Giving Tuesday & Welcome Wednesday

0:00  

Thank you so much for having us here today, Heather. My name is Emily. I’m the brand manager at DonorPerfect. And today, we’re really excited to talk about giving Tuesday, and how it’s Read More

0:00  

Thank you so much for having us here today, Heather. My name is Emily. I’m the brand manager at DonorPerfect. And today, we’re really excited to talk about giving Tuesday, and how it’s going to be different this year and the awesome strategies that some of the panelists are going to be using to engage donors and grow their community, as well as being able to retain those new donors and develop those relationships. So I would like to hand it off to our wonderful panelists to introduce themselves now. So let’s Hello, everyone. So happy to be here with you.

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I’m Celeste Flores, and I’m with GivingTuesday. And I work specifically with our community campaigns and all over the world. So I’m looking forward to speaking with you and Sharon today.

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Hi,

1:00  

my name is Tamar. And I am in charge of social media for new leash on life USA and nonprofit prison dog program based out of the Philadelphia area. And I’m really excited to talk to everyone today and talk to you about how what we found to be successful, and hopefully it helps you too.

1:18  

i Good morning. Good afternoon from the Hudson Valley. I’m Kate Cox. And I’m the Associate Director of Development at the Bard Prison Initiative, where for 20 years, we’ve been providing liberal arts education inside six New York state prison facilities and in the last three years have begun to provide tuition free college opportunity in community and community partnership with institutions like public libraries, and healthcare agencies. And I’m also very excited to be here. This is a big year for all of us. And I think there’s lots of questions. And we also have lots of tools in the toolkit. So I’m really happy to be here to talk about that deal.

1:59  

Thank you all again, for joining us, everybody in the audience and our gracious panelists. So as for our agenda, like I mentioned, we’re gonna discover the impact of giving Tuesdays Celeste has fresh new data, just off Giving Tuesday now, as well as numbers from giving Tuesday 2019. Then she’s going to talk about crafting a donor engaging campaign. And Kate and Tamara will share some inspiration for you from what they’ve done that’s been successful. Then I’m going to touch on how to expand the reach of that campaign, as well as setting up a new donor welcome series to invite those new donors to really join your community. And then finally, Heather will open it up for q&a from all of you, Celeste.

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Hey, everyone,

3:00  

sorry, just making sure it wasn’t on mute. It is great again, great. I’m grateful to be here with you. Today, I’m gonna talk a little bit about GivingTuesday. And expand hopefully your definition a little bit about the day and talk about some information and that we’ve learned just in this given year of all the things that have happened, but really around giving and how exciting of an opportunity, all of the tips and strategies that you’ll hear about today and how you can maybe leverage them on GivingTuesday. So as I mentioned before, my name is Celeste and I work specifically with our 240 community campaigns across the country. We have others in other countries, other country leaders. I’ll talk about that in a minute. But you know, just to kind of set the level ground about what it says level the ground on what is GivingTuesday it really was born as a simple idea as a day to do good and GivingTuesday has grown to a year round global movement. But again, focused on deeply local network to grassroots generosity and we hope it’s not just one day and we hope it’s not just one form of giving we really want to really redefine who is a giver and who can be a giver and who is a recipient of generosity. But the leaders who launched the movement. A lot of them are with us today and we’ve grown but it is GivingTuesday is celebrated in every single country in the world. And we look forward to December first. So giving just a little bit about giving Tuesday’s leader full movement. It’s a 70 countries, it who we have leaders in it and you’ll see on the next slide but 70 Oregon 70 countries is just grown exponentially the number of countries that have taken on creating a country wide movement. We are distributed leadership model we depend on hand raisers people raising their hands and bringing wanting to bring the GivingTuesday message and building a campaign that is authentic and meaningful to a particular community. We also have the Country Community campaigns that I just talked about. And in those community campaigns, the definition is varied. A lot of them are geographic based, whether they’re in, you know, a particular city or state or town. But we also have national initiatives like our Giving Tuesday Spark, which is our youth initiative, we have GivingTuesday military, which is galvanizing military families across the world. And we have campaigns that are focused on issue based or identity like Latinx gives our Muslim give or giving zoo day, there’s so many ways that people identify and define their community. And we celebrate that and give them all the tools they need to grow. So you know, the the, it’s about bringing joy, and it’s about bringing, you know, giving to a community. But yes, the day’s big on the last Giving Tuesday, you’ll see on the next slide on the last Giving Tuesday, December 3, it was a big day, forgiving as it traditionally is, it’s one of the three days in a given year, that people are actually looking to give, there was about $2 billion generated on December 3 of last year, but they what is countless is the number of millions of people worldwide volunteering, performing acts of generosity, donating their voices, their time and their money. So while yes, GivingTuesday is big, and a lot of people see it, I’m going to talk a little bit about how you use the day to your advantage when you’re in your own local community for your own organization. But it’s more than fundraising Tuesday is what I’d like to say it, there’s a whole lot that you can do to engage people on this day. And I think the magic is, is on the next slide. The real to me, I really great statistic is that, you know, 52% of the people who participate in this day, in the day are doing it because they are part of something bigger, that they’re doing something together. And I feel like that is the magic of the day is you providing a way for people to engage, because on this day, they’re looking for to do this together. And I think that’s the notion that will carry us in any effort going forward, especially in this environment. So why we built this day GivingTuesday is why we built GivingTuesday. You know, giving is the mechanism, we believe to build a community you want to live in. But we are, you know a world, we’re hoping that it takes all hands to build a new normal and the new way that we want to operate. But we also are redefining, as I mentioned earlier, who is a giver and who is a recipient of generosity, every single person has something to give. And it’s providing people that space, that’s really important. But again, it’s going to take all hands on deck to put things back together, not as they were but what you know, as we wish. And you know, we have so many case studies to support this, I’m going to show a little bit of data first. So as we talked about, you know, giving the mechanism and the next slide, you’ll see just observations after doing GivingTuesday for eight years now or almost eight years, is started in 2012. Some things that we know, generous people are generous, and that is a no brainer, right. But what we mean by that is generous people are still generous, especially in this year. I think there’s lots of concern about going into the end of the year and worried but I what we really feel well, data tells us there’s a feeling and then there’s data, right? And I think the the feeling is that we need to work from a place of abundance and not scarcity. I think we make poor decisions when we and make our tactics are different. When we operate from a place of scarcity, the data is showing after the first half of 2020 are encouraging but it’s still going to require work and it’s still going to require us doing the work to engage people GivingTuesday we’ll be sharing more data next week on kind of observations of the first half of 2020 that hopefully will help you as you craft your your plans. But the the the concept or at least the the notion is is it is on us to not retreat, but to make a plan and go forward. So I show you this slide because it shows we know where we come from on GivingTuesday of honoring always of giving your data shows that people don’t choose to do give only money or only a canned good or only volunteer that they have tendency to do both. And I think that’s what’s really important is giving during this time especially is giving people a way to engage and to and to act in a way that is meaningful to them. And really moving people from transaction to transformation. With authentic interaction and engagement, we really want to move people, as you’ll see on the next slide, by giving people meeting people where they are, and how they want to engage, we have an opportunity to move these people up this ladder of engagement. I know we’re all development professionals, and I’ve seen this a million times. But it really does hold true that you want to move people from that transaction into transformation. And the opportunity here is that taking stock and valuing the everyday giver in the first quarter of 2020, even though major donate donations either stayed the same donations of 20, less than 25, I’m sorry, less than $250 was up 4%. and I are the data that will be that we shared next week will show a bigger increase than that. So it’s really those grassroots everyday givers that can help sustain some giving. And we want people to become those advocates and those evangelists for our organizations. People give when they believe in things, and they give repeatedly when they believe in things. And so I shared this with you as just a reminder of not focusing on just on that one initial transaction or that continued transaction that you need at the end of the year. But you’re looking past that, as we always,

11:36  

you know, harp on as development professionals, you know, yes, this year has provided a whole shock to our systems, in general, and especially in our ecosystem of nonprofits and giving, you know, up, you know, a couple of things that I list here on the slide about, you know, resiliency, the nonprofit sector, really is resilient, and individual giving maybe be suppressed in some ways, and maybe the major donors are major donations, they think it’s gonna be really critical and important, you’ll see on the next slide, that is the diversity of, of, you know, giving or options for people to give is going to be really critical in past economic downturns and unexpected global events there, we obviously will see some sort of reduction, we don’t know what that will look like. But the nonprofit sector tends to be more resilient in economic shocks than others. And while I know that doesn’t provide a huge amount of consolation to organizations who are struggling to survive, and you know, concerned about their waitlist and concerned about their budget, I think it’s really important for us to again, make a plan and activate and don’t miss this opportunity. We also find this as a moment to innovate and experiment and try something new. We also feel that collaboration is going to be super important. This this time around, or it’s always important, but I think in during this time, that’s an opportunity for us to try something new and collaborate and consider collaboration over competition. Again, abundance versus scarcity is what I hope to impart. And what we know. In big words, on the slide that you know that the more integral you are to a to people’s lives, the more likely they are to prioritize supporting you. And you’ll see that on the next slide, I’m sorry. The opportunity here is to illustrate your unique value and critical place in your community. And we’ll talk a little bit more about that in a minute. But I’ll just share a little bit more information. But what I would like to say is that way I get so many organizations that do reach out to us about not being considered frontline or not being considered critical during this time. And that is not true. I all organizations are frontline, at least in our eyes. And we have to remind people, what our communities would look like if your service or your organization was no longer a part of that community. And I think it’s really an important time to do that. So you see on the next slide here a little bit about GivingTuesday. Now, this was the day that we stood up in May May 5, it was not our intention to have to giving Tuesday’s in a given year. And we know that a lot of people were like, Why are you doing this? But it really was an activation based on hearing from all of our leaders around the world saying we really needed a day of solidarity. There was already lots of grassroots generosity happening, collective waves of generosity happening all over the world. And they were happening at a rapid pace. And we wanted to honor a day that people could coalesce, come together and give. We heard that from our local US leaders. We heard that from our leaders across the globe. And so we stood up on May 5 GivingTuesday. Now To create that wave of generosity, a million acts of generosity around the world. This is how some of our communities mobilized on the next slide, you’ll see, we had five weeks to plan GivingTuesday. Now, a lot of our leaders were surprised what they were able to do in five weeks versus if the months that it takes them to, to create a campaign for the end of the year, I think there was lots of lessons learned, there was not a lot, some new things tried, and there was lots of collaborations. So this is a couple of our leaders whose to efforts in their local communities, our friends in South Jersey, worked really hard with a collaboration of organizations and volunteers to be over 200 immigrant families in their community who were not eligible for access to other resources. That program actually continues on throughout the rest of the summer because they were so activated. So in engaged on that may 5 event in our friends in Liberia to set up a campaign to distribute PPE, but also to educate their community and try to weed through the misinformation that was being shared in their communities. So the next slide shows you a quick showing of the overall results of the day. And I think what was surprising to a lot of people was the activation around, well, obviously dollar donations, but how closely it aligned with how much was given the previous December for GivingTuesday was that $533 million was donated online. Of course, participation and volunteerism and donation of goods did go down, it was in the height of the pandemic and a lot of lockdown created very big challenges for organizations to activate that way. But we see those trends going up as far as activations around donations of goods and donations, of donation of time. So how to craft a campaign around your that rallies your community reaches new donors, we’re going to get into all these tactics, thank you for you know, listening to kind of what why we think the day would be a powerful day for you all and ways to use it. So these are all the ways you could activate. And these are just a sampling of ideas of how nonprofits and communities around the world use this day in a way that is meaningful to their community and their community of donors and the community and nonprofits. There is all sorts of, you know, different examples out there, a lot of people do do the direct fundraising. But if you do that, I do encourage you to have some other element to your campaign that other people can engage with it is it will prove to be a really great new innovation and try a new strategy for you.

17:41  

And with that,

17:43  

I’m going to share with you just kind of are on the next slide is just some key things that as we did GivingTuesday now, when people were built, nonprofits are building their campaigns, the ones that we felt like stood out. And there were really steeped in relevance, authenticity, urgency, and, and creativity, really, were able to stand out not only in our local community, but even standing up to asset, you know, for looking at the enormous you know, campaign globally. But having a little bit of all of these elements are really, really important, again, relevance, why your organization matters. Authenticity is how you are responding as an organization, and urgency, and of course, creativity. But I leave you with this. This is kind of just some high level themes at the end here of what we see giving looking like in 2020 thinking of owners, not donors, and how people you can invite people and drive your message forward, and helping them drive your message forward. And embracing the moment again, value showing your value to the community, and how you’re meeting the moment and get creative. And so now I’m going to turn it over, you’re gonna know from me, you’re going to hear some awesome stories from organizations who are actually doing all of this on the ground. So tomorrow, I’m gonna throw things over to you.

19:07  

Thanks so much less. That was awesome. The statistics are really incredible how everything played out this year. Okay, so hi, everybody. Thank you all for being here. And I’m excited to talk to you about what we do at New leash on life USA. So we are a very small nonprofit in the Philadelphia area. And we’ve had a lot of success with giving Tuesday. And we just want to kind of share with you some of the things that worked for us. Hopefully it’ll work for you. So new leash on life USA is a nonprofit prison program that pairs individuals who are preparing to be paroled or preparing to leave prison with dogs from our city shelter. These are high risk dogs. These are mostly dogs who have medical or behavioral concerns and are likely to be euthanized. We pair them together for 90 days in prison. And then post prison. The dogs are adopted. We have a 9% adoption rate. We do have one forever foster for medical reasons. She’s wonderful and Our gentleman and our ladies, when they graduate, they actually go into a 90 day post release program. So while many programs focus on life behind bars, we straddle the behind and post together. So we’re able to help people really get back on their feet and help dogs find forever homes. So we’re very proud of what we do. And what we are really centered on when it comes to a lot of our social media and a lot of our engaged with the community is knowing who our demographic is, who is our community, who do we serve. So unlike a lot of the larger nonprofits, we’re not looking at multimillion dollar foundations and large federal grants and things like that as much as we’re looking at individual people and who and who cares about us and why. So our general demographic is generally women between 25 and 35. If we look at our insights on our social media, and they’re generally individuals who just care, they care about the dogs, they care about our inmates, they care about our graduates, they’re people who have a lot to give in terms of emotional support. And they have a lot of true compassion for what we do, we do have a lot of people who are interested in social justice. So that’s been really exciting to see how we can make a change in our local community. And we have a lot of people who care about dogs, because they’re awesome. And we all love dogs. So that’s really what we’re looking at and we’re looking at is where do they engage and how so our largest social media engagement is going to be on Facebook, not surprisingly, and most of our donors give small amounts. So we focus on large numbers with small amounts, as opposed to trying to do like an ASPCA or HTSUS style campaign, we look for how individuals can each help. And on the next slide, you’ll see that one of our first campaigns with giving Tuesday was, which is worth your six, or which is your $6 worth. So this was actually a campaign, we won the first campaigns that I did. And our goal was $6,000, in one day, for our sixth anniversary in $6 increments. So we tried to find a cute way to have people give small amounts. And this campaign, I use all free resources. So you’ll actually see at the bottom of the image, there’s a watermark for SparkPost. I left that in for this presentation. But when I actually posted this online, I very easily removed that using paint and Premiere. So all free resources, we didn’t invest anything in this campaign. So this was simply a few individuals creating a bunch of images that we posted throughout the day, we send emails in advance, letting our core base know that we will be asking for a small amount, just $6. And then throughout the day we posted, which is worth your six featuring several dogs, this is Rolo, so which is worth your six, saving his life or buying some candy that day. So we had Rolo latte, a bunch of dogs that had been named after products or items, and we just asked people to donate $6. So again, our goal was to raise $6,000, in one day, in $6 increments. And we ended up raising $8,573, which was awesome, because again, this was all using free resources. And at the time, I was the director of dog programs. So I was also in charge of all of our dogs from Selection through adoption, foster medical and behavior. So really, we took this on as a project on top of our jobs. So a couple of us do this as an extra thing. So that was the first year we really got involved with giving Tuesday. And we consider that a success. You don’t need to raise millions of dollars to be successful, that $8,000 saved many lives. So each of our dogs receives full comprehensive medical care, food training, all that wonderful stuff. And many of our inmates also received lots of services post graduation, including a paid internship in the community. So every dollar really does count for a lot of our small nonprofits. And I’m sure lots of you can relate to that. So this was our very first campaign. And it was really great. We were able to do it all using free online resources, which I’m happy to send to anybody but basically SparkPost through Adobe, and then our Flickr account. So it was a really fun way to dive in. And I think it went really well. This year, our plans have changed.

24:28  

So

24:29  

usually we ask for a small amount because we want every donor to feel good about what we’re asking for. We don’t want to ask for an amount that people can’t give. So there’s an example here from last year our Giving Tuesday, which we did a lot of before and afters of dogs that needed major medical care dogs that had a large bills. So we just asked for small amounts so we knew people could give. We want people to feel good. We don’t want anyone to feel like their donation isn’t enough to help every dollar matters and every action matters. So this year, we’re asking for an action. This year, we’re asking that if you care, please share. So we’re not asking for monetary donations this year, a lot of our, our public, our, our community just don’t have it right now. And we understand that and we’re not, we don’t want to feel bad, they cannot give money. So we’re asking people simply to share our message. If you care, please share, just pass on the word. We’re hoping that this builds more community and engagement, and maybe donors in the future, maybe people who’ve never heard of our mission will find us and donate money in the future, which would be wonderful. But our big concern this year is actually that people are going to get bombarded with lots of asks for money. And we don’t want to add to any stress that they’re trying to give to too many organizations or give too much. So this year, we’ve totally kind of done in about shift. And we’re going to ask that if you care, please share. So you’ll see some cool messaging, if you follow new leash around that, and it will be highlighting a lot of our success stories. A lot of our graduates, we have several who have gone on to become social workers, educators, pillars of our community running businesses, and many who stayed in the animal care field. So we’ll be highlighting their successes and just asking people that they care about what we do, just share the word spread the message, help us get to reach more people, and hopefully more donors in time. But really, it’s a different angle this year, because, as Les was saying, it’s not always necessarily about people donating money, but a lot of times also action and engagement. So this year, we’re gonna be focusing on that, I believe on the next slide. So what we’re doing on right now to kind of lead the way as we approach, Giving Tuesday is I’m sure many of you who are in nonprofits had a bit of a setback this year, whether in funding or ability to actually do your job. For example, the prisons were a high risk environment. So we were actually removed from prison back in March, and we have not yet been able to return. So our focus has shifted, we are spending a lot of time on community engagement and ways we can help within the city with food drives and pet food pantries, and things that were not our normal go to, but we want to maintain that connection and community to help here at home. So one of the key aspects of doing that is we did not slow down on social media. One of my goals is a post today. So every single day, there is something on Facebook. Now with no dogs in prison and no new class. People may think well, what are you sharing, there’s nothing going on. There’s a lot going on. And we’re actually doing a lot of reframing old stories, or touching back on old stories. So for example, this July, we reached out to a few of our graduates who have been successful, and we got updates from them. So we’ve been kind of reshaping their story from how they started to where they are now. So we’ve done a lot of repurposing content in fresh new ways. People may have seen Maurice a few years ago, but not seen him since. So quick update on what he’s doing, along with several of our other graduates. So you can always take old things and make them new again, find a new spin, find a new angle, but let people know that you still exist, and you’re still doing things. And we’ve also focused a lot on what we’re doing now. So we have a pet food pantry that we just did this weekend with the community, we’ve been doing food drives, we’ve been helping a lot of our graduates find housing, things that we’re not always things we had necessarily time for or focus on. We’re now finding that time and shifting our focus. So I’ve seen a lot of nonprofits unfortunately, scale back on their social media. And I think that if you’re gonna be pushing on Giving Tuesday, you need to push leading up to Giving Tuesday, you need to let people know who you are well in advance and stay forefront in their thoughts and stay engaged, we still have a lot of comments, we still have a lot of shares. We may not have as many brand new fun, impactful things, but we have lots going on. We have several 100 graduates, both canines and humans. So there’s always fun stories we can share. So whatever it is that you do, it’s just important that you’re always engaging and letting people know that you’re still there still show up on their news feeds still respond. Even if your purpose has shifted, or if you’re taking a pause. For us. It’s really big that we continued engagement we never slow down. So if you’re planning to share it for giving Tuesday, start engaging now make it make it part of your routine now so people know who you are.

29:35  

I think that’s it. I think Kate is next. Yeah.

29:39  

Sure. And thanks so much. I feel like getting to sit and listen and also be part of this panel is so exciting because I’m just writing down words like this abundance and just seeing the notion of creative engagement that you just mentioned Celeste earlier and then what you’re saying tomorrow about repurposing content others know that you’re just thinking about how to really I think some of these Things are happening naturally across the nonprofit sector people just we are like, in some ways, I feel like we’re all kind of thriving we all are like people who know how to like drive after our mission. And this has given us a like clarion call of how to continue to meet our missions. And so it’s just really exciting to hear how people can you know, not just what you’re seeing big picture Celeste, but also hear like what tomorrow saying, and I’m sure all the people on the call

30:32  

this morning are thinking about this in the same way. I hope so. And so, I’m at the Bard Prison initiative. And we, I would say we kind of got like, we were slow on the uptake with giving Tuesday, we had been an organization that for many years had a very, like clockwork, sort of annual fund solicitation, that end of calendar year solicitation at the end of our fiscal year solicitation. And it wasn’t until three years ago that we because of a generous match from the Brooklyn Community Foundation, as part of the award that we were sort of semi finalists for, had sort of said, Okay, if you participate in this local community, giving a part as part of the national GivingTuesday project will match every dollar up to 5000. And so we thought, okay, well, we’re not going to let that slip by, but okay, and suddenly, here’s this, you know, giving Tuesday project this like date Giving Day project. And so it was really new for us starting three years ago, and something that was exciting at the same time, which is that after, as I had mentioned, about two decades of work in prison, we had just begun a partnership around providing tuition free college opportunity, Bard College Opportunity, in partnership with the Brooklyn Public Library, this was a new program, new effort. And we thought, what a great way of kind of getting the word out about the sort of localized effort inside the Brooklyn community and getting people behind funding that effort. So we while we are an organization that has a national reach in terms of our donor community, we we took in that or we just took that as a sort of a scope of frame of the work of jumping into giving their project by saying we’re actually going to geographically target engagement for this day and see if we can send a very specific message around what people other Brooklynites can do for each other. In this way of this new it’s in partnership with another local institution. And it means that people in their community are directly receiving access to something that has traditionally been out of reach at high costs seen as something that is, you know, more of an elite reach for people who are typically maybe inside their neighbors in their community. So we, I think, the very first day, the first given day we participated in again, we, we pulled, you know, the solicitation was just sent and shared with through an email campaign, because at the time, we were also quite small on social media, these are the kinds of things that we had really kind of slept on, like social media outreach and giving day, we had kind of formed our annual fund around a very specific strategy with donors. And so we didn’t have a huge social media reach at the time. And

33:31  

we, we built it off of this matching gift and a series of short emails that were very targeted, anti freeze, frozen, that I freeze, like frozen. So just this cam, okay, yeah. So I was just going to share that I that we had built the very first day on a series of really specific email campaigns. And inside of that, we raised $50,000. On the first day, it was a really big day for us, and we just thought, Okay, we’re gonna do that again. And, but I think some of the things that were really exciting that happened for us over the course of the next year is that a, we were the subjects of a national documentary with national reach that Ken Burns and Lynn Novick produced that aired on PBS. And so inside that First Year of Giving Tuesday, and flash forward to 2019, we were building up and getting ready for some really significant national exposure of our work. And so, but again, we were still kind of behind the ball with our social media outreach and kind of thought, Okay, we know what worked last time. This is great. We’re going to do this again. And we went back to the assets we had used for kind of refresh them same message, and we didn’t really we were also we hadn’t won the prize that we got the matching grant through for the first year and we became finalists again, still haven’t gotten that prize, but we did get the match again. So we were able to Use the match again, you know, we all met, we really like repeated what we thought worked. And we did well, but we didn’t like, you know, hit the ball out of the stadium again, it was more like a 30k day. And I think that we learned some really important things there, which was that, um, sometimes what works works again, and sometimes what works like needs to be rethought again, and again, you can’t just go in with the same idea. And that was, I think something that was really helpful for us to sort of think about how, when you’re, when we’re doing something very targeted, we know something was responsive, and people there was success, that sort of pattern of doing something one, two or three times really giving you the sense of what’s working and what’s not working. So I think, again, we’re in another big year where we’re all facing, needing to repurpose things needing to rethink our messages and look at our audience in a fresh way. But I also think, sometimes staying the course is important, because you do learn what’s working on what’s not working, what was special about the year, you did it in what was special about or maybe what is not repeatable, and those are things that I think sometimes, there’s also a piece about that persistence and staying the course around some of the key things that I think are important to identify in early strategy conversations about what you’re going to do, and really like and really rethink it around. Why is something working? Do we all agree that this is still working? And are we testing it? Or do we know that? You know, again, that, Celeste, you mentioned the data versus the feeling. So if we all have a feeling about something, let’s make sure there’s that you know, and it takes a while to build data and figure on programs.

36:38  

So I think that I think I had also in our earlier conversations, as a group mentioned, another thing that was a great lesson learned around the next slide that where we created some social sharing elements that this was, we have a small creative team that helped us do this. But we created just a little media asset that as people were making gifts, and we’re being thanked, this came through as a small file that they could attach on, you know, or lay over a photo that they could then share online. And we were trying, I think this is something again, that was a real lesson learned for us because we were pretty new to social media in early 2019. And, or in late 2019, that we know we created this badge, we put it out, we encourage people to share it. And then there was you know, it was slow if people weren’t like right there ready to do it. And I think something that was really great that we did, again, this spring, when we participated in the May 5 day was to do some things like share examples really push and uplift and re and for us, when we saw people using this on through our social media channels and tagging us, re sharing them, so that people are being not just them sharing it themselves. But we you know, we we just in practice, try to reshare almost, to a great extent, you know, a lot of things about what other people are posting about us, and we sharing them as a way of uplifting other people’s work to share our work. And it’s kind of this like, like echo chamber strategy, so that it’s like we see you Yeah, you see us now we see you and it just kind of builds and builds, which has been really fun to watch and have people you know, then reshare like, hey, BPI just thanked me for this thing. So it kind of almost really returns on in the way social media is just kind of, you know, the bubble gets bigger and bigger. And I think this final point about influencers is that we also realized that there were people who are just and we hopefully all know the market and in our own communities around the natural influencers in our community like something you know, we and maybe tomorrow you had mentioned having similar like, if you have within reach a celebrity or even a local celebrity, or someone who has what you think looks like a broad network, sometimes we overlook people who are personal connectors and influencers in their own communities, whether or not that’s their community organizing or spiritual communities or professional communities with sort of far reach and I think we had not really in the first round tapped into how to have people do work for us in that way. So that was a really great opportunity when we went again in May for the International the global movement around giving now for COVID. And I think we did also something very new then which we had never done before which was not to just seek

39:56  

support for our work, but in May we I saw rapidly there are a lot of directories again, here we go. Our formerly incarcerated alumni who had been coming home recently, and also were anticipated to come home. We’re just in need of direct assistance. We had never as an organization provided direct assistance before. But we received some generous funding from foundations in in the New York City area, and we decided to use that match to help build build a fund for direct assistance to alumni of our program. So again, it was this with the overall message being that Brooklynites are helping other Brooklynites, and this is something very specific in this moment that we’re doing. I think we going into this fall, we have something that is still taking shape. I mean, we like many of you are probably, we have not taken months to plan this day, we’ve been taking the last months to figure out how to do the work this fall, you know, everything is just like, very, very, very dynamic. I feel in many ways, this has been a state of acceleration, not a state of pause in COVID, things are just moving very quickly. And so, but I think we, you know, we’re looking, again, to sort of wheat to think about, I think, expanding what worked within these very targeted messages to the Brooklyn community, and for this time, really thinking in the first way how to really engage this as a national project for us, because something that happened as a result of, and I recognize that, like, this film that was made about us is not something this is something that was done to us. And for us, we didn’t earn this huge audience right away. But um, our social media audience has grown tenfold, we started like, last year, at this time, we had maybe 1000 people following us on Instagram, and it’s now like, 11,000 people. So we have really, really, through promotion of this film, and through people viewing it have now have this social audience. And so I think about our strategy before being a series of email campaigns, you know, will not be that this year, we have a massive social media reach for us. I mean, that’s it’s now massive for us. irrelevant, relatively, and I think we need to be really be considering what it will look like on social media. So that’s not a real lot of like answers there. Just the idea that we are going into this year with still a lot of questions that we’ll be building, and creating as we go. So. Thank you so much. Yeah.

42:34  

So you just heard, really great ideas for your Giving Tuesday approach this year, both Kate and Tamara shared ideas that really talk about thinking small, whether you’re asking for something small, like a just a share, or a small gift, or thinking small in terms of, you know, geographically and focusing on your community. So now what I’m going to do is just touch upon a couple ideas that you can use to take those efforts that you’re putting together and really making sure that they have the impact that you are aiming for. So first off, you’re really gonna want to take a multi channel approach here giving Tuesday campaign. While you can do strictly social, you might miss out on donors who aren’t yet following you on social media. So you’re going to want to advertise your campaign on your website, via email, social media, even phone calls to some of your donors. I know right now, there are a lot of people looking to give back. But they’re worried about, you know, wanting to social distance. So recruiting some volunteers, giving them a script to call your donors and see if they would either give or spread the word about your organization for Giving Tuesday is a great way to engage and get them involved. And not really ask too much, even if you gave them 10 people to call. Another way is crowdfunding which I’m going to go into a little bit of detail in a moment. And also direct mail if you want to send a postcard just to say, Hey, this is coming up. Because if your donors don’t know that you’re participating, they’re not going to be able to share, give volunteer, all those things that that you’re hoping for. So first off, I just want to touch on your donation form, because a lot of people are probably going to be giving digitally this year. You’re going to want to dress up your form so personalize it in the spirit of giving Tuesday instead of just using your regular donate form. Use a dedicated form so you can show and tell about your campaign. You should say why this campaign is special. Call out any benefits. You know, Kay talked about Everybody who gave to their campaign, their gift was double buy a matching gift grant. If you are giving away, let’s say, a free T shirt to donors of a specific level, let them know. And you can also inspire monthly gifts by making sure that you have recurring giving as an option, you can even default that so somebody can’t give a lot today might want to give a little bit over time.

45:32  

So next, crowdfunding is really a great way to get the word out. And, again, this is something that I believe all of you touched upon giving people different ways to participate, because some people are out of work right now, or they don’t have the budget to be able to give, but they still care about your cause. Crowdfunding is a great way to invite people to get involved. So according to donor, perfect Stata, when somebody creates a fundraiser for your organization, they raised an average of $568. The average donation to a crowdfunding campaign is $66. And over half of people who receive an email from someone who created a fundraiser for your organization, donate to that campaign. And a lot of that is the power of if your donor is creating a fundraiser for you, and you’re talking about why they care, and then sharing it with their friends and family, their friends and family are not just going to feel good about donating to your organization, they’re going to feel really great about knowing that they’re supporting someone they love, or someone they work with three ways to supercharge your campaign, because we were speaking about this previously, you know, sometimes it can be challenging to get people to follow through on that ask. So how about starting with some of the people who already support you, that would be your board members, and also those influencers in your community potentially, and ask them to say, Hey, can you help us out and create a fundraiser and share it with your network, you can also contact local schools, many schools are still virtual right now. And if you contact the school in your community, teachers might be thrilled to say, hey, here is an activity that my you know, a lot of these kids are more socially, social media savvy than, than myself. And they can put together their own fundraiser pages to have a you know, gets back day at school in support of you and your organization. Another thing that you could do is frame it as a family activity, a lot of families are kind of hanging home a little more. So children can either draw pictures or write stories about why they care about that organization, and parents can share it. And as a family, they can be excited, watching the people they love contribute to a cause that they care about.

48:18  

Next, I’m just going to touch upon. So there’s new donors that you’re going to get forgetting to say, how are you going to stay engaged with them. And one way to do that is to really make that a point after getting to say making that Wednesday, a holiday in itself. So on Wednesday, we welcome new donors. It’s a Mean Girls reference. And no, we are not trying to make fetch happen. We really believe that by investing in a retention effort that is specific to your new Giving Tuesday donors, you can grow your community. So it’s not just that small dollar gift or that social media follow, you’re gonna have somebody for the long term who’s going to be engaged with your organization. So first things first about welcome Wednesday and your new donor welcome series. And that is your thank you. So according to GuideStar donors who are thanked within two days of their gift are four times more likely to give again. So you can even start right now. Before your campaign is over and set up your thank yous and just have placeholders because you know what you’re going to want to tell them you’re going to want to remind them of how much you were hoping to raise, how much you raise, how awesome they are for helping you get to that point and reach your goal. And also just let them know, Hey, we’re going to be letting you know what your generosity has done for our organization and for who and what we serve. And you don’t have to stop there. So again about Tamara’s idea about if you care, please share and having people follow you on social media, that’s an effortless way for somebody to keep tabs on what you’re doing. So you’re going to continue that conversation by following up that thank you, a week or two later with, Hey, let’s stay in touch, follow us on social, it doesn’t cost them a dime. And, again, while they’re looking to see what their friends family brands that they follow, or up to, they’re gonna see you and the good that you’re doing in the world. Now for other emails that you can follow up with them. And again, you’re bringing them into that wonderful community that champions your cause. You can have socially distant events that you’re hosting virtual events, or, you know, remote volunteer opportunities. You could also if about a month after giving Tuesday, you have some news for them about where those funds have gone about what’s planned, or maybe you even started getting to work with those things, send them an impact update, let them know. You could also send them a little later a donor survey, maybe ask them, hey, what kind of event would you be most likely to attend? Or, hey, we were thinking about doing these different projects, which one do you think would be the most urgent to fund for our community right now, basically, what the donor survey is doing, it’s just treating them like the stakeholders that they are. And then finally, you could send a what’s ahead for you. And that would kind of be like a roadmap for what you’re planning in the future. And there’s a great opportunity to invite your donors and your supporters to give and really invest in what you’re going to be planning for the future. So I hope that these ideas gave you a good reason to consider celebrating not just giving Tuesday this year, but welcome Wednesday. And don’t stress because I feel like if that feels like a lot to put together in a short amount of time, we did create a new donor welcome series, email template kit, where you can plug in your details and be good to go. As well as a Giving Tuesday fundraising template kit to help you with your GivingTuesday campaign this year. And in addition, Celeste had reached out. And let me know that there’s also an awesome Giving Tuesday toolkit from giving Tuesday that work. So what we’re going to do is we’ll send you all of these things. So you will be prepped and ready for giving Tuesday. And welcome Wednesday. Thank you.

52:57  

Oh, all right. Thank you so much like, this is Heather Mansfield. The first time I’ve ever showed my face, but I figured I’d better join 2020. So here we go. We had a lot of questions come in, but we’re low on time. Generally, what I say is, if you’re busy and you have a pressing, you know, meeting you have to get to go ahead and leave just wave say goodbye. But I’m just going to keep asking as long as they’re there. Okay. So me being the nonprofit tech person, I tend to have this lens where I’m thinking about what impacted social media versus email versus blogging versus something else. So here are some of the key questions that came up. Tomorrow. This was this first one’s for you. And I’m curious, which drove more donations on your register $6 Worth campaign? Was it email? Or was it social media?

53:54  

Social media. So for us, that was more of a social media campaign. We emailed everybody letting them know that we were going to post on social and to please donate through social. That was the first year we did it. So we’re actually really hoping for one of those Facebook matches if you like donate right away at first thing in the morning. So we let all of our board members and big donors know that are previous donors know that the earlier you donate, the more likely you might be able to get we might don’t get a match. As everyone knows, that sells out in like 10 seconds. But it’s still galvanized pretty much everyone to at least donate earliest we can kind of see where we were tracking it earlier in the day. But yeah, that was a purely social media campaign. The emails were setting people up to jump on social and donate. And then we always as Emily had those great email, post donations, we do send out emails, thank you after an impact update a few weeks later, so we do keep everyone engaged through email, but we certainly got more donations through social that year.

55:00  

Right. And one question that somebody had was, were the donations actually $6? Or did people give more?

55:07  

Most people gave more? Yeah, most people rounded up, we got a lot of 10s. And a lot of the 20s were multiples of six, which was kind of cool a lot of eighteens. But they were generally small dollar amounts, we get a couple of, you know, $100 or something, but they were not nobody donated 5000 or 7000. It was small dollar amounts by individuals. Okay.

55:28  

And one question I get a lot is, How do you feel about Facebook fundraising tools in that you don’t get the full donor contact information? Was that something that you had a discussion about an organization? You said, Well, let’s go with it anyway? Or, like, what was the? What was the feeling around this that you were allowed to do this without getting mailing addresses? And sometimes even email addresses?

55:53  

Yeah, actually, we did have a big conversation about that. We were debating if we should raise using a separate link, like directly to DonorPerfect or directly through some other organization. And we decided at the end of the day, the less clicks, the more likely people will do it. So we decided to use the embedded Facebook donation tool, you do get some information in the reports. So we got some polls, at least names so we can reach out to them and thank them. But for this appeal, specifically, we decided we just wanted to see how we would do and if we got people’s info, that’s great. If not, that’s okay. We did include in two of the eight or 10 posts, sign up link to our newsletter. So anybody who saw those posts could also choose to sign up and give their information voluntarily. But yeah, you lose a little bit of that personal connection of knowing who everybody is. That that is that is a that’s a fact, unfortunately, yeah.

56:49  

But it was a trade off your organization was willing to do.

56:52  

Yeah. Okay. Great. Great.

56:55  

So let’s I have a question for you. I’m giving Tuesday, a global and as it spread throughout the world, some places more than others. And I think a lot of that is a language barrier. Like if you can’t promote Giving Tuesday in Spanish or in French or an Arabic, what did you recommend to US Space nonprofits? I mean, is it still an English only campaign? Or do you recommend that they start branching out perhaps into Spanish as well? And some locations? What What’s your take on that on multilingual, GivingTuesday campaigns in the US or Canada? Where French is spoken?

57:34  

Yeah, I think, yes, to all of that we have a lot of, so to speak to the global sense. A lot of stuff that we create, obviously is English based, but we have a lot of our country leaders who take those materials and actually translate them, not only like literal translations, but cultural translation, like a lot of that we say, here in the US do not translate the same way. Even like words like giving and philanthropy and generosity don’t even translate. So there’s like the cultural translation and which is fascinating and amazing to be a part of a global movement that to understand what generosity looks like across the globe. So and then there’s the literal, literal translation of language. So we have country leaders who are definitely taking and creating campaign in some of those other countries are not even called GivingTuesday. It’s like the of the door like, you know, other words that mean the same concept, but have don’t even say GivingTuesday might be just the heart of GivingTuesday. And that is fine with us. Here in the US. Yes, very much. So I came from the leader network. I was from Austin, Texas, running an organization and doing the community campaign for GivingTuesday. And so we did community wide campaigns in general, several times through the year GivingTuesday being one of them. And in particular, in Texas, dual language campaigns and door efforts are really important, not only for organizations that are held are working with people of other nationalities, but or other other cultures, but it also we had grassroots leaders who were doing work in their community, who were you know, trying to do X campaign and making it relevant for them who when they were first born, you know, Spanish speakers or Spanish native Spanish speakers, English as their second language. So we definitely are trying to work through that we personally in the US have do have some communities that have translated their materials, they’re giving Tuesday Giving Tuesday materials into Spanish or other languages that are prominent in their community. The other piece to that is we are trying to translate this year some of our materials into Spanish speaking so I shared a link that has a lot of toolkits on there they are in English, but we’re trying to get some of those bigger toolkits done in Spanish as well and hopefully have those in the next week or so, sharing but very important to understand it inclusion of all In a generosity campaign is the only way we’re going to grow. And it’s necessary.

1:00:05  

Right? And so those NEW MULTILINGUAL resources will avail be available on your website.

1:00:10  

And I’m not saying was, yes, where that were where I sent people for toolkits right now, hopefully, that’s where we’re also adding the ones in Spanish. Okay,

1:00:18  

perfect. Thank you. Kay. Just a quick question for you. How did you find the influencers in your community? Like, how did you reach out to them one on one, did you do a random kind of contact us if you are an influencer? Or how’d you how’d you find them?

1:00:35  

Um, so again, this is like, where they reached out to us in a lot of ways, you know, and I think that that’s something that I think, where I’m, we were looking at it, you know, we do have some true, like, for lack of a better word, true, like celebrity influencers, who are no of our work, who will share our work. But I think because of that we had not again, we just were kind of new, you know, with a few of these in kind of, in the bag, and heads. And having seen certain specific types of success, we had just sort of, not sort of, really in our heads up to look around. And so what happened is that

1:01:15  

people

1:01:17  

started doing things like, middle of the day, you know, sharing and saying, like, if you give to this, you’ll get, you know, like printmakers are people who are, say, you’ll get choose from one of these like anti racist stickers that we’ve created or something like that, you know, a lot of social justice movement, people who follow our work, or give if you do this, you can pick, pick a book from our bookshelf in our small bookstore that we run. And so it was like people who already had audiences that we would never have considered specifically reaching out to, in terms of seeing them as you know, niche small groups, but then, if they themselves have fiber success, and people following their small, independent bookstore, who suddenly say, oh, I want to get one of those books, I’ll make a gift. And so it’s almost things like they themselves are doing to the point of like, doing what they can to do. And on top of giving and making it easier for someone to facilitate a gift for someone else. So we just saw that happening on our social media feed that people would just jump up and do it. And it actually continued throughout the spring that happened that began first on the May 5 day, and then with we, we saw a lot of activity and donor movement throughout the spring. And similarly, like those relationships just built. So I think that but now when I think of how we might have actually been able to, again, be wiser, smarter and more strategic about the audience that we have not really begun to know yet our social media audience is big. know a lot of them now, when when our social media audience was like 1000 people, it was a little easier to kind of know who they were. And so now, it’s part of it’s like the growing pains of getting to know them, and also realizing that it’s not just have they liked us or commented or made a gift. But really getting to know them is something that is different in a way then because if hopefully, over time, they’re either making gifts or encouraging other people to make gifts or just becoming that doing the advocacy for us spreading our spreading the word about our work. Yeah, we need to invest in getting to know them. So we’re spending time doing that too.

1:03:30  

And what did spending time like that mean? Like you’re putting it in a spreadsheet or adding them to a Twitter live,

1:03:37  

it’s the data and the feeling like solicit didn’t a lot of analytics, we use HootSuite and we just are just looking at all of the things that that generally paints a picture for you what is going on with your audience. And then and then just actually or the organic, like research, like kind of thing going into their accounts, just seeing who’s who we’ve had. Because we’re associated with Bard, we’ve had the opportunity to to have work study students sometimes who, you know, have done like really like almost like donor prospect research, they’re going in seeing who is following who, who was following them, and seeing what these natural notes of connection are. And that’s a kind of, kind of like treating our social media audience like a group of prospects.

1:04:22  

Interesting. Well, good for you. For you. Would you left this here? I’m Emily. A lot of people picked up on the 48 hours. If you think someone within 48 hours, they’re four times more likely to give again, was that to the Giving Tuesday campaign again, or is that just throughout the year? And was it done? One person particularly asked to use me personally nails 48 hours help or is helped improve that retention rate? They literally just get creating an automated campaign. What’s your advice on that? Oh, Um,

1:05:00  

so the that stat is actually just referring to not just giving Tuesday, but anytime somebody gives the gift, they want to be acknowledged and get that, you know, feels message right away. One way that you can personalize it is to be able to, you know, have an email system, you know, like our, our users have constant contact and use mail merge with DonorPerfect, where it can instantly put, you know, Hi, Emily, you know, thank you so much for your gift. And right away, it feels like a letter from a friend. So you get that feeling right back. And you can schedule and send that pretty seamlessly when you have all of that setup with your CRM, and a really great email tool.

1:05:54  

Alright, I’ve been reading so much lately, about personalization and email, and even using the person’s name in the subject line is like, dramatically increasing open rates. So, so fascinating. And, yeah, go ahead.

1:06:13  

It’s major. I mean, even think, you know, I even think when I’m editing my, my promotions for my inbox will be crazy. But when I see you know, Emily, this is on sale. I’m like, Oh, okay. Yeah. Social media.

1:06:29  

Thank you. You know, do you just see, like creating a graphic the day after the says, Welcome Wednesday, or grateful Thursday? You know, how do you? How do you see how you can reach out to people who aren’t necessarily on your email list, but are on social media? What’s your recommendation for that?

1:06:50  

One thing we’ve seen in the donor, perfect community. And I definitely also would like Tamara and Kate, I feel like that they could answer this, probably amazingly, but I, we have seen organizations actually invite their supporters to post an unselfie, where they take a selfie of themselves that saying, you know, I’m supporting new leash on life, and here’s why. And then they share it with their friends and family. And then your organization, which I saw new leash post, last year, will then retweet that and then share that. So it’s almost like, even with that retweet, you’re thanking and acknowledging that donor, on social and then everybody who’s following you on social sees how much you’re celebrating your community. So as for the day after, you can always even reserve some of those posts to share if you have if you have a bunch. And you could probably, which I would think would be a good thing to do is post how much you raised with a thank you to your whole community. So people see that, you know, a lot of people participated in this. And I would love for tomorrow eight to

1:08:04  

also, the one thing to be aware of is if they do it through Facebook, you actually don’t know exactly how much you get that next day, I think it takes 48 hours for you to get the official amount. So that would be a great idea. If we knew right away, we don’t. So we actually posted, we always posted thank you on social the next day. Now we did share a lot of our own selfies. And we also did thank you directly from a couple of our dogs. So we had some photos of our dogs take the advance that we held on to and then we added some graphics and posted thank yous directly from them. So I think people really liked that so we didn’t say an amount until our impact email. And we put an impact post about a week after but we did do a thank you immediately from the dogs knowing that we did get something without necessarily having to share the amount.

1:08:59  

Okay, I’m getting lots of Thank you really awesome. Couple of people have to go people are leaving so I’m gonna wrap this up. And I’m gonna ask Kay first and then Emily min Tamar. Giving Tuesday is two months and two days away. What’s your 20 Word or less piece of advice for nonprofits listening now to get ready.

1:09:28  

I think to connect to your authentic message to think about what you have to say right now and to kind of like tune out the other white noise that’s happening around what might happen, what might happen and just really tune into the authentic voice that’s connected to your mission and why you’re here and still hear and why you still continue to need the support of your community. Excellent, excellent.

1:09:50  

Emily.

1:09:52  

I would say share those stories. I think that you know, that message of say active on social and really be talking about what you do in the community and connects you’re connecting your mission to to the moment, however, rough this moment is, you’re doing a lot, because people like me, I look to the nonprofit community to see, what do I do right now? Because it feels so hopeless. But when I see people like, tomorrow, like Kate, you know, dedicating their careers to making sure that my community and you know, along with people who don’t have the privilege that I have are doing okay. I’m, you know, I feel like I have direction, and it gives me a purpose. So, you know, thank you for what you do. And just keep telling those stories. Because it’s everything to all

1:10:47  

of us. Really. Yeah, wonderful. Tomorrow, okay, all of that.

1:10:54  

But also, just, if you are planning to be strategic in what you want to do for giving Tuesday, stay active on social now be active. But if between now and giving Tuesday, you get a few like really good little stories, you may want to reserve them and not share them right away. Maybe plan for your kind of one, two punch forgiving Tuesday and welcome Wednesday in advance. So it’s not scrambling the week of me like man, I wish we hadn’t posted that in October, we could use that now. So just kind of start to spedically Keeping maybe a little folder on your desktop of things that you either repurpose that are really good. Or if something new happens, kind of save it for day up, make sure you have something, something really fun to share because the world blows up on GivingTuesday on social media. So you want to stand out somehow. So just think about strategically what you want to what you want to use.

1:11:46  

Wonderful, great advice. All right. Thank you everyone. Just a reminder, the webinar is being recorded. And Emily will send you that recording via email within 24 to 48 hours if you don’t have it. Emails a little weird these days. Look in your spam folder. It might be there. All right, thank you everyone. All right, have a wonderful day. Ay ay

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