 All right. Hello, everyone. We'll get started just at the top of the hour. But before we begin, those of you who are already logged on, if you could just let me know that you're able to see my screen and hear me by just typing yes in the questions box of your GoToWebinar panel, that would be a huge help so I can make sure that everybody is hearing me. Awesome. Thank you, guys. All right. I'm going to put myself on mute for just a second, and we'll get started right at the top of the hour. All right. Hello, everyone, and welcome to one of our last webinars before Giving Tuesday. This one is all about planning. You're giving Tuesday campaign last minute because, amazingly, it's already November. And happy election day to everybody. I hope everybody got a chance to get out there and vote today. My name is Linda Gerhart, and I'm the Senior Community Engagement Manager here at Mighty Cause, and I've been with the company since 2016. So this year's Giving Tuesday event will actually be my fifth Giving Tuesday event with Mighty Cause. Before I started working at Mighty Cause, I worked in nonprofit communications for organizations large and small, and I've had to do a lot of last-minute planning for campaigns in my time. So I hope the tips that I share today are helpful to you as you gear up for Giving Tuesday. So today, we're going to be breaking the campaign planning process into six easy steps, as well as going over the literal least that your organization can do to participate in Giving Tuesday. And just as a bit of housekeeping, I will be taking questions at the end of the webinar. So if you think of something you'd like to ask while I'm presenting, just go ahead and type that into the questions box of your GoToWebinar panel, and we'll make some time at the end of the webinar for everybody's questions. And just to answer this question before it gets asked, we are recording this webinar, and you'll have access to the recording and slides on the on-demand webinars page on the Giving Tuesday site. And I'll also be emailing it out to everybody who registered for this webinar. So you will have access to the recording and the slides. So before we start getting too deep into campaign prep, I just wanted to make sure that we're all on the same page regarding Giving Tuesday. So we will go over the basics first. If you happen to be on this webinar and you're participating in another Giving event that happens on Giving Tuesday, December 1, the information about campaign planning will still be applicable to you. But this section is obviously specific to the Giving Tuesday event on Mighty Cause. Giving Tuesday is a global movement, but each year, Mighty Cause hosts its own event to organize the nonprofits that are already using our platform or would like to get started using our platform. We do actually share our data about how much money is raised on Mighty Cause with the GivingTuesday.org folks. They are friends of ours. So our event is part of the global movement, and every donation that's made through Mighty Cause on Giving Tuesday is counted toward the official Giving Tuesday on the whole for the year. What sets our event apart is that we focus specifically on small and mid-sized nonprofits to help lift them up, whereas events like the one on Facebook, the prize money basically always goes to the biggest nonprofits in the country. But our user base is mostly small and mid-sized nonprofits, so we really want to lift those organizations up and offer them an opportunity to win prizes. Registration for Giving Tuesday is open now, and we actually just announced our prizes, which we're going to go over in just a moment. In keeping with our commitment to empowering small and mid-sized nonprofits, we're also offering free fundraising resources for nonprofits that are participating in Giving Tuesday on our platform, like this webinar, with a comprehensive toolkit, an on-demand webinar library, three ebooks, and more. There's a whole bunch of stuff there, and we're going to talk a little bit more about the toolkit later on in the webinar. There are some important dates that you should know if you're participating in Giving Tuesday. Coming up first is Tuesday, November 17th, which is when early donations start. That means that at midnight Eastern Standard Time on November 17th, all donations made to your Mighty Cause page will count towards your Giving Tuesday totals if you've registered for the event. Registration closes a week before the event on Tuesday, November 24th, so make sure that you register well before that date. And then the big day, of course, is on Tuesday, December 1st. And one thing I did want to point out is that on Mighty Cause, it's actually a 27-hour event. It starts at midnight Eastern Standard Time and ends at midnight Pacific Standard Time so that everyone who's participating has a chance to fundraise regardless of what time zone there is. So East Coast folks don't have a leg up on the West Coast folks, for instance. So prizes are probably the thing that everyone here is most curious about. So if you missed our email announcing this year's prizes, we're going to go over them. And you can also find them on the Giving Tuesday website under rules and prizes. This year, the Mighty Cause Foundation is giving away $5,500 in cash prizes and more than $7,000 in free subscriptions to our advanced fundraising tools. There will be two leaderboards, which will rank the orgs in the leaderboard according to how much they've raised. And we always have a small nonprofit leaderboard and a large nonprofit leaderboard. And how we determine where you are placed is based on the information that you provide in your registration. So it's all based on what you tell us when you register. And because we mostly serve small and mid-sized nonprofits, the line between large and small nonprofits is $250,000 per year as your budget. Large nonprofits are over $250,000 and small nonprofits are under $250,000. There's a $1,000 prize for the top position on each leaderboard, $500 for second place and $250 for the third place on the leaderboard. We'll also be having two power hours, which are worth $1,000 each, where you'll be competing with all other nonprofits to either raise the most money or get the highest number of individual donors in the space of an hour. You can actually find the schedule for that so you can target these hours on the Giving Tuesday website under rules and prizes. And we've got four golden tickets, which are random prizes, that will give winners six months free of Mighty Cause Advance. So you get a free subscription to Mighty Cause Advance for six months. We've also got two special prizes this year, which are outside of the leaderboard's power hours and golden tickets. First, we have the Meet Your Match Prize, which will have two winners. Every nonprofit that posts and meets a matching grant for $1,000 or more will have the chance to win a free one-year subscription to Mighty Cause Advance. And the Amplify Your Fundraising Challenge will enter all nonprofits who raise $1,000 or more into a prize pool to win a free one-year subscription to Advance. These prizes are really designed to help nonprofits who win them fundraise year-round, save them a little bit of money, and give them some extra access to advanced fundraising tools, which includes our CRM tool, text to give, volunteer management, unlimited fundraisers, templates, and a lot more. So they're really designed to enrich your fundraising well after Giving Tuesday. Okay, so we're going to move on to the campaign planning steps, and step number one is to register. Before you do anything else we talk about in this webinar, go to givingtuesday.mightycause.com and click register to start the process if you are not already registered. It's free, it's really easy, and it will only take you a few minutes, I promise. And if you're new to Mighty Cause and you've never used our platform before and you're not set up on Mighty Cause, that is A-OK. The registration process actually starts that process for you. You get administrative access to your page, and it helps get you set up on the platform, so you're basically killing two birds with one stone. There's no separate process for that. You do it all in one shot through the registration form. So before you do anything else, go to givingtuesday.mightycause.com and register for the event. And if you're already an admin for your nonprofit on Mighty Cause, it's super easy to register, because when you're logged in we pull your organization's info, and you just have to click to confirm that we have the correct nonprofit listed. And if you are an admin for more than one nonprofit, you'll just have to verify which one is the correct organization that you're registering. And if you're new to Mighty Cause or you just don't see your organization on the list, you can search for your organization's name or EIN and just pick from the list. We have an import of all active nonprofits from the IRS database. So unless you're physically sponsored or a very, very new nonprofit, you should see your organization in the search. Now if you're a local chapter of a national nonprofit or you have a name that's very common, like if you're a humane society or an SPCA and there are a lot of similarly named organizations, I recommend just using your EIN in the search tool so that you don't have to sort through a long list of other humane societies that look like yours but are not. Registrations are approved super fast, usually within an hour, but officially you'll have your response within 24 hours. So registration really couldn't be easier. So please, if you have not already done so, register for the event that is step number one. All right, so on to step two, which is to get your mighty cause profile ready. This section of the webinar is going to be a little bit technical, but I really want to walk through the specific things that your nonprofit should do to get ready for Giving Tuesday so that there's no gray area after this webinar. You can log on to your profile if you're registered and start doing these things. So here is a little checklist that you can use. The first five things are actually on your to-do list, which is on your overview page if you haven't already completed it. You'll want to add your logo, which is simple enough to do. You just need a square logo. And it's really important because the logo that you upload will represent your nonprofit all over mighty cause in the Giving Tuesday search and even on the leaderboards. So it's really just the face of your organization throughout the Giving Tuesday event. You'll also want to add a background image to your profile or a banner image just to give it some color and make it represent your nonprofit's brand. Then add your thank you page, which we're going to talk about how to do in just a moment. Add your story or at least read over it and make sure it doesn't reference old dates or old campaigns and update it so it's relevant to your campaign this year. And just as a tip for 2020, it's a great opportunity in your story to talk about how the pandemic and the recession and all of the chaos of 2020 has affected your work, your financial situation, your ability to provide services or operate since a lot of nonprofits are at limited capacity right now, especially those that do a lot of face to face work. So it's really a great way to talk about how you are affected by current events. And that's something that really resonates with donors right now. We're finding that donors are really responsive to calls to help organizations, their favorite causes that are struggling or having to change things up because of the current situation in our country. So don't be afraid to address that in your story, get specific to 2020, and just check it to make sure that there's nothing that's out of date or old. You want it to be current and new because if somebody sees old information, they may not be inclined to give because they might suspect that you don't pay attention to this page. And then finally you'll want to set up EFT. Now you can still receive disbursements via check, but unfortunately there is a $5 check fee because a lot of those get returned to us, and it does take a lot longer. So we highly recommend setting up EFT so that A, you can avoid the check fee and B, get the money you raise much faster. As those of you who've been paying attention to the news might be aware, the U.S. Postal Service is seeing some delays, and we are seeing that impact. How quickly nonprofits who are receiving check disbursements actually physically get their check. So it's a great time to set up EFT and start getting your disbursements through a direct deposit. Some additional steps to take are checking in on your suggested donation amounts. You can customize these, which we're going to chat about in just a minute, but it's a good idea just to check on what's listed in your checkout flow and make sure it's updated for 2020, especially if you had some old campaign specific suggested, suggested donation amounts there. And if you've participated in other giving days this year or you haven't checked in since last year's Giving Tuesday, you'll want to check on your metrics for your page and your goal and make sure that they're reset for this year, and we're going to walk you through that in just just a second. All right, so customizing your profile is vital because it is the face of your organization and where you will make your appeal to donors. It's where you'll be telling the story of what your organization does and why it's important to support you. So unless you have a separate fundraiser set up, which you can absolutely do, that's not right or wrong, you can do that if you choose to, your profile page is usually the main URL that you'll share with your supporters to ask them to donate. So you'll just copy and paste the URL from your browser and ask people to go there to make a donation. You can customize your profile quite a bit and really make it reflect your organization's brand and tell a story about what your nonprofit does in your community using the tools in the quick edit menu and the inline text editor in your about section where you can add a lot of flair to your profile and tell a multimedia story with text, pictures, and video. And again, 2020 is a weird year, so don't be afraid to talk about how your work has been affected and get personal with your supporters. We are seeing at Mighty Cause that donors are getting to their favorite causes and want to support them through the pandemic, through the recession. So if you are affected by all by the chaos of this year, talk about it in your story, get real with your supporters. Supporters really are responding to that this year. And this is also where you'll want to put information that is specific to your campaign, or if you're really in a pinch and you really don't want to mess with it too much, you can always just put your mission statement and some basic information about your work in the about section of your profile if you want to keep it simple. This can be where you put your mission statement and just simply explain what your nonprofit does and some basic facts about your work. On your profile, you also have some metrics like how much you've raised and a progress bar with your goal. This year, they're even easier to edit. You just click the little pencil icon next to them. You can see that on the slide, the little pencil icons, and then you can just open up the editing tool. You can set your goal for 2020 is giving Tuesday. And just as a note, this is really important to know, on Mighty Cause, you are never, ever, ever locked into your goal and you can edit it at any time. So if you want it to lower it, or you wanted to set a stretch goal, you're always able to go in there and edit that, you're not locked into it. That will add a progress bar to your page as well that shows how much you've raised towards your goal and how close you are. And for your metrics, which is such and such amount was raised by this number of donors, you can actually reset that by making sure that it's counting only from November 17th on, which is the date that early giving opens. So that way you're only counting donations that were made for Giving Tuesday. So that resets your metrics down to zero. And so you can start fresh for this year. A page I want to show some love to is your checkout flow, which is in your fundraising submenu on your dashboard. On Mighty Cause, you have a lot of control over your own checkout process. So the process that a donor goes through when they're making a donation. So you'll want to check in year after year and customize it to look and function how you want. You can choose your suggested donation amount and descriptions, which we recommend if you're able to trying to tie into your campaign to bolster your messaging. And there is a text limit for the descriptions. So keep those clear and focused and to the point, just so that they're really easy to understand at a glance and fit within that text limit. I also recommend previewing your checkout flow, which you can do on this page just to make sure that it doesn't feel like it's too long of a process. And so that you can see what donors, what your donors are seeing and double check that you're getting the data that you want from your donors. And you can also apply an editing eye to your checkout flow and make sure that it's not too cumbersome of a process for your donors. It only takes a moment to go through the process. So you can just sort of get a feel for what your donors are seeing and make sure that that they're seeing what you want and that you're getting the information that you want from your donors. And just as an added note, you can also enable dedications and or designations on the checkout flow page. So if you want to give donors the option of designating their donation for a specific program or fund or dedicating it to someone else or giving it in their honor, this is where you would choose those options. So do show some love to your checkout flow page. It's not a particularly exciting page, but it is really important because this is where donors are all going to end up. And so you want to make sure that it looks and functions the way you want it to. So there is a toggle button on your checkout flow page where you can control what donors see after they check out, which is also a really critical moment with donors. And there's some really, really important stuff there. So first you've got your thank you page, which uses the same inline text editor as your about section. And you can add a thank you video as well, some text, some photos and so on. And just as a note, we don't host videos on Mighty Cause. So any videos, you'll just need to upload to YouTuber Vimeo first. They both offer free accounts. This is a page that donors see right after they complete their donations. So as soon as they've gone through your checkout flow and their donation has been processed, they'll be taken to this page that you'll set up. And you can also add a CTA button there and send them back to your home page, back to your profile, encouraging them to share the link with their friends, wherever you would like them to go. So you do have some degree of control over where they go after they complete their donation. And this also acknowledges them immediately, which basically buys you a little bit of time with your follow up. And lastly, just make sure you click that save button once you've built your thank you page, just to make sure that you don't lose everything that you've added. Also on the page with your thank you page, if you scroll down just a bit is email and receipt customization. After a donor makes a donation, they are immediately emailed to receipt for mighty cause. And this section allows you to include a note from your nonprofit, which automates donor acknowledgement for you. So you can obviously, and we recommend doing more follow up after that, just to touch base with your donors after giving Tuesday. But this at least gives you the ease of mind knowing that you've thanked them. They received a message from your nonprofit and they have been acknowledged. So whatever your follow up plan is that you've already got automated thank yous set up so you can buy yourself a little bit of time to do your follow up. You can add texts, text lists, hyperlinks, and even emojis. But I just wanted to make a note that it's a little bit more limited than your thank you page because the emails themselves are limited. So any pictures or videos that you want to share, put those on your thank you page instead and keep this to a simple message of gratitude. And once again, once you fill this out, make sure that you click save. This will go into effect immediately. So if you're doing it right now, you may just want to update it to be giving Tuesday specific right around the 17th when giving Tuesday donations begin. So for a new giving Tuesday campaign, or if it's just been a little while since you've checked in, we also recommend taking a look at your settings. You can check on the admins who have access to your page. You can add anyone on your team who may be new or may now need access to say your donation report. You can have up to 10 admins. And we also recommend taking some time just to remove anybody who's no longer with your organization or no longer needs access to your page, just as a bit of housekeeping to make sure you've only given access to the people who need it. I also recommend checking on your pricing plan and making sure that you have opted into our pricing guarantee so that you can save some money on fees. When you opt into the pricing guarantee, the average rate for our platform, it is variable, but the average rate is 1.9% and 29 cents per donation, which is way cheaper than PayPal. So just make sure that you've opted into the pricing guarantee to save yourself some money on fees and make sure your discoverability is turned on so that people can find your nonprofit from our search. And check on your social sharing settings. If you go to share your link on your Facebook page and you notice that it has old information or an old picture on it in your settings under social sharing settings, that's where you would update that information and update the picture that's attached to the link. You can add or update your EFT in your settings. And it's always good if you, even if you have EFT set up, just to double check to make sure that it's connected to the correct bank account, especially year after year, just in case anything has changed. And then just check on your info, like your legal address, your name and so on, and just update that. If it's changed, you can do it right through the platform. If you wanted to upload some more information about your address changing, obviously a lot of nonprofits may have gone remote. So you can change the address where checks are sent if you're still receiving checks or just update it. So it's, we have the correct information on file because we usually have the information that was in the IRS database. But if that's no longer accurate, you'll just need to go into your settings and update that. And finally, I just want to make everyone aware of the, one of the metrics that we provide for you, which is donor retention. You can find your current donor retention rate on your overview page. And we also provide a retention report where you can export info for all of the donors who have not yet been retained this year. These donors are low hanging fruit. So we recommend, if this is not your first Giving Tuesday with us, working on a plan to reach out to these donors and bring them back since they've given before and therefore they are more likely to give again. You'll also want to work with them to increase their gift from last year and bump them up a little bit, which you can do by sending out some targeted emails or even doing personal outreach to some of the donors who gave them larger amounts. Or if it's just not that many, you can send out a few emails to those donors. One thing that I recommend is having an email appeal for the donors who have not given yet this Giving Tuesday, ready to go on the big day. And so going in pulling the list in the middle of the day or early evening, and then just plugging that list into Mailchip or Constant Contact or whatever program you use and make sure that you email those donors specifically so that they do not lapse. So get familiar with your retention report and know what your donor retention rate is and make sure that you know how to export it quickly so you can do it on Giving Tuesday and get that email out to retain those donors. All right. So step three is to utilize the resources Mighty Cause has made available to you. So if you're planning a campaign on the fly, you can get a crash course in everything Giving Tuesday through our nonprofit toolkit, which has lovingly been curated for you by me. I'm actually the person who put this together. So there's a lot of stuff there. You can find it by going to the Giving Tuesday site, which is givingtuesday.mightycause.com and going to resources and then nonprofit toolkit, like you can see on the menu bar here. In the toolkit, we have how-tos, walkthroughs, some checklists, case studies of successful Giving Tuesday fundraisers if you need some inspiration, a planning guide, which is going to be invaluable to you if you're just getting started on your Giving Tuesday campaign, email templates, which is one of our most popular resources. We have a long social media guide, which is an ebook that you download, a guide to matching grants, and Giving Tuesday logos and graphics. And we have three whole ebooks worth of material about Giving Tuesday is designed to be skimmable so you can find specific information that you want, but all of this information has been curated and put together for you in the nonprofit toolkit. So if there's something that you're looking to do, just go to the toolkit and we may have information there that pertains to the thing you're looking to do, or if you have somebody who's working on the campaign with you, and they say you want to know more about social media, we have a lot of information about that. So just take a look at the toolkit, especially if you're just doing this right now and you're just getting started, the toolkit is going to be invaluable to you. And we also have an on-demand webinar library and we've had some really interesting webinars this year. So our first webinar was about COVID-19 donor engagement. So everything's weird right now and this is all about how to engage donors during this unprecedented circumstance, how to focus on recurring giving, which is especially important in 2020. And we just did a social media webinar where we talked about live streaming and how to engage your donors when you aren't really able to do so in person as much. You can watch them at your convenience, they're totally free, they're really great for in-depth discussion of topics. If you wanted to outsource watching the webinars and taking notes, that's a really great way to get the information from them. If you have a volunteer or a staff member who's willing to do that, they're about an hour long and they're full of information. And for the most part, I think they're all me. So you can check that out and get a crash course in Giving Tuesday. And for instance, if you're looking to focus on recurring giving, we did a whole hour-long webinar about it that has some great tips. So there's a lot of great information there. And this is also for just to mention it, where you'll find today's webinar and the slides. All right. So now we're going to get into more of the fun stuff, which is step four, start scheduling your content. So email marketing is going to be really important, especially in 2020. In previous years, we always gave advice, like, you know, don't be afraid to pass out flyers to people in your community. But that's not really as much of an option this year. So email marketing is going to be really important. As I mentioned, we do have email templates that you can use for inspiration. Or if you're really quickly, you just don't know what to put in an email and you want to just copy and paste and do a little bit of customization, we do have email templates for you in our nonprofit toolkit, which will help you figure out what you need to send and what kind of things to say to your donors if you're not quite sure. One thing that we recommend is segmenting your list of donors to hit your key audiences. So it's absolutely fine to have a bunch of blast emails that go out to your whole list of supporters. But what we recommend is maybe segmenting, you know, some specific supporters that you really want to do some extra outreach to with email marketing, say everybody who gave over $100 to your last Giving Tuesday campaign, people who gave last year. Again, we recommend just trying to retain those. So within your whole list of people, see if there are some key audiences that you can do some additional outreach to and just set up emails for them. But of course, blasts are completely fine. We just recommend where you can, where you have these valuable donors and these groups of donors, trying to pick them out and do some targeted emails to them. Include your Giving Tuesday campaign in any routine emails. So if you have an e-newsletter that goes out or calendar of events, it's the beginning of the month. If you wanted to circulate an email with what you've got going on or even just in, you know, routine emails that you send out, just include some Giving Tuesday messaging. Tell them to save the date and let them know when your campaign is just so you're setting, you're setting your donors up to expect emails about your Giving Tuesday campaign. The more you repeat things in emails, the more your audience retains it. And then one thing I always recommend is testing your emails before sending. You know, I recommend having at least two eyes on each email that goes out, testing your links, checking you for any formatting problems, any typos, especially because Giving Tuesday is a high stakes day. A lot of people are going to be paying attention to you. So just make sure to test your emails out and also make sure to test them on a phone because sometimes things look great on a laptop, but they can look a little bit wonky on your phone. And that's where most people actually read their emails on their smartphones. So make sure that you also send a test email to your phone. So social media, we did a whole webinar about. And we have a social media guide that has some in-depth information about strategy and best practices. So if you really want to dive deep into how to utilize social media for Giving Tuesday, because it is a day that's sort of built around social media, I recommend trying to watch that webinar that we just did on social media that talked about live streaming or downloading the social media guide so you can get some more in-depth information. But basically when it comes to social media, you want to have your content ready well before Giving Tuesday. So schedule as much as you can through Advance. In Advance, you can do that through the publishing tools on Facebook or Tweet Deck. Or if you have a program like Hootsuite or Buffer, you can use those to schedule posts that are campaign posts, but aren't specific to anything like, hey, we just won a prize or we wanted to thank this donor. Just schedule as much as you can in Advance just to make life easy on yourself during Giving Tuesday. And again, use the tools that are available to you. If you don't have the budget for something like Hootsuite, they do have a nonprofit program, but it is a little bit on the pricey side. You can schedule using Facebook publishing tools and Tweet Deck. These are both free programs that you can use to schedule posts in Advance so that you have the basic scaffolding of your social media presence there before the big day. And then you can save your live tweeting and your live posting for things that need to be done on the fly, like saying, thank you for helping us win a prize or something along those lines. All right, so step five is to get your day of plan together. This is basically your war plan. So day of management is pretty important. You just want to make sure that everybody knows what they're doing. And what I recommend is assigning a point person for a few key things. So assigning a social media manager for the day. Obviously, if your nonprofit has somebody whose title is social media manager, or they tend to manage social media as part of their job with your nonprofit, it's very easy to do. But you can also just assign somebody, even a volunteer, if you're a really small operation, who can manage, who can manage your social media, monitor it and engage with supporters on social media because engagement is very important on social media. And you'll also want to have somebody who's tapped to handle donor questions. So we do offer support at Mighty Cause. You can email us at supportatmightycause.com, we're available to you, and we're available to your donors. But generally speaking, donors do like to come to your nonprofit because they know you better than they know us. So have someone on hand who's able to take phone calls or answer emails that come in from your donors just so that they are attended to, they're taken care of, and donors get a quick response to their question. And you can also forward their emails on to us at supportatmightycause.com. But just having somebody who has been tapped to be responsive to donor questions is really important on Giving Tuesday. And then having somebody who's monitoring donations, looking at what's coming in, seeing if there's anything out of the ordinary, who's able to see, oh, my gosh, this donor just made a $1,000 donation, we need to call them immediately and thank them. Somebody who's taking a look at what's coming in so that you can be responsive to anything that's out of the ordinary. Like sometimes you might see somebody, and this happens on a lot of Giving Tuesdays, unfortunately, where somebody adds an extra zero to their donation. So if somebody makes a $10,000 donation, you can always check in with them and just make sure that they meant to do that. Just having somebody who's making sure that everything coming in makes sense and is responsive to anything that's out of the ordinary that comes in in terms of donations. And we recommend having a meeting before Giving Tuesday to get your team on board. So just everybody knows what they're doing. Everybody has a job and they all know what their assignment is. They all know what the battle plan is for Giving Tuesday. So you may have to schedule that virtually if you're not working in the office, but just make sure that you have some time to assemble your team and meet with them and make sure that everybody knows exactly what they're doing. And if you are really small, a lot of nonprofits, especially the ones who are small, are having some capacity issues right now, everybody's stretched to the limit. So don't be afraid to ask volunteers to help out with Giving Tuesday. There are a lot of people who are spending some extra time at home and would be more than happy to help out their favorite cause with Giving Tuesday, whether that's calling donors to thank them, sending emails, or even helping you manage social media. Do not be afraid to tap volunteers to help you out if you need it on Giving Tuesday. All right, some day of tips. We do recommend keeping an eye on what's coming in in terms of donations and celebrating your milestone. So let's say you raise your first thousand dollars. Make sure that you are ready to celebrate that on social media, post about that, and let people know that you hit this big milestone. I also recommend we talked about prizes earlier. Take a look at the rules and prizes page and understand when the power hours are, when they begin, when they end, and just make sure that you have some social media posts and emails that are scheduled to go out so that you're taking advantage of the possibility of bringing in an extra thousand dollars. That's quite a lot of money, especially to small and mid-sized nonprofits. So keep an eye on when those are and make sure that you've got something in the hopper to go out when the power hours begin. Look for opportunities to engage online. So this is really important. Social media more now than ever. The algorithms that determine whether or not a post appears on somebody's page are looking for early engagement on posts. They're looking for lots of conversation and comments, lots of back and forth. They prioritize those things. So having somebody, your social media manager, who's there and looking for opportunities to thank somebody for sharing a post, thank somebody for tweeting, encouraging their friends to donate, looking for those opportunities to engage with people is really important. And then we just recommend monitoring the giving to say hashtag. The event itself is a hashtag. So monitor that. It moves fast and furious. And if you have your own campaign-specific hashtag, which you can absolutely do and sort of tag yourself in any discussion of it, monitor that as well. If you have any relevant hashtags that your organization uses on a regular basis, monitor those. I recommend using tweet deck to do that. You can also use some Facebook tools to monitor that and Instagram tools. But just, you know, keeping an eye on what's happening and looking for those opportunities to engage. All right, the final step is planning to follow up. Follow-up is always an important part of the campaign planning process. So following up is really important because a quick and sincere follow-up from nonprofits increases the odds that donors will make a future gift. Studies have actually shown that the amount of time in which a nonprofit delivers a thank you plays a large role in whether or not donors are likely to come back and give again. So if they don't feel appreciated, if they don't feel like their donation was received well, if they don't feel welcomed by your nonprofit when they make their first donation, they are likely to lapse. So you really want to make sure that you have a quick and sincere follow-up. So you want to make sure that it's quick, but also it's quality. It comes from a person. It's really, you know, full of gratitude for them. So make sure that you have a plan in place, whether that's having a donor call, I'm sorry, a volunteer or a staff member call donors after they make a donation. That can be really great. I made a donation to an organization on Giving Tuesday on Mighty Cause and within five minutes I had a volunteer for that organization call me and thank me for my donation. And that was really fantastic to see and it made me feel great as a donor. So things like that can be really effective, but even a quick email from somebody in your development department or if you have an automated email that you can sort of personalize and send from your executive director, those things make a huge difference. So when you're planning your campaign, even though you're doing it and you're getting it off the ground really quickly, make sure that you include that in your plan. You also want to close the loop on your Giving Tuesday campaign. And what I mean by that is on December 2nd, when the campaign is over, the money has come in, you know how much you've raised. If you were telling a specific campaign story, make sure that that story has an ending and make sure that you follow up with all of your donors and let them know how much you raised and let them know what you're going to do with that money just so that donors have a satisfying end to the story and can actually segue into end of your giving. They need to mentally close the door on the campaign they just gave to you before they will be open to giving again. So just make sure that your campaign story on Giving Tuesday has an appropriate ending and you're following up after the day is over. And then think about keeping donors engaged. So how are you going to follow up with your donors so that they stay engaged in your cause? And this is especially important because Giving Tuesday this year is December 1st, so it's already December. So there's really no lag time between Giving Tuesday and end of year. You're going to have to sort of move into the next thing very, very quickly to capture them for end of year fundraising. So think about that next step. So when the event is over and you thank them, what is the next step? How are you going to segue them into end of year giving because it's going to come fast and furious? And then you'll also want to start stewarding donors, especially if they are new donors. So think about things like a welcome series of emails, a phone call to welcome them to your organization, mailing them a welcome packet if you have materials and some goodies you want to send them. Those are all really effective at making donors feel appreciated in making them feel like they've just joined a club of other do-gooders who are invested in this cause. Any supporters who are sustaining you, who are recurring, who give to you on a regular basis, reach out to them. Make sure it's personal as much as it can be. If you have a lot of donors, you may need to set some parameters like everybody who gives over $100 on Giving Tuesday gets a phone call from either a staff member or volunteer. And if you did get a large donation or a matching gift, make sure that you follow up with that donor and let them know how grateful you are. Something like a Zoom meeting or a Zoom lunch, sending them some little token in the mail or just calling them, having somebody hire up, especially if it's a large amount, somebody like your executive director or your director of development giving them a call, and just thanking them and building that relationship with them is really important. So even though you may be planning last minutes, definitely think about stewarding, following up, and building relationships with all of your Giving Tuesday donors. Okay, so I always think this is really fun. What is the least that you can possibly do to participate in Giving Tuesday? So if somebody is, for instance, watching this in the On Demand webinar library, and it is December, it's November 28th, and you're trying to get your campaign going, what are the key things that you should do? So ideally you'll do more than these things, but the absolute least that you can possibly do is you can scan your existing Mighty Cause page to make sure that there's no outdated information. So you're not really adding anything new, you're not telling a new story, you're just looking at it and making sure that all of the information there is current. You're not telling a grand story, you're just scanning it and updating anything that's outdated. Scheduling one to two social media posts with a link to your Mighty Cause profile on Tuesday, December 1st. So it can be one, it can be two, but just a quick reminder to the people who follow you on social media that you are participating in Giving Tuesday, here's how you make a donation, keeping it simple, just make sure that you do one to two posts on social media wherever people may be following you. If you have one social media platform that has a lot more followers than your others, focus on that platform. So if you have, you know, 5,000 people following you on Facebook and you only have 50 people following you on Instagram, donate, I mean, dedicate all of your attention to your Facebook audience because that's where the most people are. And then finally, just plan one blast email to your subscribers or to your supporters announcing that they can help you by donating to your Mighty Cause page on December 1st. So the literal least you can do is just one blast email to your whole email list, letting them know where they can support you on Giving Tuesday. These three things are the least that you can do to get something out of participating in Giving Tuesday. And just to reiterate, in order for these three steps to work at least on Mighty Cause, you do want to register for the event. It's really quick and easy. And then you can just do these three things. So if you're having capacity issues this year, if you have a lot going on and you don't have the time or the manpower to create a whole big campaign, these are the three things that you can do to participate and at least get something out of it. Giving Tuesday is a day where people will be giving. They are looking to give. They know to expect giving Tuesday every year. And the question is whether or not they'll be giving to you. And if you do these three things, you can make sure that you're at least doing something to make sure that some donations come to you and you're communicating with your donors. All right. So I wanted to take some time for questions. So if you have a question, I'll just go ahead and type that into the questions box of your go-to webinar panel. Yeah. So somebody wanted me to confirm that Giving Tuesday is November 17th at midnight. Yes. It's November 17th at midnight eastern time. So just pay attention to where your time zone is. So if you're on central time, you are an hour behind us, so it actually would start at 11 p.m. central time. But midnight eastern standard time on November 17th is when early giving starts for Giving Tuesday. And just to reiterate, yes, you are going to get a recording of this webinar and access to the slides. They're going to be on the on-demand webinar library on the Giving Tuesday page. And you'll also get them emailed to you because you registered for this webinar, so you will have access to the recording and the slides. What do you do for donors that want to remain anonymous? They have not provided their contact information. So for Giving Tuesday, we have provided sort of a partially anonymous option. So if somebody is giving to your nonprofit but they just don't want to have their name displayed anywhere, they can check a box when they're making their donation to keep their name publicly hidden. They can also hide the amount of their donation. But that means that for Giving Tuesday, you will have some basic information about your donor. So for Giving Tuesday, they are not fully anonymous. You will have their name and email address. It just won't be publicly posted anywhere. There are some giving events where they've opted to enable fully anonymous donations where you won't have access to that information about your donors. But for Giving Tuesday on Mighty Cause, you do have their information. So if you're participating in another Giving Day, let me know because it is different for each event. So like Georgia Gives on Giving Tuesday, I'm not quite sure what they're doing. Richland Gives is another event that's happening on Giving Tuesday and they'll each have their own settings for whether they allow fully anonymous donations. But just our Giving Tuesday event at Mighty Cause, you will have some basic information for all of the donors because they'll have to give us their email address and their name in order to complete their donation. So that's important to know you will have some information to follow up with them. Oh, this is a good question. What do the initial CTA stand for? So that stands for call to action. So basically what a call to action is in an email when you send out a marketing email, it's usually what's in the button. What is the main action that you want the user or the person who opens the email to take? On a page, that might be like if you go to the Giving Tuesday page right now, there's a button there that says register and that's really big and noticeable and at the forefront of the page. It's above the fold, so you don't even have to scroll to see it and that that's a CTA button and that is the main thing we want you to do right now is register. So a CTA is just a call to action and it's basically in a nutshell just what do you want this person to do. And on the thank you pages, that's where you would put the link to wherever you want them to go after they make their donation. So you can send them really wherever you want if you wanted to send them to your blog, if you wanted to send them to your website to learn more, if you wanted to sign them up for your email list, you will have their email address but you can send them wherever you want and that's basically all a CTA is. It's a call to action, what do you want the user or the donor to do and that's usually in marketing in the form of a button. So it'll be a button in an email button on a page something like that. So I hope that helps. Let's see. Are specific asks slash campaigns the best strategy or general support? I would say specific asks are definitely more effective with donors, non-profits who put time into telling a specific story about how their organization helps their community or the people that you serve. Those really emotionally resonate with donors and why do donors give? Donors give because they are emotionally driven to that you've touched something in them that makes them want to support you and those kinds of specific campaigns really do resonate with donors more so than general requests for support. But if you're getting going really last minute or you don't really have anything that you can think of that will work for your Giving Tuesday campaign, you can always do a general ask. So if you're doing a little bit less because you have a lower capacity this time of year or you want to save your big storytelling for your end of year campaign, you can always just do a general ask. But in general specific asks and storytelling do resonate more with donors and tend to be a little bit more successful. Something that you'll also want to consider especially if you have an end of year campaign plan is you can actually use Giving Tuesday as the kickoff for end of year fundraising. Some non-profits do that especially because it's in December this year, it was in December last year as well. In previous years it's been in November so there was a little bit more space between Giving Tuesday and Year End Giving. But since it's in the beginning of December, you can use Giving Tuesday to kick off your end of year efforts and use the same story or start telling a story that's similar to what you want to use for end of year. But definitely specific storytelling and specific campaigns definitely resonates a little bit more with donors. What's a good way to generate new foot traffic to my social media profile before Giving Tuesday? That's a really great question. So basically you want to look at where your people are right now. So if you have supporters email them and say, hey follow us on social media, we're going to be posting some really great stuff there and it would really help us out if you followed us there. So if you have a decent sized email list or even if it's a small list, then you can start with the people who support you and have made donations to you and shown an active interest by signing up for your email list. So send out an email and just ask them to follow you on social media and give them the links to your accounts. The other thing that you can do if you already have a little bit of an audience there is post a specific request for people to invite people that they know to follow you to keep tabs on what you're doing and see the great content that you post. That's really how you develop an audience and then obviously if you post great content. So post frequently and be very conscientious about what you post, post things that are engaging, that are entertaining, that are interesting. People will follow you when there's good content and if you post good content they'll tag their friends or they'll tell people they know about it, they'll share your posts. So posting things that are interesting and entertaining or informative, those are great ways to get people sharing your posts and that will get you more followers. But really the simplest answer is if you have a base of supporters but they're not following you on social media or you want more followers just ask them and if you have a lobby that people are going into ask people to sign up to follow you on social media as well, collect their email addresses and send them an email and let them know that they can follow you here and also make sure that on your website you have links where people can find your social media because a lot of people will just Google if they want to find out more about a non-profit often when they're looking for your help. So make sure that your website if you have a separate website has links to your social media pages and just make sure that you're posting really good content there and it's absolutely fine to ask your followers that you have on social media to share posts. It's totally fine to do that but you can also email them and ask them to follow you just wherever your people are try and shepherd them to your social media pages and just make sure that the content that you post is worth their while because people will come and they will stay and they'll tell their friends about great content. All right so do organizations participate in Giving Tuesday and Giving Tuesday? So I assume this is about GivingTuesday.org which is the global movement and the easy answer there is yes. So GivingTuesday.org sort of the originators of the Giving Tuesday movement, excuse me, they sort of act as a directory rather than hosting their own event so they were very involved the first couple of years but they just sort of collect the different events that have popped up throughout the country like the One Almighty Cause and there's a lot of localized events and they add them to their map or their search that they use to direct people to GivingTuesday events. So yeah you're technically part of that because they don't host their own events at GivingTuesday.org they just sort of act as the you know the shepherds they provide the information they provide resources and they a lot of their focus is on data about how people are giving so the information about how much is raised on Mighty Cause does actually go to the GivingTuesday.org folks for their data purposes we don't share any donor data we don't share your non-profits data we just kind of share some numbers with them so they know what kind of activity took place. So yeah you participate on GivingTuesday on Mighty Cause to be part of our event and be eligible for prizes and we usually have our event added to GivingTuesday.org's directory so that people can find us there. So you're kind of participating in both because one is more of a movement and ours is an actual organized event so I hope that answers the question. Whenever I begin to register the questions asked for first and last name information is this the correct process for registration if you are new to Mighty Cause or you're not logged into your account that sounds like the correct process so on Mighty Cause if you are not currently somebody who has an account with us then it will ask for your information your name your last name your email address and you'll have to set up an account before you can get to the registration form for GivingTuesday so that does make sense for this but if you have any questions about where you are you can always email us at support at mightycause.com and we'll make sure that you're in the right place and ready to register for GivingTuesday. Oh okay so sorry this is the earlier question I meant to say GivingTuesday and Mighty Cause so yeah so GivingTuesday is something that Mighty Cause does every year just to provide an opportunity for the nonprofits who use us or are interested in using us to compete for prizes and reach some new donors so we host an event for GivingTuesday but GivingTuesday itself is kind of a nebulous thing there are lots of GivingTuesday events and GivingTuesday has just kind of become a big global day of giving that has a lot of smaller events inside of it so yeah I hope that makes sense you're participating in GivingTuesday on Mighty Cause but there's a lot of fundraising that happens outside of Mighty Cause on GivingTuesday but if you want to be part of our event and be eligible for our prizes you'll just need to participate in GivingTuesday on Mighty Cause I know it's a little bit confusing because GivingTuesday as I said is sort of a vague thing it's more of a movement than an organized event at this point at least in the large picture. All right how do peer-to-peer pages work and connect to our main donation page? This is a really really great question so peer-to-peer fundraising is a really great way especially if you want to get some more feet on the ground on GivingTuesday to sort of reach more people and on Mighty Cause peer-to-peer fundraising is really built in it's baked in it's one of the things that we offer to everybody so the easiest way to get peer-to-peer fundraisers to fundraise for you is if you go to your profile page you'll see that right next to your donate button there's another button to the right of it that says fundraise so if they click fundraise that'll put them into the process for starting a peer-to-peer fundraiser and it'll automatically connect their page to your organization now if somebody goes to mightycause.com or GivingTuesday.mightycause.com and they want to start a fundraiser from there they absolutely can and how they connect to your page is that in the process of creating a peer-to-peer fundraiser they will be asked to choose the beneficiary of their fundraiser so they would just choose your organization and again we have every organization that is active with the IRS in our database so they should be able to search for you by name but the easiest thing to do is just go to your organization profile and click that fundraise button and it's automatically connected to your your organization and your EIN and the donations that are made to those peer-to-peer pages they flow up directly to your organization so there's no middle person they are just included in your disbursement of donations we bundle all of the donations together and we send them directly to you no peer-to-peer fundraiser will ever have access to your your funds they just go straight into your donation report and are recorded there and they're bundled together with all of your other donations and sent directly to your nonprofit via EFT or check or however you have it set up through us so that's a basic explainer for how peer-to-peer fundraising works but if you go to the nonprofit toolkit on the GivingTuesday page we do have some specific peer-to-peer resources there so you can find some more information about how peer-to-peer fundraising can bolster your GivingTuesday campaign and some technical information about how to set those up we also have a support library that has like step-by-step walkthroughs of peer-to-peer fundraising so there's a lot of information but it's basically baked into Mighty Cause and we've set it up so that your organization gets the money directly and it's very easy for people to find the correct nonprofit and connect their page. All right how to cancel previous accounts so contact support at mightycause.com and let them know what you're trying to do and they can walk you through the process you know especially if you maybe were fiscally sponsored and your EIN has changed because you've gotten your own 501c3 or different situations like that if you need to sort of figure out page logistics or profile logistics contact support you'll get a quick response from our team and any technical questions like that go to support at mightycause.com just email them let them know what you're trying to do and they will walk you through it and in some cases even do it for you depending on what you're trying to do. All right should you have an event page for your peer-to-peer pages so that's a really really excellent question it depends on how much you're willing to do so creating an event on mightycause is basically having a centralized place for your peer-to-peer fundraising and it's kind of a great way to get a larger peer-to-peer effort going it's not hard to do it does require a little bit of planning so if you have some time to invest in engaging fundraisers and sort of managing them through an event page then absolutely set up an event especially if you're going to be doing some outreach and asking people to fundraise for you it's a great idea to start an event page it just really depends on what you're looking to do and the capacity that you have because obviously if you're organizing an event you're organizing all these fundraisers you will have to do a little bit more work to interact with them and help them get set up you can set up a template through an event page but you can also do that through your organization page but it's a really great way if you're thinking about reaching out to multiple people and having them fundraise for you or if you even wanted to get a team of people together like volunteers staff members you're bored that's a really great idea for Giving Tuesday especially since it's around the end of the year you can have them funnel their end of year giving their annual giving into a Giving Tuesday gift an event is a really great idea if you have the capacity for it it doesn't require a ton of extra work but it's a little bit of extra work rather than some of the sort of things that we talked about in this webinar but yeah if you are able to do it and you have the time and the effort to put into it an event is a really great idea but when it comes to Giving Tuesday whatever you really want to do on our platform is whatever works for your nonprofit is great so if an event and focusing on peer to peer makes the most sense for your organization create an event if having a fundraiser page with a specific story that's connected to your organization profile makes the most sense for you if you really don't want to get too bogged down in editing your profile but you want to create a fundraiser then that's great and if you want to use your profile then that's fantastic too there's a lot of different ways to participate and it all comes down to what makes sense for your nonprofit at this point in time and what you have the capacity for but definitely peer to peer is a really great way to get a lot of fundraising going that you don't have to actively manage yourself the fundraisers are really doing the work for you so that's a really great idea if you have a little bit of time to sort of put into creating the event page and recruiting people for the event that's a fantastic way to sort of almost delegate the the actual fundraising on Giving Tuesday so absolutely if you are interested in an event create one but there's a lot of correct ways to participate in Giving Tuesday all right I think that's all of the questions thanks thanks for everybody who attended today and stuck with me through the whole webinar I know it was a little bit boring in times but I really appreciate you all being here with me today and I wish you luck on Giving Tuesday again my name is Linda and if you have any questions for me you can always reach out at linda at mightycause.com thanks so much for attending this webinar and happy fundraising