 Welcome to Crowdfund Your Way to Year-end Success. My name is Becky Wiegand. I'm the Webinar Program Manager here at TechSoup. I've been with the organization for a little more than 6 years. I'm prior to that spent about a decade working with small nonprofits in Washington, D.C. and Oakland, California where I was frequently the accidental techie having to make technology decisions and plan our fundraising and online campaigns in a small nonprofit environment. Also joining us today as our primary speaker is Michael Gale who is a Senior Program Manager at Global Giving. He manages Global Giving's efforts to grow their network of global do-gooders. He helps them join the global giving community. But before becoming a global giver, Michael supported grassroots nonprofits in Latin America as a program officer with the Global Fund for Children. And he's also dipped his toes in the fields of Immigrant Legal Services and Indigenous South American Languages. So we're glad to have him join us today to talk about his experience helping nonprofits, fundraisers, and source donations from supporters around the world through his work with Global Giving. And he'll be sharing tips on how to do that with crowdfunding tactics today. You'll also see assisting with the chat, Ali Bizdikian who is an Interactive Events Producer and Video Producer here at TechSoup. And she'll be on hand to help you with any technical issues. A look at today's agenda, I'll do a quick introduction of TechSoup in case you're not familiar with who we are. We'll talk about why giving Tuesday and year-end fundraising are so important, why this part of the year really matters so much to nonprofits, and why it's becoming more important to have a real campaign presence online during this time of the year. Then we'll poll you to get an idea of your fundraising background, particularly around crowdfunding. Then we'll talk a little bit about Global Giving and their success in helping organizations reach new donors and new support. We'll learn some crowdfundamentals, as Michael likes to call them, and then we'll talk a little bit about crowdfunding tools and resources. We'll have time at the end for Q&A, but feel free to ask those questions as they come in. So if there's opportunities for us to raise them sooner, we will do our best to do so. So TechSoup is a 501c3 nonprofit. We're working toward the day when every nonprofit, library, public benefit organization has the technology, knowledge, and resources to operate at their full potential. We do this in a variety of ways. We've been doing it since 1987. We've served more than 200,000 charitable organizations in more than 60 countries around the world with things like donation programs with companies like Microsoft and Adobe to get you access to the latest and greatest software tools, hardware, and services to meet your technology needs. But we also do it by hosting events like this where we work to connect you, our end users, with experts in the sector who can impart their wisdom and their expertise to help you improve your programming and help you grow and become more capable of meeting your own mission. So we're happy to help doing that through webinars, articles, blog posts, community events, all kinds of things. So jumping into the topic of the day, Giving Tuesday is coming up on December 2nd, and some of you may not be familiar with what that is. It's fairly new only having been around now three years, and it is the day we already have Black Friday and now Cyber Monday that are the big shopping days, and Giving Tuesday is really intended to be there as a way to remind people that not only should they be rushing out to get the latest deals, or maybe they shouldn't, but not only will they be rushing out to get the latest deals for holidays, but they can also make a real difference in giving back, giving back to their communities, giving back to their sector, giving back to causes that matter to them, and showing their support by giving on a specific day of the year when organizations are developing campaigns and gaining attention really rapidly. And so we have a couple of slides really quickly that were made available to us from our donor partner, Donor Perfect. They did a study along with Giving Tuesday looking at how much impact Giving Tuesday has had. We know that the great majority of funds that organizations receive are donated in the last quarter of the calendar year. So from now until December 31 is the biggest fundraising season of the year for most organizations, not all but most. And Giving Tuesday has really helped accelerate that. And so TechSoup is partnering with Giving Tuesday this year as well, and helping to make it more known to nonprofits and help you capitalize on the fact that there is a groundswell of attention given to this one day where you can put yourself out there and hope to get more than you would on a regular day. So for example here in 2013, nonprofits who participated in Giving Tuesday outgrew their non-participating peers in all-important December fundraising, in the all-important December fundraising season by nearly two to one in online and offline donations. So here are a couple of slides that just show some statistics about how much giving has increased as a result of participating in Giving Tuesday. And so it's December 2nd coming up. And we did a webinar a couple of months ago at this point about Giving Tuesday and year-end fundraising strategy. And they all agreed that even if you don't have a strategy in place yet, there's time to do it through the month of November and to just get emails out to your supporters to remind them that there is this day that you want them to come back and do something. It could be giving. It could be posting a picture of themselves with your organization on it and saying why they support your cause. It could be your staff sending thank yous to people who have already donated, encouraging other people to do the same so that they get a thank you too. So lots of great ideas are around and percolating around Giving Tuesday this year. And you can see that the growth in gifts increasing from 285% in 2012, that we've already increased that much year over year for 2013. But since 2011 when it first started, there's been 517% growth in giving on that day as a result of Giving Tuesday. And you can also see here that the size of gifts has increased dramatically. So from 2012 to 2013 there was a 9% increase just in the size of the gift. So $164 was the average gift in 2013. And they're predicting that it's going to be over $200 for the average gift this year on December 2nd. So with that I want to encourage you to think about how to build if you don't have a campaign yet for the fall and end of year giving that you think about little things that you maybe can do. If it's not a full-fledged campaign maybe you don't have the capacity to do it all right now. But there are things you can do this year. And Michael is going to talk to us about some ways to do that in just a moment. Before we do that though, we really want to have an idea before I hand off to him what your level of experience is right now with crowdfunding. So has your org run successful campaigns or a campaign in the past? Go ahead and click on the radio button on your screen that makes the most sense to your organization. Has your organization tried crowdfunding but maybe not had much success? Has your org not tried and you're not really planning to yet? It's not really on the radar yet. Maybe you haven't tried yet and you're planning to. And maybe what's crowdfunding? Maybe that's what you need to know today. And so we'll talk about all of these things and how to move forward with successful campaigns because that's where we want you to be doing it for no reason doesn't make sense. But if you can do it and get success out of it, that's where we want you to be. So go ahead and take a minute. I'm going to just give a few more seconds so everybody has a chance to click on their screen and then we'll go ahead and hand off to our presenter to share with us 11 crowd fundamentals that are going to help you take individual steps. Maybe not all of them at once but maybe just a couple that you can adopt today that can help you succeed in this last quarter of this year with your fundraising goals. I'm going to go ahead and show the results. So more than half of you have not tried, far more than half have not tried crowdfunding campaigns and 55, 56% plan to which is great and about 16% don't know what crowdfunding really is. So we'll start off with that first. So I want to go ahead and introduce our primary presenter today, Michael Gale who is going to talk to us about those crowd fundamentals and he's going to introduce a little bit about global giving first and then we'll get to that definition of what is crowdfunding for those of you who aren't quite sure. Thank you so much for joining us today Michael. Welcome to the program. Hi, thank you Becky. It is a pleasure to be here with you all today. Thanks for tuning in. Happy Halloween Eve to everyone. I hope you have fun plans for tomorrow. I thought about putting in some little ghosts and goblins throughout my presentation but I decided I want to actually focus on how crowdfunding should not be scary so that's probably not the best strategy to go with. I think crowdfunding has amazing potential to transform the social sector in the United States and abroad even more than it already has. I'm really excited to talk about it today. I need a little bit of a pick-me-up because I'm a Kansas City Royals fan and we had a rough game last night but congratulations to everyone out in the Bay Area on the big win. Go Giant! Sorry, we're in San Francisco here at TechSoup so we've got to celebrate a little bit. I appreciate that. It was a great series. So yeah, I'm going to first talk a little bit about global giving just to give you a context where we come from and why we talk about crowdfunding and then I'll move into 11 what we think are easy to implement steps to get your crowdfunding off on the right steps for Giving Tuesday. Your year in fundraising campaigns or anything in your plans for 2015. So in a nutshell, global giving is an online marketplace that tries to connect donors with great ideas from NGOs around the world. Our mission is to catalyze a global market for ideas, information, and money that democratizes aid and philanthropy. We do all of that primarily through a web platform. So this is just a screenshot of our website from a few days ago. We currently are doing a major fundraising effort around raising money for small nonprofits working in Ebola affected regions of West Africa. I encourage you to visit our site after this presentation, www.globalgiving.org and just kind of poke around to get a sense of a little bit more about us. Basically global giving is a crowdfunding platform plus. So we do run crowdfunding campaigns for nonprofits throughout the year but we have a little bit of a plus to us. We also manage grant programs for foundations and corporations. We run matching campaigns, both day long campaigns, month long campaigns with funds that we get together or funds from our corporate or foundation partners. We work with over 60 corporations to power cause marketing campaigns, employee giving opportunities, and other corporate deals. We also offer a collection of fundraising and donor management tools that nonprofits can use to stay connected with their donors and their community. We provide ongoing training and support both to our partners but also to the greater nonprofit community like we are doing today. And I mentioned we want to be a marketplace for not just money but also for information and ideas. So we're starting to incorporate into our work this idea of organizational effectiveness and trying to match resources with organizations that are showing themselves to be learning organizations. We're excited about that work. I don't think I have too much time to go into it today but be happy to talk with anyone offline if you want to learn more about how we're moving forward in the effectiveness space. Just a few quick statistics from last year. We worked with around 2,500 organizations. These are the organizations that were active on our platform in receiving donations. About half of those organizations are based here in the U.S. They're registered 501C3 nonprofits. The other 49% are nonprofit organizations based overseas. We work in 148 countries. Last year we processed over $22 million in donations to these organizations and those donations came from over 70,000 unique donors. About half of that volume came through individual donors, individual people going onto our website, choosing a project that they're interested in and giving $25, $100. The other half came through our partnership with corporations and foundations where we move a little bit greater volume through the platform. That's enough about us. You all are here to learn about crowdfunding. I love seeing the results of that poll that over half of you have not tried crowdfunding but planned to. I hope that the crowdfundamentals concept is one that's easy for you to implement in your organization for your first crowdfunding campaign. And like Becky said, we're going to talk about 11 tips. I think even if you just pick a couple of them to focus on for your first campaign, you'll see some wonderful results. Everything I'm going to be talking about here today comes from a free resource we just put together called Crowdfundamentals. It's available on our website. You can find it from our homepage and we'll also be sending around a link to that later. The guide will go into greater detail about all of these tips and also link you to some of the additional tools and resources that I'll mention. So let's jump into it. Our first tip is to plan a smart campaign. Online fundraising versus crowdfunding, really the difference is that a typical crowdfunding campaign involves getting lots of small donations from a large number of people. It's a distinct fundraising effort with a clear beginning and a clear end. After testing what makes crowdfunding work, we've been doing this for more than a decade, we found that goals and deadlines work to motivate rather than limit potential donors and that the most successful fundraisers know that donors will respond to specific donation requests related to a clear objective with a deadline. So just posting a project and putting it out there and hoping for the best does not count as a strategy. Just like anything you do in your organization is set forth a goal, what you hope to achieve from a campaign and how you'll know when you get to that mark. So an example that we use a lot is you want to raise $5,000 in one month from 40 donors to fund this particular project that you're working on. Maybe it's to fund your after-school programming for three elementary schools in the month of January. I'd like you to take a moment to think about what your specific smart goal would be for a crowdfunding campaign on Giving Tuesday or for Year-End Giving. What are you raising money for? How are you going to measure it? Is it attainable goal? If it's your first campaign, you probably don't want to set out to raise a million dollars. Maybe you want to raise $5,000 or $10,000 or $500. It should be a relevant goal. It should be relevant to the work your organization does. And the key thing is it should be time-bound. This is really what makes crowdfunding powerful is giving donors a deadline. So take a moment and think about a smart goal that you can say in one sentence for your year-end fundraising and just share it in the text box if you'd like to. We'll just wait a few seconds to see if we get a couple examples we can share out. It often takes a minute for people to formulate something. So Lori types in that she wants to raise $2,750 on Giving Tuesday to reduce the – I'm not sure what that list is for our PJ Library program. So that's good. That's very specific. Yeah, it's very measurable. And it sounds attainable. Yep, Amy comments that they'd like $1,000 match funds for a down payment for a new homeowner. That's fun. So Amy, I just add in there. What's your time frame for that? Is that a goal for Giving Tuesday? Or is that a goal they're going to raise in December? Joanne comments, 100 goats for 100 kids in our communities in Uganda, Tanzania, and Kenya. Gretchen comments, raise $10,000 to buy a wheelchair for our disabled riders to mount their horses. So that sounds like a very specialized chair. But again, timely, I think that question needs to be asked, when do you want to do that? And by what date? Is that for the end of the year? So I think those could even be honed even more. Vanessa comments, $3,750 to increase our STEM learning program. So that's for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Karen comments, raise $2,000 to buy headsets for our 24-7 crisis information and referral hotline. So yeah, I think these are some great, very specific, very specific, and smart types of goals. You're reading them too, Michael, so feel free to comment. Yes, I love that they are specific. Setting out to raise $5,000 for my organization. That's not specific enough for a crowdfunding campaign, but these specific projects or programs that you want to raise money for, great ideas, measurable in the amount of money you want to raise, attainable. It should be a realistic goal for your organization. And I'll just add in some of you are adding in your time-bound nature. That's a really key part. So are you raising this on one day, in a week, in a month, by the end of the year? Keep these goals in mind. And I'll ask you to refer back to them as we talk about the different steps, the different tips. Think about how you can apply them to your specific goal. All right, get your story straight. We think that good crowdfunding, when you get down to it, is really all about telling a good story. When donors visit your project page or when you're telling them about your project, they're going to be asking a lot of questions in their head. They might not know that they are, but they're going to be asking a lot of questions. They're going to be asking, why should they care about this issue or problem? What's your organization doing to solve the problem? What difference will my support make? And why should I give now rather than next week or next year? Why are you asking me now? You can't list out all the answers to all these questions, but we think the best way to address them all cohesively is to tell a story. And ideally, the story that focuses on a single individual. I have up here six examples of the types of stories you can tell. And our crowdfunding guide gets into a lot more specifics about these types of stories. But just to briefly review them, you could tell a story about the issue. What is the problem your project is trying to solve? Or what are the effects of that problem on one person's life? You could describe that person's life without your project. You could talk about the place. How is a problem or solution unique to an individual from a particular region of the world or a particular community? And who are the people who might care about this person in that place? You can talk about the people. How is the problem you're addressing or the solution you're using unique to an individual or a community in particular cultural context? And how can you motivate others who might share an affinity for that part of the world or that cultural context? Maybe you have a unique idea or a unique methodology for addressing an old problem. And you could talk about how that solution has impacted one person. You can also talk about your own motivation. What's your backstory that's driving you to fundraise for this cause? How can you use your own story to connect with people on your network and invite them to join you? The last tip on here, the hero's journey, we think that your personal story as the fundraiser is important the way to connect to your network. But we recommend you don't make yourself the hero of your organization's story. Think more about how you can empower the beneficiaries or the participants in your programming or of your organization and talk about how through your programming or your organization they've become the hero. The key thread through all of these tips is that try and take what your organization does and get it down to an individual level. When you're appealing to individual donors they want to read about individual stories. And that is really a key component to a successful crowdfunding campaign. Once you've identified what story you're going to tell it's then time to, as we say, put it in writing. Sometimes this is called creating your project page. Whichever platform you're using to crowdfund or if you're using it through your own website you've got to put the ask out there. On Global Giving we find that donors spend an average of 4.2 seconds reviewing each campaign page. That means they're spending less than 5 seconds on a page before they decide to either donate or move on into a different project to fund. There are a few things we think you can do to make the most of those 5 seconds. The best tip, use pictures. Our project pages feature pictures very prevalently because we know that the human brain processes pictures 60,000 times faster than it processes words. So if you only have 5 seconds a picture is a great way to tell a lot of your story very quickly. Get to the point as quick as possible. Your first sentence or your first 2 or 3 sentences should tell a donor everything they need to know about your project. It sounds crazy but some donors will leave after reading those first couple sentences so make them count. Make your project page clear, use bullets, use diagrams or flow charts. Make it easy for a donor to figure out what it is you're doing when we know people are just going to be skimming for the most part. Don't forget to ask for money. Some people spend so much time thinking about a wonderful story. They get to the end and they've forgotten to ask for a donation. It seems self-explanatory but after you make your page, make sure you go back and look that I actually asked for a donation here. We think video can be a powerful tool when you're writing out your story including video and I'm going to talk more about that in a later tip. And then we also recommend including donation options. Individual donors who might only be giving $10, $25, $100 want to know what kinds of tangible impacts their money will have for your organization. We've actually found through analyzing our data that 4 options is the right number when you're presenting donors with options. So maybe you have a $25 option, a $50 option, a $100 option, a $500 option. Fewer than that and you might miss out an opportunity to upsell a donor. More than that, you might confuse them or make them decide it's too hard to pick which level to give to and they'll move on to a new project. Rely on your network. We also sometimes call this around global giving, rely on your tribe. Unfortunately, there isn't really a magical crowd out there that's just waiting to fund your project. We all wish that there was, we all wish that all of our crowd funding projects could be the ice bucket challenge or could be the guy on Kickstarter raising money to make potato salad. Unfortunately, it just doesn't happen to 99.99999% of projects out there. But there is a way to reach the crowd if you work for it and that is through your existing network. In order to reach your crowd funding goal, the majority of your funding will need to come from your friends, your family, your colleagues and other people in your personal connection and your personal network in addition to past donors to your organization. The key to making crowd funding work is getting the word out beyond that network by making it easy for your donors to become your advocates. Advocates are donors who are so convinced by your cause that they start fundraising on your behalf. Your job is to make your story so compelling that they want to do that and to provide them the tools and the advice and the connections and the communication to make it easy for them to do that. You want people that don't just donate to your cause but that encourage others to donate as well. You can imagine if you can get 20 donors and they can each get two more donors how quickly you're talking about triple or quadruple digits for your number of donors for your campaigns. This is a related tip. It's really important to start strong. We know that projects on Global Giving that receive their first donation during the first three days of a campaign are more likely to achieve their goal than those who don't regardless of how long the campaign is. And really this makes sense if you think about it. If someone sends you to a crowd funding campaign page for an organization that you have heard of or that you're interested in would you rather be the person who gives them their first $10 for their project or would you rather be the one who gives them the last $10 that helps them complete their goal and pushes them over the edge to be able to complete their project? Obviously you want to see if you're going to put your money forward that other people already have that you're not the only one invested in this campaign. So get your best donors, your most likely donors to donate early. Ideally in the first day of your campaign this is really key for getting the crowd to donate. It also works well because people are more likely to donate if they're asked by someone else to donate. So get your donors to give early and then ask others to donate. And really the first donor to your project should be you. Before you go out and ask someone to donate you don't want anyone to get to your project page and see that no one has donated. So give your project $10 and then start sending out your project to your supporters. Okay, if you've done some online fundraising or you're just waiting out into it for the first time, if you only take one tip away from this presentation I want you to take away this one. Email like a pro. We know that on Global Giving email is most likely to convert someone into a donor. And really it's not that hard to write a powerful fundraising email. They usually just have four simple components. First a high quality photo ideally of an individual or just a couple people close up. This is what really photos of individuals connect with individual donors. So you want a photo, you want a short story and I mean short. I'm talking about one paragraph maybe two about your project or a beneficiary of your project. And you can go back to the get your story straight tips for knowing how to write that story. You need to have a link or ideally a button that encourages people to make a donation and you need a clear call to action. So that's where you get back to your smart goal. Donate now to help us reach our goal of X amount of money so that we can carry out X project. Then once you have your email ready to go think about how you can test it. This is where you can start to collect some excellent data that can feed into your future campaigns. So if you're using an email client like maybe MailChimp or SendGrid feel free to look those up if you haven't heard of them. I imagine TechSoup also has some good resources for this. Try sending out different subject lines to different segments of your donors or maybe try two different photos and see which one gets more donations. You can save all that data and use it to feed your future campaigns. All right is pop quiz time. What percent of emails do you think are read on mobile devices? Let's see what you think. Here's another quiz. So go ahead and put in what you think the answer is here in this section. Just give it a couple seconds. This is so rapidly changing too with how many people are reading email on their devices these days because so many people have more devices on them not just phones but tablets and other portable devices. So it is a rapidly changing sphere. We have lots of people chiming in. Let's give it a few more seconds so everybody can weigh in. We have around 80 some people in the group right now. We want to give everyone a chance to vote and we can go ahead and show the results. Great. Yeah, you guys are right on track. Smart ones. So according to our research 50% of all emails are read on a mobile device. I think the nationwide study is about 51%. With just global giving data we know that about 48% of the emails we send are read on mobile devices. So this is just to highlight why it's important that emails be simple, be straightforward, be short, have nice photos that will scale well to mobile phones. People aren't going to read a 7-paragraph email on their phone. They're just not and they're not going to get to the bottom where you ask them to donate. You want to get right to the point. So we spend a lot of time giving nonprofits advice about how to write compelling emails, how to test your emails, how to track your data. But then some of them tell us these are all great. We're excited to start trying this but we only have a 10-person mailing list or a 20-person mailing list. So how can we get more potential donors onto our mailing list? So I put a couple ideas here, things like putting the email sign up on a prime place on your website, promoting your email sign up on social media, making sure you get your volunteers onto your mailing list and encouraging them to invite others to join, sending out interesting content through your mailing list, not just solicitations for donations but maybe interesting blogs that you think your supporters might be interested in, interesting videos, announcements about events. If you think you have any other ideas on interesting ways to collect more subscribers for your email list, I'd invite you to share those in the chat box and maybe we can share a couple of interesting ideas. I'll go ahead and read the next tip and then maybe we can come back and share some of these strategies for getting more subscribers to your email list. Okay, so a lot of people when they think about crowdfunding, they think about social media. Social media is very important. I want to give you a few tips and then one key caution. And if you read it to the bottom of the slide, you'll think you'll know what my caution is going to be. So first of all, spend some time getting to know your audience in social media. What are they talking about? What are they tweeting about? What are they posting about? That'll help you guide your content more to appeal to them. Secondly, recognize that on social media it's not all about you. We have some organizations, we work with email us after a couple of weeks of a campaign and say, look, every day of the campaign I've posted 10 times for people to come donate to my project on Facebook and no one has. And we say, well maybe that's not the best strategy. Maybe people don't want to be shouted at to donate all the time. So make sure you're sharing interesting content that your audience cares about, not just always asking for donations. Plan your post ahead of time. If you're doing a crowdfunding campaign, there's lots to do. You need to be thanking donors. You need to be sending out emails, following up people making sure they've donated, tracking your results. Spend some time ahead of a campaign and use something like a tweet deck or a Hootsuite, one of these software systems that lets you plan your post in advance and let them be posted automatically. It'll really save you time and energy during the campaign. And then again, use photos. I'm going to sound like a little bit of a broken record around photos, but a lot of the social networking sites now, particularly Facebook and Twitter, give priority to posts that have photos in them when they're deciding what shows up on your friend's news feed, for example. So make sure you have a good selection of photos to use for your social media. But the most important tip here is don't rely on social alone. Asking for money on social media will rarely result in a donation. I know, I know, it's kind of a bummer. Social media is useful for engaging your donors, giving them a space to feel like they're a part of your cause. It's good for alerting them that you're going to ask them soon for a donation. So post about it and then send them an email. It's also good for reminding them to donate. So after you've sent out your email solicitation, post about it on social media and make sure, put it back into their heads. You might see a few donations come through from social media, but you really need to supplement it with email, phone calls, in person asks to really drive the point home to your donors. Michael, just to jump back quickly to the email since you brought that up, that we know that that's still in large part the bread and butter of how organizations reach their subscribers and reach their donors and get support from them. We did have some people who suggested, Sandy commented that you can have sign up lists at events. Annie commented you can hold a raffle at an event, collect email addresses on raffle forms. Rusty commented that you can have contests or drawings that include signing up for the mailing list. Those are all great ideas to expand the list. I would add collaborating with other organizations that you might work in partnership with to cross promote one another to your respective lists in the hopes of getting some other subscribers signed up who are interested in the cause in general. So there's lots of opportunities to partner with organizations, to partner with community groups in your community that you might work in. I'm sure there's a lot of other ones too, but those are just a few that were chatted into us. Those are great and get creative. It's true you have to have people to ask for money in order to ask for money. So a big part of your fundraising strategy is you should just be developing that list. And these are times to offer things of value to a community that don't necessarily include an ask right in the moment. You can come back to them for the ask later, but first you've got to get them in the door, get them interested in what you have to talk about. All right, we've got four tips left. I want to be a little conscious of time so I'm going to move forward to tip number 8, show your gratitude. It probably goes without saying, but it's important to thank your donors. The key here in crowdfunding is that the thank you has to come quickly. Crowdfunding campaigns are time bound and when people do things online, they are expecting that kind of rapid response to their action. So we recommend thanking each donor no matter how much they've given within 48 hours. Don't get intimidated by this. There are things you can do to make it easier. Before your campaign starts maybe you draft a template thank you note that you can use as a basis for thanking your donors just with a quick email. If you're on Global Giving we can help you create templates that you can send right through our platform so right when you see you get a donation you can just go ahead and send that thank you note. But be sure to personalize it for each individual donor. And then for the donors who are maybe new donors, you might want to have a particular way of cultivating them. It's great to give donors shout-outs on social media if they haven't given anonymously. People like that social recognition. And then get creative with it. Invite them in to visit your office or visit a field program that you're doing. Send them a video thank you note. Now with smartphones those are really easy. Just have a quick note maybe from your team or from some of your beneficiaries thanking the donors and send those in the email or post those on Facebook. Get creative with it but do it quickly. Another reason to thank your donors quickly is you want to keep your donors engaged so again they become your advocates. Donors who are thanked and encouraged to share and invite other people to join to your cause are much more likely to do so than those who you don't thank until after the campaign is over. I mentioned earlier video and we could do a whole webinar on how to create a good fundraising video. I imagine TechSoup has done whole webinars on how to do good fundraising video but I just want to focus on a few quick tips. But before I do that one key is that you don't need to have a video. If creating a fundraising video is just too intimidating don't let that hold you back. We've actually found that on Global Giving having a video on your project page does not necessarily increase donations. It does help when you share on social media because people love sharing videos so you might get some more shares of your Facebook posts or your Twitter posts. But don't let not having a video prevent you from doing crowdfunding. So just a few quick tips, prepare, take some time to write a script, share it with a friend to get feedback and make sure your video tells a compelling story. Having the script in advance will save you time when you're filming and editing. Add music. Having music in the video will help you connect with your view emotionally. It's a good tone, a good mood for your story. And you can use a lot of resources online. Just search and Google for royalty-free music. You'll find a lot of music you can use without paying royalties. And this will prevent your video from getting taken down by sites like YouTube if you use a copyrighted song, like a pop song for your video. Make sure your video includes a link to your fundraising page. You want to connect your video to your crowdfunding effort. So make sure you include that call to action in that link. The video should be under 3 minutes. A crowdfunding campaign is all about moving quickly. This is not the time to include a 30-minute documentary on the history of your organization. This is the time to have a short, exciting, to-the-point video that talks about your organization and what your campaign is raising money for. The focus should be to act now. And I would say if you can get it down to 1 or 2 minutes, even better. Make sure you have the people in the video you have eye contact. A sincere message can turn a viewer into a donor and then a donor into an advocate for your cause. And be creative gathering resources. You don't anymore need a professional video camera and a professional film crew to have a good video. Most smartphones will shoot high-quality video at a tripod and maybe a clip-on microphone which you can borrow or get cheaply. And some free editing software you can find online or whatever your computer already came with. And you can do a decent video. Find someone who is in your organization or is a volunteer that enjoys this kind of thing and engaged them to have them help you. Tip 10, analyze your results. So whether you succeeded in your campaign and raised the money your organization needed or if you fell short of your goals there's a lot to learn in the days following your crowdfunding campaign. First, check in with your team. See how the campaign went for people that you worked with. Get their feedback. Track your data. Global Giving has some built-in tools that lets you analyze where your donors came from, how many people visited your page, how many of those visitors actually converted and made a donation. But also look at external tools. Use Google Analytics to see where people are losing interest on your website or on your project pages. You can use Facebook Insights to see which of your posts have had the most likes or click-throughs of the most engagement. And I mentioned earlier a couple mail sending software clients like MailChimp or SendGrid where you can track email open rates, email click-through rates and see which of your communication strategies or techniques have been the most effective. You also should share your results of your campaign with your donors. Even if your campaign wasn't successful, I think it's still worth it to get back to your donors and tell them what you achieved, what you're proud of, where you fell short, what you might do different next time. And ask for their feedback. This is a key chance to collect results and brainstorm ways to improve and grow for your next campaign. This is really a big benefit of crowdfunding and we think this feedback loop is an important opportunity and a valuable part of the process. The work you do after one campaign is really the best thing to prepare you for the next campaign. Global giving one of our values is listen, act, learn, repeat. And this is exactly what this is all about. So before a campaign you're listening to your donors and your community to industry best practice like this webinar. You're going to act. You're going to try your campaign. You're going to experiment. Afterwards you're going to analyze your results, look at what worked and what failed, what you should change, what you should do differently next time. And then you'll be ready to repeat and do the whole process over again. Go back and listen again and try another crowdfunding campaign. The great thing about crowdfunding is you can track this data really easily and you can also iterate quickly. So you can do a crowdfunding campaign every month or every quarter and keep getting better and better. And lastly there are literally hundreds and hundreds of crowdfunding platforms from everything for raising money, to fund maternity care for women in third world countries, to raising money for a private business venture, to raising money for nonprofits. You want to make sure you analyze all of the things a platform offers and find out what best fits the needs of your organizations. So think about the tools and features of the platform. Most will provide basic tools for processing donations, sharing your project on social media, posting photos and videos. But think about what else you need. Do you want the ability to post to have fundraiser pages so you can get your advocates to fundraise on your behalf around specific events or running a marathon or having a book drive? Do you want integrated donor management tools? Do you want to be able to send reports and thank your donors within the platform? Or do you have kind of a communications team and a donor management software that will do that for you outside of your fundraising platform? You want to be sure to look at fee structure. Some platforms charge set up fees, ongoing subscription fees and or fees per transaction. Some have annual fees. You want to make sure you compare what fees are being charged and when and how by the different platforms and what makes the most sense based on what that platform is offering to your organization. You want to think about if the platform does ongoing fundraising or does one-time campaigns. This is one thing that makes global giving a little bit different from some of the other crowdfunding platforms is that we're kind of a year-round fundraising platform for our partners through both ongoing crowdfunding campaigns and some other corporate partnerships I mentioned. Some campaigns you have your time-bound campaign and then it's over and then you start again next time. So think about what you're looking for and choose your platform accordingly. You should think about the tax advantages especially as nonprofits. Not all platforms can give donors tax benefits for contributing for your project. At Global Giving we obviously give tax advantages to U.S. donors who give to projects on our site. Even if those organizations are registered internationally we're able to give tax benefits to U.S. donors. And through our sister organization Global Giving UK we can give tax advantages through gift aid to donors in the United Kingdom. But there are other crowdfunding sites registered in other countries so that would give tax benefits in those particular geographies. So think about where your donors are and where it's important to have the tax advantages. And then finally think about reputation, name recognition, and any additional vetting done by the platform. A platform with a recognized name and a brand can make your donors feel more secure in donating. It's that extra level of confidence when someone's making a transaction online if it's a platform that seems trustworthy. Global Giving and some other crowdfunding platforms will do their own vetting of organizations. So donors can read about that and know that there's this extra level of scrutiny around the projects and the donations when they're contributing. Those are the 11 tips. I hope a few of them will be helpful to you into your giving campaigns. Again the whole guide with all these 11 tips and more is available for free on our website. Here's the quick link. We'll also be sharing that at the end. If you're interested in learning more about Global Giving, the way to join our community is through a Global Open Challenge which we run four times a year. This is our first onboarding campaign so it's basically a month-long trial campaign to try out crowdfunding on Global Giving. There's matching days where we will match certain percentages of donations made to your campaign. We offer bonus prizes for organizations that are successful in having the top three most amounts raised or most unique donors. But we think the best benefit of trying the Open Challenge with Global Giving is if you're successful in raising $5,000 from 40 donors, you earn a permanent spot on Global Giving and you get to be part of that ongoing fundraising and learning community that we offer. So we'll be sharing all these links again as I said later but if you just type into your browser goto.gg-nonprofits there's a lot more information on how to join. And lastly, I want to get back to this idea of listen, I learn, repeat and encourage you all to test out that right now. So you've just listened to a webinar where we've been talking about 11 tips for successful crowdfunding campaigns. Think about just one way you will test out something you learned today. Maybe it's trying an email client like MailChimp or SendGrid. Maybe it's setting a smart goal for your next campaign. Think about one way you're going to act to test out what you learned and then think about how you will know whether that idea works for you, what data will you collect, and what results will you look for and how will you demonstrate what you learned from your experiment. So just think through how running a test based on what you learned today can help you learn as an individual and as an organization. Here are just some other links if you want to start your application. Again, it's the nonprofit section of our website, link to the free crowdfunding guide I've been talking about. We also have at the end of that guide a PDF checklist you can download which just is an easy reference as you're preparing for your year-end campaign to make sure you're considering all the different things you should be thinking about as you get ready to kick off what is the most important fundraising month or month and a half for nonprofits in the United States. And I've also included my email, mgale.globalgiving.org. Again, my name is Michael Gale. Happy to answer any questions about global giving or crowdfunding in general or if you want copies of any of the resources I've talked about today, feel free to drop me an email. And I think with that I will turn it back over to you, Becky. Thank you so much for that, Michael. Really appreciate it. And I think there are some really excellent tips that people can employ, some on the low-hanging fruit end and some that are probably a bit more involved. But I think depending on where you are there are some tips for anybody to walk away with. I wanted to just go ahead and show a few resources quickly before we open up to questions. We have a few questions in the queue right now. But again I wanted to highlight because some people have asked about tools and how do you pick a tool? How do you know what's a good tool? And we have some resources on TechSoup's site that not only highlight some tools that are available for either discount or donation to organizations, so everything from online fundraising and crowdfunding platforms to apparel that you can have custom branded and fulfilled for your cause, online storefronts, mobile donation and text messaging platforms, payment processing services. So if you need a little credit card swiper that you can attach to your phone, you can accept donations at events. And when you are out in the world doing things that those are available to you. I'm not going to spend time talking too much about them but I just wanted to highlight that there are these types of tools available for donation or discount depending on the different offer that are available to organizations. And so these are ones that are available directly through TechSoup. This is just for the little mobile payment processing just as an example. And then there are other ones that are out there in the world that aren't available through TechSoup but we try to talk about those too because we know that you are going to look for whatever meets your needs the best and we want to help you find those things. So I have some additional resources that I'm going to share just quickly. If you are interested in learning more about Giving Tuesday, they have a lot of resources on the Giving Tuesday website. Totally free to anybody. Tips on campaigns, specific images you can use and banners and logos and things that you can just co-opt for your own organization, graphics and video clips and things like that that you don't have to create that you can just plop on your site and encourage your users to participate in Giving Tuesday. So they make it really easy for anybody to just do this. Giving Tuesday was created by 92nd Street YMCA in New York City and has grown into a big collaborative of lots and lots of nonprofit organizations who are contributing to it. So it is all very much based in the social sector. There is no big financial gain for anybody behind it or anything like that other than the organizations that participate and that have come together to sort of market as their day in early December this year to really encourage their users to participate and give on that day. I mentioned the ROI, the return on your investment, and the tips and statistics I shared earlier. There is a full report as well as six tips for online fundraising available from our donor partner, Donor Perfect. Some resources on different ways to plan and how to plan, and different examples of crowdfunding campaigns that have been successful. And then for people who are looking for crowdfunding platforms in which are best, it so depends on the specifics of your organization. But if you want to have some background on comparing the freebie tools that are out there like Kickstarter, Indiegogo, GoFundMe, those are in this article that compare those different tools that are out there and what they might be used for. But I would recommend really thinking carefully the tip that Michael shared around reputation and branding. I know people that set up GoFundMe because they want to get a new pair of shoes for themselves, not for somebody else. So I mean think about how you want to use it. And Kickstarter, for example, you can have a Kickstarter and you can have lots of people pledge money but unless you meet your goal, you don't get any of it. So there are some risks involved with some of them. And others, he mentioned the fees. So this is a great place to start if you are trying to decide on platforms as well. So with that I'm going to go ahead and ask a couple of questions before we wrap up here. So Lori asked, will crowdfunding your tribe take away from your unrestricted annual campaigns? Will that cannibalize your tribe if you are primarily reaching out to them for your crowdfunding? That is an excellent question and one we hear a lot. There's a couple things I'll say about that. One is that we find that nonprofits are way more concerned with donor fatigue than donors are. In general, if someone is a fan of your organization they don't mind being asked several times a year to donate. They might not do it but they are not going to mind being asked. My personal example is I support a nonprofit in my community and I write them, I know at the beginning of the year I write them a check for $100. They reached out to me to donate during your crowdfunding campaign. I had already given my donation but I went ahead and gave $10 because I wanted to help their campaign. But then I also shared it on Facebook and I encouraged my friend to donate, friends to donate, and that brought in six other donations for the organization who then might turn into long-term donors. So crowdfunding is great because it's a way to engage your regular donors in a different way and also it makes it much easier for them to bring in new donors. Crowdfunding is a great way to bring in new donors and supporters to your organization. Great. I have a similar question from two people here. Angela and Elizabeth both asked similar questions. They are wondering if crowdfunding would be a good fit for them when they have startup costs or things that are really not very sexy or tear inducing as one of them wrote. They are really practical things that they need to have funded. Would crowdfunding be a good fit for that? So yes and no. No, if you can't think of a good story to tell, but yes, if you can think about how your not sexy needs still have a good story behind them. So if you put a crowdfunding site up that says we need to buy a new computer because we need to do our end of the year financials, please fund us $3,000. I wouldn't donate to that. I don't think many people would. But if you can talk about how your startup costs or your administrative costs support the important work of your organization and how your organization is changing lives or changing a life in particular, I think you can still tell a compelling story. So if your organization is doing important work, which I'm sure that it is, there should be some story you can tell. I would say go back to those six types of stories and see if you can think about one of those that fits the type of work your organization does and if you can construct a little narrative around it. Absolutely would agree with that. We had a webinar just a few weeks ago with a grant writing expert among experts. She said one of the biggest mistakes that organizations make is that they put technology under a line item on their budget. They put payroll on a separate line item on their budget. They put all of their administrative costs in separate line items. But they don't adequately reflect that all of those things are supporting all of their program work and they should be building those into their budget for their programs. So you should be talking about how the computer or the servers that you need or the website that you need is really supporting all of the program work and that that's part of that program. So I think you're right that it is so much about the story that you tell with it. We had a question from David just asking, is there a local representative of global giving in any areas and in particular he's interested in the Seattle Tacoma area? Do you guys have local folks or are you all based in D.C.? We're all based in D.C. and then we have our sister organization in London. However, we do make frequent trips to the Seattle area for workshops. A lot of our corporate partners are out in the Pacific Northwest. We work with Nike and Microsoft and some other corporations. So that gets us out there pretty frequently. If you'd like more information about when we might be out there next, feel free to drop me an email and I can send you information about when we might be making a trip. We're also always happy to set up a Skype chat or a phone call with anyone who's interested in learning more about global giving and how to get involved. Well, thank you so much for that. And with that, I'm going to go ahead and wrap it up because we're at the top of the hour. And I'd like to invite everybody to join us for any of our upcoming webinars that might be of interest to you. So next week we're doing a webinar that's specifically targeting why's around the country. So if you are part of a Y or affiliated with one, feel free to join us to learn about tech donations that can help your organization. On the 19th we'll be spending time talking about tech tools for early literacy and how to help children with their early reading through the use of technologies. And then on November 20th we'll be talking with Microsoft about their product link that can help you connect and collaborate both inside your organization and across it. So please join us for any of those and watch for more. Thank you so much, Michael. Really appreciate the time you've spent with us today. Thank you to Ali for helping on the back end. Thank you to our audience for participating and for all of the great interactive comments and questions that you shared today. And lastly, thank you to our webinar sponsor ReadyTalk. They spent their time providing this platform for us so that we can present these webinars to you on a regular basis. We're using the ReadyTalk 500 which is available in TechSoup's catalog for donation at techsoup.org. When you close out, please take a moment to complete the post event survey so that we can continue to improve our webinar programming. We like to embody that think, act, repeat, or think, listen, I'm mixing it up. But you know what I mean. So thank you so much for helping us to improve that as well. Have a terrific day everyone. Thanks. Bye-bye.