By Gary Bess Associates
For the Climate Capacity Project in 2024, we offered a series of five webinars on grant capacity topics. Each one was joined by between 100 and 200 virtual attendees from across California. Maybe you attended one, or several, of these webinars—or maybe even all five. (If you check out the audience poll in Webinar 5, there are 2% of attendees who reported that they had been at all five—how fun! We are grateful for those in our audience with that level of engagement!)
The series of webinars is designed with many similarities to the day-long, in-person grant trainings that we have delivered in communities across the state. It covers the same important grant topics—but, in general, the trainers in the webinars are different professionals and bring their own perspectives and expertise. For instance, no one loves logic models more or teaches about them better than Dr. Brenda Freeman, presenting in Webinar 4—which is why we asked her to present for this online series!
You are invited to use this guide to explore the webinar recordings, whether your goal is to get a refresher on fundamentals, hear some new-to-you perspectives on grants topics, or begin to learn about grant writing for the first time.
Each Webinar Offers . . .
- Each video posted on the Recordings page of the Climate Capacity site is the recorded, edited version of the 1.5 hour webinar presented virtually between January and May 2024, for a total of 7.5 hours of curriculum – about the same length of training that is delivered at our day-long trainings.
- Webinars are bilingual English-Spanish. Presenters use English, with side-by-side translated slides and live interpretation in Spanish. Videos with Spanish audio are available for each, with the link to each Spanish webinar posted on the Recordings page. You can also view playlists for all English or all Spanish videos.
- Slides and additional resources can be downloaded for each one. Download links are posted with each webinar, and presenters explain how to use the additional resources during their presentation.
- Each webinar has live Q&A with the presenter and audience discussion, so you can hear presenters’ answers to specific questions emerging from projects and organizations where audience members are working, applying general grants topics to real life.
Grant Topics and Where to Find Them
Review the topics covered in each webinar, pick what you want to learn more about, and follow the directions and links below to go exactly where you need. Each webinar covers two main topics—find your way below.
Webinar 1 – Project Launch, Foundations of Grant Writing, and Analyzing a Funding Opportunity
Foundations of Grant Writing
An overview of the task of grant writing as a whole. Presented by a very experienced grant writer, this section is good to establish your grant writing outlook as a beginner and a good guide for experienced grant writers to integrate their own skills and experiences.
Analyzing a Funding Opportunity
Step one of every grant you’ll ever write! Using the Listos California 2024 funding opportunity as an example, this section walks you through what to look for as you decide whether to apply for a funding opportunity.
Webinar 2 – Knowing Your Organization and Community: Connecting Capability, Data, and Need
Organizational Capability: Building on Mission, Values and Focus
Organizational mission and capability is the unspoken foundation of writing a grant – the claim you’re your organization, with its unique history, community, and past accomplishments, is the best choice to do the work to be funded. Learn how to present these strengths about your own organization.
Needs Assessment: Making Your Case
The needs section of a grant ties the need of a community to your organization’s ability to effectively meet that need through a funded project, and it’s where you begin to tell the story of the funding application. Also covered: types of data to explain need and where to find them.
Webinar 3 – Building Your Vision: Searching for Grants and Designing Programs to Meet Your Mission
Unlocking Funding Opportunities: A Guide to Effective Funder Searches
Where to find the right opportunities for your organization and the work that you are ready to do in your community? Learn how to perform a funder search that identifies opportunities and funding sources that are highly aligned with your organization’s work.
Crafting Impactful Programs: A Guide to Effective Program Design
The program is what a funder is supporting through a grant award, whether it’s a project made of time-bound activities (project support), building a new facility or large equipment purchases (capital projects), or the ongoing, daily work of your organization (operational support). Learn how to design and articulate what you have planned for your funding request.
Webinar 4 – Telling the Story of Your Work: Program Evaluation and Logic Models
Developing a Data Collection & Performance Measurement Plan (Evaluation)
Evaluation can be an intimidating topic, and it can be easy to leave it to the experts. But this presentation explains two practical ways to approach evaluation: through writing an evaluation section in an grant application and through designing and evaluation plan—planning and staffing what data and measurements you will collect as your project is implemented.
Logic Models: An Essential Component for Grant Applications
Love them or hate them, logic models provide a graphic representation of a project and its inputs, activities, outputs, and outcomes, showing how all the parts connect. Learn how to make a logic model that can concisely represent your project and communicate it to funders and other audiences like staff and the community.
Webinar 5 – Bringing It All Together: Budgeting and Planning for Collaboration
Budgeting, Pulling your Application Together
Budgeting is another element of grant applications that can feel intimidating—but a budget is simply a picture of your project through numbers. In this presentation, see how to walk through standard budget categories, create realistic financial plans for your project, and write the explanatory budget narrative.
Working Together: Designing Projects for Partnership and Collaboration
A panel discussion with panelists addressing project planning for collaboration (and the technical details like MOUs/MOAs), partnerships with local governments and community organizations, and proactively building collaborative relationships and conceptualizing projects before the request for proposals drop.
Use the Chapter Links on YouTube
From the Recordings page, you can open a webinar recording video in YouTube by clicking at the bottom right.
On YouTube, when you open the video description below the player, you can see a chapter list of all topics and sections in the video. Click on the blue time stamp to jump to a specific topic in the video.
Visit the Playlists
For links to all five webinars, check out the playlist in your preferred language: