KATHIE KNOBLE-IVERSON: One of the other things that you have to do when you do strategic planning, is to decide, have you all done the SWAT? Help me. Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. And what we decided to do is to talk about the kinds of things that we do well as an organization. So that's really fun. You can do the sticky notes on the wall, you can do all sorts of things and it can be really an upbeat thing for staff. But then you have to do the other side. We identified the things we do well. Got it in here. People like what we do, we collect good data, we have good outcomes, we have good documentation. This is a current one: We're a good partner, a good collaborator. Didn't used to be. But then we had to go and decide what we didn't do well. And that was really interesting. To see different people in the organization try to decide what they didn't, had to not make it personal. That it wasn't something they didn't think they did well. It was as a whole. So we had to go at that a couple different times because people had, I think comments that weren't appropriate. So we went back to the table. We did it once. The same day that we did most of the planning. And we came back to it as a staff. And I had people really think about the things we didn't do well. And I used an example in here that I shared with the staff. Most of the staff weren't around when we decided that we were philosophical snobs. That we thought we were so much better than other organizations because we were an independent living center and practiced the IL philosophy. And that really got thrown in our faces when that advocacy issue came up around the building, when my friend said, you guys are philosophical snobs. We were. And when we talked about that situation, then we were able to sort of get on track and talk about the kinds of things that we don't do well. We weren't good partners. There were all sorts of things that weren't going well for us that we weren't aware of. Should have been. So we weren't good at, still, I think a lot of centers aren't good at sharing their stories. Because your stories are your outcomes. And you have to connect those. Marketing person, development person, she knows. Because you got to put those in grants. Got to identify with people. That connection to the outcome an individual has with why you're asking for money. That's not any different when you sign a contract or when you develop a fee-for-service. So again, you were the one that was telling me about the template. I think that's a wonderful idea. Do you keep it on the common drive? That's fun. I think that's a really good idea. Then the minute she needs something that's geared towards the type of grant, she can go in and get that. I have to take that idea home. I love it. One of the other things, a long time ago, I don't think we were thinking and acting like, we weren't operating like a business. We were acting and operating like a non-profit. And it is okay for non-profits to act like businesses. You are a business. You just happen to have non-profit status in your state. So I think that was a huge change for us. We made that one pretty quickly. That was probably three years after we opened. We just decided we have to change our focus. Did somebody have a question down here? No? Okay. So how do you decide what kind of opportunities exist in your community? Anybody want to share? Or come across a great opportunity that sort of jumped out at you? No? Yes? Sorry. Click, Kathie, click. Nobody has, do you talk about, yeah? AUDIENCE MEMBER: We've done training for ADA compliance for businesses and stuff that recently an intern reached out to us from NASW to do cultural competency training on the culture of disability and that turned out to be a great opportunity for us. It got exposure for our agency and they now want us to do, they also gave us ideas for additional workshops or fee-for-service ideas. Like, for example, invisible disabilities, cause some of us that were presenting have medical or mental health and wasn't as visible as some of our other staff that were presenting there that day. And they want us to present at their annual conference and do some kind of training on yearly or biannual basis on different topics, related to independent living and the culture of disability. KATHIE KNOBLE-IVERSON: That's a great opportunity. Did you get paid for any of it? Yeah. That makes it even better. I think that's one of the opportunities that all centers have. You're sitting on a gold mine if you don't try to help people understand that you can do, you can do skill training. This is basically skill training to the public is what it is. And it's really, we've gone wild doing trainings around the state and now we just got asked to train the Department of Health Services in Minnesota on recovery and mental health services. And we're charging $6,000 a pop. It's a three-day training. We send three staff. They're not doing other things. I think ADA, even helping landlords and other people understand their responsibilities, work accommodations, helping employers understand, accessibility, all sorts of things that you can be marketing. Don't have to do a whole marketing plan. But you can make sure that the word gets out that you have expertise in those areas. But if you're going to advertise, then you have to be able to respond. To me, that's something that almost every center does. And it's okay to ask to get paid for that. I think one of the things that you need to also identify is who your partners could be in the community. That can open other doors for you. Like I said, we had this altercation with another organization and they have become our partners in a whole bunch of housing events. No money exchanged, but a lot of exposure. We cross-train our staff. So they come in and spend a day with us, helping us understand all the changes in housing laws, all of the things, there's been some unfortunate laws passed in Wisconsin about renters' rights that is just sad. But we need to understand them so we can help people deal with those issues when they come up in their own personal lives. So they're coming to train us in a couple of weeks for a half a day about what all this means to us as advocates. It is those sorts of things. So when they're there, we're going to set up a time that we go back and train people in their agency, because they have a, not a lot, but enough turnover where they feel like they need to have us help their staff understand, they do low-income housing. And they don't understand disabilities. They understand poor people, but they don't understand poor people with disabilities. And they don't have a very good reputation with that population. So they would like us to help change that. So they want us to come in and help work with their staff. So how do you identify in your organization what threats exist? This was probably one of the hardest opportunities because I think when we did this early on, a lot of the staff was not as connected to the community. And now every staff person has to be on at least two, if not three committees somewhere in the community. In one of our counties. And so this last time, it was really easy to identify what our threats were. When we did this, this was when we were thinking about getting into fee-for-service. So the threats were complacency, lose sight of our mission, failure, staff and board resistance, strong competition, those sorts of things. When we just did our last strategic plan that I'm just finishing up, it was much more sophisticated because the staff were so involved in the community. They just really felt that they really knew what was going on. And there were many more opportunities than there were threats anymore. Because we have developed so many good relationships with people. And I think, I know, I hear it all the time. I hear it at home from our agency and I know you hear it at your organization. I'm so busy. How can I take the time to go beyond a committee that's going to take half a day? And those are the kind of things you have to decide in your organization. When you talk about values, we really value connections to the community. Because in the long run, they pay off. You may never write a grant with an organization and you might not ever partner with them on a project, but if you have somebody who needs housing and you're on one of their committees and they know you when you call and you go, we've got somebody who really needs housing and they don't have any income, could you wave the, or they don't have any deposit, you might work that out. So it pays off either programmatically, or it pays off financially, to have a lot of these connections in the community. I personally think that we wasted years not developing partnerships. And now it's part, it's on everybody’s job description. That they have to understand how to network and they have to understand how to be a full participant in some sort of group. Because you can ask, and I'll talk about this, I'll just do it. You can send somebody. I could send you tomorrow and say, I want you to be on high school transition advisory committee. Okay. And what do you know about transition. What do you know about the school district we're sending you into? How well do you express who we are and what we could do for this organization? And we ended up doing, I was telling somebody earlier. We did skill training about documentation. We also did training sessions about how to be an effective participant in a group. Because not everybody knows how to do that. People can go and be quiet and never say a word and they don't know you're there. Or people can hog the time with useless babble or they can come and say, I'd love to come be the secretary. I take good notes and you'll always know what's going on. Or you could be the treasurer or you could be the person that's going to find space every time you need to have a meeting. It's really, for us, it's really paid off. We aren't in as many counties that way as Id like. We're only in about seven counties. Very actively involved. That leaves six and they're all the ones farthest away. And the peripheral of our service area. But that is one of our long-term goals is to have someone either have an office and that staff person or staff persons would be involved in that county or we send somebody from the main office to be involved on some level. So we are doing mental health expansion. We are doing some expansion in our agency. And it's all because I got asked to be on the mental health expansion advisory pilot program. I know everything that's going on. I know what new requirements are going to be made for staff. I know how much they're going to pay, I know when they're going to roll out. Nobody else knows that. And we're a provider. And it's giving us an edge nobody else has. Just need to think about, again, if you're going to roll out a new service, is there work groups, committees, those sorts of things that you can get staff involved in. And then they have to know when they hear important stuff. They can be good participants, but they have to be brought up to speed about what's going on politically. Or whatever, there's politics going on in every entity. There's just different levels of politics. So you need to know, I can talk about pulleycat? that's the organization that we've been partners with. Nobody makes any decisions about housing in a four county area, unless they decide they want to make a decision. We know that. They are so revered by funding sources and have so much power around housing that, we know that. When they have a meeting, and they start talking about new housing or changes at HUD, people listen. We have had to, we've had turnover in that committee. And now they put me on it and housing is not my thing. But I have to learn. And I have to be able to go and bring back pertinent information to the organization. So that we can continue to be a good partner. I want to talk a little bit about, when we talked about staff and board buy-in. If people asked you, how many of you could identify what your agency culture looks like? What, Tim? KATHIE KNOBLE-IVERSON: Okay. I made it too interactive, huh? You need to understand what your agency culture is all about. How decisions get made, how information gets shared, what your hierarchy is, the real one. There's ones that are on paper and then there's how things really happen in an organization. And unfortunately, they should be the same, but a lot of times, they're not. You can show an org chart that says, this is how things happen. You can have a procedure description, but that's not really how decisions get made. And you need to be clear to everybody in the process so that people know when a final decision is made, how it's going to be made. Is it going to be up to the director at the end, is the committee making that decision, is the board making that decision, who's going to make that? And then you need to publicize your intentions. You also need to know who your competition is. And there's some AUDIENCE MEMBER: That's all right. You can be as interactive as you want to be. I wasn't telling you not to ask questions. Want me to help you KATHIE KNOBLE-IVERSON: I got a lot of slides to go through yet. Can you go back to 14? KATHIE KNOBLE-IVERSON: There are lots of things you can learn from your competition. But you have to be able to ask. So if you don't have a relationship with them, you're not going to find much out. And we have some competitors that don't share anything. And so you have to figure out how to find out the, is there a public survey that's done, is there access to their quarterly reports because it gets made to a public entity. Those sorts of things. Otherwise, you're going to be operating in the dark. We know a lot of our competitors in most of our counties and some we don't. And we make it a point to figure out who they are, what they value, whether they're non-profit, that's easy to find out. But we have, I don't know about in your region, but we have a lot of for-profit organizations coming into the human service system. A lot. Before you do anything, I think you need to do your homework. This is one of the things I can really need to drive home. You really need to understand your own organization. And you need to be pretty tough on yourselves. You need to understand, do you have an infrastructure that works. Do you have direct service staff that can do what you want to do. Do you have the potential for recruitment, do you have money that you can hire people. And what level of risk are you willing to take on? And then you need to be sure that staff and board support this venture, even when things get bad. That's when you need to have a plan, when do we call it quits, so that the board knows, staff know, that sort of thing. And then you need to design a process to monitor your program. You also need to identify what changes need to take place in order for the transition. Do you need a different, does staff need a different skill set? Do you need, we had one contract that insisted, we were going to apply for it, insisted that we buy a software program that was $15,000. And we wouldn't have made $15,000 in five years off the program. And we just said, forget it. We're not going to do it. And so I think it's important to understand what requirements there are if you go after a contract or an RFP request for proposal. Do you have an effective data collection system. Do you need a more sophisticated accounting system? Do you have to update policies and procedures? Do you need more supervisors? And then you need to decide what your current barriers are. And you'll hear from everybody that time is a barrier. So this is when you have to decide are we going to pull somebody out to do this, are we going to take the risk and hire somebody new? You have to do what works for your organization. I can skip over the internal assessment. One of the things that we do every four years at our agency is we have an outside assessment done. We have a peer review done. And believe me, they're brutal. They're our peers in Wisconsin. And we have one done. Last year, we paid for our own. I can't remember. Maybe our third one we did. We paid for our own because the state didn't have the money for a center. But it's a tool that we use in Wisconsin that we developed. We market it. And if anybody wants any information, but that's the best way, not necessarily that tool. Might be able to find something in your own community. But you need to really have someone assess what they think your assets are and what your deficits are in your organization. And that is probably the most unbiased assessment you'll get. If you do a self-assessment, which you can do. You can get a check list, you can get a tool, they tend to be a little more biased. Because, you just do. You think, oh, sure we do that. And that's how the question gets answered and so nothing changes in your organization. How do you fund needed changes? Can you get start up money? Can you ask for an advance? Can somebody in the agency write a grant that would help with start-up money? That's the best. Then you don't have to worry. You can do what you need to do if you have start-up money for a project. Then you need to decide if there's skills in your organization. I just said, can somebody write a grant. You might find out that you have an intern, sitting in an office and they're there because they have a psychology degree, but they happen to know how to write a grant. They have to sort of look, every two years, we do a survey and ask staff to share with us, what hidden talents they have that they might be willing to share with the organization. Now, we don't have much turnover, so I could tell you. I know. We do it with new staff. We try to ask them, what could you do for our organization that we don't know about you? We had somebody who has great recreation, she's a professional skier. We didn't know that. So she has all kinds connections to adapted, for us to get adapted equipment to give to people. How am I doing time-wise? Good. Then you need to also understand the requirements, not only your internal, but you need to understand the requirements, whether it's a contract, where it's an RFP, whether it's a fee-for-service. You need to know what skill set is needed, what outcomes are required, how much flexibility you have to have. I just had some, one of the independent living centers in Wisconsin just applied for a United Way grant to do crisis intervention. And I was like, really. And it's 24/7 they got a huge grant. They got $75,000 I think to hire someone that's going to respond to emergency calls that the county didn't know what to do with. They didn't know what to do with these calls that come in and people have died, people have, it's homeless folks, but it's also people in crisis and they're working on a crisis response team, but it's going to take at least a year to get that up. So they're willing to pay the center for a year to do this until they get it done. And Dee just said, we'll do it. And they found somebody and they are using all sorts of electronic phone transfers so there's always somebody trained that knows what to do. So it brought in money they weren't even thinking about and they bought on a really excellent staff person. You need to have strong communication. You need very specific documentation styles. Does your staff really know how to do good documentation? With CCS, we found out we had a lot of staff who didn't understand how to tie their documentation to what a person's goal is. Well, you're supposed to be doing that in our database, which is MyCIL, which is my independent living center. And so we went back and started looking. And now we have a work group that works on monitoring documentation at our agency. Because for CCS, the two supervisors monitor every case note that gets out the door. Because otherwise, it will come back to us. And we won't get paid for that contact if it's not a quality documentation. So you need to know those kind of requirements before you get into the business. How much travel and mobility is required? You have some folks who, disability-related. They can't go more than an hour in a car. And so is that somebody we would assign to northern Monroe County? Probably not. We need to understand whether it's safe or not. I wanted to talk a little bit about that. We do CCS, which is the skill training, but we get referrals that tell us that John lives in northern Monroe County. He's isolated, hasn't left his home in five years and his outcome is that he wants to be able to leave his home. And we know his Social Security number maybe, because it's a Medicaid bill and that's all we know about him. So we set up a process. We created our own referral form, even though the county wanted to just send that kind of information, we said, no, were we're not going to send somebody out all by themselves to rural Monroe County to a house where you know, you can't tell us anything about that. We need to know our environment's safe that we're sending people to. Or as safe as anybody can guess. So we created our own referral form. And they really did not want to fill that form out. And we just said, fine, we just can't do this then. And it took some negotiations, but they ended up using our form instead of their own form. They felt it was, what we did was blend in what they needed and what we needed and created one form. And you need to identify whether you have you to make infrastructure changes. Then there's the whole issue of the demand for services. When you get into fee-for-service, at CCS, during the pilot, we knew exactly how many referrals we were going to get, when we were going to get them. Because we went to all the meetings and they said, okay, we're going to start with six referrals this month and next month, we'd like to do 12. When you get into the free market, you can get ten in a month or you can get 60. And so you have to be able to respond to whatever it is that you're going to sell. And like I said, the 504 assessments that really caught us off guard. We had planned. We knew that a whole bunch of townships were going to come back to us because it had been five years. We weren't prepared for this last request for 25 buildings. We just weren't. So I have managers out doing those. Because everybody else is just too busy. But we're going to do them. Because it's an opportunity we don't want to pass up. So you have to have sort of a plan or do you say, okay, we can only handle, we're going to build the capacity to be able to take 20 referrals a month. And that's what we can do. And after that, we don't have any more capacity. If you get to that capacity and you make some money, you can say, okay, we're going to hire a part-time person and now we can handle 30 referrals a month. It just depends on what you're doing, what kind of service it is and you have to be able to assess your own agency capacity to respond and you have to know what kind of competition you have. And you have to be able to identify how quickly you can recruit somebody. At our center, we don't let an independent living specialist out on their own for six months. We really keep them close. And we want to make sure that they provide a really high quality service. That's a luxury I'm not sure we're going to have this go-around with our expansion and so we wrote a grant, an expansion grant that's going to pay for six months of that person's time so I can free up a seasoned independent living specialist to respond to the demand. Now, we won't know if we're going to get it yet, for a month, but we asked for $150,000. That's going to pay for our rent for a year, going to pay for a staff person for six months. Two staff, actually. It's going to pay for an office and all the training they need and all of that. But you have to think about those kind of things. And then what if we don't get it? Somebody asked me that at the staff meeting. What if we don't get this grant? I said, then we have to go back to the drawing board. Because we can't expand if we don't have new staff. We just don't have anybody else to send, we do have a new office and it's going to be free. And they've got a computer there and we get to use everything. We found a really, in a Boys & Girls Club who want us in their building, because they have so many kids that need our services or their families. So we found that connection, but now we have to have warm bodies in that office in order to respond to the need in that county. Okay. I'm going to talk about preparing to become, slide 22. Way ahead of me. Preparing to become a vendor. I know some of you are going to say, of course we know our service area. But this is when you really, really, really need to take a look. And we have 13 counties. I'm going to be honest with you. There's no way we know all of our counties as well as we know seven or eight of them. We know all the players, all the non-profits, we know service providers, we know the county sheriff, we know all of these players in these counties. The rest, we're not very connected to yet. And so we need to look for like-minded philosophy, common interest, shared space, like the Boys & Girls Club, agencies that maybe have a really good reputation, but they don't do anything that IL centers do. They don't have any connection, but they have a really good reputation. Now, domestic violence, we have some great domestic violence organizations in our service area. They run great shelters for women and their kids. And I was sitting at a table just a couple days ago around homelessness and a grant and the director bent over and said, we really have to figure something out. We got to do something together. We have same set of values. We really are connected to our communities and we're in a county you want to break into. So let's get together and let's talk about that. So those are the kinds of connections that if you get staff on committees and you just, you have to network. You have to get connected to folks. And you also need to find somebody that maybe has something you value or you need. The housing. (Inaudible), we needed them, they needed us. They do housing, we do advocacy and it's been a really good partnership. Or they might be another disability-related provider in your service area that you might want to partner with. And then we went into identifying, and this was just, I just this as an example. Potential purchasers for services. You have to do this. This is for our service area. You have to do this for your service area. Or your state. Because some of these things are state issues, some of them are federal. Like the Social Security Administration. There's always little projects that are posted in the federal register. You just need to decide if it's something you're interested in or not. The Division of Voc Rehab, county human services, Medicaid, insurance companies, that's Dennis worked out that relationship with Prudential. And then the villages, cities, townships, we had a real lovely little town in one of our counties get a home makeover. Got one of these infrastructure grants from urban, from the Department of Agriculture. And consumer called us and said, they're not putting in curb cuts. And we go, yes, they are. And they go, no, they're not. So we throw somebody in the car and go up there. And they did every street. It's a small town. So every street's probably 20 sidewalks. Not one curb cut. And so we're walking down the street, looking for whoever's in charge and meet this burly guy and go, how can there's no curb cuts? Ah, people in wheelchairs, they can go down people's drive ways. They don't need curb cuts. And so we go to the mayor, who is very part-time, because it's a very small community. And say, you got a problem. If you don't do this, we'll sue you or somebody will sue you. Or somebody's going to get hurt, going down somebody's driveway. You're going to have a mess. And we convinced them that they needed, and we did, he asked us to do a survey. He had to go back to the funding source and admit that they didn't have curb cuts. This guy loves us. We saved him or their community from a lawsuit, whether it's precipitated by us or somebody else. He's still one of our biggest fans. I think it's those sorts of things that, I don't know how many towns you have in your service area, we only do what we can. And it's the same with school districts. There's lots of, we have I think 63 school districts in our service region. There's no way we can know everybody. We can't know the directors of special ed in every school. We are on every TAC in Wisconsin, they have Transition Advisory Committees, and we are on nine TACs and somebody goes every time. So that we know what's going on in the schools at least. Then you need to decide what the purchaser values. And this is amazing to me. We've watched managed care go from valuing quality of life of a person with a disability to not valuing the quality of somebody's life and only being concerned about health and safety. That's really sad. Especially for the folks that are in the system. But you have to figure out, and I'm on a quality assurance task force for Western Wisconsin Cares. It's the biggest managed care entity in our service area. And they'll come right out and tell you at this point that quality isn't a priority. And I can raise a ruckus. But they showed me their contract from the state and it says that they do not have to be concerned about quality. Yeah. So does your purchaser value quality services, strong outcomes, cost effectiveness, their relationships with their providers. Consumer satisfaction or do they care about no problems and cheapness? Yes? AUDIENCE MEMBER: Okay. You know, I've heard other contracts and things coming out of the county human services with the adults and children. And I'm wondering how those RFPs or contracts, how, if you have an example of some or how I could research that or other folks in the audience, I'd be interested to hear. KATHIE KNOBLE-IVERSON: RFPs, you should be able to go to any county's website. They have to post those. They have to be public, but only a time frame. But you could probably go back and get copies of old RFPs. In our county, they archive them for three years, in case anybody challenges them. AUDIENCE MEMBER: Have you had any success or anybody here in the audience, as far as contracts with county human services, adults and children, that may have been mentioned, but. KATHIE KNOBLE-IVERSON: We have six contracts. One with Vernon County and five with La Crosse and now we're going to have one with Monroe and one with Jackson County. AUDIENCE MEMBER: And that's the mental health services or? KATHIE KNOBLE-IVERSON: Mental health services, kids services and what's the third one? Skill training. Not CCS, but basic IL skill training. The county buys that from us. Somebody else asked me if I could have an example of a county contract. And I'm going to tell you, a county contract in Wisconsin tells you nothing about the service you're going to provide. It's your basic anti-terrorism, you know, you have to a have all these things in your agency. The addendums only list the service and list how much you're going to get paid. So you need to, we have asked counties to develop provider outcome or provider expectation sheets and they have, most of our counties have, when we have a contract with them, so that we understand what they're expectations are, cause you just don't have it in the contract. I called one day and said, we'd really like to be part of your children's services to do support groups for kids. And they go, well, we don't have that on your contract. We'll send you an addendum. The addendum was this much on a piece of paper that said, children's support groups, $15 per person. That was it. We could have showed up and, you know, had ice cream for all we know. It was interesting. So now we said, come on. If we're going to do this, we need to understand what you expect from us. So they did. They have a template that they filled out for us so that we understood what they expected to come out of that support group. Especially around documentation. And as children, so we have to have permission. Providing those kinds of services to kids is really interesting because you have, even going into schools, you always have to have permission from the parents, there's transportation issues. In our area, transportation is just, you get out of the city of La Crosse and it just doesn't exist. So it's up to that family then to get that person in for the support group. So it's going to be interesting. We just are starting that in a couple weeks. You also need to identify how you're product is compatible with the values of the buyer. If you don't know what they value, we've gone in not knowing what a buyer values and been incredibly disappointed. But we knew what we valued. So that's what we provided. And they didn't want to pay for what we valued. They wanted to pay us half of what we valued and we just said, no, sorry. We can't do it. They wanted to pay us $16 an hour for skill training. We just said, there's no way. We can't do it. We'll guarantee you an outcome and they go, what do you mean? Well, what they were looking at is that we were going to provide a service to take care of people. It was more like supportive home care. They didn't even understand the kind of skill training that we do. That we do it and there is an outcome. This person can learn. They're going to attain the skill and then we'll be done. And they go, what do you mean you'll be done. Well, whenever they learn the skill, we won't be billing you anymore. That was three years ago. They were paying agencies for skill training for years, 30 or 40 dollars an hour and never had an outcome. No one was ever taken out of the service because they acquired the skill. And now it's part of the expectation. They did an RFP and you have to meet 85 percent of your outcomes if you're going to contract with the county. If you don't, you have to document why. But that was a huge systems change for them. And it took us sort of calling the question rather than them. And you really need to share and highlight what your CIL values. You need to have it in all your presentations, in your stories, you need to not do a blatant comparison to your competitors, but you can talk about the fact that you have outcomes, actual outcomes and that a person's not going to be in skill training for the next 24 years, but maybe for six months, you're going to help them figure out how to balance their checkbook, and manage their own money, maybe, one balancing your checkbook will happen in six months and managing their money independently might happen in another six. But you can identify the kind of funds you would be saving the county if you didn't do that for that person. And that's really effective. And that's how we, we took six case scenarios to the county and compared them to our competition who never took anybody out of services and saw, we would save them $150,000 in two years for those six people. These are again, just ideas that came from our staff about unmet needs in our service area. But there's some things, I don't know how many, do all of you get United Way money? A lot of you? Do you, do your United Ways do needs assessments in the communities they're in? Yeah. They're invaluable. We use all their data. We use it. They spend a lot of money collecting unmet needs in the area. We have a university that has a sociology department that does that. We have a health consortium. That's one of the things we got really involved with for quite a while because a report came out from the health consortium about the suicide rate in seven of our 13 counties. People were outraged. And couldn't figure out what was going on. And we realized, and so did the health consortium, that probably, the suicide rate was probably at least a third if not half more than reported because so many families don't report suicides. So you need to sort of identify, what's going on, what's being done for you to help you understand what's an unmet need in your service region? And what's in the news? The economy? Jobs? In Wisconsin. Jobs, jobs, jobs, because we have a governor who, that's all that's getting funded in Wisconsin. We invited the governor to come to our center and do a roll out of a jobs bill. And we were on TV and we were in the paper and got interviewed, our staff got interviewed. And then we brought in consumers who had benefitted from the bill that he was signing. It was a pilot and then he signed into a bill. He's not my favorite guy because they cut lots of other programs. Medicaid's been cut, BadgerCare, which is medical assistance for low-income folks. You have to be, you can't make more than $9,000 a year in Wisconsin now to qualify for Medicaid. It's horrid. But he knows who we are now. He understands. And Maureen Ryan, our lobbyist has a great relationship with him and we're hoping that we're going to get a cost of living increase this year. So you need to decide what's going on, and we do a lot of education about employment, even though we don't have an official employment program, like the independent living center in California, we do a lot of employment-based support for people. We help people do resumes, we help people do job searches, we help them figure out how to use the databases in Wisconsin for our job centers. And we help people get jobs informally. We know somebody, we know there's a vacancy, and we hook people up and they get jobs and don't get any credit for it. So you need to figure out how to collect that kind of data, so that you know that people have outcomes. We, homelessness in this country, and mental illness, every time there's a shooting or a mass murder, it hits the paper and people's reputation, if you have a mental health diagnosis, it's, I said we take ten steps forward and a hundred back. It's just really sad. And one of the things that we are doing is working on stigma that's related to mental health. We do an article in our newsletter every time about how to reduce stigma. We do education, we do, has anybody heard of mental health first aid? Yeah. We have three trainers who know how to do mental health first aid and you can go in, we do it for the public and we do charge, unless it's a civic group and it's an 8-hour training about how to respond more appropriately to folks in the general population that have a mental illness. We have a series of gas stations in Wisconsin called QuikTrips. They're worth billions of dollars. And they have I think 650 gas stations or something. We're going to train their HR people and then they're going to develop a plan so that we're going to train all their managers, who are then going to try to train their staff. These places are open 24/7. They get a lot of folks in there that are distressed occasionally. And they just don't know what to do. And it's going to be really helpful. And they're going to pay us a lot of money to do that. You have to think about what's going on in your region, how people react or overreact or are acting in a very uneducated way about how to solve a problem. And you can be the problem-solvers. And then, our center, housing and transportation are two top issues that we get asked for all the time. We use, I was saying this earlier. I'm a techno idiot. I have wonderful staff who are so skilled in how to use Twitter and our website and all sorts of ways that are very cost effective to get the word out about what we do. Every time we do something special, our development person does Twitter and just gets a buzz going. That's what she talks about is starting a buzz about what you're doing. And it's an electronic buzz. It's a really cheap, effective way to get the word out about what you do. And we're finding out that the kids in our service region do not respond to telephone. They do not respond to e-mail anymore. I can't remember what the program is. I don't know what it is that they respond to now, but we have a mental health clinic that that's how they're setting up appointments with kids is they have somebody who's really, it's not Twitter. Not Facebook. IM. Yes. Yeah. So they're having a much better response from kids. They don't answer their phone. And it's stuff like that you got to stay on top of. And it's not going to be me that's going to stay on top of that. Do all of you know how to do a press release? Yeah. Before we had a development person, we were pathetic. We've only had her a year and a half and we're just like embarrassed at some of the press releases we sent out before. It's something you need to learn to do and do well. And what we found out is the Tribune, our local newspaper, would have been willing to come in and teach us how to do a good press release. We didn't know that. She goes, well, I learned from the Tribune. Okay. We use SurveyMonkey a lot for all kinds of information. We went over that I'm on page 34. One of the things that you have to figure out once you understand who you are and what your buyer's expectations are is how do you close that gap if there's expectations from the buyer and a deficit at your center? Anybody have any ideas? No? Development person? Write a grant, huh? It's really important that you figure out how you're going to close that gap. Because if you don't, you won't be successful at your fee-for-service or your contract. You also have to evaluate your marketing strategies. That's one of the things we just did so poorly at our agency until we had somebody come in who knew what she was doing. And I don't think we valued it very much and now we really, really value good marketing. And that change came in a year and a half by having someone who knew what they were doing. Sometimes you don't even know you’re doing a bad job. We knew. We knew we were really doing a bad job. But some places don't know they're doing a bad job at marketing their services. And then you need to talk about what untapped resource you have. We have got, a lot of you were in really small communities. In Wisconsin, we have identified 15 small town newspapers. They die to have stories in their newspapers. They will print anything we send them and put it in their newspaper. We have radio stations who are constantly their little, they reach one county, they have talk shows. We found out we have the Ron Fruit Show on in a county where we have an office and he said, I've been so disappointed you people haven't used me for years. Now, once a month, we get an hour on his show and we get to pick the topic. So we talk about Social Security benefits, we talk about assistive technology, we talk about nursing home transition, we talk about anything that we think is pertinent to that area. And he belongs to an association who now we're doing that in three other counties at three other radio stations. So we use the same information, not recreating the wheel here, but use the same information and have it go to different audiences.