 Hi everyone, it's just about the top of the hour. I'll give everybody just a few more seconds to get logged in, but it's just about two o'clock central time now. So hello and welcome to our second webinar for Give Big St. Croix Valley. Really happy to have you all here today. Just before I begin, I just wanna make sure that everybody can hear me and see my screen the last time I did not check. I went through the first couple of slides and nobody could see them. So if you can just type yes into the questions box of the GoToWebinar panel to confirm that you're hearing me right now and you're able to see the screen, perfect. Thank you, Kathy. Thank you, Ashley. Excellent. All right, so we'll go ahead and get started. My name is Lynda Gerhard. If you are a veteran of Give Big St. Croix Valley and have been participating for the last few years, I should be pretty familiar to you. At this point, I've been helping with Give Big St. Croix Valley since 2017 and I'm really happy to be part of this event. I work for Mighty Cause, which is the platform for the event. And I'm also joined by Lisa Murphy who's taken over the Give Big event at the United Way this year. Hi, Lisa. Hi, Lynda. Hi, everyone. Thanks for making time to be here today. All right, so just quickly, I wanted to go over our agenda. And actually before we dive right in, I wanted to do a quick poll just to find out where everybody is. So the poll should be active now. So I'm basically just I wanna find out how ready you're feeling for Give Big. So there's three answers there. You're ready, bring it on. You're ready to go for the event. You're still planning the campaign. And also we haven't started yet help. So if you wanna just take a moment and answer the poll, that would be really helpful. And just sort of gauging where everybody is in the process and there's absolutely no shame if you haven't started yet. That's part of the reason we're having this webinar today. So I'll just give everybody a few more seconds. So far it looks like most of you are right in the middle of planning, which is fantastic. And 10% of you are ready to go. So congratulations to the 10% of you who are already ready to go and run fundraise for Give Big. All right, amazingly no one has not started yet on this webinar, which is really excellent to see. All right, so I'm just closing the poll. I'm gonna go back to my slides. Sorry about that. All right, so the agenda for today is really gonna be focused mostly on strategy for Give Big. We are gonna go over the basics of the event. Go over a few reminders for anybody who may have missed our last webinar or just needs a refresher, but the bulk of our time is gonna be spent on campaign strategy. And then we're also going to do a live Q&A session at the end of the presentation. So if you think of something that you would like to ask while I'm presenting, just go ahead and pop that into the questions box of your GoToWebinar panel and we will make sure to get to it at the end. And with that, I just wanted to cover the basics. And for that, I wanted to turn things over to Lisa for a moment so that she can give you the rundown. So go right ahead, Lisa. Okay, great. Well, a lot of people on this call are probably familiar with the basics, from the sounds of it, if they're so ready to go. But of course, Give Big's St. Croix Valley is hosted every year by United Way St. Croix Valley on the last Tuesday of April. This year it's April 27th. Giving begins next week. I can't believe it's here already, but April 1st, early giving begins. And registration is required, of course. There's a $100 registration fee. If anybody has any questions about any of that, you're welcome to contact me and you should all be receiving my email. So that's what I'm gonna ask about at the end if anybody on here is not getting my email updates. Otherwise, that's the basics on Give Big. I'll turn it back over to Linda. All right, thank you. So I just wanted to go through six easy steps to participate because these are things that your nonprofit does actually need to do in order to fully participate in Give Big. So I just wanted to issue a few reminders. As Lisa mentioned, you do need to register for the event. Even if you've been participating in Give Big, since it was with the Asiola Community Health Foundation, you do need to register every year so that we know you plan to participate and also so that we can get updated information from you. You need to customize or update your Mighty Cause profile. Since a lot of you are veterans of this event, you probably just need to do a quick update and refresh. But some of you who are new to the event, you may need to actually create your profile. And then you'll need to create a fundraising plan. It sounds like that's the stage where most of you are at this point, which is perfect because we're talking about strategy today. And then you'll need to start collecting early donations on April 1st, which is amazingly next week. I still, I can't believe it either, Lisa, that it's starting next week. Well, you'll be able to collect donations. And then you wanna reach out to your supporters for Give Big St. Corvalli. So you need to promote your participation in the event. And then you just need to fundraise on April 27th. So it's really six easy steps. Obviously there's a bunch of little steps within there, but there's just six things that your nonprofit needs to do to participate in Give Big. And before we dive into strategy, I just wanted to go over a few reminders about the Mighty Cause platform, just in case you have any questions and just to make sure that we're all operating from the same base of information. We did do a full webinar that was basically platform training. So if you missed that, you can find that on the nonprofit toolkit on the Give Big site, but I just wanted to go through a few quick reminders. So we're all on the same page. The first thing that you'll wanna get familiar with is navigating your dashboard. You have an overview screen and that has actually been updated recently. So even if you've been participating for years and you think you know Mighty Cause, check out your overview screen because there's a lot of really cool things that you can do in terms of measuring your important metrics there. And it'll also tell you the status of your Give Big registration. So if you're approved, it'll say that you're approved. If you're pending, it'll say that you're pending. And this is also where you can access your to-do list to make sure that your profile is completely filled out. You have a fundraising tab. I think that's called fundraising tools now actually. So from there, you can basically find all of your fundraising tools. It's pretty self-explanatory. You can access your profile, edit your profile, customize your checkout flow and work on creating your Give Big campaign. This is probably when you're in the planning stage where you're gonna spend most of your time when you're on the Mighty Cause platform. Reports is an important place to know about on your dashboard. This is where you'll find all of the reporting that you need from your donation report to your donor retention report to your disbursement report when you get a deposit and your bank account and you're like, wait, there seems to be something missing. We break it all down for you in the disbursement report. And then your settings. Your settings is where you can do basically all of the boring things that you do need to do to manage your profile, like adding and managing your admins, updating your legal info. I know Lisa's gotten a few questions about setting up EFT and that's actually where you can do that is through your settings. If you wanna update it, I'd recommend year after year, just making sure that you have the correct bank account there. Just in case anything changes, we wanna make sure that you get your deposit as quickly and with zero complications as possible. So one thing you'll definitely wanna do is update your story. Review your story, make sure that you're not talking about your 2020 campaign or COVID relief. If you participated in Giving Tuesday Now last spring, there's a lot of old information that can hide in stories. So make sure when you go to your Mighty Cause profile that the information there is fresh and up to date. And then add some information about your campaign this year. What are you fundraising for? What's happening at your nonprofit this year? And this is also where you can add a campaign video, some new images about your nonprofit or related to your campaign. You can even include infographics, hyperlinks. There's a lot of stuff you can do with your story. And this is one of the places where you'll wanna spend a little bit of time making sure that the information is up to date. Your checkout flow is really important when you're going through the process of getting your page ready for a giving event like GiveBig. So you can choose what donor data you collect. Obviously all of the donor data that's collected belongs to you. So if there is a piece of data like a phone number that you're looking to collect from your donors, make sure that you do that and mark that off in your checkout flow. One thing that we talked about a little bit in our last webinar is using custom donation suggestions and descriptions to reinforce the impact of making a donation to your nonprofit during GiveBig. Those you can customize and they hit donors at a really important point when they're making their decision about how much money to give. So make sure that you check in with those. And that's also where a lot of old information goes to die. So sometimes people don't realize they have old information hiding there. And it's really important to make sure that you're not referencing last year's campaign in your amount descriptions. You wanna make sure that they are in line with this year's campaign. You can preview the checkout process and also you can enable dedications and designations. So if you have dedications in your newsletter or on your website and you wanna enable those to allow somebody to make a donation on behalf or in memory of somebody, you wanna make sure that that is enabled. Another place that old information goes to die is on your thank you page and the receipts. You have a custom area on your receipt where you can put a thank you message and a lot of the panicked emails that we tend to get on giving days are when people realize that their receipt that was sent out by Mighty Cause referenced in old campaign. So just take a minute, go to checkout flow and then post checkout. And then you can update your thank you page which displays as soon as a donor completes their donation. And you can customize that message that goes into the receipt which automates the thank you process. It's certainly not what we would recommend as the only thank you to your donors but it's definitely something that will buy you a little bit of time so that you can follow up in a more personal way. And you can also preview the thank you page. I don't believe you can preview the receipt at this point but you can take a look at the thank you page and just make sure that that looks how you want. And this is also really important. We get lots of questions about this leading up to the event but you do need to reset your metrics if you've been participating in GiveBig for a while. We are working on a mechanism where we can do that for you but right now you will have to manually go in and reset your metrics so that you're counting only donations and donors from this year. And most of the tickets that we get in support that say, hey, my page isn't matching what's on the leaderboard. It's usually a discrepancy in where you started counting your metrics. So what I mean by your metrics are the amount that you raised how many donors you've had and your progress towards your fundraising goal. So this is pretty easy and intuitive. You just wanna make sure that you're in edit mode on your page, your profile I should say. And then the little circles with button or this little circles with pencils inside of them are kind of the universal edit icon that we use throughout the platform. So you'll just click those and you can edit the amount raised. You can choose whether or not to include offline donations and you can start your calculations on a specific date and to reset them you wanna set that date to April 1st, 2021 at midnight central time. So when you do that, you'll be able to reset them. And then obviously you can set a new fundraising goal which will erase your last year's goal. Sorry about that. Those are the kind of the technical reminders. Now we are gonna move into campaign strategy which is definitely the more fun thing to talk about. So as I mentioned, the early donation period begins on April 1st. And the reason there is an early donation period is to give you time to build momentum before the giving event. So it's not the first time your donors are gonna hear about it on April 27th. You've already been soliciting them for donations and trying to build up your base of support. And the great thing about early giving is that it all counts towards your totals on Give Big. So taking advantage of this period helps you and it boosts the amount that you raise overall and it makes the event more successful for you. So this will also affect your leaderboard position when the site switches over to the live event site on midnight, all of the money that you've raised beforehand will be included in your leaderboard totals. So it kind of helps you get a leg up on the competition so that you can be competitive for those prizes. One thing that I do wanna make sure that everybody knows is that these are not pledges. These are donations that process immediately. So sometimes there's some confusion about that. It's not a future donation, it's just a real-time donation that counts towards your Give Big totals. And just once again, it starts next week so you can start getting your emails ready and start asking your donors to give early. And one thing that I do recommend doing is sort of pre-launching your campaign to your inner circle. So people like your board of directors, volunteers, donors that are given on a recurring basis and people that you know have a higher propensity to give to your nonprofit. And that will help you build up a nice little bank of money to start the day with. Pardon me, I have a little bit of allergies happening. And another thing that I want to mention is that a lot of people get concerned with early donations. They ask, oh gosh, is that gonna steal the thunder from the actual event day? And we have not found that to be true at Mighty Cause. We haven't seen that it diminishes the number of donations that you get on the event day. It usually just results in more donations. So instead of people making a donation that they would make on the event day early, they actually tend to make two donations or more depending on how much they give. And that makes a lot of sense to me because you're basically looking at the difference of a month and a lot of people give according to their pay schedule. So you basically have two different pay periods that you're hitting here and most people who will give during the early giving period will also give to you on the event day itself. So don't be shy about asking for early donations. It really does help boost the amount that you raise overall. Matching grants are a really great way to increase the amount that you raise and incentivize your donors to give now. And how securing a matching grant works is very similar to securing major gifts. So you start by prospecting. You wanna start with people that you know have a propensity to give. And I usually recommend making a spreadsheet, just something simple so that you can see who you want to approach. So board members, your major gift donors, corporate sponsors are a great place to go if you're looking for a matching grant. If you're not quite sure who to go to, your board members are definitely the first place you'll wanna start. Then you cultivate, you communicate with them, send out an email, set up a meeting, find out what's going on with them and just sort of get a sense of whether or not they are in a position to give. Obviously with the pandemic and the recession, some people may not be in a position to give. So you can have that conversation, learn what's going on with them in their lives or at their business, and you'll sort of be able to whittle down your list of prospects once you start talking to them. And the easiest thing to do is just let them know that Give Big is coming up and see if they have any interest in getting involved. And then once you've done some cultivation, you just make your ask. And it's really helpful here to appeal to their interests. So for instance, major donors sometimes don't want a ton of recognition, but they might really appreciate the opportunity to use their donation to bring in other donations and use that money in a more effective way. So a matching grant allows somebody who makes a donation to get more for their money because it's doubled, but it also gives the opportunity for the person who provided the grant to give more than the dollar amount of their donation. And corporate sponsors and community partners doing a little bit of cross promotion and letting everybody know that they are philanthropic and helped you during Give Big is a really great way to appeal to their interests. We have a lot of flexible matching grant options. So make sure you take a look at the tool. We have a lot of different ways that you can run a matching grant. The most common is one-to-one, which means if I have a grant and you have a donor that donates $25, you actually get 50. So that's the most common, but there are some really cool different things you can do like a threshold match where the grant kicks in after you raise a certain amount. So work with your donor to see like what works best for them, what they're interested in doing. And see if you can come up with a goal, like what is most important to them? Is it most important to give donors more value or do they wanna help you raise a certain amount on Give Big so you can work with your grantor to decide what the best way to structure this grant is. And you can also combine smaller matches. So for instance, let's say your volunteers may wanna give a matching grant and they wanna pull together $20 from each of them. You can pull together small donations from a pool of people and turn that into a bigger matching grant. And you can also post smaller matching grants. So one that you wanna use for the entire day, you typically would want that to be a bit larger, but smaller matches can work, especially during an hourly competition for a power hour. So there's a lot of creative ways you can use matching grants and you just wanna make sure that you incorporate that into your strategy, especially if you've been participating in Give Big for a while, it's a really great way to shake things up and get your donors excited. So the question of who provides a matching grant, we talked about this a little bit, but major gift donors, this is a natural extension of what they already do for your nonprofit. And it's also a way to sort of deepen their impact at your nonprofit. So instead of just writing a check and giving you the money, they're using that money to bring in more donations. So they're getting more out of a matching grant donation than they would just a regular donation. And it's important to make that clear to them that this is a more effective way to use that money because it brings in more for your nonprofit and it can even bring in new donors for the first time. Your board of directors is, people sometimes can be afraid to tap your board of directors, but they do have a responsibility to fundraise for your organization. So this is a great way to leverage that responsibility that they have. And something that you can also consider is do they have annual dues or annual fundraising minimums? You can use their dues as a match or a portion of their dues as a match. And you can also make sure that this counts toward their fundraising minimum. So there's a lot of things that you can do to make this appealing to your board. And sometimes even if the board as a whole does not want to give a matching grant, you'll have individual board members who are more than happy to provide a matching grant. And then sponsors, if you have relationships with local businesses, any community partners, those are great opportunities to get matching for matching grants. It's also a really great icebreaker with businesses or community members or community organizations that you don't have a relationship with but have some aligning values with. So that's a really great way to sort of open the door to an ongoing partnership. So a matching grant is kind of like a tree falling in a forest with no one around to hear it if you don't promote it. So it's really important to promote your matching grant once you've secured it. So we do have some tools on the Mighty Cause platform. When you enter in the information, it'll display in a few different places. It'll display on your page. It'll display on your donate button when you have a live grant so that anybody who goes to click that donate button knows that you have a matching grant available. And it'll also be included in a search on the Give Big Site. That will list all of the matching grants that are available, which is really handy because some donors wanna make their money go as far as it can and they'll look for organizations that have matching grants available. So there's a few different ways that organizations can see that you've got a matching grant active and find you on the Give Big Site but you also wanna make sure that you promote it to your own audience. So share it on social media, share your progress on social media and definitely include the match in your email campaigns if you have a multitude of matching grants available providing a schedule for those matching grants so that people can plan their gifts can also be a really helpful thing to do but just make sure that you're talking about your matching grants so that you get the full impact of the work you did to secure it. So to pivot from matching grants, I wanted to talk about peer-to-peer fundraising. So just to make sure we're all clear about what peer-to-peer fundraising actually is, it is a fundraising technique where you leverage your existing supporters to bring in new supporters and they do that by creating a fundraiser on behalf of your organization. So they're asking their social network to make donations to their fundraiser for your nonprofit and the benefit there is that you can't ask my Aunt Kathy to make a donation to your nonprofit because you don't have permission to solicit her, she doesn't have an existing relationship with your nonprofit but I can certainly ask my Aunt Kathy to make a donation to your nonprofit through my fundraiser. So it really opens the door to acquiring new donors and getting people to make that first gift which is really important statistically in the nonprofit space, most people actually give to a nonprofit for the very first time because somebody they know asked them to. So peer-to-peer fundraising is a really powerful tool that we highly recommend you use on GiveBig. So as I mentioned, donor acquisition is really the magic of peer-to-peer fundraising. A lot of smaller nonprofits can really get stuck on the question of how do I expand beyond my list of supporters? I have my email list and I have my social media audience but how can we go bigger? And this is a really great way to do that. It's really designed to bring new people in. So you get to reach new people and it also just generates buzz. You have lots of people talking about your nonprofit and the work you do and they kind of give you testimonials. It's also really great for engaging those existing supporters. So giving a donation every month or every campaign is important but it can get a little bit boring when you're just giving and giving and giving. And this gives your biggest and most enthusiastic supporters a way to support you that's new and exciting to them. So it's actually really great for keeping those donors engaged instead of just asking them to give. You're getting them actually involved in your fundraising which can be really exciting to them. And it also just puts more boots on the ground. You have 24 hours for Give Big. Obviously you have the pre-event giving period as well but you have a short period of time to fundraise. So the more people you have posting about your campaign and talking about your campaign and asking people for donations the better result you're going to see just because you have more people out there asking. So that's another important thing to consider when you're thinking about peer-to-peer. So peer-to-peer on Mighty Cause is pretty simple. It's not too hard. You basically just want to ask supporters to fundraise for you. I've seen that done on social media. I've seen that done through emails. And sometimes you can target people specifically based on their relationship with you. So you may want to target your volunteers specifically to ask them to fundraise for you. But it's really as simple as sending them to your nonprofit profile and clicking that button that says fundraise. It's right next to the donate button. It's really hard to miss. And then from there Mighty Cause will take over and we'll coach them through the process of creating and setting up their fundraiser. And then they just set a goal and start fundraising on April 1st or after that point if they haven't already created a fundraiser you can do this throughout the month of April leading up to the event. So it's really simple. It's one of the things that Mighty Cause was built to do as a platform. Really before we did anything else before we did giving days we did peer-to-peer fundraising. So this is something that's very easy and something the platform is built to make easy for users. So just some quick facts about peer-to-peer. All of your current administrators will get an email notification when someone creates a peer-to-peer page for your nonprofit. So that way everybody knows when there's a peer-to-peer page that's been created and that gives you the opportunity to reach out to that fundraiser and say hi, thank you for setting up a fundraiser for us and offer them support and encouragement. Peer-to-peer pages can also be managed and tracked in the campaign section of your dashboard. So you can see who created the page. You can see their progress and you can see the dates that it was active. One thing that I do wanna mention about your campaign screen in particular is that you also as an administrator have the ability to hide old campaigns. So if you've been doing Give Big for a long time at this point you may have a lot of peer-to-peer campaigns and you don't necessarily want those showing in the search because our search will pick up every page that is active for your nonprofit. So you can hide old campaigns that are no longer relevant in your campaign screen. It's very easy to do. And you can even delete pages if you want. If they're really old and that you just don't need them there anymore, you can delete them as well. So you might wanna just take a minute and do some housekeeping there just so that you're ready for this year's Give Big campaign. All donations made to pages that were created by your fundraisers that includes the individual pages, teams and events. The donations are counted on your profile on the leaderboard and they do count toward prizes. So for instance, if you have donors that are coming in through a peer-to-peer page those donations made to that page are they increase your likelihood of winning a golden ticket. You can utilize that during power hours. So if you have multiple fundraisers let them know when power hours are and tell them to fundraise really hard during those hours because those donations can all help you win prizes and they're all tracked on the leaderboard as long as they are online donations. And one of the main questions that we tend to get is like, does that mean that there's somebody else who has access to our money and our donor data? And the answer is no. All peer-to-peer donations are just treated as donations to your nonprofit which means that the data is pulled into your donation report and the donation itself is bundled into your disbursement for the event. So there's no middleman at any point. You just have somebody else doing the asking and they have limited access to your donor data. It's just a donation to your nonprofit and it's sent directly to your donation report so you don't have to track it anywhere else. And fundraisers must be linked to your Mighty Cause profile in order to be included in the event. So this is a super edge case but sometimes people can go through different avenues on Mighty Cause and create a peer-to-peer page or even a personal fundraiser. That's something I've seen happen. And if it's not properly linked to your nonprofit on Mighty Cause, then it won't get picked up in the Give Big event. So the easiest thing to do is just to send people to your profile and have them create their peer-to-peer page from there because that will automatically connect their fundraiser to your nonprofit. So something that I think is, it's maybe like two years old at this point is fundraiser templates. And they're really useful, especially if you're incorporating peer-to-peer into your campaign strategy. So a fundraiser template allows your nonprofit to sort of pre-fill parts of a peer-to-peer page for the people who sign up to fundraise for you. So it makes it easier for them to get their page published and it means that they don't have to start from scratch. So every nonprofit is allowed one fundraiser template, which you can use as your Give Big template. And you can just pre-fill it out, fill out their story, their title, et cetera. And that way it makes it a lot easier for them to be done with it so they can just focus on fundraising. This is also really helpful as an olive branch to your busy board members. They are more likely to fundraise for you when you make it as easy as possible. And this is a way that you can help them out without having to actually create the entire page for them. It is optional. So if somebody really is motivated to create their own page and customize it, they can opt out of using it, but anybody who creates a fundraiser has the option of using the template that will pre-fill their page. And users can still edit it and customize it. So if they use the template, that kind of gives them a running start, but they're more than welcome to change the images out. They are more than welcome to customize the story to their liking. It just kind of gives them a head start so that they don't have to sort of figure out how to talk about your nonprofits since that's not something that they are typically used to doing. So pivoting from peer to peer, I wanna talk about email strategy. And this is an area where I'm actually a little bit nerdy because I do the email marketing for Mighty Cause as part of my job here. So I stay on top of marketing best practices and I'm very interested in email marketing trends. So I'm happy to kind of share some tips with you about email strategy. The biggest thing that I can recommend to you is to keep your emails short and sweet and keep your messaging pretty simple. You want it to be laser focused and make sure that your email is skimmable. Most people do not sit down and read their emails word for word, especially if it's from an organization or a company, they tend to skim. So using things like headers, lists and images to sort of make it easier for people to find key pieces of information is really helpful when you're building emails for your Give Big campaign. And segment your audiences. This is a really important thing, especially if you've been doing Give Big for a while. It gives you an opportunity to fundraise more intentionally and more specifically. And what I mean by that is that instead of sending every email app to your whole entire list, you're taking your email list and breaking them up into affinity groups. And so what is an affinity group? An affinity group would be a group of people who have something in common. And just to use a couple of easy examples, one affinity group would be donors who've given to your Give Big campaigns in the past, recurring donors would be an affinity group. Volunteers, there's a lot of overlap between volunteers and donors. So donors who are also volunteers is an affinity group. And you can also get creative with it. I was the marketing coordinator for an animal shelter. And our database had some really interesting information about the interests of our donors. And that was whether or not they had adopted a dog, a cat, a small animal. And so little tweaks to each email, I was not starting from scratch with each email, but I might make three different images for an email that I'm sending out. So the dog people might get an email that has a dog picture in it. The cat people might get an email that has a cat picture or a cat story in it. And I may put some birds or hamsters into the email for the people who've adopted small animals. So you have a lot of information about your supporters and your donors. So segmenting is basically just using that information so that you can communicate more specifically with your base of supporters because people tend to be more responsive and pay more attention to emails that seem like they are crafted specifically for them. So definitely if you have been doing Give Big for a while, this is a way to get a little bit more sophisticated with your email marketing so that you're just not blasting everyone. Obviously it depends on the size of your list if you have a very small list. This may not be worth doing, but if you have a pretty large base of supporters, it's definitely worth thinking about segmentation when you're building your emails out for Give Big. Schedule and timing are really important to consider for Give Big. So obviously you wanna do an email, maybe to a segmented audience on April 1st when donations open up. And because there are prizes that are time sensitive on Give Big, you'll wanna get familiar with the prize schedule and make sure that you're hitting your audience with an email when it's imperative that you reach out to them and get them to donate so that they know if you make your donation during this hour, we have the opportunity to win X number of dollars. So make sure that you're timing them out appropriately. You don't need to send 20,000 emails if you usually send like one a month, but just find a cadence that makes sense leading up to the event and take a look at the timing of your emails on the big day. Make it mobile-friendly. So most people are not looking at emails on their desktop computer or their laptop. They are looking at them in an app on their phone. So that's important to consider. Make sure that when you're choosing a template through constant contact or MailChimp, that you're making sure that that's a mobile-friendly template and also test it. So when I say test it, I mean test for a couple of different things. Number one, actually look at it on a literal phone. So maybe have a staff member that has an iPhone, take a look at it, send them the test email, have them pull it up and look at it on their iPhone. Have somebody who uses a droid pull it up on their phone and look at it in the app that they use for email. Because sometimes when you're just sort of previewing it in a browser on a desktop or a laptop, it looks fine, but when it's actually in the app, it looks a little bit funny. So it's helpful to actually know what it looks like on a phone before you send it out. I also recommend having at least two sets of eyes on each of your emails to check for typos and also to check your links. Make sure that your links are working and going where they're supposed to go. As somebody who's been doing email marketing for quite some time, there is no worse feeling on this earth than knowing that you sent out an email to hundreds if not thousands of people with a link that is incorrect or does not work. So it's worth the effort to make sure that people are testing your links for you, because especially when you've been looking at an email over and over again or you've been looking at it, editing it for a really long time, it's easy to sort of miss a detail like that. So make sure that you have at least two sets of eyes checking each email for you carefully to make sure that everything's working and that you're not sending out something that's broken with an embarrassing typo. And lastly, on email, make sure that you're using a clear ask. As I mentioned, people are mostly skimming. So making sure that your ask is clear from your subject line, from your headers and that you have a clear CTA button. And make sure that link is working again. It's the worst feeling in the world. So just do your diligence to make sure that your donate link is working. And I really recommend making sure that you're using clear language. So sometimes nonprofits are tempted to use like please help us or we appreciate your gift. I've seen people thank donors for gifts that they haven't given yet. You wanna make sure that you're asking them clearly, please donate now, give now. So that tends to be more successful because people are skimming them and they're trying to find out what you want them to do. So just make sure that you have a clear ask, that it's clear in multiple points in your email and that you have a working link where they can make their donation. And so social media strategy, my biggest piece of advice here is to stick to where your audience is. Stay in your comfort zone, it's absolutely fine. If you have 10,000 followers on Facebook and 20 on Instagram, you don't need to spend equal amounts of time on Facebook and Instagram. You wanna build your strategy around where you have the most followers. Now that doesn't mean ignore other platforms, but make sure that the attention you give each platform is proportionate to the number of followers and the amount of engagement you have there. As much as you can schedule things ahead of time. So services like Tweetdeck, Buffer, Hootsuite. And most of the services, I think with the exception of Instagram, although you can do that through Facebook, give you the ability to schedule content ahead of time. So sort of your tentpole content, your big posts throughout the day, your posts at the beginning of power hours, you can schedule those ahead of time and save yourself a little bit of grief on the giving day itself and save any sort of live posting for celebrating milestones like meeting a matching grant or reaching a fundraising milestone or interacting with your audience. So schedule as much as you can. It'll just save you some time and effort and you can also review it and make sure that every post is good and solid and ready to fire on the big day. Something that has been very prominent, especially since 2020 is live streaming. So giving events are often about gathering people. That's something that we tend to see a lot is people actually physically gathering for the event and planning something at your nonprofit. Obviously you can't do that this year. We're getting better, but it's not at a point where we can safely gather in large numbers. So a way that you can create camaraderie and a sense of community, which is something that people are really craving after a whole year of isolation is doing a live stream and you can actually post the link right into the story on your Mighty Cause profile. So that's something cool that you can do as well. Focus on content that we know is engaging. So photos, videos, stories, things along those lines that are built to draw the viewer in to get them to stop scrolling and read what you have to say. Those are really important on Give Big. So make sure that you have some content at the ready. One thing that I always recommend to people, I use it all the time myself is a service called Canva, which is built for social media posts. You can really create anything from flyers on it. And this is not sponsored. I have no partnership with them. I just love Canva. You can create a lot of really great things on Canva and they do have a nonprofit discount so you can actually use their pro services for free, although there is a free version as well. And then always include a call to action with a link. That can be easy to forget on social media if you get wrapped up in sharing your video. But just make sure that you provide a link where people can go to donate on Instagram. This is a little bit tricky. What I recommend, because you can't put direct links into actual Instagram posts, is getting a link tree. Link tree is a free service where you can put a link in your bio that will show people a series of links. So you can just embed the link into the link tree and link to that in your Instagram bio if your nonprofit uses Instagram actively. So retention is really important. Give Big has been around for a while and if you have participated before, you wanna make sure that you're trying to retain the donors that you've already captured through Give Big. And so the good news is that we provide a report where you can easily find the donors who haven't given yet for this year's Give Big. And you can also just grab a list of everybody who's given in the past and do some targeted outreach to those donors because we already know that they support you. We already know that they're likely to donate because they have in the past. So they're really worth showing a little bit of extra love to when you're making your strategy. Wrap them into it and make sure that you're talking to your previous donors in a very specific intentional way and trying to get them to not only come back and make another donation, but also increase their gift. So you can do some fancy things with email marketing and sort of customize the amounts that you're suggesting to them. So if you really wanted to be email pro, you could break it out into people who gave under $50, who gave between 50 and 100 and just sort of suggest an amount that is bumped up a little bit, but you don't necessarily have to do that. But that is a way that you can sort of make it worth your while to get these people to come back and get them to give more. Because obviously, if they make a bigger gift this year, you're probably going to see your overall fundraising amount increase. And one thing that I definitely recommend for a 24-hour event like Give Big St. Croix Valley is to track your retention during the day and have an email ready to go in your email marketing program. So whether that's Constant Contact, MailChimp, Campaign Monitor or something else, have an email that's already built so that you can go into your retention report that day on April 27th. Pull the report of people who have not given yet and send them that email as sort of an opportunity to get them to give now. So even if you've done some work to retain them leading up to the event, have something ready to go where you can just plug in the list of donors and send them an email and really focus on the message of you've supported us in the past and your support means so much to us. We really need you to come back and support us again in 2021 and talk to them specifically. But that's something that I really recommend doing, especially if you are a Give Big Veteran, just have something ready to go where you can plug the list into your email program and send that email to them. And that way you'll usually see donors actually come back and make a donation in the evening is a great time to have that ready to go because that's when they tend to be most effective. But yeah, have something ready to go and just plug that donor retention list into your email. So again, you have a donor retention report. We track your donor retention on your overview screen and it's actually really cool. You can sort of, when you filter, you can filter by time, but you can also just easily pull the list of people who gave to Give Big in 2020 and in the past. So you can actually very easily filter that. And this is a great way to retain everybody, make sure that you get familiar with your donation report. And something that we tend to forget in the age of email marketing and digital communications is personal outreach. So especially for donors who've given in the past over a certain amount, you may wanna consider in the weeks coming up, sending personal emails, even making phone calls to people on that list to let them know that Give Big is coming up again and you need to count on their support. So there's a lot that you can do with your donor retention report that will be really helpful in getting you to your fundraising goal. And it's always important to make follow-up and for a part of your campaign strategy. So basically if you collect new donors and you get people making donations to you, that's fantastic, but you really wanna start thinking about stewarding them as soon as the campaign is over. So we do have some automated thank yous that are built into the platform. As I mentioned earlier, like your thank you page and the message in the receipt, but donors really do need a personal thank you directly from your organization. So we buy you a little bit of time to do that with the automated tools that we have, but you also wanna consider what you're gonna be doing afterward. And you can easily sort of make personal thank yous. One thing that I remember is that for a past Giving Tuesday event, I made a donation to a nonprofit that I thought had a really cool campaign. And not five minutes after I completed my donation, I got a call from a volunteer thanking me for my contribution. And I still remember that, that was probably three years ago. And I still remember how great that felt to be thanked so quickly. And statistically, it's really important to thank your donors within 48 hours. So even if you wanna do something like sending them a letter or a welcome packet, if they're a new donor, make sure that you have some kind of thank you strategy in place. Obviously you'll wanna close the loop with your Giving Day impact. So tell them how much you raised, what you're going to do with the funds that you raised, send an email a day or so after the event, just sort of reporting on your results and thanking your supporters in general for everything they did for you to make Give Big a success for you. And just make sure that you have something like that plan so that you don't have to scramble after the Giving Day, because if you're anything like me, you're gonna be really tired after 24 hours of fundraising. Pay special attention to your first-time donors. 2020 as a whole, the nonprofit sector saw a lot of first-time donors and every first-time donor is an opportunity to create an ongoing lasting relationship. So think about what you're going to do to start stewarding these first-time donors that you might get, especially if you're doing a peer-to-peer, you're gonna be getting more first-time donors. So what are you gonna do for them? Are you gonna just send them a thank you letter? Do you have a packet you wanna send them? Do you have a welcome email journey or series of emails that you wanna sign them up for or some combination of that? Just make sure that you have a plan in place so that you can pay the attention that you need to to those first-time donors that they come back to your next campaign and make another donation or even make their donation recurring. And then just make sure that they are enveloped into your year-round stewardship and communications. So obviously put them on your email list. A lot of organizations only use Mighty Cause once a year for GIF Big, which makes me sad, I wish you would use us year-round. But if you have another program that you use, just try to make sure that your donors from GIF Big don't get siloed on Mighty Cause and that they are part of your annual, yearly, regular communications with your donors. So make sure that you're including them even if you use a different program. All right, so that is it for my presentation. I did wanna make some time for questions. So let's see what we've already gotten the hopper and let's see. All right, so I don't see any questions just yet. So if you have something that you wanna ask me or Lisa about GIF Big now is the time, don't be shy, this is what we're here for. And just to let everybody know we are recording this right now, you will have access to the recording that'll go on the nonprofit toolkit as soon as I'm able to upload it. So make sure that you are gonna get it if you miss something or have to hop off early. There's a message from somebody who does have to hop off. Ashley had to hop off early, but you can certainly get the recording afterward if you missed anything. All right, this is a, I'm not quite sure what this is referring to Patricia, the $100 fee. So, and Lisa, you can weigh in here or you can clarify Patricia in the questions box. The $100 fee is from the United Way of the St. Croix Valley to sort of offset some of the cost of running the event. It's not actually for the Mighty Cause platform unless you have subscribed to one of our Mighty Cause plans. So I'm not quite sure what you're referring to, but Lisa, did you wanna speak to the $100 fee? And I'm sorry, Linda, I can't see the question. I don't, there's something that I'm missing. I'm kinda missing my chat as well. Okay, it just says, is the $100 fee good for using this for the whole year? So I just basically wanted to clarify that the $100 fee is just to offset some of the cost of running this event. Is that correct? Yes, that's correct. So the $100 fee does it, the registration fee goes to United Way St. Croix Valley and it helps to pay for the promotion that we do in particular and staffing for, forgive big. But primarily that all of the dollars that we receive for the registration is, a lot of that is taken up with our marketing of the event. Yes, there's always a lot of confusion between what is Mighty Cause and what goes to United Way. Yeah, and the United Way does a great job of marketing and promoting the event that gives everybody involved a boost. So that $100 fee that's taken at registration is helping pay for the cost of the event because it's not free to run a big event like this and to do all of that, the great work that goes into it and all of the promotion. But if you meant something else like you paid for a subscription on Mighty Cause, you can always email me and I'll, I'm happy to chat with you, Patricia. This is a question from Kaffee. Can you change matching grants while give big is in progress? So yes, you can change the matching grants while the event is in progress. If you need to change a matching grants while the actual grant is in progress, that's a little bit trickier. In that situation, I would recommend contacting support if you need to make some sort of change to the grant just so our support team can walk you through it and make sure that you don't do anything that that creates a bigger problem for you. There are, it's really all display money. Like obviously there's real money that's being exchanged through the matching grant but we can do some manipulation of the display for you if there's something that needs to be changed. So if you're talking about during the actual period that the grant is active, I would just contact our support team that support at mightycause.com. During give big, we will have people available to you during the whole 24 hours. So even if it's 2 a.m. after the event started, you can contact our support team. We will have somebody available to you. But during the event itself, you can absolutely change it. It's a little bit trickier if you're changing it while the grant is active. So just contact support if you need any help with that. All right, so in the matching grant setup, what should you use in the title? So that's a great question and the answer is basically anything you want. So for instance, you may wanna talk about a power hour matching grant if that's how you're using it. If you have a corporate sponsor, you can name the sponsor in the title of the grant just to give them a shout out. It really is up to you, which I know can be frustrating if you're like, I don't know what to put there. But just think about what the match is being used for, who provided it and use that in the title. If you have a power hour grant or if you have a grant for the whole event, that can be something that you use for the title, but it's really open to whatever you would like to do if you wanted to give it some sort of creative, clever game, you could do that, or you could just keep it as simple as 3PM power hour grant from John Smith or whatever you wanted to do. So it's really open to whatever you would like to put there and what makes sense for the use of the grant. This is a question from Ann. Can you provide a more specific example of peer to peer? Yeah, so there's a lot of great examples on this site, but just as a... So one of the things that happens, it's not really a great example for a giving event is sometimes people create birthday fundraisers. So in lieu of birthday presents, they will ask their friends and family to make a donation to a nonprofit of their choice instead of a page where they can do that. So that's kind of, I think, is a good example of how peer to peer works with somebody asking for donations on behalf of your nonprofit would be like a birthday fundraiser. Something that we'll commonly see during giving days is board challenges. Lots of people get involved with teams and events on Mighty Cause, and you can actually create a team for your board members and have them compete to fundraise for your nonprofit. Sometimes board members will just create their own page or you'll have one page for your board. And what they do is they send that link out to their whole social network and ask them to make a contribution to the page. So those are some examples of peer to peer fundraising that we commonly see. And you can also just ask your supporters to create a page for Give Big, and it'll be as simple as Cathy for Give Big, and you have your own page that you have control over where you can talk about the nonprofit, what it means to you, how you came to be involved with it, and then the person who creates the page just sends it out to everybody that they know on social media and asks them to make a contribution. So that's just kind of how peer to peer fundraising works. And as we get into the event, you'll probably see more if you go to the search for Give Big and you'll start to see those peer to peer fundraisers. But if you wanted to go to mightycause.com right now and just search for, you just hit the search bar and you can search for fundraisers and you can see some real live examples. So there's a few different ways you can do it. The most simple is just a page that's created by a supporter that we do also have teams and events which are more organized and structured peer to peer fundraising methods. So I hope that helps. Let's see. Oh, this looks like a good question. This is from Mike. Do you recommend if a possible peer to peer person is not all that handy with technology that they just send a personal email to their contacts and simply use the link to our Give Big page where someone can donate from there? I think when making their own fundraising page, I think making their own fundraising page will be off putting to some board members. So that's a really common thing that people run into is where is it easier for them to just send a link to our page? And the answer is yeah, if you have somebody who is resistant to starting a peer to peer page of their own and they can't be convinced with fundraiser templates, it's totally fine for them to just send an email to their contacts or post on their LinkedIn like, hey, I'm on the board for this nonprofit and we're doing a fundraiser. It would be great if you could make a contribution or send that to their personal email contacts. That's absolutely fine. A lot of people you would probably be surprised are happy to create a page for you because it's actually fun for a lot of people. But yeah, it's definitely up to you and the person that you're looking at. And there's all kinds of peer to peer fundraisers. When I talk about it, it's usually in the context of somebody creating their own page, but certainly if somebody is really just not able to create their own page or they just don't have an interest in it, they can send out a link to your GIF big page and that's totally fine. It all counts. It all helps you on GIF big. So I hope that helps. Let's see. This is a question from Mary. I'll add to that too, Linda, just quickly. Oh, sorry, can you hear me? Yeah, go ahead. Oh, sorry about that. I was just gonna say, I would add to that too, that I've had some luck in the past with providing templates to people like Mike was talking about them that may not wanna do a page, but just in the same way that you would provide a communication template for somebody that was doing a peer to peer fundraising page, you can give them an email that they can personalize any way that they want, but it can just make it that much easier that they can just copy and paste that into an email, maybe personalize it a little bit, sign it and send it off to their contacts. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, and I've also seen lots of organizations. For board members, for some reason, this is especially a hurdle, but they will, you can create a campaign for them. So for instance, there's no particular need to do this and give big, but if you just wanted to track which donations are coming from what source, I've seen nonprofits go in and personally create pages for each of their board members and we can switch ownership over to them or you can retain ownership, but basically they will create the page, fill it out, make sure it's ready and it has their board members' name, even picture on it and then they will just send it to their board member and say, here's your page, here's your link, just use this. So there's a lot of ways you can facilitate that for people who are either not interested, too busy or just aren't comfortable with technology to the point that they feel comfortable creating their own page. All right, so moving on to the next question from Mary. If we have an email we developed to send to donors that we want input on to ensure it is short and simple and has the right ask for money, do you offer some time to review or some guidance? So that's not typically a role that I play, but I'm happy to take a look at your email and provide feedback. That's something that I can do pretty quickly. So if you're really unsure, you can always send it to me and I'm happy to give you a quick bit of feedback about it, but you can also use people at your nonprofit to see if you think that this is a good email, if they think it's easy to understand and skimmable and easy to read, but it's not something that we typically offer, but I'm always happy to take a look at it as somebody who's a little bit of a geek for email marketing. So yeah, sure, I can't guarantee that I can do it like 20 times, but if you want me to take a look at an email, I'm happy to give you some pointers and some feedback. Let's see. This is from Shelly. Can we- That's a good segue. Go ahead. Go ahead, sorry. I'm offering a deep dive training on March 30th at two via Zoom. So all of the people that are on this list today should have received an email from me earlier today with that information, but I'm gonna be sharing and talking about specific templates and really wanna use it more as a workshop for those that are really working on their communication strategies and wants some feedback. So that might be a good opportunity for the person that was asking about reviewing an email too. Just wanted to put that plug out there. Yeah, definitely. That's a great service to offer. So if you are looking for help, that's something that you would definitely wanna take advantage of. But yeah, I'm always available too. So I might not be as quick as attending that training, but I'm happy to take a look. All right, so this is a question from Shelly. Can we encourage donors to donate by doing a giveaway? For example, could we offer an entry into a drawing for a gift card to anyone who donates during Give Big? I'm really glad this question came up. So on Mighty Cause, we cannot do raffles or prizes, basically. And the reason for that is that all of the donations are processed through the Mighty Cause Charitable Foundation, which is the donor advice fund that allows us to disperse the money and issue tax receipts for you. And on that tax receipt, it very clearly says that no goods or services were exchanged for this donation. So since these are 100% tax-deductible donations, we run into something where if someone is getting something of value from making a donation, that we could sort of get into tricky territory as a donor-advised fund. So as part of our terms of use on Mighty Cause, we do not allow raffles or goods being exchanged for a donation. However, it basically depends on what you wanna do. Definitely a raffle would be something that we would probably not allow on our platform just because of our terms of use and the rules that we have to follow in order to maintain our status as a 501C3 and a donor-advised fund. But you could get creative and maybe send out a little token to everybody who makes a donation, something simple like a button, a pin, a bumper sticker. Those things are absolutely okay. The little tokens for making donations are absolutely fine. And that's something that you can consider doing. You just basically wanna make sure that it's not a high-value item. So for instance, a $100 gift card is a high-value item. So if I make a $100 donation, I get a $100 gift card in exchange. I basically just bought a gift card. So auctions are also not allowed, but certainly like little tokens of appreciation are allowed because a bumper sticker is super cheap. And it's certainly not something that you're doing, you're making a big donation to get. So that's a little bit tricky territory. If you have an idea for something, you can always reach out to our support team. And we are happy to listen to your idea and sort of tell you where that fits in with our terms of use because we just do have to obey that guideline that no goods or services are exchanged. So that can rule out things like spa gift cards, bottles of wine, gift baskets, or something along those lines, but certainly little tokens of appreciation to your donors as long as they are sort of equitably distributed, those are fine. So the raffle idea is not something that we can support, but if you have any other questions about that, you can always check our terms of use that's on the footer of the GiveBig site. And you can also reach out to support and we're happy to sort of walk you through what's allowed and what's not. If you have something that kind of skates the edge or something that might be akin to a giveaway. So contact us if you have any questions about doing something along those lines. All right, let's see. The next one is from Kathy. If we want to use Mighty Cause at another time, would we have to purchase a membership? So it depends. So we just recently changed our pricing. So if you are already a Mighty Cause user, because you have been participating in GiveBig, it's, you don't have to purchase. You basically are on a legacy plan. So you have access to all the tools that you have had access to in the past. If you are new to Mighty Cause, we have three different plans. One is a free version that has some limited access to tools, just sort of our basics. We have an essentials plan, which has basically all of the essential tools that you use and then advanced has some really heavy duty tools like a CRM, integrations with MailChimp and Salesforce. So those options are available to you. You don't have to have a membership to use us. And if you are currently a Mighty Cause user, you're on what's called a legacy plan. So you don't have to purchase a membership. But if you go to our pricing page, you can kind of see the breakdown of the different plans that we have available. And if you wanted to upgrade to advanced because using MailChimp integration is really helpful to you, you could consider it, but outside of the giving event, you don't have to purchase a membership or a subscription, but it is something that you can do if you decide that's right for your nonprofit and you're looking for sort of a year round fundraising tool that you can use. Let's see. This is another one from Kathy. What is the answer when a business says they will donate that day, April 27th, and you would like them to do a match? So if they want to donate that day and they've already told you we're gonna make a donation on April 27th, and it's a decent amount of money, like $50 is probably not gonna do much to you, but if they're gonna make like a $500,000 donation, say, hey, it would be really helpful as if we could use that as a matching grant. So basically instead of just taking the donation, we can take that donation and use it as a tool to encourage other people to donate by offering to match their donations. So just pitch it as something that would be a really great way to get more giving happening and to better utilize the funds that they're offering to give you. And you can also sort of start a conversation with them and find out what would be appealing to them. Are they a business? Do they want to be tagged on social media and have their logo added to your nonprofit profile? You could do something like that. So just pitch it to them, have a conversation about if they would be interested in using their donation for that purpose. And you may need to just sort of explain what a matching grant is and how it works. So yeah, instead of just accepting the donation and that being the end of the story, just mention that you can use that money to provide a matching grant, which will be exciting for your other donors and get more people to make donations and help you win prizes on gift big. Most people will be responsive to that. So yeah, go ahead and pitch that to them and just start the conversation from there. And if you do need some help sort of explaining how matching grants work because I've been doing this for six years at this point, five years at this point. I still have a hard time really articulating what matching grants are. We do have a support article that can help you sort of find the right language to explain how that works. But I like to say they're kind of like Bogo deals on donations, but you may just have to explain what a matching grant is and just pitch them the idea. Most people, if they're already planning a donation, it will be more than happy to let you use it as a matching grant. Let's see. This is a question for Lisa. When will we know about the schedule for the power hours and golden tickets? So if you wanna just give a quick update about where we are there. Lisa, did we lose you? Yes, so actually we did set the time for the power hours. I believe it is, I know that for sure the first one during the day is 10 a.m. We've we set the time for the second one at 1 p.m. But I have to confirm. I'm actually working on the whole grid of the prizes right now and how it's gonna break down with all the details and descriptions. And I will send that out no later than early next week is my plan. Awesome and it'll be on the give big site. So I mean, I'm sure Lisa will let everybody know, but it will be on the give big site so that you know hour by hour what prizes are available. Let's see. Okay, this is a question from Michael who said that no question to not listen to his previous question. So I'm glad that that was resolved, Michael. So it looks like that's it for questions for today's webinar. You guys had really excellent questions. Thank you so much for attending this webinar and being such active engaged participants. I really appreciate it. I'm excited to see what everybody accomplishes this year. I've been working with give big for a while now and I'm always happy to see all of your excellent campaigns and all the money you're able to raise for your causes. So just as I mentioned, we are recording this so you will have access to the recording and thank you all so much for attending. Happy fundraising.