 Hi, everyone. We'll get started right at the top of the hour, but just before we get started, if you are logged on and you can see my screen and hear me talking right now, if you could just let me know in the questions box by typing yes, that would be a huge help just so I know that everybody can hear me and see my screen. Awesome. Thank you guys so much. So we'll just give everybody a few more seconds to get logged in and then we'll go ahead and get started. Alrighty. Well, hello, everyone. Thank you all for joining me today for our webinar on summer fundraising strategies and ideas. Obviously, things have changed a bit since we last did a webinar on summer fundraising, so all of the content today is going to reflect that. My name is Linda Gerhardt and I'm the Senior Community Engagement Manager here at Mighty Cause. I've been with the company since 2016 and I host monthly webinars focused on nonprofit fundraising strategy. So if you enjoy this webinar, please be sure to sign up for our monthly fundraising webinars to hear more from me and learn more about fundraising strategy and nonprofit fundraising in general. We usually send out an email about a week before we do each webinar. Before I started working for Mighty Cause, I worked in the nonprofit sector for most of my career from very small nonprofits to very large nonprofits, so I'm excited to be able to bring that perspective with me to these webinars. My email address is here if you ever want to reach out to me to chat through any fundraising strategy or you have any questions about the content I gave you. Here is a look at today's agenda. This should be a fairly simple webinar and we're going to talk through the current circumstances in this country and how that affects fundraising, but mostly we're going to spend time talking about tangible strategies and ideas that you can take with you after this webinar and start implementing and start fundraising. So just as a bit of housekeeping, I'll be taking questions after the presentation. So if you think of a question you want to ask me while I'm presenting, just type that into the questions box of your GoToWebinar panel and we will make sure to have time for it at the end. And just as a note, we are recording this webinar and you will all get access to the recording and the slides, so if you have to step out or you missed part of it, you will have access to the recording and you'll also have access to the slide deck. All right, so we're going to keep this part really brief, but we do have to talk about how weird fundraising is right now, so here we go. So in case you haven't heard already, we are in the midst of a pandemic that is upending so many aspects of our lives, including fundraising. Nonprofits sort of freaked out in the spring when we realized, oh, no, this is really, really bad and everybody had to adjust course, cancel their spring events and rethink their spring fundraiser. A lot of us scrambled to participate in Giving Tuesday Now, which happened on May 5th. And for the most part, we saw some really cool efforts come out of that scramble, that adjusting course that happened. But the thing that's tough here is that everyone was kind of hoping fingers crossed that things would be more or less back to normal by the summer, but that's really just not where we are as a nation right now. COVID-19 cases are remaining steady and in some areas they're actually spiking as social distancing measures are relaxed. So for that reason, the CDC and other health experts are strongly urging people to stay at home, wear masks and not gather in large crowds. And a lot of people, myself included, are not inclined to go to a large gathering of people, even if we are technically allowed to. So if you were hoping that you'd be able to just have a summer fundraiser where you could gather your supporters in one place and connect with them, unfortunately, you are out of luck. And we still have no idea what the rest of the year will look like. We haven't quite gotten past the first wave of this virus, and we're being told that there may be a second wave that starts at the end of the year. So basically, fundraising for the whole of 2020 has been altered by this virus and the uncertainty that it has brought with it. And as a result of the virus, we are also in a recession and have been since February of this year. Millions of Americans are out of work. Lots of people are furloughed and have had their hours reduced and people are still waiting on relief for that. Businesses are struggling to get by and assistance from the federal government and state governments are moving slower than expected and running out quickly. So I'm not sure how many of you were working in the nonprofit sector in 2008, but that was a really dark time to work for a nonprofit. Lots of organizations had to shutter their operations or just scale back their operations. A lot of really big nonprofits had to lay off large numbers of their staff. A nonprofit giving just took a hit along with the economy. So it stands to reason that a lot of nonprofits right now feel weird asking for money or wonder if they even should do a summer fundraiser with things being as they are and with so many people hurting financially. So that is sort of the second tier of the situation this summer. And so it's as if a pandemic and a recession were not enough. We're also in the middle of an uprising against police brutality and the general state of policing and race in the United States. The death of George Floyd in Minneapolis sparked protests all over the country. That's those are still happening today. One of the results of this uprising is that giving to organizations like Community Bail Funds, organizations focused on racial justice and addressing racial disparities in the criminal justice system went through the roof in May and are still going pretty strong. There were a few organizations that went from being really small bail funds that now had multimillion dollar budgets overnight that they did not see coming. So again, even when those are good things, everything in 2020 is kind of flipped upside down and it feels very unstable. So in light of all of these circumstances is summer fund raising canceled? The answer is no, obviously, but there are some caveats because of the pandemic, you will have to move as much as your fund raising online as possible. You cannot have large gatherings. So a lot of the old standbys of summer fund raising that involve people getting together in one place, having fun, those things are all out because of the recession and political circumstances. You may have to change up how you frame your ask. And in some cases, you may have to change your ask altogether. One of the things that I love seeing about nonprofits is how adaptable they are. Nonprofits rise to meet challenges and they solve problems. That's what nonprofit work is all about. The nonprofit sector is full of innovators, people who are able to find creative out of the box solutions to really big and intimidating problems. So we really just need to bring that innovation and that creativity to this current problem of fundraising during this situation and find out how we can sustain our work. All right, so now that the doom and gloom portion of the presentation is out of the way, we're going to talk about moving some of this. We're going to talk about some of the solutions that could help you fundraise during the summer this year. So before we go any further, I want to address one of the most common concerns coming at me from nonprofit professionals right now. And that is, is it even OK to fundraise right now? And of course, the answer I'm going to give you is yes. Charitable charitable giving is strong and steady. And this is a trend we see time and time again when there is political uncertainty. There was a huge uptick in donations in 2016 with a lot of people reacting to the election after any sort of disaster situation. We see an uptick in charitable giving. So even though things are uncertain and it feels strange to ask for donations right now, charitable giving is up. People are giving to nonprofits, so it is OK to ask them to support your work. People look for ways to be helpful and useful. And one of the most common ways they find to feel useful is by donating to causes they care about. So even if you're not directly connected to public health or racial justice or anything going on right now, economic relief, you can still ask them for donations because it gives people a meaningful way to feel like they're helping the world become a better place. Something that may be helpful in making your ask of supporters is just acknowledging the circumstances head on like, hey, we know times are hard. We know everything feels really heavy right now and so on and so forth. That can go a long way, just acknowledging that things are hard and they're kind of strange and scary right now and that you're right there with them and something that people appreciate in times like this is transparency. So talk about how the pandemic and the recession are affecting your operations. And we framing is really helpful, you know, framing you and your supporters as a unit, it lets them know that you're with them when you're reaching out. You're not another entity asking for something from them. You're right there with them. So that kind of framing when you're talking to your donors can be really, really helpful. So as I said before on webinars, this has been a little controversial, but there are there's no sustainable fundraising for nonprofits without a focus on recurring donations. People have given me some pushback on that, but I've been in the nonprofit sector for a while and I've been working with nonprofits for a while. And recurring donations are really the lifeblood of nonprofit sustainability. And the good news is that there are some benefits to using this particular moment to ask for recurring donations. Number one, recurring monthly donations are usually smaller amounts. So it's a it's a much more approachable ask for many people. Someone may not be able to comfortably afford one hundred and eighty dollars as a donation all at once, but they can easily manage fifteen dollars a month. So over the course of twelve months, they've given one hundred and eighty dollars in a way that feels approachable and accessible for them. So especially if people are experiencing economic anxiety, asking for a lot of money from them once feels like more than asking for a little bit of money on a recurring basis. And it's helpful to frame your ask for recurring donations as requesting ongoing support and investment in your organization's work in the community you serve in their community, framing it as asking them to support their community. And it's also effective to break those monthly amounts into tangible real world items they provide for your nonprofit. For instance, food banks are really great at this. Food banks do this a lot. They'll emphasize that say twenty dollars a month helps them feed a family of four for a week, thanks to their partnerships. An animal shelter might emphasize that fifteen fifteen dollars a month provides food and shelter for an animal for two weeks. Just pulling these numbers out of thin air or things like that. It really making it feel tangible and real what they're providing with their their recurring support on mighty cause. You actually have a tool that you can utilize for this. And unfortunately, I find that it's a little bit underutilized. I want to see people take advantage of it more. And that is your checkout flow. You have you have some options there where you can start. You can customize your suggested donation amounts. And you can also write a short description of what that amount provides. So those are right in people's faces when they're trying to decide how much to give. It's a really critical point in the donation process. So if you have not taken a look at your checkout flow on your dashboard and customized that section, I highly recommend that you set that up so that you're not only having some amount of control over the amounts that you're suggesting, but you're also providing a description of what those amounts provide for your nonprofit just to make sure that your messaging is cohesive. And you can also kind of bump people up a little bit or include some recurring donation language in there when they're making that critical decision of how much to give. This is important year round. And it's just kind of a cornerstone of nonprofit fundraising, but it's even more important right now to emphasize community. And that's because people are feeling really lonely and isolated in lockdown and striking a tone of being part of the community is likely to land really well with people right now. Using things like donor tiers can be a really helpful way to make people feel like their donation makes them part of the community of people who are invested in a cause, who are part of a group of philanthropists who are trying to do good. So if you don't have donor tiers, that can be a great way to get more recurring donations and make people feel like becoming a recurring donor is becoming part of a group that's dedicated to a cause. And something that can also be an effective way to emphasize community is to talk about your nonprofit's impact on the demographic you serve. So that could mean providing personal stories from the people you've helped and overview of what you're doing, some metrics about your impact, but reminding people that they are part of the community and your nonprofit is serving that community is just a really effective way to connect with donors at this particular moment in history. So we're going to talk specifically about how to do this in the next part of the presentation, but create opportunities for connection with your summer fundraising, make connections a cornerstone of your summer effort. And that can mean your nonprofit's connecting with your supporters or supporters connecting with each other or facilitating supporters connecting with their own social network or all of the above, but make it a goal to get people engaged just beyond just making a donation and calling it a day. People really need that right now. And it's a great way to make sure that your nonprofit's fundraising efforts really land with supporters in a way that's meaningful. OK, so the last tip I have related to strategy is to keep it summery. Summer fundraising should be fun above all else, save the serious stories and the sad stories for when you're going really hard at the end of the year. But for the summer, keep it light, keep it positive, because the world feels really heavy right now. You want to give your donors and supporters a way to channel their energy toward a good cause without bringing them down even further. Because unfortunately, the effect when you pile more doom and gloom on a new cycle that feels like it's never ending doom and gloom is that people kind of turn away, they change the channel to something that's more appealing. So you want their attention and a way to do that is to keep it light, keep it positive and inject some sunshine into their lives. Using summer imagery here can help light and colorful images that are a break from all the gloominess of the news that can be really helpful. And one thing that also helps around is incorporating typical outdoor events and summer activities into your fundraising so that it feels familiar to them. So even just images of people at a pool, people at a barbecue, those sorts of things, those can really evoke those emotions and people that make them feel happy and positive about the message you're sending. So that's just something to keep in mind as you're getting your emails together and thinking through your social media strategy, keeping it light and bright and positive and trying to invoke feelings of summer in people, even though they can't do a lot of the things, unfortunately, that we usually do in the summer. So with the strategic portion out of the way, I wanted to provide everybody with some tangible ideas that you can take with you from this webinar, personalize it to make it yours and start funding fundraising with immediately. The tool I want to recommend to you for summer fundraising is Mighty Causes Events Tool. Now, our Events Tool allows you to host a virtual event, which can be a component of an in-person event or it can stand alone as the main event. Basically, what our Events Tool does is allow a bunch of people to engage in fundraising together as part of a group which fosters a sense of community and belonging and gives people a way to channel their energy for a good cause. Events are just essentially a kind of peer to peer fundraising and peer fundraising is a technique where your nonprofit supporters sign up to fundraise on behalf of your nonprofit and ask their social network to support them by making a donation, which gives them a way to connect with the people in their lives. And I just want to mention that event fundraisers on Mighty Cause, because they are group efforts, raise more money than stand alone fundraisers. So they're a really great way to have a big impact and raise a lot of money. Your nonprofit running a campaign on your own or you're raising money and you're interfacing with supporters directly, those do well. But having an event fundraiser where you have lots of boots on the ground and you have lots of people asking people to make a donation to your cause, those tend to raise more across the board on our platform. So I wanted to talk through some of the benefits of event fundraising. As I mentioned, they can either exist as a digital only event or they can augment an in-person fundraiser by adding an online fundraising component. Obviously, with the current circumstances, we are talking about events in the context of being digital only in this webinar. The other cool thing that event is that event fundraising is free on Mighty Cause, so it's this really robust tool that you can access at no charge. It's available to nonprofits and it's available to supporters. That means you, as a nonprofit admin, can log in and start an event for your nonprofit, and it also means that if your volunteers wanted to, say, start their own event, they can do that on our platform. It's available to everybody. Events allow for more complex peer-to-peer campaigns. With a regular peer-to-peer fundraiser, you might have one person who, say, starts a fundraiser for their birthday or giving Tuesday and asks people to make donations and they raise maybe six hundred dollars and that's it. But an event allows you to gather a group of people who are each going to raise six hundred dollars and allows people to team up. So, for instance, your volunteers can join together and work as a team to raise money and they're all working toward a common fundraiser goal, a larger fundraising goal. So this adds complexity, but that complexity allows for your nonprofit to raise more and run a more robust campaign. And they also track all the individuals and team fundraisers on a leader board. So you have the added element of competition, which often pushes people to raise more than they would if they were just doing it on their own. And there was no one coming up behind them raising more than they were. It's usually friendly competition, but it just pushes people to go a little bit further. And finally, we have a bunch of really great tools that you can use to manage your event, build fundraiser templates, contact participants, track their fundraising and more just built into the tool. So even though I'm saying that this is more complex and it is, you have all the tools you need at your disposal to easily manage all of this complexity in a way that feels really simple and easy. And in the next slides, we're going to walk you through some of the examples of how you can utilize this tool for your summer campaign. I've got some events that I've created as examples. They're not real events, but I'm also going to show you some real events that have raised a lot of money on the Mighty Cause platform. So there's a mixture. You'll probably be able to tell what I invented and what is real. And I'll also explain that to you, but we've just got some examples of things you can try and different ways you can use the events tool. First up is a virtual gala. Spring is often gala season and a lot of people had to cancel or postpone their annual gala. The bad news is that you're probably not going to be able to host your gala in person at all this year. It's going to have to be permanently canceled. But the good news is that you can easily use events to bring it online and make it a digital gala. You can sell tickets through our Eventbrite integration. But one of the big shifts that needs to happen when you host a gala online is that ticket sales are no longer the cornerstone. People are not paying for a fancy night out on the town in a high-end meal. So tickets are not going to send people scrambling for their wallets. You need to adjust course. So to make up for that, we recommend making peer to peer fundraising. If you're a star of the show, you can get creative with how you run your gala. But having your executive director and speakers go live on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube Live, or even just doing a big Zoom meeting is a great way to give people the gala experience from the safety of their homes. And there's a lot of really cool ways you can get creative with this. For instance, having a local caterer that you would have worked with on your gala send out a few recipes so people can try making them at home or even do take out orders if they offer that. For your gala, it can be a really fun way to give them that feel of being there and connecting with other people over this great event, but doing it virtually from the safety of their own homes. So this is something that we've seen a little bit. This is one that I've invented. The Mighty Cos Gala is not a real thing that's happening. But this is an example of something that you can do really easily through the events tool and engage your supporters. Next up is a readathon. So these are really popular anyway, particularly with education based nonprofits and schools, but a lot of people are spending their time in lockdown catching up on their reading. So why not turn that into a fundraising opportunity? How readathons typically work is that readers sign up and ask their family, their friends and social network to show their support by making a donation to their fundraising page and all of that money gets sent to your nonprofit. Of course, you could make it an educational event by creating a suggested reading list with books that help people learn about your cause. This is definitely something that you can do to engage more adults. Readathons often involve children, but this is a way to sort of engage adults looking for a more intellectual pursuit. You could create a reading list with some pieces that you've curated that will help them learn more about your cause. So for instance, if your organization is focused on food insecurity, giving people a handful of options at different reading levels to help them learn more about food insecurity would not only be helping you raise money, but would also give people a better understanding of the work you do and the issues you addressed. The same could work for a faith based nonprofit, an animal nonprofit. Really, the options here are endless. There's tons of books that explore the issues that nonprofits address in an in-depth way. So there's a lot you could do with a readathon to really raise awareness for the issues that you address while getting people really engaged in your cause and raising money and to make it inclusive and accessible for everybody. I also recommend just providing some audio book options for those who are vision impaired or just prefer to listen rather than read. So this is a really great option that gets people raising money, engaging with your cause in an in-depth, meaningful way and raises awareness of issues that you tackle as an organization. So you can help buy their long term investment by getting them really in-depth and into the weeds on the issues that you address with your reading list. So this next one is one of my favorites for quarantine, and it's a tried and true fundraising model, which is the walkathon. Now, I do want to make clear that almost anything in the a-thon genre of fundraising events is a great use of the events tool. But I like this one because it allows people to engage with a very familiar setup, which is really comforting to us during this time, or at least it's comforting for me to engage with this kind of setup. It operates just like any other walk-a-thon would. Walkers sign up to participate and ask the people in their lives to pledge their support with a donation. The only real difference is they're walking at home, they're walking in their neighborhoods on their own timeline at their own pace. I walk at a very leisurely pace myself. So this is definitely more my speed than walking around a track and going, oh, gosh, I'm falling behind the group. You can even walk the distance on a treadmill. There's lots of options here and there's lots of different ways for people to get involved, something you may want to consider for a virtual walk-a-thon is sending virtual or remote goodie bags for participants. They're usually an important part of most walk-a-thon. So getting a bumper sticker or a hat or a t-shirt can mean a lot to your walkers, and it's also a great way to make sure that any sponsors you have, get the exposure that they're looking for. Walk-a-thons are like catnip for sponsors. So having a virtual walk-a-thon is a great way to engage them in a format that they easily understand. And one thing I do recommend doing is getting a hashtag going for your event so people can share selfies of themselves on their walk and engage with your nonprofit and other walkers online or even just starting a Facebook group so that they can connect with each other. Again, going back to this idea of building community and engaging people when they need it. This is especially fun when pets are involved. So if you're an animal shelter or rescue, a pet walk-a-thon is a great idea for your summer fundraiser. And that's definitely something that's going to get a lot of great pictures on Instagram, so I highly recommend it to a hashtag for a virtual walk-a-thon. This next type of event is one of my favorite uses of the event fundraising tool as well. I feel like all of them are my favorite, but I love this one. And that's a board fundraising challenge. Now, recently, I hosted a whole webinar on the topic of engaging your board in fundraising, which I recommend checking out. If this is a topic you're interested in or if your nonprofit would like to do more of this, but basically the financial well-being of your nonprofit is part of your board's responsibility to the organization. So it is totally appropriate to ask them to do something like this. And I wish more nonprofits would engage their board in this way. But it's basically what it sounds like. You set up an event, ask your board members to join, and you can keep this invite only to prevent other people from trying to participate in an event that's only for your board, if you would like, and have them compete to see who can raise the most money for your organization. That friendly competition can be really attractive to some board members, especially if they are go-getter business executive types. And one way to make it attractive to them is to make it part of their annual giving requirement, either by having them donate to their own fundraiser, providing a matching grant or allowing the funds that they raise to count toward their annual giving. If this isn't right for you this summer, totally understand no problem. But I would keep it in your back pocket as an idea for Giving Tuesday. Those can be really successful. And just as an anecdote, lawyers really get into this. Lawyers love competition. So if you have some lawyers on your board, think about a board fundraising challenge, because they usually fundraise hard. So next up is a real fundraiser that took place on Mighty Cause called House Potty, and I'm saying that correctly, House Potty. It was an animal based event. It was a spring event. But as you can see from the screenshot here, it was super successful. And they raised more than $200,000 for the participants. They had nonprofits from all over the country participating. And that's another important point about the events tool. This was a multi-cause fundraiser, which is a very cool thing that events on Mighty Cause can do. You can team up with other nonprofits to raise money and fundraisers can pick their own cause. So, for instance, if you wanted to team up with other nonprofits in the area, you could set up, somebody could set up the events and each person could join as their nonprofit and raise money for their own organization and Mighty Cause takes care of sending the money to the correct place, so you don't have to worry about that. So what House Potty did was they organized a national event where animal shelters and rescue organizations signed up along with individuals who just care about animal welfare, and they got together and they raised a whole mess of money. They did have an actual party on Facebook with speakers and events that participants engaged in. So they utilized Facebook Live to bring people together virtually. Excuse me. And the other great thing they did was they provided a fundraiser toolkit, which helped participants learn how to participate, get the lay of the land for the event and set them up for fundraising success. If you're interested in peeking at their event, you can take a look at Housepotty.mightycause.com. Their toolkit is also there if you wanted to see what that includes. And this was just a really great event because it was national and it rallied lots of people from across the country and organizations on this same issue, on animal sheltering and animal rescue, and helped them raise a lot of money for their work. So they did a really amazing job and they rallied together a lot of people for a lot of different organizations. Another event that is still getting going, but it's it's still on getting on its feet, but it's a really cool idea that I wanted to share with you is a school supply fundraising event called Stuff the Bus. Now, I believe they usually have a physical school bus where people bring school supplies to donate and try to fill the bus with them, but this is virtual. However, the image and the sensation of filling a school bus with school supplies still works, even though it's virtual. It's a timely seasonal fundraiser. People love this kind of fundraiser this time of year. And it's an easy draw for sponsors and community partners. Now, this kind of event could be adapted for a lot of different kinds of causes. Obviously, education is a really, really easy one. We see lots of filling backpack type fundraisers this time of year, but you could also do it as a virtual food drive. You could even adapt it if you're an animal rescue to filling a dog kennel with pet supplies for an animal shelter or food for a pet meals on wheels program. When I was working for an animal shelter, we had a fill the crib event where we had an actual physical crib in our lobby and asked people to bring in supplies for the newborn kittens that we had in our foster program. So there's a ton of possibilities here. This can be sort of cut and paste and adapted for your own purposes. But the main hook of this type of event of event is even though it's virtual, you're giving people the sensation of being able to pick out an item and donate it, which is a really meaningful experience for donors being involved in picking out a particular item and imagining somebody using it. It helps donors connect to the experience of donating in a way that can can kind of fall flat when they just donate money. In this case, they are donating money, but you're helping them connect to the thing that the money provides. So Stuff the Bus is a really cool idea that you can adapt to your own nonprofit and the work you do. But it gives a really great visual of providing lots of physical things. And you could even remotely have, you know, a remote bus or remote crib or whatever you want to do that people are filling up sort of as the thermometer. We can't do that on our platform, but that is something that you could consider having as a companion piece to this is sort of generating some sort of visual of something being filled with things that are donated. Another real fundraiser, as an example, is a virtual sleepout. This event is still under way, so they're still raising money, but so far they've raised more than $12,000. And basically what they're doing is asking people to sign up to sleep out in a tent or wherever to raise awareness for people who are unhoused, who are experiencing homelessness. This is a really creative way to merge raising awareness and building empathy for people who are experiencing a crisis like this in their lives with with raising the money and bringing them together around this cause. This one is an interesting one to think about. Obviously, this doesn't work necessarily for every kind of nonprofit. But is there a way that you can use this kind of framework for a fundraiser at your nonprofit? Is there an issue that you address that could use a fundraiser like this to sort of build empathy and an experience that helps people understand the issue that you address? So it's interesting food for thought and a really, really creative fundraiser from Shalom Community Center. I'm really excited to see what their grand total is when their event ends in about a month. So did you know that you can use our events product to host your own Giving Day? You can and it's really, really easy. All you have to do is pick a day, create an event and ask people to sign up and fundraise for your organization. That is it. You can easily invite and manage participants and your event through the platform and Giving Days are completely virtual. That is the beauty of them. If you wanted to, you could have an in-person event. But Giving Days are 100 percent virtual. So there's no in-person component that you need to worry about. We do recommend creating a toolkit for your fundraisers just so that they're set up for success. They understand what you're doing. They understand why you're doing it. And we also recommend using social media and live streaming and graphics to get people really hyped up and engaged before the day and during the big day itself. And the really cool thing about Giving Days is that because it's peer to peer, you're really maximizing your impact without expending a whole lot of your own resources doing it. You're setting it up and you're creating the infrastructure, but you're passing off a lot of the actual fundraising to people who sign up to participate. And because we also have multi-cause events, it's also possible to team up with other nonprofits during a Giving Day. Like if you're a school lunch debt organization, you could partner with a Head Start program or even just your county school system for an event. There's a lot of possibilities with multi-cause events. And you can also just start one as your own organization. Now, I do want to mention because I know that there are a lot of people on our platform who came to Mighty Cause through a Giving Event. We do host giving events on our platform and those are much larger scale events. So this is not the same product that you would use if you were participating in our Giving Tuesday event, for instance, or give to the Max Day or something like that. Those are much larger in scale, but our events product is absolutely 100 percent able to handle a nonprofit Giving Day. So if you or other nonprofits wanted to team up for a Giving Day or you wanted to host it yourself, events is perfect for that. So it's a little bit smaller scale than if you are familiar with giving events on Mighty Cause, but you're just doing it for your nonprofit and our events tool is perfect for that. It's an even longer campaign. OK, so this is the last example I have for you today. And we've seen a few of these lately, but events is great for photo and art contests and calendar contests. I kind of lumped all of those things in together. But we've seen a lot of diverse variations on this theme. You can be really creative. We've seen it used for t-shirt designs, calendars, pet photos, all sorts of things. One way you could make it go even further is to turn the winning photos or designs into a calendar, which you can give to the participants, but sell to other supporters or even including your donor tier. So using that as an incentive to create a recurring donation. Most often, how this works is that a minimum of five dollars counts as one vote. So somebody wants to vote for their friends, pets photo or their friends designed for a t-shirt. They make a five dollar donation and that counts as one vote. Entrants have a fundraiser set up or they set it up personally. And they ask people to vote for their photo or their design with their donations. So you just have to count them up and the design or photo with the most votes wins. This is a really fun interactive way to involve your supporters and drive donations with these types of contents. You really do see some fun creative submissions and people get really into them because they're trying to win. So they have a personal stake into it in it because it's their pet or it's their artwork, it's their photo and they really want to win. And they're really jazzed about asking their friends to help support them and make their vote for them to win the contest. So just some final thoughts before we do our Q&A. If you're not up for running an event this summer for whatever reason, one thing you can do is simply ask your supporters to create peer to peer campaigns for you. It's free. It's easy and people are often on their laptops or on their phone at home anyway, so it's a very low investment way for them to help out. We talked about this before, but running a recurring giving campaign is a great idea for summer and can be a lower key campaign for the summer months that will allow you to go hard in the fall if that's usually when you fundraise the hardest. If you are in need of emergency fundraising or COVID relief, please start a fundraiser for that. Again, people want to help out. So if you need help, ask for it. We've seen a lot of really successful COVID relief fundraisers on the platform. So if you're facing an urgent funding need, don't be shy about starting a fundraiser that details what you need and asking for that help and fundraising for a specific program or project is also good for the summer months. Again, when I worked in an animal shelter summer was a good time to talk about and raise money for our foster program. And some of the restricted funds we had for animals that were in need of special medical care just so that all of those coffers could be filled before we headed into the fall, which is a much busier, more frenetic fundraising season. And one thing I think it's really important to think about now is collaboration. You do not have to be in this alone. Reach out to other nonprofits in your area or ones that do similar types of work and see what they're doing, bounce ideas off them, see if there's any merit in collaborating on a fundraiser. This can help increase your impact and help add weight to what you're doing. Definitely two heads are better than one when it comes to fundraising. So do not be afraid to reach out and team up with other nonprofits. Coalition building and collaboration keep the nonprofit sector alive. So please don't hesitate to reach out to other organizations to see what they're doing or suggest teaming up for a fundraiser. All right. So that is our presentation for today. I did want to make some time for questions. So if you do have a question for me, just type that into the questions box of your go to webinar panel. And I will take a look and see what is there right now. Let's see. And I apologize for the silence while I'm reading them. Should we be part of the COVID awareness in our fundraising? Like selling branded masks, branded personal sanitizer, social distance, your donation, it depends on what you do. Things like custom masks can be a little bit expensive and it can be a cumbersome process to take those orders and distribute them. So if e-commerce is not really your cup of tea, I don't know if this is a great time to get into that. But certainly using COVID as a framing technique and using it in your messaging can be helpful. You know, it's actually a really great idea. If you can get little bottles of hand sanitizers for like a walk-a-thon goodie bag, that would be an amazing goodie to put in those goodie bags. But those sorts of things you can think about e-commerce is tricky. It's hard to do. And it can also run into some tax IRS implications because you're not supposed to be exchanging goods or services for donations if you're a 501C3 public charity. So keep those things in mind. But yeah, you know, using that messaging and just being aware of the the circumstances, like social distancing, your donation is a really cute way of framing it. I like that a lot. But I wouldn't tread into e-commerce if that's not an area where you're normally comfortable, but using those kinds of ideas like, gosh, it would be adorable if you had custom labels for hand sanitizer. I love that idea and that could be really easily worked into an event. But yeah, just be careful about the tax implications of that. But anything you can do to sort of tie your fundraiser to the events in a tasteful way is something that I encourage. People are obviously thinking about it. You just don't want to be too doom and gloom about it because people can sort of tune out. Let's see. We have mighty cause for our web donation tool. Are there any COVID-19 tweaks or brand branding being added to the tool? At this point, no, we did do Giving Tuesday Now. So we helped facilitate fundraisers for Giving Tuesday Now on May 5th. But the thing about our tools is that we kind of leave it up to you. So they're more or less a blank slate. It has sort of our look to it. But if you wanted to add some COVID-19 messaging to your donation widget, for instance, you can use your custom donation suggestions to do that in your checkout flow. So take a look at your dashboard. You might have some things that you can do with your donation tool on your website or some framing you could add to your profile on mighty cause to sort of be tied to current events. OK, so this is my first time attending. You spoke about the mighty cause dashboard. Where do I get access to that? So basically welcome. You have to just sign up to manage your nonprofit on our platform. So we import nonprofit organizations from the IRS database. So if you are currently in the IRS database, you have a page on mighty cause, all you need to do is claim it. So if you go to mighty cause dot com and you click, I believe, nonprofit, there's a drop down menu on our nav bar. And I think it says products. So click products, nonprofits. And there's a little short form to fill out to just tell us who you are. You can also just search for your nonprofits name or your EIN on the mighty cause platform. Find your page. And there's a little link there that says manage this page or manage this organization and you just fill out a short form, tell us who you are. And we grant you access. So just go to mighty cause dot com slash nonprofits and you can get that process started, but it's free to all nonprofit administrators on mighty cause. So you just need to count and to tell us that you are interested in managing your page and welcome. So let's see. I just wanted to reiterate. Yes, this was being recorded. It's being recorded now. So everybody will have access to the recording of this webinar. Can the event tool be used for auctions? That is a great question. And I should have clarified that during the webinar. At this point, we cannot use host auctions on the mighty cause platform because the mighty cause charitable foundation is the one giving you the money. So we are not allowed to host auctions or raffles. Those are just the two things, unfortunately, we can't do. However, there are a lot of platforms that do allow for auctions and raffles. So if you wanted to continue using mighty cause, you could always link out to an auction site that you've set up elsewhere. But unfortunately, because of our donor advice fund, the mighty cause charitable foundation auctions and raffles are not allowed. But you could go through other platforms to get an auction going. It's like, for instance, you wanted to have an auction for your virtual Gala. Mighty cause events is perfect for that. An auction platform might not be great for the whole Gala. So you could always incorporate those types of things. You know, you can have a link in your about section that leads people to where the auction is taking place. But unfortunately, we're just not able to host auctions and raffles on the event. OK, so this is a common common problem. It's more of a support question. So if you run into an issue like this, you can always contact support at mightycause.com and they will help you out. I tried to set up an event for my organization, but it put it under my personal profile. Is it possible to have it housed under my organization page instead? So contact support and they can help you get on the right track specifically with your page when you are setting up an event. There's no like nonprofit user account. If you don't want your personal name to show, change the name on your account. So you might want to change your name on your personal account that you log in with through your email to something that's more generic to your nonprofit. If it's actually signed up as like a personal cause event, that we wouldn't be able to move that over. But if you're associated with your nonprofit and you're just seeing your name there, just change the name on your profile if you don't want it to show your full name, but contact support, they're really quick and able to help you out, get these things straightened out. So support at mightycause.com. In general, is Mighty Cause seeing an increase or decrease in overall giving since COVID-19 hit? We are seeing an increase and a lot of that is because of Giving Tuesday Now. Giving Tuesday.org is, you know, they have their annual event every year. That's usually it's always the Tuesday after Thanksgiving. It's been it was December last year and it's going to be December 1st this year. So that's usually an end of your campaign, but they did do an effort for COVID-19 relief on May 5th this year, Giving Tuesday Now. And that was something new and we did see an increase because of that. There was just more of an effort. We've also seen an increase from, you know, organizing people making donations and starting fundraisers, you know, in response to the political events that have been happening. So overall charitable giving is up on our platform and it's also just up in general, not to say that we have like Scrooge McDuck money piles, but in general, the trend that we are seeing is that charitable giving is doing quite well. It's actually even increasing and that is in line with what generally tends to happen during any sort of unrest kind of situation. We saw it in 2016. There was a huge spike after the election with certain causes in particular. And we saw it in the recession, too, after every disaster, every hurricane, every flood, every earthquake, there's always this big uptick. So when people are feeling helpless, one of the things they do is they give to charities because they want to feel useful. So that's important to keep in mind is that that is a normal human reaction. We want to help, we want to get involved. And charitable giving is one of the ways we do that. So we are seeing a bit of an uptick right now in charitable giving, and that is on trend with what we know about the nature of charitable giving and trends we've seen through history. Is there a way to place donate tool button on our social media page that connects us to our mighty cause platform? So that's actually an interesting question. Facebook made some changes about the amount of followers you need to have in order to have sort of being able to use their API for donations. And the reason for that is that Facebook, as I'm sure you're all aware, is become they're trying to get more involved in fundraising, especially peer to peer fundraising, so they don't want you to go through their competitors. They want you to go through them and they have a partnership with Network for Good. The problem with Facebook fundraising, we have a couple of blog posts about this, is that you don't get your donor data. You get a very sparse report that tells you the donations were made. So they kind of use it as part of their larger scheme, not scheme, but their business model to monetize personal data. So each time somebody makes a donation through Facebook, they have a lot of valuable information about that person and what they care about. And it also reduces friction for purchases made through Facebook. So when they save their credit card information for you to make a donation, you also have it saved. If you wanted to make use Facebook payments to send money to another person or purchase an item on Facebook. So there's a lot of reasons that they've gotten a little bit more sheltered about how they allow people to add donation buttons to their Facebook page. And that's a long way of saying, unfortunately, at this point, you need to hit a really high follower threshold. And I forgive me, I don't remember what it is, but most non-profits don't have anywhere near that amount of followers on Facebook to be able to have their own donate button and being able to take take advantage of their API and integrate that. So the short answer is no, and we're sorry about that. We were kind of shocked and saddened to see that we were not allowed to use Facebook in that way. But hopefully in the future, we will have more ability to do that. I'm hoping they'll relax on that. Let's see. OK, there's a couple of questions about a name change. Contact support at mightycause.com. They can walk you through changing your non-profits name if you had a name change. Any sort of address change, that kind of information support can walk you through. You can also do it through your dashboard. There's some tools there if you need to update that information. But I think your name, just contact support and they can help you out. Let's see. Do mighty cause events reach more people? Generally, yes. So that's a great question. And generally, yes, they do. And the reason for that is that you say have if you have 10 people who sign up to fundraise for you, a lot of events have many, many more people. Let's say you have 10 people who sign up to fundraise for you. What each of those 10 people are doing is they're going to their Facebook page. They're their people in their lives and they're asking them to make a donation. So you may not have access to ask my aunt for money for your non-profit, but I sure have access to my aunt to ask her for a donation for your non-profit. So what happens is that it opens up the door to all of these donors that your organization would have not otherwise been able to solicit for donations. So yeah, it's a great donor acquisition tool because of that reason, because it kind of builds a bridge between these people that don't exist in your donor database and your organization. So it opens the door for them. And for that reason, we really recommend if you do an event, have a strong follow up plan, start an onboarding journey for them with your emails, send them a welcome packet in the mail, whatever you tend to do to welcome new donors to your organization, make sure that there's a place in there's a plan in place for your events that you can follow up with all of these new people who learn about your work and make their first donation so that you can get them to make the second donation and have them continue to support your non-profit. So they're really great for that. They do reach more people and they also raise more money because instead of just your non-profit contacting your email list that you've had for however long, you have all of these new people who are finding out about your work and your organization. And it's a really great way, especially if you're a small non-profit to expand your donor base. So definitely it's something that we highly recommend if you're looking to expand and reach more people. That's what events are perfect for. OK, so when someone donates on Mighty Cause to us, is there a quick link that they can share slash post that they did that to their connections? Yes. So yeah, there's definitely I think that's built into our checkout process. We've made some updates recently, so I'm not 100% sure. But there's the Twitter, Facebook icons on your organization page. And they are given the option to share. Like, hey, I just donated to this organization and provides a shortened link for social media. We actually see people on our Twitter feed using that all the time. So that does happen. It's built into the platform. So if they are on your page, it's not something you really have to coach them to do because it is built into the platform. But we do actually see people using that quite a bit on Twitter, especially. There's a quick preloaded preloaded tweet that they can sweet out to all of their friends to let them know, like, hey, I made a donation to this organization and it tags Mighty Cause and it can also tag your organization if you've given us your Twitter information and Facebook as well, they can easily share at your fundraiser. So yeah, that's built into our platform. And hopefully people are using that. We see people using it on our Twitter feed all the time. They tag us multiple times a day. When people donate through Mighty Cause, as their donation show, it went through, went to our org or a donation to Mighty Cause. So it's a donation to you, but the way donations on Mighty Cause are processed is that they filter through the Mighty Cause Charitable Foundation, which is a donor advice fund or a death. So when they get their tax receipt, they see that it was made to the Mighty Cause Charitable Foundation and advised for your nonprofit. So both names will be on that receipt. And it'll show that way on their bank statement too. It'll show that it was made. I think it'll say like mc.com and then the name of your organization. So they should see both names because technically it is a donation to us, but advised for you. So we just filter the money to you. And that is what allows us to provide tax receipts to your donors so that you don't have that extra step of having to provide them with a tax receipt. We automatically email it for them and you can include a custom message there as well. So yeah, they will see both names. There is sometimes some confusion. We don't find that there's a lot of confusion. People usually are able to understand the receipt that they receive from us. But it's both names basically because it's it's made to the Charitable Foundation but advised for your nonprofit. So that's how mighty cause functions. And that's what is what allows us to provide tax receipts for your donors and help you with all of the automation that we're able to put into place so that you have less to manage at your nonprofit. All right, so thank you for sticking with me. I think that's it for questions. If you think of anything after the webinar that you want to ask me, you can always reach out. My email address is Linda with an I-L-I-N-D-A at mightycause.com. If you need some technical support, our Cracker Jack support team is here to help you out their support at mightycause.com. If you have a technical request, they are much faster and better than me at answering that request. So don't be shy about reaching out to them and I'll make sure that everybody gets a recording of the webinar and the slides. Thank you so much for your time today and happy fundraising.