 Okay, great. Hi everybody. My name is Luisa Raposo. I'm the senior director of marketing communications at the Georgia Center for nonprofits. And as Irene mentioned, we shepherd the Georgia Gives on Giving Tuesday. So I'm going to walk you guys through basically what we are, what is Georgia Gives, and then go deeper into how to participate and offer some of the different resources that we have, guide you along the way, and then, you know, open it up for questions. So I'm just going to do a quick start because I don't know who is on the call, but just really quickly, what is it? So Georgia Gives is the biggest day of giving for the state of Georgia. It was found, we started doing it in 2012. And in 2017, we actually partnered with the Global Giving Tuesday movement. So we're the partner official organizer for the Giving Tuesday campaign. And that Giving Tuesday on, Georgia Gives on Giving Tuesday is the Tuesday after Thanksgiving. So that date kind of shifted to the day after Thanksgiving in 2017. Since 2012, we have rallied hundreds of thousands of individual contributions on our site, GeorgiaGives.org, and raised us over $70 million for nonprofits. So taking a little bit of a step back in terms of our strategic goals and what guides us is really top to bottom in terms of a marketing funnel, right? We're really trying to help build awareness and appreciation for the nonprofits across the state and having a communications campaign targeted towards just everybody, all the citizens across the state trying to make a better place to live. So connecting nonprofits to the general population. And in general, just connecting citizens to specific nonprofits, right? Engaging them at a high level, finding out what the day is about, and then trying to get them to connect with nonprofits around them so that they can donate. We also have, you know, we're trying to help nonprofits. So we don't just talk to the general Georgia audience. We also are trying to build campaigns with nonprofits to drive them by leveraging us in our tools for their fundraising programs. So kind of going based on that in terms of our audiences, our platform, GAGives.org, it's a free fundraising platform for all Georgia-registered 501c3 nonprofits. So you go on our site, you search, your organization should be on there. There's like over 40,000 orgs. It's all based on IEN numbers. And if not, there's an FAQ to walk you through what you got to do to get on the account. But you can get a free fundraising platform there. And you can use it all year long. So Georgia Gives on Giving Tuesday is the Tuesday after Thanksgiving. I'll talk about that timing. But you can leverage the platform as a digital fundraising platform all year long. So I think it's important to remember that for any time you want to kind of go deeper and use some digital fundraising tools. Louisa, this is Irene. I am so sorry to interrupt you, but I don't know if it's just me, but your PowerPoint is not advancing for me. Oh, now it is. Perfect. Thank you. I have to get it off the share. Okay. You can see it now. Thanks for telling me. Yes. Now I see slide four, our audiences. Yep. Okay. Okay. And my apologies for interrupting. No, no worries. I'm glad you told me. I'll just go through here in terms of audience or audiences. We also work with a range of partners ranging from corporate partners, foundation partners, media partners, alongside the Giving Tuesday movement. We go to their conferences and everything to really create, be part of that global generosity movement. So at a state level, we work with, you know, WSBTV. We work with different corporate partners to sponsor prizes, which I'll talk about. So we're, we are talking to partners. We are talking to nonprofits and obviously too, we're talking to citizens across the state. So those are the three audiences that our team is engaging with. So before we go into how to participate, I want to talk about some insights from what we're seeing. Giving Tuesday does a really great, they go deep with data. And so what we saw from last year, because last year obviously was not a normal year. And this kind of actually happened on the local level too, is that we saw, you know, more smaller donations. And so we had more donors and more donations last year than the previous year. And that was the same with for what Giving Tuesday saw. So instead of fewer donations that were higher numbered, last year was the opposite, right? We needed more people to donate that could donate less. And that's how we got to the big, to like, raising over 70 million last year. So engaging more people is really important. Another piece that I think is is crucial that I hear in terms of like, we don't want to do Georgia give because there's a lot of noise. So it's really hard to compete. And what's interesting is that it's not noise. It's actually building awareness for the day. So if you're not participating, you're not able to ride the wave. So I recommend considering that, right? So if everybody's talking about Georgia gives on Giving Tuesday, and you're not, there's a there's a wave happening. So your donors are being engaged by other people that day. So consider it as ride that wave, build momentum, leverage Georgia gives, according to your strategic plans. Is it going to be a kickoff to the annual fund, annual end of the year fundraising? Are you just going to do some digital, you know, you're going to dip your toe in the water with digital, whatever it is, take the opportunity to ride that wave. Um, so ultimately, why why join Georgia gives? Well, there are lots of reasons. And I just want to start by saying, there are lots of ways to do Georgia gives. It can be a little overwhelming when you when you see all the resources. But that's because we're trying to have resources for any type of organization. And the nonprofit, nonprofit industry is complex. It's big and small. It's regional, right? It's urban. It's suburban. It's rural. So think about your strategic goals and think about, okay, what does Georgia gives have already that I can leverage? So um, some of the reasons why is I mentioned already that free platform. It's got a powerful fundraising tool we use mighty cause. That's the fundraising platform, the technology behind Georgia gives and they have the more you use their platform, the more you can leverage some of their tools, including here and I'll go through some of them, but peer to peer fundraising P to P matching grants. You can actually post volunteer opportunities. So it's just it's not you can not just ask for money. You can be like, Hey, we have volunteer opportunities. Georgia gives itself. You can win prizes. I'll talk about that. There's access to training and I'll talk about that. And that includes some of some webinars that includes graphics of things that you can plug and play. We have also a media campaign. I'll talk a little bit more about that that we have opportunities where nonprofits can submit, submit their stories to be featured. And just, you know, again, it could be a year round fundraising tool and a new way for you to find donors. And what I mean by that is we have a search tool, right? If you're a citizen, you go and you search, you can search by your location. So like, what's near me that I want to get to know or by category. So okay, the environment's important to me. So you can search by type and you'll get results based on those categories. So just being a part of that search results is an added bonus for nonprofits. All right. Any questions so far before I go a little deeper? All right. Cool. So let's get into it. How to participate First and foremost, I would recommend that you go to gagives.org and register your organization. If you literally go on the homepage, there's a register now button. So even though you don't need to register to like be on the platform, you want to register to be eligible for prizes and to be part of the opportunities to hear about opportunities about our media campaign. The deadline to register for that is the end of the month. So if you haven't done that already, go ahead and register. What I would also do after you do that, I would go into our nonprofit tab and just explore all of the different things that we have, right? That includes the toolkit, that includes some FAQs, that includes our trainings, graphics, etc. We get comfortable with that so you can get a sense of all the different resources. They're all there for you. After you register, I would build or update your page. So once you get access to the back end, there's a little dashboard where you can, and it's super user friendly in the sense that, you know, if you go and are on social media and have updated your profile picture, it's the same way to do that on this page. It's pretty intuitive where you want to, you can update your logo, you can add a logo, you can add some copy about your current campaign, what your goals are. You can build out also, check out. So for example, you can have a thank you page for when people donate, things like that, right? You want to set it up for your ACH for direct deposit so that after whatever you receive, you can get a direct deposit. So there's a lot of basic easy-to-do lists that walk you through all those steps. So I recommend once you, once you log in and get access to the back end, just kind of go through those, those paths so that you can make sure your page is set up. And hey, if you're looking for inspiration, go search for another organization on the site and check out what they do. There's a lot of different ways to leverage, but I would say less is more. But this is just definitely where you want to get started. After that, what we highly recommend, and this is in the toolkit, is planning your campaign. And what does that mean? It's basic things that I have seen get skipped because people are busy, and I totally get that. But we know that when you set a goal, you actually meter exceed your expectation. So I think it's really important to set a strategic goal. So for example, hey, I've never done Georgia Gives before, a digital campaign. All right, well, let's do $500. Let's do $1,000. Or we have some orgs that raise a lot of money on Georgia Gives, $1,000. So what is their goal? And not just their monetary goal, I would also think about after a monetary goal, like how are you going to achieve that monetary goal, right? So is it trying out a P2P campaign with a board member? And having that be the focus and like, okay, what are the social media posts that we want them to do? So really using that goal to basically cadence out all the different things you're going to have to do. And I think a goal too that's important is like, we know that nonprofits are stretched thin. So a lot of the time it's one person doing it all, which we know we're there with you. So if that's it, then the goal might be, you know, what's the, I'm going to spend an hour a week. This week, I'm going to build out the page. I think it's really important to define the team, define the timeline, so that you meet your goal. So there's more resources on the toolkit page about planning your campaign. We link out to some of GivingTuesday's resources that are really good too, but we definitely push some of these because we have seen them make a bit different. So after you have set up for, you know, your planning your campaign, I would consider competing for prizes to be part of potentially your goal, if it makes sense to do so. We're actually going to be pushing out our 2020 prize information this week. So if you haven't already, when you go on the Georgia Give nonprofit toolkit up at the top, it says for you to register to get our email. So if you're an admin, you get them, but make sure you're signed up to get those because that's where we will be sending out notifications about when the prizes are up, which will be by the end of the week, and reminders for webinars or deadlines and things like that. But I would look at those prize information this week and think about, hey, what makes sense for us to compete for? This is last year's screenshot of last year, but I can tell you already a sneak peek that we will have both leaderboards and power hours this year. Well, what I recommend is reading through the prize details because our prizes, some of them are for all organizations can compete. Some of them are for specific causes. So when you register, it asks you what type of causes or what type of communities you serve. So I definitely fill that out so that when it comes to prizes that are for specific categories, we can pull you to compete and we'll notify you that you are eligible after we confirm that with each sponsor. But either way, let's assume that you're competing in either one of our powers or leaderboards. The prize rules will let you know how to win, right? So most of them are by number of donors, not by amount. So you can say, hey, we're going to try to win this 9am power hour. So that can be part of your goal, right? You're reaching out to your donors and you're trying to say, hey, we're competing. Help us win. And throughout the hour, really push for that. And if you win, you can notify them or say, hey, we didn't make it. Let's try it for the 12 o'clock. So it's a way for you to actually engage your audiences is by competing for prizes. It's something to talk about throughout the day. So I definitely recommend trying to win one of these as a way to engage donors and win a prize. All right. And so I've been talking about engaging with your donors on social, on email. We know that graphics are important because not everybody has time or a dedicated resource to create social media content or email graphics. So we're here to help you with that. I mentioned before that there's that dropdown and for nonprofits tab with the graphics link. So that page literally takes you to our graphics page, which has this is just some of our graphics that you can link to. So we created all of these on Canva. So if you aren't on Canva, we highly recommend that as a resource because it's made for basically people like us, right? We are multi we have multiple skills and it's super easy design online design program. So all of these graphics, you can use them already on Canva. So like and customize them or you can just download the JPEG PNG and just place them on your own programs. But it's great. We highly recommend it if you can customize it or you can just use it as is this postcard. Right here you can actually order postcards directly through Canva. So that's kind of cute if you want to do like a save the day or if you wanted to change this and just send it to as a thank you. We highly recommend sending save the dates and thank you to donors as a way to keep them engaged. So there's some resources there to consider. The last thing I want to mention on this page is our beautiful door to give 2021 logos. So as you guys can see here on the top of the page, we asked the local artist Dusty Kramer to create a 2021 logo for us this year because we heard that we wanted to have more graphics so that organizations can refresh as they're going back every year for Georgia Gibbs. So this is it. We actually really, really love it. And there's lots of different ways to use it. There's actually one that's just this frame of the vines that you can use, for example, as a Facebook frame and things like that. So consider leveraging these resources when you are building out your posts and emails, etc. Okay, so I talked about some graphics and those resources. I would say this is my fourth Georgia Gibbs that I am planning. And when I came to my own goals for this year and what were the most important things for nonprofits to do for Georgia Gibbs, it was peer to peer fundraising was at the top. It's the number one. We're not leveraging. I'm seeing organizations not leverage that enough. And I highly recommend it. So I'll explain what that is. When you create, when you claim your page on Georgia Gibbs, that is your organization's page. But when what we're seeing in terms of digital fundraising trends is it's much easier to grow a network that then asks their networks for donation. So it's think about it being exponential growth opportunities. So what peer to peer fundraising is is basically peers asking peers. So they can create you can create individual fundraising pages for say a board member to create their own page. So they use that link to send out to their network to donate. So the organization that Pat here is fundraising for is Health and Powers, but she has her own page. And therefore, if she has her own personal goal of 10,000 and say the organization has 30, this page is going to update with people that donate through her page. But the totals will go into the larger organization's page. So it's a great way to have folks personalized and have a more unique story or ask for their own funds. I've seen people use this, for example, you know, donate a birthday fundraiser. It could be, hey, instead of Christmas gifts this year, I want to do this. You might see some of this on Facebook where people are donating, you know, asking on their behalf or organization. This is the same thing. So I highly recommend you guys trying out peer to peer. There are different peer to peer pages. You can have here an individual page. So one board member creates a page. You can actually create their page for them. And you send them the link to this page. And they're just basically sending that link out to their friends and families online. Or you can get a little bit fancier and you can say create a team page for all your board members or for the four, three to five people you want to test out peer to peer fundraising with, right? A board member page so that each board member has their individual page like you see here. But then there's a page that houses their team. So the board team and all of these funnel back up to the organization's page. So you can be creative. We actually had a peer to peer fundraising webinar that really went through this in depth a few weeks ago. And so if you go to that training tab on our site, it has the replay. So I highly recommend going into that. There's also resources on the toolkit for you to read if you prefer that. But it's pretty intuitive. You go on your dashboard and you go to the peer to peer part and you can create, it's super again, super intuitive to create a page. You can actually even create a template so that if people want to create their own page, there's already some basics like your logo and things set up. People just have to create an image or upload an image, a little bit of copy below here. There's a little bit more space for you to speak to the organization, why it's important to you, etc. So if you are comfortable and have done Georgia Gives in the past or want to maybe have a really small but dedicated campaign, I highly would recommend trying out, asking a board member or asking somebody that's digitally savvy in your organization. And most of the time I see this coming from the fundraising or development teams or that might be the ED or whoever the board member is that's focused on fundraising, try it out as a way to just test it because we see this growing exponentially year after year. Digital continues to grow, especially with COVID events having to go digital. All right, so when it comes to the most important things for Georgia Gives this year, I talked about peer to peer fundraising. The second thing is sharing impactful stories. So there's a few different layers to this. And I have here just the screenshot of our storytelling webinar. That was awesome. I had a panel like the folks that I work with on our Georgia Gives team. I have a videographer that used to work as the WSB community program producer. I had folks from my PR team. I had our digital marketing specialist who does their social media. They basically ran through a different storytelling best practices that I think are really important because what we notice is that when it's Georgia Gives, it's really important to tell stories about impact and about mission and keep it social media friendly. Less is more. And so this webinar really goes through some of those like very, I would say important and sometimes obvious, but it's good to get a refresher. I loved one of our panelists spoke about how just because you did one post on one person doesn't mean you can't reuse that across your channels. You don't have the same people watching every single post. I think sometimes we think they see everything and they don't. So a story can have a long runway. You can pitch that in different ways. You can post that in different ways. There's some tips here on how to create, create a video slideshow from still photography if that's what you have or create some animation using photography. So I think some of the most important pieces here from a storytelling perspective is assets. And what do I mean by that? It's graphics. It's imagery. So I think it's important to collect a few of those in time for Georgia Gives, because if you're going to be digital, then you need visual in that. It's very important. So start pulling what you have. Start thinking about your strategic goals and okay, how do we set that up? So if we're going to do a board fundraiser, what are they going to post about? So it might be they're announcing that they're participating in a challenge where they're trying to raise $500. And they might want to explain, well, why am I engaged with this nonprofit? Here's a story of who or what we do, what's the impact? Because I think that's something that when you're on social, it's important to know that people want to be engaged. People want to hear those stories. And I think sometimes nonprofits, they struggle with that. And we totally get it. But I think this webinar was great because it kind of opened up people's eyes to the opportunities to write in front of them. So for example, you might think that because you work in an office or you don't have a visual, well, maybe feature somebody that works with you guys, a volunteer or somebody from programs. And you know, because those folks are passionate, those folks are maybe more hands-on than sometimes the marketing and fundraising folks. They're there, they probably are excited to talk about things like that. And sometimes because sometimes we don't have enough time. So leverage what is in front of you and leverage what is going to be impactful. That's why I think creating those goals helps you and guides you, right? Because I know it's overwhelming. But if you're doing, you're trying to do one thing and create the stories and the digital campaign to, you know, help that, that is going to help you keep it efficient, I guess is a good way to say it. Because we know it could be overwhelming. So definitely check out that webinar. And the toolkit will also have some of these links to some of these resources. All right. I mentioned our media campaign. So our team works with media partners and pitching PR across the state. We have a media campaign that is, it does a lot, we do lots of things. Our CEO has an op-ed that runs in newspapers. She goes on different programs speaking about Georgia Give. So getting folks to be aware about Georgia Give on Giving Tuesday. We have a, the bottom left here is just a screenshot of a PSA, a public service announcement, TV spot that we also pitch and send out to media across the state. We'll leverage video on our social and promote that as well. And then finally, we also will be sharing opportunities for nonprofits themselves to participate or engage with the media. I mentioned before that if you register for prizes, you also find out about media opportunities. So we, for example, we'll be sending an email with a link for you to submit your story. So a place for you to upload pictures or a video or write down, hey, we have this event, what we're doing this and this, so that the PR team can look and see like, okay, there's an event here for this org. That's a great visual. We're going to pitch that to a local market that they're in. Or we're going to use this, you know, use this story or ask them to provide a quote for a press release or for a story that we're doing about certain types of nonprofits. It's an ever going thing. So definitely register so you can hear about those media opportunities. But then on the flip side, we also, you know, we, we provide opportunities about that media companies have in terms of advertising or promotional opportunities. So here on the top left, AG Rhodes was featured in a segment on Atlanta and Co. And I just got the details for that promotion. So we'll be sharing that out via email and adding that to the toolkit when it's ready. But for a fee, different nonprofits can have I think like a five minute segment on the show Atlanta and Co. So we work with different partners like the business Chronicle, Outfront, which is an out of home media company. So we receive in kind support from some of these partners. And we also want to leverage some promotions that they have for nonprofits to buy an ad space or be featured within one of these broadcasts programming. If I'll finish with actually we last week, we had our media summit with hosted by WSB TV out of Atlanta. So we'll be posting that playback. But if you missed that, check that out. What I love about that media summit is that you bait, we basically get the folks that we pitch to to come on and talk about like how do you pitch an editor? What are they looking for? What's their email address? So it's actually exciting because you get different editors, different producers from a news station to come on and tell, you know, from social to news to other programs, letting you know in particular how to reach out to them, what they are looking for so that you yourself can pitch to them. And even, you know, if you haven't already build, you know, it's all about building, I think, some relationships, right? And getting to know them a little bit. And, you know, they're super friendly and they welcome information because their job is to get important information out there. So I think it's great to build relationships with these folks. So probably if not this week, next week, that playback will be, will be available. And if you missed it and you want to attend it, that's an event that we do yearly. So if you're not engaged with our GCN, with the Georgia Center of Nonprofit, sign up for our emails. That's a one of many different events that GCN does. I don't know if you guys know about us, but we also have just, we're all about nonprofits building capacity. So we offer professional training, development, consulting, etc. So that's, that's my little spiel just to let you know. But we do have one final webinar coming up for Georgia-Gives. That is in a couple of weeks. It's just, it's great if you haven't yet started. It's last-minute tips for Georgia-Gives. So our mighty cause contact will be hosting it. And basically, if you haven't gotten started, register for this webinar, because we're going to be talking about some must-do items that you can do to help you prioritize and make the last few weeks worth your while. So if you go again on ga-gives.org on the nonprofit tab, there's our training drop-down, click on that. And at the bottom there, that's where you can find this page and the playbacks of our previous webinars. But at the bottom is this one where you can register to attend. And I'll be on there and you can say hi. But yeah, this one's a great one to join if you missed some of the other ones. All right. Well, I'm going to wrap it up by just going through some key dates here. It's just a way to keep these top of mind. So I would say that 1027, that last-minute tips webinar, the next event we have coming up. As a reminder, our registration deadline is at the end of the month. So if you haven't, please, please, please register. The following day is when early giving starts on November 1st. So early giving is, we basically, when Georgia Gives on Giving Tuesday happens on the 30th, all the donations starting from the 1st will get loaded onto the site. So if you raise already some dollars until then, when the day comes, that's sort of the amount that gets shown and will be counted towards the totals for the day on the 30th, which I cannot believe is a few weeks away. But there's still a lot of times for you guys to get set up and be strategic. Pick a few things you want to try out or some bigger goals to achieve and leverage the site and all those resources to help you out along the way. And that's a really quick recap. I would ask you to go to the site to kind of find your path, but I will open it up to questions if anybody has some. Thank you so much, Louisa. That was just great. While I have heard a presentation before about Georgia Gives Day, it's been a couple of years and after the 20 months that we've all gone through, it is great to be grounded again in the opportunities and all of the resources that GCN provides for nonprofits to participate in what is the largest giving day. Great. We ask, please, this is a time for questions. We have such a great resource right here with Louisa. You can drop your questions in the chat and Matt and I will pick them up or while people are thinking of those. Louisa, one simple but I think powerful takeaway is it's not too late to get started, is it? Exactly. What we see is there's like two waves. There's the folks that got started in the summer as they, you know, and then there's the folks that start now in October. I would say that I can't have a pulse on everybody, but you're not the only one. It's just been a rough year. Everybody's just, I mean, we're all feeling it, which is why I really press on be specific about what you want to achieve and maybe be realistic, you know, and if it's 500, 1,000 or 5,000, just be specific and then go from there. Don't, don't, everyone's feeling overwhelmed, which is why you just do one thing at a time. You know, maybe it's getting, it's pitching this year or it's P2P fundraising, it's doing a few social posts, tapping a volunteer. Don't think you're supposed to do it all because you have all of the resources available to you. Think about where you are and where you want to go and what is the low-hanging fruit to get there since we are only six weeks away. So yeah, be strategic. It's really hard, but we recommend, you know, go slow. Yeah. Don't, don't think that you're going to fund maybe a majority of your operating budget through this, but you can definitely, as you said, be realistic and, you know, if you can take care of some things through unrestricted funding, that is a huge relief to any non-profit leader. Exactly. Yeah, and you know, leverage is Georgia gives its own thing, is Georgia gives part of your year end and is sort of the kickoff, you know, it could serve like, where does Georgia give fit into your year end fundraising? It's probably the first, don't make it a completely separate thing, right? Yeah. Let it help, help that goal. And so maybe break it off for Georgia gives like, okay, we're going to break it off and do that way, you know, let it be a part of those conversations already. Good advice. Anyone else with questions? Well, I hope everybody will, in the time that we're going to give back to you, will hop on the GCN website, the Georgia gives website and go ahead and get registered since we know that it is not too late to be realistic and be strategic about your plans for this year. And it is really a wonderful way. Thank you, Louisa. Louisa's dropped the URL in the chat, gagives.org. It is really a terrific way to get some unrestricted funding into your organization. And I think it's a way to engage your board members who may not know exactly what their role in supporting the development is. But if you can task them with reaching out to their networks, then it's kind of an easy way for them to get on board and fulfill any get or give requirements that they may have. All right. Well, Louisa, thank you again so much for joining us definitely today and also for joining us in August as we got everybody at least hopefully a little bit aware that Georgia gives day was coming later in the fall. So, Matt, if you have anything to share, if not, then I guess we'll give everybody 10 or 12 minutes back in their day. Just a big thank you as a first year with a non-profit having no idea where to go, how to start fundraising. This is probably the easiest and will likely be the most effective step that we have for getting our toes dipped into fundraising. So, thank you. Yeah, no problem. Thanks for having me. All right, everyone. Well, we will be in touch about our 2022 schedule. You'll see emails. I've just dropped my email in the chat. I bartonatcomcollaborative.org. Matt and Margaret and I would really love your ideas for future topics for 2022 and look forward to connecting. Until then, hope everybody has a very successful Georgia gives day and safe and happy and healthy holidays and we will look forward to seeing you in early 2022. Thank you all. Thank you.