 Hi everyone, I will get started in just a moment, but before we begin, I just wanted to make sure that everybody can see my screen and everybody can hear me. So if you can see the first slide and you can hear me, just type yes into the questions box of your GoToWebinar panel so that when we get started, I know that I'm talking to people who can see and hear what I'm saying. Perfect, thank you, Connie. All right, so I'm gonna put my, oh, it's actually just three o'clock. So we'll go ahead and get started. So welcome everyone. This is our last webinar for Give Local Allegheny Highlands and it's a fun one. This one is all about giving events strategy. My name is Linda Gerhardt and I am the Senior Community Engagement Manager here at Mighty Cause, which is the platform that Give Local Allegheny Highlands is hosted on. And I've been working with giving events for many years at this point, so I'm really excited to help this event get off the ground. And I'm joined by Daniel who has been organizing this whole thing from the Allegheny Foundation. Hi, Daniel. Hello, and yeah, thanks everyone for making the time in your days to participate in this one. I'm also very, very excited to hear what Linda has to say about the, some of the advertising and strategy of this, but don't really have much to add or contribute. I'll be there in the Q&A session, but other than that, I'll just hand it to you, Linda. All right, thank you so much. So here's a quick look at today's agenda there's actually quite a bit of content to go through. So if you have any questions while I'm presenting, go ahead and put that into the questions box of your go-to webinar panel. And we will do a live Q&A session with both Daniel and I at the end. So I do hope that you have questions I wanna encourage you, that if there's anything about the event that's unclear to you, anything that you're a little bit fuzzy on, I want you to leave this webinar having full confidence in how Give Local Allegheny Highlands works. So make sure that if you have something that you wanna ask, you go ahead and put it into the questions box of the go-to webinar panel so that Daniel and I can address it before you leave this webinar today. All right, so before we get too deep into strategy, I really wanted to scale back for a minute and go over the basics and some reminders so that we're all on the same page, especially if you missed the first webinar we did. So some quick facts about Give Local Allegheny Highlands. The first thing is that you will need to register for this event. So if you haven't already registered, registration is still open. So you can go ahead to GiveLocalAH.org, click the button that says register and make sure that you register if you wish to participate for the event because if we don't have your registration, we don't know that you're looking to participate. So that's really the first step if you wanna participate. Even though Give Local Allegheny Highlands is just one day, you actually do have some additional time before the event to start building momentum and collecting donations and that early giving period starts on June 1st, which is a Tuesday. So you have two weeks to fundraise before the actual event kicks off. And the big day is Tuesday, June 15th and the event goes from midnight to midnight. So starting at midnight on June 15th, you'll see the Give Local Allegheny Highlands site switch to the live site where you can view the leaderboards and see where you rank with participating nonprofits. And we're gonna talk a lot about leaderboards in just a few moments. The event goes, it starts at midnight and it goes on to midnight the following days or actually 11, 59, 59, right before midnight on the 15th. So that's a full 24 hours of fundraising. So if you wanted to get started at midnight, you can get started right at midnight and start fundraising. And you can fundraise up until the final second before the site switches over to the post event site. So you have a full 24 hours to fundraise. There are basically six steps to participating in Give Local and you may already have some of these completed at this point. The first thing, as I mentioned, is to register. And once you're registered, you'll need to customize your Mighty Cause profile, which acts as the face of your organization during Give Local. If you missed our first webinar, you can give out a watch on the nonprofit toolkit page on the Give Local site. That webinar went into the ins and outs of customizing your profile. So if you're a little bit lost with that, you should definitely give that one a watch. And the third step is creating a fundraising plan. Basically, how are you going to reach out to your donors and your community about this giving event and how much you wish to raise? Daniel and the Allegheny Foundation are working really hard to publicize this event locally, which will give everybody participating a boost, but you'll also want to reach out to your existing base of supporters. And we're gonna talk a lot about how to do that in this webinar. And then you'll just start fundraising on June 1st, which is when early giving begins. You'll start promoting your campaign and your participation and give local Allegheny Highlands. And then you'll fundraise hard on June 15th. Those are the six steps that you need to do to participate in this event. And if you need me or Daniel to expand on any of these things, any of these steps, please pop any of your questions into the questions box. So we make sure that you don't leave this webinar without being clear about how the event itself functions. So there are a lot of really excellent reasons to participate and give local lots of benefits, like being able to connect to new donors in your community and raise money. But one of the biggest benefits is prizes. So we're going to break down what the prizes are for this event and how they work. So really the most important thing to know here is that Give Local is giving you a ton of chances to win prizes for your nonprofit. And they're actually giving away a lot of money to the participating nonprofits. They've got $32,000 to give away through prizes. And in working with Daniel on creating the prize structure, I do also want to note that he and the Allegheny Foundation have really gone the extra mile to make sure that prizes are fair and every participating nonprofit has a chance to win. So there is a lot of money to be won. And as you're planning your campaign, there is a rules and prizes page that you can refer to that lists out all of these prizes in detail so that you don't have to memorize all of this information that I'm giving you. There's a breakdown of the prizes on the rules and prizes page on the Give Local site. So there are a few different types of prizes in play for Give Local. So we're gonna break down what they are. First is leaderboards, which I mentioned earlier. And these are boards that rank nonprofits according to how much money they raise. And there are prizes available for the nonprofits that raise the most money throughout the event. There's $14,400 in leaderboard prizes. So there's a lot of money tied up in leaderboards. Next are power hours, which are competitive hourly prizes. And we're gonna go into detail about how they work in just a moment. There are $8,000 worth of prizes available to power our winners. So these are really valuable prizes to compete for. Golden tickets are randomly, random hourly prizes that pull one donation at random from an hour. And the nonprofit that received the winning donation wins an additional prize. So there's $2,600 in golden tickets. And these are totally random. So any organization that received a donation within that hour is eligible to win a golden ticket. The next prize is really cool. And that is a $7,000 pull of prize money that will be divided evenly between all of the nonprofits that receive at least 10 unique donations. So all you have to do to win a piece of that pie is get 10 separate people to donate to your nonprofit, which is pretty cool and pretty easy money, if you ask me. And there's a really unique high school giving program where your organization has the opportunity to win $50 each time a local high school senior votes for your nonprofit. And we'll talk about that as well in a little bit more detail. So the leaderboards are really the centerpiece of the giving day. They are front and center on the live event site. And this is where the most money is available to win. There will be two leaderboards, one for small nonprofits and one for large nonprofits. So this is give locals first year. So in terms of where the dividing line is for large and small nonprofits, we're still getting registrations in. And once we have everybody's registration in, Daniel will look at the budget ranges listed in the registration forms and make a determination about who is participating and what their size is. So the information you gave in your registration form is what will determine where we place you and you'll know before the event which leaderboards you'll be on. So just stay tuned for an announcement about that. The leaderboards rank you by the cumulative money that you've raised from the start of early giving on June 1st through the end of the event on June 15th. So leaderboards really are about playing the long game. So there's, as I mentioned, there is $14,400 total that we'll be giving away. And for each leaderboard, there are four prizes available to the first board, the top four nonprofits that raise the most money. The first prize is $3,000. Second prize is $2,000. Third place wins $1,200. And fourth place wins $1,000 on top of all of the money they've raised. So that's your prize replacing in the first top four spots of each leaderboard. And there's $7,200 available on each leaderboard. So there's quite a bit of money to be won. And hopefully it's an incentive to keep fundraising throughout the event. When it comes to winning a leaderboard prize, that early giving period I've been mentioning is really crucial to your success. Because if you start getting donations on June 1st, you're going to have a leg up on the competition. You'll already start the event with some money in the bank, so to speak. The leaderboard usually displays about the top 10 organizations. But if you can't find where you are, you can actually search the leaderboard. All of the leaderboards are searchable. And just as a note, the leaderboards here, since we don't have any screenshots of Give Locals leaderboards are from another giving event just to show you what they look like. So knowing where you are on the leaderboard can help you reach out to donors on social media and emails, and you can ask for their help in climbing the leaderboard to help you break into the top 10, break into the top five, and so on to help them get excited about giving to your nonprofit. What a lot of organizations do is they coordinate large gifts. So for instance, if you have a major donor that usually gives a donation around this time each year, you can reach out to them and coordinate their gift so that it will process during the donation period for Give Local. And you can also work with board members to get larger gifts that will help you raise more money and climb higher on the leaderboard. A lot of smaller donations can also help nonprofits win leaderboards, so you don't necessarily need a major gift to top the leaderboard. There's a variety of different ways you can climb the ranks. But the strategy with leaderboards is really just sustained effort throughout the event from early giving through the very last hour of the event. And just one note about leaderboards, they freeze at midnight when the event is over, so these leaderboards will not change even if somebody makes a donation after the event is over. Your place on that leaderboard is sort of frozen as soon as the event is over. One thing that is important to note here is that offline donations do actually count towards your leaderboard totals. They don't count toward the hourly prizes, but you can use offline gifts, meaning any cash or checks or so on that you get to help you on the leaderboard. So for instance, if you have a lot of donors who really do just prefer to give checks or stop in and give you cash, you can enter that information and that will help you on the leaderboard. So to enter offline donations, it's very easy. You go to your admin dashboard on your organization profile, you click reports and then click offline donations and then you just enter in the fields to tell us about your donation. Now, this is all more or less done on the honor system. So we expect that if you are entering a check donation, that check actually exists. And any offline donations that you enter are subject to verification by the Allegheny Foundation. So expect that if you are climbing the leaderboards with a whole bunch of checks, you might hear from Daniel on the day of the event to check in and just talk to you about those donations. And once again, offline donations are only counted on the leaderboards for the event. They do not count for hourly prizes, but we wanted to make sure that offline donations were included because every organization has some donors who just like to send in a check. They just like to give you cash or give through other means. So we wanna make sure that the totality of your fundraising for Give Local is actually reflected on the leaderboard. So power hours are always really exciting on giving days. There's usually a lot of activity and Give Local has quite a bit of money available to the winners of power hours. A power hour is basically an hour long fundraising sprint where you're looking to hit a specific type of fundraising goal. The winner of the hour gets a prize and the prizes are automatically tabulated by the platform. So we're not pulling these manually, these are automatically tabulated by a query in our system. All of the power hours for Give Local are split by budget size. So if you're on the small nonprofits leaderboard, you'll be competing in the small nonprofits power hours to make sure that everybody is competing against nonprofits that are similar in size and capacity so that you have a fair shot at winning. There are two different types of power hours. The first is a most dollars raised power hour where you're looking to raise the most money in the space of the power hour. And the other is most unique donors which are about bringing in as many individual people as possible in an hour's time. The schedule of these power hours is on the Give Local site under the rules or the prizes page. So definitely refer to those time charts to understand when your power hours are once we explain to you which leaderboard you'll be in. So the strategy for winning power hours obviously depends on the type of power hour you're competing in. But essentially you'll wanna plan communications at the start of the power hour that you're competing in so people know that it's extra important for them to give during those hours. For most unique donors, power hours, the strategy is all about mobilizing the greatest number of people to support you. It's all about numbers. So this is a good time for an email blast for planning to have your staff or volunteers or both make donations to your campaign and so on and so forth. You wanna basically get as many people on your page making donations as possible. The size of the donations does not matter for most unique donors. So a donation that is $5 counts just as much as a donation for $1,000. So the amount of the donations does not matter which can be a really great hook especially for donors who may not have a lot of money to give or if you're trying to get people to make a second gift. So if somebody else gave $200 to you already they might be able to give you five more to help you during this power hour. There are often some questions about what constitutes a unique donor. And basically the answer is really simple and that is a unique donor is one single person. So if you have one person who gives 20 times that's one donor. I truly don't recommend any strategies like creating dummy email addresses or using a bunch of different payment methods to look like different people because that will look suspicious to our security system. And you may actually get locked out of donating which we don't want to happen to you on a giving event. So any sort of method to trick the system into thinking that one person is actually like 10 different people they usually end up biting the nonprofits in the rear end. So I really just recommend a unique donor is one individual who makes a donation. So you wanna just go with honesty as the best policy and really just concentrate on mobilizing the donors you already have in your circle people on social media and so on and so forth. For most dollars raised power hours lots of smaller donations can really really add up. So you wanna get lots of people giving obviously the amount of their donations matters a lot more with most dollars raised power hours. But another strategy that we commonly see on giving events is coordinating larger gifts during these power hours and doing outreach to donors who have a history of giving in larger amounts. So engaging those donors who tend to give it a higher level. This is also a great time to get your board members to make bigger donations. So what you're looking for with a most dollars raised power hour is obviously the amount you raise. You can win with a bunch of smaller donations organizations that have lots of donors who given smaller amounts can win just as easily as an organization that has one or two really big donations. So there's a few different ways you'll wanna think about your base of supporters and what the best strategy is for your organization to potentially win a most dollars raised power hour. One thing I do wanna note about these power hours is that you are competing somewhat blind. There's no ranking that you're able to see while the hour is underway. Our system will pull the winner about a minute after the power hour ends. So you just have to really go hard on that hour and do your best to win those prizes. You're not able to check in and see where you are. You just have to try your best during that hour and hope that you come on top. So golden tickets are random prizes. There are 13 golden tickets during give local worth $200 each. There's a golden ticket pulled every hour between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. So basically during the day. There are lots of chances to win one. So you have 13 golden tickets every hour in addition to your leader board prizes and your power hours and so on. So what our system does is pull together all of the donations that were made in the previous hour and randomly choose a winning donation. So donations for winners for golden tickets are actually tied to a donor. So your donor will get a little bit of a shout out on the table of golden ticket winners which is a really great opportunity to reach out and thank that donor for helping you win a golden ticket and helping you win an extra 200 bucks. Golden tickets essentially operate like a raffle. So the more donations you get during the hour the more likely you are to win the more entries you have in the prize pool basically. So there's not really a way to game golden tickets or really be competitive about them because they are random. But the best strategy is just to try to get donations every hour when you have golden tickets being given away. Unfortunately, if you do not get a donation during a golden ticket hour you are not eligible to win a golden ticket because our system is pulling golden tickets from the pool of organizations that have received donations. So if you don't have a donation during that hour unfortunately you can't win a golden ticket. So the strategy really is just to keep giving consistent throughout the day. The winners will post on a chart on the live site. So you'll want to check in periodically just to see if you've won one. We won't email you or anything like that. So just go to the live site. You'll be able to see if you've won and you'll be able to check in at the end of the day as well. So lastly, I wanted to go over a couple of very unique opportunities that the Allegheny Foundation is giving everybody to win during Give Local. The first thing that they've got available is $7,000 that they are splitting up equally between all nonprofits who get at least 10 unique donations for the event. So how much you'll win depends on how many orgs hit that fundraising goal. And literally all you have to do is get 10 people to donate to your organization which should be pretty easy for most nonprofits. If you reach out to your board and your staff and some volunteers you've got your 10 people. So this is very easy to be a part of and you have a very good chance of winning some of this money. And finally, this is really unique and cool. Daniel has put together a giving program for local high school seniors that will basically help you passively win money for participating in Give Local who doesn't love passive money. So starting on May 17th, local high school seniors will be able to go into a survey and see a list of all of the participating nonprofits. And then they'll be able to vote for one of them. Every vote that a nonprofit gets will result in a $50 donation from the Allegheny Foundation for that nonprofit. So this really depends on the seniors and what they choose to do, what appeals for them. You may have some seniors who wanna give to animals, maybe some seniors who wanna give to food banks. There's a lot of different things that might get a senior to vote for your organization. But one thing that you could do if you wanna make sure that you are included in here you can consider outreach to any families that may have a high school senior at home and let them know about this program and encourage them to vote for your nonprofit. If your board members have kids and they may have high school seniors, it's worth flagging to them. Maybe their kids can vote for your nonprofit. So there's a lot of different ways to win and it's really not something that you can gain the system of, but it is an opportunity to win some extra cash for your nonprofit. And it's another huge benefit of participating in Give Local. So that is sort of the rundown on the prizes. If you have any questions, if any of that was confusing or overwhelming or a little bit fuzzy to you, please just pop something into the questions box. I wanna make sure that everybody who leaves this webinar today understands the prize structure and has all of their questions answered about prizes. All right, and so with all of the prizes out of the way, I wanted to go into campaign strategy. Hey, Linda. Yeah, sorry. Can I just add one thing really quickly with the golden tickets and the power hours? Sorry if this was mentioned, but just wanna specify that each group can win one golden ticket and one power hour. So if your group has won the first power hour, then you guys will not be eligible for the next one, just because we want to be trying to spread the prizes around a little bit. Yes, thank you for that. There was so much information about prizes that I did not put that in so it was not mentioned. So thank you for popping in with that. All right, so campaign strategy. As I was mentioning earlier, securing early donations is a really important part of running a successful campaign for a giving day. So on the platform, what we see in general is that nonprofits that take advantage of the early giving period, they tend to win more prizes and they tend to raise more overall on the giving day, which makes sense if you think about it because you're starting with some money already in the bank and instead of just giving yourself 24 hours to fundraise, you have a full two weeks. And that also helps you build momentum for your campaign. It helps get people excited. It helps introduce them to the idea of give local Allegheny Highlands and what you're doing for this event. And one thing that lots of nonprofits do is they actually sort of use the early giving period as a soft launch of their campaign. So they mostly promote it to people who are already in the nonprofits inner circle. So staff members, board members, volunteers, and they're really tapping the people that they know will give reliably for those early donations. And also sometimes they collect feedback, like, hey, this wasn't clear or I didn't like this on your campaign. So sometimes, especially if they're people who are close to your nonprofit, you can garner some feedback for them as well. So one of the questions that I often get about early donations is, well, is this going to eat into the donations that I get on the event day? And the answer overwhelmingly is no. Most people who give during the early giving period actually come back and make another donation on the day of the actual event, which makes sense if you think about it because a lot of people who they give according to when they get paid. So we have two weeks difference here. It starts on the first and then the event is on the 15th. So most people are already in a position to give again by the time the 15th rolls around. And what we see is that most people who give during early giving, they don't just say, okay, I'm done, I gave my gift, they come back and they actually make two or more donations to the event. So you're actually getting people giving more than one time, which obviously helps you raise a bit more. So this is a little bit of a sophisticated fundraising technique, but matching grants are a fantastic way to set yourself up for a successful campaign. What a matching grant is, it's basically a larger donation that you leverage to bring in other donations. So you would use it as sort of a Bogo deal on donations. So if you have a major gift donor or a corporate sponsor that wants to give you say $1,000, instead of just writing you a check and giving you the donation, you can use that and say to your supporters, hey, we've got a matching grant. So up to $1,000, all of the donations that are given during this period of time will match one to one. So if you give $25, it's actually $50 for our nonprofit, which donors love. And a lot of sponsors really love this kind of setup because it gives them a little bit of, it gives them a shout out. It says, hey, this is a generous person or a generous company that gave us this matching grant to help us out on this giving day. And how the matching grant process works is you would basically treat it like securing a major gift. So you would use the same three steps, you prospect, cultivate and ask. So when we're talking about prospecting, who is available that might be able to give you a matching grant? Some common sources of matching grants are board members, major gift donors, sponsors and community members, local businesses that you have a relationship with. And then you'd cultivate them, sort of start the conversation and see if they're in a position to give and what they have going on, let them know what Give Local Alavini Highlands is all about and what you stand to gain from participating and doing well and just see how open and warm they are to providing a matching grant. And then you just ask. And you can sort of tailor the ask to the kind of donor that you're approaching. So for instance, a business or a car dealership or someone locally that is looking for positive publicity, you can offer them a shout out on social media, adding their logo to your page and your website. You can sort of tailor it to their needs so that it's interesting to them. And for donors who are not interested in publicity, you can also really just make the case that this is a great way to use their donation to bring in more donations. So instead of just accepting the check and taking it to the bank, you're using it for a purpose that is a little bit beyond that. You're using it to incentivize other donors and get a bigger benefit to your cause. So we actually have quite a few options available in our matching grants tool. You can find that on your admin dashboard under fundraising tools. So there's a lot of different things. You don't have to do a one-to-one match. You can do it to reach a certain threshold. You can match a certain percentage of each match. You can set a cap on the amount that will be matched. So like, for instance, if you have $500, you can put a cap of $50 on the match donation so that your grant goes a little bit further. And you can also combine smaller matches to post multiple opportunities or you can roll them into one match. So it's a pretty flexible tool. If this is overwhelming, what I really recommend doing is going to your organization dashboard, clicking on the matching grants tool and just going through the process of creating a grant and just seeing what options are there because it's a really huge help on a giving event. So as I was talking about matching grants, you don't really have to look far and wide in most cases to get a matching grant because your organization likely has some people who are already primed and ready to give. So the first group of people that you'd wanna tap would be major gift donors. It's a natural extension of what they already do for your nonprofit. And for them, it can add some excitement because instead of just cutting a check to you, they're actually getting involved in a way that's new to them as a donor. So it actually helps engage them, engage those major gift donors. So it can be really appealing to major gift donors, pardon me, who are perhaps just a little stuck in giving donations and wanna do something new and exciting. Your board of directors is definitely a group that you wanna tap. Some individual board members may be willing to put up some money. And they can also pull together funds to provide a match. That is one of the responsibilities that your board of director has to your organization is the fiscal health of your organization fundraising. So it's a really great way to get them involved in fundraising and get them involved and give local Allegheny Highlands. One thing that is sometimes a really great route is if your board members have annual dues, you can get their dues and use them as a match. So that's something that you can also consider if your board is a little bit confused, you can just sort of take their dues and use them as a matching grant or just pitch them the idea in your next board meeting, but they are natural grantors for matching grants. And then obviously sponsors. If you have any people or businesses in the community that you have a relationship, you can ask them for a matching grant. They often love the positive publicity. And this is also a really great way to sort of break the ice with some businesses or sponsors in the community that you have a relationship with, but haven't had this kind of relationship with. So this is a great opportunity to turn somebody that you have a positive relationship with into a sponsorship relationship. So it's a great icebreaker if this is all a little bit new to you. So as I mentioned, there is a tool on Mighty Cause that you can just enter this information into. You basically just enter in how your match works, how much it's for, when it is active, and there you can do things like add the donor's name. You can add a logo. So for instance, if it's a business, you can add their logo to the matching grant. And it also, you can include it in your totals. So for instance, if you have a big donor and they are providing you with a check, you can actually automatically add that check bit by bit with each donation to your total so that it is included and you don't have to enter it separately. So there's a couple of places that this displays. It'll display on your organization page in a few different places at the bottom. People will be able to see that you have a match and it'll also create a little sticker on your donate button so that when people go to donate, it shows them that you have a matching grant that's available. And there's also a search on the live site where people will be able to find organizations that have an active match because a lot of donors look for organizations that have a match so that they can make their donations, donations go a little bit further. And then you'll also wanna just make sure that you're promoting it to your own channels on social media, in email and so on and so forth. So moving on from matching grants, the next thing I wanted to talk about is peer-to-peer fundraising. So if you're not familiar with peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer is a fundraising technique and what it does is it basically leverages the people who already support your nonprofit and uses them to bring in new supporters by having them create a fundraiser and market it to the people in their social network. So the main benefit of this is that they have access to people that your organization does not have a donor relationship with so that can actually bring in new donors. So peer-to-peer fundraising, donor acquisition is really the big part of that. So a lot of nonprofits, especially smaller ones, are curious about how you expand beyond your list of existing supporters, the people that you email all the time and ask for donations with every campaign. This is a fantastic way to do that. The magic of peer-to-peer is that if I'm a donor for your nonprofit, you don't have access or permission to solicit my mother or my husband or my best friend because you don't have a relationship with those people. However, I do. So I am able to create a fundraiser, go to them, and say, hey, I care about this cause a lot, please make a donation. And that works to bring people in. Most people just across the nonprofit sector make their first donation to a nonprofit because they are asked by somebody they know. So it's a really great technique at getting people in through the door. It's a great way to engage your existing donors rather than just asking them to give. You're actually asking them to fundraise for you, which is a fun and exciting new way to get involved with a cause that they care about. They also are talking about what your organization means to them, why your work is important, and that's a really great testimonial effect because a nonprofit talking about how important their work is only goes so far, but when a person that somebody knows and trusts and has conversations and a relationship with says, hey, this organization does fantastic work. Here is why I'm interested in them and I really want you to support them today. That really goes a lot further than just them getting an email blast from you. That really gets people hooked and it gets them to actually pull out their credit card and make their first donation. And it's also a really great way to generate buzz on social media. That is a way that you can get more people engaged on social media, especially if you don't have a huge audience yourself. It puts more boots on the ground, so more people are hearing about your campaign. So peer-to-peer fundraising on Mighty Cause is pretty simple. All you have to do is ask your supporters to fundraise for you. You can do that in any number of ways. You can get your staff together in a meeting and ask people to start a fundraiser. You can send out an email. You can post on social media. However you want to ask them, you just have to ask them. And you want to send them to your organization's profile. So the URL that you will be sharing to collect donations because there's a button right next to your donate button that says fundraise. And when they click on that, it automatically takes them into our fundraiser creation wizard and walks them through the process and it connects the fundraiser to your organization. And then they just set a goal and start asking for donations. Most people don't start during the early giving period, but they can start a little bit closer to the event. And if they do start taking donations on June 1st, they all count toward the event. So peer-to-peer, just some sort of details about how it works. If you're an administrator for your nonprofit on Mighty Cause, you'll get an email notification each time someone creates a fundraiser for your organization. You have a campaign screen, which you can access through your admin dashboard and you can see the campaigns that have been created. You can see who created it, how much they've raised. You can also see if it's not published. So for instance, if you have somebody who starts a page and they don't finish it and publish it, you can reach out to them and be like, hey, do you need any help finishing this page? All donations that are made to peer-to-peer pages, whether they're teams, events, or just individual fundraisers, they are counted on the total in your profile. They're counting toward the leaderboard and they are eligible for prizes. So all of those donations help you. They're just sort of funneled into your organization's page and your grand total for the event. Peer-to-peer donations, they just get bundled into your normal disbursement. So you'll just see them in your donation report and you'll see them in your disbursement. There's no middleman. It is a donation to your nonprofit. Nobody has any access to that money. It just gets bundled into your disbursement. So when you get your check or your deposit from us, those donations will just be included and you'll be able to see that on your donations report and your disbursement report. And you can also link them on your nonprofit's profile. So you can also just reflect that you have people fundraising for you for your Give Local campaign. So if you wanna give them a shout out on your page, you do have a space called Featured Fundraisers where you can do that and you can link to the pages that are connected to your nonprofit. So moving on from peer to peer, email strategy. Your email list is really your secret weapon on giving events because you don't have to worry about social media algorithms. Unfortunately on social media, sometimes posts don't show chronologically. So somebody who follows your page on Facebook, they may not see your post until a few days afterward, which is a real bummer. But with email, you send an email and you show up at the top of their inbox. So you have a direct line to your supporters through your email list. So we definitely recommend getting an email schedule together to let them know you're participating, to let them know that donations are open on June 1st and that leading up to the event, get them given, get them interested, included in your e-newsletter and so on and so forth. So email is a tool that you can really use to get people excited about your campaign and engage in your campaign. So what we recommend is keeping email short and sweet. People on the internet have a very short attention span. So making sure that your email gets to the facts very quickly has a big CTA button that people can just click to get to where you want them to go. And it's short and skimmable. Most people don't sit down and read word for word. What's in each email, they sort of skim it for the important points. So use headers and images and things along those lines to make it easy for people to very quickly understand what you're emailing them about and take action. We do recommend segmenting your audiences. And what we mean by that is that if you have a big email list, instead of just sending a blast to everybody, split that list into smaller groups based on affinity. So what that means is that you don't want to talk to people who gave one donation two years ago the same way you would talk to volunteers who are helping your nonprofit on a regular basis. You don't want to send an ask for $25 to a major gift donor. So think about some affinity groups, people who are alike in some way and how you can segment them out to appeal to their interests directly because people are much more likely to be responsive to emails that appeal to who they are as a donor. So segmentation and just sort of pulling out some key groups like your recurring donors, your volunteers and so on and so forth can really help your messaging through email be more effective. You'll want to make sure that you're coordinating your schedule and your timing and sending emails when it's most important. So for instance, if your power hour is coming up, have something that is scheduled and ready to go well in advance. We also recommend making sure that it is mobile friendly. So most email marketing programs have templates that are mobile friendly just as a rule. But sometimes if you're using constant contact there may not be, all of them may not be mobile friendly. So you want to make sure that people can access the email and read it and have it look good on their smartphone because that's how most people are reading their emails. So make sure that it's mobile friendly and test your emails. My rule of thumb is to have two people edit it. So when you're writing an email and I do emails for Mighty Cause, so I can tell you this firsthand, when you're editing an email and you're changing things around, it's really easy for that email to start looking a little bit funky because you've been staring at it for hours. So having two sets of eyes on it is really helpful to making sure that your email makes sense, that it doesn't have any typos. Have people test links and make sure that those work because as somebody who works in email marketing myself there is no worse feeling than sending out an email where the link doesn't work or it goes to the wrong page. So just make sure that you're testing your emails and if you're really small volunteers are often a great resource to help with those kinds of asks. And then just make sure that you're clearly asking people to donate. Some nonprofits can be a little bit timid and they'll say thank you for your support. That's not really asking them to donate. So you wanna make sure that you're using calls to action that say give now, donate today that are really clear because again people are skimming these emails they're not reading them word for word. So if you say thank you for your support that's not really very clear to your donors. So you just wanna make sure that you're using a clear ask. And if you're segmenting it's also helpful to get really specific like say give $50 today if that's the segment you're reaching out to. So yeah, those are our recommendations for emails. It really does not need to be as intensive it should follow your natural cadence for talking to your supporters via email. So if you usually send one email a month you don't need to scale up to doing one every single day do it in a way that makes sense with your overall communication strategy but these are our recommendations and I definitely would recommend getting your key emails in place, edited and ready to fire well before the event day so you don't have to worry about it on the day of. So social media is also a really big place to get donors interested and engaged on a giving day. My biggest recommendation when it comes to social media is to just go where your audience is you don't need to spend a bunch of time figuring out Instagram stories if you have two followers on Instagram but you have 2,000 followers on Facebook definitely spend the most time and effort where you're likely to get the most engagement and interest. So yeah, just look at where your followers are and make a plan to post there leading up to the event and during the event. I do recommend using tools like Hootsuite, Tweet Deck Facebook publishing tools to schedule your key posts ahead of time and save any live posting on the giving day for celebrating reaching milestones thanking donors who've made big donations countdowns and so on and so forth. So you can go into most social media scheduling programs and you can plug in your giving of your power hours get that in the hopper so that you don't have to worry about it because you're gonna have a busy day and anything that you can do to make your day a little bit easier is something you're going to thank yourself for. Things like photo, videos, stories, infographics those kinds of eye-catching things are really great on social media. If you have the capacity to make a campaign video I highly recommend it you don't need to have a Hollywood production. You can use an iPhone and splice together some images on your iPhone a short video on your iPhone or your smartphone and use that as your campaign video it doesn't need to be a grand production. If you have any volunteers who are experienced with creating videos it's a great opportunity to get them involved but it doesn't need to be a Hollywood production but videos do really well and they're a really key piece of content that you can use in multiple different places on the giving day. And again, social media just make sure that you include a link you wanna make sure that people know what to do and where to go. So if you're posting on social media make sure that you include a link to your organization profile where people can make their donation. So one thing that is really important it's not really something that you need to do during the event but you wanna make sure that you account for follow-up. So the whole purpose of the giving event is to engage donors to get new people on board at your organization and get them interested in your work and giving to support your work. So if you don't do that then you're not getting the most out of participating in the event. So make sure that you have some follow-up planned. So we do have some tools in the system that will kind of make it easier for you to automate quick thank-yous. Something that is really important if you have the capacity to do it is just sending a quick email to people who give to your organization especially if they're familiar to you just saying, hey, thanks for giving. One thing that I think is fantastic if you have the ability to do it is phone calls. You have the ability to collect phone numbers when people are checking out and there was one giving Tuesday, I think in 2017 and I was working for Mighty Cause and I just saw a really cool campaign and I gave to that campaign. And then my phone rang just a minute later and it was a volunteer who was thanking me for my donation and I was so impressed. I remember that years later. So it really made an impression. So the more personal you can make your follow-up the better it will be to get people ready to give a get and really engaged in your organization. You wanna make sure that you close the loop on your campaign when you don't sort of talk about like this is how much we've raised and this is what we're going to do with the money we've raised. People can feel kind of unsatisfied. So definitely make sure that you're planning on sending out an email or posting on your website and social media what you managed to raise and thanking them and reinforcing the impact of your work and what you intend to do with the money you raised. Definitely first-time donors if you get new people in the door have a plan for them. Figure out how you're going to engage them whether that's a welcome packet or a welcome series of emails or getting them on the phone and getting to know them a little bit. If you get new donors in through the door on Give Local Allegheny Highlands you just wanna make sure that there's a plan in place so that you can start engaging these donors and make sure that these are donors who are ready to be moved down the pipeline and become ongoing recurring donors to your nonprofit and just sort of feed them into your year-round communication and your stewardship. So every new donor that comes in you wanna just make sure that you're engaging them and that you're including them in all of your communications and moving them on so that they're interested in your next campaign or they're ready to make their donation recurring on a monthly basis. So just make sure when you're putting your campaign together that you don't forget about follow-up so you're not scrambling to do that the day after the event. And that is it. So thank you so much for listening to me talk about strategy for a while. It looks like we've got a couple of questions already in the questions box. So I will go ahead and answer a few of those. Hey, Linda. Yeah. Before you do, I wanna just add one comment onto talking about the emailing campaign strategy and also the social media strategy. So I know like for some of the groups that is kind of an uncomfortable thing to start doing. And so what we've done is we've created some templates to help groups with getting started to send out emails to potential donors asking for money. And so those templates are in the nonprofit toolkit. And then we're working right now on creating some templates that are very similar for social media posts that will also be in the template. So if you guys go into the nonprofit toolkit there are some resources there to help you with sending some of those communications out. Yeah, thank you. Sorry for missing that. But yeah, the toolkit is a great resource. If you're not quite sure what to say on social media and there will be some forthcoming resources available to you so you don't have to feel stuck if you're not normally asking for donations on social media. Often it's just a matter of saying, hey, here's what we're doing and here's a link but there will be some, there are some templates available for you in case you get a little bit of writer's block. So let's see as far as the questions go. How do matching grants work? I have one entered and what do I do now? That's a great question. So basically if you've already entered the matching grant and you've got things sorted out with the person who is providing the grants your job is to start promoting it. So you wouldn't wanna start promoting it right this second because at this point donations aren't open. So it depends on when the dates are for your matching grants. I would not recommend making the grant active before June 1st because obviously you wanna make sure that it counts for the event. So look at the dates and then just start promoting it to your network. The people who are on your email list, social media you can also let your staff know let your volunteers know that you have a matching grant available. So the next step is really just promoting it. Once you've entered it into our tool it will sort of fire on its own. So you're basically setting it so that you can forget it at least as far as managing the grant goes. So you're telling us the dates that it is active the times that it is active and how it works. So as far as the matching grant on the platform goes once you've entered it, it's set and you don't have to worry about it. You can edit it if you made a mistake or you change your mind about something but you don't need to do anything else necessarily from the mighty cause side. Your job is really just to promote it to the people who support your organization and get the word out there. I would recommend if you do an e-newsletter or even a print newsletter just including it in there that you have this matching grant available for give local Allegheny Highlands and just that sort of plants the seed in people's mind. And whenever the grant becomes active when it kicks into gear and becomes available you just wanna make sure that you promote it to whatever channels you're using. So whether that's print, whether that's social media whether that's email, just promote it to whatever channels you're using. But hopefully that helps but you don't need to do a whole lot from the management side on Mighty Cause you just wanna work on getting the word out there. All right, so offline donations sometimes come in the mail every other day for us. Should I be entering them now? I would say no, if they count if you're wanted to use them for the event start entering them when donations count which is on June 1st. However, I mean, this is a little bit questionable I guess Daniel, you can weigh in. I don't think it's in the spirit of the event to sort of bankroll like sort of hold them and hoard them and then enter them in for the events if they're not specifically for the event. So I would try to just enter them as soon as you can when you start getting them after June 1st but since there's a month to go at this point just do what you normally do for those donations and then starting on June 1st when you get donations in the mail you can start entering them for the purposes of give local Allegheny Highlands. That's not really specified in the rules but I would say it's a little bit questionable to sort of hoard them and enter all of your donations from the month of May in on June 1st. So I would probably recommend against doing that but when you start getting donations in the mail checks in the mail on June 1st you can certainly start entering them into Mighty Cause to get credit for those starting on June 1st but at this point donations you can still collect them on Mighty Cause you can certainly still use the platform but they don't help you win prizes. They don't count for leaderboards that all starts on June 1st. So Daniel, I don't know if you have anything you wanna add to that about entering in offline donations. Yeah, I'd say for us when we are doing the verification we're not gonna verify every transaction but if it's like a large transaction or something seems suspicious about it I'll get in contact with you and just ask to verify it and for that I'll ask if the checks are made out on June 1st or later to be accepted for the Giving Day leaderboard. Yeah, I think that's more than fair. So just June 1st is when all the donation activity starts you can certainly use Mighty Cause as a donation platform but starting on June 1st is when things start counting for the actual event. All right, so there's one more question and make sure if you have a question and you have me and Daniel here this is our last webinar. So please if there's something that's on your mind and you wanna learn more about please make sure you ask us cause we want everybody who's here today to leave feeling confident and good and ready for give local Allegheny Highlands. But I have one question here. Do offline donations qualify for golden tickets? The answer for that is no. For the hourly prizes which is golden tickets and power hours only online donations count. So for instance, when you're getting ready for a power hour only you wanna drive people to donate online because checks don't count cash doesn't count for those our system is automatically pulling them and we don't have any way of knowing that you've received this donation during this hour. So we wanna make sure it's fair and online donations are the only ones that count for golden tickets and for power hours the offline donations only count towards your leaderboard position. So the leaderboard prizes which are the ranking that is sort of looking at how much you've raised from June 1st to the end of the day on June 15th those count offline donations but for the hourly prizes it's only online donations. So during those hours you wanna urge people to go to your profile on the Give Local Allegheny Highland site and make a donation there because cash and checks don't count. All right, so there's one more question I have here. How are seniors notified to vote for an organization and are all high schools eligible or just in Allegheny County? I will turn that one over to Daniel since he's the mastermind of that program. Yeah, so we're running some news articles about it this weekend. So those will hopefully do a good job of explaining how the program works but I'll say it here too. So that will be for seniors who are based in Covington or Allegheny County. So right now I've been working with representatives at both a boys home and then also Covington and Allegheny County high schools. So for Covington and Allegheny County when the registrations are finished I'll send the list of all the nonprofits participating in the Giving Day to representatives at the two schools and then they will put all of those nonprofits into an online survey on the learning management systems that the two schools use and it will be assigned as a quiz to all of the seniors in both schools. And then there will be some announcements on the morning announcements and emails and things like that going out to encourage the seniors to fill out the survey and select one nonprofit. And then for the boys home because it's a smaller group we'll just send them the list and they'll get their seniors to select a nonprofit from that list. And then if there are any homeschooled kids in the area or seniors at any other locations that we're not aware of then in the newspaper article we're asking for people to just reach out to the Allegheny Foundation and we'll send them the list as well. So it's only for seniors in Covington and Allegheny. Thank you, yes. Super informative and I didn't know all of that stuff. So thank you for answering that question. It looks like that's all we've got in terms of questions. So if you have any questions that you think of after the webinar I'm available to you, Daniel is available to you and we can work with you if you have anything that you wanna know more about but it looks like that's it for our questions today. Thank all of you for attending and listening to me talk about strategy for so long. I can't wait to see what you achieve on Give Local Allegheny Highlands. I'm really excited for the event and here to support you leading up to the event. Mighty Cause does have support staff that is available to you. You can email support at mightycause.com with any technical questions that you may have as you're customizing your page, using the matching grants tool and so on and so forth. So don't be shy about reaching out to our support team if you have anything that you need help with. They are happy to hop on the phone with you or send you instructions step by step with screenshots. They're very helpful, very friendly and always happy to help. So support at mightycause.com is how you can get in touch with our support staff. My name again is Linda and you can email me directly at Linda L-I-N-D-A at mightycause.com but that's it for today. We will make this recording available on the Give Local site. It'll be in the nonprofit toolkit. So if you wanted to check in on the recording, you can watch the recording and download the slides there. I just need a minute to upload them but those will be available there if you have anybody else that you wanted to show this webinar to. But that is it for today. Thank you guys so much and happy fundraising. Good luck on Give Local.