 Hi everyone. Before we get started, I see people are filtering in. I just wanted to make sure that everybody can hear me and see my screen. You should see the title slide with an apple and some books. So if you can see me and hear me, it'd be a great help if you could just type that into the questions box on your go-to webinar panel just so I know that I'm actually speaking to you and you can see the slides I'm talking about. Awesome. Thank you. All right. So it's just about two o'clock, so we'll go ahead and get started. Hi everyone and welcome to our webinar today. Back to school tips, education fundraising tips. My name is Linda Gerhardt and I'm a community engagement specialist here at Mighty Cause. I've been with Mighty Cause for a little over two years and since I started, my job has been helping nonprofits fundraise better. I run our blog which is called Mighty Blog and produce a lot of the nonprofit oriented content that we have available. Before coming to Mighty Cause, I spent the majority of my career in the nonprofit sector and I'm just really excited to be able to share some tips with you based on what I've seen work for education nonprofits on Mighty Cause. Here's a look at our agenda for today. Just as a bit of housekeeping before we dive in, I'm going to take questions at the end of the presentation. So if you think of something you want to ask during the presentation, just type it into the questions box on your go-to webinar panel and I'll make sure we get to your question during the Q&A session that's scheduled at the end of the webinar. And before we get into the meat of this webinar, I just wanted to take a minute to introduce you to Mighty Cause in case you're new to our platform or you haven't really checked in with us since we were Razoo. Mighty Cause has been in the crowdfunding and nonprofits fundraising business since 2006 when we were founded as Razoo with the intent of helping small nonprofits build their capacity. We've helped nonprofits raise over $600 million since we were founded. In April, we changed our name to Mighty Cause to reflect our mission of helping Mighty Cause raise money and awareness. We're the industry leader and innovator in giving events and we've expanded our offerings to include a full nonprofit fundraising suite and recently we were rated top nonprofit software by Gartner Research, which is really cool. Alright, so now that we've got all that housekeeping out of the way, let's just dive right into the main content of this webinar. I wanted to start off today with a discussion of some of the most popular fundraising methods in education and talk about how they stack up against each other. So there's basically four categories of education fundraising that rule the scene. First, there's sales-based fundraising, then collecting box tops or proofs of purchase, then events, and then online fundraising. In the next few slides, we'll talk about each of these methods in detail, but one thing I wanted to go into before we do that is the criteria schools need to look at when they're choosing a fundraising method. The first and most important consideration is how much money is actually coming back to your school. Obviously, if you're going to go and invest time and effort in fundraising, you want to make sure that your efforts are well spent and that the vast majority of the money you raise comes back to your school. You also want to take a look at how much time and effort is involved. Is something going to take up a ton of staff time and time managing students and require a huge administrative effort or is a particular method a little bit easier to manage requiring less internal coordination, staff time, time is money, and when you're in a field like education where teachers and school administrators are already working overtime and at home and outside of school hours, you just want to make sure that everybody's time is well used when you're choosing a fundraising method. Another thing that is important is how engaging the fundraising method is. Is it something that feels like a chore to everybody involved or will it get your students, your parents, your donors, everyone involved with the school pumped about what you're doing and education? And then does it actually advance your school's mission? Does it get everyone engaged in the issue of education? Does it reinforce the importance of what your school does on a daily basis? And finally, is everyone involved going to get something out of the fundraiser? Does it teach students important lessons? Will it be a worthwhile experience for the parents and teachers involved in it? So that's a lot of criteria and we'll talk about how these particular popular fundraising methods fit into this criteria in the next few slides. So first up is sales and some examples of sales-based fundraisers that exist today are old standbys like wrapping paper and pizza kits and candy and cookies and some other companies like Yankee Candle have gotten in on the school fundraising game as well. I don't know about you, but I definitely remember selling pizza kits, wrapping paper, popcorn and cookies and candy bars for my school. And in fact, many of these sales-based fundraisers simply feel like part of the school experience for a lot of people. The biggest issue with these sales-based fundraisers is the return that your school sees. Generally speaking, it's pretty low. The school only sees a small percentage of the money that comes in through a sales-based fundraiser and unsurprisingly the vast majority of the money goes to the company that makes and distributes the products your students are selling. So to get a real-world sense of how this breaks down, I took a look at Joe Corby's which is a company that has schools selling pizza kits in the Mid-Atlantic which is where I live. They were and still are a stable of elementary and middle schools in the area where I grew up in Maryland and my mom and I sold pizza kits pretty much every year. So I did some research on their website. Joe Corby's requires that you sell a minimum of 100 kits before your school even starts to see a percentage of the profits. And the kits range from 20 to 25 bucks, so that means before your school gets anything from the sales you're conducting, the company makes around two grand thanks to the hard work of your students and teachers and parents who are purchasing the pizza kits. After that your school gets $5 for every pizza kit sold which means that for a $20 kit the company sees three quarters of the money parents and families dole out to pay for the kits thinking that they're helping their kids school. And unfortunately this isn't really unusual for these types of fundraisers. At the end of the day these fundraisers are totally product focused and turn your school into kind of a mini distribution center for these companies which takes focus away from the cause of education which should always be at the center of any fundraising efforts for a school or education environment. Another issue is that when purchasing a product is done to help your school the donations are not tax-deductible because the money isn't going to your school it's going to a for-profit company and the company is the primary beneficiary of the tax benefits for this fundraiser. One thing that's also a little hard to quantify about sales-based fundraisers but is definitely something most people have experienced is the awkward situations that can arise out of these sales-based fundraisers. Like when you've got a friend who's selling Amway or Sensey or a family member that's trying to make a living selling cut-go knives. The student's parents, work colleagues, family members and friends can feel pressured to purchase products they don't really need or want just to help the school and help the student they know do well in the fundraiser. The other side to that coin is the fact that students who fare best in these fundraisers are typically kids who come from wealthier backgrounds which can create an issue with fairness when there are prizes and other incentives for selling the most pizza, kids wrapping paper, candy, whatever in the fundraiser. So moving on to a slightly different type of fundraising we'll chat for a minute about box tops. Box tops for education is one of the most popular and widely used fundraising methods in schools across the country but like sales-based fundraisers it's got some issues. Number one is the low return on each box top. Your school gets 10 cents for each box top so let's say you get a box top for a box of Cheetos from Wal-Mart. So one box of Cheerios on the Wal-Mart website costs $3.64. When someone buys that box of Cheerios cuts off the box top and sends it to school with their child for box tops for education the school gets 10 cents so that's .02 of the purchase price of that box of cereal that actually goes back to your school. Now usually the argument for something like box tops for education is that it's a passive fundraiser. The argument goes that these are products the parents would be buying anyway so it's not a huge deal for them to clip off the box top and send it to school with a student but if you've ever dealt with this sort of fundraiser either as a parent or a teacher you know that it does require a lot more effort than that. It means that a parent has to spend time clipping off box tops making sure not to damage the box top because they might not accept it if it's damaged. Storing them, sticking them in their child's backpack making sure that they get to school with the child which is always a struggle and then you have a collection box or other point where they are dropped off which someone has to create and manage and empty out periodically. Box tops for education requires that someone be appointed the school coordinator then the school coordinator needs to take all the box tops count them fill out a form package them up and submit them to box tops for education. So when you break down the steps that are involved in this passive fundraiser it's actually a pretty time consuming effort for parents and requires lots of time and effort from your staff. So that's all that for just 10 cents per box top and the other assumption that parents are buying these products anyway is really only a partial truth. The main point of box tops for education is marketing and it's a really good marketing tool because if a parent is in a store and trying to decide between a brand name serial and a cheap restore brand serial the fact that the brand name provides a box top for his or her child's school and the store brand does not could be the tipping point in which serial they choose to buy. Parents and grandparents have even been known to prepare their shopping lists and back to school lists based on what they can get a box top for so while the school gets some benefit the main beneficiary of the box top for education program is General Mills and the company whose companies whose products offer box tops. The main point of the program is to entice people to purchase their products with the promise of being able to help out with education at your child's school which really brings us to the last concern about these types of fundraisers which is that the products they're pushing really aren't always the healthiest while they have diversified the products eligible for box tops for education and have tried to work with brands that are labeled organic that's mostly been in response to concern from health experts the list still includes sugary cereals like lucky charms granola bars cookie dough pizza rolls cinnamon rolls and other food like that which are certainly delicious and can totally be part of the healthy diet but the program exists to lure parents to purchase these products for their child there's only two green giant green giant products that will allow parents to collect box tops with vegetables so these programs can contradict a lot of what parents in schools try to reinforce with their students about healthy food choices okay so moving on we've got a pretty broad category of fundraising which is events and an event can include anything from an ice cream social to a posh gala at a university to car washes so this covers quite a few different kinds of fundraisers and while the pros and cons can vary from event to event this slide breaks down the pros and cons of event fundraising just in general in the pro corner we've got that they're versatile which is a huge benefit an event fundraiser can be anything where you gather people and have them come out to support your cause so you're really only limited by your own creativity and of course budget and manpower but mostly you're just limited by what you can think of there are also easy ways to get people engaged because you're offering something in return for their support whether it's a car wash or a family fun run or a movie night and you're taking fundraising and making it social reinforcing that person-to-person connection that's at the heart of good fundraising and planning and getting involved in an event can be super fun for students much more so than selling wrapping paper and trying to meet certain expectations in terms of how much they're able to sell under cause cons we've got coordination and planning at the top if you check these types of lists like I do event planning is one of the most stressful jobs in the United States and fundraising event planning can require a whole lot of mental energy and time from the people who are tasked with pulling the event off you can also run into some logistical issues like meeting permits from your city or county for a fun run or how to coordinate a bunch of students and parents after school since you know as you all probably know that's like herding cats on a good day and lastly we've got online fundraising which can encompass everything from your mighty cause page to Facebook fundraisers to just having a donate button on your website or an actual organized fundraising campaign and like all of our fundraising methods just so you know we're not biased there are some pros and cons to think about for education organizations on the plus side online fundraising makes donating easy and doesn't require buying products or filling out order forms or anything like that to help your school it's a very simple transaction people decide how much they are willing and able to give they make the donation and they're done it's also a year round option so you can build sustaining support for your school and online fundraising is also versatile you can work in online fundraising component into most events and other campaigns and like events you have a lot of flexibility in the type of fundraising you do online and what kind of campaign you run one thing that can trip up schools when it comes to online fundraising is the sheer number of platform options settling on a platform can often be the hardest part a lot of schools are also concerned about the cost of online online fundraising although as we've discussed a lot of the popular fundraising options like selling candy bars are much more expensive and have a much lower yield for your school and another thing to think about is internet access most people have access to the internet at school or a library or with a smartphone but there are a lot of americans that don't have consistent internet access and if you have a school that has families who have this issue internet fundraising can be tricky and make it make it a little bit awkward for people and like all the fundraisers we've talked about online fundraisers need someone to manage them on mighty cause that would be your nonprofit admin who has access to the back end of the page and donations and can make edits and create fundraisers so I like when I said I wasn't biased I am a little bit biased in favor of mighty cause obviously so I just want to go over a few of the benefits of using mighty cause as your school's fundraising solution we've got flexible pricing plans that can suit schools of all sizes and budgets you have lots of options on mighty cause and you can choose what works best for your organization our default pricing is no upfront costs with a four percent platform fee which donors can opt to cover but you can also turn off platform fees all together and allow us to ask donors to leave an optional tip to support the platform again at no upfront cost and it's totally dependent on what you'd like your donors to see and experience we've also introduced subscription plans which we'll talk about a little bit more later but they offer even more options for your school and one of the biggest benefits is the versatility of the mighty cause platform you can create peer-to-peer fundraisers team fundraisers project pages and you can use your organization profile and the widget that you can get through your mighty cross page at no cost to fundraise 365 days a year we provide detailed donation reporting so you've got all the info you need just to download away and you can customize your pages to really reflect your school so mighty cause is truly a powerful fundraising tool for schools that can help you take your fundraising efforts to the next level all right so now we're going to move into some common pitfalls pitfalls of school fundraising and learn what you can do to avoid them the biggest fundraising pitfall and one that's particularly easy for schools to fall into is because there's so many people involved is losing sight of your admission really this all comes down to a failure to communicate well it's mostly about focusing on the what instead of the why or taking the stance that everybody already knows what you're trying to do and why it's so important so when you're dealing with parents and others you can assume that they're in the know and you can easily lose sight of some fundraising fundamentals about communicating the why of what you're doing so to avoid the miscommunication the biggest thing I can recommend is pinpointing some key messages when you're starting a campaign which are two to three core talking points about your campaign they explain your why why you're doing what you're doing why it's important why people should care and outlining these key messages before you get started will help you keep your messaging focused accessible and help you leave it into every aspect of your campaign and on this point I do recommend writing a communications plan for your campaign which will outline who you're contacting how you're contacting and how you're speaking to them this will help your campaign be more effective and help prevent miscommunication about your goal your mission and what your fundraiser is all about it can also be a huge help to distribute some talking points about your campaign to anybody who will be helping with it so that everybody's on the same page they know what's up they know what to say they know how to answer questions and finally it's important to keep education at the center of all your fundraising efforts which seems really obvious but it's so easy for schools to forget because they have so much going on so even if you've got a complex dance of fun that has a really intense structure and the dancing and the campaign itself need to come after the point that this is for education and education is so important so you need to make sure that your work and the core of what you do which is teaching children is at the center of all of your communications another pitfall I've seen a lot of school fundraisers fall into is making things way over complicated I'm talking about dozens of team pages one person trying to log in and log out and manage pages for 20 other people wanting to have five different leader boards on team pages and really just going over the top with the amount of complexity and sometimes that can be successful I've seen it be successful but often it really just distracts from the point of the fundraiser and makes the person managing it want to tear their hair out so this can happen when schools over plan making sure there's something in place to cover every single edge case anyone can think of or trying to incorporate the wants and needs of every class every grade every student teacher and so on sometimes it's really just a matter of having too many cooks in the kitchen trying to put their stamp on the fundraiser or make sure that their idea is incorporated so however it happens sometimes school fundraisers in particular can get a little bit messy because of over complication so here's how to avoid it first and foremost aim for simplicity a fundraiser really and truly doesn't need to be super complex to be successful and in fact some of the most successful fundraisers in the history of nonprofit fundraising were incredibly simple having a concept of price structure and process that's easy for people to wrap their heads around is important to actually be successful so you can spend your time talking about your mission why it's important and trying to get people to donate instead of explaining the rules and the structure of your fundraiser over and over again secondly assign a point person this person is the final decision maker and all questions about the fundraiser and is in charge of making sure the project stays on course that sometimes means vetoing ideas saying no to requests and doing whatever it takes to keep everything on track and keep it from becoming overblown and over complicated you'll also want to keep an open mind when planning you can only plan for really so many things there might be edge cases that pop up that you need to address in the course of a fundraiser that's totally normal but over planning and over complicating won't prevent that in fact it'll make it more likely to happen so plan to the extent that you can and try to have a solid plan but also learn to adapt as you go and allow for the possibility that you can't think of everything upfront and that over planning makes it more likely that things will go wrong because as we said you're just adding those layers and layers of complexity each time you do that all right so now we're going to move on to how schools can use the mighty cause tools that you have available to fundraise smarter you may have gotten some emails from us recently about some cool new tools we have available we've done a lot to upgrade what we offer make our platform easier and more intuitive to navigate and add its own tools nonprofits have told us they wanted so we listen to you when you reach out and you ask us if we can add a particular tool or add something to an existing tool and you'll see a lot of those things incorporated in some of our new releases so first we're going to dive into the newest tools available that you can use right now first up is your mighty cause manager which is a fancy name we came up with for your dashboard now everything you need is accessible from an easy to navigate menu we upgraded your dashboard to make it easier for you to find the tools you need and the info you need in your daily work and to be able to find those things intuitively so you can just go to something that's very obvious pull the information you need or activate the tool you need to use and be done with it we've also added one tool admins have been asking for for a long time which is the ability to view all campaigns connected to your school or nonprofit so now when you log in on the campaign screen on your dashboard you can view and manage all project pages and campaigns started by your organization as well as any peer to peer or team campaigns that were created by others so that's something that's been a long time coming you guys told us that you wanted it and we've listened to you another huge upgrade is in the new donor experience tool which you can find on this under the donation section of your dashboard and you can use this tool to design and customize the donation process for your donors one of my favorite things about donor experiences that you can now add dedications and designations into the donation process which is something a lot of you have been asking for you can also preview your donation flow in full without having to make a test donation opt to collect additional information from donors like phone numbers preview your receipt and we've added a custom thank you page after a donation is completed so on that page you can add a video write a message and you can also add a cta button a call to action button to the page that will let you basically tell your donors where you'd like them to go next whether it's back to your main mighty cause page somewhere on your website to take a survey or to learn more about your work or really anywhere you choose it does not have to be on the mighty cause platform excuse me so what this tool does the donor experience tool is give you an an unprecedented amount of control over the user experience for donors you can craft the perfect checkout process for them and make sure that your school gets all of the information you want we've also rolled out mighty cause premium which is a subscription to mighty cause that gives you access to additional tools and frees you from platform fees there are three plans available so there's one to suit every budget and they start at $99 per month you can take mighty cause premium for a test drive to try out the tools like analytics data integration donor and supporter records volunteer management custom donation pages and increased branding control so if you're interested in getting a 30 day trial you can just email me after the webinar at linda at mightycause.com and we also have a group demo tomorrow at noon eastern time but you can attend if you'd like to learn more about premium and actually see some of these tools in action all right so before we wrap things up I wanted to go through some creative ideas for school fundraising that will hopefully help get you in the spirit spirit for the new school year when you're trying to put together a fundraiser it helps to know what has been successful for others and on mighty cause there are a few fundraising techniques that we've seen raise lots of money time and time again the first is really the whole a thon sweet fundraisers which includes walk-a-thons write-a-thons art-a-thons dance-a-thons read-a-thons and so on our fundraising our team fundraising tool is the most common way schools run these types of fundraisers and one of the reasons they're so successful is that they're competitive they add gamification and it's a familiar setup for people most people know what a read-a-thon is what a walk-a-thon is etc so it's not hard for them to wrap their minds around and it gives parents family friends and so on a way to support a child's individual efforts their creativity and it gets the students really invested too read-a-thons are my favorite not only because I'm a little bit of a bookworm but because they're so easy to connect back to the core cause of education and art-a-thons are also a really cool fundraising idea that I've seen raise lots of money for art education battle of the classes is another time tested favorite and it really works best with kids in the middle and high school age range because that's when they're best able to engage in a little friendly competition with other grades a private school that uses mighty cause called forest ridge academy raised almost fifteen thousand dollars in a single day with a campaign that pitted two of their classes against one another and these were large classes these were not like you know homework classes these were entire groups of students and the friendly competition just really helped motivate the students to fundraise hard and get people behind their cause the friendly competition really helps motivate students in general and it at that particular age middle and high school they are really motivated to show that their classes number one and their classes the best and the other guys are not the best so that can be a really fun way to get your students involved to get them pumped about your fundraiser and finally one that kids always love one thing kids always love is the chance to get revenge on an authority figure like a principal so if you have a popular teacher principal or other school official that is on board that's important they need to be 100% on board to look a little bit silly in front of students you can draw up a lot of enthusiasm with like a stunt campaign the idea behind it is that the fundraising goal when it's reached they the chosen authority figure will do something that's kind of embarrassing like shaving their head dyeing their hair a crazy color wearing a ridiculous outfit at a school assembly or being the school mascot for a basketball game or something of that nature something that's sort of out of the ordinary with what students are used to seeing with these authority figures and the magic here is that it really gets students excited and involved and can really turn into a fun engaging way for them to help raise money for the school another great way to raise money and awareness is to involve the community you may think that your support stops with parents and family members that many more people in the community are likely to want to get involved in your cause because you're educating children in their community one way you can get people involved is to partner up with a local restaurant for a benefit night it's a win-win in that they get business in their door and your school takes home a slice of the proceeds these are usually really fun low-key events you can set up a donation kiosk where donors can make donations right there at a table and have a sign-up sheet for email addresses so you can stay in touch with new supporters you meet and make sure that they get your emails matching grants are always a huge donation booster so work with community partners and businesses to provide a matching grant for your next fundraising campaign basically a matching grant if you've never used one before you're not familiar with them it's a large donation that you leverage to bring in other donations by offering donors the ability to have their donation matched it's basically like charity bogey we've seen successful campaigns where the entire hook of the campaign is that they have a matching grant so matching grants are not only a great way to boost donations but they're an awesome way to get community partners and business partners involved in your fundraising efforts birthday and holiday fundraisers are also typically very successful though of course if a student is doing a birthday fundraiser and they're under 13 on mighty cause they will need to have their parents help these are peer-to-peer fundraisers where instead of getting gifts or money for an upcoming birthday or holiday they ask for donations to a cause they care about in this case their school this is an awesome way to engage alumni as well we have a guy on the platform named Terrence who comes back every year to raise money for his alma mater and groups that support education in his community and he's raised several hundred thousand dollars over the course of several years he's no joke he's done an amazing job getting people excited about these causes and his campaigns his friends and family are always just waiting for his birthday campaign his last campaign raised over six grand in about a month which is super incredible and he's not a professional fundraiser or an employee of the organization or the university he's fundraising for he's just a regular guy who cares about education and wants to give back so giving people a vehicle to do this through mighty cause is a great way to encourage these types of fundraisers whether someone calls you or emails you asking how they can help or if you just want to put a link up on your website encouraging people that if they'd like to do some peer to peer fundraising they can do so on mighty cause is a way to get this started and encourage these kinds of fundraisers okay and finally we recommend that schools participate in giving Tuesday this year giving Tuesdays on November 27th which is the Tuesday right after Black Friday and Cyber Monday that's when giving Tuesday always is although the actual calendar date changes from year to year registration is open now at givingTuesday.mightycause.com and the main benefits to participating in giving Tuesday is that you can compete to win prizes and you get a free trial of mighty cause premium just for registering it's the biggest fundraising day of the year and it's smack dab in the middle of a lull in school right after Thanksgiving break and right before your holiday break so it's a great time to run a fundraiser and again you can register at givingTuesday.mightycause.com registration this year is easier than ever there's no fee it's basically just give us a little bit of information and we'll sign you up for the event and then you can fundraise on November 27th all right so that's just about it for today but I did want to take some time to look at some questions and take a look and see if there's anything that you guys are curious about so if you have a question just type it into the questions box on your go-to webinar panel and we will go over it so go ahead and type that in if you have a question okay here's the question what should you do if your school administrators insist on running a product fundraiser each year but you'd like to try something different that's a really awesome question because obviously for each individual they don't necessarily have the decision-making power but basically really getting into the nitty gritty of the cost and time and effort put into these types of fundraisers versus what you're actually bringing in is the key here being data focus is the best strategy because honestly the data does not look good for these fundraisers in most cases and what the school brings back is pretty small compared to the amount of effort and time they put in so do the math put some spreadsheets together and plead your case obviously no one can guarantee that they'll listen but perhaps they can add in a different type of fundraiser and see how it goes what the return is for your school and it'll give you even more ammunition in the future if you're able to show that this fundraiser is more cost-effective and more time efficient because that's something that decision-makers always like to hear and are usually open to hearing. All right so there's a question about Giving Tuesday are there fees for Giving Tuesday this year so just like last year we're waiving our platform fee for Giving Tuesday so the only fee you'll see is the credit card processing fee which is 2.9 plus 30 cents but you won't see that 4% platform fee added okay and then one more question will you send out a recording and slides for this webinar yes definitely you guys will have a recording of the webinar and slides by tomorrow at the latest so I will take care of sending that out to you so you can share the slides and recording with any of your co-workers or anybody else you'd like to have access to the webinar. All right last call for any questions all right so I think that's it thank you guys so much for spending your afternoon with me and attending this webinar if you have any questions or would like to talk strategy you can always get in touch with me at linda at mightycause.com I love talking about fundraising strategy so I'd be happy to hear from you um so enjoy the rest of your day and I wish you guys the best of luck with the upcoming school year