 Alright, I think we're ready to get started. I want to start off by thanking everyone for joining us today. This is going to be a good chance for us to start to close out the year and think about what we have coming up in the next year. We're going to kick off our presentation in just a few moments here. As we go through, we're going to be talking about Giving Tuesday, the big marathon fundraising event that a lot of our organizations have gone through, and we'll be thinking about the role of Giving Tuesday in an overall engagement architecture. And as we continue through that, we'll talk about the campaign context for Giving Tuesday, what it takes to run a Giving Tuesday campaign, and we'll proceed into lessons learned from this year and years past and talk about practical steps in terms of improving the outcomes of future fundraising efforts, in particular, thinking about the platform implications of that. So as we begin, I'll introduce myself first. I'm Stefan Byrd Krueger. I'm the head of the data strategy practice at Parsons TKO. We look at organizations and we look at their audience engagement capabilities. And a big part of that is understanding how we can use data around those capabilities. And that's a big part of what we do in our consulting work. In our consulting work, we help these organizations understand what those audience relationships look like at scale and often through a data lens. Joining me today, we have two of our consultants, Kimberly Rollins, who comes to us with a wealth of background, having spent years as a major gift officer in the nonprofit sector, and as well as John Harrison, who leads some of our largest consulting projects, including and especially with development clients on development projects. So as we get their perspectives, we're going to talk a little bit about the major context for fundraising efforts, and particularly the Super Bowl of fundraising that is giving Tuesday. I'll talk first a little bit about what that looks like and where it fits in an organization's broader context. And then we'll hand it off to my co-panelists and we'll end with a little discussion around that. So I think when we talk about having giving Tuesday retrospectives, the retrospective itself might just be a moment. We're going to talk about the process of bringing your team together and thinking about how that team surfaces insights and sets goals for the future of their work. But a big part of this and why we are making such a big point of having this kind of look back is to extract long term value from your campaign. And that is a major goal for us. We focus on improving organizational capabilities. And we do that through our company lens that we call engagement architecture. And so as we look at organizations, we think about the overarching and holistic and comprehensive set of capabilities that they have to drive audience engagement. And that's the sum total of the technology, the platforms, but also the people in that organization and the processes and how they work together, those workflows that help them achieve their strategy, create positive experiences for audience members that drive the key engagement touch points, which can be donations, but also extends to a lot more than that. It's about the long term relationships that we're forming with our donors, the opportunities to volunteer, the content that they consume. And through all of that, there is this thread of data that flows. So that's a big part of our perspective is that that data can be used as an input into the rest of the architecture and use it to improve those experiences and improve the long term engagement. So when we talk about giving Tuesday, giving Tuesday is really but a moment in the long term and year round cycle of audience engagement. But that moment is one that we have to seize and we seize that moment with the capabilities that we have developed. And that process of developing those capabilities is not instantaneous. We don't start working on giving Tuesday the morning of. It is a long process and people work through many phases, both in the weeks before, but really the years before each giving Tuesday and the context of that is really important as to whether or not giving Tuesday is successful and whether we are able to extract that long term value out of giving Tuesday. And this is the context of thinking about that, understanding that how the day goes depends on how well prepared you are. A lot of organizations will spend weeks, if not months, ahead of giving Tuesday, making sure that they know what their approach is going to be. They have the resources in place. Sometimes organizations will even staff up for all of the back and forth and the conversations that they're going to spark around giving Tuesday. And a lot of those capabilities, what ambitions you have for your giving Tuesday campaign are going to be constrained and empowered by the underlying donor engagement capabilities that you have as an organization. And those capabilities are years in the making. And that's going to be a big focus of ours today is figuring out how we can use each Giving Tuesday to improve those underlying capabilities. But again, giving Tuesday is that moment, but the relationships that we spark there should not end by the Wednesday after. So every Giving Tuesday campaign is an opportunity to start long term relationships and the tone of those relationships are set in the weeks after. How do you follow up? Is there a phone call that goes out to new donors, for example? And how is all that managed? How do you keep track of that? And the importance of this is the years of potential for a long term supporter experience. And if you can get it right the first time around with the flood of new donors you might get on Giving Tuesday, you're setting yourself up for recurring revenue, but also long term supporters. New volunteers, new constituents, perhaps. And depending on the work that you're doing, this is a real chance to expand the reach and engagement of your entire organization. Now when we think about Giving Tuesday, it's important to consider the context for running a campaign and the different steps that you have in running a campaign to improve the quality of that campaign. And then more broadly to improve the quality of long term campaigns. A lot of times when we think about campaigns, we are looking at the first three steps of this campaign planning process. How do we actually do the planning? How do we come up with the strategy? Consider the experiences? Think about the goals of the campaign. And then that second step in targeting is really understanding how we use our tools to achieve, to actually succeed in that plan. How do we create the segments that we're going to be sending appeals to? How do we decide what channels we're going to be on? And how to reach our target audiences on those channels? And really thinking about those precise mechanics of getting our message to the audience and capturing the audience that is right for our organization. And then the third thing that we can do to improve the outcome of any individual campaign is that optimizing a step, which is as it's happening. Do we have the flexibility? Do we have the governance in place to actually change what we're doing if we find that one of the parts of our strategy aren't delivering? And we can reallocate efforts in real time to improve the outcomes of that. It takes a degree of sophistication and I think more important discipline of a team to be able to recognize that, understand what is and isn't working in real time and make those choices. Those are all things that you can do for any one campaign. But I think for this topic of retrospectives, it's almost more important to think about what happens after the campaign has concluded. And so that's where we're talking about these steps four, five and six. The evaluating step where we actually sit down and think about what we've done, think about what we've accomplished and gather the lessons learned from our team. The step of demonstrating is also very important. Can we tell the story of what we learned and communicate up to leadership and even out to peers and partners, demonstrate how successful we were in achieving the plan of a campaign? And then last but certainly not least, recording. How do we help the organization actually keep track of the relationships that we formed so that they can be followed up with and engaged holistically in the future? And those four steps are the major domain of the retrospective and what we're going to dig a little bit deeper in today. And as we talk about those major steps, I think just a couple other examples and quick tips and things to focus on. When you're talking about evaluating a campaign, this is what it should look like. It's how do you bring your team together and actually make the time and preserve the time to have that conversation and extract those lessons learned? You know, I always encourage people put the retrospective on the calendar for your campaign even before it begins. It's very easy to skip this step because the campaign is done so you can't change the outcome of it. But this step of having the retrospective is how you get the value, the long-term value out of the campaign is by making sure that you look back and guard that value and find ways to preserve it. And so things you can do here just really help to democratize hypotheses, if not also the analysis. Your team who execute the campaign have the best seat in the house for understanding what happened, what worked, what didn't work. And so getting their questions, getting their responses is really important. And it's also a chance to look for the small data rather than the big data surprises. Are there really detailed and nuanced, you know, perhaps one particular Twitter thread that went wild and brought new attention? These are things that you're not going to notice in the long term and, you know, in an abstract, you know, overall campaign impact report. But your team will see it while they're actually in there looking back at everything they just did. This is a great chance to notice those. And those are a lot of the best lessons are hidden in those moments. And just jumping to that last step of recording, figuring out what you remember about your audience will help your organization ensure that your audience remembers you. And so being clear about what you want to do with your data, how are you going to use it again in the future? How might you use it again in the future if it's properly preserved? And this is a chance to really empower your organizational memory. You know, anyone who's in development work and, you know, particularly your major gifts, we depend on our brains, on our relationships, everything that we curate as individuals. But when you're talking about Giving Tuesday and you're talking about individual giving and the scale that you have there, your ability to record that data is really your organization's institutional memory. It's how you remember relationships at scale. And so thinking about how you manage the data around Giving Tuesday is very important. And being sure that you migrate that data into a system of record and a system of action, where are you actually going to use it again to do the segmentation, to have follow-ups. But it's not just about the data. It's, again, it's about the lessons learned. So from that retrospective, the conversation you'll have with your team perspective, where are you going to put the lessons learned so that they can be accessed again in the future? What is your institutional memory? Whether that's a wiki or, you know, minutes for a future agenda, an agenda for a future meeting. These are all opportunities for you to make sure that the lessons learned get surfaced again in the future. And with that, I will hand it over to my colleague, Kimberly, to talk a little bit more specifically and personally about experiences with Giving Tuesday and the kinds of lessons we can extract from it. Thank you so much, Stefan. And so as already mentioned, Giving Tuesday, probably about a decade ago, was novelty to us. We'd heard of Black Friday. We'd heard of maybe Small Business Saturday and even Cyber Monday. But this idea really came about to allow a universal focus on philanthropic organizations and, quite frankly, the global impact that organizations were having across the world. So for those of us that were already knee-deep in the trenches in development, some of us were met with a little bit of confusion on, OK, we've got our plans for the year. We know what we're doing. And here comes this global day where we've really got to stop and focus our attention in a way that sets really a path forward for the organization itself and not just thinking about this collective buy-in. But really, what does the voice look like for your Giving Tuesday campaign? So it's notable that we should mention that nearly 40% of all Giving really comes into most nonprofit organizations in November and December, which I think is oftentimes why we like to say that Giving Tuesday campaigns are sort of the kickoff to the Giving season and the Super Bowl, if you will, of philanthropic support. But one of the things that we want to talk about is that retrospective component. It's important to also think about what the activity is on that day and the significance. So for those that are really philanthropically minded, you may have donors that are giving to multiple organizations on that single day covering various interests. You may also have audiences that are new to you and have never been to your website, that have never seen your story. And given the strength that is hashtags as well as other campaigns, it really gives you an opportunity to expand your voice as well as your audience in a way that you might not have been able to do if you were more local or a regionalized organization. And so it's really important as you think about your retrospective to think about what are ways that donor patterns could have changed, both given things like COVID in 2020. We saw many new donors that showed up on Giving Tuesday's doorstep with an opportunity for organizations to share their stories and also grab in new audiences. But also Giving Tuesday can be a really unique opportunity to be thoughtful about what are the ways that your current donor base has been supportive of your organization. Is this the time that really you want to bring in volunteers and thinking about peer leadership? We can draw on a couple of examples of really strong matching donor programs that really provided a deeper impact for that single day, but really took months and months of planning to get that one donor who may, for example, have said, I'll do a dollar for dollar match up to 50,000. And all of a sudden, you're now entering a new territory where you're able to not only double impact for donors that might be giving much lower dollars, but also really raising the awareness as well as the significance of their gift impact by utilizing and playing on the strengths of board members or perhaps the much larger donors to your organization in the past that really can feel that their philanthropic support covers a much greater swath. So it's important to think about that. It's also important to think about what are the tactics? So sometimes you can come into Giving Tuesday, particularly if you're newer in an organization and newer to development and maybe say, well, what did happen? Were we making comparison notes from last year? Who came in during that day? I think it's a really good call out to also think about what were the splashier messages that got maybe higher gift amounts. And I think, again, the uniqueness of the short term campaign is that you can really call out and pull data specific to areas in which there was tremendous support or maybe a decrease, for example, in Giving. So really being able to track almost in a timeline manner is really important as you're thinking through the impact as well as the messaging that you're telling. And lastly, really thinking about what are going to be your top priorities on how you improve? So I always say, if it's not broken, don't try to fix it. But as a part of this evaluating and demonstrating and certainly the recording experience, it's really imperative that as you're looking at your Giving Tuesday activity, that you do think about what is the message and who is it resonating with, as well as think about your internal structure for Giving Tuesday and don't limit it just to your traditional fundraising team, but really thinking about if you have a programs team, if there are other areas within the organization, even from the leadership perspective, what types of voices do you want to emerge as you talk about the impact of the work that you're doing because truly you do have a platform in a very spotlighted way during your Giving Tuesday campaign activity? The next slide. This is one of my favorite sayings, plan your work and work your plan. I think it's critically important as we think about, again, a couple of key areas, not only just for Giving Tuesday, but as you're thinking about short-term campaigns, your target audience, it may change from time to time. It should stay core and central to your overall mission and thinking about where your messages truly can resonate, but really use Giving Tuesday as an opportunity to think about different types of segmentation. One great example of that and an organization that I worked for was we really leveraged a group of young professional volunteers and really empowered them with a toolkit as well as smaller training sessions prior to Giving Tuesday to really empower them to go out and share the message of the organization. And so it might just be that your segmentation might be younger donors. It could be that your segmentation is thinking about those that might have lapsed, which we call saibons that have given some years to your organizations, but not in other ways. Really thinking about important segments can also be a great way to guide and direct some of the work that you're doing as you look back in your retrospective of if you haven't segmented, what are some of the key core audiences that it might resonate with? The other thing I'll mention is current events. Are there things that are happening in your mission that are relevant? So whether you are working at workforce development and there are some things happening on the ground or the impacts of COVID have impacted the workforce, thinking about those segmented audiences of interest is also something that you can play into that. Your outreach strategy. So outreach is critically important. We know you have to also keep in mind that your audience is being bombarded with messages, right? Like this is not just another day where they're only getting a message from organization X. They're gonna get messages from about 20 to 50 organizations if they're really involved in 501C3s and other nonprofit activity. It's a lot to get head with. And so really thinking about your outreach strategy is important. And then the other area that I wanna mention is the storytelling with impact. Donors we know in particular thinking about older millennials, Gen Zers and really everyone for that matter. I think it's been a call out more recently about these are the audiences that truly, truly care about impact. And so you wanna get the story right on Giving Tuesday because if you're not demonstrating that impact you can certainly lose a donor or it might not be a donor that you keep. And we wanna be sure that we can have long-term strategies for keeping those donors that might show up on Giving Tuesday and really sharing that impact and storytelling. Also think about your voice, the voice that you want the messages to come from. Sometimes in organizations your leader is the only voice in your direct mail and sharing updates. Think about whether it's your board chair or maybe somebody that's been greatly impacted as a result of your nonprofit and think about how that voice might change or shift as well as add to and enhance the impact of the overall messaging. And lastly, creativity, right? Like we are oftentimes very reactionary in our organizations. We have a lot on our plates all year long. November comes along and maybe we forget the creative angles that we wanna take and the retrospective will provide you with an opportunity to set some time to think about what are the creative ways that you wanna do things differently? What are new things that you wanna try? And lastly, I say look to your left and to your right at your neighbors that are also doing the similar work because we know that as a campaign time this is the one time where every nonprofit in your area and across the country is sharing best practices. There are toolkits that are available. So really leverage that time and opportunity as you're doing those retrospectives to truly get creative and think about ways to maybe elevate your message while also thinking about long-term strategies for things that you might wanna change going forward. And now I will turn it over to John. We will talk about what you can gain from the retrospectives. Thanks, Kimberly. So I'm gonna go into some tactical elements about giving Tuesday retrospectives but I wanna sort of sell this idea on it first like why retrospectives are important. And I came from a nonprofit background and we didn't do retrospectives for a really long time. But once we started doing them it was an opportunity not just with giving Tuesday but with all campaigns to really kind of democratize the team cohesion that's happening to really hear from the folks that put in the effort that built the content that pushed out the landing pages that amplified things on social that did all the work to really make your giving Tuesday bring in the revenue that it did for your organization to really hear from them on what they thought worked what didn't work and things like that. It's really helpful to have the team hear about the effective tactics that they use so that they can be elevated. It's also great to hear about those key stories about the good work that your nonprofit is doing your mission-driven work to hear about the impact that it made on those particular giving Tuesday audiences. And then also identifying those top priorities for improving those capabilities. So it's really thinking about like this is what we did this year what can we think about this from the perspective of like shrink wrapping those things and putting them on the shelf so that when we come back six months, eight months, nine months, 10 months, 11 months to the next giving Tuesday we can look back at what we did. We have a good document in place. It's an institutional knowledge like Stefan was talking about really thinking about what are those things that we can take off the shelf and revisit for the next giving Tuesday. So that's really what we gain from retrospectives. I'm gonna delve a little bit into some of the tactical things in a minute here. So this is really to know where you've been to know where you're going. You really want to assess like what went well to keep doing these things what could be improved so what could be done better what went poorly, don't do these things again and what did your aspirational peers do? So I think it's really important to give your team especially the folks that contributed to giving Tuesday activities to really think about these kinds of things. Treat your campaigns as an opportunity to develop long-term strategies and enhance and build upon that culture of philanthropy at your organization. So on the next slide, I have a simple retrospective agenda and this really you could really dive in deep into retrospective depending on the time that you have with your team depending on how many folks might have contributed to the campaign from a content perspective from an outreach perspective from an application perspective. But I think at the top level the three most important agenda items would be number one, what went well. So think about what the things that you did that you should continue doing. Number two, what could be improved? And so those are the things like what are the things we should do differently? And that might be really obvious you might hear from the team right off the bat around the things that are improved that you wanna improve. And number three, what things should we stop doing? And you can go a level deeper so you can sort of build upon the fidelity depending on the time that you have with your team. So think about like, where should we invest our money or time next year if we stop doing things versus doing what we're doing this year? As far as like what went well like were there pleasant surprises? Did something do really well because of market conditions because of current events like Kimberly was talking about earlier? Like what were the pleasant surprises that something did a lot better than you thought this year? As far as like on the improvement angle like do we have the best information and data to make future decisions? I mean, that's a huge one. Like if you don't have a way of tracking some of the some of the touchpoints perhaps or some of the platforms or some of the channels that you're promoting or giving Tuesday work through like maybe that's something to think out for the future so that you have better data insights into that work. And lastly, about the things you should stop doing perhaps do you anticipate challenges that for next year that you can proactively address? So you can kind of refine this agenda if depending on how much time you have. On my next slide, I have a huge list of questions that you can go deeper if you have the time with your team to really focus on this during your retrospective and these are very tactical. So start with your high level questions start with those high level questions and you can increase the fidelity and detail of your inquiry as you listen and learn from your team. You can make adjustments based on how things went but I would start up here at the top ask your team like what was done differently this year from last year's? How did each outreach channel do? So if you're using social to amplify things obviously your website, email marketing maybe you're using a new social channel this year you know, TikTok, Instagram maybe that's something you haven't done in the past maybe LinkedIn for business is a new one. Maybe you've done something different with direct mail this year. How do things do this year? Okay, so you can start really high level you can ask questions about a particular thing that you might have done differently like in this example I've got did we increase budget or effort in a new area like for instance, advertising perhaps and depending on the amount of time that you have you know, where can you dive in and go a level deeper? Like do we have any results that can validate some of these assumptions that we had going into the Our Giving Tuesday campaign? Like for instance, did we intentionally attempt to optimize or improve one of our approaches compared to last year? Did we amplify a specific channel? How did each touch point fair this year compared to last year? And as you start to talk through this you know, this starts to point to why having a good platform in place with data allows you to make some of those comparisons year over year. If you're looking at something like an advertising budget like you might go a level deeper like how did our ads perform in general? What ad placements for the most successful and why? Was it the content? Was it the budget for those ads? Did the matching gift ads perform better than the non-matching gift ads? So you can really increase the fidelity of your retrospective questions, you know, with your team. You can choose to dive into particular areas that might give you some insights for the coming year. And as you move through this, you know, make sure that we're documenting this. Make sure that you're building that institutional foundation so that you can go back and look at your retro, you know, nine, 10 months from now so that you can start planning for your giving Tuesday, 2023. One thing to think about too that has come up this year that always should be considered when you're thinking about talking about a retro is platform changes are inevitable. So this year you may have done something a certain way. You know, there's no surprise if you're paying attention right now to Twitter, for instance, like, you know, nonprofits have a lot of reliance on Twitter and have in the past, but that reliance is starting to decrease over the past few months. So we've got advertisers that are leaving the platform and other platforms are stepping up. You know, you've got LinkedIn for business, there's Mastodon that's appearing. So there's a looming question out there that we, you know, nonprofits and mission oriented organizations should start thinking about for giving Tuesday, 2023. It's like, well, Twitter be around next year or will we use it in the same way we're using it this year? You know, if you've used Twitter this year for amplifying your giving Tuesday appeals, it may be worth thinking about plan B. You know, what would you do with that time and effort next year? How are you going to pivot? When do you need to make a decision? You know, these things are happening fast but they may take time to unravel. You know, you don't have to have the answers to all the questions in the retro but they're definitely next steps to begin discussions and planning around. You know, another consideration too that's not mentioned here is your platforms contain your donor information. So if they're set up to cultivate and document your most valued, high value donors, how are they configured to track giving Tuesday donations? You know, we've worked with a lot of nonprofits who have like a CRM system that is set up in a way that the CRM is capturing their high value donors. But it turns out a lot of high value donors have contributed to giving Tuesday, whether it's a $50 donation or a $2,500 donation. So these are valuable data points for philanthropy teams who are on point to manage and cultivate those relationships with high value donors to be aware of that, you know? So definitely think about how your data and your platforms can be more actionable and can be optimized in a holistic fashion around giving Tuesday as well. All right, so I'll pass the next conversation off to Stefan who's gonna talk a little bit about our February webinar. Thank you very much, John. This is just a quick highlight. We do have another webinar coming up that extends some of the topics that we, you know, have just covered and talked about today. I think in particular, the idea of understanding the role of our platforms, how all our platforms get stitched together, and we're very excited and proud to announce that we're gonna be partnering on this upcoming webinar in February with Civis Analytics. Civis manages a platform that is exceptionally tailored to that goal of ingesting huge amounts of data from lots of different places in a complicated campaign and allowing you to study it, analyze it, and perhaps most importantly for operating at scale, giving you the power to manipulate and then reinsert it back into your systems in ways that can be used in the future. And so I think in this upcoming webinar, this is our February webinar, we're gonna get a chance to talk about what that looks like. And it's particularly important in a year like this. I mean, every year is different than the last, but we are facing an era of pretty unprecedented change. You know, we have a high, record high inflation, like we haven't had in decades. We have a looming, you know, the threat of a looming recession. In being able to look at macroeconomic context like that, cultural context and changes, and being able to decide how are you gonna change your strategy based on that? It requires both a nimbleness and a creativity, a foresight, but then also the platform ability to act on those insights and act on those decisions. So this follow on webinar where we're gonna get more into the operations and tactics of the lessons that you'll learn from doing your retrospective. How do you put them into practice? That's gonna be the topic of this upcoming one, not our next one, but the one after that in February. And I think we, yeah, if you look in the chat, you should see a link to register for this webinar to make sure that you don't miss it. And I think with that, we're probably ready to go into questions. If anyone who's followed along so far has anything that you'd like to hear us discuss, please go ahead and throw it into the chat and we can take a look at that. I think I wanted to start off though, but I'll take the opportunity while I have the mic to ask a question of the group. And I'm not sure if this is more for John or more for Kimberly, but John, you made that comment about when do we need to know what's happening in the landscape to decide what we're gonna do with our platforms. And I thought that was a really, really good point. And to me, it spoke to the importance of governance, knowing when do we make decisions? What is the process? Is there a particular meeting? Is there a particular person whose job it is to make these decisions? And how do you keep track of that? Where do you manage the authority to change tactics? And I'd love to hear either one of you talk a little bit about what that looks like, both theoretically, but also just from your own past experiences. Yeah, that's a great question, Stefan. I would say it's definitely important to hold yourselves accountable as leaders and non-profits and mission-driven organizations like with this Giving Tuesday example in particular, like if you're gonna do a retrospective and you're going to hear about the things that worked well, the things that didn't work well and think about the potential landmines that are coming up for 2023, it's definitely a point of like at least team governance or self-governance over the Giving Tuesday campaign planning process, I think would be to go ahead and set a date on your calendar. When you start doing those initial planning efforts for Giving Tuesday for the coming year, get ahead of it. You may wanna think about getting inputs from the same team that provided the retro. Just some things to think about. Definitely want to get that date on the calendar as soon as possible so that you don't forget about it and make sure you bring that documentation, that institutional knowledge that you've gathered from your retro to that meeting so that you can say, let's pick off where we left off last year, because as Kimberly was saying, Giving Tuesday, it's a one-day event, but there's a lot of planning that goes into it, so you can make this retrospective become part of what informs that planning. Now, I think those are all really strong points. I think the other thing to keep in mind too, again, for those of us that are more insular to specific development roles and development leadership that have to show up at the larger table, and thinking about how organizations are utilizing certain platforms and system tools, it's a great call out to have the data show the backdrop of where changes need to be made and why those changes need to be made. So I think it's really important as you're thinking about systems and framing or even thinking about staffing needs around certain times of year for development work, it also can really strengthen and support the narrative of what's needed to really impact deeper results and development. Another thing that's a little bit different from the question that was just asked that I would be remiss if I did not share, is as much as an ask strategy is important, a think strategy is also important. So how are we thinking people? So thinking about the larger stewardship components to campaigns, and it's something that I did not call out, but there's really great strong data that suggests the ways in which donors come into the organization is one thing, but how they sort of stay on the organization can really be reflected on this after piece. And so again, I think it really adds another bullet point if you will as to why a retrospective can be so important because we wanna make sure that those that have engaged with us, that have taken the time to go to the website, to click the link, and certainly to give and donate to the cause, also feel that they're embodied and felt their presence throughout the organization, not just for that day, but really, what's the thinking strategy and how are we utilizing those across organizations as well as other tools that can make that strategy very successful, but also very efficient and uniform across all the platforms. Excellent, excellent points, Kimberly. John, I think our next question is probably a good one for you. We've talked a bit about the kinds of platform changes, how do we evolve our infrastructure based on the lessons learned? I know you've worked on a lot of projects like this, particularly architecture enhancements, building new capabilities for organizations. Can you give examples of platform changes that you've seen organizations make based on lessons learned from the past? Yeah, I think one that we're working on with several of our clients right now across PTKO is like the Google Analytics for Migration, thinking that with Giving Tuesday, like if your website is a big driver of outreach and you've got data around how people are using your website, how they're interacting with your forms, how they're reading your blog content and your thought work, like really thinking about, okay, well, Google Analytics, that version is going away. There's a new version out there. And this is a topic that I know Stefan is very well in the know of, and we have a lot of thought work on our website about it, but just thinking about how does that, what does that mean for Giving Tuesday 2023? Like how are you gonna compare the Apple data to the Orange's data? It's in Google Analytics version four. Another thing that I've seen organizations think about adding to their platforms is often organizations will have a disconnect between their sort of their digital grassroots or low dollar donation fundraising and their high dollar donations and fundraising. And sometimes that can be tied back to a CRM or multiple CRMs perhaps. So we've seen some organizations that have multiple CRMs that they're using for the low dollar donations or the grassroots donations and there's a disconnect there between the digital side, the grassroots side, the low dollar side and the high dollar side. And often that points to that holistic need for an ideal contact model in organizations. So really thinking about how everyone within a philanthropy team or development team like should see the people that they engage with whether they're low value donors, whether they're advocates, whether they're plan givers, whether they're major gifts, donors. So really thinking about how the systems and platforms are capturing the data that is going to help you make better decisions in the future. I think there's also a component around like, just more like data privacy, there's suppression like how organizations are maintaining like opt-ins and opt-outs of email and direct mail and things like that. So really thinking through, is your platform set up in a way where if you receive a request to your website or through the phone that it's gonna end up in a place where the people that need it most can see it and can act upon it and do something with that data. Something with advertising I've seen is, folks have pivoted from Twitter advertising to LinkedIn for business. They're using Google search ads more. So thinking about like if you've never done this before, do you have a platform in place where you can tie some of those conversions and some of that activity that you see with your engaged subscribers with your website visitors with people that are searching for your nonprofit brand and your mission, so that they're finding you and that they're coming to you and they're participating in the things that you're doing, the good work that your organization is doing. So I've seen a lot of platform changes around more tactical things like advertising, social media and how that shows up as well on these backend platforms. Very good, Kimberly did you have something you wanted to chime in there on otherwise? My next question is probably best for you, Kimberly. We've talked a lot about the principles of retrospectives, that you sort of the theoretical value, the role of a retrospective and the campaign life cycle and how to build capabilities off of it. But of all of us, I think you have probably sat through the most retrospectives for Giving Tuesdays in particular. Can you give us any specific examples, tactical examples of lessons learned that you've seen teams take away from conducting a retro and then down the road how that actually gets implemented, how you've seen those lessons learned to put into practice? Yeah, sure. So the first thing I'll say is you really need one person in your organization, perhaps outside of your lead of development focused on Giving Tuesday. It can be a project that's doled out even if you have a really small development team. But what I found is the greatest success when doing a retrospective was there wasn't a core central person that could really target and think about all the things that go into Giving Tuesday, both the lead up, the actual action of Giving Tuesday itself and then certainly the after. And so thinking about that, I think that's one of the most important things to do. It's also important to look at, again, who gave during that period. And I think sometimes, again, in the busy nature of development, particularly in November, we sometimes forget to pause and actually look at who gave. But you can really unmind some really great donors that might actually be much larger donors that might have given a small starter gift, if you will, to your organization and come to find out, they're a good friend of a board member who actually has much larger capacity. So not looking at sort of the aggregate of who gave overall, but really breaking down the data right then and there to understand and gain a bigger picture of who actually supported the organization during that time. So that's been really important. The peer-to-peer piece was something that, again, at another organization was incredibly effective, but also really empowering as you think about what are the ways that you can bring your either volunteers or people that are huge fans of your organization into the work that you're doing by really leveraging their own social media platforms. And so thinking about, I think was mentioned earlier, how do you leverage them to support and utilize toolkits? When I think one year, we didn't have toolkits for the volunteers. And so I think while they did their own messaging, the next year we found exponential returns because we actually had set toolkits, we had timelines and conducted a mini training that really greatly empowered them, but also reduced the time, if you will, for them that they would have had to spend to try to find a really cool fact or a nice picture. And so those were some of the main highlights of some changes that were made. And lastly, the most recent Giving Tuesday was really the change of the voice. It really does matter who is doing the outreach on the other side. So even if it is ghostwritten by your development team, talking to people and using videos, again, maybe it's a day in the life of somebody that's been greatly impacted by your organization and they get to have your social media handle for the day. And it's really incredible to see, again, where that impact might reside versus your executive director or vice president of development saying, here's the impact that you can make on Kimberly versus Kimberly saying, this is so great because of this organization. I've had better education outcomes. These are the great work that I'm doing as a result of the support from this organization. And really putting the persona behind, again, where the donor impact goes. The last thing I'll say that was a big change for some organizations I worked for from year to year was on the Giving Landing page, making it simple to give, as well as having a section on that page that said, why do you give? And it allowed us as a team to then go back to those notes and say, okay, this person said that they gave because a family member was deeply impacted. When we give them a thank you call because we did that prior to sort of the advent of all the things that we do only electronically, we used to pick up the phone and call and say, thanks so much, Stefan, for your gift. We understand that your cousin was deeply impacted by this organization. Are there other things that you're interested in? And really, I think donors appreciate the fact that the extra step is taken to not only recognize their gift, which in many cases can be averaged around $100 or less on Giving Tuesday, but really understanding that maybe they wanna support the organization in other ways throughout the year. And so just that's another great way to personalize, again, the data and the segmentation and pulling of information to really drill down to who is actually giving on those days and during that campaign. Brilliant examples, love that, thank you. Thank you, Kimberly. All right, well with that, I think we can go to our final slide, which is just to say thank you to everyone. Thank you for tuning in and engaging in discussion and getting those questions in there as well. I think I wanna say from all of us, how much we appreciate the mission-driven sector, all the work that everyone has done over this year. And we hope each of your organizations felt duly rewarded on Giving Tuesday. Our way of giving back in addition to participating in the work that we do with our clients is to provide content like this. And so we really encourage everyone in the sector to look us up, come to our website, ParsonsTKO.com and we offer a wide range of content, written and video, a podcast and events like these and occasionally in person in select markets. And we really are looking forward to building the community of practice and helping to contribute to organizational capabilities with this kind of content. So thank you all so much. And we look forward to seeing you next time.