 All right, looks like we've already got a couple of people here. We're going to just get started in a moment. We're just going to do some of the housekeeping to get ready for the webinar. So pardon us if you hear some, some chit chat. Let's see. Okay, so I just started sharing my screen. If you can see the title slide, it should say giving day for apes prize structure and strategy. If you could just let me know that you're able to see it by using the chat in zoom. I'm going to be really helpful. I just want to make sure that everybody can see and hear. All right, excellent. Thank you, Susan. All right, so we've got just another minute. So we'll give everybody a moment to get logged on. Jackie, can you hear me? Are you ready to go? I can hear you. I'm ready to go. And I was just going to say it'd be great if our attendees could say hi and introduce themselves in the chat. We'd love to have some new names this year working on the campaigns. Yeah, definitely. If everybody who's on the attendee list, if you could just say hi in the chat, let us know where you're from. That would be really helpful. And you know, it's a small group, so don't be shy. We'd love to be able to get to know you if we haven't chatted with you personally before. All right, so the offer still stands. Hi, Reba. Hi, nice to meet you from Chimp Haven. I don't think I've ever chatted with you before one-on-one, so it's great to meet you. And I'll just go ahead and get started with the webinar. If you guys want to use the chat, you are free to do so. We'd love to hear from you. Hi, Susan. From Ape Action Africa. But it's three o'clock here on the eastern coast, so we're just going to go ahead and get started. Just because we have a lot of content to get through today. So thank you all for joining us for our second giving day for Apes webinar. We're going to be talking about the project of the year. And we're going to be talking about the project of the year. And we're going to be talking about all about prize structure and prize strategy. My name is Linda Gerhardt, and I'm the senior community engagement manager here at Mighty Cause. And I've been really proud and happy to work with giving day for Apes since I believe 2017. So I've been working with this event and with Jackie for quite some time. So I'm happy to have another year to work on this campaign. And I'm also joined by Jackie Bennett from Global Federation of Animal Sanctuaries. Hi, everybody. Nice to see you. So for today's agenda, Jackie is going to be doing the legwork and going through the prizes, the price schedule and the rules. And then I am going to take over and I have a lot of content to get through because we're going to be talking about prize strategies and tips. So how to actually win the prizes that Jackie will be introducing to you. Some peer to peer fundraising, matching grants. And then we'll have some time at the end of the webinar for a question and answer session. And you guys have us wrapped here. You have a captive audience. So please feel free. If you have any questions while either of us is presenting to just pop that into the Q&A box. And we will make sure that we get to it at the end of the webinar during the Q&A proportion. And also, I just wanted to let you know that we are recording this webinar. So this will be available to you as well as the slide deck on the Giving Day for Apes site under the nonprofit toolkit. All right. And with that, I will turn it over to Jackie. Thank you, Linda. Well, we're excited to start another giving day as noted on the slide. Early giving is going to begin September 13th for the event in October 12th. So all of your online donations received starting September 13th are going to count towards your leaderboard totals. And some other prize. We have some new prize categories this year. So let's dig in and get started. So I'll start by saying every year after giving day, we ask for feedback on our prizes. And we like to think about new strategies that will give everyone a chance to win. And we do recognize this is a global event. There are participants on three continents and many time zones. The people volunteering or working on the campaigns are in other areas and they might be targeting communications to their donor base in other areas. So there's no, not necessarily a perfect fit when we set out the prize schedule, but we do our best on it. And we also know participants have different staff and volunteer resources available to them. And so we try to design prizes that give everyone a chance to win something which we have done this year. I hope this year we are offering a total of $60,000 in prizes. This is the most we've offered yet. This is $2,000 more than last year. Some of those prizes are familiar to you, to those of you who've been engaged in giving day before, they're basically unchanged over the years, such as the leaderboards and the power hours. But we also have other prizes and some new things to share this year. Let's move ahead. Thanks. So we'll start with something familiar, the leaderboards. As with other years, we are going to have five leaderboards. Each region is going to have a most dollars raised leaderboard. There will be a leaderboard for the most unique donors for the event that everyone is going to participate in. And there's going to be a leaderboard for the most raised by an individual peer-to-peer fundraiser on which everyone will participate. So we're going to have a refresher on peer-to-peer fundraising in a little while. The leaderboards are only going to be calculating online donations made on the Mighty Cause platform. And those online donations will be counted starting from the time that early giving opens on September 13th. Okay. So our price structure for the leaderboards is going to be the same as last year. For each of the regional leaderboards, we're going to have the same amount of donations made on the first place. As well as the leaderboard for most unique donors, prizes will be awarded for the top three placements. And the prices are here. First place, 3,750. Second place, 2,250. Third place, 1,500. Again, this starts with early giving from the time that the early giving opens. So we're going to have the same amount of donations made on the leaderboards until the actual 24 hour event opens. But the Mighty Cause platform is going to be calculating the donations coming in that whole time. And you will see it once the event actually starts. Let's go to the next one. So last year, we changed the price structure for the peer-to-peer leaderboard and we're keeping those changes in place again this year. It's going to be the same total price funding on the leaderboard. So we're going to have the same amount of donations made for prizes for the top four placements rather than the top three. So you can see those price amounts here ranging from first place, $3,250 to fourth place, $750. Let's go on. We'll go on to the power hours that are coming back this year. And these are always very popular. And we see a lot of donation activities during the power hours. So we're going to be putting up a total of $1,500 each. There will be one winner for each power hour. And they will be by region. So for each region, there will be two power hours. One for the most dollars raised during that time. And one for the most unique donors during that hour. We are going to be putting up a whole schedule of when these power hours are. I think it's completed. And you will see the start times and end times for your continent's power hours. Let's move on. So I know Linda is going to be talking a little bit more about power hour strategy, but I'll just go over with some of the basic rules for power hours. There are assigned start and end times for each power hour. It is based on online donations only through the mighty cost platform. It is only donations received within that hour. So for example, if you have a power hour, one to two o'clock in your region for most dollars raised, you may be at the top of your region's leaderboard at that point. But if you don't raise the most money in that hour, you're not going to be the power hour winner. It's only looking at the donation activity during that time. And the same is true for the most unique donors power hour. If you have or at the top of the leaderboard for most unique donors overall, this is only based on activity during that hour. And importantly, if a donor has already made a donation to your organization, they can come back during that power hour and make another donation and be counted as a unique donor for that power hour. And because the most unique donors is counting number of donors, it doesn't matter how big the donation is. The minimum donation on the platform is $5. So it's counting the number of different donors who have made donations. Okay. Golden tickets, this is a big change. I said that we listen to feedback when we get it from other events. And one thing that we always hear is everybody likes golden tickets. And in the past, we have awarded 10 of them. So we decided to listen and offer more. We have a total of 18, yes, 18 golden tickets this year for Giving Day. Each of these is worth $250. And I'll just give some basics on this because again, Linda's going to talk about your strategies. But the only qualification to be eligible to win. During a golden ticket hour. Is that you've received at least one donation during that hour. And I always describe it as a think about each time you get a donation, your organization's name is going to be thrown into a hat. And then at the end of the hour, someone's going to pull the name randomly out of the hat and that organization will win the prize. And that is what happens, although it's a virtual hat, it's done through the Monaco's platform. It's a random draw. The only qualification is that you got some donation. During the hour that the golden ticket is being scheduled. And obviously if you get one donation, your name is thrown in that virtual hat once. If you get 20 donations, you get 20 chances. Okay. So we have some categories among these golden tickets that I want to break down because we're doing something new this year. Of those 18 golden tickets, nine are going to be limited by region. This is something we first did last year. And we got really positive feedback. So we decided to make more of these golden tickets region restricted. So we're going to have three tickets that are only available to those organizations participating on the Asia leader board. And the same for the Africa leader board and North America leader board. You still have to receive a donation during that hour for chance to win. But the pool of participants who could win or eligible to win are going to be limited by region. Then we're doing something new this year. We're going to have four tickets that are only going to go be eligible to be won by what we call smaller budget organizations. And if you filled out the registration for this year's giving today, you'll remember that there was a question. Asking what level your organization's budget was in. We are going to have the smaller budget organizations be those that indicated $500,000 and under during registration. Again, those organizations to be eligible to win a ticket during those, those specific hours. They have to get a donation in that hour. So their name could possibly be drawn. But the potential winners are going to be limited to a smaller budget organizations. I will be putting together a list to confirm prior to the event who was on the smaller budget organization list. But that isn't finalized yet because we still have registrations coming in and will be over the next couple of weeks. So we will get a final list together. We will see who will be eligible. And we will see who will be eligible to win those, those four golden tickets. So that counts for 13 golden tickets. The remaining five of them are going to be general tickets. They're not going to be restricted by region or by budget. Anybody can win them. Let's go back. Not done. A couple of things about golden tickets. They're not going to be able to win. They're not going to be able to win. They're not going to be able to win any more organization can win to three. Also, those five general tickets and organization can win two. After that, if an organization has won two general tickets, they still might win a region restricted or budget restricted ticket as they're eligible. But they're not going to be able to win another general ticket. When we put up the schedule, we will see that you can get the ticket. And we will see that you can get it. But that will be when you're eligible hours are, so you know what that you can tell your supporters that. And you will see that during certain hours, more than one golden ticket will be awarded. So you may see an hour where a golden ticket is going to be pulled for the Asia leaderboard participants and the North America leaderboard participants or something like that. Just focus on what your eligibility is. And when you're golden ticket hours are. All right, so we have other prizes. And last year we introduced that what we call the kickoff prize. It was very popular and we are bringing it back again. This is a $500 prize. That is going to be one by one organization. And it's based on activity in that early giving period that begins on September 13th. And that is going to be the launch of giving day at midnight Eastern time on October 12th. It is going to go to the organization that has received the most unique donations from the most unique donors. During that period of time. Because we're counting unique donors or rather the mighty cost platform is counting the unique donors. The amounts of those donations don't matter. They could be for $5 each. And that is going to be one by one. And that is going to be one by one. And that is going to be one by one. The first prize is the most money during that early giving period. It's who's accumulated the most unique donors gotten the most engagement during that early giving period. And that organization. When the event launches and those leaderboards become visible. That will be the organization that's at the top of the most unique donors later board at that moment. Although we know that those placements changed during the 24 hour event. We know that those placements changed during the 24 hour event. We know that those placements changed during the 24 hour event. So we're going to go ahead and do that for that last year. If you want some further clarification or want to ask any questions about this or any other prizes. Please send us an email or let us know right now. All right, let's move on. Last year, we also introduced milestone prizes. And we're bringing those back this year. We are going to give two milestone prizes there. $500 each. These are random. These are luck. The number of donations that have come in. They, there's, there are numbers of them. The mighty cross platform knows. What is the 25, you know, 2,500 online donation total that has come in. What is the 3000th donation? The organization that receives those donations will win the prizes. And the number starts counting from early giving September 13th. And the number of donations that have come in. And the number of donations that have come in. And when donations come in. We can't predict when they're going to happen. Linda and I've looked last year to, at last year's event to see how many donations total there had been online. And I believe it was over 7,000. It had been over 2000 in early giving. But we just have no idea. If it will be at the same pace this year. So these are just a matter of luck. Anyone can win. And I think we're going to be able to do that. We're going to be able to do that. We're going to be able to do that more. At the time that happens. If you get a $5 donation, that is that milestone donation. The organization wins that price. Okay. All right. Last but not least. We have a brand new prize that we are introducing. And this is after a lot of thought and strategizing and planning to be a little creative. These are the storytelling prizes. And we've talked about storytelling a lot. We covered this in a webinar last year's event. Those recorded webinars, I think we're still available. But all of your organizations have such great stories, whether it be about a particular animal. You've rescued. You want to rescue. Something you want to build. And add to your facility that will help all your animals. And things like food enrichment, bringing water to your animals. They're all potentially great stories that can be told with words and photos and video. And we want to take that to the next level now and challenge you to submit your story for consideration to live $500 prize. Briefly and Linda's going to touch on this too. I'll tell you how this works. There's going to be a link that will give you to submit your name and a short description of your campaign theme. What is the name? What is your campaign about? We asked for it to be submitted by October 1st, although you can do it well before that if you want. And the announcement of who wins will be midday during the 24 hour giving day itself. Now, who's going to decide this? This is going to be decided by a panel from my cause. It's not going to be anyone for global Federation of animal centuries. I'm not even going to know who has submitted the names. Linda is not going to be one of the judges of it. It's going to be people who are very familiar with giving days. I've seen a lot of giving days, a lot of fundraising pages have seen what works, what hasn't. We're not going to be as familiar with who you are, but are going to be able to judge the impact that your story tells to potentially a new donor. The emotional impact, the connection, the want to learn more. And that is going to be the storytelling prize. And we hope that inspires you to, as you look at your pages and see how you're going to update them for this year to really tell some great stories. I know you will. So that's an overview of the prizes. As I said, a schedule is going to go up. When you look at it, please let us know if you have any questions about it. If you have questions about any of the rules, any of the eligibility, we are happy to explain that further because we know how important it is for you to give very clear information to your supporters so they can make the donations that help you win the prizes. And with that, I'm going to turn it over to Linda for all the rest of this. Thank you very much. So now that Jackie has gone through what the prizes will be. And again, just to reiterate, you will have access to a schedule and you'll be able to see very specifically what the prizes are and when the power hours and golden ticket hours are. But now that that is out of the way, we're going to move into strategies and how you can actually go about winning these prizes. So leader boards are really the centerpiece of the giving day for apes site on the big day and they have some extremely generous prizes attached to them. So if you want to make a make the giving day do as much as for your sanctuary as possible, you'll want to think about how you can strategize to get into one of the top spots on your leaderboard. Since leaderboards reflect the totality of your giving day for apes fundraising, utilizing the early giving period is really the best way to give your sanctuary an advantage and climb into one of those top spots. Generally speaking, for both giving day for apes and across all giving events on the mighty cause platform, we tend to see that the top fundraisers on leaderboards or organizations that take advantage of early giving, which makes sense because when the clock switches to midnight eastern time, you've already got some money in the bank and you've already ranked on that leaderboard. You're not starting from zero. So donations start on September 13th at midnight eastern time. And that means that starting on September 13th, all donations will count toward your leaderboard total. We recommend using this early giving period to target people in your nonprofit's inner circle, like your staff, your board members, and any past giving day for apes donors because these donors are low hanging fruit. You can almost always count on them to give during the giving day. And what we tend to see with these donors who've given in the past is that they give twice. They give at least twice. They give during early giving and then they also give on the day itself. So they're a really great group to target when you're thinking about early giving, although you can definitely target your broader audience, but really honing in on those people who've already shown in propensity to give and support you for giving day for apes is a really great strategy to rank high on the leaderboard when the event kicks off. Something that you can also consider doing to boost your position on the leaderboard is using matching grants. And you can use a pre event match to fuel your early giving. We'll be talking a lot more about matching grants and how those function, but you can actually institute a pre event match that will help you win that kickoff prize and help you rank higher on your leaderboards when the event it becomes live. So if you want to be at the top of your leaderboard this year, here are a couple of things that you can do to help with that. The biggest thing I can recommend is focusing on donor retention, meaning bringing back donors who've given to your leaderboards. So you have a really powerful tool tool through Mighty Cause that you can use to target these donors, which is your retention report that is available to everybody with on Mighty Cause through your dashboard for your organization. It is on the list of donors that you can use to increase their gift size. When you focus on bringing back donors and getting them to give a little bit more, you will boost the overall amount that you raise. And that will help you succeed on your organization. It is under reports on your dashboard and you can use that to find donors from previous years who haven't given again this year. So it's a really helpful tool and you want to make sure that you have some outreach schedule to these donors and that you're also working with them to bump up their gift just a little bit. Keeping supporters informed about where you are on the leaderboard is also extremely helpful. For instance, if you're in the number four spot on your continents leaderboard and email or a social media post that's asking people to help you get into the top three and also telling them how much you have to raise to get into the top three can really be the thing that cracks the top three for you. And lastly, it's important to keep an eye on it because it really truly is anyone's game until the last seconds of the event. We've seen a lot of competition in the leaderboards leading up to the very like last minute. So one big donation can really change everything. And a sanctuary can send out a last minute appeal and drive donors to their page to make donations right before the event ends. So even if you're in the top three spots and you think you've got your position locked, keep an eye on the competition and maybe have a few aces in your pocket within the sense of having emails ready to go and social media posts ready to go so that you can just get them to either claim your spot on the leaderboard or keep your spot on the leaderboard. As Jackie detailed earlier, there are a lot of chances to win through power hours through giving day for apes and there's quite a bit of money that's available through power hours. These are pretty valuable prizes for you to win. And the thing that I love about power hours is that they really are anyone's game. Even if you're small and you're not near the top of your leaderboard, all you need to win a power hour. The thing you'll want to do here is make sure that your donors know when your power hours are so that they can plan their gifts. So sending an email and posting on social media before your power hour begins is a good plan and sending out a schedule of the power hours that you're eligible for before the event. In addition to starting at the start of each hour announcing it on social media and email it's a good way to get your donors to know when they're ready to go. And then you can also do the round work you can lay so that your donors can expect these power hours and they can plan their gifts. That's all going to benefit you in the end. With power hours urgency is built in. That's really how they're engineered. They're engineered to light a fire under your donors and get them to donate now. So there's a time limit and there's a lot of time limits in place that can make them stop what they're doing and actually make their donation. One really effective way to motivate donors is also talking about what winning a power hour prize could do for your sanctuary. I'm completely making these numbers up so don't hold me to them. So I'm going to go ahead and make sure that you're using urgent language and making them really feel the heat to give because it's hard to do that. But say if $2,500 could help you provide food or enrichment for the apes in your care for a week or a month or they could help you update a piece of equipment at your sanctuary, you can use that to hook your donors in and make them understand how important it is that your sanctuary have a chance at winning that money and motivate them to give. As Jackie mentioned, there are two types of donations. Each continent has power hours at each type. So once the final prize schedule goes up, just make sure that you're paying attention to what kind of power hour you're competing in as well as the time that it begins. The first type we'll discuss is the most unique donors. Your goal is to bring in as many individual donors as possible. Even if another sanctuary raises more money than the first one, it's not a number game. This is nothing but a numbers game. For a most unique donors power hour, you're not concerned with the amount of the donations, but just bringing in as many of them as possible. So this is a great time to ask your staff, volunteers, board members and so on to make a small donation and also go on their social media channels and encourage their friends to donate as many of them as possible. So it's a great way to get donors who've already given to come back and give again. And again, they are unique within that space of the hour, even if they've already given earlier in the day. As Jackie mentioned, the minimum donation on Mighty Cause is $5. So a winning strategy could be, for instance, equating that $5 to a real world item that you can use for a small amount of money. And you can also use matching grants to win a power hour and you can set a match to kick in when a certain number of unique donors is met. So there's a lot of really cool things you can do with matching grants, which we'll go into in a little bit. So if you have a smaller match, this can be a really great way to utilize it, is by offering a match. To motivate as many people as possible to give and tapping into your peer to peer fundraisers and encouraging them to also promote their page during a power hour is a really great idea because they can help you reach more people. Each person who creates a fundraiser has their own network of people. I think the common number of Facebook friends that most people have is, you know, well over 100. So each one of those people has a big network of people that they can reach. So by getting them involved in making sure that they are promoting their page and getting people to make their donations during the power hour, you can increase your footprint, you can increase your reach. And now the one thing that I wanted to clarify and just reiterate is that they only need to be unique within the space of that power hour. So even if your executive director makes 20 different donations at the beginning of the hour and we count each unique donor as they come in. It is a totally separate count than the donor count on your page and on the leaderboards. And we always get questions about what constitutes a unique donor. And we actually look at a couple of different factors. So a unique donor is an individual person. There's really not a good way to game the system since we can see a lot about each transaction in the space of that hour. And the next type of power hour is most dollars raised, which is exactly what it sounds like. And the sanctuary that wins will bring in the most dollars in donations during the space of that hour. Now this is a great time to reach out to previous donors. And I'm going to go ahead and share with you a little bit about the space of that hour. Now this is a great time to reach out to previous donors. So have an email ready to go for people who gave in 2020 but haven't given again this year. You may want to pull the list of people who've already given and say, hey, can you chip in another $5 to help us out during this power hour? Pull that retention report and reach out to people that you know you can count on to give. Some sanctuaries will also work with major donors to make sure that you have a strategy in place that you're sending emails, you're posting on social media, you're working with any major gift donors and people who gave in larger amounts in 2020 using a matching grant, like in any combination, any of these strategies can really help you get the edge and help you win. And last but not least, we have another strategy that you can use to gain an advantage during a most dollars raised power hour. And last but not least, we have golden tickets which are random hourly prizes. These are truly random prizes and it works kind of like a raffle as Jackie was talking about. Each donation that you get during the hour is an entry and the more entries you have, the more likely you are to win. So making sure that you're bringing in donations during golden ticket hours is the best way to win. The more donations you get, the more chances that you get to win. So making sure that you're bringing in more entries during golden ticket hours on smaller donations during golden ticket hours and let people know that each donation can help you win a prize. This year there are golden tickets just for sanctuaries who have smaller budgets. So this is a really great opportunity for any sanctuaries that may feel like they have a harder time competing with organizations for power hours. So making sure that you're bringing in those super competitive power hours, golden tickets could be a really fantastic opportunity for you to use your strategy to really increase your chances of winning. But unfortunately it is completely random so there's no real tip beyond making sure that you get donations and you know when your golden ticket hours are. And as Jackie was talking about, it's really important to make sure that you have a chance to win a power hour. So one of the prizes that any sanctuary can win outside of dollars, outside of donors, because it's being judged on the quality of your storytelling. So even if you feel like you may not have a chance to win a power hour, these prizes are truly anyone's game because we're not looking at any of that. We're not looking at the dollars and cents, but we're not looking at that one. And if you want to compete for the story, one of the storytelling prizes, we will be providing a simple form that you can fill out that will be available to you on the Giving Day for Apes website where you can submit your page and let us know that you'd like to participate and basically put your name in the hat so that our panel can consider your, your, your campaign. And once again, we'll be going a lot deeper on this webinar, but things that will give you an advantage and an edge are telling a multimedia story. So incorporating text, photos, videos, graphics, like, you know, charts, things along those lines, and really making the story a multi-sensory experience for the people who are viewing it, giving them lots of different ways to engage in your sanctuary story. And planning out your story is really going to be helpful here. So think about who your characters are, who is in the story, what are the challenges that they face. And you really want to hone in on what the overall message is that you're sending about your sanctuary. A good fundraising story will tell the story of your sanctuary and your work through telling a smaller story. So that's what you want to do. You want people to understand your work through hearing this story. So as you tell a story of perhaps a particular ape that came into your care, you're also telling this larger story about the important work that your sanctuary does. At this stage you'll also want to be thinking about the assets that you can use, which photos and so on will be helpful to you, planning ahead for any videos that you would like to create. And something that's really important is making sure that your story is understandable to people who are telling a story about the effects of deforestation or poaching. You also want the story to serve as an introduction to those issues instead of assuming that your audience already knows a lot about them because you want it to be a compelling and understandable story to somebody who has no idea what kind of work you do and is not familiar with the issues that you address. Just as a note, as Jackie mentioned, our fundraising team will be the judges here. I am not part of that team. I am recusing myself because I have a pre-existing relationship with many of you as you've participated over the years. So this will be a neutral panel of our team that works with giving days and fundraising each and every day. So they are experts in fundraising and they will be looking at the stories just to see and they'll be putting in a vote for that. So they will be selecting the winner. I will not be part of that, but our experts here at Mighty Cause will be part of that panel. All right. So we have a dedicated peer-to-peer leaderboard in 2021 as in years past. So we're just going to go through peer-to-peer and talk about how you can use peer-to-peer fundraising to win prizes. So peer-to-peer, if you're not familiar with it, is a fundraising technique where you have people fundraising on your sanctuary's behalf. So instead of your sanctuary going to donors and asking them directly for donations, you'd have a supporter to start a fundraiser and have them ask their social network, their friends and family to make donations in support of their fundraising efforts for your sanctuary. Now, if you're not familiar with peer-to-peer fundraising and how it functions, it can sound a little convoluted and strange like why wouldn't you just fundraise directly? The short answer is, A, we have a leaderboard with prizes for the top four individual fundraisers. So if you want a shot at a fundraiser, you need to have some peer-to-peer fundraisers this year. And to drill down a bit more specifically, the reason that Giving Day for Apes encourages peer-to-peer fundraising is because it's really fantastic for donor acquisition and bringing more people to your page to donate as well as raising awareness of your sanctuary's work. Most organizations have a list of supporters, but this is one of the ones that can reach new people. So for instance, if I start a fundraiser for your sanctuary, you can't contact my aunt to ask her to make a donation because she has no relationship with your sanctuary. But if I start my fundraiser, I can ask her because I have that relationship with her. So I act as sort of a conduit to get her in to make the first donation and she's my aunt so she wants to support me, and that's actually that ties into something that we know about how people give. The most common reason a lot of people make their first gift to an organization is because somebody they know asked them to. So it's actually a really effective way to generate buzz, to get more people involved, to get new donors that you can start to engage. And it also has a really great testimonial effect because one of the reasons that it's so helpful to have somebody introducing somebody that they know to your cause is that they care about that person and they want to know what they think. So what's important to me as a peer-to-peer fundraiser is going to be important to my friends and they're going to want to support me and they trust that information because they know me. So that preexisting relationship that I have with the people in my social network makes me a much more effective fundraiser with most of these people than your organization who they have no existing relationship with. So that's why peer-to-peer fundraising is really effective and it can really help your campaign on Giving Day for Apes because all of these donations filter back to your nonprofit. They count for leaderboards, they count for prizes and it really just helps you reach more people on a day when that is really important. So sometimes organizations are skeptical about peer-to-peer and obviously this is an international event so it's not something that is as popular in certain countries as it is in the United States where we have lots of platforms to choose from and it's kind of just part of our vernacular here. So you might wonder why would people want to do it or if it's too much to ask of people. Well the cool thing about peer-to-peer is that it's actually really fun for the people who do the fundraising. It deepens their relationship with your organization and it makes them feel important. They're happy to be ambassadors of your sanctuary's cause. So it's definitely not too much to ask. People are usually really engaged and excited about this and that's why it's a great stewarding tool. So for the people who are already in your nonprofit's inner circle who already give and support you and possibly volunteer, this is a really great way for them to get involved in a new way that kind of shakes things up. So you know if you're a donor to any organizations it can be a little bit stale to just get asked to make a donation time after time again. So this is new. This is something new that you're asking of them that's not just giving them money and the good news is that most people who create fundraisers also make donations to their own fundraisers. So you're not asking someone to fundraise or donate. You're asking them to fundraise and they will most likely donate to their own fundraiser and also financially support your cause. So you're asking something in addition. And people who fundraise for you really really care about your cause. So this gives them an opportunity to talk about why they care, why it's important to them, how they came to care about your cause, why it's fulfilling and compelling to them. And it's really you know it's helpful in getting people engaged in the first time for the first time because you know they're giving a testimonial in support of your sanctuary. So it's a really powerful fundraising technique. So creating peer-to-peer pages on Mighty Cause is extremely easy. And just as a note you'll want to use a new page every year so that we can see that your page is for this year. So we do have some people who like to reuse the same page. Unfortunately that's just not really a great way for you know for this to be you know factored in because we have to do a lot of sorting. And there's a lot of pages that are historically part of this event. So when we pull that data and we're building that leaderboard of fundraisers we want to be able to see that it was created this year and it's fresh so that we know to include it. So if you're all able to please create a new fundraiser or ask your fundraisers to create a new page it's very very simple. There is a fundraise button on your profile page. So you just send people the link to your profile and then they click the fundraise button and then our fundraiser wizard will take them through the steps. If you wanted to make it even easier for them you can create a fundraiser template that will pre-fill some of the key parts of the page for them so they can get published more easily. This can really help with busy board members and people who maybe don't have a lot of time to devote to actually building the page. So make use of the fundraiser template that you have available to and I just want to note that if you are fiscally sponsored this year your page is most likely right now in an opted out state especially if you are sponsored by Global Federation of Animal Sanctuaries because that sponsorship only exists during the timeframe of giving day for apes. So you may not be able to create a fundraiser before September 13th so I just wanted to mention that to everybody if you are fiscally sponsored you will have to wait until donations open up and we opt your page back in and that sponsorship relationship becomes activated in order to create fundraisers for your page. So that's actually coming up very very soon so it won't take too long but I just wanted to make that note for people who are using Global Federation of Animal Sanctuaries as a fiscal sponsor. I also wanted to go through a few bits of peer to peer housekeeping here. When somebody starts a fundraiser for your sanctuary all of your admins will receive an email notification letting you know that somebody has created a fundraiser for your organization and you can also track and manage peer to peer pages in the campaigns tool of your dashboard. This is where you can see the details of who created the page whether it's published, how much they've raised, the date that it was created if you have any old pages in your campaigns tool which you can access from your admin dashboard you can actually hide them so that it's not visible in searches as well. All of the donations that are made through a peer to peer fundraiser are included in your total. They're included in your leader board totals and all online donations to these pages will be eligible to help you win prizes. So these donations are incorporated into your overall donation report and on your organization profile so as a peer to peer fundraiser gets donations you will see that reflected not only in your donations report but on the total on the leader boards that you're competing on and as well as the total that you have on your profile as long as they're online donations and those donations from peer to peer pages are just bundled into your disbursement for the event so there's no separate check or separate payout they just get bundled into that overall payout that will give you after the event so who do you ask to fundraise for you well you have a lot of people who are already affiliated with your sanctuary that you should be able to ask your board of directors or trustees are both full of natural fundraisers for your sanctuary I will admit that I'm not super familiar with how board of trustees may differ from a board of directors but in the U.S. a board of directors actually makes a commitment to fund raise for your organization and it's one of their priorities so if you have a board of directors please do not be shy about asking them to contribute by creating a peer to peer fundraiser if you have a board meeting coming up see if you can add that to your agenda for that meeting your staff your volunteers really anybody that's in your sanctuaries inner circle is worth asking to fundraise for you and on that note your staff members and your executive director and so on can definitely fundraise for you and the only stipulation is that they cannot use organizational resources to fund raise so they can post a link and ask on their own personal social media they can send emails from their own personal email addresses but they can't post on your sanctuaries official social media accounts or use the sanctuaries email list and tools to ask for donations the idea is that they as people are asking the people that they know one on one asking so when you use organizational resources to promote a peer to peer page it's kind of against the spirit of peer to peer fundraising in general and it can give people an unfair advantage if they have access to more resources because of their position with your sanctuary so you'll just want to be careful about that this is a small group of organizations and because of that we usually hear about it if the rules are broken or even stretched and unfortunately it has actually caused people to have issues using organizational resources to promote a peer to peer page so just don't do it if you have any questions about whether something would qualify or stretch the rules you can always ask me or Jackie and finally if you're not quite sure who to ask you can always just ask everybody on your email list and on social media and try to get them involved to a lot of people even if you don't have a pre-existing important relationship with them many people are really happy to do work organizations that they follow so you can always ask via an email or a post on social media alright and so this is a strategy you can use to win prizes so that's why we are including it we're going to be talking about matching grants what they are how they work and how they can help you win so first things first what is a matching grant a matching grant is a donation that your sanctuary uses to bring in additional donations by offering it up to match meaning that the money from the larger donation is used to match incoming donations so in case that was a little bit of a circular sentence $25 would become $50 through a one to one matching grant $50 would become $100 until the match money runs out for instance if you have a donor who gives $500 to your giving day for apes campaign every single year instead of just asking them for the $500 you could actually just ask them if their donation could be used to provide a matching grant and incentivize other people to give to your organization excuse me and then just instead of the $500 that you take to the bank you can use that $500 to bring in an additional $500 so they are multiplying their gift by you allowing you to use it as a matching grant but there are a lot of options that for how you can use that matching grant so that you can do a lot of really cool things with it it's a really flexible powerful tool you'll enter them into the matching grants tool on Mighty Cause once you've secured the grant and that'll allow us to do the math for you you can schedule it ahead of time a lot of people have multiple grants throughout the day and you can just schedule those to fire and when you're trying to convince people to give during a power hour for instance a match can be a really powerful method of the competition because everybody wants to make their money go further everybody wants to do more and everybody loves a good sale basically you're giving them something for free and you're allowing them the opportunity to maximize their donation by taking advantage of the matching grant so this is a really powerful way to incentivize donors the next question that we most people usually ask about matching grants is where do they come from anyone who normally gives to your organization some places you'll want to ask for a matching grant would be major gift donors again if somebody always makes a big donation to support you every year for giving day for apes or even just a donation that you know you can do something with in the space of an hour that would be someone to approach about making their gift a matching grant many times board members trustees or even these groups as a whole will provide a matching grant so sometimes pulling money together from your board or your volunteers is a really smart way to create a match to provide for your donors and any sponsors you've worked with in the past pardon me and want to build relationships with are great places to ask for a match and if you have no existing relationship with them a match can actually be a really great icebreaker with a new sponsor you want to start and I hope it's clear at this point but just so it's absolutely crystal clear your sanctuary does need to secure the match yourselves mighty cause does not provide the match global federation of animal sanctuaries does not provide the match you want to use your existing network of supporters to get an it's get a matching grant to provide your donors on giving day for apes the process of getting a matching grant is actually very similar to finding sponsors or major gift donors you start with donor prospecting which is just the prospect of the process of identifying people who would be appropriate to provide a matching grant the biggest predictor of whether or not they'll be willing to give is past getting so you're looking for a history of giving an existing relationship with your not your organization and that's why the easiest place to start is with existing donors you already have relationships with certainly you can use your prospecting to find other opportunities and people who you don't have a preexisting relationship with but I'm a fan of working smarter not harder so definitely start with people that you already know that are already part of your organization and working from there when you're prospecting you'll want to create a spreadsheet to track who you're asking and the conversations you have with them one thing that I do recommend is having one person in charge of talking to each person because as a donor it can get really involved with multiple people are reaching out to you and it can kind of damage the relationship so as much as you're able to being you know one person as a point of contact for that person who's managing that conversation is preferable to having multiple people get in contact with that prospect once you've got a good list of prospects you'll want to start cultivating them meaning that you just start the conversation you reach out you say hello and you're ready for apes if this is somebody that you have a really good relationship with you can always lead with an ask and let them know exactly what you're doing but often it's just about seeing if they're warm to it gathering information about whether or not it's a good time to ask them for instance if you are talking to a business that has sponsored you in the past but they tell you they're really hard hit by COVID and they're really struggling it's as a prospect and you want to cross them off your list and maybe move on to the next one and then once you've done all of those steps you just ask them if they'd be willing to provide a grant and see what they say there's a lot of flexibility so it helps to let them set the tone for how much they're able to give and keep the process open and friendly and loose there's a lot of things that we've discussed you can do with a matching grant so it doesn't need to be a really structured process just talk to you what they're willing to do and make that work within your strategy so once you've got the match you'll want to think about how you can use it best to help you achieve your goals so if you're looking to win prizes you can schedule it during a power hour or a golden ticket hour to help you win if you have a slowdown period for donations like you didn't get any donations after a certain point you can always schedule a matching grant during those hours to get people more interested in giving during that time you can use the amount that you raise you can also have a grant that is active all day long especially if it's a larger grant so if you get one donor to give a $2,000 grant and another said they could give you $500 you might want to schedule that larger grant to run all day long and target the $500 match for a power hour so you can get really creative especially if you have multiple grants to play with so you can have multiple grants active at the same time and you can also schedule them to fire sequentially as well so there's a lot that you can do to use matching grants to boost your giving day strategy and really support your fundraising goals so if you haven't already think about what your goals are when the prize list comes out and the schedule comes out think about what prizes you really want a target to win and see how you can use a matching grant to start bolstering that strategy and now is actually the perfect time to start those conversations with people who could have a matching grant so start working on this as soon as possible because as most of you probably know sometimes it takes a little while to shore up those details so it's a good idea to get started early when you've got your matches you can add them to your matching grants tool which is under fundraising on your dashboard you just create a new match and basically you tell us what you want we'll do the math for you we'll put the matching grant in a few key places we will add a sticker to your donate everybody who clicks that button can see that there is a match available there's also a search function on the live event page where people can find sanctuaries that have available matches and people will be able to see that you have a match that's active in the search you just add the information and you save it so that it fires when you send it when you schedule it to so basically you can set it and forget it now one thing that I do want to make clear here is that you do not need to collect a match online so for instance if you have a donor that's providing a sizable match and they want to do a check because that's what they're comfortable with that is fine to do it doesn't have to be an online match but you won't get credit for that grant in your leader board and it won't help you win prizes if it's collected offline and you're collecting it as a money order a check however you choose to do it because only online donations are eligible but benefits your organization if you can work with the person providing the grant to make their donation online so whenever they choose to do that is up to you and the grantor but if you can get them to make that match make that larger donation online it will benefit you even more than if they just give you a check so that's one thing I wanted to make clear online donations only across the board for giving day for apes so if you can see if your grantor can provide that match online alright just to start wrapping things up Mighty Cause is here to support you leading up to the big day and during the big day itself so please don't be shy about reaching out to our support team if you need any help with your profile matching grants peer-to-peer fundraising and so on please utilize our support if you need it as you get ready for this year's campaign if you don't know how to do something or if you're lost somewhere on your profile if you need to do something please don't suffer in silence please email supportatmightycause.com and we will help coach you through it you don't have to try to figure it out on your own we are here to help you and as I mentioned before we're doing a third webinar that is going to focus on storytelling and donor engagement so this is a really great one to attend if you are interested in winning one of the storytelling prizes we'll be talking a lot about storytelling that has worked for organizations in the past for giving day for apes so you can register for that on the giving day for apes website it's in the nonprofit toolkit which is also where you will find the recording and slides for this webinar and the one we gave a few weeks ago alright so that was a lot of information if you guys have any questions for either me or Jackie please let us know we would love to hear if you have any questions I do have to unshare for a minute let's see we've already got some stuff here that was in the chat oh okay this is actually this is in the chat this is from Susan she says thanks for clarifying all prizes are based on online donations on Mighty Cause what methods are accepted credit card crypto other kind of business donate if they do it by one of those methods so I will say we don't accept cryptocurrency at Mighty Cause but we do take all major credit cards and we also have an option for people to connect their bank account so that's only for donations that are $100 or above so they just need to go into their payment type and select that they would like to pay with their bank account and there's a secure app that they use called plaid to connect to their bank account and that is advantageous if you're making a larger donation the fees are actually capped I forget what the exact percentage is I think it's in the FAQ but the fees are capped for the bank fees the platform fees will still apply but the bank fee is capped so that usually that's a percentage so as you make a larger donation those you can get those fees get bigger as well because every time you process any sort of transaction through a credit card the credit card company imposes fees and this actually puts a cap on those since you're paying directly from your bank account so that is an option for larger donors who want to give in excess of $100 they can opt to pay with their bank account through the plaid app but basically credit cards your bank account and if you happen to have a giving card we don't really do those often anymore but those are basically your options we don't accept things like stock or cryptocurrency and that answers your questions Susan I think that's all I see so far so if any of you have any questions please go into the Q&A box and let us know and Jackie did you have anything after all of the talking that I did that you wanted to add? No I think you covered everything but I just want to go back to Susan's question first can payment go through PayPal? Oh yes I'm sorry I forgot about PayPal and then the other part of her question was whether a business can donate if they do it by one of those methods and Susan I'm assuming you mean like a company credit card but if that's the case Linda do you want to address that? Yeah yeah I mean if you have a valid credit card then for sure you can use that credit card they can use that credit card to make a donation you just want to take care to note that you know who it's being made under I don't know if they word worded that correctly but like for instance if you Susan you can't run their credit card for them and they want to make sure that they're creating their own account because when they get that tax receipt it's going to have the name attached to that account on the receipt so they could absolutely use a company credit card there's no issue with that they would just want to make sure that they're giving with their own account and another rule that always causes a little bit of confusion is that they don't want to allow you to run credit cards on behalf of other people because that is a violation of most credit card companies policies regarding money laundering which is kind of a scary term but that's what they generally consider it to be so you don't want to run any credit cards for any donors any businesses you want them to run it in accordance with their credit card agreement so I hope that answers the question all right so you guys are questions please let us know you have a wrapped audience here you can pick my brain pick Jackie's brain for any information that you would like so I'll give you all just another minute if you have any questions please don't be shy but yeah I think that covers all of it I'm really excited for this storytelling webinar that's always a fun topic to dig into and there's a lot of prizes available so I really do want to emphasize that giving day for apes has a really really generous prize structure so there's a lot of opportunities to win and Jackie and everybody at global federation of animal sanctuary animal sanctuaries is very careful to make sure that there are lots of different opportunities to win so every organization has some sort of opportunity where they can shine and win a little bit of money so kudos to them for putting together that really great schedule of prizes and as you know it went through many different versions and iterations to get it done make sure it looked balanced and clear and everything was fitted in that schedule so it will be coming out all shortly. Absolutely and then one thing that Jackie also does say I want to make sure that I give her due credit for is all of the power hours she does a really great job of trying to make sure that if you're in a different continent that the time zone is it's listed in your time zone or around the time zone because that's so complicated and I can't wrap my head around it honestly but she does a really great job of making it really easy for you to understand when your power hour is especially if you are operating in a different country and in a different time zone the event itself is an eastern standard time but we have lots of people from lots of different time zones so when that list goes up you will be able to see relative to your own time when that power hour is taking place when that golden ticket hour is taking place. And again as we've said if you have any questions after you see the schedule after you read the rules that are up on the website because we're going to put the prize rules up let us know and we'll clarify those. Absolutely so it looks like that's it for questions. Jackie and I are always available to you if you have any questions about the event if you have any technical questions related to using the platform you can always reach out to our support team we have multiple people in support and I'm just one person so they will be faster for you and if you ask me a technical question so don't be afraid to reach out to support at mightycause.com and with that I will go ahead and end this webinar thank you all so much for thank you Reba thank you all so so much for attending this webinar we will make sure that the recording and slides are available to you on the giving day for apes website and until then happy fundraising. Thank you Linda and thank you everyone. Bye.