 Welcome to Giving Tuesday and Year End Fundraising. My name is Becky Wiegand, and I'm the Webinar Program Manager here at TechSoup. I've been with the organization for a little over 6 years, and prior to that spent about a decade working for small nonprofits in Washington, D.C. and Oakland, California. I'm happy to be your host for today's event and excited to have our panel of experts joining us today which includes Melissa Cronin who is the Director of Special Initiatives at New York's 92nd Street Y. She helps to develop and scale innovative programming across the 92 Y's multi-disciplinary areas. One initiative is Giving Tuesday, the National Day of Giving on the Heels of Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Giving Tuesday Movement has united more than 10,000 corporate and nonprofit partners in the U.S. and around the world. That was as its second year only. So in 2013, more than 45 countries participated in Giving Tuesday. So we're excited to have her talk to us about how they created that and the success of it and how you can leverage that for your nonprofit fundraising goals for this end of the year season. Also joining us is Wendy Harmon who is a proud Red Crosser and Digital Nerd. She recently became the Director of Information Management and Situational Awareness at the American Red Cross. So she creates programs around collaborative information sharing around disaster responses and recovery efforts and preparedness. Prior to that though, she served as the Director of Social Strategy at the Red Cross and we know nobody does it better than the Red Cross when it comes to leveraging social media and social channels to raise funds for the great services that they provide not just here in the U.S. but around the world. She was responsible for the national social media response and presence including developing their listening program, social content, and community engagement. She has spoken to nonprofits about how to leverage these different social channels and things like Giving Tuesday and events for nonprofits and technology and around the social web. She has been named to Nonprofit Times Power and Influence Top 50 list from 2010 through 2013. And she is famously known for teaching President Obama how to tweet in 2010. And if you are familiar with Twitter scandals so to speak, she helped develop the strategy about how to handle the mis-tweet of the getting slizzard that Red Cross had which is a fun tweet history. If you aren't familiar with go ahead and Google that term while we are here together today and learn how well they handled that with Wendy's guidance. You will also see assisting with chat, Ali Bazikian who is an interactive events and video producer here at TechSoup. And she will be on hand to help respond to your questions and flag them for follow-up and help you with any technical issues throughout the webinar. A look at today's agenda will do a couple of polls after I do a fast introduction of TechSoup. We will talk about what you are giving Tuesday experiences already and your year-end fundraising plans. And we will talk about some Giving Tuesday history and success stories and how to get involved, how to do it, and leverage it for your organization's fundraising goals. Then we will hear from Wendy who will talk about how American Red Cross plans their year-end fundraising and uses Giving Tuesday as part of that big holiday fundraising plan. We will have time for Q&A at a couple of points throughout the webinar, but also a big chunk toward the end. So stay with us for all of that. Quick look at TechSoup. We are a 501c3 nonprofit. We are working toward the day when every nonprofit foundation library on the planet has the technology, knowledge, and resources to operate at their full potential. We do that in a variety of ways since 1987, serving more than 200,000 charitable organizations around the world, delivering now it is actually more than $4 billion in IT expenses in more than 60 countries. In addition to delivering IT technology resources, we work to develop education and community. One of the programs that is happening right now is our Storymakers Campaign, which is our annual digital storytelling campaign. So I just want to share a little bit about that to invite you to participate. One of the great ways to help your cause get noticed and get funding and get support from your community is to have a great story to go with it. As part of this campaign, we invite you to submit your own digital stories and become eligible to win these amazing prizes, lots of cash prizes this year. So go ahead and join us for Storymakers 2014. We will talk a little bit about upcoming events later on in the program. Now on to the topic of the day. Go ahead and click on your screen to give us an idea of what your experience is with Giving Tuesday. So maybe you don't know really what it is. Maybe you have no experience. You can click multiple things on this option list as well. Maybe you have personally donated to campaigns in the past or contributed or shared information about it. Maybe you are planning to run a Giving Tuesday campaign this year, or maybe you have done it in the past and presumably you would be doing it again this year as well. And if there is something that is not listed as an option that you would like to have listed, go ahead and comment in the chat. We have about 340 some people on the line with us right now. So we have a big crowd today so I'm going to give just a few more seconds so everyone has an opportunity to participate. I'm going to show the results here. So it looks like around 46% have said that they plan to run a Giving Tuesday campaign. And around 40%, 42%, and either don't know what it is, actually it's more like 52%, have no experience with it or they are not sure what it is. So this is really helpful for us and for our presenters to get the context of where everyone's level of experience is with this campaign. And it looks like a few people have donated to campaigns in the past and some have run campaigns in the past. So for those of you who have run your own campaigns in the past, you are also welcome to share your experiences in the chat and we'll do our best to chat those back out so the rest of the audience can see. One other question. So do you have a year-end fundraising plan in place already? It's a simple yes or no. And while you are responding to that one, I'm going to read out a couple of the chat comments that have come into us. Sorry that we can't let everybody see them. Our tool does not actually let us. Ann says that they are still deciding whether they want to participate in a campaign. Lots of people are saying that they are interested in learning more. Kellyan says our organization has never participated in Giving Tuesday, but since my start here this July I'd like to learn more and try to implement one. That's great, dive right in. And Galen says I'm aware what it is. I think it's important, but I'm not quite sure how to run a Giving Tuesday campaign. Well hopefully today's event will give us some helpful tips on how to get started. So I'm going to go ahead and skip to the results on this question. And so around half of you, a little more than half, have a fundraising plan in place already, and just slightly less than half don't. So have a real split down the middle here with our audience of who's already got plans in place and who doesn't. So with that I'd like to go ahead and move us to our presenters for the day who are going to share their expertise not only around Giving Tuesday but how to really plan for this most generous time of the year when we know that organizations raise the bulk of their donations in the last quarter of the calendar year. So I would love to invite to the program Melissa Cronin, the Director of Special Initiatives at the 92Y. And she's going to talk to us about Giving Tuesday and how you can use it. Welcome to the program Melissa. We're glad to have you. Thanks so much Becky. It's a pleasure to be here. And it's a great time to be able to share about Giving Tuesday as this week just marked the 90 day countdown to Giving Tuesday. So Giving Tuesday basically celebrates giving. People are encouraged to be generous in whatever ways matter to them from volunteering with the local charity to donating to a favorite cause. Giving Tuesday is not a new giving platform but rather a call to action that celebrates giving and encourages more, better, and smarter giving during the holiday season and throughout the year. It's an organizing principle that encourages the creativity and the energy of people all over the world to work together for good. Becky mentioned that last year was Year 2 of Giving Tuesday moving into Year 3. And in 2013 we had over 10,000 non-profits volunteer organizations, corporations, and foundations come together in over 40 countries with just one common purpose. To help others and to incentivize ways to give more, give smarter, and to kick off the holiday giving season. So in this presentation I will share with you a little bit about the history of the movement, some examples of innovation in the non-profit community, some trends we are seeing, and how you can get involved with Giving Tuesday. The success of Giving Tuesday depends totally on the collective efforts of our partners and their participation. Really you are the most important part of making this movement a reality. You can create your own initiative and help build the movement in your communities. We will provide you with all of the resources you may need in order to help make this season the biggest season of giving yet. The idea of Giving Tuesday was simple. In the U.S. we have Black Friday, a massive day of in-store shopping deals that's followed by Cyber Monday which is the online version. On both of these days the retail sector across the board sees a huge lift and we thought wouldn't it be great to have a day that celebrates giving and the entire non-profit sector would see a lift across the board, Giving Tuesday. So I wanted to share with you some of the highlights from Giving Tuesday. We've seen a 270% increase in online giving, the Tuesday after Thanksgiving since 2011, and a 40% increase in the dollar value of average donations. I saw that somebody was joining us from Tanzania and I'm sure other places around the world. In 2013, partners like TechSoup Global, the United Nations Development Program and others helped us bring Giving Tuesday global and engage countries all over the world, highlighting that Giving Tuesday isn't just about the funding but that there are lots of ways to give back and celebrate local heroes. In 2013 over 40 countries joined Giving Tuesday from Zimbabwe where these students were celebrating Giving Tuesday with some volunteers at their school to Buenos Aires where a local group taught CPR to passersby in the main city square. Some countries even have their own Giving Tuesday movements like Giving Tuesday Canada and Giving Tuesday Australia. To find out more about how you can participate in these local movements you can visit givingtuesday.org where we have links to all of the Giving Tuesday websites around the world as well as information on how you or your organization can get involved if there is not an official Giving Tuesday movement in your country. So we saw a lot of innovation from our partners here in the U.S. as well. And our partners range from small grassroots organizations, big NGOs, local businesses and corporations working in partnership with a cause that they care about. It could be a Girl Scout Troop, a student group and more. So I wanted to share with you some of the great examples of Giving Tuesday campaigns from the non-profit community. We saw some great matched Giving campaigns like this matched challenge from Case Foundation in 6 degrees. Panthera gave an opportunity for donors to double their donations on Giving Tuesday. Phoenix House had a campaign that asked people around the country to write letters of encouragement to people in recovery. The Michael J. Fox Foundation used the hashtag Unselfie for their community to share stories and raise awareness about Parkinson's. And I'll talk a little bit more about the Unselfie in just a bit. The United Methodist Church engaged their stakeholders around the world and were able to raise $6.5 million on Giving Tuesday last year. Dress for Success had Giving Tuesday to help local women get back to work. But it's not just the bigger organizations that are joining Giving Tuesday. Organizations of all sizes are seeing success with Giving Tuesday. For example, the Arts Commission of Toledo, Ohio had a goal of raising $3,000 for their Young Artist Outwork program. And an arts-based organization in New Jersey had a goal of raising funds for two scholarships for after-school arts-based education. The trends that we are seeing are cities, towns, and counties joining together for Giving Tuesday with non-profits, local business, and government officials collaborating to shine lights on local causes. This is an example of Giving Tuesday Bucks County, Pennsylvania. The City of Baltimore joined together for the Be More Gives More campaign and had a goal of raising $5 million for local causes on Giving Tuesday and a goal of making Baltimore the most generous city in America. Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake led her support to the campaign and they were able to not only meet but surpass their goal. One of the key things that helps to amplify Giving Tuesday's message is the participation of those with large and national and global followings. And no one has more of a following than the White House. In year one, the White House endorsed Giving Tuesday on the day. And in 2013, we saw a deeper engagement with the White House like in this blog posting. This support was really key to getting the word out. Bill and Melinda Gates are another example. In year one, Bill Gates tweeted his support of the movement but deepened his and Melinda's engagement in the second year by choosing four non-profits they were passionate about to support during Giving Tuesday. Giving Tuesday is also a great way to engage your celebrity ambassadors. This is a list that we kept here at Giving Tuesday Central last year on the day itself of all of the different celebrities that use Giving Tuesday as a call of action to their fans to raise awareness about the causes that they care about. There was a wide range from Ellen DeGeneres to Eminem to Hugh Jackman. But one of the great things about Giving Tuesday is you don't have to be a millionaire or a celebrity to take part and change the world. Everyone has a way that they can give back. Another great way non-profits engaged their communities was through the hashtag un-selfie. We all know what a selfie is. Selfie was even the word of the year in 2013. And the un-selfie was a great way for people to show how they give back to their favorite causes. People posted photos of themselves doing good or posted pledges of how they would give back in the upcoming year using hashtag un-selfie. So how can you get involved in Giving Tuesday? We try to make it as easy as possible. It's free to participate and we encourage all of our partners to get creative and make it their own. There's a wide range of educational resources including toolkits and tips from cross-sector experts available at our website GivingTuesday.org. These are all there to help get you started. You can also follow us on Twitter at atgivingtuesday where we have all of the latest information about the movement as well as highlights from our partner campaign. It's really the perfect time to start planning your Giving Tuesday initiative as this week marks 90 days to Giving Tuesday. We can't wait to see what you come up with for Giving Tuesday. Save the date. Giving Tuesday is on December 2nd. Thanks so much and back to you Becky. Thanks Melissa. We had a few questions come in that I'd like to raise a couple of them up to you now and then later on in the program we'll have time for more Q&A. So Terry asks, does Giving Tuesday add to or take away from year-end campaigns? Do you find that people that do it in addition to their traditional year-end campaign that they actually earn more, or do you not see that there's much difference? We've seen people have so much success with Building Giving Tuesday into a comprehensive year-end campaign so using it as a kickoff or a launch to this holiday giving season. For example, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in here in New York had a matching grant that they secured and they promoted this match on Giving Tuesday and then used it, used the momentum that they received on December 3rd to get out the give throughout the end of 2013. So we've seen a lot of success with nonprofits who use Giving Tuesday as kind of incorporating it into the year-end campaigns. Great. I'm getting a bit of feedback on your line so I don't know if you can move back from the speaker a little bit. That might help. We also have a question from Katie asking, I'm interested to hear what the average Giving Tuesday donation is and the average cumulative amount that's raised from Giving Tuesday campaigns. I don't know if that's information that you have necessarily since organizations can participate without giving you any of that info after. What do you think is the average? Do you have any details on that? So it is hard to measure the total amount because all of the different nonprofits and partners who are participating in Giving Tuesday have various ways of collecting the funding. They could be online donations. It could be cash donations or checks. So some of our partners are able to report back to us and let us know how they did. We also are able to get some information from our partners like, for example, BlackBod in 2013 saw a 90% increase in online giving when they compared to Giving Tuesday 2012 which was actually increased 53% from 2011, so from the start of Giving Tuesday. PayPal saw an increase of 123%. Network for Good measured 16% increase. So we are able to see that there is an increase during that timeframe around Giving Tuesday. Also from BlackBod, the size of the donations was increased by 40%. I think it was $141 with the average donation last year. Wow. So trying to get a big blitz of activity on the one day does seem to be at least your resources seems to really help not only grow the amount of donations but the size of them too. So that's great to know. And it looks like I love the examples that you shared from smaller organizations too where they can try to get their audience to donate on that day because it does kind of give that sense of urgency of today is the day to do it. Let's all do it together and make our impact that much more. And those examples of how people partnered to do matching donation programs or got local leadership whether it's a mayor or city council member to help promote it for that day as well. I think those are great strategies to try and employ particularly for the smaller organizations who may not have access to huge lists already and may not have access to celebrities to do it for them or the White House to talk about it. We had a couple of other questions. So maybe I'll take one more and then hold the others for Q&A later so we have more to talk about then before we move on to Wendy. So Brie asks, how would a volunteer campaign or utilize Giving Tuesday when the organization as a whole does not? So they are a volunteer-led campaign and they haven't really had much support from the organization as far as social media or matching gifts or events so far. So they don't have a lot of buy-in across the organization. But if you are volunteering and you really want to help support it, how can you do that as an individual? Do you have any tips for that? Yeah, I think that a great way is to be a social media ambassador and talk about the cause that you care about. You can encourage people to use like an unselfie or you can help build awareness about the cause or the organization that you are with. We have a social media ambassador toolkit on our website and it gives you lots of different sample tweets and sample language that you can use to help use Giving Tuesday to spread the word about your cause. I'm not sure if that answered the question. Yeah, I think that's a good start. And we have a bunch of other questions that have come in as well. But first I'd like to go ahead and have our next speaker share her experience and her expertise in this area because it may answer some of the questions coming in. And again, we'll have time again later to have more thorough Q&A in the program. So I'd love to invite to the line Wendy Harmon from the American Red Cross who really is an expert among experts when it comes to leveraging social channels for change and for fundraising. So thank you for joining us on the program Wendy. We're so glad to have you. Thank you so much Becky. And I'll try to be quick and share as many of the examples out of our sort of case study and our trial and the error that we've been through over the last few years here so that we can get to your questions quickly. I see them flying through the chat window. They're all really great questions. So to start I think the Red Cross itself never had a year-end campaign until 2009. That was the first year that we really tried to launch something. And for the first try what we did was our idea was to create a holiday campaign. So we don't call it year-end. We call it our holiday campaign. And in the first year it was basically a holiday catalog we created that had lots of items that we wanted to raise money for with dollar handles attached to them. So a donation of $25 could give a certain number of hot meals or a certain number of people a shelter for the night. You get the gist. So we found a considerable amount of success in that first year in 2009 and decided to grow from there into a more comprehensive all-channel year-end holiday campaign and began in earnest in probably January of 2010 to start planning for that year's campaign. And so we actually have the outgoing channels of the American Red Cross are sort of situated in different departments. And so actually this is one of the first times back in 2010 when we were able to really begin to come together around this project and tear down some of those institutional silo walls that we're keeping our strategies separate. So it might not be a huge hurdle for those smaller organizations, but if it is, I'll say that organizing around a single campaign for the whole organization is something that can really help to bring people together. So at any rate we grew the campaign and ended up with lots of creative. We had an advertising campaign attached to it and now it's a very big deal here. So when Giving Tuesday came along in 2012 it honestly was an enormous boon for those of us on the social engagement team because we had really struggled to make that traditional holiday campaign resonate on the social web. So Giving Tuesday actually gave us a boost and a reason to really talk about giving and to have some fun. And so in 2012 the first year we really treated it as a chance to say thank you to all of our donors. So rather than have us beg all day long what we did was try to get as many people as we could to talk about Giving Tuesday and giving and to be very active in sort of encouraging and thanking those people who were doing it. So last year after that first benchmark year we were really actually, we saw results in that first year and so it actually helped us to have a seat at that table where we're beginning to be able to bake social into the campaign from the beginning rather than just being asked to tweet about it after it was totally created already. So the holiday campaign itself is what our marketing team calls a surround sound campaign. So you'll see up at the top there we have the holiday giving catalog which is something that is now a digital project as well as a tangible product although the digital part is probably more powerful at this point than the tangible product is. And it has a series of things you can order and gifts you can give on behalf of your friends and family that will help us make an impact in the communities around the United States. We have developed TV, print and radio around the campaign so we have had a theme over the last several years that is give something that means something. And then we build out campaign materials around that theme for the last several years. We definitely have drive to site search efforts that are coordinated throughout the year so that when we go live and launch we're really making sure that we're showing up in all the right places and the Red Cross is the place that you land to give your donation. Email campaign is probably the most important. That email is still very, very key in fundraising and especially with social because the connection between those two and the click-throughs you can get from email to social and from social back to the site are key in driving results. Mobile we've worked with our mobile and SMS team and text to donate so that on Giving Tuesday actually in 2013 we've sent out text to encourage people to participate and to give a donation and a text to donation. And then we have social which I'll talk a whole bunch more about. We also have what we call brand central here internally. We're an incredibly large organization so we have 26,000 employees I think and several hundred thousand volunteers. And so to keep everybody sort of using the same brand materials we created what we call brand central where everyone who's associated with the organization can access brand central and get localizable materials to create and print for their own communities. So for the social part of the campaign what we did was in 2013 anyway, we decided we wanted to continue that attitude of gratefulness by thanking individuals and corporate donors by social media and we wanted to actually increase the internal participation in the holiday campaign of Red Cross. So we developed a pretty robust set of training and discussions around giving all Red Cross a chance to be part of donor relations and to participate in Giving Tuesday and in the holiday campaign in general. So it became a really fun day for us internally as well. So a couple of the planned tactics. So this does take quite a bit of early planning. We've been, I'm no longer a part of it, but we've been in meeting then in planning sessions for the entire year not just for Giving Tuesday but for the whole year-end campaign. So last year we had an intra-net system what we call the exchange and so we actually created a schedule of holiday catalog gifts that we were going to push during specific time periods on Giving Tuesday. And we connected with our corporate donor around each of those. So we had a sponsor for the military comfort kits from 10 to 12 and they would match all the gifts that were coming in on all the donations to the catalog that were coming in on Giving Tuesday during that time period. So you get the gist there. That way we were just, we were very organized about when we would be pushing particular things so that we could all be doing it together all 28,000 employees of the Red Cross could be talking about the same thing at the same time. We also made sure to give clear action items to all the Red Cross staff and volunteers. We asked them to follow the Red Cross on Twitter and Facebook and at those specific launch times to help share and promote the special item for that timeframe. We asked them to prepare by gathering stories on how their chapter or their region or the field office had used each of those items and what the impact that they'd made in their communities and then to sort of come up with images of those items and really tell the story of them so that we were inspiring people to give on Giving Tuesday to make those impacts in the next year. So you can see we created, you guys will all get a copy of this so you can see we created sort of tips for exactly how to engage here. Then we also had people, it was the same for our corporate relationship managers. So we actually tasked all of our fundraisers with reaching out to all of the corporate partners that we have to encourage them to participate in the day and let them know what we'd be doing and how they could help. The same for our celebrity engagement. We have a celebrity cabinet here and so we sent notices and a how-to to all of our celebrity cabinet well before Giving Tuesday and sort of held their hands as we were leading up to the day to sort of show them exactly how they could get involved in what to do. And the same with consumer marketing. So Giving Tuesday messages were sent to the whole email list on Cyber Monday and on Giving Tuesday which is what really drove the majority. I think I'm going to give you some results in a little while but about 90% of the results are those emails pushing people to use the social web and to give those donations. So one of the more fun iterations we made last year was in that spirit of thanking our donors and getting people to talk about Giving Tuesday more, we actually worked with our Creative Resources team and said for every time we see someone using the Giving Tuesday hashtag and talking about the Red Cross, let's send them a thank you. And we were like, well, how can we do that in an interesting and fun way? So we actually had the Creative Resources team come up with all of these thank you images that we made available to everyone who works at our volunteers for the Red Cross on our intranet. So they could take any of these that made them laugh or smile and share them out with anybody they saw talking about Giving Tuesday or anyone they wanted to thank at all. So this tactic actually worked in spades in that it made a lot more people than would normally be engaged internally with helping with the campaign to really want to hop on board. And it also really elevated the awareness and visibility of our participation in Giving Tuesday. And it's just funny and fun and nothing wrong with that. And for us a really great mesh of our Creative Resources team and marketing and the social engagement team and communications because they're in two different departments, we don't usually get to work together that closely. So that was just another inside benefit. We also have, as I said, celebrity engagement. So we got 35 celebrities to participate on behalf of the Red Cross in Giving Tuesday. And we prepared a bit for this to teach them how to search for people who were using the hashtag Giving Tuesday and talking about donating to the Red Cross. So we had them all queued up and we would find some of them for them and push those tweets to the celebrities. And then they could write a note and take a picture and say thank you or just send a tweet. And you can see that they had a lot of fun with this idea of gratefulness and drumming up the awareness of Giving Tuesday by really putting some of that one-on-one attention on the people who were really participating. So this resulted in actually several surprise giveaways for fans of these particular celebrities. And we were able to garner 50 million impressions just by the celebrity engagement aspect of Giving Tuesday. So for corporate engagement is a little bit of a different story. So we have corporate sponsors and the University of Phoenix is one of our holiday campaign sponsors. And so we had really connected with them all along the way to participate in Giving Tuesday as well. The rest of our holiday sponsors I think did not have a presence on Twitter or Facebook. So that was a pretty big hole. Again, one of those things you have to sort of look at how do we really begin to target our corporate partners and help them along the way if they are not there yet or find the corporate partners that are very dynamic on the social web and are willing to take a few risks and really find that sweet spot between being mutually beneficial for them, for the organization, and for the community. But we had University of Phoenix there. And then Burlington Coat Factory was an enormous surprise. There is a room for improvement here. Usually if a company is announcing a $200,000 gift it has been months and months of work and relationship building. And in this particular case they just did it and announced it on Twitter and we had no idea it was there. So that can always happen. And it made us feel good that we had done a good job with Giving Tuesday to inspire this gift. But in the future I think companies are generally not that risky on social. And it was a little bit hard for us to sort of get them involved until they saw all the buzz on that day. And then they did want to get involved and we were like, well we were trying to get you to do this before. But at any rate after the fact wrote up a blog post to thank all of our corporate donors after Giving Tuesday so they got that attention as well for those that weren't on the social web. So what you really want to know I think is some of this information. So we actually do have a benchmark now because we participated in 2012 and in 2013. So the number of catalog items which is what we really are pushing back to on Giving Tuesday more than doubled in 2013 over the 2012 numbers. So that additional lift I think of the popularity in Giving Tuesday in general and in our surround sound efforts to make sure all of our stakeholders and donors understood that it was happening helped us with those numbers. The visual gifts that I showed you, the thank you gifts were, gave everybody internally a chance to get involved and they dramatically raised the visibility of the Red Cross in the Giving Tuesday conversation. I'll share a bit more of those social numbers with you after in the next slide. The vast majority of the catalog donations came from the Giving Tuesday email that was launched. So that cross channel marketing is critical to finding some success and traction on the social web. So about 10% of the catalog products on Giving Tuesday that were sold were results of the social engagement efforts on that actual day. We were able to generate 130 earned media hits across the country for Giving Tuesday which I think we're big in every community in the country and so getting that attention of the local news station is something that I think every all of you can do if you're participating in Giving Tuesday and they have a big appetite for that kind of peace around the holiday times. So you'll see a number of stats here. We actually captured, we have a pre-sophisticated social media software system and command center and so we actually captured some holistic numbers for Giving Tuesday which is that we found about 364 public mentions during that period of time on Giving Tuesday last year. The vast majority of the activity happened on Twitter, 94%. So that's where you want to concentrate your efforts. There were about 5,000 of those were mentions of the Red Cross, so pretty small overall percentage, right? You all get the slides so you can see all these stats but importantly I think in comparing year over year or day over day really because we want for this to be a sustained holiday giving period of time for a month or even two months you can see that Giving Tuesday was actually a huge lift for us on social and in the donations that resulted. So we had a 79% increase over the daily mentions of the last several days, 100% increase over the average number of clicks to Red Cross.org and RedCrossBlood.org and a really positive sentiment there. So this is what it looked like when we sent a thanks to some of the donors and I just wanted to say thank you to all of you guys and I want to make sure that we have lots of time to get to all of your questions. So please let's do that. Let's have a conversation. Thank you for that Wendy. We will get to that conversation. One thing I wanted to raise quickly because we've had a few people ask if you're a smaller nonprofit and you're just starting out and you don't actually have tools for online fundraising or you don't have a catalog of products that people can purchase to support your cause. I just wanted to highlight quickly some fundraising tools that are available to you and of course the first link is just to take you to Giving Tuesday and all of their resources. They have images and logos and web banners and things like that that you can download for free and use to help promote your cause using some of the collateral materials that they've created. They also have great toolkits and things like that that can give you advice on how to roll it out, how to do it, how often to email people, things like that and lots of little video clips and great resources there. I also just want to point you to the fundraising page on TechSoup where we have collected a variety of articles and resources and blog posts as well as tools that can help you actually set up platforms if you don't have those existing already. So quickly to highlight a couple before we get into questions, Causebox is an online fundraising and crowdfunding platform that's available for donation through TechSoup. Teespring is a crowdfunding custom-based apparel tool that's donated through TechSoup where you can have your custom t-shirts for your cause or your organization created and fulfilled without you having to ever touch them or ship them or do anything to them, and you only pay for what is actually purchased. Shopify is an online e-commerce and storefront program available for donation to nonprofits and that allows you to set up a storefront if you want to have coffee mugs to tell people to donate by buying a coffee mug for your cause or what have you. That's a great way to have a presence without necessarily needing to build one yourself if you don't have that capacity in your organization. Connect to Give for folks who are interested in doing those mobile campaigns like what Wendy mentioned around SMS campaigns and text messaging Connect to Give can help you set that up and that's available in the catalog as well. And then the last three on this list are different payment processing or donation processing services that are available either donated or with discounted rates for processing either online donations or mobile payment. Pay Anywhere is a little thing that attaches to your phone. So if you do fundraising events in person that might be something useful to check out so that you can swipe a card on-site and collect those donations at your events or on location if you provide direct services in your organization's offices. And then Dharma Merchant Services and Sage Payment Processing. Again, those are both credit card processing services that offer discounted fees for nonprofits and for this community. So those are just a few options that are many, many, many others out there. These are ones I just wanted to highlight quickly because they are in the TechSoup catalog and I can easily point you to them. Now on to the fun of Q&A. We have a lot of great questions coming in. So since I mentioned SMS, we had a question from Trevor asking, how often do you message your list during the year and what kind of response rates do you typically see? And he's asking specifically around SMS or text messaging. Do you get much response around text messaging or how successful do you see that as being part of your overall campaign? So it's a great question. I'm probably not going to have quite as much data about it as Trevor would like, but we have the ability I believe the last I checked to do an outbound text message to the people who have opted in four times per month. I think we very rarely do that. If we have a large disaster or a big event happening, we will use those for outgoing messages, but for this particular campaign we figured that Giving Tuesday was one of the key high impact days where we could do an outbound message and encourage text donations. I don't have the numbers in front of me. We don't have any direct way to correlate exactly how well those outbound messages do because we're not tracking the phone numbers that send a donation back in. So we can see that we had a bump in text giving on that day which could be a result of social media promotion to text, email promotion to text, or that outbound text message. So as we all know, SMS and mobile fundraising is an imperfect science when it comes to donor data and that sort of stuff. Does that help? Yeah, I think that's great. And I think we do know from research that's out there that particularly if you're working with establishing relationships and donor partnerships with younger audiences that text messaging is something they're much more likely to respond to than maybe if you're working with an older population. But things like that should also play a part in your decision about which of these different technology methods to employ in your campaigns. So if you aren't really, if you're focused on an audience of donors that's 70 years old and up, that might not be the best channel. It might be okay, but it might not do as well as if you are working with a youth population, for example. So we had another question for you, Wendy, really quickly. Can you give an example of what your drive to site search means? Can you explain that a little bit more for participant Elizabeth? I can sure try, Elizabeth. I think we have a small team here who concentrates on search. And so all it means is that we bid through Google to have words associated with Giving Tuesday and with the Red Cross. And we do that for the entire year-end holiday campaign, have a strategy around how we show up on those search results to drive people to the catalog or to a donate page. You'd need to get our search experts in here to tell you exactly how they do that and what the strategy is. But that's generally what I know. That's helpful. It gives us an idea at least. So here's a question for Melissa. We have a lot of different people asking, how far in advance do you start talking about Giving Tuesday with your community? And I know Wendy already mentioned that when they talk about planning their holiday giving campaign, they're working on it kind of year-round. But how far in advance do you actually talk about it with your audience? Do you start putting it out there and saving the date, so to speak? So last year, oh, sorry, do you want to go, Melissa? No, please go ahead. We actually started that planning process internally and sort of teeing up with Red Crossers probably in early November and with our celebrities and with our corporate partners, like trying to get everybody teed up to participate on that day well in advance. But then for the general public, we didn't do a huge advance like we're participating in this campaign nationally. If some of our local chapters were sort of making those connections with their communities early, that's one thing. But the email push is really what launched it on Cyber Monday to get people teed up to give on Tuesday. Great. Melissa, do you have any advice on how far in advance people should start? I think that it depends on the campaign that people are running. I definitely recommend planning early in advance. And then depending on what campaign you're running, you can decide when to reach out to publicly. We do have some partners that kind of use Giving Tuesday much earlier year-round where every Tuesday they'll highlight a different special something about their organization or volunteer activity that they're taking part in and kind of use Tuesdays as a day to do that or once a month talk about something with their organization on a Tuesday just to kind of keep Giving Tuesday a live year-round. But I think that in the lead-up to Giving Tuesday, a lot of our partners will start in November and many will go past like past Giving Tuesday and use it as more of a comprehensive year-end campaign as well. That's great. So really you've got some time to plan if you're just starting out now, and you've got time before you need to start talking about it with your audience. We had quite a few people asking questions saying we're from a really small organization or we're in a really small town and we're a small organization. How do you go about getting those celebrities? How big can this actually be for us, the little organization with an all-volunteer staff or very small staff? And so do you have any tips for those really small organizations who may not have the name recognition and clout of a Red Cross, for example, and can't get Josh to ML so necessarily post pictures on your behalf? So this is Wendy. I can say that I don't have the at least recent experience of being in that position, so it's a little bit tricky for me to say with a lot of authority how to go about doing this. But one of the things I would say is that any of these tactics can be broken down into actually free tools and tactics and strategies to take advantage of. And so even if it's not a Josh to ML, maybe it's the mayor of your really tiny town or the business owner or the most popular high school kid that you sort of team up with and get together. And I did see somebody ask about should we get together with other organizations in our community, or will we compete too much? And I'm sort of Pollyanna about that, but I think a rising tide lifts all boats. So I think we've seen by the very existence of Giving Tuesday and its success, we've seen that that's true. And when you get more people in a community talking about Giving on a particular day and working together to do that, then I think everybody sees a good benefit. So it's really about, it doesn't have to be a Josh to ML or some very famous person or even a huge multinational corporation that you're working with. It's just really those relationships that are important to you and making sure that you're collaborating and working together whether it's just on Twitter or just in a simple email program. I think it doesn't matter. All of these tactics are applicable all over the place. I think that's great and sage advice. And I responded to somebody in chat saying, you know, you can also look to local newscasters who are local celebrities in addition to city council members or mayors. And if you had somebody who's a celebrity that grew up in your town that maybe is a big star now or a politician or something like that, they might still have a real tie to that community. So it's worth barking up those trees too. We are just a couple minutes from ending so I want to go ahead and wrap it up. I'm sorry we didn't get to everyone's questions, but I hope you've gotten some great resources out of this webinar. And please definitely go to the Giving Tuesday website for more and also to the Fundraising sections to help you plan your year-end fundraising and your campaign for this year that we hope will be successful to support your organization. I'd just like to also invite you to join us for upcoming webinars and events. Today we're actually holding a 24-hour global tweet chat that started in the wee hours yesterday in New Zealand and is traveling around the world talking about how to tell compelling stories and what makes a great story and the tools for doing it. So if you are on Twitter and would like to join us, go ahead and use that hashtag StoryMakers2014 to join that conversation today. Next week we have an event with Black Girls Code and YouTube where we'll be talking with them about how to optimize your stories and your digital media that's maybe out there on YouTube to get it seen, how to make sure that it gets noticed and comes above the sound, all the noise that's out there already. On the 17th we'll be talking about how to tell your library stories. So if you're joining us from a library that webinar might be of interest to you. And then on the 18th for those folks who are in small towns or in rural America, we'll have a two-hour webinar with GrantStation, CEO who is a fundraising and grant-seeking expert talking about how to find funding and support for your community. And lastly on September 25th is your website holding your org hostage, how to set your site free. So we'll have tips about how to get a better and nicer website. Thank you so much Wendy and Melissa for taking the time to join us today and share a little bit of your expertise on this topic. I'd also like to thank Ali for helping manage the chat and the backend. And lastly, thank you to our webinar sponsor ReadyTalk for making the use of this platform available to us so we can provide webinars like this on a weekly basis. We are using their ReadyTalk 500 which is also available in the donation catalog. So feel free to check there if you're looking for a tool like this. Thank you all so much and have a terrific day. Bye-bye.