 All right, so again, thanks everyone for joining us this afternoon. We are here to talk about a community thrice, exciting campaign that is officially launching. Today we're really going to focus primarily on the aspects of getting started with this year's campaign. My name is Bethany. I am the director of community engagement here at Mighty Cause, the platform partner for this campaign. And we're also joined today by Sue Madden, the director of the Gannett Foundation. We'll be hearing from her in just a few minutes to kick us off, give us a little bit of information about the community thrice campaign in general. So just a brief agenda for us to give us a feel for what we'll cover during today's training. We're going to start with some of the basics of the challenge, understanding what the challenge is all about. And then we're going to jump into and really spend the majority of our time focusing on how you get started on the platform, from submitting your application to building your page to accessing your donations report, all the key information that you'll need to know about using the platform to participate in the fundraising challenge. We will close out with some exciting information about the grants and the bonuses that are available as a part of this challenge, cover some key items that you need to know and then end, as I mentioned, with a Q&A session. So if you do have questions throughout the presentation, please feel free to type it into that GoToWebinar control panel on the side of your screen. And with that, I am going to turn it over to Sue from the Gannett Foundation, who is just going to give us a little bit of an overview about what the community thrice campaign is really all about. Okay. Well, welcome everyone. I'm so glad to share the program with you and happy that you've been able to join us this afternoon. And so what is a community thrice? So first I just thought I'd quickly mention that the Gannett Foundation is the philanthropic arm of Gannett Inc., which is the parent company that owns USA Today and about 260 daily publications across the country, in addition to a couple hundred other weekly and periodical publications. So today we are here to talk about the program that was launched three years ago, Community Thrives, as a way for the company to link its purpose with some implementation and sort of walk the talk of being a partner in the community and enabling our communities to connect, act, and to thrive. And the program also was started to enable small organizations and large organizations alike to compete for grants from the foundation. And also two years ago we launched the Fundraising, the crowdsourcing piece of the initiative, which has enabled us to leverage further our investment in the program and through which we've raised, or the organizations, excuse me, have raised about four million dollars contributing to the impact of the program. And the net net of the program is to enable you all to bring ideas that are very organic and reflective of your particular community needs and raise them up and leverage our platform across the country to give both visibility and to bring resources to you. So the Fundraising campaign will be starting on the 21st of September. We are right now in the application phase, which was launched on August 18th and will be completed on the 11th of September. So I don't know whether all of you have already submitted your applications or whether you're in process, but obviously we would like you to or need you to finish your application by the 11th if you have not completed it yet. And then we will be in touch with you and give you lots of additional tools on how to set up your particular campaign page, which will be the tool in which you use to fundraise. The initiative requires that the organizations participate in the Fundraising crowdfunding campaigns and raise a minimum. Generally what we do is we take the pool of applicants and take the their general look at the general operating budgets of those organizations and divide them sort of into two groups that a smaller budget organizations and larger budget organizations and the grants are organized in that fashion. And we'll get into that a little bit more in a little bit more detail. So we have several different pools of funds that the top fundraiser grants for each smaller organizations and large organizations so that you're not necessarily directly competing with large organizations if you're a small entity. And then included in that will be weekly challenges to incentivize you and your organization to and your donors to give throughout the campaign and not just at the very end. All organizations will keep all funds that you raise online and this year we are partnering with Mighty Cause for this particular piece of the program and they've been a fantastic partner and we're really excited what the future will hold for us together. So this year this number is actually well there's $2.1 million in grants available outside of the fundraising grants and the fundraising grants total $200,000 there's two general pools one is the top fundraising the three top fundraisers in each of the two tiers and then after they raise the minimums that are identified there that I mentioned earlier and the weekly bonus grants so those two pieces to get our total $200,000 for the fundraising piece of this and the grants will be announced in early December you will be able to and Beth and I will get into this a little bit you'll be able to see on the leaderboard how your organization is doing compared with other organizations so we'll have a sense each week who has won the bonus challenge grants and then obviously at the end of the fundraising period the top fundraiser grants. Great thank you Sue that was very helpful to get some insight from you. She will be here for the rest of the presentation so that we may hear from her from time to time and she will be here with questions at the end so if you do have more questions for her and the Gannett Foundation but for now I'm going to take it back over and really get into the remainder of what we wanted to cover today. I wanted to start with just a little bit of information about Mighty Cause as Sue mentioned we're the new platform partner for this year's campaign so for those of you that are not familiar with Mighty Cause we're a year-round fundraising platform we have a full software as a service suite for nonprofits everything from peer-to-peer fundraising tools CRM donation forms all kinds of great stuff for nonprofit partners and one of the biggest pieces of our business is these giving event campaigns that we've been hosting since 2007 in partnership with all different kinds of organizations like like the Gannett Foundation as well as nonprofits corporate partners etc and excuse me as you go throughout the challenge we will be the go-to contact for any technical support questions that you have we'll cover at the end all the different ways that you can reach out to our team for customer support and we'll also be the team guiding you through with tips and tricks throughout so be on the lookout for emails from the Mighty Cause team as well we'll be here to kind of guide you through the process so we're going to start just with a little bit of information about how a fundraising challenge like this works for those of you that might be new to this concept so really the goal is to bring people together to raise money really in its core element so you work collectively goal is of course to raise funds and awareness for your mission and your work but by being a part of a platform like this you get to be exposed to this larger network come together with other organizations that are also doing great things in their communities and as Sue mentioned one of the fun pieces of this is the ability to compete to earn these fundraising grants we'll talk more in detail about what those fundraising grants are and how you can win those later in the presentation but you'll also have the ability to become eligible for merit based grants as well you can engage sponsors community partners peer-to-peer fundraisers really it's about bringing people together to raise money for your cause and all kinds of great causes across the country and so we'll go through a lot of this today but when you boil it down to the most important things that you need to do to participate and be successful the very first step is to apply so as Sue mentioned the application process is open right now it's open through September 11th so if you haven't started the application go ahead and do that as soon as possible if you've started it but you've not finished it yet make sure that you don't forget to go back in and finish that process after you submit your application applications will be reviewed and you will get a response hopefully your approval and your response within two to three business days from when you submit your application so definitely no reason to delay if you know you want to participate go ahead and get that application started today once you are approved to participate you'll update your mighty cause profile page you'll start planning your fundraising campaign what will you be doing to promote on social media email etc might you invite any of your supporters to create peer-to-peer fundraisers on behalf of your organization all those pieces that go into making a fundraising campaign successful and then we jump in once the campaign actually launches to raising money so now that we have a brief overview a big picture about what you need to do to participate will dive into some of the specifics so once you log on to the platform you'll see that you have access to a dashboard for your nonprofits account on the platform so a quick overview of what you'll find on that dashboard at the top you'll see an overview screen this is where you can access a to-do list which helps you with some of the key items to complete on your profile page any announcements and key metrics of your organization next you'll have a fundraising tab this is where you can access and edit your profile page that will be the page that you use to participate in this campaign if you do have any peer-to-peer fundraisers start for your organization you can view and manage those in that section you also have the ability to add batching grants to your campaign customize your checkout flow lots of exciting additional tools there your reports section that's going to give you all the data that you need from your donations report to disbursement report to help reconcile any funds that you do receive from the campaign talk more about all of this later but just a quick overview of what you'll find where and the last item is the settings this is where you can update and review your organization's information legal address set up your bank account for electronic funds transfer add and remove administrators that have access to your page so again just a quick highlight of what you can do where and now actually jump into really the most important things that you'll want to do in each of those sections so customizing the profile is really one of the most important things that you'll do for this campaign this profile page is the main page that you will share with supporters so you have the option to customize the look and feel on the platform and you'll want to do that so that you can really tell a story to the donors and the visitors to the page but why they should make their donation why should they give to your organization why should they give to your organization during this challenge and of course this will be just one of the tools that you use to communicate with donors you'll be posting on social media you'll be sending emails but whatever that key messaging that you define for the campaign you'll have the opportunity to add that to your profile so that donors are seeing a consistent message from you wherever they're hearing about your participation in the campaign so the very first thing that you'll be able to do on this profile page is to edit your theme this will be right up at the top of the page so you'll first want to upload your logo it's going to be a one to one aspect ratio so this is going to be the same size that you would have uploaded on Facebook Twitter etc so most organizations should have a one to one aspect ratio logo ready to go you can click on the little pencil icon that'll be your cue throughout the platform that you have something that you can edit clicking on the pencil icon will allow you to upload that logo you'll also have the ability to upload a banner image that's that background image that you see behind the logo there we do have a gallery available so if you don't have a great image or you're working on getting a great image you can always borrow one from our gallery in the meantime that's really meant to be a background image more just context setting for donors visitors when they get to your page something that reminds them of the work that your organization does for the community you also have the ability to add a filter over top of that background image so you have one but it's a little too bright or the opposite you can add a filter and play around with the strength of that filter and all of that you can do live on page editing so you have the ability to play around with the tools and see how it's looking as you're building it so that you have a really easy time designing a good looking page without having to be a graphic designer and the final theme editing option that you have is the ability to set a theme color for your page so you can select one of the colors from your logo perhaps enter the hex code select it and then throughout your page on your donate button other places throughout this profile page that theme color will be carried through so next kind of moving down the page if you will you'll have the ability to add a goal to your page and choose what metrics you'd like to display so you have the option of displaying the dollars that you've raised during the campaign as well as the number of unique donors that have given to your campaign you can display both or neither on your page it's up to you you also have the ability to add a fundraising goal and a progress bar so if your organization is hoping to raise $10,000 in this campaign for example you can add that progress bar to your page and as donations are being made throughout the challenge that progress bar will be updated alerting both you and donors and visitors to the page of your progress towards your campaign goal and finally you do have some flexibility in those metrics when you'd like your metrics to start counting from so for example if you've used Mighty Clause in the past you've participated in another challenge or event you might have metrics already showing at the top of your page but you'll want to set the start date for these metrics to be September 21st at 12 p.m. Eastern when this challenge starts now all the leaderboards challenge totals and everything like that will all be calculated from this start date no matter what you select here but this is really just your opportunity to make sure that your own profile page is accurately showing only the totals that you're raising as part of the challenge next moving down the page is really your option to tell your story it's kind of the meat of the page you have an inline editor so that you have the ability to tell a dynamic story it's not just a block of text you can add formatting you can add headers lists bullet points bold italic you can add hyperlinks you can add images videos so we really encourage you to build a nice looking story here it's always hard to capture and keep donors attention for very long so using some formatting tools can really help to make sure that your key message really jumps off the page at the donor so that is some of the key items on the front donor facing page that donors will see and now we're going to come go through some of the administrative tools that you all have access to on the back end to customize the experience and access all of your data so the first is the checkout flow so on the mighty cause platform the checkout flow has been built and is constantly monitored for conversion optimization across all devices of course to make sure that we've really designed a simple intuitive checkout flow so things like browser auto fill for example are all already designed and built into the checkout flow but within that we have some additional tools that allow you to customize that experience so first you have the ability to choose what donor data you'd like to collect beyond name and email which will always be collected from donors for example you can choose whether or not you need to collect the physical mailing address from donors phone number company name etc so you have the ability to decide do you want to streamline the process for donors or are some of these additional pieces of information important to you and your stewardship process you also have the ability to add four custom donation suggestions to your page so when somebody comes to your organization's page and clicks to donate they will see four suggested donation levels for example $50 buys food for a family of four $100 buys food for a family of four for three weeks whatever it might be of course every organization is going to have a little bit of a different spin on this but it's a nice way to really tie a donation amount to something more tangible for the donors reinforce the impact that they will have with their donation and also continue to tell that story that you started in your email campaign on your profile page about what your organization really does for the community and finally you'll have the option to preview the donation experience so I always recommend before a challenge like this starts preview the experience here in your checkout flow tools so that you know exactly what it's going to look like for donors when they come to your page and make their donation you also have the ability to customize the experience after they press submit and complete their donation so you'll have two key options the first is a thank you page that donors will see on screen right after they complete their gift with prompts to share on social media you have the ability to add additional information there if you want to add a thank you video or just a personal note from your executive director for example you have flexibility also an inline editor there to share your thank you messaging and beside from the thank you page that's on the screen you also have the ability to add custom text to the automated thank you receipt that is sent to donors on completion of their donation so the tax receipt is handled by the platform that will be sent automatically you can add customized text that gets added into that so that as soon as they complete their donation what they see on the screen the email they receive all tie back to your organization and your campaign for a community thrives so just like I encourage organizations to preview the donation experience I also encourage you to preview the post donation experience so you can send yourself a sample receipt preview that thank you page so that you know exactly what donors will see during the process so one of the really great tools that organizations have access to to build out your fundraising campaign make it exciting is the ability to add matching grant to your page so part of the reason that a campaign like a community thrives is so exciting is the extra urgency and opportunity that comes with all those fundraising grants that are being given away so this is really an opportunity for you at your own organizations level to kind of build in additional incentives so if you have a local corporate partner local business maybe your board of directors wants to come together and provide a match for your organization's participation in the challenge you have the ability to add that matching grant to your campaign now the match doesn't have to be paid online through the platform it certainly can if that's the preference if it's not paid through the platform let's say you get a $5,000 matching grant and the donor wants to just send you a check after the campaign is over that's still great and you have the opportunity to leverage that for during the challenge but of course that $5,000 match won't count as part of the challenge if your donor does decide they want to make their gift through the platform then their matching gift will be a part of your challenge totals so just something to keep in mind there there's lots of flexibility in terms of how you add this match to your page you can do a dollar for dollar match you can do a one to one match you can do a double match you can do a triple match you can have a match that's only available if you get a certain number of donations made to your campaign so depending on your goals and the goals of your matching donor you have some flexibility in terms of how you present it and when adding a match you'll add an additional display on your profile page that shows donors counting down during the challenge how much time is left for your matching grant and how many dollars are left in the match that you have available so it's a nice way to just add additional urgency and excitement to your own campaign I mentioned previously that you'll have a reports tab on your dashboard and that's really where you're going to access all of your donation data during the campaign so first thing is that all administrators for your organization will receive an email notification when a donation is made throughout the challenge so for anyone that does have access you'll get access to your page by filling out that application form but anyone that has access will receive email notifications by default if you don't want to receive these notifications if for example you're getting way too much way too many donations and it's overwhelming your inbox that's a great problem to have you're welcome to come into your profile settings and turn off those donation notifications and anytime during the campaign you can log in and access your donor data in real time so you'll see all the most up-to-date donations in your donations report on screen you'll see an overview with some of the key details the donor name amount email address etc and then you can download a full CSV to get all the detail about their gift for example if you asked for billing address or phone number etc all that will be available in the CSV report that you can download you'll also have the ability to add offline donations to your page total so let's say you do receive a check donation or cash donation and you want to reflect that in the totals on your page you're welcome to do that and there is the ability to add an offline donation through these reports as well as I mentioned similar with a matching grant that's not paid through the platform those won't count for challenges or your fundraising minimum but it is a nice way to make sure the total on your own page is representative if you do have additional funds coming in from other sources and the final thing to note here is that donations can be made on your page before and after the challenge you do have access to this profile page to use it when you'd like but only donations that are made in the challenge window will reinforce the challenge window dates for you a couple more times on today's webinar but really only donations made in that challenge window will count as a part of the challenge of course any donations that you receive on your profile page at any time will always be dispersed to your organization and to share a little bit more about how that disbursement process works our preferred method is to disperse funds to nonprofits by a direct deposit on a twice a month schedule so any donations that are made to your organization on the platform between the first and the 15th of the month will be sent via EFT on the 25th of that same month any donations made from the 16th of the month to the end will all be sent on the 10th of the following month so as I mentioned that's our preferred disbursement method and we encourage organizations to sign up for that it's free and you'll get your funds faster and in the current times when maybe you're not at your office you're working remotely whatever it might be it just ensures that there's no delays in your organization receiving your funds because they're deposited directly into your account if for some reason you can't sign up for EFT or you don't want to we will batch any donations for the month of September for example and send them in a check around October 10th so we will do disbursements once a month if you don't elect to sign up for EFT there is a $5 check be associated with this but you'll still receive all of your funds we'll send that to the address that's on file with the IRS and no matter how you're receiving disbursements you will have access to detailed disbursement reports on the platform so that if you do receive a direct deposit of $5,648 for example you can go into the disbursement report and see exactly what is made up of that amount any what donations were included any fees etc so all that information will be easily reconcilable by your finance or accounting team using the disbursement report so the final item down the dashboard is the settings page and I mentioned it earlier but this is really where you can kind of manage your organization's presence on the platform do things like adding and removing administrators so administrators are anyone that can access your organization's profile page your organization data so if you have other people on your team that need access to the platform the data etc you can go into your settings and invite anybody else on your team that needs to have access you can have up to 10 administrators per organization this is also where you can do things like updating your legal address or the legal name of your organization we import regularly from the IRS database so we should have the most up-to-date file but if you have recently changed any of that information you can submit documentation to get that information changed on the platform this is also where you can sign up for that electronic funds transfer disbursement that we were just talking about quick and easy setup process there you'll enter your account number and your routing number and many organizations are approved with just that information though some may need to provide a voided check or a letter from the bank to finalize and you also have the ability here to customize your social share experience and the end of the URL for your fundraising page so we've covered a lot of the platform basics that I wanted to go through and now we're going to take some time to talk about some of the exciting grants and bonuses that will be available during the challenge so the first is the top fundraiser grants and these are going to be available through the entire length of the challenge so right from the start Monday September 1st all the way through the end of October 16th at noon the challenge starts and ends at noon in the middle of the day so you'll want to go ahead and set your calendars right now for those really important times and the top funders or grants the competition for those will go throughout the length of the challenge and the top three organizations that raise the most dollars during the challenge will win these prizes here and earlier there are two tiers of organizations small and large tier one, tier two and so there will be three winners picked, three recipients picked from both of those tiers so the first prize will be $25,000, second prize will be $15,000 and third prize will be $10,000 so there will be as Sue mentioned leader boards live on the page during the length of the challenge so you'll be able to see how you're doing in comparison to other organizations so you can keep an eye on your progress and use your project or progress or you're standing on the leader board to encourage your donors to continue giving and supporting your organization though all winners will be reviewed after the challenge just to be sure that the rules etc are followed correctly one of the key things to keep in mind for the top fundraiser grants is that organizations must have a minimum of 10 unique donors to their campaign to be eligible so aside from the overall top fundraiser grants throughout the length they'll also be weekly bonus challenges going on during the campaign to help keep it exciting throughout but also give opportunities to earn prize grants so the first bonus challenge will start right at the kickoff of the challenge and go through Monday September 28th at 1159.59 a.m. and in both of the participating tiers there will be two organizations that receive the most soul source donations through their page will receive a $1000 prize grant we'll talk a little bit more about soul source donation what that means in a moment and then the second bonus challenge starting right when that first bonus challenge ends Monday September 28th and going through Monday October 5th in this bonus challenge there will be eight total charities that are recipients for in each tier and this will be organizations that raise the most donations on their page will receive $3000 each bonus challenge three starting October 5th ending October 12th again this is going to be based on soul source donations individual donors there'll be six total charities three in each tier that receive $4000 each and then the final bonus challenge is going to start Monday October 12th and end Friday October 16th so this one is a little bit less than a full week but it'll go the last full business week of the challenge again eight charities four in each tier that have the most that raise the most donations will receive $4000 and all of this challenge information is published on the website so you can go and refer back to it we will be sharing detail in emails so you have plenty of opportunity to reference what challenges are happening when so that you know how to adjust your strategy accordingly but a few details about the rules to keep in mind with this overall challenge there is a detailed official rules document available on the website and I encourage everyone to take a look and read through that there's lots of great information about the how to participate how to win what challenges are available and any rules that you need to keep in mind as Sue already mentioned there will be recipients in both tier one and tier two the tiers will be finalized based on overall participation in the challenge looking at the size of all the organizations that have applied to participate so you will be notified by email before the challenge begin based on your organization size whether you fall into tier one or tier two so keep an eye out for that email that will be coming once the application process is closed so soul source donations as I mentioned earlier this is going to be donations to your campaign from a unique individual so for those weeks that the challenge is about soul source donations if you have a donor that makes 10 donations to your organization during that week they will only count as one soul source donation because they're the same individual that has given multiple times and another really important rule to keep in mind proxy donations so your organization making donations on your own credit card are not allowed of course the goal of this challenge is to encourage nonprofits to raise funds activate their community will also leverage some of the really exciting grants that are available from the Gannett Foundation and as a part of this community thrice challenge so keep the spirit of that challenge in mind when you're planning how to participate how you are going to plan your strategy to take advantage of and hopefully earn these grants so a few reminders and announcements on some of the key things to know as a part of this campaign so the first is the challenge website has tons of really great information available for you so the toolkit that's available on this challenge website is going to have a recording of today's webinar as well as the registration link for next week's webinar in which we will dig a little bit deeper into strategy for the campaign you'll also have the ability on this toolkit to access tips FAQs how to's for the platform we have templates for email and social media logos etc to make it even easier to build your campaign successfully remember we have mentioned this before but it bears repeating because it's really critical the challenge the fundraising challenge begins Monday September 21st 12 p.m. noon eastern time and it ends Friday October 16th 12 p.m. noon eastern time I just mentioned a minute ago but our next webinar is going to be next Wednesday September 9th 1 p.m. eastern I just mentioned dig a little bit deeper into strategy on what your organization can do to really make the most of this campaign digging a little bit deeper into some price strategy peer-to-peer fundraising matching grants etc and again you can sign up on the nonprofit toolkit on the website and throughout the challenge from now through the end the team here at Mighty Cause is here to help you with support so we have help center support.mightycause.com there's tons of articles and tools available here we have video walkthroughs we have articles that walk through step by step of how you can do specific things on your page so make sure you check that out support.mightycause.com if you're not able to find what you're looking for you can get some one-on-one help from our team you can email support.mightycause.com or you can call us at 202-800-1618 our team is available Monday to Friday 9 to 5 p.m. eastern time and we are happy to help and so with that I am going to take a look and see if we've had any questions come in throughout that so if you have any questions you are welcome to post them in now. Bethany can I just mention a couple of things? Of course. Hi everyone this is Sue Madden with the foundation once again and I just wanted to say thank you to Bethany that thank you for providing us with so much information on the fundraising aspects of a community thrives on the programmatic side so we don't highlight here the other grant opportunities that are available through the program but by participating in the crowdfunding piece of the program should you meet your minimum fundraising total then you will be considered for both the national project grants and if you operate or have operations or reside in a market you will also be considered for a local a general operating grant which is not necessarily based on the project it is based on your mission and purpose so with the national project grants I did want to mention that it is helpful if you highlight what your project is on your campaign page that Bethany was talking about where you just kind of talking about your mission and your purpose and sort of making the sale pitch about your organization or initiative so it is helpful for us internally if you highlight your project as well as your mission there and some organizations are not interested in competing for a national project grant which is also fine in which case you would obviously be highlighting in that area your mission and purpose to be looked at by our regional committees who will decide the local operating grants and I think that that in general was on the programmatic side I wanted to touch on okay great thanks and that strategy is helpful even just from a fundraising perspective you mentioned you have your story section on your profile where you can talk about your organization but donors love specifics donors love to know what their funds are really going to go to support so sharing information about your project on the page while it sounds like it's a great tool for the team at Gannett it's also helpful for donors in really getting good solid understanding about what their money is going to be used for and how they will make an impact so definitely a good plan whether you're going for those national grants or not alright so we do have quite a few questions here I'm going to go through some of the questions and if we do run out of time to get through all of the questions we will follow up on email after so go ahead and post any questions if you have them and if we don't have a chance to get to your question we will follow up afterwards to get you your answer first question is there a fee to join Mighty Cause the answer is no Mighty Cause is available as a year round platform of course as a part of this challenge as well there's no fee to join there is a subscription plan that we have available if nonprofits are interested that's $99 a month but you don't need to sign up for that plan to participate and be a part of this challenge okay great next question if you meet the requirements for either tier one or tier two does that automatically guarantee a grant or will it only make you eligible to apply also we'll all proceeds go to the organization so I'll answer first the second half of this question and then Sue I think you can answer the first half any amount of money that you raise on the platform as a part of the fundraising challenge will go to your organization whether you meet your minimum or not so any funds that you raise from donors on the platform will automatically always be going to your organization sorry go ahead I was just going to restate the other half of the question was if you meet the requirement does that guarantee a grant or only make you eligible to apply right there is no guarantee of a grant by meeting the minimum it is a threshold entry point great thank you how many applicants will be selected to participate what criteria used to select applicants for participation so I'll answer and then Sue you can chime in with anything I don't miss so applicants are eligible to participate as long as they are a 501c3 in good standing with the IRS and specifically 509c3 organizations are not eligible to participate but aside from that all interested organizations that meet those criteria are eligible to participate in the fundraising challenge and encouraged to apply and be approved and then of course you know as as Sue mentioned the grant making part of this is kind of the second layer but all organizations that meet those basic criteria are eligible to apply to participate and you'll be approved as long as you are a 501c3 organization meeting those criteria and then for the national project grants and for the local operating grants we do have a scorecard available for you to view on in the rules document if you scroll down I believe that it is under how grants are decided and so that will provide you some detailed information on that in addition we will also be looking at organizations that have that service historically disadvantaged populations great thank you the next question is where is the link to where we put our profile do we need to finish the application before we can do a profile page so technically an organization does have access to a profile on the mighty cause platform before you complete your application but in terms of the flow of participation in this challenge it definitely makes sense to finish the application first so that you can be approved to officially participate and then build out your profile page the link to your profile will be found in your dashboard so when you log back into the platform in the upper right corner of the platform you'll see little user profile icon clicking on that you'll see a drop down menu that allows you to access your organization's dashboard that dashboard will have a number of items as we went through under fundraising you'll be able to access your organization profile the URL that's at the top of that page when you're on your profile editing is the link that you'll share so it'll be something like a community thrives.mightycause.com slash organization slash the food bank for example you have the ability to customize the end of that URL as I mentioned in your settings and you can grab it from the top of the page while you're on the profile making any edits next question is about support contacting for technical support you can contact support.mightycause.com so again you'll first want to make sure that you complete the application profile as a part of the application you'll be granted access to your nonprofits dashboard on the platform if you haven't received your approval yet then you may not have access to your organization's dashboard once you've been approved the person that registered or completed the application process should have access to that dashboard but you can always contact support.mightycause.com if you're having trouble finding where to grab where to go to access your dashboard next question are reports generated in excel for uploading to other CRM apps yes all of your donations report disbursements report etc you can download them all as a CSV and then you can easily manipulate them if you need to move the columns around address the data a bit so that you can upload into your CRM system next question do donors have the option to pay the fees for their online donation yes they do have the ability to cover the fees associated with their gift will be a little checkbox that they see when making their donation and that will allow them to cover the fees and then 100% of their gift will come to your organization to get into a little bit more of the fees that are charged on online donations there's a 2% platform fee and then a 2.9% plus 30 cent credit card fee and again donors do have the option to cover that next question is it possible to email this presentation to participants yes all of participants that are approved will will receive an email tomorrow with a link to access the presentation moving through what are the budget sizes for tier one and tier two this will be announced prior to the campaign at this point it's not 100% certain what that will be because the goal is to try to split it as evenly as possible so we need to wait until we have the full pool of applicants and then and then the decision will be made I'll just pop in here that the past two years yeah it's been greater than and less than $500,000 because we have so many organizations that applied who are on the small side great thank you and the next question is also for you as well if you happen to have this information how many applicants were there in each tier last year that is a very good question I can't remember off the top of my head but because I as I mentioned previously we divided right in almost in half so I'm going to go with approximately 750 on each side of that great thank you next question is is there a minimum or maximum amount per donor there is a minimum donation on the platform the minimum is $5 per donation but there is no maximum amount per donor again reading the rules will be helpful in terms of understanding any details in terms of being eligible for those grants and any considerations there but there's no maximum donation amount that a donor can make on the platform okay if we have a database that records donations how are those donations imported if we're able to we're already able to process online donations what's the benefit of using this platform so that's a great question a really organizations need to use this platform for the crowdfunding aspect of this challenge in order to be eligible for the overall ability to earn grants that's you know part of the challenge is fundraising through this platform so that all the donations and everything can be tracked together and there can be a leaderboard to show how the different participating organizations so even if you do have a donation page on your website for example you do need to use this platform to be eligible to participate in this in this challenge next question the nonprofit that I work for is a national one with regional areas of focus do nationally based nonprofits typically participate in the challenge is this a deterrent at all in receiving a project grant so I'm going to share that with you Sue. I don't think it's a deterrent now because we had a couple winners last year and if you want to see who the winners were last year you can go to act.usaToday.com that were regional entities under the working under the umbrella of a larger national organization great next question very important one to be protected and not used for other purposes yes absolutely there is a privacy policy available on the platform that you can access for further information but your donor data is yours might cause won't solicit those donors will not sell those that donor information so you can have confidence in the protection of your donor data on can you provide more information about the merit based grants that we become eligible for if we met the fundraising goal I'm not sure if this question was asked before you shared a little bit more information at the end of the training Sue on this but I don't know if you feel there's anything else to add besides what you've already shared I think I would reference the rules again where it outlines in pretty decent detail how what those grants are we're looking for as well as how they will be scored the national project grants are will be decided at the corporate level with the the board of the foundation and myself and then the local operating grants will be determined by local marketplace leaders great thank you and I see a couple of questions about share a little bit more about what is considered a community building project or what kinds of applications are considered community building shorts obviously a very broad category and I should have had my definition right in front of me which I do not but generally community building projects from our perspective our initiatives that contribute to and creating a sense of community where there has been none or less than what is desirable we're running out of time here and we do have a decent amount more questions so I'll answer just one or two more here and then again we will follow up with everybody who has answered or who has asked questions are videos desired for the website platform yes videos are always a great way to tell a story they're not a requirement but it's always a great way to tell a story and you do have the ability to upload a video right onto your page next question does the campaign allow for peer to peer fundraising yes this is definitely encouraged it's a great way to raise more money as a part of the challenge and so we'll talk more at the next webinar on what you can do with peer to peer fundraising some strategies to keep in mind and how to take advantage of it on the platform so definitely tune into that next webinar but we would certainly encourage you to take advantage of peer to peer fundraising as a part of your campaign and with that we are I'm going to go ahead and cut us off because we're right here at an hour and we do have lots of questions left but we will make sure to follow up with everyone for all those questions that are about having access to the presentation and the recording yes it will be available on the nonprofit toolkit on the community thrives website community thrives dot mighty cause dot com and there will be an email sent tomorrow for everyone that has registered for the webinar and is approved to participate in the challenge so thanks again everyone for your time we will follow up and answer the remainder of your questions and we look forward to seeing you all next week at our next webinar thanks so much and thanks Stu for joining us thanks Bethany