 Hi, everyone. Thank you for joining us today for our first give local Piedmont webinar. We are going to get started in a minute. We still have lots of participants joining. For those of you who are here, we would love to have you just open up the chat and let us know your name and what organization you're representing today. And we'll get started in a minute. Sarah, will we see your picture. I don't have my camera on today. Okay. And so we won't see my picture either. Nope, you're hidden as well. Okay. Well, I was, I was decorating myself with give local Piedmont magnets but I'll take it off because I do want me to turn on your video. You can turn it on for a minute and tell me how stupid it looks. I was trying to make a crown with it. I couldn't do it. I'm just going to enable it for you. Okay, so you should be able to start your video now. And then we can all see what you got going on. Oh, it's not that good. It's cute. It's like, I like to do it here. I can't get it. Oh, that is like a crown. All right, I'm taking off my video. Bye bye now. Alrighty, thanks to everyone who's filling out the chat. We love to see how many of you there are. Very exciting. Okay, so we're going to get going because we have 30 minutes for these webinars and lots of content. So we're going to get going. Welcome everybody to our first give local Piedmont webinar for 2023. We're super excited. These are kind of a series of three shortened 30 minute webinars so that you can come get the details and then be on your way working on your campaign. So I am Sarah, I'm a project manager for give local Piedmont this year with mighty cause and we're super excited to be a part of y'all's 10 year anniversary event. So I'm going to pass it over to Jane who is also here today to say hello. Hi everybody. It's Jane with Northern Piedmont Community Foundation and it says I'm community services but actually that's DD she's supposed to be with you today. My child caught a bad bug. And so she was unable to join us. This is our 10th anniversary for give local Piedmont. I came in on the second year. There's some pretty exciting things we have this year I mean part of it as you know is keeping the momentum and the excitement for the event. I am still meeting with sponsors so I look forward to talking to you a little bit later and really if you have any questions concerns ideas. Always feel free to reach out to DD me or Renard at Northern Piedmont or Sarah at mighty cause. So thank you Sarah, and thanks everybody for attending. Sounds good. So quick housekeeping note we are recording this webinar. So it will also be available in the toolkit along with the slide so you can access that after the webinar. So to get started we have top 10 kind of tips and things to know as you prepare your campaign or goal for this webinar is pretty much to break down into just 10 different pieces of information for you. So if you have any other tips or just kind of suggestions as you prepare your campaign, starting with one of the most important tips, just getting through the basics, kind of reviewing what the event is about. And just, you know, taking note of all of that so I'm going to pass it back to you James you can cover the slide. I like it that I'm the basic. That's good. So, I'm going to speak to you as if some of you already know all this and then some of you are brand new to the campaign. So, the website of course is give local Piedmont.org. One of the things that I find exhilarating about give local Piedmont is when I go to the website of give local Piedmont.org. And I look at all the fabulous organizations that are doing the most incredible work in our communities. So that is very exciting for me. We have sponsored this program give local Piedmont for the last 10 years. We're thrilled that we have sponsors in our communities and funds that we manage that think it's a very important event. We've, we've learned that for many of you, it is a major budget line item and we want to continue that so thanks again for all the great work. I am sorry I have allergies and sound like a frog, but I can't do anything about that we have, you'll see when we get to prizes that we do have some nice play on the 10th anniversary. So we've, we've tried to keep it fun, and we hope you'll agree with us on that. This event does take place it's a little later this year it is on Tuesday May the night, and it starts at midnight, and it ends at midnight. And believe it or not we are. Didi, Renard myself and Tonya Paul who's been with the event every year are looking at that clock at midnight. For those of you that are brand new. A lot of our donors don't want to have to remember that they can only give on this one day. So what we've done is we've opened this up to early giving so that means starting on April 25 that any donor can go and contribute to your organization on the website. That doesn't happen so that's a great convenience. This event does serve all four communities that's in our service area which is call pepper fuck your Madison and rap panic. Let's talk just a minute about checks. We do accept checks even though this is an online giving event. We accept checks is we found that many of our donors are older and they don't want to go online and give and they don't want to pay fees. Let me just say this about fees. 92% of our donors last year paid the fees. So any fees like I know there is a fee for Northern Piedmont Community Foundation sponsorship that fee that we collect does not go into Northern Piedmont it stays in the give month bucket and we use it to launch the campaign. We have postcards magnets yard signs banners. All kinds of things. So the fees do support running the program. We do accept checks and checks this year have to be in our hands not mailed by May the eighth. If you have any problems getting those checks to us, let us know. We have an office to opposites here in Warrington but we're also, we can, I can find folks that can come pick checks up. If that's what you need. Checks should be made out to Northern Piedmont Community Foundation or and PCF with your organization in the memo line. The organizations the nonprofit organizations may not enter their own checks. That's just not part of the program. They do have to come to us beforehand. Again, we've got some great prizes this year. I'm thoroughly thankful for our sponsors. I'm still working on that. Hopefully we'll have a few more prizes. And if you have any questions, feel free to call me anytime. Thank you for participating. Yep. I'm moving into our top 10 number two. You must register to participate and give local Piedmont so registration is required each year. You can see whether or not your organization is registered for this year by logging into your organization's page and there will be kind of underneath the overview. Kind of button that says registration is open for give local Piedmont and there will be a button to register once you are registered. It will let you know also that your organization is registered for this year's event. Same thing if you have a pending registration or anything. Do you need to, you know, save your registration form and come back later. You can come back to your organization page and continue to access your registration form through your organization overview dashboard. So yes, registration is required each year. You're just going to go, if you're brand new, you'll go to the give local Piedmont.org site. You can click register right on the homepage. It will bring you to a page where there's a short form to get you access and to register your organization. If you're completely new, you don't have admin access to any of your pages yet. This is also kind of an all in one process. If you click register, it will ask you to log in or set up an account if you're brand new. And by doing so, you're also claiming admin access to your organization page. So that admin request gets sent over to our mighty cause support where we review, and usually in about, you know, to max three business days we're going through and we're adding people approving them as admins to their organization pages. We always like to go through kind of like that process, just because whoever is being added to the organization has access to sensitive donor information. So register claim admin access kind of all in one. So once you are registered, once you have been approved as an admin, you'll be able to access your organization page. This is a very important slide because this is give local Piedmont org is going to be your home base for the event for all of the giving period. Early giving all of that you're going to always come to the give local Piedmont org site to log in and access your organization page. So at the top right there's a button to log in. It'll prompt you to log in using either Google or Facebook or you can log in via email. And then once you are logged in, you I have DD as an example here, you'll be able to click that name in the top right your name and it will give you a dropdown to your organization page. And this will be kind of how you can quickly access the organization that you're an administrator for. Another top thing is to become familiar with all of the kind of dashboard tools available to you and we'll go into kind of more in depth on another side for fundraising tools. But you this your organization dashboard once you log in and head to your page is going to be another hub for you and you're going to be kind of always in here. So you're, you know, setting up with your fundraising tools setting up campaigns building up fundraiser templates accessing reports. A big one updating your organization page. This is kind of the homepage for your organization where you can kind of explain the details of your campaign this year. Add additional photos make sure everything says 2023 if you haven't used it since 2022. There's a link in the description below reports where you can access your checkout and make kind of customizations here at a thank you page and thank you message. And then of course additional settings if you need to you get at it as an admin or you need to add additional admins who will also be needing access to the page maybe you have a department who needs to be accessing reports you can add them here. And then your reimbursement settings can also be managed. So our number four tip is to definitely take some time, re familiarize yourself or if you're new, take a look and kind of just browse through your dashboard. Open up each of these and kind of see what's available to you and add that as part of your to do list. And like I said, one of the big things that your splash page pretty much your organization page is to go through customize it if you're new or do a, you know, a nice refresh and update to your page. This organization page. And for me it looks blurry I don't know why it looks very blurry, but this page is going to be your main link that you share with supporters when you want them to come find you on the give and want site. So kind of as an example, you can see that there's photos there's videos. It's really a great chance for you to kind of tell a powerful story to your donors about why they should give to your organization. You can update your goal bar. If you meet your goal during the campaign you can re update your goal bar so that there's always kind of sustained momentum during the event, but definitely customize look and feel. You can see that the button is blue here. You can also take the time to customize this for your brand. So you can change it if it's purple or green. There's a lot of fun ways to customize your page to make it feel very connected to your organization. And by updating this, I mean it's a good way to kind of share your story. A lot of donors can come to the give local Piedmont site and they can just click and maybe they have never heard of your organization before but they can filter by kind of maybe you're an animal organization they can filter and find organizations that they may have not heard about before. So you definitely want your page to look really nice, especially for new potential donors. Moving into tips six, definitely review your nonprofit toolkit. It is filled with resources for you. We have everything from step by step instructions for building a great campaign. We have timelines we have tips, some templates. Our goal is to try to make give local Piedmont easy for you so that we can kind of take as much as we can off of your shoulders. So it's, you know, it's hard to know where to start if you're brand new, and maybe you've been doing this for a while and you, you know, need some new tips. So definitely check out the nonprofit toolkit. We also have marketing material pickup locations. So, one of our future webinars, we are going to kind of cover communications and different marketing tips. So this is a good, easy way to grab some materials to start advertising that you're participating in give local Piedmont. And also you can sign up for upcoming webinar trainings as well. Outside of the toolkits, you'll also want to review the FAQs. So we have FAQs for donors and we have FAQs for nonprofits. A lot of your questions will probably be answered in the FAQs. So definitely look there if you have any questions. A lot of the information also is easily kind of copied and pasted into any emails that you're sending out to donors. Again, use all of the information that we have provided to you. When you're, you know, crafting emails when you're doing all of this, just definitely be sure to check back and see how, you know, the local Piedmont has phrased different things and use it to, you know, make things easier for you. So our seventh tip is to take the time to assess your goals. So, you know, everyone is going to have different kind of capacity levels as far as what you're able to achieve by participating in the local Piedmont. Everyone's organizations are going to have different amounts of, you know, people who are working on the project. We're going to have it taking a minute, assessing your goals and making sure you set smart goals. So this is an acronym that we use to kind of figure out what goal setting is appropriate for your campaign. So setting very specific goals. What are you trying to achieve? Do you have a certain, you know, donor goal, a new donor goal? Do you want to try to get peer to peer fundraising working for you? Also setting measurable goals. So how do you plan to track your progress towards these goals? And making sure it's achievable. So like I said, capacity level is going to be a big thing when it comes to figuring out and setting your goals. Are you going to be able to achieve them based on the skills and the resources that you have? And then, of course, realistic goals and timely. So we are, you know, working towards a timeline towards give a local Piedmont. What are you going to be able to achieve given the time and the resources that you have? Tip number eight. So we have utilizing the fundraising tools. So after you've kind of, you know, checked out the toolkit, started to assess or build out some campaign goals. So if you're going to want to, you know, review the fundraising tools that are available to you, we have several built in tools that can help, you know, achieve fundraising success and build into your strategy. You might not be able to, you know, use every single one of these quote, these fundraising tools, but based on your goals, this is a good way for you to start to use certain things. So widgets, a big one right here. You can see a good way to capture, you know, donations that might come in on a different fund like your different kind of personal organization website. You can add a widget, any donations that come in through the widget on your other site will get added to your give local Piedmont total. So that's a great fundraising tools to use. We have the matching grants tool, which is going to be a biggie. Being able to set up easily different matching grants, matching grants, we'll go into kind of more details at another strategy webinar, but they're a really great kind of built in tool to help you drum up excitement for your campaign. We have a cute little sticker that comes up on your page when you have a live match. You have of course customizable donation forms. So just kind of looking through all of the fundraising tools found on your dashboard underneath fundraising tools. And you can start to add those into your strategy. Two more. So a big one for the give local Piedmont campaign, definitely a top 10 is to stay engaged. Like I was saying, your capacity level, everyone's capacity levels are going to be different. Every organization is at, you know, a different stage a different size. So, try not to judge what you're doing based on other orgs. Kind of evaluate yourself independently and start planning and strategizing now so given the time that you have the resources that you have what can you do to have the best campaign this year and how are you going to measure your success. You're going to be engaged. That's a ton of ways to stay engaged. You are definitely going to be the biggest cheerleader for your organization. So, you are going to drum up the engagement by others by being engaged yourself. So sending emails, social media posting, reaching out for peer to peer support, starting now to think about if there's any community partners that you can engage on your campaign. And don't forget your board members, they can be a really great resource to stay engaged as well. And then of course, all of this kind of starts to lead out of this webinar and into our next two, which are our perfect 10 tips, building and give local people fundraising campaign. So that one is happening on Tuesday April 4 at 2pm toasted by mighty cause as well. So we're going to offer just a ton of tips about how to really start to get into fundraising strategy. And then we also have our third webinar, which is more communications and marketing base that's getting attention with a communications plan for get give local people. And that one's happening Tuesday, April 11 at 1pm hosted by MPC F so you can sign up for these through the toolkit. Can I interrupt for just a minute. Do you do. So the, the person we have doing our communications plan not that the fundraising isn't going to be brilliant to is a she's a digital marketer so it should be interesting I hope you'll be able to participate in both of those. And one of the things that Sarah just added about how you engage others for give local Piedmont I mean we Northern Piedmont suffers the same thing it's like really we have to do this all again. But, but what what I've been seeing from some of our nonprofits is that if you have volunteers that work for you. Of course, and you're bored. And if you even said to your volunteers let's say you have a nice solid volunteer base. What, what do we do that you like that you work for us, and then you when they articulate that then you say can you share that with three people and what's happened is people have gotten better at better at sharing. And that's why somebody should donate to your organization so you really have to look in your sphere of influence and see who you can use to help market your organization, and now I'm going to be quiet and let Sarah go on. That was a good tip. Okay, so I have my last or last of the 10 tips accessing support seems pretty straightforward but it is always here for you. And especially during the giving event. Of course the give local Piedmont support team is also available. Didi and Tanya, you can reach out to them directly with any campaign questions. And then of course if you have technical questions. If you need any donation receipts recent, or if you're, you know having trouble logging in or anything like that, our mighty cause support team is available to you as well. You can reach out to us at support at mighty cause calm. And then during the actual event you have 24 hour support available to you so don't feel like you can't send us an email about anything. And then of course we also have wonderful additional support resources. We have if you go to support that mighty cause calm. You'll find just a bunch of different like nonprofit support resources donor support questions. A lot of this is really helpful if you have questions coming to your organization, maybe you have peer to peers, people fundraising for you who have questions, you can often find exactly what they need by just checking support and then you can copy paste the answer directly into an email. But of course if you need help reach out to us. And then a good one also to note is mighty cause calm slash guide. We have awesome blog posts that we have written all about fundraising strategies how to engage your board. How to, you know, secure a match and to, you know, draw up excitement with giving. So if you are looking for some light reading geared towards the event, you can definitely take a look at that there's super just wonderful tips and suggestions as well as a couple pre recorded webinars so if you're looking for something. Very specific we have a wonderful webinar all about just specifically matches that mighty cause has put together. So you can get the links to those through our mighty cause calm slash guide site. So I am going to switch it over to questions. I, we are 124 I'm impressed we got through all 10 slides under 30. So if you have any questions you can click the q amp a button, or you can click the chat and send them through and Jane and I will help you all out. Don't be shy now. You're not shy. No questions yet Jane do you have anything you want to add. Well, I just, I just know that, you know, part of the issue with give local Piedmont is some organizations are great big and have huge support staff, as well as donors and some organizations are teeny tiny and are run all on volunteers. So, no matter what your status. We do want to help you and particularly if you're new to the event, like, if you do nothing, you probably won't do so great. But if you do three things, either from the mighty cause website or from the little workshops that we're doing. If you do three things, if you send postcards. If you ask your board members to try to recruit one person chair with one person what give local Piedmont does. You will do better than you do, if you do nothing so hopefully everybody can get a little charged up we do have a month. I'm not putting posters out until April 1. And that's right around the corner. So we plan to just swamp the communities with posters as well as yard signs are trickier we have some in every location. I have not checked the Madison or Rappahannock materials drop off. I do expect you all to let me know if we're running low on certain materials we still have postcards available. The blank postcards so let us know either email or whatever if if you need other materials. That's what I know. Thank you. And then we have a question about donor fees involved. Do you want to answer that one Jean or I can answer it. I think I did I should have looked at that before. So, typically, there is a I think our fees are up at 7% total. In terms of there is a software feed a mighty cause. There is a credit card fee, additionally, that happens. And then there is a northern Piedmont Community Foundation charges if you make over $1,000 a 2% That's the fee that stays in the give local Piedmont bucket so that it's there for next year. I will say this about fees because I've had some of the big organizations say we don't want to participate. The fees are too high. Every organization makes more in their donations because of the bonus dollars we have $100,000 in bonus bucks from the path foundation, and then we have 25,000 in prizes, every organization makes more than their actual donations so it is a the fees are intense because it is online giving just like when you're ordering from Amazon or other places. But we hope that that you can assure your donors that that that that the organizations go home with more than they actually make. That's the whole reason for the bonus dollars and this and the sponsorships that I asked to answer the question. I would like it to me. And then will the PowerPoint be sent out so we are going to download the PowerPoint and we will upload it to the toolkit I don't know Jane if you're going to do additional emailing of the slides. Probably not. Okay. And then how does matching donations work. So you're going to enter into matching donations and kind of some strategy around it at the next webinar, but kind of at a very like basic level for matching grants. So you were going to kind of secure a match, you will whatever amount that is it doesn't have to be a lot can be you know $200. So you're going to set up the match in the fundraising tools on your organization page and then usually like a donation will come in and it will be matched by the amount that you have so typically it's like a one to one match. So if someone donates you to $10 $10 is going to be matched and it will show up on your giving event totals. And then once the match is completed all say $200 have been matched. You can work with either the donor to have them do an online gift to kind of close out the match. Or you can do of course, kind of post event however you want to handle the matching donation afterwards. That's kind of it and like the simplest way but stay tuned. Next webinar is going to focus a lot of matches. And that was huge last year the matches really did help many organizations bring in more than they would have so hopefully everybody can secure and here's the thing about a match I mean I get the hesitation you know I want to say to you know what's the worst he can say, no, I don't want to you know I will thank you. But otherwise, if you don't ask you, you don't get it so it is worth. We saw last year that lots of people increased their donations with the matches so. I love matches I think they're definitely like, you know, next level for campaign fundraising. And one thing to note is that you don't need to get a match from just one individual you can get like a group to give you know if not everyone can give $1,000 maybe you can get, you know, 10 people say your board each one donating 100. So you can kind of get creative with how you put together your matches as well. And stay tuned, lots of good info at the next one. And I think our last question, Jean, how do you pick up the give local people materials. So they are in every county, they're in the path building here in warrenton on the second floor, and they are in the Rapunet County Public Library in the lobby. And they are at express copy and graphics and call pepper right in their lobby as well, and they're at skyline cap right when you walk in the front door. The kicker is if if you get there and you're like Jane there are no postcards. Shoot me an email and I'll make sure that you get some. I recommend putting out yard signs until at least two weeks out from the event just because of the wind and particularly if it's in warrenton and in call pepper there, they'll pull them up if they if you don't follow a pretty strict zoning laws about where signs can go. But it will help get the word out and we'll have some, some good paper advertising as well as online and again our street banners, so. Awesome sounds good I think that's all of our questions. So thank you everyone for taking time out of your day to join us for our first webinar, and definitely make sure you go and sign up for the next few days should be fabulous. Hey, hey, Sarah there's one last question how do you tell if you're registered for give local Piedmont on your organization page when you're signed in. Yes, good question so when you go to your overview button on your dashboard, it's the kind of splash page when you first land in your organization. There's a kind of small text underneath the big heading overview and it will say your organization like something like your registered for give local Piedmont 2023. Another good way to tell if you're registered is to just go to the search if you are showing up in the search, it means you're registered. Yeah, but definitely check out your dashboard it'll have a quick link directly to the registration. If you're not registered, or if you need to finish your registration because you saved it already I think that's everything now so thanks again everyone I will get this uploaded the webinar recording and the materials to the toolkit. And we'll see you at our next webinar. Okay, thank you.