 Welcome to 5 Quick and Easy Innovations for Fundraising Season. We are joined today by Peggy DuVette and David Guilhoeffa from NetSuite. And I'll do a quick introduction of myself before starting with them. My name is Becky Wiegand and I'm the Webinar Program Manager here at TechSoup. I've been with the organization for 6 years. And prior to that, I spent a decade working for small nonprofits in Washington D.C. and Oakland, California. I'm glad to be your host today. Also joining us will be Peggy DuVette who has been a thought leader in social change and technology for over 10 years. As the Director of Social Impact at NetSuite, she is responsible for the donation of the NetSuite products to nonprofits globally, which they do through their TechSoup donation program. We'll talk a bit about that today as well. Previously, she was the Executive Director of WiserEarth and she has been responsible for growing an online community of over 80,000 people and a directory of 115,000 nonprofits working toward sustainability and social justice issues around the world. Also joining us is David Guilhoeffa. He focuses on the intersection of technology and social change. In his 20-year career in nonprofit technology, he's included working on running the Eastmont Computing Center over in Oakland and also being one of the founding team members behind CIVI CRM. He currently leads Corporate Citizenship for NetSuite. So we're glad to have them joining us today. You'll also see on the back end assisting with chat, Ali Bestikian, an interactive events and video producer here at TechSoup. She'll be there to grab your questions and help you with any technical issues. Looking at today's agenda, I'll do a really quick introduction of TechSoup for those of you who aren't familiar with who we are. We'll spend a couple of minutes doing some polls to learn a little bit more about your expertise and background. And we'll talk about these different areas of implementations that you can do to help increase your fundraising before the end of the year. We'll have time for Q&A, so feel free to ask us any questions throughout the webinar, and we'll try and make time for those toward the end. TechSoup is a 501c3 nonprofit, and we're working toward the day when every nonprofit, library, social benefit organization on the planet has the access to technology knowledge and resources to operate at their full potential. In doing that, we work with more than 200,000 charitable organizations in more than 60 countries around the world, and we've been doing it since 1987. And that is done through a variety of capacities including the donation programs on TechSoup.org as well as providing informational resources like these webinars, articles, blog posts, all kinds of things. So if you're not familiar with us, please join us at TechSoup.org to learn more. Diving into the topic of the day go ahead and click on your screen and let us know sort of how you would self-identify as far as your personal technology expertise is concerned. Are you a beginner in tech? Are you intermediate? Maybe you're familiar? Maybe you have responsibilities for performing some tech administration in your office. I often identified as the accidental techie, meaning that I was the one that had to make a lot of the decisions but didn't have formal training. So maybe I would identify as intermediate. I knew the lingo but not necessarily the way to do it. Are you more advanced? Or feel free to chat in the comments if you have your own way that you'd prefer to self-identify when it comes to your technology expertise. And this will help our presenters better speak to the majority of the audience on the line if we see a trend here in responses. So I'll give just a couple more seconds for this question to be answered. Click those radio buttons on your screen. And it looks like we've got about 63, 64% identify as intermediate and about 23% identify as more advanced. So for the couple of you who've responded other, feel free to comment in the chat with what that means to you. And a handful of people who identify as total beginners. So we'll make sure in the context of this webinar we'll be looking at different processes and strategies that sort of start at the basics and move up to more advanced topics. So there should be something in here for everyone and we hope that you'll get a lot out of it either way. But we want to make sure that people are comfortable with definitions. So if there's anything you don't understand in the process or in what we talk about, feel free to chat into us and we'll answer those questions. Next question, what have you implemented at your organization personally, meaning you yourself? What of these things have you either built out or helped design or developed or launched? If maybe you didn't have to develop it and out of the box you were able to implement, click on the things that you have personally helped run. And while you click on those answers, maybe folks don't know what some of these are either. So a website, we all know what a website means. But online donations, having the ability to process donations directly on your website, take payment. Responsive design is having a website that responds to the different devices that are viewing that website. So if you access a website on a mobile phone or on a tablet, the website will respond to that design automatically. And so have you implemented that? Landing pages are just those kind of hub pages that we might built out in a site. And then microsites are kind of what we would consider maybe subsites or sites within your site that might have specific functions. So go ahead and click on those things. And if you've done none, I didn't actually include an option for none of the above or all of the above. So you can feel free to chat into us if those would apply to you. Wendy comments, I have a small amount of experience in different areas and I've learned how to call the advanced people. That in itself is a skill and no doubt. We know that you can't see all of the comments that come into the chat window. So if there are any that are particularly useful to everyone, we'll make sure to share those back out with you. So skipping to the results here, it looks like about 85% of you have implemented personally your website. So that's terrific. And about 62% have helped set up or completely set up online donations. We do have quite a few people in the comments that are mentioning that they have done none of the above. And a couple of people also asking questions about what about social media. So today we won't get too much into social media except how it interacts with your website and some of these other implementations that online donations where you might be using social media to send people to that. So we won't be talking about social media too much today. One other quick question and then we'll get into the topic, what is your current website technology? So the website that you have, if you have one, is it based on just an HTML hard-coded website? Do you have an installed content management system, one that you've had to download and run locally? Do you have a hosted content management system? Meaning that it's a third party runs that and you go to the web and just have to be on the Internet to access and update it. Or maybe you don't have a website yet and it's okay also to just say you don't know. So we'll give just a few seconds for people to respond to that. And again, all of this helps inform our presenters so that they can better speak to your needs today and to your expertise and responses. So it looks like the majority of the folks on the line who have responded so far have a hosted content management system, almost half. And another 18% have a content management system that's maybe an installed system and about the same aren't sure. And there's 13% that are still kind of stuck under an HTML or hard-coded website so we want to help you get off of that. Aaron asks, is WordPress a hosted content management system? It really depends because there is an installed version and there is also an online version. So it depends on which one you have. It could be either, but it is a content management system. It just depends on whether you're running the installed or you're using the web app. So with that I'd like to go ahead and bring our first presenter on the line and welcome Peggy DuVette to join us to tell us a little bit about how you can run these innovations that can help you raise some funds and have a better system to succeed with your organization. Welcome Peggy. We're so glad to have you on the program. Thank you, Becky. David and I are thrilled to be here today to share some of our best practices. Traditional fundraising methods such as direct mail campaigns, looking on doors, are still a very effective way of soliciting contributions. However, a well-designed website can generate much more funds than you can expect. Today David and I will demonstrate how online fundraising can be easy even if you don't have the technical skills. So what we will discuss is what we need. You obviously need a website. You need to ask for donation on your website and make it prominent. You need to ensure you address mobile users and have a responsive design. You need to deliver a targeted message with specific landing pages. And finally, you need to run targeted campaigns with microsites. So we'll cover all those topics today. Let's talk about the web first. Did you know that 87% of American adults are currently using the Internet? I mean, our non-public website is your home on the Internet. It's really your digital space. Yet so many nonprofits allow for their website to fall into obscurity. This can be due to a lack of priority, to a lack of a good content management system, or even a lack of technical knowledge for some of us. But what are the benefits of having a website or even movable online presences? A website is a great platform to communicate with your key audience and show your impact. You can easily set up a website and update it, not to mention that websites are pretty cheap and sometimes free. You can also achieve your key communications and inspire and use images and really create relationships with your audience. We all know that Internet giving is expanding, so we know that we do need to be there. Having a website also requires you to communicate effectively to build a awareness about your cause and generate donations. You need to be clear and consistent in your messaging. You need to use simple language and compelling images. That language might be fair depending on who you talk to. The board member or major donor will most likely need a very specific call of action and really understand the impact of their potential donation as a matter of fact. Your communication needs to appeal in order to attract attention and inspire donors to make that donation. And most importantly, every communication we create should strengthen the relationship with our potential donors. Donations are all about relationships after all. Once you learn how to communicate effectively you need to be very strategic about the timing of your communications. 30% of annual giving occurs in December and 10% of annual giving occurs on the last three days of the year. So I just give you a brief overview of the importance of having a web presence. And we show from the poll that a lot of you have actually implemented websites. But David will now demonstrate how to get started with a website. Thanks Peggy. So most folks already have a website. And in getting started with a website we are really talking about this in the context of what you can do this month. So even if you have a website or you are a more advanced user keep in mind we are talking about things that you can do in a couple of weeks. So it is going to be fairly basic by nature. So there are really two approaches here. What can you do in a couple of weeks? And then there is also the intermediate approach of kind of let's take the time to think about this and do it. So if you are interested in driving into the intermediate approach we tend to send you to resources to go read up on. You are not going to be able to get it done in two weeks, but it gives you the right context for how you are doing it. So this resource that Idealware has, two workbooks, you need a new website implementing a new website planning your approach are great starting points for figuring out kind of the longer term path. But today we are going to focus on just the basics. And there are really two things that you need to do something really quick in two weeks. One is you need the right technology. So most of you already have content management systems. Today we are going to be demonstrating things with content management system that is available on TechSoup called Light CMS, but everything that we demonstrate will be just as relevant in your content management system. So if we show you how to create a landing page and it has these steps, all you have to do is go figure out how to do those steps in the content management system that you already have. So the first piece is the technology. The second piece is basic skills. And so for most modern content management systems you really don't need to know HTML or you need to code. But you do have to have basic computer literacy, understanding the pointing and clicking process, understanding to have instruction. And then finally, if you have both of those things, you can get something like a website or any of the other things we are going to talk to today in let's say a couple of weeks if you are just starting out, a couple of hours if you are not. So let's go to the first step. So the first step is always setting up your new website. This is where kind of hosted content management systems are really useful. If you want to have a very easy way to essentially get a free trial, so whatever system you are using, in Light CMS you fill out a few fields, you hit submit, and then you have your website that is a pre-built template that you can use. So the next step is to actually pick among a set of templates. Again, big feature for your content management systems is make sure you have that choice of templates to move through. Templates if you want the quick and easy version have to be kind of accepted as they are. Most systems will allow you to customize it, add your own HTML, add your own CSS. But you need to be aware that as soon as you go down that path, you are often to be intermediate and not in the path of what you can do in a couple of weeks. I always like to remind nonprofits that if you can do something in a default way and get it to work, so this is whether you are doing a database, or a website, or a direct mail, or anything else. You can do it in the default way and get it to work. Then you know it has value for your organization. You can go and invest a little bit more time away from that aside. The next step after you pick your template is editing the content. And really in most content management systems, it's as simple as looking at sample text. So this is an example from like GMS. On the left you see the template has a piece of text that has meaningless words in it. You click text, settings, and then you can start editing the text, which is the next step. Most content management systems are going to provide you with a nice little box where all you do is edit the text. Don't worry about the HTML. It's like a word processor and you just make the system work. This is no HTML required. This is something where if your content management system allows you to create a site like this, you can literally just pick the template you like, replace the text in the images, the editing processes for images are usually exactly the same. Click on the image, hit the edit button. And then you have ultimately the website you're looking for. This is an example of an organization that does primarily Coke donations. And they have a very simple, straightforward, but beautiful web presence. One next kind of extra step is setting up the domain. I always like to end on the easy part, but the domain stuff always gets you a little bit more difficult. So most content management systems, hosted content management systems will give you a domain. So for example, like GMS it's this net-sweet.org.publish-path.com. And people could access that, but ultimately you'd want to use your own domain. And so the system provides a way to get into the settings to simply create your new domain. And then the last step is this little instruction down at the bottom. This is the same for every website. You're going to have to go contact the people that sold you the domain, your domain name registrar, to make sure that all the numbers are entered in the right place. And your website actually shows up. Back to you Peggy. So now that we learned how to reset up a site life, thank you David. We're ready to talk about setting a donation page. The online giving trends are growing according to the BlackBot index. It makes about 7% of total giving and is growing at 14% compared to 5% from offline giving. Last night I was just reading about the results of Giving Tuesdays that just happened two days ago. And it marks the busy season for nonprofits especially for fundraiser and marketers. The Giving Tuesdays donation were up this year to 36% compared to last year. This was the third year it was held and the results continued to be extremely positive. BlackBot, I believe, processed more than 26 million just two days ago. And there was also an increase in the number of nonprofits that were reaching 15% wider reach of nonprofits. And the reason I wanted to mention Giving Tuesdays is to highlight specific fundraising opportunities and we'll also talk about the timing of your fundraising in general. So you can raise money at any time obviously anywhere when you have an online page and it has a scope of outreach. You can extend your donor base and leverage social media. You can easily adjust your appeals and have faster access to your donated funds. You get fixable reporting and get all the contact information of your donors. And you can do A-B testing. A-B testing is a simple way to test changes to one of your page against a trend design and determine which one produced the positive results so that drives more donations. I want to use the example of the Wikipedia Foundation that mastered this over the years. Last year I think for the 2013 statistics, they received approximately 32 millions from online fundraising banners. Keep in mind that they are fundraising in around 50 countries I believe. They receive donations in 20 different currencies. But the team created and tested around 250 different banners using the A-B testing methods. So this is obviously quite a lot. But for smaller-than-profit, you can slowly do A-B testing in just a few banners and this will dramatically increase the number of clicks through your donation page. Here's the list of attributes for a stronger donation page. You need to let everyone know that you are actively fundraising. Make it visible. Email your contact list, announce it on social media, put a banner on the homepage of your website. Your donation button needs to be big and obvious. I can't emphasize that enough. Put a large donate button at the top of every page of your website. When a potential donor clicks on that button, don't make them log in or create an account. They should be able to start and complete that donation in one to two pages. Two years ago when I was running my nonprofit Wiser had a very embarrassing moment. One of our major donors that was one in the Bay Area sent an email to my board share complaining that he had not found a donation button on our website. He wanted to make a donation. He had not found the donation button. I mean you can imagine how embarrassed I was. Another important piece around your donation page is the story you tell. It is so crucial. You can try different variations of your story to see which elicits the best response. And you can be sure to directly ask the reader for donation after they read your story. It's obvious, but once you donate a certain donation, you should encourage them to share the news of their donation on Facebook, on Twitter. And when they can see that they have supported you they are much more likely to donate as well. You should also show gratitude for donations through timely emails and letters. Help the donor understand that the money is being used and is treating an impact and effect on the world. And always give them the opportunity to get further involved in your call. Every once in a while, you know, write a letter and express your thank you. Also giving the donors the option of making recurring donations is important. It reach out to them again the next time you run a fundraising campaign. At my nonprofit at Wiser, we had this tool where we would thank any U.S. donor within 24 hours of their donation. But this was just one of the many other things that they would receive. We would always thank our donor at least six times before we would ask for donation. So we would thank them early within the first 24 hours. We would thank them often. And we would thank them accurately. We were very specific on why the donation had treated an impact so we would demonstrate an impact. This is an example of a very compelling donate page. The last transformation features here a photograph of a cancer survivor with part of the community. You feel an immediate connection with that potential donor. It's visible. It's easy. And I think it's pretty clear that we can all see the call of action here, donate. So now I want to pass it on to David who is going to demonstrate how to create a donation page and receive donation on like CMS. David Thanks Peggy. So whenever I hear Peggy go through the whys of things and all the different things you can do, I always feel like a small organization I would get overwhelmed. Wow, this is a huge list of things. So this is why our demo pieces are really about the basics. We are talking about just the technology and the basic skills. If you want to get deeper into it, Idealware has a great primer for online donation tools. But what we are focusing on is really just the technology and the basic skills to get something up in a couple of weeks. So first step for setting up an online donation provider is to set up your payment provider. Now whatever system you are using, whatever tool you already have, you may already have a payment provider set up. Some content management systems may include payments. So something like LightCMS because it includes e-commerce actually has the payment provider set up. And again, you are hearing a theme we are pushing you toward hosted kinds of solutions because those tend to be just point and click that is not complicated. So like TMS here you see we have Stripe, we have PayPal payments, and it is really a matter of clicking on these things, following the instructions. Keep in mind you are going to have to go out to that payment provider and provide them with a bank account, some other stuff before you can take that information and put it into your content management system and have it work. The next stage is to set up your payment page once you have a payment provider set up. So again a lot of different ways of doing this depending on which solution you are using. If you are using something like LightCMS one of the easiest ways is to look for a form builder. And so this is an example of a LightCMS form builder and you would build a donation page pretty simply. You would drag the name over, you drag the email over, you drag the donation box over, and the system itself is going to keep track of linking it to the payment provider and things like that. The other option is to add code to your page. So if you don't have a form builder or you can't access a solution that does have existing donation one pages, you can always use code from your payment provider. So PayPal is the most common version of this. You will simply set up your payment provider and then get the code by cutting and pasting HTML. So this is one of those areas where you actually kind of have to be able to recognize what HTML is. But the instructions generally are so straightforward that you don't even really need to know what's in the code. You just need to make sure you copy the whole block from the front to the back and you put it in your content management system properly. The last step is things that people often forget, which is just testing, right? Make a $10 payment, get a friend to donate, and then watch them. And you will avoid somebody sending your board chair a call saying they can't find the donation button because you will have seen your friend not find the donation button first. Back to you Peggy. Thank you David. Obviously the donation page is arguably the most important part of our website so it's so important to test. Now I would like to talk about meeting where your donors are. 58% of American adults have smartphones, which I have not realized when I found that statistics. And according to this recent study, 91% of all people on Earth have a mobile phone. 50% of mobile phone users use mobile as the primary internet source. And 72% of tablet owners purchase online from the tablet every week. So this key that we start developing website that has a responsive design. So let me be sure first what is responsive design. I understand there's quite a lot of intermediate users here, but I'll just take a few seconds. Responsive design refers to a website design that adapts to whatever device your target audience is using. It targets the width of each user's web browser to determine how much space is available and how the website should get displayed. Statistics currently show that mobile users will surpass desktop users by the end of the year. And did you know that smartphone users shake the devices 150 times a day? Maybe kind of that, if they could click on that donate button just one time in a day? Glad for just to release a study a few months ago, they made a non-profit and responsive design. They studied over 105 non-profits. And one of the top findings was that responsive websites had significant better conversion. And also donors were 34% more likely to make a donation from a website that was responsive. But why are correction rates important anyway? Well, when you get a donation page that does not result in a donation, it's often an indicator that your potential donor intended on giving but changed their mind. So the question could be, what conversion should I expect from my own donation page? According to this study, the average conversion rate from all organizations was on 9%. However, the organization, the top 10 organizations that have responsive designs had a conversion rate of 33%. That's a pretty ambitious goal. But yet I think it's something that all organizations should consider. So I briefly expressed here a few benefits of responsive design, higher conversion rate. But you also increase the readership of your content. You can better communicate and raise money on any devices. It allows you to improve on your basics when you try to inspire and bring your cause more visible. It's so short. And again, it allows you to create a stronger relationship with the potential donor. And when I think of responsive design, I mean I obviously think about the website. I also think about when you send newsletters, you know, it's usually newsletter formatting two or three columns. You know, really think about that. But also most importantly, I think of the donation page that needs to be responsive too. So we'll have now David demonstrate how to set up the responsive design with ICMS. Great. So at this point everybody on the webinar is probably sensing the pattern, right? We're doing the basic approach quick and easy, but we're trying to point you at resources that if you want to take a deeper dive you can. So TechSoup recently did a webinar optimizing your website for mobile devices. So they can have enough time to do content that we can't cover here. But we're going to shoot at that basic approach which is really about having the right technology to provide responsive design. So again, more likely to be a hosted content management system. And having the basic skills, the ability to point and click and kind of understand what you're going toward, can get you a responsive website quite quickly. So the first step is really just to pick a template in these systems. So this is like CMS you see on the screen. The responsive templates have a little mobile icon down there on the right-hand side. The non-responsive design don't. So again if your hosted solution doesn't have responsive design templates then there's really no quick and easy way for you to provide a responsive design to your constituencies without actually knowing HTML or bringing somebody into the process. So in like CMS you just pick the template. The next step is to actually hit click that little apply button. One of the nice things about any kind of system like CMS is when you click each of the templates it will show you a preview. Basically you can just keep clicking until you find the one you like, then you click apply, and then literally that is your live website. So you just need to verify that everything looks good. This is an organization that uses like CMS for their whole website. But one of the key things is if you're using that quick and easy approach the only thing you can do really is to apply a template because you're not going to be able to get into HTML and do the hard, heavy lifting. You have to check and make sure that that template applied throughout your site correctly. But didn't you just refer to the template that worked for you? Back to you, Payne. Thank you, David. No way what we want to talk about is segmenting the messaging to your donors. With technology we have an increasingly stronger potential to better understand who we serve and more specifically utilize that data throughout the giving lifecycle of your donors and potential donors. Different donors respond to different things and segmenting your donors allows you to communicate with messages that resonates the most for each specific donor. So the question is how can we segment our donors? The most common segmentation is that gift amount. Communication to a donor that gives you like $5 is going to be very different in tone and tenor than the communication with a donor that gives you a million dollars. You also tend to have a different color of action when you target your major donor. So segmentation usually falls into two buckets, either segmentation by attributes or by personality. So for example, a gift amount will be an example of an attribute. Personality segmentation will refer to some personal preferences. Maybe a donor that likes going to events or a donor that might be dedicated to a specific cause or to one of your programmatic areas. Once you understand how you want to segment your donors, you can personalize your communication on the landing page. Your small donor might get a landing page that highlights the impact of a $10 donation. Your major donor will get a landing page highlighting obviously the impact of a $1000 donation. So it also depends on how you define what a major donor is your own organization. So you have this ability to deliver multiple messages. In addition to that, you can also track performances. Each landing page will have a distinct URL so you can measure the traffic and see how efficient it is. And around your social media, you can then have specific social media strategy or targeted one strategy depending on who you're going after. And I want to show a little anecdote here on some of my experiments when I was leading my nonprofit. Around three years ago, we had around $200 unique donors. And the board challenged me to really increase our donor base. So we sat down and made a strategic decision to increase our donor base by at least 50% in two months which felt like something unachievable. We had a very large membership base. It was global, but they did not donate. Our members did not donate. They believe in the free service that we were offering. So we decided together to do a geographical segmentation and specifically target members that were located in Asia. And the way we did it is we asked for a symbolic $1 donation. And we told them if you believe in the mission of WISERF, donate $1 today. So what did that do? That allowed us to go from 200 unique donors to a standing number of 550 unique donors in two months. No, did I want my major donors to see that campaign and give me $1? Certainly not. So this was a very specific campaign with the geographic segmentation. And then we had a peer lending page and a peer social media strategy. So now I'd like to pass it on to David who's going to walk us through the lending page. So lending pages are, again, we could do a whole webinar on them. And so we recommend you go take a look at this Media Cause article if you want to get into the details. But we're going to really focus on the basics. What can you do in a couple of hours to get a landing page out? What are the critical pieces? So the technology is critical. You have to be able to copy and paste existing pages in your website essentially. So you need technology that supports that. And then hopefully you and you have those basic skills, non-HTML skills pull something on. So unlike CMS, really it's kind of as simple as creating a page just like you would create any new page. Almost every content management system makes this really easy with a little plus button or something like that. Once you get into that page, for a landing page it actually becomes really important that you set up your page title correctly because you're going to have lots of landing pages. So let's say I'm focusing on different segments of donors and I'm focusing on my donors in Asia like Peggy was mentioning. And I have a landing page where all the content is maybe in Vietnamese. And I have another landing page where it's in English. And I might have 10, 20 landing pages for different purposes. Naming becomes really important. Not only does it become really important because you just need to keep track of between all these things, but if you're using that same URL in social media, or if you're using that same URL in emails, that name should tell the donor that they're going someplace that makes sense. It shouldn't be some gobbledygook. Still on this page, once you've got your page title in light CMS, you would actually copy and paste just like a word processor, your previous page into the box. And then the other kind of key thing for any kind of hosted content management system if you're doing a landing page is you need to make sure these don't show up in your menus. So you can imagine if I put up five or six or seven landing pages and they show up in my menus, it just doesn't make any sense for anybody that's just navigating the website. In light CMS, you just mark it as a hidden page. The last kind of step here is to track the performance. Again, in almost all hosted content management systems, there will be a little link in light CMS. It's called stats there on the right. You click on that and it will tell you how many visitors you've had your webpage and what the referrers are and things like that. If you need more advanced capabilities like tracking people from social media to your webpage to a donation, maybe to other sites, then you're going to need something like Google Analytics. And again, you want to look for your hosted platform to make it really easy to put the Google Analytics code. And that's what you see at the bottom of the screen. Just cut and paste the Google Analytics code and it's live on your whole website. Back to you, Peggy. So we talked about how to track performances right into the landing page. Now what we want to also cover is the use of microsites. A lot of you have already a website, a nonprofit website. And I wouldn't be surprised if they suffer from kind of the multiple personality disorder. You know, you have the program inside of your nonprofit that wants to tell the amazing way your programs have said the homeless pets or empower the woman. Then maybe you have events, people in nonprofits that try to sell tickets. Then you have the fundraisers that want to share the real story. And the bottom line is it's really not an easy task when the messaging is only one part of a huge multi-dimensional nonprofit. So a microsite is a very effective marketing tool that can be used for targeted campaigns. We often all have websites, but sometimes we'll set up a quick microsite so that it can help a new program or a specific campaign in a unique way while keeping the core brand of the nonprofit. As I mentioned earlier, nonprofits tend to have a solid website and it may be time consuming to get it updated on time for the campaign that you're trying to do, especially if you're talking now December. You could easily set up a microsite, deploy your campaign quickly and make it on time because remember it's all about timing. Since each microsite has a unique URL, it's easier to track and you also get the benefits of search engine optimization. When you combine with the network of other microsites, your nonprofit online footprint certainly increase and this leads to higher search ranking and more successful organic search marketing results. I also want to share that microsites are great experimental dreams if you go back to this A-B testing method that I was talking about because you can then test what business is the most with your donor. But one thing I want to pose ourselves is a microsite right for you. I mean there is no question that microsites allow you to typically tell a story of a single coupling issue. You can get them up and running in a few days or weeks. You can gather new supporters for your calls and it's a great way to mobilize potentially new supporters as well. But I wouldn't just jump into the microsite bangwagon just because others are doing it. I would ask myself, do I have a sensor urgency? And then if you do make sure that you have a very specific topic or campaign that needs specialized attention. So you're willing to set aside time and effort to make it happen. So David, why don't you show us how to set it up? Great. So like always we start with a little referral into an article on the N10 site that's got a great overview of microsites for folks that don't need to get something up in a week. But we're going to focus on how do you get a microsite up in a week? And I think Peggy's point is very well taken which is this may not be for you to test it, figure it out. And then for the organizations that might be bigger organizations where you have like a web brand standard and things like that, clearly you're not going to get a website, a microsite up in the next week. But it actually might be a great way to test things and build the case internally for ideas. So the first thing you need is technology. It's technology that allows you to create these multiple sites under URLs very quickly and you need to have the skills to actually pull it off. So the first step is of course setting up the new website. We already went through this with a system like LightCMS, WordPress.com, anything else that is a good hosted solution. It's generally a couple of clicks just to get a simple site up. It makes it a lot easier as a microsite because you will mainly have three or four pages. But we already went through the process. Create your site, select your template, edit the content a bit differently, set up your analytics. What I will point out is in most hosted systems, or one thing you want to look for in a hosted system is the ability to do your own template. So for example in LightCMS you can actually create your own template and then apply it on an ongoing basis to new sites which then keeps you inside the brand standard. Next step and the last step for a microsite is I just got my template up. Now I got to go put in my content and potentially modify it. Really the best way to set up your microsite content is to take your content from your core mission, from your main website, and tailor it. So if you are an environmental organization, you are talking about stewardship. Your basic stewardship mission is the same. But your microsite might be focused on elephant habitats. And another microsite might be focused on lion habitats. Much of the content is going to be the same, but you are going to have a picture of elephant on one and a lion on the other. You are going to have a little bit of content that is unique to what that donor cares about when they are starting to hit that microsite and interact with it and starting to take action. And a lot of times with a microsite you will also add that donation page. So really getting a microsite up is as simple as a couple of hours as long as you have the right tool that you are building off of. And that tool actually doesn't have to be related to the existing tools that you have in your organization. Back to you Peggy. Thank you David. So today what we were trying to achieve is demonstrate that if you have a current website and it's obsolete, you can still create websites on the side, create different landing pages, and also create microsites that are responsive design. So you can really increase the chance of acquiring more donors and also getting access to donors to support you during your course this December. And we also wanted to share the importance of adding permanent donation button. And remember to ask because again you could have the best system in the world. You could have a great kind of management system, but if you don't ask or you don't want to donate this will not happen. And one thing I wanted to share is that the demo obviously that we've done was based on the LightCMS which is a website management tool that requires no software to install and no service to maintain. So I will now pass it on to Becky so she can talk a little bit about the TechSoup program. Thank you Peggy and thank you David for sharing all of these resources. And really if you have a website and you're just looking to make improvements, there are so many tools out there that can be added on or plugged in that can help you do some of those things. And for those of you who don't have a site and don't have these capabilities, I think LightCMS is a great option that's available. It is donated by NetSuite and so there is a $60 admin fee that's paid to TechSoup and that's to help us continue to operate our programming. And you can find it on our website under techsoup.org-net-suite which I chatted out earlier and it is their LightCMS product. And you can see that it is an online product. So it's something that you just go to the website and create your account once you've gotten your donation of it and you can then create your own website. So we'll include links to this in the follow-up email for those of you who might be interested in looking more specifically at this product. But we hope that you'll be able to apply some of the ideas that we talked about today to whatever system you have and whatever site you have. So if you have any questions, feel free to chat those into the window. We have a couple already so I'll go ahead and ask. And one of them, just following up on the microsites, and I guess this would be best for Peggy. So Janet asked, will social media folks be able to find microsites again if you're pointing them to it from social media and it's not part of the overall site menu? Because a couple of the examples you had were different versions of the same site maybe in a different language or maybe for a specific cause or focus. How do people find microsites? Is it really up to you to just make it visible? How does that work? That's a great question. Thank you, Janet, for asking that. From my experience, what we used to do is we'll trade the microsite and really reach out to the audience that we were looking after. And then in terms of social media, you direct them to that specific URL that's dedicated so that's their way to come back. One of the things you can do is you potentially from your main current website because I hear a lot of you guys have websites. You could put a link into the microsite or you could totally make it independent. I had used the example of my one-donor symbolic campaign. In this case, we tried to really separate it because we did not want to confuse the donor based. So basically to answer your questions, I think it's part of the work is once you create the microsite, you also have to do the marketing and outreach strategy around it so people can start talking about it on social media. Great. We also have a question from Nora also for Peggy. What percentage of your $1 donors stayed on as donors the following year? What did they get in return for making that dollar donation the first time that would make them want to come back? Oh, that's a great question. Thank you, Nora. And this is where I think we may have failed. Out of those, so we had around what, 250 new donors? I would say only 40% and actually came back the next year. So the problem we had in that case is we put so much focus on trying to get those new donors. We didn't have a clear strategic kind of a ladder engagement for those donors. And we also know that we had a lot of people from India and Bangladesh and it was to have them to make more money was going to be hard. So what we actually decided to do is to help us increase the number of unique dollars but we engage them in volunteering. So one of the byproducts of that $1 awareness campaign was that we increase also a volunteer base for from around 60 volunteers the following year to 150 volunteers. So from that $1 donation then we ask, well, would you be interested in volunteering? Would you be interested in starting a WISO local in Bangladesh? So that's the way we engage them. But I have to say I think we could have done a much better job in terms of that ladder engagement than trying to help them move up in terms of their donation amount. Well, it's great though that you were able to not only get 40% return which even if it could have been better but you also got those volunteers committed to working more for the cause and supporting your organization. And the more you bring them in the more you can recruit them to further give and further donate time and resources and get their family and friends to give. So it is a good way to step them up the ladder. There's a question from Pamela and I guess I'll direct this one to David. I'm a nonprofit media entity or I work with or for providing daily radio podcasts and each day has a different theme. Would I look at a microsite for each theme? What do you think about that idea? So I think the first thing I'd ask is how much traffic, right? Because it's cost-benefit. And then also ask the question how much traffic both at the podcast and then ongoing. So for example, if you do a microsite that is very targeted to the topic of each one of those themes. It has imagery. It's optimized for search engine optimization so we're into the intermediate piece. So go read that NTEN article on microsites and I think it will help frame this a little bit. But if it's search engine optimized that may actually be an incredibly valuable gateway because people will come to it by, hey, I'm using hopelessly simple examples, but I did my webinar on elephants. I landed on the Elefant microsite and now I want to learn more and now I go off into your main property and I might affiliate then with your organization beyond just the topic of your specific piece. So I could totally see a strategy but my question would be how much traffic and I'd experiment, measure, and decide whether it's worth the work. Great advice right there. I always want to test it and see how it's working. Evaluate along the way. So we have just a couple minutes left so I'll get to one other question quickly. So Jeff asked, I read in a Wall Street Journal article that Facebook will be filtering posts that point to websites. We don't have a marketing budget to spend on advertising. So how do I push people to our donate page from a site like Facebook if it's going to be filtering us out? So I'll take the answer on that without really having an answer which is a lot of the social media gateways are linking things to revenue. So for example, in Facebook if they choose, so two things are going to happen. One is they're not going to completely filter it out but they're going to use some kind of algorithm and you're going to have to go figure out what's happening. So you might post something on Facebook one day and get 10 people to your donate page and you might post it on the next day and get one person in your donate page because they're filtering things out. What Facebook is trying to do is get you to buy Facebook ads to your microsite or to buy sponsored content. Now if you absolutely don't have that capability then you're going to have to do one of two things. One is you're going to have to go to a different platform that is not driving you to a monetized solution or the alternative is you can be smarter than machines. You don't have to have the full URL in there. You can put in, hey visit us at our website blah blah blah blah dot com. If people remember way back in the battle days when we tried to avoid spanners by writing your email address as name, AT, organization, DOT, com, you could do that and try to play the game. But I think this is just a big problem that you have very little control over and you just have to be aware of what the platform is trying to monetize and you have to adapt. I think we have a list of a bunch of blogs we like in the back. If you keep up with the blogs they'll tell you what's happening on Facebook because it's so dominant a communication message. And if I may add, I think Matt if I may add is Facebook currency photos and pictures, right? So one of the things you could do is you manipulate the photo and put the URL inside that picture. Yeah and then if you get your community to share it for you then hopefully it will get through to their communities. So with that we've got to go ahead and wrap up since we're at the top of the hour. But I would invite you to join us at techsoup.org slash community if you have additional questions that you'd like to ask and we can have our experts there help answer those. So look at these other resources that were mentioned really quickly. Links that were shared in this webinar these will be also shared in the follow-up email. And then the favorite blogs this will be sent out in the follow-up email as well. And this is where you can help, you can see lots of articles and resources that can help you monitor sort of the changes that are going on out there in the social media world that can help you optimize how you best leverage those for your own organization. With that I'd like to thank our presenters, Peggy so much. Thank you. David also thank you for your participation today and for sharing your insight. I'd like to invite our audience to join us for our upcoming webinars. Next week we'll be talking about Tech Predictions for 2015 and what things to watch out for, what things to maybe sit back and not invest in right now as a nonprofit and join us to hear more about that. If you are with the library we'll be talking about websites on a budget, what kinds of tools and tips you can garner in improving your own website if you're joining from a library. And if you're new to TechSoup and would like to learn more about our technology donation programs you can join us on December 18th for that. Thank you lastly to ReadyTalk our webinar sponsor which provides the use of ReadyTalk 500 for us to present these webinars to you on a weekly basis. Please take a moment to complete the post-event survey when your screen closes and continue to help us improve your webinar programming. Thank you so much everyone and have a terrific day. Bye-bye.