 And before we get started today, I just wanted to make sure that all of you can hear me and see my screen. So if you are able to see me, see my screen, you should see the first slide. And if you're able to hear me, if you could just let me know in the questions box of your go-to webinar panel, just by clicking, by typing yes. That would be a huge help to me just so I know that I'm not presenting to no one. It looks like we're successful with the visual and the audio. All right, so it's just about two o'clock. So we'll go ahead and get started. Hello everyone and welcome to our strategy webinar for Richland Gives. My name is Linda Gerhardin. I'm a senior community engagement manager here at Mighty Cause. And it's been my honor and pleasure to be working with the Richland Gives team since 2017 on this great event and to help you guys fundraise better. So I'm really excited to dig into fundraising strategy for Richland Gives. Here's a quick look at our agenda for today. We're gonna be starting out by going through some basics, then move into campaign strategy, the real meat of the webinar, then go over the prizes. And then we've got Maura Tina from the Richland County Foundation on the line for a question and answer session. So hi, Maura. Hello, how are you? Great, how are you doing today? I'm looking forward to fabulous Richland Gives. Me too, it's always fun to see those numbers go up and last year, everybody exceeded expectations. So it was a really excellent day of fundraising. So also looking forward to see all of the amazing things that everybody accomplishes on December 3rd. So just as a little bit of housekeeping, we have a lot of information to get through today. So if you have a question while I'm presenting, just type that into the questions box of your go-to webinar panel. And then during the Q&A portion, we'll make sure that we get to any questions that have come up. So to get started on strategy and how to build a strong strategy, you need to have the basics covered. So before we get into the weeds with strategy and email and all of those good things, I wanted to go through the basics and the things that you can do on the Mighty Cos platform to support your strategy. The first thing that you should do, and I hope everybody on this webinar has already done, is register for Richland Gives. Hopefully everybody has already registered, but if you haven't, please take a moment and go to richlandgives.mightycos.com and click register. It's a very short film to form to fill out and registration actually ends on Halloween, which is incredibly next Thursday. It feels like it's still August to me, but it's next Thursday is Halloween and donations actually open on November 1st. So we're on a little bit of a tight timeline. So if you're on this webinar and you have not yet filled out your registration form and been accepted into the event, it's okay to take a tab on your browser and register for the event now. It's very quick and it's really the most important part participating in Richland Gives is actually doing the steps you need to, to actually know that you're participating. Once your registration is approved, you can go in and add other administrators and any staff and volunteers as admins that they can have access to your page. Once your registration is approved, you'll wanna take some time and get familiar with your dashboard on Mighty Cause because this is where you'll go to customize your profile, choose your settings, pull your reports and customize the donation experience. It has changed a little bit since last year. So even if you're a veteran and you know your way around Mighty Cause, it does behoove you to take a moment and get the lay of the land. So now you'll just wanna note that all of your reports are in one place, all of your fundraising tools are in one place and so on. Now we've just reorganized it with some sub menus to help you find what you're looking for a little bit more easily. A lot of the tools you can find in your dashboard, particularly donor experience will really help support your fundraising strategy. So it definitely takes some time to become fully acquainted with what tools are available and how to access them. One of the most powerful ways you can use your Mighty Cause profile to support your strategy is by customizing your profile. This is the main link you'll share with your supporters during Richland Gives and what you'll see linked on the Richland Gives site. This is essentially the hub of your Richland Gives campaign. So you'll wanna make sure to leave your campaign's themes and story into your profile. So your donor experience tool is what you can use to customize the checkout process for your donors. And that sounds a little bit dry but you can actually do a lot of really cool things with it. For instance, you can choose what data you collect from your donors and you can also set custom donation amounts and suggestions and use those to reinforce your campaign messaging. So for instance, if you're celebrating your 20th anniversary as a nonprofit and you wanna build a campaign around that milestone and the number 20, you can set your suggested donation amounts in increments of 20 and then talk about why that number is important to you in the description of those amounts. Or to give another example, if you're a food bank and you know that a donation of $40 allows you to feed a family of five for a week, you can build that sort of messaging into your donor experience so that when donors are actually choosing what amount to give, they have that message reinforced. It's also a really great way to bump them up to the next level. If you have a donor who maybe wants to give $20 and you make a really great case for donating 30, that's not a huge stretch for them and you can help bump them up to the next level of donations. Another thing, and we'll talk about this a little bit more, that you can do when donor experience is to build a thank you page that will display after they complete their donation which helps you automate the follow-up process. Something we always get questions about before any giving event is how to reset the metrics on your profile. So you can start fresh with a new goal for this year for Richland Gives. To reset your metrics, go into profile on your dashboard, then click page settings and then you'll be able to set your goal for this year's campaign and reset that date to November 1st, 2019 so that your fundraising totals are zeroed out on your profile. Though just to be clear, you'll obviously retain all of your data. It just changes the display on your profile's front end which the public sees. And if you need any help with this, you can always email us at supportatmightycause.com and we'll help you refresh your totals. So your profile is really the face of your Richland Gives campaign and your story is what it all revolves around. So you'll wanna make sure that you update your story or your about section. They're the same thing they just, it's called your about section on your page. So that it really reflects your current campaign for 2019 so that it's compelling and it reflects the themes of your campaign. So for instance, if you have a new campaign video, embed that on your story. If you have some campaign-specific graphics, add those to your story and make sure that your dates are up to date and any information you share is current. I really recommend using this space, not just to share your mission statement because that can be a little dry and it doesn't really appeal to donors usually but to really appeal to them, make an emotional case for donating to your cause and try to convince them to support you during Richland Gives. You have a lot of tools at your disposal to liven up your story and make it a multimedia experience. So definitely try to use them all. And I mentioned this a few slides ago but I did wanna talk a bit more about the thank you page that is in your donor experience tool, under post-checkout. This is a great way to make donating to your campaign more satisfying to donors. Studies have shown that how quickly you follow up with donors after they complete their donation is a good indicator of how likely they are to come back and make another donation to your organization. So this helps you make sure that the donor has acknowledged they are thanked and they know that their contribution to your campaign was important to you. You have all the tools here that you have in your about section that's the same text editor so you can add videos, you can add links, you can add images and you also have a little CTA or call to action button that you can use here however you would like. You'd like to direct them somewhere else after they complete their donation. Donors are dropped right onto your thank you page after they complete their donation. So it's really a key moment to talk to them and it's a huge mistake to leave it blank. You wanna use this to reinforce the importance of their donation and start the stewarding process as soon as they're done with the checkout process. All right, so the last thing before we start digging into strategy is to note that you have an entire toolkit of information at your disposal on the Richland-Gives website which the team at the Richland County Foundation has worked to tailor to your needs and to make it useful to you. So definitely if you haven't already checked out the non-profit toolkit, take some time and take a look at the information up there, you have some templates that you can download, some tip sheets, graphics and a lot more that will just help you as you plot out your campaign strategy. All right, so with the basics of Richland-Gives out of the way, we'll move right into campaign strategy. The best thing you can do to make sure that you hit your fundraising goals for Richland-Gives and to raise more money overall is to collect early donations. A lot of non-profits worry that they have one shot at getting a donation from a donor and they don't want to ask early because they feel it's their only shot so they wanna ask on the giving day. But the truth is that in the U.S., most of us get paid bi-weekly, we get paid twice a month. So it's likely an entirely common for people on a giving day to make a donation early because they were asked, then come back after they get paid a few weeks later and you ask them again and make another donation to your fundraiser. So you really don't have to worry about asking too soon or shooting your shot too early. It's okay to ask multiple times because it's normal for people to make multiple donations to causes they really care about, especially if they are asked. And the Richland County Foundation has some really great incentives for your non-profit to try and get those early donations and it would be a terrible shame to ignore them. For the first 25 non-profits to raise $1,000, they are offering a one-to-one match. They're offering a $1,000 grant. So you'll get rewarded if you work early for those donations. Early donations start on November 1st. And just to be clear, these are donations that process immediately. These are not pledges or anything that processes at a later time. So you'll just wanna make sure that your communication with your donors about that is perfectly clear so they don't think it's a pledge for a later donation on December 3rd. One thing that we see consistently at Mighty Cause, especially on giving days is that organizations that have matching grants raise more money overall. And a matching grant, if you've been on one of these webinars in previous years, you are familiar with matching grants, but it's basically a Bogo deal on donations. And people love a good deal. So it does a lot to build excitement and buzz around your campaign and to convince people to stop scrolling on their phones to bypass your email and actually take a minute and make a donation now because you're offering them an incentive. You're offering them the opportunity to make their money go further. And so just to clarify how matching grants work, a matching grant is a large donation that your nonprofit leverages as a match to bring in donations. And the process of getting one works a lot like getting a major gift, which is essentially what a matching grant is. You start out with donor prospecting, trying to find people or corporations or organizations that might be willing to provide a matching grant. And we're gonna talk more about who that might be on the next slide. Once you've got your prospects, you cultivate them, you start the conversation with them, set up a meeting, have a phone call, talk to them about your Richland Gives campaign. And then finally, you might make your ask. You ask them to provide a matching grant. Now we have a lot of ways you can run your match, some of which are new, so definitely check out the tool and see all the different things that you can do with it because we've added a lot of really interesting options. And you can really let the donor lead and work with them to come up with a match setup that's meaningful for both of you. Though the most common setup and sort of the default is one to one meaning that, somebody makes a $20 donation, it's matched for $20. You can also set a limit so that a big donor doesn't come off on while you have a matching grant active and eat up the whole match in one fell swoop. So if you wanted to make that limit like $500 for a $1,000 match, you can set that up using the matching grants tool on Mighty Cause. And another thing that you can do that a lot of people don't tend to think of, they're looking for that one match is you can actually pull together some smaller donations, like if you had, for instance, a group of very engaged volunteers who all wanted to give $100 toward a match. If you had eight volunteers who wanted to give $100, that's an $800 match and that can go a long way. That's not anything to sniff at. So also get creative and think outside the box if you don't have somebody who can provide a $1,000 match right then and there, you may be able to pull together smaller amounts to make a larger matching grant. The most likely grand tours are people that you already have a relationship with at your nonprofit. So think board members, existing major gift donors, corporate or business sponsors and so on. One thing that you can think of doing if your board members haven't paid their dues for 2019, December 3rd is pretty close to the end of the year. So you might be looking to collect at that point. You could float the idea out there of using their collective dues as a matching grant as a board match for Richland Gifts. Any major gift donors are also a great place to start and asking them for a matching grant can be a really great way to deepen their relationship with your nonprofit and give them a fun new way to support your organization. If you have any relationships with sponsors, those are a great option as well for matching grants like businesses, community partners, companies that you've worked for in Richland County and so on. Those are established partnerships that you may have and those are great to tap for Richland Gifts because Richland Gifts and Giving Tuesday as well has a boosted visibility. So you both benefit from having a matching grant agreement on that day. Now you can also work to make contact with new people and organizations that you haven't worked with before. An event like Richland Gifts is a really great icebreaker. It's just much faster and easier if you already have relationships with them. And it can be a bit of a big first ask. It's not something that you usually come right out of the gate with. So you can certainly feel free, especially if you're on the smaller side and you don't have a lot of these existing relationships to use it as an icebreaker and opener. And it may take you a while to actually get the matching grant or they may provide it for a future campaign, but it's always worth a try. So I don't want to make it sound like you can't ask new people to provide a matching grant and start those conversations. You would just probably want to start the ball rolling soon. So once you've secured your matching grant, you'll want to do a little bit of legwork to promote it. And the first thing that you'll do is add it to your Mighty Cos profile. You just share the basic info about your grant, how much it's for, who provided it, the dates that it's active. And you can also even add a little logo to it, which is actually new this year. And on the next slide, we're going to talk about where these various things that you see on the slide would display on Mighty Cos. And off the Mighty Cos platform, you'll want to post about it on social media and add it to emails and let people know how much you'll have available and when it'll be available so that they can plan their donations. Once you add your matching grant to your Mighty Cos page, there are some built-in marketing tools that display your match in a few key places on the platform. First, it'll add a sticker to your donate button, which is really important because you're getting them when they're actually making the decision to click the donate button and start the donation process. So that's a really important place to make them aware that a matching grant is available. There will also be a summary of the grant that displays on your organization page, which is the dollar-for-dollar match box that you see right there. And donors can filter their searches specifically to show organizations that have matches available in case they're looking for, how they can get the most impact for the amount of money they have to give. So your nonprofit, when you have a matching grant available, will appear in those searches as well. So moving on from matching grants, one strategy to go bigger on Rich Link gives is to incorporate peer-to-peer fundraising. So before we can get too deep into the particulars of how peer-to-peer fundraising works, we need to talk about what that actually is. And peer-to-peer fundraising is a technique where a nonprofit leverages existing supporters to bring in new supporters by asking them to create a fundraiser and then ask their social networks for donations. That essentially means deputizing your nonprofit's biggest supporters to fundraise on behalf of your organization. They then ask their social network, meaning their family, their friends, their colleagues, and people they know through online channels to make donations to your cause. Since all donations that are made to their pages are also added to your fundraising totals, this means that having more people fundraising for you will drive your leaderboard totals higher and help you win prizes and increase the overall amount that you raised during Rich Link gives. There are a couple of reasons why peer-to-peer fundraising is a big deal. And the most important reason is that this type of fundraiser is really great for donor acquisition or getting new donors to make their first donation. The thing peer-to-peer fundraising helps you do that no other fundraising technique does quite as well is break you out of your existing list of supporters and engage new people in your cause. And this is because your fundraisers are asking people to donate that your nonprofit doesn't really have access to solicit for donations. So their family and their friends and their coworkers and people they know personally. And even if you had access to say someone's mom or their best friend, we know unfortunately that your nonprofit is less likely to get a donation from them because one of the top reasons people donate to a cause is because someone that they know personally asked them to. So even if you could send them an email and ask them to donate, that's less effective than someone they know personally, someone they trust asking them to donate to your cause. And the other reason peer-to-peer is such a big deal on a day like Rich Link gives is all that extra reach you can get will help you and peer-to-peer fundraisers will help get your cause in front of more people and help you generate buzz which is invaluable on a giving day. And every single peer-to-peer fundraiser you have bolsters your cause by adding testimonials to your work. For instance, peer-to-peer fundraisers may use their page to talk about how much your nonprofit and your advocacy work means to them, what you do in the community, how they got involved and illustrate how important your work is in the community in a really personal way that can be harder for a nonprofit to replicate on their own. So it's a really great story. Most people are really happy to talk about their experience with nonprofits that they care about. And it adds a great testimonial effect that really tugs at people's heartstrings and makes them want to support organizations. So thankfully Mighty Cause is a platform that was built for peer-to-peer fundraising. So it's very easy to do on Mighty Cause. The first thing that you need to do is just ask your supporters to fundraise for you, which you can do on social media. You can solicit them via email. You could have a meeting at your center and just explain to them what peer-to-peer fundraising is and what it entails and what you're asking of them and actually have someone there with them to get them set up on the platform. That would be a really great idea for like a lunch and learn, a volunteer meeting or something like that. So it's really easy to do. They just go to your profile and they click that button next to your donate button that says fundraise. And once they click that button, our fundraiser creation wizard will take them through setting up their page and help them get published. And then all they have to do is just set their goal, fill out their page and start fundraising on November 1st. So before we move on, I just wanted to share some quick facts about how peer-to-peer works on Mighty Cause and answer some of the most common questions. First, you'll know that when somebody sets up a fundraiser for your nonprofit because all admins are gonna be sent an email saying, hey, so-and-so created a fundraiser for you. And you can also track peer-to-peer pages in the campaign section of your dashboard, which will give you an overview of any campaigns that were started for your nonprofit. And all donations from peer-to-peer pages, which includes ones that are started by individuals, teams and events, they're counted on the leaderboard on your profile and they're eligible for prizes as long as they're made online and within the donation time period, which starts November 1st. These donations are just bundled into your normal disbursement. They don't have to do anything to release the funding and there's never anybody who's personally in between them. It's just included and set directly to you with your regular disbursement. And these are all in your donations report, so you'll be able to see where donations came from and export a full report if you want more information. And this is sort of an edge case that sometimes it happens that a fundraiser is created, but it's not actually linked to your nonprofit or they set it up for the wrong organization. So just to note that the fundraiser has to be connected to your organization to count for Richling gives. But if you notice something that's off with a fundraiser, and I definitely recommend looking at your campaign screen to keep track of it, you can always email us at supportatmightycause.com or send the fundraiser to us and we'll help them get it straightened out. One easy thing that you can do to make it easier for people to find peer-to-peer pages that are connected to your nonprofit is add them to your feature fundraiser section on your organization profile. This is under the page editor and you just kind of built that by pasting the URLs that you wanna share in there. So with peer-to-peer, really the fundraisers themselves people who've signed up to raise money for you are gonna be doing all the labor to promote their page to their social network. But this can give the fundraisers a little bit of extra visibility. It can showcase the fact that you have people who are fundraising on your behalf and just sort of direct people to different pages they can donate to if they choose to on your profile. So if they end up at your profile, they can also see that you have some peer-to-peer fundraisers going and if they choose to donate through those they can do that easily through looking at your featured fundraisers. All right, so I wanted to move on from peer-to-peer and talk about events for a minute. Now having an in-person event can be a really great way to get people involved in your Richland Gives campaign. We do have an event planning tip sheet in the nonprofit toolkit that has some really great tips but you'll wanna think about something that's fun that will attract people and interest people. That's also relatively easy for your nonprofit to pull off that doesn't require a huge lift or months and months of planning. So something like a tour of your facilities like a brown bag lunch or a lunch and learn having a guest speaker or even just a party can really help you generate donations. If you have an event, you can set up a computer or have a tablet ready that allows people to make donations right then and there to your page. And people can also donate from their phones because the Mighty Cross platform is mobile responsive. So you can print up some signs with the URL and help direct people to your page so they can just make a donation from their smartphone. And one thing to think about here with events as well is media coverage. Some events, especially if they have a really good spin on them, things like cute kids or animals can be magnets for morning news shows. So you may be able to get radio out there as well. So just as you're thinking of an event and thinking of inviting people, remember to also invite the media because a media showcasing your events could really boost your bottom line on Richland Gives. So don't forget to invite the media to your event as well. So your email list is an important tool for Richland Gives because it's a direct line to your supporters. It'll appear in their inbox and they'll most likely receive a notification about your email on their phones. So email needs to be an important part of your Richland Gives strategy. More and more people are reading and responding to emails on their phones. So that's a reason why it's important to be relatively brief and get to the point of your email quickly. People are usually skimming. They're not gonna sit down and read war and peace. They're not gonna read a wall of text. So make sure when you're building your emails that these are skimable, that you break up the walls of text with photos, headlines, buttons to click on and so on. And that will help keep people engaged once they've opened the email. Because if you hide your CTA button behind a giant wall of text that they're not inclined to read because they can't skim it, you might unfortunately lose some people who opened your email. So keep it short and sweet and you're more likely to keep their attention because a lot of people, myself included, will close right out of an email with a giant block of text. Your call to action or CTA buttons are really the most important part of your emails. That's the thing you're asking them to do and they should go straight to your Mighty Cause profile. And we recommend keeping them urgent and to the point using language like donate now and give now and help us today is more effective than sort of passive language that you might use in a CTA button. One thing that is really important and I cannot stress this to you enough as somebody who sends a lot of emails for Mighty Cause is to test your emails. So if you're using an email marketing program like Constant Contact or MailChimp, send a test email to a few people, have them click on the links and make sure they go to the right place and have them double check for you any errors. There's really no worse feeling on earth than sending out an email to a bunch of people on a high stakes day and then realizing that you have a broken link. So make sure that you test things out beforehand so that when Richland Gives comes around and you're sending these emails, you can trust that they're solid and they will do what you want them to do. You should also be sure if you're using an email marketing program to choose mobile friendly templates and actually test them on some different mobile devices because more and more, as I mentioned, people are reading their emails from their phones. So if your email looks weird on a phone and sometimes different phones and different apps can behave differently so you'll probably want a droid and an iPhone to test it on, they may not read it if it looks sunny or if it looks broken. So just test them out and make sure that they look how you want and when it comes to mobile emails, it's important to know that design can be simple. It doesn't need to have a million columns because on mobile, those are gonna stack anyway instead of appearing side by side. So keep the design pretty simple and keep the text short and skimmable and just check for any weird formatting that might occur on a phone. And especially if you've been doing Richland Gives for a few years now, you should be segmenting your emails which basically means that instead of sending a blast email to everybody on your email list, you basically send the same email with very small specific tweaks to different groups of people and what those small tweaks do is they just tailor the email to who that donor is and what kind of relationship they have with your nonprofit. So for instance, people who have given to your Richland Gives campaigns in the past should get an email that acknowledges that they are a past donor and is worded a little bit differently than someone who's maybe say used your services but has never made a donation. So things like giving again, we know that we can count on you to help us and stuff like that works a little better with those donors because they go, oh yeah, I did give to them. So I'll give again because I like this organization and I wanna support them. And volunteers and board members should get their own emails because you don't wanna talk to a volunteer who's helping you every single day like you have no idea who they are, the same thing goes for board members. And one thing that you'll wanna do if you're comfortable with segmentation already is target people based on their gift size like people who donated in the past in the five to $20 range, a different email for people at the 50 to $100 range and so on so that you can get really specific about what you're asking and try bumping donors up to the next level to get them to increase their gift size. So that's an advanced level email segmentation that you could try, targeting people based on their gift size and trying to bump them up a little bit to increase your overall fundraising on Richland Gives. You don't have to try that but that is a good idea if you've been doing Richland Gives for a little while and you are comfortable with segmentation. Social media is another important channel for promoting your Richland Gives campaign so you'll want to be strategic about using social media channels. The first thing that you can do that's really easy is when you're posting about the event use the Richland Gives hashtag which is Mark and correct me during the Q and A if I'm wrong but it's hashtag Richland Gives so pretty easy to remember and that way you can be part of the conversation online about the event. We also recommend as much as you're able to interacting with people on social media channels responding to comments, thanking people for retweets and so on so that you're active and engaged on social media and that makes it actually more likely that you will be seen because pretty much all social media platforms are using an algorithm to actually sort through what should and should not appear in people's feeds and early engagement which is people clicking on things, retweeting, sharing, liking, commenting and so on will make you stand out more and make it more likely that the algorithm will put you in people's feeds. Appointing someone as a social media manager can be a really great way to make sure that you're taking care of your social media channels and responding to people who interact with you. This person can be a volunteer if you don't have the capacity to use a staff member for this purpose. Obviously if you have somebody who manages your social media regularly then they are a natural fit for this position. I really recommend just as a general rule staying in your comfort zone and just going where your audience is. And what I mean by that is that if you have a lot of followers on Instagram, use Instagram. And if you have the most followers on Facebook, use Facebook as your primary channel. You don't need to try to do everything or try platforms that you're not normally active on. You just want to basically concentrate your energy and your efforts where you're likely to see the most payoff. So it's okay to stay in your comfort zone. And something that's not on the slide but is definitely important is asking for help, asking for a boost. So if you have sponsors or relationships with other organizations or relationships with companies or businesses, you can always just send them an email to, hey, can you post this on your social media during our events? And that can help you get some additional reaching boost to your campaign. You'll just want to take a look at what their social media is like before you ask them if somebody has five followers, that's not really worth it. But if they have a thousand followers on Instagram or Twitter and they talk about your campaign, that can be a great way to boost your visibility. So email is also important for donor retention. Make sure that you pull a list of your unretained donors from your donor retention report and reach out to them about Rich Link Gives. Now this is really easy. When you log into your profile and you're on your welcome screen, it'll have some metrics there for you. One of the metrics that you see there now is actually your donor retention rate, which is really cool, especially for an event like Rich Link Gives. Some of you might not use Mighty Cause 365 days a year, you kind of check in when you're ready for Rich Link Gives. And this can tell you during the day of and before the event, how many people you've retained from 2018. So it's really helpful. And the cool thing about it is there's a little arrow that is right by your donor retention rate that allows you to pull a report. You can also access this from the report section of your dashboard. And what this allows you to do is see the donors that you have not retained yet. So this is really, really important during Rich Link Gives. If you've done this event before, you can see who did not come back in 2019 to make a donation that made a donation in 2018. So what you wanna do is you wanna make sure that you have an email ready, schedule it, build it out. And then on the day of, just pull that list near the end of the event, middle of the event. You can do it a few times and just plug that list in to your email marketing software and send them an email saying, hey, you donated in 2018. That was so amazing and you helped us out. Can you come back and donate again today? We really need your support. And you'll see that people do come back to make that donation. You've got a great new tool to focus on donor retention. And that's really important for Rich Link Gives because this event has been around for quite some time and most of you have probably participated before. So make sure that you check in on your welcome screen or check in reports and understand where that donor retention report is located where you can easily pull it, get an email together, build it out, do everything but plug in the list and then have that ready to fire on December 3rd. You can do it a couple of times. You can do it once, but that will make sure that anybody who fell through the cracks in 2019, you are making an effort to bring them back to make another donation. And one thing that you can also do is work with them to increase their gift size. A great way to increase your overall fundraising, again, is to get people to increase the size of their gifts. If somebody gave $20 in 2018, maybe see if you can get them to give 30 or even $40 in 2019. So that's another thing that you can do to focus on retention and increase your overall fundraising. So yeah, just definitely check that rate on your welcome screen throughout the day. Have an email ready to send and just export that list. It's a CSV. You can load it right into Mailchimp, Constant Contact or any email provider that you're using. And finally, follow-up needs to be part of your strategy because as we mentioned, the timing of your thank you is a big predictor of whether or not a donor will come back to make another donation to your organization. So you wanna be sure on sending a prompt and personal thank you, you can obviously utilize the tools and mighty costs to automate some of this on the day of. But after the event, you'll wanna regroup and send some personal thank yous and follow-ups with them to start stewarding the people who've donated to you during Richland Gives. This can be a really great job for volunteers, getting them to call people on the phone or coordinate cards or thank you letters, sending emails and so on. Volunteers love this kind of thing and it's really easy for them to do. A lot of them can even do it from home. So if you are small and you really just want to get this over with, you can ask volunteers to help you just coordinate something so that you're reaching out to donors after the event. And you'll basically want to close the loop with all of your donors. So you may wanna send some segmented emails or a blast that just kind of report on your results and let them know what you achieved in addition to the more personal touches. It can be really unsatisfying for donors to give money to a nonprofit for a specific campaign and then just never hear about it again, especially if it's something specific, like you had something in particular you were raising money for, for like a new roof for your building or a particular program, if they never hear about it again, then that's not gonna be a satisfying experience for them because they wanna know the impact of their donation. And also pay special attention to first-time donors and send them a welcome series of emails or mail them a welcome packet and just start stewarding them, get to know them, get them involved in your nonprofit. All right, so that was a lot of information and before we start the Q&A session, I wanted to just go over the prizes that are available for Richland gifts. So as I mentioned before, there is a one-to-one matching grant that's been made available by the Richland County Foundation for the first 25 organizations to raise $1,000 for their campaign. So that's super easy money. And the key there is to work on getting early donations. Since if you wait until the week of the event to start fundraising, 25 orgs will probably have already beaten you to the punch and have taken up those spots and taken that prize money. So make sure that you're concentrating on early donations. And just as a note, we track this sort of off the platform before the event between Mighty Cause and the Richland County Foundation and they will be in touch if you've won one of the matching grants. Leaderboards are really the centerpiece of Richland gifts and there's quite a bit of money tied up in them. And just as a note, because this is always a question every year, only online donations currently count toward leaderboard prizes. So there's gonna be two leaderboards, a large nonprofit and a small nonprofit leaderboard and that's gonna be determined by the budget information that you gave us in your registration form. They're all ranked by the most dollars raised and there's gonna be $10,000 total awarded. The first place is $3,000. Actually, I think I got these reversed 550 for first. Second place is 3,000 and third place is 5,000. So that's $5,000 per leaderboard. That's quite a bit of money. And the strategy for winning leaderboard prizes is really just trying to increase your overall donation volume, the amount of money you raise. That's all it's looking at. And again, these are only online donations. So your matching grant itself doesn't usually count toward your leaderboard unless that grantor has fulfilled their donation with an online donation if they processed it through Mighty Cause on the Richland Gifts Portal. But things like matching grants and all of the strategies we've talked about so far will help you increase that overall total and help you do well on the leaderboard. So the first three organizations, the top three organizations on each leaderboard are going to have stars next to them. And that means that they are eligible for a prize. This usually changes a lot on the day of, so it's really exciting to see, you know, who pulls into the lead, who falls off the top three. And just as a note, you can also search for your organization on the leaderboard. The leaderboards are searchable. So if you see that little magnifying glass right here on the slide, you can just click that. And then that will actually that'll allow you to search for your organization. So if you don't see yours because we only have a limited amount of space for them, you can search for your organization there and see where you're placing. There's also golden tickets, which are hourly prizes that you win by raising the most money in the space of that hour. And they're each worth $500, which is quite a bit of money. They pull between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. and you can find the full schedule of golden tickets on the Richland Gives website, on the rules and prizes page. You'll definitely want to schedule some email and social media activity around these prizes so that you get the opportunity to take home an additional $500 for your organization. It's definitely a nice boost and just a little bit of information about how golden tickets work. You need to receive donations during those hours in order to be eligible for them. And just like the leaderboards, online donations are what count toward golden tickets. So putting in offline donations or a large matching grant, if it's not fulfilled through the platform, don't count towards golden tickets. It's only online donations made through the Richland Gives portal on Mighty Cause. And there are also event prizes available. There's a leaderboard watch party at IdeaWorks that has six random drawings worth $500 each. These are random. The time's here. It's from 5.30 to 6.45. And you can only win once during the watch party. So if your organization wins one of the random prizes, you would be taken out of that prize pool so that you couldn't win any additional. So those are four random and you can check the rules and prizes page to see the exact breakdown of that. But that's an additional opportunity to win during the watch party. All right, so let me get Mora back on. Hi, Mora, can you, are you able to hear me? I'm able to hear you. All right, so I just wanna check real quick that any questions we have and see what people are interested in learning. All right, so, oh, yes, well, just to let everybody know, we will be posting a recording of this webinar and the slides on the Richland Gives website. So just check in the nonprofit toolkit for that once I'm able to actually download it and upload it to YouTube. I'll make sure that it's embedded there and you'll also be able to download the slides. All right, so, okay, this is a question about the Richland County Foundations match. Regarding the one-to-one match is the gift made 11-one count toward the first 25 organizations for the grant. So I think I'm just reading this. So in order to start, to be eligible for the match, it starts counting on November 1st. Nobody has any donations that count before November 1st. That's when the whole thing flips over and you can start accepting donations that count toward Richland Gives. So we're gonna be calculating starting on November 1st who are the first organizations to raise $1,000 and they will be eligible to win the match from the Richland County Foundation. So I think there's a couple of other ones here. Yeah, so non-online gifts do not count for the match from Richland County Foundation. Online donations only count. So no checks, no cash donations, nothing that you enter as an offline donation on Mighty Cause counts, those we can't verify and it's not fair to Richland County Foundation the position of like checking checks that were received. So only online donations count really for the whole event. So starting November 1st, start getting donations and hope that you're one of the first 25 to reach $1,000 but it's only online donations. I think that was the main question. Oh, and so this is another question about when to start accepting donations. Is it too early to start soliciting donations? So yes, it's too early to start accepting them because nothing until November 1st counts towards Richland Gives. However, you can start putting it in your emails, you can start putting it on your website, you can send out a save the date, you can post a save the date on social media and start getting it in people's heads that starting November 1st you have this campaign coming up, let them know what Richland Gives is all about and start introducing some of the ideas and themes of your campaign. You can change your Facebook cover photo and your Facebook profile picture to be Richland Gives. So you can start promoting your campaign now but it is too early to actually accept donations. They just, you'll still receive them, we won't hold them but they won't count towards your totals for Richland Gives. All right, if anybody has a question looks like that was all of the questions we had during the presentation. If you wanna know anything from me or from Mauritainer if you have any questions about the prizes just type it into the questions box of the go-to webinar panel and we will answer it. So I'll just give you all a minute to enter those in if you have any more. Linda. Yes. I would like to clarify just a couple of things. The donations start tracking at 7 a.m. on November 1st and when you say refer to online donations what we mean totally and I think you said this clearly but it's credit card transactions via your Richland Gives website page. Also the leaderboard watch party at IdeaWorks will start at five o'clock and we will start pulling tickets at 5.30 and how that works if you're new to Richland Gives invite your board members and your friends and family to come down to IdeaWorks. At the door each person will receive a raffle ticket and they write down their favorite nonprofit on that raffle ticket. So we put all those raffle tickets into a golden bucket and we draw prizes six times during the leaderboard watch party. So this year you are only eligible for one of those prizes during the leaderboard watch party. And then another question that I get periodically especially the closer we get to December 3rd organizations wonder how does Mighty Cause put an organization at the top of the search page? So if you could explain that that'd be great. Sure. So our search is you know it's an algorithm so it looks at a couple of different things. One thing that you can do to increase your visibility in the search is to make sure that your profile is completely filled out. So you have actually a to-do list on your welcome screen. So when you log onto your nonprofit profile when you're logged in there's a little to-do list there. It's just five things that you can do that will make your profile complete. I would say the only thing you don't need to worry about is EFT. I would hope that you wanna sign up for EFT and get your money sooner, but that is not required for the search. But things like having your logo uploaded, having a cover photo, having your story filled out. Those are all things that are gonna make us know that you paid attention to your profile and then it's more visible. The other thing that we look at is traffic. So pages that are getting more traffic, more visitors to them, they are going to rank a little bit higher in search. And we also look at when the last time someone was in the search updating thing. So again, that's why it's important to update your profile every year. If you look at the search, usually you'll see that down toward the bottom of the search, if you search for everybody, you'll see a couple of profiles that really haven't been shown much love. So that's why it's a great idea to get into your profile before the event, show it a little love, update it, and then start driving people to your page as soon as you can, because the more traffic you're getting, the more our search algorithm is gonna say, oh, people are interested in this page, this is relevant. But there's always a few questions about that. There's really no preference for any organization. It's really just down to those three factors. And then also the amount of donations that you're getting counts as well. So if you're raising a ton of money, you're gonna rank higher in the search. Because we're showing people the pages that we believe are most relevant when we're just filtering for organizations. So organizations that are doing lots of traffic have complete profiles, getting lots of donations and have been paid attention to recently. Those are kind of the things that our search algorithm looks for. But yeah, so that's kind of how they end up, where they end up in the search screen. All right, so there's another question here. Did our donors from last year have to enter an email address? Yes, so as far as address those, you can choose to collect mailing addresses in your donor experience. But email addresses are kind of how Mighty Cause runs. That's how we attract donors. So every donor that you had last year had to enter an email address. So we don't, unless they have an account with us, we don't verify it. So we don't know that that email is necessarily still active or one that they're using. Every donor, when you download your donation report or your donor retention report, you will have an email address for them there. And one thing to keep pay attention to, especially if you're sending donor retention emails out, is your bounce rate. Some of those emails just may not be good anymore. And you can see that by looking at your bounce rate when you send out emails through like mail chamber constant contact. But they did at the time of their donation have to enter in their email address. You should have emails for all of your donors. Okay, so. So there's another question about the leader, the leader board prizes. I did actually say that I switched those in the middle of the slide. So you can check the rules and prizes page to see the prize breakdown. That information is listed there again. Oh, this is a long one. Where can we get ahold of the best elevator speech for the Richland Gives program? What would we say to somebody who asked what is Richland Gives? What's a crisp clear two sentence descriptor? I struggle to explain it succinctly as I'm new to the program this year. So that's a really great question. I'll let more weigh in as well. But really I think the thing that's most helpful for people to understand what Richland Gives is all about is that it's a giving marathon. It's trying to get people to invest in nonprofits in Richland County and for 24 hours all coming together as a community to support the nonprofit sector in Richland County. So maybe more can maybe put together an elevator pitch and send that around. But that's kind of really where with most people the lack of understanding is not necessarily in what a community foundation does or what Richland Gives is, but what is a giving event? Why just this one day? And the whole idea is to get them to come together for one day and celebrate and support nonprofits in Richland County. And I just wanted to give more some time to chat about that too, since that's your job. Okay, what I typically say because when we first began Richland Gives it truly was one day. So originally we would say what if everyone gave on the same day and that same day is Richland Gives. Well, now we have expanded it because we started taking pledges I think in 2016 and that has grown to we are now taking donations starting on November 1st. So it's no longer just one day, but it culminates on one day. So what I say is what is Richland Gives? It's an online giving event that encourages you, meaning the donors to make gifts to local nonprofits that you care about. And the other thing is, is the reason why the foundation decided to do this was to help nonprofits obviously raise money for themselves. And in 2015 we had numerous nonprofits in Richland County who did not have a mechanism to accept online donations. And online donations really are the most cost effective way to get your donation. So we did it to build capacity for nonprofits, to build philanthropy in Richland County and also to make the community stronger. So I think on some of the templates on the nonprofit toolkit, there is a news release template. I may update that or I may also email this out, this kind of information out in one of my emails that I send out to the Richland Gives participant. So the other thing we do is we purchase local radio, TV, newspaper, Richland source online ads that advertise Richland Gives to help you so that you don't have to pay for the advertising. So I'll work on an elevator speech for you and send that out in the next week or so. Yeah, and just to reiterate what Maura said, you have that nonprofit toolkit. So if you're like sitting down to write an email or a social media post and you're just like, I don't know how to word this, go to the nonprofit toolkit and download the templates because it's really, you can customize it and make it, your own personality and your own nonprofit's voice, but that's a really great jumping off point, especially if you're new to the event, sort of framing the event for people who may not be familiar with it. So make sure that you use the toolkit and you find your inspiration there because those templates are there so that you can copy and paste and just sort of customize them to be specific to your nonprofit's work. All right, so that I think is all of the questions. So I'll go ahead and post this on the Richland Gives website once we're all done and you'll also have access to the slides if you would like to download them as well. That'll be in the nonprofit toolkit area of the Richland Gives website. I just wanna thank all of you for spending so much time with me today. I'm really excited to see what you guys achieve on December 3rd and Maura, thank you for jumping in to answer a lot of those questions. Thank you. Absolutely, you have a great day and happy fundraising everyone.