 Today, you'll find out how you can get your audience highly invested in your crowdfunding campaign story and drive more donations than you thought possible. You'll learn how to write a compelling crowdfunding appeal, video storytelling tips that grab attention, ways to engage your audience to share stories, how to write a compelling crowdfunding appeal, video storytelling tips that grab attention, and other ways to engage your audience to share stories and reach a wider audience. So, without further ado, I want to formally introduce our presenter today, Candace Cody. She's the manager of content education at Cosbox. Candace Cody is the manager of content education and is passionate about seeing our profits flourish. Over the past six years, she's worked with thousands of nonprofit professionals to help them adopt and grow digital fundraising at their organization through online courses, webinars, e-tools, e-books, blog posts, and the digital fundraising summit virtual conference, and more. So, thank you so much, Candace, for joining us today. We're so excited to hear more from you, and I'll let you start your presentation. So, let's talk a little bit about storytelling for crowdfunding and how you can craft stories that get your audience highly invested in your fundraiser. Thanks, Mina, for the intro. As Mina said, I've worked at Cosbox for six years, so I spend my time working either one-on-one with organizations, helping them get their digital fundraising up and running, which includes a lot of crowdfunding and a lot of peer-to-peer fundraising campaigns. So, I've seen thousands of campaigns run, and so a lot of what I'm sharing with you today has really all learned from just working with so many different organizations and seeing how they told their story and watching what crowdfunding and peer-to-peer fundraising campaigns performed really highly, and kind of taking those insights and their storytelling tips from them. So, as much as I like to educate nonprofits, I also learned so much from working with so many of them. So, thank you all for doing what you're doing. Just a little bit more about Cosbox or a digital fundraising platform for nonprofits. You can run crowdfunding and peer-to-peer fundraising, donation pages, event ticketing, and more. So, if you're interested, feel free to reach out to me. I'd be happy to chat with you. And let's actually get into our session agenda for today. So, the first stop is really just doing a little bit of storytelling basics for online fundraising. Then we're going to go into crafting the perfect fundraising appeal. We'll get more into that later. And then some video storytelling tips for crowdfunding as well. And then we're going to, lastly, talk about engaging your audience in storytelling. So, I'm going to try to leave plenty of time for Q&A. So, feel free to keep those questions coming in in the Q&A pane and we'll get to as many as we can. All right. So, let's talk a little bit about storytelling basics for crowdfunding. Of social media users who make donations, 56% said that compelling storytelling is what motivated them to make that donation. And 68% of donors agree that knowing how their donation makes an impact is important to their gift. Now, these two statistics tell us a lot about people want stories and people also want to see the impact of their gift. And so, a lot of these insights is really, really valuable when it comes to crowdfunding because this is the people who you're sharing your cause with and really knowing what motivates them to give is extremely important. So, when you are just basically looking to share a story with anyone, a good story will put a behind your campaign so it should be focused on one person who your audience can identify with and see this is who my donation is making an impact. It should draw your supporters in to emotionally connect with your cause because just knowing impact alone without seeing it in someone is going to make people disconnect from the emotional impact behind their donation. And lastly, you want to show your donor how they fit into that story. So, how their donation actually is making an impact for your organization in that person's lives and in the lives of all of those who you serve. So, it's really about creating a deep connection with your donors. Time after time after time, there can be a really, really cool part of your campaign where you go over all the impact and all the statistics. But at the end of the day, people are motivated to give to people, not organizations. So, if you can tie those awesome statistics with an individual story, that is really what's going to motivate people to give. So, let's talk a little bit about just online fundraising in general. Yes, and someone said or animals or trees, I have been reading a ton of things about the fires in California and saving the trees and that that's getting me all emotional too. So, you can draw emotion from any story that you talk to. So, let's talk a little bit about just the basics of what an online fundraising campaign is, and then we can talk about how you can fit your storytelling into it. Okay, so an online fundraising campaign has a branded online fundraising site. It's usually a site with your organization's logo. It is usually focused on a particular program or specific need urgent. So, a lot of online fundraising campaigns are branded and then also focused on a specific program need, and it also tracks progress towards a particular fundraising goal. So, it's usually short term, a lot of the campaigns that I see are between four and eight weeks long and they're, they have a fundraising goal set and have a progress bar working towards that goal. There's also tons of content on the page, which this is where you really inject your storytelling in multiple ways. And there's should be an easy way to donate on the site with suggested giving levels that hopefully are tied to your story and your impact show you a little bit more of that later too. And then there should be easy sharing options that people can easily share that story and your overall campaign across multiple platforms so it should be integrated very easy to share across different sites. There should be donors listing donors listing, not only just shows just who your recent donors are but that actually creates a community. And it encourages people to give so that not only is their name on the site but maybe they know other people who have given and that will also inspire them to make a gift or make a similar size gift as well. So, a little bit of social proof happening there. And then sometimes there's personal and team fundraising pages. And that is really where you can empower your community to fundraise on behalf with peer to peer fundraising. So I just wanted to show you like a basic example of what I'm talking about so you can get a good idea of what a crowdfunding campaign could look like for your organization. So kids, they're doing the New York City Marathon campaign. You can see they have their fundraising goal here. They have their days are main encounter. They actually are showcasing how many kids have been served by the funds raised so far. So that's a really fun metric to tie dollars to impact and you can see that they have their video right here. They have a donate button they have a join the campaign button inviting people to fundraise for them and then an easy share button that's integrated with social media. So if you scroll down on their page, they have the whole section on the left, and this is what I'm talking about when I say fundraising appeal so this is going to be the content, the text on your page that is basically telling people what this crowdfunding campaign is all about, and why they should get. This is a perfect, perfect place to put images and statistics and also share your story. So this is really what's going to be the primary spot that people are consuming content and motivated to give the section on the right. That's what we call the sidebar. I mean, this is can be used for anything. And I'll talk a little bit more about how they're using it later. But I just wanted to give you an overall idea of what the format of this can look like and they're doing peer to peer fundraising so you can see they have about 11 people signed up to run the marathon and they have their own pages with their own stories on them. So now that we reviewed just what one of these campaign sites can look like, there's a few parts of this that you want to have prepared in order to set up your page so you definitely want to have a campaign title and fundraising goals and end date. But most of where you want to be sharing your story is going to be in your fundraising appeal, the fundraising appeal that you prep for your peer to peer fundraisers so that should also have storytelling aspects to it. Your social sharing should have, you know, defaulted with, you know, I pop in graphics and people of the people that you're serving so that people can kind of see visually how their donation can make. And then there's also that that fundraising video and you can add more graphics to your site and the personal pages and all of that to even enhance storytelling on on the page. And then again suggested giving levels are a great place to also tie donors to impact so we call them donation tiers on our end but they're usually the defaulted when someone does click the donate button and they are moved by your appeal and they are moved by your video and they're ready to make a donation. They should have some options that are actually tied to your overall impact that your organization is making so even how you saw there's 206 kids served by below cities campaign. How can you break that out into some suggested giving levels so that the donor can choose the amount they want to give to your organization, based on the impact that they're creating. So, all of this just a few there's also the automatic donation receipt which you also can embed storytelling elements to and quotes as well to really carry your story, not just from the first time your donor lands on the page but also to your final interaction with your campaign site. So, having some, you know, quotes from beneficiaries is a great way that you can really embed your story throughout your whole campaign. So, I say all of that, but I really want to focus on a couple of main things today and where you're going to tell your stories because there's so many different places you can kind of have your story consistent and branded throughout your whole campaign. But on a basic level, the best online fundraising campaigns, tell a story through their campaign site using their appeal and then in their video and then also, you know, using their story to influence the other content that they create. And then number two, engage their community to share their story. So, it's not just about how you tell your story. It's about how you can get other people to share not just your campaign story but also take the story and make it their own and make it personal to them. Which is really how campaigns catch on. So, any campaign that has gone viral is because people are taking that story with them and so it's helping your community feel ownership over that story. So, we'll talk a little bit about some of the ways that you can do that. But first, we have to work on your campaign story and that starts with your fundraising appeal. So, again, your appeal is the content that's on your page that's going to drive people to make that donation. Nick Hudson, when he was talking about getting stories and sourcing stories for their appeals and their videos and all their social media content said that the best and most effective promotional tactics we use are the posts that involve patient stories that come from the patients themselves. They're telling their story and their own words with quotes directly from them. Then we can say, here's how our organization can help them. And I just think that this is such a great approach that stupid cancer and you can see it in all of their branding all of their social media posts. They use this basic method time and time again to really just get people sharing their stories and then now you have such a great source that you can pull from and create your appeal and story with. So, I have a few storytelling tips for you. So, especially when it comes to fundraising appeals, so you probably want to try sourcing stories from your community way before you get to the point of when you're actually putting together that crowdfunding campaign. So this could be something that you're doing all the time and have kind of built into your process so that you're on an ongoing basis sourcing stories that you can then reference back and share. So sometimes people call that creating a story bank. And yeah, one of the things that I love is a lot of organizations. Well, I see a lot of organizations retell someone's story in their own words. But I kind of love that tip from stupid cancer, where they're actually just using quotes and images from the people who actually are telling their stories and their own words because usually that is even more powerful than you kind of remove like putting a barrier between like when you tell someone else's story you're kind of putting a barrier between the donor and the beneficiary. But when you use direct quotes and images alongside of each other, it usually just removes that barrier completely and allows their donors to emotionally connect with those beneficiaries directly. You can encourage storytelling in multiple mediums. So when you are sourcing stories, you can have people write it, you can have people send in videos, you can have people share images and graphics. So storytelling doesn't have to just be part of a written appeal, but the great thing about a video is you can then take a quote from that and write it down. So there's like a lot of ways that you can source stories and then also share stories in multiple mediums too once you have them. And then yeah, but when it comes to crowdfunding, the biggest thing is that not just having these stories but making it easy for people to share them. So making sure whatever you're using is highly shareable and easily shared on email and social media. So when you are doing trying to source those stories, I have a few people who I suggest sourcing stories from first of course is going to be your beneficiaries. So the more that you can connect people with your beneficiaries, but there's also a lot of other people that you probably already have also have some pretty great stories that they can be sharing. So one of the some of the best stories that I've seen have actually come from major donors and board members or even volunteers. When people ask, like, why do you give us, you know, $10,000 a year and just hearing more about what their story is or why is your board member so invested. What have they seen over the years of serving on the board at your organization accomplished and, you know, your volunteers, they're dedicating their time to you. That's the reason why and your volunteers are actually the ones in the field serving. So, you know, they have different stories that you've probably never even heard of before to share about how they've made an impact and seen impact from your organization. And then there's your peer-to-peer fundraiser. So if you are doing peer-to-peer fundraising and having people fundraise for you, again, they're going to be able to share their own stories. And then lastly, you as a staff member and all of the other staff members on your team have also stories to share. So these are all great people to kind of source those stories from. And some of the ways that you can source these stories, it's probably going to be through a few different avenues. You can always reach out over email and just say, like, hey, I just wanted to know, you know, why are you on our board? What are some of the best things that you've seen so far from our organization? Just see what you can get over email. A lot of this could be on a phone call. I would actually do a Zoom call so you can record it and then kind of translate that to written afterwards as well. And then you can even use the video from that recording, potentially repurpose that in a fundraising video as well. You can potentially do a blog post highlight. So some things that help you share your story well is actually just being like, hey, can I actually set up a full interview? And I want to either video or having them fill out like interview questions and then write up a story just about that person. A great thing that you can do with really any donor is just have a thank you survey go out and ask them why they gave and what they're hoping to see accomplished with their gift. And then that's a great way to at least source some stories. Also, any kind of challenges that you have, image sharing challenges or social media sharing challenges can be a source of stories and you can follow up with people to get more detail. And also, of course, you know, peer to peer fundraising, people write their own stories on their own pages and you can kind of start sourcing those stories. So once you have that story to share, so hopefully at some point you have a whole bunch of different stories that you can choose from. And you want to pick one of them to be the main focus of your fundraising appeal once you cross that bridge. So your fundraising appeal must do five main things. It should show what you're trying to accomplish. So communicate what your fundraising goal is and why that matters. So the impact of the gift, like going back to that quote earlier, people love to see, like, why and love to know what the impact that they're making with their gift. Usually the third part of this is just tell a story. You don't always have to do it in this way. I've seen it done in different formats, but this is kind of a very typical format. Number three is tell a story, integrate a quote, talk a little bit about someone who's benefited from your organization, share, you know, why your board member serves any of those things. Then you want to connect that story with the vision of your organization. So there's a little bit of a science to it where you want to be able to easily transition to say, Hey, so this is what we did with one person. And imagine what we can do when we impact this many people with this campaign. So it really nicely puts it together for the donor. So they're like, Wow, I can make an impact, not just with that person, but with this many people or animals or trees or And then lastly, you want to have a clear call to action to donate with urgency. So a lot of organizations will write this amazing fundraising appeal and then kind of fall flat on the call to action. They'll maybe just say thanks for supporting us. They haven't supported you yet, right? You may actually have to click on the donate button and support to support you. So you want to make it really clear what you actually want the people who are reading this to do and why they should do it now because a lot of people will be like, That was an amazing story. Loved it. Cool. Maybe I'll even share it, but you still need to get them to donate and donate now and make it feel like it's an urgent need. So I love this appeal for many reasons. I'm actually going to read it for you because I think it does a really, really nice job. So it says this holiday season make more fiver stories possible. So already out the gate, they're talking about the stories of the people that they're impacting Since opening our doors in 2000, more than 1500 children have experienced the magic of fiber. Justin is an alumnus who completed his 10 year fiber journey in 2018. This is excerpt from his graduation speech. So, even from the beginning, it just emphasizes the impact of how many children they've impacted and goes right into the story and just draws a quote from a speech he gave. So he says, I believe all my life. I've been misunderstood growing up. I was called annoying and bunches and impulsive fiber started to change me. I learned how to make fun without technology and to cherish nature. I learned it is okay to be me. I had the strength to realize my own flaws and become a better person. And that's why I'm forever grateful to fiber becoming a fiber is being open to growth and change. So I felt the support of community and culture where young people can take healthy risks, find their purpose and address their weaknesses in the space devoid of judgment and filled with affirmation and kindness fibers like Justin developed an authentic sense of self with confidence and direction. They are ready to make an impact on the world. And they have this great picture of their graduates from that year. And then with your support, we can continue this important work. We have more transformational journeys with fiber possible in the season of giving. We hope that you will consider investing in our youth with a donation today. So this is almost the perfect appeal. I went through a lot of them. It's very hard to actually find someone ones that are written like this. So I will be sharing the slides with you. I encourage you to come back and sort of reference back to some of these examples that I'm going to go over. So it says all of these things, right? It says what they're trying to accomplish, why that matters, they're telling a story, they're casting a vision of it's not just Justin, it's all of these, all of these kids that were impacting over the years. And then they have that clear call to action of not just to donate now, not just to donate, but why they should donate now during the season of giving. So I love it. And so I wanted to just kind of go over how you can write something like this for yourself. So one of the best things for you to do when you're trying to write this as to just basically start off and let people know what your organization does. Because a lot of a lot of people that are donating to your crowdfunding campaign, maybe hearing about you for the very first time. So you want to do a very quick intro to let them know what your organization does. It's just very simple to give one sentence saying them saying that they help people living with multiple sclerosis. And then what do donations support specifically so donations. I love this example. I says donations made through this fundraiser will specifically support meat by so that and they have some statistics in there and today we've given 306 bikes worldwide and then project 13 which is providing equipment. And it's very detailed. It says who the organization is what the gifts are specifically supporting and as a bonus, I love that they have those impact statements kind of input into their appeal as well. And then also you want to go into why it matters so why is what you're doing with this program or whatever it is that donations are supporting why is that the right solution and who and how many people will be helped. And kind of showcasing that bigger impact statement. And I thought this was a great example also continuation from meat bike so they're saying how research shows that regular cardio helps reduce symptoms and improve the life of those living with MS I get. Okay, this is why this program is helpful. And then it talks about how donations are supporting each athlete. So, very so as long as you have that what and why and then it usually really easily runs right into a story. And so you can basically all story needs to do it doesn't have to be long. I actually think the shorter the better when it comes to stories and in a fundraising appeal, because you don't want the content to be too long for your donors they just need to get a taste to understand what someone's challenge was like before they were impacted by the organization, how your organization helped and any ongoing impact in their life so it's best again if this is told in first person and with pictures of the of the person that whose story you're highlighting. So I have that screenshot from the quote from fiber again as that example. And then lastly, how you can cast vision is to really try to transition from the story of one into the story of many so it's not just that one person, or thing that you're supporting, but you're really translating that into into how your organization supports so so many more stories. And so this is a great way to really easily also transition into that call to action. Another great way of casting vision is to show what the result of reaching your fundraising goal will look like, how many people specifically again will be impacted by this campaign. Another way that I've seen some organizations also cast vision is to not only show what it looks like when we reach our goal, but also cast vision of what it looks like when if we don't. So how many less stories will be possible if we don't reach our fundraising goal. So kind of hitting those two together can sometimes also really motivate people to not only buy into the vision of what can happen but also the vision of what won't happen if they don't give. And then lastly, there's the call to action again, which is just telling the people exactly what you want them to do, and why they should donate right now. The best thing that I've seen called actions do is actually invite people into the story that they're telling I just love Fiverr's call to action. It says in the season of giving we hope you will consider investing in our youth with a donation today. And that's really just, you know, you're investing into the stories that Fiverr is telling and Fiverr is making possible. So love the call to action that they shared and great way to write that fundraising. So once you have that central story. This is easily becomes part of all of the different parts of your campaign. You want your video to really match that story as well. You also want to continue telling that story in different ways throughout all your social media posts throughout your whole promotional campaign that translates to the emails that you're sending. So once you have a really strong appeal, you can really easily take parts of this and bits and pieces and translate it into the overall promotions plan for your campaign. So and the story is so central to that. Let's talk a little bit about video storytelling. I don't want to over overrun on this but because a lot of the things that make a good fundraising video are also the things that make a good fundraising appeal. So I would love to actually just show you a great example of one and then talk about some of the ways that you can create. So, Mina, if you want to go ahead and share that video now would be a great time. Let's see. Our favorite part of Volo has probably been the staff and the leadership. I really can't say enough about that. Our son can be pretty shy sometimes and I think they've done a great job about building kids and growing kids and encouraging kids. I think the staff is really good about tapping into where kids may need to push and really help them with that. Through participation and Volo, I think our son has definitely grown with his confidence. He can be soft spoken sometimes and he's a deep thinker and he has a lot on his mind but he's always not willing to share. So Volo helps with that at the end of every game. Coach is always like, what worked well today? What did you like about today? And so he's been feeling better about sharing at that time as he sees other kids share. My favorite memory playing with Volo is that the first time I joined Volo, everybody was so nice and everybody was so supportive of me and now I know how other people feel when they get here. I'm most excited for the season that new people who are not here come and I get the chance to show them what to do. Thank you, Volo City. Thank you, Volo City, for making free sports possible for my child. Thanks, Mina. Yeah, I hope everyone was able to hear it. I was able to hear it. I saw someone comment that they weren't, but I just thought that that was such a perfect example of a video for a campaign. It's just so moving, but they do a few really key things with that video is that they talk about impact at the beginning. They have a big impact statement. They focus on one story and then also talk about how he wants to continue seeing the impact of Volo City at the end. And so I literally get a little teary eyed when I see it and the call to action blows me away every time. So it's that you can help people join in the power of play and you can join in this story and creating more stories like this by donating. So I just think it's so powerful for those of you who didn't get a chance. Maybe I can share the link in the chat later on in the Q&A so you can all take a look at that video later. So I'm going to share my screen again. Perfect. Okay, so when you are creating a video for your campaign, I have a few quick tips for you should be specifically related to your campaign ask showcasing the specific program that you're supporting. It should only feature one to two people telling their story because you know there's only so much someone can do a story in the one to two minutes that you have to share it. And you want to show your programs in action show what it looks like when you know your programs are up and running and they're funded and have a clear call to action. So, again, Volo such a great example they do all of those things the highest performing videos do tend to be about 30 seconds to two minutes in length. There tends to be a drop off and attention after two minutes. So I think Volo was right at that two minute mark. So definitely try to keep it short and sweet just like your fundraising appeal. You can do graphics and images that is always nice, especially if you don't have if you don't have like a lot of video of your programs in action you can substitute that for like some images over the over the voice. You don't have to do something that's crazy expensive or fancy to create a good video. You know, even for Volo's story, they got, you know, maybe like a nice DSLR camera and shot that it looks like in a couple hours on the playground. So it doesn't look like they have to do too, too much and then they just had, you know, maybe someone edit that for them as well. But you don't even have to do anything, even that fancy really just any way that you can show your story and have people tell their story themselves is always great you can even use an iPhone for it. If you're editing it yourself, you can do quick time. If it's really, really simple, just basically two minutes, putting a few clips together. Adobe Premiere gives you those graphics and you can do some something that's a little bit more advanced, especially with audio. You can do more, more editing with audio in Adobe Premiere that's usually like $20 a month. So if you are doing it yourself in house, you know, those are a couple good options. And then the last one that I've seen a lot of these campaign videos recently do is use Canva. Actually, they have Canva has a new way for you to create videos and editing. They actually have some really cool graphics and templates that you can use as well. So I would like to refer people if you're doing your video yourself. Canva has a lot of really great tools for it. It's free for nonprofits, which you probably already know. But I only discovered, you know, how great these videos can come out with Canva sort of recently after seeing a few of these fundraising videos. So recommend that you check it out. If you yourself are not an expert, I would try to reach out to any volunteers that may be able to help with this. You can always hire someone to using service, maybe like Fiverr or anything else, you know, basically just putting it out there to hire someone to help you with a video. Since, you know, you might not have all of those two expert tools at your fingertips. But yeah, even just something as simple as using your iPhone can be very easy to actually put the video on your campaign site. You are going to want to upload it on YouTube or Vimeo and then maybe upload it on a couple of different social media platforms just so that you get high engagement across the board. I also want to say that there's more that you can do beyond just the campaign video. Of course, you might have that main campaign video, but you also might want to make storytelling, video storytelling part of your overall strategy throughout your whole campaign. So, you know, you want to also try engaging people to share videos of themselves and then share those across multiple platforms telling their stories. You also might want to consider live streaming, even if you're not doing a virtual event, you can use live streaming to really get in front of a wide audience. The thing with live streaming is that Facebook and Instagram loves to notify people when you go live. So even if you just have, you know, a five minute live stream talking about your upcoming campaign that can, you know, again help you tell your story to a wider audience online. So I have a resource here about live streaming ticks for nonprofit. So recommend that you take a look at that. Alright, so lastly, but not least, this is kind of the most important actually. So once you have your video, once you have your fundraising appeal, and you're integrating that story throughout your campaign site and then across your social channels yourself, you want to now put the story in the hands of your audience. So really the power behind your campaign comes from the stories of your supporters and them buying into your story and also making it their own. So one of the best ways that both the kids gets the word out about their organization is that they actually ask people to post a picture of themselves playing sports as a child to their personal fundraising page if they're fundraising for them and to social media. And then along and their challenges along with it share what play means to you and why you are passionate about making it possible for all. And then it says please use the hashtag so basically they're creating a sharing challenge on social media to get people sharing pictures of themselves and telling their own stories about why this cause is important to them and then also using hashtags to bring it back. So that is one amazing way that you can kind of get people actually speaking instead of just not just donating but instead, you know, actually telling their own story and amplifying the reach of your can another great way to amplify the reach of your campaign is to do peer to peer fundraising to raise this twice as much as opposed to just crowdfunding campaigns and that is because you're getting people to share their own stories and share that across social media to a whole new audience that you were not privy to previously. Celia Stanley she joined in for this virtual hikeathon for miles for for Mojave Desert Land Trust told her own story on the page challenged herself to hike 100 miles and raised $1500 and went way above and beyond so super easily shareable and it's putting the power in the hands of your supporters to not just buy into your campaign story but really tell their own. Another great way that Mojave Desert Land Trust empowered their supporters is that they asked them to or suggested that they actually write blog post updates. So this was a virtual hikeathon they had people take screenshots on their phones and blog about their their hikes and they would share pictures from their hikes and share those not just on their personal page but then also share those across social media. So it's not even just one page telling their story but now they have 16 blog posts where they're they're sharing their story different stories of their experiences so another great above and beyond way to do it another great way that Mojave Desert Land Trust empowered their supporters to share is that they created fundraising toolkit which had suggested content that they share on social on different social media platforms and they even gave them the images to upload and share as well just help people share and so we've seen that with peer-to-peer fundraising a lot of the most effective peer-to-peer fundraisers are the ones that are given some content to work with using a fundraising toolkit to get the word out. I love I absolutely loved this example from Duradash what they did is that for certain donors and fundraisers they actually reached out to them. I think they did like a Google doc or a Google form and ask people a few basic questions. What are you doing for Duradash for the campaign. What do you want people to know about the Spinal CSF week and then what do you hope to see in the future. So they asked them three questions and they have they wrote up a blog post and then actually took quotes from this and created graphics so they I love the way that they repurpose the content so not only did they share their story in a blog post but then they also turn it into graphics that work for sharing and and more and share this more stories on their site. The Little Black Dress Initiative also does a great job of encouraging people to take actions themselves. So this is from the junior league. They run the Little Black Dress Initiative. It challenges women to actually for five to seven days wear the same black dress and have people ask them about their dress. So not only are they just raising funds but they're also raising awareness about poverty in their area by taking a personal action and participating in a challenge. So it's been really shown that when people actually participate they're way more likely to not just donate but also the National Society of Black Engineers did a gala. And one of my favorite things that they did is that they actually had a few staff members and then also a few even like I think events attendees people that already bought tickets share in like a 30 second or less clip why they were excited about the upcoming gala. And then they use this as their whole promotion campaign leading up to the event to just really drum up interest. You can certainly do this when it comes to crowdfunding or peer to peer fundraising as well as just these really simple videos. Why are you excited about this campaign. And then you now have all these different stories that you can share. Again stupid cancer is such a great example as well. And so they source stories all the time and I think they really get people connected with each other. And so this is just one of their examples from from their Facebook. It says today is National Scar Appreciation Day. And they say our scars make this unique. They share a picture of Patrick and his story. And then they invite people to go ahead and submit their own story and their own photo. So what a great way that you can start getting people connecting with each other and sharing their stories and then you know you as an organization can turn it into something bigger than your organization and get this shared across such a wide variety of avenues because people are now taking your mission and connecting it with them with themselves first. So this is just a quick summary of all the things that I just suggested social media photo or video sharing challenge with a hashtag is great engaging your community and peer to peer fundraising so they can tell their own stories, creating a physical or awareness challenge that people can actually participate in and make it their own and then have their own stories to share as a result. You can highlight your donors fundraisers and beneficiaries and blog posts and graphics and kind of do those follow ups and interviews. You can encourage them to continue sharing their stories across social media platforms when you can also provide a fundraising toolkit to help them succeed. I want to learn more about what fundraising toolkit looks like I have a resource here for you as well and then you can also download 10 peer to peer tool kit examples that have really performed well if you want to learn more about fundraising appeals or potentially have us review your fundraising appeal live. I have something called the fundraising bill throwdown it's going to be me and two other people on who are experts in fundraising appeals and we're going to be assessing a lot of these fundraising appeals live what we like what we don't like what we think could perform better so feel free to join us for that. And again, if you are interested in using a fundraising platform to run your crowdfunding or peer to peer fundraising Cosbox tries to make it really easy for you to do that and get it up and running now we do have full year of Cosbox you can get for the price of six months that is only available if you book between today and tomorrow. I'm going to take a demo with either myself or another member of our team and get that on the books so that you can learn more about how you can actually use Cosbox for your upcoming fundraising needs. So, I know I ran a little bit long but we should still have about seven minutes for questions so I would love to just get into that and I'll paste a few to that I just mentioned. Thank you so much Candace was so informative and I've seen a lot of engagement here in the Q&A so I'm going to go ahead and bring a couple of questions on screen for us to answer. So, thank you. The first one here. Our population speaks an indigenous language for videos is it more impactful to have a voice over with translation or use text to translate. I would probably use text to translate. I don't know if that's just my personal preference, but that is sort of what my first instinct was when I saw that just because I think there is something so powerful about hearing someone tell their story in their own language. You know, I mean a lot of people have captions on I know even, you know, most shows, you know, like Narcos is like half in Spanish but like everyone's fine with reading the text. So, I know that was a totally different reference but you know I think people like hearing people tell their stories in their own language so that's what that's my good instinct on that one. Awesome. Thank you. And another one here. We've had trouble getting new people to the crowdfunding campaign. How can we reach a new group of people than we've reached before. Yeah, I mean I think that is a lot about inviting people to share their own stories. I haven't tried, you know, those types of, you know, challenges where just challenge people to participate by even changing their profile picture to something related to your mission, have people share a quick anecdote about a personal experience. So things can really get people sharing. And also, if you have a feeling like you're kind of tapped out with crowdfunding, I would try peer to peer because you can engage a lot of those people who do give consistently to then now fundraise for you. And then you're opening yourself up to a whole new audience. Awesome. And I think I'll go ahead and pull one more here from Tina. Are there any stats on how effective videos are at getting people to donate? Or is picture or text appeal sufficient? I'm sure there are statistics. I can't think of them off the top of my head, but probably should do a little bit of research on that. But what I see is that as long as you're effectively communicating your story, it kind of doesn't matter if it's a video or just a really great appeal. But if you don't have a video, make sure your appeal is really, really stellar and try to have as many images as part of that appeal as possible. But I do think the combination between some people just consume content differently. Like sometimes I just skip a video because I'd rather just read, but I know some people are more visual learners and might engage differently. So I think the best capitalized video and text is great. But you know, I've seen really amazing crowdfunding campaigns that only used picture and text, but instead of even like that in place of that main, in place of the video at the top of the page, they actually had an image with a quote on it. So they had like a nice high quality graphic that also shared a story. So I think that kind of almost worked, almost worked the same as the video. So you can easily replicate it. Awesome. Thank you so much, Candace.