 We're just going to wait one more minute as people are continuing to join. If you could help me out and let me know in the go-to webinar questions panel, let me know if you can hear me. That would be awesome. You can enter in the color shirt you're wearing today. We will wait one more minute and then get started with. Hi, everyone. We're just waiting maybe 30 more seconds. People are still joining. If you could let me know that you can hear me by just typing in your name or whatever you want in the go-to webinar questions module, that would be very helpful. Thank you so much, everyone. We are going to go ahead and get started. I wanted to welcome everyone today to the Give Education Training webinar. My name is Dawn, and I'm going to be leading you through today's presentation. I have a few housekeeping items to note before jumping in. First, I want everyone to know that the webinar will be recorded and posted in the toolkit on the Give Education site under the Resources tab. And then you can use the go-to webinar questions slash chat module to send across any questions that you have during the presentation, and we'll get to as many as we can after the webinar. So again, my name is Dawn. I'm with Mighty Cause, the platform for Give Education Day. I also have Carrie on from Alumni Nations. She and Josh, who's also here from Central High School Foundation, have both been working really hard to really help make this giving day great for everyone. So I wanted to welcome both of them. And Carrie, if you have anything you'd like to say, then now is a great opportunity. Thank you, Dawn, so much. Again, this is Carrie Dayton with Alumni Nations. And I just wanted to say thank you all for attending this call. Today is really all about strategy and trying to help you understand or give you the tools rather that you need to set yourself up for success. And I specifically had asked Josh with Central High Foundation to come on the call today, the reason being they have had a tremendous amount of success with online giving days for their foundation. And Josh, I'm going to say that you are the expert oracle of how to raise funds with online giving and really engaging your guests and their platform. And so I wanted to just welcome you to listen to Josh, learn what he's going to do. And if you do have any questions or have any technical challenges or any questions or anything that I can do to help you make this a successful event, please don't hesitate to email me at the give givee-educationatalumniations.com. We will answer your questions. And if I don't know the answer, I will find someone who will help you. And I am here as a resource for you. Dawn, thank you so much. Yeah, and hello, everybody. Like Carrie said, my name is Josh Busy. And I'm the creative director and database administrator for the Omaha Central High School Foundation. And I believe this is our seventh consecutive giving day participation of some kind. And so a day like this is something that we've had a lot of success with in the past. And we've kind of worked it so we have a kind of a strategy every year for our campaign. So as Carrie mentioned, as you're going along, if you have any questions about maybe a campaign that we run in the past or any tips or suggestions, we would be happy or I would be happy to help you out. We do our best to kind of create a campaign for social media that ties in with quotes from some of our students or teachers and people that we impact at the school. And it's just an incentive for people that want to give and participate. And Dawn has a lot of great stuff for us to discuss today, including like a matching gift possibility. And that's something that we've taken advantage of quite a bit. My boss, my executive director, Michelle Roberts, tries to reach out to donors who she knows that will participate ahead of time and secure a matching gift. So it incentivize people to want to participate in our day of giving. And yeah, so if you have any questions, feel free to reach out. But there's a lot of great stuff that Dawn's going to talk about today. And there will be a chance for questions at the end, I know. So I guess, Dawn, I can turn it back over to you. Actually, Josh, can I ask you a quick question? This is Carrie. Oh, sure. Josh, with regard to your participation and giving days in the past, would you say that you guys put a ton of time into it? Or is it an average amount of time with a great reward? What's your opinion on how it works for your organization? No, I definitely think it's something very manageable. I'd say, obviously, the first year is probably the hardest just because you're trying to get used to everything. But in all honesty, I think it's one of those things where you put in some work ahead of time. And then when the day of giving arrives, you kind of just have to sit back and see what happens. So ideally, you're scheduling social media posts ahead of time to kind of get the word out there. Maybe you send a postcard out a couple weeks out to let people know about the date and how to participate. But for the most part, most of your work should be happening ahead of time so that by the time the actual day arrives, you're in pretty good shape. But I would say for sure, obviously, the first year's the hardest. But I mean, it's a very manageable process. It should be super overwhelming or daunting. It's a great way for people to get involved and participate. So the platform is super easy to use and set up. So I don't think it should be a time-consuming process. Great, thank you so much, Josh, Don, thank you. Yep, yeah, thanks to you both. Like Josh mentioned, I am gonna be going through just a little more in-depth look at email marketing, social media marketing, later on in the presentation. And again, if you have any questions at all, please feel free to put them in that questions module and we'll get to them at the end. We are just really excited to partner with both of you for this inaugural event. And we're looking forward to providing the technical support as everyone gears up for the big day. And then just a little bit of background on Mighty Cause really quickly, we are a fully functioning organization fundraising suite that many, many organizations use 365 days a year to raise money for their causes. We've been around since 2006 and we're actually one of the first platforms to host giving days. So we've been doing this kind of event for a long time and we're just really excited to host to help host Give Education this year. So here's a look at today's agenda. We're gonna be going over some of the basics for the Give Education Giving Day. Then we're gonna go through the prizes available during the Giving Day and then move into strategies that you can use to really make this campaign successful for you. And then again, we'll do a Q&A session at the end. So if you do have a question, feel free to type it in that questions box and we will see it and be able to answer it at the end. So Give Education basic. Give Education is hosted by alumni nations and is going to take place on March 24th. It's a 24 hour giving day that runs from midnight to midnight central time. Early giving started on March 1st, but the main giving push is definitely going to be on March 24th. So there's still obviously plenty of time to register, get set up and start soliciting donations. Registration is required for this Giving Day and really any 501-MT3 organization or school any schools with NCEES codes are welcome to participate and there's no cost to register. So first things first, if you haven't already done so you're going to need to register your organization for Give Education to register, just go to give-education.com and click register. On the registration page, you can search for your organization and create an account if you've never used money cause before. And once you take that step, a short registration form will appear and you can fill that out and click submit and that'll complete your registration. Then within 24 hours you'll receive an email with next steps to help your organization get onto the site, customize and really plan for success. And then after you complete registration you'll also have the ability to add additional administrators to your account if multiple people are going to help manage the campaign. And of course, if you have any questions at all please don't hesitate to email the Mighty Cost support at supportatmightycost.com. So once you've filled out and submitted your registration form you'll want to click on the user icon in the upper right on the give-education.com site to access your organization account. Your organization account is gonna be the hub of your activity for the Give Education Giving Day. So I recommend taking some time to get to know your account dashboard that'll appear on the left hand side of your organization account. So when you log in, you'll automatically land in your overview section. So this is where you'll find a really handy to-do list that outlines some great next steps that you can take to customize your profile on the site as well as metrics that will come in handy once you start actually raising funds. And then under the fund raising section on your dashboard you can customize your organization page by toggling on the edit mode. You can include page metrics like adding a goal for the Giving Day that will enable a progress bar on your page which is really handy when you wanna send people there they can see very easily how close you are to your, to the goal that you've entered in. Then within the fund raising section you'll also find a checkout flow which we're gonna talk about later on as well as a matching grants tool which we're also going to touch on later. And then below that fund raising section on your dashboard is a reports section. This is where you'll be able to preview and export different types of donation reports, disbursements reports, et cetera. And then you can manage your organization settings like URL customization and admin control from your settings section within the dashboard. So jumping into the overall profile for your Give Education account your profile is the face of your organization for the Giving Day. So you're gonna wanna make sure it looks good and represents your organization well. And just so you know, your profile link is the link that you'll wanna share with your supporters to ask them to donate to your Give Education page. So to share your page just copy and paste that URL into an email or a social post or wherever you're advertising the campaign. And then as you're going through your to-do list you'll wanna customize your profile to match your organization's brand. You can change your theme color to match your logo. You can upload media to your gallery to add some visual interest on your page. And your story or description is really the centerpiece of your organization profile. So in your story you can put your mission statement, you can add photos and a video. You can embed something like if you have an existing video that's on YouTube or Vimeo you can embed that into your story. So then when people come to your profile as you're promoting Give Education Day they'll be able to watch that video right on your profile. So this story section is just really where you can go in depth about your work. You can make a strong appeal to donors just tell them why your organization needs their support and you can show the impact of your work here as well. So after you get registered I really recommend spending some time customizing this profile because really the more work you put into it your donors are going to notice that and the more information that they know about your organization and really what you're focusing on that'll help them to know oh I definitely want to donate to this organization. They know what you need then they'll be sure to complete that. So the next item that I really recommend customizing is your organization's checkout flow. So the checkout flow is located within your fundraiser section on the dashboard. The checkout flow is what your donors experience when they make a donation towards your organization. The first part to customize is your checkout steps. This is probably one of the more important features to focus on when you're setting up your organization's profile page. The checkout flow section just gives you a lot of control over the donation process for your organization. It allows you to opt into collecting certain information you want from donors like addresses and phone numbers. You can also set up custom suggested donation amounts and add descriptions to help tie those amounts to items or services that your organization provides which just strengthens your appeal to donate. So the checkout steps within your checkout flow also allow you to preview the whole checkout process without having to make a test donation. So you can see what your final process looks like and then use that to edit yourself if needed. So moving on from the dashboard in your Mighty Cause Give Education account I just want to make sure I mentioned the really great tools that you can use as you get ready for Give Education. And that's going to be the organization toolkit. The toolkit is located on the home page for Give Education Giving Day which is give-education.com. The toolkit has a lot of tips and tricks. It's got FAQs, it's got walkthroughs. It has templates you can use for your email and social media to help you get inspired and really figure out how to promote your campaign. And then the toolkit is also where you'll be able to find today's training recording as well. And we do have the previous training recording already on demand within the toolkit. So if you missed that one, feel free to go back and watch at any time. Definitely check out the toolkit if you haven't already and refer back to it as you're planning your campaign. Prizes. So this year, $6,000 in prizes will be given away to participating organizations. These prizes are provided by the Comer Family Foundation. Basically every hour, during Give Education Giving Day, there's gonna be $250 given away to a randomly selected organization that has raised funds during that hour. So the first winner will be pulled at 1 a.m. Central on March 24th and we'll continue pulling those winners with a new winner being drawn every hour until the Giving Day ends. So for more details on the prizes, definitely check out the Prizes tab on give-education.com. Okay, so jumping into campaign strategy. So the prizes provided during Give Education Giving Day, definitely allow for additional incentive for your organization to get donations every hour of the day. So keep tabs on which organizations have won so far. If you've won yet, there will be a list of all the winners that will show on the site on March 24th. So you'll be able to check that out and keep track of it. And if you haven't won yet during the day, then that's definitely a great messaging piece to keep your donors and supporters updated on if you've won one of those random hourly prizes yet or if you're close to your own goal that you've set for Give Education as well. Basically, emphasize how much is at stake during the Giving Day. How much money, could the money that you raise due for your organization, what would that money help you achieve? Tie everything back into your overall messaging about what you do, why you do it, to just really get people excited about helping you win that money. And then if you do win one of the prizes during the day, then that is an awesome messaging piece to just really pump your donors up and get them excited. Just everyone likes to win things. Whenever, if you are one of the winners during the day, then make sure that you communicate that to your donors and just get them pumped up about it as well. So mapping out your campaign with mini goals. Give Education is a 24 hour event. So the trick to making the most of it is to sustain your fundraising momentum. One really great way to do that and to make sure that your campaign's on track too is just that mini goals for your organization to help generate buzz and build excitement. So set mini goals for certain hours in the day so you can keep people excited about your goals and continue working towards your overall fundraising goal that you've set for the day. Mini goals just really help sustain your fundraising momentum and they get people excited about helping you reach your goal. So to set mini goals, you'll wanna think about your overall fundraising goal for the day and what you'll need to raise or if your goal is like number of donors, how many donors that you'll need to get each hour or section of the day to reach your goal. So be sure to keep in mind too when your donors are most active to kind of adjust your hourly or section goals accordingly. And when I would say section, I mean like our goal this morning until 10 is to get this many donors and then our goal during the lunchtime portion of the day is to get this many and then our goal in the evening is to get this many. So just keep track of everything, adjust those goals depending on when your donors are most active. And if you know that there's gonna be certain times of the day that's gonna be slower for you, then you might wanna boost that time period by utilizing a matching grant to kind of shake up your campaign. And we'll talk more about matching grants in just a little bit. Something else that you can do to get your campaign rolling is to ask for seed donations. So seed donations are donations from people in your organization's inner circle that essentially break the ice with donors. No one really likes to be the first donor. There are exceptions. Some people are like really love to be the first donor but for a lot of organizations, what works best is if they have a little bit of momentum built up before they really make some big pushes. So to help get that ball rolling that people ask for a seed donation from their board, staff, especially those who are director or C-suite level leaders at your organization, volunteers are great. People to ask for those initial first donations before you go out to your wide net. Really anyone at your organization who's highly engaged with your work. Seed donations do not have to be huge donations but getting a little bit in the bank by tapping people in your inner circle really does help you move your campaign forward and get those donations coming in. So securing a matching grant. A great strategy for driving donations on a giving day is securing a matching grant. So a matching grant is essentially a large donation that your organization leverages to bring in other smaller donations by offering that large donation up as a match. So for instance, if you had someone willing to give you $1,000 instead of just putting that money in the bank and calling it a day you could use it as a matching grant. So basically you take that $1,000 and say to your supporters, hey between this hour and this hour our donations are gonna be matched up to $1,000 which basically allows those donors those smaller donors to double their donation. So you can do a lot within our matching grants tool within your account. Like you can set a cap for donation matching say $200 so one person doesn't come along and just make a big donation and eat up your entire match. Our matching grants tool we talked about it in the last training recording. So it's just really cool. It's a complex little tool that just allows you to do a ton with your matching grant. And on our platform specifically we have seen that matching grants especially on a giving day can be a really powerful way to drive donations. So since a matching grant is ultimately just a large donation you'll wanna follow the same process as you would to create one when you secure matching gifts. So you prospect, you cultivate and you ask. So people you should consider as prospects for a matching grant are board members. Sometimes an individual board member will be happy to provide a match but one thing you can also consider is asking your board to work together as a group to provide a match. So if your board still has to pay dues for instance you could utilize their dues by turning that into a matching grant. A major gift donors who have given large donations to your organization in the past are also really good prospects and providing a matching grant can be a really fun way to liven up their donation. So instead of just writing a check they're helping your organization grow and drive other donations as well. So you can also give a donor who provides a matching grant some extra recognition when you're promoting the match. So major gift donors who like a little shout out are even better for those matching grant prospects because of that. Corporate sponsors are also really good prospects. It's a fun proactive way for corporate sponsors to get involved in a public way and draw attention to their philanthropy. So at this stage in the game you can start making phone calls, sending out emails and just start cultivating those prospects by letting them know what you're doing. We're participating in Give Education Day. We would really like to utilize a match to make our giving day exciting. This is especially helpful if in the middle of the day when you know your donors are not super active then maybe having a match to kind of make that portion of the day more profitable for you then a match might be a great opportunity at that time too. In the coming weeks then as you're kind of searching out these prospects you can make the ask and then shore up the details of the match as well. You can also have more than one match running at the same time on Mighty Cause. So if you get a lot of great responses, that's awesome. Don't feel like you have to just pick and choose one. So at the end of the day a matching grant is really a marketing tool. So in order to make the most of your matching grant you're gonna need to promote it. So the first step is going on to the matching grant tool on your Give Education profile and adding the matching grant there. There are some marketing tools built right into the platform for your matching grant. So for example, if you set one up as soon as it goes live it's gonna put a little sticker on your donate button that notifies everyone coming to your profile that the matching grant is active. There's gonna be some changes to your checkout process to reflect the match and the match also gets listed on your organization profile. You'll also wanna add some information to your story though especially if it's a big match and you'll wanna promote it on your social media channels. You know, send out an email basically pull out all the stops to let all of your followers know about the match. Countdowns also add urgency. So counting down and sharing your progress can be a great way to get people excited and urge them to stop what they're doing and make a donation. So since Give Education Giving Day is a 24 hour event if you do have a matching grant you're welcome to set it up for the whole entire day but if you know that your donors are most active between certain hours like I said before you could set up the match to just last for a few hours so that you can really try and drum up on the urgency during those few hours. But again, it's totally up to you the tool is very flexible. If you're not quite sure how you wanna do it or what would provide you the most success then feel free to email Carrie or Josh or our support team at Mighty Cause to get some strategy insight into your specific organization. So moving on from matching grants I wanna talk a little bit about ambassadors. So ambassadors are people who are usually in your organization's inner circle who can help boost your campaign. So that includes board members, volunteers, volunteers especially ones who are highly engaged staff members, et cetera. Utilizing ambassadors can help you break out of your list of existing supporters and engage new people, new donors people that you wouldn't otherwise have access to. So an ambassador can help you in a few different ways they can simply share a link to your page within their social circle to ask their family and friends to donate. And that'll obviously help boost your campaign to give education. So like if you have a board member for instance who's very well connected this can be a really big boost or your ambassadors can help by getting involved in peer-to-peer fundraising. So peer-to-peer fundraising is a fundraising technique where you basically deputize your supporters to fundraise on your behalf. The Mighty Cause platform is set up for really easy peer-to-peer fundraising and peer-to-peer fundraising can be a great way to kind of shake up your campaign and acquire new donors. So if you wanted to try peer-to-peer basically what you do is you ask supporters to set up a fundraising page for your organization to help you raise funds for give education. This may sound like a big ask but it's often a really fun way to engage your biggest supporters and allow them to tell their own story about your organization. How they came to work with you why your work is important to them. And their story, their participation doesn't distract or draw attention away from your campaign. They're operating alongside your campaign. They're reaching out to people they know personally for donations, which in most cases their friends and colleagues and family they're not people that your organization would typically have access to to solicit for donations. So in the peer-to-peer process you're actually picking up new donors most of the time. So for people like your board, volunteer staff, program alumni, this can be a really great way for them to get involved without just being asked to give money. And it can make the whole experience just more meaningful for them than just making a donation or sharing a link. So you could take this peer-to-peer fundraising and make it part of your stewarding process, building sustaining relationship with that specific reporter. We've seen organizations on the platform get some really great peer-to-peer action going by just inviting people on social media or sending them an email asking for their help. And for younger people who have a big social network and are really comfortable online, maybe they don't have a lot of cash to give but asking them to be a fundraiser for you, this can be a really great way for them to help out and make a meaningful contribution for your organization. So to help make things easier for them, for your ambassadors, you can set up a fundraising page template for them within your account. In that template, you can add image, talking points, facts and logos. You can even offer to help them set up their page since hopefully you'll be pretty comfortable on the platform soon if you're not already. Organizations that utilize peer-to-peer fundraising do tend to raise more money on giving days. So it's definitely worth talking about how you can incorporate into your campaign strategy. So the timeline is great to get started on this. We've got a couple of weeks until Give Education Giving Day. So now is a great time to kind of put out the word to ask people to join, get them comfortable with it. And then there's not like a ton of time for them to back out beforehand. So now is a great time to put the word out there and then start putting things together to send to them, get them signed up, all that good stuff. So that they can start raising money as soon as they're on the site really, but big pushes on March 24th. So if you're able to generate a lot of interest in peer-to-peer, or let's say you've done that and you've participated in a Giving Day in the past and you've done that before or you wanna try something new, I would consider trying out team or event fundraising as well. So teams and events can be a great way for groups of people who wanna fundraise together like your board or companies or just volunteer groups to make that statement for your organization. Teams and events can be a great way to get people working together and united for your cause. They also are a great way to inspire some friendly competition to keep people motivated at the same time. So the difference between teams and events is basically that an event allows individuals and groups of people to participate and fundraise together while a team fundraiser is just a group of individuals working together toward a collective goal. So one of the cool things about using our teams or events products for Giving Day is that there's tools built in to make it managing really easy. So for instance, you can create a template fundraiser for a team and event as well. Then as we discussed previously, it really helps people get set up on the site quickly since it pre-bills some of those sections on their pages. You can also email team and event members through the platform to keep them motivated. So teams and events are essentially just more complex peer-to-peer campaigns. They can be a really great option if you've got a lot of people willing to fundraise for you or if you've done peer-to-peer before and just kinda wanna try your hand at a new type of campaign for a Giving Day. So your email list is going to be one of the most important tools during Give Education because emails are a direct line to your supporters. So unlike social media, you don't have to worry about an algorithm getting in your way or preventing people from seeing what you send them because unless they've unsubscribed, your message will end up right up in their inbox and probably send them a notification on their phone as well. So I wanna talk for a bit about email strategy because that's going to be important for Give Education. In general, you're gonna wanna keep your emails relatively short, simple and definitely skimmable. Most people read their email on their phone these days. So they're not going to be interested in reading a novel. They're gonna wanna be able to skim it and get to the point. People are much more likely to read emails that pertain directly to them. So I highly recommend segmenting your email list by sorting donors into a few key groups. Donors who have given a lot or give on a regular basis, one-time donors and people who have utilized your services but have never donated. Other segmentation groups can be your board, volunteers and so on. So you don't need to craft entirely new emails to reach each of these groups, but you can tweak small things about the emails for each group to make it more personal. So for instance, in an email to volunteers, you wanna acknowledge how they already help your organization. And you wouldn't wanna send an email to a major gift donor asking for a $25 donation. So be strategic about it. Really think about what kind of messaging you wanna send to each group. Just identify those key segments and tailor your message to them. Again, when an email is tailored to who the recipient is and the relationship they have with your organization, they are much more likely to read it and take action on it. And how you segment depends on the program you're using, but most services like constant contact and MailChimp, they use tag to segment people on your email list. So one of the first things in creating your email strategy is definitely going through and identifying the different segments that you wanna target and kind of working through to figure out what message you wanna send to each. The other thing that you'll wanna pay attention to is the timing of your email. So I would recommend taking the time to schedule as much as you can beforehand. And if you have a template email ready, for things that you need to send out day of, like a blast email asking people to help you get to your campaign goal or an announcement that you won one of the hourly prizes. As I mentioned before, most people read their email on their phones these days. So make sure that you choose a mobile friendly email template and definitely test it out beforehand. Look at it on an iPhone, an Android, make sure that it looks the way that you want it to look. And then leading up to the event, I also recommend doing some AB testing, especially with subject lines, because you'll wanna make sure that not only people are receiving your emails, but people are driven to open your emails for give education as well. So try out different subject line formats, try things like, if your audience is like that, add emojis, see what works better to get people to open your email. So when you're sending out the critical emails, this way you'll have an idea of what tends to work with your email list. AB testing, if you're new to that term is basically splitting an email up 50-50 and testing a variable. So let's say you're testing a button color or a subject line, half your list gets email A with one subject line, the other half gets email B with another subject line, and then whichever email gets the most opens basically wins. For button color or placement, the email with the most clicks would win. So you just wanna be careful about testing too much, throwing too many variables in there, because then it's really hard to say why something won the test and performed better. Lastly, your call to actions within your emails should be very clear and action oriented. Call the actions like give now, donate now, help us today. More passive calls to actions like thanks for donating or please contribute aren't as effective. So you're gonna wanna be crystal clear and urgent with your call to actions within your emails. Have multiple people look at the emails that you write and create within your email program. That way you get other people's opinions. If you've already done a lot of extensive email testing and work within your organization, that's awesome. You're ahead of the game and you already have an idea of what works with your supporters. So for a high stakes day, like give education, we really recommend staying in your comfort zone when it comes to social media. Go where your audience is. What I mean by that is if you've never logged into TikTok before or if you've never logged in in your whole life, that's fine. You do not need to use TikTok for give education if that's the case. If however, you have 1,000 followers on your Facebook page but only a handful on Instagram, then you should probably spend more time and effort on promoting your campaign on Facebook than Instagram. Put your efforts into the platform where you're most likely to reach people and have an impact. So I definitely, Josh kind of touched on this at the beginning, schedule any posts in addition to emails that you can't ahead of time just to save yourself a lot of trouble during the giving day and leading up to it. Get your key content scheduled. You can do that with Facebook's publishing tools or Creator Studio. You can go into Tweet Deck and schedule your tweets. Basically save any live posting on the day of the first stuff that needs to be done that day. Like if you want to tweet or post every time somebody donates and thank them, that would be an example of something you'd save for day of. If you wanna save posts for updates on your progress, prize announcement, get templates set up early. That way, if you do win a prize, whenever someone does donate, you can just copy and paste and enter in the applicable information and really save yourself a lot of trouble on the day of. And doing this allows you to quickly respond to comments on those posts. It allows you to interact with your followers more since interacting with followers is really important on social media and the interaction can also help you in terms of the algorithm since most platforms show priority to posts with lots of engagement. So scheduling everything ahead of time, writing out templates for yourself, make sure you sit down and take some time to do that. That way on the day of, all that you're really actively doing that day besides monitoring your page is putting out announcements for real time stuff and then interacting with the posts that you have previously scheduled that people are just now commenting on. I do recommend budgeting a little money if you're able to boost some posts or promote some tweets and on social media, $20 for an ad can go a pretty long way. So you'll wanna make sure that your ad is targeted properly. And if you're not sure how to target an ad, you can always just default to targeting people who just like your page already or follow you. So in terms of what types of content will do well on social media, it depends a little bit on the platform but in general, photos and videos do really well. And you may wanna consider doing something out of the box like a Facebook live video or a watch party for a campaign video to help generate some of that additional engagement because that kind of stuff, anything visual is really algorithm friendly and will kind of push you up and bump you up on people's news feeds. And then of course too, if you're asking them to share then that just gets you additional exposure to people outside of your supporter group and is always a great ask in those posts. So finally, when you're planning your campaign, follow up is also very important to consider. So when you're planning your content, you'll also wanna plan your thank you to donors, things like making a video or a photo of your staff can be really, really great for this. Be sure to talk about the impact of the funds that you've raised and kind of close the loop on your campaign. So if you were fundraising for something specific during give education or if you had a specific goal that you were really marketing that day, then those would be great opportunities for you to kind of close the loop. Obviously you'll wanna send out emails periodically on your progress during the day, but closing the loop after the fact is also a great practice too. And then you'll also wanna make sure that you've got a good onboarding plan in place for any new donors that you've acquired during give education to basically encourage them to come back and donate again. If you collected addresses, then mailing donors or any existing donors, information or a welcome packet, that can be a great way to kind of steward them. And then you can also create an automated email journey where donors can get more information about what you do and why it's important to support your work. So really take into consideration after give education day. How are you going to steward the donors that have given new donors that you've acquired? What are you going to do to keep them engaged with your organization? So make sure that you include that in your planning strategy as well as you're getting set up for the day. So lastly, as we wrap this up, I wanna make sure that all of our support contact information is here for you to reference. This support information specifically for Mighty Cause as the technical partner for give education day, if you have any technical questions or if you wanna strategize around some of our tools that we provide within your accounts, you can reach our support team at supportatmightycause.com. They're available Monday through Friday, nine to five Eastern. You can also call them at the number there as well. And then on give education day specifically, they'll be available 24 hours. So if you have any problems at all during the course of the day on give education giving day, our support team will be here to help you as well. Okay, so let me see if there were any questions that came in. Hey, Don, I can speak for just briefly about a couple of thoughts that I had as you're going along. So for the many goals, some organizations, we haven't done this in the past, but I know some organizations have done such a thing where they set certain thresholds and if they have a donor that will give an additional amount of a certain threshold is reached. So for example, say you raised $10,000 and the donor says, I will give an additional $5,000 on talk of my matching gift. If you reach that threshold, kind of another incentive for people, if you're really close to that $10,000 for people to say, oh yeah, like I need to donate because we're so close. And for us, the busiest times of the day I would say are in the morning, that 4 a.m. to 9 a.m. time. And actually at night, we have a decent number of people who donate after work. So we kind of have like a late push in the day for some donations. For seed donations, I would definitely suggest even if it's just the people in your office making a donation, a $5 donation, it adds some legitimacy and creates some momentum for your profile if you're able to show, oh look, five people have already donated and like $50 has already been raised. It kind of creates that sense of participation, I would say, or like I said adds legitimacy almost to the cause. Our email strategy, we usually try to send an email out maybe a week or the week of. The giving day, we send an email on the morning of. The giving day and then depending on how close we are to reaching our matching gift goal, we might send a second email throughout the day. We use MailChimp, that's the platform that we've used and had a lot of success with. And then after the event, we try to send a postcard to thank our donors. I'm the graphic designer and so I have the postcard already created before the event is even beginning, but all I need to know before we go to print, of course, is how much money we raise and how many donors we have. So that's something else where, kind of what I mentioned earlier, a lot of this stuff you can kind of already have completed ahead of time. You just kind of need to have some of the pieces in place. So when the giving day comes around, everything's already kind of scheduled out and you're kind of, you've already spread the word, you've already educated people. It just has to see how things go. Yep. And one of the other things in terms of follow-up, having everything scheduled ahead of time is just really convenient when it comes to timing. Really the recommendation is to make sure that donors are thanked in some capacity within at least 24 hours after they've given. The nice thing with your account that you have with on Mighty Cos for Give Education is you can customize that initial thank you receipt that gets sent out automatically after a donation so you know your donors will be getting thanked and get their donation receipt right away. So that's been done, but then knowing that, we also have a postcard to send out and they're all ready to go by end of week that day or that the week of Give Education or the first thing the following week. So just having it scheduled in a timely manner to know that this is already done, I don't have to worry about it and people will feel they'll get nice warm fuzzy feelings from donating to us because we're thanking them and letting them know that they're helping make a difference in what we do. We do have a couple of questions that came in. One person asked, do you require that the match go through the portal? I have a donor who doesn't want the fees to be taken out of their match. Great question. We do not require matching sponsors to donate through the website. So if you have, if you've been fortunate to secure a matching grant and that specific sponsor does not want to pay online, totally fine. Our tool has a way for you to still count those, their donation into your total. And so as people donate, like let's say you set up a one-to-one match, then you could set the tool up so that whenever somebody donates $10, then their donation actually goes up by 20 on your total count. So you don't have, your sponsor does not have to pay through the site. And so sometimes that helps in terms of securing a matching grant. And then you're still able to utilize that grant on the site and get the benefits from it. Good question. And then the next question, how far out should you send your first email or social media post? Another great question. Josh, you had mentioned that you guys typically will send an email out the week of. That's obviously great practice. Since early giving, for Give Education is already open, you could really send an email or social post whenever you're ready prior to Give Education because the site's accepting the donation. So if donors go to your profile to check it out from the email or social post that you put out there, they will be able to complete an action. It's not like they're gonna be going there and not be able to do anything and then maybe forget to come back later. So if you wanted to send it out as soon as possible, you could definitely do that. But at least sending them something the week of to let them know this is happening, mark your calendars. If you wanna donate ahead of time, if you know you're gonna be out of town that day and not able to donate, please consider donating ahead of time to help us out during this giving day, then that's a great option too. Yeah, I was just gonna hop in and say we, about a month out, we say in our newsletter, kind of save the day. We don't really offer a lot of details, but we kind of just try to get it on people's radars and calendars. We really start hitting the social media posts hard about two weeks out, I would say. So we try to every day have some kind of post about impact. Maybe it's a pick for us, we use a lot of pictures and quotes from students. So we try to highlight the best that we can where some of our teacher classroom grants are going to students and teachers and field trips, stuff like that. So there's a lot of very heavy visuals on our social media in the lead up to the actual day. And then on the day of it's still some of that, but for the most part, we're just trying to inform people of how close we are to hitting some of our goals or certain thresholds for goal amounts. So again, a lot of the things we're doing, we're kind of just trying to build momentum, get the date out there, especially since people can donate now, we include the link to donate in all of our posts and encourage people to even kind of double dip. So maybe donate early and then also try to donate again on the actual day of giving since people can do that. So that's another option as well. Yes, and I mean, that's a great point too. A lot of people are willing to give more than once. So if they give during that early giving period, don't hesitate to send them information again the day of to ask them to donate an additional time, especially if during the giving day, you have something more exciting going on like a match, then don't exclude them from your communications just because they've already given. A lot of donors are willing to give more than one time when it comes to causes they care about. The other thing that I wanna mention really quickly is you do it, like let's say for your give education, giving day campaign, you do receive cash or check donations. You do have the ability to input those, record those on your account and that way they show up in your giving day total. There's no fees charged on the cash or check donations that you record, it's literally just a record. So if you do receive any sort of cash or check donations or let's say you have an older donor base who prefers to give by check, totally fine. Just collect what you can and then you can input it in on your profile. That way those donations, you can see your total raised for the day and any records that you do input on your profile will be included in your donation report. Again, there's no fees charged on the offline or cash or check donations, but that is an option as well. I think that was all the questions that we had. If anyone thinks of something later or you need some help with anything else, our support team is ready, support at mightycost.com. Carrie or Josh, do you guys have anything additional that you wanna end with before we let people go? I just had a question. I think some people might be interested. How do people get the payouts from the day of giving? Such a great question. So basically there's two options on MightyCause. We can do direct deposit. So if you sign up for direct deposit, then you can get your funds twice a month. So give education day is March 24th, which means organizations who utilize direct deposits would get their funds on the following month on the 10th. So April, around April 10th. We also allow check donations too, or check disbursements rather. So if you don't wanna sign up for direct deposit or let's say there's too much red tape with your district or whatever, check donation is possible and we will send the check to the address that you have on file with the IRS. You can find that address within your profile as well under the settings. And then if it needs to be changed at all, you can just contact us and we do ask for additional paperwork to confirm that that's the address that you want it sent to. But yeah, so check or direct deposit. And it's all automatic. So you'll get your funds through whatever method you decide. Okay. So two minutes left, but I just wanna thank everyone again for your interest in Give Education Day. We're really, really excited to be the platform for this inaugural Education Giving Day. Again, if you have any questions or think of anything, please don't hesitate to reach out. And our team is here to help you strategize, help you get set up, whatever you need, let us know and we'll be happy to help. And lastly, again, this webinar was recorded. So I will be posting the recording in the toolkit on the Give Education site, which is give-education.com. I'll be posting that by tomorrow morning at the latest. So if you wanna review anything, have any of your team members watch it, then it'll be up there in the toolkit for you to check out at any time. So thank you again for your attention and your time. And we are just so excited and I hope everyone has a great rest of their day.