 All right. Hello everyone. It looks like we've already got some people here. So if you are here a few minutes early, if you could just let me know that you can see my screen and you can hear me talking in either the Q&A box or the chat panel. That would be really fantastic. I just want to make sure that everybody can hear and see me. So let's see. All right. Perfect. Thank you guys so, so much. So we'll give everybody else just a minute to get logged in before we get started right at the top of the hour. If you are here, I would love to find out where all of you are from. So if you don't mind telling me your location and your organization, that would be really great and help us get to know each other. And if not, that's absolutely fine as well. I would just love to see who is here. Oh, we've got Amanda representing from Atlanta, South Carolina, Detroit, Park City. Gosh, there's people everywhere. I have a fellow Virginian here from Fredericksburg. Hello, Elizabeth. I am up in Haymarket, Northern Virginia. Lots of folks from Georgia. Fantastic. Georgia is really representing today. So nice to meet all of you. I'm so happy to have you here for this webinar. And I'll give everybody just another second to get logged on. And then we will just go ahead and dive in. Ooh, Wisconsinites. I love people from Wisconsin. I have a giving day in Wisconsin. So hello, Andrea. More Atlanta. Awesome. All right. So it is three o'clock on the dot here on the east coast. So I will go ahead and dive in. Hello and welcome to our webinar that is all about matching grants. My hope for this webinar is truly that everybody here will leave with a good understanding of how matching grants function and everything you need to know from beginning to end to start working on matching grants for your fall campaigns. I know that's a busy time that's coming up and matching grants can certainly help you achieve your fundraising goals in the fall. So I really hope that after this webinar, you have all of the basics down. You know how to get a matching grant and what to do with it so you can get started on your fall campaigns. My name is Linda Gerhardt, by the way. And I am the senior community engagement manager here at Mighty Cause. I've been working with Mighty Cause since 2016. And I've also helped manage a lot of giving events, which we'll talk about a little bit later. And we see really the power of matching grants through giving events and other campaigns. So I've seen a lot of matching grants and a lot of different strategies in my years at Mighty Cause, which I'm hoping to share with you today. So here is a look at today's agenda. We're going to be going through the basics of matching grants and then talk about how to secure one and then how you can use it and you can strategically use it to achieve your fundraising goals. Just as a little bit of housekeeping, we are recording this webinar and everybody is going to have access to the recording once we're done. And I'll also make the slides available too if you're the kind of person who likes to look at a slide deck. We're going to be doing a Q&A session at the end of the webinar. So if you think of something that you'd like more information on or something that you'd like to ask while I'm presenting, just go ahead and put that into the Q&A box on your Zoom panel and we'll make sure that we get to it at the end of the presentation. And obviously any questions that or situations that you think might be helpful for other non-profit professionals to hear the answer to as well, please ask those in the Q&A box. So and also we're all friends here. We're all fundraising professionals. So please feel free to chat with me, chat with each other in the chat box. I really want it to be as interactive as possible. And a lot of you have great knowledge and experience as well. So feel free to chat with each other while I'm presenting. So before we get into the details, we really need to make sure that we are all on the same page about what matching grants are and how they function. So that's what we're going to be doing first. And on that note, what is a matching grant? So a matching grant is a fundraising tool that is used as a donation incentive. A nonprofit secures a large donation, which is offered up as a match to incoming donations. So basically it's kind of a Bogo sale on donations. If you make your donation when a matching grant is live, you get another donation added sort of in spirit. In its simplest form, a matching grant would be working with a donor or a sponsor to get a grant, say in the value of $1,000. And instead of them just paying that out to you, sending you a check and calling it a day, it's paid out proportionally to the donations that come in. So for instance, when somebody gives $25, the grantor also gives $25 and so on and so forth until $1,000 or whatever their match value was for is raised and all of the matching funds have been used. Now that is not to say that all matching grants function in the same way. There's actually a lot of different ways that you can use matching funds. Some grantors will give you the full amount, whether or not you meet your funding goal. And some will make it conditional. So if you don't meet your funding goal, you won't get that match. But that's the basic concept. You have a grantor who provides a pool of match funding and that funding matches each donation that comes in. A matching grant has a start and an end time or it ends automatically once the matching funds have all been used up. So there's a lot of different variables, but basically you have three different people involved or types of people. You have your nonprofit, you have your grantor who is a donor who provides the matching grant, and then you have your regular donors who will be making donations to have their gifts matched by the matching funds. So under the umbrella of matching grants, there are different types of matches that work to achieve different things. The most common type of match that you'll see, especially on Ladycause and elsewhere too, is a one to one match, which is a dollar for dollar match. So for instance, if somebody gives $25, they get credit from the matching funds for $25 as well. So they actually give 50 with the additional 25 coming out of the matching funds provided to the nonprofit by your donor. A lot of nonprofits will add another layer to this by putting a cap on the amount that can be matched. For instance, everyone donating up to $100 will be matched dollar for dollar, but then after $100, the match no longer applies, which just makes the grant stretch a little bit further. So there's a lot of variance in how nonprofits choose to handle these. You can also match a certain percentage of each donation. So for instance, maybe you have a grantor who wants to match 50% of each donation made during the time period when the match is active, but then that makes the matching funds stretch a little bit further as well. You can also use a matching grant to target a particular funding goal. For instance, if your goal for a campaign is to raise $1,000 and you have a sponsor that matches that $1,000 after you hit the $1,000 fundraising goal, that will help you achieve that goal because the money is conditional upon that funding goal being met. You can also set a matching grant to target a certain quantity of donations. So if you're looking for a large volume of donations, that can be a handy way to use it. Or if you're looking to acquire new donors, you can actually set a match to kick in once you've reached a certain number of unique donors. That's something that with giving events on Mighty Cause you might be interested in using if you're trying to get a lot of unique donors for a power hour or something along those lines. And just to be clear, all of these types of matches are ones that you can program in with Mighty Cause' matching grants tool. So the question usually is, this sounds like a lot of work and it's a lot of math. So what is the point of all of this and how does this benefit your nonprofit? Well, as I mentioned before, it provides an incentive for donors to give and it builds a sense of urgency. It's very easy for donors to get an email or see a social media post asking them to give to your campaign and say, oh, well, I'm busy right now, but I'll give later. But a matching grant has the same effect as a sale. For a limited amount of time, they can get something more for their money. So it behooves them to actually stop what they're doing and give right then and there. So when you're trying to accomplish something specific for a fundraising campaign or hit a goal by a deadline, this can obviously be a really powerful tool to get people to donate when you want them to. So for instance, on Giving Tuesday, you have 24 hours. If you want to make sure that people are giving within those 24 hours, a matching grant can really incentivize them to give during Giving Tuesday instead of kicking the can down the road and maybe making a gift at the end of December instead. So it really does work to incentivize and build urgency to give now. And a matching grant is at its heart a marketing tool. So with a matching grant, you have a hook already built in. You have something to offer your donors and you have something to talk about in your appeal. And it's just a really great tool that you can use to market your campaign and get the attention of your supporters. It's also goal oriented. Match matching grants work in support of your fundraising goals and they act as tools to achieve them. So if your goal is to raise $15,000 for renovations, a matching grant is a tool that you can use to get to that goal. So it's a way of achieving your goals in a very direct and proactive way. The other thing that matching grants are tools for is donor engagement. And they actually work on a couple of different levels in this regard. So for your regular everyday donors, not the ones who are providing the match, a matching grant allows them to get more bang for their buck and maximize their impact. So if you personally could turn $25 that you have to give to a nonprofit that you support into $50, I'm sure you would jump at that opportunity and I would too. So to donors, it's very appealing to them. It grabs their attention, it gets them engaged and it makes them feel like they're getting a good deal and an opportunity to do more with the money they have to give. And it's also a really great tool to engage the donors who are providing the match. So it's definitely a great deal if you only have a little bit to give and there's a match available. But a lot of people don't realize just how great it is getting your larger donors and your sponsors engaged. So if you give to a nonprofit, especially at a higher level, it can really feel a bit stale after a while just to write a check to them every year. But by giving them the opportunity to provide a matching grant, they get a more fulfilling experience. That's fun. It's exciting for them to see all of those donations coming in and know that they're driving giving, they're going beyond themselves. They're not just giving to your nonprofit, they're also inspiring other people to give. So it's a really great way to give them a fulfilling experience in addition to fulfilling your regular donors who are giving in smaller amounts. So whether they're providing the match or they're the regular donors who are giving in smaller amounts, it's a really great tool to engage them. So it's a really fantastic donor engagement tool. So if you're thinking about your stewarding, this is a really great way to steward those larger donors and your sponsors. Another thing that matching grants are really fantastic for is engaging sponsors. So if there is a prospective sponsor that you have been just dying to work with and get involved with your nonprofit, this is a really great icebreaker that you can use to start bringing them in. Having a matching grant for a campaign and trying to kickstart that process can get them on board and get them involved in your nonprofit. And matching grants are really kind of catnip for sponsors because they have recognition built into them. It gives your sponsor an opportunity to show their support for your organization and be recognized as generous and philanthropic to your supporters and the larger community and highlight their work to support nonprofits doing work in the community. So for sponsors, it definitely helps you out as a nonprofit, but they get something out of the deal too as well. So it's very appealing to sponsors. And again, it's really engaging. It's a matching grant is fun and more interesting than just cutting a check or something like a corporate giving program. Those are extremely important and they can be great arrangements, but they're not really exciting. Whereas a matching grant adds this element of excitement. There's a countdown, you're watching donations come in, and it's a really fantastic way to engage sponsors. So if you have a list of sponsors that you're either looking to work with or already work with, this is a really fantastic way to engage them. So the thing that trips up most nonprofits once they decide matching grants are fantastic. I want to use them is how do I actually go about getting one? And so we're going to go through that process step by step so that you can start thinking about getting matching grants for all of your fall campaigns. At the end of the day, a matching grant is just a large gift. And the process for securing a matching grant is honestly not much different than securing any sort of major gift. So if you work in development, if you're even a major gift officer at your nonprofit, this process is probably very familiar to you, but you already have a template in place to start this conversation and start this process. It's three steps. You start with prospecting, which is where you identify potential sources for your grant. You cultivate, which means building the relationship and starting the conversation and then making your ask. It's pretty simple, three steps. So the first step is prospecting. And in a lot of ways, I think this is really the most important step because you're laying the foundation for the work you're going to do. Donor prospecting can sound kind of intimidating, but all you're doing is making a list of people or organizations or companies that might be interested in providing a matching grant. So as with most things, it's helpful to start with a list. So make a spreadsheet and list out your prospects and their information, anybody off the top of your head, as well as within, which we'll talk about in just a moment. So when you're finding a prospective grantors and you're getting your list together, there's three basic factors that you want to consider, which are also key factors in major gift prospecting. The first is affinity, meaning do they have some sort of connection to your cause? Do they have a preexisting relationship with you? Are they just part of the same community as you? Is there some sort of overlap in the work you do? Or do they just know somebody who sits on your board? There's a lot of different ways that they can have an affinity, but do they have some kind of connection to your nonprofit? And you'll also want to look for giving history. Have they given to your organization in the past? Or do they have a history and a reputation for working with other nonprofit organizations? Are they known for being philanthropic? The best predictor of whether someone will make a gift to your nonprofit is a history of giving. So this is something that you'll want to research during the prospecting phase. So if it's a company, for instance, have they worked with organizations in your community in the past? Have they worked with organizations like yours? And just really figure out, do they have a history of doing this sort of thing for nonprofits? If they don't, that's not a reason to necessarily kick them off your list, but it's an important piece of information about how they interact with nonprofits. And finally, you want to consider capacity, which is basically a little bit of a softer way of saying wealth. You don't want to approach like a failing business to provide a matching grant or hit up a major gift donor who just had a major health or life issue that knocked them out and is eating up all of their attention. So you want to make sure that you're targeting people who can actually realistically financially provide a match for you. You want to make sure, since you're going to be putting in a little bit of effort to secure this, that you're targeting people who can realistically provide a match. Like if you called me tomorrow and said, Linda, can you give me $1,000? Unfortunately, the answer would be no, because I'm not that wealthy. So you want to make sure that you're targeting people who have the capacity to give at the level you're looking for. One of the things that I recommend here when you're making your list is looking within before you start thinking about cold calling anyone or starting off fresh with somebody that you've never worked with before. If we look at matching grants on Mighty Cause, one of the most common sources for matching grants is nonprofit boards. And that's because board members make a financial commitment to your nonprofit. They are responsible for overseeing the financial health of your organization. And fundraising is often a part of their responsibilities. It theoretically should be a responsibility of your board members to fundraise. So this can be a really great way for your board to get involved. So sometimes an individual board member will provide a match. And sometimes board members actually work together and they pull together funds for a match. So across the board, even if you have no one else to ask, if you're very small and you're overwhelmed by this, ask your board. They should be willing to work with you. Any current major gift donors are obvious places that you should ask for a matching grant and add to your prospecting list. These are tried and true supporters who are invested in your work. And you know that they tick all three boxes. They have affinity, they have history, and they have capacity. So they should be included in your list. And if you have any sponsors that you work with regularly, work with regularly, these are really great prospects as we talked about sponsors love things like matching grants. So even if your organization is very small, you have a smaller network and you're really overwhelmed with the idea of prospecting, you already have a group of people affiliated with your nonprofit, who are excellent prospects. And one thing that can also be really helpful at this stage is asking for referrals, especially from your board of directors. Many of them know people in the community, they may know business owners, they may be able to help you make introductions, they may be able to introduce you to people. So even if your board is not able to provide the match, ask them for referrals. Most board members are pretty connected to the community. So just ask them if they have anybody that they can introduce you to. It is important to stay organized when you're prospecting. And to that end, I really recommend using either a spreadsheet or a CRM tool or some combination of the tool. If you're interested in a CRM, Mighty Cause has a tool that comes with our advanced subscription called supporters. And we also have a Salesforce integration that you can utilize to help you stay organized. Salesforce is really very well set up for this kind of process, the discovery process. So it's a really great tool if you already utilize Salesforce and you can actually integrate that with your Mighty Cause account. I highly recommend that you assign one contact to each prospect so that you can really have one person that's focused on building and cultivating that relationship. For people who are being prospect, who you're trying to cultivate, it can be really frustrating and confusing and make it impossible to actually build a relationship when you have different people reaching out and they're saying different things and some people know things and some people don't. So having one main contact for each prospect is really the best way to go about it. And keep notes on your prospects, log your conversations with them because these are all things that are going to help you down the road. For instance, if you have a prospect that has told somebody at your organization that they absolutely hate talking on the phone and you don't write that important piece of information down and you keep calling them, you may end up losing that relationship. So it's just important to keep notes about these prospects and what you learn about them. The next step is cultivation, which is really just the process of building the relationship. So you reach out, you say hello, and you start talking to your prospect. This is a personal process. So things like phone calls, meetings, zoom calls, breakfasts and lunches, these are all really great ways to make that first step and make that first contact. You can also use email too, like definitely we're all logged in. So if you prefer to use email to reach out for the first time, you can do that. And what you're doing at this stage is you're building up to the ask and you're also collecting information. So one thing that can be helpful is having some qualifying questions that you want to try to work into your conversations just to see whether or not they're likely to be warm to an ask and have the capacity and are frankly worth your time and their time. So you don't want to waste anybody's time. You definitely don't want to call them and start going down a list of questions, but some things that you want to get out of conversations with people. Like if you have a relationship with a local restaurant and you reach out and they tell you that they are understaffed and struggling because of COVID, that you probably want to cross them off your prospect list. So you're really just gathering information and trying to find out how likely they are to want to get involved. Now every prospect is different and there's really no set path to get to your ask. So for instance, if you have a board member that you talk to all the time, it's going to be a much shorter path to making your ask than if you're talking to somebody for the first time who's never worked with your nonprofit. So you want to be flexible and really use the cultivation process to build that relationship rather than trying to just jam them through a process because it's going to be different for everybody. And again, keep good records because this can make or break your attempts and all of your contacts. So take note of how each prospect prefers to communicate what their interests are, what's going on for them right now, and so on so that you can tailor your approach to them. And these notes are also going to be helpful to your organization in the future. And then finally, you make your ask. Now this is basically where you would pitch your idea of providing a matching grant. So you'll want to make an informed pitch. Use everything that you've gathered in your prospecting research and the cultivation process to make an ask that is tailored to that person's style, their interests, their preferences and their capacity. Like with any pitch, you'll want to explain to them what they get out of it. So be sure that you're also explaining how providing a match benefits them and use what you know about their interests to make that case. So for instance, for community sponsors, you might want to pitch it as showing their community how much they give back and how much they're committed to helping out and include some information about how you're going to recognize them and shout them out. And be flexible. You want to use what you note, but be open. If somebody can't provide $5,000, and that's what you had in mind, but they can provide 800, you can still work with that. So don't go in with really firm expectations and be willing to work with each individual prospect. So some tips for making your ask. You want to be prepared. You don't want to over prepare. You're not going on Shark Tank, but you do want to do your homework on the prospect and be prepared to share some information about your campaign, your impact, talk to them about how matching grants work, what they are, because definitely some people can find this confusing. And even when I'm trying to talk about it, I can sort of talk myself into circles. So be prepared to so be prepared to share some information about them. And one thing that can be really helpful to bring to them is some financials like an annual report so that you are prepared and you're ready to answer their questions. You want to keep it simple. Most people are not nonprofit fundraising experts, so you really want to make sure that it's easy for them to understand that you're not using jargon or a lot of things that don't make sense to them. You want to make sure that anybody, regardless of their experience, can understand what you're proposing to them. And when it comes to actually making the ask, it can be really helpful to pull someone else in who has maybe a little bit more clout. So if you personally have been managing a relationship with a prospect, when you're actually going to make your ask whether you're setting up a phone call or a zoom call or actually meeting in person, you want to be there because you're the person who has the relationship with that prospect, but also bringing in somebody like your executive director, your major gifts officer, your director of development or even somebody from your board can really add some weight to your ask and make it more likely to be successful. So sometimes you want to tag team the ask. You want to be the one to manage that relationship and who have the person who's been having those conversations present of course, but making the ask is a great time to loop somebody else in. So there's a couple of different outcomes here. And the first we'll go over is getting a yes and you've got the matching grant. So first and foremost, say thank you. Thank them for their generosity and make sure that they feel fantastic about it. And then you want to shift into hammering out some of the details. So talking about how much they're giving to you, how you're going to function, how this match is going to function rather, when you will expect the match, if you're going to get the full amount regardless of the outcome or if they are making that conditional on meeting a fundraising goal. So you want to talk to them about some of the details and understand what they want and also have in mind what you want. Like obviously it's preferable if they give you the donation anyway, but just chat with them about what their expectations are and make sure that you are setting expectations and working with them and hearing what they want. So talking about goals is really important. You want to find out from them and hopefully you should have a sense at this point, but finding out what's important to them and sort of working with them so that their goals and what they want out of this experience is included and accounted for in the plan and also making a plan for how you're going to report to them the results of the match. They may want to know something in particular. So make sure that you're talking about what the goals are. You don't have to get too lost in the weeds with them, but talk to them about what they want out of the match and work with them on that. And then also talk about recognition. Some donors, especially major gift donors, actually don't want to be recognized. They would prefer to remain anonymous on Mighty Cause. They absolutely can. If it's a sponsor, they may have some specific ideas about how you can recognize their generosity. So this is the stage where you'd want to shore up the details and talk to them about the particulars like how they would prefer to be recognized. So the other outcome is, of course, that you get a no. So even if they say no, you still want to thank them for their time and attention. You want to make sure that you appreciate them and make them feel appreciated so that they just don't say no and you saunter off and they don't hear from you until you need money again. You want to keep the relationship going and don't despair. Even they know they gave you a no right now. You're still learning a lot about them. You're building that relationship with them and you can utilize that to make future asks. Maybe the timing is not right. It doesn't necessarily have anything to do with how you approach them. But keep it going. Keep cultivating them. Even though it's a no right now, that could be a yes in the future. There could be another opportunity that's more suited to their capacity, to their interests. So don't take it as a no forever. It's a no for right now and continue stewarding them and building that relationship with them. And again, you want to keep cultivating and engaging. So really all this is about is building a relationship with either a sponsor or a grand tour. You want to make it a good experience for them. You're not just taking the money and running. You want to make sure that they find it fulfilling because if they find it fulfilling and satisfying as a donor, they're most likely going to provide another one for you because they got something out of it. You want to also make a plan for how often you're going to keep in touch with this donor, with the grand tour, what reporting and information you'll send with that send to them and keep them engaged during the process. Again, don't take the money and run. You want to continue cultivating that relationship. And then you also want to talk about thank yous. So how are you going to thank them for their generosity? Definitely saying thank you in a public way is important, but maybe you'll do something like send them a card that's signed by all your staff, sending them some flowers or something along those lines. Think about how you can make them feel valued and make this a fulfilling, satisfying donor experience for them. All right. So now that you have theoretically secured your match, we're going to talk about how to actually use a matching grant. So the first thing that you'll want to do is assess your goals. So if you have a campaign and you've gotten a matching grant, that's fantastic. And you want to think about what your goals for that campaign are. So do you have a specific fundraising goal? What are your goals and how do you want this match to support you? So either you may want to run a certain type of match to support a goal of raising a certain amount or getting more donors. And you want to think about your high level goals as well and how you can utilize this match to really support your overall goals for the campaign. So what do you want this grant to do? Do you want it to stretch for the entire length of your campaign? Are you going to use it for a short period of time, a particular day, an hour? Think about what your goals are for the grant and how you're going to fit that into your overall fundraising campaign. And then also consider the high level goals for your organization. So for instance, if one of your goals for 2021 is donor retention, can you use the grant to encourage that? Think about how it can tie into your overall fundraising goals for your organization and engaging your donors. So think about your goals for your campaign, for the grant itself, and your high level goals. And then you think about how you can fit that into support those goals. So this is a little bit technical, but we do have a matching grants tool in Mighty Cause. It is on your admin dashboard. So if you are already an admin for your organization, you have access to this. If not, you can get signed up now and start using the matching grants tool. And the cool thing, my favorite thing about this, frankly, is that it does the math for you. So it definitely benefits you to enter the matching grant here in the Mighty Cause tool. You go to fundraise, matching grants, and then create new grant. And then you kind of just fill in the blanks. You tell us about your match and how you want it to function. You tell us what type of match you're doing. And then you have to make a couple of decisions in terms of how you want this match to function. Do you want to put a cap on the amount that gets matched? Do you want to count offline donations? Do you want to include peer-to-peer fundraisers in your match so that when somebody makes a donation to a peer-to-peer page that's connected to your page that also has their donation matched? You can opt to do that or not. Do you want to set a limit on its match once per donor? There's a lot of smaller decisions that you can make in the matching grants tool that are really as simple as clicking a box. So basically, all you have to do is fill out this form and tell you what you want from the match. And then we'll schedule it for you and it will go live when you schedule it too. So we actually display your match in a couple of key places. So the first and most important place that we display it is on the donate button. So when somebody goes to your profile or they go anywhere that your organization is collecting donations on Mighty Cause, there's a little sticker there that says that you have a match that's available. And that's really important because if somebody is deciding whether or not to click, that can be the thing that tips them over is that there's a matching grant available. It's also viewable on your organization profile. So people will be able to see that it's active if they visit your profile and it'll also be visible in searches. So many giving days, if you're participating in a giving day, actually have a search that's just for matching grants and people can also filter their search so that it only displays organizations that have matches available. So there's a few different key places where it displays on Mighty Cause to sort of support you as you promote your match. But really in terms of making people aware of your match, it all comes down to your marketing. So here's what you want to do to try and promote your match. The first is email marketing. If you are sending emails about your campaign, you want to include the match so that donors can plan for their gift. If you have multiple matches for a campaign, let them know what the schedule is so that they can make a plan and give during those times. Definitely using social media can be a really great way to promote your match. So promote it before it goes live so people are aware of it and then also announce when it becomes available and announce when it closes. If you have a website that you update and you're mentioning your campaign on there, make sure that you also mention the match. Basically anywhere that you're promoting your campaign, whether that's your website, direct mail marketing, a poster, a flyer, you want to make sure that this match is mentioned because again it's really appealing to donors to be able to get more bang for their buck. So think about where you're going to be marketing this to your audience and how you're incorporating it into the marketing for your campaign overall. Some other things that you can do to help promote your match are a social media takeover. If you have like a corporate sponsor or a business that you're working with and they have a decent social media presence, something that can be really effective is actually taking over their social media account for the day so that you can reach their followers and they can become familiarized with your organization and what you're doing and you can promote that match. So that's something that you can try if you're working with a business sponsor. Peer to peer fundraising is also a really fantastic way to promote your match if you're already using peer to peer. So if you have an event happening or a team fundraiser or you're just enlisting people to help you fundraise, make sure that they know about the matching grant so that they can help promote it to their people as well because then either you're able to increase your reach and get the word out to more people. Getting your team involved is a really great plan. Having your staff, your board members, volunteers, anybody in your inner circle that works in your operations day to day, have them reach out to their social network and say, hey, I care about this organization. I work for this organization. There is a match available. So if you make your first donation or you make a donation, it'll be matched and that is a way for you to reach more people. And don't forget about traditional collateral like signs, flyers, anything that you would use otherwise to promote your campaign. Make sure that your match is included in those things. All right, so now I'm just going to go through some matching grant strategies and how I've seen organizations utilize matching grants during a campaign on Mighty Cause. So one of the most popular places that organizations use them is for giving days and giving events. So we have a lot of giving events on the Mighty Cause platform. We, of course, have our own Giving Tuesday events and then we have events throughout the year and matching grants are often a really key part of that. A lot of organizations will use them to win prizes. There's competitive prizes in most giving events. So there's leaderboard prizes and hourly prizes and the strategic use of matching grants can bolster your success at winning those prizes. It adds urgency. So for instance, I mentioned before, Giving Tuesday is 24 hours. So you have a time limit in place and you want to make sure that you're getting, you're doing all you can to rally your people to come to your page and make a donation. And matching grant is perfect at that. So if you have the built-in time limit of a giving day, using a matching grant can be a really great way to get people to stop what they're doing and give now. And then it can also just increase the overall amount that you raise. You're doubling your money. You're getting more for your money as well. So processing that matching grant online especially can be helpful during giving days. And it also just helps you be competitive. So if you're participating in a giving day, it's definitely worth thinking about getting a matching grant for that day. And if you don't know what Giving Days are or you haven't participated in one, we do have one coming up this fall on Mighty Cause that's open to all Mighty Cause users called Giving Tuesday. I'm sure you're all familiar with Giving Tuesday, but we have our own event where there will be some prizes and you can participate in that. It's November 30th this year and you can register at givingtuesday.mightycause.com. If you're participating in another fall event, you can just ignore all of that and focus on your event. But there is an event happening that everybody is able to participate in on Giving Tuesday. One thing that is really cool and I've seen a lot is a board challenge. So it's actually kind of hitting on two fronts. Not only do you have your board members actually providing a matching grant, they're providing it on their own fundraiser. That's a really beautiful thing. So having an event or a team where your board members are competing against each other to raise money for your organization and providing a matching grant is a really fantastic way to engage your board and not only get them to provide a grant but get them to fundraise. So if you haven't tried a board challenge, I definitely recommend giving one a try. We've seen a bunch of them on Mighty Cause and they're usually really, really successful. So a board challenge is a really fantastic way to get your board to do both. You want them to do more and not less. So if you can get them to get matching grants on their own fundraisers, you're really just hitting it out of the park. You can use multiple matching grants. So this is something that is really helpful if you have a longer campaign. So it obviously requires more work but you're doing all this work to prospect and cultivate people. So you may actually end up with several matching grant offers and you can use all of them. So for instance, you can use those for different purposes. You may want to use a large grant that you have the largest one you have available that spans the entire length of your campaign and then have smaller ones work to bolster your campaign as strategic points within the campaign. So you can actually have multiple matching grants running at one time. I know we have somebody in the audience from Park City and Park City is part of our Giving Day Live PC, Give PC, and they use tons of matching grants and most nonprofits have a lot of matching grant activity happening. So you can actually get multiple grants together and make matching grants a bigger strategy where you're using multiple grants throughout the day to bolster your fundraising. You can use it to kick off your campaign. I think this is always a fun way to kick off your campaign and build momentum, get people excited and set the tone for your campaign. So if you're not quite sure where to fit a matching grant into your campaign, just offering it as an incentive for people to give as soon as your campaign starts is a really great way to go. Definitely it helps you start strong and if your campaign starts strong, it'll most likely finish strong as well. You can also use a matching grant to push you across the finish line. So offering a matching grant during the final day, final hours of your campaign can really push people to take you as far as possible before your campaign ends. And you can also use it for a stretch goal. So if you have one in your pocket or maybe your board member would like to provide one as you're coming up on the end of your campaign, if you've already hit your goal, you can create a little mini mini goal at the end to stretch your goal and you can use the matching grant to incentivize people to donate. It can also be a really fantastic way to get people to come back and give again. So donor acquisition is something you can actually use a matching grant for. We do have a matching grant type that counts unique donors. So if you're really looking to acquire new donors, offering that matching grant that brings that kicks in once you've brought in a certain number of unique donors can really support you in that goal of getting more people to give to your nonprofit. And you really want to approach this from getting your whole donor base involved in letting people know that in order to get this this match money, they need to get more people to donate. So the minimum donation on the platform is $5, getting people really motivated to go out there, spread the word and help you get donors in the door by providing this matching grant can be a really great way to boost your donor acquisition. And donor engagement. So if a donor, if you're looking to engage donors, you can set a match type that's looking for a certain number of donations. That can be a really creative way just to get as many people as possible involved. And it's also a really great way, as I mentioned, to get people to come back and make a gift. So let's say you're running a campaign that lasts a week, somebody makes a donation on day one, and then on day five, you have this matching grant available. Well, they might just come back and make another gift. So it can be really great at getting donors engaged, getting them involved and getting them to come back and make more than one gift. Because if you get donors making multiple gifts, you're going to boost the overall amount that you raise. All right, so that is it. I know I've gone over time a little bit and I apologize about that. So I do want to make some time for questions. And just to answer some questions that are already in the chat that I see, yes, you will get a recording of the webinar and you'll also get access to the slides. So as soon as I'm able to get that email together and send it out to you, you will have that in your inbox. So just keep an eye out for that. And I think I just have to stop sharing to get to the Q&A box, unfortunately. So let's see. All right, so this is a question from Bob. Let's see, I'm just going to read this out. One of the boards in this community is pooling money for a match. How can we consolidate it legally and accountably? For example, can one member's LLC or entity channel the total pool, provide the bookkeeping, disperse the money, et cetera? So unfortunately, you're probably not going to love my answer, which is that I can't provide any legal advice. So what I would recommend is talking to your organizations, your lawyer to answer any questions along those lines, because I just unfortunately can't answer that question. You just want to work with your legal team or have the grantor or some the person who's LLC you want to filter the money through, work with their lawyer to make sure that you're following all of the all of the proper procedure to make sure that that's completely legal. And there's a comment from Bob. This is interesting. A comment on getting a yes. Three types of people to influence those who can say yes, those who must not say no, and those who influence the first two, I spend a fair amount of time learning who they are and cultivating trust with them. Yeah, that's a really fantastic tip. I love that. So I'll make sure that we include that in the email. It's a really great tip. And there's another question from Bob. Must we use the mighty cause matching fund dashboard tool, or may we just enter the grant as matching funds on the donation report page? So you don't have to use the mighty cause matching fund dashboard tool. The only downside to not using it is that then you would lose some of the places where we automatically display it for you. And again, my favorite part is that it does the math for you. So you can actually just it'll automatically close when the match funds are gone and it'll stop when you would like it to stop. So there are some cons to not doing that. You can also just enter it in your donation report. That works as well. And the one thing I did want to mention about the matching grant tool is that if you don't want to process the grant online, you can just sort of add it to your display total. So you can opt to just calculate it automatically. And that will kind of add it in as an offline donation bit by bit. So you can do it really any way you would like. But if you have specific questions about like what should I do, our support team deals with a lot of matching grant questions. So don't be shy about reaching out to support at mightycause.com. They can assist you if you can't figure out what to do. Or if you're not sure what's the best move to do. So yeah, I mean, if your staff is better at calculating what the match will be, then our pro our tool that we've programmed for you, you can do whatever you want. There's no rules. We're not going to tell you that you can't do that. You can do it however you would like. I would recommend using the tool just because it does so much for you, but you certainly don't have to. Let's see. Can you this is a question from Kelsey. Can you use mighty cause to create tailored matches, like matches that are live for specific groups, such as faculty, staff, alumni and friends. That's a really fantastic question. At this point, it's kind of just a match for everyone. So unfortunately, we don't have a way of like saying, well, this match is not available to this person because you know, they are not faculty. But what you could consider doing is starting a fundraising page that is specifically for those individuals and then placing the matching grant on that page. So for instance, if you're doing a Giving Tuesday campaign or just a fall campaign, and you're using your organization profile as the main source for that, you could create a connected page. That's just for faculty members. That's just for alumni and so on. And then just put the matching grant on that page. So through the tool, there's not really a way to do that, but you can create a page where only that you're only sharing with people who meet that criteria and just stick the matching grant on that page. So I didn't mention that in the webinar, but you can put individual matching grants on peer to peer pages or project pages, event pages, and as well as teams. So if you wanted to use it more specifically like that, yes, you could do that through creating a separate page, which I hope makes sense. Let's see. This is a question from Dallas. If we have a matching grant set up for a Giving Day, the match amount will be counted immediately and count toward a Power Hour prize, like for the highest amount raised, for example. So that's a really fantastic question. And it really actually does depend on the rules of the Giving Event. So for instance, for some of my Giving Events, they choose to count offline donations for leaderboard prizes. For hourly prizes, it kind of depends on whether or not offline donations are counted. If you're specifically gearing a matching grant to help you during a most dollars raised Power Hour, what I would recommend is working with your grantor to have them make that donation through the Mighty Cause platform, because then you can be absolutely certain that it will count. If it's made offline, like you accept a check and you just kind of enter the match, I can't guarantee that it will count because every event has its own rules. So check the rules of the Giving Event that you're participating in. But if you are able to, get the grantor to make the donation online for a Giving Day, because it will definitely, definitely help you. And we do actually have an option for them to pay by connecting their bank account through the Plaid app. That is available, I believe, to most donors who give over $100. And that actually puts a cap on the bank fees. The platform fees, whatever they are for that event will still be in place. But every time there's a credit card transaction, there's a fee associated with that that is imposed by either the credit card company or the bank. But when you use the bank account option, it does cap the fees for the bank account, because those are proportional. So if somebody is giving $5,000 and the bank fees are 2.9%, that can be a lot of money. So you can push them to give using the bank account option through the Plaid app, which is 100% secure and should save them a little bit of money. But if at all possible, try to direct them to do it through the Mighty Cost platform on a Giving Day, because that's really the only way I can guarantee for certain that it will count toward power hours and leaderboards and so on. But just check the rules of the event. Let's see, just to reiterate, if you checked in late or you had to check out early, whatever your situation is, you will get the recording and you can review any parts that you may have missed. Well, this is an interesting question from Tanya. Have you ever had a situation where a grantor couldn't meet their matching pledge and how do you deal with that? I have never seen that situation mostly because you want to work the terms out with them ahead of time. So you want to make sure that if this grantor has $5,000 to give, you're not putting them in a position where they would have to give more than that. So they are setting the terms in terms of how much they can give. You're not going to surprise them with an amount unless you have a unicorn of a grantor who is open to that. You want to try to hammer those things out ahead of time. And if there's a situation where, for instance, somebody promised you $5,000 and they could not provide it, you can always work with them to see if they can make payments or do something along those lines. And if they absolutely just cannot meet the match, I would recommend being transparent with your donors just to make sure that you're maintaining the trust that they have in your organization and letting them know, hey, this grantor unfortunately was not able to provide the match and just let all of the donors who took advantage of the matching grants know that so that you don't break that trust with your donors. Let's see. This is a follow-up question from Donia. Do you feel obligated to inform donors? Definitely. Transparency with donors is really important because it's a relationship that's built on trust. They are giving you money and trusting that you are using that well and that you're being honest with them. So I always err on the side of being accountable to your donors and transparent as possible with your donors. They don't need to know all the dirty details like this restaurant failed, no longer exists. But you want to be honest with them if those match funds were not actually provided. It doesn't affect them in any material way. They only receive credit in terms of like tax receipts for what they actually gave. But yeah, just if you can be honest with your donors at all costs, be transparent with them. You don't need to tell them anything that is inappropriate or too much or embarrassing to anybody. But just let them know if a match doesn't work out and that their donations were not actually matched so that they feel like they can trust you. Let's see. So there's a question from Donna. Do you receive all the funds donated by the match sponsor or does Mighty Cause take a percentage? So there are fees involved in Mighty Cause. I want to be completely transparent about that. We do have a platform fee and we also have bank fees. So the platform fee that is standard on our platform is 4%. If you're participating in a giving event, sometimes that is different because giving events often have their own pricing. So it may be less than that. It may be more if the giving event has an additional fee that they would like to tack on to cover some of their event costs. That is in our terms of use. And it also, your donors have the option of covering any fees for you when they check out. It's just checking a box and we'll tell them exactly how much it is. So we do take a percentage. That's part of how we maintain our business and make sure that our technology is good and solid for you. So yeah, just check our terms of use. If you're participating in a giving event, check the giving event FAQ because it'll tell you there. But we are transparent about that. So you can actually see that on your disbursement report as well. Anything that we take in terms of fees you will be informed of up front and you'll also see in the disbursement. So there shouldn't be any surprises. And again, what I would recommend is if you have a grant or who's paying online, have them use the plaid app so they can save a little bit of money in bank fees. And it just occurred to me now that if you're not getting the grant through the platform, we don't take any fees. So if you get a check from somebody, we never touch that money. So we're not going to charge you for that money. You just use the tool and it's on the honor system that that money exists and is there for a match. But we're not going to charge you for anything off the platform, obviously, because we can't. It's only for transactions that happen through our platform. So that's another consideration. When you're thinking about how you want to manage your grant, is do you want to process it online? As I mentioned specifically with giving days, there can be a specific advantage to processing it through Mighty Cause. And if you are not participating in a giving day and the donor prefers to give via check or something along those lines, then that's your situation to arrange. And we're not going to touch that money. So we don't have to pay any fees on that. So it's only transactions that happen through the Mighty Cause platform. All right, let's see. Oh, there's a comment from Marvin. It would be very nice if the local newspaper could put a list of 501c3 organizations in their newspaper area and put the nonprofit's website on it so local people can see that the local paper has local nonprofits. I definitely agree with that. I mean, you know, it's community information that should be out there. So I would definitely recommend taking that to your local paper. I don't know about where you live, but where I live, there are a lot of little papers. I'm in Virginia and there's lots of little papers for different pockets of Virginia where I live. So pitch that to your local paper. And just as a tip, if you email them on the weekend, you are more likely to get a response than if you email them, say, on a Monday. So I would definitely bring that up to your local paper. That's definitely a good idea. All right. So I think that's it. You guys had some really fantastic questions. And I will make sure that everybody has a copy of their link to the recording as soon as I'm able to put that on YouTube. And I'll make sure that you also have access to the slides. Oh, and there's one more comment from Laura. They're also more likely to put it in their calendar events of events in the paper. Fantastic. Yeah. I mean, a lot of newspapers, even if they don't put it in the physical paper, they have a community calendar on their website that you can, you know, submit information for so that you can find so that if you have a campaign in the fall, you may want to submit it to your local paper just so it's listed there and community members can more easily find it. So thank you for that suggestion, Laura. But anyway, so I'm just about at time. So thank you all so much for attending this webinar. I'll make sure that you have the slides and the recording. And if you have any questions, you can always feel free to reach out to me. My name is Linda. My email address is linda at mightycause.com. And thank you again. And happy fundraising.