 Welcome to our first webinar for Giving Day for Apes this year. I hope you all can hear me and see my screen. But I am here with Jackie Bennett from GFAS. Hi, Jackie. Hello, everybody. All right, so just a quick introductions before we dig in. Oops, sorry, my slides were jumping. My name is Linda Gerhardt. I'm the senior community engagement manager here at Mighty Cause. I've been working with Jackie and Global Federation of Animal Sanctuaries on Giving Day for Apes since 2017. So I'm really excited to get started again this year. And we also have Jackie, who you all know and email a lot. So we'll go ahead and get started. Today's agenda, we're going to start with an introduction from Jackie. Just to say hello to everybody and introduce you to this year's event. We're also going to go through some Giving Day basics. So if this is your first year, or if maybe you are new to your organization, you haven't participated before. You have the full picture of what Giving Day for Apes is all about. Then we're going to go into Giving Day strategy, or I'm sorry, email marketing strategy. The agenda's a little off, so I apologize for that. We're going to do email marketing strategy. And then we are going to do a Q&A with me and Jackie. So if you have a question for Jackie, you can ask her. And if you have a question about the technical side or email marketing, you can ask me. We will be taking questions at the end of the presentation just because we have a lot of information to get through. So if you think of something while I'm near Jackie or talking, just stick that into the questions box of your go-to webinar panel, and we'll make sure that we make time to get to it during the live Q&A. All right. And with that, I will pass the mic to Jackie. Thank you, Linda. First, I want to say welcome to everyone today. I know this year has been a surprising and challenging one for everyone, and sanctuaries and rescue centers like yours have had some special challenges, of course. So we're really happy to again be presenting Giving Day for Apes and giving you a chance to promote your organizations so you can tell your stories, write some funds, and maybe win some prizes too. This year we again have the very generous support of Arcus Foundation, as well as returning prize sponsor in the American Antivibisection Society, and we are grateful to both of them. Also, as with last year, Mighty Cause has demonstrated its commitment to a successful Giving Day for Apes by lowering its platform fee from the standard 6.9% down to 4.9%, which means more funds go directly to our participating organizations. I promised in my email for this webinar that we have a sneak preview today of our prizes for this year's event, and that's something we're really excited about, and that's going to come a little later in the presentation. And finally, today is the first in a series of three webinars we're offering this year, and we hope you'll join us again for the next two. Those are listed on the slide. We have one on August 25th, and then our third on September 10th. You're able to register now through the Giving Day website and we'll send some reminders as well. So with that, I'll turn it over to Linda. All right, thank you. Okay, so like I said, I just wanted to start off with some basics sort of stepping back for people who may be new to the event or maybe just need to be reoriented to the event from last year. So first of all, how does Giving Day for Apes work? Giving Day for Apes is on Tuesday, October 13th this year, and the goal is to raise awareness about the issue of welfare and conservation and to help your sanctuaries raise funds that help you to continue to do your important work. You'll be competing with other sanctuaries and rescue centers to win prizes, as Jackie mentioned. And our next webinar will be all about the prizes. So if you want the full rundown, make sure you sign up for that one. And the event is essentially a marketing opportunity. It's a chance for your organization to engage with sponsors and engage with your partners, engage your supporters and your donors, and talk about the issues that your organization handles. In terms of what you need to do to participate, it's really simple. You need to register your organization, which I assume most of you on this webinar have already completed. But it is invite-only. Jackie has reached out to everybody who has invited to participate this year, and then she'll go through and approve your organization based on the information in your registration. You need to update your profile for 2020, which we're going to talk about more in depth in a moment. And you also need to plan a fundraising campaign for Giving Day for Apes. You'll need to promote your campaign to your followers, invite your supporters to do peer-to-peer fundraising for you. There is some prize money tied up in that. And then just raise money for your cause. So it's really just an opportunity for your organization to get out there, talk to your partners, your supporters, your biggest donors, and just, you know, talk to them and get them engaged in your cause. So that's really all it is. It can seem a little bit complicated when you get in the weeds, which is why I just wanted to step back and just emphasize that participation is really easy and it's just an opportunity for your organization to reach out to your donor base and also win some fun prizes. All right, so there have been some changes on the Mighty Cause platform since last year. So I wanted to sort of reorient everyone since it's likely that many of you haven't visited Mighty Cause since last year's Giving Day for Apes event and go through some of the things that have been changed or updated and just sort of reorient you to what the key things you need to find on your profile are. This part of the webinar is going to be a little bit technical, so apologies in advance, but hopefully it'll get you acclimated to any changes and allow you to get up and running more quickly when you log in this year. So one of the first things you're likely to notice when you log in to get started for 2020 is that the dashboard has changed. Hopefully it's pretty easy to understand since we've designed it to be intuitive and easy to navigate, but I just wanted to go through it from the top down and explain what you're looking at. First, at the very top of your dashboard, you'll see the name of your organization. Now, if you're an administrator for multiple organizations, this is how you'll toggle between them. If you manage a few different pages, you can click on your organization on your dashboard to access any other organization profiles you may be managing. Below that, you've got your overview screen, which should be familiar to you. That is where you'll find your to-do list that has some key items for you to complete on your profile, any mighty cause announcements, and a few key metrics, which can be really helpful if you're just looking to get a quick look at what has happened with your organization on Mighty Cause recently. Below that, you have all of your fundraising tools under fundraising. The dashboard is organized in carats, so if there's a lot of individual tools to access as there are with fundraising, you can click on the carat, which is the little arrow on the left-hand side and expand the profile to access the specific tools. So under fundraising, you can access your profile. You can edit your profile. You can view and manage your campaigns. You can also get an overview of all the peer-to-peer campaigns that are set up for your organization. You can add matching grants and customize your checkout flow. There's a lot going on in that fundraising section, but an easy rule of thumb is that if you're looking for a fundraising tool, it is under fundraising, which is hopefully easy to remember. Below that is reports, which you may have guessed is where we put all of your reporting. You'll go here to find your donation report, your website that you need to pull a spreadsheet for is located under reports. And finally, you have your settings, which is where you can manage your information. You can add or remove admins, manage your EFT if you're getting direct deposit disbursements and more. So it's pretty easy to navigate, but it is a little bit different from last year, so I just wanted to go through that very quickly. So once you're logged in and oriented to your new dashboard, you'll want to update your profile. So from time to time, Jackie and I will see old information in people's stories. So just take a look and audit your page for anything that might be out of date or could be updated. Your story is also a really great place to add new graphics, new images, a new campaign video, and so on. So even if your information is fine and there's nothing explicitly out of date, it's a new year, so it's an opportunity to jazz it up and make it more compelling so that people will be inspired to stay on your page for longer and read more about your organization. A lot of organizations have been hard hit by coronavirus and have had to sort of change how they do things. So this is also an opportunity you can do, you can use to weave that story of how your organization is managing in these crazy unprecedented times in your story. So just take a look at your story and make sure that you're telling the full story there and that it's updated for 2020. Most organizations don't change their logos that often, but you can always see if you need a logo refresh. A lot of organizations for giving events will actually add their own special giving day logo. So you can always take a look at your logo, see if it's the one you want and if there's any way that it can be refreshed. This part is a little hidden, but it's really important and that is updating your thank you page and thank you message every year because donors see those. They see their thank you page after they make their donation and they see the message in the receipt that we send them right after they complete their donation. So they're very visible to donors and where these are located are under fundraising, checkout flow and then you just toggle over to post checkout. Just make sure that that information is up to date for 2020 sometimes because it's a little bit hidden. You can have things there from other years and that can be confusing for donors if they get receipts that say thank you for donating your donation to giving day for APES 2018. So just take a moment to update those two pieces. Banner images are another key part of your profile that is highly visible to donors. So if you haven't refreshed yours in a while, try adding a new image there if you can, especially if you can tie it into your overall campaign story for 2020. That's even better than just having a general image there. And then also check your media gallery. On your profile, but if you haven't uploaded any images since 2017 when you first built your profile, it may be time to add some new photos there that better represent what's happening at your sanctuary at this particular moment in time. We always get lots of questions about this, so I wanted to go over resetting the metrics with you on your page and that's actually in a new spot this year, so I wanted to go through this real quickly. This year it's even easier than previous year metrics right on your organization profile page. You just have to be in edit mode in order to do that. You can get started by clicking the pencil icon or it'll be a plus icon if you don't currently have any metrics set. You can also access it from the quick edit menu at the top of the page by clicking on fundraising stats. You'll want to start counting your donations from September 14th, 2020, which is when early giving your donation, it'll reset your donation display on your profile to zero. You'll also want to set your 2020 fundraising goal if you have one for this year. Remember it's totally fine to have goals that are not about how much you raise, but that progress bar on your page can really help motivate donors and you can change your goal. You're not locked into it. It's a good idea to put in how much you're hoping to raise or a goal that you feel confident that you can make a great strategy is having a stretch goal. Let's say last year you raised $5,000, which is a great amount. You can set your goal for $5,000 and if you get over that or get to the point where you're very close to surpassing that, you can reset your goal, increase the amount and set a stretch goal so that donors will be motivated to come back and either make another donation or make their first donation once you set that stretch goal. This is easy to do. You don't have to go to the page anymore, so this is very easy and when you're updating your profile and refreshing everything, just refresh your metrics as well. We haven't really emphasized this before, but 2020 is a new decade and it's a really great time to take a look at your settings and see who your admins are. When you go into admins in your settings, you'll see a list of everyone who currently has access and you can actually manage them from this screen. The admins named there in your admin list, they have the same access that you do. You can add people through this screen, people who might need access to your page, like if you have volunteers this year who will be helping or new staffers or any admins that might need to pull a donation report. You can also remove any admins that don't work for you anymore. If you had a volunteer a couple years ago who helped you out but that volunteer is no longer available, you can just remove them so they no longer have access through their mighty cause account. One thing to also look for is duplicate accounts. If you have an admin account that's connected to multiple different email addresses, it's usually a good idea to get rid of any that you don't actively use and just have one login for yourself because it can get really confusing if there's multiple people with your name and title that have admin access unless of that then you don't need to do that but sometimes over the course of participating in this event year in year out people can develop duplicate accounts and have admin access with those multiple accounts which can just get a little bit confusing so you may want to just, if you have a duplicate account there, remove it. You can have up to 10 admins at one time and just to clarify since I think this can be a little bit confusing, there is only one type of user account and we grant admin access through that account. Usually there's no access that we can grant for your whole nonprofit. It's all tied to your user account so if you can't log in or you're not sure what the login is, you'll need to use the email address that you registered for the event with. Part of the registration approval process is we grant you admin access to your page with the email address you use when you registered and you logged in. Or you'll need to sign up for an event with this page in your settings. For instance, some people will contact us and say I'm not sure how to log in or I don't know what my nonprofit's login is. Well, it's your login, it's your email address and it's attached to you so if you don't have one, you'll need to create one and then have a current admin give you access through the settings page. I just wanted to make that clear that there's one type of admin access and it's tied to your user account and your granted access with that account. One of the easiest things you can do to make your profile look great and refreshed is updating your theme. In your theme, you can upload or change your logo. You can upload a new banner image and you can also choose a filter color for your banner image if you want. You can also set a theme color which will carry out through your profile like on your donate button. This is a really simple and easy thing to do. Just take a look at your theme. This can be a quick way to refresh how your page actually looks. Your story is really the centerpiece of your page and where you'll want to explain who you are, what you do and why people should support your cause. There's a really easy inline text editor that you can use to add some additional color and pizzazz to your page with headers, images, lists and graphics and videos that will help your story stand out. This is an excellent job organizing their story. They have headers, video, infographics about where their donations go and how people can help. We recommend utilizing the space to talk to donors and provide skimmable, easy to read information about your organization. You all have the coolest photos of any giving event I have ever managed. Please use your photos and show us the animals that you help. I just love seeing them in your stories year to year. Make sure you plug some images into your story. You can also add an additional tab where you can put more information about your organization that you want donors to be able to access but don't necessarily need to be front and center. If you have something else that you want to say as an addendum to your story, you can put that information in a custom tab. That's something cool you can also use. Some organizations use it for statistics or details about how their money is spent. Those are kinds of things that add to your fundraising story that don't necessarily need to be on the main page. I just wanted to point out that that is an option as well in case you wanted to provide additional information about your organization and the work you do. We talked a little bit about this earlier but refresh your media gallery. If you use Instagram, just to add more life and more elements to your page. One thing you can also do is optimize your social media sharing settings which is in your settings under your general organization settings. You can set it that if you want people to tag your sanctuary automatically on Twitter if they tweet about your organization and your campaign from that page. You can set that there. You can also upload a custom image if you don't like the image preview showing there. Sometimes it's just your logo and it's not optimized so you can add a custom image there. There's a lot of cool things you can do to optimize your social sharing settings as well. Just take care of that media gallery. People will scroll down there and they'll take a look at what you've got. You have amazing photos so make sure you are adding some new ones for 2020. Donations and disbursements are under reports. It's important to know where these are and how to access them so that if a donor is asking you a question on October 13th you're not scrambling and trying to figure out I don't know where to find information about their donation. You know exactly where it is because you visited there and it's under reports. As always every admin for your organization will receive an email when a donation is made. If this gets to be a lot on October 13th I suggest sending them to a folder so that they're not bothersome to you because you will get a lot of notifications on the giving day itself. You can view donor information on this page but just as a note we have a limited display area here so the details are in the full donation report which you can export from your donation report page. I did want to walk through some disbursement information. If you have nonprofit status in the United States you can set up EFT to receive your donations more quickly and if you have EFT set up you will get your disbursement on the 25th of October for the giving day. Take a quick look at your EFT settings and see what you have set up and verify that it's the correct account because if you have not updated it since 2017 and it's going to some bank account like we do have checks in place so that if it goes nowhere we'll know about that and it's going to the wrong account and that account is still active but it's not the one where you want it to go there's not much we can do so check in see what account is connected for EFT and just make sure that it's where you want the money to go. If you are fiscally sponsored meaning you're outside the US and you don't have a friends of organization with nonprofit status in the US don't worry about any of this because you'll receive the money that you raised from your fiscal sponsor. You can add offline gifts and there's also a separate offline donation report so you can stay organized when you're entering those so if you wanted to see what offline gifts have already been entered you can easily pull a quick report to find out just the offline gifts. You can add offline gifts to your page just to reflect the full scope of fundraising you're doing for giving day for apes but it's important to know that offline gifts do not count for your leaderboard totals before the event and we may just reach out to verify if we see that your organization entered like a super large amount just to make sure that that was what you meant to do just for our purposes when we're calculating the event totals. We have also reached out in the past to nonprofits just to verify that they were aware of a donor who made a big donation. I just wanted to mention that as well because something that happens surprisingly often is that people making donations add zeroes so instead of $50 they donate $5,000 and amazingly that goes through on whatever card they use so that happens occasionally so when it's a big amount with a lot of zeroes we usually just check in with your nonprofit just to make sure that you're aware of that donor because most donors who are making large gifts you're already aware of and have talked to that donor so that's another reason we might reach out but generally speaking the offline gifts are for display purposes only so it's not tabulating any cash or checks that were given to your nonprofit but they do not count toward prizes. Another thing you'll also want to check is your checkout flow which is under fundraising this is where you can choose what donor data you want to collect from donors and set your custom donation suggestions and descriptions and hopefully tie those into your campaign. Sometimes these are easy to forget about as well and just let them know that these are up to date and making sure that they tie into your campaign so for instance if you're you know campaigning for supplies for your clinic you can make those donation amounts and suggestions about the specific things that you need to purchase and what those donation amounts provide so that's a really great way to get people to bump up the amount of their donation and also just tell a cohesive story about why funding your organization is so important. Make sure that you haven't built a really cumbersome and long donation form people are much more likely to complete donating when it's very easy so you need to get what you need to get but just make sure that it's not super long and arduous for them to complete that form and again this is where you'll update your thank you message and page and just toggle over to where it says post checkout and you'll be able to update those messages. All right so this is the last slide that is new this year and I wanted to talk about for a moment is the ambassadors tool which will be available for this year's giving day for apes. Peer to peer is a very important giving day for apes strategy especially because there are prizes attached to it but if you have someone or several someone's who maybe want to get involved and they want to help you fundraise but they don't really want to create their own fundraising page and do a full peer to peer campaign what this tool does is it allows them to be an ambassador which gives them their own personalized link that they can share that goes straight to your organization's page something they can also do if they are interested in it is become giving day for apes ambassadors where their link just goes to the giving day for apes main page and people can navigate from there so one thing that's really cool about this is that we can see how much traffic these people bring in and how many donations they're actually bringing just as a note this doesn't count for the peer to peer leader board you'll still need for people to create an actual peer to peer page to qualify for that leader board and any prizes associated with it but this is a really cool new way you can engage supporters that may not want to go you know whole hog and create their own peer to peer page but just want to do something quick and easy to boost your fundraising on giving day for apes so we're adding that to the site and it'll be a new option this year that can help raise more money and engage people so I just wanted to quickly go over that and we will talk about that more in the peer to peer webinar that's coming up next okay so with the technical stuff out of the way let's get into email marketing some of you may not know but I come from a nonprofit marketing background and I manage our email marketing here at mighty cause too so hopefully this information is actually helpful to you I really want to get into the weeds a bit because the group of people who participate in this event I see emails getting better and better every year in the fundraising storytelling getting better and better and I really think that we can get into the nitty gritty of what kinds of emails to send and what tactics to use because you guys do such a great job every year so the first email you want to send especially when your profile is refreshed for this year is a save the date email just letting them know that you're participating in giving day for apes and to mark their calendars and get a full schedule if you've already got a full schedule for emails it can always be added on to another email or a newsletter and but you can also turn this into an opportunity to plant the seed for peer to peer fundraising to recruit peer to peer fundraisers if you need volunteer help finding volunteers to help with the campaign if you're going to need them and sort of laying the groundwork for what this day is and how this event works in marketing repetition is key to getting messages and ideas to stick in people's minds so adding a countdown to your regular emails or sticking reminders in your regular email marketing is a great way to build momentum plant that seed and make sure that when early giving opens up your supporters are ready because they have good they have been given notice as I mentioned early giving starts about a month before the event on September 14th and that's when you'll really want to focus on your nonprofits inner circle when you're getting your email campaign together plan out emails to people that your nonprofit counts on every year to support you that means recurring donors volunteers your staff past giving day for apes donors and people that are close to your organization like your board of directors to help them get help help you get some money in the bank so that when the event switches over to live you've already got some money raised but the messaging that works really well with these donors is acknowledgement that they are tried and true supporters you can always count on them to come through so don't be afraid to go hard on that message with these particular donors because it's absolutely true these are the people that you count on for support one thing I did want to chat about on this subject is that sometimes organizations can be a little wary of early giving and worried that it'll hurt what they raise on the big end of the day. So we have a ton of early giving for giving day for apes and we really didn't see that it affected day of giving in that way what early giving does is it helps your organization raise more overall and one of the reasons for that is that with a month between early giving starting and the event happening early giving usually means that instead of just giving early people are actually giving more than once so that's why donors that you know will show up for you because these are not people who are just going to make one donation of $15 and be done they are invested in your organization and donors tend to do what I call paycheck math which is that if they have the money when they are asked to donate they will donate so for many people as long as you don't hit them like twice in one week if they have a new paycheck they're probably going to make another donation if you ask them again so it's a buffer of time between early giving beginning and the event actually beginning that you're most likely going to get more than one donation from people rather than just getting one early donation from your donors so when you're building your email strategy you'll want to think about a few countdown type emails these are most effective before early giving begins and right before the event and in these emails you're just trying to give them and develop some of that repetition I talked about that means by the time we get to October 13 your supporters are familiar with this event and they are planning to give so some of the things you can talk about in countdown emails are your goals your campaigns focused there's an email on this slide from Ape Action Africa and they sent out a really great email explaining what they were raising money for on giving day for apes they were raising money for their clinic and introduced the hashtag for their campaign which was just a really smart marketing move and they also used another tactic we're going to talk about more in depth in a moment which was an email from a leader at their organization you'll basically want to set the stage for all the need to know information like who are you what's happening where, when, why and how to get involved so that you can concentrate on fundraising on the first time and a PS or a post script reminders at the end of regular emails like PS don't forget giving day for apes is 14 days away can be a really great way to add a countdown if you've already got a full email schedule or there's something else that you're emailing donors about so I wanted to talk about day of emails and sort of the bare minimum that you should do in terms of email marketing on the big day now you can certainly do more than this and you can go bigger but these emails should really just be the scaffolding that you build your email campaign around. Social media is also really really great and important but the great thing about email is that you don't have an algorithm to contend with people will see your emails at the top of their inbox unfortunately sometimes with Instagram and Facebook they won't see what you post on the same day in their feed the email gives you that immediate connection to your supporters you're sending it straight to their inbox so as long as they're checking their email they will see your email when you intend for them to see it or shortly after you send it so email is just really important and this is sort of the bare minimum schedule that I would suggest first there's the kickoff email letting everyone know that the event has begun you're off to the races and asking for donations you should also plan emails for the power hours that your organization is eligible for and just send them out a little bit before the hour actually begins so that people are ready to go when it starts at least 15 to 20 minutes before is generally a good amount of notice that will put your email near the top of their inbox when they check it but not email them too early so that they have an hour of their work day where they forgot about it doing a midday appeal with some information about how you're doing and how much you're raising is a really good idea you can also use this as an opportunity to thank everybody who's made a donation so far and this is often a prime time for people to give so make sure you have a campaign email scheduled for midday and one thing I cannot recommend enough is setting up a donor retention email put the email together and get it ready to go and then on the big day pull your donor retention report from your profile around early evening end of day and just take that report plug it into your email marketing program whether you're using constant contact mail champ autopilot whatever you're using and send it to the donors on that list that gave in previous years but have not yet given this year they haven't been retained yet these donors are low hanging fruit so it's really important to reach out to them and make sure you're doing some specific outreach to the people who gave in the past and haven't given yet this year most people will give one ask so just make sure you're doing a targeted email to them and this is one where you can just sort of set it up in your email marketing program and then plug in the list when you pull it giving day for apes often sees a boost in the last hour of the day so send out a final hour email letting people know they have one more hour to donate and help you win prizes it's totally okay to use some urgent language here and then finally send out a quick wrap up email just after the events over you can plug in the details after the event and send that off just have that one ready to go and plug in how much you raised just to wrap it up and give yourself a little bit of extra time to do some more intensive follow up and a more organized thank you but that at least caps off the day and ends it on a good note you let them know thank you so much and you have some time to do some more detailed follow up so having that one ready to go is also a good one to have in your plan alright so I wanted to talk through some of the things you should consider when you're building your email strategy first giving day for apes is an eastern time I think we'll be in I think we'll still be in daylight time at that point but I'm not entirely sure about that but I know we have a few centers in that time zone but most participants are in different time zones so think about that when you're putting together emails especially as it relates to power hours so if you say no that you have a ton of donors who are on Pacific time taking the step of doing the time zone math for them will make it easier for them to understand when they are supposed to donate Jackie usually does a very thorough conversion of time zones on the prime the prize page for power hours in particular so you can find that information on the prize page on the giving day for apes site once that is up you don't need to account for every time zone imaginable but you know where your donors are located so it's worth thinking about ways to make it easier for them and if you have donors who are kind of far flung and in different time zones you can also consider if you're up to it doing some segmentation so that you have the correct time in their time zone for the power hours on that subject leader boards and power hours and golden tickets are not part of the average person's lexicon so it may be helpful to explain what a power hour is why it's important explain what the leader board is and how much you can win if you end up at the top of it you don't need to get super detailed this can be something that you do in one of your countdown emails but just a quick sentence about what those things are and what it means can help donors really wrap their head around those elements of the giving event and something I really hope you'll consider is a personal outreach plan that personal touch of someone sending a direct email from their actual email address or even making a phone call to ask a donor to make their donation can make a huge difference in the return you get so it's more effort but you usually see a higher rate of return in people appreciating the gesture and actually going to your page to make a donation so you may want to also build a direct outreach plan alongside your email marketing plan especially for those donors who are really important to your organization and are worth making that extra effort for so somebody who gave $10 in 2017 is maybe not worth a phone call in the likelihood that they will follow up with a donation that somebody who gives in a good amount every year it might be worth that extra mile for them volunteers can help with this and they can do it remotely so just write up a script for them and send them a spreadsheet with some people to contact and that part can be done easily and it definitely makes a difference so when we're talking about email marketing that's not the only part of it is constant contact in these blast emails and the general outreach is also an important part of marketing so I wanted to give some general marketing tips so that you can consider these as you build your plan and actually build the emails themselves we saw Ape Action Africa do this in an earlier slide but emails from leaders at your organization are very impactful so this can be a really great method to get more opens and get more people reading your emails especially if these are really key emails where you want people to let me tell you when Mighty Cause sends an email from our CEO we get so many more opens and clicks so it's something that you want to use strategically because if people think that your executive director is spamming them they're going to get annoyed but if they see an email every once in a while from your executive director or your board chair or somebody important at your organization they go oh I should pay attention to this so hearing from your executive director your program directors and board members that can really get people involved and even if you're using an email marketing program believe it or not people do not realize in most cases that you're using a marketing program they will go oh my gosh this person emailed me personally this must be important I'm always surprised by that but it is the truth people don't they aren't bothered by that so it doesn't need to look like an email from that person's personal email for it to have the same impact this is such a tiny little thing but it's so important make sure you're putting a link in the first image of your emails I don't know why this is true I don't know why people do this but this is the truth people click on whatever the first image in your email is it's very consistent across the board and all of my years of marketing so whatever your main cta link is for the email whatever you're putting into in your cta button make sure that your image is mirror that link especially when in the email because people will click on it so that's just a quirky little tip that can make a huge difference and means that when the person clicks that image instead of just pulling up a bigger version of that image they're actually going to the link where you want them to go I saw some orgs doing this last year another silly little thing that makes a huge difference but emojis in the subject line do lead to more opens you really don't have to go wild with these and have a huge string of emojis because they can do the opposite and look spammy but some selectively chosen emojis can really help your open rates get up just make sure that you know what the emoji means because they can have double meanings like the okay signal it can mean something not so good in certain cultures and even in the US it has a double meaning that you don't want to be sending to your supporters but you're always safe with say a sparkle emoji and they actually just released some new animal emojis this year and Android released an update with a gorilla and an orangutan so you are safe with those and again suggesting amounts as recommended because if nowhere else in life donors like to be told what to do when it comes to fundraising and they sort of use recommended amounts as a jumping off point for making their donation one thing you can also do if you have the capacity is segment your emails by the amounts donors given so that you can make a strong suggestion to give in your email so for instance if you have people who typically have given in the 10 to 20 dollar range you can maybe suggest 25 or 30 dollars to them if people you know you have a list of people who normally give 100 to 200 dollars try bumping them up to 250 so you can sort of do some work to segment your emails and make them more specific by suggesting amounts in your emails this can also be really effective when we're talking about most unique donors power hours definitely reminding people that they don't need to donate a lot to help you win a most unique donor power hour can be really helpful because it doesn't matter what they give and they the platform minimum is five dollars and you can remind them of that when you're making your appeal that makes it seem more approachable and can help people actually click the button and make the donation in the United States right now it is election season and if you're getting any campaign emails you'll see that political campaigns do this a lot because it's smart 13 dollars may not ultimately be what somebody donates but it gets them to click through the link and sometimes when they click to the link and they end up on the on the form they actually donate more so your your goal is really just to get them to the page to make a donation if they want to increase it at that point they certainly can but that's a known marketing technique that works and gets people to click through is by suggesting an amount that is approachable for them all right so I wanted to talk through some good campaign messaging you guys do an awesome job with this every year but just going through some some really key messages that you want to send because of you messaging is really effective reminding donors that none of your work is possible without their support if you're in the United States public broadcasting does this a lot and the reason is that it works and you can actually see it in this email on the the slide they're using they're literally saying because of our fantastic donors like you we've been able to provide daily care in an enriching sanctuary home for Linus and 50 more animals so it just it really works it resonates and it makes people feel that their their contribution is appreciated focus on hope especially in our current climate everything is upside down and feels on fire sending emails that paint your sanctuary is a place of hope lands really well it resonates people are looking for that they're looking for second chances they're looking for hope they're looking for bright spots because everything feels really dark right now and you know sanctuaries and animal rescue and conservation is a really great vehicle for that message of hope so you can hit people with a little bit of sadness because that also tends to work but just make sure that you turn it back around and ends on a hopeful note keep the apes front and center they are why your donors are involved in your nonprofit in the first place they are what people care about they are what brings them to your organization so use the animals at your sanctuary to tell the story of what you do how do you help these these animals you know explain what you do through them you know obviously you want to be cautious and careful about that but you have these these amazing animals in your care so make sure that you are giving people what they care about which are those animals and then also something that can really work I've seen this done in previous years is pulling back the curtain you know show the work that you do because it's really interesting I work at a laptop all day I am fascinated by caring for animals in a sanctuary because it's so far outside my normal life and donors love that too it also gives a feeling of transparency to what you do so giving people an inside peek at that what their donations are helping to fund and what life is like inside your sanctuary you know who is doing the work how they're interacting with the animals if they are obviously safely is the message there but talking about the enrichment and things that you do for the animals in your care that's really really important and it can really land well with donors because they're getting you know a day in the life at your sanctuary and it's something that a lot of people don't have access to or any idea what it's like so that may seem mundane to you because you do it day in and day out but to your donors that is fascinating and they love to see it so that has been really successful for other sanctuaries in years past so just consider that you know how you can add a little bit of personal this is what we do vibe to your emails as well all right so I wanted to talk through a few examples of what not to do so we've talked about what works what does so first is the wall of text everybody is super super busy I know that I personally am not going to read a giant long multi paragraph email all in one sitting so people they absorb information a little bit differently in this day and age they skim they don't sit down and read word for word they sort of dart their eyes across the email and try to find the important information so make sure that your emails are skimmable break up your longer emails with headers images buttons and other things that you can do to separate out the information and avoid that wall of text you can certainly have a long email with a lot of information as long as you break that up having an unclear ask if you're just saying please support us well what does that mean like Howard how do you want people to support you so be clear and direct ask for what you want them to do like I said donors like to be told what to do in a fundraising context so exactly what to do please support us is a very vague ask whereas please donate $13 now is a very direct ask that donors can easily understand and if you have a long email again those are fine just make sure that you are repeating your ask what you're asking the person reading the email to do throughout the email so if you have a long story with images and headers you don't want to bury your your cta button you want them to click click at the bottom of the email you may need that link several times throughout your email just to make sure that people are able to easily find it something that is I have my background as an animal welfare as well and something that's a particular problem with people in that field is jargon so jargon is something you do not want to include in your emails like I was just saying most people don't work in an animal sanctuary so make sure that when you're explaining you're not using jargon that they don't understand if you you know if somebody on the street randomly wouldn't understand it don't use it don't use inside baseball language these can really turn people off because they don't understand it and it makes them feel small and stupid because they're not able to understand what you're telling them so it's very easy to fall into an animal care fields especially but just make sure that you're using plain clear language say what you mean but don't include any jargon in your emails whole list blasts only so definitely blasts should be part of your email plan but one after another can feel kind of still and they you know start to see past them and you want to engage certain types of donors specifically like I was talking about with recurring donors people who've given in the past and are not yet retained so spend some time talking about the people that you want to target specifically and doing a little bit extra for those donors instead of just sending them the same blasts that you might get somebody on your email list who's never donated to your organization so just think about that you know you go beyond the blast definitely have blast emails to your whole list but what can you do beyond that to get more specific and how you're communicating with people I did want to go through a few best practices this should be hopefully obvious to everybody this day and age but optimized for mobile so when you're choosing your email template make sure that you are using a mobile friendly template most of us are not looking at it a laptop or a desktop computer when we're checking your email we're on our phones and the other part of that is test it out actually send a test email to somebody to have them check it on an iPhone or an Android phone both ideally just to make sure that it looks good just because sometimes it can work when you preview it and then when you actually look at it on a phone things are a little out of whack so you just want to make sure that you actually test your emails and that they look good on mobile devices use a mixture of text and images images and this is something that is a little bit of a trend in email marketing just having nothing but images but that puts you in a really awkward position if they don't load which could happen because sometimes people are using something like Microsoft Outlook and it's not going to load the images because they're at work and their employer takes out all images and emails that is something that happens more than you would think there's also people who use screen readers who are not looking at images and emails and so unless you're including alt text in all of your emails people who use screen readers might not be able to understand what your email is saying to them so definitely use images and pictures but make sure that you also are telling your story with text it's a trend that I don't think is a particularly good one and you guys are usually pretty good at it so I just wanted to make sure that you're using both you're using images and you're using text and if you are able to through your email marketing program adding a little bit of alt text to your images will ensure that people who are using screen readers are able to tell what's in the images because their screen reader can access that information and they're getting the full experience of reading your email and spend some time focused on the donor this is something that we can easily overlook in marketing we want to talk about us and what we do but most donors like to hear about themselves because they want to feel appreciated that's why the because of you messaging is so important and it's so effective so spend some time talking about the person reading the email how they can help how they can get involved how the apes are sounding on them for their support and that can really help draw people in because people like to hear about themselves so make sure that you're also talking about donors and specifically the donor in the email the one that's reading it when you're putting your emails together use personalization if you're able to go through your list and make sure that you have the information you need because there's really nothing that will kill an email that's meant to feel personal then seeing your first name so just make sure that you have the information if you want to use personalization variables but if you do have that information and you can use them reliably that's a really great way to make your emails more personal and include the donor in the email instead of just only talking about what your organization does alright and last thing I'll say before passing things back to Jackie is to get support from us we are here to help you our support team is available to you you can email us at support at mightycause.com you can also give us a call we are a Monday through Friday operation 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Eastern time our phone number is right there you can also send requests to me I'm more helpful with a strategy I haven't worked in support so sometimes I'm not as great at getting back to those emails with the right answer immediately and have to send them to our support team anyway so if you have a technical question and you're trying to locate something please don't be shy about contacting our support team we're real people we're here to help you that is part of our job and just to let you know on giving day for apes we are there the entire duration of the event we will always have support members checking our our Q checking incoming requests so that if you have an emergency send it to support because we will have somebody there for the whole 24 hours will not be the same somebody that somebody will be there to help you and just turn it over to check you again thanks Linda so here we are there sneak preview on prizes sorry well now sorry sorry about that no problem so in the past few years we've awarded a total prize package of $50,000 and this year we have even more thanks to our generous sponsors our prizes this year will total $58,000 and this is going to include a combination of some that you're familiar with already such as leaderboards and power hours and golden tickets although there may be something new about some of those and we're also going to have some new types of prizes as well we've been working to design a prize menu that's really I think going to give every participating organization whether you're large or small whether you have dedicated fundraising staff or not it's going to give you a chance to win some meaningful cash prizes next slide and we're going to tell you the details of the prizes during our next webinar on August 25th and by that day we'll also have posted our new prize structure on the giving day website so during that webinar we're going to go through each prize category to make sure we explain what they are the amounts the rules and when during the event they're going to be awarded so that you'll have all those details and you can consider your strategy for contacting your supporters and we're also during that webinar going to be talking about peer-to-peer fundraising which has its own leaderboard in the event and I'll give you another hint there may be a change to that leaderboard prizes this year we've talked about peer-to-peer fundraising in the past we had a webinar talking about it last year and we saw a doubling of funds raised through peer-to-peer fundraising it went up from about 42,000 of the total to 84,000 of the total which is very exciting so this year we're going to give you a few more resources to make it really easy for you to ask your supporters to help you raise funds for giving day and so that's it for me other than I wanted to say we are going to be starting our save the date announcements on Tuesday August 18th start generating excitement for the event on social media and the logo for this year's giving date is available for your downloading through the giving day website so you can start putting that on your own promotions and with that I'll turn it back to you Linda all right so I don't have any questions this is the live Q&A portion so if you have something you would like to ask me or Jackie go ahead and put that into the questions box of your go-to webinar panel this is your chance you've got us live you won't have to wait for an email so I'll give you a minute to see if you have any questions if you want to type those in right now so something that I did want to address because it's something that I'm hearing from a lot of nonprofits and people participating in giving events is sort of talking through whether it's okay to ask so definitely throughout the world at this point a lot of people are heart hit by coronavirus and the resulting economic problems and so there are a lot of nonprofits that are just like oh is it okay for us to ask them for money right now and the answer is overwhelmingly yes without getting too into the weeds we've actually seen charitable giving through our platform go up like a lot so things are doing well for nonprofits and part of that is because people look for ways to help when the world feels out of control and scary so that's something that we're definitely seeing here at Mighty Cause so if you're feeling a little bit anxious about asking your donors for money because that's something that I'm hearing is very common right now please don't be afraid to ask them because they are rising to the occasion even if your organization is not directly helping with coronavirus relief or anything that's in the news and happening in the world right now so that's one blanket statement I wanted to address while I had everybody on a webinar and we don't have any questions at this point if you have any questions I'll give you a few more seconds to enter that into the questions box otherwise you will have to email me or Jackie or both of us specifically to ask your question so I'm just going to put myself on mute for a minute and see if any questions come in and I just want to add and when there's a lot of information that was presented today and these webinars are recorded so you're going to be able to go through the slides in your own time and listen to the recording again in your own time if you really want to go back and refresh on how to update the page and go over the new features on the Mighty Cause platform yeah absolutely they'll be uploaded as soon as I'm able to get the video up on YouTube and you'll also have an option to download the slides if you wanted to look over the slide deck or share that with any of your colleagues or any volunteers so at this point I'm not actually seeing any questions come in but you guys can always email us if you wanted to talk to us you know Jackie's email and my email is Linda at mightycause.com if you have any questions and as you're going through your profile and you're updating for 2020 also utilize support that's support at mightycause.com they're very quick they have a lot of resources to help you out so make sure that you contact support with any technical questions but with that I guess we'll wrap it up thank you to everybody who attended today I'll put the recording up as soon as possible as well as the slides and thank you to Jackie for helping me present this webinar thank you Linda and looking forward to a good event for all of you yeah absolutely happy fundraising everybody