 Welcome everyone to our TechSoup event. We're excited to have Trellis here and have Rebecca share some great information with us. I am Sandra Amar and I'm your Ontario TechSoup Connect host. So we are a program of TechSoup, which is a global network of tech for good meetups. We are a nonprofit that helps other nonprofits get, implement and use technology effectively. I have been part of TechSoup now for I think we're going on two years, which is a little bit scary because it was just at the start of the pandemic. I was hoping to do in-person events, but here we are doing virtual, which is great as well because we can actually reach a wider audience with all of our events. So that's great. I run all about systems where I basically help empower entrepreneurs, small businesses, charities to use technologies more efficiently to create efficient digital workplaces. I do a lot of one-on-one training and consulting and project management related activities as well. I also am the president for the One Parent Families Association, as well as being your TechSoup host for today. But enough about me because we're here for you guys. So these are our TechSoup community values for those of you who maybe are new to TechSoup and don't know much about us. We welcome everyone to come and join us. We put our community first. We're always here to help each other, build stronger nonprofits. That's ultimately our goal here, to help you, help others. And technology is the way that we do that. This has been a great fit for me and all of the things that I love to do, which is helping people, being efficient and using technology. And we would love for you to participate. I know that these sessions here with Trellis are great because you really get us involved, which is nice, but beyond that, if any of you are interested in presenting anything or looking to hold your own sessions, have something to share, I'd love to hear from you. And as always, we will treat each other with kindness and respect because I don't think there's any other way to do things. Again, we would love your help. So if you're interested in helping us run the chapter or planning an event, please reach out. There's different formats we can do. I am trying to look at what Eli is doing over in Vancouver because he's got some great neat formats for different types of events and maybe reaching out to some of you as well to see if you're interested in doing some of, some similar kind of format events like that. A little bit more about TechSoup. It connects you with a whole bunch of donated and discounted products that you can use to help you run your nonprofits. Some examples of the technology that you can get at prices that you can afford. Microsoft, the one that's missing here is Google Workspace. You can get your free Google Workspace for nonprofits through TechSoup as well, which is actually how I learned about TechSoup in the first place and came to become your Ontario chapter host. This is an example of how much your nonprofit can save by using the discounts and donations available through the TechSoup program. And we also have a forum on TechSoup, forums.techsoup.org, where you can ask questions of your peers and other people in the technology related field that can help you with any of your tech issues. And you likely already know this site, how this is where you probably would have gone to log in to this event right now. So be sure to join our Ontario chapter and then you'll be notified as we add on more events as we go. I have a duplicate slide. And I think that is it. All right, so let me close that and stop my sharing and hand it over to Emily and Rebecca to take it away. You think by now I want to come off mute before and start talking, but here we are. Also, so good to be here today. Hopefully you guys can see my screen as we load it now. Yeah, I see it. Perfect. Thanks so much. We are really excited to be here today and share some really effective tactics for your event marketing. And I was just looking at the chat and I was seeing some of you guys put in some details around what you have coming up. Keep doing that. It's really helpful for us and we want to get into the specifics around what you're doing too. And whether you're new to marketing or you've been doing this for years, I know you're going to walk away with some insights, but before we get started, I wanted to quickly share a story about how much of an impact good marketing can have. During the pandemic, Shannon was really close to having to shut down her entire organization. They lacked the funds they needed to support their programs and were about to let go of most of their employees. Shannon didn't want to give up though. And so she started planning an online event with the goal of $40,000, just enough to keep them open. Through a focus on social media, email marketing and utilizing her event partners and network, she was able to reach a much wider audience than she expected. In just over 24 hours, Shannon raised over $220,000. And a huge part of her success came from leveraging her event partners, which is a strategy we're going to talk about today. So I know that everybody in this room right now is not coming here with the same starting point. Some of you might not have large networks or followings or email lists or budgets to rely on for these tactics. But what I'm going to talk about today is going to work for every single one of you. So here's where we're going to go. Let's briefly review an event marketing schedule and dive into the type of social media content that is going to help you create a larger following and also engage more people. Then we're going to go into what kind of social media content is that and how can you engage more people? Towards the end, we're going to talk about data collection and event partners to make sure that you can figure out what you can do next in order to engage different groups and different networks that you might have. Throughout this session, I'm going to share some real-life examples and ideas from organizations that have succeeded. My goal for our time here is that by the end, you're going to walk away with clear next steps and how you can market your next fundraising event and how to track your results effectively as well. In addition to that, we've put together a guide on event marketing that goes so much further into detail about what I'm going to talk about today. So you can use the link that we have in the chat right now or you can scan the QR code or the link on the slide here to download the guide. You can think about this talk that we're doing right now with step one and the guide is going to be like step two. We cover the same topics, but the guide includes how to steps for building out your social media posts, examples you can follow, advice from industry experts and worksheets and checklists to help make sure you aren't missing anything. But first, before we get into all of that, a little bit about who we are. We're from Trellis. I'm just coughing away here. And we build fundraising software for events, auctions, raffles, and we work exclusively with nonprofits and charities. We help build tools for charities to manage all of their events from galleys to golf tournaments. And we've supported hundreds of charities through their fundraising on Trellis and we've learned a ton about their successes and failures. I've personally been involved in helping about 250 charities execute their events. And so I'm going to share with you some of my favorite ideas and tips to make sure your fundraising is a success. I'm here with my two colleagues, Emily and Zoe, who are hanging out in the chat right now. So if you have questions, please throw them in the chat. I know Emily's been in there ready and chatting with a lot of you and they're going to be able to answer your questions right away. Or they're also going to save some so we can do a live Q&A at the end. Me and my team were joining from the unceded territory of the Seahawks people. And we wanted to just take a moment to pause and recognize the line that we get to live and work on. So like I said earlier, we're going to move really quickly through the first two sessions and we're really going to dive into the last two. But because we're going quick, if you have questions while I'm talking, make sure to throw them in the chat. Like I said, we will get to them as fast as we can. But the first thing we wanted to do was go back to square one and talk about the entire event marketing schedule before we dive into some of the specifics on how we can execute each one. So now I've put together a rough timeline, but I know these timeframes might look different for your organization and that's okay. This is a bit of a guide that we can put together to think about your event marketing schedule and where to even start. First, you're going to start by planning your next event, the day your last event ends. You're going to want to announce your next event during the current event and start sharing it with attendees through email too. Next, you're going to launch ticket sales and when you do, email past attendees to invite them to come back for your new event. Use your email newsletter and let your donors know through social media as well. You'll also want to start messaging your event partners and asking them to share it with their network, but we're going to get into what that means in just a second here. Next, in the few months or weeks leading up to the event, you'll want to increase the frequency of your marketing tactics, including your emails and your social media. And in the last couple of weeks before the event, start personal reachouts to encourage your donors to attend and that could be a phone call or a personal email. We love the idea of doing a personal phone call. It could be a really simple, just like two-minute chat from one of the executives or leaders at your organization and it really goes a long way for your donors. You can use that as an opportunity to do a personal invite and to thank them for their past involvement with your organization. Not only does it encourage people to attend your events, it goes a really long way for relationship building and continuing to establish that relationship with key donors that you have as well. Then in the final week before the event, you're going to want to just keep reminding everybody your partners and everybody in your network what's going on, getting them to keep resharing your posts or create their own announcements about their involvement with your fundraiser. We've seen some really creative ideas when it comes to fundraising events. Emily from our team here, she actually heard one of these ideas from one of the partners that we work with and it's quickly become one of our favorites. So I would encourage you to quickly take a screenshot and you can save it for your next fundraiser here. But I would encourage you to think about how you can find new ways to incentivize your donors to buy tickets sooner as people just like to wait to the very last second to buy tickets. So try things like discounts or entries or special gifts as a way to encourage them to start buying tickets earlier. One of the organizations that we've supported, they involved their sponsors. They asked their sponsors to donate 100 bottles of wine and for the first 100 people that bought tickets, they gave everybody a complimentary bottle of wine. It was just an easy way that people can engage and participate sooner and on the day of, if they were virtual or in person, they had some drinks that they can enjoy. I don't know about you guys, but for me, if there would be a bottle of wine on the line for me to buy tickets sooner, I'm definitely gonna get on that. So think about your donors, what's gonna work for them and how can you get them engaging earlier with you as well? Okay, that was really quick and high level in terms of event strategy and timelines, but hopefully that kind of gets you guys thinking about what does this look like for your organization? And we're just gonna pause here for a second. If you have any questions, if you wanna throw them in the chat, Emily would love to answer those for you. And like I said, we will be saving some for our Q&A at the very end too. But while you're doing that, now let's look into our next piece, which is all about social media. And actually, before we do that, I would love to know from you guys what does social media look like for you guys? You can just throw one word in the chat. Are you struggling or are you succeeding right now? We would love to know how things feel. So struggling. Okay, I'm seeing these answers roll in. Struggle, yes. Kay, it is hard. It's a lot and it's often one of the things that is one of the last pieces to be thrown onto your plate. So you guys are not alone, trust me. We have worked with a ton of organizations and the ones that have really focused on their social media engagement, often start to engage people outside of their usual demographic. So I see some of you saying it can be a roller coaster, hard to get traction, but I'm gonna encourage you to really think about these five tactics in terms of how you can engage more people through your social media platforms. The first one is catchy and clear to call to actions. Shortened links or quick links that people can click and remember. Engaging images or photos or videos. Attention grabbing captions. And then lastly, tagging and hashtags to help spread the word. Because this has been a challenge, it sounds like for most of you, why don't we dive into an organization that's doing it really well? Let's pick apart their social media posts and see what you guys can do and what you can take from that as well. Again, I would highly recommend downloading the guide and we can throw another link into the chat for that too. We really go into social media posts in the chat or in the guide, make sure to grab that too because I think it could really help you guys. But one of the organizations we've worked with a lot is Georgian Bay Hospital Foundation and this is one of their social media posts and we really like how they put it together. The first thing they do is they have a really clear call to action to register for the event and I love it. It gives an easy and really direct next step for people to take. Their call to action is help raise more money for Georgian Bay Hospital by registering to for free at this link. It's direct, donors know exactly what they're being asked to do and they've made their caption really direct and active in their tone too, which again, makes it really clear for your donors to start taking action. The next thing they have is a link. So on Instagram, you can put the link in the bio up at the top of your Instagram platform or it could be just like an easy link to copy and paste. That's just in a description. On this Instagram post, they've just got a really quick and easy URL that people could just copy and paste. But when you're thinking about putting together your Instagram posts or any platform posts for that matter, making it really quick and easy just makes things easier for you and for your donors, it's a lot more memorable. Other social media platforms, they do make it easier. You can usually just click on the link and it takes you directly there. But having a link again, just really helps drive people to take that next step that we're encouraging them to take. The third thing that they have is a really engaging photo. If you guys know Lane and for those of you in Ontario, hopefully you guys do, they are amazing and they're so engaging. And this image that they have right here, right in the jacket, again, it just gets people excited. It draws the eye and it's a really great place to start. They've also got logos and they've got names on there too. Again, just if people are quickly scrolling through, they can easily see their eyes are drawn by the pink jacket, but they can easily see what the post is about. They also added a great caption. They started with the words, record breaking and that gets attention too. They used words that bring a sense of urgency and excitement and use those kind of words as well in your social media posts to get your donors engaged as they're scrolling through on social media. And then they have used another key tactic which is really designed to help get a wider reach. And I see that Arjaina, hopefully I said your name, but you said hashtag and you're asking about that too. Partner tags is a really great place to start. Makes it really easy for other people to share and then hashtags, of course, again, help you get a wider reach and make your posts more relevant and searchable. With hashtags, you likely won't see instant results and that's okay, but the payoff in the long run is definitely there. Just makes it easier to find the content that you're sharing and that's really where you wanna start. Okay, that was a lot of information really fast. And so maybe you're like here, Rekha, that sounds really great, but I don't have somebody dedicated to social media. I know a few of you said it's a one-man band and you're trying to just do everything. So if you don't have somebody dedicated to social media or a graphic designer in your back pocket that you can call on to make graphics like the one we were just looking at. Again, I'd encourage you to download the guide. We do have some recommended free tools that kind of make it easy to make Instagram worthy posts on your platforms. Download the guide and like I said, also those five points that I just mentioned are also in the guide. Again, makes it really easy for you to figure out how you can start with your social media posts and use that template to get started in the right direction. I'm seeing a lot of questions come in, but if you have any other ones, please throw them into the chat now. Emily's frantically typing away right now, but we will also make sure we answer them at the end if we don't get to them right away. Okay, and now we're gonna slow down a bit for these last two. First, we're gonna chat about event partners and how you can use that to grow your reach. And so some of you might be sitting there thinking, I haven't done an event before, I don't have an old list to go back to, I don't have a big social media following, maybe I'm a new organization and I don't even have really an email list to rely on. So what about me? If that is you and you're feeling like that is where you're at right now, your saving grace is definitely gonna be utilizing event partners and your network to help you reach a wider audience and really expand your marketing efforts. And you might be wondering what we mean by event partners and truly event partners include everybody involved in the execution and planning of your events. And again, some of you might be thinking, I don't have those. So I thought, why don't we make a quick list of all the event partners that you do actually have? First, let's start with your sponsors. Maybe for your event, you're doing a live auction or maybe you've got a silent auction with 10 items. You right there have 10 people that you can reach out to, all of them your auction item sponsors and ask them to start engaging a little bit more with your event that you've got coming up. Maybe you've got a restaurant that's providing food and they're acting as your restaurant sponsors or you've got other in-kind sponsors that are providing other elements of the event, decor or technology, and you've also got your monetary sponsors as well. Next, your organization has key supporters. Those could be your volunteers, your staff or your board members and other key donors you might have. Who is it in your network? Who are those people can you rely on or start asking to support your events in a bigger way by sharing what you're doing and getting the word out? Or you might have community influencers and thought leaders in your community or in your industry. How can you engage them and how can you ask them to share what you've got going on? It is key to remember that these people already love your organization and they will be happy to share your event. You just have to make the ask and ask them to even start doing it. Next, you've got your talent, maybe any speakers or hosts or auctioneers, performers or bands that are participating in the event. These individuals tend to have a following already so leverage that if possible. And then your last category of event partners we'll be talking about is your fundraising professionals. That's gonna again be your AV team, your venue, your event planners, fundraising consultants, production companies. One thing to keep in mind if they are local to you and in your community, they will be especially more willing to share your event. So now that we know who our event partners are, you're going to really wanna make it easy and set expectations in order to engage them. So here are three quick ideas to get you started and thinking about what that could look like. First, tag your partners on social media and encourage them to reshare. We just did a really quick, but really deep dive into social media and the key elements of a good social post. So set them up for success and just start sharing and tagging them on things. Next, make it easy for them to talk about your event too. Why don't you create a Google Drive with a bunch of social media posts, maybe some suggested captions that they can copy and paste. They can post on their own platforms too. And then include promotion into your partner contract. Make it a requirement that they do promote you in some capacity. Depending on who they are and maybe the different ways that they engage their own audiences, it might look different. It might be an email newsletter for some and lots of social media posts for somebody else, but making it part of the contract does make that conversation a lot easier right from the get-go. Another idea that we would love for you to steal because we just love it so much is making inviting people a game. And we actually made it like that. With your organization supporters, give each one of them a custom affiliate marketing link and set a goal of how many invites you want them to send out. Give them an email template, like I said, make it nice and easy and set your expectations. Then each week, give an update on how many emails were sent from each person and who the current winner is for inviting the most people. And then at the very end, when your event comes, you can give somebody a prize for being the most active at engaging more people and inviting people to participate and attend. With your event partners, as well as your own network, email communication is key and consistent emails pushing to your fundraiser, reminding people to buy tickets, giving them updates, telling them about the latest silent auction item you have can again get people excited and drive more engagement. I would highly encourage you to plan a whole strategy around that. Use email drip campaigns and regular emails to keep engaging your existing email lists as well as your donors. In the guide, we talk a lot about the different ways that you can get each of your sponsor types to engage and have all of your different partners start participating more in promotion for your events. Unfortunately, right now, we just don't have the time to get into it. And so again, there's lots of links in the chat already for how you can download the guide or you can use it from the screen, from the one on the screen right now. But I would highly encourage you to download it. You can just review them all and think about the different partners you have and the different ways that you can get engaged in what you've got going on too. And now we are gonna move on to our last section, which is all about data collection. But again, if you have any questions about anything I just mentioned, email marketing, then definitely throw it in the chat in different ways that we can engage your event partners. And so as exciting as it is to talk about getting the word out, it is also really important to track and learn from what you're doing and how your marketing efforts are working so that for your next fundraiser, you can drill down on what's actually working for your organization. Again, like everything else that we've talked about, there's a lot of different ways that you can approach this. But we wanted to start by giving you our two favorite and the easiest and simple ways to get started. And the first one being a custom question at checkout so that you can ask your guests to buy tickets. You can also ask them how they heard about you or how they ended up coming to your fundraising event. And so what we mean by that is making a question that's required, giving them a dropdown. So when they buy their tickets, you can say to them, where did you hear about this? When they come to actually make a buy a ticket or participate or engage in any way, they can answer, maybe it's a friend or family, social media, an event partner, social media or email newsletter. You can also get more specific and ask them the names of people, but this information alone will give you a lot of insight into what channels are working for you and how you can continue to engage your sponsors and earlier donors leading up. I would also encourage you that as you're doing that, start making changes as you go. Don't be afraid to take what you're learning and what you're seeing right away and start to implement it. Think about how are different ways that I can promote my event and use the information I'm learning that maybe social media is our best option or email newsletters are our best option as you continue with your promotion plans. Again, once you've collected that information, you can start making better decisions around where you go next. But again, this can also really impact what you do for your following events or following fundraisers. So write down that information, keep it like present to use so that you can call on it the next time you've got something going on too. Our second tactic that I wanted to quickly touch on was affiliate marketing links. And with your fundraising page URL, it's creating a custom link for all the different social media platforms, websites, event partners, board members and anybody else or anywhere else that you can think of that people might be finding your page. Then again, afterwards after the event, you can take a look at those channels and figure out what's driving the most engagement to things like your ticket sales. Again, if this is brand new to you, don't worry, we will give some next steps in just a second here. But let's jump on to the next thing really quick. And then like I said, we've got some next steps coming up. Now that we've got people engaging in your fundraiser, the next thing that you're gonna wanna think about is growing your email list too. So again, make sure that as everybody signs up for your event to your email list for the future, you can start asking them if we can continue promoting other things that you've got going on. There's two really easy ways to do this. The first would be adding a note in your ticket that says something along the lines of do you wanna be added to our email list. You can choose if you wanna make it required and it's just something they agree to versus an actual question they get to ask. And then when they're checking out and buying their tickets or making donations, whatever it is, you've started collecting those emails that you can go back to. After the event, you can follow all of our double option rules that you can make sure that you follow up and just confirm that they're okay being on your new list, thanking them for their participation and involvement, and then using those emails and keeping them involved in different communications you've got coming up. This does take time, but growing an email list will be a key to success for your organization in terms of spreading the word and getting started. So I'd encourage you with your events coming up, think about adding this question right away so that you can get going. So I know we've covered a ton of different things right now. So before we move on, if you have questions about data collection, affiliate marketing, email lists, again, throw them in the chat. We would love to get to those and I'm seeing people are throwing questions already, which is great. Let's quickly review what we went over and then we can open up the floor to some questions here. So we started by talking about what it looks like if you don't have a big social media following or an email list. Like I said at the very beginning, if you don't have social media lists or email lists that you can go back to, using these tactics will be a great way for you to start succeeding with your event marketing right away. But first, we talked about an event marketing schedule to help you plan out your posts and share details about your events. Then we talked about how to build a click-worthy social media post and we took a look at the five different elements of a successful social media post. Next, we touched on the different types of event partners that you can utilize for your fundraiser and how you can expand your marketing reach. And finally, we talked about data tracking to improve your marketing and make better strategic decisions as you market your upcoming events as well. So as you're thinking about this, if you implement these strategies, if you don't have a big social media following or you don't have a big email list, like I said, we still think you can succeed with your event marketing. By now, you've probably downloaded the guide and you have got all of the details again that dive further into all the things we talked about and how to execute them. But I know that's not everything you need to run a successful fundraiser. You do also need a software solution that's gonna be able to support all of the event marketing elements that we just talked about. As well, you need to be able to facilitate all of the different fundraising components you have. And as you're looking at different fundraising software, there are four pieces that you're gonna really want to look for. I made a quick list on my screen, but the first one is a platform that does custom checkout fields to ask your donors questions and get their email addresses. Next, you're gonna look for platforms that have tools to customize your social media posts, add social sharing links, and make it really easy for you to engage people through social media or other platforms like that. You're also gonna want a platform that does affiliate marketing links to track who's sharing your posts, what is working to get the engagement you need for your fundraiser. And finally, event analytic tools to learn more about what's worked for them and how you can get the same engagement for upcoming events too. I know that software is just a piece of a full fundraising event marketing plan, but I also know that with the right tools and technology, you can engage your donors and raise more for your cause. And as you're looking at different platforms, you're gonna need one that can support these elements too. Over our trellis, we can support those four pieces, custom checkout fields, social media sharing, affiliate marketing links, and then event analytic tools. And we would love to work with you guys and help you as you figure out what to do for your upcoming fundraising events. We're gonna throw a link into the chat. You can book a time with me and my calendar and we can sit down and chat about your organizations, what you guys have going on. And if you're using other platforms and that is totally okay too, I really think that the strategies that I have shared today are gonna help as you think about your upcoming events and as you plan with what your fundraising events look like. Again, I would highly encourage you to find a platform that can support these things and talk to the platforms you're currently using to make sure that they can support your critical marketing pieces too. But with all of that, let's open the floor to some questions and we can talk a little bit about what you guys have going on at your organizations too. Oh man, do we ever have some good questions this event? I'm so excited. I have been frantically doing my best to grab all of the questions you guys have posted into chat. We likely, let me check the time here. Yeah, we'll definitely have some more time for a couple more questions even after we get through this big load here. So if more questions pop up or if you think of one that's really specific to your organization and a problem that you're trying to tackle right now, please let us know. We'll do our best to help and likely somebody else is facing something pretty similar. So don't feel bad if it's like really specific to what you're trying to do. Let's start up from the top. So the first, okay, actually first thing I want to mention if you guys didn't see it, Sandra posted a link in the chat about Google ad grants. A bunch of you guys were talking budget and different things. So if Google ads are something that you want to do or something that you're currently spending money on, definitely check out if there's a way for you to get $10,000 every month for your organization to spend. And I do know there are a lot of fundraising consultants out there that help nonprofits do this. So you could even do a quick Google search on like fundraising consultant to help me with nonprofit Google ads with that online. We can help you find a couple. I think I know a couple of people if you want to send us an email to put you in contact with someone, but there's a lot of resources out there to help you with that piece. The very first question that I wanted to tackle because it's the most specific question that we got to their organization. So I want to make sure we can help Elizabeth out with this is right now she is looking to fill a black leadership event but she's having trouble generating interest from the black professional community in Greater Toronto, Ontario. So super cool that you're already using Google ads and LinkedIn, the event is free. Thanks for that comment. I'm good to know. So the kind of first thing that I wanted to mention which Rebecca already touched on a lot was this is a huge opportunity to use partners. Now that might look like a little different depending on your current situation. If you have speakers lined up those would be the first people that I'd reach out to because they are going to be the face of this whole thing. Hopefully they're black leaders themselves and it's just all going to tie in so perfectly. We have no partners save speakers. Okay, sorry, I don't know anything by save speakers but yeah, if you have speakers that would be really awesome. If you have except speakers, awesome. If you have anybody who has bought tickets so far I would definitely recommend sending them a link to some of the posts that you're making and encouraging them to refer some of their other friends or maybe for the first few people that have bought tickets you can send them, I don't know some sort of like incentive or something like that to get people to sign up. If you're able, I know the tickets are free but if you're able to create some sort of incentive for people to go and buy their tickets first that might help a lot. And so maybe there's one session where it's like VIP access they get to talk to the speakers or something like that something that you can use to differentiate it to really encourage people to start buying tickets faster. And then once you have a couple of people starting to buy tickets faster you can get all of those people to go and promote it especially the speakers like they can just be posting it on all of their different channels. And then if you're already using LinkedIn I encourage you to try to create some sort of like group or community on LinkedIn. So you can create like a LinkedIn page where you can start adding people to it and then that's like a non intrusive way to actually directly message people as well. So if you find people that like are in your exact target audience of people that you wanna invite you can actually say hey we have this group it's we have this event and this group if you wanna join I think it'd be super awesome and then you can invite them to join that group and then in that group everyone smile make a post about the event and then if they're interested they'll be able to see it there. You can also do that on other platforms so I would encourage you to expand outside of LinkedIn and also to Facebook or Instagram. Specifically I was thinking you might be able to use hashtags to help you out a little bit. So because you like are specific so specific kind of with your event and the area you can search a couple relevant hashtags and see if you can find people who you think are gonna be interested and then send them like a little personal message just to get that started. I know that's like a little more time consuming but once you get it started then you'll have more people who are able to promote that a little bit further. So those are probably the first few tips that I have but I would definitely work towards trying to create a community rather than the Google ads because Google ads are gonna be a little harder because that's where people are gonna have to be searching and interested in it. And the last piece is if you're open to find new partners I would see if you can find someone who is like a consultant or some sort of like influencer or something like that that really aligns with the event you're doing and maybe you can invite them for free or give them a sort of incentive to go and share that with their community or if it's so specific and they really like your cause just asking them to post one thing about it on their Facebook page. They totally might be willing to do. So worth reaching out, worth asking. So yeah, feel free to ask them follow up questions. Go for Rebecca. I was gonna say a quick other thing with that. If you are looking at doing a hybrid or online event in any capacity Elizabeth you can also look outside of the GTA area. We've got a lot of organizations that are doing nationwide events and they're small organizations and don't feel like you have to be constricted to just the GTA especially if you're going hybrid or especially if you're just going virtual. Awesome. Okay, we'll go through a couple more questions and then we'll make sure to run through the chat again so that we're not missing anything but we'll jump down to the next question here which was from Beth. So Beth has special events of historical background that they run about every month or two. So this is a pretty cool like case that you have here of how frequently you have events. So I just had a couple of ideas here for you Beth. The first thing being use every single one of those events as an opportunity to market the next event. I know Rebecca touched on this and it's like gonna be so much more effective with how close your events are because if you're telling people about an event that's one month out and that's perfectly in the range of like it's reasonable to add like an event to your calendar in one month out versus six months out and sometimes it'll be a little harder for people to plan, right? So one month out if people had a really great time at your event this is a great opportunity to tell them about your next event. Depending on what your event looks like this could look different. I was thinking it might be an opportunity to actually do some sort of like flyer of sorts to actually like physically give something to everyone. If you have the budget to have a different one for each event that's one way you could do it or if not just make a generic card that has a link to your website page that lists all the events that you can give to everyone. And then I caught to that word of mouth is really big for you guys. So what I was thinking is you guys have a cool opportunity to do some sort of like referral. So for example, maybe everyone who has attended event in the past maybe they can get 20% off the next event if they bring themselves and a friend who has never attended, right? Or 10% off if just them are gonna attend the next time. And so you can create a little incentive that like won't be into your funds that you're raising too much and it'll bring in a full other like new donor new participant that's gonna be able to come in there. And then the next thing was create like a newsletter specific to these events or make sure that there's constant promotion for those people that are gonna want to participate in a lot of ones try to create incentives people to keep coming back and attending more of these events. Yeah, that's where we'd start. I keep seeing things pop up in the chat. I'm glad that you liked the bring a friend idea. I think that is gonna work really well for the success that you've already been having. That's like a point that I hope everyone takes away of whatever is working for you guys do more of that because it's working. So it makes a lot of sense to put more time and energy there. Rebecca, maybe you wanna go in and see if there's a couple new questions in the chat just to add in. I'm gonna answer one more question here and then Rebecca have a question that I want you to answer actually. So this next question here is what do we do with the emails that we collect from the ticket sales? So Rebecca gave you guys a really good strategy on people have attended your event, they bought a ticket, they've given you their email and put a note on the email or you ask them if they wanted to opt in to your newsletter. So all of those people who have opted into further communication for sure put those people on your newsletter. Anyone, even if they didn't opt in, you have their email and it's really important to thank them like everybody in the fundraising community screams at the importance of thanking the people that are participating in your event, whether they bought a ticket, whether they made a donation, thank every single person for their contribution. So that's the number one thing to do with those emails that you've collected. After that, I think a really cool strategy is to follow up with the impact that was made based on the funds that was raised from that event. Some people have a specific fund in need where it's like, hey, we need $10,000 for this new kitchen equipment that's gonna help us do this. That's like really awesome because you have such specific tangibles but even if you're just raising general funds and then you wanna tell people about specifically how much that amount of money was able to impact the programs or the cause that you're doing, following up with a thank you and then a little while later, following up with, hey, that contribution you made that we were so grateful for, it led to this. And then that's gonna make donors feel like so good and so excited. And then for sure, promote your future events to those emails. And that's more generally add them to whatever newsletter you have going. If you don't have a newsletter going, I do suggest that you try to work towards a goal of sending something out like once or every two months just because that creates, it creates awareness of your organization keeps you a little more top of mind in your donors so that when you do go and email them about something that's happening, they're already familiar with receiving emails from you. They're like in the know of what's going on in your organization and they're gonna be really excited to come and support you. So a couple of things you can do as well as send everyone on your newsletter like cool early bird opportunities if you have some sort of early bird incentives for the events that you're doing. And then it's just a great opportunity to keep them interested and engaged with what's happening in your organization. So there's a bunch of different ways that you can do that, but I just always recommend that people like showcase the really cool things that their organization is doing. That's a great starting point. It's just showing the impact that you guys are having and continually thanking people for their engagement and their involvement with your organization. Awesome. Okay, Rebecca, anything jumping out in the chat that we need to address? No, I feel like you've covered it all. Awesome. Okay, sorry, I go way too fast on these but it's just because I have so much excitement when it comes to marketing. So comment in the chat if I need to slow way down. But Rebecca, the next thing I thought you and I could bring the storm on are a couple ways that these organizations might be able to increase their engagement on the different social media platforms they're working with. Yeah, good question. Each platform is gonna look really different. I think the first step to that is figuring out what platforms are you getting the most engagement on and which ones do you wanna focus on? There are four big social media platforms that most organizations are using. First would be Facebook. That's gonna be probably the one we hear that most people are having the most engagement on. I know Beth, you just commented in saying that's really a really good platform for you too. Instagram is gonna be your next platform. Instagram is great if you've got lots of engaging images and videos and content like that to share. To get really engaging content on Instagram, it is really about quality of the content you're posting and videos have now become the new big thing on Instagram. So sharing video content is getting more engagement. Twitter is a really great platform for quick short updates. 30, I don't know, I think the word count is 150 characters. So however many words that kind of adds up to be for you guys, but it's more real-time updates. A lot of organizations either love Twitter and have a great following there or actually similar to Trellis. We have no engagement on Twitter, so we just can't afford to put the time and focus there. Oh, Paul is saying that it's 280 characters. Shows how much I use Twitter. And then LinkedIn is a great platform for really engaging more of a business community. So Elizabeth, really cool to hear. That's what you're using to get the word out about the event that you've got coming up. Again, because you're going after business professionals, really great fit. So I love that you were doing that. Because each four platform has a very different audience they target to. First, I would think about which platform do you want to use to get, to really focus on so that you're engaging the right people. Now that you're engaging the right people on the right platform, the kind of content you post does really matter. So things that people can engage with, the links that they can click, videos they can watch. Maybe it's just a caption or something that you're posting and you're asking people to engage and add comments and get discussion going. Those are going to be the places I'd really encourage you to start. Again, focus is really all about getting people engaged, getting people talking or taking an action. Awesome, thanks, Rebecca. Yeah, do you have anything to add, Emily? Yeah, I had a couple of things. And I also want to add what Beth just popped in the chat as well. They have a student that they pay with a grant whose only job is social media. And that's a really cool place to start if you don't have the manpower, the human power on your team to currently get that done. Our younger people that are interested in marketing, that's such an awesome opportunity. That's exactly where Rebecca and I started in our marketing careers was just a cool student opportunity with a job that we cared about. So if you want someone who maybe uses social media more than you do too, see if you can find someone who's open to even an unpaid internship or a grant that you can find to get these people paid on your team just to have a little more help to increase the consistency of the posts that you have. So I was going to mention that's another important part as well, if your posts are really sparse people aren't going to be used to seeing and engaging with your posts. And so it is important to keep some sort of regularity to it. If you're only able to make one post a week, that's all good. Just do your best to stay as consistent as you can with it. And then I was going to add in there too, loved Rebecca's point about videos. If you have videos, there's a couple of tools out there too that you can use to crop your videos really short because for example, you might not get somebody that wants to engage with a 30 minute video, but they might be really excited to watch something that's 30 seconds or a minute long, but it can be difficult to produce a ton of videos that are nice and short like that. And so you can always just crop a longer video shorter and then people watch the 30 seconds a minute if they want to know more, then they can click the longer link and go find the longer form video content that you have. And then the other thing is I would utilize your volunteers and your staff as much as you can, especially when you're small and starting out, you might not have too many kind of loyal supporters that are really gonna be commenting on the chat. So getting as many kind of friends and family, staff volunteers that are already interested in this cause to be the first ones to engage with your post can invite other people to engage with your post because if there's only a couple of likes, maybe not any comments yet, that can be a little intimidating for someone to go and be that first comment, but if you already have a little bit of engagement from people who already know your organization, maybe you make a post and you text everybody on your staff, hey, can you go give this a share and comment right now? That might be a good way to just invite other people to get a little more engaged with it too. And I encourage you to just ask questions to your audience as well. You have to remember people might not be engaging because you haven't invited them to engage with your post. And you do have to put in some sort of call to action like we talked about earlier what do you want your followers to do with your post? Do you want them to click on the video? Do you want them to click this link to buy tickets? Do you want them to answer a question that you've posted in the comments in the chat? So make sure you are really specific with what you're asking to invite them to go and engage that way. Yeah, okay, so that's all the super big questions that we had so far. I think for most people here finding ways to get themselves into new networks by leveraging all these different types of partners is going to be one of the best strategies I think for most people whether you have a small following or a big following. So if that's your one takeaway, start thinking about who are really big advocates for your organization that you already know that maybe you can reach out to, find people that are going to be really excited to help you get in front of networks that will be interested in your cause. Maybe that is a different nonprofit that you can partner with and share, cross-share networks that way in posts on behalf of each other. So there's lots of ways you can do that but that's definitely the quickest way to grow your following and that'll happen a lot faster than you just organically making posts and hoping that people are gonna find you. You gotta get yourself in front of people and tell them what you want them to do.