 Hi everyone, thank you for joining us today. We're going to give it a minute to allow everyone to join in and get settled. So in the meantime, I see a lot of participants are here. If you are here and you can hear me, I would love to know either what school you're from, where you're representing today, or you can just tell me you can hear the audio so we can make sure that all this is going to be heard by you all. You can just let me know in the chat. Welcome to Josh and Carrie. All right. Okay, so welcome everyone to the second Give Education training webinar all about strategy. My name is Sarah and I'll be leading you through today's presentation. Just a few quick housekeeping items to note before we get started. I want to let you all know that the webinar is going to be recorded and it'll be posted in the toolkit on the Give Education site under the Resources tab. So you can refer back to that whenever you need it. And today you can also use the Zoom Q&A little button. Excuse me to send across any questions and we'll get to as many as we can either during the webinar or at the very end. Okay, so a little bit again. My name is Sarah and I'm with Mighty Cause. I'm also joined by my colleague Don who will be helping answer some questions today and so Mighty Cause, we're with Mighty Cause and we are the platform provider for Give Education. We also have Carrie joining us today from Alumni Nations as well as Josh from Central High School Foundation. So I want to give them both a warm welcome and pass the mic over to Carrie so she can say a few words. Len, thank you so much for attending today. And I hope that you find that the seminar provides you with some useful information on how to make a truly successful Give Education day. We, Alumni Nations, had started this to really celebrate the K-12 public education institutions and give them an opportunity to raise funds. And when you think about it, I'm often overwhelmed that, you know, we have these wonderful Give Tuesday and all of these excellent opportunities, but there's never really up until last year been an opportunity to focus on public education and it's involved in so many facets of our lives. And this is a great day and opportunity for you to get out there and earn some some funds and really do well. And we are continuing to look forward to grow this program year after year. And for those of you that are returning to the program, it's great to see you back this year. But let your friends know as well. We want to make sure to really open this up to people all across the country. And it's not too late to get involved and to sign up and to create your profile. Last year we had, you know, organizations that had jumped on board I think three weeks before and we're still able to raise and achieve their their financial goals of what they were looking for. So we encourage you to get involved. And if there's anything that you need from a technical perspective or have questions, I'm your gal. You can certainly email me at give-educationatalumniomations.com. We will do everything I'm here as a resource for you to help you make this successful and do anything that I can to assist. But thank you so much for joining us today. Awesome. Thank you both. Josh, you're welcome to say anything as well if you want. Yeah, hi everybody. Looking forward to a great webinar today. My name is Josh Busey and I'm the creative director and database administrator for the Central High School Foundation in Omaha, Nebraska. I believe this is our eighth consecutive Giving Day participation of some kind and it's something that we've had a lot of success with in the past. And I just wanted to say that, you know, we want to do everything we can to help you be successful for Give Education Day 2022. And so there'll be some things that as we go along, I might try to chime in, bring up some points and things that we've done in the past that have been successful. But I don't want to take too much time away from the Mighty Cause team. So happy to be here and looking forward to a great webinar. Awesome. Thank you both. We're just really excited to be here with you all for Give Education again this year. Real quick, I'll be brief. If you don't know about Mighty Cause, just a quick intro. We're a fully functional organization fundraising suite that encourages organizations to, you know, use the platform every day of the year if they'd like to raise money for their causes. We've been around since 2006 and we're actually one of the first platforms to host Giving Days. So we're just very excited to be involved with Give Education again this year. Alrighty. So our agenda. Here's a look at today's agenda. We'll be going over some of the basics for Give Education. Then we're going to talk through some prizes available during the Giving Day and some of the strategies you can use to help make your campaign a success. We'll do a Q&A session at the end of the presentation. So if you do have a question while we're presenting, you can just click the little Q&A button on your screen and you can send this to us. And I think Don may be helping to just hop on and answer any Q&As as they come through. Alrighty, so our event basics. So Give Education is hosted by alumni nations and will take place on March 23rd this year. It's a 24 hour Giving Day. It'll run from midnight to midnight central time. Early Giving will start on March 1st. Registration is required for this Giving Day. And any 501c3 organization or a school with an MCES code are welcome to participate. So first things first, if you haven't already done so, you're going to need to register your organization. To register, you'll just go to the GiveEducation.com site and click register. On the registration page, you can either search for your organization or you can create an account. And then within 24 hours of registration, you'll receive an email with next steps to help your organization plan for success. And of course, if you have any questions, you're welcome to email, you know, Carrie, like she said, or you can email support at mightycause.com. So once you're registered and ready to roll, you might be wondering just what you need to do next. So first, you're going to want to customize your organization profile. If you have not watched our first webinar, Getting Started, that webinar focused on all the nuts and bolts of how to navigate the Mighty Cause platform. And has a ton of really great Getting Started information on how to customize your organization profile. So I don't want to repeat too much of that content here. So do check that out. It's available on demand so you can view it from the toolkit whenever it is most convenient to you. So after your organization page is customized and filled out, how you would like, you're going to want to start to really think about communication strategies for the giving day and the different outlets that are available to you to reach your donors. So you want to really start thinking about the goals you have your organization, excuse me, for your organization during the Give Education giving event. You'll also want to start to think about securing matching grants to entice your donors. And you'll want to start thinking about how to engage your community and supporters or your ambassadors of your organization to help with peer to peer fundraising for your organization. So this is a really great time to just get creative and get excited about your Give Education campaign and really plan on how you want to connect with and make the appeal to your donors. Alrighty, so I want to make sure we definitely mentioned the good tools that are available to you as you get ready for Give Education and that is the organization toolkit. The toolkit is located on the home page for GiveEducation.com and it just filled with tips, tricks, FAQs, walkthroughs. It also has some templates you can use for your email and social media. So help you get inspired and figure out how to promote your campaign. This is where you will also be able to find today's training recording as well as the first training. So definitely check that out and refer to it while you're planning your campaign. Some prizes. So let's talk about prizes. So each hour during the giving event this year from midnight to midnight central, one participating organization will be randomly selected to receive an additional $100 in prize money. And each nonprofit is only eligible for one hourly prize during the giving event. So if you'd like more details, you can see the prizes tab on GiveEducation.com. So now we're really going to get into the nitty gritty on campaign strategy. So since Give Education is a 24 hour event, the trick to making the most of your campaign is to really sustain your fundraising momentum. And one really great way to do that and make sure your campaign is on track is to set many goals for your organization to help generate buzz and just overall build excitement during the day. So set these many goals for certain hours of the day so you can keep people excited about your own goals and continue working towards, you know, whatever those might be. And many goals also help sustain your fundraising momentum and really get people excited about helping you reach your goals. So to set many goals, you'll want to think of your overall fundraising goal that your organization has and what you'll need to raise or how many donors you'll need to get each hour or section of the day to reach those goals. So be sure to keep in mind when your donors are also most active and you'll want to adjust your hourly or section goals accordingly. So if you know there are certain times of the day that'll be slower for you, you might want to boost that time period by utilizing a matching grant to help really just shake up your campaign and get some momentum during those times. So something else you can do to get your campaign rolling is asking for seed donations. So these donations are from people in your organization's inner circle that essentially will break the ice with with other donors. They really help get the ball rolling and they're called seed donations because they make the number of donations grow. So people to ask for a seed donation might be your board members, your staff, especially those who are in director levels or high level leadership at your organization. You can also ask your organization's volunteers or anyone else like parents or, you know, people who are working at your school who are highly engaged in your work. So just a reminder, seed donations really don't have to be huge donations. It's something that can get into the bank and to your donor kind of minds. They're not the first. Sometimes it's hard for people to be the first one to donate to a cause. So just really getting a couple people who you know will donate so that you can move your campaign forward and start to get more donations coming in. Okay, so great strategy for driving donations on a giving day is also securing a matching grant. So a matching grant is essentially a large donation that your organization is going to leverage to bring in other smaller donations by offering it up as a match. So for instance, if you had someone who was willing to give you $1,000 instead of just putting that $1,000 into the bank and being done calling it a day, you could use it as a matching grant. So you would take that $1,000 and say to those who are donating, hey, between this hour and this hour, any donations you make will be matched up to $1,000. So that basically allows them to double their donation. People love to get more money, more bang for the buck. So this is going to be really helpful. You can do a lot within the Mighty Cause Matches tool like setting a cap for donation matching. So if someone donates, you know, $200 and comes along and makes a big donation, they're not going to eat up the entire match. So it's a cool little kind of tool that allows you to do a lot with your matching grant. And especially on a giving day matching grants can be a really powerful way to drive your donations. So since a matching grant is ultimately just a large donation, you're going to want to follow the same process as you would when you secure a major grant gift. So you're going to prospect, cultivate and ask. People you should consider as prospects for a matching grant would be, you know, anyone up again in high level board members, anyone who might be happy to provide a matching grant. One thing you can also consider is asking if you have a board to work together to provide the match. So if you have people who still need to pay dues, for instance, you could utilize dues and turn them into a matching grant. Consider your major gift donors who have given large donations to your organization in the past as well. These are really good prospects. And providing a matching grant can be a fun way for them to liven up their donation. Instead of just writing you a check, they're, you know, helping your organization grow, helping you drive other donations. You can also give the donors some extra recognition when you're promoting the match. So major gift donors who like to have a little shout out or even better matching grant prospects, those who like to be acknowledged. Corporate sponsors are also really great prospects because it's a fun, proactive way for them to get involved in a very public way if they so choose and draw attention to their philanthropy. So at this stage in the game, you're, you're probably making phone calls, setting up emails and starting to cultivate these prospects by letting them know you're at what you're doing, seeing how warm they might be to the idea of getting involved. And then in the coming weeks, you're going to want to make your ask, shore up the details with them. You can also have more than one match running at the same time. On my because if you get a lot of great response for matches, you don't need to feel like you have to pick and choose. You can queue them up throughout the day as well. So promoting your matching grant. So at the end of the day, a matching grant is a marketing tool. So in order to make the most of your matching grant you're going to need to promote it. So the first step is going to the matching grant tool on your give education organization profile, and you'll want to add it there. So there are some marketing tools built into the platform for your matching grant, such as like putting a sticker on your donate button when the grant is active which all your donors will be able to see some changes to your to your checkout process also will reflect the match and the match will get listed on your organization profile. You'll also want to add some information to your story in the about section, especially if it's a big match and promote it on all your social media channels, you'll want to send out an email to all your donors or prospects to let all of your donors know about the match countdowns are really great these will add urgency so counting down and sharing your progress is a great way to get people excited and urge them to just stop what they're doing and make a donation so they can further their dollars. Activating your ambassadors so moving on for matching grants, we just want to talk a little bit about ambassadors ambassadors are people who are usually in your organizations in our circle who can help boost your campaign. So that includes board members volunteers. You know, anyone who has highly engaged staff members so utilizing ambassadors can help you break out of your list of existing supporters as well and engage new people and people that might not otherwise you have, you might not otherwise have access to. So an ambassador can help you buy it. You know the most simple thing is just sharing a link to your page with their social circle to ask them to donate and help boost your campaign for give education, or if you have like a board member for instance who is super well connected that can be a huge boost. Or they can help by getting involved with peer to peer fundraising which we'll get into next. So peer to peer fundraising is a fundraising technique where basically you're deputizing your supporters to fundraise on your behalf. So the mighty cause platform is actually set up for super easy peer to peer fundraising. So this is a great way to shake up your campaign and inquire new donors. So if you wanted to try peer to peer you would ask ambassadors your supporters to set up a fundraising page for your organization on mighty cause for give education. It might sound like a big ask but it's often a really super fun way to engage your biggest supporters and really allows them to tell their own story about your organization, how they came to work with you or why they love you why your work is important to them. And remember that this these campaigns don't distract or draw attention away from your campaign, because they're all operating alongside your campaign so these campaigns are typically reaching out to people that they know personally for donations and in most cases these are their friends their colleagues and family, and these aren't typically people your organization might have access to solicit for donations. So you're actually picking up new donors through these peer to peer campaigns most of the time. So for people like you know board members on here staff program alumni. This can be a really great way for them to get involved without just being asked for money and donations. It's a really meaningful way for them to not just make a donation or share a link. And this is a great way. It's actually a really great way to be a part of your stewarding process and really building and sustaining relationships with these supporters. Jumping for just a second so for us, we kind of consider for peer to peer fundraising, we kind of think about people from like a brand management perspective so like we have what we call like cheerleaders people who are out there, using their social media platforms or even just like word of mouth, sharing what we do on a daily basis but for Give Education Day. These are folks who they don't necessarily have to be donating to your cause they can use like their social cloud to kind of spread your message and get the word out there so like, I would just encourage you to think of this as a way to not necessarily seek out donations from these people like if they do donate great, but think of it more like a social perspective like what can they do to further the mission of your organization and get the word out there about your your Give Education Day campaign. Great. Very helpful. So we've definitely seen organizations get some really great peer to peer action by just inviting people on social media as well. Just sending them an email asking for their help for younger people if you have connections, obviously you know from schools and you know younger alumni who have big social networks and are really comfortable online. So they don't have a lot of cash to give but this can be a really excellent way for them to help out and make a meaningful contribution to your organization. One thing to note to help make things even easier for these people you can set up fundraising templates within your account, you can pre fill images, pre fill talking points facts, your logos. And if you're you have the capacity you can also offer to just help set up the pages for them. For organizations that utilize the peer to peer fundraising, we do find that they tend to raise a lot more money on giving days. So it's definitely worth, you know, talking about how you can incorporate some of us into your campaign strategy. Team fundraising so if you manage to generate a lot of interest and peer to peer or you've done that for Give Education in the past and you're looking for something a little new, you can consider trying out team or event fundraising on your head, or on top of. So teams and events can be great for groups of people who want to fundraise together so if you have a board or you have a company or you just have you know parent teacher group or volunteer group teams on events are a great way to get people working together and united over the same cause. You can also inspire some friendly competition to keep them all motivated. So the difference between teams and events is basically that an event allows individuals and groups of people to participate and fundraise together, while a team fundraiser is a group of individuals working together towards one collective goal. Another thing about using our teams or events products for a giving day is that there's tools built in the make managing it much easier so for instance, you can create a template fundraiser so people can use this to get set up quickly and you can pre fill some sections of their page. You can email team and event members through the platform to keep them motivated. So these are essentially just a little more complex peer to peer campaigns. So if you've got a lot of people willing to fundraise for you or you've done peer to peer before and you want to try your hand and a new type of campaign. Alright email strategy so your email list is going to be one of the most important tools for you during give education, because emails are a direct line to your supporters. If you're on social media, you don't have to worry about an algorithm getting in your way or preventing people from seeing what you send them because unless they've unsubscribed your emails it's going to end up right in their inbox and probably send them a notification on their phone as well. So I want to talk a little bit about email strategy because that's going to be super important. In general, you'll want to keep emails relatively short, simple sweet skimmable. You can read email on their phones these days. So you want to be able to have them skim through to get to the point. People are more likely to read emails, probably that pertain directly to them as well so we highly recommend segmenting your email list by sorting your donors into a few key groups. So, for instance, donors who have given a lot or given a regular basis or one time donors or people who have utilized your services, but never donated one time donors you're born volunteers, you get it. You don't need to craft entirely new emails to each of these groups, but you're going to want to probably tweak small things about the emails for each group to make it more personal to that group. So for instance, in an email to volunteers, you might acknowledge how they already help your organization and you wouldn't want to send an email to a major gift donor asking for just $25 if they're a major donor. So first things first you'll identify your key segments, however it applies to your organization, and then you'll figure out how to tailor your message to them. The email is tailored to who the recipient is and the relationship they have with your organization they're much more likely read it and to take action on it. How you segment it really depends on the program you're using but services like constant contact and MailChimp will use tags to segment groups of people on your email list. One thing you'll need to pay close attention to is the timing of your emails. And taking the time to schedule as much as you can beforehand and having a template email ready for things that you need to send out on the date of your education like an eblast asking people to help you get your campaign goal met, or any announcements if you've won an hourly prize. Excuse me as mentioned before most people are reading their email in their phones so make sure that you choose a mobile friendly email template. And test it out beforehand you can send yourself a test email try it on your iPhone your Android, your iPad, whatever you have just to make sure that it is looking and conveying the right love the way you want it to. If you have the capacity leading up to the event we also recommend doing some ab testing, especially with subject lines. You'll want to make sure people are driven to open your emails for give education. So trying out different subject line formats try things like adding emojis you're going to want to see what works better so on the day of your prepared. So, if you're listening wondering what is he talking about a be testing. If you're new to that term is basically splitting an email 5050 and testing one variable variable so if you're testing a button color or a subject line half your email list will get email a with one subject line the other half can get email be with another subject line. And then you can go into your email service provider like MailChimp and see which email gets the most opens. So, to continue on this example so for the button color or placement the email with the most clicks would be the winner for that email you could. You just really also want to be careful about not over testing too many variables. Throw too many variables and it's going to make it hard to see why something might have won an email test or performed better. And lastly, your call to actions or your CTA should be clear and action oriented so something like give now donate now help us today are really great. More passive call to actions like thanks for donating or please consider contributing are not as strong and effective you want to be crystal clear and you want to meet urgent. Social media strategy. So social media. For a high six day we really recommend just staying in your comfort zone. Just going where your audience is so what we mean by that is that if you've never logged on the tick tock before in your entire life, you don't need to start to use tick tock for give education. If you have all the bulk of your followers in Facebook, but only a handful on Instagram and you should really spend your time and energy and effort, really promoting your campaign on Facebook where you're just bulkier supporters are rather than Instagram. So putting your efforts into the platform where you're most likely to reach people and really have an impact. Finally, as well, just like we recommend scheduling emails we recommend scheduling any social posts you can ahead of time to save yourself a lot of trouble during the giving day and leading up to it. You can get like all your key content scheduled with Facebook's publishing tools or creator studio. You can go into tweet decks schedule your tweets save any live posting for stuff that needs to be done the same day, like thinking a donor. If you have progress prize announcements. We find it's super helpful to assign someone on your team to social media for the event so if you have a trusted parent volunteer or a trusted supporter or a board member or someone who can monitor your social media. So they can quickly respond to comments interact with their followers, keep the momentum up on your social feeds. We recommend budgeting a little money as well to help boost some of your social posts or your tweets so for $10 to $20 for an ad it can actually really go a long way. You'll want to make sure your ad is targeted properly as well though so if you aren't sure how to target an ad you can always just default to targeting the people who like your page or the people, the audience that already follows you. It depends on the type of content that does well on social media it depends a little bit on the platform, but in general photos and videos are going to do really well, and you're going to want to consider doing something, maybe a little out of the box. Like a possible Facebook live stream video or a small watch party for part of your campaign. These types of interactive features really help generate buzz, while delivering that ever so lovely algorithm friendly content. And finally, if you're when you're planning your campaign you're going to want to consider follow ups the follow up is super important to keep in mind. When you're planning your content you'll want to plan your thank yous to your donors things like making a video sharing a photo of your staff can be super successful for this. So make sure to talk about the impact of the funds you raise and just kind of close that overall loop on your campaign that means if you are fundraising for something specific, like a new piece of equipment or improvements you're building or something like that. You'll also want to update and send emails periodically on that progress. You'll want to make sure you've got an onboarding plan in place for your new donors, so they come back to donate again. So if you collect addresses mailing them a welcome packet can be a really great way to get them onboarded. You can also create an automated email journey so they can get more info about what you do why it's important to hopefully continue supporting your work. Alrighty so as for support as we wrap up I just want to make sure all the support contact info is here for you for your reference so our mighty house support team is a super great resource before and during the giving day for anything campaign related. If you need help setting up EFT if you need some help figuring out how to strategize around your timeframe. If your donors want, you know, another receipt sent you can reach out to our support outlet and anytime. The times are 9am to 5pm Eastern, you can call, you can email us support at mightyhouse.com. And we will shift into the questions section. That was a lot of information to observe so thank you to everyone for sticking around. If you have any questions you can click the Q&A panel, type those in and then I'm going to open the floor also to carry and Josh if there's anything you'd like to add you can do so now as well. Yeah, I was just going to say, traditionally what we do as donations are coming in. We believe in trying to call the donor possible on the day of and usually we try to get a student or a couple students in here. When we call the donors are really excited when they get a chance to connect with a current student at the school. So it's usually just like a we give them the students a script but it's usually just like a quick hey thank you for your donation, we really appreciate it. But then we follow up as soon as we can with a postcard or in some cases a postcard and an email to those donors saying because of you, here's what we did. So the total amount raised, the number of people who are participated, and then we try to list some action items of like what kind of impacts we were able to achieve thanks to their money that we received. And so you, it's an important piece to not only thank them, but also let them know what you were able to do because of their support. I think that's important as well. That's great. I love that you all have students reach out. Let's super personally. Let's see I don't see any questions coming through something else to that we learned last last year. Mighty cause has a great kind of indicator bar on your organization page to keep track of how much money you raise as it comes in. And something that it's super minor but something that I think is worth mentioning. Even if you're able to get maybe your matching gift money to count early. It's nice to have some kind of information on the page so if a donor goes your page it doesn't say zero donors zero dollars donated. It doesn't say exceed money or like something to start the event off. I think that also indicates probably on the donor's end a willingness to participate if they're not necessarily the first one to jump in and participate get their feet wet. Yeah, that's very true. I love to see other people also contributing so seeing other people caring and being involved like by through seeing other donations will really inspire more people to donate. No questions. Well, if you all do think of any questions, you can reach out. Carrie put her information up there you're also welcome to reach out to our support team. Yeah. Okay, well I'm going to thank everyone again for joining us today thank you Carrie thank you Josh for your hard work as always and always providing valuable insight to us. The webinar will be uploaded to the toolkit on give education along with the slides so you don't have to relist into my voice. You can download the slides and review them at any time. And remember you can always reach out to support support and mighty cause calm and thank you everyone and happy fundraising.