 Good morning. Thank you so much for joining us for today's webinar. Winter is coming. Get ready for year-end giving. Today we will cover Part 1. And on December 8th at 11 a.m. we will finish up with Part 2. And I am your host and chat facilitator, Leshika Phillips. And today's presenter is Michael Stein. Now I will share a little bit more about Michael in just a bit, but first I want to make sure that everyone is comfortable using ReadyTalk. So if you have any questions, let me go back so you can see. This is Michael Stein, the Digital Strategist who will be presenting. And again, I'm Leshika Phillips, your host and be facilitating chat this morning. And as I mentioned, it's really important for us that you are comfortable with ReadyTalk. So I want to let you know that if you have any questions, feel free to chat them in the small box in the bottom left side of your screen. I also want to let you know that if you are on the phone, all lines are muted. 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Some of you may know and others may not know, but our mission is to build a dynamic bridge that enables civil society organizations and social change agents around the world like yourself to gain effective access to all of the resources that they need to design as well as implement solutions for a more equitable planet. And we are based here in San Francisco, California, and I'm really curious. I want to know where you are. Where are you listening from? Feel free to share your location in the chat box. We really like to know where our learners are tuning in from. I see North Carolina. Thank you so much for tuning in and Boston and all over. Thank you so much for joining us. We are happy to have you all join us today. And by the way, I should mention that all of the blue shaded area on the map before you, all of those areas, that is where TechSoup is providing and facilitating donation programs. And we do that by partnering with partners such as Adobe and Symantec and Cisco and all kinds of technology, like GoDaddy, even Shopify. So I highly recommend visiting our website again, TechSoup.org to learn more and again check out our nonprofit favorite section. So as I mentioned, I will share a little bit about Michael Stein and let him dive in because we only have a brief time today. We have a 30-minute webinar and he has a lot of content for us today. So we are really excited. So Michael has been a writer and a digital strategist to progressive social causes for more than 20 years. He is also the author of three books and he has written several articles chronicling the rise of digital marketing, mobile, even online fundraising. He is also a contributor for the TechSoup blog here. And he also works as a consultant to coach nonprofits, foundations, and educators with a focus on marketing and fundraising. So we have the right person. You are with the right people at the right time. And we are going to learn some really good information so that these nonprofits can gear up and get ready because winter is coming. Michael, take it away. Thanks for joining us. Thank you so much, LaChica. That was a great intro. Hello everybody. This is Michael Stein coming to you from Northern California. I'm in Berkeley. And we are going to spend the next 25 minutes talking about getting ready for year-end giving. So here's how I thought we would tackle the content in today's webinar and we will continue it in a few weeks if you choose to join me for part two. So we will talk first about Giving Tuesday. We need to do that because it is only 11 days away. We will then segue and talk about preparing your website for year-end giving. We will talk next about creating an email appeal series and the importance of that for fundraising. We will then talk a little bit about engagement on social media and the importance of integrating that into the mix for fundraising. And then we will end talking about measuring everything, just the importance of constantly learning and tracking what we are doing. Great. So let's dive into our first topic and keep this going as quickly as we can. Although my slides will be available to you later and I do invite you to get in touch with me if you have any more specific questions. So Giving Tuesday, I mean, I'm sure that many of you are busy planning already since it's only 11 days away, but I wanted to reinforce the importance of a couple things. One is to find a campaign theme for Giving Tuesday. I know that Giving Tuesday is a theme in and of itself, but I think it's important to connect the Giving Tuesday theme to something that is original and authentic within your organization, such as a community project for something that you are fundraising for that's going to happen next year or something that you are building on. So I think that's an important piece of the puzzle. I'm always asking people to sort of say like, what worked last year at Giving Tuesday? I mean, you did something last year. Just really look back, see how much money you raised, how many donors you brought in, the different channels that you pushed out content. What worked last year? What didn't work last year? And help use that to reflect on how to build what you are doing this year. You may be partnering for Giving Tuesday which is an important piece of the puzzle. There may be a business or two that you work with, a foundation, other nonprofits in the community. There may be a local safe organization. So this is a great opportunity I think for partnering and building a great campaign theme around it. And of course the core piece, setting a goal I think is important. It's such a small window Giving Tuesday because it's this one day thing. Maybe you are raising a certain amount of money. Maybe you are trying to attract a certain number of new donors. Maybe you are recruiting some monthly donors. And maybe you have a match, a challenge match that helps motivate people. But hopefully those things you can shape into your campaign theme and get people excited. I do want to put a super big shout out for GivingTuesday.org which is the kind of official mothership of Giving Tuesday website. And there are some really terrific materials on there that I recommend that I am showing you here on the screen. There is a toolkit which is wonderful. And there is also a set of case studies that has 50 or 60 case studies from last year. And I use these a lot and I recommend people take a look at these materials. They are invaluable and they are free to download from the site. Another issue of Giving Tuesday really quick is really sort of getting the timing right. Giving Tuesday falls on a Tuesday. You have a couple of other big events Thanksgiving the week before. You have a weekend. You have Black Friday and Cyber Monday all kind of meshed in there. Some obviously you are going to be fundraising on Tuesday the 28th. Let's think a little bit about what makes sense for your messaging. A lot of people like to message sort of before Thanksgiving to get people excited, introduce the theme. And then I think it is common for there to be a lot of messaging on the weekend itself. And then on Monday I think Monday is fair game for you can give today or tomorrow. And then you build a lot of attention on the 28th for this is the final day for Giving. But I would say don't limit yourself to just asking for money on the 28th. And really expand as much as you can. A couple of other themes just think multi-channel for Giving Tuesday. So if you've got any events that are going on right before it, there is no reason why you can't promote your Giving Tuesday fundraising. Of course you are going to want to be putting material on social media and on your website. So again just think multi-channel so that you can really build visibility. And of course you are going to be doing emails and sending those out to your list and your file. Inspiring millennials to give and recruiting social ambassadors and using videos, I think those are all just other ways to think about how to make noise on social media. Video is going to be helpful. I've seen some terrific videos that people have created for this one day activity. Again you probably need a little bit of lead time to create videos but I would encourage you to think about those assets to help you build your campaign theme and to make as much noise as possible online. Again I'll just close this topic and just say take a look at GivingTuesday.org for those wonderful PDFs which you can download. Let's move on to our second theme today which is preparing your website for the year end giving season. And I have a couple of ideas that I wanted to share with you. The most obvious one of course is that just the importance of promoting your year end fundraising appeal on your homepage. I mean for most organizations the homepage gets the most traffic. So whether you have a carousel or whether you have a big section at the top for headlines it's just really important that your website be poised for year end giving. A lot of people have normal content there. This is a good time to switch out that content or to share the content. Again you want to make sure you have a clear headline, donate to help our campaign for next year or give tax deductible help with our maps. Just really get your headline and the value proposition of why the gift really helps us do X or Y. Really reinforce the importance of images to inspire people to get and the all important button which would say donate now or help us with our maps. Whatever the messaging is going to work best for you. Over here on the right just an example from the FETI Institute which was a client that I was helping just last week. And we were talking with them about let's get this carousel prepared for year end. And they have a little section over here on the right of their page. And I wanted to make sure that was appropriately ready to promote their year end campaign. Here is another quick example. This one is from the Middle East Children's Alliance. Again I was talking with them about let's take this panel at the top here that says 95% water and gauze is unsafe. We are going to change that a little bit and focus it a little bit on the year end. And then that button which says learn more, we are going to change that. And it is going to turn into a button that says either donate now or it is going to say match my gift. So again think about the best way that you can use your website to do that. And also think about other places on your website that you can basically strengthen your appeal. If you are fundraising actually for a specific project or the unveiling of something new or a campaign, you could maybe, this is again on the Middle East Children's Alliance site. They have a section on news and updates and I suggest let's take this item here on project updates and make sure at least one of these is connected to your year end appeal. And then always I will remind everyone, let's make sure that you are looking at your website on mobile devices. If there are ways to improve, to look and feel of those things that is going to be important because you are going to get a lot of traffic from people using their mobile devices at the year end, especially if they get your emails they are going to click through and so it is just important to put your best foot forward in that way. Another big theme for preparing your website is the light box. So the light box are these pop-up images that appear whenever a visitor comes to your site. I think they are very important at the year end to promote your fundraising. I definitely recommend that everyone have one for the final two weeks of the year. If you feel that that is a little too much then fine. It may be the last week of the year. But the idea is that you really want to get in front of people. I think it should appear absolutely on the home page and in a perfect world on the top 20 pages of your site. And if you have the ability to control how often it shows I would say you only want to show it to new visitors so if someone comes back again and again they are not seeing it over and over. This particular example over here on the right is from the Children's National Health System in D.C. I like this pop-up, this light box because it includes the gift amount which I think is an interesting way for people to see to build some expectations. I mean granted $1,000 may be too much for some donors but it starts at $35,000 for the other amounts. You get people thinking right away, yeah I want to help children this holiday season and I love the Children's National Health System. This particular example here is from the International Medical Corps. This picture just says the whole thing. It's a very strong photo. Photos are very important as part of light boxes. And again you've got your headline, you've got your buttons. So this is a nice clear light box. Of course when you click anywhere on the light box, the idea is that it takes the visitor to the donation page where they can continue to complete their donation. Another quick example of this one is from the SETI Institute that I was referencing before because of scientists. This one I thought was just clever with the planets. It doesn't have to always be square. This one is kind of circular. And this one again emphasizes that December 31 a couple of times. And this one was running for the last week of the year. I think I have one more example to show you. This one is from the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy. This one is pretty fancy. It's got a countdown clock. Not everybody can pull that off but I just wanted to mention that. Okay, our third topic is the email appeal series. And I wanted to just throw out a couple thoughts in a few minutes. Just the importance of creating an email appeal series that you can deploy during the month of December. I've seen people do two or three in December. And I've seen other organizations do as many as 9 or 10 in December and spreading them out. Maybe most people tend to clump three or four of them during the last week of the year just because that tends to be a busy time for giving. But other organizations like to spread them out. Most people like to avoid the Christmas period. But other people like to use the Christmas period. So it's really variable and really depends a little bit on how your organization works, what the issues you worked on, and also what else is going on with the messaging that you might have. Of course, the appeal series itself should increase in urgency. So you might start out talking about a match and then you would get closer and closer to December 31. You might talk about the deadline coming up and only a few more days left. And I'm sure many of you have lost that experience with that kind of messaging. I think that you can also, think carefully about how you segment for some of your different audiences. People are lower level donors. Make sure that when the messaging is appropriate for them. And then just also make sure that these are nice and mobile responsive because a lot of people, at least half the folks are going to be seeing these on mobile devices. So again, those are some quick considerations. Here's a quick look at two email appeal series. Again, this is from the Middle East Children's Alliance that I keep mentioning before. And the main reason I wanted to show these to you is that clearly their focus is on using photography. And I just love that just because it carries the theme so strongly throughout their email appeal series. I think they did about five in December. And each one used a different photo. I just thought those were really, really strong. I wanted to show those to you. Here's another one from the Plough Series Fund from a couple of years ago. There's not really a lot of photos here other than a couple of local celebrities including Michael Douglas used to be on their boards. These are a little bit more focused on the match. But it gives you kind of a little bit of a different idea of what an appeal series could look like. It's focused on the colors and really highlighting the match. Another couple of messages focused on tax deductibility because some of the gift levels were kind of high. So that was a consideration for their audience. Let's move on to our fourth topic, keeping a look at my clock here to make sure that I'm on target with the time. I think the key thing around year-end fundraising for social media is really just the importance of the multi-channel element. In other words, if you are sending a series of email messages which we just talked about, and if you have good visibility for your fundraising appeal on your website which we also talked about, then really the social media is like the perfect complement for that. And it's just important to just think multi-channel and to make sure that you're integrating the content appropriately. So as you deploy emails and they have different themes, or as you put different material on your website, create a little matrix so that you can keep track of when you want to post content on social media that ties in well with it. And of course, you're going to put a fundraising appeal on social. You're going to create links in your social media that are going to allow people to click through and go, in an ideal world, they would go directly to your donation page. Although I know you may want to try using some of the fundraising tools that are available, for example, on Facebook, nothing wrong with that. But I think the more common to see people have links that bring them over back to your website where you have a little bit more control over that giving amount. Social media is super important to focus on use of images. I love watching this happen in real time in December and see how people are taking pictures from the emails. They're thinking about how to create emotion on social media. And also just important to create an engagement loop, respond and thank people and engage if someone posts a comment. If you're able to thank donors on social media, that's great too with their permission. But creating just a little bit of that energy on social media is really an important piece of the puzzle. Let's see, I'll mention a couple of other important pieces about social media for fundraising that relate specifically to Facebook because this comes up a lot when I work with organizations. One is that it is important, I believe, to have a little bit of budget set aside to boost your content during that year-end December season when you're fundraising, as you know only about 20% of your follower community is going to be reached with content organically and you need to add a little bit of money into the Facebook advertising platform to boost it. I think it's money well spent. It's pretty inexpensive. And I think you can go on to the Facebook advertising platform and you can see how much it's going to cost. I definitely want to recommend that. Another thing which is a little bit more of an advanced idea is that you can also take all the email addresses of your donors that you're reaching out to. And you can actually use the Facebook advertising platform to send them literally advertising on the Facebook platform that actually promotes your campaign. So again, it's a little bit more of an advanced feature on Facebook. It's also super affordable. But that's another idea that I think ties in well with this multi-channel concept. So you're touching people through an email campaign. And then you're also going to get in front of them on the Facebook platform with advertising. Again, the advertising is clickable and then it takes people to your donation page. And I'm seeing a lot of organizations use this technique at the year-end. And I will do our final topic just really quickly and then we'll go to some questions. Just the importance of measuring everything. At the very beginning I said what worked last year. And the only way you're going to learn for next year is of course measuring everything that you can. And so what I mean by measuring is all the gifts you've received, how much you're getting, the average gift size, the number of donors, the number of new donors, the number of monthly donors, etc. So everything you can about the revenue you're bringing in and the donor activity, you also want to understand the performance of everything by your different audience segments. Maybe the donors that are the small donors or the mid-size, or if you're looking at, for example, different groups of audiences that you may have organized by issue or by how they came to how you acquire that name. Any kind of performance you can do by segment is really great. And then also on your site, on your donation pages, it's just really important to measure how much traffic you're getting at year-end. And if you can break that down by source, that's incredibly useful using something like Google Analytics, like how many came from the email, how many clicks came from social media. And then also if you can even measure of the people who got to your donation page, how many people completed the donation. We're going to talk a little bit more about this stuff in a couple of weeks, but just wanted to throw that out there. I think I'm going to pause right there because I wanted to get to 11.25 and see, open it up to questions. I may be passing it back to you, Lashika, if you wanted to see what we do next here. Great. Thank you so much, Michael. That was a lot of information. I mean, a lot of different tools. And I think that if the organizations that are tuned in today, if they can commit to maybe taking one of the different tools or ideas that you've shared and implement, I mean it really could be a game changer for year-end for that organization. I do see a question here. It's a great question. So they want to know what resources are there to learn how to best edit websites. Let's see, Mario. I could interpret that in two ways. One, it could be like a technical question, like, hey, I want to change how our website looks, and I want to edit it or change it physically. Another way to interpret it is you want to edit it in more of like a copy editing or writing in a language way. So I'm not sure which one you meant, but I think if you're asking about technical questions, oh, you've added technical questions. Thank you very much. So it's going to depend a little bit on what platform your website is on. I mean, it could be on Drupal. It could be on WordPress. It could be on Wix and so on and so forth. So depending on which one of those platforms you're on, typically that platform offers support packages or they can help you find another theme or that kind of stuff. If the website was built sort of more like handcrafted by somebody in the past, like someone for example built it on WordPress or Drupal for example, there are a lot of really skilled consultants and contractors around the country. And let me see, you are based in Burlington, North Carolina. I would imagine that it might be not too hard to find a consultant that could help you if you needed to sort of rebuild the site again. I don't know what platform you're on, but that may be – I mean if you want to contact me separately after you get my contact info from the email, I'd be happy to try to refer you to someone in your area to help you, Mario. I'm so glad that you mentioned that, Mario, as well as Michael. As far as consultants, I want to announce, I'm not sure if all of you are aware, but TechSoup has launched a new service called Consultants Connection. And it's a program and it's a service as well as a directory. The nonprofits have access to several different consultants around the country in several different areas of expertise, from database management to website design to Office 365 website and graphic design. Everything that you need, there is someone that can support you. And so the website that you want to visit, Mario, and to anyone else that's listening that is in need of a consultant. And just know that all of these consultants that you find here have been vetted through TechSoup. So that website is consultant.techsoup.org. Again, that's consultant.techsoup.org. And again, the name of that program is called Consultants Connection. It's a new program. If you go to the website right now you can see that it even says beta on there. So that is an option there for you as well. Did you have anything else you wanted to share, Michael? Oh, just to thank everybody for joining today. And I hope we get a chance to speak again in a couple of weeks when we'll do part two of Year End Fundraising. We'll discuss a couple of other more in-depth topics and always open to your questions or comments if you have something that relates specifically to Year End. So back to you, Lashika. Thank you, everybody. Thank you. Thank you again, Michael. Thank you everyone for joining. And Michael, it's a lot of information. And we really look forward to having everyone join us again as we continue with part two on December 8th. Again, it will be at 11 a.m. Pacific Standard Time. Before we go, I want to find out what is one takeaway from today's webinar. What is the one thing that your organization, you'll try to get your organization to implement for Year End. Chat in the box. We want to know. We want to know a takeaway. We want to know something that you are excited to share or excited to implement. And we're really excited to see that. Thank you so much. And so we do have another webinar. It's coming up on November 30th. And it is part two in the Libraries and Social Media webinar series. It's a webinar that TechSoup is doing in conjunction with Web Junction. And again, Michael Stein and I will be back on December 8th. If you have any questions, you know you can reach out to us at webinars at TechSoup.org. Look for the email after this webinar with all of the links, the recording, and everything that you need. And we look forward to seeing you next time. Again, thank you to ReadyTalk, our webinar sponsor. And to each and all, have a great rest of the day.