 Hey, everyone. Welcome to the People vs. Oil and Gas Logistics and Fundraising webcast. My name is Robbie. I work with a group called Stop the Frack Attack. We're one of the members of the host committee for the summit. I am here filling in for Normir, who also works with me, and Madonna Sitting Bear. Madonna, unfortunately, is stuck on an airplane somewhere above the United States. She's unable to join, and Norm is on another call still. And then Liz had a family issue pop up, so she's unable to join. But I do have Drew. Drew, you want to introduce yourself. Hey, everybody. I'm Drew Hudson. I work with Beyond Extreme Energy and a bunch of other groups who are on the host committee as well, and I'm part of the digital team. And I'll be talking about fundraising in just a minute. Great. So I'm just going to kick this off with a very simple sort of run through of the logistics. Everyone who had requested a hotel and was approved for scholarship for that hotel should have received a confirmation email for myself last week. If you did not receive that email, please email me immediately at robbyrobby at dcactionactyonlab.com. I'm going to pull up the email right now to read through just some stuff. In that email, you would have found your information about which hotel you're staying at, what confirmation of your check in, check out dates, and if you had a shared room, if who your roommate would be. Email also included a whole bunch of other information that I'm going to run through really quickly as soon as I find one. Sorry, I thought I had one of these open. Great. Great. So some of the other information that was in that email was the Uber code information and the shuttle bus information. If you are coming in on Thursday, it is a 99% chance that we had to put you up at the Hyatt Regency Pittsburgh International Airport. We unfortunately oversold the Omni fairly quickly. The response of the conference was Immaculate and it's still going Immaculate. But there's this football team called the Steelers that's based here in Pittsburgh and they are playing and they have decided to take all the hotel rooms with them. So we had to use this backup hotel. The Omni, I mean the Hyatt is literally attached to the airport. I was there earlier today. I'm actually in Pittsburgh right now staying at a lovely quality and it is fairly easy to get to in that email. It has the directions, but essentially if you come up from the baggage claim and you walk street, like you're walking through the airport to the parking lot, you will hit the Omni, hit the Hyatt and we'll have a rep, Nora will be there starting at four o'clock checking folks in at the hotel, making sure everyone's logistics needs are met, giving you your registration packet, your name tag and all that stuff. And then the next morning at 8 a.m. sharp, there will be a bus leaving from the Hyatt to the Omni to bring you to breakfast at the Omni and the kickoff of the conference. Some other things is that you are not coming in on Thursday, you're coming in on Friday and you are a scholarship recipient. I had a hand email every once, so I sort of had a very, that's the email kind of went to everyone and there's a mix sometimes of scholarship folks, non-scholarship folks for your rooming assignment. You'd see that there is the Uber code. The Uber code I also attached to how to instruction manual of how to use the Uber code. What this does is it allows you to call an Uber at the airport and have it drop you off at the Omni and instead of you having to pay for anything, it automatically gets billed to the conference. This is just a much simpler way and much more affordable way of doing airport shuttle, which is part of people's scholarships. So I think I'm going to stop there because there's probably a whole bunch more logistical stuff and I'm sort of just going through it really quickly and I want to just make sure that there aren't any questions in particular right there. And how folks can ask questions by just tapping into the chat box, correct? Yes, so they can do chat. In fact, let's try to keep everything in chat rather than putting it in two different places. Let's put everything in chat and I don't see anything there yet except for just sort of general banter and a note to everybody that we are recording this for review if that's helpful or people who missed it and we'll send everybody the link. Well, so just sort of progressing through the timeline. Well, we will have breakfast at the Omni for folks. The official star and kickoff for the conference is not until 1230 at the Omni. We'll have a welcome from the local Pittsburgh community and then welcome from some of the main groups on the host committee and then we'll hop right into a full blooded agenda of lots of panels and trainings and discussions. The full agenda has been recently posted on the website and I believe Drew, correct me if I'm wrong, he was also emailed out recently in the last email announcing this webinar. Yeah, the email folks would have gotten yesterday sort of your last minute reminder included a lot of these same logistical updates and had a link to the spot on the website. But if you want to check out the website was just updated in the last day or so with all the new stuff and the URL is still people versus oilgas.org. All one word and I'll put that in the chat as well and you can check out that and it's got updated agendas and lots of other logistical things. Great. Yep, and then so the conference officially ends on Sunday at 2 30. Our final keynote is going to be a conversation that I'm going to facilitate between Angel Logan who works on environmental justice, environmental racism and California, and Naila Cabo who's a Latinx youth who lives with urban drilling, oil drilling in her community in Central LA, and Elise Alclon who is a lawyer based out of West Virginia. After that we do have these two field trips which you can sign up for online. There is a trip out to the Lumney exhibit that happens to be in Pittsburgh at the same time and there's also a trip with Earthworks and Frack Tracker to go and look at some of the direct impacts in the surrounding Pittsburgh area. And then on Monday, attached but not actually attached to the conference is an action that the local Rising Tide chapter is pulling together. We're going to go to South Point which is a commercial park about 45 minutes outside of Pittsburgh. We'll have busing transportation to the action. And it's essentially every evil corporation that is coming into our communities. We're going to go into their communities and let them know that we're not, they're not welcome there anymore. So console energy is there, range resources is there, Halliburton is there, Mark West energy is there, Rice energy is there, EQ2 energy is there. It sort of just happens to be this commercial park with all of the evil players who are destroying our earth, destroying our water, destroying our access to clean air. It's going to be really exciting. I'm a big protest person. It's what we do for a living and it's fun to get to do it with folks all around the country and from Canada. We have a large section of folks coming down from Canada. After the action, we will be busing folks directly to the airport. So don't worry again about your ground transportation. We'll take folks to your airport. If we booked your flight, we made sure that there was plenty of time. We have most of the folks are leaving after four o'clock. This enabled us, you should be at the airport by one o'clock. So that gives you at least three hours at the airport to get there and lots of leeway time in case we get stuck in traffic. So that's sort of a quick run down, quick maybe gritty of the logistics. If folks have any questions, again, you can just send them into the chat box. I would love to answer them. And then I haven't used Zoom webinars before. Put your mouse over the screen and a little thing will pop up at the bottom and there's a chat link there. So we've seen a couple people test it out, but haven't had any questions yet. Ask away. Who do we coordinate with for our specific panels? Great. So you should email the person who's probably calling right now. Liz Butler is in charge of the program and the agenda. I'm more of the logistics person. I will put Arley and I will put her email in the chat box, Liz Butler DC at gmail.com. You should have received an email already at this point connecting you to your other panelists. But Liz, if you email Liz, she'll be able to make sure that connection is made. For sure. Are there any other questions? You're welcome. Great. All right. So if there are any other questions, I'm going to probably kick it over to Drew. I'm going to put my contact information in the chat box here. Robbie at DCActionLab.com. 631-241-5966. Email is much better. I'm super good on my email. I'm actually really bad at picking up the phone. It's a thing. So feel free to reach out if you have any questions about your rooming assignment, hotel confirmation, questions about your scholarship. We had some folks call us today about their flights. If there's a problem with your flight, we can try to figure out how to change it, make it better, with an understanding that prices and money and all that stuff does play a hand in that. But don't feel free or do feel free to reach out and give us a call. We're here to help and make sure this conference is a pretty successful and awesome thing. Just so folks know, I'm pretty sure, and I hate saying this because there's always someone who's like, actually, there is a bigger one. But as of right now, this is probably going to be the biggest conference and gathering a frontline and grassroots organizers on oil and gas issues. Definitely at least for the Trump era. And I would say probably ever. We're up to about 325 people, which is really spectacular. So cool. I'm going to throw it over to Drew. I'm going to pass it over to Drew, and I'm going to listen to his fundraising training. Again, we're offering this fundraising training as part of the scholarship that a lot of folks received. We were able to have 126 full right scholarships, which was awesome. And we want to make sure that the folks who are getting the scholarships are learning some skills on how to do the fundraising. And Drew, you can kick it off. Great. So I am going to be that guy and do a little slide deck thing here. But we will also have, we'll see that. Okay. Great. We'll also have some questions. So don't be afraid that it will be all me talking. And also because I'm me, I have brought cute internet kittens because that's what I do. So let me start off. I said in my introduction before that I am part of the people versus oil and gas digital crew. We get our own training, at least a few of us. Several folks from the digital team are on various panels and things. You'll see us around usually taking your picture and tweeting about it and things like that. But we also have a panel on Saturday that I'm going to plug. If you want to come learn more about digital organizing and social media, come by our session. It's me and Emily from 350, Vanessa from stand. It's going to be awesome. And it'll kind of pick up some of the themes we'll talk about tonight. But with a little bit more general focus, this one is all about fundraising in particular. We'll talk more generally about like how to turn people out for events and how to live stream your stuff on Facebook and things like that. And that'll have cute internet cats too because I just think that's the most important thing. So a little bit about me just so you know how I end up being here other than I am Robbie's third choice for presenting things sometimes. So I'm part of the digital team on this conference. I also work with a bunch of the other folks who are sponsoring orgs. So I'm on the fundraising team at 350. I help them raise money. I work with Beyond Extreme Energy and I'm basically our finance department. So I pay bills and also raise money for BXE. And I've worked with a bunch of different people over the last 20 years helping to run and especially start up new environmental groups. I'm actually in the middle of just launching another new environmental group called 198 methods. So you'll see some samples pulled from emails I've been sending in the last few weeks for them. So wherever you are in the process, whether you're a small group that's just getting started or you're like a handful of friends and you're thinking about raising money for your first video or to come to the conference or something like that. Or if you're a really big group or you work with a really big group like 350, if you're a local chapter or Sierra Club, you know, all the stuff we'll talk about tonight can apply to you. It's all germane. And I do love cats with the internet and otherwise. So I start off a little bit sort of with the general, you know, why do we ask for money? This may seem like a self obvious question because because we want money because who doesn't want more money for their cause and for their campaign. But it is a good point, you know, most of us get into this work not because we're trying to be rich or famous or whatever, have a lot of dollar bills because we're trying to like stop a pipeline or unite our community or protect a special national forest or local place. And those are not things that immediately make you think I should go ask my friends for money. And in fact, there's a big stigma, especially in most of our cultures against the idea of asking people to give you money to support something you're doing. Anybody who ever tried to sell cookies door to door or, you know, canvas door to door or anything like that. There's like this really distinct emotional reaction around asking for money. And so the first thing I want to do is sort of try not necessarily get you over that, but you know, just make you feel better about some of the feelings that are very natural to have. So first of all, the reason why we ask money is that we actually need it as organizer, as activists, as leaders in our community. And if you're on this webinar, you are a leader in your community. Congratulations. You know, we need money to do some of the stuff we need to do. So some great reasons why people often, you know, takes a particular event or something happening to kind of get them over the hump and make them want to ask for money. And so here's three great examples. These aren't the only ones why you might need to do that. First is if you need to get somewhere. So my example here is when I work with Karen Faradun from Brooks Gas Truth about bringing buses of folks from Pennsylvania to the First People's Climate March in New York a couple of years ago, we literally, we had a need for money to get from here to there. And just like this week, Robbie was saying, we were able to offer a ton of scholarships for people, which included their travel costs to be able to get to this conference and be part of people versus oil and gas. And that's tremendously important. So that can be a great reason to raise money is if you have people in place A and they need to get place B, that's a great reason to do a fundraiser. Second great example, maybe you need some kind of special equipment or supplies. This is a picture from Earthworks. They did a bunch of great research. And if you go on the field trip, that's like the local impacts of fracking field trip, as opposed to the Lumie exhibit one, you will get to take out a forward facing infrared camera, a flur camera, and look at some spewing methane out of there. And that's a special piece of equipment. You have to go buy one of those special cameras to be able to take these pictures and document harm in communities in this particular way. And that's true all the time. Sometimes we need a really special camera. A lot of the times we need a totally normal camera, but we need somebody who knows how to use it and come take pictures. That's a special need unique for the thing. And last great example is just if you are planning something really awesome and cool, like the people versus oil gas summit, then you are going to need some money to pull that off. Just for example, we needed to rent a bunch of hotel rooms. We had flights to buy. We needed crown transportation and Uber codes. All those things you heard Robbie talking about logistics, almost all of them cost money. We can do a lot with volunteer labor and donations and all kinds of things. We do a whole other webinar sometime about how to like totally crowd source, get people to donate you bagels so you never have to buy breakfast. But generally speaking, if you're going to pull off a big event or some really cool monitor rally or action, you're going to need funds to do it. And that's a great reason to ask people to get. Second reason is that it feels good. People like to donate money to causes. So I have two slides on this. First one is this organizing for action thing. This is from way back in the 2012 Obama campaign. You don't have to love Obama or love the history of political fundraising or whatever. But just the idea that giving money is a way that people feel ownership of an action or an event. If you chip in for a campaign, you feel like you are a part of it. The same thing is true with any of the work we do. If somebody gives you $5 to support what you're doing, they're going to feel a little bit more a part of it. They feel like they own a piece of it. And that's a good feeling. It's not a bad thing. It makes people feel positively towards you. And that's an important part of what we're trying to do as organizers is to pull people in, make them feel like they're a part of the struggle, make them understand how they can be a part of it. The other part of it is that people are going to donate money to stuff. This is from a report done by the Chronicle for Philanthropy, being sort of the publication about giving and things like that. But the key thing to note here is that the bars get taller based on the number of gifts people give and also are they go right to left based on the number of gifts people give and they get taller based on the total amount they give in a year. Don't break your brain too much trying to figure out this somewhat complicated dual level chart. But the bottom line there is if you look in the middle, most people, the most common responses in here are people are giving between 30 and 40 gifts a year. Those aren't age brackets. Those are number of donations at the bottom. And they're giving a total of $1,500. So like lots and lots of people are going to give a total amount of money. I mean, I think most of us would be overjoyed with someone giving us $1,500. That's not a common response. And that's not what we're looking for most of the time. But that's how much a lot of people are giving in a year. And they're also importantly giving a lot of times. People are giving like about once every other week, which means it's not rude of you to ask. It just means you have to figure out how to pitch your thing that you need help funding into the constant stream of emails and letters and other requests for money that they're getting and make them feel like it's a good thing to do this week that they haven't done last week. But people give, they give a lot, they give frequently and they give a pretty substantial sum of money. There's another great state. I don't think I put the data in here in this chart, but the vast majority of giving in America actually does not come from wealthy people. There's this mythology that like Bill Gates gives all the money away and that that's where all the funding for everything comes from. That's totally not true. Most of the giving in this country happens from people of middle incomes and lower income people. So if you look around your community and you see people who look like you, those are the same people who are mostly funding charitable work around the country. A lot of time they're given through church or from local institutions that they support, but that doesn't mean that your cause can't fit in with their understanding of community and what it means to them. And the last thing is giving is a really positive, doable way to help for a lot of people and not everybody can do everything. This is the picture that we used on the website and the banner and we've done in a bunch of our share images is from a big Nebraska rally by Keystone Pipeline. And just to say like not everybody can get on the flight and go to the rally in Omaha. Just like not everybody will be able, even with scholarships and things like that, to get on the flight come to Pittsburgh with us. Not everybody can do everything. Not everybody can travel and take time off work. There's ableism. Not everybody can march in the thing or carry the sign or whatever. Different people have different capacities. Chipping in a little bit of money is a thing that a lot of people are able to do, especially if you make it possible to contribute meaningfully at the level of $5 or $10 crowd funding, what we're talking about tonight. A lot of people can do that thing who may not be able to do bigger, harder things like travel long distances or take time off work or be away from their families. So I always encourage people think of fundraising not as you're asking people to do this, the hardest thing ever. It's the thing about it is a continuum of action. Like the stuff we want people to do really is pretty radical. We want people who show up and walk in the streets and say no when the police tell them, hey, get out of the road. And all these things, that's actually really hard to do. Chipping in $5, not actually that hard in the scheme of things to do. Not everybody has $5 to give and we want to respect that. But in the scheme of things, it's actually a pretty reasonable thing to ask. And it's pretty low on the kind of ladder of engagement as we would think of it. So let's talk about how to do it. It's kind of needed this stuff here and then we'll take some questions at the end. I'm not able to look at both screens at once. So hopefully people aren't typing a million questions in the chat box while I'm looking at my slides and talking about them. But when thinking about basic principles for how to ask, the first thing is you have to ask people to donate if you want them to give you money. If you are supposed to come to this conference, even if you were a scholarship person, we asked you to chip in a dollar or something like that. And literally, that's because raising money was part of what we had to do for this. And so if you want to raise money as part of your event or your action or your campaign, you have to ask people at somewhere in that. You can't just put a tip jar out on the counter and hope that people will chime in to do it. They might. But that works much better if they're already there buying a cup of coffee and we're not a coffee shop. We are progressive organizations trying to change the way. Once you've decided to ask a couple of general things to keep in mind, and then we'll show a bunch of different examples that kind of show this stuff out. The first is you always want to be specific. And the three bullets under here are kind of different ways of doing that. So one is to have a theory of change, which we'll talk about more on the workshop on Saturday. But basically, this kind of boil down to like just being able to explain why someone giving you a donation fits into the scheme of how we're going to ban fracking or stop the pipeline or whatever it is we're trying to do together. Sometimes people like to make that really kind of commodified and capitalist and say, you know, what, here's what $5 buys quote unquote in the campaign. That's very rarely a literal transaction. We don't buy activism, nor should we sell it. But that idea of making a really explicit connection. If you give me X dollars, we will do why thing with it. Your contribution helps us offer more scholarships to bring more people to the conference stuff like that. And then also thinking about, again, that range of things people can do, they can give money, they can also take action, they can sign petitions online, they can come to an organizing meeting, they can show up at a rally. Those are all different things. So thinking about how the money fits into that continuum of stuff, you're probably asking people to do and that you need them to do over the course of your campaign. A couple other quick ones, setting goals, always good, you know, being straight with people. I do a lot of, I work on a bunch of budgeting committees and I'm on boards. And so one of the things I'm always saying is like, let's put the budget in the email. Nobody ever loves that idea. But but in principle, I do like it because the idea is just being really straight with your supporters. If you're asking somebody to give you money, you should have the the courage and the honesty to say, here's what I'm going to spend it on. And if that's, you need staff time or you've got to buy lunch for everybody who's coming, don't feel bad about that. Just be straight with people like, we think it's going to cost about this much to feed everybody who comes to the conference and feeding everybody who comes to the conference is an important part because otherwise they'll be hungry and nobody pays attention well. So, you know, having ways to lay out clearly what your goal is, what you need the money for and then connecting that to people's donations. Being timely, you know, don't ask for next year, we think we might start a new campaign and hiring new organizers. So can you give me money right now? But do say the conference is next week, can you chip in to support it? And do say, you know, if you need the money well in advance, like our scholarship fund or like anything that involves travel costs, especially, you know, if you're saying, look, I need to get people there in a month, but that means I need to buy plane tickets four weeks out. Totally fine to say this is the deadline for me to raise the money to buy plane tickets. So just have a clear deadline why you need the money right now. And then we'll talk more about this in a minute, but especially when you get into if you're sending emails or doing Facebook posts or communications about your fundraising stuff, make some room and space in your brain and in your communications calendar to try things. We call them tests in the internet world because we actually do scientific A-B testing things sometimes. But really, you know, it's a matter of just being creative and thinking, you know, what if we offered people a hat if they gave 20 bucks? Could we order hats? Do we have a good hat? What if we said, you know what, this week, we just want everybody to give $1 because $1 is really easy to give. And then we'll come back to people and say, hey, thanks for a dollar. Now can I have $100 because we actually need more money. Try out different things, try different approaches, try different pictures and imagery and stuff and be willing to experiment with your fundraising and not freak out if you try something and then it doesn't raise as much money as you want. Make sure you have time to like then try something else because that's pretty normal. So a couple quick examples. These are sort of like different ways you could go about raising money. I'm thinking starting the sort of simplest for you as the organizer would be to go use somebody else's platform. There's a ton of these things out there that are crowdfunding platforms. Fundly Kickstarter, GoFundMe, Tilts, those are a couple of examples. There's a bunch of other ones out there. And the picture here is from our friends at Lloyd Levy Camp who had a fundraiser on one of those platforms, Fundly, that was for their response to Hurricane Hardy. So they raised money, bought supplies and then because they were close in the Gulf region, they actually drove them over to places around Texas and the Gulf Coast that needed all kinds of stuff, supplies, diapers, food, water, all kinds of things. So that's one example of how you can set one up. The stuff you need to set up something like Kickstarter or GoFundMe campaign, you need to have a bank account where you can receive money. So most pretty much any bank account will work, but sometimes it's easier with one that has an online banking or something like that. Or you may want somebody from your group who does the online banking for your group to be the one to set up the GoFundMe page or whatever. You need at least one decent picture. This one of the shrimp is kind of their logo from the campaign with the scene of hurricane destruction is fine. Just something that can get shared on social media because all of these crowdsourcing sites always have a connection to things like Facebook and Twitter. So you want to make sure you have a picture that works for that. And you have a story worth telling. It goes to our previous thing. You need a reason why you need the money. I need to be able to explain that to people. So there would be some description text on this page. Usually it's worth it to have somebody write it out in like 400 words or so and then maybe somebody else wants to be the one to edit that. So two people on the writing team to put together the picture and the description text that's going to go on to one of these pages. And then the other thing is just to know in your own mind, when you work with one of these other pages, you do lose some money in processing fees. So the way that, you know, fungly and all these other sites get paid is they take a percentage of every transaction that goes through their site. And there are different fees and things that you can do with that. I won't do a whole dissertation on it. But just know going in that if you're using somebody else's platform, any of these ones to do your crowdfunding, you're going to lose a little bit of the total money you raised in the processing fee. And that's just part of the give and take. On the other hand, it's pretty easy for your donors. Basically all they need is a credit or a debit card and to believe in what you're doing. It does really help. And again, think about who you're asking to donate. If people have internet connections, social media connections, this is basically online fundraising, as opposed to if you want to do a bake sale, the thing you need is for people to have cash on hand or be able to write a check. And you need to have a place where they're all going to show up. So crowdfunding, usually we think it's better for everybody being connected to the internet. And you try and make it as simple as possible for somebody to do like from their telephone or something like that, as opposed to in-person fundraising, which can also be crowdfunding, where you usually rely more on cash donations. And it's really, it's mostly about like being in a place where everybody's going to be at the farmer's market, at the local event at the school, at the hearing, on your pipeline, whatever it is. Second idea, this is a little bit of a specific one, but if you are running anything like an encampment or a specific place, if you have a community center, people are doing really interesting organizing with Amazon wish lists. I don't mean to endorse Amazon as a pretty horrible corporation, but just this idea that you can make a list of things that you would like to be bought for you. It's almost like a wedding registry or something. And then people can go on and order that stuff for you. They can buy it and then it gets shipped to you. So this is a Amazon wish list that Kent Makwa had set up a protesting line three. And there's a bunch of other examples. They had some big ones of these for some of the parts of the standing market camp and things like that. The things that you need that make this kind of work is if you need actual stuff, so it's not like you need money to buy tickets or buy things that you might use in the campaign, but you need physical objects. The difference I had here was like, it would not make sense for the conference, for example, for us to go out and say, hey, can you go on our Amazon wish list and buy us like a hundred boxes of cereal so we can feed everybody breakfast in the morning? It makes way more sense just to say, you know what, why don't people chip in money and then we'll buy hotel breakfasts and things. Everybody can get breakfast together in the ballroom and kind of outsource that as opposed to us trying to provide the object of a box of cereal each time. If you do go with this kind of model where people buy stuff and they get sent to you, you obviously need a mailing address for delivery. That's also important for people to think about if you are mobile, if you're distributed, if you have a network of people all over the state, how is stuff going to get to the various people in the state who need it, as opposed to getting delivered just to one person's house and then they have to somehow drive it everywhere. And then it's a little bit more of a kind of complicated story to tell, you know, just looking at this example from Camp Mokwa, like, you know, what do they need the scanner for? Are they listening in on police or is that just like a radio that they're trying to do? It requires a little bit more explication usually to kind of get people on board with why you need these things, what you're going to do with them. And it works better if you have kind of like a relatively well-established core group of people who are already working with you on the campaign. So they're like into what you're doing. And you guys have all said to each other, man, wouldn't be great if we had a GoPro camera. And then you can put up this thing and say, actually, if we all chip in 50 bucks or anybody has a spare of $200, why don't you throw it down here and we'll get the GoPro camera we've all wanted. So anyway, just the storytelling around this kind of wishlist shopping thing can be a little bit more hard to do. And the last and kind of the most complicated but not necessarily the most complicated is to get what we call a CRM or a constituent record management thing. This is just a tool that lets you do stuff like send emails and put out Facebook posts and have a donate page and also maybe have a petition and have all these other things. We, for the conference and lots of progressive groups, use this one called the Action Networks by Pictures of. It's free for people to sign up for. If you've got a local group, you can use it right now today if you want. It doesn't cost you a thing. They do ask you that it's movement tech. So if you get bigger than I think like a couple of thousand people a month that you're sending emails to, they ask you to chip in to support the cost. But generally, they're great about, you know, helping local groups get started. It's what all the indivisible chapters have used and lots of other progressive groups. There are also other options out there. If you're like at the point in your group's organizing plan where you're like, yeah, we got to get serious about fundraising, we got to get us one of those Action Network or something that counts and send a lot of emails and raise a lot of money. You may want to look around at some of the other options out there. They include things like Salsa, can be illuminate, Nation Builder, Act Blue, there's a bunch of different ones and you can find me or a bunch of other people at the conference and we'll talk your ear off about the pros and cons of all those. In general, the difference here is you're going to have more control over how you raise money, but you also need a little bit more established stuff. So you need a bank account. I didn't put in here, but oftentimes you will also need either right when you start or eventually something like an incorporation document. You need to be able to show your bank and the people who are processing donations that you are a legit organization or community group. Sometimes you have to produce a tax certification. Sometimes you just have to say, here's my bank account, here's my sponsor and some other stuff. But you have to basically be a little bit prepared to like have your stuff together as an organization so that you can legitimately present yourself as stop the frack attack or BXE as opposed to like, no, it's like me and Robbie. We just do stuff sometimes and we call ourselves awesome dudes. You know, that would not be enough for us to get our own CRM account, get a bank account, get a credit card processor all in the name of two awesome dudes. And then usually people will want some communication stuff to go along with that. This would only be worth it if you have something like an email list, which could just be, you know, honor people in a Google spreadsheet if you want, something like a Facebook page or something like that where you talk to people and maybe a Twitter account, that kind of stuff. And the benefit of it is if you have all that stuff, if you go into the trouble to get all set up and put together that way and then you get one of these action network accounts or something like it, all people really need to get in to your queue and be part of your group is like an email address, they just sign up. And then you can send them fundraisers, you can talk to them on social media, you can do all this different stuff. So it's much easier for new people to get involved. You've never heard of you before, kind of find you and get signed up. But it's a lot more work for you as the organizer to put all that stuff together. Next couple, I'm going to go too much faster because we have a little bit of time. So talk about how to do this. So thinking about fundraising, like we said, back at the beginning is always part of a campaign. And so what that looks like is, these are just three examples from a campaign I was doing earlier. So you might start off telling people like, oh my gosh, there's a bill and we don't want it to pass. So this is the dirty energy bill in the Senate I was talking about. And then you might ask people to like, hey, can you make a phone call and tell people not to vote for that bill? And then the third email might be, hey, can you chip in to support what we're doing? We're going to go do a delivery event on Capitol Hill or something like that. So anyway, the point here is just when you're talking about fundraising, don't think of it like the very first thing you're going to do is ask people for money. It should usually come somewhere in the process. So you're going to ask people to sign on and support or maybe just sign up and join your group. Then you're going to tell them some useful things they can do from home or maybe invite them to a meeting or an event. And then after that, you might ask them to chip in and support what you're doing. When we're writing things like those fundraising emails, we use this thing we call inverted pyramid style, which is a practice we borrow from journalism. Basically, it just means like you assume people aren't really going to spend a lot of time with the stuff you write. It's hard for people like me who write for living. You want to feel like everybody reads every word. But the truth is, most stuff that you're looking at in your email, on your Facebook feed, on your Twitter feed and stuff like that, you're really kind of skimming it more than you're reading it in depth most of the time, which means when you write for that kind of stuff or when you put your Facebook post together, you want to make sure it's super easy to get the idea right at the top. If it's literally an email or something that's a written document, you want the first sentence or two to explain the whole idea. And then after that, you can add some more information that's interesting, but maybe not absolutely essential. And then the last thing you'll add is stuff that's not that important, but might be interesting to know. So the way I describe this is when I write emails, I actually put this box at the top you can see where there's like actually a big, there's like a short recap and a donate button or something like that at the very top. So you don't ever have to even scroll down to figure out what it's about. If you want to, there's a whole email down there. And if you get all the way to the end, there's even like footnotes and references and links to other people's websites who are working on the same campaign. So there's a bunch of stuff there if you want it, but you don't need to read all that stuff if you don't want to just to get the gist of what we're asking for. In terms of what makes good fundraising asks, short sentences, easy for people to read, compelling content by which I suppose we mean things like pictures, bolding, making sure that it's clear in the formatting of what you're writing and putting up that you want people to donate and why. Only asking for one thing at a time is really important, especially with fundraising. If you put in, if you write an email asking people to chip in to support what you're doing, and it's like click here to watch the video and then click here to read the long news article about the thing. And then by the way, can you click in to donate? Most people by the time they get to the donate thing have stopped reading. So they've already watched the video and they've read the thing and then they're out of time because they only had 30 minutes on their lunch break or whatever to engage with what you were sending them. So it's fine to do those things, but do that as three emails. Send an email that says, oh my gosh, look at this great video of the action we did. And then, oh my gosh, look at this great news article that came out about the action we did, and then send the fundraising email that says, oh my gosh, look at all that great stuff we did in the last week, can you chip in? But only ask people to do one thing at a time and asking them to read or watch a video that counts as asking them to do something because you want them to spend time on that. Especially if you're asking for money, ask more than once. That means both sending the email more than one time, possibly or posting about it more than one time on Facebook. And it also means in the content of a single thing, it's okay to have, like, click here to donate and then have a picture that says click here to donate and then also have some description text that later on says click here to donate. You'll see that in some of the examples in a minute. So these other ones are more specific to email, so using PSs, so people who do read all the way to the bottom, spend time with your email, have another ask there at the very end. That actually is a great idea and works very well. Paying attention to that first bit, if most of us read a lot of stuff, I'll say more about this in a minute on our telephones now. So making sure what you write, that it has that part that fits on a telephone screen where you get across the idea and you ask people for the donation in that first scroll on the telephone. And paying a special attention to things like subject lines, your headlines on Facebook posts and things like that. The stuff that shows up in bigger font and that people are more likely to read as a result of that. So here's a couple examples to kind of show you some of how this works. This is not necessarily the best fundraising email, it's just the one I had it out, the right size. This is a group I used to work for in Dharma Action. So why this email works for the format stuff we're talking about primarily. First is it has that short lead, two sentences right at the top, even on a mobile phone, you would see that little block of text before you saw anything else. And it's got a little bolding, so it just kind of sums up what we're doing. For emails especially, but also for Facebook and other things, it's got what I like to call the clicky bits, which are colorful pictures and buttons. And when you make something a link, you want it to be blue or kind of stand out different colors than the rest of the text. People want to go tap on that, click on that, interact with that particular piece. And then overall the format of this email, the font is probably too small for you to read on most of your screens if you're seeing them. But you get the idea that this is short paragraphs, lots of contractions, it's colloquial language, it's easy to read. This is not an economic treatise on the necessity of stopping oil spills. This is a quick casual email between people who know each other saying, hey, this is really important, can you chip in to make it happen. Same ideas for Facebook. This is not the best performing Facebook from 350.org, but it was the best one from the last couple of days that had a picture in it. So that's one key thing, especially, especially, especially for Facebook and so much of our lives now happen on Facebook. Something like six hours a day right now is the average amount of time Americans spend looking at their cell phones and their laptops and things like that. Facebook takes up a huge percentage of that six hours a day and about half of it is on a telephone. So when you think about where people are likely to see whatever you're asking them to do, including your fundraising s, they're most likely to see it on their phone, on Facebook, looking something like this. And if you look at the way that Facebook sets that up, you don't get to pick this, but it makes the photo the most important part of that post. So make sure when you put stuff up, when I was saying about having your crowdfunding site, it's use GoFundMe or something like that. Make sure you have at least one really good picture that tells the story of your campaign. This is why is that that's the thing on social media that's going to get shared and it really needs to grab people to get them engaged. The second thing is that headline text. So even though Facebook puts the headline kind of below the picture, it seems like almost less important, but it's still the biggest font text in there. That's the biggest letters and that's the thing people are most likely to read. So making sure that it's short and it's kind of colorful. Sometimes people like to make funny headlines. I am hilarious, but not when I write Facebook posts. So I find that hard. But if you are funny, then feel free to write funny Facebook headlines. That works great. And then also having some description text in there. This little bit goes above the article or the link. You also can have some in the page that it links to that would be pulled from your description text on your donate page. But something gives a little bit more context, but really it's about a sentence long. You don't want too many words in there. So just something brief that gives a little bit more than the headline. And this one, you want to be descriptive as opposed to colorful. So the headline, it's great to be like, you know, 10 things you didn't know that we need money for. The fifth one will shock you. That kind of hilariously old fashioned clickbait. But that kind of stuff works great. The headline does not work at all in description text. Description text should be pretty dry. And like this one, you know, just telling you, here's the nut graph of what this story is about. Here's the thing we need. We need to raise X number of dollars by Wednesday to support the rally, whatever it is. Make that part really straightforward, even if you play around a little bit in that one. The other thing to say about Facebook is especially right now, and again, we'll talk about this lots more in the Saturday session will come. If you want to learn more about this stuff, video always wins. This is a post with a video from the Code of People's Law Project and didn't try and make the video play, but it is a great, well edited, well produced piece of video. But even if you have something much more casual, just you and your friends talking about why the campaign is important on a cell phone camera, that video will perform much better than a picture of you and your friends talking about why the campaign is important on Facebook. So if Facebook is part of how you and your group talked to each other, it's part of how you want to raise money, try and figure out a way to have a video piece in there. And this is a great example of raising money for a legal defense fund. It's really important coming out of Standing Rock. Great example, a lot of people can sort of relate to or think, oh, yeah, we've done something like that, or we could use something like that for something in our campaign. And then last, this is sort of like black belts, Facebooking, whatnot, using the Facebook Live tool. So if you have a Facebook page, then you have the capacity to do a live broadcast on your Facebook page. And those things are even better performing than videos. This is one 350 did just earlier today, which on the face of it is kind of like the most boring video ever. It's like a handful of 350s staff and Fred sitting in front of a little plywood wall at the cop talks in Germany. But it already had reached about an hour after it launched 23,000 plus people. And that's because live video is really engaging. It's also because, you know, for 350s members in particular, the annual climate talks around the world at the UN are a huge deal that a lot of people care about and have already chipped into support. And so the idea of getting kind of a live update from the sidelines of that conference is really interesting to a lot of their supporters and members. If you do this stuff, if you're putting up a Facebook Live video, three quick tips. One is if you can, you know, promote it before put up a Facebook page like we did with this webinar, we put up Facebook posts yesterday and today and the last week or so saying, you know, hey, come on, let's repeat the webinar. Do that same kind of thing if you're going to have a live video on your Facebook page. Invite people to show up at the time before it happens and let them know that you're going to be doing it. Also make sure that the first couple of minutes are exciting that they're interesting in terms of video content. What happens is even if you're going to broadcast for an hour and you know that Facebook doesn't know how long you're going to be live. And so they put stuff up and they look at the first 10 minutes, how many people signed on to decide how many new people might want to see that Facebook video. So you want to make sure that the first couple of minutes, there's like exciting things. It's like, you know, the James Bond movie, it starts with like a car chase and a plane crash and something amazing happens and everybody's like, whoa, that was crazy. And then the credits roll. You want to do the same thing with your Facebook Live video, make the first couple of minutes really interesting and engaging, kind of jump in in the middle. And then if you want to do panel discussion or whatever, you can come back to that in the second half. And then try and look interesting with the sound off because these things do pretty well without sound running. So something like this, three people looking at a camera is almost the worst thing you could do, except that there are at least all looking at the camera. The worst thing you could do would be to have three people not looking at the camera, talking to each other, completely ignoring you, which doesn't look like anything you want to click on and turn the sound on and interact with. So at least have people addressing the camera in the first couple of minutes so that it's clear like, hey, you should click on me and turn on the sound and hear what I'm saying. Even better if you have something that looks interesting, like a rally or a protest or, you know, a public hearing or something like that. So people are like, oh, I see people are talking. I want to know what they're saying. I want to know what's happening with that. And then almost the last thing to say about this is if you're doing fundraising on Facebook and on email for your campaign, make sure that it's not the only thing you're doing. And it's not the only thing you're doing like in any given week or month or whatever, you know, have a plan so that you ask people for money when it makes sense in the campaign. And you also ask them to do other stuff. And you also share updates from what happens. And if you are in the place where you are sending emails to ask for money or your schedule, you have a team of people who put stuff on Facebook, you're anything more than one person asking for one donation for one thing, which is pretty much all of us. It's worth having a little team that works on this, can just be two or three people and making a little calendar to script this stuff out and figure out, okay, who's in charge of writing the thing? Who's going to copy it to make sure there's no typos? Who's going to be in charge of posting on Facebook and following up and all that kind of stuff. So make sure you have some support in place and that you have a plan for who's going to do some of these things. So it doesn't all get dumped on one person. And seriously do report back when things are done. So remember way back my email example was talking about that dirty energy bill and people were calling Schumer and other Democrats. And this was the end of that series of actions for me and some other people that's me getting let away with the plasticuffs. At the conference this weekend, Kim and some other folks from St. Energy in New York and a bunch of other folks who are in this picture, not the police, but the people will be there. And we sent this out afterwards. Essentially what we said to people was email your senator, tell them not to vote for the bill, call your senator, tell them not to vote for the bill and then, hey, we're going to Senator Schumer's office and we're not leaving until we get an answer or we're hauled away. It turns out we were hauled away before we got an answer. But there we are with our banner that says, don't trump our future, no unfurc, no undirty energy bill. And so that's a clear, we sent that email out afterwards as we're back and to say, hey, here's what we did not with your money, but here's what we did with your messages and things like that. We went, here's the action that happened. So you really feel like that's part of the campaign. And that's it. So here is some content for me. If you want to follow up or see more pictures of adorable little kittens that fit in your hands, you can follow me on Twitter or on Facebook. Come by the training on Saturday. Say hi to me and some more of the Digi folks. And you can also always email me. That's my work address at power through consultant. And I think we shall now take us some questions. Yes. So if you, oh, good. We do have some chats in here. So if anybody does have questions, you can type them into the little chat box. And see, I'm seeing some, yeah, mostly people saying, okay, there's one funders and platforms. Is there anything wrong or less encouraging with using the organization's PayPal button? No. So PayPal works great too. I would kind of sub that in as like a different version. If you don't want to use go fund me or one of those other platforms, PayPal is pretty easy to set up and you can connect your bank account to it. And then you can use PayPal to collect donations. It's a little bit more of like, you know, you still have to do all the work of like, where are you going to put the PayPal button, right? You're still going to need somewhere online that like explains the story of the campaign and things like that. So PayPal is a great way to take donations and some people prefer to give money through PayPal because they don't take their credit card number into stuff. So it's a great option to give people, especially if you have security conscious people. But in principle, you still need to do all the work of figuring out, why am I raising money? Why does it matter? Who am I asking for money? Getting trouble with the IRS over donations. I've definitely known people to get in trouble and also start fights with the IRS over donations. Generally speaking, you can do a whole like seminar on tax law and raising money and things like that, which we won't get into. One great resource, I'll type it in the chat box in a minute. This place called Boulder Advocacy, which specifically advises C3 nonprofits. If you don't know what we're talking about, plug your ears for a minute and we'll come back and answer more general questions. But if you're one of those groups where you have a C3 organization and you're trying to figure out can I raise money and talk about legislation or can I raise money and talk about an election and stuff like that, Boulder Advocacy is a great resource. They have lawyers hotline and they also have lots of great documentation resource stuff that advises you specifically on how to do that, what you can and can't say, how you can and can't raise money. Generally speaking, most of the groups who are coming to the summit or on this webinar, you'll be fine. The IRS does not as a rule that they're not like going out of their way yet in the Trump era to like go investigate people who do activist work and challenge their tax debts. You may have heard about a little rash of that that happened a couple years ago. It was mostly going after tea party groups. The reason why that happened was those groups were not like you and me and anybody we know. They were getting like multiple million dollar donations from anonymous people, mostly the Koch brothers in this very kind of dark money way and then claiming to be a social benefit corporation. They were saying like, no, no, we're doing this for the good of Missouri is why I have to run 180 television spots about why abortion is terrible in October of an even numbered year. That kind of stuff will get you flagged by the IRS, but none of us are doing that. If you are thinking about getting charitable designation from the IRS or getting into that stuff, the basic stuff you need to do is come up with something like a mission statement and a board, a group of people who work with you who can legitimately say that you are trying to do something that benefits your community. And for most of us, that's actually pretty easy, right? Because it's like we're trying to stop a pipeline because we don't want pollution in our community. That would be better if there was less pollution. We don't want this special place to get mowed down and logged and all that stuff. So things like that are legitimate social benefit things you can apply for IRS status if you want to. You also don't have to do that stuff. You can just be a group and there's all kinds of little tax statuses you can do or incorporations you can do to be like a little co-op or a little community group and you don't have to do all this stuff to get tax status designation and get audited and all that kind of thing. You can just be a little association of people and you can still raise money. And especially for all those little crowd funding platforms tilt and go fund me and fund Lee and all those things. Those guys will not mess with you at all about that. If you put up a thing and say like I want to raise money to bring bottled water to Puerto Rico for disaster relief, you can do that and that's totally legit and they will help you do it. But if you start to get into messing with elections or buying heads on television or things like that's where the scrutiny comes in. Still paying for the Koch Brothers. I'm terribly sorry. Delightful friend from Kansas. As a general, the question is, is there a limit on how much money charitable orgs can get from donations? No, not really. Also, may that be your blessed problem? Maybe you have so much money that you literally don't know what to do with it. The rule of thumb. If you have someone that we should ask for some money, would you like to donate to the two awesome guys, but be it Robbie. No, the real rule for charitable orgs is you have to be able to demonstrate that the money you're raising is used in the service of your mission. So again, this only applies if you're like trying to be a nonprofit corporation or a charitable C3 or one of those kind of groups. If you've gone to the trouble to organize yourself as an organization and you have declared that you have a mission, for example, preserving local wildlife or preventing pollution or improving the health in your community, then you have to be able to show that the money that was given to you served that purpose. And it's a pretty broad thing. The IRS very rarely challenges people on this or kind of comes in and audits people over this particular thing. So it's more like don't be stupid and don't kick the hornet's nest. But if somebody gave you a million dollars and you turned around and bought a speedboat and said that that was a really all part of your charitable corporation to promote public health in your community, that would be suspicious and possible to raise the IRS. But other than that, if somebody gives you a million dollars and you use it to pay staff and rent an office and you're educating the public and you're doing the stuff that you should be doing to promote public health in your community, no, there's no cap on it. People can give you as much money as they want. Any other questions to pay a lawyer's bill? Yes, you can pay a lawyer's bill. Actually, that is true. And one of the things actually that we do lots of people, I will not put anybody who is a sponsor of the conference on spot, but there are lots of great groups in our network who do this thing called fiscal sponsorship. And they will help you raise money. They will basically take in money for you and let you use their charitable status, not use it, but like they will sort of take you under their wing if you were doing something that fits with their mission. And then they'll help you raise money to do the stuff that you're doing. So beyond extreme energy, for example, one of the groups I work with is not its own nonprofit corporation. They are fiscally sponsored by Earthworks. And so we do all kinds of stuff. We do events and protests and education and rallies and we're coming to this conference, a bunch of us and things like that. And when we raise money, people give money through Earthworks to support the work that we're doing. And one thing that we do with that money sometimes is we pay lawyers to advise us on things like, do we need a charitable certification for this? Or are we allowed to say this as a little nonprofit group or things like that? And it's a totally legit expense to pay a lawyer as part of your startup costs to help you put together articles of incorporation or file a nonprofit application with the IRS. That is a legitimate charitable expenditure. So if you want to raise money to pay lawyers to help you get registered as a charity, that all counts as a charitable expense. So of course, we don't want you just to start more groups. You should go do actual good stuff, stop pipelines, promote public health and do all that work. If you need help from lawyers to do what you're doing, then that is okay. Last call for questions. Can you come up on eight here? Okay. Well, I think that's it. Robbie, can I hand things back to you to close this up? Yeah, there's one more question. What time is your panel? Good question. Look at that there website. I know it's on Saturday and I know I haven't finished my part of the slides. Agenda's up at the top. I can't see it. I'll be full of things. All these charming windows that tell me. I'm also touching my screen like that. Actually, it's going to check. It's a touch screen. Here we are. There you are. Yeah, there we go. So 130 to 230 in conference room B. Me, Emily, and Vanessa, and we'll talk more about not just fundraising, but sort of general stuff around using the internet to win your campaign. And that's on Friday or Saturday drill? Saturday. Cool. Great. So yeah, that is the end of our seminar. Thank you, Drew, for that lovely fundraising. You maybe were the third choice, but you are always the first choice in my heart. And hopefully folks who listened in got some good information out of it. I know I did. Actually, I love watching other people present things. And I truly think it's important like you start off the conversation that to understand like getting over the fear of asking for money is the biggest thing. And yeah, thinking, always thinking about it like this is how your way of getting involved. And that's great for some people because these things do cost money and they cost lots of money sometimes. So again, my contact information in the chat box one more time at tcactionlab.com. And I look forward to seeing you all over the next couple of days. I will be running around. Drew will be running around. Feel free to come and say hi. We're definitely here to help and make things better. All right. I think I think we're done, Ann. All right. Great. Thank you. Thank you, Drew and Robbie. And thank you everybody for joining today. And we'll get the recording up and send you the link ASAP. Cool. Good night, everyone. Thanks, everybody. See you in the