 So today's guest is Rebecca Alfred from Trellis, who's going to talk a little bit about improving event marketing strategies by leveraging what you already have and what already works. So instead of coming up with fancy new things, let's go deep into the things that already work. And so who is Rebecca? You ask first of all, a repeat host here with us, a repeat expert. Rebecca is part of the team at Trellis Social Enterprise, supporting charitable organizations, hospitals, nonprofits, and other orgs to find new online approaches to raising money for the causes they care about. Rebecca comes from a diverse background, including technology, marketing, accounting, but now she's totally settled into our social sector. And since starting at Trellis, Rebecca has supported hundreds of organizations as they run fundraisers with specialized expertise around signature fundraising events and donor experience in both virtual and hybrid fundraisers. Thank you so much for having me here. I'm really excited because you've got some amazing and really effective tactics that we're going to share around event marketing. So whether you're new to marketing or you've been doing this for a year, this session has been designed for you guys. But before we started, I wanted to share a quick story with you about the impact in marketing. During the pandemic, Shannon was really close to having to shut down her entire organization. They lacked the very necessary funding that they needed in order to keep their organization going. And she was really worried she was going to have to let go of most of her employees. But Shannon didn't want to give up. And so she started planning an online event with a simple goal of $40,000. It was going to be just enough to keep them open. You might know what that feels like. The pandemic has been so hard for organizations across the board. And as Shannon's organization, Mamas for Mamas, supports moms and a lot of single parents, she knew she couldn't let them down. Through a strategic focus on social media, email marketing, utilizing her event partners and her network to reach a wider audience, Shannon was able to raise just over $220,000 in less than 24 hours. And a huge piece of this amazingly wild success came from leveraging her event partners, which we're going to talk about today and as one of the key strategies I'm going to share. So I know as you're sitting here, not all of you are coming from the same starting point. Some of you might not have large networks or followers or email lists or budgets like Shannon that you can rely on. But the tactics we're going to talk about are going to work for every single one of you, regardless of where you're started from today. So here's what we're going to do. Let's briefly review an event marketing schedule and dive into the types of social media content that catches attention and then get to what to do if you don't have a big email list or a big social media following. Towards the end, we'll discuss how data collection can help you build marketing lists and reiterate on your strategy. Just as a heads up, we are going to go pretty quick through the first two here and then really dive into event partners and data tracking. But throughout the session, I'm going to share some real life examples and ideas from organizations that we've seen succeed. My goal for this time here is that you all walk away with clear next steps on how to market your next fundraising event and how to track it. In addition to all of that, we've also put together a guide on event marketing that goes way further into depth than what I can talk about in this one hour block we have right now. Zoe is going to throw a link in the chat right now. You can download the guide. You can think of this talk, step one, and the guide is like step two. We cover the same topics, but the guide includes how to steps to build social media posts, examples to follow, advice from our industry expert partners and worksheets and checklists to help make sure you aren't missing anything. But before we do all of that, let's rewind a little bit and first talk about who we are. We're from Trellis. We help build fundraising software for events, auctions and raffles, and we work exclusively with charities and non-profits. We build tools to help charities with all of their events from galleys to golf tournaments and standalone fundraisers as well. Hundreds of charities have run fundraisers on Trellis, and we've learned a lot about their successes and failures. I've personally been involved in helping probably about 300 of those charities execute their events. So I'll be sharing with you some of my favorite ideas and tips to make sure your fundraising events are a success. I'm Rebecca. I'm joined here by two of my colleagues, Emily and Zoe. Zoe's going to be hanging out in the chat, but just answering any questions. And she'll also be saving some of the questions you guys ask for the very end. We'll do a live Q&A and go back and forth here. So as we're going, please ask as many questions as you can. But me and my team, we're joining from the unceded territory of the COX people. And we also wanted to just take a moment to recognize when you get to live. Like I said earlier, we are going to move pretty quickly through our first two sections and then really dive into the last two. But again, because we are going quick, if you have questions at all, make sure to throw them in the chat or the Q&A box, and we will definitely be responding to all of those as well. But the first thing we want to do is we want to go back to square one and talk about the entire event marketing schedule before we dive into the specifics on how to execute each of these. Now to start, we've put together a pretty rough timeline. And I know that these timeframes are going to look different for your organization. And that is totally okay. But we wanted to just map out the five different stages to your event marketing schedule that you're going to need to include. The first one is you're going to start planning for your next event. And the day that happens is actually the day that your last event ends. So you'll want to announce your next event during the event that's currently running and start sharing it with attendees through emails too. Next, you're going to launch your ticket sales. And when you do so, email your past attendees to invite them. Use your email newsletter to let your donors know first and start posting about it on social media. You'll also want to message all of your event partners and ask them to share it with their networks too. But we're going to get into that a little bit further in a sec here and really work through what our event part next. In the few months or weeks leading up to the event, you're going to want to increase the frequency of all of your marketing tactics, including social media and emails. And then in the last couple of weeks before the event, start personal reachouts to encourage your donors to attend. This could be a phone call or a personal email. We love the personal touch of a phone call. It could be a simple two minute call from a leader in your organization, just letting your donors know what you have planned for the event and a direct invitation to attend. Not only does this go a long way for your donors, but that personal connection can help build valuable relationships for your organization. Then in the final week before the event, make sure to keep reminding your event partners to reshare posts, ask about your event or to create their own announcements about their involvement with your fundraiser too. We've seen some really creative ideas when it comes to event fundraising. One of the ideas that Zoe shared with our team here at Trellis was this idea she heard from one of our event partners. And it has quickly become one of our favorites. I would take a screenshot right now just so you can save it for your next one. But for this organization, they needed to incentivize their donors to buy tickets sooner. And this could include using discounts or entries or special gifts. But this one organization, they took it a bit further. They involved their sponsors. And so they asked their sponsors, can you guys donate a hundred bottles of wine? And for the first 100 people that bought tickets to the event, they got a complimentary bottle of wine to enjoy at your event if it was virtually or in person. Now, I don't know about you guys, but if there was a bottle of wine on the line here, I am definitely going to buy my tickets faster for an event. And that was the exact same result that they found for this organization. Now, I don't know what it is for you. Maybe it's not a bottle of wine with your donors. Maybe it's something else. But think about what's going to resonate with your donors. How can you encourage them to buy tickets earlier? How can you involve your sponsors in that as well? Okay. So like I said, we were going to go quick through that first one. And that kind of covers a high-level event strategy and timelines. But if you wouldn't mind just taking a second here, if you have any questions, please throw them in the chat. And like I said, Zoe's in there and would love to answer them as we go, or she's going to be saving some for our live Q&A end as well. And as you're typing away, let's now look at social media. Again, maybe you can also throw this in the chat. I would love to know, is social media a struggle for your organization, or is it something that's succeeding for you? Again, throw it in the chat. I love to know, just to see where people are at these days. Let's see, we'll give everybody 30 seconds here to start typing. I was talking with some other organizations the other day, and a lot of people work all over the fence. There was a lot of people struggling. A lot of people were saying that it's pretty in and out. It's good at some points, not to get it other times. Yeah, always a struggle between branding and fundraising, struggle, struggle on certain platforms, excelling at others. Awesome, Keely. I love that you guys are seeing success in some platforms. The Great Start depends on the platform. Madeleine said the same thing. Yes, but it's on loan refinement. I love that, Myla. I love that you guys are reiterating on the process. That's amazing. Struggle, struggle. Okay, the mix here. Awesome. We have worked with a lot of organizations and the ones that focus on social media tend to get great engagement and often engage donors outside of their... Sorry about that. Outside of their typical demographic. And the organizations that we're working with... Wow, one sack. There we go. That might be better. Nothing worse than when people are coughing on mute or on with their mics on. But the organizations we're working with tend to follow five different key elements and create a simple formula out of it that's allowing them to succeed. And so I wanted to guys what those five things are. The first one is a clear and catchy call to action. Super simple, but just getting sure that people know what you're asking them to do. The next is an easy to remember and an engaging image, attention grabbing captions, and then tagging and hash tagging to spread the word. And we thought, why don't we take a look at a social media post that did this really well? And I love this one post in particular from Jordan Bay Hospital Foundation. I know we've bought some Ontario friends in this call to you, so this is a little bit more local to you guys. But let's take a look at how they set up their post. So first, they have a clear call to action to register for the event. And it's great. It gives an easy and really direct next step for people to take. Their call to action is easy. Help raise more for Jordan Bay Hospital Foundation by registering for free, just like it's direct and donors know exactly what is being asked of them. When thinking about captions, I just encourage you to have a really direct and active tone so that your donors are clear on what to do and they actually go on to take action. Next, they have a link. Now on Instagram, you can put the link in your bio at the very top of your page or like these guys make your link really easy so you can copy and paste it into the description as well. Other social media platforms make it easy to click the link directly in your posts. These guys in this post, they just included the link in their description. Short and easy. People can take it copy and paste it into their web browser as well. The third thing they have is a really engaging photo. Now if Lane let this fundraiser is going to be a lot of fun, then the auctioneer set is a partner at Trellis and we absolutely love them. They've got a super captivating smile and they've got a bright pink jacket which again it's going to just draw the eye as you're done. They also added a great caption. They started a caption with the words record breaking to get attention. Use words that again bring that sense of urgency and encourage people and get them excited so that they can get their donors engaged when they're scrolling through social media. And they used another tactic which was partner tags. So they tagged the people that are involved in their event in this post as well. Again a really great way to make it easy for them to re-share what's going on. They've also used hashtags to encourage engagement and make their posts more relevant and searchable. And although you may not instantly see the return from things like hashtags or tagging your partners, the payoff in the long run is definitely there. Okay so maybe you're looking at that and you're like Rebecca that is great but I can't do that at my organization. I don't have somebody dedicated to social media or I don't have a graphic designer in my back pocket that can help me create graphics similar to what the Georgian Bay Hospital Foundation did. And if that is the case not to worry in our guide we actually recommend some of our free or our favorite tools to create Instagram worthy posts for free. And so if you download the guide you'll definitely find it in there and we can also make sure it's in the chat there too so you guys can quickly grab that. And again before we move on if you have any questions about social media I would love to hear them again throw them in the Q&A box and we will definitely answer them at the end of our live session too. So now you may be thinking what do we do next and we're going to jump into event partners and we're going to talk a lot about what that looks like. And if you're thinking right now I've never done an event before so I don't have an old email list to go back to or I don't have a big social media following I can rely on and I don't actually have the budget for ads but even if I did I probably wouldn't know what to do with it so what about me? If that sounds like you then your saving grace will be utilizing your event partners and network to help your marketing efforts reach a wider audience than you currently are. You may be wondering what do we mean by event partners and truly your event partners are every single person involved in the execution and planning of your event. And before you sit there and think I don't have any of those let's make a list of all of the event partners you do have. So first let's start with your sponsors maybe you have a live auction or maybe you've got a silent auction with 10 items. Now you've got 10 people right there you can reach out to all of your auction's item sponsors and ask them to start talking about your event maybe you've got a restaurant providing your food as a restaurant sponsor or you've got in-kind sponsors set up providing other elements maybe event decor or technology or venue and then you've also got your monetary sponsors too. Your organization sponsors those or our or supporters I should say they would be your volunteers your staff your board members and any key donors you have who is it for you in this group and how can we engage them on? Or maybe you've got community influencers or thought leaders in your community or industry how can you engage them and ask them to share what you're doing. Remember these are all people that already love your organization and will be happy to share your event you just have to make the ask. Next you've got your talent maybe you've got speakers or hosts or auctioneers or a band that's participating in the event. These individuals tend to have a following already so you can try and leverage that if possible and then the last category of event partners we'll talk about are your fundraising professionals that could be again your AV team your venue event planners fundraising consultants production companies keep in mind that especially people local to your organization will be especially willing to share your event just because it's in the same community as where they are where they are too. So now that we know who your event partners are you're going to want to make it really easy and set expectations really well in order to engage them. And so here are three simple ideas to get you thinking. The first tag your partners on social media and encourage them to reshare your posts. Like we talked about with those kind of five key steps to get social media posts it's a really great place to start and you can encourage them to share that with their network too. Next make it really easy for them to share maybe you create a google drive or a dropbox with a bunch of sample social media posts that they can use maybe some sample captions as well that they can take. And then of course add it to your contract when you've included it in your partner contract and from conversations starting on day one they know that they're being asked to participate with promotion it makes that entire conversation so much easier so set yourself up for success then and make it part of the agreement. Another idea that you're probably going to want to steal in screenshot now is to make inviting people a game and we actually mean that giving all of your event partners or your organization supporters a custom affiliate link and then setting a goal on how many invites you want them to send out so you could give them an email template and set expectations of they need to send out at least 20 invites a week or whatever the number is then each week give an update on how many emails were sent from each person and who the current winner is for inviting the most people when the event ends you can then give people a prize for the winner there especially with things like this right when we're using affiliate links having it all online just makes it so much easier for your donors that or your supporters and event partners to make it really easy to with your event partners as well as your own reach out email communication is also really key so consistent emails pushing to your fundraiser reaching reminding people to buy tickets giving them updates getting them excited about silent auction items or just excited about the event in general are really great ways to drive more engagement so I'd encourage you again to plan an entire strategy around this use email drip campaigns regular email is to people to keep people engaged both from your existing email list as well as your donors again in the guide we do talk about each sponsor type and some really great ways to engage your partners based on sponsor type including emails and how to do that unfortunately we just don't have the time to really get into it right now so again I'd encourage you to download the guide and then you can figure out different ways to engage all of your different sponsors and partners through there too and there's some other great ideas that you can now we're going to move into the last section which is all about data collection but again if you have any questions about about each event partners how to engage them email marketing all of that throw it in the chat and we will be answering those shortly here as well and as exciting as it is to focus on getting the word out it is also super important to track and learn which of your marketing efforts are working so that the next time you do a fundraiser you can drill down on what actually works for your organization even when we talked about social media at the beginning it was all across the board some of you guys are struggling with it some of you are seeing some success with certain platforms and some of you are succeeding with it across the board too as it's different for every organization so there's no one solution for everybody but figuring out what's working for your organization will set you apart and allow you to be more successful in the long run again like everything else there are tons of ways that we can approach this and so we wanted to start by giving you two of the most effective ways to get started and the first one would be custom checkout questions it's a really simple and easy way to do this and a custom checkout question can be used so that you can learn more about your donors so when your guests buy a ticket you can ask them how they heard about your event and we see people have the most success with this when they make this option acquired as they're buying tickets and give them a drop down with some different marketing efforts that you had to see what they're doing and how they came so how would we do this first you're going to set up your ticketing page and you're going to add in a custom question to each ticket option that says something along the lines of where did you hear about this fundraiser and then you're going to drop some drop down question options below a friend or family member social media an event partner social media an email newsletter whatever it is for you guys again if you want to get more specific you can you could maybe have another question afterwards that says something along the lines put in the name of the person that referred you or the company that referred you and then your donors are going to come along and they're going to buy tickets to support your event they'll see this question when they're paying for their tickets and if you've made it required then they are required to obviously give you that information as you're doing this don't be afraid to make changes as you go if you find right at the beginning you notice everybody's coming from social media use that information to your advantage and steer how you're going to keep promoting your event you don't have to wait till the end of your event through your fundraiser to learn from the data be collected and once you're making once you've collected all this information again you can make better decisions around your marketing at this event or your next one so you're focusing your time energy and potential money on what's actually working you guys all know you're working with small teams or you don't have that much time or energy or capacity to take on more things so let's just focus on what's working and really stick to those things and figure out how we can improve them instead another great tactic i wanted to briefly touch on was affiliate marketing links and i dropped the beginning of this when we were talking about using affiliate marketing links to get more promotion through your event partners so with your fundraising page url you can create specific links for different social media platforms websites event partners board members and anywhere else or anybody else you can think of that will be finding your page then after the event you can see which channels drove the most engagement for your ticket sales and again if this is all new to you don't worry we are going to go over some next steps in just a minute here now now that we've got more people engaging with our fundraiser we want to make sure we continue to grow our email list so first you're going to make sure that everybody that signs up for your event is also added to the email list in the future this will make it a lot easier the next time you go to promote an event if you already have donors to reach out to and there are two really easy ways to do this one you can add a note in your ticket letting people know that they will just be added to an email list or two you can add another custom question asking people if they wish to be added to your email list similar to the one that you guys would have seen as you sign up for this session and hopefully you all said yes to receiving some more details about trellis too again if you're worried about a double opt-in no need to all you have to do is after the event follow up with all your newly collected emails and ask and just confirm that they're okay to be on your list this is also a really great time to reach out and say thank you to thank donors for coming to the event or to reach out to new donors and again thank them find out why they chose to support and learn more about how people want to engage with your organization too but setting that email will achieve that double opt-in and help you create a growing email list that the next time you have an event you've got a full list that you're ready to go back to and keep engaging to get promotion out for the next fundraiser too okay let's review here are the four things we talked about but there is one more that we are going to get to and it is really important so let's spend some time there but first we talked about event marketing schedules we talked about click-worthy social media posts event partners and data collection but the last piece that I wanted to mention is actually really important and you guys might not take it as seriously but I actually think it might be the most important part of this all the first thing that you're going to need to look at is your software and what software you can use to support your event marketing at UI said right at the beginning there that technology is really powerful especially in the nonprofit space and one of the reasons why is because it can make or break an event that you have finding a software that can support your event marketing is really important and single-handedly has the ability to change your success the wrong software isn't going to have custom checkout fields which might only sound like one thing but when you ask your donors the right information you get more insight into why they're choosing to support you if you don't get that information you don't get those insights you won't be able to grow your charity in that way and if you don't have the options to customize social media posts then again you won't be able to create engaging posts they get your audience excited and drive more traffic to your event which again ultimately raises you more money for your cause and before today how many of you knew about affiliate marketing links and if you did how many of you were actually using them as I'm talking to more and more organizations I'm discovering that not that many people are using affiliate marketing links and first of all your software should be able to give that to you but then secondly you need to be using them using affiliate marketing links has the ability to help support your fundraising help you track better and really dial down into what's actually working for your organization if your software doesn't currently support that I would highly recommend switching and finding one that can give you affiliate marketing to and finally event analytic tools that you needed to learn more about your event after the event to find out what worked well and also see what did it and if you can't see event analytics or results or see page views after the event then you need to start looking into this as well those insights again are critical if you want to move your fundraising and your marketing strategy forward and raise more for your organization I know that was a lot of information at trellis here we do support all of the kind of pieces of your event marketing I've actually worked really closely with our product design team because I just know how important it is for your organization thank you so much for listening I know that was a lot of information I'm Rebecca my contact details are on the screen so please send me a message and let's chat about your event marketing and how we could support that too but I would love to open up the chat and let's see if we can answer some questions here we've had some great questions coming in as we were talking so let's kick it off as we're answering these though feel free to keep putting questions in the chat or the q&a we'll power through as many as we can yeah so just keep going we'd love to answer your questions before we go too far I have a note here from Justin Block saying he has to drop but but he did write down three things so Rebecca you're in the air I'm in the clear for Justin but if I'm not in the clear for anybody else please throw it in the chat thanks Justin I appreciate the vote of confidence that's awesome so glad to hear Rebecca's emails there too and just make sure you hold her accountable for that three notebook worthy points so we'll kick it off with the first question yeah so somebody tuned in say that most of the organizations have a week showing on social media most board members struggle with tech and they have a very wide demographic so it's very hard to know where for this person where would you suggest they begin to focus or how should they narrow down that audience to know where to focus yeah that is a great question and that is a question we often hear as we're talking about marketing first I would say if you are doing multiple platforms for social media I would say seeing which ones have worked the best for you in the past you might be thinking a lot of them have but there's probably been one kind of more clear winner for most people it tends to be Facebook where they get more engagement for people right now so I'd focus more of your time and energy there just to break down some of the different platforms Facebook we find people have everybody's own Facebook so you can get pretty specific around the different groups or individuals that you want to connect with and so most people find that's a great place to start and start slow right it could maybe be just two or three posts a week and slowly you can build that off as you get more engagement and you get more traction with different people and start to expand your now awesome yes we have this question it's on a little tune but someone was saying that their social media doesn't seem to be generating results obviously what would be those next steps it could be like partners as you talked about what would you suggest next steps if you're not really seeing those results from social media yeah so I would say first start with those kind of five key elements that we said of social media posts all of those again are in the guide you can grab links from the chat or the screen whatever works best for you but I would start there think about your social media posts focus on those five key elements the catchy title the clear call to action engaging images good captions and tags that posts are tags hashtags and take a look at your social posts see if you're doing all of those things and see how those posts are engaging compared to the other ones I would also think about different ways that you can actually engage people through social media a lot of people will say to us I'm not getting much engagement but there's actually not opportunities for people to engage so maybe asking a question and encouraging people to give a response back through your social media comments or whatever that is could be another really great way to get some of that engagement going and start conversations to get people more and more people seeing what you've got going on on this next question I love this next question because it's so important but what are some of the metrics that you would be looking for on the social media posts or in general in marketing your fundraising event definitely good question honestly Zoe had our team here she's the one that looks after our social media so she probably answers this better but so we jump in if I'm not doing it justice I would say to start one of the things you're going to want to look at is just your engagement how many likes comments and reshares you're getting on your posts those are three really easy numbers you can see at a glance posts that you're getting lots of likes on them or lots of comments on them oh Rebecca just heads up you've got that was strange maybe I should be good but if people are commenting back on your comments or on your posts things like that any engagement I would start looking at those four things what did I say comments shares and then also likes the next thing you're going to want to keep track of is how many new followers do you have month over month or over some time periods how much new followers to have what kind of traction are you getting on that part as well yeah and I'm just going to add to that a little bit like Rebecca was saying those custom checkout questions obviously that's not social media based but you will be able to tell which social media platforms are working the best for you if you add those social media questions especially if you specify them down to Twitter Facebook link in Instagram you'll be able to see which which of your purchasers are coming from those certain platforms and you can double down on what's working yeah great points Zoe you're right with those custom questions you can also use that information to your advantage to help with that so talking about yeah so the next we have a question on in like your time investment how much time and investment you should be putting into the marketing this is like a tricky question because it really is very dependent on your team and what is going on but you have any guidelines for kind of ratio to investment to return is realistic and like a event fundraiser how would you guide that that is a hard question because you're right Zoe there is it's so dependent on the organization and what's worked for you well in the past again thinking about the return on investment not just from dollars coming in but also the potential for the donors long-term impact creating awareness those are all factors that I would consider as well as I'm thinking on the investment I'm pouring into a specific I would say definitely start by just tracking it start by seeing and for your first one it's going to be a lot of just looking at it and figuring out where to start but tracking how much time are you actually spending on social media alone or just an email newsletters and with those affiliate links or those custom questions seeing how many people are actually coming from those places and figuring out how can you get more how can you get tighter on the things that are working for you and maybe spend more time or more energy there and how can you spend less time and energy on the things that aren't really working or didn't really provide as much value for you guys the clock out because I know I didn't really answer the question but honestly it is so dependent on organizations and in terms of like how much time you do spend also dependent on the size of your organization how much staff you have things like that too yeah awesome yeah so we've had a few people asking and I think this will be an easy one for you since you've talked to about a lot of kind of those crucial software elements what funding platforms like are able to do this any suggestions for people looking yeah definitely there are a lot of fundraising softwares out there so there's lots of different ones you can look for depending again on what you're doing for your fundraiser there's different platforms that do different things right you've got Givergy you've got 32 auctions you've got uh Greater Giving I'll wait for your options things like that ticketing big range of different platforms you can use a lot of people still use them Canada helps things like that as well and then raffles again just totally different ballgame there's raffle nexus raffle box ascend all those platforms as well I would be I have to obviously mention we're at Trillis here so we are a fundraising software we help organizations with their fundraising we're actually all in one platform too so we do to get donations auctions raffles the whole works and then we do also support all of those fundraising elements we talked or the marketing elements we talked about too you write your event analytics your affiliate marketing links social media posting and then also custom checkout fields so we do all of that too but like I said I work very closely with our product team I talk to a lot of charities and I hear the things that are working for them and so I can then go back to our developers and our designers and say these are the marketing pieces you guys need to add so that we can help charities raise more definitely all things we can do at Trillis you can book a demo with our team if you want to just learn what we do or we've been just check it out and see the options and then Eli just very kindly put in a link to our website as well and yeah we are bc based but we do have our second office is actually in Saskatchewan so I know there's somebody from Saskatoon so awesome and I'm just checking the time here looks like we have time for a couple more cut me off in any time you like if you need to we talked a lot about custom checkout questions and you covered some custom checkout question examples but is there any other ways that you would use custom checkout questions to your advantage in terms of data collection totally not data collection related but still very important as we are slowly moving back into the world of in-person events custom checkout questions are great for all of the like more logistic things too and chimney dietary restrictions do you want red wine or white wine with your event whatever it is questions like that the key ones that you're going to look for in terms of data collection will definitely be adding people to email newsletter lists so adding questions around that maybe you're wording that as do you want to learn more about our organization is there kind of other questions along those lines that you can also add ask to get to the same place in terms of other data collection things I think the other really big one is just finding out the source of where people came from how they found your page and details like about that too awesome going back to metrics of social media obviously sometimes you got a lot of followers and some are good followers some are like not as useful followers so give me like advice on how you figure out those quality followers or how you really like dial down on getting the followers that you you need and want for your events as opposed to just like random followers and aren't going to help you totally yeah you're always going to have I'm going to say Alex you threw that question in there Alex you're always going to have I think followers that aren't really of quality maybe they don't engage with your posts or maybe it was just your friend's friend that knew you work to their organization that just gave you just because they know it helps but they may not be really your demographic for your target audience and you're always going to have those people and I think that's okay honestly but instead it's really focusing on the people that are engaging with your posts and again really taking a look at what's working what kind of posts are they engaged with are they all posts that have a specific image or maybe video content whatever it is that's working dialing down on that and you'll start to attract more quality followers over time as well I hate to say it be that it is true social media is a slow game right you start slowly you start to build up that following and sometimes you'll see quick kind of pickups but it is really all about the maintenance of it and getting more and more followers over time awesome yeah keep going here yeah so you've mentioned a couple ways what are your favorite ways to encourage people to buy their tickets obviously early ticket sales help with everything they get you secured down and so and like what's your advice there yeah definitely first yeah the wide model example we love that one a hundred free bottles of wine from a sponsor like how fun everybody's gonna be all over that I think so doing things like that is great early bird tickets with maybe discounts or an organization I was chatting to just the other day are based in Alberta and they are doing a draw prize so the first a hundred people to buy tickets have a chance to win a gift basket with a prize that they're going to be announcing on the day of things like that always work we've seen organizations more in a virtual or hybrid capacity doing extra mystery boxes or stay at home gala experience packages that they can buy to watch with the event again typically they have the limited quantities available those could be meals maybe a wine and cheese box they could be just different elements to make that virtual gala experience stronger having those limited inventory of those another great way to attract people to buy tickets sooner and again also help increase the amount that you're well we had a great clarifying question here in the chat affiliate marketing could you just give like the overview of that and also while Rebecca's talking I'm just gonna throw her email in the chat here because we don't get your question she would love to think on it and get back to you so I'm just gonna do that while Rebecca goes into affiliate marketing yeah definitely so affiliate marketing would be I'm just gonna scroll back here so you guys can see it on the screen too at the same time affiliate marketing links are really custom links that you can create for your event so what that means is you're gonna have a link to your fundraiser let's just say it's going to be trawlers.org slash hybrid event 2022 I don't know what it is what you can do is you can create custom links that then allow people that all direct people to the exact same page but it has a little extra piece at the end makes that you are all slightly longer but we can direct we can have specific links so we can see where people are coming from and what engagement there what engagement that's driving so what we mean by that is maybe you bought a link that says trawlers.org slash hybrid virtual event 2022 slash Facebook that's your Facebook only link so every time you post on Facebook you're using that exact same link later on as you're selling tickets you can go back into your affiliate marketing tool and you can see exactly how many dollars have come through the ticket sold on Facebook same thing with Instagram or maybe for a specific event partner they put their own link that they can use and so creating those custom links to help you understand where people coming from and where are you driving the most traffic and more importantly how much of that traffic is actually driving dollars for your organization awesome yeah and how important is these needs affiliate links you went into some of the kind of results of that but like how much consideration would you put in to deciding whether you want to use this affiliate links or not yeah definitely i would definitely use them i think that on um our platform i haven't used too many other ones our platform it probably takes all of like 13 seconds to set up one affiliate link so honestly we're really not that long at all so i would definitely use them i would start using them and maybe you start super basic right you've got your email version you've got one that comes from your website directly and you've got social media doesn't matter what platform social media always has the same link starting as basic as that will help you make decisions and help you feel more confident moving forward around what's actually working for your organization so i would highly recommend it again if you have questions around how it works or want to see kind of what other organizations have done and how they've set it up let me know so we just threw my email in there too i'm gonna flip back there on the screen so you can copy it down too but we can chat further about how it works for you guys and your specific organizations as well going back to event partners which event partners would you go to first what where are you gonna get the best results from yeah i would definitely start with your entertainment event partners i can't remember if the top of my head what we just called that now your talent your speakers your bands your musicians all of those people they just generally have a following already and so starting with them first like getting them all set up and posting about what you guys are doing is a great place to start after that i would look at your sponsors again and they've now given a financial commitment to support your event to make the most of it easiest way to do that is to include in your contracts that they have to promote you guys makes also it makes it more successful that for them as well when they're getting more recognition and awareness for what they're doing so it starts there afterwards and then finally i'd end with your fundraising professionals your a b team people like that and then of course your donors and your organization supporters are slightly different throughout the whole campaign you can keep relying on them maybe at different points or when you've got new announcements they're good people to constantly keep reaching out to awesome i think i'll all finish there with the q and a thanks for having me everybody thank you so much we're back