades go up what are those things what are the details of that success th
at indicate to you that you're on the right track and that your program works but I also want you to think about your organization overall what does success look like for your organization what are the indicators that let people know that you're you're you function well that you are the authority in your space that you are a strong organization maybe there are some fiscal things around a you know we didn't have a shortfall last year right so that establishes you as a strong organization or you h
ave retained your staff through the pandemic that is Success so I want you to stop getting so focused on just what we at as traditional data I want you to start thinking more broadly about how you can position yourself as the best organization and how you can make that case so you also want to look look at what the success look like for your organization are there any goals you've created related to your strategic plan that you want to hit for your organization for the year what does success loo
k like do you increase your Community Partnerships for the year right do you have any advocacy goals or anything like that I want you to think holistically and the Define for yourself what that looks like and when you're thinking about outcomes when you're thinking about your outputs you want to make sure you use the smart acronym anyone heard of smart so I'm just going to go through it very quickly you want to make sure they're specific you want to make sure they are measurable you want to make
sure they are achievable and realistic that's a andr and you want to make sure they're time bound so you want to have parameters around what success looks like for your organization but I also want to offer one more thing to you sometimes what success looks like for your clients or what success looks like for your organization can actually be measured very well and I know there are some people who probably in the research world who would throw daggers at me for saying this but I feel like we ha
ve to talk about this right so there are some things that your clients May express to you that your organization does for them that's really really hard to measure that's really really hard to put into numbers how can you how can you measure a feeling how can you measure a sense of confidence for somebody there may be some measures that do that but it's hard to really quantify that at times so I would offer to you that when you're trying to define success sometimes the goals or the outcomes that
you're looking at don't actually have to be measured in numbers you still want to know what the success look like for somebody even though it's hard for you to put that on paper now I'm G to give you an example of why this matter and how this matters so I helped an organization start um they needed to raise $100,000 to launch their organization and they had not provided one service they hadn't done one thing and they needed to be able to make the case to their donors that it was worth investing
in their organization and this organization did coaching so they were bringing highlevel coaching to people of color the name of the organization is coaching for everyone great organization look them up and so I had to develop the fundraising copy to make the case for why we deserved to be funded even though we hadn't done one thing yet so what I did was I talked to people who were coaches I talked to people have been coached and I asked for them to describe what it felt like to be coached beca
use there there isn't a whole lot of research around coaching yet there are some but there's not much that you can really quantify right so I asked people to describe like what does it feel to be coached and I used that information even though it wasn't I couldn't quantify it I used that to describe to the donors what we could bring to our potential clients right the success the transformation that we could bring based on what I learned from people who have been coached and using that informatio
n and using those terms in language I was able to help that organization raise $117,000 in five months and they hadn't provided one service yet for those so for those people who are sitting here thinking we're new we haven't done a lot of things yet you still can make the case that's why I always start with belief because you still can make the case for funding but even in the fact that I couldn't describe the outcomes and numbers I could still say help us U make sure a hundred people could get
coached I still could quantify some things help us reach 50 people help us provide housing for 25 people you can still quantify it but in describing the outcome you can describe it in a way that's not necessarily measurable I hope that makes sense I hope that resonates with somebody out there so I want to give you some practical tips on defining success for yourself first things first every program needs a logic model have you heard of a logic model before if you have please put it in the chat i
f you have not go ahead and write that down as a note for yourself to to to read and research on what a logic model is a logic model basically is a graphical presentation of the impact that your program makes it helps you lay out basically your case for why your program would be successful so if you are running any kind of program that you believe can have some kind of measurable success you need a logic model and what it does is it lays out the inputs so the resources that you have that you're
putting into your program the activities that you're carrying out and then what happens as a result in terms of your outputs and your outcomes so you have what you're putting into the program and then you're seeing the logical connection between what you're doing and what it impacts and it's such a great tool because it helps organize your thinking to make sure that you're doing all the things that connect to the outcomes that you're interested in that's really important for you to understand fo
r yourself but here's the thing some people don't know how to create a logic model shoot some people have never even heard of a logic model and the question is well what do you do if you don't have the resources or the capacity at a bare minimum this is what I want you to do I want you to document the outcomes and the outputs in a sheet that best describes your organization they don't have to be everything that you collect they don't have to be everything that you measure but what are those part
icular outcomes and outputs that really put show your organization in its best light or you believe highlights the strengths of your organization and what I want you to do is list that out on the left your outcomes and your outputs and then I want you for each one to put the target goal for that outcome or that output so it's important that you measure the number of meals you provide well is there a Target goal that you want to reach it's important that if you're a domestic violence shelter that
the number of women that you serve reach Financial depend Independence is there a number put that Target goal right and then I want you to outline the target population I'm going somewhere with this but starting this process helps you organize what you do why you do it and the data that are related to it but the first step is you got to Define and document those outcomes and outputs when you're defining that for yourself check in with your staff check in with your board talk to your clients tal
k to your donors and your funders for their input because they can describe for you what success looks like they can describe the transformation that your organization brings way better than you can way better than chat GPT way better so you want to lean in and talk to those people because they can help when you're describing or writing materials writing proposals and things like that you want their input okay and I want you to keep this simple I really want you to prioritize what best describes
your organization because we're all about efficiency and streamlining this process so that's where we start okay I'm not going to let you leave this presentation without writing down what your next steps are for yourself so what I would like you to do based on what we just talked about and defining what success looks like for you ask yourself what strategy based on what I heard so far am I going to implement to help define success are you going to look at your outcomes and tweak them and make s
ure they really describe who you are as an organization are you going to include some of those organizational goals and outcomes ask yourself what is something new or something that you're going to do differently to implement in terms of defining success all right promise me you'll do that okay here's the Second Step can somebody put examine in the chat for me just to let me know you're still here the next step the next thing you're going to do is look at your data what I want you to do is do a
data inventory but we're going to do an inventory based on the outcomes and the outputs we said matter the most for our organization okay so we're going to look and see all the things all the information that we know we are already collecting on our organization or on our clients okay but I want you to think big I want you to be different okay there are different types of data that can really help make your case one type of data you want to think about is demographic data demographic data is bas
ically what's the data points that what are the data points that describe your organization or describe your clients um what's the information that provides the profile of who your typical client is or that describe your organization if it's related to organizational outcomes and then you want think about more story based data or narrative data there are stories that program staff typically hear about they're writing about in their narrative in their case notes that you may be overlooking that y
ou want to think about so where are those opportunities or where are those points in your organization where you're actually collecting stories and it's not necessarily for the purpose of fundraising people are doing it in the function of their everyday jobs so I want you to think about that where does that exist and then I want you to think about the empirical data and that's the more traditional sense so that's the data that's collected in a standardized way and that could be qualitative or qu
antitative I'm taking y'all to school today so I'm trying to go slow so I don't lose you qualitative is that data that's just not defined in numbers and quantitative data are defined in numbers that's essentially the difference but qualitative data is is absolutely can be considered research you can collect information from people you can collect narrative from people or words from people in a structured or semi-structured way so maybe you have focus groups that are done at the end of every coho
rt you have for a program that you have you do a standard set of questions that you ask and based on those standard set of questions you're pulling themes from that that's absolutely research so you want to think about all the different types of data that you're collecting when you do this inventory then I want you to think about different methods of data that you're using or different methods you're using to collect data so surveys typically people know and they understand right but you may be
collecting interviews you may be doing focus groups as I mentioned you may be doing observations as a part of your program the program model may require that you do observations of your clients maybe there a questionnaire s or quizzes or tests that you're collecting maybe there are case studies that program staff are putting together for their own purposes that you may not know about one thing I want you to think about also is artifacts so images drawings right one example may be you're a a drug
treatment program and you take pictures of your clients when they first enter the program and then when they leave the program and and that kind of before and after can be very powerful but we don't always consider that data we don't think of it as data when we hear the word data we're just thinking about numbers right so you want to think about like all the different types of information and data you're collecting that can be powerful for your donors and your funders and then I want you to thi
nk about what is the secondary data so it's not data that you collect as an organization but someone else collects but you still use so that could be test scores from the school or it could be you know it could be I'm blanking on what it could be but you know what I mean it could be test scores from information it could be something else like grades or something from the school there it is y'all so think about all the different opportunities that you could create or you could find data to use be
cause you're going to leverage the data this is what I want you to do I want you to think back to that list of outcomes and outputs you created that matter the most for your organization and then for each of those outcomes and outputs I want you to answer these questions and I would take a picture of this slide so you can do this for yourself you can put it in a spreadsheet you can put it in a Word document whatever makes the most sense but for each outcome that you're interested in ask yourself
well how do we measure it right are we using surveys are we doing interviews right who's responsible for collecting that data is it a staff person is it self-reported where your client enters that information how often are you collecting that data right is it beginning of the program and after the program document those time periods where can you find the data I think this is a huge pain point for some of y'all you know the data being collected you have no idea where it is what people are doing
with it where is it where can you find that data if the data are being reported when is it being reported is it at the end of the year is it every three months is it a quarterly thing and are there any highlights that you can quickly see or understand about the data so why am I asking you to do this because when you need to make the case for your organization you need to see in a glance where your strong points are and so if you know that one of the outcomes that you're interested in is your re
ading scores you having this inventory and having this document will tell you immediately where you can find the data how often you collected what are the key points of the data so you don't have to be scrambling around every time it's time to write a grant proposal or every time it's time to write your fundraising copy you want to have this in the same place and it helps helps for everyone to know where everything is when you do this inventory I want you to ask yourself are the data were collec
ting aligned with what we said is important so we said these outcomes are very important for us this is a priority for us to describe our organization and what we do but are we collecting the data that actually make that case for us and this inventory can help you see whether it does or if it doesn't it can also help you opportunities where you need to collect better data right or Institute more data collection because you may see the gaps in the data collection you may have a whole row if you h
ave a spreadsheet where there's nothing that communicates what your out you know it relates back to your outcome right you looking at your data can also help you see is there an outcome that we didn't realize we have but we're collecting data on it and we should be thinking about about it or we should be reporting on this so doing this inventory helps you reveal like all the it helps you plug the holes basically and find the gaps in your data all right I'm going to give you some practical tips a
round this because I know that in order to track your data and leverage your data it's a partnership especially if you have staff so your staff need to be invested in this I want to tell you a really really quick story so I used to work for Child and Family Services in Washington DC I was a data analyst and we were a part of a lawsuit over 20 years and we had to report data monthly on 90 measures can you imagine 90 different outcome measures we had to report data and I was assigned to one measur
e that was supposed to be really easy for our agency to meet but for some reason there was a disconnect the program staff were saying one thing the data staff were saying another so what I did was I sat down with both and I tried to diagnose what the issue was and I talked to the program staff and I realized that they had information to prove that they were meeting this standard they had all the information they were collecting everything they needed but what the data staff defined as success wa
s different from what program staff did so the program staff were not putting in the right data to make the case so all it took for me to help understand what was happening was to sit down and listen that's all it took so if you have program staff and you're struggling with getting to them or getting them to understand the importance of data one tip I will give you is to talk to them about their data talk to them about how they define success talk to them about wins talk to them about all the th
ings they're doing so you can make sure that you're clear on how they're defining it so it can translate back to what you're trying to do because too many times we're coming from the perspective of I need it for this purpose and they have no clue why you need it or what you need it for so I really really really encourage you to sit down with your program staff participate in their meetings listen to how they talk listen to the words that they use how they describe the work that they do and it wi
ll change how you look at your work when you're trying to make the case for your organization I also encourage you to set up time like every six months to review your successes as an organization what are some things that have been happening that you can highlight that you can share with others and put time on your calendar to proactively do it not just because a grant proposal is due but because you want to always stay on top of how to describe your organization I want you to make sharing stori
es a regular part of what you do right so get people used to talking about things that are working well get used to people talking about their successes talking about their clients make it a part of your agendas in your staff meetings and in your board meetings train people to talk about your data I want you to report back wins so if you know that you have to collect data from program staff tell them where the the information went tell them that because they entered the data correctly you were a
ble to show that the organization is helping more people they need to see and be invested as well and if all else fails and people still don't care about the data it's really important for you to have a data Champion someone who's pretty high up probably the director level or more who can speak about the importance of collecting data who can talk about data in every meeting who can hold people accountable for looking at their data when they're making decisions so that was a lot but I want to giv
e you tools that you can use that you can can take away so I don't expect you to do everything but I want you to think what is one strategy that you just heard around examining and leveraging your data that you can execute and I want you to write that down as a strategy that you're going to use okay and then finally make the case how do you put all this together so I want to ask you a question how do you persuade somebody to trust you when you're trying to convince somebody to trust your organiz
ation or give to your organization how do you do that what are some things that have been helpful or what are some things that have been useful and I'm checking the chat just to see mutual respect active listening empathy I start with listening to them use a story Spotlight success story got it got it got it love it I hope you guys are checking the chat because people are giving you insights about how to persuade someone and so what I want us to remember is that when we're making the case for fu
nding people give to things that they trust right and so at the core of good relationship building and good fundraising people just need to trust that the right organization to give money to so I want to offer two things three things to think about to persuade people that you're the right organization and there are three things you can do that you can focus on for that and I just called it my sap method just to help you remember it more easily but there are three things you can do to instill tru
st in people or from people first of all show them success show them and report back to them how you're the most most qualified to do the work that you do okay the second thing you can do is share your Authority so A is for Authority you can educate them on something that they didn't know about maybe you have learned something new as a part of your work something that's novel something that's Monumental in your field that people don't necessarily know or understand and when you always show up as
the expert in a topic people begin to associate you with the authority right and they want to be attracted to you they recommend people to you because you have established yourself as knowing something that other organizations don't another way you can instill trust is share a perspective that other people don't have so this especially works when you're serving a a population of people that organization shy away from or organizations don't really have experience with serving and if you have tha
t special experience and you can share the perspective of serving that group then people again begin to associate you with or as an authority right so how do you how do you pull all that together you use that to highlight your strengths but before you do that you also need to understand your audience and use storytelling all right so how do you find your unique Factor you need to understand as an organization What Makes You Different what makes you unique what are the things that show the best a
bout your organization what are you the best at in terms of your outcomes are there approaches or processes or Frameworks that you use that make you the best right again this is establishing your Authority and one grant writer put it this way I loved how he put it he said in comparison to others how are you the best how are you the first how are you the only so when you're presenting your case you're presenting yourself as the best at something or as unique at something so you gota you got to ha
rness that you got to understand why do you come to this differently or why should people look at you over another organization and you need to make sure you leverage that when you're making the case the second piece is and somebody hit on this when they said listen you you have to know your audience so you have to understand that what a grant funder wants to hear from you is different than what an individual may want to hear from you so a grant funer is probably more so interested in your quant
ifiable outcomes they want to hear stories too but they absolutely want to know that has this been proven to work whereas an individual if you're doing a giving Tuesday campaign numbers are not going to move them emotions will right so know the audience and know what matters the most to them and what resonates with them and the first step of doing that goes all the way back to what I talked about in step one talk to them ask them questions talk to your donors and your funders ask them what their
values are what are their priorities look at their websites if they Grant funders look at who they funded because where they put their money tells you what they value and if you know what they value then you can highlight the things about your organization that align with their values because then I what I want you to do is I want you to go back to that sheet and every time you want to approach a new donor or a new funer ask yourself what do they care about what they want what do they want to k
now about our organization and what data do we have to make that case because you've already laid out for yourself what you have to present you may may have stories you may have pictures right you may have the numbers of how many people you served or what happened so ask yourself of the data that I have what matters most to the person knowing who I'm talking to what matters most and you prioritize that in whatever you're developing in terms of your pitch or in terms of your proposal and the last
thing I will say is when you are presenting or making the case I want you to use a story telling framework sometimes when we talk about storytelling people get stuck on the idea of having to tell stories and some people are like well I am not good at writing or I don't really have a personal story in this I didn't get into this because of a lived experience so I don't know how me telling a story is going to convince somebody that they should give because I don't have that personal experience bu
t what I would submit to you is not about just telling personal stories it's about using a storytelling framework so when you present the information present it as if you developing a compelling story so let me let me tell you how you can do that this is my formula I would take a picture of this as well so you can keep this with you and always remember how to structure and ask and this can apply to anything even with grants so you want to have a hook you want to grab people in you want to say so
mething that would make them want to care when I was doing a free challenge and I was teaching people how to fundraise for their organizations one woman told me she was in Chicago it was in the winter time and she said we have kids who come to school with duct tape tape to their shoes because they have holes in their shoes her organization provided shoes for kids in the school system and when she told me that story I said well there's your hook right there because if anybody heard heard that the
re are kids in 2024 walking to school or going to school with holes in their shoes in negative deegree weather if somebody were to tell me that first of all my response would be you're lying there's no way but that would make them listen that would make them want to hear more so the point of you using a storytelling framework is you're drawing people in first with something important you need to say something compelling that they need to know about then you present the problem because you got th
eir attention there are more than 50 kids in one school alone who we saw don't have adequate shoes and clothes when they show up to school which prevents their you know their ability to learn right it disrupts the learning process for them then they get behind in school then you start telling them more why does this matter cuz you're laying out the problem then you position your organization as the solution we provide clothes and shoes for those children so that they can have what they need to s
how up and learn because not having adequate schools or clothing shoes or clothing should not be a reason that a kid can't learn all right you position yourself as a solution then you talk about the impact as a result more kids show up to school more consistently and teachers report that their kids are more engaged in the classroom right and then because you're making a case you're presenting that call to action to that funer that donor with your money we can help even more or we can prevent thi
s or we can make sure this happens so what you're doing is you're laying out the formula or you're laying out the case and you're presenting the opportunity for that donor and that funer to respond as a result so instead of just thinking oh I don't have own my own personal story I want you to use the framework and how you present the information and finally I just want to give you a couple of tips I've said this over and over again because it cannot be overstated if you feel like your story is n
ot compelling enough or it's not Landing it could be that you're not highlighting the things that matter the most to the people who want to give so most people they want to give because they want to make a difference they want to know that they're making a change for the people or the things that you serve so you have to put your your solicitations or your requests in the voice and in the perspective of the people they want to touch or they want to help in a lot of ways they don't necessarily ca
re that it's your organization doing it they just care that something is happening to the people they want to help so you have to use their voice and their perspective another way you can go about this is leverage other things to supplement your ask when you establish yourself as an authority use thought leadership to do that right show up on earned media show up on TV show up in radio let people see you in your local community make sure on your social media post you're EST abish in your Authori
ty and you're educating write articles have staff members write articles or your CEO be positioned as an expert in your space so people see that you're a leader in your space and are attracted to you do speeches and presentations so people see you as the authority and want to be attracted to you and never forsake the importance of Storytelling in everything that you do when you're talking to employees when you're having your meetings when you're talking about your wins and your celebrating use t
he storytelling framework so people can feel invested and feel like they helped facilitate that change okay and that motivates people that makes people understand why they got into this for the first place that helps people connect with why they want to do this work when they're able to celebrate and feel like they helped something change for somebody so I know that was a lot but I also just want to bring you back to how you're going to execute what is one strategy that you're going to use in ma
king the case for funding that will present a stronger case to your donors and your funders that you may not have been using before you came to this training so I want to say thank you so much for joining me you'll see the QR code if you want to get more training or accountability in my membership Community but I will stop stop here for questions and I know that I see some in the Q&A so I will stop and see there's anything that I missed and um while while you're getting there Tiffany I'm happy t
o to funnel through some of those with you as well but if you want more resources from Tiffany as well as join in the community be sure to fill out the the poll on the screen um for now I want to make sure that everybody has the chance to connect with her that wants to um Tiffany I I saw a couple of questions come in at the beginning um about the story based data and I know you talked a little bit more about it um but I think some folks were kind of hoping for just another like concrete example
of story based data um especially if you I saw in the chat have clients or folks that you don't want to exploit or you don't have permission to kind of use their information on right so if you have some clients that you know it's not appropriate to show their faces or it's not not appropriate to share their stories you can talk about from the perspective of your staff um and you can talk about what it means for them to see the change or the transformation that they bring about for the people tha
t they serve or you can talk about your volunteers and of course always so we don't want to approach this as if we're saviors for people we are facilitators for change so I do want to call that out but your staff and your board and your volunteers are just as impacted by the work you do um as the clients are so if you don't want to like Leverage the specific stories of the people you're serving you can also um leverage the stories from your staff and your board awesome yeah that's um that's grea
t advice Tiffany um and quickly before we hop into the next question I see a lot of thank yous rolling in um and just in case folks want to jump I did see at the beginning a lot of folks saying they were having trouble organizing their data really having trouble like keeping track of the right data it's confusing they're not sure how to tell the story if that's you and you want to learn a little bit more about some of our tools here and how they actually help folks with that organization really
keep the right data um to help you tell those stories um I'm going to leave a a poll up right now while Tiffany heads into the next question um because I think it would be a great time for you to explore I I saw somebody say we're growing too quickly and can't keep up with the data which is um a great problem to have and and when things like this can really be beneficial um so I'll leave that up for a moment and then as far as I don't know if Tiffany you saw another question come in that you wan
ted to get to but um I saw some folks asking about you know how do you tell these stories and how do you collect this data when it's not all from the same cohort of people right and that you know kind of the programs and people change um as events and activities change over time as well sure so like one example I would give is maybe you're doing a training and I don't know the context for this question but maybe you're doing trainings and that's the only point of contact you have with somebody b
ut there's still something that you want to be improved or changed as a result of a training that you're given so it could be that it's a change in their knowledge or their understanding of a concept and after you know a two-hour training maybe you're doing financial literacy and they understand what a budget is now like they understand certain terms or concepts you absolutely can use that as an outcome for your organization because it's a change and a shift in their knowledge now it may not be
a long-term outcome you may you know because you only meet that person one time but it's still an important data point that you can use to leverage and you can you know make the case for funding yeah that's a great Point um Trina there a lot of questions that came through but a couple of folks I did notice Tiffany asking how they stay connected and if there's a space for um nonprofit leaders so I'm going to put the link in the chat again to join Tiffany's Community um and scan that QR code so I
want to make sure people know there there is a space for you Tiffany um and so make sure you you hop in there um I've seen a lot of people ask for any good examples of a logic model I know you said kind of hey take a note look that up but did you have any kind of quick tips for a good example of that there are a lot of good resources online for logic models one of the classic resources was developed by the United Way I think it was a local United Way I can't remember what state but um there are
a lot of Foundations I think the Wallace Foundation has produced some informational logic models that are very easy to understand so if you Google that a lot of stuff will come up for you great advice um let's see um some folks were asking about the idea of surveys when you were talking about that um how do you get people to fill out those surveys um especially when you have are maybe working with parents right of of those are being served and those people don't like to fill up forms like do you
have any way to encourage that data collection well the first thing I would do is kind of assess when it does work well and like look at your processes and see like are you having some successes and kind of Leverage that but a lot of times especially with people who are on the go they may communicate better with texting or doing things right on their phone or if you couple the data collection with the program that they're receiving or a service they're receiving so before they leave as a part o
f the service they have to fill out something or answer a question it's much easier to collect that survey data on the spot than having them follow up or sending them an email or something like that you can always attach it to programs that you're doing so that it just feels seamlessly as a part of a service that they're getting it doesn't feel like something separate I hope that helps yeah feel free to put in the chat um if that helps I feel like I'm I'm gonna start taking your your model Tiffa
ny here of like are you still with us like put put this in the chat um so it's been awesome to be a part of um we probably have time for maybe one or two more questions um okay this one came in from chrisy um who had asked when you do prevention work so if we do our jobs something won't happen right which is very hard it's very hard to measure um so do you have any suggestions for telling that story that's a good question because I work in child welfare and we do a lot of stuff around prevention
I think um one way you can get at that is you know are there predictive factors or there are certain factors that would predict whether or not somebody would end up you know a certain result would happen so in child welfare the result may be they end up in foster care they end up with a child um abuse investigation and there are certain factors through research that indicate that protect parents from having to do that so can you measure how you've um improved on those protective factors so one
example could be a stronger social support network or another example could be having food in the home or you know or having certain people in the home or having somebody that you can call and connect to you know that's a protective factor that may prevent further involvement with the system so you can kind of measure that and show your success that way and I do want to say that a lot of funders especially in like prevention kind of work understand that they understand that it's difficult to mea
sure prevention so it's it's a conversation like it's almost you educating them and you making the case that we know it's hard but we have designed a way that we can strengthen that process and we can kind of prevent that and this is what we've done this is the approach that we use so you're almost having that open conversation with them so that you're not going at it cold like just be honest that you know that it's difficult to do that but but this is the process we put in place to kind of circ
umvent that hope that helps yeah I think I think that was helpful um seem seem to answer it for me but feel free to um put in the chat whether or not that that came in for you um okay so this is a followup from Lori um who had just asked for prevention um what are the community stats prior to that service and what are other comparable stats um from communities that are s maybe similar to that I think she was offering that as an example to okay yeah that people could do yeah that makes sense awes
ome um maybe a quick yes or no is the the last question here from Claire um who had asked if you encourage incentivizing participants to fill out surveys or or participate in data collection yes that absolutely works a lot of times in research that's what we do we offer gift cards we offer food if it's appropriate um and you know you also want to make sure that it's not coercive though right so it's not so ridiculous that you're coercing people to do it but yes offering like a 25 to $50 gift car
d I've seen that range and the work that I've done in research is appropriate awesome thank you for sharing that um and thank you for all of the the knowledge here today Tiffany um I I saw so many comments throughout the presentation uh I saw Hannah wrote down I'm scribbling down notes like a madw woman about halfway through and I thought so many thank yous come through that this was such an excellent presentation and it was packed with information um You Did In fact take everyone to school uh o
n this one and I really always appreciate working with you Tiffany um and I know our audience is super lucky to have you kind of instill knowledge on them and I hope everybody is able to join Tiffany's Community continues to follow Tiffany on YouTube Instagram um work with her if that's what you're looking to get some extra advice um I've really enjoyed learning from Tiffany every time I'm in one of these webinars with her and um she always has something new and exciting to share so thank you so
much for being here we really appreciate your time and for those of you who joined us uh thanks for for jumping on with us for the last hour here we hope it was helpful awesome thank you for having me take care everyone
Comments