 So once again, welcome to TechSoup's webinar, Wisdom of the Crowdfunding. And I'm Michael DeLong, the online community manager at TechSoup, and I'm your facilitator today. And joining us today we've got Rob Wu from Causebox, Carter Gibson from LittleBigFund, and Bill Caesar from Teespring. So just a quick look at today's agenda. We'll do a very quick introduction of TechSoup. We'll define crowdfunding for you. We'll hear from our guests, and then there will be time at the end to get your questions answered. So TechSoup is part of TechSoup Global, and our mission is to work towards the day when every nonprofit, library, and social benefit organization on the planet has the technology, knowledge, and resources they need to operate at their full potential. Here's just a quick overview of some of TechSoup's successes that we're proud of just to let you know we are also a nonprofit organization. 11 million software and hardware product donations, which totals $3.61 billion in IT expenses in 56 countries around the world. So just a few more stats here on TechSoup. And we're going to go ahead and get you warmed up with a little bit of a poll to see where everyone is at with their knowledge about crowdfunding. So go ahead and take a moment to answer the question here. I'm just going to give you a few more seconds, let everyone catch up, and get those answers in, and then I'm going to be closing the poll in 3, 2, 1. Okay, so it looks like a lot of you here have heard of crowdfunding, but you haven't tried it yet, which is great because our guests today have a lot of great tips for you, and a lot of resources. So you're in the right place. Just a quick definition for crowdfunding. This is in the words of our speakers today. Crowdfunding is the process of raising funds by leveraging the collective power and intentions of a group or community. Crowdfunding uses your friends, family, and the public to help you raise funds for a project or cause. And crowdfunding is not in fact an angry mob from The Simpsons, but I just happen to get a kick out of that image over and over again. At any rate, we're going to go ahead and get started with our first guest, and I'm going to hand things over to Rob from Cosvox. Take it away, Rob. Thanks, Michael. Hey, this is Rob from Cosvox. I'm very excited to hear that a lot of you have heard of crowdfunding, but haven't tried a campaign, so that's super cool. Today I just want to present four tips on how you can get started on your next crowdfunding campaign. So I'm going to start off with some basic info, just some background information about myself and what I do, just so it provides some more relevance to our discussion today. I am the CEO of Cosvox. Cosvox is an online fundraising platform, a crowdfunding platform for social good projects as well as nonprofits. We help out people like the Jeremy Lin Foundation, IDEO, United Way, and Red Cross. So how you use Cosvox is first, you train an account, and you design a template without needing to know how to code. And then you can customize some of your crowdfunding settings just to make sure that your specific crowdfunding site works, looks, and functions how you want it to. And then what you do is you can enable team and personal fundraising pages as an extension of crowdfunding, and then you can take lots of donations from there. This is just a look at some of the fundraising sites that have been featured on our platform. It's very cool so you can see how people use a platform for donation pages, crowdfunding, as well as social fundraising campaigns. So about me, a few years ago I helped American Red Cross raise over $125,000 within 10 days. I did a crowdfunding campaign that leveraged both social media, the press, as well as individuals and advocates as part of the greater crowdfunding process. So what I want to do today in my short time is just share with you four tips on how we made that happen. The first tip to jumping into it is that if you're trying to run a crowdfunding campaign, you always have to start with the story. You don't start with the technology. You don't start with the donations. You always start with the compelling story. To make this very tactical for you guys, I found that there are three different story plots that work really well for crowdfunding. The first one is what we call the challenge plot. This is like your summer blockbuster movie, like your Superman or your Pacific Rim or whatever movie you watched last Friday. It's about how there's a hero and then there's a huge villain or obstacle and then somehow you overcome that obstacle or challenge and that's the story that you use. The second story they can use that has a lot of impact in crowdfunding is the creativity plot. A lot of nonprofits use this one. The creativity plot is always about how you have a novel solution, a novel approach to solving an existing problem. Say for example, you're a nonprofit that helps end poverty in the developing world. One of the solutions is through a new tool like a stove or like a new education tool. So you're going to use the creativity plot as a way to tackle the grid issue of poverty. And the last plot is really about the connection plot. The connection plot is when you reach around traditional boundaries like race, geography, gender, and then you reach across the table and then you help other people that way. So when you look at these different plots, you have a challenge plot, you create the creativity plot, it's an extra plot. And these are the three proven ways that you can craft a story for your crowdfunding campaign. The second step after you formulate this story is you have to find your true believers. When you look at your support base, or when you look at your Facebook page or Twitter page, you see a number, but you don't really look to see how each one of the supporters are different or how they're unique. So the first thing you want to do when you're launching your crowdfunding campaign is identify the true believers that are going to help you propel the campaign to success. Now these are the people that are most passionate about your cause and most passionate about your campaign. So there are three different characteristics that they usually display and how you can identify them. The first one being is that your true believers are typically very responsive. If you say, hey, I'm trying to run a crowdfunding campaign, they're the first ones that raise their hand and say, hey, I want to help out. Or hey, I want to do something to help you make that a success. The second characteristic is that they're very giving. Giving not just in terms of donating money, but actually giving in terms of their time, their resources, their network, their connections, their social channels, whatever it is. That's another characteristic of a true believer. You might have a very passionate true believer who is let's say a college student and they're willing to dedicate their weekends to help you create a media packet or tweet out 10 things a day, but they don't really have a lot of income so they can't really give financially. So that's one example. And the last one is that the true believer has a sustained passion, meaning that you see them progress along the engagement ladder. You see them really buy into your nonprofit and your cause and that they have this continued passion towards whatever you're doing. So those are the three characteristics. You always want to start with a true believer so that once you launch the campaign you have a group of people that are willing to become mega funds for you to really spread the awareness about the cause. So let's say you launch your campaign and let's say you have a great story and then you've given it to your true believers and they're telling all their friends and family about whatever the crowdfunding campaign is. The next thing that you want to do is you want to leverage the press. And the campaign that I ran for the Red Cross, one of the main reasons why we were able to get so many donations and so little amount of time is because we actively pitched the press. We talked to CNN. They featured us. We talked to The New York Times. They wrote about us at the ad age to a lot of different other press channels too. So what a lot of nonprofits and what a lot of people do wrong is that they try to get press at the wrong time. Meaning that they try to get it too early when their campaign hasn't shown a progress or hasn't shown the journey or they get too late. Meaning that they try to get press after the campaign is already over and that it's been already written about. So it is a timing thing of all, but one of the things that you want to start with first in terms of getting press is the following three basic steps. The first one is that you first have to identify who wants to write about you. So even before your campaign begins, you have a good idea of what the campaign is about. So the first step in terms of preparing how to get press is identifying the journalist that will be most likely to write about you. So what you can do is you can look online through Twitter through different publications that you want to target. You can look at the different people that have written about certain interests or certain beats as they call it. You can look at the profile to see what they write about. Let's say they write about social good, or they write about technology, or they write about health. You can come up with a laundry list of the different interests that a journalist has. So once you identify them, what you can do is then you can start to cultivate their relationship. So in order to cultivate a relationship, you have to have first a solid understanding of what they like. And then from there you can start to either send the email messages or engage them on social media, as well as leave comments on some of the articles that they publish and write so that they understand who you are and they start to think about who is this awesome person that's trying to engage with me. So after you start to cultivate them, and then once your crowdfunding campaign has been running, then what you can do is you can find the right time to pitch them. So in terms of timing, one of the things that you must do in terms of crowdfunding you're trying to get pressed is to try to pitch them when your campaign launches. Most likely they probably won't write about you. It's kind of discouraging, but the beauty is that they'll see that you have something like that starting. And then after you pitch them when the campaign launches, you want to update them on the progress. The journalists love stories and they really love writing about interesting stories that are relevant to your beats. So if you engage them persistently and throughout the whole crowdfunding campaign, then what they get to see is they get to see your campaign unfold. And then once it unfolds, they get to see progress. They get to see how many people are joining interesting stories that level up different fundraisers. So that sometimes is a lot more interesting to your journalists rather than just the launch pitch. So lastly, the fourth step is that you have to optimize your crowdfunding site in order to take the most amount of the nation and at least the amount of time. Optimizing your site is probably the easiest step just because there are funding platforms out there including Cosbox if you like a lot of the heavy lifting for you. But just to show you kind of an example of a good crowdfunding site, this is a crowdfunding project on Cosbox. This is just a group of friends that wanted to try to nade through a video. On a good crowdfunding site, you always have what we call a branded experience especially for nonprofits. Because you guys have been around for a while meaning that you've existed for a while. That's why you differ from a lot of the traditional I guess for-profit crowdfunding campaigns out there. For-profit crowdfunding campaigns typically are entry level products like the first time product or first time project. So branding for them is not as important. But for an existing nonprofit, branding is super important. And there's also this study by ILL that says that with branded pages, donation pages at least, you get 40% more donation. So I'm sure that applies to crowdfunding campaigns too. So the first step is to make sure that you can customize your crowdfunding site to look like your organization. So your existing donors would understand from a get go of who you are. The second thing is to really be able to include some type of visual story telling. For the top-grossing campaigns, crowdfunding campaigns on Cosmox, we've seen that around 80% of those campaigns feature some type of video because video is one of the best ways to engage an audience to instill an emotion in them for them to take action and to donate. And another step is another character that's on a good page is that you have personal fundraising pages. This is very different than traditional for-profit crowdfunding because a lot of people that buy into traditional for-profit crowdfunding, they buy into the product because it's a perk that they get. But we've seen that if you do give perks, they have to be directly aligned with the mission of the nonprofit, meaning that has to be an impact-driven perk. So with that, you have to be careful in terms of how you define the donation shares and how you define the perks that people get for donating. And also with personal fundraising pages, back to my first point, this is a proven way for you to get donations. A lot of people run peer-to-peer campaigns as well as social fundraising campaigns. So you can actually plug this into your crowdfunding site so that the people that understand how to create a personal fundraising page can help you expand that. So with our campaign with the Red Cross, we enable personal fundraising pages and that allowed us to reach people all over the world to help fundraise for disaster relief. So I think my time is up. So if you want to have more tips, you can visit our blog at Cosvox.com.com. There's a lot of free resources on crowdfunding and online fundraising, storytelling, marketing communications. So if you used to subscribe to our blog, you can also follow us on Facebook. We tweet out as well as we post daily inspiration on fundraising as well as fundraising tips. And if you want to learn more about Cosvox, feel free to visit us at Cosvox.com. I think my time is up. So I'm going to hand it over back to you, Michael. Great, thanks Rob. That was really super. You really packed a lot of information into a short amount of time. I love the media relations tips, and really love the focus on fundraising, not fundraising, but storytelling. As a lot of you know, digital storytelling is a huge thing for us here in TechSoup. So it's great to see the focus on that. I did want to remind everyone that if you are on Twitter and you're enjoying this webinar, please tweet out the tips and things that you're learning that you like and put the hashtag TechSoup on them. So that would be pound sign, T-E-C-H-S-O-U-P. Next up we have Carter Gibson from LittleBigFun. So I'm just going to hand it over to Carter. Hi there guys. That was a great presentation. I think that I echo pretty much everything that he just said. It's a great job. I'm here to talk today about why you should say know-to-marketing and yes-to-community. So my name is Carter. I'm the founder of LittleBigFun. I'll tell you what that is in a second, but my background is in community management. Community management is the best way that I found to put it, is that when I work for companies, I'm the voice of the customer to the company, and the voice of the company to the customer. It's my job to make sure that my users and my customers feel engaged with our product that they feel like they're making a difference, and I build loyalty. So that's what I'm in my background in. And LittleBigFun is essentially a platform that uses stories to crowd source funds for organizations who need it. And the reason that I started LittleBigFun is twofold. One of the reasons is because I'm obsessed with this idea. And the idea of turning not much into something is an idea that I've been obsessed with for a very long time. I think that we've all had that moment where we're like, what if everyone in the world gave me $1? What could I do if everyone gave me $1? What if we lived in a world where no one felt the consequence of giving, but everyone felt the benefits of what that gift could do? And this is an idea that permeated the ad council where I used to work. So ad council is responsible for Rosie the Riveter, Smokey Bear. Smokey Bear is one of my campaigns. Friends want friends to drive drunk, loose lips, sink ships. And at the ad council, we knew that we weren't going to change attitude immediately. That when people saw one of our ads about saving money, that they weren't going to run to their bank and try to save money. What we did know is that if we created effective advertising, they would at least start to think about it. And if enough people started to think about that issue, then it could change everything. Look at Smokey Bear. Anytime you're out in the wilderness and lighting a fire or having a campfire, you think of Smokey Bear because enough people just thought about the concept and then that did huge change. So that's reason number one why Little Big Fund exists. It's because I saw firsthand, while I was working at the ad council, excuse me, that we could all do such incredible things if we all did not very much. So the second reason is a little bit more tangible. This is my Google Plus page. Google Plus is the real other reason why I'm here in the first place. I got an audience on Google Plus of 1.2 million people. So every day I would blog from the very beginnings of Google Plus and I built community. I told people what was going on in my life. I told people what I thought about different issues, lots of LGBT fundraising, lots of tech reviews and everything like that. And all of a sudden I realized that I had this huge opportunity to find the people in my community who cared about me the most, who cared about what I believed in the most to an act of real change. So by being a personality and interested in causes, I realized that I had to do something more with that. And that's what got Little Big Fund started. I see the question about why I chose Google Plus or Facebook. I'll just answer that right now. Google Plus was the place where I could just blog and be myself. Didn't have any of the pressures of my friends on Facebook. And I joined Google Plus to be my own personal blog and it just so turned out that it worked and more on that later. So now that I had an idea that I wanted to do something, what was I going to do? And what I was going to do was start with Little Big Fund. And this is our process. Every month we source and select three nonprofits within the same category. So three nonprofits who are helping people in tech. Three nonprofits who are LGBT resource centers for disenfranchised teens. Three resource centers who are using education to teach theater. We then work with the selected organizations to tell their stories and we feature them on our website. What this means is that we ask them all sorts of questions about what's wrong with your organization? What makes it difficult to do what you do? What do you do well? And this goes back to the whole story thing. So we started getting these amazing stories from all these organizations that I'd source from my community. I'd ask people to nominate and have other organizations apply to be featured by us. So far I haven't spent any money on marketing. We have lists of over 200 organizations that want to participate in Little Big Fund. And it's all because you were able to use a brand to get people to engage with you. Next we fundraise money to form a large fund. People donate anywhere from $5 to $100. And then donors vote for an organization. They read the stories and they say, you know, this really made me more passionate. This story is the one that deserves my money. And then we grant the funds to the winning organization. So all of a sudden, your $5 has become $2,500. And then you get a saying where that goes. This is important because it helps everyone who is crowdfunding with us to actually be the person to go out and do our advertising for us. They have a vested interest in making sure that their organization wins. They have a vested interest in making sure that their friends go and vote for the organization that they care about. So so far we're spreading the word. And that's what community does. So this is how we approach the little planet that is Little Big Fund. On our surface, our crust is our values. This is what people see. It's what makes us beautiful and why we use the imagery that we do. We want to immediately engage people and get them okay with the concept of, okay, lots of things are working together. Okay, these colors make me feel a certain way. Okay, they're asking me to be inspired. This is our hook. This is the first thing that people see about it. And we want them to feel special. We want them to feel a certain way when they see us. Our mantle is formed by outreach. So after we sell people on the feeling of giving, we reach out to them and ask them to join our mission. We look at the people who are commenting on our Facebook and Google Plus posts. We look at the people who are tweeting about us. We look at people who are sharing our posts. And we reach out and say, hey, we would love your support. You believe in us enough to share? How about we go that next step and you become one of our biggest advocates? So we actively pursue that person because our values got them interested in us. And then at our core is community. So after we bring people in, bring people in, bring people in, they've donated, they've shared, they've become part of our process, they become our core, they become our community. And our core keeps us spinning and changes our mantle and crust from the inside out. So as you all know, cores are molten. The reason that we have volcanoes and that our value and our core or crust changes is because this spinning core, this violent changing core, it changes the way that our planet looks from the inside out. And that's how I feel about LittleBigFund is that I understand that our community is able to shape the way we present ourselves to everyone else and we value their opinion and we let them know. So this is what $0 in marketing can get you. These are the results from our first month. We got over $5,000 pledged annually. We let people donate recurring to our website. $1,000 to the June fund that went to an organization. So we're able to donate $1,000, which doesn't sound like much, but we're making sure that people are donating recurring, which means monthly, and that they get the feeling that, oh my gosh, my $5 turned into over $1,000. And we didn't really have that many donors. We only had 69 total donors. Over 50% of them donated monthly and 63% of them donated to our operating costs. Oh no. So this is really important. These stats are the most important stats that I can emphasize today. The percent of people who became monthly donors, the percent of people who believed in us enough to donate every month was 50%. So then 92% donated to our operating costs. And this is because we got our community in and said, hey guys, here's what we're doing, here's how you believe in us, here's how we involve you. And not seen are the thousands of shares and plus ones. So then the reason that I think the community is so important in our marketing is I like to sort of analogize it to who you would rather date. So someone that you find through community outreach and someone that you find through marketing. Someone that you find through community outreach loves you for who you are. You haven't marketed to them, you haven't tried to sell them, you haven't tried any tactics to get them to love you. You were just yourself and they fell in love. A marketing lead loves you for what you'll give them. You have to sell them on some sort of idea, some sort of benefit to them. And if you're not giving them what they want, they'll leave you. A community lead is retained if you follow through on your mission. They're behind you because of your mission. And a marketing lead retains you if you're better than your competitors. A marketing lead will come by and say, oh, you know, I was using this app. But then this app came out and I like it more. So I'm going to switch to that. And they have no qualms doing that. A community takes a lot of initial work but pays off over time. And a marketing lead is easy and can leave you at any moment. So what I'm talking about here is that your brand needs to have a relationship with your community in order to successfully crowdfund. It's hard to have conversations or relationships with marketing leads because those relationships are typically on the surface. And you have to keep telling them, keep telling them, keep telling them, and even reach out to them still. So the problem with community is that you rely on your community. I'm learning that this is more true every single day. So we rely on our community to stay in operation. We rely on people to give us optional donations to our operating funds to keep us running and keep our website up. We rely on them for donations to our organizations too. And the problem with community as well is that they can turn on you. They idolize you in what you do, which can be a blessing. And it can also be a curse because if you ever do anything that they don't think is something that you should do, they can turn on you really quickly. And you have to be very careful to make sure that you're rewarding those donors and making sure that they stay with you and love you. But there's a flip side. So the best part of community is that you rely on your community. They get the word out for you to new eyes. You don't pay anything for that. They're always there for you if you're having a hard time. So if you are short on donations one month, if something is going rough, but you've been doing everything that you can, your community are the people that are there to rally for you. And again, they idolize you, which is the flip side of the they idolize you coin, which says they'll do almost anything if you keep up your end of the bargain. Little Big Fund is a small organization without a lot of money. We have just started. It started as a side project for me right after I was at my job for about a year. And I think that a lot of organizations out there have a lot of trouble in spending a lot of money on marketing right up front. And I'm sort of here to help you believe that you don't have to do that. So this is the first thing that you see when you come to a website, which is that when you get people to believe in your mission, you turn them into your advocate. It's a snowball effect. And too often, I feel that we're motivated by easy one-time customers that have a fleeting interest in our mission. I'm far more interested in making people love Little Big Fund and continue to donate than I am with higher revenues and higher churn. I firmly believe that as our community grows, so too will our revenue. And it's a slower burn, but it's secure as longevity. So that's our presentation. With just a small contribution, we can make a world difference in our communities and talking about just that you don't have to go out and do all the blasted posts or the promote this post or boost this post thing that will ultimately waste you money for the people who you have to really fight for. Instead, focus on the people who are already your biggest advocates to start out. And then after that, make sure that you can get on new eyes and get on new eyes because you already have a community that will do it for you. Thanks, guys. Great. Sorry, we're having just a few small technical issues here on the back end. That was an excellent presentation, Carter. Thank you so much. I'm sensing a theme here with the focus on storytelling, so I love to see that, and especially the focus on community as well. I actually just lost the screen, so I do apologize for that. But regardless, we're going to keep trucking along. And Bill, you're up next, so I'm going to hand it over to Bill and hopefully figure out what's going on the back end here. So take it away, Bill. Okay, thank you. Hello everybody. I'm going to be talking about Teespring. I'm one of the co-founders and COO of Teespring. It's a web platform that we believe has disrupted the fundraising dynamic. I want to emphasize actually what Rob and Carter have already gone over in terms of crowdfunding, and that is the efficiency that can be found in crowdfunding. And I'm going to highlight some of that efficiency during my presentation. And we think of that in terms of elegance. When a platform is elegant, then it should be no hassle, no pain, and it should be a delight to use. I also want to emphasize the power of social networking. And I know that word crowdfunding is starting to become more popular. And for us, it really means leveraging the social networking and the power. It's really taking your existing donor base, and it was just mentioned a few minutes ago. You can really use your existing donor base and leverage that existing donor base and their social muscle to expand your complete envelope. So you can really, it's really the digital word of mouth, if you will. So it's very important, I think, to emphasize the efficiency and the power of social networking. So Teespring, if I move their slide, we are a for-profit company. We are less than two years old. However, we are currently raising over $2 million a month for charities and nonprofits, large and small, global and local. We've taken the traditional gift donation model, turned it a little bit on its side, and applied both group buying dynamics, like Kickstarter, Groupon, so the group buying dynamics, and social gaming components. And I'll go over those. But the basic thing is that, again, we've moved a platform that is a bit disruptive, a little newfangled. I think some of the things you've heard already from Robin Carter are the ideas that we've incorporated into Teespring. The basic premise I want to cut to the chase is that we allow organizations to launch what we call fundraising campaigns over social media, and very easily to construct what you're seeing right now, which is a typical link URL to an awareness fundraising campaign. It allows for individuals to share this particular campaign quite easily, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, e-mail of course. And these types of campaigns are just seeing this as an actual live campaign for ACCO and the childhood cancer is something that will go viral. So very easily when we start out these campaigns, they're pushed over social media to the existing donor base. And we're asking those folks to use their social muscle, their individual network to expand the envelope and push it and push it and push it. And soon we find that we will have doubled or tripled the amount of exposure and therefore really leveraging that power of social networking. I'm going to show you a couple more details in a few other slides and I'll talk about the social game mechanics behind this as well. Again, it's a pretty simple model. Number one, you go on to our site. We are a partner with TechSoup and are very pleased to be recently engaged, and we've already I think been working with hundreds of TechSoup clientele. We allow them to come into the site. They create and design a campaign very easily. I'm going to show you that in one minute. They launch the campaign over social network, and hopefully that goes viral. Individuals will receive the invitation or that campaign either through their computer, desktop, or mobile, making it very easily for them to reserve a shirt. When enough people reserve the shirt, because there is a tipping point which I'll talk about in a second, that's the game mechanics. If enough people reserve the shirt, then the campaign, that particular shirt would be in production. When the sales goal is reached, then the production begins and we ship door to door to everyone and the organization then receives the profit. So the checks go one way, starting with creating design of the campaign, launch the campaign, and then hopefully do their part in terms of facilitating the social push. And when the campaign ends, the charity receives their profit. We've shipped over several million products to over 80 countries. So this really is certainly a global opportunity, again very efficient. I'm just going to walk very quickly through the platform, and this is what you would see at Teespring.com. You'd be able to come in, pick a shirt, style type, add some content, sales goal right over here, if I can use a pointer in this area right here, that's where you set your tipping point. You would then choose how many shirts you think you could sell. The higher the tipping point, the lower the base cost of the shirt. You then set your own selling price. So if we told you right here that a base price of a shirt was going to be $9.00 in so many cents, you can then set your selling price. Typically people set the selling price of the shirt from $15.00, but it's been even up to $50.00. It depends again on the social muscle that you have in terms of the clientele, etc. This then is your predicted profit. And on your next step, which is the final step, you add your campaign title, you add a description, how long you want it to run, choose your URL, and then you launch the campaign. And this again is the launch campaign. So you've added the title, you've added title, you've added the shirt obviously, the description, the price, the tipping point, which is that game mechanics, and also how long it's going to last. So it's both the tipping point and a time-limited offer. That's I think what engages people. There's no risk, no cost. There's no fees to use Teespring. You can also launch as many campaigns as you like. We have a full design team that helps organizations come up with a theme or a particular look and feel for their campaigns. You can launch as many campaigns as you'd like. We completely take care of all the production back-end, all of the inventory. And you realize now, there's no guessing how many shirts and inventory. All of that is eliminated. So it's really that group buying power, etc. And we've leveraged all of that efficiency. We have campaigns that have raised hundreds of dollars to most recently. We delivered a $500,000 check to Arizona firefighters, the 19 firefighters that died tragically in the fire in Arizona, Granite Mountain. So it's been very gratifying for us to be able to help the organizations. The accounts receive a dashboard and your own account manager, a lot of help along the way. So we've actually built in a lot of assistance so that we can work with large and small and even the small organizations that have limited resources work with us with as much clout and success as the largest clients. But I want to emphasize here again that the benefits is really to expand your social reach to use the existing donor base and because of the social tools for sharing, the Pinterest and Twitter and Facebook of course, as well as traditional email. It's the digital word of mouth and that can really allow people, the donors to get empowered. And also we believe that we're reaching a younger demographic that isn't quite used to pulling out and writing checks. They're used to seeing things and discovering and executing and participating online. So this is highly technically oriented, again, but easy enough for the millennial to do. But it's not scary so that it impedes anyone of an older generation as well. So I think it's becoming universally accepted. Again, there's no costs, etc. There's the checks I call it, checks go one way. Just so you know that there is also when you are signed up and working with Teespring you get your entire enterprise portal which allows you to look at your current active campaigns, your draft campaigns, your completed campaigns. It will also give you access to your bank which means that you can just look at your profits increase and increase and at any time you can just accept a check or transfer to bank or PayPal payout. So we made that very easily as well. We've worked again with global clients like PlanUS to some of the smaller ones and in between the Moria Foundation was a really early adopter for us. They had quite a very strong social muscle. They were able to probably put their T-shirts at the highest levels that I've ever seen, probably $50, $60. But again, it's more the experience. And if you've got the particular clientele and donor base you can really work with it. I just wanted to say we also now work with all other kinds of products too. So T-shirts were our original genesis of the company, hence the word Teespring. But we've worked everything from jewelry to hats and cups and bottles. And we're doing some very nice things with jewelry and coins and memorabilia kind of products. So it really is, we hope has been a very effective asset to a multi-prong approach for the clientele. So with that, I hope I've enlightened a bit, emphasized efficiency, elegance, and the power of social networking. Thank you. Great, thanks so much Bill. That was excellent. I love that information in there about the psychology of the time-based campaign. I think that's really important. And now we're going to move on to questions from our audience. Although I do want to quickly mention that as Bill mentioned Teespring is a TechSoup donor partner, so if you want to find out more about that, you can visit http colon slash slash b-i-t dot l-y slash t-s-t-e-e-s-p-r-i-n-g. So TST Spring, if you want to know a little bit more about how TechSoup is working with T Spring and how that can benefit your nonprofit. So now we are going to move on to questions. We've had some great questions from the audience, and let's get started. So this question is from Renee, and she was curious to know what kinds of causes and organizations typically do better with crowdfunding. For example, HIV and AIDS research, education, U.S. versus international, is there anyone who wants to jump in and answer that one? This is Rob in CauseVox. In terms of what kind of causes, there's not a particular set. We've seen high-performing campaigns that are religious-based all the way to gay rights-based, to international, to domestic. So I think what really matters more about the cause is more about how you craft the project, what the project is for, what you're trying to raise money for. You got to go back to the story again, how you present the story, and why you need to fund. I think people say that there are sexy causes out there, and there are non-sexy causes, but in reality it's more about their sexy stories and non-sexy stories. So with any cause you can craft a sexy story. So I don't think you should be concerned about what are the causes. It's more about how you can craft that piece of it. I'll give you back off of that. I totally agree that the stories matter most. I will say though that a little big fun when we're looking for causes to promote each month, we sort of take up a pulse of what's in the news, what people are already talking about, and we try to capitalize on that as much as we can. For instance, our first month was in June. And June is Pride Month. So we featured LGBT organizations in June, and did very well. Yeah, just to build on that, there's a concept called news checking, meaning that you look at the different trends of what the press is reporting about, and then you kind of crash for a campaign or you're messaging around that. The reason why you want to do that, or consider doing that is just because you'll be able to get more pressed that way because journalists like to talk about things that are trending in terms of news. So I think that's a great point by Carter. Great, sexy stories. I love that. So let's see. I think this question would be answered a little bit differently for Teespring and Little Big Fun than Cosbox. But Carrie was wondering if a nonprofit who is waiting for their official 501c3 from the IRS can still do crowdfunding. And I'd like to kind of expand that question a little bit and say, is it possible to do this kind of crowdfunding through these platforms if you're not an official nonprofit but you're just raising funds for a cause that you feel strongly about? Well, this is Bill of Teespring. We have a mix of 501c3, official nonprofit, and also fundraising that is being done for local schools and churches and anywhere there is a community. So for us, the crowdfunding definition broadens where it is the intentions of the community. If there is interest, then we could supplement it and it doesn't necessarily have to be a 501c3. So we have a mix and it extends large and small, local to global. So as an organization, this is Carter from Little Big Fun, but as an organization that is currently seeking its 501c3, we incorporated as a public benefit corporation in California in January. And we're currently awaiting our 501c3 status which is a very long process in California. The way it works here is that you have 27 months to apply for your 501c3. Better to do that quicker than later to save yourself some headache when it comes to taxes. But we expect our 501c3 to be in within a few months and approved which would make all of our donations tax-deductible retroactively. So there are a lot of different ways that you can do it. I just think that you should look at the legal requirements and whatever state that you're in because it's a different state-by-state. And make sure that you're very transparent with the people who are donating to you and if it's so pleased as you seek a fiscal sponsor if you're seeking 501c3 as well. Great, thanks Carter. And Rob, what about with COSBOX? Is there a restriction or verification process for nonprofits? Or is it open to kind of a broader social benefit crowd? Yeah, COSBOX is fully open. We like to say that we're agnostic to your tax status, meaning that you can be a 501c3, you can be a 501c4, you can be a church. You can just be a group of friends that want to fundraise. The only thing that makes you different is that we do have the ability for you to send donation receipts directly from the platform. If you're not a 501c3, then the language on that donation receipt would just have to be appropriately adjusted for that. But in a broader context, if you're thinking about crowdfunding, it's always better. If you're a public charity doing social good, if you can get a fiscal sponsorship, if you're not a 501c3 as Carter said, then that's a great idea. It's fairly easy for organizations to do that once you find the right one to give that to you instead of waiting to get your determination status from the IRS. Great, thanks. So I'm going to shoot another one to you, Rob, because storytelling seemed to be such a strong part of your presentation. Mary Jo was wondering, as far as stories go, what's kind of a good rule of thumb for the length of the story to hook people? So if you're thinking about a story specifically that you want to show people, it's like the first impression of your crowdfunding campaign. Typically, we recommend a video that's less than 2 minutes long. Anything longer than that typically does fall off for the general video producer, meaning that you can have a longer story, longer video, or whatever channel that you want, or whatever medium. But you didn't make sure damn well that your story is very, very good. But typically for people who are not professional storytellers, it's best to stick to a shorter story just so that your story is very concise, that it follows a very strong story arc. So I guess long ends are short, less than 2 minutes is best. Hi, this is Bill Teespray. I'm going to answer it in a little different context. But our campaigns run from 3 days to 21 days. And the originator, the author, if you will, has the ability to determine that length. Typically what works best is probably around 2 weeks, so 14 days. So we have found that in that Game Mechanics where it's a limited time, it really I think makes people more likely to engage versus just waiting. And that's sort of what sets it apart also from an open storefront that is evergreen. And you really have the ability to participate with the crowd, with the group, and with the community to achieve a goal. Again, nothing new. We've seen that with the thermometer that is raised up, and that's sort of our counter that appears on the site. So by the way also, five engagement emails go out automatically to all of the donors when they first do their donation, or they're buying a purchase or reservation of the shirt. And then along the way at 25%, 50%, 75%, they are actually then reminded of the count and also encouraged very easily through that same email to click it forward, push it forward, to post it, tweet it, Facebook, Pinterest, and again that's what sets the virality going. Great. So we've actually got a ton of questions coming in. And if we don't get to all of them, I am going to post a link to a forum on TechSoup.org where you can come and post your questions, and we'll do our best to get them answered either by our experts or we'll crowdsource them from our super smart community. And here's one for Teespring. So is there any thought to having a Teespring marketplace in which people interested in supporting organizations through Teespring can search and find active Teespring campaigns around causes, their own kind of pet causes? Absolutely, yes there is. And on our roadmap in fact is the ability for as we probably have over 400 or 500 charities active right now. And what we'd like to do is actually provide the ability to find that in our next iteration, find the charity on our list, search for it as you come onto the site, search for that organization, and then be able to run a campaign on behalf of that organization. If anyone is familiar with Teespring and seen it or on the site, you'll notice that many of the campaigns also have what's called a verified donation badge. And that verified donation badge, it's a green badge that appears on the campaign indicates that it's a third party that is raising money on behalf of a foreign organization. And they have indicated that all of the proceeds will go directly to that organization. So that's a third party doing the fundraising for the organization. We call it like a high-tech bake sale. And we do that now behind the scenes for people that call us and say, I'd like to raise money for X and such and such. They'll set up a campaign. They won't be the beneficiary of the funds. They've already told us 100% goes to. So we are in the process of building on our next iteration. The ability to search for the charity. If you don't find it, you can include it or add it. And then you'd be able to hit this verified donation and your efforts and all the proceeds and benefit go to the selected charity. Great minds think I like that. That's exactly where the direction we want to go. Great, thanks. So one of the themes that's kind of popping up from a number of different questions is around how to build that critical mass of donors. If you're a nonprofit that hasn't built that donor base yet, how do you really home in on who your core supporters are and build that? So for us, and this is Carter from LittleBigFund, we look for very simple things. We look for people that say, hey, that's a great idea on any of our social media posts. We look for people who are tweeting about us. We look for people who reply to our newsletters. We look for current donors as well to reach out to them and say, hey, what if you got your best friend to donate as well? Then your donation would be twice as much. Isn't that incredible? And then the most important part about getting that core is making sure that you stay engaged with them. And someone mentioned in the chat about the difference between fundraising and crowdfunding. And my definition of fundraising is that you have an interaction with someone, you get their money, you move on to the next person, and in crowdfunding, you talk to someone, you get their money, and then you ask them to keep sharing, and you ask them to be a part of that process. So making sure that people are staying part of the process is the most important part in making sure that that donor base stays where it is. You can't afford to, quote, unquote, lose any of them. Yeah, I just wanted to add, this is Bill from Teespring. I wanted to add a tip for I think everyone out there, and I tell this to our new clients that come on to use Teespring. Find someone, find an influencer, and this can be locally in your community, a celebrity, an athlete, or search around on Google and Facebook and find someone that has some interest in your cause or like it, whether it's a disease or a particular movement, etc. Find those people and then reach out, and all you're asking them to do is to tweet it. Tweet the link to this campaign. You would be amazed. Well, no one pun intended. You've teed it up, you've got the link, you've got the URL, and now you're just trying to find influencers. You would be amazed at one phone call to one celebrity, to someone local or in the community. You're not asking for money. You're just saying, could you put that on your Facebook? Could you post it? Could you tweet it? Could you pin it on the Pinterest? Right there and then you have created an amazing thrust of your campaign in your effort and your publicity, if you will, an exposure. So great tip, easy to do, very strong. Great. Thanks, Bill. Well, that's all the time we have for today. There are some unanswered questions, but we will, as I said, make sure to get those answered. If you'd like, you can visit our discussion forum which is at http://bit.ly-tswcs. And that's actually right up there on the screen right now. And I'm also going to plop that into the chat so that you can all see that link. And thank you all for being here. I want to say thank you to our sponsor, ReadyTalk, and a special thanks to all three of our guests who gave extraordinary presentations today about crowdfunding. Thanks everyone, and have a great day.