welcome everyone to the annual grants to states state program report webinar
we've been doing this a few years now to help people get back into the swing of
this system which usually sees the most activity from october to december
and this year we have the added joy of having the cares act stimulus funds
to report on in the system so we wanted to be sure to cover some of the strange
nuances that would come with that and
we like i said earlier are recording this session and if you haven't already
seen the slides they are available on our website already and we'll get the
recording up as soon as we can it might be a week or so
with that i will turn it over to my colleague michelle farrell to get us
started hello everyone today we are going to
cover upcoming deadlines for reports where to submit your lsta report and
this year how to enter not only your fy 2020 grants estate
award information but the cares act project information as well
we'll talk about entering your interim federal financial report
for fy 2021 lsta funds and the 2021 arpa funds
and we'll highlight some of the best practices for reporting in the sbr
and lastly how to bundle projects in the report
if you see that you can't meet the reporting
deadline you need to contact imls before to ask for a reporting extension
and as you can see december 30th your 2020 final financial
status report and the narrative reports including fy 2020 and the cares act is
due as well as your 2021 interim federal
financial report and fy 21
award and arbor award er on that interim report
this is just a reminder that reports are due in the spr
not in egms because we know there's a lot of new people there
and that's the login
we've been working throughout the year on user enhancements
and here are a few of them now when you are filling out the
activity section it will save each screen along the way
the spr will now only let you choose one intent
so if you are carrying over a previous project you
need to pick one intent for that project
by april 2022 every grantee should have
a universal entity identifier or uei
it takes the place of your duns number and the spr will reflect that
there is also a button available now that you can choose
if you're interested in joining the community of practice cop
and as a reminder we still use wonder wednesday evenings
to push out new updates and to maintain the spr
as you can see here the light-colored bar is the period of performance and the
block after that is the time you have to submit your report
the karazhak award ran parallel with your fy 2020 award and ends and ended
september 30th the arpa award is running parallel with
your fy 2021 award and won't end until september 30th
of next year so this year you will have two financial reports due the final
financial report for fy 2020 award and cares
and the interim financial report for your fy 2021 award and arpa
you want to complete the project reports first
because the financial figures roll up into the financial status report
here's what filling in the spr will look like
both your fy 2020 allotment and cares will be reported in the same part of the
str to differentiate the karazhak projects
you need to give them a title prefix of cares act colon and
then whatever your project is as you can see in the box here
note none of the cares projects should have a
starting date before 4 21
2020
as much as possible report cares act projects separately however
if a project has combined several funds from your fy 2020
and cares act you won't be able to differentiate them
except in the budget narrative as you can see
from the example here where the wi-fi extenders were paid for with cares and
the lsta uh kicked in another two hundred dollars
also match isn't required for cares act
awards but if you had sub-recipients that had match funds
then feel free to report them here
you can use up to four percent of your allotment for administrative costs
and it will be a combination of both awards your fy20 and cares
of course it's your choice to choose to use any or
all of that for the allowable four percent
as a reminder the administrative project can include state or other match
funds for administrative purposes
and this amount is not subject to the four percent cap
in the financial status report area for administrative costs the allowed field
is auto calculated as four percent of both your fy 20 and cares act award
the figures that you included in the administrative project will show up in
the actual field here in the center the difference will be auto calculated
if you notice any incorrect calculations here in this section we suggest you try
saving the financial status report again we're hoping that'll take care of it
to accommodate reporting the financials for both awards
begin by entering the two log numbers for your fy 2020 and cares act awards in
the financial status report form you can find these numbers in egms
on the award document known as notice of action
the total federal funds authorized will autofill
and represent a combination of your fy 20 and your cares act allotments as you
can see here those two figures going into the figure on the left
note that the financial status report auto calculation for the minimum match
requirement is only based on your lsta allotment and
does not include the cares award which is good news
and now i'm going to handle it over to madison
thank you so much michelle um as we wrap up that section does
anybody have any questions about cares act reporting uh you can put them in the
chat um or if you'd like to unmute that's fine too
all right um i don't see any questions coming
through um you may continue to put questions in the
chat along the way so we'll go ahead and move on
so now i'm going to be talking about how to enter your interim ffr data for your
fy 2021 allotment and the arba award if the following slides look familiar it
is exactly how you reported your 2020 and cares act in your internal report
last year
so here is a path uh to the interim federal financial report which we you
will fill out for fy 2021 and arpa combined
pretty easy to get to
and as with your your cares act and
20 reporting we will need to have both grant numbers for both awards or both
identifying numbers in the the
federal agency grant number field uh you can find these numbers in reach in your
account and you can also find them on your official award notice notification
document but they both need to be there and they need to be separated by a comma
or semicolon or
slash whatever works for you
now we have adjusted the interim ffr in the spr to appropriately
appropriately reflect both fy 21 and arbor fields
to the combined amount of both awards but if you initially go into that
interim ffr you won't see that so we ask that you go ahead and go into the ffr
and then save it for those correct figures to auto populate
you'll then want to fill out the federal share of expenditures field and that
will be how much you've expended for both awards combined
and then you'll have the total recipient share required field which is
the match field this is auto populated but will only reflect the allotment
match requirement this is because there is no match requirement for arpa
you can still report match on arpa if you have some but again this is going to
be the combined sum of your match for both arpa and fy21
and uh for the um excuse me um
we've all heard about the news uh switching from a done summer to the
unique entity identifier or uei uh we have added uh
the we've adjusted the duns field in the state information page in the spr to
reflect the uei um
if you want the ui you your uei reflected now you can go ahead and
update it um you can find your new uei in sam.gov
but for this year we only require your duns number
you can have both this year if you want next year
beginning in april 2022 is when we we will want everyone to up this field to
the uei only
now this is a reminder that for your for your reporting you will not enter
any arpa narrative projects until the next year's spr
and we know that arpa was such a large infusion of money for everyone and we
greatly appreciate all the creative ways that you've come with with spending your
funds but this is a reminder that we need to frame all our spending as
pandemic response as much as we can if your sub recipients don't frame it as
pandemic response you might need to work into it in the svr for them uh
to have what next year's narrative report comes due
all right do we have any questions around
i do believe we have a question in the chat
let's see
alice asks if you use cares money for the online portion of summer reading so
this is cares afterwards um for summer reading and you already have a summer
reading project with regular lsta funds would you still make a separate project
for the summer reading or would that be a case where you could
combine them into one project great question
um we are going to be covering uh bundling
projects in a few minutes which may be able to answer your
question about whether or not to do two separate projects
or or bundle them i don't know if my colleagues have any
other initial responses to that one i this is terry and i would say if
online summer reading was one of the only things you did with cares you might
want to have a separate project around it just so we can see that
you know and it goes out in the public view that way and people can see the
money was spent that way but if you had a slate of five or six projects with
cares and that summer reading online tool was a very small amount of money
i could see a case where you just combine it with your lsta existing
project and make the differentiation in the budget like michelle showed earlier
so we're trying to be flexible but we also want the good fruits of your
labor to you know go out in the world
so to the degree you can sort of balance that we're going to leave a lot of that
discretion to you but if you have questions or you want to bounce
something off your program officer they'd be happy to weigh in on
approaches thank you
uh and mary asked uh sh we would assume that cares act funds also need to be
framed as pandemic response you're absolutely right karzak also needs to be
framed as a response to the pandemic
all right great well i'm going to then pass it on to laura
thank you madison well this is the portion of the webinar
that shifts from the new information related to cares act funds reporting and
into a refresher and some general best practices for the spr
i'm going to start this section by going over some first steps as a new user
as well as some suggested approaches for preparing your spr report
and this is a slide that shows how you know log in and your imls program
officer can help set you up in the system by creating an account for you
your username is just your email address and we will send you your password
you can change your password by going into the account management section of
the spr after you've logged in and something to note is that chrome and
firefox are the recommended browsers for this system
issues with saving and editing can occur when you open two browser windows or
tabs for the state program report at the same time so it's best to avoid that
this often occurs when users want to look back at the prior year's report
while completing the current years however this can lead to editing and
reporting bugs
one of the first things you should do when logging into the spr for the first
time is update and verify your own information as well as the information
about your state library all three of these options are in the
account management menu if your state library grants sub awards
don't forget to maintain the subaward info section of the spr
this section is separate from the project section of the spr and provides
information about sub-awards beyond just the ones that were funded
we also have some writing tips you know in addition to plain language uh
remember that the report is happening after the completion of activities and
should be written in the past tense the one exception to using names in the
report is with outside consultants when it is acceptable to reference names
and again we don't want just a program history or general
description you should think about you know the entire
project what did you do this year it should reflect the budget and activities
you can take this information and put it in a brief paragraph
and do avoid bullets and pay attention to formatting
when you copy and paste and you can use the format stripping
workaround to accommodate the spr systems issue
and don't use colored and with that i will turn it over to
dennis thank you laura i'm gonna cover um some
other elements of the spr um certain things we look for in in certain
sections and um most particularly talking about approaches that you can
take to bundling um projects which i know a lot of uh states with the cares
and the arpa funds might be thinking about for the first time
either in a while or ever so i'm happy to kind of provide some guidelines and
principles in that area so the first element we're going to discuss
is statewide projects and um taking a moment to determine is
this a statewide project should this be considered a statewide project or is
this um something that happened more at the local level so uh these are some
helpful uh tips as far as determining whether it
was a statewide project the biggest one being if the entire state's population
were potential beneficiaries uh rather than a specific uh smaller target
audience and the statewide projects are usually
administered by the state library administrative agency um the easiest
immediate example of a statewide project is in statewide databases
that is kind of one something that the state library often administers and even
if even if every single recipient library
doesn't use the databases as as you know robustly as others it's
still available to every library in the state
as far as bundling projects um these are here are some tips for
kind of giving you a guidance on when it's appropriate to bundle or not um a
big disclaimer with a lot of what i will be uh communicating is that uh
there these are general guidelines uh there are these are very much a
case-by-case situation we've had a lot of state libraries already reach out to
us with their specific scenarios to determine guidance on whether it's
appropriate to bundle or not so we fully anticipate having those kinds of
one-on-one conversations sometimes but these are some general principles to
help kind of contextualize some things so as you can see um
it's uh you can think about individual projects especially sub grants that
could be combined into a single project report if they support the same intent
if they cover the same subjects they target similar beneficiaries
and um when you bundle them they're still
with under that 10 activity limit within your project so
a lot of these are
reporting principles and some of these are also principles related to the way
the spr allows you to use the system you have to really
have some common ground with these projects like they're sharing the same
goal and they're sharing the same intent in order for them to even be um
even for it to be technically possible to bundle them together in the spr
so here's a tangible example uh related to ppe
recipients because that was a popular um thing to purchase with cares fun so we
thought it would be a good example so in this example uh this scenario um there
are 75 libraries that receive bpe across the state
you can report that as a single activity because the ppe
purchasing is all one activity type uh
and then you can indicate the 75 locales in the um
in the locale information uh but that's also there's also
flexibility in how you indicate that as well so what you would put even if you
were giving the ppe as several sub grants the state library administrative
agency would be listed as the grantee because there has to be a single grantee
in the spr listed uh and again as i mentioned you would
have a single project and in this case a single activity because
the um the purchase was so uniform across all of your subrecipients
uh and then you have two options as far as identifying um
[Music] the the
sub-recipient libraries you can indicate that the activity was not
statewide and when you do that the sbr gives you
um an institution kind of a data entry area where you can
look up the institutions that we have in the back end of the spr system
and list them there and that is that's extremely helpful from a kind of a data
integrity standpoint because then we have all of the kind of geographic
information for each of the recipients which is which is helpful often
um but we also are trying to be flexible with
the reporting burden that this could potentially put on you so another option
is to indicate that the activity is statewide and then you can put the
number of public libraries or other library types um in the institution
types as a number so what we've also seen with uh recipients
who do a lot of subgrants especially the the
closest parallel i could see with ppe as opposed to what we normally would see
from state libraries would be collection development subgrants because they tend
to be um they're very detailed they're very
granular and so we try to be flexible with the reporting burden that we put on
the state libraries and so we've seen various iterations of this and then some
state libraries just in the interest of providing as much clarity and detail as
possible will sometimes upload uh the spreadsheets that they use to track the
recipient libraries maybe you know the types of equipment that they received um
and because they were already working on it and it was something that they were
using internally it doesn't put more burden on them but then it gives me as
the reviewer a really lot of helpful information so
that's one example again i'm sure it doesn't cover all the spectrums of um
possibilities but that's a way to see how the system works
now here is again a very i'm not going to go over all of these in detail but it
displays the intense and the focal areas we talked about how knowing when to
bundle uh sub grants into one project is if they all share the same intent and so
you can see the intents laid out there in bullets
but the bullets are organized by the one of the six focal areas that they fall
under so you see in bold to the right that lifelong learning has two different
intents information access has two different intents and so forth and so on
so um i won't go over these in detail but again this just gives you a sense of
how the spr is looking for you to organize your um
your projects and how you can think about what would be best for
bundling and here's an example of two intents that have similar subjects
underneath each project so if you are really kind of trying to torn between
picking an intent uh a particular intent and you're thinking oh you know this
this intent has this subject and i want to make sure i can report that you it
would be good for you to look at the subjects that are underneath each of the
intents because you might find um might find some similarities underneath
of them that won't that will kind of get you hung up in one intent that you don't
want to actually use um and another area that might help with
bundling is to look at the crosswalk that you developed as part of your five
year plan because if you had this project identified in your five-year
plan there should be an attempt aligned with it already so you should be able to
kind of just follow follow the lead of what was already in there and if it's a
new project that you didn't have as part of your plan um then again we want to
emphasize here that it should have just one intent
um this is important for several reasons
but especially important when your outside consultant who's evaluating your
five-year plan um they're gonna take each project and describe how it met a
particular goal and intent with reviver plan so it's a lot easier for them to
just have a one-to-one relationship with project and intent
and activities um a good rule of thumb again these are these are definitely
guiding principles and good rule of thumb kind of of tips related to
structure in your report but if you're determining whether or not you should
uh list
some part of your project as a formal activity under that project it should
account for at least 10 of the total amount of resources committed to the
project so this could be that ppe example that we
talked about obviously that's a large amount of resources that were committed
under the project but um
you also don't forget about staff time can be quantified and
considered at least 10 percent of the total amount of resources committed to a
project as we mentioned earlier you want to make
sure to keep uh the number of activities under 10 if you find that that's
challenging to do that might be a good indicator that you need to maybe uh
think about unbundling uh from from what you were considering
and maybe have two separate projects just for clarity
and to really make sure that the activities for each
um project are kind of rising to the surface of being
really critical and important piece to the to the story that your report is
telling um and then
we mentioned this a lot but having a more of a holistic view of your spr when
you're reporting is uh that the activity title and the description under the
activity it should be distinct so you shouldn't be spending a lot of time kind
of copying and pasting what's in the whole project's um abstract and
putting it into the activity uh because theatrics should be very top level and
then the activity title and description should be a little bit more detail about
what was going on in that project um and that way it reads
kind of um not in a redundant way
and here's an example again i'll briefly cover this because um we have you'll
have the pdf2 review um
later to look at more detail but the reason why this is
a good example of an activity abstract um it briefly outlines what happened
within that specific activity it provides only the necessary info but
that info is distinct um
and then uh you also see the activity in the mode selections in in this uh
screenshot that it's an activity mode of instruction and consultation which is
great for these kinds of um what you would say like
drop in exactly what it says in the activity mode like drop in informal
instruction um [Music]
events and activities um
activities also prompt you to enter quantities after you finish this part of
the narrative piece some examples of quantities is how long
a program lasted in minutes or in this example how many consultations were
conducted how many books were purchased etc
but sometimes we see as a common issue with activities is that um an entire
section is blank completely filled with zeros so you want to make sure that a
you're providing the the numbers at least in one of the fields
because sometimes you have multiple options you don't have to fill every
single field out but making sure that at least one field has substantive numbers
in it and if you're if you don't have those numbers
then maybe it's not the right mode for the activity that you're trying to
report
so there are um here's speaking of activity types in their modes again i
won't read every single one of them but um when you select an activity type
that will that should generally follow the
spending and the thrust of the project i think um for
you a lot of the states that have done this before may have seen some
some uh reports returned saying i read this
happening in the budget but then i didn't see
its kind of correlation in the activity so that's what we're talking about it's
kind of okay i read about it up here but what happened specifically with that
money that they said was being spent where is it in the activities that kind
of thing um and you can report on multiple modes
within a single activity um
they can be bundled together for example um
and then this is a specific example one that comes up a lot
with sla with lsta funds is if you have staff attending conferences then the
instruction other activity mode is a good use for that other
uh mode there are sometimes as i just mentioned you don't necessarily have the
exact data that fits in certain modes but other
does have a have a useful place sometimes depending on the type of
activity i'm going to spend a little more focus
time on the procurement activity type because it's um it's special uh and it
has kind of specific components to it
um it's used very we've seen and what we recommend is that it's used very
sparingly um and you'll only see it as an option of an activity type to choose
from if your project has an institutional capacity intent so that's
another thing where you kind of have to think about all of the pieces together
if you were planning on using procurement then you have to make sure
that the project uh that you're reporting has chosen an institutional
capacity intent and you can see on the slide there's three institutional
capacity intents that you can choose from and those are the ones that are
going to allow you to choose procurement um and we put in here very specific to
this year and note that ppe would could be an example of procurement if the
intent is institutional capacity uh you can use content acquisition though if
the intent of the project is something other than an institutional capacity
intent so we really are trying to indicate here uh
there's flexible options for how to report we're trying to help you use the
spr to most effectively report and tell the story of what you
did specifically in a unique way with your state
um but there are here are some examples too
of purchases that are not procurement activities and shouldn't be considered
procurement activities uh purchasing databases is considered content
acquisition um acquiring licenses purchasing laptops for a learning lab um
is an instruction activity and uh subscription for data collection
services is um often content creation activity
so um that's kind of a breakdown of
procurement there's always an asterisk with
certain situations might not apply but that's good general principles
uh and then finally the activity outcomes section we have outcomes
reporting built into the spr um and this is both at the activity and
the project level um and an outcome as we define it
is the effect of programming programs and services something that changes an
individual's life or the lives of the of the community
and it's a change in knowledge attitudes skills behavior or condition
um and what we're trying to accomplish with these these outcomes reports is to
document what changed for participants due to the use of lsda fund services or
programs um and so you can see in this chart that
there are in the orange these are the four instances where
you would be expected to provide data related to outcomes and again this is
all dependent on the activity um mode and um and types and beneficiaries uh
when you report in the spr so if you are wondering why when you're
reporting in the spr and you've done an activity and there's a big orange
outcomes button it's because you've chosen one of these four
um avenues for your activity and then if you're looking for it and it's grayed
out it's because it's in one of the you've chosen activity modes and types
that urban and or beneficiaries that are in the um the no area that wouldn't kind
of light up the outcomes button so and this is just another reminder that we do
every year imless does not expect you to survey children
so activities that involve children don't have to have outcome figures
um but you still might want to include in the overall project outcomes section
that's the narrative section towards the end of the spr
uh some information on how many children participate in some things that you kind
of anecdotally observed
but that's um but we don't expect this kind of
strict data collection elements to to be related to children so
with that i am going to hand it over to madison to talk about budget
thank you uh we just have a few budget reminders
we're not going to touch extensively on the budget area but want to wanted to
have a few tips when conference registrations are in the
budget it's best for them to go in services not travel
if you purchase application software or any type of licenses those are also
services and not supplies and then generally we would like you to
avoid vague or misleading terms in the your budget descriptions so anything
that's that's you write other or miscellaneous
we'd really like you to be more specific than that
and here we have something some great examples for the salaries salaries wages
and benefits uh part of the budget um when filling out information for this
this budget category please provide the position titles and the fte equivalents
these two screenshots here provide great examples of budget descriptions the
first shows the differentiation between lsta and state funds how that salary is
broken down and then the second one shows how a single staff member salary
is allocated across multiple projects and remember again we don't need names
here we just need the position title
and now we have the other operational expenses category in the budget
this category is for indirect costs for the sub-recipient only
if you as the slaa have indirect costs they should be represented in the
administrative project uh we have the top two examples uh first
which were returned in projects because the charges described in those boxes
aren't considered other or uh or indirect costs
you can see how these two types of charges could be misperceived as other
um or charged it doesn't really seem to fit
uh obviously with any other budget box
but for the purpose of the spr however the category is solely reserved for
indirect costs so for both of those instances they would go better in that
services budget category the example at the bottom of the slide
shows an example of how the category should be used indirect costs for
uh the specific indirect cost rate percentage that was charged to the sub
recipients grants is key and should be mentioned in the
budget description um and again if you have a project that
combines sub awards that bundling project with
several subrecipients who are using indirect costs it would be ideal to
itemize those costs in that description box
and we have our inner our additional materials um remember to upload uh
additional materials if you have them we have stabilized this part of the system
from prior years sometimes uh people would upload things and i wouldn't save
well that problem has been resolved so they should consistently be there every
time you upload we really love
photos of your projects so special shout out to folks who
include photos and we encourage that but any additional materials you want to
include that give us a better idea of the project
such as outreach materials press releases curricula
toolkits website links are great for sign up
forms anything that you would consider to be useful and provides more info on
your project
project tags um this helps us with national level
analysis uh and could really be helpful for you as well um it's an open text
field um not any controlled co controlled vocabulary so um you can
put whatever terms you like and separate them by uh with commas
then we have match only projects and some states
do have a match only project where the budget would have zero dollars for lsta
funds and it would be solely on on match funds reported
um these are reported like regular projects with budget figures uh in the
appropriate categories and you will you will need to identify an intent for this
as well as at least one activity in this project
uh now we're on to once you have uh completed writing up your projects for
your report you'll need to change the product
statuses from draft to completed they have all projects have to be in
that completed status for validation or certification
and an easy way to do that is in the list projects there is an option for
changing product project statuses in bulk just pictured here in the
screenshot
uh now you will still have to uh open the
administrative project separately in order to change its status and here's a
quick uh pathway to show you um where to do that
we recommend opening and saving the fsr the financial status report at the very
end once you've completed everything because that fsr will automatically
catch all of the financial information in your projects
so you'll want to do that last so it catches everything
and then re-save it
and finally we have certification the slaa chief needs to certify the spr
to fully complete it and you can see the pathway here on how to do that
um the the lsd coordinate coordinator can actually use the same sequence to
validate the report so if you want to validate it first
that will clue you into any uh error messages that may come up to
prevent you from certification um but the first round of certification
will be for the projects the 2020 projects the fsr and the administrative
projects all of the those final reports um you select certify reports in the
menu and then certify again with
the correct fiscal year in the drop down you can ensure the certification went
through by checking the project status under list projects they'll say
certified or you can look at the certification fields in the financial
status report once it's certified you'll see the name
of the chief and the date stamp of when they did that
so the second part of the certification is for the interim ffr you do have to to
certify that in a completely separate process and we find that sometimes falls
through the cracks um again the sal slaa chief needs to certify it
by going to the fsr hitting on interim ffr
and then certify and once again you can ensure that the
certification went through by looking at the certification fields at the very
bottom of that ffr
you'll see the name of the chief and the date stamp
final reminders uh we do have a sandbox for the spr and it's available for
practicing and training um there's the link there um and your regular login
should work if you have any issues with logging into that let your program
officer know and again reporting deadlines they're
all at the end of december december 30th your final report will include all
projects and the financial status report and your interim federal financial
report is for uh fy21 and arpa
um in addition to this um
spr refresher that we have we do have additional resources available on our
website that are part of the grants to states manual
and you know that our proverbial door is always open
we're happy to answer questions um from everyone uh here are all of our contact
information if you need it and now we are available
for final questions
i know if you came in
sounds like coming from the
uh chris's question
and kind of janet's also and karen's question
uh is more clarity on considering a project statewide or not um whether if
50 libraries across the state but not every library participated in a project
is statewide um and and this i i would be happy for uh
my colleagues to help clarify as well but my impression is
um you know
a statewide project is intended to be
different than what i would consider like a sub granted
project a sub grant project those are the two when we do data analysis in the
past we've we've had those buckets a lot you know this is a statewide project or
this is a project that involves sub grants and so
that's why the databases is always a good example of a statewide project
because whether or not a local library is using the databases promoting them
etc it is available to them whereas a competitive sub-award award
process is technically available but they have
to apply and win the award to receive the funds and the funds go right right
to them in a very tangible way and that's what that's my interpretation of
that differentiation but i am happy to have others
talk about that too i think i think that conceptually is
totally accurate i'll get into the nitty gritty of the system
which is just if you choose
the statewide button it's going to preclude you from
dropping down and typing in individual institutions
so if you want to type in 25 of your institutions and note that there is a
type ahead autofill thing going on with that so it's not like you're actually
typing in the names and addresses of every single library it's usually you
type in the first word or so and then the rest kind of fills itself in um so
choosing the statewide button will sort of close down that option
so you know it may be a statewide project
but you just you know you want to list all those libraries then um
don't check statewide
i do see a question um from jody in california about
discussing uh what would qualify
as an activity when we say 10 of resources for activity are we talking
about financial resources or only or if the activity took at least 10 percent of
the time expended on the project um i would interpret that as
10 at least 10 of the financial resources so if it was like 10 at least
10 of the total total budget then you would want to have a separate
activity for that and time is money so time is also time
is also a financial resource too so
but the other thing i might say to that one because it might not be clear
is if it's a smallish project you know a couple thousand dollars it may not be
that you need to designate all ten activities that were happening i mean we
often just see smaller projects with one or maybe two activities total so it's
okay if you're not actually covering like all the flyer creation and all of
the you know outreach and all of the partner work you know in separate
designated chunks i mean we might want to see that for a very large
multi-million dollar project and that's when we tend to see
activities up in the like 10 range but it's just um it's just a little bit
of a rule of thumb like what was the most prominent activity
if there was a second one at it if you had a really big project we could
see 10 but i think madison's right follow the
money
jamie from arizona asked a question about outcome buttons lighting up even
if the activity was targeted for children
um i could be wrong i don't think our spr
system is that's that's sophisticated yet
unfortunately jamie so if you find the activity is targeted
for children and that outcome button is still lighting up
you don't need to fill it out and
hopefully the program uh officers will
get it
but it is a really great upgrade suggestion
rachel asks if libraries reports can libraries report
staff time spent on the grant and paid locally as an in-kind match if they were
not outside of their standard work hours um
it's another one that i'm happy to get additional perspectives from but my my
impression is what what's important to us is just
the time spent on the project whether it's within their standard
work hours or or not um just because if they were if they were spending time on
on that project then they weren't spending time on
something else so um that is technically an in-kind
contribution on behalf of their of their library to allow their staff to
participate in the in the project but happy to get that verified or
vilified more i don't want to muddy the waters but i'm
thinking a little bit about the principle of allocability which is that
if you are a salaried employee you're already getting 100 of your time paid so
i'm not sure that we'd want to see time over and above that
being reported as in kind match just based on principles of good reg
reporting kind of stuff but if
if you have more nuance to that that we're not getting i mean certainly send
it to us and we can mull it over
we have another question from erica about um
bundling is there no longer a limit on project amounts can be bundled into one
intent it used to be 5k or 10k yeah yes i can say that we used to uh we
used to have that as a general guideline for bundling projects
um but especially with the dawn of cares act and arpa
um i think it's less of a mountain a less of a matter of
amount the amount of funds versus what are you doing
like what are the projects happening and how similar are they
yes i would agree i would say i think the reason why i mean i could be
wrong but i think the reason why we haven't kind of said there's a
moratorium on that role and forget what you learned before is because this is
such a unique influx of funds and then you know once
the stimulus funds are behind us and we're back to normal
uh amounts of funds it might still be a good rule of thumb when you're trying to
figure out whether a project should whether some grant should be bundled or
not but i it was never my impression it wasn't my impression that it was ever a
hard and fast rule like if we ever saw sub grants that were over 5000 we would
you know that were bundled we would reject them all together it was more of
a guidance on helping you figure out how to organize your subgrants and your
projects
yeah we'll just think of those bundles as bundles of joy in this season of big
money and stimulus funds
well you all have been so attentive and we're close to the top of the hour
if you have additional questions you can always send them to us offline
but i think for now we will stop the recording and give you five minutes of
your day back and we will look forward to seeing you
again in the future
good luck with reporting
thank you we appreciate your time