 Hi, everyone, just before we get started, everybody's still filtering in. But for those of you who are here, I just wanted to go through a little bit of housekeeping and make sure that you can hear me and see my screen. So I'm just gonna flip through the first couple of slides. If you were able to see that and if you're able to hear me, if you could just do me a huge favor and type yes into the questions box, that would be fantastic just so I know that everybody's able to hear the presentation. All right, perfect. Thank you guys so much. All right, so it is 2 p.m. Easter time. So we'll go ahead and get started. Thank you all for joining me today. This is one of my favorite topics. Today, we're gonna be talking about tips for small nonprofits who want to participate in Giving Tuesday. My name is Linda Gerhart. I'm our Senior Community Engagement Manager here at Mighty Cause. I've been with the company since 2016 and before coming to work for Mighty Cause, I actually worked for nonprofits. I've worked for very large ones and very, very small ones. So I have the perspective of both and I'm really happy to share what I have learned with you and some tips that can help you get your small nonprofit moving and gaining traction and earning money or fundraising on Giving Tuesday. Here's a quick look at today's agenda. First, we're just gonna quickly go over some Giving Tuesday basics for those of you who may be participating in Giving Tuesday for the first time. The bulk of the presentation is going to be the tips that we have for small nonprofits. And then we're gonna highlight just a handful of campaigns from small nonprofits that have done a really great job of raising money and gaining support on the Mighty Cause platform. And then at the end, we're gonna be doing a question and answer session. Since we have a lot of ground to cover, if you have a question while I'm presenting, just put that into the questions box of your go-to webinar panel. And if we have it covered by the end of the presentation, I'll make sure to take that question at the end. And so before we get into the tips, I just wanted to go over the Giving Tuesday basics to give you a refresher or introduce you to Giving Tuesday for the first time. Giving Tuesday is a global giving event that's held annually on the Tuesday after Thanksgiving, after Black Friday, and after Cyber Monday, which actually falls on December 3rd this year. This event basically aims to refocus the public on charitable giving and philanthropy after a long holiday weekend that's steeped in consumerism and hoping to get people spending money on charitable causes instead of the latest tech gadget or the biggest sales or food for Thanksgiving dinner. It was started by the 92nd Street Y in New York City in partnership with the United Nations Foundation back in 2012, and this is actually its seventh year. Giving Tuesday engages nonprofits and NGOs from around the globe, it's gotten huge. And it's helped raise millions upon millions of dollars for charitable causes. It really has become a cornerstone of the nonprofit calendar since it began, and it's a can't miss event for any charitable organization of any size. You can learn more about Giving Tuesday, the big global event at givingtuesday.org. And just to make sure that you understand the difference between Giving Tuesday, the general event and Giving Tuesday on Mighty Cause, Mighty Cause hosts our own Giving Tuesday event on the Mighty Cause platform, which utilizes our giving event technology. What makes our event a little bit different is that our giving event platform adds the element of competition with leaderboards and hourly prizes. It's open to all 501C3 nonprofit organizations and fiscally sponsored orgs as well. We do ask that you register for our event so that we know that you plan on participating and registration is open right now on givingtuesday.mightycause.com. We give you a little bit of extra time to start fundraising and you can start accepting Giving Tuesday donations this year on November 19th just to give you some extra time to push toward a fundraising goal and build momentum for your campaign. So since Giving Tuesday is a day that pretty much anybody can participate in and there's lots of platforms to choose from, you might be wondering why you should sign up to participate on Mighty Cause if you haven't registered already. The biggest one is really the price on Mighty Cause. Using our platform for Giving Tuesday costs less than PayPal and you'll never pay more than 2.2% plus 29 cents per transaction. And our effective rate, meaning what nonprofits actually pay is actually way less than that. Right now the effective rate is 1.08 and 29 cents which is really cheap and it's cheaper than any of our competition. So you'll see more of the donations that you get from Giving Tuesday on the Mighty Cause platform than you will on other platforms. We are a platform that's built for small nonprofits. So you won't be in competition with the American Red Cross or other national heavy hitters for attention and prizes. You'll be up against other small and mid-sized nonprofits. We do have mid-sized nonprofits on our platform who are a little bit bigger and have a little bit more budget to play with but they have their own leaderboard so you won't have to compete with any nonprofits that have say three times the amount of resources that you have. We have tools like peer-to-peer fundraising, teams and events that will help you maximize your impact on Giving Tuesday, not to mention having all of our fundraising tools at your disposal that'll help you amplify your campaign. Some of those tools are matching grants and optimized donation flow which we just recently updated and a donation widget that allows you to accept donations on your website. And finally, we offer lots of free resources and free trainings just like this one leading up to the event which is another perk of participating on Giving Tuesday on Mighty Cause. So as I mentioned before, registration is open now so you can get started at givingtuesday.mightycause.com. It's a pretty short form and it'll grant you access to your nonprofits profile on Mighty Cause if you've never used us before and it gets you signed up for this year's event. We have some questions there for you just to learn more about your nonprofit and also what kind of training you'd be interested in getting from us leading up to Giving Tuesday so be sure to ask for whatever you need help with. We're here to help. We're still designing our training for this year so let us know if there's anything in particular that you would want to see and get some training on. All right, so now we're gonna move into what this webinar is all about which is tips for small nonprofits. Our first tip is to have a battle plan and on this slide you'll see one of my favorite quotes about planning which is, failing to plan is planning to fail. So really and truly for small nonprofits flying by the seat of your pants just doesn't work because you're crazy busy and you have limited resources so you've got to plan ahead. And to help you out we've put together free planning resources for you in our nonprofit toolkit. So there's no real need to reinvent the wheel or start from scratch or pull out a notepad and start a plan from nowhere. You can get started by checking out the planning guide, the checklist for success and the Giving Tuesday ebook which has a week by week guide to plotting out your campaign. These are totally free and they're aimed at small orgs with limited resources so please check them out when you're gearing up for your campaign. We also recommend putting together your Giving Tuesday dream team which basically means assigning some key roles and finding your most important players. In general, you will want a project manager who steers the whole shit and thinks about the big picture, a social media manager, an email marketer and someone to act as a liaison with your donors. Now you may have some staff members that already fill these roles so obviously those are a natural fit but some of you who are smaller operations may be saying, Linda, what are you even talking about? I'm one person. And the solution to that is utilizing volunteer help which we're gonna talk about even more in depth later on in the presentation. Your dream team does not have to be paid staff members and you don't even necessarily need one person for each role. So beyond that, what kind of planning do you really need to do for Giving Tuesday? What does it look like? First, you wanna start off planning your campaign's message and theme. You can fundraise just generally but what we know on my new cause that it's important to have a focus. Even if you just use your nonprofit profile to fundraise and don't do anything different with it, you wanna have a message. So think of a message or a theme, something that makes your campaign feel urgent and relevant and compelling to donors. What that could look like in practice is raising money for a special fund at your nonprofit, a special project, improvements to your equipment or your premises or even just finding a tagline in a theme that works. Like for instance, an animal rescue might want to focus on their foster program or a food bank might fundraise focusing on meals for the holidays but you're gonna need some kind of focus no matter what it is to help your campaign sing and feel important to donors. So that's really the first step is that strategizing and thinking about what you wanna say and how you wanna say it. And next, you'll need to plan your content out. The first step there is gathering what you already have that fits into the theme or the message you've chosen like photos, videos and so on and then evaluating what you might need. And don't forget during this process to reach out to any staff members or volunteers. They often have a goldmine on their phones. So have them send you any pictures that fit in with your theme. Have them send you any video clips that they have because sometimes they have amazing stuff right there on their smartphones. So don't forget to ask people at your nonprofit to send what they've got. So for instance, you may have lots of great photos and video clips but you may need to just pull them together into a cohesive campaign video. So that's where you'd go next. And from there, you'd wanna move into planning how you're actually going to utilize that content specifically on your email and social media channels. For emails, you'll wanna think about who you're gonna contact and at what time. We strongly recommend segmenting your email list meaning separating your main list into more specific groups of people so that you can tailor the message of the email to them. So for the animal rescue that's focusing on his foster program, they might wanna send one email to their cat adopters focusing on a litter of kittens that went through the foster program and send dog adopters an email with a story about a dog or a puppy that went through their foster program because they know enough about them to know what is more likely to resonate with them. And that also goes for volunteers, board members, program alumni, recurring donors and so on. You have a little bit of information that can change how you talk to them and make that email more effective. So think about your different segments and come up with an email battle plan and start drafting and scheduling emails when you can. Now for segmentation, if you have a really small list that may not make sense if you have a segment of say two. In that case, you'll wanna think about more personalized outreach to donors if your list is extremely small, but for a larger list, we definitely recommend breaking those contacts up into more specific groups and talking specifically to their relationship with your nonprofit and what you know about them. Social media is really the main place you'll wanna share your Giving Tuesday content and stories. Since Giving Tuesday is a day that's built for social media, the name of it is a hashtag. So think about what platforms you'll use, how you'll engage and definitely utilize our social media guide. I actually wrote our social media guide, so I can vouch for it. It's free and it'll help you understand how to work the various platforms and how to stand out from the crowd on a day like Giving Tuesday when there's a lot of activity. That's located in the nonprofit toolkit on givingtuesday.mightycause.com. So now another part of the planning process is goal setting and we're gonna move into goal setting for small nonprofits and how setting the right goals can help you succeed on Giving Tuesday. So most of us are probably familiar with SMART goals. SMART is an acronym for specific, measurable, achievable, realistic or relevant and time-based. And we're gonna go into what is and is not a SMART goal for each letter. So we're gonna start off with the letter S. S is probably the most important because if your goal isn't specific, you probably won't be able to achieve it. Some examples of SMART goals that are specific for Giving Tuesday would be retaining 2018, giving Tuesday donors, getting new monthly recurring donations or stretching to create an engaging campaign video for social media when you've never done that before. Those are things that you can look at and say, yes, we did that or no, we did not do that. Which is the idea behind being specific. It's a pass, fail kind of deal. Some not so SMART goals would be raise money. Like obviously you wanna raise money but how much do you wanna raise? When do you wanna raise it by? Vague goals like build sustainable report, that's cool, everybody wants sustainable report support. But what kind of support are you talking about? Are you talking about donors? Are you talking about followers online? And how are you determining what is sustainable about it? And the last not so SMART goal here is engage people. Who are you trying to engage for what purpose? Where are you trying to engage them? And what are you doing to try to engage them? So be specific when you're thinking about your Giving Tuesday goals and set specific targets that you can hit. They don't have to be all financial that you can have non-monetary specific goals like adding people to your email list if that's something that's valuable to your nonprofit. But you want to make sure that they are specific. So now we'll move on to M, which is measurable goals. If you set goals without any way to measure your success, those goals are essentially kind of meaningless, right? So a SMART measurable goal would be to retain 60% of donors from last year's Giving Tuesday. That would be a really high percentage, but you may want to shoot stars there if it seems achievable for you or get 15 new monthly donations. And we've got the same vague not so SMART goals of raise money, build sustainable support and engage people as a contrast. Your goals are basically what you want to do on how you plan to get there. And if your goals aren't measurable, they're not worth setting. So make sure that your goals have some kind of metric built in so you can determine whether or not you successfully met that goal. I mean, technically you could raise $5 on Giving Tuesday and meet the goal of raise money, but you wouldn't really consider that a successful Giving Day, would you? So be specific and be measurable with your goals. And now on to A, which is achievable or attainable, depending on the breakdown of SMART goals that you're looking at, sometimes it says achievable, sometimes it says attainable. But basically they both mean the same thing. And all it means is that you shouldn't shoot yourself in the foot with pie in the sky goals, but rather set goals that are reasonable for your nonprofit to achieve. So a goal of raising $8,000 may be attainable for your nonprofit, but you'll want to look at what your nonprofit normally does for a fundraising campaign. So if your last campaign raised $500, $8,000 may be unattainable for you. So just scale your financial goals to whatever makes sense for your nonprofit. Getting a matching grant to help drive donations is an attainable goal for most nonprofits. And we're gonna talk more about matching grants in a bit. Things that are not achievable for most small nonprofits would be raising $1 million for Giving Tuesday. If you're a small nonprofit, you may not make that much in a year or raise that much in a year or getting a bunch of big corporate sponsors to help you with Giving Tuesday like Coca-Cola. They're not gonna sponsor you. So you'll want to scale down your expectations and scale your goals down to things that are realistic for you to achieve. Next up is R, which is realistic or relevant depending on how it's broken down. And I personally like relevant because realistic and achievable are kind of the same thing. So we're going with relevant here. A relevant goal would be to use Giving Tuesday to segue or transition into your end-of-year fundraising or using Giving Tuesday as a kickoff for your end-of-year campaign or just trying to engage peer-to-peer fundraisers for the first time. Goals that are not smart and not relevant would be things like getting 600 likes on Facebook. How does that help you? Why does that matter? And what is the point of that? That seems pretty arbitrary, just like sending 10 emails on Giving Tuesday. These are the kinds of traps that small nonprofits can fall into very easily. Because you think, okay, well last year we sent five emails and we fell short of our goal. So this year we're gonna send 10 emails and it's just such an oversimplification and it's irrelevant. It's an arbitrary thing. So it's not really worth setting that kind of goal. Those are specific, those are measurable but they are not relevant. So you wanna try to focus your attention when you're setting your goals on things that will actually help your bottom line and help your nonprofit. Sending 10 emails isn't going to help necessarily unless those emails are really awesome and segmented. But segmenting your emails for the first time may be something that will actually help and is relevant to your goals. Okay and lastly we have time-based. Thankfully for Giving Tuesday you have a timetable built in. So basically all this means is give yourself a deadline that makes sense. And what makes sense here is either December 4th, the day after Giving Tuesday or December 31st if a particular goal can stretch until the end of the year. So just make sure that you have some sort of deadline in place for your goal because without it you can sort of just keep kicking the can down the road. You wanna have an endpoint where you sit down and you evaluate whether or not you achieve the goal. So moving on I wanted to talk more about utilizing volunteers. This is really the biggest question I hear from nonprofits especially pertaining to Giving Tuesday. I'm a one person organization we only have a handful of volunteers working for us. How can I even begin to make a campaign happen? And the answer is the same way you would make anything happen at a small nonprofit which is asking volunteers to help. For some reason nonprofits usually have absolutely no problem asking a volunteer to sort in-kind donations or drive things from one location to another. But most nonprofits have volunteers that have skills and interests that are far beyond helping you clean up your lobby or handing out flyers. So a big tip here is to use them. The first step is really just asking. So have a meeting, send out an email to your existing volunteer base with some job descriptions and do whatever you would normally do to ask a volunteer for help. It helps to have some jobs in mind for them that are specific. So make sure to include the date that you are expecting them to work, how much time it will take from them. And here's just a few jobs you can assign to volunteers. You can get their help with social media. They can be your social media manager if you don't have one. They can help you draft your posts. They can respond to comments, monitor your social media feeds, do live posting for you. And if you have some with a little bit of marketing know-how you can even get them to place ads on social media. They can also help you build out your Mighty Cause profile or assist with thanking donors. And it doesn't stop there. There are even more jobs that volunteers can do. They can help you create your content. They can film or edit a video for you, take photographs, do some graphic design work like creating a new social media banner or avatars that are specific to Giving Tuesday. They may even be able to write copy for you or help you copy edit. You may actually have some very skilled people in your volunteer base who can help you with marketing strategy, placing ads or even doing some media outreach for you. And if you need help with the back office accounting side of the event, see if you have any accountants or finance folks in your volunteer base. Basically my point here is that if you're volunteer run it simply doesn't work to say we don't have enough people to do all of this stuff because you pool in volunteers to help you every day in your work. So you wanna pool in volunteers to help with these jobs even if they seem unorthodox for what you do. Sometimes we'll have really skilled people who are stuck cleaning a lobby and they are skilled professionals with talents that just aren't being utilized. And they just don't know that because they haven't been asked. So don't make volunteers who are skilled professionals walk dogs or take out trash instead of putting their skills to use. So ask for help, you really don't have to do it all alone. So here's how you can recruit some volunteers. We talked about this a little bit. But first you wanna start with your existing volunteers. Once again, they may have talents you don't even know about because you've never asked them. And then if you don't have any luck there or need more help, go to your board. Honestly, I would say go to your board anyway. Many board members for nonprofits are extremely well connected and they may even be able to help themselves. So ask them. Also ask your staff. It's possible that the young kid you have answering phones may be really awesome at Instagram. So don't be afraid to pull in staff members and nurture the skills that you may already have working for your nonprofit. And you can also send a plea for help to your general email list posted on social media if you need to cast a little bit of a wider net. So volunteers are awesome, which I think we all know but here's why specifically. They will help you expand beyond your current capabilities as a small nonprofit and help you move beyond what you can currently do on your own. Many nonprofit volunteers, as I mentioned, have high paying skilled jobs as professionals and will be more than happy to share their skills with you for free, which is pretty great. So you might have a consultant who normally charges $100 per hour in their daily life to talk to them about marketing and you can maybe get them to come in and help you out for the cost of $0. That's pretty awesome. If you're a one-person show, this also frees up time for you to focus on the big picture. You really just have to ask. Asking can be hard, especially in the world of small nonprofits where people tend to burn themselves out and take everything on themselves, but volunteers are people who will show up for your work. So let them show up for you, ask for their help. All right, so now we're moving into my personal favorite tip for small nonprofits, which is that you've got to embrace being small, be small but mighty. So a lot of nonprofits can feel kind of shy and intimidated about fundraising, especially on a day with Giving Tuesday because they don't have the resources that a really big organization does. They can't make TV commercials or slick content and videos like the big dogs do, but it's important to embrace that punk DIY fundraising attitude because it's what can help you grow and find your voice. If you don't have the things a big nonprofit has, you need to use what you've got. Necessity is the mother of invention. For instance, you really don't need an expensive camera to have a video because most of us have this small marvel of technology just sitting in our pockets, our smartphones. A smartphone can take really high quality videos and photos. So pull it out and use it and don't be shy about using it. And Mighty causes a platform you can use for free to help you fundraise. So use us and use all of the tools we have available to you as well. You can also find really awesome free tools that you can utilize. You don't really need Photoshop when you can use Canva to make really great social media-friendly graphics. You don't need a professional grade video editor when you can make a video that works and is edited and is slick and professional using YouTube and Vimeo's free editing tools. In app stores, you can find all kinds of apps that will help you get creative and create slick, polished content for free or for a very low cost. So seriously, embrace being small and use what you've got available to you. We talked a little bit about this when we were talking about goals, but scale your campaign to your resources. You don't need to do an all-out huge fundraising bonanza if that doesn't make sense for your nonprofit size and resources. You don't need to do everything, just do what you can. You wanna be authentic to your nonprofit and run a campaign that is true to what you do and who you are. So it's fine to look at big nonprofits and see what they do because they can provide some really great guidance about how to fundraise, but don't get caught up into comparing yourselves to them because it's not gonna be apples to apples if they have millions of dollars, a professional development staff and a professional video production staff. You can set smaller goals. So maybe instead of setting a monetary goal, you just wanna get more people signed up for your newsletter for Giving Tuesday or run your first peer-to-peer campaign to see how that works out. Or you just wanna spread awareness and get word of your work out there. Those are all okay goals to have. You don't need to do everything, just do what you can. So one of my favorite stories from when I was a kid was the story in House on Pooh Corner about Piglet in the Storm. Piglet and Pooh went to visit Owl and a horrible storm trapped Pooh, Owl and Piglet in Owl's tree. Piglet, as he constantly reminded the other animals, was a very small animal. But in this situation, it was his smallness that enabled him to help. He was able to use his smallness as an advantage and help his friends out of the tree by climbing out of an opening that was much too small for Pooh or Owl to fit through. So be like Piglet, embrace the bigness of being small. And what I mean by that is turn your smallness into a rallying cry. People like to support small businesses and small nonprofits. They're skeptical of big businesses and big nonprofits. And I say this as someone who worked for a very big nonprofit with hundreds of employees. The top question we got from our donors and from people in general was how much do you spend on overhead? It was a constant question. So if you're small, play that up. Use messaging that emphasizes how many big things you're able to make happen even though you're small. Emphasize the fact that your overhead is really low and your operations are lean. People like that. They like knowing that they're money instead of going to staff salaries which isn't a necessary thing you need to pay your staff but they like knowing that operations run lean so more of their money goes to programs and services. And being small does have some advantages because you can focus on personal contact in one-to-one touches like personal outreach, phone calls and letting people get to know your key players. You can have more faces out there for them to get to know. So the lesson here is to avoid seeing your small nonprofit as a detriment and embrace your smallness as a strength. And now we'll move into our fifth tip which is to leverage partnerships. So Giving Tuesday is a great opportunity to reach out to community partners. It's a great icebreaker and it's a wonderful way to keep any existing partners engaged. This can include businesses, companies, anyone who can help boost your campaign. You wanna think more about natural partnerships. For instance, a natural pet food store might be a great partner for an animal rescue and a small local restaurant that does farm to table food might be an excellent partner for a hunger relief organization. And your Giving Tuesday campaign is a great icebreaker and it's an easy way to segue into talking about working together. One thing that we definitely recommend asking partners about is providing a matching grant. A matching grant is a donation that your nonprofit leverages to bring in other donations. So let's say the pet food store provides a $1,000 match for the animal rescue. For a set period of time, say for the entirety of Giving Tuesday, the pet food store matches each donation that comes in one to one. So you donate $25, $25 is matched. So you actually donate $50. It basically is a Bogo sale for donations. The process for getting a matching grant is the same as major gift prospecting. You prospect meaning you find people or businesses that might be into this kind of partnership and have the means to provide a matching grant. You cultivate meaning that you build that relationship and then you make your ask. Outside of companies you can ask board members, highly engaged volunteers, sponsors and community partners and major gift donors. And one thing that I have seen nonprofits do is if your board members have not paid their dues yet this year, you can always ask them to pay their dues by providing a matching grant. You can pool together money from their dues and provide a matching grant and use that to bring in more donations on Giving Tuesday. We have a nifty tool on Mighty Cause that allows you to enter and market your match. So if you're able to get a matching grant, enter it in the matching grants tool and make sure that you can use it to the greatest extent you can. And another area where small nonprofits have an advantage when it comes to matching grants is if you're the American Red Cross, $1,000 or even $800 is not gonna go very far for you. But as a small nonprofit you can make smaller asks and you can make those smaller matching grants go a lot further for the work that you do. So this is another area where being small is actually an advantage. Now, something else you can do is partner up to work with other small nonprofits. This helps you build and cultivate relationships with these orgs and helps both of you maximize your resources. You can work to boost each other's campaigns basically. Small nonprofits are better together than separate. So think about coalition building with other organizations that have similar missions or whose missions align with yours because it can help you put more boots on the ground and boost your presence in the community when you work together. All right, so our sixth tip is to try peer-to-peer fundraising. Peer-to-peer fundraising is a technique where you leverage your existing supporters to bring in new supporters, essentially deputizing them to raise money on your behalf. This is made for donor acquisition because it allows you to reach beyond your existing supporters and reach people that you may not have otherwise been able to reach. It can help you grow your email list, which is another concern a lot of small nonprofits have. And the good news here is that Mighty Cause is built for peer-to-peer fundraising. So it's very easy on our platform. All they have to do is click a button and fill out a few fields. So basically peer-to-peer is a form of volunteering. So you'd wanna ask the same people you would ask to volunteer. I definitely wanna mention because sometimes small nonprofits especially can feel a little bit strange about this, but it is absolutely appropriate and it is smart to ask your board to get involved in peer-to-peer fundraising. So if this is new to them, if this is not something you've ever done before, maybe try bringing it up at your next board meeting, give them the facts of what it's about and what it's involved and see if they're willing to give it a try. Volunteers, staff members and other people in your nonprofit's inner circle are natural peer-to-peer fundraisers. And you can also put out a general call to people on your email list, including donors and post on social media to see if anyone is interested in starting a peer-to-peer fundraiser. So the benefits of peer-to-peer are multiple and huge, including acquiring new donors because you can talk to people that you wouldn't otherwise be able to talk to. You may not be able to ask your board members aunt for a donation for your nonprofit, but they certainly have the permission to. So it's a great way to increase your reach. It's also a really fun way to get people who already support your nonprofit involved in a new way. They're able to tell their own story about your work and explain why it's important to them. And it's a great way to steward them and get them more deeply involved in your nonprofit. And if you're interested in taking it up a notch, if you've already given peer-to-peer fundraising a try, you could try teams or events. Teams are groups of people who are fundraising together toward a common fundraising goal. That's great for volunteer groups, workplaces, board member challenges. They have a central page where they're tracking their collective goal and then they each have their own individual pages where they can tell their story. And if you wanted to do something a little bit more grand, you could talk about doing an event. It's basically a step up from teams. Groups of people work together and teams of people work together. So you have individuals and teams working together toward a common fundraising goal. And it's really good for bigger peer-to-peer efforts. So if you're able to generate a lot of interest in peer-to-peer fundraising and lots of groups and individuals want to get involved, events may be a great option for you. These are both totally free on Mighty Cause. They're included with your account as a nonprofit. So there's no additional cost to this. I mean, it's a really great creative way to get more people involved in your fundraising efforts. Just some quick facts about peer-to-peer fundraising. Money is added to your nonprofit's fundraising total for Giving Tuesday. So even if it's not made directly to your organization's page, it is included in your overall total and will help you win prizes and help you climb the leaderboard. All donations are dispersed directly to your nonprofit using our regular process. So sometimes if people haven't tried it before they're a little bit concerned, like, will this person have my nonprofit's money? The answer is no, it goes directly to your nonprofit. Nonprofits that utilize peer-to-peer fundraising on Mighty Cause raise more money per campaign and they do much better during Giving Events like Giving Tuesday. And again, peer-to-peer campaigns, teams and events are totally free and unlimited for nonprofits on Mighty Cause. So this is something that you can wrap into your campaign and give a try without any additional cost. All right, and then we're almost done. Our final tip is to follow up. So when we're talking about planning, you also want to make a follow-up plan. So when you get new donations, especially when you get new donors, you wanna make sure that you don't just let them sit there. You want to follow up with them and start the stewarding process. You would start by thinking about how you're gonna onboard new donors. Ways you can do that is like through a welcome packet, a welcome series of emails. One thing that is really great is a welcome phone call. So if you're able to get a staff member or volunteer on the phone with them to thank them for their donation, that's a really personal and effective way to thank them, which helps you steward them and get them to make their next donation. You wanna get to know them, so establish personal contact with them, whether that's an email or a phone call, and get some more information about them. How did they find out about you? What are their interests? What brought them to your nonprofit? So get to know them a little bit so that you can, in the future, speak more specifically to who they are. You also want to prep them for your end campaign, especially if it's gonna be different than your Giving Tuesday campaign. You can sow the seeds and let them know that you've got another great campaign coming up. And don't procrastinate. A quick thank you, statistically, they've studied this, is extremely important in whether a donor will make another donation to a nonprofit. So I think the hour window is 72 hours. We do send receipts automatically on Mighty Cause, but they also wanna get that personal thank you from you. So it's really important to follow up quickly with donors. And this is another great area where you can get volunteers involved in making phone calls, sending cards, and so on. So that brings us to our next slide, which is recommended ways to thank your donors. Again, phone calls are really great. So because you're a small nonprofit, you have the ability to do more of this personal one-to-one touches, like phone calls. So get volunteers signed up to help you make phone calls to donors. Last year for Giving Tuesday, I made a donation to a smaller nonprofit. And within 10 minutes, I got a phone call from a really friendly volunteer thanking me for my donation. And I've been working for nonprofits for a long time. I donate to a lot of organizations, but I still remember that a year later and I'm planning on donating to them again this year because they were so gracious about my donation. That wasn't even that big. So that's something that small nonprofits can sort of have as a superpower is being able to use these smaller personal touches. Handwritten thank you cards are also really great and they're not that expensive. You can get a big packet of cards if you put your logo on them, even better. Get staff and volunteers to handwrite a thank you message, get multiple signatures, get your executive director to sign and thank the donor in the card. And to that effect, a personalized email from your executive director or other leadership at your nonprofit can go a long way because it makes people feel important. That's somebody who's so important at this organization reached out to say thank you to me. So those are some ways that you can plan to thank donors to make sure that you don't just let them hang there, you're stewarding them and you're getting them into the next phase of supporting your nonprofit. One thing that's really important is closing the loop. So after giving Tuesday, you want to report publicly on your results. You wanna say we raise this amount, thank you so much. So go on social media, send an email out. If you have a website or a blog, add it there and talk a little bit about your Giving Tuesday campaign and what you were able to achieve. Send an email out to your donors, thanking them specifically for helping and share your results with them and make sure you thank them again. There is no such thing in the nonprofit world as thanking people too much. And follow up on any specifics related to your campaign. Show your impact. Did you manage to fund the project you were fundraising for? For instance, if somebody donates to a nonprofit who is raising money to get a new building and they never hear whether you were able to get that new building, they're not gonna be inclined to donate to you again because they don't know that when they gave you money the last time you used it for the purpose they gave it to you for. So make sure you close the loop on any storytelling and anything that you were fundraising for specifically. All right, so that's it for our tips. I just wanted to move into some nonprofit campaigns from 2018 that did really well and were hosted by small nonprofits. Institute for the Musical Arts is a small nonprofit that's located in Goshen, Massachusetts and they raised $32,000, over $32,000 for Giving Tuesday in 2018 from 112 donors. What they do is they provide music lessons and industry training to women and young girls. Their Giving Tuesday campaign is driven by one employee, they're a co-founder and executive director. So they are super small. They focus on the impact of their program in young women's lives. So they have a lot of testimonials, they share video, they get the girls who've gone through their program involved in their Giving Tuesday campaign and that's been really effective for them. Year in, year out, they've raised a lot of money, they're very small, it's very DIY, they don't have a professional staff to support them. It's just two people really running this campaign. So they have really been able to utilize their program alumni in giving testimonials, providing them with content, giving them quotes about how important their work has been in their lives. And they're very savvy with social media and their email lists. They're very particular about when they post, how often they post and when they email and contact their donors. So they're very intentional and very thoughtful about it. And that's been extremely effective for them. $112, 112 donors is not that many in the world of nonprofit fundraising, but they've made it so that their donors are so engaged with the work that they do and believe in it so strongly that they were able to provide that amount of funding for them in 24 hours. So they're a really great example of a small nonprofit that just uses everything they have at their disposal to make their campaign shine. And they were number two on the Small Organizations Leader Board last year and they want a golden ticket. They are very competitive. They make sure that they understand when golden tickets are gonna be issued and they make sure that they email and post on social media to notify their donors. Another one, this one kind of came out of nowhere last year is Bronx La Crosse. They raised over $31,000 on Giving Tuesday last year from 404 donors. So just going back to IMA, they had $112 raised over 32,000. These guys had 404 donors give over $31,000. So they had a larger number of donors giving in smaller amounts. So you can do it either way. They are a small nonprofit focused on education. They're a fairly new nonprofit. They were founded in 2017 and they had really strong campaign messaging. That was I think at the end of the day what made them stand out. They asked for donations of $25, which is the price of a new lacrosse stick. They reached their goal again with a large number of smaller donations. So you don't need people to give in $100. You don't need people to give $200. If you have enough people who are motivated to give in $25, which is a pretty small ask, you can do a lot with that. And they, again, were very social media savvy. They had their own hashtag that they created to promote their campaign. And they put together a really cool video that told their nonprofit story. I was not able to speak with them, so I don't know if it was a volunteer project or if that was something they did in-house. But they had a really effective campaign video that told the story of what their nonprofit did, does in the world and what they were hoping to achieve on Giving Tuesday. And that was really effective for them. The video was able to work for them on social media and emails and even right on their page. So they made that piece of content they put together go really far. So when you're thinking about putting together content for this year's campaign, think about that. These kinds of content, these pieces of content can go really far in a lot of different ways. So Bronx La Crosse did really great. They ended up at number three on the Small Organizations Leaderboard last year. And this one actually didn't place too high on the Leaderboard, but I just wanted to point them out because they had a really great campaign. They raised $8,555 on Giving Tuesday. And they increased that to more than 24,000 by rolling their Giving Tuesday campaign into their end of year campaign. So they basically kicked off their end of year fund raising campaign on Giving Tuesday and ran it through the end of the year and through persistence, they were able to raise much more than they had initially set out to raise. They are a volunteer run sanctuary for senior animals in the San Francisco Bay Area. And they also did something that we mentioned before, they raised money for a specific fund, their veterinary fund, which was a clear focus that reinforced what their mission is. They care for senior dogs and a lot of these senior dogs have special medical needs and need extensive medical care. So what they chose to fundraise were actually reinforced what they do and reinforced their mission and really spoke to the kinds of people who support their work. And again, they raised a smaller amount on Giving Tuesday. They didn't place very high on the Leaderboard, but they had a huge impact because they extended their campaign. So they were flexible enough to look ahead and say, this is probably what we can do on Giving Tuesday. And then they went through the end of the year and they raised over $24,000 for their veterinary fund, which is an incredible amount. They're all volunteer run. So I just wanted to point out that you don't need to place high on the Leaderboard to have a successful campaign. There's all kinds of ways to run a successful Giving Tuesday campaign. All right, so I wanted to open the Florida questions. It's 2.45, so we've got plenty of time to take some questions. So if you have something you wanna ask, just type it into the questions box of your go-to webinar panel and we will try to get to all of them. Oh, okay, so this is an interesting question. If we sign up for Mighty Cause, how will we know what nonprofits we are competing with? Well, you really won't. You can go through the search, but in terms of like their budget, there's different Leaderboards. There's usually a larger organization Leaderboard and a smaller Leaderboard. So you won't know specifically who you're competing against, but we do make sure that when we're dividing organizations up according to their budget, you're paired or I guess not paired, but grouped with organizations that have a similar size and resources. So we're not gonna put you on a Leaderboard with an organization that is a multi-million dollar organization. You're gonna be on a Leaderboard with organizations that have a comparable size and budget. So there's no real way, we're not gonna give you a list of like a hundred organizations you might be competing with, but you're gonna be grouped with organizations that have a similar capacity to the extent that we're able to group people together. Yes, and there was a follow-up question there. We separate by operating budgets. So yeah, we're gonna look at your budget. That's why we asked for that information in the registration form, just so that we know where to place you. And we're, you know, again, we're not gonna place you in a Leaderboard where you're competing for prizes with organizations that are much larger than you are. So that's how we make that determination. So when you're filling out your registration form, just make sure that information is accurate because if you tell us, you bring in a lot more money than you do, we're gonna put you in that appropriate Leaderboard and that's where you'll be. So just make sure that that's correct when you fill out your registration form. So there's a question about thank yous. Can we customize our thank you on the Mighty Cost site? That's a fantastic question and yes you can. So there's a couple of ways you can do that. Under donor experience, you can go to post checkout. That's just an area on your Mighty Cost profile. And there you have a couple of different options. One, you can customize the receipts that donors are sent after they complete their donation. It'll have some standard boilerplate language that we have to send them for their tax receipt, but you can put a message in there that thanks them for their donation. So that way you've kind of automated that process. I don't recommend stopping there. I definitely recommend reaching out beyond that, especially as a small nonprofit, just to say thank you. But yeah, you can automate that process by putting a custom thank you message into your receipt. And then we also offer donation pages. So after somebody completes their donation, they're gonna be dropped onto a page. If you have nothing there, it'll just say thank you for your donation to small nonprofit Inc. or whatever the name is. But you can customize it so that you can put in a custom thank you message. It uses our inline text editor. So you can add hyperlinks, you can add images, you can embed videos. I mean, you can really, you know, snazz that up and make it jazzy so that you're thanking people and you're getting them involved even more in your story. There's also a call to action button or a CTA button on the thank you page. So if you wanted to send them somewhere else, if you wanted to send them to a sign up form for your newsletter, or if you wanted to send them to your website, you can do that on the thank you page. So definitely those are two things I recommend doing if you participate on Mighty Cause is fill out your receipt so that you have a custom thank you message there and then build out your thank you page. Those are in your donor experience under post checkout. It's just two spots that you can fill out. It's super easy and it does have a huge impact. Okay, so here's another question about who you would be competing with. Yeah, it is nationwide. So it's open to any organizations within the United States or anybody who has a 501c3 or nonprofit status in the United States. We don't really limit them by location just because it's not logical for us to do that since we're a nationwide platform. So yeah, it'll be open to any nonprofits across the United States. We don't really do regional leaderboards. So you'll just be grouped with people or other nonprofits in a leaderboard according to your operating budget. But that's just makes it simple to group everybody together with organizations that have similar resources. Let's see. When asking for matching grants, it seems you are asking individuals slash places that have already given donations to you. What is the benefit to having them donate further through a matching grant? That's a good question. So typically matching grant donors are major gift donors or partners or sponsors. The benefit to asking them to give through a matching grant is that you're engaging them in a new way. Instead of just giving you a check and you cashing the check and using the money, they're giving you a check or making an online donation, however they choose to do it. And instead of just taking the money to the bank, you're using that money to get more people to make donations to your nonprofit, which gives them a new way to be excited about donating to your nonprofit. It also helps their donation go further instead of just stopping at this $1,000 that I'm giving you. I'm taking my $1,000 and I'm turning that into another $1,000. So it's a new way for me as a donor if I'm giving you a matching grant to make my donation go further and do more for your nonprofit. The other benefit is if you have like a business in the area that you work with and they provide a matching grant, you can give them a shout out on social media, on your MightyCost page, wherever you wanna do it, and emails asking people to contribute because you have this matching grant available, which lets people know that they're philanthropic, they do good work, they care about their community, which is good advertising for them. So there's a lot of benefits to it. It basically just makes the donation go further and it helps you engage that donor in a new way. It's part of the stewarding process. So instead of just asking for that same donation year after year and having them write the check, you're finding an interesting new use for that money and using that to bring in more donations. So you're giving them also the opportunity to double their money by providing a matching grant. So there's a lot of benefits to it. When it comes to people who are not individuals, you're actually, you're able to engage them and get them involved in your nonprofit so that they have a clear thing that they can provide for you, a clear ask. Sometimes when you're trying to engage community partners or corporate sponsors or companies, you can sort of feel like, well, what am I gonna ask you? This way you can set up a meeting and say, hey, we have something that we wanna ask you. We think you might be interested in it. It might be beneficial to both of us. And it gives you an icebreaker. It gives you something to talk to them about other than, hey, we should do something sometime together, shouldn't we? So there's a lot of benefits to having a matching grant for your nonprofit. We've already talked about those. You'll get those really do drive people to donate because they wanna make their money go further. And for the donor, you're giving them a new way to interact with your nonprofit. All right. Is there somewhere I can get more information about grant matching as that is a new term for me? Yes. So we have in our support library, kind of a technical explainer that walks you through the matching grants tool and what it can do because it is a complex little tool. It's not hard to use, but it does have a lot to it that you can use to make it exciting. So I would definitely go to our support library from mightycause.com and just read that over. We are also working on a longer blog post that talks about matching grants, everything you need to know. And we also, I believe, have a longer form article in our nonprofit toolkit about matching grants. So take a look at the nonprofit toolkit. We have some information in there. And if that's something that you're interested in, let us know. We may be able to do a video, an on-demand webinar about that topic. Is it okay to use our organization page for the fundraiser or should we do a fundraiser page? It's totally up to you. It's absolutely fine to use your organization profile for your fundraising. A lot of organizations do that. It's sometimes simpler and more easy. You can definitely set a goal on that on your organization profile now. You can have a progress bar appear. So it is set up for you to use it for that purpose. But if you have something that you wanna, if you wanna set up a more specific campaign, like if you're fundraising for a specific fund or a specific project, a campaign page, a fundraiser page, might be a more appropriate place to do that. But you don't have to. It's totally up to you and how you wanna run your campaign and what feels most natural to you. But either of those options can work and has worked on Mighty Cause. Okay, so there's a question here about Facebook and whether they should use Facebook as well as Mighty Cause. So the deal with Facebook is that they usually do kind of a Giving Tuesday deal. In the past, they've worked with PayPal and have provided quote unquote, free fundraising. Now, you can certainly work with Facebook if you want, they do offer some money. Typically that money goes to larger nonprofits. So for small nonprofits, that prize money is technically available to you, but it typically goes to larger organizations who are able to generate more traffic on Giving Tuesday. And the thing about Facebook is that when something seems free, it's usually you or your donors that are the product. So that is true of Facebook. So the reason that Facebook typically does peer-to-peer fundraising, it's not something their platform was designed for, is because they want your donor's information and they want to set up payments through Facebook so that it reduces friction for users making other kinds of payments through their platform. So I would say be cautious using Facebook. You certainly can use them if you want to. However, it is best for donors if you have a clear path for them, if you say, well, you could donate here or here. Sometimes people go, I don't know what the best thing to do is, so I'm not gonna make that decision and I'm not going to choose. That's a documented effect that too many choices have on people. So when you're talking about making donations to a charity, it's best to keep it clear and simple and choose one or the other. The downside to Facebook is that you don't own that data. So when your donors make a donation through Facebook, Facebook owns their information. They can do whatever they want with it. They can resell it. They can charge advertisers to advertise to them. On Mighty Cause, you own your donor data. We don't sell that information. We don't share that information. It is yours. So we don't do anything with your donors. We give that information to you and that is it. We send them a receipt. We never market to them. So that is one thing to keep in mind. As a small nonprofit, you want to build trust with your donors. And unfortunately, Facebook is an environment where when you use their platform for fundraising, you are turning them into consumers of Facebook. They are the product. They are what is being bought and sold. So that is kind of the big downside to Facebook is who controls the data and why they are even participating in the first place. So it's up to you. I would definitely recommend using Mighty Cause just because I know for sure that we're not gonna misuse your donor data. We're not gonna sell it and we're not gonna monetize it in any way. All right. Is there a way to link donations made through Mighty Cause to double the donation, which provides guidance on how to get employers to match donations? Yes. So that's actually kind of an advanced level question, but we do have an integration with double the donation. So if you go to their support library, there's actually a step-by-step instruction for integrating your Mighty Cause profile with double the donation. So that's in their support library. Mike, I can follow up with a direct link to that just so that you can utilize double the donation on GivingTuesday, but they absolutely do have an integration with us so you can set that up. And I'll make sure that you have those instructions. Any suggestions on connecting GivingTuesday with an end of year event? So the event, if you're just kind of talking about your general end of year campaign, I would say it's best to, if you're not going to extend your GivingTuesday campaign to end of year and GivingTuesday this year is on December 3rd. So if you're planning on running an end of year campaign and you wanna give yourself a month, you may just wanna kick it off on GivingTuesday. Just have that be a kickoff point. If you wanted to do two separate things or for whatever reason you do need to do two separate things, what I would recommend is connecting them. So having a similar message and having a similar theme, if you wanted to do a holiday theme, food for holidays for a food bank or something like that, just connecting them thematically can make a huge difference. I wouldn't worry too much about donor fatigue because end of year is the time of year when donors expect to be hit with a lot of asks and either they will give again or they won't. And asking again doesn't harm the chances of them giving again. It's the end of year, that's when they expect to be asked. But thematically connecting them, talking about the same things, hitting the same talking points, that can be a really great way to connect your GivingTuesday campaign with your end of year campaign. And since GivingTuesday is so late this year, last year it was in November, so it felt a little bit earlier. This year it's a little bit later, it's in December, so you may just wanna use it as a kickoff for your end of year event. Just to kill two birds with one stone and just launch your campaign all at once. All right, so I think that is it. Guys, thank you so much for all of your patience today and sticking with me through the whole hour. I will make sure that we have a recording up on the GivingTuesday site. So look out for that if you wanted to share this webinar with anybody on your team. I'll also have the slides up there. If you have any other questions, you can certainly email me at lyndaatmightycause.com. We're right at three o'clock, so thank you so much for your time and attention today and good luck on GivingTuesday.