 Welcome to our webinar. Welcome to Five Mistakes Nonprofits Make and How to Fix Them. We're so excited to have everyone attending. My name is Lisa Gauperin. I am the Marketing Communications Manager here at Mighty Cause and we're also joined by Josh Garcia who's the Fundraising Development Coordinator here at Mighty Cause. And before I pass the reins over to Josh to go over some of these mistakes and how to fix them for nonprofits, just a couple of housekeeping and informational things. So if you have any questions throughout the webinar, please use the Q&A tool on your Zoom control panel. And that's the easiest way for us to see questions. As we go through, we'll try to answer as many questions as possible. We'll also dedicate some time at the end as well for questions. But if you can enter those questions into that specific section, that would be very helpful. So just a little bit about Mighty Cause for those of you who are, maybe this is your first Mighty Cause webinar, you're not so familiar with us. So for those of you who are not so familiar with Mighty Cause, we've been around since 2006. So quite a long time in the nonprofit world. We're a year-round fundraising platform. So we've kind of dedicated to creating a platform that is all in one for small to medium-sized nonprofits where you can run your year-round fundraising, your peer-to-peer fundraising, or utilize us for CRM tools as well. So Josh will kind of go into a little bit more detail about some of our tools that may be helpful for you, but just a little bit of information some of the things that we offer, as I mentioned, we have the ability to do integrations, analytics, donation processing, as I mentioned, all in one. So just a little bit of information about Mighty Cause. So I'm going to actually turn it over to Josh now. Hey everyone, I am really glad to connect here with everybody today in the webinar. So as we mentioned, we're gonna be going through five mistakes that small nonprofits make when they're fundraising and how to fix them. When I define, in my experience, I've been here, or I've been working in the fundraising software space for nearly a decade, in my experience, really would define small to medium-sized, even more so than budget. Really is manpower. Time is a commodity for the organizations that we work with. So that's really what I'll be speaking to today. I'll be focusing on best practices, some of these five things that are, issues or challenges that organizations face, speaking to how we can address those, and with some of those also show how nonprofits that are with Mighty Cause are able to leverage those. So let's jump into it. And just to mention as well, as Lisa mentioned, we will be taking questions. So I'll pause periodically throughout the conversation to stop for questions after we go over a certain section. Biggest thing that we'll be looking to do though is have a reserve time at the end for us to walk through it as well. So if I don't get to your question at a certain section, we'll make sure that we try to get to it there at the end. So today, the five big challenges that we see on the market for small to medium-sized nonprofits when it comes to their fundraising, and we'll be addressing each of these. Number one, you're not sending enough appeals. Number two, your website is not optimized. Number three, you're not focused on recurring giving. Number four, you're not investing in peer-to-peer. And number five, you're sending receipts instead of thank yous. So starting off with number one, you're not sending enough appeals. So the problem that we see for organizations very often, because again, the organizations that we work with, time is a commodity. So what we tend to do is put a lot of our eggs in one basket and maybe just have one or two campaigns per year. We might see like a summer fundraiser or maybe we're really just waiting till year-end to try and get all of our fundraising in. Number two, our appeals are limited to specific campaigns. So we're talking about general fundraising because as we all know, we don't just need funds at certain points. We do need those funds to be sustainable throughout the course of the year to make sure that our mission is able to serve our communities long-term. So some organizations will limit their fundraising only when they have a campaign in mind. Number three, our fundraising channels are not diversified. So again, putting a lot of our eggs in one basket. This can be relying on one source of fundraising, maybe becoming overly reliant upon grants or on that note, overly reliant on one signature event or maybe hosting too many events. So this is also something that I see with a lot of organizations, conversations that I have with individuals who are looking to fundraise, they're hosting lots of small events. And the thing about events is everyone knows who's hosted one of these. They're very labor-intensive and they're very time-consuming and often require a number of volunteers. Which means when we're hosting a lot of events, we're starting to wear down our resources, which is our time, our labor, our volunteers, and it wears down on our donors a lot as well. Additionally, events tend to have smaller ROI compared to ongoing fundraising. So it's a lot of effort, but not a lot of great return. So this happens to a lot of organizations. Again, a lot of the conversations that I have with nonprofits is that we do have limited resources. And because a lot of these organizations have limited fundraising and limited resources, they then consequentially will trade off their fundraising efforts. But by trading off their fundraising efforts and not fundraising consistently over the course of the year, we never are able to build up that larger resource or bank or sustainability for us to be able to continue to grow and expand our programs. So this continues into a bit of a cycle where every year we're scrambling, trying to get enough funds to get by, and this becomes an ongoing year-over-year problem. This is particularly challenging because the average nonprofit loses over 50% of one donors from one year to the next on average, which means when we're limiting ourselves to one year or one period or two period of a year in fundraising, we're also going to a smaller donor base, which means we have to use our limited time to also try to find new people. When I talk about fundraising limited to campaigns, what we're talking about is really focusing on one big message, one organized campaign. We're fundraising for this. This is something that we're looking to do. When what we really should be doing is incorporating this a lot more into our day-to-day operations. Fundraising is something that never stops. Fundraising is something that we do over the course of the year. Fundraising also means sending out thank yous. It means following up with donors to let them know about the impact of their gift, what we're using it towards, letting them know about other ways that they can get involved in fundraising efforts. When you don't prioritize this over the course of the year, you're missing out on crucial funding opportunities. And then reactionary fundraising. So this is when it becomes an emergency or very necessary. A keyword that you're going to hear me use throughout this webinar today is going to be sustainability. And that's something that I always preach to nonprofits that I'm working with, is that we want to be continuously fundraising over the course of the year so that when these instances of a need or an emergency does come up, we're prepared and we're not scrambling at the last minute. Now, over-relying on one source of funding is another big challenge. So failure to diversify, as it says here, you can put you in dire streets. Grant funding is very volatile. Grant funding is not reliable on a year-by-year basis. I think a lot of organizations particularly saw that in 2020 and 2021 when a lot of grant opportunities were drying up and a lot were being redirected towards more emergency resources. Being very reliant on a major donor or a founder who is essentially funding the organization, again, puts us all in one basket. Anything that could happen might take away that source of funding and now again, we're reactionary funders. What you should ask yourself is does more than 30% or a percent of your revenue come from one single source? If so, your revenue is not stable. We should be looking to break this up into a more even pattern. So the solution, what do we do here? There are a number of different things that we can do to address making fundraising a little bit more sustainable. The first thing is that we want to make it an ongoing continuous project. So what I mean by this is we want to build appeals into our day-to-day operations. I'll give you a statistic and think about this as a benchmark compared to your own nonprofit. In 2022, the average nonprofit sent two appeals per month by email in addition to a newsletter. That's three communications via email per month that they're reaching out to their donors. Two of those are specific appeals. Is that something that we're doing over the course of the year? Ask yourself how many times a year, a quarter, a month that you're reaching out to your donors, reminding them of the impact of their gifts and sharing the opportunity to do so. And remember, don't just rely on our existing donor base. We also should make the challenge every week to reach out to somebody new about a potential giving opportunity. We can leverage our network starting off close in a smaller circle, friends and families, expanding into volunteers, expanding into past donors, expanding into asking for referrals for people that might be interested in supporting our nonprofit. We also should consider a few easy ways to be able to add more sources of funding, such as peer-to-peer campaigns, which we'll go over in a little bit, a recurring giving program, which again, we'll go over in a little bit. Adding a donation widget or donation form to your website for more passive donations and exploring corporate and employee giving opportunities. Another area where a lot of organizations leave money on the table is by not looking for donations from their volunteers. A lot of hesitancy comes from nonprofits because their volunteers are already giving in the sense of their time and their effort. However, a really great quote that I learned from a certified fundraising executive that I used to work under was that when you decide not to ask somebody for a donation, you're taking their choice away from them. You're not enabling them or empowering them to decide for themselves if they want to. And when it comes to volunteers, 86% of volunteers in 2022 made a donation to the nonprofit they volunteered at. So most of these volunteers are expecting to donate, so we should continue to engage and build those relationships. And the last thing is to make sure we get our boards involved. As a board member, you're a representative of your nonprofit. You are somebody who is involved, is invested, both in your time, and it should be in your efforts as well when it comes from fundraising, as well as giving. So I wanna take a quick pause here to see if there are any questions in the Q&A. Looks like not immediately again, we're gonna have some time for questions and answers here at the end of the conversation as well. So the next thing that we're gonna discuss is that your website is not optimized. So the problem here for a lot of organizations, again, with time as a commodity, it's easy to let something like maintaining our website falls to the wayside. We might have hired somebody to build our website some time ago, but there isn't active meet and submit. If your website is out of date, it can be very apparent as soon as someone comes to the page. You need to think of your website as your first introduction to your potential donors, as well as to your potential volunteers. If your website is full of old information, individuals who are not longer there, or elements of your site that have no current up to dates, news, events, it doesn't give you the opportunity to engage with an online audience. This is also particularly important when we're thinking about a donation page. If your donation page is clunky or uninformative, it's gonna be difficult to receive those donations. So an interesting statistic is that 64% of donors, of all donors in America in 2022, said that giving online is their preferred method of donations. That compared to the next closest method check is only 16% of donors, and cash falls to 4%. Another interesting thing about this is this is actually reflected in every single generation currently giving. Both Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, and Baby Boomers all prefer to give online by at least 55% of that donor base. So this is the majority of the individuals out there who are looking to make contributions are looking to give online. And if our page is difficult to navigate, if it's clunky, if it's not really giving any context on the donations, it's gonna make it challenging for those donors who are ready, willing, and able to do so. Hey, Josh, could you repeat that statistic one more time? Of course. So the statistic was that in 2022, 64% of American donors said that they prefer to give online as their preferred method of giving. Only 16% of donors in 2022 said that giving by check was their preferred method of giving. And only 4% said cash. And on top of that, if you look at every bucket based on generation of donors, Gen Z donors, Gen X donors, Millennial donors, and Baby Boomer donors, each one of those buckets, online donations is the preferred method of giving by at least 55%. Now, if our website is not up to date, this is gonna have a domino effect. So as I mentioned, your website's often the first place the public is going to go to learn more about your nonprofit. It's what I do. As soon as I come across an organization, the first thing that I do is I go to their website. If their website looks like it's out of date, they may wonder if your nonprofit is even still operating, which is the thing that I do have to go and try and dig a little bit more information to see if that's the case. Think of your website as the professional face of your nonprofit. We wanted to reflect all the great work that you're doing. A difficulty user clunky website can prevent us from getting potential sponsors, community partners, volunteers, and donors. We also have to think about mobile donations because people will leave. In 2022, 28% of donations were made from a mobile phone. If you can't use your website from a smartphone, you will lose out on willing and able donors. This actually happened to me recently where I passed by a coffee shop in my neighborhood that also operates as a nonprofit. And they were advertising that a donation of $18 would provide two free meals to members of my community. So I pulled up my phone and the first thing I did was I went to their website and I found it hard to find their donation page. Then when I got to their donation page, it was very clunky and difficult and not formatting to my phone. It was a 15 minute walk back to my building and I was not able to complete the donation over that period. I stayed and made sure that I made this donation, but the majority of people are not going to. Think about it when you're shopping online. If you're looking to purchase something that it's more difficult and harder to navigate and get through the process, you're more likely to leave. So we wanna make sure that it's simple so that when someone raises their hand it says, I'm really willing and able to donate to this nonprofit. They have all the information that they have to know about the work that you do and trust that they can easily make a donation. So what are some essential components of a good website? It's easy to navigate and mobile friendly. That just simply means that when I pull it up on my smartphone, I'm gonna be able to view the website. It's important to have an about section. It's the first thing that I look at in a nonprofit. Who are you? What do you do? What's your mission? Tell me about the work that you do. Having a contact page? So it should be clear how to get in touch with you. Contact forms, volunteer sign up forms, ways that I can let you know that I'm interested in learning more and getting involved. I also think it's great to have a board members and staff page listing out individuals letting us know who's involved. Just helps us get a good picture and kind of put a human face to the nonprofit. Having a prominent and easy to use donate button that leads to an easy donation page and then how to get involved as I mentioned. So the solution for organizations is to make sure that we're focusing on our sites. So redesign your site if it's out of date. Creating a website is a lot easier than it used to be. So platforms like WordPress, Squarespace and Wix are a couple of common examples that organizations that I work with. Again, these are smaller organizations, a lot all along here. They're using some of these different sites to be able to make it easy to design their website without any developer knowledge or any sort of coding experience. Also CrawlWalk Run. That's something that I preach when it comes to fundraising, when it comes to building your website. Everything we start off slowly and we build. So you don't need to fix everything all at once. We're gonna tackle it piece by piece. So make yourself a timeline, commit to certain updates and add those different components over time. And then the last thing I'd like to share is how to use an easy to navigate donation page. So I'm gonna pull up an example of one of our nonprofits. And this is their homepage. What we're looking at is a nonprofit called Dylan's Wings of Change. This is their website. You see the donate button is probably located right here. This donate widget was created in Mighty Cause. When I click this icon, it takes me to their Mighty Cause donation form. A big thing to note here is that it's embedded within your website. Embedded donations are shown to convert about twice as many visitors into donors than if you take into a third party landing page. They don't wanna be redirected to Mighty Cause' website or to a different page like PayPal. They wanna stay on your page. What this also allows you to do is keep me informed. I can see a little bit about the work that they do. Reminders to give monthly donations. They can show me pictures of the students who are impacted by their work. I can reach out to their Contact Us page right here to join their fundraising efforts. The donation form is simple. Select an amount. I can add personalization to it like a dedication. Custom questions, if there's information about your donor base that you'd like to learn. Multiple payment methods. These also lead to more donations. Credit card, PayPal, Venmo, Google Pay. Mighty Cause also offers bank transfer and ECH as well as Apple Pay. Having more payment methods leads to more donors out of their visitors and more donors signing up to give a recurring method. So this is an example. As you can see, that was very simple. That process can be, I'd like to donate. I'd like to give $10 a month. I'm interested in booking their workshop. My name, my payment information and I can make my donation. Hey, Josh, we have a question about your nonprofit's website. How many website pages are too much for small nonprofits? Sure. So we wanna make sure again that we're informative without overwhelming. That's reflected both on the donation form we don't want too many options, but we wanna be direct. So the types of things that we might wanna look on on a website are an updates or news or events. So you can kind of categorize or bucket that as a like what we're working on right now, what's new with our nonprofit. Contact me section. Again, giving them that opportunity to be able to contact us. A donation page. So a page where we can make that contribution. Meet the staff. So our team section, board, whoever's representing the organization. Again, putting that face to the nonprofit's name. And then an about us section. Letting us know in general, this is who we are. This is what we do. This is the impact that we make. Those are gonna be the five main categories of a website that you're gonna wanna focus on. One more question, a little bit of a tangent, but ideas for communication with supporters to use texts, not email. Sure. So some of the things that you can do, for example, with the contact us form, we can edit that so that we can include how would I prefer to be contacted? That's actually really important to know. Another thing that I always remember from the certified fundraising executive that I worked under was that all of our engagement, relationship building and fundraising comes down to knowing who our donors are, what brought them to us, what motivated them to reach out to us and how do they like to be contacted? If we can understand who they are, why they care about or support our nonprofit and how they like to be communicated with, that's gonna give us all the information that we need to build out a strong relationship. So two things that you can do, number one, on a contact form, we can have a section for both providing their phone number and then two, asking what is your preferred method of communication. Number two, we can also do that on our donation page. So on a Mighty Cause donation form, we can include custom questions as I showed you with the, I would like to be contacted about booking or starting one of their programs. We can use that to also ask, how would you prefer to be contacted and if it is by text, providing that text. I was gonna pop the chat over here so I see it as it's coming in as well. Awesome, everyone. All right, let's move on to our next fundraising challenge. And again, we'll stop for questions at the end as well. Number three, you're not focused on recurring giving. This has been one of the biggest things that I've preached in my entire time working in this space is focusing on recurring giving. The problems that you're focused on donor acquisition, small nonprofits often think that more donors equals more funding, but it actually costs more to acquire a new donor than to retain an existing one. Recurring donors have a higher value than first-time donors. In fact, it is 10 times more cost-effective to re-engage an existing donor than it is to find a new one to take their place. And over a donor lifetime, a recurring donor is roughly three times more valuable in terms of dollars brought in than sustaining one-time donors. This touches back to what we talked about, the vicious cycle of limited resources. Stewarding donors and creating a donor pipeline requires work, which you may think you don't have the resources for. So we end up losing donors and expanding more effort, time, and money trying to find new ones. A lot of the conversations that I have with nonprofits is they're saying, I need to find new donors, how do I get in front of new donors? People ask about buying donor lists, which I never recommend. The best way to do it is to build out relationships once you receive donors and continue to steward them over the course of their lifetime, donor lifetime, donor lifestyles, one, two. Here's what you need to run a recurring giving program. You need the ability to set up a monthly recurring donation. So as I showed you previously, we can do this on the Mighty Cause page. Touching Mac to problem number one, we need a plan to check in with and engage these donors in your work throughout the year. So again, we can't just ask them once a year. Think about that person in your life that just comes to you whenever they need something. Those are not positive conversations. But think about the people that we build long-term relationships with, that we communicate with, that we keep up to date with, that we learn more about. Those are people that we want to continue to engage with that goes both ways. That's how our nonprofits look at, or our donors look at us. And then we need a way to recognize and think our sustaining donors. We need to help them understand the importance of their gift. We need to help them understand that we are rightful stewards of their gifts and that we're using it to support the initiative and cause that brought them to us in the first place. And we need to let them know that we appreciate them and it's made possible by them. Recurring donors are often called sustainers for a reason, they're the basis of sustainable funding. The average one-time gift is $121. And again, as I mentioned before, that $121 donor has a 50% odds of dropping off from one year to the next. So if we have two donors giving $121 in 2024, total of $242 between those two donors, we can expect about $121 between those two the next year. Whereas the average monthly gift in America in 2022 is $25 a month. So that means if we have two monthly donors giving at $25 a month, we can expect 300 or 600 between them again, the following year. Recurring donors are engaged donors. They're essentially investing in your nonprofit. When someone signs up to be a recurring giver, it means that they support your mission and they want to be involved. They wanna make sure that they're making it possible. So beyond the fact that they are great sustainers, they're champions. They're people who will share your message, they're ambassadors for your organization, they're the people most likely to volunteer, most likely to sign up for a peer-to-peer campaign. And in many cases, they're people that might become stewarded towards a major donor giving level or someone who might leave a bequest. Recurring giving is the key to growing as a nonprofit. The more recurring donors you have, the more financial stability and resources you have. Additionally, when you're looking for grants, a lot of grant organizations will look at your sustainability. They'll look at what type of reliable income you have on a year-to-year basis before they invest their grant funds into your organization. So it's really important that we build up these recurring givers because they're also gonna expand other opportunities for us. And as I mentioned, maintaining a good relationship with a recurring donor is a much easier use of our time than trying to find someone new to take their place. So, what is the solution? What we wanna do here is make sure that it is easy for donors to be able to receive and make recurring donations. We should ask and make it specific on our website to let them know that we're looking for recurring donations. And another thing that we wanna do is we wanna use a core number. Now a core number is the cost of providing the smallest unit of your program services. So I'll give you an example. Let's say you're an animal rescue and it costs $25 a month to feed one of your animals. That is your core number. And when we're communicating with donors, we can use that core number to help them understand the impact of their gift and make a suggested solution. So I'll show you exactly how we can look this up and leverage this using Mighty Cops. So the first thing that we're gonna do is we're gonna go into our Mighty Cops page. I'm gonna click on my supporters tab and identify my donors here. I can click on an individual like Huey who made a $250 gift. I see their gift. This is the page that they gave for. And I can follow up with Huey. Huey, thank you so much for your gift. Your donation of $250 helped us with X, Y, and Z. It enabled us to do X, Y, and Z. A gift of $25 in 2024 would help us with X, Y, and Z. I'll show you another example. So this is a real example and I'm gonna base this using this Dylan's Wings donation page. I worked with an organization who's a shelter for unhoused members of their community. When they came to me, they were looking to grow their recurring giving. So the strategy that we put in place was we built out a core number. Their core number was $25 a month provides one night of safety and shelter for a member of their community. Then we built out their donation form so that monthly was their default option and we correlated these impact statements. So it's say $25 a month means every month or covers one night of safety and shelter. $50 a month covers two nights of safety and shelter, et cetera, et cetera. Then what they did is they went through their supporters, group people based on the amount of gifts that they gave. So we put them into buckets and then reach out to those individuals. Josh, thank you so much for your gift of $200 in 2023. Your donation provided eight nights of safety and shelter for members of our community. Here's a picture of Nate. Nate is one of the members of our home who's been able to take advantage of our shelter as well as our work and study programs. The 2024 faced a number of challenges and for just $25 a month every month, your gift will provide another member of the community like Nate with their first night of safety and shelter. Click here to be a sustaining donor today. Take some to this page. I see a $25 a month right here with the impact statement and I make that donation. Now what they've done is they've taken my one time $200 gift and steward me to a reliable $300 a year by helping me understand the purpose behind it. What this organization found their first year using the strategy was a 189% increase in donations. And why that is one of my favorite stories in my time working in fundraising is because that 189% increase didn't come from a new major donor who fell into their lap. They didn't acquire a ton of new donors. That was their existing donor base, but what they did was they engaged them, they helped them understand the impact, they thanked them and they made a specific ass with an easy, sustainable option. Hey Josh, quick question about those donation levels. How do you calculate those donation levels and descriptions? What do you include in that? Sure, so what we wanna think of a core number isn't necessarily a designation. So it isn't something that it is directly, if you give me $25, I'm directly using it on this. It's just something that's gonna help us give a little bit of context on the work that we do. For example, I worked with another organization who helps unhoused members of their community. One of their big services that they were really focusing on was that they provided a shower services. So they provided a portable shower to provide hygiene services to those members of their community. Essentially, what they looked at was this is how much if we run it for, are we using this for the day, it costs us this much. During that time, a shower takes an actual amount of time that's allotted. That means over the course of the day we can provide this many showers for this cost. So it comes down to, for them, it was about $50. So they would use their impact statement around $50 provides a shower for an unhoused member of your community. There's not always gonna be something that's directly in need, but what we wanna do is just give some general context on some of the smaller things that we do and how those make an impact. Another thing that we also wanna do when you're thinking about even when you're talking to larger donors, don't be afraid to talk about a larger amount that we're not necessarily gonna ask for. But we can say, maybe someone who gave $2,000 last year, we might say, this is a project that we're working on and it actually would be made possible with $5,000 and a gift of $250 a month would help us get halfway there. It helps me see the sort of investment and end result as a result of my gift. Oh, that makes sense. So they're not always gonna be a very neat answer. And to be quite honest with the organization, it's not 20 that I mentioned in the reference, $25 is in the exact cost. But that is roughly what it costs and that's what it helps us to get a little bit of impact and understanding. Because if I'm just giving a donation and I don't understand what it does, then I'm just gonna pick a random amount. But if I know or have some context, hey, $25 is the equivalent of providing someone with a night of safety and shelter, that's gonna lead to larger one-time gifts. But more importantly, more people willing to make a recurring gift because they know what's gonna happen as a result. Really what you wanna think about is this. Donors like to see themselves as the one who's actually making the impact. And they like to look at the nonprofits as the vehicle through which they're making that impact. So when they're giving to the arts, they're making those performances possible. When they're giving to an animal rescue, they like to think of themselves as the one that's saving or rescuing or feeding a cat or a dog. So this is how we wanna empower them by helping them understand, this is made possible by gifts like you. I could truly talk about recurring giving all day. It's one of the things that I really, really preach to the organizations that I work with. And not focusing on recurring giving is really an area where we leave a lot of money on the table every year. And it's something that can be done in a very practical and efficient manner through some of the things that we just walked through. Another area that I really like to discuss with organizations is peer-to-peer fundraisers. So for those not familiar with peer-to-peer fundraising, peer-to-peer is where someone creates a fundraiser on behalf of an organization and then reaches out to their own milk. The problem here is a lot of organizations, as I mentioned, they say to me, I'd like to grow our donor base. If your nonprofit is consistently reaching out to the same donors over and over again, you're more likely to see donor fatigue. And you're not finding anyone new to join your nonprofit. Again, you're asking the same question, it can start to become a little stale for our donors. And again, another challenge is that board members are not necessarily active participants in our fundraising efforts. So again, peer-to-peer fundraising is a technique where a nonprofit leverages their existing supporters to bring in new supporters by asking them to create a fundraiser on their behalf and share it via their social network. People are three times more likely to make a donation if they're asked by someone they personally know rather than the organization itself. And in 2022, about a third of all donations originated or the individual donor found out about the opportunity to give via social media, often through a peer-to-peer campaign, most frequently on Facebook. So why would supporters be interested in peer-to-peer? First of all, it deepens the donor's relationship with your organization as part of the stewarding process. When someone signs up to be a peer-to-peer fundraiser, we're becoming actively involved in the organization. We're taking on a bit of responsibility. We're investing our time and efforts. We're becoming an ambassador for the organization. That inherently is gonna build a stronger relationship with that donor. As I mentioned, donors are three times more likely to donate if they're asked by someone they know rather than the organization itself. And it also helps you to be able to increase your impact. Donors can raise 10 times more on average from a dollar perspective with a peer-to-peer campaign than they can afford to donate through their own donations. So not only am I investing my time and efforts and becoming an ambassador representing your nonprofit, but I'm seeing the impact that I make towards this nonprofit that I care about increase 10 fold. There are a lot of different ways that you can leverage peer-to-peer campaigns. So charity walks, marathons, golf outings, a really unique one. My wife is a board member for a nonprofit and what they do is they put on an annual flag football game. And all the participants who take place in the game create a peer-to-peer fundraiser. I volunteer as a coach for the charity flag football game and I create a peer-to-peer fundraiser as well. So when people are signing up, we ask them to sign up and leverage their own social network to support them with donations. So you've probably seen a lot of those before. Birthday fundraisers, a really passive way to fundraise, you might have seen them on Facebook, but a lot of organizations that have the opportunity for their donors to create a peer-to-peer at any point of the year, we'll let them know that they can create this through their own pages and share it on any social media platform. This is another really common one, I'm sure you've all seen. Campaign add-ons, a nonprofit is running its own fundraising campaign and also ask peer-to-peer campaigns to help out by fundraising alongside them. So this might be, for example, we have a specific campaign. Maybe let's go to an animal organization. We're looking to expand our shelter. It's something that we're actively working on and fundraising for. And we asked some of our volunteers to go out and build a peer-to-peer page on our behalf. Giving events. So again, at events, we can ask people to fundraise building up to the event. Another great one is board challenges. Board members make a commitment to fundraise for their nonprofit. So a lot of organizations will have a requirement that board members have to contribute or raise a certain amount. And a really easy way for them to be able to do so is to create a peer-to-peer page. And board members are great ambassadors for your organization. They're actively involved in you and your work and your mission. And this gives them an opportunity to share why they invest their time in this organization and share it with their own community. So what is the solution for peer-to-peer? Ask your network of supporters. Don't be afraid to ask. As I mentioned, when we're not asking, we are not, or we're making that decision for our donors on their behalf. So ask your board members. Ask your volunteers. Ask your alumni. In 2022, 10% of all donors also had a peer-to-peer campaign for an organization. We can also do it as an individual page or we can break it into teams, make it like a fun competition. The flag football game that I was mentioning, the two teams not only play against each other to try and win the charity game, but they're also trying to out-fund raise each other as well. That's equally a part of the competition. And again, get our board engaged. So there are a couple of different ways that we can do this. On the Mighty Cause page, pull this back up over here for you. On our organization page, we see right here an opportunity to fundraise. So what I might do, going back to, again, the animal rescue organization, maybe we're looking to raise funds specifically for our adoption program. I might come in here, tag my adoption volunteers and send a message to them, letting them know that we're raising funds for our adoption program. Per their interest and involvement as volunteers, we would love to include them in our peer-to-peer campaign and give them a link to sign up. When I click sign up to fundraise, I'll click get started. And one thing that you can actually do here is provide a template for your organization. So you have a pre-built template set for them. So when I click to build my fundraiser, what I see here is an almost ready-built page. I'll add my name. They gave me a stock photo. If for some reason I wanted to change it away from these adorable puppies, I can click and all of these sources, I can pull a photo from. I can edit my goal. Maybe I start up with a thousand, but as I start to reach that goal, maybe I expand it. They've given me an about section, but again, people can make it personalized. Maybe I talk about why this organization means so much to me, how they've impacted my life. Share photos, share videos, share links. To show you an example of a real campaign and the impact it can make, this is the Live Oak Wilderness Camp. They created a campaign to raise funds for a camp or scholarship so more students could attend their camp. They had 45 ambassadors. So those are volunteers, staff members, board members, alumni of the camp who signed up to fundraise. Collectively, those 45 individuals raised over $67,000. But not only did they raise over $67,000, but they received 462 donations. When you're using the Mighty Cause page, those 462 people who donated are all now names and emails in the back end of the system that we can again start to build a relationship with. Warm introductions. And when you break this down, those 45 people received just about 10 donations or a person, those 10 friends and family members. What an end result page might look like. Here's Caleb's page. One click for him to share it and create a Facebook post. And using the Mighty Cause system, we can use our automated emails to send out once someone creates a peer-to-peer page an automated email with descriptions of how to build or how to leverage their peer-to-peer page, ways that they can edit it, how the best practice is to share it, and how to contact for support. And as I mentioned, we can also do this as a team where you see in this example of school, had their students all join their individual grade and had the different grades fundraise against each other. So fun, friendly competition. So we had two questions related to peer-to-peer fundraising. So one is what are your thoughts on getting companies to support or participate in peer-to-peer? Yeah, you know what? That's actually a great example. I've seen that really often. One of the things that I've seen is having different companies for like sponsors, especially if you know a company or an organization that has like a fundraising donation part of their employee program. That's a really great way to be able to get people involved in some of your fundraising efforts is to have people, you know, we're gonna, I would use that, why I just showed you in the team model and have the different companies potentially have like a friendly competition against each other, you know, which local company can raise the most, have the individual employees sign up under their team or under their company's team and be able to fundraise. So that's a really good example of how people might use their peer-to-peer. Another question was about board members. If a non-profit is struggling with getting their board members involved or participating, what advice would you have? Sure. So one of the things that we definitely want to do when we're bringing on board members is we do want to set expectations from the get go. So we do want to communicate when we're bringing on somebody as a board member that we appreciate the time and effort that they're going to put into this. And this is what we expect from them. This is the type of relationship that we're looking to build. From there, this is something that, you know, moving forward, we can set expectations. This is what we expect from our board. These are going to be the goals. These are going to be the commitments. But this again goes back to my crawl, walk, run. We don't need every board member to jump in overnight doing everything. And that might be a little bit of a shock to the system. But a really good thing to be able to approach them with is this is how much we need to fundraise this year. This is how it will make us sustainable. And these are some easy ways that you all can get involved. So we'd like everybody to maybe create one fundraiser a year, maybe ask something small like a birthday fundraiser. I showed you the example with leveraging the template. It's very, very simple. We can build basically a pre-built template for them. All they would need to do, you also using the Mighty Cause system can actually build the template for them and just ask them to share it. Hey, can you please, we gave you a page. Can you share this twice a week with your network over the month of April? We think that that can have an impact. You know, we're just looking for 10 no donors that we can build a relationship with. And that will help us to be able to do X, Y and Z. But the big thing is just going to be communicating and setting expectations. So our last one. You're sending receipts instead of thank yous. Over 90% of donors say that the thank you is the most important message that they receive. Thank yous help our donors understand that they're appreciated and that their gift is making an impact. Another fun thing I learned from a major gift officer that I worked under was that a lot of major gift givers will test out organizations. They don't start off with a five-figure, six-figure gift. They'll start off with a small one-time gift and they'll see how does the organization appreciate me? Do they thank me? Do they follow up and let me know what they did with my gift? Or are they just going to follow back up at the end of the year with another ask? So the problem is we shouldn't look at it as just crossing it off the list. Number two, we're focusing on it as like being in the bare minimum. Like I said, fundraising is a year-long effort, but not all fundraising is making asks. Making asks for a donation is a small part of the fundraising efforts. Thank yous, asking how they're doing, building out relationships, letting them know about the importance of their gift and how they used it, how we used it and what the end result was, those go a long way. And again, this thinks about, we have to think about long-term plan. I've referenced a couple of times the donor life cycle. To expand that donor life cycle, it requires, so those donors don't fall, as I mentioned, the 50% who fall off from a one-time gift to the next, we need to discuss with them why their gift was important, how they continued to make an impact and why they're appreciated. So we do this over the course of the year. If donors don't feel appreciated, they won't come back. I used the example of a major gift giver, but let's even get away from a gift giver. Again, as I mentioned, someone who made the average gift size in 2022, the average one-time gift was $121. That's $10 a month. That's somebody that if they don't feel appreciated, we lose $10 a month. That means we miss out on the opportunity to build them to be a recurring donor. That starts to stockpile as we start to lose donors. And again, going back to our first question or our first problem, where time is a commodity, now we have to replace those donors. So we're losing opportunities to build those relationships. And again, we end up chasing our tail. Non-profits need to focus on this, not just being a series of transactions. Be human is the thing that I like to preach. As I mentioned, like it's why it's important to have the about us, the staff member, the board member section on our websites, make a really human connection and relationship. People give to non-profits that they care about in terms of their mission, but there are a lot of organizations that care about their mission. They wanna give to those that they like and enjoy and have a relationship with. Failing to steward your donors means that you're failing to grow. And again, we're going right back to the first problem, kind of chasing our tail, continuously trying to find new donors. So remember, donors want more than a receipt. They wanna get involved in your cause. They wanna feel like they're the ones making an impact, like they're the ones making a change. So the solution, build an onboarding plan. How do we welcome our new donors? We should have a specific message for our new donors. I showed you the automated email feature in the Mighty Cause system. One of those automated emails is for new donors. Someone who makes a first-time donation will receive a unique email 48 hours after their first gift. So not only does Mighty Cause automate that first immediate thank you for them, but then we'll create a follow-up thank you where you can share the impact of their gift and invite them to build a relationship with you and learn more. Make use of a CRM. So having something like the Mighty Cause system can help us understand who our donors are. We don't wanna be overly reliant upon just a spreadsheet. Spreadsheet doesn't tell us the story of who a donor is. Again, if we go into the Mighty Cause page, leveraging a CRM, coming to my supporters, I can build out these custom tags. Who are my special volunteers? If I click on one of my special volunteers, star, I see she volunteers as an adoption volunteer. She's in the Friends of our program, which is recurring giving. She's a board member. She is a special volunteer. Contact information. Notes, I can see that we had a call with her on January 10th to discuss a fundraiser. After that call, I can follow up. Maybe she gives a donation and I say donated $250 to the adoption program. Contact about becoming a recurring donor at 25 per month. It might seduce. I can see the types of volunteer opportunities that she's had. I can see those donations that she's made. Any emails that we've sent her here are recorded. I have a better picture of who Star is as an individual. And this allows me to reach out, continue to build connections and steward that donor, build a longer-term relationship. Build donor gratitude into your day-to-day operations. So just like fund, as I said, fundraising is a year-long effort. Build in those donor gratitude as part of that fundraising effort. Follow up and let them know about impacts of their gifts. If it's at a certain level, certain donation amount, we might want to decide, hey, maybe that's worth a phone call or a personally signed letter from the executive director. Things that make you stand out amongst the nonprofit crowd. And then create an annual report, have a system of accountability with your donors. At the end of the year, let them know this is how much we raised as a result of your donations. This is how much we raised as a result of everyone's donations. And this is what we did with them. And one of the things that Mighty Cause actually does for each of our donors is generates an annual giving statement as well. So, sorry, stop sharing there for a second. Again, wanted to pause here. We're at the hour mark, but I have a few minutes to ask or to handle any questions that you all have. I also want to refer Mighty Cause has a number of different ways that we can support you. If you're interested in having a demonstration of the Mighty Cause platform, that is something that you can submit through our website. We'll also have a forum that you can follow up with that on as well or feel free to drop that in the chat. If you're interested in having a demonstration, we'll have a member reach out. You can always find our webinars on our website. All of our webinars are recorded so you can always find an archive version. So if there's past topics that we've covered that you'd like to learn, please check those out. We also have a number of eBooks on different topics as well as blog posts that you can find again on the mightycause.com website that cover a number of different topics. These are all free resources. So just wanted to pause here for some final questions before we wrap up. Yes, there are a couple of questions that have come in. So in regards to thank yous, can you talk a little bit about direct mail or physical thank you letters versus online thank yous? Sure. So this kind of goes back to us wanting to know and understand how our donors like to be communicated with. We should think about time sensitivity as well. So I do think that we should always try to understand how do our donors prefer to be communicated with. The preferred communication for donors, another one of those 2022 fundraising sets, about 35% of donors said that emails, they're preferred communication method, which means it does vary. So it's important for us to understand how do you like to best be communicated with? If you have a system that allows for more automated emails or more automated direct mails, we can take advantage of those. If putting together a handwritten letter or a direct mailer is a little bit more time consuming, then maybe reserve those for specific gifts. Maybe a first time gift, maybe giving at a certain level, maybe a donor anniversary. Also just think about ways to be creative with it. One of my favorites is, there's an animal rescue organization here in DC that I am a donor for. And I also rescued both of my dogs from them. And one of my favorite things that they do is they will send me an email, me and my wife, on the anniversary of when we adopted our dog every year. It's a really great way to reach out to us to build a relationship with us. And quite frankly, we end up donating when we receive that message. They're not asking for a donation. They just have a little link at the bottom that's there. But these little touches are great ways to be able to kind of cut through the noise of all the different nonprofits that we're communicated with. So just think about how do our donors like to be best communicated with, if possible, try to gather the information from them and then make the best use of our time. Another question that came through was about MightyCross tools in regards to, do we have a free version? Are we only paid plan? Yeah, so we actually have three different plans. We do have a free version. A lot of the features that we covered here today, do not fall under the free version. Things like the embedded donation form, the peer-to-peer campaign, the CRM, those do fall under our paid plans. All of our information is on our website. When you're speaking to one of our representatives, their goal is going to be to focus on understanding where you're at as an organization and what actually do you need? Because for some organizations, maybe the free plan is what's best. For many, maybe one of those other two tiers of subscription will accomplish what they're looking to accomplish. So it's always really important and what we preach here at MightyCross to be very consultative and understand what's right for your nonprofit. And I'd also mention, you can find our plans on our website. It's at MightyCross.com backslash pricing. It details everything that's included at all of our plans. But as I mentioned, we work specifically with small and medium-sized nonprofits. So our pricing is meant to reflect that as well. So unfortunately, we are at time, but as Josh mentioned, if you are interested in a demo, please feel free to include your information in the chat as well, a survey will pop up once this webinar is finished. And if you're interested in scheduling a demo, learning more, you can fill out the survey and we'll be in touch soon. This webinar, a recording and the slide deck will be sent out in a follow-up email. So be on the lookout for that as well. And please let us know if you have any questions. And thank you, Josh, so much. I see a lot of positive feedback in the chat. So I'm so happy to see that this was super helpful and informative for a lot of people. Of course, everyone, I really appreciated the opportunity to chat with everybody. This is a topic I'm very passionate about. So I love to discuss it. If anyone has any questions again or any interest in a demonstration, I would be happy to be in contact, but I'm also, we have a full team here of individuals who are able to reach out as well. We're happy to help however we can. As I mentioned, free resources online, our subscription platform, however we can help, happy to do so. Awesome. Well, thank you so much, everyone. And I hope you have a great rest of your day. All right, bye, everyone.