 Hello everyone, and thank you so much for joining us for the webinar today. My name is Jessica Unger, and I am the Emergency Programs Coordinator, the Foundation of the American Institute for Conservation. We're so pleased to be able to offer today's program as a part of a webinar series that addresses the needs of Alliance for Response Communities and other cooperative disaster networks nationwide. These programs are made possible through the generous support of the National Endowment for the Humanities. I'm so glad that I see so many familiar names in the participant list and that many of you were able to join us for past sessions in this six-part webinar series. And of course, today is the final program of that series, and we're really looking forward to what promises to be a great presentation. Before we dive into the formal presentation today, a couple of brief technical notes. On your screen you'll see several boxes, including one labeled chat on the left side of your screen, one labeled web links, and one labeled files on the bottom. Use the chat box to say hello, ask questions, and share information. If you post a question, you'll receive a response either from me or my colleague Tiffany Emig. Any questions will be noted, collected, and then I will ask them of our presenter. To use the web links box, just click on a link that you want to see and highlight it in blue, then click on the Browse To button to go to that site. Likewise, in the files box, click on the file you want to download, highlight it in blue, and then hit the Download File button. If you've missed a past program in this series, don't fret. We have been recording all of the programs and hosting them on AIC's YouTube channel, and you can access that via the web links box below. We currently have all of the other sessions up in the YouTube channel, and we'll aim to have today's up before the end of the week. So please do use that as a reference if you'd like to go back and see any programs that you might have missed or revisit some of the past topics. For those who aren't familiar with Alliance for Response Initiative, I just wanted to give a bit of context about the history and goals of the program. Alliance for Response began almost 15 years ago with a key mission in mind to help communities more effectively protect their cultural and historic resources. The immediate objectives are two. One, build relationships. Initiating an ongoing dialogue between cultural institutions and emergency managers and first responders. Two, to educate cultural heritage and emergency management professionals. Working to raise awareness of the need to protect cultural and historic resources within communities. Encouraging disaster planning and mitigation at archives, historic sites, libraries, and museums. And three, to develop strong ongoing networks to facilitate effective local response. The topics that we've covered in this series have tried to address all three of these goals, some of them hitting on multiple goals at once. Today's program I think in particular really gets at this final goal of developing these strong ongoing networks that will be able to effectively respond to local events. As many of you who are involved with Alliance for Response are aware, the need for funding to support those project goals is key to that mission. So we hope that today's session will help inspire and strengthen your networks moving forward. Many of you might be familiar with Alliance for Response as an initiative of heritage preservation, but in May of 2015 heritage preservation unfortunately closed its doors. However fortunately at that time many of its programs transferred to the foundation of the American Institute for Conservation. Alliance for Response and other emergency initiatives at heritage preservation joined forces with the emergency initiatives currently underway at FAIC including the National Heritage Responders from really known as AIC CERT. A team of trained collections of care professionals who can provide on-the-ground support for impacted cultural heritage institutions. You can find out more information about the National Alliance for Response initiative and the existing networks by visiting our website at heritageemergency.org. Again you can access that link by clicking on the box below. Before I turn things over we just wanted to get a quick sense of who is on the webinar today. To that end I have several poll questions and if you've been on programs before you are familiar with these. First up, how many of you are currently involved with an AFR network? Great, so it looks like about two-thirds are around a third aren't the shifting a little bit. Perhaps more are than not. But that's great. Thank you all. Okay, for those who are involved with AFR, do you know of anyone from a network outside of your own region? So how much connection is happening between current AFR networks? Great, similar responses to last or the past program. So a small majority of you are in contact with each other. We're hoping to continue those connections. Great, thank you. And then finally, if you're joining us from within the US, we're curious to know what region you're from. So note that these are slightly different regions than some of the earlier sessions. So find your states to indicate which region you're from. Great, as always we're seeing a lot of representation from the Mid-Atlantic and Southeast. Great, thank you all. Again, we really appreciate that. It's helpful for all of us to know who's on the session, but especially for our presenters to know who they're talking to. So really appreciate that. So today we're incredibly fortunate to be joined by our wonderful presenter, Ellen Gora. For the last five years, Ellen has served as the manager of disaster fundraising for the American Red Cross. In this role, Ellen is responsible for leading fundraising in response to large domestic international disasters across the organization, as well as the application of fundraising policies, regulations, and disaster statistics. During her tenure, she has led fundraising campaigns for Hurricane Matthew, the Louisiana Floods, Superstorm Sandy, the Nepal earthquake, and dozens of other disasters, helping the organization raise more than 500 million in response. Ellen has nearly 15 years of fundraising experience. Prior to the Red Cross, she was a senior consultant with CCES fundraising. Here she led major fundraising efforts for the Maryland Hospital Association and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. Ellen also directed field operations for two U.S. congressional campaigns and was a world-teach volunteer in Hunan Province, China. When not being on call for disasters, Ellen enjoys spending time with her family and friends, outdoor sports, cooking gourmet dinners, going to concerts, and watching her favorite sports teams, UNC Tar Heels and San Francisco 49ers. Ellen received an MPA from the Maxwell School at Syracuse University and a BA in Journalism from UNC Chapel Hill. She, her husband, Chris, and one-and-a-half-year-old daughter reside in Silver Spring, Maryland. With that, I will turn things over to Ellen, and thank you so much for your time today, Ellen. Thank you, Jessica. That was a very kind introduction, and hello to everyone out there. I hope everyone can hear me well enough, although we did some volume testing before I started. But I'm here to just talk about what I do, and I'm hoping that that will translate and help you all out in the future. So here's just our agenda today. We've got between 30 minutes and 45 minutes of a presentation. I think it will depend on how many questions you might want to ask as we go along or even at the end of the presentation. I'm going to spend a little time at first just giving you a background of the American Red Cross. I would imagine many of you are familiar with the organization, but I'm going to go into just a little bit more detail, particularly around our fundraising and how we're set up, because I think that translates into a lot of what we eventually do and how we do it. Then I'm going to talk about disaster fundraising and what disaster fundraising means. That is when it's not just that our fundraising is a disaster, but when large disasters happen either here in the U.S. or in other parts of the world, how we respond as an organization and work to fulfill our mission by raising dollars to help those in need by those disasters. Then I'm going to go into a little bit more detail about how we do this by segment. I think this might be the longest part of the presentation. Again, going into detail on our major gifts and individual giving, on how we do it in the corporate space, on how we do it in what we call our core channels, which are donors who give less than $2,500, and we usually assign them into email and our direct mail programs, etc. Then last but not least, we'll touch on stewardship, because that is very important. I'm going to dive right in, and I hope you enjoy the presentation, and again, I hope it's helpful. Our mission, we just updated our mission statement about three years ago, but here it is, plain and simple. We help people, and we try to prevent and alleviate what could potentially be human suffering. The American Red Cross is part of the global Red Cross movement. Most every country around the world has their own national Red Cross or Red Crescent Society, and we are one of many of those organizations, and one of the strongest. Our services are straightforward. I'm sure you're well aware of what we do in times of disaster, and you're pretty familiar with our blood services. That makes up a large chunk of our organization, and again, the wonderful volunteers who give blood, we provide around 40% of this country's blood supply, as well as platelets, plasma, and other blood products. Then you're also pretty familiar with what we call preparedness, help, and safety services, but that would be CPR, life-guarding, and those courses that really do help save lives. Then we have our international services component of the American Red Cross, and it's a smaller portion of what we do, even though of course the world is very large. But we focus in two areas now. The biggest is in disaster preparedness, so we partner with a number of countries around the world. Then we also have a small help component, and that is our measles initiative. We're part of a UNICEF and UN Foundation project that aims to eliminate measles around the world, and so we support that initiative. And then the last is our service to the armed forces, and our goal here is to support military families through emergency communication efforts, through our Holiday Mail for Heroes program, and through other projects that directly support our military and our military families. So those are a rundown of the five services that this American Red Cross provides. And then this is just a snapshot of how the American Red Cross impacts others. 180 times a day our workers, 90% of whom are volunteers, are helping a family affected by a disaster. You all are familiar with how we help after large disasters, but every day we're helping with home fires across the country, and we respond to nearly 64,000 disasters each year, providing support locally, and then we really ramp up when a large disaster happens. In fact, it's been quite busy over the weekend, and now we continue to help after those deadly tornadoes out in Georgia, Mississippi, and other parts of the Southeast. And then again another snapshot of some other figures. Okay, so now jumping into fundraising. We have, as an organization, we have, let's see, around 400 fundraisers across the country, and we have an annual fundraising goal of approximately $500 million. And this is how we see some of the revenue come in by those lines of service I showed you. So most of it comes in fairly, fairly general. And then the orange shows that we raise in nine disaster times a good amount through disaster relief. And then we usually raise additional. That word episodic is when we have a larger disaster and it's restricted to those larger disaster events. And then you'll see the same through international how that comes in, and a portion also goes towards the specific disaster at hand. So that's really how it comes, and you can see how raising around disasters is pretty important. That orange slice of the pie increases based on the number of disasters that we have each year. And in fact, FY15 for us, so that was nearly a year and a half ago, was actually a fairly slow disaster year. And then it really ramped up in our fiscal year, 16, and we're halfway through 17 now, and it's been pretty nuts, I can tell you that. And then this also, this chart just will show you the variance in some of those disasters and how much we are not necessarily dependent, but on those large disasters, but how much our revenue can fluctuate based on large events. So you've got, of course, 9-11, then you have that Southeast Asian tsunami more than 10 years ago, Hurricane Katrina, Haiti, Japan, Hurricane Sandy. And then our FY16 and 17 will likely be a little higher too because of recent events like the Louisiana floods. Okay, any questions so far? And if you have them, I believe Jessica, you're welcome to send them to the chat box if you want. Yes, I will echo Ellen on that. Please do drop them in the chat box, nothing yet though. So we are, we used to be not one organization. Now we are 1501C3. Up until a few years ago, we had several hundred different chapters with varied programs across the country. And several hundred different chapters meant that we had several, you know, dozens of different ways of fundraising. And now we have our headquarters in Washington, D.C. and we have our field chapters across the country. We have 60 regions and we have 60 regions and they are part of seven different divisions. And this map doesn't physically show, but this also includes Puerto Rico, Hawaii, our American Samoa and islands in the Pacific, as well as, of course, Alaska. So seven different divisions and the fundraising is done in the field. At National Headquarters, we serve as support to the field. So we're providing them the tools, the guidance and really the overall strategy and they are there to implement it. And then each of those divisions has their own kind of fundraising vice president who's overseeing some of the metrics. And it's, in a way, it's almost like a sales mentality of fundraising, but of course that relationship management is so, so important to us. And then this is our small unit and what I help manage. We do have a national chief development officer and I report directly to him and he also oversees those fundraising presidents that are in the field, as well as all the fundraisers I mentioned who are helping us. And then my small, we call ourselves a small and mighty team, but I have three employees who are fantastic. One leads international and one and really two oversee domestic. And that's the bulk of our work is really standing up when big disasters happen and making sure our field has what they need. And these are the three areas that my team is responsible for. And we break it up similar to how our disaster program and our international program define their jobs. They help, we help fundraisers prepare, respond and recover from big disasters. And so by prepare, we make sure that each of those 60 regions out in the country have what's called a disaster fundraising action plan. And I'll go into more detail of what that is later. We provide training specifically for them to know how to ramp up and rev up when a big disaster happens. And then just general guidance throughout the year on how to solicit for donations for either international or domestic disasters in those programs. And then the response part keeps us very busy and we're in charge of the guidance and the strategy. So when a big disaster happens, one thing I like to point out is we work with our senior leadership to decide. Are we going to have a specific designation or event code for a disaster? Or are we not? Because our goal really is to raise more general dollars in response to a disaster, which are absolutely going to help with that disaster. But they can also help with our other program work around disasters that happen in those 64,000 other disasters I mentioned. We also help to make sure that when a disaster happens, the impacted areas and the impacted fundraisers have the resources that they need. Because the first two calls that happen when a disaster happens to a local Red Cross and we'll use this weekend's tornadoes as an example. The first one being in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, the first people calling are saying, okay, I need help. How do I get help? Or they're calling to say, how can I give help? How can I make my donation? And we've got to be ready to respond. And then by recovery, we work and coordinate on stewarding and providing the reporting that's needed, both from a financial and programmatic side. And we work very closely with our disaster teams and our international teams on that, as well as finance. And then conducting after-action reviews with our fundraisers. How can we get better? This just happened. What can we do better next time in documenting that so that we can, again, continue to improve and continue to provide the best possible service to our donors, to our partners, to other fundraising prospects when that disaster happens? Because it all happens fast and furious. So I like to show this to give a better example of what it really means to be in crazy fundraising mode. These are a couple of different tactics that all come about when a big event or emergency happens. And our goal is to make sure that these are organized and kind of set up in a certain timeline so that you don't get caught in the fog and the haze of having too many things come at you at once and you stall. Because when you do stall, that means that you're not able to do your main job, which is to be talking with donors and prioritizing funding opportunities so that we can raise what's needed for the disaster at hand. And so those fundraising action plans I talked about have these items and others listed and how to go about updating them or tracking them when that disaster happens. And this is just a slide to kind of reflect on the objective of our organization and others when a disaster happens that are in this humanitarian space. One, our objective is first to help cover the cost of the disaster response and kind of our portion of what that is. Each of our disasters, when they happen in the U.S., has a number associated with it and it really depends on the amount of homes impacted and the amount of service that is needed by the Red Cross for those impacted individuals and families. Internationally it's a bit of a different story because like I mentioned we have dozens of other very strong and less strong national Red Cross societies around the world. And so the response and the need from a country like Japan is going to be very different from a Nepal or from even the Philippines. And so it really depends on where the disaster happens and what's needed and we have to wait on that before we can raise money and send it to that organization. The American Red Cross as a whole does not and has not asked for help from other national Red Cross societies since I believe Katrina and even then we didn't necessarily ask for direct support because we are able as an organization and as a country to supply what's needed. But the second that deadly earthquake in Nepal happened, the National Society said we're going to need help. We can't do this alone. There's just too many casualties, too many needs. And so we were able to set up fundraising fairly quickly. For that big Japanese tsunami that happened a number of years ago or back in 2011, and this was before I was with the organization, Japan as a strong country society said you know what, we're good. We have what we need to respond. Even though this is a tragic and terrible event, we have what's needed. And we ended up working out an agreement with Japan because we had so much donor interest that we were able to raise money for that event to support it, but it just took a little longer to make that decision and get it to them. And you know, it's been a very good relationship since then and we've been able to spend what's needed. All right, so back to this slide. Cover the cost. And then like I mentioned earlier, we want to raise additional unrestricted funds as we can to support the work that we do every day while our mission and our, in the moment and what we do is in the public side. And then as we can, following a big event, we, like many organizations, we want to expand our donor base, turn those new donors as we can into annual sustaining donors. I'm not sure if this is showing up. It's not showing up in mind, but this was, Jessica, can you see the visual in this? No, I can't. Let me see if I can get the PowerPoint uploaded in another form. But I don't see it, sorry. Yeah, and it's really okay if this is the only one that's not going to show up. But this was just a visual of how my small team intersects with the whole organization when the disaster strikes to coordinate fundraising. Because we've got a big organization and we've got a lot going on. And so this showed my team as the hub, and then we have field fundraisers, we have marketing, we have advertising, we have our programmatic teams, either disaster services or international services, and we have finance. And we have really most all parts of the organization because when it happens, we have a number of activities to do, and I'll go into more detail on that. So what's part of those disaster fundraising action plans? We work with our fundraisers, and this is something, I think, that would be beneficial to you all. Again, how do you prepare for the next kind of large response-like event with your organization? Where you've got a short window of fundraising opportunity and the attention maybe on your organization, how can you do it successfully? And so we've got, we ask our fundraisers to build their disaster list of prospects and donors ahead of a disaster, have those ready to go. Then we look at our portfolio management system that we use as Salesforce, and so they load those lists into it. Before, when we had Razor's Edge, they did a similar thing. We talk about who's going to do what because there are a lot of actual different jobs or short-term jobs that come up when a disaster happens. Jessica, I see that you pulled the picture up, at least it's showing up on my slide. Yes, do you want me to bring that over for others to see? Yeah, sure. We'll only keep it up for, you know, five seconds. This is what I was referring to. Oh, I miss communications. I knew I was missing someone. Making sure we have the right messaging and the right fundraising messaging across the organization. And consumer fundraising is our, I mentioned the core donor, again, online email, paid search, our crowd rise or third-party pages that we have, text to donate, et cetera. Thanks, Jessica. I think that's all we need. So back to preparing before a disaster, who's doing what? Like I said, the staffing. There's some extra roles that happen with us. Telephones, third-party fundraisers, in-kind donations can take up a lot of time. People want to give stuff. So we ask that each of our regions assign fundraisers extra jobs, as they can, or work with volunteers and other staff to assign those jobs to them or roles so that they can do that when they are ready to do that when a disaster happens. And then before a disaster, how are you going to process those extra donations? How are you going to actually report on what's coming in? What's your acknowledgement system? We're all on one system at the Red Cross, but still there are many questions and little things that can bear and boggy down as it relates to accepting donations and processing them correctly to figure out ahead of a disaster. Okay, I'm going to go on to the next slide. And just a more on this fundraising action plan. It's about 10 pages. Regions are able to update it as they like, but it has additional things like timetables. What are you going to do at our day one? What's your priority for day two? So they don't just jump right into in-kind donations and worry about getting lunch for the volunteers, which is important, but maybe they should prioritize on reaching out to the donor, another one of their donors in their portfolio and asking or requesting a $10,000 donation because we know this disaster is going to cost the Red Cross a million dollars. So trying to refocus and prioritize is a big thing. And then it has the different contracts that we use, and it even has contingency plans. What happens, for example, we had a tornado that impacted one of our chapter buildings and damaged it, and so people couldn't physically come into that building. Do you have your list of donors ready and even printed or on a jump drive and contact information that you have that may not be at your office computer if you have a desktop? Things like that. So the disaster strikes, and I hope this is showing a large wildfire. It almost looks like a volcano. Sometimes we've got a little time before disasters, but when we know that hurricane is coming, we don't know exactly where, and they tend to move around a little bit. But at least we have a few days' notice. But for the majority of our disasters, like tornadoes, like an earthquake especially, even wildfires, the disaster just happens really quickly, and you don't have time to prepare, or you should have. And it usually doesn't happen at a convenient time like a Monday afternoon or Tuesday afternoon. It's going to happen late on a Friday night on a holiday weekend. So the disaster happens. We're asking the impacted regions to activate their fundraising action plan, and then we're going to try to get information as quickly as we can. What is the size and scope of the current disaster? How much do we think it's going to cost? How long is the response going to go on? Sometimes we can quickly get this information, or we just know it's going to be big, or it's getting a lot of media attention. Or sometimes the disaster is a slow building flood, and it's in an area of the country that maybe could be more rural. It's not on anything but the local news, but it's going to impact hundreds, if not thousands of homes. We're going to have a very different fundraising strategy than if it's all over the news, and we're getting calls unannounced, left and right. And then we're going to build our fundraising campaign, kind of like a mini capital campaign, to raise X amount of dollars within a certain week, two week, even four week time frame. And then this is a little bit more about what my team does to support and how this directly will help this field, because we want them out talking to donors and working with their board members and working with their companies and not worrying about some of the back end stuff, not worrying about sitting and writing a case statement. We will do that for them. So we're sending them out regular information in an email, at least daily. We're working on that fundraising strategy, like I said, so that they know what to see. And across the organization we're saying the same thing to our donors, so we're able to instill public trust and honor the intent of donors' wishes. We are holding an all fundraiser call. And so we'll set up a call for our fundraisers across the country and just go over with our chief development officer the top priorities and the strategy and the materials, which we're also helping to do. As an additional bonus, we help set up national donor calls. We usually do two. One is for our, we have a subset of fantastic donors in the corporate space called our annual disaster giving program donors. And those are who annually give to the Red Cross for disaster, $500,000 or a million dollars. They're fantastic. We'll also set up a separate conference call for the board members. And the purpose of these calls is just to give them a snapshot and highlights of how the Red Cross is responding and how much we appreciate their donations. And if additional ones are needed, we will work with our, we'll provide the background information and then our relationship managers or fundraisers will go back to them after that call and make an additional request for funding or other sources. And then we also provide donor trips to see our operation in action. And we do that for a number of, we probably just do one or two because they're a very heavy list. The last time we did one was for the Louisiana floods and we had our national chair of our board come as well as a number of top donors. And we really worked with them for about two thirds of the day and showed them all the cool stuff we were doing and how we're helping others. It was a great experience. And then lots of updates because there's always something new with the disaster. So back to that kind of during the disaster response, what are our fundraisers doing? They are making sure that whatever they're asking for, it's very clear to the donor. I'll give you an example of this. So we have, with the current disasters, we have a tornado operation in southern Georgia, a tornado operation in Mississippi, and another one in Alabama. We have a statewide fund open for Georgia and a statewide fund open for Mississippi. And let's say a donor comes and says, I want my money to stay in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, because that was one of the places that was impacted by tornadoes. And we would kindly say, well, thank you. We don't have a specific Hattiesburg fund set up, but we do have a Mississippi tornadoes fund. And this is helping with our Hattiesburg response. But you know, the tornado also impacted other areas outside the physical city of Hattiesburg. Our Red Cross volunteers and workers are crossing county lines and really making sure that everyone has the services they need. Are you okay with giving instead to Mississippi tornadoes? And usually the donor says, yeah, I understand. I totally get it. So that's what I mean by the clear fundraising language and honoring donor intent. And then we've got progress again. My team works and tracks what's manually entered into Salesforce to have a whole national picture that we will present even to our CEO, Gail McGovern. And we're able to track that progress daily through reports, and we can again shift our strategy as needed. A good example again, recent. We ended up, we weren't planning on holding an all fundraiser call for this disaster because over the weekend, because you know, we were getting a good response. Our fundraisers in the impacted areas were doing a lot of work and holding telephones and raising what was needed. But we looked at our first report and the number of asks that were in the pipeline were not as high as they should have been. And so my boss said, let's hold one of these calls. And we did, and the ask doubled just in one day, the total amount that was being asked for. So things like that is how we help and how we monitor what's going on across the organization. Not sure if you have that ability to do that at that quick of a timeframe, but you may. Excuse me, I had to get a sip of water. And then we are, like I mentioned during the disaster response, we are trying to manage those relationships. We are engaging our donors through either donor trips or observations locally. So we might not set up a national donor tour, but once it is safe to do so, and it's kind of the right timing, I can imagine our team in Georgia is going to work with a couple key donors and board members to make sure that they can go see our operation in action. And then working on a campaign end date, which my boss would say we never really have an end date for a campaign, but we do kind of slow down and we may have to change strategy if we know that we have raised what we needed. We will go out and say we have what we need and work much more and shift back to what we call blue sky or annual fundraising. All right, so I'm going to go into the specific segments now, which was going to be kind of the bulk of this presentation. So I'm going to talk first about corporations and foundations. The Red Cross is very different from the majority of other organizations, and it's because we receive more than, of our private funding, we receive, I believe, more than 50% from corporations and around 30% from individuals, which is normally flipped even more. I believe it's 80, 20, 80% individuals, 20% other sources for a majority of organizations. So our corporate fundraising is strong. One of the reasons for that is that until about 5, 10 years ago, the majority of our individual funding was had or was received through the United Way. And so we didn't necessarily have to interact as much with individuals to receive their individual donations, because it would kind of automatically come each year from United Way. And given the changes in the United Way, we've had to kind of shift around. So we have a lot more attention being focused on our individual areas, and we continue to kind of increase in that space and segment each year, but we continue to have a strong, really great partnership. So when disasters happen, we, with our companies, look to a couple different areas. Not only just the straight-out donation, but we look at employee giving and workplace giving, engagement around that disaster, customer donation programs and cause marketing, and even in-kind donations. And we have a number of programs set up and ready to go, so we can snap our fingers and begin raising money through the companies in these areas. One is the online workplace giving campaign. We have what we call a microsite, and so we can go to the company and the company can put either on their intranet or even on their public servers a way to give to general disaster relief or the specific disaster. And in times of disaster, I believe for Matthew, we may have activated over 100 of these in different parts of the country. For a smaller disaster like the one we have now, we'll probably activate between 10 and 20, and by we it's the fundraisers in the field. So it's been a great success for us. In-kind donations are a bit more cumbersome and complex. We typically try to, like most organizations, and especially in the disaster space, cash is absolutely the first thing needed in dollars in the door, because with that we can purchase what's needed for those that are impacted. We know exactly what we need. We have a lot already in our warehouse ready to go, whereas when in-kind donations come in, especially the very kind small boxes that can show up on the door of sweaters and in clothing or products that may be expired or partially opened, this is something that takes up a lot of extra time. We can't always give out. And we also want to make sure that each of our clients receives equal service from us. And so when you have a bunch of small donations, we can't give it out to everyone. And we want to be able to spread the wealth and make sure that they're given what they need and also what they're asking for. So in general, we stay away from in-kind offers unless water is one that we take, and we ask for large pallets of water, and it's even better when the company or organization that wants to donate can come and drop it off themselves. We look at snacks and bug spray, and we have a great partnership with Clorox. They give quite a bit of bleach to help our clients clean things up. So once in-kind donations start, it's kind of hard to stop or put on the pause button, but we do have good messaging as we try, and we work with our fundraisers to make sure that they're accepting the right in-kind donations that are requested by our disaster teams or not. And one note on international events. We actually do not accept international in-kind donations because of, one, the amount it costs for us to ship. We have three warehouses located across the world that we pull supplies and culturally relevant supplies from, but very, very limited cases do we accept in-kind donations just because of the shipping, the time it takes to get from point A to B. And the biggest thing, too, is that the country asking for support is the one helping to coordinate those goods. And they're the ones that will eventually have to use or not use them. So we try to stay away from them then. All right. Here's a list of at least some of our ADGP members, our annual disaster giving program members, who are fantastic and we work with regularly in times of disaster. They often always will set up their own workplace giving program or work with us in other ways to kind of help promote the importance of giving to the American Red Cross when a big event happens. On the individual side, we work very hard to engage our boards when the disaster happens because they are often the face of the local community, as well as the ones often helping us make ask to their peers and their support networks. We have some what we would call affinity groups. One is called the Tiffany Circle. And so each many of our chapters have a group of women who give it a certain level each year. And the Tiffany Circle women in our regions really stand up when the disaster happens to not only help us raise additional funds but promote the good work that we're doing. So we manage this in a bit of a different way than our corporations with the altruistic factors and value-based giving and making sure that our individuals understand how they can help and how their donation is meaningful. We also have a celebrity team that works with individual celebrities, mainly on the social space now, in terms of their giving capacity and then working with talent agencies and reaching out to ones that have affinities for certain geographies when the disaster happens too. So that's a neat aspect. On the consumer fundraising space, that core donor space, usually when a big disaster happens we work pretty quickly to get an email out. We have direct mail and typically the cost benefit is now sending out direct mail isn't worth it unless a huge, huge event happens and then we see a great ROI. We do a lot on social media. We'll put a button up quite often on our RedCross.org website and we'll activate our text to give. And then our peer-to-peer area is CrowdRise. We also see our funding pop up on Network for Good and other spaces like that when a big event happens. So we're ready to go on those. And just a little more on email and mail. Our recommendation is emails should be sent out within 24 hours of the disaster and if you do choose to send an additional direct mail piece it should be sent out within 48 hours of the event happening because the quicker it gets in someone's inbox or mailbox when the attention and the mission is at hand the better results you'll see. We always have our text RedCross to 90999 available and we will just advertise it more and use it more when a disaster happens. And then when larger events happen we will set up a new keyword for text to give. Right now our keyword is text tornado to 90999 to make a donation. We try with our fundraisers especially our major gift relationship managers and fundraisers to kind of use this as a back pocket. But they should be going and either having a personal conversation over the phone or in person and asking for a larger gift and automatically just sending out a message that says oh by the way you can give $10 to the RedCross. This is more for our everyday and fantastic core donors who give at a lower level as well as for others just to use to share and the donations absolutely help us when that disaster happens. Telephones we usually hold them in the impacted areas because it's a great way to raise awareness and raise funding. But we do evaluate them and we ask our regional chapters to evaluate whether or not the ROI is there because the telephone just takes a lot of work. It takes a lot of volunteers. It takes a lot of time especially at a time when there's heightened activity going on. So we ask our folks to evaluate. Usually they move forward and hold one because they want to make sure that our name is out there and plus they are fun once you start running them. But it does take a lot of time. And then we'll hold national ones if requested by a large network when a huge disaster happens. During the floods in Louisiana this past summer we worked with Raycom Media and we held a multi-state telephone. It wasn't a national one like the one we did during Hurricane Sandy. But that was successful and it was a great opportunity for us. But it did raise, it was very time consuming on at least I would say 30 of our staff at national headquarters and in the field to take on. And the cost benefit was eventually there but not in the same capacity of our NBC telephone during Hurricane Sandy which was a fantastic success and raised millions of dollars and happened very quickly. So just a couple examples. And now kind of the last part of the presentation and thanks for listening to me around donor stewardship and maintaining and ensuring that trust with the donors and continuing as we can to build those relationships and enable that annual support for the organization. We work on this by providing three months, six months and one year reports for specific large events and work internally here to produce those. We incorporate some of those new donors into the annual fundraising plans and the portfolios of our relationship managers and fundraisers. And then sometimes we'll hold events and thank you events. We use our volunteers. There are a number of ways to continue to engage that donor following the event and get them to either learn more about how we're still helping those donors after a disaster or I'm sorry, the clients and the people that we're serving after the disaster or managing around what we're doing in the stewardship space to talk about our other programs so that they get to see and feel how the Red Cross is helping either in their community across the country or around the world. And just an example of one company or one donor that started as episodic and then kind of branched out nationwide insurance. They gave a response to a large event years ago and we were able to talk them into joining that our annual disaster giving program because they wanted to help not only for that event but for future events to come and help us be ready so that we had the funding we needed before that disaster happened. And then we expanded and now they're hosting blood drives for us. Some of their employees are taking our first aid and CPR courses. They're helping to fund blood mobiles now in some of our communities. Some of their management serving is board numbers. So this is a great example of a way that we're able to broaden that gift and make it sustaining. All right. That is it, you all. That's the thank you for listening and joining in. And now would love to take your questions. I already see one from Miranda. Are there any specific strategies you use to expand our donor base that you think would work well at the small local level? I guess there are a couple. The main strategy is just to, one, make sure, and this sounds so simple, but in everyone's busy life, we ask our fundraisers to come up with stewardship and move management plans for specific donors after they've given to an event. So how are you going to follow up? What's your timetable and have them place it into our Salesforce platform so that they won't forget, oh, I need to follow up with Mrs. Jones who made that wonderful $5,000 contribution to the Louisiana floods. She hasn't given in maybe three years and the event inspired her to give. So I know that at month one, I'm going to give her a call and see if she wants to meet with one of our volunteers who deployed to the Louisiana operation and get some firsthand and learn firsthand how that volunteer experience or really about that volunteer's experience. And then at the three month mark, I'm going to make sure that I'm going to mail her one of our stewardship reports and give her a call, follow up, see if she has any questions. And then, you know, at the six month mark, we've got that event coming up and I'm going to see if she wants to go to it, et cetera. So I think simple things like that, Miranda, does that answer your question? Are there any other questions? I know I gave a lot of information to you, but we're a big organization and pretty complex, so I hope this was helpful for you all. Ellen, this is Jessica here. I do want to say thank you for helping us all understand a little bit more about some of the structures at the Red Cross. Because as you said, you are a very large organization. Our groups are, you know, much more regionally based and working with a smaller donor base as a result, but I think a lot of the principles apply. Certainly considering not only how to fundraise for response, but also to help support some of the preparedness efforts that these groups undertake and how to build more people into the fundraising part of that work is definitely central. So Miranda has a couple of other follow ups. What about approaching donors who have never given any helpful starting points? Obviously, Ellen, you have a name brand recognition that is very helpful, but do you have any other insights on how do you begin that conversation? Again, it depends on the type of donor, but the best way I've seen is luckily during a disaster we have the ability to cold call and be relevant. And so cold calls can work, you know, when you're front and center. But really the best way would be can you get an introduction from somebody who knows you as well as and knows your organization as well as who knows this person. Because that personal touch is always the best and they'll take your phone call or tend to take your email and just having that when you're able to get that meeting, having that discussion. We do a lot of prospecting and research as well around disaster giving. And I know our fundraisers have a number of prospects that they will call based on either the type of disaster or some other affinity, such as we have a list of alumni from certain areas that we'll pull. Right now I would imagine we would pull and I don't know the university in and around Hattiesburg, but actually there was a college that was directly impacted and we would look and see across the country do we have any current donors or lapsed donors who are alums. And we could reach out to even though they're in the Washington D.C. area now. That's another way. That's really helpful. Thank you. And I did want to if it's all possible to enable Miranda Nixon's microphone because she is someone who's been involved with Alliance for Response Group in Pittsburgh that had a very successful fundraising effort to receive a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to fund their supply cash. So Miranda, are you able to speak in your microphone? I try to enable your microphone rights. I can barely hear you. Can you turn up your microphone? You sound a little bit louder. Do you want to? Are you able to speak a little bit about that? Yeah, I can do that. I'm just going to hold it really close to my mouth. Sounds great. Okay, so yeah, Miranda Nixon, I'm with the Alliance for Response Pittsburgh chapter and as with many of our groups, we have trouble with fundraising, you know, trying to either get programming off the ground that we would like or just extra resources. And for us, this NEH preservation assistance grant was a big help for one of our projects that we now have on hand to help anyone who needs these disaster supplies. So our group started back in 2008. And I think the idea for this shared disaster supply cash came up pretty quickly, probably through Tom Clarison with Clarisus, but I can't remember now who actually suggested it. But we started looking into grant funding opportunities and this preservation assistance grant for smaller institutions was really the best fit for what we needed. We applied, thankfully in 2010, we received the maximum amount of $6,000 and we were able to put together a large shared disaster cash and provide a training workshop to go along with that. The tricky parts of the grant for us were that we had to be registered as a U.S. nonprofit organization and we were not then and we are not now. And so we had to find a way around that. Thankfully Pittsburgh is pretty. There are many, many cultural heritage institutions around Pittsburgh. So we partnered up with a few different groups in order to apply for the grant and to think about the long term storage of this supply cash and what we were going to do with it. So we partnered up with the Pennsylvania Academic Library Consortium Incorporated, which is palsy for short, since they are a 501C and we had several very active staff members from them in our initial AFR group. And so then we at least had a way to submit the application and we had project directors that could work directly with NEH for the distribution of the funds and making sure that we were executing it correctly. But then in terms of what were we going to do with these materials, we're a group but we're representative of the emergency managers that are in Pittsburgh and around the county as well as several organizations that were big names or universities but then a lot of smaller groups. And we didn't have extra funds to either rent a location or even if we'd come up with money for maybe a year or two then what do we do? So we also teamed up with the University of Pittsburgh's university library system, which is actually also where I work, and we have space offsite for us where we can host the supplies long term. We were able to provide space for the training workshop and then it was a lot easier to figure out our access strategy. So we had to also devise or write up an agreement. How were we going to stipulate that people would be able to use these disaster supply materials whenever they had something happen that they couldn't cover themselves? But then also we had to figure out they're going to have to replenish these materials. We can't just have them go away when someone uses them and then we're done. We want something that can be ongoing for all of our community members. So we had to write a lengthy agreement which our partners had to sign off on. So Palsy had to be okay with it and the University of Pittsburgh had to be okay with it as well as the Steering Committee for Alliance for Response. And once we agreed on what the terms would be, then we had to reach out to our members and those who were interested in signing this memorandum for use would then have to have it approved by the appropriate person in their organization and sign off on it. And so within the agreement then we had to also come up with, well, how are people going to access these materials, especially when it's always on a Friday evening or weekend or a holiday? And so I think the University of Pittsburgh was best placed to have someone and staff on hand that could very quickly gain access versus a potential offsite storage facility where there are no people present or anything like that. That has been a successful project for us. We were very thankful that we got the grant and that we were able to work with two large organizations to make it work. But since then further fundraising has still been very difficult. Programs we try to aim at something that is free for all of our members. Certainly there's a lot of reasons why attendance can be difficult for anyone, whether that's geographic location or they don't have the staff to cover them leaving their institution. But also we like the idea of exploring perhaps trainings where attendees might have to pay a very small fee, but we really also sort of rebel against that idea because we don't want another obstacle to meeting attendance. So for us we constantly try to look at further partnerships. Are there local vendors maybe that we can ask for sponsorship for some training or just for meeting space or to pay for the presenter or just meeting refreshments or something like that. So working with local vendors and organizations has become our new way of trying to look at fundraising opportunities, which is why I was asking the questions that I did. Thank you Ellen for your presentation. And we did, I think that's the AFR New York City group that has achieved 501C3 status after Hurricane Sandy and we last year actually looked into this. We were in contact with them to find out what would be entailed in this. Would that actually give us better opportunities to apply for grants on our own without having to have these partnerships. But really the feedback that we got was that don't attempt it, it's extremely problematic. So we've had to look into other directions to try to make these programs and trainings work. Great. Thank you for those insights Miranda. It's really helpful. And I see that we've had another question come in from Carl in New Jersey. Noting that many individual and corporate donors who already support specific cultural institutions, they're accustomed to helping those institutions meet their mission program and even capital facility goals. So then asking the same donors to contribute towards disaster preparation and planning efforts of the Alliance for Response groups in those regions, which are essentially collectives. It might be a hard sell. So how would you think about making a compelling case to such donors to make additional contributions towards a collective effort? You know, I'd be curious to hear how Ellen might address this question and likewise if Miranda has any insights to contribute. But I would say that, you know, this is one of the big questions for the Alliance for Response Initiative because we're not just individual institutions that are trying to make these connections. It's these broader collectives. So whereas, you know, it's easier to stay on the radar of corporations and individual donors when you have the kind of institutional presence that a large museum in the area or library might have. Making sure that people are aware of the existence of Alliance for Response groups, I think is probably going to be a first step and just, you know, the public awareness piece of it. Again, the American Red Cross is such a well-known name that people don't turn to them in disasters because they are able to do so much good to help. So, you know, I think that in my opinion, perhaps one of the first steps we need to do is to just all individual AFRs and then here at FAIC to try and raise the banner more for what the overall initiative is trying to do and what these groups are able to provide in terms of assistance following events. Do anyone have anything else to contribute to that? This is Ellen. I'll go. I absolutely agree making them aware first and educating. But one thing we have to do quite often is, again, people want to give to that specific disaster and not necessarily our broader mission, even if we do have the name recognition. And so we have to come up with ways to make it to ensure that they know how their donation is helping at the local level and give examples of how their donation will help, even if it's a broader mission, how that will tie back and help them locally. So, I think building the case for that is important as well. Miranda, did you have something you wanted to chime in with? I do. I think for me I also see a great value in trying to work with the cultural institutions very closely on this and trying to get them to understand the value of our organizations. Especially if they don't have anyone who regularly attends our meetings because I see an in in terms of they have their mission program, whatever their own goals are. If they can start to work in the idea of disaster preparation, any planning, and then perhaps work AFR into that, I think that maybe instead of working with the donors from two different sides of it, it would make more sense to work with them from just the side of the cultural heritage institution and that seeing if we can form a partnership that way. So that if funds are donated to those organizations, maybe some amount of it, I mean not that I feel like this is likely, but maybe some of that could be set aside to work with AFR for other disaster planning or something on that front. I know that just within our own organization at Pitt, that's one way that in terms of preservation, we try to get people to look at, well, we get donations to our archives or special collections, what have you. And when they ask for monetary donations, I try to get them to think about, well, there's also the preservation aspect, which doesn't really get mentioned to the donor, but that costs money. So I think that maybe approaching it from that side could also be beneficial and trying to make partnerships on that side instead of us both trying to come at the donor from different sides, you know, where they're not seeing that, oh, well, I'm being bombarded, but it's really for the same cause. I think that's a great point to really be more collaborative in those efforts from the start. We had another question come in from Carl saying, did he notice that some of American Red Cross's corporate donors like Walmart Loads, even Dell all can match their business products and services to the disaster response programs of American Red Cross. AFRs probably need to do something similar since such corporate donors may be more interested in helping a collective and supporting individual cultural institutions. So that's an interesting thought, certainly. Yeah, so actually some of the vendors that we tend to have sponsor some of our meetings or where we've held our meeting at their facility. Those have been vendors that supply disaster response services or who we've had construction companies who've approached us because they deal with disaster restoration and restoration of historic properties. So those are companies that maybe we wouldn't have thought of before, but they've been great resources for us. Great book. Yeah, to that end we have the win-win. We have a number of insurance companies, as you saw on that list, and others that are much easier to build partnerships with than someone who may, a company that just doesn't have the affinity or really, I guess, have their employees and others be directly impacted by events and their products help with them. So true. Well, I don't see any other questions coming in at this point. I just want to kind of summarize again that a lot of these groups are certainly working on a much smaller scale, but I think so many of the principles that Ellen outlined for us are certainly applicable. In particular, I was encouraged to see that we all, I think, when we think of the Red Cross, we think of response and recovery activities, but to see is a big focus on the preparation side and the fact that you all are able to get support for that and kind of build it into your overall culture of giving as well, I think is a really encouraging example for everyone in the Alliance for Response groups to consider as well. I hope that everyone else found this content to be as fascinating and useful as I did. So I want to just say thank you again to Ellen and of course thank you to Miranda for jumping in and sharing some of your experiences here as well. So Ellen has very generously provided her email address here. So if people have other final questions that come up or things that you think of after the fact, thank you for sharing that, Ellen. I'm sure everyone appreciates it. So I just want to go ahead and wrap up today's session as well as the whole Alliance for Response webinar series that we've put together. And just thank everyone who's on the program today and thank everyone who was able to join in for other sessions as well. And remind everyone to tune into the YouTube channel for the whole six programs in the series. I'm going to go ahead and pull over a survey link for today's webinar. And again ask you how to just take a few moments to fill out a brief 10 questions survey. In particular we'd love to get your input on the last question here which would be topics for future webinar programming. This is the last session of this six series program but we do have a few more webinars in the works for later this year and into next year as well. Again for the Alliance for Response community. So if there's other topics that you've been inspired to learn a little bit more about please do identify those for us. And again I want to give a big shout out to our wonderful presenter Ellen Gorm. We're so grateful to you Ellen for taking the time to educate us all today. So thank you. And of course we're so grateful to the National Endowment for the Humanities for making this whole series possible. So thanks to everyone and we will hopefully see you all back for the next round of webinars when they take place later in the year. Thank you everyone.