 Hi everyone, we'll get started in just a moment. So if you can hear me and see my screen, you should see some nice pretty flowers with the title of the webinar, Spring fundraiser ideas. You could just type yes into the questions box on your GoToWebinar panel. That would be a huge help. The one time I did not ask, people could not see. Excellent, thank you guys so much. All right, well, it is just about the top of the hour. I actually wanted to get started with a little bit of a poll to find out where everybody is with their spring fundraiser. So I'm just gonna put that up here before we get started. So you have a couple of answers to the poll. One is already planned and ready to go, or one is we're still in the middle of planning our spring fundraiser or just getting started. And the third response is I have no idea, please help me. So if you could just let me know where you're at, I'll give everybody a minute to respond. And it looks like so far most people are really just looking for some basic help with fundraisers today, but I'll give everybody just another minute to respond. Oh, wow, so 48% at this point have answered. I have no idea, help me, which is interesting. So only 8% of everybody on this webinar today is already planned and ready to go. So I'm gonna go ahead and close the poll. That's super helpful for me to know that at this point, everybody is just sort of at the point where you're getting ready to plan, you're getting ready to get started with your fundraiser. So this webinar is really for you, although if you already have some things in the hopper or your fundraiser is already planned, hopefully this will be helpful to you as well. So just to give you an idea of who I am, my name is Linda Gerhardt and I'm the senior community engagement manager here at Mighty Cause. I've been with the company since 2016. So I've seen quite a few springtime fundraisers since I started working for Mighty Cause. And I'm happy to share some ideas that I've seen be really successful for other nonprofits here with you today. My email address is on the slide here, lindaatmightycause.com. So if you have any questions that are specific to your organization, just feel free to shoot me an email. But yeah, I'm always available to you and happy to chat about fundraising. Our agenda here today is pretty simple. We're gonna talk a little bit about spring fundraising and types of fundraisers, but the most time on this webinar is going to be spent obviously on fundraising ideas. And I did wanna leave some time for a question, answer session at the end of this webinar. So if you have a question while I'm presenting and have something that you'd like to talk more about, just feel free to pop that into the questions box of your go-to webinar panel. And I'll make sure that we get to it at the end of the presentation. And just to let everybody know right off the bat, we are recording this and everybody will have access to the recording and the slides. All right, so here we go. So first I wanted to start with some spring fundraising basics to sort of set the context for the rest of the presentation. So one thing that's really important to think about when you're planning your spring fundraiser is the tone of your fundraiser. So most of us, I think everybody in the United States and internationally as well as coming out of a really hard, long winter and fall season. So it's really important if at all possible to keep the tone for your spring fundraiser light. People are very fatigued right now. There's bad news still almost every day it seems like. So it's a good time to step away from the really heavy hitting fundraising messaging. Of course, if that still makes sense for your nonprofit then that is perfectly acceptable to still use. But we really wanna see spring fundraisers be light, bring a sense of community. So spring fundraisers are generally event focused and they're often about bringing people together, building camaraderie and participating in events. So instead of the hard hitting end of year fundraising that's really laser focused on the message about your mission. Spring fundraising tends to be a little bit more about getting people involved, getting them outside and getting them to participate in a larger happening for your nonprofit and renewal and hope. So we wanna talk about renewal and hope really position your nonprofit as a place of hope. Obviously it's a really great place to use spring imagery like flowers and seeds and talk about planting seeds and just really focus on the good work that your nonprofit does as opposed to the sad aspects of your work. Obviously these are just suggestions they're not hard and fast rules but over the years we've seen what tends to work for spring fundraisers and these kinds of themes and messages and tones tend to be more successful in the spring season. So piggybacking off of that really spring fundraising should be about fun. You wanna put the fun in fundraising to be corny for just a moment. A lot of things in the spring that work really well are focused on getting people outside. Obviously you wanna be safe and cognizant of the fact that the pandemic is still happening and people are still at risk but really focusing on getting them out of their house getting them outdoors to enjoy the nice weather and also getting for people focused on interacting with each other. So a lot of us in 2020 myself included have spent most of 2020 and most of 2021 so far just kind of indoors isolated and a lot of us are just really craving a sense of community and building relationships with people. So that's what spring fundraising is kind of about in a normal year but this year interaction and building camaraderie and community is gonna be extra resonant with people as they're sort of coming out of their isolation and the weather's getting nicer and people are feeling a little bit more motivated to gather even if that gathering is just done virtually. And something that is really successful in spring fundraising is the element of competition. So that's something that we're gonna be talking about a little bit more when we get into the actual ideas but stoking the fires of competition is a really great angle for a spring fundraiser. Obviously you wanna keep it all friendly but it's another great way to get people interacting and also motivate them to fundraise for you which we're gonna talk about more in just a bit. So this is a question that I really did wanna make sure that we addressed today. So more people are getting vaccinated. I actually personally am getting my vaccine next Monday my first vaccine next Monday. So it's a time when people are starting to feel a bit more safe. And President Biden announced that he is, all vaccines will be available, the vaccines will be available to all Americans by May. So we're starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. We're starting to see more people get vaccinated. I know more and more people that have been vaccinated in my own life but we just wanna note that we're still in the midst of a pandemic. Not everybody is vaccinated and it's still not possible to safely gather lots of people. We don't advise it at Mighty Cause. So for the most part when we're talking about events in this webinar we are talking about virtual events because it's better to be safe than sorry. And we're used to it at this point. Last year we had to all sort of last minute move our fundraisers online and adapt to that. This year we have the benefit of wisdom. And so we can plan ahead and make sure that the bulk of our fundraising is done online and we're not actually gathering people in large crowds because goodness knows nobody wants to be a super spreader event. So at this point we just wanna make sure that everybody's being safe and we're not scheduling big in-person events and that we're thinking digitally. So before we get into the actual ideas I wanted to preface it with the types of fundraisers that we will be talking about just so that if I'm using some shorthand you're not confused and we're all on the same page. So the first type is a fundraising campaign which is pretty simple. And most of you have probably run one or not if not many of these. It's a campaign that's run by your nonprofit. So basically you're directly soliciting your supporters asking them for donations and you're running the whole show. The benefit of this is that it's really focused messaging you're able to really hone in on what you wanna tell your supporters and make a clear case for donating to your nonprofit. And you can stay in control because sometimes when you invite other people in as peer-to-peer fundraisers you sacrifice a little bit of your control so that they can fundraise on your behalf. But this way your nonprofit stays in charge and you can deliver a really clear and concise message. And the other benefit is that this is really just easy. This is a lot of nonprofits comfort zone is just running their own fundraising campaign. You don't need to recruit anyone. You don't need to manage other people except the people at your organization. You just set a goal, build your page or use your existing Mighty Cos profile and then you start fundraising. So this is really the simplest easiest option. The level up from that is peer-to-peer fundraising. And that actually is an umbrella term that includes a couple of different kinds of fundraisers. So peer-to-peer fundraising is all about engagement. It's all about community. And it really is any fundraiser that involves asking your supporters to fundraise on your behalf. So that includes individual fundraisers like if somebody starts a birthday fundraiser for your nonprofit. It includes teams and events as well which are more complicated and organized peer-to-peer campaigns. And you'll often see this shortened to P2P which you'll often see on this very webinar. But this is really all about engagement. It's great for donor acquisition. It's one of the main benefits of peer-to-peer as a fundraising technique. You put more boots on the ground. You have more people asking their social networks to support your cause. And so you tend to see more people that are new to your organization come through the door. So a lot of organizations really struggle with how do I expand beyond my existing base of supporters? And this is the answer. You sort of take the people that are in your circle and you ask them to ask the people that they know to make a donation to your cause and act as sort of spokespeople by creating their own fundraiser. And these are still not super complicated. Teams and events are a little bit more complex but most of the effort is front-loaded. So you do need to recruit and think about how you're going to organize peer-to-peer fundraisers. Certainly in the general space of fundraising there are some that are kind of passive like when somebody starts a birthday fundraiser for you. In the context of this webinar these are all kind of proactive peer-to-peer fundraisers that you would be initiating. And I wanted to talk about Teams and Events just really quickly. For those of you who were on our last webinar which was about Spring Fundraiser Planning you got a lot of information about Teams and Events and we will have that up in our webinar library soon. So if you've missed that webinar feel free to check that one out once it's up. I'm hoping it gets up by the end of this week at mightycause.com slash guide. But I just want to talk about the basic difference between Teams and Events. I don't want to spend too much time on it but here's the basics. So Teams are a group fundraiser that consists of individuals who are raising money for your nonprofit. So this is just one team of people that's comprised of however many individuals who are raising money and each of those individuals has their own fundraising page where they can ask all of the people that they know to make a donation and talk a little bit about why they care about your cause. And Teams are really great for smaller groups and smaller fundraising type of events when you're looking to do a more organized peer-to-peer campaign but you don't really need a full blown event. And this does add the element of competition because all of the team members are ranked on a leaderboard on the page. So you have the opportunity to get your participants or your team members competing with each other and you can even add some incentives so that they are motivated to fundraise for you for the winning fundraisers. And Events are basically the step up from Teams. So Teams have a group of individuals. Events have individuals who join the event as well as teams of individuals who've joined the event. So it gets all of these individuals and groups of individuals together fundraising for your nonprofit. So these are generally larger in scale. The other cool thing that you can do with events which may or may not be necessary for you based on what you're looking to do is allowing registration. So if you wanna really get organized and have people commit through a registration form to participate, you can do that through our events product here at Mighty Cause through our event-bright integration and you can also sell tickets. Like I said, these are much larger scale, typically. Sometimes they'll involve an entire school. That's something that we see very frequently. So this gives you a little bit more flexibility to manage a large group. You do have some specific tools through the events product that will allow you to contact your participants, monitor their progress and do a little bit more advanced organization behind the scenes. So Relate Teams are kind of midpoint and then events are really big, large scale. Events, they don't need to be huge but they generally just are heavier duty and have more people involved in them and have more heavy duty management tools available to you. So with no further ado, I just wanted to get into the meat of this webinar which is the fundraising ideas. So the first type of idea that I wanted to talk about and we talk about this a lot is recurring giving. So if you're really stuck for what to do for your spring fundraiser, run of recurring giving campaign. It's a spring renewal type of theme so you could talk about planting seeds and that sort of stuff and really use the spring imagery to your advantage because they would be renewing their donation every single month. It would be automatically withdrawn. And you can choose a handful of impactful suggested donation amounts to do this. Now on Mighty Cause, we don't wanna put you in a position where somebody wants to make a donation but they can't because they're not ready to make a monthly donation. So we can't allow you to set your checkout so that it only accepts monthly donations but you can use your suggested donation amounts and your descriptions to be clear that you're looking for recurring donations and also make your marketing very clear. And using your suggested donation amounts and your descriptions are gonna be really powerful here. You can break it down in numbers and explain what each of these amounts provides. So for instance, if you're a food bank and $30 per month allows you to feed X number of people for a month, that can be really powerful in getting people to actually commit to donating that amount every month because it's a real world service. It's not just money coming out of their account. It's something that they're providing for people in their community. So that's a really powerful thing to do with the recurring giving campaign. And it's also really focused on smaller donors. So it helps you get more bang for your buck. I was reviewing the data from 2020 in terms of donations and overwhelmingly we saw more first time donors to nonprofits in 2020 than really any year recently and they gave in smaller amounts. So people are instead of putting lots of money into one nonprofit, they are sort of putting smaller amounts into many nonprofits, which is an interesting new giving trend. But this gives you a way to steward those smaller donors that you may have picked up in 2020. You're not asking them to really increase the amount that they give significantly. You're just asking them to do it on a monthly basis, which actually does boost their value to your organization. And if you have a lot of donors who are giving on a recurring basis it boosts your revenue and it also makes your revenue sustainable, which is something that we learned in 2020 is really, really important. So we do actually have a whole webinar and several blog posts completely devoted to the topic of running a recurring giving campaign. So check out our webinar library that's mightycause.com slash guide and then you just click webinars or check out our blog and just search for recurring giving because we have a lot of information about how to run these types of campaigns. Another thing that you could do is host your own giving day. So last year, pardon me, last year we actually had two Giving Tuesday events. We had the regular Giving Tuesday event, the Tuesday after Thanksgiving. And then we also had Giving Tuesday now, which was like a COVID relief type of event. And that was actually really successful for a lot of nonprofits. Some of the bigger organizations that host giving events have actually added spring events even though their main event is in the fall because it did work so well at mobilizing donors. So if you participated in Giving Tuesday now last year, why not host a day of giving in the spring as well? If that worked for you and you understand that format, now you can't use the Giving Tuesday hashtag mostly because they're not having any spring event this year, to my knowledge, but you can certainly create your own giving day. And this is a really great opportunity to bring in your supporters and get them incorporated with peer-to-peer, having teams and individuals, you can engage sponsors. And the short deadline of giving days really does allow you to really focus in and it really motivates people to get excited about giving. And also it's a really great way to engage local media. So it's an excellent icebreaker. If you wanna email your local TV news station or local radio station, they can help you give you a boost for a day. Morning television news really loves these types of things. So it's a really great way to engage the community and get some more people through the door. And just as an example of when that worked, last year we had the National House Potty, which is a P-A-W-T-Y. They brought together shelters and rescues from all over the United States for a virtual slumber party last year. They raised over $200,000. It was a really great event for them. And yeah, you have lots of possibilities open to you. Think of any sort of day that you can focus on. And the secret to hosting a giving day is that it's not just one day. You can allow people to donate beforehand. So you can give yourself a week or two weeks or even a month that will culminate in a giving day so that you can make sure that you reach your fundraising goals and have enough time to do your outreach. But yeah, the House Potty was a really great event. There was obviously really fantastic imagery and they engaged a lot of nonprofits from all over the country, but nonprofits have also hosted their own giving days as well. So it's something that we see, be really successful for nonprofits as a format. But if you are going to do this, I do recommend that you use the event's product. It's just the easiest way to manage this kind of event. So I want to talk about special dates. There's a lot you can do with special dates. So you can do really anything with this or you want to do a fundraising campaign, team or event. There are a lot of special dates in the spring. Just some examples. We have Earth Day, Arbor Day, Mother's Day, Memorial Day, National Pet Day. There's a lot going on. And the easiest way to find these dates, there are some really goofy ones. Like there's like a National Dog Biscuit Day, which doesn't matter to most of us, but there's a lot of special dates where that people kind of create to raise awareness of a particular issue. And you can search for special dates calendar online and find lots of information about special dates that are happening in the spring. But all of the ones that I've listed here, like Mother's Day and Earth Day are ones that we've seen nonprofits actually use as sort of a theme or a basis for their campaign. And what the days are kind of designed to do in general is bring people together for this one particular cause, whether it's the environment or veterans or pets. And you're kind of just shoe warning your own nonprofit into that. So you get to ride the wave that you didn't create. And it's a really great way that you can frame the event for people or frame your campaign for people. And it's easy marketing. Most people understand what Earth Day is. So you can send an email, create a campaign and get people engaged. And this is also, again, something that local media loves because they have a lot of hours to fill especially in the morning. So if you email them and say, hey, we're doing an Earth Day fundraiser, here's what our nonprofit does. You can get a boost from new shows and radio stations. So that's a really great icebreaker for media as well. So these are worth looking into, especially if you're getting a little bit of a fundraiser block. So the next type of fundraiser, and this kind of includes a lot, is the sort of fundraiser-a-thon genre. There's a lot that goes in here into this. Typically it's a team or event. We've seen so many iterations of this on Mighty Cause. It's a really successful format. So we've seen write-a-thons, art-a-thons, read-a-thons, dance-a-thons, cycle-a-thons. I've also seen an improv-a-thon where an improv group did improv endlessly for a certain period of time. So there's a lot of things that you can do with the a-thon genre of fundraising. And it's an easy win if you're having some fundraising block. It's a really great way to sort of break out of that and think of like, what could we have people do that is relevant to our cause? And they're also tailor-made for engagement. So they're built on engagement. People have to engage with it in order for it to be successful. So it is a really great way to get your supporter base really interested in what you're doing and get them actively, like, literally engaged. And sponsors love these types of events. They're like catnip to sponsors. So they can provide prizes. They can provide matching grants. There's a lot of things that you can do with sponsors, with these types of fundraisers. We have a nonprofit called Artseed and they host an annual art-a-thon. And they have artists of all skills, all ages, just creating for the duration of their events and then asking the people they know to support their art and also support Artseed. So that's been a really successful format for Artseed. But we have a lot of them on our platform. This one I thought was particularly cool because there's been such longevity to this. They've done it for many years now. So yeah, think of an a-thon. If you're really stuck on getting an idea, doing something like this can really, you know, help the whole campaign come together for you. So this is an obvious one probably, but a charity walk. These are usually a team or event type of fundraiser on Mighty Cause. It's a classic. It's one of the perennial favorites of fundraising. And the reason for that is that the public understands it, it resonates with them and they are successful. They raise lots of money. Definitely this year you wanna make it virtual. So you can allow the participants to sign up and then complete their distance, whatever it may be, on their own schedule in their own neighborhood safely. And I actually think this is cool because if you have somebody who's older or doesn't have the same ability level and maybe wouldn't be comfortable doing it around a track or something alike in public, it allows them to participate as well. So you can get people of all different ability levels involved in a virtual charity walk. Something that you'll wanna consider is swag bags, like offering them a t-shirt, a bumper sticker, a little bag of goodies for fundraising over a certain threshold. I've participated in charity walks where in order to get a t-shirt, I needed to raise $200. Clearly the t-shirt is not worth $200, but it was a nice incentive for me to continue to fundraise and reach that threshold. So think about swag bags if you're doing a charity walk. And obviously these are social events. So since you can't be there safely in person, use a hashtag and get use social media to get people involved in your event, get them sharing photos of them walking. Just as an example, one that we have going on right now, Big Brothers, Big Sisters of Central New Mexico is running a run for kids' sake. So this is more of a run, but it is virtual, I believe, and they're in progress right now. So this is a perennial favorite. Everybody understands a charity walk. And because you have to do it virtually this year, it actually removes a lot of barriers in terms of setting these up. You don't need permits. You don't need to go to town hall and sign paperwork. You don't need to worry about the route and making sure that it's clear on the day of. You don't have to secure a track. People are doing it on their own time in their own space. So it's a really great year if you've never tried a charity walk to dip your toe into it, if that kind of event is a little bit beyond the scale of what you can do at your nonprofit in a normal year. So focusing on a timely program, there's a lot of flexibility in this. So this is sort of a, you'd have to look at what you offer and see if there's a fundraising or a program or service that needs funding or deserves the spotlight. This could be a campaign, a team, or event, but really focus on an element of service or a program that you provide and really talk to the public about it. And one thing that is kind of interesting that I've seen happen for years and years now is kitten showers at animal rescues and animal shelters. So the spring is what we tend to call kitten season in animal welfare. That was what my background was in when I worked for nonprofits. And they would usually have like a playpen where people would bring donations, but then they've also been adding a virtual component to this where they say, you know, for $25, we can buy X pounds of KMR, which is kitten milk replacement for orphaned kittens and get people to donate that way. So that's kind of one angle. They're drawing attention to their foster care program because these kittens are too young to be put up for adoption. So that would be a great example of a timely program fundraiser. It would be a kitten shower for like an animal shelter that wants to spotlight their foster program and raise funds for their foster program. So one of the things that I mentioned with the kitten shower is providing a tangible donation experience. So donors really love buying items. That's why canned food drives are so popular with people even though food banks tend to hate them and because they're big and expensive and they have all of these cans and they have partnerships that they can leverage to get more food for less money, but people love them because they like the experience of going to the store, picking out some beans and putting it in the cart and buying it. So anything you can do with your donation levels and your descriptions to add that experience is really going to serve you with this type of fundraiser. And again, there's a lot of room for creativity here. So take a look at what, you know, what makes sense for you to spotlight right now and see if there's some way you can spin that into a creative fundraiser to highlight that program or that service. Hang on just a second. Okay, sorry about that. I am, am I, okay, here we go. Sorry, my slides crashed for a second. Okay, so it just didn't load my screenshot. I apologize for that. There was a screenshot here and it looks like that was not loading, but a board fundraising challenge is something that you can consider as an event, a team or event to get your board of directors involved and engage their competitive side. So most board of directors, they do like to compete with each other. And this is a really great way to engage them, fundraising and the financial health and wellbeing of your organization is one of the commitments that they made when they agreed to sit on your board. Sorry about that. And this is a way that you can get them meeting those responsibilities and engage them in your fundraising. And as with most things with board members, you wanna make it easy. These are busy people usually, so that whatever you can do to make it easy for them to participate is something that you'll want to do. So you can use fundraiser templates and help them get set up so they don't have to do much to get launched. And then you can also wrap this into a larger event or campaign, which is actually what the screenshot that didn't load here was showing Covenant Life School is a school that is a nonprofit and they have a yearly serve-a-thought or they have a yearly Giving Tuesday event, I apologize. A yearly Giving Tuesday campaign and they actually had their board compete as a team. So they were able to get their board to agree to compete as a team in their Giving Tuesday event. And they actually raised quite a bit of money because typically board members are well-connected people and they can certainly get the word out about the fundraiser and they can also put their own funds into it. So consider a board fundraising challenge as either your main fundraiser or just an additive to an existing fundraiser. So those of you who are already planned and have your spring events ready to go, which are the minority of us, think about how you can get your board involved just to add on. So digital galas. So most of nonprofits had to cancel or postpone indefinitely their galas last spring. But now is a really great time to bring it online so that you can actually have the gala. So you would want to use a team or event for this. Just move it online. Don't worry about postponing it. Just try to get the gala done online. You can use live streaming and you can actually embed your live stream onto your event page, which I wanted to point out because that is semi new. So you just put the link into your story on your event page and you'll be able to include any live streams there. So if you wanted to use live streaming to share the speeches, the performances, anything that you would normally plan for a gala, you can do that on the Mighty Cause events product. And then you can also sell tickets, which is a key part of galas. So one organization that did that is Locally Haiti. Last year they moved their spring gala online and they actually had their leaderboard be their virtual table captains and they raised over $82,000. So they did a really great job and they engaged their supporters in a gala online without having to cancel it. They raised a lot of money. They still got people engaged. They still had it and it was really successful for them. So if you've been postponing a gala or you normally have a spring gala and canceled it last year, now is a really great time to move it online. And it's again with like charity walks, it's easier to pull off online than in person. You don't have to worry about catering. So if you have wanted to try a gala but you're a small operation and haven't been able to do it on your own, you can dip your toe into it with a digital gala, which is a really creative spin that helps you get a feel for how these work so that you don't actually have to worry about organizing caterers and securing venue spaces. You just create a page on Mighty Cause online. So something else to consider is National Volunteer Week. This could be any number of things, a fundraising campaign, a team or an event. And basically the angle here of National Volunteer Week is April 18th and between the 18th and the 24th. So it's coming up pretty soon. It's just asking your donors to make a donation to thank your volunteers. So obviously you'll wanna do something outside of that, like sending an email or having some sort of get together to thank your volunteers. I guess a virtual get together is what I meant to say there. But you wanna do something else in addition but this is a way to sort of publicly thank your volunteers for all that they do for your organization and ask your donors to thank them as well. And it also gives you an opportunity to spotlight your volunteer program. So you can talk about your volunteer coordinator, spotlight some of your rock star volunteers, the people who are there for you every single day and doing hard work for you, share interviews and quotes. And you can also use this as a recruitment opportunity. So during National Volunteer Week, you can also, in addition to asking people to thank your existing volunteers, you can use this to get more people involved. And you can actually post volunteer opportunities on your Mighty Cause page if you subscribe to Mighty Cause Advanced. So if you would like to wrap it all in together, fundraising and recruitment, you can actually do that on Mighty Cause with an advanced subscription. So the next type is a photo contest. And this is usually done as a team or event. So how this works is that each donation typically counts as a vote. So for instance, $10 equals one vote. So you have participants signing up to share a photo. Obviously you want this to be relevant to your cause. So this works really great for animal nonprofits. And they ask their, once you sign up, the people, they create their page, add the photo they want people to vote on. And then they try to get their friends and family to vote for their photo by making a donation. So if somebody donated $10, that would count for two votes if we were doing the $10 for each vote. And it adds a lot of friendly competition. It stokes those fires of competition. It adds a really cool prize. One of the things that we've seen a lot on our platform is calendar contests. So you have people compete in an event to win, by getting the most votes slash donations. And then you add the winning photos to a calendar that you can either sell and maybe send one to the winners of the event. And we've also seen t-shirt design contests, art contests. There's a lot of things that you can do based on the mission of your organization. And so there's two things that are on this slide. The first is a photo of my dog Cooper. He has actually participated in a photo contest for homework trails, which is the animal rescue that we adopted him from. And he participated with one of his Christmas photos. So he has actually been in a photo contest himself. And there's also an animal rescue on Mighty Cause named Snooty Giggles Rock Dog Rescue. And they had a calendar contest as their event. And you can sort of see on the slide the different contestants, they would submit their pets photo and ask people to donate to vote for their dog. So this is a really a fun thing to do. It's very interactive, very engaging. I loved doing this for my own dog here. And obviously I was happy that I had great pictures of him to share. But this is something to consider if you wanna really, really get people involved. And if you normally put out a calendar, why not turn it into a contest and use it as a fundraising opportunity? So one of the last things I wanted to talk about was a golf tournament. So I myself, I'm not a golfer. I do have a father-in-law who is a big golfer. He competes in so many golf tournaments. Like I wanna say like every other week, he is in a golf tournament because he's constantly on the golf course. And thankfully during the pandemic, golf is kind of built for social distancing. So it's something that people are able to participate and they're able to sort of gather safely and golfers have their own protocol for golf tournaments and playing courses now so that everybody is safe. And the best way to do this is to partner with a golf course. So golfers love tournaments, like any opportunity to play golf, they take that opportunity. And golf courses host a lot of them. So they are the experts and the best thing that you can do rather than trying to figure this out all on your own is if you have a local country club or a golf course that you know of, give them a call, set up a meeting and see if you can get them to partner with you so that they can share their golf expertise with you and you can share with them what your causes and what you're looking to do with this tournament. So one thing I did wanna mention as important to golf tournaments is swag and prizes. This is one of the main draws for people who participate in golf tournaments is what do I win if I win the tournament. So this is a really great thing that you can do used to work with sponsors, putting together gift baskets or having sort of high value gifts for the golf tournament and it can be an add-on. So this doesn't need to be your main event because obviously it's a little bit of a niche event but it is something that you can consider as an add-on if you wanted to do something else. And you can see an example of a golf tournament that's been hosted on Mighty Cause on the slide. So the nonprofit Keep Golden Isles Beautiful, they raised over $34,000. And one thing that is really interesting about this is that a lot of the golfers were their board of directors. So if you have a board of directors with a lot of golfers, this might be a really fantastic way to engage them in your spring fundraiser. So don't roll out a golf tournament. I don't know anything about golf. I've never played golf in my life but a good golf course will be able to help you out because they host these events all the time or just ask your board, somebody probably pays golf on your board. All right, so those are all of the fundraising ideas I had for you today. Obviously there is more. This isn't every idea under the sun but if you have a question for me or you wanted any clarification about anything I said, please just pop that into your questions box of your go-to webinar panel. And I've got some already here so I'm just gonna dive right into them. Okay, here's one from Shana. Is anathon mainly just a branding name or is it something done differently in promoting the fundraiser? That's a really great question. So theathon genre is you are asking people to do something in addition to just fundraising for you. So let's just say you're a community center and you have a really great community of knitters and you wanted to do a knitathon. So you're asking people to, A, sign up to participate in your knitathon and you're also asking them to be fundraisers and knit. So you may have like sort of a knit in where you have everybody and they knit, they share their creations but you're asking them to usually physically do something. Artathons have people creating paintings and other pieces of art. Danceathons have people dancing. So you're kind of asking people to do an actual physical thing and fundraise. And how the fundraising works is that if I'm participating in an artathon, I'm saying to my friends and family, hey, here's my fundraising page. I'm participating in this artathon for this fantastic charity that does all this great work to support arts in our community. Please support me and my art by making a donation to this nonprofit. So that's kind of the framework of an artathon. If you think about it, it's really just sort of a twist on a walkathon where people ask the people they know and the people in their lives to make a pledge to support them as they complete a certain distance of a walk or a marathon. That's really the basis for it and you're kind of just taking that and spinning it into doing different things. So I hope that helps you understand what I mean by the athon genre and we see a lot of them, there's a lot of creative things that people do in that genre of fundraising. And it's a really fun thing to do and it does get people engaged. So hopefully that helps. If you have any other questions, you can certainly email me and we'll talk about it. Let's see, just to remind everybody, yes, you will get a copy of the slides and you'll also get a recording of the presentation. So if you popped in late or you missed something, if the sound went out for you, that happened for at least one person, I apologize for that. You will have the full recording and you'll have the slides as well. Let's see, this is a question from, I'm sorry if I'm mispronouncing this, Jeneca or Genessa. For the virtual charity walk, do they donate to the walk or where would the donations come from with giving out the t-shirts and the bags? So the charity walk is basically, you would ask people to register to participate in your charity walk and your walkers would be your fundraisers. So these would be your peer-to-peer fundraisers. So your participants are doing two things. They are walking and they are fundraising. So that's what your participants do and the goodie bags would be for the participants and it would really just be whatever you can fill the goodie bags with. It can be existing merchandise you have like bumper stickers, buttons, things that you may already have sitting around your office or you can work with a local printer to get some t-shirts printed and then you would just be setting a threshold for them to get that goodie bag or to get an extra goodie bag, like raising $200. You just wanna make sure that the threshold is much more. The fundraising threshold is much more than the value of what is in the bag and something that's also really helpful for these types of events for charity walks is working with sponsors. So when you get a goodie bag together, you can put in coupons and different things for your sponsors to drive business to them. So that can be another thing that you can do with the goodie bags. But yeah, so you can really do that however you want. I would suggest having a threshold if people are gonna be getting something like a t-shirt, but if you just have like some stickers and some buttons that you wanna share with them, I would say just stick those in the mail and send that to your participants. But yeah, it's just a suggestion that's kind of part of the culture of charity walks is to have a t-shirt or some other memorial or commemorative object from that event, like a bumper sticker that you can put on your car. So those are not required. You don't have to do those, it's just a suggestion. If you are open to the public, you can certainly have people make appointments to pick up t-shirts if you wanted to do t-shirts, but you could also just stick them in the mail. All right, this one is from Scott. You talked about people enjoying the tangible experience of buying something. Can you give a specific example or two of what that could look like through an online fundraiser? That's a really great question. So one of my favorite examples of this, I went to a conference in Washington DC and it was a panel of people who were working for food banks and they had done something really innovative. They were one of the first nonprofits to do this. They had a virtual shopping cart and when you were making a donation through the website that they had built, they had actually people putting in like food items that you would get in a grocery store to give them the experience of going to a grocery store and taking food items, non-perishables, putting them into a cart and purchasing them. And so how that worked on the back end is that they just attached an amount to each of those things. So if you wanna buy a bunch of apples, then that bunch of apples costs $5. That's a $5 donation. And then at the end, you would check out and that would be the total of the items that you put in your cart, just like you would at the grocery store. And the reason they did that is because food banks in particular, people really love donating cans of food to them, but they have partnerships in the community and with grocery stores that allow them and in farmers as well, that allow them to take a $5 that you might spend on a can of beans at Whole Foods and turn that into, they could turn that $5 into a week of food for a family. That's how powerful their partnerships are. So they wanted to sort of give people the experience that is meaningful for them, but also sort of push them to donate money because they can do more with money than they can a can of beans. So that was the experience that they provided. Obviously we don't have that particular experience on Mighty Cause, but that would be where you would go to your checkout flow and you would take a look at the four amounts that you can suggest to people and the descriptions you have there. So let's say that one of your amounts is $30. Look at what you do and what does $30 provide? What could that do for your nonprofit and break that down into something tangible? So if you work at someplace like a food bank, that's a little bit easier. One of the things that we did when I worked at animal shelters would say, this amount of money, $30 helps us vaccinate an entire litter of kittens or something along those lines. So you're basically attaching a real world item to the monetary donation because with donors, and this is something that's happened really since charity began, there's sometimes a disconnect between money that they give and items that they give. So you're kind of just taking the in-kind donation experience and attaching it to a digital monetary donation. So I hope that makes sense. And you're basically just altering your donation suggestions on Mighty Cause, but just making that small tweak can be really effective when you're fundraising. Let's see. Oh, this is a great question from Cindy. Are there good options for us to embed a silent auction onto a page for a Gala event? Yes, so we are working on potentially changing this in the future just as a note, but right now we don't allow auctions on our platform. So you would want to, if you have a platform that you already used for auctions, you can link out to that. Just put a link into your story on your event page or your Mighty Cause page or whatever you're doing, and you can link out to that auction platform. That's a whole different arena of fundraising. And we're looking at potentially adding that in sometime in the near future, but we don't have it yet. So you just want to add a link to your auction elsewhere on the internet. And the reason we can't do that is for tax purposes right now because everybody gets a receipt from us from the Mighty Cause Charitable Foundation that says that no goods or services were exchanged, which is obviously not true in an auction. So because our donations are currently processed through our donor advice fund, we're just not able to host raffles and auctions. But yeah, just post a link in your story if you wanted to host an auction on an auction platform. And that way you can incorporate both of them. If there's something else you wanted to do, you can always contact me and we can talk through it, but you have the ability to add links and videos and all kinds of things through your story. So that would be the easiest way to do it. All right, let's see. This is a follow-up question from Scott. Can the Mighty Cause platform do that type of shopping cart or would it just need to be more giving levels? It would need to be giving levels. And you can reiterate that in your story. I've seen nonprofits create graphics just to reiterate that messaging that this amount provides the X number of things for us. So you would just want to utilize the donation descriptions and the donation amounts and also use your story and your marketing to make that case and provide that experience because as much as I would love to have a digital grocery store, we just don't have the capability of that. So you'll just have to use your checkout flow to customize those options. All right, so I think that is it for questions. Thank you guys so much. You've been such a great audience. I had lots of excellent questions and thanks for being patient for me when my slides didn't want to load a photo, but if you're ever curious about that screenshot, it will be included in the slides that I send out to you after today's webinar and I'm hoping to get that out to you as soon as possible. But thank you again so much. I hope you have a great rest of your day and happy fundraising.