36 MINS
How To Maximize Your Crowdfunding Campaign
DonorPerfect Training Manager Kelly Ramage shares how a customer surpassed their goal threefold using a crowdfunding form and demonstrates how you can achieve similar success.
Categories: Giving Tuesday, How To, Expert Webcast
How To Maximize Your Crowdfunding Campaign Transcript
Print Transcript0:01
Hello, and welcome to the webinar how to create your Giving Tuesday, crowdfunding campaign? Can you imagine having a goal of raising $10,000 and only having 24 hours to do it? But imagine in that amount of Read More
0:01
Hello, and welcome to the webinar how to create your Giving Tuesday, crowdfunding campaign? Can you imagine having a goal of raising $10,000 and only having 24 hours to do it? But imagine in that amount of time you not only met your goal, you almost tripled it. Well, these are some exciting numbers that we’d like to share with you because this represents what what one of our customers did using DonorPerfect on Giving Tuesday with a crowdfunding form. So what’s all the excitement why crowdfunding? Well, crowdfunding is giving you the opportunity to rally your supporters. It empowers people who care about your cause to raise money on your nonprofits behalf by creating a fundraiser page and sharing it with their friends, family and colleagues via email and social media. Reach new donors of course, when a current donor creates and shares a crowdfunding campaign, your organization effortless, effortless, effortlessly expand your reach as everyone in their network will learn about your mission and be invited to support you for boost your revenue. Yes, absolutely. Well, last year, on Giving Tuesday, one of our DonorPerfect customers did that just that using DonorPerfect crowdfunding for a fun and easy way to energize their supporters to give and share and boy were their results. Incredible. We hope that you can experience this same kind of success. My name is Kelly Ramage, and I’m here to help you see and learn how easy it is to create a GivingTuesday crowdfunding form, how quickly you can share it, how you can monitor your success towards your goals and how you can simply oversee the crowdfunding forums and help your donors and supporters be successful. What I’m going to be doing in our time together as we get underway here is I’m going to be introducing concepts using a slide presentation. And then at various points, I’ll be scooting into DonorPerfect to do a demonstration. First, we want to focus on creating. And when we talk about creating, what we have to start with first is the organization page, this is what you are going to build. And when you’re creating an organization page, for your crowdfunding experience, you’re going to have the opportunity to create your story and the image that you desire. You’re going to be able to set your goals and show your progress, you’re going to be able to show off the success that you have reaching those goals. And you’re going to provide a way for your individual fundraisers to create their own page with a few clicks. Not only that, you’re going to be able to use technology that you’re already familiar with, because you’re using the DonorPerfect online form tools to be able to customize the donation portion of the page. And you’ll be able to collect your donor and donation information easily easily and effortlessly. Once you have your organization page created, then you want to promote it, you want to get it out there because this is where sharing can come into place. This is where your donors and their friends and families are going to be able to really embrace what it is that you’re doing. So it’s for them to create their individual fundraiser page, they’re going to start at your organization page. And they are going to find a button that they can click on right here. That just simply says Create your own organization page. Once they’ve created their page quickly, rather, once they clicks on that button, they’re underway to creating their page, they can easily create it by entering in their username and excuse me their name and email there’s no username or password required. Once they enter in their email and click on Create my page, two emails will be sent to them. One is going to give them the opportunity to personalize the page where they can enter in their own story and images and set their own goals. And then a second email is going to be provided so that they can send that to their friends and family to ask for support. In addition to having emails that they can send to their families and friends. They can also share it using various different social media sites. One of the things that’s super exciting about a crowdfunding forum is that you’re able to see your success you’re able to see Your progress, not only can you see it, but anybody who goes to your page is also going to be able to see it. Another advantage and way that you’re going to be able to succeed easily is that the money is going to go directly into your account, there’s no need to worry about getting to the bank to make the deposit is actually going to be there. And an integral part of crowdfunding is being able to say thank you. And we’ve made that easy as well, thank you is communicated for you, you get to craft the email that goes to the donor as the nonprofit, but it’s done easily and automatically. So there’s actually two things that are sent out with regards to thanking one is going to the donor from you, saying thank you for your contribution. The second email that’s going to be sent out is going to be going to the individual fundraiser to let them know that that contribution has been made as a result of somebody using their individual fundraising page. So what I want to do now is I want to go into DonorPerfect and show you how easy all of this can be done. Using tools of DonorPerfect. So from DonorPerfect, I’m going to go to app links and online forms. What I’m going to do is I’m going to actually pull up an existing crowdfunding form to show you kind of an end result. And then I’m going to back up and then go through the process of creating a new one. So first, here’s a sample of an existing GivingTuesday crowdfunding form, you can see that you can clearly see what the purpose is, you can see what the goals are and where you’re at in reaching the goals, you can see who the recent supporters and top fundraisers are. You can see that there’s a place to enter in like pictures and images, as well as your messages. And there’s a button that says create my own fundraising page. So I’m going to go ahead and click on that, to show you that there is absolutely no user name or password required, all I have to do is enter in my name, and email address. And so I went from showing you an organization page to putting on my hat of an individual fundraiser, entering in my name and email address creating my page. And I will now have two emails ready for me to go and read those two emails will then guide me through the process of making my own page, as well as forwarding some information on to my friends and families to support. So that’s the end result. How did we get here. So what we’re going to do is I’m going to start at the beginning. So I’m back at DonorPerfect online forms review and acceptance center, or what’s referred to as the rack, yours might look a little bit different than mine. But you’re going to see an orangey kind of gold button that says Add form. When I click one add form, you’re going to see several different forms available. And these are all different types of templates. Since we’re focusing on crowdfunding, I’m going to choose the crowdfunding form. And I’m going to click on use this template. And so here’s where I can enter in the name of my template what kind of payment options am I going to accept and the currency that I’m going to accept them in, and then a confirmation email for who is just going to be notified that this form is created. So I entered in my own email address. So now I’m going to choose Continue to set up what you’re seeing here is only going to happen in rare instances, if you have multiple gateways. Otherwise, you’re not going to see that screen at all. It’s going to bring you right into the admin area of the crowdfunding form. So the form has been created. Now I have to I have the opportunity of tweaking it, customizing it making it my own. So here’s where I can put in maybe a more user friendly organization name. You know, sometimes you have long organization names, and you might want to abbreviate it people know you with more of an acronym. Otherwise, it’s just going to be the organization name. That is up here in the upper right hand corner, which should match what your actual business name is, but you can always change that
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okay, the name of the form is carrying over from what I initially created. And you can see here here Here’s the lengthy URL that’s being built. But I can always change this form if I wanted to have it be a little bit shorter, or maybe a little bit clearer.
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And then I can enter in my goal. Now one of the things that is often asked about crowdfunding is obviously it’s becoming very much an online event, that there are people that want to support you as a result of Giving Tuesday, but they’re going to send in cash. So there’s a little message over here that says plan on entering checks. And so if we call those offline donations, so offline donations, whether in the form of cash or checks can be entered and tracked that they’re going to be entered through DonorPerfect, not as part of the form. And I’ll show you how to do that when we get to the administrative area. So now, I’m going to go down here, and here’s where you can personalize your page, there’s a default story and image available. But if this is something you want to change, you can certainly do that. And so I’m just gonna go in here, and I’m just going to grab a couple of Giving Tuesday logos.
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The other thing, because I’m building the organization page that you also have available, is that you can create a default story for your individual fundraiser. So you’re giving them something to start with that if they can’t come up with anything creative, or they just don’t have time or whatever the scenario is, you can give them something to work with. As we scoot down here, then we have to associate a solicitation code with this form, because when gifts are given online, they’re going to come in to a DonorPerfect, and we want a solicitation code assigned with them. So we can choose one from the list because hopefully, you’ve created that in preparation for GivingTuesday campaign. If you didn’t, you can always click on the little plus sign and you have the opportunity of creating a code and a description as you’re building the form. The other thing that you finally have here is the contact information for who is going to be the contact for this particular event, in this case Giving Tuesday. And you can have up to two contacts and this information is going to appear in the in almost like the footer area of the form.
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Okay, and then I can save. So pretty painless. So now if we wanted to take a look at it, I’m going to view the form. And there you have it. So obviously, you can see some changes that you might want to make, you might want to add some customizations like maybe you don’t like the underscores, maybe you want to change the goal, you know, maybe it’s a different logo, but I’m just simply viewing the form. Now, I’ve created the form as it is I’m showing you at what it looks like right now. But if you want to go in and you want to make some additional modifications to the whole form, remember crowdfunding and giving Tuesday, crowdfunding is part of the DonorPerfect online forms technology. So that donation portion, you can also modify using the normal functionality. Now I’m not going to get into that today. But you can certainly go in and style your form and make sure that you have those email options set up properly to say thank you, maybe you want to give him Tuesday logo there. But the one thing that I’m drawing your attention to is down here. At the bottom on the left, I have a crowdfunding menu option. And here is the organization page that I just built. So I have my form created. It has a unique URL that I can now share out in an email, I can post that maybe at your own organization, social media sites, or however you want to share it. Or you email this to your donors encouraging them saying hey, look, what we have, you can now partner with us, you can now create your own form. So every form including crowdfunding, GivingTuesday forms has a unique URL, and there are the URLs so I can copy and paste them and use them accordingly. Now that I have my form created, okay, I’m gonna put loaded up here. And now I’m going to kind of switch hats and become a donor. So I have been informed of your crowdfunding GivingTuesday campaign. I’ve come to your site or I opened an email I clicked on the link and it brought me here. So I can at this point, choose to create my on fundraising page, or I can continue to just be a donor or focusing on crowdfunding. So I’m going to build my own page. Again, you’ve seen this kind of experience, just as we’ve been talking here. So now I’m going to create the page very easily. And what’s going to happen is I’m going to get an email. So one says, personalize your email. So I’m just dragging that across. So you can see that it says, personalizing my email. And I’m going to go to personalize my page. So now I’m the individual fundraiser. And here, I’m able to go in and change the image. Change my story. And I can choose not to show the supporter list. But that’s one of the exciting things about crowdfunding. So we have that as a default, you can also change the goals and the name of the page. So once it’s set up, so we’ll go ahead and we’ll change this image to a different Giving Tuesday image. There we go. And I’m going to save and publish. So now, I’m going to get an email that says, hey, now that you have this page built, let’s go ahead and share it out. So let me just drag this across here.
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And
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I’ll show you what that email looks like.
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Okay, so here again, I am the individual fundraiser. And here is a sample email. Okay, and basically, I can send this out forward, this took my friends and family, and I can have them donate. Alright, so it’s all pretty, pretty straightforward. Pretty exciting. Okay, so now, what’s going to happen if people start using that. So what’s going to happen is, I’m gonna go ahead and make a donation using that individual page. So let’s just see here. Give me one moment here.
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So you can’t see what I’m doing is going to be a little bit of a surprise here.
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Okay, so I am just filling in this information, kind of pretending that I am a donor and entering in some data here, so that in just a moment
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what will happen is this page that you’re looking at is going to be updated?
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So let’s see.
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Okay, so that happened. So now, this is the organization page. And look at that. There’s now a $500 donation. So you can see the recent supporters. I also happen to be surprised surprise, the top fundraiser, okay, so you can kind of see what’s happening here. All right. Now, one of the things that is going to happen is I can monitor this, I can see what’s going on. So I can see this, you know, from the page. But because I’m an administrator, I can also navigate and see my success in other ways. So let’s go back here and talk about some of the admin options. Well, there’s a lot of admin options. So I was just highlighting the ease in which it is that you can create a crowdfunding form. But the reality is creating is one thing, getting it exactly right, and helping people be successful and managing the details is a completely different ballgame. So what are some of the administrative tasks and options that you have? We’re going to look at it based on the several kinds of different categories. So first, the organization page at any time, you can go in and edit the name and the goals that you’ve set. You can update your story and image you can show or hide the donation summary. And you can change the form contact information. For a fundraiser, the individual fundraiser list so again from an administrative point of view, so you have individual fundraisers, using your form creating their own pages, but they they might get stuck. What might you need to do? What are some common things that you will have to help them with? Well, you can edit the fundraiser name, maybe there was a typo. You can activate as well as inactivate. fundraiser pages. You can edit the fundraiser page for that maybe they didn’t know how to upload an image or they were having problems or maybe it wasn’t in the what you wanted it to be you have those controls in common one, I can find the emails can you resend it, and yes, you can resend fundraiser emails. And if there’s ever a need to delete a fundraiser page, maybe they changed their mind, maybe they never completed it, maybe it was inappropriate, you know, whatever the scenario is, there is opportunity to delete the fundraiser pages well. Another kind of administrative task in above and beyond just managing the pages is the transactions. So that brings us to the rack, the review and acceptance center, you’re able to review the monetary transactions, the gifts that have been made, you can download the transactions or use the automatic option to save yourself some time, you can always quickly see the total raised and a big one that some nonprofits have our donors who are very supportive of GivingTuesday campaigns, they just don’t do it online. So you have to deal with offline donations. And you have to enter those into DonorPerfect. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to go back to the form that we built, and I’m going to kind of walk through some of these administrative tasks. So now back at DonorPerfect. And again, we have our form here. So let’s just refresh the page, make sure everything’s current, there we go. So here’s our form that we’ve been working with. So this is what it looks like right now with the donation and I showed you how to create the page. And now we’re going to deal with the administrative side of things. So we’re focusing on this one right here. So sometimes when you have to make changes, you might have to update an image or a story or a goal. So what I did, and that might have been a little too quick. So let me just go back here is I found my form, and I’m clicking on the pencil, so I’m editing. And again, the top kind of menu choices, the basics fields and items. And additional options are all about the online form portion, I’m just focusing on crowdfunding, so I’m going to go to the organization page. So I’m under the crowdfunding menu option. Here’s where I can change the organization name and the goals, here’s where I can change the story. So I can change that maybe I want it to be bold, and I want it to be
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in your edit.
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I can also insert videos. Anything that you see here, really can be can be edited. Okay, one of the things you need to remember though, is if you make changes is to save it. So from the organization page, you can make lots of different changes when it pertains to common things, the things that I’ve seen, that often need to be changed, especially as you’re getting closer to Giving Tuesday or just reviewing things is often going to be the story and the image anything’s available to be changed. Those are the two that tend to be common at the top of the list. Probably more common after you have your organization page built is going to be the hand helping and interacting with your individual fundraisers and their lists. So as individual fundraisers create their own page from your organization page, you’re going to be able to see them as a list. And some of the things that you’re going to be able to do is you can edit the fundraiser name as well as their email, maybe they entered that wrong and also choose to keep it active or if you’re going to make it inactive. The checkmark means go ahead and save it. Okay. So the other things that I can do, and this seems to be probably more common than not than just editing the name is helping them edit their actual page. So again, what I I did, as I clicked on this little icon over on the far right, and that’s going to load that individual fundraisers page. And here are the things that they can edit anything with a pencil. But there’s also some useful text up here. But sometimes that’s just not enough to help people. But you can come in here and you can help them upload different images, or change their story or choose to not show the supporter list. But again, you’re making a change to the page. So you need to make sure that you choose Save and Publish. Other changes that you might find yourself needing to help your individual fundraisers with is the resending of the emails. So it’s just clicking on the little airplane, and they’re going to get both of them, but at least you can resend them. And then if at any time, you need to delete a page, there’s a trashcan over here. Now, once a page is underway, and it’s in use, you’re going to get those contributions. So if I were to view the page, it’s nice that you can see, you know, kind of what’s been received from this perspective, and you can see where you’re at in reaching your goals. But the reality is, you need to make sure that those contributions are being brought into DonorPerfect. So what you have to do is you have to review the transactions, you need to make sure that the transactions are being put into DonorPerfect. And that brings us to the download options. So right now, in this particular system that you’re looking at, it’s an automatic download, because there’s nothing under pending for this form that we built right here. This form the test, one that we started with, was created before it was switched to automatic. So if the transaction the money has been processed, it just hasn’t been pushed to DonorPerfect. So there’s a manual download, and then there’s the automatic, if you choose to do the download transactions yourself, then somebody’s gonna have to come in and choose to download the transactions, if you want to use the automatic option, that’s going to be found in the upper right hand corner. And then you can choose Download settings, and you can choose to have them download automatically. The other nice thing that’s available at a very fast, quick way is you can see how much money has been raised to date. All right. Now, the next big hurdle is handling offline donations. So I’m gonna come back here to DonorPerfect, and I’m going to get my donor. So I’m just searching and how are Jeffrey send in a donation
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have
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$200. So this is just basic data entry. But because it’s giving Tuesday, and I want to connect it to a crowdfunding individual fundraiser, you’re going to find a section in it, I don’t know if it’s going to be the second one, the third one or the fourth one, but you will find a section that says web link fields or crowdfunding fields or online form fields. But you’re going to see this right here where it says apply to a crowdfunding page. So I’m going to click on apply to a crowdfunding page. And it’s going to pull up all of my different crowdfunding pages that I have. But there’s my 2019, Giving Tuesday. And there, you’re going to then see a list of the organization page, which is typically the first one that you’re going to see there, which is what you see here. And then underneath it is going to list all of the individual fundraisers. So I’m going to select the individual fundraiser that this person wants to support. And what will happen is, when I choose to save this, if I did not choose the proper solicitation, it’s going to change it accordingly. And now I have my offline donation entered connected to Giving Tuesday. Now a common question that’s going to come up is does that change? My giving? Yes, it does my progress. Yes, it does. But what it’s going to do is it’s going to list those offline donations under the grouping of anonymous. They’re not going to let it’s going to name them as anonymous, the contribution is there. And the progress is listed, but it’s going to list the person as anonymous. So pretty exciting to see He everything kind of coming together for a crowdfunding event on Giving Tuesday. Now, as we kind of think about the data going in, of course, there’s going to be a point where you need to see the progress not just in, you know, are you reaching your goal, but in report form. So how do you see your results? Well, as I’ve already indicated, you can certainly use the review and acceptance center to see that I’m going to show you a couple of other options there. But then that brings us back to DonorPerfect where you can see the information from within the gift record, you could export the data if you wanted to, because the crowdfunding fields that you were just looking at on the gift screen are just that data fields that you could choose to export in an export template and drop it into Excel. If you have the EZ Report Builder, you could be build an easy report. Or you could simply run a financial report where you might want to segment by your fundraiser name. So let’s go ahead and review a couple of the options where you can see your success, see your results. So scooting back here to my forms, and specifically my rack. Okay, so here’s where we left off. I’m just going to refresh this one more time. Okay, so at a glance, in my review and acceptance center, I can see how much has been raised quickly. If I want to see more specific donor details, I can drill down into the sub clicking on the numbers to see a list of the contributions. This is the summary view. But you can also switch it to complete so you can see more information about that particular donor. And I could also choose to export this information into Excel. Again, I don’t know that this is necessarily going to give you everything that you want, but it is a way that you can see who are your Giving Tuesday, crowdfunding donors. So that’s happening from online forms review and acceptance center also referred to as the RAC. In DonorPerfect, we can see information from the gift so this is looking at it from a donor perspective. So oops, if I go to the right donor is helpful right. Now, it was probably Carson Sorry, I thought that was in a different record. So if we go to Molly’s record,
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and we
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edit, I can see that she supported Kelly Ramage. But that’s nice. I’m seeing it from a donor perspective. So from a donor how much money was raised for giving Tuesday 2019. Well, that would be more of a financial report. So if I were to just run a financial report, and there’s many that you could choose from, I’m going to choose the giving summary by selected field. And I can specify kind of when I started my Giving Tuesday fundraising efforts. And when I started accepting, or maybe getting donations, you always accept donations, right. And I want to segment by solicitation since that’s where I have identified Giving Tuesday. Now, I could set a filter to just look at Giving Tuesday. But if I use a report like this, I’m going to see here’s my Giving Tuesday results. Alright, so there are some of my donors. Now, in addition to looking at like how am I doing, just in terms of how much money has been raised, I could also run this report not based on solicitation, but based on individual fundraisers so I’m going to segment by fundraiser name
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and I can see the different fundraiser names. Pretty interesting way of looking at things, being able to see my success. And then one other option is I could build an export template or create us create an easy report but I actually already have one called crowdfunding. And again, this is going to be dependent on whether you have this in your DonorPerfect package, but you could build a designer report where it’s live Looking at Mike only zooming in on crowdfunding Giving Tuesday contributions. So there’s many different ways that you can look at what your results are as a result of Giving Tuesday, crowdfunding campaign efforts. As we wrap up here, I hope you’re excited to see that there’s easy signup for building a crowdfunding GivingTuesday form, but more importantly for your individual fundraisers, there’s no password required. It’s frictionless, signup process and templates are available. We try have tried to make this really as easy as possible for you, but also for your donors to support what it is that you’re doing. These things are mobile responsive. These types of forms are mobile responsive because 35% of crowdfunding donations are made on mobile, making it very easy for people to support what it is that you’re doing. And make sure you check out the frequent updates, leverage the thermometer share via email and on social media. So I wish you all the best as you are launching your Giving Tuesday crowdfunding campaigns, be sure to check out our other Giving Tuesday webinar recordings and I hope you have huge success in raising funds for your mission.
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