 We have all of our panelists here and we will, I'm sure some folks will trickle in from other meetings but we can get started. Thank you all so much for joining today and I know a lot of you on the call. For those of you I don't know I'm Lindsay Gleason and I'm the Assistant Director at the Community Foundation at the New River Valley and I'm the main contact at the Community Foundation for Give Local NRV and we have a lot of great panelists here who are going to answer some some questions from our wonderful nonprofit partners and so I'm and we also have Jess and Laura and Sarah who just make up the the Giving Day team so I can let folks introduce themselves if Sarah and our Community Foundation team want to kick things off. I'm Jessica Wargo on the staff of the Community Foundation. I'm Laura Penn and I am as well. And I'm Sarah. I'm a Project Manager with the Mighty Cause so we are the platform provider for Give Local and they are fabulous partners through the Giving Event and I can just name off people. Intros on Zoom are always special. Ginny if you would like to go next. Yeah thank you. I'm Ginny Ayers Executive Director at Literacy Volunteers of the New River Valley. Thanks. Barb? I'm Barb Clark and I'm the Executive Director at the New River Valley Disability Resource Center. Shannon? Sure. Hi everybody. I'm Shannon Hardwick at the Junebug Center. Caroline? Hi everyone. I'm Caroline Riley. I'm the Development Director at Springhouse Community School down in Floyd County. And Lorraine? I'm Lorraine Blackmore. I'm the Director of Community Engagement at the YMCA at Virginia Tech. Thanks everyone. Thanks for being here. So I'm going to share my screen everyone and for those who are just attending if you want to put your name and affiliation in the chat we would love to know who's on the call and what organization you're with. So can folks see my screen okay? Great. So today's webinar is focused on strategies for a successful Giving Day campaign. And that's me, Lindsay. And we'll share more contact information at the end of the call. But I'm going to kick off by just sharing a little bit about our Giving Day event and then we'll go and chat with each panelist. And how it will work is what we want to talk today about is our different strategies that we've seen folks use successfully in the past. And not just with our Giving Event but with Mighty Cause's expertise at other Giving Events across the nation. So and then we have a panelist from several nonprofits, as you all can see, who are going to share about their experience with different strategies and what's worked for them in the past and what they will have, what advice they have for others. So as many of you probably know, we are very excited because this year is our 10th anniversary of Giving Day. And in the past 10 years, well the past nine years, our community, all of you, so many organizations and donors have come together to raise $2.6 million for our community, which is pretty extraordinary. So this year, we have 68 organizations who've registered to participate so far. And registration closes on May 25th. So you all still have some time to register. But I know, I don't know about you all, but April's already going fast. So we just encourage folks to register as soon as they can. And registration closes a week before the early giving period. Early giving will kick off on June 1st and Wednesday June 28th at 11.59. And we'll kick off at noon that day for our Giving Day, which will go till noon the next day. So the tools and strategies that we're going to cover today, we're going to talk about the peer to peer tool with Carolyn from Springhouse Community School events with Loreen from YMCA and Shannon from the Junebug Center. Social media, Sarah and I will cover that. We're going to talk about matches with Barb from the Disability Resource Center. Email campaigns with Ginny from literacy volunteers. I'll talk about strategy around power hours and golden tickets. Sarah is going to share a bit about a new tool that we have this year called Text to Give. And then at the end, I'll share a bit of information about the grants and prizes we have this year. All right. So I'm going to switch over to chat with Carolyn. Carolyn, if you want to share a little bit about how long community or the community school has been involved with Give Local and what your role is at Springhouse. Sure. We have been involved with Give Local since before it was called Give Local. It used to be called Give Big. I believe since the beginning of the giving days in Springhouse, Springhouse has existed for nine years. We're actually entering our 10th year. So I think from the very beginning, we got connected to CFNRB and the giving days. I'm the development director, as I mentioned earlier. And one way that we've really looked, do you want me to start jumping in to peer to peer? Sure, of course. So if you want to share a little bit about what the peer to peer tool is and how you all have used it in the past, that'd be great. Great. And Sarah, for Mighty Cos, feel free to jump in. If there's technical things, I'm not getting right. But yeah, the peer to peer tool has been our greatest way to grow the network of donors, essentially. I imagine that every organization here has volunteers or current donors who are really big advocates for your organization, for your nonprofit. You have maybe other staff, maybe you don't. But we've found that using this tool, the peer to peer, which essentially gives every individual that's connected to a nonprofit through the Mighty Cos platform can create a fundraiser so easily. Just going to the main page, the main landing page for your organization, there's a fundraise button. And there's a lot of cool options to set up templates for individual fundraisers. There's great tools. I've really enjoyed using Mighty Cos for this. Because you can create a campaign name, a set image, sample text for someone who wants to fundraise for you. So what we've really done is empowered all the staff at our school. We've empowered teens or teens parents to basically say be an advocate for us. We know people get tired of us asking them for money. It's like, will you ask for money for us, for this place that you care about? Your teen goes here or you're an adult participant who's been to some of our retreats or past programs or staff members who are deeply committed to the work here. So it's a good way to share the personal story and how your organization has impact to the people who are advocating for your success. It's really, I can't remember the most number of peer-to-peer pages we've had, but I know in the past it's just fun to go through on the giving day and see all the different springhouse fundraisers that are created through the support. We really empower and encourage people step by step how to do it. And usually we do it, we create a template just to help with a prompt, an invitation to tell their personal story that's connected to our larger campaign message and story. If you have questions, Lindsay, that are coming to mind that you want me to explore further, please ask. Sure. And I should have mentioned if folks have questions that they want to add in the chat while panelists are talking, please feel free or you can save them to the end as well. Carolyn, it's been so exciting to watch you all use the tool so well. I think you touched on this a little bit, but what advice might you give to someone who is thinking about using the tool but is maybe not sure how to make that ask to people? It's a good question. I would start with the people who are close. Who is close to you and your organization? Maybe it's one solid committed volunteer who shows up for everything or maybe it's someone on your social media who actually engages and responds to posts more regularly. And maybe it's setting a goal of I'm going to find five people this year. Start with what's realistic for your nonprofit, your organization, and take the next step of just inviting a conversation about it. Would you be willing to have a fundraising page? I'll help you set it up. And there's the tools on Mighty Cause are really helpful and there's a lot of training videos and support for that. And if people want to reach out to me, I'm happy to help too if there's anything I can do further. But I would just start with who's close and who really cares and start small and watch it grow. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. I think sometimes little successes can help build and kind of depending on what organization you're with or team you're on, maybe some healthy competition. It can be fun. It's just fun to see numbers go up and encourage people in your network to donate and to personalize your own fundraising page. Yeah, exactly. I mean, just one other thing I'll add in there quickly is it might be helpful to say, you know, can you seek 10 people to give $10, right? Like you could think of like help people come up with a structure to experiment in, you know, could you find five people to give 50, you know, and set little micro goals that might help your constituents or the people who are going to be your advocates in creating this page. Just something to play with, right? Like our teams, who are they appealing to? Probably grandparents and family. So, you know, their goal may just be five people in their family, maybe no money amount, but, you know, there's just so many options in it and structure, a little more structure may help and a little less might be better for certain people. So, it's really relational and knowing who you're asking to advocate and fundraise for you. Absolutely. Well, thanks for sharing, Caroline. I know that everyone, we have just short periods of time with each one of you, but I appreciate you sharing that so much. And we can, I think, toss it back over to Sarah if you just want to share a little bit about what it looks like when you're setting up your page. Yep. Okay, so from the platform kind of tool side of things, we have kind of three different options when it comes to peer-to-peer fundraising. I've put here the two that you will probably 99% of the time use. And that's individual fundraisers. And then in some cases, you'll want to use a team fundraiser. So, two kind of variations of the same thing. So, individual fundraisers, they're created by a supporter. So, and I put supporters in parentheses because one person can, you know, use the same page link with a friend if they're fundraising together and they want to share the same link. So, they're using and setting up individual page looks something like that to try and solicit donations from family, any of their kind of circle of supporters. And then in some cases, you might also want to set up a team fundraiser. And that's basically made up of a bunch of different individual fundraiser pages. So, kind of use cases if you have literally a team who wants to work together or you're bored, maybe you have 10 board members who all want to create a page and there's some gamification around it. It's fun because these pages offer a leaderboard. You can kind of see on the image there's a little leaderboard. It shows how people are doing, it offers kind of another level of engagement for people who are working together towards one goal. So, they can set kind of a team goal for all their pages stacked together. If you go to the next one, Lindsay. So, setting it up is super easy. Basically, you'll send the link to Fundraise, your organization page to any supporters. They click Fundraise, it prompts them to create the fundraiser. They'll click Get Started. And then they just click build the fundraiser. And this is kind of what we were hearing about how you can kind of create a template to kind of cut down a couple steps for people, make it really easy for your peer-to-peer supporters to just kind of jump in and see some content already on their page. And then they can adjust from there. Next one. I think there's three here. And then from your end, as an administrator for your organization, this is kind of what your dashboard looks like. You have, if you go to Fundraising Tools, you'll see campaigns in the fundraiser templates. That's pretty much what you'll use here. Campaigns is going to show all of your peer-to-peer fundraising pages so you'll get to see any peer-to-peer pages that were set up for last year's event. You can hide ones that might no longer be active and you don't want them to show up in the search on Give Local NRV. You can see who the owner is. There's lots of just good data here. And then if you also want to cut down some steps for your supporters, make it easy for them. You can click Fundraiser Templates and you can create one template. So that's kind of what it looks like. You can add an image, add a heading, add a goal, everything like that. And Sarah, it looks like we have a question in the chat if I can get the chat to pop open. So can pages be set up in advance and set to go live on June 1st? So when the page is set up, it is live, but you can toggle discoverability. So you can hide the page manually yourself. Okay. So it's just one that one extra step to flip the switch on June 1st. Okay. All right. And we're going to move on to chatting about events, but as questions come up about any of the topics, please feel free to add them in the chat. So Lorraine and Shannon, thanks so much for joining today. And I know you all have kind of formatted events in a few different ways. But if you just want to kick things off by sharing your role at your organization and how long you've been involved with Give Local. You have a preference who goes first. Go for it, Shannon. Okay, great, great. Hi, everybody. I'm Shannon from the June Bucks Center. I'm the executive director here. And Give Local, I don't know. Maybe Laura can help me. This is my second year here. So I don't know how long we've been involved. I think a little while, though. It's been several years from what it has. Oh, okay. Yeah. I think it has been since the beginning. Oh, it has? Okay, good. So we've been here since the beginning. I'm just new to it. But I will say, like, when I first looked at some of this stuff, especially that peer-to-peer, I was so intimidated. But the more we get into it, the coordinator and I, Risa Matts, and the more we play with stuff, it's really user-friendly. And it's not nearly as scary as I think I built it up to be. So anyway, what did you want me to talk about? I'm sorry. Did you have a question after I introduced myself? You're good. And we can kind of take it by each of you if you just want to share what types of events you've had in the past. I think we typically do have an onsite event, or that's what I've been told historically. Last year was the event I was involved in, and what we did was an open house. And I will definitely say the promotion there, we probably could have improved that greatly. It was our first event. I didn't really know when to start promoting it. And there was a lot of events happening at the same time. A lot of open houses just right down the road from us, actually. So I think we're a little bit more prepared this year. But we had an open house, and our whole goal was to, as somebody came into the facility, what could we show them that would explain what the Junebug Center is? So we took every room and we dedicated it to a program. So when they walked into the Lego room, there were Legos everywhere and all these different steam projects we did from ziplines to boats floating. And then we had a description of what the Lego Club was, for example. And that was also in that room. So we kind of did that with every single room and every single program. And for the people that did show up, I won't pretend we had a huge crowd. We did not. But for those that did show up, they were really impressed. So we definitely are going to do something similar. We are going to improve our promotion. Events in the past, I think we've done some outdoor stuff too, like some festivals or some kids programming. But again, I think the key to a lot of these events in online or in person, it's to promotion and how you promote it and getting the word out. And sometimes that individual invitation, you know, me texting or emailing or even calling up somebody, we're more likely to get people showed that way. Absolutely. Thanks, Shannon. Yeah. And you all have been great at doing videos of. Oh yeah, yeah. I mean, we were so intimidated by that too. But I mean, I kind of work with the perfect people for this stuff. We're an art entertainer. I'm like, act, you know what I mean? But we also have musicians, the Jams program. There's nothing like a little kid playing a fiddle and a banjo, you know, to really sell that video. So yeah, I think reaching out to all your different staff and instructors and help with those videos, because clearly nobody wants to hear me, even though you all are listening. I'm sorry. Nobody wants to hear me just talking about the Junebug Center. I'd rather see a kid playing the banjo. I mean, wouldn't you? Absolutely. That's great. Hey, Lorraine, I can pass it over to you if you just want to share your role at the Y and how long you've been involved with Give Local. Okay. Lorraine Blake Moore at the YMCA at Virginia Tech, and I've been there since January 2020, but I believe the Y has been involved in Give Local every year, I think, since it started. So for me, you know, 2020, what a great year to be involved. But actually, that year we didn't have an event as such. We actually worked with a young high school student who just went out and interviewed. And, you know, we just put together a really nice video of what we do and the people we're serving. And, you know, that kind of took place instead of an event. But for the last two years now, we've been doing a couple of, a couple of different things. Last year, particularly, we, a few days before Give Local Day, we did our food truck design reveal where we'd been having a contest to see which design would be picked and combine that with the Chamber of Commerce ribbon cutting. And of course throughout that, you know, we were promoting what was going on Give Local this year for us. We had, we set a goal for enhancing our money in our feeding program. So it was really like, you know, give us money and feed children. It's a no-brainer, isn't it? So, you know, that was, that was our pre-day event. And then on the day for the past two years, we've had happy hours in two different places. So we're partnering with local businesses for that, which makes it a little bit easier. So we hit Christiansbury, we were at Iron Tree Brewery, and then Happy Hour in Blacksburg Wine Lab. And, you know, we had the two events there. My advice, I don't know if you want that yet, but I might as well just, you know, be very clear about your expectations with the partnering businesses because, you know, the last year, you know, we didn't really say, oh, you know, will you give us some money as part of it? We just said, oh, we're going to host this big thing there and anybody who comes in, we'll talk to. This year, we're a little wiser because we discovered that people turning up at the event were buying things from the business, assuming that a percentage was being given to us. So, you know, then we were having to talk to them and say, well, no, that's not the case. So we're going to make it even easier this year by getting those businesses on board while ahead of time. So, you know, that's something I've learned. And another thing I always, you know, you were talking about the marketing part of it. The best tool we've got is to bring along a group of your solid supporters, your board members, your, you know, your big Facebook followers. And if you can get them there, then they'll get other people to come and they're also doing the job for you as well, you know, talking to people about what your cause is, what the money's going to, making it very obvious, you know, that your money is going to buy this or whatever. We have been fortunate to have a matching grand tour for the last two years as well. So, you know, of course, we invite them and we really put signage everywhere to make sure people knew that they, you know, believed in us enough to match up to a certain amount. So I think that helps the great deal. And of course, invite the community foundation members to come along to your events because they give it some extra publicity. You know, they let people know what's going on. I mean, I know you try and do that anyway, but, you know, it's great to have them turning up as well. So I think that's kind of how we're planning on working again this year, but having, you know, partnering with a local business, you're catching people that you might never see and it gives you a chance to talk to them, you know, no pressure, but at least they can see what you're doing while you're there. They'll ask questions and, you know, maybe make donations and start to learn more about your organization. So, you know, as well as bringing your own groupies as it were, we've found that really helpful just to hit people that we wouldn't normally hit. You know, if we ideally, you know, of course you want to have it in your own premises, but sometimes you're only going to get the same people coming. So this way we're finding that we can definitely hit some people that we wouldn't normally see. So that's kind of what we've been doing. Absolutely. Hey, thank you both for sharing about that. I know we're kind of doing lightning round style going from topic to topic, but I appreciate you sharing the idea of welcoming people into your facility and showcasing your work in person so people can see exactly what their donor dollars are doing or doing something more social. And certainly, if you all are planning on an event, send that information to the Community Foundation and we're happy to share about it and try to show up because it's always fun to see you all in action. So thank you to Shannon and Loreen. Our next stop on the Giving Day train is going to be just chatting a little bit about social media strategy. And Sarah, I know that you do a lot of work on Giving Days all over. So we'd love to hear a little bit from you about what you see kind of works best with a strategy on social media. Yeah. So what we see that usually works best on social media is just starting now, starting early if you don't have social media, if you're kind of a sporadic poster, kind of creating a timeline of content that you want to share is really helpful, you know, laying out each of the upcoming weeks. Not everyone has capacity to like post every single day. That's a lot. I mean, just creating captions can be stressful enough when it comes to socials. So, you know, making small goals for yourself, wherever you are going to be posting, whether that's Facebook or Instagram, or kind of a mix of everything. We always encourage going where the bulk of your audience is, making sure like you're putting your energy and efforts into the space that's going to have the most payback. So definitely keeping that in mind, pre-scheduling as much content as you can. There's a bunch of free resources out there. Like, I mean, nowadays people are using what is it, auto-generated social media kind of captions and stuff, which is pretty neat stuff. But you can also set up free Canva accounts for designing, kind of pre-scheduling, Instagram posts or Facebook posts. And then also we always encourage if you have the budget boosting for some posts, when you get closer to the event is really helpful. Even just paying to, you know, $10 to try to boost just to the audience following you is really helpful. Unfortunately, you sometimes do have to pay to get your content in front of people. So if you're going to do it, that's the time to do it. You know, the day of the event, the day before the event when you're really trying to jump up as much activity and excitement as you can. That's pretty much what we see works the best for socials. Yeah, and I would add figuring out ways to tell stories and not have it always just be an ask. I think about my high school and English teacher saying show, don't tell. And I think in this case, you want to probably show and tell. So show people the impact of your work through stories and maybe numbers that you have, the number of clients served, pounds of food on the community, whatever your metrics are, but also ask them if they'll make a gift. And folks who've been around for a bit would give local know that online you can give as low as $5 and really emphasizing the impact of the community aspect of the event of everyone coming together and any of your messaging. We also have a hashtag that we use. It's hashtag give local NRV just put that in the chat. And we'll have some we're working on a 10th anniversary logo and some other materials that you all are welcome to use in social media if that's useful to you. And I would also say, and Sarah feel definitely feel free to disagree, but I think that sometimes people rely on social media expecting to get more gifts than maybe they do. And I think in my experience, I've seen more gifts come out of that direct email outreach and working with your email list. How would you say that kind of goes? Well, I think it's a that's a good point. I mean, I think it varies depending on the nonprofit and how much you have for an audience online. I think for most organizations, a lot of weight is put into email. It's just a very direct form of communication. You don't have to fight with an algorithm to try and show up on, you know, in people's phones and stuff like that. So I would say kind of yes, a mix of both. I would say emails definitely. If you don't have an email list yet, start building that now. You can always use it, you know, in the next couple months or even just next year's event. But yeah, social media, it's it can be hit or miss. I think the best use of it is to just drum up excitement, even if it's a link and bio that directly goes to a donate button. I do think that's one of the best ways to just stay in front of people's faces who are on socials. Because people love video. I mean, you want to see what's happening behind the scenes of these organizations. So even if you, you know, are on Instagram and you're just you only have five minutes of your day, you can always pull out a phone and just maybe take a picture of staff or volunteers just to show that there is things happening. Because everyone just everyone loves behind the scenes types of footage. And I think that's where you're going to get the best kind of interaction with that. Absolutely. And it's fun on give local day to go to your social media page and your feed, seeing everyone posting about it. And it's just it's in leading up to the event to during give early giving to see the excitement building and reminders to people that it's it's here and time to make a gift and encourage others to. So thanks, Sarah. Hey, we're going to switch over and chat with Barb about the about matches. Thanks, Lindsay. To start with, I want to give you all a quick elevator pitch because it's very much part of my five minute presentation. I already introduced myself as the executive director of the New River Valley Disability Resource Center. We are a center for independent living the newest of 17 centers for independent living in the state. We all 17 of us have five core services, which include advocacy, independent living skills, training, peer support, transitions and information and referral. Information and referral is your bread and butter when you're talking about matching grants. You need to know who does what. And it's even more important to know who does what in each company. Acquaint yourself with those people acquaint yourself with the management with the leadership and with the board of directors. You know, you build you build on who does what. So when you have identified an agency or a business that has a mission that is similar to yours or could be similar to yours. It's all about creating that opportunity, which hopefully will give you a matching grant in the future. The first thing you want to think about is what can you do for the agency or business or center that might have someone interested in working with your establishment. So what can you do to benefit them? It's not about seeking to get something from them. It's about mutual respect, relationship building and partnering before you can have a discussion about reciprocating in a financial sense. And those things need to happen first and over a considerable amount of time before you can introduce financial giving or not necessarily even giving at that point, but your financial resources and what your background is and who are your primary donors and who are your board members who are most supportive and why. And then you can introduce those things into a conversation. And that conversation doesn't stop because you know one matching grant from one agency or business can lead to another matching grant the following year from a different agency or business. So back to information and referral it really is about who's doing what for who. Absolutely. And I think sometimes when people hear about a matching grant they think it has to be an enormous figure. But I think that we've seen from our experience at the Community Foundation and from what Sarah has shared from Mighty Cause that something as low as $200 can be incentivizing to donors. So Barb can you share a little bit about how you structured your last year and how you ended up meeting your goal? There was no magic to it Lindsay. We announced well in a perfect world you want to be able to announce who your donor is, whose money are you matching because I think that that speaks equally loudly. In this particular scenario the individual who created the base for our matching grant didn't want to be identified but we made it loud and clear that we had a matching grant available. And I think just mentioning that the fact you've got a matching grant. I mean think about the radio-athons and the tel-athons. Everybody wants to give when they think they're doubling their money. Absolutely. And what would you kind of suggest to somebody who's thinking about approaching a donor for a potential match gift? What advice would you give them? You've got to be in it for the long game. If you're thinking today about matching grant you're going to get it 60 days from now you kind of missed the boat. If you're thinking today about who you might find to do a matching gift one or two years from now now is the time to start cultivating those relationships. So thank you so much Barb. We appreciate you joining in and one thing I'll share from what we've seen at the Community Foundation is you could potentially, I agree the time is short, but you also can potentially approach a board member who always gives over a year and ask them if they might want to be a matching donor because you know that they like to support Giving Day. So you might have some people or just even just a close friend of your organization, one of your fans and ambassadors for your organization. If you know that someone is going to give on Giving Day because they like to support the event that might be a request that you can make because you already have that established relationship. It's not just calling someone out of the blue, although certainly called people out of the blue and you see what happens sometimes, but well hey thanks Barb. I'm going to switch over to Sarah and she's going to share a little bit about what matching grants look like on the Give Local site. Okay I think I have two slides for this one. Okay so for kind of the back end of Mighty Cause and the tools you'll be using, so matches can be set up in a variety of ways. Basically you're going to go to your kind of, what did I write? So you go to your sidebar and you're going to click your fundraising tools and you'll click matches and it comes up with this kind of beautiful display here and you can see live matches that are queued, you can see past matches, matches that have been closed, met, incomplete type of thing, but as far as setting them up, it's really quite easy. You'll just click create and you can see in this kind of little video there's just a bunch of different settings that are available to you. So it can be you know basically your one-to-one match where you meet match the exact same amount as the donor is giving. So if someone gives $10 they're going to get matched $10. We have a bunch of different kind of settings that you can implement. You can add photos, you can set the queue time, you can set your match type, so maybe you don't want to match one-to-one, maybe you want to match half of what they're giving, maybe you want to stretch it a little bit further. You can, there's a bunch of different settings here so I would definitely encourage you to just click it, check out what's available so that you kind of know different options when you're presenting different match ideas to potential grantors. But super easy tool. Once you have met your match the match is closed. You can also download kind of a full report for that match. You can pull any data that you need. Sharing the data from your match is a really good kind of close the loop thing item that you can add to your list with your grantor just so they can see how much of their match you know went to support your organization, how many donors took advantage of the match. That type of thing is really good data that you can follow up on. And then I think I have one more slide for you Lindsay. And then once the match is met your match can be paid through the platform just as a regular online donation. So once the match has closed you don't want an active match on the site at the moment that they you know complete their gift or else they'll be taking from that live match. So just you know thoughtfully timing when they complete their online gift if it's an online gift. And then of course your match sponsor can also write you a check which you can then log as an offline gift. Two kind of really cool ways that might be cause can help kind of advertise your match. So when you do have a live match on your site you're going to see a little sticker like this little sticker on your donate button that says you have one match in grants live so that kind of drums up some excitement on your page. Also donors who are coming to the give local NRB site and are looking around for you know different organizations to support there's a filter they can click has match and then they can see which organizations have a live match at that moment. So that sometimes helps donors who don't know who to give to or want to give to new orgs. So that offers a little more visibility as far as your match as well. And then we always encourage you don't just rely on these tools definitely share your progress on social media promote your match and all of your you know your emails wherever your letting donors know about your campaign let them know once you have a match live. And also be sure to add a countdown if you have you know $200 left of your match or your matches you know only $100 left all of that creates urgency which encourages people to donate right down in there. Absolutely. Thanks Sarah. All right I'm gonna pause sharing and check in with Jenny. Hey Jenny did you have any slides that you wanted to share? I do thank you if I can share my screen. Sure you should be able to hop on there. It looks like it says I can't share until the other participant stops sharing. Oh well that would be me. Hey there you go. All right thank you. So I just had a few slides because I thought it was easier to illustrate what we had done with our email campaign last year. So just for some context this was our theme we used last year which was the be a dream maker theme. So we had our adult learners we had taken pictures of many ahead of time and they we posted stories about what their dreams were and then our donors could be dream makers and so that was the the theme that we used. And so I before I talk about this we did promote give local in our normal emails leading up to it. So we have an email newsletter that comes out every other month and it was in that and we also had sort of given some peaks and asked people to save the date and that kind of thing and some other promotions. So these were the emails that were specifically dedicated to give local. And this is a little confusing because I took screen grabs from our MailChimp but it starts at the bottom left here where we had a series of four emails and so at the beginning of June when it was the early giving had opened we went ahead and sent out one email about that and I'll share a screenshot of these individual emails too. So we sent that out a month out just sort of sharing the campaign and early giving is open and then we did one one week out we also had an event in open house and so we included the invite for that in there and then we did one the day before announcing that we were shooting for the early bird award the next morning and then we sent out an update one in the afternoon during the day of and of course we were doing tons of social media promotion at the same time to go along with that. So this is our email that we sent at the beginning of the month just saying early giving was officially open kind of sharing this theme that we then started to trickle into our social media throughout the month we talked about what give local is and I think that language came right from Community Foundation is so great about sharing some things that we could grab some templates and then we also were lucky to have a match so we announced that matching opportunity in that first email and then this was our one week out email again sharing the date market calendars or one week away reminder about the early giving and our open house invitation which is going to be the next day and then a match reminder so just kind of getting everybody excited and making sure oh this is one week out I was thinking next day but just making sure that they were paying attention and getting excited with us about it and then so the day before we sent another note out and this was the one we thanked all the people who had given already during the month talked about the early bird opportunity that we were going for match reminder and another open house invitation and so these were all through our mail chimp email campaign list but we also had staff and board members were sending personal emails to their networks in general about give local but specifically about the early bird opportunity and so that's another kind of emails to not forget they're more personal and we gave our board members a kind of a copy and paste thing that they could use to send out to their family and friends and then day of we just sent one in the afternoon that was an afternoon update and again thanking everybody who'd given already sharing that at that time we were at 65 percent of our goal which we were happy to achieve at the end of the day and another award opportunity with the unique donors award so just sort of sharing all that excitement keeping everything in the theme sharing more pictures and then I also another type of email outside of the mail chimp campaign was on the day of give local I had just blocked out my calendar for that day and so as gifts came in I sent a personal email to everybody that made a gift throughout the day and that sounds like a lot but well you're lucky if it's a lot but I just had a template in Gmail and so I just copied and pasted I had one for people who were repeat givers which I could check pretty quickly and then a different one for people who were new new donors that day yeah I think that's it um Lindsay anything you can think of that I didn't mention or that I wanted to touch on no I think um from well you can tell me if I have the right impression it looks like you all did a fair amount of advanced work with writing out your templates but it also looks like you were populating in some information as you got in the running for certain grants and kind of updated people so you were in so you had already done that pre-work to help yourself but um so if you just want to share a little bit about that yeah thank you yes I had um the emails that went out through mail chimp those were all created ahead of time and I just left space to be able to um add an update in there and I think I had there was some language that community foundation had shared and there were some other places ahead of time I was fortunate um Lindsay and I both worked at Virginia Tech and went through several of the giving days there and so I had at least an idea of how we could keep pushing that theme through and some of the language to use and so I actually had saved some ideas to be able to create those but it definitely was easier to have it all set up ahead of time and just be ready to click send that day absolutely thanks Jenny yeah thank you I'll stop my share of it and I I know we're closing in on time so I'll just share um quickly and I might ask you something Jenny um but uh about our power hours and golden tickets so um with our change this year to um running the event from noon to noon we're going to shift the timeline a little bit of when we have those power hours and golden tickets and as a refresher or for folks who are new a power hour is a designated hour long period where if you're an organization who gets the most unique donors during that hour then you win extra money and then a golden ticket is also a designated hour different from the power hours and all the donations that are made during that hour are kind of put into a pool and one is randomly selected so if I made a gift to illiteracy volunteers and mine was chosen then they'd automatically get money additional money and so um I know folks um I get excited about those each year and um what we're excited about this year with our 10th anniversary is we're gonna add an extra power hour and extra golden ticket and kind of change up the format a little bit of when they um go throughout the day but I know a lot of people kind of work on an email strategy to win a power hour do you mind just sharing a little bit about how you all have approached that in the past because you all have been our early birds in the past and getting your donors at that uh between five and six to win that prize yeah thank you um so we did just send out as part of the I'll just call our mailchimp strategy but the thing that was going to the whole list we did send out we we chose first of all that that was the one that we wanted to focus on and that we felt like based on our donor pool that we had a good chance of winning and so rather than trying to um you know pick ones throughout the day we had decided ahead of time that's what we wanted to go for and so we had the email lined up the day before but then we also had prepped again our board members and our staff were already with our emails and we knew um the day before we're going to reach out to all our personal contacts um yeah so it was a lot of fun we it was fun to see the gifts come in early and a lot of family and friends participating and um we also shared I mentioned emails so along with the email we were sharing on social media as well just that we were specifically looking to win that award I think those awards are great and I think they're really good motivation and it lets people um we had a match as well and so we were able to say kind of during that hour the match was also active and so if we win this prize you could actually like triple you know triple your gift if you were one of the early givers absolutely hey thanks jenny um and um sarah I'm gonna turn it over to you if you just want to share about text to give quickly and I can finish out with prizes yeah um I have one slide perfect um so text to give is a uh advanced mighty cause feature provided to you all by this uh cf nrv this year um so really fun and easy to use we always try to make everything easy for you all to use but basically you'll just go to your fundraising um when you're on your organization page you'll go to fundraising um and then you'll click text to give uh and it'll prompt you to create a keyword so this is the keyword that your donors are going to be texting to this number to make a donation to your nonprofit so one thing to note about keywords they do have to be unique so if you plug in you know cats uh that one might already be taken because um they uh so all kind of keywords just have to be unique um so but you can also create different keywords for different campaigns uh for the most part what you're going to want to do this year is just have a keyword um for your organization page you can also use it year round for fundraising if you have specific campaigns like if you want donations just to go to a specific fundraising page that you've set up you can also create a keyword that uniquely links to that specific page um but basically once the keyword is set up the donor is going to text that keyword to the number they receive a response in their phone then they just click that link in the text and then they can complete their donation and the amount that they choose so really easy to use um as you start sending your texts uh as you start receiving the text I should say you'll start to see data about um kind of gift count uh donation basically a full donation report for your text that's awesome Sarah and I just appreciate another tool to make giving easier for some people who like to um I mean a lot of us are on our phones a lot a lot of people like to give on a desktop whatever the format is I feel like Money Cats has you covered with giving options it's awesome yeah true I will also say this uh text to give is really good for live events so if you do have like an in-person event um or anything like that it's really like just easy to throw it up on a sign or you know a tv monitor type of thing and just have the information there absolutely all right um so I know we only have a couple minutes left so I and I we will share this zoom recording with you and the PowerPoint as well as the list of grants and prizes so um don't feel like you have to memorize them but I just wanted to share a little bit about what we're um well some of the stuff we're excited about this year so this year in celebration of our um 10th anniversary of Give Local we are going to give away 25,000 in grants and prizes which we're really excited about and so um on this prize list you'll see some of the prizes and grants that we've had in the past but we tried to um see where we could increase amounts wherever we could um so these two at the top most money raised and most unique donors um will now be worth 2000 each and we split all the once registration is closed we look at our list and everyone's budget size size and split everyone into three categories of a small budget medium and large and this is an attempt to try to um give out money to all kinds of different organizations um but we know that larger organizations sometimes more have more resources and so just try to be a little bit equitable with giving um a prize uh or a grant rather to each each size organization for money raised and unique donors we'll also have an early giving prize one for peer to peer and then this year like I mentioned before we're going to be adding an additional power hour and each are now going to be worth $750 and that's for this year with our 10th anniversary um and more to come on when those power hours are going to be um but we will share that with you all and golden tickets those will be 500 again this year and we're adding one additional ticket and then we are going to have two superstars again and so those are nonprofits that best embody the spirit of give local as decided by our team um so another way to uplift other organizations that maybe didn't receive a grant um it's a great way to shine the light on some other superstars and two new um prizes this year one is text to give um so with using that tool that Sarah just shared um if you you're the one who raised the most money you'll receive a prize and then farthest donor um the person who is farthest away geographically from the community foundation office um will can win an award for their organization and then the one um that we might be most excited about is um another um special anniversary opportunity is we are going to be an awarding an episode of Buzz for Good um and if you aren't familiar with this show um we'll definitely encourage you to check it out um but it airs on New Year's uh pardon me uh Blue Ridge PBS and it features a different nonprofit each episode and the whole goal is about generating buzz for that organization and addressing a marketing challenge or publicity challenge that the organization has and um matching them with a pro bono organization that helps them out with that challenge so we're really excited about being able to offer that to an organization um and we'll some more details after this call but to be considered for the opportunity your organization needs to fill a short survey and actively participate and give local um so I know I just ran through those quickly again I'll send out the list um after this meeting um but uh the last thing I just wanted to share quickly um is I know that we went through these topics um pretty quickly and um but just if you have any questions about any of the information we talked about today uh if you wanted to meet one on one I'm always happy to meet with people and strategize and walk through the platform help you build your page whatever it is um so unless there's any questions let me just check um yeah it looks like we have one question and this might be one for Sarah if one were try one were to try to get board members to do a competition as mentioned earlier could each board member do a match as part of the team fundraiser um I I'm maybe hold on is this for like fundraising pages you think I might need some more specification I'm thinking if this is for like a team fundraiser maybe that's what they meant um yes so fundraising pages like especially if your board members are all a part of a team um you can set up a match that specifically will be able to uh just be applied towards those pages that are a part of the team okay and in general with um with matches uh an organization can have more than one match that is that correct mm-hmm yep you can set up different matches throughout the day you can cue them so they go one after another um lots of different kind of setup functions great all right well I know we're a bit over time so um we can wrap up here but again if folks have questions please feel free to reach out to me um and thank you all for joining us today thanks everyone thank you