 Welcome to Online Fundraising Strategies for Giving Day Campaigns. My name is Becky Wiegand and I'm the Webinar Program Manager here at TechSoup Global. I've been with the organization for nearly 7 years and prior to that spent a decade working at small nonprofits in Washington, D.C. and Oakland, California. I was regularly the accidental techie having to decide on technology for my organizations and ran online social media, communications campaigns, fundraising, kind of all of the above wearing many hats in small organizations. So I'm happy to be your host for today's event and for all of TechSoup's webinars. Also joining us today is Lori Finch, the Vice President of Community Giving at Kimbia. And Kimbia manages the Give Local America event that's coming up on May 5th. And she helps coordinate the strategy behind that largest single-day online crowdfunding event in history that last year in 2014 raised $53 million on one day. So prior to Kimbia, Lori spent 6 years at the San Diego Foundation where she served as Director of Nonprofit Programs developing education resources and tools for more than 250 local nonprofits. We're glad to have her joining us today. Also on the line is Josh Hirsch and he is the Director of Development and Chief Gratitude Officer at the Weiss School in Florida. He also has a great deal of experience with online fundraising. He has a certificate in Strategic Fundraising and Philanthropy from Bay Path College and is a graduate of Nonprofits First Sustainability and Social Enterprise Institute. He began his career working with Educational Philanthropy in 2008 working at the Palm Beach School for Autism as their Director of Development and Marketing. He is also a member of the Association of Fundraising Professionals, Palm Beach County Chapter where he serves as the Communications Chair. And he most recently served as the Marketing Chair for Planet Philanthropy 2014, the Statewide Conference for AFP Florida Chapters. So we are here where I have pointed to us on the map. We as in TechSoup Global are in San Francisco headquarters right now. That would be myself and Allie. I've pointed to where Lori is in Washington, D.C. and where Josh is in Palm Beach, Florida. Go ahead and chat into us in the window and let us know where you are joining from today. At the moment we have a little more than 200 people on the line. That number is surely to rise as we get a few more minutes into this event. We have people chiming in from Texas, Wisconsin, Arizona, Michigan, Indiana, South Carolina, Virginia, Minnesota, Tennessee, California, New York, all over the country. So we are really glad to have you all joining us. A look at today's agenda, we will do an introduction to TechSoup quickly for those of you who aren't familiar with our work. We will pull you on what your experience is with Giving Days. And then we will launch into the conversation about strategies of successful campaigns. Josh will then talk a little bit about the 2014 strategies that worked for his organization at the Weiss School He will talk about some social media tools that helped him logistically roll out those strategies in action. And then he will talk about the 2015 strategy planning that he is working toward for this May 5th event. And these can be applied to all kinds of Giving Days, not just give local America. But we wanted to do this in conjunction with them because these are strategies that you can launch during any Giving Day whether it is a local community Giving Day, one that a foundation or a community foundation in your area is running, one that might be tied to a cause nationally that you are affiliated with, or something that you just come up with on your own. So we want to make sure that you've got some strategies to move forward with these kinds of events. So we will talk a little bit about Give Local America 2015 for those of you who may still want to participate and get your organization registered. And then I will talk a little bit about online fundraising tools that are available for donations through TechSoup and some additional resources and how-to's that you can refer to while planning your own campaigns. We will have time for Q&A at the end, but feel free to ask your questions throughout the webinar so that if we have time we will try and answer them on the back end or throughout. So TechSoup is a global network of 63 partner NGOs serving nonprofit and social benefit organizations in now 121 countries around the world. You can check out more about our work in our 2014 year in review. I am proud to have been a TechSoup user long before I was a TechSoup staff person at those three small organizations. I regularly got donated technology and accessed the resources like NetSquared Networks and Community Events in our forums. So I hope you'll check those out as well. I was active in the Washington DC NetSquared before I joined TechSoup. So if you are in any of the dots that you see on this map, many of them are hidden by these little boxes, definitely check out where there are ways for you to connect. We have delivered nearly $5 billion worth of technology products and grants to the NGO and social good sector around the world. So I am proud to have been part of that in my small way. A lot of our work is done through our product donation programs, but also through those community events, educational resources, and events like this today. So you can check out more at TechSoup.org. On to the topic at hand. We are here to talk about online fundraising strategies. And so to start that off, I'd love to have you, our participants, take a moment to click on the response to this question. Have you participated in a Giving Day event in the past 12 months? And I put some examples there. Some of you may have participated directly for your organization's benefit maybe in a campaign that you helped run. Maybe you participated as a donor or supporter for somebody else's organization or for a cause that you care about. Maybe you did the Ice Bucket Challenge. Maybe you participated in Giving Tuesday and donated a few bucks to some charities that you care about or some causes that you support. And feel free to chat in to let us know if there were specific events that you did help participate in. I see somebody writing in Give Out Day for LGBTQ organizations. Somebody participated as a donor and for a different organization. I'm sorry I didn't set that up to have more than one answer, but that's great that you let me know. We also have a comment saying, train the dog, save a warrior program. Great. We're glad to have you there. Somebody else is commenting that they participated in Big Payback. We know you can't see all of the chat questions and comments coming in. But if there's anything that our participants share that we think would be useful for the rest of you to know, we'll be sure to share that back out as well. So looking at the results so far, we have around 240 in the room at the moment participating today. And about half of you participated in some type of Giving Day event in the past 12 months. So that's terrific. And about 43% have not. So really split down the middle here. But hopefully all of you will come away today with some useful information whether it's a new tool that you didn't know about, or a strategy, or just hearing the experience of somebody else who's done it and the way that it worked for them that maybe you can employ this year for your campaigns. So with that, I'd love to go ahead and welcome Lori Finch from Kimbia to the Line to tell us a little bit about why online fundraising campaigns work and how you can get involved and make them work for your own benefit. Thanks so much for joining us today, Lori. Thank you, Becky. And thank you all for taking time out of your day today to learn a little bit more about online fundraising campaigns and strategies that will help make them a great part of your own fund development plans throughout the year. I'm going to just give a little bit of an overview about why they work as well as some strategies for successful campaigns. And then Josh, I'm really thrilled that he's joining us from Palm Beach to talk about his own experience and share. So why do online fundraising campaigns work? Well, there's nothing like creating a sense of urgency. So online fundraising campaigns by design tend to be short and really creates in that of itself creates an urgency for people to give. So we were a popular campaign where you may be building up to for three to five years. These are ones that you can create a moment or a time to give. And that urgency really inspires people to give. They work because they leverage social and peer-to-peer fundraising model. You all probably saw, if you're on Facebook or read the news, the Ice Bucket Challenge last year. So that element of peer-to-peer and asking or challenging individuals to give is one of the most effective ways to use online fundraising campaigns. And they also appeal to a wide variety of audiences. We see donors giving from all age groups, from all sizes of gifts. You can ask for a $10 gift to a $10,000 or even more. We've seen gifts as large as $100,000 come through on some of these campaigns. So they really, really appeal to a wide variety of ages and donor levels. So some strategies to think about and to think about these in context to what you'll hear Josh talk about next is that what we see for organizations who have the most effective campaigns is really setting goals. So set public goals and announce them out there. So if you have a goal of 100 new donors to your organization, 100 donors, $100 or $10,000, be sure to use that as a way to help excite and engage people. Most online tools allow you to track in real time your success. So you'll be able to update your audience throughout the campaign. But this is an opportunity to make your network knowledgeable and excited so to engage them. Think about using not just your donors or your board, but their network. So one that we've seen where there's been incredible successes where people have leveraged the networks of their networks and really gotten them excited about their cause. That's why we see 20 to 60% in some cases of individuals who participate in the event as first-time donors to those organizations. Online fundraising campaigns really help engage new donors and a lot of new donors will give their first gift to your organization online. Another reason they're successful is that it offers you the opportunity to be creative. So creative messaging and compelling digital assets can really help you make your campaign fun, exciting, and different from maybe a Gala or other event that you have. There's lots of free resources out there to help. There's enough of resources on the GiveLocalAmerica.org website. And Josh is going to tell you a little bit about how, about some as well. And he's got resources available for you. I think I'm going to turn it over to Josh now, and he can share a little bit more about his organization and their success in the campaign this past year. Thanks, Lori. And I am going to share, as she mentioned, some tips and tools and some advice that we used last year for the Great Give and how we've been moving this year forward with the Great Give. I'll give you a little background about the Y School. We're a small private independent school from Palm Beach Gardens for specifically for gifted students. We have about 253 students from pre-K through 8th grade. And what's unique is that even though we've been around since 1989, the school went from a for-profit to a non-profit model back in 2010. So the notion of charitable giving is still very much new to our families and we're truly educating them about the culture of philanthropy that we're trying to build here at this school. So when we had the opportunity to participate in the Great Give last year, I wasn't too sure really what would happen. It was at the beginning of May, it was the few weeks before school was ending. So people have started to check out, students have started to check out. So were we going to be successful? So I did a very small 10-day communications plan, mainly focusing on email communications through our weekly heads-up email newsletter to our families. We did some posts on Facebook. We did some custom posts on Twitter. Instagram was pretty popular last year, creating memes and the like, but we did no direct mail and we had no committee. It was basically myself who said, all right, we're going to go forward and we're going to do this and we're going to see how successful we can be. So what we wanted to do, as Lori mentioned, is it's a chance to be creative. And you have a little bit of creative license when it comes to your materials that you use. So for me it was important to be able to create visual images that would really sum up what our school is in a very brief image. So I've got a couple of examples here today that you can see. The key thing that I had running across through all my images was the branding. I wanted to make sure that you looked at an image, you knew that A, it was for the Y school. B, we were supporting gifted education. C, that it had the Great Give logo on there and then it also included the Great Give hashtag. Now these images I was posting on Facebook. I was posting them on Twitter, on Instagram, all leading up to the day itself. And I have a couple other examples. So here you can see an early childhood classroom very engaging with the technology. That's a smart board. All of our classrooms have smart boards. We're a very forward-thinking school when it comes to technology. So I wanted to be sure we highlighted that in this image. Here are some middle school students that are doing a dissection. Once again you can see the concurrent branding running through all my images. Here is our early childhood classroom working one-on-one with a teacher. And in the background you can see the students working with the technology on the iPads. But most importantly I wanted to make sure we constantly thanked our donors because they are the lifeblood of who really made this event successful. So what was great about Kimbia is that they were giving you real-time data as your donors were coming in. So I was able to have on our Facebook page at the top posted as a pinned post was, you know, I was saying, alright we are at 30 donors at $15,000 and I listed every person's name. If they were friends with our page I made sure to tag them so it showed up on their page. But we wanted to make sure that they were really involved all the way through because they are the ones who made it such a success. So as far as goals and results, as Lori mentioned, we wanted to set a goal. So we set a goal of $30,000 which was certainly a stretch but that $30,000 was going to make us reach our overall annual fund campaign goal for the year. So that's how we came up with that number. And it was key to have it all tied around the annual fund because that is the driving force with a lot of our fundraising here at the school. Another goal of mine was to have an 8th grade class gift. We had never had a coordinated gift amongst the 8th graders. And here was a chance for students who were part of the first class that ever had started at the school at 3 years old in our FreeK3 program. So they had been at the school for 9, 10 years, some of them, and it was a chance to really leave their mark and leave their legacy. So I was lucky enough to have an 8th grade parent who took the lead on that and really made it her mission. I'm happy to say that we not only met our goals but we exceeded it. As you can see, we reached $38,000 from 55 donors. And what was really exciting for me is that these 55 donors comprised new donors who had never supported the school before, donors who had lapsed, who had given in previous years but not currently. But more importantly, donors had already given in the year and were repeat donors. We saw that donors came from all grade levels. It wasn't specific from one area. Although the 8th grade class as a whole made the largest gift of close to $15,000 including matching funds. And what was nice is that they were able to leave their legacy and the brand new science lab that we built was dedicated to the 8th grade class of 2014. Out of the 330 nonprofits that participated in Palm Beach and Martin County we raised the 7th highest total, which was shocking to me as a small little private school here in Palm Beach County where there are hundreds and hundreds of nonprofits doing incredible things and major national nonprofits that have home base and affiliate offices down here in Palm Beach County. So it really set a lot for the support from our families. And most importantly, we had one new major donor that came out of it. And I'm going to touch on that story in a second. But when all was said and done and we found the final totals out from the United Way Community Foundation I posted this on our page and you can see it was back in July of last year. And it was just so exciting to be part of something bigger. The day after the great give I called every donor, all 55. And the first question, obviously I said thank you for your support. But the first question I had for them is why? Why did you give? What was your motivation to support the school? What was it about this campaign that really wanted for you to get your support behind? And I heard different answers from various families, but there was one family and this is the family who gave a $2,000 gift at 11.45 at night that pushed us over our edge to reach our goal of $30,000. And this family had been at this school for about four or five years. Had never made a financial commitment to this school but always was willing to give support and advice and the old adage you ask for money, you get advice, you ask for advice, you get donation. So when I was saying what really motivated you at this time they said that they really liked the direction the school was going with our three-year initiative which we call the Centers of Excellence. And this year we launched that Centers of Excellence initiative with the first two centers being Language Arts and Science and Technology. And to them technology was a hot button. That was their passion. And for me it's very important to connect donors with their passion and make them understand the impact and result of the gifts because that's how you bring them in. It's one thing to get a donor for a first time but we all know that it's much easier to retain a donor than trying to acquire a new donor. So that's where stewardship really comes into play. So after that first initial thank you with them I invited them to come sit down with me for a meeting because I could tell that they were interested in supporting the school further. So we sat down and had a good conversation about the direction the school was specifically our technology program. And I put together a proposal of how they could help the school specifically around outfitting our technology lab. And it was about a $33,000 proposal and they had initially budgeted $25,000 for the gift. Well this was in early May and everyone was going on vacation. So I stayed in touch with them throughout this summer and a couple phone calls here but they were way in Wyoming on a Native American ranch and were traveling all over so didn't really have the face-to-face that I would like to trying to progress them through the antiquated term that I'm not a fan of, moves management. I really think we need something newer and fresher but really taking them from that first gift to their next gift to a major gift level. And it came to mid-July and we were getting ready for school and I needed to purchase the materials. We had on this wish list for the proposal was a brand new 3D printer and all this Adobe Creative Suite software and 20 new MacBook Air so truly create this lab. Well thankfully they were very much interested and I said to them on our final phone call I said I understand that philanthropy is very personal and I'm not one to rush a donor into making a decision but we're at the point of the year where I need to know whether or not you're going to do it. And I kind of just threw it out there and they said you know what Josh we're going to do it, we're going to pull the trigger, we're going to make that gift and it was phenomenal. So here's a family who went from being at the school for five years never having made a gift to 90 days later they had already made a major gift of $33,000. This family is now super committed. This mother is my annual fund co-chair. She's also a great give committee co-chair member for this year which is phenomenal because as I said last year there was no committee and here we are one year later and I've been meeting with this family with these group of families for months and months now planning what is going to be a huge part of our not just giving for annual fund but the overall culture of our school. I had about a two hour meeting with them this morning putting together final details as we get closer and one mother said I want this to be a tradition. I want what we're setting up for the school to be something that families will remember year in and year out and want to be a part of. And for me that's just so exciting to see how quickly they've gotten behind it. So as you saw with my images I did a lot of those in Photoshop. Well a lot of people don't have necessarily access to Photoshop so there are a lot of great tools out there to be able to not only create content but to share content and monitor content. So I'm going to share my screen here and hopefully this should work which it did. So the first thing you see here is a tool that's called HootSuite. It's a fabulous way to curate and monitor content setting up these different streams based on various interests. Here you can see my great Give 15 stream as well as my Give Local 15 stream and here people are tweeting along live so thank you for those who are doing that. But it gives me a chance to see at all times what's going on regarding a very specific subject. I can go and click on Give Local and see what they're tweeting out about at any time or who's mentioning them in a tweet. But it's important because you want to be able to listen and engage with your support base. It's not as effective if you're sitting back and waiting for something to happen as opposed to listening to what your supporters are out there saying about you and engaging them on their level. So if a donor makes a gift to you online, you want to make sure you're thanking them online because they've gone to that level to make sure we're able to stay connected. Another tool that I use is something called Canva. What's great about Canva and it's Canva.com it allows you to create these pre-CAN templates and here's for various sizes Instagram, Facebook, Facebook Cover, Twitter. So where you want to know, okay, well a Facebook post is 940 pixels by 788 pixels. If I don't have Photoshop to put that into I can click on this and already have it pre-populated with the proper size. So I did a couple sample ones to show you. Here is one on donor gratitude and it's a donor haiku that I had written a couple years ago through a program called Gratitude Camp. Donors are heroes. Their impact changes the world make them feel special. And that's what we want to do. We want to show donor love because they are the ones who are going to be the game changers and the ones who are going to be the world changers for what we're trying to do. Yes, there's those nonprofits that if we do our job right they won't exist anymore. And while as unfortunate as that may be but that's what we're in it for. We're in it as fundraisers to make sure donor's passions are connected to causes and we can someday either alleviate that cause or further that cause along the way. Another one that I made and this was a concept that I had just found out about. I just got back from the Association of Fundraising Professionals International Conference in Baltimore. It was 4,000 fundraisers that descended upon Baltimore from 25 countries for 4 days to learn and network and share. And Lynn Wester who you can find online at Donor Guru is top notch when it comes to donor relations and stewardship. Well she came up with this concept of something called Gratitude Day. So every Tuesday she posts on social media various posts or ways to thank your donors around this Gratitude, Gratitude Day concept. So that's something I'm going to plan on running with as we go forward with the Great Give campaign. So how do we schedule our content? Well yes you can schedule through Hootsuite but what I really like about Buffer and that's Buffer app, there's an app for it or Buffer.com is it pre-populates your images directly into Hootsuite where if you use some other pre-scheduling content platforms it doesn't necessarily automatically pre-populate your image. So here's one that I have a tweet set to go out in about 20 minutes today at 250. Show your donors the love they deserve. And then I have various hashtags related to our giving event as well as the Give Local and then I've tagged the Community Foundation, the United Way, Give Local, and TechSoup. So in about 20 minutes this will go out. Now I could share it right now which I'm going to do so this will go out. And that tweet has just been sent. But what's nice is you're able to have it either create on a time-based when you want or you can have it pre-populate with an autoschedule feature. So these are some different tweets that I have scheduled for the next few days. And then here's one for next Tuesday. What are you grateful for on Gratted Tuesday? So hoping to see something like that how it will pick up and creating a question because what's great on social media is if you end a post with a question mark versus a period, your level of engagement on that post will go up exorbitantly because you have a chance to have your supporters, your people that are engaging with you interact. And that's really what social media is about. It's about creating a forum to not just share content but become engaged with that content. So Buffer is great. You can also add not just Twitter but you can add Facebook profile, a page, a group. You can connect LinkedIn, Google Plus, various services. So very, very highly recommended. Both Hootsuite and Buffer are free. Canva is also free. There are paid features of those platforms. But for the general user, you are more than fine using that basic platform. Another last resource I'll share is something called Spruce. It's tryspruce.com. I believe this is by Prezi. I think are the ones who created this. But it's strictly for Twitter. And it has a much larger database of free images from which you can choose. And it's very simple to use. You can just type in here what you want to have. And you can just save it, share it out, and you're done. So in literally 15 seconds you can create a viral image to share out there with your supporters. Let's go back into here. So that's everything that I did last year. Those are the tools that I used. So how are we moving forward for this year? Well as I mentioned, we now have a committee and I have a very dedicated group of parents who are helping us. So we have gone from a 10-day communications plan to a 90-day communications plan. And as we move closer to May 5th and May 6th, we will have a much higher level of engagement with our family members. We've started putting out Twitter posts and Facebook posts. And what was nice is that the Community Foundation in United Way were having a social media contest leading up to the rate give. And there was about a month there where you had a chance to create interesting and engaging content. And then there was voted upon to see who the winner was. Something else that we're going to be doing this year is phone solicitations. We're not going to be doing a hard ask. It's going to be more subtle. On May 4th, we're going to have a volunteer group call all our families. And ideally our goal is to have family members within that grade level call other grade level family members because a 7th grader getting a call from a kindergarten family that they've never heard of before isn't going to mean the same thing if they have someone within their own grade level calling. So it's simply going to be a call saying, please join us tomorrow on May 5th for our Cinco de Mayo celebration and as well as join us on May 6th for our Celebration of Everything White School at our Great Give Showcase where we'll have an author day's performance as well as other things. And the last line is going to be, please support the White School on the Great Give. And that's it, 15 second conversation, no hard ask, nothing give us now, but just a reminder that we will be having this event coming up. So some images that I've did this year, this was one that I had as part of the contest. I believe this is one of the contest finalist entries. And it was fun. Every day I was trying to come up with, well, how can I incorporate the Great Give logo as well as continue the running brand as you see just like I had last year, support gifted education, the school logo, and the hashtag. That way anytime you see any of our images you know what it relates to. Well, the contest was also going on during the Oscars. And as we all know, the Oscars is a huge time for social media as with any major national event, the Super Bowl, anything where there's going to be a lot of people watching. So what I did was I created this image in maybe 5, 10 minutes and with the notion of trying to quote unquote hijack the Oscars hashtag. So by implementing this tweet and this image with the Oscars hashtag, anyone who is following along with that Oscars hashtag also saw this image that we had shared. Which was great because it got our message out there to a larger audience. Another campaign that I'm doing this year is something called I am. I am a gifted student. So we're creating these images and very compelling images with the simple starting line I am and then something related to that. So this one you see our early childhood student I am inquisitive. Here's one, I am a critical thinker. So I've taken this to the next level and we're going to be creating 15 second spots of our students saying my name is Glenn. I am 12 years old. I am a future scientist. I am a gifted student. Support the great gift. And these images and videos will be starting to pop up on social media as we get closer. They will also be shared within the school. And we are also doing a 30 second PSA with a slideshow of photos over some of our very compelling content. And the keeping here is you want to create engaging content that is compelling that looking at, hearing, you know what the cause is, you know who is talking and what you're supporting. So as I mentioned we're having a Cinco de Mayo party here because it's nice that it kicks off on May 5th. So we're having some chips and dip and something you know celebration for our families. We're going to have some DJ music but we also want to highlight our students because that's what this is about. So working with our Spanish teacher they're going to be putting together some performances, some poetry, some songs, some dance, and going to be headlining this event on May 5th because our giving day is from May 5th at 5 p.m. until May 6th at 5 p.m. The next day as part of our Centers of Excellence Language Arts Initiative each student this year has become an author. They have put together in a book and it will be a hard count, hard bound published book that will allow them to walk away within the years saying, here is a collection of all my work whether that's poetry, whether that's a short story, whether that's an article they wrote for the school newspaper, something that makes them say how proud they are. So they're going to have a chance to read each of their stories on a great level basis to all of their families in our media center. So we're going to have that going on while simultaneously in what we like to call our campaign headquarters in our cafeteria is going to be a flurry of action. We're going to have our innovation station which will have various bank of computers with the various different computer software that our students have been working on, the different code that they've been writing. We're going to have our robotics on display. We're going to have our 3D printer out there. We're going to have an art gallery. We're going to have our art teacher is going to be working with each grade level and we're going to have two giant four by eight foot canvas banners that is almost going to be a kind of a paint by number and we're going to have these great master piece arts like a starry night and as the day progresses and as we raise more money then we will be completing these paintings. We're also going to have a debate competition. We're going to be having our Taekwondo students doing a demonstration. We're going to be having our band and our chorus and our play all highlighted within this day because that's what it's about. It's a celebration of what makes it so special and the reason that people are supporting us. But what's more important than just supporting this school is that we also want to support the community. So we're going to be having hands-on community service projects that day. We have a very large culture of community service within our students here at this school. On average, I would say there's probably a good dozen or so different community service projects that happen whether that's collecting canned foods for a food drive or collecting bags, disposable bags, a public type bag that you would get the nylon canvas bag to give to the homeless coalition. We've collected toiletries for the local VA hospital, but there's always something going on. So we want this day to be a continuance of that culture of giving because it's important for our students to learn from an early age that it's important to give back. So we'll be doing and we're still finalizing the projects whether that's making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for the local homeless coalition or if it's going to be writing letters to soldiers or if it's going to be making phone calls and just saying thank you to our supporters. But we want to make sure that the students are very much more engaged with this than anything. As Lori also mentioned, it's important to have a goal. So we've set a goal for this year of $50,000 and we will certainly exceed that. That's my goal and my personal goal is to be the number one highest-grossing nonprofit in Palm Beach and Martin County to raise the most money that day. Not necessarily the most donors but the highest-grossing totals. And one way that I'm hoping to achieve this is that we've been soliciting pledges leading up to May 5th and May 6th. That way we're getting commitment from both minor, smaller level donors as well as our major level donors that will make that commitment and step up to the plate and say, yes, I'm going to give a dollar. I'm going to give $10,000. I'm going to give $10,000. What have you? On that day knowing that they're part of something bigger because together we're going to make a larger impact than as with a single gift. So it's very exciting, the energy that is going to be flowing through here especially as we get closer. And one last mini campaign that I have going on is something and this is a challenge that I'm placing to all of you. It's something called a Frelfie and a Frelfie is a fundraising selfie. And here you can see a little Frelfie I did the other day and I used a simple little app on my iPhone called Over which allowed me to do this Frelfie graphic down here and this Be Grateful. But the whole point is to share why we're giving, what makes us special, why are we doing what we're doing. And my goal is to get this Frelfie to get a Frelfie trending leading up to the Great Give. So I'm pluring all of you to go out there, snap a Frelfie, post it online, and share what you're grateful for and why you're giving gratitude and why it is important to support nonprofits both locally, nationally, and internationally. And I'm now going to turn it back over to Lori and she can fill us in on a little bit more. Well, thank you so much, Josh. I think one of the things that strikes me and I hope with the audience is that. So this is an online fundraising campaign but it has, it hits so many different components. You can see a lot of the activities, while the campaign itself is around getting donations online. Josh and team have built this into a way to highlight his mission, build a word for his organization, and really be creative. So Josh, I applaud you for that. And thanks for the great resources and tools. I wanted to, before I pass this along, just tell you that some of you on the call are participating or have participated in a giving day but about half at the early part have not, or are not participating in one. And we thank TechSoup for the opportunity to do this webinar at the perfect time. We are hosting and the Great Give is a partner in it, a program called Give Local America and by 515. And we are inviting any and all nonprofits. So if you don't have a local host or you do and you miss their deadline to participate and register at Give Local 15.org. So we'll be creating communities of nonprofits because we think that this is a great tool in your fundraising toolkit. It is a great time to do it. So this is the spring time. This is an opportunity for you to try a new campaign leading up to potentially a year-end campaign and building this in. And so we really encourage you to join us. You can learn how to register at Give Local 15.org. We have a ton of free resources and trainings at Give Local America.org. So some of the stuff that Josh mentioned, there's some tips and tricks on all the different partings of social media tools, and more on online fundraising strategies for nonprofits. And it's not too late to join. So with that, I'm going to transfer it back to Becky and say thank you for this opportunity. Thank you, Lori. And I think a great point, it came up in the chat a little bit. Somebody asking about how do they sign up? And somebody else saying, well, our deadline has passed. But one thing that I think is amazing about these online campaigns is that even if you're not registered, clearly we want you to be signed up so we can really track the overall impact of these different campaigns, whether it's your local community foundation, whether it's a day affiliated with a cause, and everybody's just doing it together on that day or that week, or whether it's through a campaign like Give Local America with Give Local 15, you can still latch on to the hashtags, to the social media attention, even if you don't have time to do a whole concerted campaign this year. And that's where we really thought, even though we're coming up pretty close to 5-5-15, we wanted to make sure that people are aware of the strategies that can be used because a lot of these things that Josh showed using Canva and throwing that hashtag on an image and sharing it on your Facebook is something that could take 3 minutes, 5 minutes, and can involve you in those campaigns even if you don't have the opportunity or the logistical moxie this year to get yourself registered or if you've missed it. And Lori, before I switch to showing a couple of other tools before we get into full Q&A, what is the deadline if people want to register directly through Give Local 15.org? Is there a deadline there? Yes, so the deadline to participate is April 12. So you still have 10 days. Yep, and the registration process is really easy. You just have to be a 501c3 or have a fiscal sponsor. And it's just a short little survey. And then with that we create a donation page for you, and you are all set to go. Great. And I saw a question just pop up and chat about what about if you're a library and you're part of a municipality, not technically a nonprofit, 501c3? Well, even though you may not be able to participate directly with Give Local 15 through their registration, if there is momentum in your community around giving local on that day, there's no reason that I think your library could also be chatting out because people do love to support their local public libraries because you do so much for the community. You do so much for your town, your neighborhood, the kids that come there after school every day. So I think any cause that's a good cause that people care about, people could jump on that bandwagon if there's one already kind of bubbling up in your community or in your region. So before we get into full Q&A, I want to go ahead and just show a few other resources and some other tools that are also available in TechSoup's product catalog, sorry. And so I just wanted to highlight this fundraising page that we have on our site. So in addition to using tools like Kimbia or some of the social media platforms that are out there, if you're looking for an online fundraising tool and you don't have one for full-time use or all the time, there are some fundraising tools that are available for donation. And I'm just going to highlight a couple of them here Cosvox is an online fundraising platform and they do have a donation through TechSoup for eligible nonprofits. Teespring is an apparel fundraising tool so you can use this to help create t-shirts for your cause or your charity or your library. Shopify is an online storefront that you can access if you have buttons or tote bags or mugs or products that you produce or gear that you produce that you want your supporters to carry around. And it helps you fundraise. Connect to Give is another fundraising platform that helps you with mobile fundraising. So if you want to have people able to text or send text messages to them to encourage them to donate on a day like May 5, you can have Connect to Give set up to help you do that. Guide by Cell, which is this one down here that doesn't have a name attached to it, that's their logo, is the little cell phone picture. They also have an online mobile fundraising platform that they help equip you with a mobile donation site and mobile friendly SMS text fundraising. And then Tint is the last one I'll mention. It's not specifically a fundraising tool, it's more of a social media tool like what Josh was showing earlier that helps you feed your social media channels into one place where people can access it if they're following a day-long campaign. For example, they can follow it all on your Tint. So I just wanted to highlight those few tools in case people are interested in other tool donations or products that can help them with their online fundraising efforts. And then I also wanted to highlight quickly a few resources on our site. So if you're looking to gain donors online, if you're looking to crowdfund, and so this was a webinar we did, Crowdfunding Your Way to Year-End Success. We did this in the fall before Giving Tuesday because so much of your donation support from the majority of nonprofits happens in that last quarter of the year. So we've done a couple of events back-to-back around crowdfunding for year-end campaigns and Giving Tuesday and year-end fundraising. So check those out if you're looking for more as you run into the late summer, early fall, and you're planning out your campaign strategies for the rest of the year. We have events that we've done on fundraising with social media, great tools for friend-to-friend fundraising, for ticketed events. If you're having a Cinco de Mayo party and you want to charge a few bucks and earn some money off of it, if you're looking to do an online auction as part of your fundraising. We've got great resources. If you're joining us from a church today, I just wanted to highlight this one since we have a lot of churches that are now part of our network and our audience that we have content that we're creating specifically to help you figure out what's out there that can help you technologically manage all of the things you need to do every day, including fundraising and connecting with your supporters. So there's a lot on our site. Definitely check some of that out. And you can also go to our Digital Engagement Forum and ask questions, get experiences from others, and I'm going to go ahead and jump into questions since we have a bunch in queue already. So we had a question for, well, here's a general one that I'll ask. Sharon asks, how do you identify a donor's passion, especially when you have no real donor base currently? Like if you don't have that connection, Josh, it seems like something that may be a little bit more straightforward when you've got their kids at your school than obviously parents want to support their kids in their success. So maybe this is a question more for Lori. How do you advise people to help identify their passion so that they want to come in and donate to you? Have any tips on that? I think that's actually a really challenging question, and I'll ask Josh also to chime in. But I would say that trying, I mean, as Josh mentioned, even though he has an engaged audience of donors, trying an online campaign and just sharing it out for your network and seeing who they can kind of drum off for support will help you find other individuals who may have some interest or passion in your organization. So I think doing some sort of online fundraising campaign is a good way to do that. I'm not sure that you can tell a donor's passion without doing that. You can also – I mean, there's all sorts of old school ways like looking at donor recognitions from other organizations or things like that. But I think that's the sort of power and benefit of doing an online fundraising strategy is that that can help you identify people who either – who care about your organization or care about those individuals who care about your organization. And to go off what Lori was saying, yes, these families may be within the school so we know that they're invested in their child's education. But there's so much from left to right that you can be interested in when it comes to education. Some people are very much interested in the arts. Some people are very much interested in science and technology or it could be language arts or it could be math. It's about personal connection. And that's really what fundraising is all about. It's about being a good storyteller. It's about being personable and making those personal connections. And then stewardship. It's how you're going to – once you have their foot in the door, keep them around. Getting that next donation next year or next month or going from a $2,000 donation and they give that up to a $33,000 donation for a major donor 90 days later. Great. And I think those are all really helpful tips for people to help really connect. Lori, we have a bunch of people asking about specific areas wondering, is there a give local thing happening in Cleveland or if you're already signed up for a local one in San Antonio, can you also sign up for give local 15? How does that work? Is there a single place where people can look to see if their community is already represented with a giving day coming up soon? So you can see – if you go to givelocalamerica.org and click on who's participating, you'll see where we have a community lead so far. We are in the process of creating communities of nonprofit so where there isn't a united way or foundation who's providing sort of that – or during the campaign like in Josh's case. We do have interest from organizations in Cleveland and Chicago and New York and all over and so we are – but if you go to givelocalamerica.org and you check there and see who's participating, you'll see if there's an event that's being hosted by one of our partners here here. If not, we are inviting you to participate. We want you to be left out and we really do want to create the opportunity for everyone to be able to give local so you can find there under the nonprofits tab how to register on that givelocal15.org site. Great. But if there are any affiliates with a local one, they shouldn't sign up for both. I wouldn't. I think that just creates a lot of donor confusion and if there is a local partner, that's going to be – that's going to be your best bet because they're going to be focused on promoting your organization and the organizations. Great. And Lori, before I have some questions for Josh, a couple of people are asking about is there a percentage of the funds that go to givelocalamerica as part of using the Can Be a platform or how does the money come to the organization once through that platform after the event, after the giving day? Yeah, sure. So if you're going to participate in a givelocalamerica, there is a – there's no fee to sign up and register. There is standard with all fundraising platforms as a transaction fee that is 5.25% and that covers credit card and platform costs. So 5.25% of the donation goes to support credit cards and technology costs. Great. Thank you for that. So now switching to Josh, we had some questions specifically. One person asked, for your project last year, what did you estimate as the cost or the expenses that you put out for your investment last year? And how would you compare that with having a 10-day lead time last year to a 90-day lead time and a committee this year in terms of cost? How much does it cost you to really do all of this? Last year I think I spent $0 to raise $38,000. This year we're spending a little more because we are creating more marketing materials. We're going to have a direct mail piece that goes out to our families giving them information about the day itself with the schedule of activities as well as information about the school and why they should support us. We're going to be purchasing some banners to hang up around school. So our investment will be minimal, but we know that we'll get that return because it's really about building those relationships with our families and building it to the point where this is something that they expect each year. We have an annual fund and this is going to be, as we saw last year, was the largest day of giving and largest net that we got for our annual fund as opposed to little gifts throughout the year. This was a one big chunk of change that we got when all was said and done. So sometimes you need to spend money to make money and it's very true. We've done some Facebook advertising this year which I don't think there's a more cost-effective way to reach out to a potential market with all the information that Facebook gathers on us. Yes, it's a little scary how much they know, but from a marketer's standpoint it's a treasure trove of gold. You could sit there and you could put an ad in the newspaper and maybe you'll get a phone call. But I've done two campaigns specifically one for likes to our Facebook page and one to increase clicks to our website. Both are $500 campaigns and the cost of acquisition for a new like on our page is about $0.53 and the click-through to our website is about $0.80. Since December 9th I've increased about 400 likes on our page and over 700 click-throughs to our website. This is very targeted. People that live 25 miles from home in the school have a family, are interested in education specifically and gifted education. So we have seen as a result of that the number of tours have gone up for the school as well as engagement in our social media posts on Facebook. It's unfortunate the way that they have changed their business model that now it's really a pay-to-play sort of thing where yes you may have a thousand people that like your page, but such a small percentage are actually going to actually see your content that if you have important information that you want to get out there, you need to do Facebook advertising and you need to do Facebook posts. Yes, I understand this is not for all nonprofits of all sizes in all budgets, but it is a recommendation that if you do have a little bit of marketing budget available that Facebook advertising is a great way to reach out to a very captured and engaged audience. Great. Well thank you for that. And with that I'm going to go ahead and wrap us up. I know we didn't get to every question, but a lot of great ones have been answered both in chat and through the Q&A. Definitely check out some of those resources and let us know in the chat window one thing you learned today in our webinar that you might try and implement or work toward for your own organization's benefit. And please take a moment after you get the follow-up email later today. Feel free to share that with your colleagues and friends who may benefit from it as well. We want to make sure that everyone knows about opportunities like this and can participate as much as they're able to. I'd also like to invite you to join us for upcoming webinars and events. Next week we'll be talking about your nonprofit and values-based brand. Then we'll be talking about our tablets, just toys, how to get work done, and Be Green with Mobile Devices in this Earth Month that we're now in. If you're joining us from a library you can join us to talk about referring social services at your library. We know many of you are hubs for local social services and referrals. You can also then join us to learn more about how to find free and legal to use images and media. So we'll be talking about music and images for your social media and website and collateral materials on the 23rd. And then on April 30th we'll be talking about how to launch your 2015 grants plan with GrantStation. So please feel free to join us for any of those or all of them. You'll get links in the email later today. You can also join us at TechSoupBlobal.org, TechSoup.org, or on our Facebook and our Twitter. Thank you all so much for joining us today. Thank you Josh and Laurie for your participation and for sharing your expertise. You will get a copy of this presentation, the full recording, and the links we discussed later this afternoon. Thanks to Allie for helping on the back end. And lastly, thank you to ReadyTalk who provides the use of their platform for us to present these webinars on a weekly basis. We also have their donation of the ReadyTalk 500 tool which is what we're using today available in the TechSoup.org catalog. So check it out if you're looking for a webinar tool. And please complete the post-event survey when you close out of this window to let us know how we can continue to improve our webinar programming. Thank you all so much. Have a terrific day. Bye-bye.