 All right, we just wanted to get started real quick. If you are on the line now, if you could just let us know, if you can hear me and see my screen, that would be a huge help. Just flipping through a couple of slides now. So if you can just go into the questions box of your GoToWebinar panel and just let me know, yes or no, if you can see and hear me, that would be great. All right, perfect, thank you so much. Well, it's just about time to get started, so we'll just get right into it. Welcome to our last and third webinar for Giving Day for Apes this year. We're gonna be talking about campaign strategy. I'm Linda Gerhardt, I have talked with most of you at this point, but I'm the senior community engagement manager here at Mighty Cause. My email address is lindaatmightycause.com and I'm happy to be working with Jackie Bennett at the Global Federation of Animal Sanctuaries on Giving Day for Apes. We've been doing this for a couple of years now together and it's just a really fun project. So Jackie is here with me, so she's gonna be presenting a couple of sections of this presentation and we're just gonna switch off. So hello, Jackie. Here's a quick look at today's agenda. We're just gonna start off with some of the basics about Giving Day for Apes, you know, just as a refresher in case you missed our first two webinars. And then Jackie's gonna talk to you about prizes, so we're actually gonna have a prize announcement for you. Then we're gonna move into goal setting, prize strategy, marketing promotion. Jackie's gonna talk to you about storytelling and then kick it back over to me about follow-up on Giving Day for Apes. And then just as a quick note, while we're presenting, just if you have any questions, type it into the questions box of your go-to webinar panel. We're gonna leave some time at the end of the presentation so that you can ask any questions you need to ask, but sometimes their answer during the presentation should just, if you have a question, type it into that box on your go-to webinar panel and we will make sure to get to it at the end. All right, so just to quickly recap some basics about Giving Day for Apes. This year it's on Tuesday, October 15th. It starts at midnight, eastern standard time and ends at midnight, eastern standard time. So we have a couple of different time zones involved, so just make sure that you understand when midnight, eastern standard time is where you happen to be located. Early donations open up on Sunday, September 15th. That is this Sunday. Those go live at midnight so you can start accepting donations. These are real-time donations. They're not pledges or anything like that. They just count towards your Giving Day for Apes total. So that's a big milestone that's coming up so that's a great time to start collecting donations. And this year we have a lower platform fee than we have in years past. So it's actually just 4.9 plus 30%. That is the full fee. That includes credit card processing fees. So this year you will see even more of your donations for Giving Day for Apes. So we're really happy to offer you that lower platform fee so that more of the money that you raise can go toward helping the apes that are in your care. All right, so I'm gonna pass the mic over to Jackie to talk about prizes. Thank you. So let's go to that first slide. Please to announce that again this year we have $50,000 to distribute in prizes through our leaderboards, power hours and golden tickets. One rule in place that applies to all of the prizes is that only donations through the Mighty Cause platform will count towards Giving Day prizes. And I did wanna mention one thing since I'm not sure if we've emphasized this in past years, but we do not manually calculate any prize winners. This is done automatically through the Mighty Cause platform. So we don't select the winners or influence the outcome in any way. And it's because of this that it is possible that one organization may, for example, win several golden tickets or win a combination of power hour and golden tickets prizes. We've seen this in past years, but this is an automated system. Let's go to the next slide and start with the leaderboards. The top three placements on each leaderboard will win a prize. The leaderboards all calculate all fundraising activity from the time that early fundraising opens on September 15th through the end of the day on Giving Day. During this early fundraising period, you will of course be able to know the amount of the donations that your organization has received. You'll see that through your Mighty Cause page on the admin side, but you're not going to know where you're placing on the leaderboards. These leaderboards don't become visible until Giving Day actually begins at midnight Eastern time on October 15th. And at that time, the Giving Day website will flip over to the live event page with all of the leaderboards displayed. Let's go to the next one. So here's the prize structure for the leaderboards, which is the same as last year for total prizes of $33,500. For four of the leaderboards, as you see the prize structure is the same with the first place prize being $3,750. The fifth leaderboard for the amount raised by an individual, these are those peer-to-peer fundraisers. The first place prize is $2,000. A few points about the peer-to-peer fundraisers. Your organization may have several fundraisers raising funds on your behalf, which is wonderful. They are going to be listed individually on that peer-to-peer fundraiser leaderboard. They're not aggregated in any way. Also, the funds raised by those peer-to-peer fundraisers on behalf of your organization, those fund amounts are also included in the totals displayed on the most dollars raised leaderboard because they are raised for your organization. This doesn't mean you get the donation twice or double the money, but it does mean those funds being raised by your fundraisers are being calculated by the Mighty Cause platform in two different locations. Move on. The power hours. We have six power hours this year, two for each continent. One is for the most dollars raised and another is for most unique donors. As Linda discussed in our previous webinar, power hours are a good opportunity to use matching grants if you have those to help drive donations during those hours. The power hours are different from the leaderboards in that they're not considering all activity from the time that early fundraising opens. The Mighty Cause platform is only calculating activity that occurs between the assigned start time and end time for each power hour. There's one winner for each power hour with a prize of $2,500. Next. So I tried to make this a better slide and I just couldn't, but I did wanna talk about this because I recall in the past, some organizations have contacted us and been a little unsure of how the power hours work and what they should be telling their supporters in terms of when donations should be made. So I wanna go through an example. This year, the power hour for most unique donors for Africa is scheduled between 9 a.m. and 10 a.m. Eastern time. So that is when donations would be made to help win the power hour and the Mighty Cause platform is only gonna be calculating what comes in during this time. So shortly after 10 a.m., the winner of this power hour would be announced. One comment on each of the power hours for most unique donors that I wanted to let you know is that donors who've already given prior to the power hour can donate again during the power hour and be counted as a unique donor. And that, again, is because Mighty Cause is only looking at the activity within the power hour hour. So if a donor makes multiple donations beforehand, they can still be counted once as a unique donor to help you win this power hour prize. Next slide. And finally, we have the golden tickets. There are 10 of them, each is worth $150. They are during the hours listed on the slide, all of these times are Eastern time. And you can also find a full schedule on the Giving Day website under the link for rules and prizes. The only qualification to be eligible to win a golden ticket is that your organization has received at least one donation online during the hour. The amount of that donation doesn't matter. It could be a single $5 donation that wins you the golden ticket. The winning ticket is randomly selected through the Mighty Cause platform and then will be announced shortly after the hour ends. Next. So just a few final words on this section about prizes. As mentioned, this information is now available on the Giving Day website in the rules and prizes section. So please do look at it to see a full description of prize eligibility and also a full schedule of the start and end times for each of the hours, for power hours and golden ticket prizes. If anything seems unclear or uncertain to you, don't hesitate to email us with questions because we wanna make sure you have the best information to give to your supporters so that they can help you win those prizes. That's it, back to you, Linda. Great, thanks Jackie. So we are gonna circle back to the strategy related to winning prizes in just a bit that I wanted to walk before we run and talk a little bit about goal setting for Giving Day for Apes because setting strong goals is really the first step in coming up with a good strong campaign strategy. So the first thing I wanted to go over related to goals for Giving Day for Apes is the concept of SMART goals, which is something that a lot of you are probably already very familiar with. SMART is an acronym that stands for specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-based. So when you're thinking through your goals for the event, this is a really great filter to use to make sure that your goals actually make sense for your sanctuary, that they're achievable for your size and capacity and are meaningful for your organization. So we're gonna talk through some examples of SMART goals and some what I call not so SMART goals for Giving Day for Apes. So an example of a SMART goal would be to retain 40% of your donors from your 2018 Giving Day for Apes campaign or if this is your first year participating, you could just say your last fundraising campaign. This is a goal that is specific. You're aiming for something that's very specific, a certain percentage and it's measurable because you can look at your donor retention rate and easily track whether you actually retain 40%. A not so SMART goal would be just to raise money because that's not specific and it's not measurable. How much money do you want to raise? How much did you raise last year and by how much are you hoping to increase the amount that you raise? So you can use SMART goals to really drill down on what you actually wanna see from this year's event and help carve a path forward for your organization with SMART goals. Another SMART goal would be to increase the total amount you raised by $5,000. That is specific, that's measurable and depending on the size of your sanctuary and what you've raised in the past, that may also be achievable. But if last year you raised $5,000 altogether, that's not very realistic for you to double the amount that you've raised. So you just wanna scale that amount to what is actually realistic for the amount you've raised in the past and what is typical for your sanctuary. And when it comes to strategy, having a goal like this is really helpful because you can come up with ways to achieve your goal like targeting people who've given it in a previous year and getting them to increase the size of their gifts. Another example of a not so SMART goal would be something like engage people. That's really vague. Who do you wanna engage and how do you wanna engage them? Why is it important to engage that audience? So a way to flip that kind of vague goal into being a SMART goal is to really get specific about who you want to engage, why and what the benefit of engaging them is for your sanctuary. So Giving Day for Apes has sanctuaries participating from all over the globe. There's three different continents participating, which is a lot. And every organization has their own strengths and their own weaknesses. Some sanctuaries have a lot of manpower or woman power and can run really sophisticated, large scale fundraising campaigns. And some sanctuaries, especially range sanctuaries may have just one person who's working on the campaign and fundraising and that is not their primary function at the sanctuary. So they may come home after a long day of working out in the sanctuary and try to run this fundraising campaign. So there's a lot of diversity in terms of the types of organizations that are participating. And one thing I hear every year, especially from organizations that don't have as many staff members or resources for fundraising is how can I do this? How can I make this day successful? How can I win a prize? And we're going to talk more specifically about prizes later, but how you can make Giving Day for Apes a successful day for your organization is to scale your goals to your size and your fundraising capacity. One thing that can be helpful when you're thinking about your goals is to look at what you were able to do last year. Or again, if it's your first year or something, what you were able to do during your last fundraiser campaign and just set a goal to bump up that amount of how much you raised. So you don't need to shoot for the stars. You don't need to compete with an organization that's twice your size and has more capacity than you do. You just need to come up with goals that are meaningful and helpful and achievable for your sanctuary. If raising $500 would be a huge help for your sanctuary, that's the goal you should set. You can keep your goals small and achievable if you're worried about competing. Just focus on what's important and achievable for you. You don't have to look at a bigger organization with a dedicated fundraising staff and say, I need to raise as much as them if you're smaller and running your campaign on your own because that's just not realistic. So just scale your goals to your capacity. Now raising money is a really big part of giving day for apes, obviously, but it's definitely not the only thing. So you'll also want to think about your non-monetary goals, which means goals outside of raising X amount of dollars. So for instance, engaging more peer-to-peer fundraisers this year could be a really great goal, especially if that's not something you really focused on in previous years. If you tend to get a lot of offline gifts like checks, you can set a goal to direct more people to give through online channels, since as Jackie mentioned, only online donations count toward prizes. You can also set goals like getting your first matching grant, which we talked about a lot in our last webinar, or use a matching grant in a different way, like using it to win a power hour, or even just setting a goal to get your board of directors involved in your giving day campaign. You can also set goals like increasing your average gift size, which will help you increase your total overall, and also get people more invested in your cause. So that can be a smaller goal, that's not really a specific dollar amount, but it bumps you up and makes the day meaningful and successful for you. Another goal you will want to set and something you'll want to keep in mind for your whole campaign is donor retention, which means getting people who've given to your sanctuary in the past to come back and make another gift. Obviously this is important because it means that you're building sustainable support for your organization and working to keep donors who care about your cause engaged. Someone who starts off making a one-time donation to your work and you work to steward them, you work to build that relationship may one day become a major gift donor or provide a matching grant to you, or at least just make predictable gifts that your sanctuary can count on year after year. And this is just really important because most of the organizations that are participating have done at least one year of giving day for apes at this point. And this giving event is a really great opportunity to engage your existing supporters. And the people who've given to your organization in the past for giving day for apes are basically just low hanging fruit. It's easier to engage an existing donor than to get a new one. So make sure that these past donors are part of your strategy. I recommend setting a specific donor retention goal and wrapping that into the overall strategy for your event. Overall, donor retention is really low for nonprofits in the United States. Less than half of donors for the average nonprofit are retained year over year. So if you can manage a donor retention rate of 40%, that's pretty good and pretty achievable. So that might be a good donor retention related goal. And on that note, to help you retain more donors, Mighty Cause actually has a brand new tool that you can use. This is on your welcome screen, which is the screen you're dropped into when you log on as an admin and go to your organization's profile. This screen will give you a snapshot of your metrics since the last time you walked in, I'm sorry, in the last 90 days. And it'll also show you your year over year donor retention rate. And the cool thing about this is now you can access a donor retention report. So this report can also be found from your dashboard. It's under reports or you can get to it from your welcome screen. This report you can filter just like you would filter your donation report. And the cool thing is that you can pull a list of your un-retained donors. So you can reach out to them and ask them to give again. You can see who you have not retained year over year. And this is a really, really handy tool to have on a giving day because with this tool, you have all that information right there. And there's really no excuse not to reach out to these people who've given in the past, who care about your cause. So just be sure to find this report, take a look at it and utilize it and plan to utilize that in your strategy. So now as I promised, we're gonna move back into price strategy. So Jackie went in pretty in-depth about how the leaderboards work. So there's no need to review that again, but basically the key to winning a leaderboard prize is to get lots and lots of donations. And the big thing to do if you want to win a leaderboard prize is to start getting those early donations. So you can start getting them this Sunday, September 15th at midnight Eastern time. Obviously getting some donations ahead of the actual giving day, it gives you a head start. So target a leaderboard, to target a leaderboard prize, you'll want to start fundraising as soon as you can and build momentum. For early donations, it's a good idea to target donors who have given in the past, start reaching out to donors who are unroutained this year with that donor retention report and reach out to people who are in your sanctuaries inner circle, like your board members and your staff and volunteers. Now something that you may be worried about is that if you ask people to give early, that's it, that's the only donation you're going to get from them. But that's actually not the case. Especially in the US, allowing people to give early can help them give more overall. Because a lot of us get paid on a bi-weekly schedule. So by the time giving day for apes is here, we've gotten paid, we've got another paycheck and we're more than happy to get to you again. So don't be afraid of tapping out your supporters by asking for more donations, especially if you're tapping people who are engaged in your cause. You're more likely to just increase the amount they give overall and get them to give several gifts rather than tapping them out early on by asking them to give on September 15th. One thing that you can also do to try to get some early donations going is then build up the amount that you've raised ahead of giving day for apes is to use a pre-event matching grant which Jackie had talked about. We went in depth about how matching grants work on our last webinar. So I don't want to spend time going over that again since we have limited time today. But if you missed that one, it's available in the non-profit toolkit. Basically a matching grant attaches an incentive to giving early by offering to match the money they give. So that can be a really great way to generate some interest leading up to the event. And that way you could start off October 15th with some money already in the event, so to speak. Power hours are really cool competitions for a prize that happen on the day of the event. So there's really nothing that you can do before the event actually begins aside from letting people know that your power hour is happening and allowing them to plan their gift ahead. So when you're letting people know about your giving day for apes campaign, it's also important to let them know that there are certain hours when donating will help win a prize for your sanctuary so that they can plan ahead and make their donation when it's most meaningful for you. You'll also want to let your followers know that a power hour is starting by posting on social media. And it's helpful to post an image or video along with it to help you get noticed on social media. And we recommend sending out an email too just to get the word out to your donors. As Jackie mentioned, there are two types of power hours, most unique donors and most dollars raised. Now most dollars raised is pretty self-explanatory but what you'll want to emphasize here is that the size of the donations count. So if you have someone who wants to give you a larger gift, you may want to ask them to give during the most dollars raised power hour to help boost your numbers. You can also take a look at people who've given in the past and people who have given at a larger rate. Send them a targeted email during that hour or just send them a personal email and just let them know about this power hour since at that time, the larger donations will help you win the prize. And for most unique donors, that's looking for lots of people who are giving. So it's a really great time to play to those smaller donors who are giving in smaller amounts and let them know that even a $5 donation can help you win. So even if they already gave or they don't have much to give, during a most unique donors power hour, it's really meaningful and important for you to get that $5. And that can be really helpful and good messaging for them to know that during that hour it doesn't matter that their gift is just $5, which is the minimum on the platform, it helps you win the prize. And playing up the urgency is a really great way to inspire people to give during a power hour. That way they stop and they give now instead of later because they know that at this point it's gonna be more helpful for your organization. There's a time limit involved and they really can't kick the can down the road and say, I'll give later, I'll give when I get home from work or whatever excuse they wanna make for not stopping and giving now. So golden tickets are random prizes and they work a lot like a raffle. If you buy lots of raffle tickets the odds of having your ticket pulled is higher. So if you have more donations during a golden ticket hour you have a better chance of winning a golden ticket. So a lot like a most unique donors power hour you should alert your followers, maybe send out one schedule, email not a bunch of email every, not an email every single time there's a golden ticket hour but send out a schedule and give them a heads up that during these hours small donations count can win a prize. The size of the donation has nothing to do with the likelihood of winning. So a bunch of donations for the platform minimum of $5 will significantly help you win a golden ticket. So for smaller sanctuaries it's a really great opportunity to pick up a prize because anyone who gets a donation during the previous hour is eligible to win a golden ticket. It's truly random. And the cool thing about golden tickets is that there is a winning donor. They don't get any money but they do get their name on the table with the golden tickets letting everyone know that their donation was the one that won the golden ticket for you. So letting people know that they also have an opportunity to win by donating at certain times can be a really good way to get them excited about donating during a golden ticket hour. So definitely get familiar with that schedule that's on the rules and prizes page on the Giving Day for Apes website so that you understand when all of these hours begin and when the prizes are announced. All right, so next we're gonna move into some tips for marketing and promoting your campaign. So your email list is an important tool for Giving Day for Apes because it is a direct line to your supporters. It'll appear in their inbox and they'll most likely receive a notification about your email on their phone since most of us check our emails on our smartphones. So email needs to be an important part of your Giving Day for Apes strategy. More and more people are reading and responding to emails on their phones. So that's why it's important to be relatively brief and get to the point of your email pretty quickly. People are usually skimming. They're not sitting down and reading your whole email like it's a book. So keeping your email skimmable, breaking up walls of texts with photos and buttons to click on will help keep people engaged once they've opened your email. Keep it short and sweet and you're more likely to keep their attention. A lot of people, myself included, will close right out of an email with a giant block of text. So definitely keep it readable. Don't send them a novel. Definitely Jackie's gonna talk more about storytelling in a bit, but just make sure that it's reasonable for a person to skim through on their phone. Your call to action or CTA buttons are important parts of your emails and we recommend keeping them urgent and to the point with things like donate now, give now, help us today, just to lend urgency that you're not asking them to give it another time. You're asking them to give now and they feel some pressure to stop what they're doing. Go to your page and make a donation. If you're telling the story of a particular ape in your care you can actually use their name in the CTA button like help Steve. Your email, we're about an ape named Steve which is kind of a weird name for an ape but you may have a Steve in your care. One thing that's really important and I cannot stress this enough as somebody who sends a lot of emails for Mighty Cause is test your emails. So especially if you're using an email marketing program like Constant Contact or MailChimp just send a test email to a few people. Have them click on the links and make sure that they go to the right place. Have them double check you for any spelling errors or any formatting issues. That's really easy to do and especially if you're the only one working on an email and you've been looking at it a lot it's really easy for your brain to sort of miss those kinds of mistakes. I've done that myself. There's really no feeling that's worse than sending out an email to a big list of people on a high stakes day and then realizing that your link is broken. So make sure to test the emails out beforehand and have a couple of people test them out. If you're feeling all alone get a volunteer involved, get a friend involved just send it to them and ask them to click. Make sure that everything goes where it's supposed to go. You should also be sure if you're using an email marketing program to choose a mobile friendly template and actually test them on some mobile devices because as I said, more and more people are reading their emails from their phones. So if your email is formatted weirdly on a phone people may not read it or click the buttons. Most templates are mobile friendly these days but you'll just want to make sure of that when you're creating your emails that it's optimized for mobile devices. And especially if you've been doing giving day for apes now for a couple of years now you should be segmenting your emails which basically means that instead of just sending one last to everybody on your list you send basically the same email but with small little tweaks to different groups of people and those small tweaks just tailor the email to who that donor is and what kind of relationship they have with your sanctuary. For instance, people who have given to giving day for apes campaigns of yours in the past should get an email that acknowledges that history with your organization and be worded a little bit differently. You should say things like give again or we know we can count on you to help us again and stuff like that. Volunteers and board members should get their own emails. There's nothing worse than a board member or a volunteer somebody who's very important to your organization getting an email that doesn't acknowledge the relationship that they have with your sanctuary. And one thing you may want to do if you're comfortable with segmentation already is targeting people based on their gift size like people who donated in the past from the $5 to $5 to $20 range a different email for the people at the $50 to $100 range and so on. So you can get specific about the amount of money you're asking for and try bumping donors up to the next level to get them to increase their gift size. So email is also really important for donor retention. So make sure you pull a list of unretained donors from your donor retention report and make a plan to reach out to them on Giving Day for Apes or about Giving Day for Apes. It takes just a second to pull that list. So one thing you may want to consider is getting an email prepped and ready and then pulling your list in the middle of the day or near the end of the day and send that email that you've prepped to people who have not been retained this year who have not given again. Again, use the language that acknowledges that they've given to your campaigns in the past. And for people who've given in larger amounts, it really helps if you can to go the extra mile to send them a personal note, send them a quick email from you personally that asks them to give again because that gives them an extra incentive because they've been personally asked. Sending a quick email from your own address that addresses them specifically can really do wonders to help bring them back and retain them this year. Social media is another really important channel for promoting your Giving Day for Apes campaign. So you'll want to be strategic about using your social media channels. The first thing you can do is use the Giving Day for Apes hashtag, which is just hashtag Giving Day for Apes so that you can be part of the conversation around the event. We also recommend as much as you're able to interacting with people on your social media channels, responding to comments, thanking people for retweets and so on so that you're active and engaged on social media. And that actually makes it more likely that you'll be seen because pretty much all social media platforms, they use an algorithm to sort through what actually appears in people's feeds. And basically what that means is that people are not seeing everything that everyone may follow posts. They're only seeing things that the platform decides based on certain criteria is relevant to that user. So having a lot of engagement on almost all of the social media platforms, having a lot of activity, whether that's comments or retweets, helps the platform decide, hey, this is relevant to this user who follows them. We're gonna show them this over these other things that don't have as much engagement. So that's one of the little things that can really help you be seen on a day like Giving Day for Apes. Appointing someone as your social media manager can be a really great way to make sure that you're taking care of your social channels and responding to people and interacting with people. And this person can be a volunteer if you don't have the capacity to use a staff member for this purpose. I really also recommend staying within your comfort zone and going to where your audience is. And what I mean by that is that if you have the most followers on Instagram of all the channels, use Instagram. If all of your followers are on Facebook, use Facebook as your primary channel. You don't need to use new platforms or try new things or spend a lot of time on platforms where you don't have a lot of people following you. You want to expend your energy where it means the most. And you'll want to focus on where you're most comfortable, where your audience is biggest. And something that's not on the slide but is definitely worth thinking about is asking for help. So if you have sponsors or relationships with other organizations or partnerships, ask them to help you out on social media whether that's making their own post or sending their own tweet or just retweeting something that you post. That can really make a big difference in the amount of people that you're able to reach on social media. So in the next part of the presentation, Jackie's gonna talk about storytelling. But before we do that, I just wanted to take a minute and go over the types of content that does well on social media so that when you're thinking about the stories you're gonna tell, you can plan on getting these types of things in the hopper and ready to go for giving day for apes. Video is a really great way to grab attention on social media and Facebook in particular loves videos. A tip for Facebook is to make sure that you're uploading the video directly into the Facebook platform, which is called native video. Instead of sharing a YouTube link because Facebook and YouTube as companies don't like each other so they don't even show the actual video and people's feeds anymore when you link to YouTube. They have to click on a link and then go directly to YouTube. So definitely if you can upload it directly into Facebook, going live, especially in a story on Facebook or Instagram is another great way to grab attention. In many cases, it'll actually send people a notification to let you know that you've gone live. So it'll prompt people to go and see what you're doing. Images are another way to be seen by more people because they grab attention, they make people stop scrolling and look at what you're doing, especially so if it's a striking image, something that's high contrast. And one thing I do wanna mention here is that your photos do not need to be professional. They don't need to be Ansel Adams. You don't need to be a professional photographer. They can be cell phone photos. So you don't need to feel like you have to have slick glossy photos that are gallery ready. They can be snapshots taken on somebody's phone because your phone actually in most cases makes really high quality images. So don't be afraid to post things that are not like professionally done. You can do it DIY, just pull out your phone and take a great photo and post that. And then finally, stories are a feature on Instagram and Facebook. It's something that they kind of stole from another platform called Snapchat where you can post things that last for 24 hours. And they can be live or pre-created images or videos. But the cool thing about them is that they're actually chronological. And like going live, a lot of people will actually get a notification letting them know that you've posted a story and that will actually prompt them to go and take a look at what you've posted. And then one thing I don't wanna leave out is traditional media. We sometimes tend to forget about that in the digital age, but the traditional media still exists. And by that I mean like newspapers, news organizations, that kind of thing. So one thing that you can consider doing if you have the capacity is to send out a press release about your campaign to your press contacts if you have them. You can reach out to media contacts to let them know about your campaign. You can also pitch a story about your Giving Day for Apes campaign and the work that you do. Some tips for pitching a story to somebody in the news media is to keep it short and sweet because they got a lot of emails about stories and with story ideas. So if you keep it short and sweet, they will be very appreciative. If you're in the United States and your press contacts are in the United States, pitching on weekends is actually a really great idea because they tend to get most of their pitches during the work week. So at sending them an email on a Saturday or Sunday, a lot of times they're in the office, might make it more likely that they'll stop and read your email. And focusing on local press is really helpful because something that may not be of interest to a national news organization might be of great interest to a local organization. And it's also a great icebreaker if you don't have any current press contacts, you can usually find their information or how to reach somebody on a website. So it can be a really great way to create contacts within the traditional media. So don't forget about these channels as well as you gear up for your campaign. Now is about the time that you'd wanna start getting a press release together and talking to news media about your campaign. All right, so I'm just gonna pass it back to Jackie for some information on storytelling. Thank you. So I was trying to think of the best way to cover storytelling in a couple of slides and I thought about something I had read that said that donors look for opportunities to find shared values between themselves and the charitable organizations that they wanna support. And so any fundraising campaign is gonna be an opportunity to tell a story to connect with a potential donor. On giving day, you're gonna have a chance to tell the public about your great work by sharing photos and videos and other news and hopefully gain some new supporters. If you haven't already updated your Mighty Cause page for this year's Giving Day, we encourage you to take a look at it and think about what's the most important thing for a potential donor to know. Most of the traffic or at least a lot of the traffic going to your individual fundraising page is probably going to be generated by you through emailing your existing supporters and contacts or posting a link to your own page on your Facebook page or other social media. But also remember that there is a possibility that someone will visit your page that's never heard of your organization before and may not really know about sanctuaries or what it means to care for captive apes or what Giving Day is. Certainly GFAS and other organizations supporting this event like Arcus Foundation are gonna be promoting Giving Day, sharing the website givingdayforapes.org. And so there might be some people who come and first see a choice of 30 plus organizations as well as multiple individual fundraisers and they're gonna decide where they wanna click and find out more. So think about what you would want that person to know. Sometimes the obvious things are missed. So I put a few here. Is it obvious at the top of your fundraising page when someone first visits your site, is it obvious where your center is located, what country you're in? Is it obvious what animals you're caring for, what apes you have? You can answer this information by using a combination of written text and photos and videos. And as Linda was talking about, we encourage you to be visual and try to use very striking photos to get people's attention. Donors are also gonna wanna know how their donation will help and what impact their funds will make. So you may have a goal of raising a certain amount of money, say $50,000, 20,000, 100, whatever, but think about ways to communicate that on your page and in your email communications and other campaign messages so that donors may have some choices and even those who don't have a lot of money will feel that a small donation, say $10, can really make an impact to help the apes in your care. Let's move on. Okay, so I hope Center for Great Apes doesn't mind me using this. This is, I was looking through a couple of the pages last night and saw this and thought it would be a good example. So Center for Great Apes, of course, wants to raise money during this campaign, but they've written their donation ask in a way that donors can choose the amount of money they want to give and see specific impacts that their funds, whether small or large amounts can make. So for example, $10 can purchase a blanket for pebbles and the donor can see great, I can purchase a blanket and by the way, there's a particular eight named here, pebbles, and so someone coming to the page who doesn't know anything about Center for Great Apes might say, I wanna go visit the website and learn more about pebbles and then you've drawn that donor in. There are also other options that go up to $500 so someone who can make a larger donation can also see an impact that they can make. And then you can see on the right-hand side that the Mighty Cause platform actually helps you to do this, you can customize your donation buttons so that they match the specific asks you've already described and it makes that donation process pretty seamless for the donor. So think about this, think about not just asking for a large block of funds but breaking it down, you don't need to have this many options but I would recommend thinking about at least two or three that you can put on your site so that there is a small donor option and a larger donor option and maybe an even larger donor option so anyone can see that no matter how little or how much they're able to give that they are making some impact and that can connect them further emotionally to your organization. Next. So it may be tempting when you're putting together your fundraising page and your email campaigns to block in, you know, paste in some text that has already been written, perhaps having been used in a grant proposal or some other report for your organization. But you may take a few minutes to sit back and think about what would you say if you only had a few minutes to tell someone about what your work means to you, what drives you, what inspires you in it. And I know all of your organizations have tremendous stories that I see you sharing on social media and in other ways that really help to make that emotional connection with donors. So it could be, for example, a particular rescue story, how the steps taken to bring an ape into your center. It could be that tremendous amount of pride of seeing an ape that you've cared for for years, finally ready to be released to return to the forest to live as he or she should have lived in the wild. It could be something about the tremendous dedication of your caregivers and staff, which we know that so many of them make sacrifices and are rarely committed to their apes. It could be something about a project that you're involved in to bring about change. And you really see a hopeful future where forests will be preserved and safe, where animals can be released back to the wild or something else. And that's a story that you can share as well. It doesn't necessarily have to be about a particular animal. Next. So here's just another example of one story that worked very well. And this is International Animal Rescue. I believe this was last year's Fundraising Campaign for Giving Day and it was to help us plant 20,000 trees. And you can see that there's a little video that they embedded in their page to tell the story of their campaign. And in the text of it, they wrote, $10 can help plant 10 trees. So it was very easy for someone who could only make a small donation to see a way that they could help. It wasn't focusing on a particular animal, but it was connecting with donors and giving them an easy way to make a donation that didn't have to be large. And that was their strategy for telling their story. And the strategy also helped them to get a number of unique donors. So the storytelling connected the strategy to winning the most unique donor leaderboard as well. These small donations do add up, so you'll welcome them as well as the large donations, but do give some consideration to your message and your story and how it may fit with your strategy as far as fundraising overall or how you wanna position yourself to win some of the prizes on the leaderboards or other prizes. If you'd like some feedback on your donation page, we're happy to do that. So please send an email and we're happy to look at it and give you some suggestions if you like. Ellen? All right, so we're just about done with the presentation. I just wanted to talk about follow-up for your campaign since that should be an important part of your strategy. And the reason that's such an important part of a fundraising strategy is that how quickly and how genuinely and how well donors are thanked after they make their donation to your organization actually predicts whether or not they are likely to come back and donate again. So this is something that's actually been studied. Usually you wanna keep it to 72 hours to give them a personalized appreciative thank you for making their donation. And after that point, you may have lost them. They may not feel that their donation was appreciated. So you wanna come up with a plan so that you can make sure that you contact your donors to thank them quickly and genuinely we do have the thank you message that you can embed into receipts. We have a thank you page. So that buys you a little bit of time that they do wanna hear directly from your organization especially if they are first time donors. And that donation, that first donation to your nonprofit or your sanctuary starts what we call the stewarding process which is how you build long lasting relationships with donors. And what that does is it ensures that this person is invested in your cause and they're gonna come back time and time and time again to help you when you need to be helped. And it also just provides donors with a really positive experience with your sanctuary and with Giving Day for Apes overall. So you wanna come up with a plan to thank donors after the giving event is over. And just some ideas for how to thank donors. Sending them an email within 24 hours is a really great idea. Again, they get their receipt. They see your thank you page but that is usually not enough. You wanna go the extra mile to make sure that they feel appreciated and that their donation has made an impact. If it's a large donor in particular I would say maybe over 50 or $100 of a personal email is definitely best. One thing if you have the capacity to do it is giving them a call on the phone. That's a really personal way. It's a little bit old school so sometimes we forget about it but getting a call from someone that says thank you so much for making the donation. It really helped us. Goes a long way in making people feel appreciated. And that's a really great job for volunteers too. So just get them some phone numbers, get them some names, tell them what to say and you can have a few volunteers knock out a lot of calls really quickly. And another thing you can do on a phone call that's a little bit harder to do with an email is coming up with some getting to know you questions, finding out how they heard about your campaign, how they came to you, if there was any part of the campaign that resonated with them that allows you to get to know them a little bit better so that you can be more specific in the future when you ask them for things. And then another thing that can be really easy but is really effective is sending them a thank you card that's signed by your staff or your executive director. And one thing that animal related organizations can do that's really cute is actually send them a thank you from an animal that you're caring for. Like as Jackie was mentioning, having bringing the actual apes that you care for into the process is really powerful for donors because they're all there supporting you because they care about animals. So that's another way you can get cute with a thank you is sending them a card or an email from one of the animals that's in your care. If you wanna be that cute, not all organizations are into that but that's another option as well. But even just your staff or executive director signing a thank you card with a short personal note goes a long way to make people feel appreciated for their donations. And the other thing that you wanna do really the last thing you wanna do is you want to close the loop. When somebody fundraises for any purpose and they don't report back on their results and they don't sort of end it in a formal way, it can feel really jarring and unsatisfying for the donor. So you also wanna make sure that you're closing the loop, you're reporting on your results. That is something you can do on social media. I recommend sending an email to your donors, send one to your whole list and also segment for any donors who gave in large amounts or volunteers or board of directors. Make sure that you're reporting on your results. Close the loop on any storytelling that you did. So for instance, if you had that ache named Steve, I don't know why I keep mentioning Steve, but if you had a Steve and your whole campaign was centered around his story and how you rescued him and his return to the wild, you can't just stop talking about Steve, you need to let people know how he's doing. So that may mean following up a few weeks later, it may even mean following up a few months later. But if I donate to your organization and I never hear about that animal again after you got me emotionally invested, that's not a good experience. So you wanna make sure that you follow up, especially if you're getting people emotionally invested like that. And also with the planting of trees, the example that Jackie gave, if you don't report back to them, they never found out if those trees were planted, that's a really bad experience for them. So you need to follow up and say, hey, your donations helped us do this thing that we said we were gonna do and that gives the donor a sense of satisfaction. And you wanna thank everybody again. Again, you can't thank donors too much. They want to feel appreciated and like their donation really helped. And then what you can also do as you're following up and closing the loop on your Giving Day for Apes campaign, if you are able to fundraise in the US on Mighty Cause outside of Giving Day for Apes, look forward to your next campaign. So if you're participating in Giving Tuesday on Mighty Cause, that would be a great time to say, hey, we have another campaign coming up in December and we want you to be involved in that as well or if you're doing a year-end campaign. So if you're fiscally sponsored, that might not be a great option for you, but if you're in the US or you have your own 501C3, that's definitely when you wanna start planting the seeds for your next campaign so that they are on the lookout for your next campaign and ready to help when you need them to help. All right, so that is it for the presentation. We've got some time to take some questions. So let me just take a look. It looks like there are no questions so far. So if you have something that you want to ask, you have my brain and Jackie's brain here to help you out. So just type that into the questions box of your go-to webinar panel and we will take your questions. So let's see, anyone? All right, let's just give everybody a few minutes. If you have something you wanna ask now is the time. This is the last webinar for Giving Day for Apes. So if you have a burning question or even just something that we went over in the webinar that you wanna go into more detail about, just type that into the questions box on the panel and we'll make the time for it. I have some question. Jackie, did you have anything that you wanted to expand on related to campaign strategy or just the Giving Day in general? Just as I said, we have time to ask questions now, but if you wanna send questions in an email afterwards, of course you can. We're happy to work with you and as I said, I'm happy to look over your pages and give some suggestions if there's something you really want us to take a look at. Yeah, and I'm always happy to take a look as well. If you have any technical questions, our support staff is here to support you as you get your campaign ready. So if there's anything with the Mighty Cause platform that is confusing to you or you're having a hard time with, our support staff is here for you. They're support at mightycause.com. That's the easiest way to reach them and they will send you a quick reply and help you do whatever you need to do. So they are also available to you and guys, don't be shy. This is the last webinar. So if you have a question, just type it into that box and we'll answer your question live. I don't wanna not answer any questions. So if you have something, just type it into that box. And I guess, definitely going to givingdayforapes.org and taking a look at the prize schedule that is up there now, it is live so that you can start getting some of this content created, schedule your emails, schedule your social media posts, get yourself ready for the day of and also be ready. You can make people aware of when power hours are when you start sending emails on Sunday and letting people know that donations are open. So make sure that you take a look at that rules and prizes page that you understand when your continents power hours are, what leader board you'll be on and so on and so forth. All right, so it doesn't look like we have any questions. So I don't wanna take up everybody's time but as Jackie mentioned, if you have something that you think of after the webinar is over just contact me or her or both of us and we will be happy to talk it over with you. So thanks Jackie for co-hosting this webinar with me. Yeah, absolutely. So we will have the recording and slides up on the givingdayforapes site in the nonprofit toolkit just as soon as I'm able to upload it to YouTube so that you can share it with any staff members or volunteers who are helping you out with your campaign. And with that, I will bid you adieu. Thank you so much for coming and spending an hour with us to have our last webinar. Thanks. Thank you.