 All right, so again, I wanna just thank everyone for joining us today for our fundraiser for Pellier PTA fundraising to new heights. We'll go ahead and get started. My name is Ashley Kefalidis. I'm a community development specialist here at Mighty Cause. Certainly excited to be with you today. And as we get started, we're gonna take a quick moment to learn who is Mighty Cause, but then we're gonna dive into that virtual fundraising and we'll cover what is PTA fundraising all about? Where does online fundraising fit? Developing fundraising motivations and comprehensive fundraising. We'll also, like I mentioned before, we'll also have a question and answer session at the end. So I won't be answering questions during the presentation, but please feel free to go ahead and submit a question, whether it's in the chat box or the question and answer box. Go ahead and submit those. We'll look at those at the end. Also, we are recording this webinar. So anyone who registered is gonna receive an email with the recording and with the slide deck. We also have a number of other webinars that you can check out at any time that I'll mention again in just a few minutes. But just real quick, as we get started a little bit about Mighty Cause. Mighty Cause has been dedicated to serving nonprofits since 2006. We offer a year-round platform for all of your fundraising needs, but we're specifically designed for that small to medium nonprofit, which makes us perfect for your PTA. And not only do we process donations, but like I mentioned, we have this free resource center with blogs, webinars, e-books, and more. So please feel free to check that out any time. But that's enough about Mighty Cause. Let's get on to propelling your fundraising to new heights. So what is PTA fundraising all about? PTA fundraising is about asking our communities to invest in our children. And just like there are different learning styles, there are different types of fundraising, we all know. And each has a place in a role in shaping your students' experiences. So for example, a spring carnival with the proceeds going toward the PTA, not only does this raise funds, but it provides a great time for your students to be with their family, their friends, and their classmates, and to create these memories and boost that school spirit. So it's more than just raising some money. And yes, there are times for sales, auctions, festivals, you name it. But today, we're gonna focus on the opportunities that online fundraising provides. And I'm confident that by the end of this webinar, you'll see how a lot of these ideas can be reflected throughout your different PTA activities. Now, where does fundraising fit? So the neat thing about online fundraising is that it can be used for year-round fundraising as a direct donation fundraiser, as a compliment to almost any other fundraiser and for some out-of-the-box opportunities. So sometimes we forget that fundraising can be as straightforward as a donate button on your PTA website. And you could also ask local businesses and organizations to include a donate widget for your school on their websites. Now, we wouldn't let that be our only means of fundraising, but it's definitely an easy option for your donors when they wanna donate. As peer-to-peer fundraising has grown in popularity over the last several years, it's also opened the door for PTAs to host these direct donation fundraisers online. So instead of buying items or tickets to an event, donors can simply donate. And when we consider this utilizing online fundraising, you're asking your donors to invest in your students and not so much in that fundraising merchandise, such as the candy bars and the cookie kits. Or if you already have a pattern of successful fundraisers, you don't wanna reinvent the wheel, but you can modernize it a little bit. So let's take a read-up on. Instead of manually collecting and tracking those donations, donations can be collected online with real-time donation reporting. An online giving also provides people an easy option to donate regardless of where they live. So this means if I live in Maine, I can still support my nephew in Kansas and neither of us have to involve the United States Postal Service. It just makes it that much easier for people to donate and for people to invest in our students. And moreover, you can host interactive fundraising campaigns that are outside of that traditional PTA fundraising box. So take, for example, the Toucan Ranch Rescue. So what they do is they put on an annual Call for Artists campaign. And for this fundraiser, participants create and submit a picture representing the ranch. And the winning picture will be made into t-shirts. So donors cast their votes with every dollar equaling one vote. Now this means that a $30 donation equals 30 votes towards an artist. And after tallying up the votes, the top three winners are announced and the shirts are made with that winning picture, but then they're then sold as an additional fundraiser. And PTAs can do something similar. So students can create artwork to be made into t-shirts or perhaps each class comes up with a rap song and a dance, it's videoed and then people get to vote using their donations for which performance they like best. Or maybe every year students develop a new annual logo that can be made into stickers or car magnets and those can be sold for those additional fundraising opportunities. So not only do these campaigns raise money, they also inspire that school spirit and that community. So to begin incorporating online fundraising, let's take a moment to look at developing our fundraising motivations. Have you ever asked your PTA, what are we teaching our students through the fundraising process? Is the focus on competition against classmates and earning prizes? Or is the focus doing your part while we all work together for the common good? Now one of the difficult balances to find in school fundraising is between rewarding students' efforts while remembering that some students don't have the connections or the family support to bring in numerous donations. And regardless of the type of fundraiser, some of your students are gonna work very hard to fundraise and celebrating these efforts is good and definitely appropriate. But when working with kids, we also have to remember that students can only do as much as is intentionally or unintentionally permitted by their parents and their guardians. Now this doesn't mean we don't reward students at all, but it does bring up some questions for the PTA to work through. And among the many topics to be addressed when planning a fundraising calendar, I would like to suggest you also consider how your upcoming events will shape your students' thoughts about philanthropy, especially about community ownership as well as giving and receiving. So one of the great things about PTA fundraising is that it's a real-life illustration about working diligently for a common goal. So for example, let's imagine your PTA is raising funds to enhance the learning technology within the school library. A child's mission shouldn't be to receive a reward for achieving fundraising success. The mission should be to raise funds in order for that child and others to be able to benefit from the updated technology. And this is that community ownership. So striving for personal success so that the individual student and others can be elevated every time they enter the library. Now again, it's appropriate to reward students for their fundraising efforts. We just don't want the reward to be that end goal. And you can also use fundraising as an opportunity to teach your students about giving and receiving with respect and gratitude. So as your students are soliciting donations, it's good for them to learn that not everyone is able to give or wants to give. And those that do are giving because they care and because they choose to prioritize a school fundraiser, not because they're required to give. And now respecting people's choices about donating can be really tricky for students who are only focused on earning that prize. But the more we encourage our students to see beyond themselves, the more we're able to cultivate that respect and the gratitude. And along the lines of gratitude, during a fundraising event and all throughout the year, you can inspire your students to say thank you by incorporating those thank you activities. Now this could be class pictures holding up a thank you message or maybe you select a handful of students from each grade to participate in a thank you presentation to a community sponsor. So there's a number of ways to demonstrate the importance of saying thank you. And not only do we say thank you as a group, but it's highly recommended that students are encouraged to thank the donors that specifically supported them. So this might be thank you cards to friends and family, including a school picture or in sticking with our online theme, it could be creating and sending out a thank you video with the help of a trusted adult. Now I'm not asking anyone to plum the depths of philanthropy philosophy. I'm simply suggesting that you take some time as a PTA to think through meaningful ways to encourage a bigger picture mindset. And that could be for the parent or for the student. So PTA fundraising is inevitable, but the positive impacts are also so endless. So now that we've looked at a few mindsets, let's look to that comprehensive fundraising. Online fundraising, like we've said, isn't only about posting a virtual or a hybrid event, but when we look at the online component, it also opens the door to easier donor management, email receipts, embeddable donation forms, automatic recurring donations, texts to give, matching grants, and of course those awesome fundraising pages. So if anyone knows that there's more to fundraising than the actual donations, it's gonna be a PTA. So consider centralizing your records. When you move your donor records to a secure online CRM, you not only free yourself from a lot of paperwork, but you make it easy to pass on the information to the next generation of PTA volunteers. And now, for my cause, not only do we offer a built-in CRM, we also offer integrations to work with the donor management systems you already have in place. Take, for example, MailChimp, QuickBooks Online and Google Sheets. Instead of manually entering and uploading donor information, our integrations will do that for you as soon as the donation is submitted. And in addition to managing your donor information, Mighty Cause provides donation receipts. So immediately following the donation submission through any Mighty Cause page, the donation receipt is emailed to the donor with all of the required tax information. Not only do we provide the donation reports you need, we also remove that task of writing up all the receipts. But what about thanking your donors? So we mentioned before how important a thank you is, but we help with that too. So built into the checkout process is a customizable thank you page and the opportunity to add a thank you message to the donation receipt. So when looking at online possibilities, you also wanna consider your donation options. Again, we mentioned before, having the ability to receive donations throughout the year is a strategic opportunity to bring in extra funding. And this can be through an embeddable donation form or a donation widget on your website. Or if a community partner wants to add a widget for your school onto their website, even better. It's a little bit of promotion and the opportunity for donations. And you can have on your own website a constant general form for donations. And then you could have that widget for those specialized campaigns. The options are limitless. And typically when people think of a school or a PTA fundraiser, they think of one-time donations. But this is a mindset that seriously needs to be challenged. Recurring monthly gifts are essential to most organizations and they can be for PTAs as well. So think about a $10 donation each month. Let's say someone creates a $10 donation and donates from September to May. That's a $90 donation throughout the course of the year. And although a donor may not be able to give $90 all at once, $10 a month may be more doable. So that's that extra income. And depending on the online platform, text to give makes it even faster for donors to give a one-time gift or create that recurring donation. And Mighty Cause provides a text to give option for any of your campaign pages as well as for your general fund. And since online fundraising is already online, sharing on your PTA's Facebook or Instagram pages is the easiest next step. So when you share on Mighty Cause page on your social media, donors simply click the post and they're taken straight to your campaign page. And let's not forget QR codes. They're making a comeback and they're the perfect complement to any online fundraising campaign or general donation fund. So with all of these options, someone may ask, I still just wanna donate with a check. Not a problem. Check, cash, bank transfer, we can do it all. So what you would do is receive the cash, receive the check, and then record these as offline donations. The beautiful thing here is that that donor information is gonna be included in your CRM and in your reporting. Now this keeps all of your reports and all of your record records, excuse me, in the same place and well-organized. Now online fundraising doesn't simply track donation and add ways to donate. Online fundraising makes it easier to raise more. Now take matching grants, for example. If a community sponsor provides a matching grant for your fall campaign, you can promote the match on every campaign page. Now on Mighty Cards, this means donors can't even tap the donate button without seeing the match. Some of you may be used to using matching grants, but for those of you who aren't, you might be asking why I even bring this up. And the main reason why is because it's been proven that donors will donate more when a match is active. For some PTAs, this might feel a little out of the box, but that's okay. When you incorporate a matching grant, not only are you bringing in a community to help sponsor what you're doing, but you're able to boost donations and promote that sponsor. So instead of, for example, at a family fun run, local business provides the tents and you would have their name up on banners if you have any event literature, their name is on it. Well, instead of having the physical evidence of this is who is sponsoring us, you're gonna have links to their website on your fundraising pages. So it's that one hand washing the other. They're sponsoring you and your support of them and the community is being enriched. Now, we all know that those community sponsors are irreplaceable and we don't wanna give them up just because we're going online. So take the opportunity not to lose them, but to maybe even build them up all the more. Another opportunity with being online are those campaign pages. So Mighty Paws offers three types of campaign pages plus a profile page for your PTA. And these pages can be used in a variety of ways. We call the event team and individual fundraiser pages campaign pages. And what's great about Mighty Paws is that all campaign pages are customizable. They display a gold bar so you can track your progress and they include downloadable donations reports. You can even use the fundraiser template in order to create a number of fundraiser pages that you can use for multiple classes, multiple students and you can do it fast. What's more, the team and event pages, they also include leaderboards. If you do wanna encourage that friendly competition or if you just want a central place to list all of your participants by name. Now, a standard setup for a fundraising event would start with an event page and within your event, you would have team pages for each grade level and then each team would be made up of individual class fundraisers or perhaps you don't wanna use grade levels. In this case, you can create a team for each class and each class team is made up of individual student fundraisers. Now, keep in mind, this is only an example of how to set up an event with teams and fundraisers but you can be creative about how you use the different pages and when. There's no set formula. For example, in December, you could encourage families to donate to the PTA in honor of teachers and staff instead of giving gifts. Now, you'll wanna have all the teachers on board with this but just hear me out. No one would be required to donate but families can donate to a single school fundraiser page and dedicate their gift to a teacher or a staff member. Now, it's not a competition and students aren't asking family members to donate. It's nothing like that. It's simply a campus wide opportunity to honor teachers and staff if a family wants to. You could also use online fundraising pages to raise money as a PTA but for a different cause. So perhaps in an effort to encourage that philanthropy your school adopts a local soup kitchen. Now, students would have the option to donate or bring in canned food. So let's say each can is worth $2. At the end of the drive, the total number of cans is doubled and that amount is added as an offline donation. So the class with the winning amount donated gets to be present when the food and the fundraising check are presented to the soup kitchen. So here we see how that PTA fundraising goes beyond just raising dollars for the school but it builds up that community ownership and it also builds up in excitement for the students giving, not just the students receiving. Now the merits of online fundraising go well beyond a single fundraising endeavor or trying to be trendy. Online fundraising as a whole can streamline your efforts, simplify your workload and even be a lot of fun. So to sum this all up, PTA fundraising is about more than just raising money. It's about providing great resources and experiences for your students while building community. And this includes developing that philanthropic mindset within your students about community ownership as well as giving and receiving with respect and gratitude. And online fundraising encompasses more than just dollars rates. The right platform is going to make things easier for you with that CRM for donor management integrations to work with your current systems and those emailed receipts and thank you messages to lighten your load. But the right platform is also going to make donating easier with those embeddable donation forms and widgets for the year round fundraising, the automatic recurring donation option, text to give and social media sharing for the convenience. And all the while you're setting yourself up to bring in more donations through the matching grants, the community sponsored acknowledgement opportunities and of course the unlimited easy to use fundraising webpages. So as you're looking to the new school year, Mighty Cause proudly offers a subscription plan to fit your fundraising needs. And if you're interested in a free demo with no commitment, I'll be posting a demo request link in our Zoom chat. And if you would like, you could post your email address in the chat and I'll be sure to have one of our experts reach out to you for a demo. We could do that if it's easier or you can request a demo through the survey that's provided immediately following this webinar. But with all of that aside, I just wanna thank you for joining us today. I wanna thank you for your time during this presentation and I wanna open up the opportunity for questions. And as you're thinking through your questions, I'm gonna go ahead and post that link for the demo if you're interested. I'll also take just another quick moment to remind everyone that not only do we have the free resource center, we also have Giving Tuesday coming up. Mighty Cause provides a free opportunity where we post a full Giving Tuesday, a full day event. It's free to register. The only thing is you do need to register. We have cash prizes, we have subscription prizes and it's also just a lot of fun and it's an opportunity to sort of get your school out there for this really in global giving event. Now, Mark asks what are the base level prices for the various services? So we have a couple of different options for our essentials package. That's gonna start at 59 a month for an annual subscription. We also have with our advanced subscription, we have starting at 99 a month for the annual subscription so we have the advanced and we have the essentials. Those are the base prices. But I would encourage you go ahead and set up a demo and you can easily let them know straight up front when they reach out to you via email. Okay, just interested in some pricing or if you have any particular questions. And Nancy asked if I could walk us through the support center and I sure can. So within the support center, if you just go to mightycause.com in the upper right corner, excuse me, in the upper left corner, you're gonna see the option for a to select resources. Clicking there is gonna take you to our resource center. And within the resource center, you don't need to log in or anything like that, you're just gonna be opened up to a library of different resources. And that's gonna include, I'm also posting a quick link to the resource center in the chat. When you go to the resource center, you're gonna see images for the mighty cause blog, the eLibrary webinars fundraising ideas, our support center and case studies. So it's a lot. All you need to do is click on the tab that you would like to view. And that's where you're gonna have anything you're looking for. And you can use the search tools within those different fields for what you would like to see. So for example, let me see if I can pull this up quickly here, within our mighty cause blog, give me just a moment, let me see. I'm gonna, I'm not gonna slack you that link, I'm gonna post that link within the chat as well. So you'll see within the blog when you click either that link or if you select the blog tab, it's gonna start with our latest postings, but you can certainly search in the upper right corner for any topic. If you type in education fundraising or just education, or if you type in PTA, it's gonna provide you with a plethora of blogs. You can do the same by clicking on webinars and you'll see a list of our upcoming webinars, but you'll also see a list of recorded previous webinars. Now that we're gearing up for Giving Tuesday, I highly recommend everyone take a look for the Giving Tuesday webinars. It feels in the future, but starting to plan now can be super helpful. Nancy, I hope that's helpful. I hope that information is beneficial. Does anyone else have, oh great, Nancy, you are very welcome. I'm glad that that was helpful. Does anyone else have any questions or any helpful information regarding some PTA fundraising that they have coming up? We'll give it just a few moments. We don't wanna just assume that people have all afternoon, but we do wanna give an opportunity just to encourage one another in the fundraising realm and also as school is getting started and things are a bit busy. And just one last time, I do wanna thank you for coming today for spending a half an hour with us. I sincerely hope that this information has been helpful, but it gives you something to think through over the next couple of months as you're preparing your different fundraising strategies. Mighty Pause is here to help. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to our customer support. Shoot us an email. We're happy to get you plugged in with your page. And again, any questions that you have, if you would like a demo, there's no commitment required. We're just happy to show you what we have and talk through how we can best serve you during your upcoming events, whether it's a hybrid event, you're trying something totally out of the box and you're a little nervous, we're here to be your cheerleader throughout the process. So please don't hesitate to reach out. We'll go ahead and call it a day. I don't see any additional questions coming in, which is certainly no problem. Again, thank you for joining us today and we will see you all next time. Thank you.