 So just give everybody a minute or two, well just a minute to get logged in and then we will get started. All right, it's just about two o'clock. So hello everyone and thanks for joining me today for our webinar on leveraging matching grants and partnerships for Giving Tuesday. My name is Linda Gerhardt and I'm the Senior Community Engagement Manager here at Mighty Cause. I've been at Mighty Cause since 2016. So this is my third Giving Tuesday event with Mighty Cause and I'm really happy to be here sharing tips for securing and utilizing matching grants because I've seen firsthand what an incredible difference they can make in the success of a Giving Tuesday campaign. Here's a quick look at today's agenda and just as a bit of housekeeping, please note that I'll be taking questions at the end of the presentation. So if you think of something you want to ask while I'm presenting, just type it into the questions box of your go-to webinar panel and we will make sure to get to it at the end of the presentation during the Q&A session. All right, so first before we dive into partnerships and matching grants, I just want to go over some Giving Tuesday basics so that we're all on the same page. Giving Tuesday is a global giving event, but Mighty Cause hosts our own Giving Tuesday event on our platform because the global event is so in line with our mission of serving nonprofits. To help you get ready for the event, we offer free trainings like this webinar, as well as a lot of other great tools you can use like blog posts, e-books, and so on. We're also offering prizes, which we'll get to in a minute, and we're offering free fundraising for your nonprofit. Specifically, what this means is that your donors will be given the option to cover the platform fee for you when they check out, which is standard on Mighty Cause if you've opted into the donation booster. But if they don't cover your fees, we will take care of it for you. So there is a credit card processing fee of 2.9 plus 30 cents per transaction that Mighty Cause does not keep, and we want to be clear and transparent about that, that the fee still applies on Giving Tuesday, but your nonprofit won't see any platform fees taken out of your disbursement, so you'll get to keep more of what you raise. As a bonus, you'll also have free access to our premium fundraising tools to help you make the most of your participation in this event on Mighty Cause. Participating in Giving Tuesday on Mighty Cause is easier than it has ever been. You just go to givingtuesday.mightycause.com and fill out a quick form. And if you're already an administrator for your nonprofit, a lot of the information will actually be automatically pulled from your Mighty Cause account. So it's a really quick and easy form. It shouldn't take you more than a few minutes. And then you just start by getting ready for your campaign. You update your Mighty Cause profile, create your campaign, and get ready to fundraise. Early donations open on November 13th, which, unbelievably, is less than a month away. And the big day is on November 27th. One thing I do want to note is that this is actually a 27-hour event on Mighty Cause because we start at midnight Eastern time and go to midnight Pacific time so that everybody gets an equal opportunity to fundraise, and no one gets an unfair advantage or an unfair disadvantage because they happen to be in a particular time zone. And as I mentioned, we're giving away lots of prizes. This year, we've got over $10,000 to give away, and there are plenty of opportunities to win. First up is the leaderboards, which are split into large and small nonprofits. So you're really only competing against nonprofits that are similar in size and scope to your own. The top fundraiser on each leaderboard gets $1,000, and the second place gets $250. The hourly prizes are super exciting and kind of the bread and butter of the day because we're giving away money each hour of the event. And some hours, there will be multiple prizes given away. There are two main ways to win, randomly and in competitive power hours. Golden tickets are what we call the random prizes, and they are worth $100. They're awarded every single hour of the event, so we'll be giving away 27 of these golden tickets. They're attached to donations, so as long as you have donations coming in during a certain hour, you have a chance to win a golden ticket during that hour. And there are six power hours throughout the day, which are worth from $500 to $1,000, and you'll win those by either bringing in the highest number of donors or the most money during that hour. You can see the full breakdown and schedule of power hours by going to givingtuesday.mightycause.com. It's right there on the prizes page, so you'll just want to take a look at that once you're registered and make sure you understand when the power hours are and what the criteria is to win because some hours are most unique donors and some hours are most dollars raised, so obviously your strategy will depend on what we're looking for during that particular hour. All right, so with that housekeeping out of the way, we'll move on to the main topic of this webinar, which is partnerships and matching grants. First, I want to go over the basics of matching grants and how they work on Mighty Cause, because it is one of our more complex tools, so I just wanted to make sure that we're all on the same page about what a matching grant is and how it works. So the biggest and most obvious question here is what is a matching grant? And it's a pretty simple concept. A matching grant is simply a large donation that you leverage to bring in other donations. It's an incentive. It's usually provided by a sponsor, a partner, or a major gift donor, and a matching grant gives your nonprofit the opportunity to say that every donation will be matched, which is a great way to motivate donors to give on a day when time is important and every donation counts for more because there are prizes at stake for your nonprofit. It's essentially a really awesome marketing tool. It's a way to motivate donors to give now and to feel like their donation has even more of an impact because they're helping you get toward that goal, which is meeting the full amount of the match, which is the full amount of the grant that your partner or your sponsor has provided. The reason why matching grants are such an effective fundraising tactic is because it's designed to appeal to the psychology of donors. First, as I mentioned, it creates an urgency to donate. And at the end of the day, it works a lot like a Bogo or Buy One, Get One deal works in a retail store. It gives people a limited time to get more for their money and appeals to their desire for a good deal. For smaller donors, especially knowing that they can make a $5 or $25 donation count for more is hugely appealing and helps them get around the psychological hurdle, a feeling like they don't have enough to donate to actually be helpful, which unfortunately can in turn make them opt out of donating to a cause altogether. It creates a clear actionable call to action with clear instructions, which makes the decision to donate easier. Donors are more likely to donate when it's clear what they're supposed to do, when you want them to give, how you want them to give. So a matching grant is really great at hitting all of those points for donors. And it's exciting, they get to be involved in helping your nonprofit secure a large donation or meet the match and doing more to help you. And it has all sorts of excitement built into it, like counting down to the grant being over, helping you hit milestones, celebrating those milestones. And those things all hit those sweet spots with donors that really motivates them to donate. I don't want to get too bogged down in the technical details because, as I said, it's a tool that can do a lot for you. It's easy to use, but there's a lot of things it can do. But Mighty Cause has a great and easy tool that's available to everyone to use to manage your matching grants. It's located under the donation section of your Mighty Cause Manager or your dashboard and you can enter in your grant to have it display on your Mighty Cause page. When you enter the grant, you'll choose the duration, which is when it starts and ends, and whether you want to name your grant tour or keep them anonymous, and the details about your match. When a grant is active, there will be a badge added to your donate button, so everyone who donates to your page will be able to see that that match is available. And we actually auto-calculate the match for you so your donors can see your progress and you can also track your progress very easily. One important thing to note is that you can add a grant on your organization profile, and you can also add one on a fundraiser. So you'll just need to be sure that you add it in the correct place. If you add it to your profile, it'll apply to all the fundraisers and teams and peer-to-peer pages that are connected to your nonprofit. And if you add it to a fundraiser page, it'll apply to that page only. So just keep that in mind if you have a specific fundraiser, you'd like to add the grant to and just consider the campaign and your strategy for the matching grant. If you have lots of peer-to-peer pages going on and you add it to your org page, a lot of people who are fundraising for you will also have that grant applied to their page. A few important things to note about matching grants is that you can add consecutive and simultaneous matches. So for instance, you can have a large match going for the entire Giving Tuesday event and then also have smaller matches to help you in power hours and drive donations at key times. So you can use them pretty creatively and strategically. That is a new feature you didn't use to be able to have simultaneous matches on Mighty Cause, but we updated the tool and now you can have several grants going on simultaneously. You can also cap your match, which basically means capping the amount that is matched so that one large donation doesn't wipe out your whole match. A case where this would be important is if you had a $1,000 match active and someone donated $800, that would eat up the available grant money or only leave $200 left, which defeats the purpose of the match. But you could cap it so that every donation was matched up to a certain amount like $100. To make that match money go a little further, you can customize that amount. You can edit them up to the time they're closed and you can also backdate them. So if you add a match for the whole event the day before Giving Tuesday, but you wanted to make sure all of the early donations you got are included in the match, you can backdate it to ensure that everything that you want included in the match is included. A few really important points that I want to make is that only online donations count toward matching grants on Mighty Cause. So unfortunately cash and check donations that you enter as offline donations won't count toward the match, at least as far as the tool on our platform is concerned, and only online donations count toward prizes and leaderboard totals on Giving Tuesday. So if you have a $5,000 match and that's collected offline via check, it won't be added to your totals on the leaderboard and won't count toward any prizes. So that's a big reason to consider having the grant fulfilled online instead and because we're waiving our platform fees for you and you don't have to have those deducted, you have that option on the day without incurring a platform fee on your large donation on Mighty Cause. Okay, and so now we're going to move into the reason that I'm sure everyone is here today, which is talking about how you actually secure matching grants. There are a few basic steps to follow to secure a matching grant and the first step is prospecting and research, which means finding potential grant providers and researching whether or not it's reasonable to spend time pursuing them for a matching grant. This can involve forging new relationships with businesses, community groups, and so on, but before you do any of that, you'll want to look at your existing supporters first because obviously they already have a relationship with your nonprofit and they're lower hanging fruit. So we'll talk a little bit more about that in the next slide, but I just want to note that you don't necessarily have to start cold calling and walking into businesses unannounced to get a matching grant because you very likely have some great prospects that are already affiliated with your nonprofit. When you're finding prospects and researching, you'll want to look for a couple of key things. The first of course is wealth, meaning can a particular prospect actually reasonably provide a matching grant or afford to give to charity in large amounts? For instance, you may have an awesome and motivated volunteer, but if that volunteer is a doctor who's two years out of medical school and saddled with lots of student debt, you're probably barking up the wrong tree to find a grant with them. And likewise, if there's a local business, that really seems like a good potential partner because their mission and their ethos aligns with your nonprofits, but they've been in business for less than six months and are still finding their footing. This may not be the right time to consider them a prospective grantor. The next thing you'll want to look for is affinity, meaning do they have a connection to your cause? Do they give to nonprofits? Are they known for their philanthropy? Is there some thread connecting your nonprofit to them? If the answer is no, you don't necessarily need to toss them out, but they may not be a particularly hot prospect for you to follow up on. And the next thing is history. Have they given to your nonprofit before or are they supportive of other nonprofits in your area? Past behavior, especially where donors are concerned, is the best predictor of future behavior. So if someone has given to you before or has partnered with other nonprofits with similar causes, they are much more likely to be open to providing a matching grant or partnering up with you for your Giving Tuesday campaign in other ways. The easiest way to start the process, in my opinion, is just by creating a list or a spreadsheet where you can identify some of these prospects and work on moving them through the pipeline. And you can take notes about your research and any thoughts you have about them as a prospect. So when you're on step one, you'll want to think about who can provide a matching grant. And on this slide, we have some places where you can start. The first stop should always, always, always be your board of directors. Funding is part of a board of directors' job description, and they should be one of the first places you go. Individual board members might be up for providing a match as themselves. And one thing you can also suggest is pooling together their annual donations from your board so that instead of just sort of passing the hat at the end of the year so that everybody can make their annual donations, they can make their annual donations more meaningful by turning them into a collective matching grant. This is really common. We see this a lot on Maggie Cause and that's because it's part of your board's job to help you with fundraising. And this is a great way they can make their annual donations go further and make them more meaningful. The next stop, I should say, should be any major gift donors. And this is important because this can actually be an important step in the stewarding process for these major gift donors. A matching grant gives the donor an opportunity to get involved in a much bigger and more public way than just quietly writing you a check each year. And that in turn helps keep them engaged and involved in your cause so you can continue to grow that relationship and steward that donor and keep them involved in your cause and in giving to your cause. And next, you'll want to think about community partners, corporate sponsors, local businesses. You may already have some sponsors you've worked with in the past but if not, you can also open the door to new relationships with businesses in your community. For instance, when I worked for an animal shelter, one of the biggest supporters we had was a local law firm and it didn't seem like a very likely partner but a lot of law firms and big companies like being philanthropic because it helps them be known as a charitable company and cultivate a warm public image. So don't be afraid to think outside the box here. Obviously, you might have some natural partners. For instance, if you're an animal shelter, partnering with a pet food store, if you're a food bank, partnering with a local grocery store but you can also sort of think outside that box as to who's providing jobs in the area, who's in the community and really get creative when you're thinking about prospective grantors. And lastly, volunteers can be a potential source of a grant. A lot of nonprofit volunteers do actually have the means to provide a large donation on their own. At an animal shelter I worked for, we had a volunteer who was sort of a gruff, retired gentleman who came in a few times a week to help with laundry and do dishes and was just really generous with his time and he also happened to be a retired successful businessman who had quite a lot to give and we didn't know this for a while because no one had really asked him or started that conversation with him but once we did, he was happy to provide us with a matching grant for one of our campaigns. So it helps to work with your volunteer coordinator or your volunteer manager who might know a little bit more about your volunteers' personal lives and their situations to identify any prospects in your volunteer force. Volunteers can also band together to pull their donations into a match. In the nonprofit sector, we often tend to think of volunteers as sort of different and separate than donors but there's a lot of overlap. These are the biggest supporters of your organization. They come in and they spend their time there when they could be sitting on the couch watching TV. So it's worth looking at that overlap and seeing how you can get them involved in your fundraising efforts. Excuse me. All right. And step two is cultivation which is basically just starting the conversation with your prospect. Reach out to them either by phone, in person, if it's someone you see in the course of your work or email. Try to schedule a meeting with them and for this, I really recommend doing it in person whenever you're able to because this step is really about cultivating a personal relationship and getting a read on them and things like being able to shake hands, see their faces and letting them see yours goes a long way to building that relationship. And once you're able to get the meeting, you'll want to start what people in the sales industry call the discovery process which is finding out what's important to them, why they care about your cause, what's drawing them in, and of course trying to figure out how open and warm they might be to providing a match. You're basically searching for information, not asking for anything directly at this stage but you can definitely get a read on them by looking at telling them about your campaign, telling them about your plans and seeing how they react and if they seem interested and like they want to get involved. And again, this is why doing it in person whenever you can is so important because a lot of people can easily hide how they feel in an email but being in person is a lot more telling. You can look at their body language, see how they respond and get a better read on them as a prospect. Okay so in this slide we've got some tips for cultivating donor relationships. The first is to assign a point person to each prospect and this is important because ultimately whether they say yes to providing a match or partnering up with your organization in any other way comes down to the personal relationship that you have with this donor and the person that's asking them for help. And if you have multiple people involved it can make the process feel really impersonal to them like the donor is being passed around and even putting the donor of having to repeat important pieces of information which is not ideal and can be off-putting. Track your conversations with them and the outcomes of those conversations in your spreadsheet or in the supporters tool on Mighty Cause. And again keep it personal you're not building a relationship with a business or a company even if that's the intent you're building a relationship with a person at that business or company and that's important to understand when you're having these conversations and you're going on this journey of finding potential grand tours. And of course find out how that person likes to communicate and tailor your approach to how often they want to stay in touch how they like to be contacted and so on. If somebody hates phone calls you should not call them on the phone if somebody prefers an email because they're super busy it's okay to send an email. There's no one-size-fits-all approach so be willing to stay flexible in how you manage each prospect. The next step is really the biggest one it's the ask. So once you've done the legwork and gotten to know them and determined that they might be open to providing a match ask for one. I recommend keeping it pretty open and letting them steer the conversation about numbers so that you don't overshoot and ask for something way over what they can provide or completely low-ball it and ask them for a thousand dollars when they would have provided up to 10,000. It really helps to pitch it as a partnership that helps both of you and it's also helpful to keep it low pressure. Nobody really likes to get a hard sell or be put on the spot so be sure to ask in a way that's open, flexible and friendly with the emphasis on how a matching grant could help your cause. So on this slide are some of the benefits that grant provider for grant providers that you can use when you're talking to them with your ask. First and most importantly emphasize that providing a matching grant will help your nonprofit build support and in that sense do more than just writing a one-time check before the end of the year would. It can help your nonprofit acquire new donors reach your funding goals and motivate existing supporters to give more. So it's really a growth opportunity for your nonprofit. So a check is great and fine and helps keep your programs funded but this can do so much more than that and it's important to emphasize that with potential grantors. For businesses especially it's also great to mention that it's good PR that their business will get exposure through your promotional efforts which will help them build their brand in the community and help them be seen as a charitable company or business that gives back. But individuals can also enjoy this exposure just as much. So unless you've got a donor who is 100% clear that they want to be anonymous and they don't want to be named publicly it's also a nice little perk to be mentioned and recognized publicly for philanthropy and it's a great way to provide these individuals with a new and meaningful way to support your nonprofit and usually it's a lot more fun than just making a quiet annual donation and writing a check. They get to be involved in the fundraising process and the excitement of your Giving Tuesday campaign and play an elevated role in your campaign. All right so the last step is just sealing the deal. You'll want to make sure you've both settled on an amount for the matching grant and of course talked about whether or not they want to be recognized publicly because some donors are really big on their privacy and don't want to use their names. So with individuals especially make sure you know what their wishes are. You can talk specific terms too. Some donors want to be involved in the terms of the match and dictate how their donation is used like matching up to a certain amount like maybe they want to stop matching at $50 or time frames or whether they want to provide a one-to-one match or a two-to-one match which is where people would double their donations. But give them the opportunity to give their input on how they'd like to see the match operate and also find out if they want to provide a true match or will just be providing a lump sum and what I mean by that is do they want to fulfill the match after the event for the exact amount you raise which may be less if you don't make it to your goal or do they want to provide one lump sum and they'll be giving you that money anyway and you'll basically be using it as a marketing tool. And then finally discuss how they'd like to fulfill their match. Offline is fine but just keep in mind as I mentioned that offline donations don't count toward leaderboard prizes or help you win power hours or golden tickets. So they can fulfill it online by making their donation on your Mighty Cause page with no platform fees if they'd like to help you on the leaderboard or help you win a power hour but just make sure you understand and have an understanding with the grantor about how this match will be fulfilled. So even if you don't manage to secure a matching grant with a prospect it's worth keeping the conversation open and seeing if there are other ways you can partner up. Sometimes an event like a happy hour or a benefit night at a local restaurant or business can be a great way to promote your giving Tuesday event and for businesses especially get people in the door. So stay open to these kinds of partnerships because there's other things you can do even if they're not in a position to provide a grant at this time. An employer match where employees give and the company offers to match their donations can be another great option that will help you out. And many companies already have this infrastructure in these programs in place. So it's another opportunity to partner up in a meaningful way and a way that's fairly easy for them because lots of HR departments already have this program in existence so you would just need to be part of that. Things like starting a team fund Razor For Giving Tuesday can also be great as well and they can also just help promote your event to employees or even just share on social media. Lots of companies are also game for volunteer days with their staff so that can be a great way to follow up and continue building that relationship with them. This is where it pays off to be open and flexible because even if they're not able to provide a match this year if you find a way to partner up with them that works for both of you you're still building that relationship with them at some point in the future it could turn into a matching grant situation but if not you still found a partner in the community who can help you make your campaign even bigger and with that we'll move on to promoting your matching grant. So first things first if you don't promote your matching grant it cannot do its job so it's really important to make sure you're hitting your supporters on all sides so they know about your match and being clear about when it starts and ends helps people plan their donation and prevents confusion about why their donation wasn't matched or feeling like they got bamboozled because they donated immediately expecting their donation to be matched but the match wasn't active yet and so on so repetition is important here too everyone should be on the same page and understand when and how the match is available and most people skim their emails and scroll through their social media so it does not hurt to continually repeat when the match is active and when it begins. Email promotion is going to be an important component of promoting your matching grant you should plan on at least one email announcing the matching grant you can also do several and then follow up by mentioning it in all of your emails about giving Tuesday and yes I mean all of them it can be really short it can be a graphic but you should mention it anytime you mention giving Tuesday and that also in things like your e-newsletter and any other regular emails that you send out you'll want to plan to send a reminder email when the grant becomes active so everyone has gotten a heads up that their donations can be matched and also make sure to acknowledge and show gratitude toward the donor in your emails based on the terms you've come with the terms that you've come to with them for a business link to their website add their logo into the email and use thankful language like a $1,000 grant generously provided by Joe Schmoe law firm and so on so just make sure that when you're mentioning your grant you're also thanking your donor you'll also of course want to schedule social media around the match giving Tuesday as an event that is fueled by social media so this is an important component there is a break on this slide there's a breakdown of what you should plan on posting you should announce the match remind them about the match announce when it begins count down to the match beginning breakdown milestones when you hit certain fundraising goals when you've fulfilled half the match when you're close to fulfilling the full match and then of course wrapping it up when it's over report back to your social media audience about how you did and if you're working with a business be sure to tag them in all of your posts and of course you'll want to add it to your mighty cause page too our tool has some built-in promotions for matching grants like adding the badge on your donate button and the list of grants on the bottom of your page it's right above it's right under your story I should say but you'll also want to add it to your story a graphic announcing the match is great it's an eye-catching way of drawing the user's focus and sharing the details of the match you can add links and logos to your story and you'll want to communicate the beginning and the end of the match as well one tool you can use if you want to share more information or if you have multiple grants or you just want to keep your story on your mighty cause page focused on your fundraising story is creating a custom tab this is a tab that uses the same inline text editor as your story so you can add links you can add images you can embed videos but that gives you an opportunity to say more about the grant list if you have multiple grant tours list them talk about the specifics of the match and people would just toggle over to that on your page it's right next to your story they just toggle over it and they can read the page that way you can keep your story clean and they can just toggle over to get more information about the matching grant all right so we're just about done but before we take questions I really want to talk about what to do after giving Tuesday so the reason what you do after giving Tuesday is so important is that part of the point of the matching grant is the excitement and the donations it generates but the other important part of it is using it to steward major donors so it's important to follow up and start that process after giving Tuesdays over touch base with the grant tour and share how it went most people like to hear specifics so don't be afraid to share with them how much you raised how many donors you had when the grant was active how many donors you had overall on giving Tuesday any prizes you won and so on so that they really know and can see how much of an impact it made on your fund raising on giving Tuesday showing the impact is extremely important because if they can see that it made this huge difference they will be more likely to provide another match in the future also tie up any loose ends with them so you can wrap it up and call it a day provide them with a receipt and acknowledgement letter anything they need to complete the transaction then you'll want to say thank you and I want to emphasize that it is not possible to thank somebody too much or too emphatically when we are talking about donors especially major gift donors because this is all about personal relationships a call or a lunch with your executive director or your development director or someone high up at your organization is a really nice touch and a nice personal way to thank them and another idea is to have all your staff sign a personal card thanking them for the grant follow up with a public thank you as well as you're wrapping up your campaign and emails and social media and on your website on your mighty cause page just make sure that you show the proper gratitude to the person who provided the grant and then this is really a key part stay in touch with them create a plan to have the contact who is in charge of dealing with them reach out periodically to check in let them know what's happening at your nonprofit hear what they've got going on in their lives and in their business if they have any issues that you address that they're specifically interested in or concerned about and so on look for opportunities to deepen the relationship with them and incorporate them in more aspects of your work for instance you could ask them to join your board of directors if that's appropriate and you have openings on your board or would like to create a position for them let them know about volunteer opportunities give them a call to personally invite them to events and so on the more you keep them engaged the more likely they will be to show up to help your nonprofit and the more you up the ante the more you integrate them into the fabric of your nonprofit and make them feel important and involved the better this relationship will be and the more they'll be able to show up and help you take a look at the year ahead and your plans for 2019 it seems crazy that it's almost November and we're thinking about the new year but we're at that point so look at 2019 and if you have a good relationship that you cultivate with this grantor look at 2019 and see how else you can get them involved in the new year all right so that's just about it for the presentation so now I wanted to leave some time open to take questions so if you have a question just type it into the questions box of your go-to webinar panel and I'll make sure to get to it okay we have one question here will we send out a recording and slides yes we will definitely send you a recording and the slide deck so that you can share it with your staff and keep it on hand if you need to refer back to anything all right again just don't be shy if you have a question just type it into the questions box and I will get to it okay so this one says what are cases where you'd have simultaneous matching grants and is there a downside to them that's a that's a good question I guess the most common case that I've seen is if you have a really big matching grant like somebody really went to bat for you and provided you with like a $10,000 grant for the day or something that's bigger and you wanted to give yourself the opportunity to use that through the duration of the event so when donations open up to the end of the event you want to give yourself more time to reach your goals there and use up that matching grant money and meet that fundraising goal and then you may also have some smaller matches like maybe somebody gave you a thousand dollar grant and you wanted to use that strategically during a power hour there's not really a downside to it you just want to try to think about how it will be most effectively used for your campaign so take a look at the price schedule see if there's some way you can use that to use it strategically but there's really not a downside to having simultaneous matches in most cases it's really just that there is one large match and one or several smaller matches and those would be operating simultaneously obviously you don't want to have too many going on at the same time just because you want it to be clear to donors what is happening when and what's counting toward what so that can get a little bit muddled if you have too much going on so you'll just want to keep that in mind as well if there's too much happening donors might go oh oh my god I can't deal with this and then just opt out of it so just make sure that you keep the number of simultaneous matches that you have going going on at the same time small and just make sure you're using them strategically but there's really no downside to having simultaneous matches as long as you're being smart about how you're using them okay so this is a great question how do you avoid donor bone burnout if your nonprofit also intends to do an end of year appeal plus giving Tuesday should we stick to just one initiative um honestly no and we have this this is the way we handle it at mighty cause giving Tuesday really is the beginning of end of year fundraising so it's on November 27th it's at the end of November it's the season where people are thinking about charitable giving they are in the mood to give and they have that tax deadline coming up so obviously the tax messaging works a lot better toward the new year toward the very end of the year but I would consider giving Tuesday a kickoff point obviously when you have a giving Tuesday campaign you want to wrap that up you want to give your donors closure and make sure that they get the ends tied together on that campaign and they know it's over but in most cases people expect to some degree to have charities reaching out to them asking for donations at the end of the year really starting on giving Tuesday so I would really just try to make sure that you are communicating with your donors thoughtfully that may mean scaling back on some communications that are maybe not as useful like maybe not sending out an e-newsletter one month if that's you know if you're really you really want to focus on fundraising or making sure that your e-newsletter is hitting on fundraising it could also mean just kind of shaking it up and how you ask making sure that your your campaigns are engaging if your campaigns engaging people will give so people are often really scared of donor burnout at nonprofits and it can happen but typically if you're being thoughtful about how you contact them and when you contact contact them and the content is strong so you're telling good stories you're asking them in the correct way and you're not sending them a lot of stuff that's not important then you know people will show up and people are used to it around this time of year it's the biggest month of the year December for fundraising so people are are getting lots of emails and the worst thing you can really do is let fear of donor burnout prevent you from asking because that's what this industry is all about it's all about asking people to step up and help you with your cause so really I find that the you know and looking at how things operate on mighty cause and in my own time at nonprofits usually the fear of donor burnout is greater than the reality and the important thing is to just be thoughtful when you're contacting your donors and you know if you hear from a donor that they don't want as many emails from you you can put them on a separate list and they can receive fewer emails if you're you know phone banking and you have people calling donors and somebody says hey stop calling me then make a note on that donor's file to not call them so you can really just respond to donors who complain often there's one or two or a handful of people who complain but don't let them drown out the people who do give because more people give than complain most years that's what I've seen and what we see at mighty cause so don't let fear of donor burnout freak you out because it's really you know it's the time of year when people are are going to be asked to give and most people are fine with it and the few that aren't just contact them less and put them on a separate email list so that they they have fewer communications with you all right so let's see are the power hours already scheduled or are they announced in the moment they are already scheduled we would never spring a power hour on you because you need time to get your ducks in a row for the power hour and get your promotion scheduled so you can find those listed on the prizes page on the giving Tuesday site that's giving Tuesday dot mighty cause dot com and on the navigation bar which is under under the fold under the big banner image you can see the list of power hours so that you can make plans accordingly and schedule social media schedule emails and so on because those are strategic so we would never spring that on you they're not random they're not going to be announced at the last minute you can start planning now so just check out that prizes page I just didn't include it in the webinar because that slide would have been either two slides or a very very long slide with very tiny text so you can check that out on the giving Tuesday site on mighty cause all right so say we are starting cold turkey by contacting them how should we initially contact them send out send out a mass email to see if they're interested so this is a good question if you're sort of sort of contacting somebody cold I don't recommend a mass email or anything like that because again if we're talking about a matching grant we are talking about a pretty large donation so we want that to be personal so and I've done this before it's always a little bit awkward especially if you're not the kind of person who's like comfortable with sales but it basically is a sales process you're calling them and you're just saying hi I work for this organization this is what we do and I would love to partner up with you is there some way we can meet up or have schedule a call or you know get in touch with each other to see how we could potentially partner up on giving Tuesday I recommend keeping it short so that you know you don't want to send them a novel if you have a sponsor program already in place that you're a non-profit and you have a one-pager that you can send them you can send that along as an attachment but it's really just as simple as saying hi this is who I am this is where I work what I do and I'd love to talk to you about partnering the tricky part there is just making sure that you are getting in touch with the correct person so that would be part of the research process you know in general you want to try to contact people who are in charge of those decisions because if you're just calling the receptionist that's not necessarily going to be as helpful unless you're just calling her to find out who the right person might be and Apologies there for assuming the receptionist is female could also be a dude but yeah you just want to make sure that you're making that that personal friendly contact and just leaving it open you don't have to give them a spiel because in the beginning you're just kind of walking up to them and saying hey this is who I am this is what I do I love what you do can we partner up and seeing where it goes so it doesn't really have to be too complicated you know if you're not naturally outgoing as I'm not it can be a little bit of a challenge at first but you do get used to it and sometimes people will say no or say you know I'm not interested and that's fine you just sort of take it as part of the process and you move on to the next prospect but yeah I mean the devil is really in the details and identifying good prospects and looking at what they've done in the past whether they lined up with your mission whether they have the wealth and affinity to even be a strong prospect and then researching to find out who the correct person is to contact at a business and I've also seen people just walk in to a business and say hey is the manager around is there anyone I can talk to obviously not all nonprofits have that kind of capacity but in the olden days of nonprofit fundraising that used to be the development director's job for the most part was making those cold calls and visiting and just saying hey who can I talk to about partnering up for my nonprofit so don't be afraid of doing that there's really the hardest part is asking but that's also the easiest part in some ways because you're just saying can we partner up and trying to schedule that first call often if you have been through a sales process with like a software company or any other kind of business you can sort of look to that as a great example of how to do it because typically what they want they'll send you a short email they're trying to get you on the phone they're trying to get a meeting with you they want to they want to get you on the horn so they can get to know you get a read on you talk to you start to learn what moves you as a customer and that's really the mindset that closes these kinds of development deals is just I'm going to ask but I really want to make that personal connection with you so a quick email or a quick call saying hey I'd like to partner up here's what my nonprofit does I think what you do is cool and just see where it goes they're just people and you're just a person reaching out to another person all right so a few more questions is there a minimum size you'd recommend for a matching grant well obviously you want to make it worth everyone's while because you're going to have to plan some promotions around it so it really depends on the size of your nonprofit obviously like a 100 dollar or 200 dollar matching grant is not is not going to do a whole lot for you but if that's you know what if that you can think about how to use that in a power hour but I would say 500 dollars is like the smallest I've ever seen there's no hard minimum like our systems not going to kick you out if you try to enter a 200 dollar match but you just want to make sure that it's worth the effort for your nonprofit and that people will get excited about it that's the other part of it is that you know a thousand dollar grant a 5000 dollar grant those sound exciting to donors 200 dollar matching grant that's a little harder to get people excited about so there's no real minimum on the platform like you can enter in any grant amount that you want but that is basically the answer it needs to be enough that it's worth your while to spend time securing this grant and then promoting it so it can be smaller for smaller nonprofits a thousand dollars can go a really long way for a small nonprofit and there's also no cap so if you can secure $15,000 or $20,000 you can enter that on the Mighty Cause platform but yeah there's no minimum but you just want to make sure it's worth it to everybody involved okay here's another question how can a volunteer coordinator or manager find out if a volunteer might be able to provide a match that's a good question as well obviously you don't want your nonprofit your volunteer coordinators or your volunteer manager fishing for personal information about a volunteer that's not their job and that's not a great experience for the volunteer but the reason I suggested that is that a lot of times people who are arranging volunteers tend to know a little bit more about their lives what their schedule is like are they retired they often are making the rounds and getting to know the volunteers so sometimes they have a little bit of inside information like so and so is retired from this business he was the CEO there he's super rich they might know those sorts of things whereas other people in the nonprofit may not they'll probably they'll usually know a little bit more about who their volunteers are what their background is what kind of work they've done and just basic facts about their lives are they retired are they still working what kind of work do they do etc so if they won't necessarily know that about everybody but they're usually a little bit more likely to know than say the people working at the front desk so it's always a good to ask them like hey is do you know of any volunteers that could provide a matching grant potentially or might make good donors because sometimes they'll be able to steer you toward who is a retired business person who's got a lot of money to spend on charity they don't always know but sometimes they might so it's worth always asking out you know reaching out to your volunteer coordinators or manager to see see if they have any ideas because often they just have that inside info about who their volunteers are that can really be helpful in starting the conversation with them and often they can even help start that conversation with them if they have that personal relationship so they're a great resource but obviously you don't want people asking invasive questions or trying to play detective and find out how much money they have it will be something where if they already know from conversations with this volunteer they can then pass that information along to you all right so I think that's all the questions we have thanks everybody for attending today I really appreciate you spending the time with me today if you have any questions about the matching grants tool we do have an article that walks you through adding a matching grant in our support library and you can also reach out to our support staff their support at mightycause.com my email is linda at mightycause.com that's linda with an I so you can reach out to me if you had any follow-up questions about the strategy of securing matching grants we will be sending out slides and a recording of this webinar so you can feel free to pass it on to any staff members you'd like to see watch it all right well thank you guys so much I hope you have a great rest of your day