 So, welcome to TechSoup's public good app house demo events, apps for community-based fundraising. So, this event is presented in partnership with Giving Tuesday. Giving Tuesday is a global generosity movement unleashing the power of radical generosity. Giving Tuesday was created in 2012 as a simple idea, a day that encourages people to do good. Since then, it has grown into a year-round global movement that inspires hundreds of millions of people to give, collaborate, and celebrate generosity. Join the movement and give each Tuesday and every day, whether it's some of your time, a donation, or the power of your voice in your local community. I'm delighted to welcome Giving Tuesday's Lexa Wilson to open the event. Lexa works with organizations to bring data and technology initiatives for the public and social sectors to life, coordinating with knowledge management experts, data scientists, developers, and fellow research enthusiasts. She supports efforts to break down barriers to data sharing and collaborative social research initiatives. Thanks for joining us today, Lexa. Hi, thank you so much to TechSoup. I'm so excited to be here with you all today. And as I was just introduced, I'm Lexa. I help manage data and analytics projects within the Giving Tuesday Data Commons team, which I'll mention a little bit more about in a second. And so I know some of you have campaigns planned. I know some of you are just curious to see what happens on Giving Tuesday. For those of you who are just learning about us, what the opportunities are, what kind of work we do, I'll take a few minutes to give an overview of the movement and especially touch on why we're excited about the platforms here today. So, yes, as mentioned, Giving Tuesday was created in 2012 based on the idea that generosity deserves its own day. And over the years, it has grown into a global movement that we believe inspires people to give to collaborate and to celebrate all types of generosity. We are currently present in over 80 countries, each of which have numerous different campaigns and activities going on on Giving Tuesday and year round. And we like to attribute that success to the fact that we've adhered to this core principle that this movement is entirely intended to be co-opted and adapted to any given groups needs. We encourage folks to take it somewhere new and to adopt Giving Tuesday in an authentic way and to innovate and do whatever they want to do with it in order to grow generosity locally. So, as I mentioned, a major piece of Giving Tuesday is the data commons. That's the area that I'm most involved in, which is, for those of you who don't know, we bring together different actors in the social sector, researchers, social enterprise, platforms, nonprofits, foundations, policymakers. In order to find out what they need, how can we bridge practitioners with researchers? How can we increase the value of the data that we're all generating so that we can provide real insights for all the different members of the social sector? So this work is done in collaboration with a whole bunch of partners who are willing to share their data with us, share their methodologies, share their needs. And we're so excited that a lot of those here today are partners of ours who share data around their Giving Tuesday campaigns. And so together we're able to generate insights about Giving Tuesday and its power as a Giving Day, but well beyond that as well. So last year we were able, thanks to those who do share data with us, we were able to find out that $2.7 billion were donated to Social Good in the U.S. alone in the 24 hours that span Giving Tuesday. But we always like to highlight that it's not just a day about giving money. There is so many other ways that people express their generosity on Giving Tuesday and every day. So it's always interesting for us to make sure that all of those different types of generosity activities are being highlighted and that they're being leveraged as well. This is just another testament to the opportunity that Giving Tuesday presents. Donations are on Giving Tuesday are growing faster than consumer spending on days like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. So there is so much opportunity here to take advantage of people's innate desire to be generous and to leverage that for your own movement's needs or your own community's needs. A few more things just to mention about Giving Tuesday, what we've been able to learn about it. 82% of organizations that participate say that they use it to experiment and try something new, and we love that. We really encourage people to take this opportunity to do something that they wouldn't have done before or to try something and measure the results of it and see how they can integrate those results into their activities later. We know that 80% of those who have heard of Giving Tuesday say that they are inspired to do something generous because of that day. That's incredible to us and that's something that we like to demonstrate to say, hey, take advantage of these people who are excited, ready to do something on this day and then beyond as well. And another thing to highlight is just people like to feel like they're part of something bigger than themselves. And we see that as well in how they report about feeling like they're part of a bigger movement. So definitely, like this is no surprise, right? People find joy in Giving. So make sure to, we like to encourage people to include joy in everything that they're doing and everything that they're promoting. The core of everything that we do at Giving Tuesday is our communities. So much of what we do is driven by what we learn from them. They are the ones who are showing us how to address equity, justice, empathy, and more through generosity. We are in the number of communities that we have is it's constantly growing, which is so exciting for us because that means we get more feedback about what's needed. We get more feedback about what the kind of interesting and innovative ways that they are addressing the topics that are most challenging in their area of expertise or their geographical area. Just want to show the kind of different communities that we have. So you see the squares. These are the types of geographical communities that that we work closely with. But we also have causes or identity based communities. And these are the ones that were so excited about growing and supporting even more. Because what we've seen is that having these approaches, having communities that built that create these coalitions around certain causes, allow those causes to be addressed by people who are involved in them. It's kind of led by them for them. And that's what's so exciting by the platforms that are here today. They are helping build community and inclusion. They're driving change that has to be led by people who are informed of the needs and who are served by that work. The last thing that I'll mention is that at the core of our work, what Giving Tuesday is trying to achieve as an organization is to reimagine a world that's based on radical generosity, which is this notion that someone else's suffering should be as intolerable as our own suffering. And so we believe that if people flex their generosity muscles regularly, we can create a habit out of giving and that there'll be more inclined to participate in all kinds of other pro social behavior. So if there's one thing I want to leave you with, it's just that Giving Tuesday is an opportunity, is a movement that gives us an opportunity to build the world that we're imagining. And especially through the support and the expertise of the platforms that are here today and who are funneling resources to communities that often don't have them or aren't prioritized otherwise. And so we're so, so excited about that. Thank you.