 All right, so as I mentioned, we are here to talk about creative ideas for your Giving Tuesday campaign. Giving Tuesday is happening this year at the end of November, and it's hard to believe that it's already the middle of August. It'll be here before we know it, that you can build into your Giving Tuesday campaign this year to have some fun with it, raise even more money, and engage even more donors than you did with last year's campaign. So thanks for joining us today. And hopefully, you'll walk away at the end of this with some new ideas that you can incorporate into your Giving Tuesday campaign. My name is Bethany. I have been working with Mighty Cause for about four years at least, and this will be my fifth Giving Tuesday campaign. It's always one of the most exciting events of the year. Nonprofits love it. Even donors love it. It's the holiday season, and it really kicks off any of your Giving. So it's always a really fun event for us here at Mighty Cause to do whatever we can to help provide resources, opportunities to help our nonprofit partners really make the most of this important day. So we'll start with a couple of basics about Giving Tuesday, how to get started on Mighty Cause, but then we'll really focus the meat of today's presentation on those creative ideas. So first, everyone knows about Giving Tuesday, or most everyone knows about Giving Tuesday by now. It is a global movement happening around the world, nonprofits, donors, schools, community groups, corporations, everyone's really getting involved. And so Mighty Cause has always hosted our own event as a part of this global movement to give our nonprofit partners the opportunity to host a campaign as a part of this global movement. Take advantage of all the buzz happening on social media around Giving Tuesday and get their own share of the funds being raised that day. So there's a couple of things that we do here at Mighty Cause to help our nonprofit partners raise more funds and have a more impactful day. The first is free trainings like this webinar today and a number of others that we have available throughout the next couple of months. So make sure to keep an eye out for those and sign up for any trainings. We also have free resources on our GivingTuesday.mightycause.com website. Both of these are intended to help save you time and energy rather than recreating the wheel on everything that you might do. Why not borrow from successful examples of other nonprofits, borrow from email templates, grab some creative ideas from a training like today. So we're hoping that those training and resources available will really help you up the ante for this year's campaign. Next, we always like to offer some additional cash prizes for nonprofit partners throughout the day. So more information will be coming out on that as we get closer to the event. But just some exciting opportunities to walk away with some additional funds on top of everything that you're able to raise through your own campaign. This year, just like last year, we're offering an exciting promotion to make sure that your nonprofit does not pay a platform fee for your GivingTuesday campaign. So donors will be given the option to cover a platform fee. But whether they cover that platform fee or not, your nonprofit will never see that platform fee deducted from your disbursement. So that means the only thing that you'll see is that credit card fee, which is a password cost for us here at Mighty Cause. And finally, another really exciting opportunity is the available to test out a handful of our premium fundraising tools including our CRM system, advanced analytics, a data integration feature that allows you to automatically sync data from Mighty Cause to external tools that you might use, volunteer management. Lots of really upgraded, exciting fundraising tools that can help you improve stewardship and engagement with your donors. These typically come with a monthly fee as a part of our premium subscriptions. But by signing up for GivingTuesday on Mighty Cause, we'll give you access to these tools at no additional cost. So it's a great way to test out these tools to see if they're of interest to you for year round and also use them to really raise more funds and better engage your donors as a part of this GivingTuesday campaign in particular. So for those of you that haven't yet committed or signed up to participate with GivingTuesday on Mighty Cause, you can get started today at givingtuesday.mightycause. You'll see a big button that says register, have a very short form to fill out. That'll give you access to your page and access for your organization to participate in the event. And once you do that, it's a matter of accessing all those great resources that we have available on the website, creating your campaign, building out your Mighty Cause profile page. You've got up-to-date content on the page telling the story about why donors should give to you this GivingTuesday. And then using that as a starting point to create your whole campaign. So email, social media, what's the strategy, what's the focus? And we'll talk a little bit more about that. A few key dates to keep in mind as a part of GivingTuesday on Mighty Cause. Of course, the big day is happening November 27th. It's the Tuesday after Thanksgiving. So you've got Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, Cyber Monday, right into GivingTuesday. Most of the giving will happen. Lots of the excitement happens on that day, November 27th. But for the Mighty Cause event for GivingTuesday, we will open early donations two weeks in advance. So starting November 13th, you can start accepting donations to your page. Start building up momentum for your GivingTuesday campaign. And it's starting that day that that promotion that I mentioned earlier regarding platform fees will be in effect for any donations from that point on. So make sure to mark your calendars for both November 13th and November 27th. And plan your communication strategy around the fact that you might want to start securing some early gifts right around and following that November 13th date. And one other thing I will mention is that we do have a more introductory webinar that will be available recorded on the GivingTuesday website. For anyone that's new to Mighty Cause or just needs a refresher on kind of the basic tools, how to get your page set up and ready for the campaign. We won't cover that in today's webinar, but we will have that available on the GivingTuesday.mightycause.com website under our resources. So we're here to talk about creative ideas for your GivingTuesday campaign. But I wanted to start by just taking a few moments to talk about the essential components for any GivingTuesday campaign. So before we get creative, before we add on any other exciting things, I want to focus on and highlight some of the key things that every non-profit will want to make sure they've got in place for their own successful campaign. So first and foremost is an achievable fundraising goal. And when it comes to setting goals, there's all different ways that you can think about these goals. It can be a dollar amount if you need to raise $15,000 to meet your budget for the end of the year. It can also be a goal around a number of donors that you want to have contribute to this campaign or a number of new donors that you want to have give or even a number of recurring donors. Finally, there's all different types of goals that are not necessarily directly connected to just a dollar amount or a donor amount. So your goal might be to launch a new program, a new initiative, or highlight an initiative that's been under-resourced in your organization. There's lots of different ways that you can take this goal, but really important that very early on in the planning process, you decide what that goal is. And then all the other actions that follow, planning your campaign, building out your page, soliciting partnerships, all of that can really tie into that single focused goal. That will help keep you and any volunteers or staff members that are supporting your campaign on track. It's always potential to make your campaign bigger than it needs to be. You need to take on additional events and activities that aren't really necessary or critical to that key goal. So having that goal in mind right from the start is always important. Of course, image and video assets. That will support everything that you do, whether it's your Mighty Cause profile page, your social media, emails, any kind of communication that you're going to do is going to benefit from really strong visual assets. Video, of course, is always more dynamic and engaging than static photo content. And don't be intimidated by video if you don't have a large team to support this effort. There's lots of great, simple ways to incorporate video into your campaign. Storytelling, of course. This is kind of a continuation from why those assets are so important because they help to tell the story. They are just one way that you can tell a powerful story. That's really what fundraising is all about at the end of the day is telling a powerful story, getting your donors and supporters excited about supporting you because of that story that you've told them about your need, your impact. So again, really, as you think about setting that fundraising goal, think about a central focused theme and story that you will tell throughout your campaign. And again, that's something that you can carry through all of your communications to make sure that you do have a consistent message throughout. Of course, here, we've already referenced it a few times, but your communications and outreach plan. You will be in much better shape if you take some time now to sketch out a very basic plan for your communications and outreach through and after Giving Tuesday. As we get closer to the Giving Tuesday timeframe, people are starting to be out for the holidays. It's getting close to end of year. Things can get really busy. If you don't have things planned out ahead of time, it can feel like a scramble to get what you need to build. It'll be done quickly. You won't always have the time you need to get everything reviewed. And you have less opportunity to really be strategic about how you want to communicate and who you want to communicate with rather than just being reactive about, hey, we've got to get something out about our Giving Tuesday campaign today because it's coming up tomorrow. So making time for that communications plan ahead of time will allow you to be strategic. Think about how often you want to communicate with people and what key messages you want to share with them. Think about how you're going to talk to different segments of donors throughout the campaign. And really make sure that, and we'll talk about this more in a few minutes, you've thought through that follow-up and thank you part of this communications plan as well. Because of course, Giving Tuesday might end at the end of the day on November 27th. But that's really just the beginning of what you can do with these donors that have supported you. How can you continue to steward them, thank them, share the impact? Whether that's leading into further supporting your end of your campaign or just keeping them more involved with your organization on a year-round basis. And finally, something that really flows through all of what we've talked about is clear and simple messaging. It can be really easy for a non-profit to get caught up in the weeds of what they do and the impact they have. You spend all day every day thinking about the programs, thinking about the impact, and you think about it in terms of the details, the buzzwords. But oftentimes donors don't always need or understand that level of detail. So keeping it simple, $10 can accomplish X. We need your support to do X, really boiling it down to the key message that's going to appeal to a donor that doesn't spend all their time at your organization, really understanding the ins and outs of your programming and the nuances of why you do something a certain way. So really try to keep that in mind as you do craft that communications plan. How can you keep the message clear throughout and very simple so that you're giving donors just a single clear option of making a donation to support your organization? So again, just wanted to cover some of the basics before we jump into the more fun creative ideas that you can use to build on to hopefully that strong foundation that you've already built. So first we'll talk about team fundraising and peer-to-peer fundraising. This is one of the most exciting and most impactful ideas that you can build into your Giving Tuesday campaign. Especially if this is your, you participated in Giving Tuesday before, you've done it one, two, three, four, five years and you're looking for a way to really step it up this year. Adding in peer-to-peer fundraising and particularly doing so by engaging a team of supporters to fundraise together is a really great option for you. So you can do this all different kinds of ways. One is creating an internal challenge. So create an opportunity for all of your board of directors to have their own fundraising page and compete against each other to see which one can raise the most funds for your nonprofit on Giving Tuesday. You can take it to a different place and include staff and volunteers in the competition, whether you've got staff going against the board of directors or staff battling it out internal departments against each other, staff and volunteers, different groups of volunteers. It's really just a way that you can create segmentation within the groups of individuals, board of directors, staff, volunteer that are really committed day-to-day to supporting your organization, make it fun for them. And something that you can do across all of team fundraising but is especially valuable in this case is creating fund incentives and celebrations for people that are able to raise the most as a part of these teams. So staff, really great opportunities to give staff a day off or a casual dress day or a free lunch in the office for those that the group or the individual that raises the most funds as a part of the competition. And also, again, for all of these groups, hosting a celebration to honor the top fundraisers. So that's a great opportunity, no matter who wins and gets the prize or the bragging rights that you offer. It's a great way to bring these people together after they've done this important effort of fundraising on behalf of your organization, bring them all together to thank them, steward them. So again, you've got this opportunity to continue this strategy moving forward. Outside of your internal challenges, you've got lots of other options to really make team fundraising work for you. You can host a 5K. Of course, this is the time of year that everybody's got turkey trots going on. You can do a bikeathon, yoga-thon, read-a-thon. There's all different kinds of things that you can make into anathon. And really, it's just an opportunity for you to encourage supporters to start their own fundraising page and raise money for your organization as it relates to their participation in this fun kind of activity. Especially again, around this time of year where people are often doing races in that Thanksgiving timeframe. Good opportunity to kind of tie into that. Maybe tie into a local event that's already happening in your community so that you're not bothering with any logistics of event coordination. But you're just encouraging a group of individuals to sign up for one of these races that's already happening and use that as an opportunity to raise funds for your organization. Another really fun team fundraising strategy, which is very successful for a lot of nonprofits, is pitting corporate sponsors or local companies against each other in a competition to raise funds for your organization. It's as exciting and as simple as that. Many organizations do this with law firms, for example, that have been involved or supporting their organization over the years. Maybe they've been a corporate sponsor for a gala. Get local law firms to compete against each other. Everybody loves a little friendly competition. And why not use that to your advantage? Also possible with maybe local businesses, local retail groups. Again, just create opportunities for these companies to engage with your organization. Have a page for each of these companies so that individual employees have the option to give right to their company's page or they can share it with their friends and family. It's an easy way to start relationships with these new corporate partners or to steward relationships with existing corporate partners by providing different ways for them to engage and to get their employees on board. Finally, as I already mentioned, one of the things that's most exciting about team fundraising is the opportunity for that friendly competition. And it's always helpful to encourage and spur on that friendly competition with incentives and celebrations for those that are able to earn the top spot of the top team or the top individual supporting your group. So aside from hosting a team fundraiser, there's all different ways you can add challenges into your Giving Tuesday campaign. One option is to look at Giving Tuesday as a 24 hour event and doing something fun throughout each of those hours or maybe just choosing the nine to five hours. You can choose but having something that you commit to do each hour will give you something to talk about on social media during the day. It'll make it fun. It'll add content and hopefully if done right, it'll also support more donors and supporters following along with your efforts during the day. So maybe visiting program locations, visiting beneficiaries each hour, posting an interview on social media or a profile of somebody that has been served by your programming or a staff member or a volunteer. Fun way to help donors and supporters get a better look at your organization. So just there's lots of things you can do like that but think about every single hour of the day that you might be able to benefit from some kind of fun activity. Goal driven actions. Of course, we all know the Movember movement, the concept of growing a mustache throughout a campaign or shaving your head. Conversely, when you meet a certain dollar amount, it's also a good time of year to start thinking about the pull or plunge depending on where you live around the country. Lots of different goal driven actions that you can take. And that's just again, a fun communications tool that you can use to hopefully get your supporters a little more engaged with not just making a single donation, but really being committed and bought into helping you meet your overall goal. And of course, one of the most important giving Tuesday challenges that you can add to your campaign is a matching grant. I would really encourage no matter what other ideas that you do for giving Tuesday, definitely try to include a matching grant if you can. Great opportunity to either engage a corporate partner, find a new local business to support you, approach a major donor that typically gives at the end of the year. See if they'll get earlier in the form of a match for your Giving Tuesday campaign. You group all of your board of directors together to see if they'll together offer enough that can serve as a compelling match. This is a really important way to drive engagement to your page and through your page during the day. And again, gives you something to talk about throughout the day. You have a $5,000 match and you've got $1,000 left to meet that match. It gives you really great opportunity to further engage your donors. It adds an extra sense of urgency of why they should give today on Giving Tuesday. And donors really love the opportunity to amplify their impact by having it matched. And on Mighty Cause, you've got lots of flexibility. Your matching grant does not have to be given through the platform, but you have all kinds of great tools to promote that match on your page. So whether you've got a one-to-one match, a two-to-one match, three-to-one match, all different kinds of matches that you can build into your page, and really help your donors get excited about making their gift. Of course, unselfies by now are a well-known piece of the Giving Tuesday movement. It's a really great way to engage individuals on social media, particularly as a part of this movement. So there's lots of different groups that you can engage to post and share unselfies. Again, this is a fun way to get individuals involved in posting on social media and sharing their connection to your mission. It also gives you plenty of content to share during the day itself on Giving Tuesday. So you can invite staff to post about why they've chosen to work for your organization or what they do date today. You can invite your monthly donors to post about what it is that's gotten them excited about giving recurring support for your organization. You can invite board members and volunteers to post about their commitment that they've made and what they get to be involved with for your organization. And of course beneficiaries as well, depending on the work that you do. You might be able to encourage those individuals to post really compelling stories about their connection to your organization. And all of this will create great content that you can have hopefully in the form of both static posts as well as short videos that you can add to your Instagram stories to keep it active all day throughout Giving Tuesday. Of course Giving Tuesday is a fundraising event and a lot of what we talk about is all about online giving. So building your page online, encouraging donors to get to your page and make their donation. But there is a lot of value to be had in bringing people together offline. And lots of different exciting ways you can do that to add to your Giving Tuesday campaign. You can host an event with a local restaurant, bar or coffee shop. Ask them to donate a portion of the proceeds and then you can encourage your supporters to come and celebrate. Meet with you at this location. It can be a low key and low maintenance way to host an event. Hosting a happy hour or something like this at a local restaurant. And it also gives you the opportunity to set up a donation kiosk to encourage donors to actually make an in-person donation through your page while they come to this event. Just a great opportunity to get your supporters together. You could also host a volunteer opportunity. So depending on what type of work or what mission your organization serves, you might have the opportunity to bring individuals together to serve meals, fill backpacks, clean up the community. Something that is giving your supporters a chance to really live your mission and see it in action. It's a great way to really reengage and get these supporters excited about it. And again, of course, gives you the opportunity to share what you're doing on social media and email throughout the day to make sure that all those that aren't directly there as a part of the volunteer opportunity are seeing other people really get involved with your mission. And finally, while it may not be directly related to bringing in funds for your Giving Tuesday campaign itself, Giving Tuesday is a great opportunity to think about attracting new supporters. And you may decide that you want to host a free class or a free performance, free access to something that typically is charged for, just as a great way to bring new people in the door. Look at Giving Tuesday as both an opportunity to raise money and to make new friends, to get new people in the door so that you have the opportunity to steward them and hopefully get a gift from them in the future. We've talked a little bit a few times about recurring gifts. And one thing that you can do with your Giving Tuesday campaign to make it stand out a little different from previous years, a little different from other nonprofits giving Tuesday campaigns, is to make it focus on recurring gifts primarily. So in your email communications, down to the text in the call to action button, you can ask donors to give a monthly gift. Instead of just asking people to give a one-time gift, you can build your whole campaign around recurring donations. We all know the value of those recurring donations. A smaller dollar amount can mean so much more for your organization over the year and the lifetime value of that supporter in particular. So you can set a goal for the number of new recurring donors and making sure that throughout your communication, you really show the tangible impact of what a small monthly gift can do. So what will a 10, 15 or $20 a month gift do for your nonprofit versus helping to see, helping to have the donor see what that $10, where that could come from. Give up your morning coffee twice a month and support us. There's a lot of things that you can do there to, again, really help the donor understand the value of a recurring gift, even a very small one. And to make it even more exciting, you can add some fun perks to individuals that sign up as a monthly donor, as a part of your Giving Tuesday campaign, lots of different non-monetary things you can do to not affect their tax-deductible donation, but still make them feel like they're a part of a special club within your organization. Invite them to special events, post their name on social media or the website, if that's something you're interested in. You can share with them a monthly impact report or a special communication from your executive director or from the field. Lots of different things that you can do to really make these recurring donors feel special and valued for the monthly commitment they're giving to your organization. And the last creative idea, we mentioned it briefly earlier, is the concept of your thank you. Giving Tuesday does not end with Giving Tuesday. You've got lots more value that you can get out of your campaign. If you continue to engage and follow up with these donors after Giving Tuesday and of course on a year-round basis. So in this time of Giving Tuesday, the holiday time, donors are getting tons of emails from nonprofits. They're hearing and mail as well, frankly. They're hearing from all different kinds of nonprofits. So if they take the time to donate to your campaign, you want to make sure that your thank you stands out. You want to make sure that they don't miss it in their email and not feel fully acknowledged for their gift. So there's lots of fun things that you can do beyond the basic thank you email. Create a video, whether it's from your staff or executive director sharing a personal message of thanks or providing an opportunity for the beneficiaries that you serve. Again, depending on your mission, give them an opportunity to say thanks directly, whether through a video, a card that they write, a drawing, lots of different things you can do there to connect the donor with the beneficiaries that they've helped to support. On Mighty Cause, you have the ability to build a custom thank you page that donors will see as soon as they complete their donation. And there's lots you can do with that thank you page. You can add a video. Of course, add that personal message from your organization. And you can even set a call to action button of where you'd like donors to go after they see that thank you page. Send the back to your home page, send them to your blog. Lots of great things you can do there. Finally, post and tag on social media and really get creative with it. Have fun with the thank you realize and prioritize the thank you as a really important piece that is often not given the credit. It is due because you focus so much on building the campaign and getting your emails out and getting people to give that the thank you can sometimes be an afterthought. And by then you're busy wrapped up in your end giving and you don't have the time to really think about the appropriate way to say thank you and how often you should say thank you. And who should get a personal thank you call from one of your staff members or your director. And how soon after the campaign should you follow up with information about the impact that you were able to have with their gift. So really take the time to step up your thank you this year, and it will pay dividends, of course, beyond the campaign, but it's also a really great and important tool for engaging and stewarding your donors. So with that, I'm going to go ahead and open it up for any questions so I'll see if anyone has asked questions so far. If not, feel free to type them into the side panel. And I'll wait just a moment and if we don't have any questions, then I'll let everyone get back to their day their opportunity to sign up for Giving Tuesday on mighty cause if you haven't yet, and really start focusing on building out your campaign. So it doesn't look like we have any questions yet at any point throughout your campaign. If you do have a question, feel free to email us at support at mighty cause dot com. And we'll be happy to help you through whatever your question is. Thanks all for your time today. And again, this recording will be available on the website shortly.