Grant writing is one of those things that collectively give our sector a headache!

When we write a grant, we don’t know what to focus on and struggle to fit everything under word count limit. When we submit, we have no idea whether it will be successful, and we just hope for the best. And when we get a rejection letter, we never find out why.

But grant writing doesn’t have to be that painful or mysterious. On today’s episode, I connected with Stachen Federick to learn about her insights on how to build communities through the process of grant writing and maximize our rate of success.

We all wear many hats in our lives. And working in small nonprofits, we wear even more hats at work. All the time, our to-do-list is overwhelming, and we can’t seem to be able to get to the bottom of it.

How we do our work every day has such a great impact on our long term success.

On today’s episode, Rachel Bearbower, founder of Small Shop Strategies, shares her journey from starting a small nonprofit as a newbie to the sector to becoming a consultant that helps small nonprofits strategize and maximize their productivity.

For everything that we do at Camp Tech and in all the classes we teach, we are saying to the non-technical people: we're gonna teach you a bit about tech, which you might not know, but we don't think you're a dumb-dumb. We have mad respect for people that are subject matter experts in other areas. We ran these workshops across Canada

Evaluation is often a pain point for a lot of us working in small nonprofits, as it often seems to involve so much work with unclear purposes for why doing it. Jeff Couillard’s insights shed light on how we can measure what truly matters and how to use the data we collect to inform our work.

Jam Gamble is one of Toronto's gifted leaders who pushes the envelope and encourages everyone to cultivate their own inner light and abilities. The multi-passionate media personality and speaker is on a mission to help people build their confidence and amplify their voice from the boardroom to the stage to your event with 1000 plus people. This Brampton raised speaker will inspire everyone to go beyond their limitations and grab hold of the life that they want.

Let’s talk about fundraising and community building. Often in our line of work, we hear people are hesitant to get involved in fundraising. But they are much more likely to get involved in community building.

Resilience is not about being tough and holding in or burying one’s emotion.

Resilience is about bouncing back from things that happen in life. When you think of shocks in a car, the bumps are there on the road, right? What we're doing is we're cultivating strength in ourselves to be able to absorb these shocks. Great research has shown that resilience is not an innate trait, but rather something we can all develop. We develop resilience not by burying our emotion or plowing through it, but actually through wellness habits.

We're going to start this conversation talking a little bit about mental health and balance and how to navigate when you do wear many hats. Which usually comes with a huge workload and a lot of stress

Sometimes due to lack of resources, it can be hard for small organizations to refocus on impact. What have you found working with organizations that are some of the challenges that you help them overcome?

The first challenge that I think is absolutely pivotal is the challenge of mindset. Do you as a leader in a sector, a leader within your organization, a leader within a community, do you see yourself as a shaper? Or do you see yourself as a taker?

Let me start by saying today we're going to be talking about direct appeal fundraising and specifically design because design is a really important piece of what we're sending out so can you start by talking about why design is important and what impact it can have if done right versus not right?

Everyone always talks about needing a case for support. And sometimes they confuse it with a pitch deck. And oftentimes, they'll write one without really understanding how to do it well. So today, we're going to pull back the curtain and show people how to do well.

I think there's a lot of kind of inertia around these things. And I've been there myself, it just feels overwhelming. Is it really necessary? Is it really urgent? For small nonprofits, it can feel like it's just another thing to do.

HireNext is a tool that we've designed to help employers get to the best young talent Canada has to offer. As many as 30% of employers struggle to fill their entry level roles. And if they're not struggling to fill them, then they're working hard to keep great talent in the organization.

So today we're talking about introverts. Let's define what it means to be introverted.

Introverts are people who get their energy from time alone. Some people will equate introversion with shyness or social anxiety but those two things while they sometimes might overlap, are very distinct from one another.

So before I dive in, I want to preface all of this with the fact that I'm coming from a place of being a white straight woman. So there's a little bit of privilege behind what I'm saying. And I think that there are others who definitely have more difficult experiences than me. But I think that this is an important conversation to have for all women. I have a one and a half-year-old and a three and a half-year-old and any woman that I've talked to you that's in that time, it's a very intense time for the family experience.

While we all know small charities and nonprofits need help and students are potentially really great sources of that help, it can be overwhelming and difficult to think about how to manage them and how to really create a meaningful experience for both the organization and the students.

We are talking about boards, everyone's favourite topic! But also more specifically how to create a high functioning board. And part of that is understanding what doesn't work with board functionality.

Tune in to our live conversation from Happy You Year as we chat with Simon Scriver, host of Simon Scriver's Amazingly Ultimate Fundraising Superstar Podcast, about Shiny Object Syndrome. Learn about how to confidently (and successfully) say no, how to evaluate whether a trend is right of you and much more!

Networking that way just feels bad. It feels fake and icky and impersonal.

Today’s podcast is all about how to network in a way that feels good. Since those days, I’ve learned how to network in a way that is authentic and that focuses on meaningful connections. My guest today, Paul Nazaerth, has built a career on doing just that, and effectively.

Alignment is about having that opportunity to step back and proactively look at the skeletal system of an organization. It's really important for organizations to be able to look at their systems and their structures, which really are that skeletal system. We try to find ways for organizations to do that where they get to look at not only the soft elements of what they do, but the hard elements as well.

In a culture that is not healthy, your feelings actually really don't matter very much. You feel like you can’t fully express yourself, where there is a lot of insular stuff happening. There's an inner circle and I think you see a ton of turnover.

So our sector really suffers from high turnover and, and that can be a sign of an unhealthy organization.

But if I were to say the one thing is that you would feel as though you are not valued, as though you're not respected, that what you brought to the table didn't really matter.