 o'clock here Eastern time. So thank you all for joining me today. It is our second webinar for this year's Richland Gives and this one is all about fundraising strategy. My name is Linda Gerhardt and I'm the senior community engagement manager here at Mighty Cause. I've been lucky enough to work with Maura and the Richland County Foundation on Richland Gives for a few years at this point. I think 2018 or 2017 was my first year helping out with this event has been a privilege and a pleasure working with Maura. And she is here. She's mostly gonna mute herself and watch the webinar but she'll join us for the Q and A. So, hi Maura. Hi, thank you, Linda. And thank you to everyone who's logged in today to learn more about the strategy. The last time I looked at the registrations we have about 80 nonprofits registered which is just felt typically what we do do. I know there's a couple other nonprofits that are registering and we hope to include them in our two weeks of giving. I will let you know that foundation as it has done in the past we will launch a Richland Gives advertising campaign on November 15th and it will run through the 30th. The theme of this year's advertising campaign is 106 ways to enrich Richland. And the 106 represents how many pages we had last year on the Richland Gives website. And as you know, we'll have the nonprofit pages plus fundraising pages set up. So, I'll turn it over to Linda so she can talk to you more about the strategy and thank you. Awesome, thank you so much Maura. And definitely as the event grows and we get more and more nonprofits involved it's gonna require a lot more to stay competitive and win some of that prize money. So, we'll definitely be going over that during this webinar. Here's a quick look at today's agenda. We are gonna do some quick reminders and basics just to make sure that everybody is on the same page and if you missed anything in the last webinar or you haven't had a chance to watch the recording yet you still have all of the necessary information. And I do wanna encourage you all to use the chat. I won't be able to monitor it because I'll be busy talking during the webinar but you can certainly feel free to use the chat. And if you have a question while I'm presenting go ahead and put that into the Q and A box and we will make time to get to that at the end of the webinar. So, if you think of something while I'm presenting that you would like to ask either Maura or myself just go ahead and pop that question into the Q and A box. All right, so I guess we'll start with some basics about the event so that we're all starting from the same foundation. So some quick facts about Richland Gives hopefully at this point you already know the basics if you're on this webinar but registration is open now and if you have not registered for the event yet that is the first step. So please feel free to go to richlandgives.org while you're listening to this webinar take a moment and fill out the registration form. Your approval will be super quick and that'll take care of step number one of participating in Richland Gives. We talk about Richland Gives as a day but it actually is it spans several weeks. So early giving for Richland Gives starts on Monday, November 15th and it culminates on November 30th which is giving Tuesday and that is the main event day. So online giving takes place from 7 a.m. on November 15th to November 30th at 7 p.m. So it's not just a day you have quite a window of time to raise money and be competitive with prizes and the whole goal of the event is to help nonprofits in Richland County grow, build your capacity, reach new supporters, talk about what you do and help make the community even stronger through this event that really puts a spotlight on the important work that you are doing in your community. So as I mentioned, there's just a few steps to participate, number one is registering. Even if you've participated in the past we do ask you to register each year because we wanna make sure that we have the correct information for you on file and we also just want you to proactively opt in so that we know you're planning on running a campaign to fundraise for Richland Gives. So that is step number one, if you haven't already done that I promise it won't hurt my feelings if you wanna go to richlandgives.org and just click that button that says register the form is very short and easy to fill out. Then you'll wanna customize your Richland Gives your Mighty Cause profile for Richland Gives and then you'll really go into creating a fundraising plan strategizing how are you gonna get the word out to your supporters and then start collecting donations on Monday, November 15th. Then you'll wanna reach out to your supporter base to make donations during the Richland Gives donation window and go hard in fundraise big on November 30th which hopefully should be a great day for you to fundraise because it's giving Tuesday and so you can kind of ride that momentum for giving Tuesday philanthropy by capitalizing on it for Richland Gives. And again, take some time to register. I hate to beat a dead horse, so to speak but make sure that you are registered because it would be a huge tragedy to plan a fundraising campaign and not be able to participate because we didn't know you were interested. So please feel free to open up a tab in your browser and register your nonprofit if you have not already done so. Okay, so we have a few important dates coming up. Registration is going to be closing next week I believe and then we have early giving in just a couple of weeks. So we just wanted to give you a few reminders so that you are in good shape and ready to go on November 15th. So first you have your dashboard and this is where you will be spending a lot of your time as you gear up for Richland Gives and also as you are fundraising. So your dashboard is something that you will see as an administrator for your nonprofit when you're on the Mighty Cause page for your nonprofit. It'll be a little sidebar on the left-hand side of your screen and this is what you'll use to navigate the different tools that Mighty Cause provides to you. And so just from top to bottom, you have your overview. We talked about this in a little bit more depth in our first webinar, but this is a screen that you can customize so that you can keep up to date on some key performance indicators for your nonprofit like donor retention and you can really customize it so that you're pulling the data that you want to make sure that your Richland Gives campaign is in good shape. So make sure that you're using the overview screen. There's a lot of really cool things you can do to monitor your progress in your overview screen. And that's kind of where you'll be dropped when you first log into your account and navigate to your nonprofit page. Fundraising tools is basically where you find everything related to fundraising. So here you can edit your profile. You can also do that on the actual page itself. You can manage peer-to-peer campaigns, teams and events. If you're looking for matching grants, this is where you will find it. And the general rule of thumb is that anything that you would need to access for your fundraising campaign, you can find under Fundraising Tools. Under Reports, that's pretty intuitive. You will find your donations report. Your disbursement report. You can add offline donations here. And you can also see all of your donation activity. It is a real-time feed. Your donation report gives you a quick snapshot, but if you want the full report with all of the data we've collected from your donors, you want to go ahead and download the CSV, but reports are under Reports, funnily enough. Your checkout flow is actually one of the things that is new this year. We've pulled it out and put it in your main menu so that you can access it more easily because we really want you to take advantage of the fact that with Mighty Cause, you have a lot of control over the checkout process and the donation process for your supporters. So we want to make sure that you have easy access to that. So that is no longer hiding in Fundraising Tools or Reports, I'm not quite sure where it was before, but it was hidden in a submenu and this year it is front and center so you can easily find it and make sure that it's customized. And Settings is where you'll want to go to check on any sort of housekeeping related things for your nonprofit. So updating your EFT, just checking in if you've already set it up in the past to make sure that it's still connected to the correct account. You can do some housekeeping with your admins if you've had some turnover at your nonprofit or you're adding new people who would need to help you with your campaign. And if your address has changed or any legal information, this is the place where you want to go just to make sure that we have all the current update information we need about your organization. Our first webinar about customizing your profile, that's where we really went in depth about the tools and the different techniques you can use to make the best use of your mighty cost profile. But this is really the heart of your Rich Link Gives campaign. Your profile is evergreen, so if you've participated in years past, you don't need to start from scratch, but you do wanna make sure that it is updated for 2021. The link to your profile is what you'll be sharing with your supporters so you can actually just copy and paste that from your browser and share that in whatever channel you would like if you'd like to customize the URL because it'll automatically pull your legal name which is not always the most user friendly so you can customize that in your settings. But basically before you get started for this year's event, take a minute and audit your profile. Make sure that you have up to date and current information listed on your profile. Make sure that you're not making references to past campaigns or 2020. You may still have your page set up for last year's COVID fundraiser that we did. So just make sure that you have current information and you are ready for this year's campaign. This is the infrastructure that will support you. And if donors go to your profile and unfortunately they see that your profile is not up to date and has references to old campaigns, then unfortunately they're gonna be less trusting and less likely to donate. So you wanna make sure that your profile is in tip top shape before we get started with the actual fundraising. One thing that you do wanna take some time to do if you've participated in the past is reset your metrics. I really wish that there was a button I could push that would do this for everyone. And we are working on something along those lines but right now we do have to ask you to go in and reset your metrics for last year. So you still probably if you haven't already reset these things have the goal and progress and the amount raised from 2020. So what you wanna do is reset that to zero. You have a lot of options here in this screen. So under your goal in progress bar that shows you how much you've raised from how many donors. There's a little pencil icon and when you click that it'll open a window where you can tell us what you would like to display. You don't have to show the amount raised. You don't have to show the number of donors. You can choose whether or not you would like to include offline donations in that total amount raised. But the important thing is that you wanna set your progress to count from November 15th, 2021 at 7 a.m. Because that is when donations start for this year's Richling Gives event. And that will basically reset it to zero because we're not at November 15th just yet. And then when donations start being accepted for Richling Gives, you can see those counted on your profile. I also recommend if you're making use of the goal in progress bar, reset your goal so that it is reflecting what your fundraising goal is for 2021. But take a moment and do this. Unfortunately, I can't do it for you all at the same time. So just take a minute and make sure that you're resetting your metrics so that your profile is good to go for 2021. Your checkout flow, we were just talking about this a little bit, but your checkout flow has been pulled out and is now on your main dashboard. And this is really customizable. And we do recommend that you take a look at this because not only is there information that you can add that will enhance your campaign like customizing your donation levels and your descriptions and what data you can collect, but you can also find here some outdated information. So for instance, for 2020 or even for 2019, if you had some donation descriptions that you set in there and you haven't changed those, your donors will see those. So you wanna make sure that you're looking at your checkout flow and that everything is up to date for the current year. And take a look at the post-checkout options as well. So you can easily access those. The post-checkout options are basically the things that happen after one of your supporters completes a donation. So the first thing that will happen is that they will see your thank you page. So once they're done with their transaction, we'll take them to a page that you have built using this tool in your checkout menu where you can give them a little custom message thanking them for their donation. And that kind of automates the process of acknowledging your donors. Although we do hope that you'll go above and beyond the thank you page. But this is also some place where you can often find old information. So make sure that you're at least updating it even if the message itself is more or less the same. And then the other thing that happens when a donation is completed is that we send an email with their tax receipt to the donor at Mighty Cause. And you have a message that you can put into that receipt because it's kind of impersonal. It's just sort of a tax receipt email. It's not very exciting to look at. But this way they get an acknowledgement from your nonprofit along with the tax receipt. And this is also where old information goes to die. A lot of people will realize and panic that there was an old message in the receipts that their donors are getting. And that's not a good feeling. It's not the end of the world, but you can just take a minute and update that message. Make sure that it's current so that you won't have to have that experience of panic if somebody sees something old after making a donation, you're already resetting it and making sure that it's good to go for this year. So as you're doing your quick page audit, make sure that you're also looking at your thank you page and your thank you message that is sent along with the receipt. Your settings, these are not particularly exciting in terms of all of the tools on Mighty Cause, but they are nonetheless very, very important. If something has changed at your nonprofit, like someone no longer works there, that is an admin and you need to remove them or your address has changed or you've moved accounts and you need to reset your EFT, we aren't gonna know that unless you tell us and the way you tell us is through adjusting your settings. So every year, especially since a lot of you may not check in with Mighty Cause outside of Richland Gives, although we wish you would because we are here to support you year round, just make sure that you're looking at your settings and that the money is going to the correct place that your EFT is set up correctly, that we have the correct address for your organization. And one thing that I did wanna note is that your legal address is the thing I'm talking about here. So if you still have the same legal address but you just have like a new PO box or something along those lines, that's okay, you can change that on the display of your page, but if you've had any changes to your legal information, this is where you would wanna put that. And there is some documentation upload tools that you can use to make sure that we have everything that we need to authenticate that. And you can also customize your URL here as well. And you have some social sharing settings that you can put in here. And that's also something that you wanna check up on not necessarily your URL, but your social sharing settings, you can customize the card, which is the image that displays when somebody shares your page on social media. And sometimes you can find old things there too. We'll crawl your page if you have nothing there, but you can actually set a custom link preview set up there so that you can have some level of control over what things look like when you share them on social media. And I do wanna highly recommend that you use the nonprofit toolkit. Mora worked really hard on putting most of these things together for you. And there's a lot of great information in the toolkit. There are tips, FAQs, how-to's, the things that I think are most useful is that you have templates for social media, an email that you can just copy and paste and customize. So it makes it really simple, especially if you're getting a little bit of writer's block writing all of these campaign emails and social media posts. And there's also some things that you can use to jazz up your communications for Richland Give. So this is a really important resource. And I really wanna encourage you to take a look at what's available and make use of the resources that Richland County Foundation and Mora have worked hard to provide for you in the nonprofit toolkit. Sometimes, we can forget about that, but there's a lot of really great stuff there. So make sure that you take a look at what's available and make use of it as you gear up for the campaign. All right, so with that out of the way I wanted to move into campaign strategy. So really the biggest thing that I can recommend to anybody participating in Richland Give is to take advantage of that early giving period. You can start collecting donations on November 15th at 7 a.m. and generally speaking, the nonprofits that you really well in Richland Give are nonprofits that are taking advantage of that extra time to build up their base of donations. So when it flips to the live site on November 30th, they've already got money in the bank. They've already started fundraising and that helps them go really far. And as we'll discuss with prizes there are incentives in terms of prizes that you wanna make sure that you are in the running for as well because of early giving. So just as a note, these are not pledges, these are not future donations. When somebody makes a donation, it is a real-time donation that is processed immediately and it counts towards your leaderboard totals. And one thing that I do wanna clarify because sometimes this is a bit of a concern for people when they think about early giving is they kind of think of donors giving once. And so if you want them to give, you want them to give on November 30th. But what we actually see in terms of donor behavior is that people who give during early giving give again on the actual event day, so November 30th. So I wouldn't worry about, you know, sort of splitting the difference between early giving and live event giving, you're actually most likely going to be getting additional donations if you take advantage of this early giving period. And that would mean starting to plan fundraising materials to go out on November 15th. So promoting your campaign as early as November 15th, sending emails, putting things up on social media. This period of early giving is really the key to success for Richland Gives. A matching grant is something that you also really wanna think about, especially at this point in Richland Gives. It's really the perfect time to start thinking about securing a matching grant. And a matching grant is basically a Bogo sale on donations. It's the same idea as a sale. You're offering people additional value for coming and spending money through making a donation when it is advantageous to you. So you would get a donor, a grantor, to make a larger donation. They don't have to be huge. A few hundred dollars can really work in your favor during an hourly prize time period. But somebody makes a larger donation, we'll talk about who those people might be in just a moment. And then instead of just taking that money, you're using it and offering it up as a match to other donors. So instead of just putting that money in the bank and calling it a day, you're taking that donation and you're offering it to other supporters to incentivize them to come make a donation because they're able to do more with the money that they have to give. So traditionally you'll see a one-to-one match which is where if you donate $20, $20, that $20 is matched in full. So it actually becomes a $40 donation. There are also threshold matches that kick in when you've reached a certain fundraising goal. So there's a lot you can do with matching grants and they are a really great tool that successful nonprofits who win prizes during Richland gives tend to use. And there's basically three steps to securing a matching grant. You wanna start with prospecting, coming up with a list of individuals or businesses or sponsors that may be willing to provide a matching grant. And then you're cultivating which is basically the discovery process or outreach period where you're starting the conversation with them. You haven't made your ask yet but you're sort of just talking to them and this is an important phase where you'd wanna find out how are things going for them? Are they in a position to potentially make a match and offer a large donation for Richland gives? So for a business, if they're not doing so well if they were really hard hit by COVID-19 it may not be the best time to ask but if they're doing great then you wanna proceed and keep them on your list of prospects. And then the third thing that you'll wanna do is ask just make your ask. I recommend keeping it somewhat open if you go in with too rigid of a mindset sometimes you can't close the deal but just ask them for a match for Richland gives be open about the amount. Again, you can do as much with $500 as you can with $1,000 if you are strategic about it. And now really is the perfect time to get started and start securing a matching grant or several for yourself. And then you just enter it on your Mighty Cause profile there's the matching grant section under your fundraising tools and then you start the process of promoting it. So in terms of who is a matching grant prospect who do you tend to ask for a matching grant? There's basically three buckets of individuals and groups who are usually willing to provide matching grants. The first is your board of directors. Fundraising and the financial security of your nonprofit is part of their commitment to your organization. So it's absolutely appropriate to ask your board of directors if they would like to make a match. So you may find that individual board members are willing to provide individual matching funds and the board of directors may as a group decide to pull together their money and make a group matching grant so that there is a board sponsored matching grant. So definitely don't be afraid to tap your board. This is in their wheelhouse and if they don't have a lot to give individually they can certainly pull funds together. And since we are near the end of the year if they have an annual giving requirement you may wanna think about if you are able to use that toward a matching grant for Richland Gifts because it really is a great incentive for donors. Major gift donors are natural providers of matching grants. So if you have a relationship with a donor that is a tried and true supporter who has given to you in larger sums in the past it would be really great to ask them for a matching grant and start the conversation with them. Obviously sponsors in the community any businesses that you have a relationship with these are really great ways to get them involved. Sponsors, especially corporate sponsors tend to love providing matching grants because it allows them to build some goodwill in the community for their philanthropy. And if you have a sponsor that you've been wanting to work with that you haven't quite started the conversation with yet providing a matching grant for a giving event is a really great way to break the ice with them. So you can actually use this to set up a sponsorship relationship with an organization or a company that you haven't had that relationship with in the past. So these are basically three groups of prospective matching grant providers that you'll want to tap and sort of include in your list of prospects. And then as I mentioned you just put it on the in Mighty Cause under the matching grant tool which is on your fundraising tools submenu. You can recognize the donor, you can add a logo which is really great if you're working with a sponsor or a business you can have multiple matches. Some nonprofits get really fancy with their matches and have one going through the entire event that's a larger match as well as hourly matches to be competitive during the golden ticket hours which we'll talk about in a bit. So there's a lot that you can do and you can also have more than one match running at one time. And you can kind of schedule them so that they fire up when you tell us that you want them to be active. So there's a lot you can do. And if you haven't taken a look at the matching grant tool I would recommend just going in there and seeing what it looks like because you'll get a good idea of what you can do with a matching grant by just looking at the tool and the options that are there. And then you just want to promote your match. Anytime you're promoting Richland Gives really a matching grant that no one promotes is kind of like a tree falling in a forest with no one around to hear it. It's ultimately a marketing tool it's something that you use to pull supporters in and incentivize them to give when it is most advantageous to your organization to get donations. So you really just want to make sure that you are promoting your matching grant and making full use of the potential marketing ability that you can get from it. So peer-to-peer fundraising is another fantastic strategy if you have participated in Richland Gives in years past and you've never tried peer-to-peer fundraising I highly recommend dipping your toe into it. It's a fundraising technique where you are leveraging your existing supporters and bringing them in as fundraisers to reach out to their social networks and ask them to make a donation to their fundraiser for your nonprofit. So this is a really great way to cast a wider net when you have a time limit on your campaign. So essentially what you're doing is you're asking the people that you know you can count on to support you who are there as donors to actually start a fundraiser. It's the next step up for them. And then they're asking their social network, their friends, their colleagues, their family to make donations to their fundraiser. So the benefits of peer-to-peer fundraising the main one is donor acquisition. You're expanding beyond your list of existing supporters. So this allows you to cast a wider net get more reach on a day and during an event when that is really important. And you're also building word of mouth and grassroots support for your cause. So that's a really peer-to-peer is a really great way to build support and bring in new people in your community who may not be familiar with your cause. It's also really fun for the donors, believe it or not sometimes nonprofits can think that it's a big ask or that it's difficult or it's just too much but donors who've been there to support you year after year they love doing this kind of stuff overall because it's a way to get engaged in a different way and it allows them to do more with their effort instead of just giving you money they can bring in more by talking about how important your cause is to the people they know. So donors really love this. It's a great way to engage them and get them moving down that pipeline and doing more for your nonprofit. And it also just generates buzz. Social media makes it really hard for nonprofits and businesses to be seen in people's news feeds and this is kind of a way around that because somebody may not be able to see your posts or they may not see your posts at all because they don't follow you, they don't know who you are but this gets more people in the loop. It makes more people aware of your campaign. So if you haven't tried peer-to-peer I highly recommend it. You'll raise more money overall. If you had a couple of peer-to-peer fundraisers who are each raising $200 a piece that's all money that's gonna go to your nonprofit and it's gonna help you win prizes. So if you haven't tried it yet definitely give peer-to-peer a try. So peer-to-peer on Mighty Cause is really simple. We were built for peer-to-peer fundraising. That was one of the first things our platform was designed to do back when we were called Razoo. So all you'll do is ask your supporters to fundraise for you, provide a link to your organization page and direct them to click the fundraise button that is right next to your donate button. It's right in the front. It's very easy to see. And then our process is very simple. We have a wizard that will take them through the process and help them set up their page. You can also set up a template for them. All nonprofits have access to one template and that will pre-fill parts of the page for your peer-to-peer fundraisers and make it a little bit easier for them. And they have the option to use it or not. It's just a great way to facilitate peer-to-peer fundraising. So it's very simple. And then just have them start asking for donations on November 15th. And that is all money that's gonna come back to your nonprofit and help you on leaderboards and help you win prizes. If you have any questions about how to kickstart peer-to-peer fundraising or how it works on Mighty Cause, you can always reach out to our support team and we'll walk you through the process. So some quick facts about peer-to-peer fundraising. Every admin for your nonprofit will get a notification when a peer-to-peer fundraising page is created. So you'll be notified when somebody creates a page for you so that you can reach out to them, say thank you and start that conversation with them. You can also track peer-to-peer campaigns in the campaigns section of your dashboard. That is under your fundraising tools and it kind of gives you an overview of all of the peer-to-peer pages that are connected to your nonprofit. You can actually email them through the platform and you can see how they're doing. So for instance, if somebody created a peer-to-peer page and it's not published, you can always reach out to them and ask them if there's something that's preventing them from publishing it and you can help them get them across the finish line. And this is also where you can hide old peer-to-peer pages. So if you have pages that are displaying in search, whether they are legit peer-to-peer pages or fundraisers that your organization started, you can also hide those. So they're not viewable in searches through your campaign screen. All donations that are made to peer-to-peer pages, whether it's somebody's individual page, a team or event, they get counted on your profile. They are on the leaderboard and they are eligible for prizes. So there's no real difference in the eyes of Mighty Cause and Richland Gives. If somebody makes a donation to their friend's page for your nonprofit and if they made a donation directly to your nonprofit's profile, it's all the same. And so all of those online donations will be added to your total. They'll be added to the leaderboard and they will help you win prizes. And then once the event is over, we bundle those together and we just send them to you with your regular disbursement. And I just wanna note that your fundraisers must be linked to your nonprofit. Sometimes there's some confusion about that. If somebody creates a fundraiser and it's connected to the wrong organization, like they were looking for an American Red Cross chapter that was in Richland, but they started one for the national organization that won't count for Richland Gives. But you can certainly contact our support team if there are any weird snafus like that that come up. So email marketing is really one of your most important tools during Richland Gives in terms of marketing. And that's because you don't have to fight social media algorithms. You have a direct line to your supporters inbox. So if they are subscribed, they're gonna see it in your inbox and you'll be able to talk to them about your campaign. So it's a really important way to connect with supporters during Richland Gives. In terms of best practices and tips that we have to share, definitely making sure that your email is short, sweet and simple. Most people on the internet, these days have short attention spans and we don't read every email that we receive word for word, we kind of skim them. So using things like headers and graphics and CTA buttons to make your email really easy to read at a glance to get the gist of it just by giving it a quick look is what you're aiming for here because people are not gonna read a novel inside of an email. They wanna get the message and then do whatever you're asking them to do. I recommend segmenting your audiences and what I mean by that is that your nonprofit has a big email list with all of your supporters on it. Every nonprofit has that sort of the master list of everybody who is signed up to receive your emails. What you wanna do to be more effective with your email marketing is pull out some affinity groups and what I mean by affinity groups is groups that are alike, people that you might wanna talk to slightly differently. For instance, volunteers, people who've donated to your Richland Gives campaigns in the past, these are groups that you'll most likely wanna pull out of your master list and send them specific messages. So you may wanna do some targeting that is extras that send them some emails that you're not sending to your whole list but in most cases what you're doing is when you're getting an email together in MailChimp, Constant Contact, whatever you use, you can create the same email essentially and have it go directly to this group and just edit a few things within the email that speak directly to the relationship that the person receiving the email has with your nonprofit. For instance, you wanna make sure that if you're emailing your volunteers, you're talking to them because as if you know that they are volunteers and you're acknowledging that important relationship they have with your nonprofit by donating their time and their effort to you on a regular basis. So it'll be more effective when you send them an email that talks directly to who they are as supporters. Making it mobile friendly is really important. I think most email marketing platforms like Constant Contact, MailChimp, Campaign Monitor and so on make all their emails mobile friendly but sometimes you can still use a one that's not quite mobile friendly. So make sure you're looking at it on actual phones because sometimes email apps particularly the inbox app from Gmail or I guess the Gmail app at this point can make emails look a little funky. So make sure that you're pulling out your phone and actually looking at your emails and definitely test them. There's really no worse feeling on a giving event or at any other time than sending out an email to a big list of people and a link is wrong or you have a typo in there and you can prevent all of that horrible stuff that happens to email marketers just by testing the email, send it to two people either other staff members or get some volunteers in the loop and just ask them to check your emails so that you make sure that the content you're sending out is good, doesn't have any mistakes in it and has links that work. And then make a clear ask to donate. Sometimes nonprofits can make soft asks so they'll have a button that says thank you for donating but they haven't donated yet. So you wanna make sure that you're using clear direct language like donate now, give today and so on so that when somebody scans your email they see the button and they know exactly what you would like them to do. So social media has gotten a little bit trickier over the past years and that is because they've switched from chronological feeds which means that you see things that people post and things that business pages post in the order they are posted. We've gone from that to an algorithm which is a mathematical formula that basically tells the platform based on that user's behavior and a bunch of different factors what they are most likely to be interested in because their goal as a platform is to keep you on the app. They wanna keep you in the app. So they're gonna show users things that they are likely to be interested in. So it's a little bit harder to reach people and for that reason I really recommend sticking with strategies like email some personal outreach picking up the phone, sending postcards because social media is not gonna be sending people timely posts but there are some ways that you can get around that. First of all, post where your audience is if you have never used TikTok in your life you do not need to use TikTok for Richland Gives. If you have Facebook followers and Instagram followers, concentrate your effort there. If you only have a handful on Twitter maybe send out one or two tweets but generate spend most of your time or you're most likely to reach more of your supporters. I recommend scheduling your key content ahead of time most of the platforms have tools where you can do that. Facebook and Instagram you can use their creator studio to post to both apps simultaneously. Twitter has tweet deck and then you also have programs that you may or may not have in use at your nonprofit like Buffer and Hootsuite that sort of act as central desktops for all of your social media channels. But as much as you can schedule things ahead of time and save the day of for interaction. So making sure that you have some space for posting updates, getting into the comments and interacting with people who comment on your posts because that's one of the things that social media platforms are looking for. Things like live streams can sort of get people's attention. So play on a live stream, it doesn't have to be fancy it can be somebody with a phone interviewing your executive director or even doing a tour of your facilities. It does not have to be fancy but doing a live stream can sort of push you to the front of the line and some users may actually receive push notifications letting them know that you've gone live. So it kind of pushes you to the front of the line and makes it more likely that you'll get people's attention. Posting the kind of content that algorithms on social media like, photos, videos are always important. We've said that for years and years and they just continue to be successful if you want your posts to be seen. And on Instagram and Facebook, particularly stories are important. They want you to use the stories feature and these are time sensitive. So there's a little bit of, you know they put them in the user's feed or I guess their app in the order of, you know which ones they are most likely to interact with but your stories will appear when you post them and that's when users will be able to see them. They last for 24 hours and it's a really great way to get more eyes on what you're doing on social media. And something really simple that you can do is when you make a post just share it to your stories and let people know that you have a new post and talk to them about what you're doing. So make use of your stories. And Facebook and Instagram have also been pushing reels which is kind of their answer to TikTok. So you can also consider making a reel. You don't have to but they are making sure that users are seeing reels that people make because they want users to use that technology. And then on social media you always just wanna make sure that people have a way to do what you would like them to do which is donate. So include a call to action with a link that's important on social media. Don't forget to actually leave a link where they can donate and ask them to do so. So donor retention is really important especially since most of the nonprofits participating in Richland Gives have been participating for at least a year or two at this point. Previous Richland Gives donors are low hanging fruit. It would be a real shame to not bring them back to make another donation just for lack of asking. So make a plan to incorporate outreach to donors who've given in the past for your Richland Gives campaign. Think about how you can reach out to them that will make them more likely to come back and make another donation. You do have a donor retention report that is available to you and we'll talk about that in just a moment. And that just makes it easier for you to pinpoint who has given to you in the past but hasn't come back to make another donation yet. And I also really recommend with previous donors using that personal touch goes a really long way. So sending them save the date cards actually picking up the phone and calling them that's a really powerful way if you have their phone numbers and in-person events if you are safe in getting people into your facilities having a little party or gathering where you invite past donors can be a really great way to reach out to them and really nurture that relationship with those supporters who've shown up in the past to support you. So your donor retention report is under the reports section of your dashboard and it's pretty easy and intuitive to use. What it does is it keeps track of year over year data. So who donated last year that did not donate again this year and you wanna use your report filters to sort of find the correct people that you're looking to target and handily enough we actually have past Richland Gives events loaded in there for you so you can very easily find past Richland Gives donors and you can even do some recapturing efforts if you have people from 2019 you haven't made a donation since then you can do some outreach to them to get them to come back and recapture those donors. This will help you retain and grow your donor base and I do recommend really highly having a couple of emails on deck to send during Richland Gives. And what I mean by that is building the actual email itself in MailChimp or Constate Contact or whatever you happen to use and then pulling that list from your donor retention report and then sending it to anybody who hasn't been retained. I definitely recommend what I call a Hail Mary email on Richland Gives before the event ends at 7pm maybe 5pm or so. Anybody who hasn't come back to make a donation send them a quick email and just ask them to come back and support you again. And this is actually really powerful but it's very easy and simple to do. So I highly recommend making sure that you're focusing on donor retention and you can also track how you're doing in terms of donor retention right on your overview screen if you're interested in tracking those metrics. So now before we come to a close I wanted to go through some prize strategy and specifically how you can actually win prizes for Richland Gives. So there are a couple of different types of prizes available and I think it's really important to talk about what those types of prizes are because sometimes, especially if you don't spend a lot of time in the world of giving events like I do or maybe this is your first year it can be confusing to understand what a golden ticket or a leader board is. So we'll just quickly go through the different types of prizes that are available. So first is the Pre-Event Giving Prize and what that is is a grant from the Richland County Foundation to the first 10 organizations that raise $5,000 starting at 7 a.m. on November 15th. So this is the incentive to take advantage of Pre-Event Giving that I was talking about a little bit earlier. You have a financial incentive to make use of those weeks where you can start fundraising for Richland Gives. So that is starting at 7 a.m. on November 15th. You'll receive a $2,000 grant prize which you can use as your matching grant during Richland Gives. So it's a really good thing to try to do focus on getting those Pre-Event Donations. So you have a chance of winning the Pre-Event Prize it's a definitely generous amount and that would be a matching grant that you can make use of during Richland Gives. Leader boards are where you'll basically be tracked during the live event on November 30th. And it is looking at your cumulative fundraising efforts for Richland Gives. And there are prizes available for the top six positions. And the leader boards are split into small and large nonprofits so that the competition is relatively equal and fair. We don't want really small nonprofits having to compete with multi-million dollar nonprofits who have much more capacity than them. So this is why you have two leader boards one for large, one for small. And those you'll be able to see when the site switches to the live event site on November 30th. Golden tickets are hourly prizes and they are worth $1,000 each. There's also some golden tickets for the leader board watch party. What I would recommend doing is making sure that you go to the rules and prizes page on RichlandGives.org and taking a look at the schedule of hourly prizes because it's a little too much for me to go into here and you're probably not going to retain it and it would be a lot of talking but you have a schedule that you can use to make sure that you know what's available when and you can sort of strategize to make sure that you're targeting your donors during those hours when you have the chance of winning an extra $1,000 for your nonprofit. So how to win a pre-event prize? Really the trick is you need to start fundraising early on November 15th. So at 7 a.m. on November 15th, start getting donations and a lot of nonprofits will do that by rallying the people in their nonprofits inner circle. So starting with people who are tried and true donors people who make donations every single month to your nonprofit, your board, your staff, volunteers, people that you can count on to make a donation to support your nonprofit. So starting from those people in your inner circle is a really great way to build up some funding before the actual live event happens and have a chance at winning those pre-event prizes. And one thing that you can also do is use a matching grant to incentivize people to give during that early giving period. You can absolutely set that up. So if you use a matching grant and incentivize people to make a donation you'll be in good shape and you may be likely to win a prize. And peer-to-peer fundraising can start on November 15th as well. That's all additional donations that you will be bringing in. It's all additional funds that you'll be bringing and additional people that you'll be reaching. So that is why peer-to-peer is so powerful, especially when you're doing something like this where you're targeting a prize that is really about volume. Those peer-to-peer fundraisers will really support you and boost your campaign. So think about making sure that you're kick-starting this and peer-to-peer fundraising and have people ready to go on November 15th. So leaderboard prizes are really, really generous. So you wanna try to win these if you can. You have a lot of chances. The top six places on each leaderboard wins a prize. So that's 12 nonprofits that are able to win a leaderboard prize. And really the key is building and sustaining fundraising momentum. This is the long game. So starting on November 15th until the last minutes of November 30th, making sure that you are fundraising and engaging donors through email, social media, in person, wherever you normally talk to donors, that is really how you do well on leaderboards on Richland GIFs. A lot of nonprofits who do well on leaderboards will work to coordinate larger GIFs on Richland GIFs. Those absolutely count provided they are made online. So that is something that can give you a little bit of a leg up on the competition. If you know that you have a donor who makes an $800 donation every December, you can reach out to her and ask her, can you make that donation online on Giving Tuesday? And most of them are more than happy to make that donation to help you out. So that's another tactic that you can try. And one thing that I did wanna mention is that you do have the ability for any donation that's $100 or over to use the plaid app so that donors can connect straight to their bank account. And that puts a cap on the bank fees, which are usually 2.9% plus 30 cents. So it's proportional, the more you give, the more that fee is that's imposed by your bank, but the plaid app actually caps that. So that can be a way to get around any concerns that are there about the size of fees because those are a percentage and it can be a lot if somebody's donating thousands of dollars. So encourage them to connect their bank account and choose that as their payment type. You wanna keep track of your position on the leaderboard. Nothing is set in stone, it's not over until the clock strikes 7 p.m. on November 30th. So until the very last seconds of the event, the positions can change. So keep track of where you are. All of the leaderboards are searchable on the live site so you'll be able to click a magnifying glass that's on the leaderboard and search for your nonprofit if you don't see your organization and ask your nonprofits to help. I mean, your supporters to help. They wanna help you raise money for your organization. They wanna see you win prizes. So you can always ask supporters through email, social media, wherever you may find them to help support you and climb the leaderboard. And you can also ask for their help in like cracking the top 10. So see where you are and see how you can use that to encourage your supporters to come out and make a donation. Matching grants, especially strategic matching grants can really help you get that total amount you've raised higher and higher. And a tried and true strategy is working with past donors to increase their gifts. So you'll raise more overall if you focus on getting donors who've given in the past to give it a slightly higher amount. So that is another case for segmenting your emails and making phone calls. If somebody donated $50 last year, why not see if they can donate 75 or 100 this year? Getting them to increase their gifts will increase the overall amount you raise and therefore you will do better on the leaderboard that is taking into account your cumulative fund raising from November 15th through November 30th. So golden tickets are hourly prizes. Really the key is to understand the schedule. You can find that at richlandgifts.org under the rules and prizes section of the menu. So know which hours you're eligible to win and make sure you understand when they're happening and what the criteria is. So just check the schedule and make sure you understand which hours your nonprofit is eligible for and make a plan to reach out to your donors during those hours. You wanna communicate at the beginning of a golden ticket hour that you're looking to win and that you're eligible to compete in and let them know like, hey, you have the opportunity to help us win an extra $1,000 for our organization which would help us do X, Y, and Z. You can get very specific about what $1,000 will help you do. So find exciting ways to grab your supporter's attention. What would you do with that $1,000? I've even seen nonprofits do things like little giveaways for tokens, like buttons, stickers, t-shirts, really just low-valued tokens but that will incentivize people to come make a donation. So that's something that you can try as well. And make sure that your supporters know when the hourly prizes are so that they can plan their gifts because there's nothing worse than missing out on a sale which is what that feels like to your donors. So something like making a graphic for your social media accounts that explain when the prizes are available so they can plan their gifts and make sure that they're doing all they can to help your nonprofit during Richland Gives is a really great strategy to win those golden tickets. A lot of them have different rules and different groups of nonprofits that are competing. So just make sure that you're taking a look at that schedule of prizes under rules and prizes on richlandgives.org. So I did wanna go through some rules about Richland Gives so that we're all on the same page because I wanna make sure that everybody has their efforts rewarded and nobody is precluded from being able to win a prize. So one thing that is really important to know is that online donations only count for prizes and leaderboard position. So one of the most common emails we get at Mighty Cause is, oh no, there's this disparity between the amount that's showing on my profile page and what's showing on the leaderboard. Usually that is offline donations and matching grants that are not fulfilled online because the leaderboards are only going to take into account the online donations that are made. You can certainly log offline donations. Everybody has donors who just like to give via check or cash and will not give online, but the more you can do to make sure that your donors are being urged to give online and that they understand that it is important for your nonprofit to give online during Richland Gives, the better off you will be. So yeah, that's a common question that we get is why are these amounts different? And it's usually because of offline donations and matching grants that are sort of effectively counted as offline donations because they're not being fulfilled online. Your organization cannot donate to itself. So I don't know if this has happened with Richland Gives in the past, but we've had it happen with some other giving events. So I just wanted to mention it that we're looking for you to engage real donors. We don't want you to use Mighty Cause or Richland Gives to funnel money from your organization to itself. Certainly your individual staff members, your board members, they can make donations as people, but using organizational credit cards and organizational money on a giving event like Richland Gives is no bueno, that's against the rules. So I just wanted to make that clear to everybody that we're looking for you to engage donors that exist in your community, that have relationships with your nonprofit, not to funnel money through the Mighty Cause platform to win a prize. And it's also against our terms of use to run credit card numbers for your donors through Mighty Cause. This is unfortunately just against the platform's terms of use and it can be considered credit card laundering. It violates cardholder agreements. So when somebody calls you on the phone and you take their card number and you run it through Mighty Cause, that is a violation of their cardholder agreement and it is a violation of Mighty Cause. Mighty Cause is terms of service. And you should really encourage people who have issues making donations online or if they call you and they wanna send you a check, encouraging them to give online themselves and actually entering their own information in so that number one, their information is completely secure and you're also not violating any of the rules of the event, the rules of participating on Mighty Cause and the cardholder agreement that the credit cardholder made with whatever company they're using. So I'm happy to answer any questions that you may have about that but I just wanted to make sure that these ground rules were understood and there's also some rules that are listed on the rules and prizes page on the Richling Give site that you'll wanna take a look at as well just to make sure that you're staying within the that you're drawing inside the lines for Richling Gives. Lastly, I just wanna make sure that you all know that you can reach out to Mighty Cause for support leading up to the event and during the event we are here to help you. So if you have any questions about your page or a matching grant or anything technical related to Mighty Cause, you can reach out to support at mightycause.com. We are a Monday through Friday, nine to five operations so you can reach us within those hours. And we usually are very quick we usually get back to you within 24 hours of you submitting a ticket to our support team. You can also give us a call if you're one of those people who prefers to talk things out on the phone at 202-800-1618. And you can make use of the support library that we put together for you. If you just wanna know how to find something on your profile you can actually search our support library or browse through the different articles that we have there that will walk you through the process and provide screenshots. So sometimes that's the easiest way to find the solution when you're trying to figure out how to do something in particular on your profile. All right, so that is it for the presentation. I would love to hear from everybody on the webinar. If you have any questions about what we just covered any questions about Rich Lynn Gives this is our last webinar for Rich Lynn Gives. So this is your last opportunity to have Mora and I here to answer any questions anything at the top of your mind. And it looks like Mora wanted to answer the question about whether Rich Lynn Gives is a national project or a local project. So Mora, if you wanna go ahead and take that question. It is a Richland County project. So Richland County nonprofits that are located in Richland County are qualified for that. And so it's not open to other nonprofits. We have made some exceptions to that role. I'll give you the example of Hospice of North Central Ohio. They are physically located in Ashland and Mount Vernon but they have an office here and they serve an awful lot of people here. So typically it's just a Richland County based nonprofit. Yeah, and sorry if I was confusing about that. So Richland Gives is a local event that is held on Giving Tuesday which is actually a global day of giving. So there's a lot happening on November 30th and Richland Gives is part of that global movement to inspire philanthropy and support communities. And it's just focused on Richland County in Ohio. So yeah, it's part of the global Giving Tuesday movement but it is a local event. All right, so I think that might be it for questions. Last call for any questions that anybody has for either Mora or myself. Let's see somebody is raising their hand. I haven't tried this before. I'm gonna allow you to talk, Steve. So I hope you're ready to go. I'm gonna just press the button. All right, Steve, do you have any questions? And if you, it looks like your audio's turned off but you can also put that. Oh, go ahead. Sorry, I think maybe you answered this a moment ago but apparently you can offer low value rewards or chachis in exchange for donations. Did I hear that correctly? Yeah, yeah, it's basically anything that would be considered a fundraising token by the IRS. They do have specific rules for like what constitutes a token but like obviously giving a gift basket away for a donation is not within the bounds of what the IRS allows but something like a T-shirt, little Chachki bumper sticker button, whatever. Yeah, that's totally fine to do. The only thing that I would mention is that raffles are not allowed on Mighty Cause. So having like a system where, okay, well everybody who donates during this hour you'll be put in a raffle for a night out at a restaurant. That's not something that we are able to permit because of IRS regulations. But if you wanted to do something like, hey first 20 people to donate to us get a bumper sticker that is totally within the bounds of what is allowed by the IRS. Obviously the rule of thumb is just don't exceed, like things that are super high value or just high value are things that you wanna talk to us about. So if there's something that's like on the bubble for you and you're not quite sure you can always contact support to ask them. Super, thank you very much, I appreciate it. Absolutely, thank you, Steve. Linda, what if somebody, an organization said to donors, you would be eligible to win a gift basket if you make a donation and we will randomly pull a name out to be awarded that gift basket. That would be considered a raffle. So we won't say that you can't do it period. We would just say that you can't do it on Mighty Cause. So for instance, if that was something that you wanted to kind of run independently on social media, if we don't know about it, we can't stop you. But on the Mighty Cause platform itself, part of our user agreement is that no raffles are allowed. So that sort of thing where a high value item like a gift basket or a gift certificate is kind of the incentive and you're gonna be pulling names from a pool of people who've made donations. That is too close to a raffle for our comfort. So we just wanna make sure that if you're doing something like that, it's either pretty fair and equitable. It's not a raffle. And if you wanna do something on your own channels, that is not something that we are gonna tell you not to do. It just can't happen on Mighty Cause.com. Okay, and I wanna make one clarification. That first prize that we're giving away, we will not announce the winners until Richland Gives concludes. Typically, we name all the winners like December 1st or December 2nd. So the first 10 organizations to raise $5,000, that price will be announced afterwards. And we do that for many reasons just to make sure we have our information correct. You provide us with all the donor information so we can double check that. And also I have found in the past if we announced the winners before November 30th or before the giving Tuesday day, people stopped fundraising. So it kind of goes against the reason why we offer the grant prize incentives. Yeah, I think great. Thanks for that clarification. I think I may have misrepresented that in the webinar, so I apologize for that. So that wouldn't be your matching grant for the event itself, but it's definitely an incentive to start fundraising early and keep fundraising throughout the whole event. Okay, thank you. Absolutely, so I think that is it for questions. So I'll go ahead and say goodbye for today. Thank you all so much for joining me for this webinar. I really appreciate it. Thank you, Maura, for all of the wisdom that you shared during the Q&A and for being a pleasure to work with. And I really look forward to seeing what everybody is able to achieve on Richland Gives. So thank you all so much for attending.