2 HOURS 1 MIN
How to Use Digital Tools to Drive Donations on Giving Tuesday
Free and low-cost ways to digitally promote your mission during this year’s giving season.
Categories: Giving Tuesday, How To, Tools, Webinar, Expert Webcast
How to Use Digital Tools to Drive Donations on Giving Tuesday Transcript
Print Transcript0:08
I love seeing that number go up so quickly. I love it
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All righty, well, I think we are Read More
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I love seeing that number go up so quickly. I love it
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All righty, well, I think we are going to get started then. So hello, everyone and welcome to our session how to use digital tools to drive donations on Giving Tuesday. My name is Amanda Padron ski. I’m a trainer here at DonorPerfect. And I’m also joined by Julia Campbell, author, speaker and nonprofit consultant. Before I hand it over to Julia, to introduce herself and get us started, I would like to remind everyone, if you do have any questions, please feel free to put those in the question box of the GoToMeeting control panel. We will have dedicated points during the presentation where we will address those questions. We’ll also be recording today’s session, and you guys will get access to that recording within the next few days. So with that said, Julia, I’m going to turn it over to you. All right. Thanks so much, Amanda. Thanks, everyone. I’m just so thrilled to be here today, talking about one of my favorite topics, GivingTuesday, and digital tools and how to best use them all together to drive donations. So I won’t spend too long on my bio, but a lot of you might not be familiar with my work. I’m a mom of two, I’ve been running my own business for about 13 years, I host a podcast and nonprofit nation Podcast. I’m an author, a speaker. But the most important thing to know about me is that I am a, I come from the nonprofit world. So I’m a former development and marketing director, often both at the same time. And I have worked in very small shops, I’ve worked at universities, but my real love are the small community based organizations, especially local organizations, and that’s where I’ve really kind of worked my whole life. So we’re not going to stay on camera the whole time. I don’t want it to lag the video at all, and disrupt anyone’s feed. But like Amanda said, if you do have questions, please feel free to put them in the questions box in the little question section. Because there will be set times we’re going to be going through some exercises. And we have two hours together. So you want to make sure that you do get your questions answered. All right. So with that, I’ll probably pop off and pop on again, when there’s q&a time. So the learning objectives for today, we’re going to focus on goal setting and messaging, I think that’s really important. Because if you don’t have your goals and your message, pretty set and hammered out, the tools that you use are really not going to work. They’re not it’s sort of like if you don’t know the plan of the house that you’re building, you don’t know what kind of lumber to use and to purchase you don’t know what kind of people to hire to build your house. So we’re going to build focus on infrastructure for a little bit. And then how to create that promotions calendar, how to promote the campaign, what messages to send, what channels to use, and we’re going to talk a lot about incorporating DonorPerfect fundraising features and your campaign. They have some amazing features that you can use, and then how to amplify the cake campaign using digital tools and social media ambassadors. So for general housekeeping, if you look in the handout section of GoToWebinar, you’re going to see the promotions checklist also, you know the campaign calendar template, and that’s really going to help you as you strategize how much and when and what to promote. So we’re gonna go through that at various times but you have that and you also have the slide deck because as DonorPerfect knows, and they are so patient with me. I have over 80 slides and a lot of the slides have pretty detailed examples.
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and screenshots on them. So you’re going to want to refer to that later on. As you’re creating your campaign. There’s going to be small breaks to answer questions to fill out the plan. And then I’m going to make sure that I take care of all of you this gigantic group, by answering your questions. So we are going to go to our very first poll. I’m going to launch it right now. Have you ever run a Giving Tuesday campaign? So just quickly answer it. Obviously, there’s probably a lot of different ways you could answer this. But I kind of want to get a sense of who’s on the webinar, if you’ve reached your goal, if you didn’t reach your goal. Okay, so let me I’m just going to take one more, like few more seconds, so make sure you’re answering the poll. Okay, it looks like we’re at 50% voted. So I’m gonna close it out. Okay. So what I find really interesting, actually, is that 21% of you, you reached your goal. That’s amazing. Good for you. That’s awesome. And maybe you have some advice for some of the people on this webinar as well. 26% Yes. But we didn’t reach our goal. I think everything’s a learning experience. And we’re going to talk about how to really, almost improve and iterate on what you’ve done. And then a lot of you over half of you are newbies. So that’s, that’s interesting. So I’m excited to see you. So no matter where you are, and your GivingTuesday process, I just want you to know you’re in the right place. Okay, so thank you. There’ll be another poll in a little while. So what is GivingTuesday? Anyway, I mean, GivingTuesday, I’m not going to spend too much time on it, because I think you’re all here because you do know that it is something not to be ignored. But it was actually founded by New York’s 90/92 Street Y in partnership with the UN Foundation. And now it is a nonprofit. It’s a learning center. It’s like a professional development center for organizations. And it really was created to be this kind of breath of fresh air after all of us have spent so much time we did Thanksgiving that we did Black Friday. And now we have Cyber Monday. Now we’ve got all of these different holidays. And what they wanted to do was really celebrate philanthropy celebrate that giving spirit. So it’s not always about driving donations. That’s what we’re talking about today. But there are lots of other ways that people have celebrated Giving Tuesday. And in fact, given Tuesday that GivingTuesday Data Commons estimates that 35 million adults participated. And that could be giving that could be holding a fundraiser that could be doing something nice for someone else, that could be thanking someone, there are so many different ways that you can participate in GivingTuesday. It’s the spirit of giving the spirit of generosity, the spirit of togetherness, that we want to promote, and it’s international. So there’s a GivingTuesday across the world and what I love about their particular social media accounts, they highlight a lot of these campaigns across the world. Now, it’s a celebration of all types of generosity. This is what I love so much about this holiday is yes, we you know the Facebook match gets a lot of press and someone making a million dollar gift or something makes you know, the front page news, but it’s really democratizing philanthropy, that’s how I see it. It’s making giving accessible to the little person like the little guy like if you only have $10 If you have $5 Even if you just have a canned good, you can go to your food pantry, you can participate in this holiday.
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The problem with GivingTuesday as we know, the old ways no longer work. Okay. This is not my inbox. I actually didn’t take a picture of my inbox last year. I need to take one this year. This is Pamela grow if you know Pamela grow. She is a renowned fundraising consultant. She just took a quick screenshot of her inbox on Giving Tuesday. Now what I want to pull out is that a lot of these subject lines, you know it’s giving Tuesday Giving Tuesday, give back on Giving Tuesday today is giving Tuesday. Can you feel the excitement today is giving Tuesday. So you probably want to think a little bit more about your subject line because we all operate in a vacuum. We all think that we are the only nonprofit sending this email. Now. GivingTuesday has been called the
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nonprofit Hunger Games vous les VUL II of nonprofit as has famously called it The Hunger Games. He hates GivingTuesday. A lot of people don’t like it. I think that it’s misunderstood, okay, so I’m not really here to tell you, you have to participate. I’m here to give you the information and the resources, so that you can make an educated decision about whether to participate. And then you can go and have a successful campaign, if you do participate. But I do not get kickbacks or get paid from giving Tuesday in any way. I just think that it’s making giving fun. I mean, it’s making giving fun, it’s, it’s a day of talking about what we do. It’s a day we’re giving philanthropy generosity is in the forefront of people’s minds. It’s in the front page headlines. I know last year, it made the front page of like the Boston Globe, it was covered in the New York Times it was covered on NPR, and a lot of the major news outlets are covering it. Good Morning, America was covering it. So whether or not we decide to participate, I think the spirit of giving Tuesday is something to be celebrated. You know, it’s like philanthropy is not about the money. It’s about using whatever resources you have at your fingertips and applying them to improving the world. So maybe it’s just kind of amplifying and sending a tweet.
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Now, how do you get buy in, you can’t really do anything, unless you are a staff of one, or unless you are the boss, how to get by and get everyone involved, give everyone a small part, show the data, a lot of higher ups, bosses boards, they do like the data, how much was raised, how many people participated, there’s so much data, and then think about getting buy in through committee process, you definitely don’t want too many cooks in the kitchen. But think about organizing some kind of exploratory committee or brainstorm committee, you will, you know, the buck stops here, you will have hopefully, the ability to
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choose the ideas that you want to pursue, and then use this time to come up with a creative and exciting campaign theme. I love the high horses GivingTuesday. Bingo. They send this out to not just their email lists, but their staff, their volunteers, their board, because they want to give everyone a chance to participate, even if they’re not giving money. So that’s really the spirit here.
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Now, the three essential steps to GivingTuesday success before we even start our mass market promotions, select your SMART goal, we’re gonna go through each of these steps, create a compelling reason to participate. We can’t just say it’s giving Tuesday. That’s not the compelling reason that might grab attention. But 9 million nonprofits raise money on GivingTuesday. And I’m not going to give money to all of them. So what is your compelling reason? And then make it absurdly easy to participate from anywhere. This means wherever your donors are, whatever your donors want to use, whether it be digital, whether it be analog, whether it be direct mail, whether it be phone calls, make it easy for your donors to participate. The first piece of this puzzle is your SMART goal. Now, I really think every fundraising campaign needs a SMART goal. Because if you’re just sort of raising money for general operating and you’re raising money for six months, how do you know that you’ve actually achieved anything? And then how do you know if your digital marketing has actually pushed the needle on this goal? So your SMART goal is specific. I’m going to give you examples, specific, measurable, achievable, but I also like to say ambitious, this is going to be I want you to know, right now, listen up this 54% of you that have not run a GivingTuesday campaign. Selecting your SMART goal is going to be hard to do. But it’s incredibly important because you don’t have a baseline, like a lot of my clients, you know, last year they raised 5000. So this year, they want to raise 7500, or they want to raise 10, so they have a baseline. If you don’t have a baseline, you got to get a little creative. It needs to be relevant. So it needs to be something that’s like relevant to your donors, and time based. So what does this look like? Okay, these are just some sample goals. We want to raise a total amount of $5,000 on Giving Tuesday, Giving Tuesday itself is almost gives you that timeframe if you’re only raising money during that day, but if you’re raising money for two weeks, that’s your timeframe. That’s the T in the smart to increase social media engagement by 30%. To gain 100 new donors. I don’t want
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By the way, to choose all these goals, I really want you to choose one, and then maybe two, maybe two, maybe something you think could happen, because of your goal. But there has to be this North Star that’s guiding the entire campaign, where every ship and you know, all hands on deck and all of those little seafaring metaphors, everybody is aiming towards the one goal 40 wishes. This is another important point, your goal does not have to be a monetary goal, you do not have to say we want to raise $50,000 A lot of people do, and that’s fine. But you might want to consider what I call an impact goal. Because I can see myself like if you said, we want to raise $50,000, on Giving Tuesday.
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I mean, if it was compelling enough, I might still give my little, you know, $25, but it’s probably going to turn off a lot of people who think Well, that’s a drop in the bucket like I my little $5. Like, what does that possibly going to achieve. But if you say our goal is to raise enough to grant wishes for 40 kids who are waiting, that just seems more palpable to me, like I feel like that’s the reason the reason that you exist is not the money. The reason you exist, is to grant wishes for the 40 kids that are waiting. And then you know, we raise enough to grant wishes for 55. Children’s, that’s even better. But think about your impact goal.
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Certainly, you absolutely can provide monetary amounts. You want to test out kind of different messages, your online donation of $25 or more will be matched help us reach our goal of raising $20,000 By midnight. And then so what I love about that is then they they don’t just talk about the money, though, they say what it’s going to go to your gift will empower nearly 600 people with intellectual and developmental disabilities to live, learn, work and play in their local communities. Amazing. Tomorrow’s the big day, we’re going to build a brand new after school center downtown, will you help us reach our goal by giving $25 I absolutely love that. Because it’s very specific. It doesn’t, I don’t have to think about it. It’s just very clear and concise. And that’s what you want.
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This is Julie Edwards on Instagram one of my favorite. Now she’s a consultant, but she used to be the CEO of a local humane society. These are the kinds of posts that she would post and raise tons of money. It’s so specific your gifts will go to work immediately. To help 26 Dogs rescued today. Yes, of course, she has the benefit of very cute dogs. But a lot of places have incredible visuals and stories they can share and they and they don’t and or they don’t write it in a compelling way. So look at these captions, look at this copy, and see what you can emulate. See what you can kind of take and translate into your own words with your own mission, your own vision. You know, our goal today is 100 Winner outfits and 100 choice you get the point
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with indivisible, what I really like about this particular donation ask is that it tells you exactly what even like $1 can do. And I know a lot of you have these kinds of missions, like indivisible where you’re not, you know, saving 26 dogs, you can’t say like we’re going to feed 50 people. There’s not that sort of tangible, quantitative, measurable goal. It’s much more ephemeral. It’s like harder to describe. So if you look what indivisible does, I think it’s in such it’s just such a great way to catch the eye to make it sound, you know, to show us that it’s really important.
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Fight colorectal cancer. Of course, if you have a double if you have a gift, if you have a match, you want to promote that, as well.
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Amanda, so I’m just going to throw it over to you to talk a little bit about the goals dashboard and how that can be used. Thanks, Julia. So actually, I had mentioned a couple slides back. One of the goals that you can set for your GivingTuesday campaign is a monetary goal or even a goal to obtain new donors. So that’s where DonorPerfect can really partner with you to kind of track that SMART goal. With our fundraising goal tracker, you can set a campaign specific goal within a specified timeframe. And once that goal is set, every single time you and your team log into DonorPerfect you can see the real time result
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it’s in progress towards meeting that goal. So you can set that financial goal, I want to raise $5,000, for giving Tuesday between November 1 and December 31. And along with that, the goal Tracker will also help you identify any new donors that have come to your organization as a result of that fundraising effort. So if you are interested in learning how to implement this, in the slides, you can click on the hyperlink. And that’ll take you to our knowledgebase article on setting this up. So with that said, I’m gonna pass it back to Julia. What I love about this is that you now have data to actually give updates to your audience. So, you know, they’re not going to access the dashboard, but you can take your phone out, and you can create a little video and say, Oh, my gosh, we just got 20 new donors, in the first two hours of this campaign, we’re so overwhelmed by your generosity, we’re so overwhelmed, like, thank you so much, or we’re halfway to our goal, or a lot of different updates are possible because you have those real time results.
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So when you’re thinking about the messaging, this goes hand in hand with the goals, really think about who the campaign is for, and it is not for everyone. Who is this campaign for? What do they care about? What’s going to inspire them, what’s going to get them excited? What motivates them, this is where you create that compelling reason to participate. This is based on your SMART goal. So it seems once you have that smart goal, the copy almost seems like a no brainer. Because you can say, Oh, we’re going that we want to raise money to provide 700 bikes to children in West Africa. It’s also based on your specific target audience. It’s based on what will capture their attention, what will pique their interest, what will inspire them to take the time to eat, not even just look, but participate in the campaign, and the sense of urgency. So the sense of urgency, there has to be a reason that I’m participating in this campaign, there has to always be a reason that I’m giving you money that I’m opening up my wallet, or I’m tapping on the Pay Pal button or whatever it is that I’m doing.
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This is one of my favorite GivingTuesday campaigns run by a local LGBTQ organization in Boston. And I was working with them. And they were really hesitant, because they have a tiny staff, their donors are tapped out. They really were worried they were going to have a big annual fund drive in December. And I said, you know, what about something really specific, that people can really understand what it goes to like pizzas for the youth meeting support group food, coffee beverages for the youth meeting support groups, one pizza at a time. So this also speaks to younger people. This is something that the teens and the youth also really wanted to communicate about. But even something small just to test it out. If you’ve never done anything like that before, I think is really powerful. Also think about your unique spin on GivingTuesday. So I have a million examples. So we’re gonna go through some of them, giving Shoes Day, dress for success, they basically turn GivingTuesday into their own visualization of like what a pair of shoes means very symbolic. Of course, you don’t have shoes to donate, you can donate money to get a pair of new shoes. And then what I love is they’re they’re thinking about GivingTuesday as a first touch point with new supporters. It’s a first touch point. I think that’s how all of us should probably think about this, if we’ve never done it before. It’s a way to deepen relationships with with donors you have, but it is this new brand new touch point to talk to brand new people as well. Giving zoo day now giving zoo day is giving Tuesday. All the zoos, a lot of zoos, a lot of aquariums, they all lift each other up, tweet at each other. It’s a very community collaborative event. I just don’t see this as the Hunger Games. I see this as a very collaborative thing that is going on. Giving foods day okay, so you just make it your own.
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There’s something for everybody I think, but this is just a really nice way to make it unique, make it stand out and then also to create community with other people that are working on like food insecurity.
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You can also turn GivingTuesday kind of on its head and just say thank you.
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You know, we we like the sound of gratitude Tuesday a lot better. You’ve given so many gifts all year long. We couldn’t be more
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grateful. So think about the unique message is really going to really resonate with your particular audience. Of course, matching gifts. And we’ll talk a little bit about matching gifts. That’s just the sense of urgency, you know, double your gift, matching gifts up to $50,000. Mark your calendars like just to let people know that it’s this sense of urgency. So, what I want you to do, right now, we’re going to take three minutes because I really want to make this actionable. I want you to walk away with some things that you can do. And we’ll talk about matching gifts after this exercise. But I want to focus first on smart goal and campaign message. So we’re going to come back together at one. Well, that’s 126 we’re going to come back together at 129. Eastern,
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come back in three minutes. And I just want you to take a minute to brainstorm to think to jot down some notes and then we’re going to end the three minute mark we’re going to go back through matching gifts. Okay, so three minutes starts now I’m keeping an eye on the clock I want the Jeopardy music but I didn’t think to cue that up.
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Alright, just one more minute.
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Okay, we’re three minutes, I hope that you got some ideas out on paper on your phone on a Google Doc, just kind of to get started. And we’re going to just keep moving forward. It’s hard to share with this large of a group. Normally in my workshops, I like people to share and give feedback. But we have a huge group today, which I think is fabulous. So, you know, if you do want feedback, we can talk about that afterwards. And you know, I’m happy to I’m happy to look at what you what you’ve done today.
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Someone asked perfectly timed, I saw it come through in the questions about matching gifts. And
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I could probably do a two hour workshop on matching gifts, but I did want to touch on it because I do think it’s something that’s so important for GivingTuesday and that you’ll see it a lot. It’s not going to make or break your campaign. But it will help your sense of urgency messaging for sure. So it’s been discovered data has shown that actually matching funds increase
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The average gift size, they also increase the number of donations and they increase the revenue by 120%. So they’re really nothing to kind of sneeze at, we do need to pay attention to that.
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Who do you approach for a match? Well, this really depends on your organization. I think people who you already have a relationship with start there, it’s so hard to go to like a completely random corporation or company or foundation, and approach them for a match because you have to first of all, convince them to give in the first place, educate them on who you are, I think people that are really, really already invested, make a list of people that you think could be potential match donors. This is help. This is where board members can come in foundations that have given to you, vendors, sponsors of your events, people that advertise the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, if you click on this link, they actually have a matching gifts playbook that is really long and comprehensive and in depth, that is really very, very helpful.
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And then, you know, now that you have some idea may be of a person or a place or a company, you could ask, really the key here is to make it personalized, approach them, don’t send a mass email out, approach them and say, Would you like the chance to multiply your giving, and increase the impact of your generosity, because make it about the impact that they can make, because that’s really at the end of the day, what it’s about, get them in the frame of mind, that they can double triple their impact by donating to this matching fund, show them that data that I just showed you on another slide. You know, matching gifts tend to increase revenue by 120%, all of that, show them that data, and then make it clear, they’re multiplying the impact of their own giving, they’re not just being looked at as sort of a transactional tool, they are giving something but then they’re actually going to be inspiring others to give. And I think a lot of major donors, a lot of people that provide matching funds, this is what they want. Also, you can talk about the promotions and say you’re going to be in all our marketing, you’re going to be in our website or email, you can give them that benefit. But to me, when I’m asking for a matching gift or advising my clients, I usually say it’s about you, it’s about your legacy, it’s about your impact. And then you know, give them a deadline, like you don’t want them to say okay, that sounds great. And then you’re kind of waiting to hear because you want to be creating, you’re giving Tuesday, GivingTuesday campaign assets, your graphics, your videos, your promotional materials. So you want to know, if you do have a match. So that’s almost like a real quick and dirty little like matching gift one on one. But I do encourage you to go back to this slide, get tips in the matching playbook, from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, because that is much more step by step. Now we’re going to do another exercise.
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So if you finished, if you finished the other exercise, that’s great. If you didn’t finish the other exercise, keep working on that. But I want you to take a minute to think about possible people and places that you could approach for that matching gift. So if you think about your board members, your major donors, your sponsors, your vendors, someone that could be a little bit unexpected, the matching gift doesn’t have to be huge. Matching Gifts could really be something that is you know, it doesn’t have to be huge. It could be up to $5,000. A question that I did get from one of my clients that I think is valid here that I want to answer is, well, what if we don’t raise the full amount. So say you get a matching gift for $5,000. And you don’t raise the full five, you are covered. If it says up to five, up to $5,000. That’s why you’ll see that language a lot, especially in some of the examples that I show you.
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You’ll see the up to five. So Amanda, she put some great resources in the chat. The double the donation is a matching gift for this is another actually great resource for you. It’s a matching gift that people can request from their employer. So if I make a donation
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and of course I’m self employed, I am my own employer. But if I make a donation and I work for like Liberty Mutual there, there’s the potential there that they might match that gift. So you definitely want to be exploring all of
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Have your matching gift opportunities because there’s just money being left on the table here people. Okay, so I’m going to take a look actually at the questions while you do this exercise. And I will answer some after this exercise I’m only going to really do two minutes for this one. So brainstorm possible people places to ask for a matching gift. We’ll come back in two minutes all right thanks.
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Okay, put down your pencils,
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put down your phones, but then a Google Doc, I really hope that you took this opportunity because it is for you, you’ve got this time, it’s for you, you’re learning. You’re trying to develop your plan to brainstorm some some places to find a matching gift. So I’m going to take two questions that I already see in the question. area, the question tab, and then we’re gonna go right into promotions. And there will be dedicated time for q&a after that. But I wanted to answer these two. So Macy says many nonprofits have turned towards marketing GivingTuesday as a day for volunteering rather than donating funds, what are your thoughts on this?
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I really think you can do anything you want on GivingTuesday and do whatever you want. I see GivingTuesday as a great playground and a sandbox, to experiment with different asks. So if you are running some huge kind of campaign, and you’re know you’re going to run it on December 1, you know, then maybe GivingTuesday is not the best day to be asking for money. But if you use it to kick off your year end giving, if you use it to showcase a new program or service, if you’re using it to like experiment with new digital marketing tactics. I just see it as like a great way to experiment.
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And a great way to to raise awareness because people are searching on the hashtag, they’re looking for it. So whatever is the priority at your organization, if you want more volunteers to run your hotline, if you want more, I know a local food bank where I live last year they did diaper drive a diaper drive on GivingTuesday. So whatever you want to use it for, it doesn’t have to be money. Just think about what strategically fits with your organization.
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Lindsay, this is such a great question. Excuse me.
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Is there a risk that donors will donate a smaller amount for GivingTuesday instead of a larger donation for the year end appeal?
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Studies have actually shown over and over and over again, like neon one I’m thinking I know DonorPerfect has done a study, like there are studies out there that say GivingTuesday does not cannibalize at year end giving. It just augments it and it gets people excited. And it brings a new donors. So sure, you know, I mean, if I gave $100. And then I give 25 on GivingTuesday. Maybe, I mean there’s a chance. But the data, the data has just shown that that is that does not what has not happened. People end up making an extra gift, or they don’t make a gift and they share the they spread the word, and then they still make their annual urine gift. So this is where you really have to be laser focused on who you’re asking and maybe segment out your database like if there’s a donor that’s giving $10,000 First of all, you probably wouldn’t send them your year end appeal. Anyway, hopefully you’d be talking to them on the phone and maybe meeting with them.
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Um, but it’s all about segmenting your donors, and really understanding.
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You know, having that compelling ask that’s on top of your regular stuff. You know, this is a special project, this is a special goal. This is a special match. This is outside of like regular operating procedure. But it’s so interesting that the data actually really has shown that it doesn’t affect urine, giving as much as much as we think it does. All right, I’m going to launch this poll, because we’re going to talk about promotion. Now many touch points do you plan to send to your supporters on Giving Tuesday, social media email, phone calls, some people send direct mail, I had one client, they sent a postcard a direct mail, appeal an email, and you know, all the above.
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So let’s see. It says 1% has voted. I don’t think that’s true. But we’re gonna wait just a few more seconds, because the percentages I can see them are climbing up. I’m gonna wait till we get to like 40% have voted.
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So I’d love to say there’s no right or wrong answer there. It really isn’t. There’s a recommended recommended answer, and we’ll talk about it. Alright, we’re at 50%.
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I’m gonna close it out and share it with you 90%, one to two 50%, three to 520 2%, five to 10 and 9% 10 plus. So it definitely depends on your goal. If you’re trying to raise $50,000, you probably need 10 plus 10, you know, 10 plus touch points, okay? If you are just sort of sending out a thank you email, then maybe you only need one to two, I always recommend between five to 10. touch points on GivingTuesday. The key here is they have to be good touch points, they can’t just be the same thing over and over. It’s giving Tuesday, it’s giving Tuesday. That’s the key. So we’re going to talk about what kind of messages we can create that are not just sort of recycling and rehashing the same message over and over.
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Promoting ahead of time, a lot of organizations do this, because they’re building that awareness. They’re priming the pump for giving Tuesday. So think about a couple of different touch points that you could even include before giving Tuesday, four days until GivingTuesday. You know, we invite you to be a part of this, if you look at the promotions checklist that’s in your handouts, there’s a whole heck of a lot to be done one month out one week out the day before. So take a look at this because you don’t just want to start all of a sudden, the morning of GivingTuesday you don’t you don’t just want to start that morning, you want to make you want people to know that something’s coming.
43:07
You also want to make sure that you are coordinated in your promotions, so coordinated in your messaging, putting that GivingTuesday logo on everything because it’s very recognizable. It’s totally free. They have an entire toolkit that you can use logos that you can use.
43:26
I mean, it’s just really amazing the resources that they have for nonprofits, but constantly saying this is the day this is the time this is the place. This is the reason
43:37
sharing stories and graphics and visuals of your impact. So there’s two really main two graphics, you definitely definitely should incorporate. The left hand side is a quote, it could be a donor, it could be a board member or a staff member, it could be a client. A quote from a real person with a real picture does not have to be a client, but it could be. And then I really like on the right hand side incorporating quotes about giving court quotes about philanthropy, because the visual is what’s really going to grab somebody’s eye.
44:17
This is the Night Ministry one of my clients, their campaign had a name, if you can name your campaign that’s always good. Give serve, advocate. They use Canva ca nva.com. I’m sure we’re all familiar with Canva free graphic design tool for nonprofits. They use the same font, they use the same logos and they use the same colors. So everything was very consistent and cohesive. If you watch Project Runway as much as I do, you want everything to be cohesive and to look like it’s all from the same place as Volunteers of America.
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They created this great Twitter, channel art, they created Facebook channel art, you can do all of this on Canva. The key here is to remember that one graphic is not going to serve everything. Like if you look at the volunteers for America logo, it works in the little logo box. But it wouldn’t work as a profile, it wouldn’t work as a Facebook cover photo, it’s not long enough. So you have to think about all of these different places, wherever you have a presence, wherever you have a presence, try to be consistent. Now I have a Google Drive, I have so many examples. And I’ve actually been adding them because I’ve been seeing some teaser campaigns, I’ve been working on some campaigns, I’ve seen some pop up. So if you look in my Google Drive, you will get a plethora of examples from all different organizations, big small social services, academic historical societies. So make sure you take a look at that I’m a huge fan of sharing examples far and wide. I love this by Boston to Boston Children’s is a Facebook ad. And the key here is that they know this ad is going to people that don’t know who they are, they’re not trying to explain everything about what they do. They’re just saying, Give by midnight, your last chance to make triple the impact on kids like Rafa. I mean, they’re just they know that this is a person that scrolling through their Instagram feed. So you really have to know who you’re targeting when you’re creating these messages.
46:39
You know, why do people give? What are some success, some milestones that you’ve reached some accomplishments, you could even talk about the year, you could talk about, oh, this year, our demand for services doubles. And this year, we saw such a great impact, or this year, we accomplished this, just really bring people into the story, testimonials, case studies, you want to be the go to resource on your issue, right? You want to share helpful resources and education around the cause and around the issue. You want people to understand the importance of what you do. And this is why they’ve come to you. They believe in the problem that you’re solving, you are filling a gap in the community. That’s why you exist. That’s why you exist, you’re filling a gap in the communities talk about that gap. Talk about how you’re filling it, talk about why it’s important to talk about why your donors need to understand this gap and why it’s important. You can share data that supports your mission, definitely show data that demonstrates the need show data that showcases impact. These are all messages that you can share on Giving Tuesday, instead of just saying it’s giving Tuesday give to us as Giving Tuesday.
48:01
I want you to leave some white space in your calendar on GivingTuesday. For those in the moment short videos. Now remember, Amanda told you about the goals dashboard. If you go in the goals dashboard, and you hit a goal. Take a little Instagram story. You know, pop some champagne, celebrate a milestone, talk to the staff members like what are you doing on GivingTuesday? Who else are you giving to? You know, what are your partners doing? Make a thank you call to a donor. You know, I don’t know if any of you saw that famous call where Elizabeth Warren calls a donor and talks to her for like half an hour. But it’s so she captured on video. And I thought it was so fantastic because it’s just very special. You have to get the permission of the donor to share the video. But it’s just a special moment. A mission moment. You know, you don’t have to take pictures of the kids take a picture of a kickball, or take a picture of a chess game. You know, share the mission moment, bring people into the fold on GivingTuesday what’s going on behind the scenes, share the staff stories. This is the Peabody Essex Museum where I live.
49:12
I love that they share blog posts, they share experiences of what their team is doing and why it’s so important. Share milestones, you know, we we still need 257 more people to give to unlock a matching gift. I just think any way that you can share what you’re doing. I love this graphic, and this quote, think about what’s vibrant and eye catching. And then put your important stuff in the caption. Thanks to everyone who kicked us off. We would love to be at 20% Here’s the link pass the word to friends and family. It’s great eye catching visual coral acres. I mean everyone should just follow them because
50:00
They just do such a great job.
50:02
And you can see the graphics, if you’ve been watching the examples I’ve been sharing, they all look like they’re from the same organization.
50:10
Our goal of 300 Winter family food packages is only $2,485 away,
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sharing quotes from your donors, I hope my donation will help other people struggling with finding their way in this world.
50:25
I’m sure you get letters like this, you get thank you letters, you get emails, you don’t have to, you know, give the person’s name, you can.
50:34
You don’t necessarily have to do that. But creating these graphics to create a community because social media is all about creating a community
50:46
of people around a cause and an issue. It’s not about looking at them as data points on a spreadsheet. It’s about looking at them as community members.
50:57
Now we’re going to talk a lot about what to do when the campaign ends, and how to thank and cultivate people. But I recommend giving campaign updates saying thank you, even when the campaign is still going. You know, thank you so much. This is exactly what we’re raising money for. This is what we’re raising money for. This is why it’s so important. Like this The shelter kit, they show you exactly what goes into the shelter kit, and what your money is going to go to. And then of course, if you have people raising money, few groups of volunteers, if you’re doing some kind of drive, if you’re doing some kind of event, tag, and thank people during the day, there’s no bad way to thank people, there’s no wrong way to thank people and you can also never thank people enough, but we will do an entire section all about donor cultivation. So, just to to kind of wrap up the section on creating like social media promotions.
52:02
I want to give you some graphic design apps that I love that are free. So Canva obviously Canva we all love it. Get your free Canva for nonprofits account. canva.com/nonprofits you can do I mean What What can’t you do in Canva click on it. You can do flyers, you can do presentations, you can resize graphics, to be whatever size that you want. Pablo by buffer is another one that I ab salutely Love.
52:36
I like Buffer a lot as a social media scheduling tool. And then designer for really making your own designs. That’s for those of us that know how to design.
52:46
And then video editing apps. Now I call these editing apps for dummies. Animoto is just by far the easiest video editing app to use. You don’t even have to have a video, you can just have photos, and create a montage of photos. Like this is what goes on in a day here. Or here are some friendly faces of our volunteers. And you can create a video, you can use their music that’s already in the app, you can put little text overlay logos wherever you want. Lumen five, same thing. Lumen five has a lot of stock, photos and stock video. So you want to be careful, you don’t want it to look like too cheesy, and you want to make sure it matches what you’re doing. But if you literally have no visual assets, lumen five, and also Canva is a great video editing app, you can create animated GIFs you can create little slideshows, there are lots of resources out there, I don’t want you to think you can’t do these great visuals because you definitely definitely can. And now Amanda is going to tell you a lot or a little bit about the DonorPerfect templates that are available to you to help enhance your communications on GivingTuesday.
53:59
And Thank you Julia. So don’t wait perfect can certainly act as a partner to really help you promote your GivingTuesday messaging and get those graphics you create it in front of your constituencies eyes. I could do slides and slides and slides about all of the tools. So what we did is we condensed all of these best practices into a Giving Tuesday cheat sheet, which you guys can scan that QR code and download that to your device. But the two that we did want to highlight in today’s presentation are constant contact and DP video integration. So with our constant contact integration, you have access to different Giving Tuesday specific email templates, where you can essentially plug in your graphics and your organization’s messaging and then blast that email out to your constituency. And those can be emails to kind of promote Giving Tuesday emails to go out during and even after.
54:56
As Julia mentioned sharing with video those
55:00
real time updates and in the moment videos. So we do have our DP video function, which lets you record or upload a pre made video and send that out to specific donors. So definitely feel free to check those out. If you are interested in learning more about any of those features, you can write, I’m interested in this feature, and then we’ll connect you with the right party after the session is over. And with that said, Julia, I’m gonna turn it back to you. I love this email specifically. So what I love about it is three ways you can get involved on November 29. Any way that you can tell someone specifically like here’s a bulleted list and only give them three things, because I believe you know, it’s human psychology, we really can only grasp like three concepts all at once and think about three choices. So sponsor a week, a food for one dog, share a crowdfunding page, post an unselfie. unselfie, by the way, is an entire campaign, you can get all of the materials on the givingtuesday.org website. And you can encourage people if you’re not raising money, or it’s maybe just another way to spread the word unselfie is just asking people to take a photo and share why they’re giving on GivingTuesday. So giving people these specific asks, is essential, I believe to success, not just sort of saying it’s giving Tuesday click to our website because that’s not going to really help you and the video function video cuts through the clutter People ask me all the time, how can I cut through the clutter and GivingTuesday use video and use more video and use more video than you think because that’s what’s going to cut through the clutter.
56:48
Okay, we do have another exercise I just want to make sure that we are taking everything we’re learning reflecting on it. We’re going to take three minutes to do the following exercise listing the channels listing potential photos and videos and then I’m going to do a big q&a Like five minute 10 minute maybe q&a section because I do see some really great questions coming into the chat so let’s take three minutes for this workshop.
59:20
Okay Just one more minute on this exercise
59:53
All right, we’re at the one hour mark. I’m really excited. So I hope you
1:00:00
some really fantastic ideas for your campaign. I wanted to call out something from this exercise, which is not to just list out what you can create, but list out what you have already. And what you can repurpose. We do not have to reinvent the wheel. I know all of you have photos and videos and stories and blog posts and annual reports, and annual appeal letters and grants. And grant reports. I’m thinking of my life as a development director with banker’s boxes stocked full of tons of assets, websites full of assets. Think about what you can repurpose and what you have already. We don’t have to recreate the wheel.
1:00:45
Okay, so I’m going to take a couple minutes for questions. There are so many coming in.
1:00:51
But I want to make sure we answer kind of as many as we can. Britney has a really interesting question.
1:00:58
Working in a specific sector, education. How would you go about marketing to new donors, knowing that a large percentage of the donor base are individuals who have families that attend your school? Okay, well, I work I serve on the school committee, but I also serve on the PTO. So we are well aware of fundraising, we do all of our fundraisers is crowdfunding, like peer to peer fundraisers. So right now we’re doing a fundraiser for the school. And it’s all based on the students going out and asking friends and family for donations. Because you know, why would like someone not attached to the school necessarily make a donation, it seems like low hanging fruit are the people that are attached to the outcome of the school in some way. So for instance, they’re doing a fun run, it’s on Friday, they set it up, I sent out the link to the grandparents, I put it on Facebook, and I already raised like $150 really doing nothing from complete strangers, because it’s on Facebook, not complete strangers, I mean strangers to the school, it’s like my aunt over here, my relatives in Canada, you know, that kind of thing. They’re giving because of my son. They’re not giving, they wouldn’t give if the school just asked them. So thinking about the networks, and how you can expand on those networks, and how the people already involved can get involved in asking for money.
1:02:27
Um, Diane says Colorado does Colorado gives day, the Tuesday following GivingTuesday, which adds another layer to the strategy.
1:02:36
Thoughts on how to best build this in. To me, I would use one of those days to either do thanking or volunteering or highlight some other organizations in your community. So I would probably try to raise money on Giving Tuesday.
1:02:55
Or you could switch this up depending on what you want to do. And then highlight your partner organizations on Colorado gives day and say these people, we couldn’t do our work without these people. Because a rising tide lifts all ships or maybe do a thank you day, and then do an asking day. But I definitely think that there’s opportunities to get the word out raise awareness and spread the goodwill, but I don’t think I would ask for money on specific money. And both of those days.
1:03:26
Kathy says do matching gift donors need to be public with their name in order for this to work? No, absolutely not. You could just say an anonymous, generous, wonderful, lovely donor don’t have to give their name.
1:03:39
Some people like the press and publicity, some people don’t.
1:03:45
Yeah, Courtney says what happens if they’re unsure they want to be included? Then? Do you don’t have to include them?
1:03:52
Um, Dominic says, do you mean matching gifts like someone puts up 20k And everyone’s gift doubled up to that point. So there’s two matching gifts.
1:04:04
There’s the we are raising $20,000 There’s a matching gift donor, there’s going to double all your gifts to midnight. And then there’s a long term matching gift strategy, which is the corporate gift strategy where an individual person can get their gift no matter what time of year matched by their employer.
1:04:29
Is it too small to ask a donor to provide a matching 5k And your goal is to raise 5k. I don’t I don’t think that’s too small. I think that’s fine.
1:04:39
Does it make sense to have an end of your appeal in conjunction with a GivingTuesday event event? Absolutely. I think so. I think GivingTuesday is a great way to kick off the year end giving season to tell people everything you’ve done throughout the year to tell them you love them. Maybe you have a specific program or service
1:05:00
that you’re launching or that you want to highlight, I think is a great way to kick off the year end fundraising season.
1:05:10
Let’s see.
1:05:12
Okay, this seems to be two questions, Michael, should we consider giving a percent to those hit by the hurricane in Florida? I don’t see why you wouldn’t. I think that’s a great idea. Thoughts on changing our goal from dollar amount to a percent participation goal. That’s fantastic. I know that I helped an organization here called Rosie’s Place. They didn’t want to have a monetary goal. They just wanted 50 gifts on GivingTuesday of any size. That was their goal. That’s what they wanted to do. They tripled that and exceeded that. But the goal is really what you make it you know, like there’s, there’s no right or wrong here as long as it’s specific. And you can say we want 50% Will you never get 50% participation. We want X amount participation in any way possible. Here’s your list of choices, here’s your three choices participate. And this is our goal to get people to participate.
1:06:11
And then there’s time management strategies, which is actually my pet passion project. I love time management, I don’t want to call them productivity strategies, because I don’t think we need to be more productive, I think we need to be able to balance our obligations.
1:06:28
But Michael says my social media time has declined tremendously in the past past year. suggestions to improve the time that I spend on social media have a focused reason to be on there and create a lot of the content off of social media. So use Canva use Animoto. Use these offline though they’re still online, but use these tools and create a lot of that content, and then have a specific reason to go into social media. I’m going into post, I’m going into look at DMS, I’m going into look at analytics, I’m going into see what the hashtag is doing. Make sure you have specific reasons, because otherwise you will go down a rabbit hole. But in terms of balancing your obligations, all of you on this webinar, you need to write down every single task, everything you do every single day, and how much time it takes. And you need to advocate for yourself, to your boss to your higher ups and say, adding Giving Tuesday adding something else on to an over overly
1:07:40
stocked schedule is just not possible, what else is gonna come off of it. So it’s, it’s probably not possible to shoehorn GivingTuesday, five minutes a week into your schedule. I mean, it’s you have to have success, you do have to focus. And you have to clear your plate a little bit of some of your other obligations. And you know what, if you can’t, that GivingTuesday might not be the best thing for you. Or maybe you run a little tiny campaign just kind of see what happens.
1:08:14
It doesn’t have to be a full time job. But what I don’t want you to do is think, oh, I can just you know, I have two full time jobs already. I’m a development director and a marketing director. And I can just add GivingTuesday on on top of it. Because it’s you’re going to run yourself ragged, and you’re going to run the risk of burnout. And you can tell your boss that I said that. Advocate for yourself, advocate for your time. Figure out your priorities for your organization and your own professional goals and what you need to achieve, and then work backwards from that. So there’s a short way to say, don’t let people put more on your plate.
1:08:53
Now, when we say make it absurdly easy to participate, that actually segues really well into what we’re just talking about. People are busy. I know that it’s so boring to even say I hate the word busy. People are busy. People are on their phones, people are on their email. They have 90 notifications. If you don’t make it easy to participate. They’re going to click away. If you don’t make it like oh, I can just click on that I can text to give I can click on this link I can if it’s not super, super easy, then they are going to look away now. This is I love this post. Because I don’t know if you’ve been there. But I’ve spent months hours Blood Sweat Tears on a campaign and someone says Wait, where do we donate? What where do we donate? It’s because and that’s on me. I probably didn’t put the link in enough places. Just make it clear. You think it’s clear? It’s not clear. It’s probably not as clear as it could be.
1:10:00
Maybe it is clear, but it can be always be clearer. If you’re using social media tools, make it explicitly clear that the donate button, you can donate or send people to your website. Send people who don’t know perfect page, send people to your website, donate page, wherever you’re sending people make it very clear what the next step is, they’re going to do you know, feed a family for the holidays. Your $20 gift provides a complete holiday meal for a family of five, very easy to understand. You are not putting the kitchen sink into these ads, you’re not telling everybody about all your fabulous programs, your fantastic services, your accolades, your awards, you’re this you’re that you’re making it explicitly clear, can you donate today, you can help $20 provides tuner meals for kids. World Vision, they created this reminder, where I clicked on a tweet, I just clicked on a tweet and and they said, if you click like on this tweet, you can sign up to get GivingTuesday reminders. And as much as we can remind people, especially in a permission based way, people need reminders,
1:11:23
double your impact for foster youth, you can do this in your email. Now what I wanted, it’s a plumber, youth promise, oh, one of my favorite, they’re tiny agency, foster care agency in Salem mass. They just do such great work. I love how they tell a story and all of that. But they put they don’t bury the lead, they put the most important information at the top and they underline it, they put the asterisk at the bottom and they underline it. So they’re telling the story, which we need. We like a story. But then it’s like, tell me what to do. What do I need to do next? The match starts now join us today, we do this in your email as well. Now text to give, this is an option that you have.
1:12:10
You can use this, especially if you are asking for money on social media. Because if you think about the way that we’re using social media, I’m usually try it. You know, I’m at my son’s soccer practice. And I’m just kind of like sneaking a little bit of a look. Or I’m like putting a little laundry in and I’m looking at my social media. I mean, I’m always usually doing something else. So if you have this graphic, and all I have to do is open a text window, love 20222, Bam, done, that’s a lot easier for me on my phone than clicking over to a donate form and filling out a form. Okay, it’s a lot easier. I do have, like, you know, whatever, Google Wallet and all of that Google Pay. And I think we need to have all those things enabled. But this is just knocking down obstacles to people making a donation. This is what we need to be doing, as digital fundraisers is constantly constantly seeing where there might be an obstacle, and like a brick wall, and knocking it down and making things easier. Now DonorPerfect has donation forms. So I’m gonna let Amanda talk to you about how their donation forms actually knock down these obstacles and enable more gifts. Yeah, thank you, Julia. So what I took away from some of Julia slides is all of those promotions that you’re doing if you’re encouraging giving, they should always link back to some type of form. So why not have that be a Giving Tuesday branded form that integrates with your DonorPerfect database. So some of the features with our forms that can help knock down some of those barriers that Julia spoke about, is using the form as a way to communicate impact to your donors. With our forms, it’s really easy to provide suggested giving levels that have impact statements that help make that emotional connection to your donors. When I see $10 is going to feed one dog for one week, but 75 is going to feed five dogs for five weeks, I’m going to donate that $75 and feed those five dogs.
1:14:20
If one of your goals for Giving Tuesday is you want to encourage or grow your monthly giving program, you can certainly set that as a default option on the form to encourage that method of giving. And every time you create a form, you can easily copy the link to that form and include it in a DEP text message. You can include it in your constant contact email blast, and regardless on how people are accessing that form. They are also completely optimized for mobile viewing as well.
1:14:54
So that’s all I had to share. If you guys are interested in DP forms, you can write it
1:15:00
Interested in DonorPerfect forms in the chat, and we’ll connect you with a rep to get you started.
1:15:06
And if you see this form, this is a perfect example of what I’m talking about in terms of streamlining, eliminating clutter, eliminating distractions. So many of us have these donor forms donor,
1:15:20
giving forms on our website when you click the donate button.
1:15:25
And I, when I do audits and assessments of websites, this is probably the number one thing I see. I click on the donate button and I go to like a get involved page listing 20,000 ways I can get involved, write a check and do a note, send people to where they can put in their credit card where they can put in their money, especially if you’re using digital tools. Because the more clicks they have to make to actually get to that, the fewer conversions, you’re going to have to once again, we have to get in this mindset, eliminating obstacles, eliminating obstacles, streamlining, making it simple, making it clear, making it easy, we absolutely need to get in that mindset.
1:16:09
So let’s talk about social media ambassadors. Now, social media ambassadors can be used in several ways.
1:16:18
They can be used to actually fundraise for you like like I’m doing with the fun run at my son’s school, I feel like I’m kind of an ambassador, I’m sending it out to my network and saying give, or they can be used as just raise awareness and spread the word. So there’s two ways that you can use them, I would focus on one of the ways out of the other way, you don’t want to ask them to do 90 things. But you want to make sure that you have a plan for how you’re going to best identify them, recruit them, coordinate and mobilize them. We’ll talk about all of that. So there are ways to identify potential ambassadors that I’m going to throw back to Amanda, to show you how you can do that in DonorPerfect.
1:17:01
Thank you. So when we’re identifying potential ambassadors, and DonorPerfect, there’s so many different fields that you could potentially use, I’m going to just highlight two pieces. One is a flags field, which everyone has access to, which is designed to capture affiliation and relationships to your organization. So looking for flag codes, like board members, staff member and volunteers, to identify potential ambassadors who have historically supported your organization with that gift of time.
1:17:38
Or you can also look at the gift table and find those folks who have supported your organization historically, with monetary support. So looking for solicitation codes, like past event attendance, looking for monthly donors, looking for those people who supported your Giving Tuesday campaign in the past or end of your efforts in the past.
1:18:00
Thank you. So both of those show that they have a vested interest in your organization’s mission. And those are the folks that we really want to ask to be ambassadors. But if we want to take it another layer and add more detail to that, to find the right ambassadors, something that you can look at adding to your DonorPerfect system, if you’re in the US is donor profit insights. So this is additional demographic and wealth data that you can add to your donor system.
1:18:32
And if we are looking for these people to be ambassadors on social media, we want to make sure that they have an interest in using social media. So DonorPerfect insights does give all of your donors a rating to identify the different channels that they typically engage with.
1:18:49
We can look at and affinity ratings. So who are the people that are really interested in our organization’s mission? If I’m an animal welfare cause organization, I’m probably going to reach out to Dorothy, if I am an arts and culture organization, she’s probably not the right ambassador for me since she has a zero.
1:19:10
And then if we’re looking to recruit those folks, we can use their communication preference to figure out the best way to reach out to them and ask them would they like to become an ambassador.
1:19:21
So ultimately, what I want you to take away is that you can use all of these data points from DonorPerfect as a way to build reports and filters to identify those Ambassador prospects. And DonorPerfect Insights is a add on. So if this is something you are interested in learning more about, you can right I’m interested in DonorPerfect insights, and we’ll connect you with the appropriate party.
1:19:48
But that’s all I had. Julia, I’m gonna turn it back to you. Thank you.
1:19:53
The key is just understanding who’s in your database because I think what happens is that we tend to just want to read
1:20:00
Shout out to brand new people. And we have so many hidden gems in our database. So many hidden gems that we don’t even, you know, we don’t utilize that information. So I think it’s very important to use it to be strategic. So when you figured out who you’re going to ask, you definitely want to know what you’re asking them, like, are you going to ask them to fundraise Are you going to ask them to just help you spread the word, then create a way to communicate with them, the two most popular ways our private Facebook group or email list, you want to give them as much as possible that they can use so they don’t have to worry about creating their own images, creating their own graphics, if you’re asking people to do something for you, you want to give them as much great, you know, really comprehensive data and visuals as possible, some posts for them maybe the cut and paste and email templates. And then just constantly be cheerleading them, give them this communication, tell them they’re doing a fantastic job and love on them. So there are so many different toolkits that you can create for your social media ambassadors. So one of my favorites is the light the night walk.
1:21:15
Social media toolkit, you can see here, social posts, social stories, suggested post copy, this is for their very specific event of light that night is a specific walk, telling them how to tag the organization, how to use hashtags, and then all of these different posts that they can just kind of cut and paste and also download and personalize and share Instagram story, things like that. So giving people as many resources as possible, is definitely really important. GivingTuesday has a ton of examples of these kinds of toolkits. They have toolkits for companies and brands toolkits for individuals. So I would really, I really recommend taking a look at the giving tuesday.org website. It’s just a wealth of information and actually done for you toolkits. So your toolkit, I recommend having an overview and instructions. What is it we’re doing, and this is where the SMART goal comes in. So put the goal front and center put the messaging front and center, the who, what, where and when. So that they can easily articulate it, if they’re raising money for you, if they’re spreading the word for you. Are there any dates or deadlines? Like? Are you having an event? Is there a matching gift that’s going away? Like what should they keep in mind, giving them compelling stories, I think is really important, because that helps put the mission and the vision front and center and really helps helps them understand a lot more about why they’re raising money, of course, photos that they can use. So photos and logos that are approved, that they can use statistics on the problem, as well. So maybe one sheet on these are the statistics, these are the data points, not your whole annual report, not your 30 page, you know, grant report to the federal government or whatever grant, this is just quick and you know, short and sweet statistics that you want to highlight. So this is the sweat for STF. Support girls education. This is the why this is the how join. This is the three ways to support like I said three ways are usually ideal, because that’s how much that’s how many, you know, bullet points people can process. And then this is this is benefits is a little bit more about the why. Very, very short and sweet, very comprehensive and great. So your GivingTuesday toolkit, you’re going to include images and graphics, like the light the night example, graphics for social media, promotional graphics, logos, anything that I don’t have to think about creating, I can just go in there and say, Okay, I’m going to be raising money for light the night I’m just going to choose the right graphic, put it up on my Instagram, my Facebook.
1:24:12
Another thing that I’ve seen done that I actually really like, and actually if I keep giving the example of the fun run the Buker school fun run.
1:24:22
That’s happening on Friday. They actually sent out fundraising tips, because they understand that we are parents and not all of us are professional fundraisers and I loved it because I said, oh my gosh is so smart. You can’t just assume that we know what to do. You can’t assume your social media ambassadors necessarily really know what to do. That’s where the posts come in. The hashtagging the tips on tagging people the tips on sharing your story, the tips on crafting posts that are engaging and on message. This is where the templates come in the exam.
1:25:00
samples, it really makes it easier for them, rather than having them work from kind of a blank page and be confused as to what they’re trying to do. So social media tips, that’s just kind of a bonus, but I think it’s really helpful to encourage people to participate.
1:25:18
sample tweets, sample Instagram posts, sample Facebook captions sample, tic tock, you know, potential tick tock ideas or reels. You know, I’m skipping a shower for skipping a shower for a week, it helped prevent disease, improve safety, and send a kid to school in East Africa all at the same time, what would you do? I’m writing these messages for them. And then I want to show this bingo again, because I think it’s just a first I just love it.
1:25:52
But it’s a menu, you want to give people a menu of options. This is more than three options granted,
1:25:59
but you want to give people options based on their interests based on their accessibility based on where they are online, you know, maybe they’re not on Instagram, so they’re going to cross that one off, maybe they want to
1:26:15
sign up for the email newsletter, maybe they haven’t done that. So just giving people very kind of low touch options is great. So, um, another exercise one, I think is our second to last or one of our last exercises, I want you to take three minutes to really think through. Who are you going to recruit? To be your social media ambassadors? There’s no correct number here. You could also send it out your whole email list, but I always think a personalized invite is the best. And then how are you going to mobilize them? Are you going to put a toolkit on your website? Are you going to send an email or you’re going to create a Facebook group? What are the tools that you’re going to use to actually mobilize and organize the social media ambassadors so we’re going to take three minutes and we’ll come back together at 2:30pm Eastern?
1:28:56
All right, just one minute everybody wrapping it up.
1:29:52
Okay,
1:29:54
all right. So hope you got a chance to brainstorm a little bit. Think about some places
1:30:00
that you can look for ambassadors, recruiting ambassadors, and some places you can put their social media toolkits.
1:30:09
Now, and we’re have a lot, we have a half hour to gather a lot of questions. But I want to talk about when the campaign ends, because this is where so many of us get it wrong. We look at GivingTuesday as like this money faucet that we’re going to turn on, or we look at it like an ATM. And we just see people as transactions on a spreadsheet. But how are we going to build a community and get these brand new donors? Or maybe if they’re just brand new social media followers, email list subscribers? How are we going to acknowledge these people and cultivate them? So there’s any number of ways to do it, there’s online thank yous, there’s offline, thank yous. So I love when people spend the rest of the week just saying thank you. And then even if you don’t have all of the numbers in place, making a point to say thank you look at this, like, thank you so much. This is just thanking the donors highlighting the donors why they gave
1:31:11
I love this is the right hand side, Amira incorporated on my favorite nonprofits really simple. This is what we raised. Thank you, and just putting it absolutely everywhere. There’s so many ways you can do it, the Night Ministry, thank you to everyone who joined us, we’re still running the numbers, we feel so grateful. And it’s not just making a donation because remember, they gave them three options, make a donation sign up to make Saks uppers and joined our advocacy team. So there’s three ways to participate. And they had GivingTuesday champions, which are they’re giving Tuesday, social media ambassadors. So I think we all need to just get a piece of poster board and get it printed out at Staples, with a big thank you on it. Because it’s just such a great opportunity. You could put this picture anywhere, I’m just thinking I’m looking outside, at my beautiful trees, beautiful foliage, I could just stand outside with a thank you poster.
1:32:08
And it really says everything. You know, this is what your gift has been instrumental. No matter what your reason for giving, we want you to know that we appreciate it, we don’t take it lightly. We don’t take you for granted. This is what we’ve been able to do. I of course, I love the safe spaces. Thank you for being amazing. With a great quote, exactly what was raised our goal, you’re amazing, much love and gratitude.
1:32:38
And then what I also love about this particular email is that people are going to be really psyched, hopefully they’ll be really excited. So give them a reason to participate again, like there’s a party or there’s a Facebook Live or we’re doing a big celebration.
1:32:52
Think about graphics, you can put far and wide on all of the different channels. And then really, if there was a specific reason to raise money, like a repaired and refurbished wheelchair van,
1:33:08
absolutely share pictures of that some of us might not have that quick turnaround with our donations. But 100% you want to share that information.
1:33:19
This is what your efforts are going to help us provide GivingTuesday made a difference. Our donors can trust that giving has helped save the lives of 1000s of children. You can do this on social media, you can do this on email, you can do this on video. You can actually do this in any way that you want to do this. If you look at both of these posts, they could be on social media, they can be repurposed for Instagram that can be repurposed in a Facebook story. They can be repurposed for an email for a blog post for a press release. They can be there’s multiple ways that they can be used. And that’s what I just really want to reiterate, is not reinventing the wheel on every channel, but creating something great and visual and wonderful. And then crafting it and molding it for the variety of channels.
1:34:16
So how many thank yous Well, the absolutely something that’s completely non negotiable. After the donation with the email receipt, so you’re sending them an email receipt, you’re letting them know their donation went through. There needs to be a thank you. I think you could easily put eat put maybe not on the right hand side because that’s just a little bit more like we were talking about the numbers of Giving Tuesday. But thank you for giving. Thank you for giving your effort will help us provide life saving resources and life changing services to our most vulnerable community members. Okay, that absolutely can be in the email receipt that we receive this
1:35:00
scheme email, I want you to know, will have the highest open rate of any email that you sent. Because it’s the donor receipt, they want it. They want to save it. And they’re excited because they just gave, they also want to know that their donation went through. So this has the highest open rate, if you could get in front of the majority of your donors, what would you say to them, this is your most precious real estate. So making sure Oh, sorry, make sure you’re not wasting this real estate on your website. So actually, you can put a thank you video, right on the website, the redirect, so I make a donation, I get redirected to your website, you can put a video on that page. After the campaign is done and the dust is settled a little bit, send a more personal thank you use DP video, use these video functions, send a video from the executive director or a board chair or you you can be from your phone, it just needs to be personal and authentic. And from the heart.
1:36:08
We have to remember that this is not an item on a to do list. Now, granted, it’s all in your promotions checklist, which I will show you. But these are simply not things that you just do once and never do again. So this is the day after follow up. You do want to make sure that you have that kind of next step for people. What that’s awesome. What’s next watch a video, join us for the celebration party, this kind of thing. So it’s just something that you want to bake into your organization. All the time donor cultivation all the time thanking donors, and actually DonorPerfect has some great templates. They have some great form. So I’ll let Amanda talk to you briefly about this.
1:36:59
Yeah, thank you. So as Julia mentioned, the email that most people are going to open is that initial email right after they make their donation, the one that confirms that you received it. So our DP forms, you can create a custom message right in that form that gets emailed right away. As soon as that person makes the donation. Or with our new forms product, you can take an existing Thank you template that you’ve already created in DonorPerfect and have the form use that instead. So that’s going to be that initial thank you to essentially confirm it was received. And then to help with that stewardship process and saying thank you long after Giving Tuesday is over, you can certainly take advantage of those Constant Contact templates to say thank you and provide people with those updates on how you whether you met your goal. And also again, using DP video as a way to provide those updates using video as well.
1:38:00
That’s great. Thank you. So there’s so much available to you where you’re done.
1:38:06
Oh, yep, I was. Okay. I just want to reiterate that there’s so much available to you. So you don’t have to be an HTML coder or graphic designer to create a really impactful, thank you. And it’s just absolutely vital, because you want people to know that they’re in the right place. And they’ve done the right thing, because actually donor regret what is it called buyer’s remorse. Donors remorse is also a real thing. So you, you want them to make sure they know they’re in the right place, they did the right thing. And they’re very excited about their donation. And that’s going to help them build that long term relationship with you. Okay, we have one more workshop exercise. Before we get to all of your fabulous questions. This exercise is, I’m going to ask you to review the promotions calendar, the checklist, it’s in the handouts. Now, I know it’s very it’s a little bit overwhelming when you look at it all at once. But I want you to write down one thing you can accomplish today to get your GivingTuesday campaign promotion started. It might be talked to my boss, it might be go take a nap and think about all these fantastic things that I learned. Or it might be download, Animoto. Whatever it is, what is one thing that you can accomplish today? And what is one thing that you’re going to accomplish tomorrow? I just want the ball to get rolling. I want the momentum to get started. So we’re going to take about three minutes for this. We’ll come back and we will have a lot of time for your questions, which I think is great. So we’ll come back at 243 Eastern
1:42:11
Alright, just one more moment
1:42:54
All right,
1:42:56
thanks, everyone. Make sure you get the handouts that are in your GoToWebinar, sort of what is it called? Like dashboard, the checklist, and the slides are there how to use digital tools to drive donations. So I think I’m going to put my camera back on again. Um, for the last few minutes or so if I can’t answer a question, I will turn it over
1:43:30
to Amanda. And what I did want to say is if you do want to connect after this webinar, of course, just email any of us.
1:43:37
But there’s my website. And of course DonorPerfect is at DonorPerfect.com. And you’ll be getting follow up emails from us as well with the recording and the slides. So thanks, everyone, for staying. So I’ve got some really great questions.
1:43:54
Let me say,
1:43:57
discus donor segment.
1:44:01
Any particular ages, different, outrageous, seemingly most successful, etc. This is from Melissa. So I think I mean, that’s just a much bigger question, I think than we have time for. But it is always good to segment donors, I think on behavior. So I don’t think segmenting donors and demographics is especially helpful. Because what if there is a 78 year old who likes text messages? But there’s a 22 year old who likes direct mail. So I would segment them on where they made their gift. Like where did they come in from? Do they come in from a check from cash from an event? Did they come in? You know, maybe your board member bought a table at an event? Did they come in from social media email? Where did they come in from and then try to use that channel to communicate with them. So I just I see this a lot like how to communicate with Gen Z donors. But I think Jen
1:45:00
Z donors are now just I mean, regular people, we all well, I don’t I’m not going to generalize, most of us use Amazon, Netflix Instacart, I just think of the five apps that I use this morning
1:45:15
to do things. And so most people, they want that instant, frictionless kind of instant gratification donation capability. Of course, like, you know, if you want if you’re keeping direct mail, which I think you absolutely should keep direct mail,
1:45:34
and that’s going to mostly appeal to probably older generations, our responsibility as fundraisers is that we do have to communicate with like, five distinct generations of donors right now. And that’s really our responsibility. And we I think the message the that runs through everything is what’s the problem you’re solving? What is your unique solution? And why are you the most trusted person to like deliver the solution? And what are your results? I think donors of every age, they want to know $5 $100 $100,000. What happened? And did this help solve a problem that I care about? So if you don’t have the time, money effort to really do these huge, segmented, targeted communications, think about that one thread that kind of runs through all of the different generations, if that makes sense. Okay, Julie, if I might just interject real quick, I’m gonna stop showing my screen. Okay, of course. So I just wanted to chime in that the insights feature that I highlighted a little bit earlier does have predictive channel preferences. So I liked that you mentioned you could have a millennial who likes direct mail, and you could have a boomer who might really be into email. So that can be another tool that you guys can add on to kind of help figure out what’s the best channel to reach your different donors and segment them by that information. And I saw in the chat, there’s a link to dp text. And deep the texting is the one channel that cuts across generations. I mean, it’s the one channel that boomers love. Gen Xers love millennials, Gen Z is sort of the one channel I mean, I did bring my parents but grudgingly into the texting age, but now they love it. And it’s like all they do. So that is the one I encourage you to explore texting, because first of all, it’s got the highest engagement, the highest open rate, the highest participation of any channel, but also it really does kind of cut across all of the different generations. Okay, so let’s see, lots of questions.
1:47:48
The Google Drive, you can click on the link in the slides, it should take you directly to the Google Drive. So if you go to the slides, in the panel in the GoToWebinar panel, you should be able to click on all of the hyper links.
1:48:08
What recommendations do you have for a campaign with a SMART goal of simply attracting X number of new donors, I would do it the same exact way that you would normally do it. But you’re going to have to reach out to your existing audience and encourage them to amplify it. Because if you only target your donor database, that’s not really going to get you to your goal. So you might have to consider ads to reach brand and people, you might have to consider asking your donors to ask five of their friends. So if your goal is brand new donors, I would leverage your existing community and your existing connections to help you find those new donors.
1:48:52
Okay, Sophie says, I’ve read that Facebook is the best social platform for converting users to make donations on Giving Tuesday, but our Instagram account is far more active than our Facebook page. Any advice? Well, you can connect your Instagram, your Instagram and Facebook page are connected, if you have. So there’s two ways to raise money. One is to use the charitable giving tools that are within the platform. That’s the donate button, that’s I press donate, and I make a donation through Facebook or through Instagram. The other way is to either use text to give and which I would use definitely on Instagram, or say link in bio so you can change your link in your bio on Instagram, to your donation page on your website, making sure it is mobile optimized, because if someone’s on Instagram, they’re probably on their phone. So there are those two ways you can either register for Facebook charitable giving tools and go through Facebook and
1:50:00
Add to an Instagram all one company, or you can optimize your Instagram profile. And then you can say link in bio or like tap the link in bio to make a donation. And you can also use that text to give in your caption. So those are ways to raise money on Instagram as well.
1:50:21
Um, Serena, what are we what tips do you have for combining GivingTuesday and year end appeal campaigns, I’ve seen
1:50:32
GivingTuesday kind of as the first day of the year end campaign. So if you have a really big goal, you know, $50,000, something like that, you probably don’t want to just raise the money in 24 hours, or if you have a big goal of serving 100 more people this year, buying 300 More books, you know, whatever it might be, then GivingTuesday can kick it off. So you can say we have a match on GivingTuesday. But then, you know, we are kicking off the year end giving campaign and it can be used as like the first day of your campaign. Or you can announce announce it on GivingTuesday. So there’s a lot of ways to use it. I mean, there’s you can use it as a 24 hour fundraising day, or you can use it to kick off the full year end giving season.
1:51:23
All right, um, let’s see if someone has left. I’m not necessarily gonna answer their question. First, I want to answer questions of people that are still here. And now I lost this one. Okay, Charles,
1:51:38
in relation to your comment about making, giving fun, what do we do when our issue is not fun, such as radioactive nuclear waste, okay. I don’t think a lot of these issues are fun. I think that giving can be joyful, because I’m giving to combat radioactive nuclear waste, which is something that I care about. So you’re giving people the opportunity to make a difference in a cause and on a problem that they care about. And your goal is to make the ask, so that I want to give so I say, Oh, this is something that I really care about I, I want to stop this or I want to end this or I want to promote this, I’m gonna give.
1:52:24
And giving us is just a way to elevate giving, and to normalize it. And to make it something you know, we don’t talk about money really in Western culture. So to normalize this talking about like, oh, I care about this, I want to give to it. So certainly, I would say 99% of the causes that I work with, are not fun, I work with domestic violence causes and crisis centers and
1:52:51
a sex trafficking organization, I work with foster care organizations. So the issue itself is not fun. But the joy of giving can be made fun and easier and sort of less, less like we don’t want we don’t want to feel like we’re MacKenzie Scott, you know, we don’t have to have billions of dollars to give.
1:53:11
Let’s see Courtney.
1:53:16
What if they are going back and forth to the point that it’s holding things up? I don’t know what that means. Oh, you’re talking about a matching gift.
1:53:25
Um, I don’t I think you can’t convince someone to do something they don’t want to do. Okay, you can give them the information. And you can say, this is an opportunity to triple or double your impact on GivingTuesday. We want to give you this opportunity because you’re a trusted partner and we love you and we we really want to work with you on this. If you do not have not ready. If it’s not the right time, let us know. No worries at all. But we wanted to come to you first if you’re talking about like that matching gift. But you’re never going to I don’t want I don’t believe in
1:54:04
I don’t believe in coercion or manipulation in any way.
1:54:08
Okay, let’s see. Oh, Joseph. Okay, this is one of my favorite topics and I’m gonna go get a little heated on it. Regarding the Facebook match. Okay. And I’ll talk about what that is if you don’t know what it is. Do you have any feedback on that last year the flooding ran out in minutes after it started at 6am. Wondering if it is worth going after? It is not worth going after? It is definitely gone at 6am.
1:54:38
Facebook every year says they’re gonna give some paltry amount to match. It’s not even worth actually wasting time on but anyway, Facebook says oh, we’re gonna give $8 million
1:54:51
to the first nonprofits that can raise $8 million on GivingTuesday. It’s of course gone in 30 seconds. A lot of organizations
1:55:00
Some said they didn’t even get it, or they got not as much as they thought, or it came seven months later, or this or that. Do not focus on the Facebook match, get your own match that you can control. And that you have access to and that you have a connection with. Because if your messaging is all around, oh, Facebook is going to match our donations. That’s probably untrue. And you really don’t want to be swindling your donors in that way. So don’t just don’t even think about it because it will be gone, it will be gone unless you’re fundraising at 12:01am. Eastern on GivingTuesday. I actually don’t know if that starts Pacific time. But anyway, you’re right. It’s gone in five minutes. And it’s kind of an embarrassing amount, in my opinion that they donate compared to the amount of money that they have.
1:55:50
What was the last I love this question. Our nonprofit gives grants to smaller organizations in our community, we’re thinking of running a GivingTuesday campaign that calls on our audience to make a donation to us as well as our grantees. I love this, any pointers, do it. And I just love it. I love it. Everything about it sounds like you already have the great idea. We’re all in this together. We make this work, you know, we help make this work possible. But these are the people that really do the work. So maybe highlighting the organization. And if they haven’t given us a campaign highlighting them. But also making sure that you make the point that you are doing the work as well. I really like GivingTuesday campaigns that actually call out other organizations, because I think then we get away from The Hunger Games, and we get more into the collaboration.
1:56:46
All right, so I don’t know where we’re at. We’ve got a ton of questions. I don’t know how much time we want to
1:56:55
spend. I’m just looking these are a lot of technical things. I’m interested in DEP forms DEP text to give. I don’t know, Amanda, if you see any question that I can answer.
1:57:09
One that I hear a lot. DP forums and insights and everyone’s very interested. So that’s awesome. Yeah. So before I ask you the last question, again, if you guys are interested in things like the p tags, DP, video, DP forms, DP insights, lots of DC, please feel free to put that into DB. Hashtag all the DPI love it. Go ahead and put I’m interested in and then which product you’re interested in. And we will connect with you after the fact.
1:57:38
Julia, one question I think would be interesting to address is what’s the best way to stand out among the 1000s of nonprofits participating in Giving Tuesday,
1:57:49
focus on your message and what makes you unique focus on your organization and your donors. Because Giving Tuesday, it’s like Cyber Monday, Black Friday, okay, it’s like how you know, I’m gonna get 1000 emails on Black Friday, Cyber Monday. But I’m only going to be looking, I’m going to be laser focused on what is relevant to me, and what I’m interested in. So that’s how you really cut through the clutter. If you don’t worry about what everyone else is doing. Don’t worry about all of the other messages. And you just kind of make it like it’s a conversation between you and one donor, and what’s important to them, and what’s going to resonate with them. And the more personal you can make it the less cookie cutter, the less automated. The more video you can use, the more people you can incorporate, the more authentic you can make it and from the heart. That’s also going to help reach your donors, I think in a more impactful way.
1:58:54
I love that questions.
1:58:57
I’m going to ask you one more question because I think you’ll really appreciate this one since you said you like working with smaller organizations in particular, everything you’re sharing is so on point for organizations that have paid staff doing marketing and development for a small all volunteer board. What are the most essential tactics we should focus on for a basic Giving Tuesday campaign? Because we don’t have many resources or time?
1:59:24
Well, I think you want to be focused on raising bigger gifts until you can hire more staff to do this. So I would, I would say you really have to be very grassroots. When you’re small. You have to actually be calling people on the phone having meetings with people and you’re all volunteer board. They have to be asking for money. So if you have a goal you want to raise everyone on that all volunteer board needs a specific amount that they’re going to raise and or donate. So it might not be giving Tuesday, it might just be your year.
2:00:00
Your end annual fund it might be, let’s just do this to keep the doors open. But I do think that it needs to be a lot more hands on. And there needs to be a lot more grassroots kind of tactics like breakfasts, and you know, going to meet the major donors and taking them to coffee or having these little like lunch and learns. I don’t think spreading a message on social media, if you’re very small, and you have a tiny audience is really going to be the best place to focus your time until you have the resources and the capacity to do that. So I would focus on, I would really focus on utilizing the strengths, and the networks of everyone on that small but mighty all volunteer board, and just raising money, anyway, any way that you can.
2:00:51
That’s amazing. And with that, we are at three o’clock, so we are at our time. So thank you again, everyone for your participation and your wonderful questions. As a reminder, you all will be getting a copy of the recording and the handouts emailed to you. Um, Julia, is there anything you want to add on before we sign off?
2:01:12
I think all of you are amazing. You’re doing wonderful things. Don’t compare yourself to others. Focus on what drives you and focus on the problem. You’re solving the gap that you’re filling in the community, and focus on what would happen if you weren’t around. That’s really the message that we need to be conveying. We do important work. And I just wish all of you so much success on GivingTuesday year end and throughout the year. So thanks for coming to the workshop.
2:01:45
Thank you
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