Video: Leveraging Marketing and Donation Platforms to Achieve Results this GivingTuesday | Duration: 3416s | Summary: Leveraging Marketing and Donation Platforms to Achieve Results this GivingTuesday

Transcript for "Leveraging Marketing and Donation Platforms to Achieve Results this GivingTuesday": Alright. Welcome, everybody. We are, getting started here. We just kinda open things up. I know that we have folks coming in. And so as you are coming in, we would love to know where you're joining us from. Go ahead. If you are able to, you'll see the chat, right to your right of the screen. Let us know where you are joining us from. We are super excited today. Welcome. We're gonna be talking about leveraging marketing and donation platforms to achieve results this Giving Tuesday. Giving Tuesday is coming up. I think it's a good place, Craig, just to start to let people know. Giving Tuesday, if you didn't know, Tuesday, December 3rd, so make sure you are aware of that. First of all, Tuesday, December 3rd, we're excited to talk about that today. So, yeah, let us know where you're joining from. Again, as people are rolling in, we have more and more people joining us. We're really excited for today. Also, we're hoping to save some time towards the end for some q and a. So you're gonna see the q and a, the little tab, at the top of the chat. You can actually submit your questions there. You can, ask, anything, and we'd love to answer the best of our ability. And yes, this will be recorded. So you'll have this sent out as well. But we are really pumped for today. We're gonna get started, jumping in. Now today's webinar, is presented by Virtuous and Or Group in partnership, And we're really glad, to be able to hopefully provide you some really valuable content as you prepare for Giving Tuesday, whether you have plans set, whether you're just starting, we're we're pumped today. Now who are we? My name I'll start with myself, then I'll toss it to Craig. My name is Scott Holthouse. I'm the partner marketing manager here at Virtuis. I am in the Chicago area, and so we just had our first frost this morning. So if you're joining from jealous of you and, a little chilly here, but nonetheless glad to be here. I have a background, both working in nonprofits, specifically in local ministries, the faith space, as well as a background in marketing. So understanding how you craft campaigns, messaging, how to use digital tools to drive donations, spent a lot of my time and energy over the past decade in there. So Melanie, I see it's still 70 in Texas, and so enjoy that weather for me. For us, we would appreciate it. I'm gonna go ahead and toss it to Craig here, to introduce himself. Yeah. Hi. Thank you, Scott. Craig Shelley here, from our group. Tell you a little bit about us. But my background, been raising money and leading nonprofits for, I don't know, 25 plus years. I'm not sure that's surprising. I work so young. But, yes, it has really been that long. I spent quite a journey. I've learned a lot. Hopefully, I can share a little bit of that with you today. Spent most of my career actually with the Boy Scouts of America. I worked in several local councils. I was a national head of fundraising and then came to our group about 11 years ago. And, in my time here, basically my focus is working with ambitious nonprofit leaders, to help them scale and grow their organizations, really run the gamut. I know from national organizations like Big Brothers, Big Sisters of America and the Obama Foundation, to local organizations like Girl Scout Councils. You kinda name it. We do it. We're a team of 80 now, based out of offices in New York where I am. No frost yet, but certainly, I did had a I I did turn out the heat a little bit in my house last night, which annoyed my wife, but, it's getting a little chilly here. And, so our city is New York and Washington DC, but, again, we really work across the country and across the world, and, just really excited to be hearing from you all today. Awesome. Well, hey. I just wanna give us a little bit of an overview of where we're going, kinda what we can expect as we jump in. We're gonna start with just understanding the why. Right? Why why Giving Tuesday is crucial for nonprofits? Why do does all this matter? What what should we be thinking about? How to strategically prepare for Giving Tuesday? Again, I don't know where you're at in the planning. Maybe you haven't started. Maybe you have a fully fledged plan. Either way, there's some things that'll be helpful regardless of where you're at in the process. Essential elements for a successful Giving Tuesday, what are the tools that you need to have in place, some ideas and strategies to implement, some tips and best practices, and then, of course, some q and a at the end. So, again, just a reminder for you, go ahead and submit any questions you have in that q and a. And as you are chatting and interacting, just know that that this platform, one of the things I love about it, you have some emojis and you have some gifts to use. So while we take fundraising seriously and getting ready for giving Tuesday seriously, we don't take ourselves too seriously. So feel free, Use some gifts, emojis. We are pumped to jump in. And so let's do that. The first place, that we are gonna to stop here is why giving Tuesday is crucial for nonprofits. So why why should we even spend our time, our energy? And there's a handful of things. Really, it's it's it falls into 3 buckets. The first one is potential. So when you think of Giving Tuesday, there is tremendous potential, and and there's potential for a number of reasons. 1, donating is front of mind. Obviously, Giving Tuesday has grown in awareness, and so the idea of generosity, of giving, of making an impact in organizations that are impacting your community, that's front of mind for people. So there's a general kind of momentum, and and awareness that that day has, for giving. I know that a a lot of you spend time and energy as fundraisers trying to get people's attention and understand, and kinda pull, their attention to what you're doing and to donating. But Giving Tuesday, that is front of mind. Now, in 2013, again, as we talk about potential, Giving Tuesday raised nearly $28,000,000. So that's 2013. The next year, 2014, it went up to 46,000,000. And then last year so by 2023, Giving Tuesday had grown to around $3,100,000,000, raised. Now, actually, just this morning, I read a report, that that was estimating that they're expecting about 3,500,000,000 given this year. So, again, tremendous potential. The second reason why this is crucial is reach. Giving Tuesday has had activity from 95 countries, over 300 communities from around our country, at least where I'm from, the US, last year. And so, again, there's just potential not only for donations and not only to see those grow, but also for people to gain awareness, of your organization, what you're doing, the impact that you're making. And there's potential, again, to reach new donors. So people who maybe haven't jumped on before, but they're looking for a reason to. Giving Tuesday can be that. And then finally, the last one, again, potential reach. 3rd one being momentum. There's opportunity come giving Tuesday. We're gonna talk about some of this in our kinda strategy, the tools, the plans, all that stuff. But to take donors from one time to recurring donors, there's opportunity to add new donors. There's opportunity for momentum whether it's matching gifts, whether it's even just a a thank you campaign. And what can happen too with Giving Tuesday is it can kinda be the springboard into your end of year giving. So there's a a lot of reasons why it's crucial, the potential, the reach, the momentum, and so it's definitely worth some of our time, today. Now I'm gonna toss it to Craig as we jump into kinda how to strategically prepare for Giving Tuesday. Yeah. Excellent. Thank you, Scott. And I think, you know, Scott painted a really good picture of of why you do this. Right? I mean, you can there's reach. There's obviously dollars. There's the opportunity to raise your profile. There's the opportunity to engage things. But I'll let you in on a on another kind of secret reason, to to make sure you're involved here. I don't know about you all, but the nonprofits I've worked in and with, board members often have very strong opinions. They are going to see other organizations being very active at GivingTuesday and they are going to ask you, what are we doing? Why are we doing more? And all of that. Now I'll give you a little bit of, of of history. You know, those numbers 2013, 2014. Fun fact, 2014, we were working and I was working with 92nd Street Y at that point, which is where they had incubated Giving Tuesday before kind of spinning it out to its own thing. I was a skeptic. I was like, this is crazy. Like, we're never gonna break through. How are you gonna get attention for these things? You know, how can you possibly think that, you know, Black Friday and Cyber Monday somehow have something to do with giving? Like many things, I was wrong. And this has clearly taken off as as we saw in this the numbers Scott cited and I think the experience we've all had with it. And it really has become a global phenomenon and something to be to be a part of. What I will sort of caveat is the way in which you raise money and the way in which you engage with your donors matters. Right? When you see people on your board members who will ask you about this, see organizations that have had this wild success and they've raised $500,000,000 on GivingTuesday, they have a certain type of base. Right? They they they have a lot of online constituents. They have a lot of email addresses. They're engaging people, in that way all the time. But whether you have that database or you're mostly institutions or you're much smaller or whatever, you know, your circumstances are, there is a lane here for for you, and there is an opportunity to do the things we're talking about. Get more attention, get more balance. So how are we gonna do that? How do we get ready, to do that? If we kinda move from there we go. I knew we were in sync here, Scott. So the first thing is you gotta understand your goals. Right? So what are you trying to accomplish? Are you let's let's name some big brand, you know, are you the the humane society, right, which tends to have a lot of direct marketing givers? They have a broad base. Are you them? Because then that's one set of goals. Are you a large nonprofit that mostly focuses on major gifts? That's a different set of goals. Right? So you have to understand your context and how that informs your goals. A great place to start with is look at what you did last year. Now if you say, oh, but great. We didn't do anything last year. Okay. That's fine. We can work around that. But even if you did nothing last year, something probably happened at your nonprofit in this period of time. I know that while we'll talk about this specific day, we really do need a little bit of a period of time. We'll get to that in a minute. But so you have some baseline of what's happened early December, late November in your nonprofit historically, whether you've done this or not. That's kinda your baseline. Understand what you did, what the results you got, what results you got, how you could do that better, how you can improve it. Again, understand your database. Right? Examine how they're interacting with you, how they're responding. I don't know. This is will be funny in the way that this all transpired, but by 92 y in 2014, a lot of the work we did was actually picking up the phone and calling their donors and telling them, giving Tuesday is coming. Can we count on you? That feels rather antiquated, but wasn't, you know, over what, just 10 years ago. But at the same time, understand how your donors are reacting with you. Is it on email? Is it on social? Is it in the mail? Is it on the phone? Is it in person events? You have to understand that and then you can leverage Giving Tuesday accordingly. So again, understand the trends, what's happened in the past, what you need to improve on, where your audience actually is. And again, you have to sort of meet your reality. Right? Where your audience is is where they are. You can't say, you know what we should do? We'll do a big gala on Giving Tuesday. If all of your donors have never given more than $10 and, you know, do it via the net. Right? They're not gonna suddenly turn up for for a gala or an event or anything like that. So you gotta understand that context and then create those goals based on what what those two things tell you. So now we have to figure out what are we gonna say. So you can go out there and you can say, we're a great organization. You should give us money. I'm gonna bet that that's not actually, like, a really compelling message for most organizations. Right? Now the good thing here is what you wanna do is you have to work off of your script. Right? You have to work off of what do you normally say? What is your standard for, you know, to use the the sort of entire term? What is your pace for support? And then how you sort of, for lack of a better term, spin that, for Giving Tuesday. So you take your mission, you take what's compelling for donors, You sort of start to think around what is the most compelling way to talk about it right now in this moment and connected to GivingTuesday, and you get it out there. Now I will tell you because a lot of this happens online, there's a really great opportunity to use visuals, use video. You know, day and age, I remember when I started whenever we wanted to use it make a new video for fundraising, it was a 6 months, you know, $20,000 project and they come in with all this machinery and you'd have to film things. So much easier. You can pick up your phone, you can film some things. Yes. There's gradation of the quality and the professionalism. A lot of people are accustomed to seeing lots of different sort of videos. So you can do video much less expensively than you used to. Certainly, you got the, you know, we can do visuals, waiting to use AI tools to make your visuals or you have a graphic designer. Visuals are very much easier and accessible than they've ever been. And then most importantly, as in every type of fundraising, what a telescope. Right? No one connects to, I don't know, name your organization. Right? No one somebody gonna hear the the City Gospel Mission in Cincinnati, Ohio. Not to pick on your camera. Right? No one you'll you have to say more than that. You need to share the stories of this is this is how our mission has impacted this person. Right? So not even like, yeah, people want some numbers and certain x meals and we do this, we do that, but they wanna hear the story. They wanna hear, you know, the story of the person that was impacted and had their life changed by your organization, whatever it is you did. So telling stories particularly in what's gonna be a cluttered period is important. So as we go to the next slide, yeah, the other thing I'll just say about that idea of a cluttered period, there is a tendency and I've heard it with organizations that that I work with and I've thought it myself at times. It's gotten so busy. What's the point? There's so much noise. How am I gonna break foot? So put aside the fact that, you know, you have that voice from those board members I mentioned at the beginning that are like, well, we we have to be doing this. It's not coming in your email. The reality is it's busy because people are paying attention. I think of like, Black Friday. Right? So think of, yeah, that's busy. Everybody's got a sale. Or why do you think like well, a bad example would be, right, REI like closes for the day, I think. But most every other organization and store out there pushes forward into that no matter how busy it is because they know they've got people's attention. And they know that's a day that people are gonna spend money. And thanks to Henry Tim's and 92Y and maybe Tuesday and all the efforts that gone into this, this day has become like that. People are just as they expected to go shopping on Friday and go online on Monday. They're expecting to make donations on Tuesday. So you gotta be there. Now action plan. Right? This is all great ideas, Craig. Brilliant. Now what do we do? Create a detailed plan. The best time to do this was probably like a month ago. The 2nd best time to do that would be tomorrow. Right? So let's start working on it. Say it week by week between now and the end of the year. What do you wanna be saying? Who do you wanna be saying it to? And what's the call to action? What you do wanna do is really work with your marketing team. Right? You don't wanna, I don't know why you will, but I've definitely worked in shops where functions can get a little silo. But if you're going out there talking to your donors, hardcore about whatever the the the message of the stories and series of stories you want to take people through, through now and good on Tuesday. And then at the same time, I go on your Twitter feed and the marketing department is talking about something completely different, you're missing a huge opportunity. So you wanna figure out what do you wanna do. Right? What is the story? What is the target audience? We'll get a little bit into that later. Right? But like, what is this? Then you wanna get with the marketing team, understand their priorities. There are other things in the organization happening that need to be continued to do. We're not saying drown everything else out and then work together to create that calendar of when are we saying what? What events are we doing? What are we trying to get press for? What are we putting out on our Facebook page, our Twitter page, our TikTok, you know, all the things that we're doing with all the channels? What else are we emailing our constituents about? And then how do we leave this message in, but then also take all those other messages and ideally hang them off of of business. Yeah. So Yeah. One of the things, Greg, that was, that that popped in my mind too is you were talking about kind of building a compelling campaign message. I think one of the practices that I've done in the past so so you kinda understand, hey. Here's what we wanna say. Here's here's, you know, some of our goals, priorities, all of that. One exercise that can be really helpful is understanding that. Right? You have that on a on a whiteboard somewhere, on a document, but sort of start from the ground up, meaning flip it and think about the person that you actually want to communicate to and the person that you want to hear and take action from your message. And just kind of reverse engineer to say, what would provoke them? What would stir them? What would what would lead them to kinda take the action that we want based on our goals? And then, okay. Well, where where do they spend their time? Where do they like you said, how do you you know, really knowing your audience and your people. And then what message and sort of instead of, you know, going, hey, top down, I think that's really important, and you have to have that. But when you can combine that then with building that message kind of bottom up, I think that's where you can come up with something where, you know, again, like you said, there's a lot of noise. It's good noise. Right? It's good. It's really good stuff, but you're able to then really be clear and and I think cut through some of that. Yeah. Absolutely. And, the poll is up in the in the in the in the little side there. You can click on it. Just would love to get a feel for what people have done, you know, in the past just to get a sense of what we're talking about there. But yeah. Absolutely, Scott. I mean, it's it's busy for a reason, and it's become, honestly, a great gift for the nonprofit sector. Right? Like, that there's a day that people are expecting you to ask them for money. Yeah. Yeah. For me. Yeah. Hey. Like Craig said, we have a poll open, so you'll see, the poll above the chat. There's a little red dot. That means go ahead and click that. And, yeah, we just wanna know how how have you participated in Giving Tuesday in the past? Maybe a full Giving Tuesday campaign. You've had it planned out for 6 months. Maybe it's promoted it lightly, and maybe by lightly, that means couple social media posts that day. Maybe you've collaborated with other partners, other like minded organizations, or maybe it's like, hey. We haven't participated. We're kinda just jumping in. So we're gonna leave that poll up for a couple more minutes, but, please go ahead fill that out. We would love to, yeah, we'd love to to kinda hear where you're at. Also, I know we're getting a couple questions in. Just so you know, we're we're hoping to save time at the end. We'll make sure to be able to answer some of those. So keep kinda sharing those, and we will definitely, be answering those, coming up soon. So we're gonna keep going here and jump into essential elements for a successful giving Tuesday. So as you jump in, again, you have your campaigns, your messaging, all of that. Right? There's that whole piece, but you also need to make sure that you have the right tools in place, so that when the day actually comes and when people actually take that action or click that button or go to your donation page, that you've prepared well on that front as well. And so a couple things to think through, one is to make sure you have optimized and secure donation pages. So what does that mean? Right? Well, 1, the question I would encourage you to ask yourself and even propose to other people, is have you reduced friction as much as you possibly can on your donation page? K. So that is an important question. I'm gonna ask it again and say it again just so that we hear it. Have you reduced friction as much as you possibly can on your donation page? Now when I say friction, I mean anything, anything big, anything little that's gonna cause pause, with the donor. So anything that's gonna be a roadblock, a speed bump is gonna kinda hinder that process. So, for example, like redirecting people to a new page. Right? So they're on your website. They're on whether it's on, you know, their their phone, their computer, their tablet, wherever, and they hit to give to donate whatever the button says. And now it opens up a whole new browser. It goes to a whole new page that can typically, be one of the things that people wanna wait. Am I still giving to the place that I wanted to? What what kind of what's going on there? Do you have too much messaging and communication? I know sometimes it feels like we need to say everything, and we need to make sure that people understand where this money is going, why we exist, how they other ways they can get involved, and we try and pack so much on there. But the reality is it kind of creates way too much to work through and ultimately leads to an abandoned donation and also, lack of clear call to action. So is it really clear to people this is what you are doing, and and this is the action that you're taking? So those are a few things, but just ask yourself, have you reduced that friction, as much as possible? In addition to limiting limiting friction, you want to have a donation page that encourages the donor to complete the gift. So, a few examples kind of from from our platform, from our raised donors platform, one is flexible giving pages. So being able to kinda customize the experience. I know Craig mentioned earlier, and and we're gonna talk about it even, as we kinda continue of really knowing your people, knowing your audience, and knowing your supporters, your donors. But do you have a platform that allows you then to customize that experience to what resonates with them? We have a diverse group of organizations on today, and that means your people are different. So can you kinda customize that experience to resonate best with your donors? Another thing that can be really helpful is a progress bar showing kinda where you're at in a campaign. It could be giving Tuesday specific. It could be a a larger initiative that you have, but that's something just psychologically that helps people see there's progress to a goal, and I get to be a part of that progress. And because of my gift, we are now closer that little red thermometer or that progress bar, whatever it is, is moving closer to where we want it to be. Also the ability to designate gifts to a certain project initiative and to really help people understand this is where your money is going to. This is where your donation is going to, the effect that they're having, as well as custom or smart gift arrays that are showing the right amounts for the right people, in the right time. So those are a few things when you think about your platform, to ensure, that you're customizing things, but you're really being able to limit that friction. And really when you pair that, then with campaign management, I know in Virtuous that we have, you're able to really both manage the camp campaign, manage the communication, but also reduce that friction, for people as they as they are, donating. And so we're gonna kinda keep going on this, the essential elements for a successful giving Tuesday, but kinda talk about, a little bit of some of the other tools that we have. I'm gonna toss this to Craig here as he he keeps going. Yeah. And I really can't stress that enough, the, like, lack of friction in your online platform and, just to sort of, like, drive that home for folks where I most often think about it. I mean, this day and age, we all do so much shopping online. Right? Like, I don't know about you, but, like, I get enraged if it doesn't take Apple Pay. Right? Like, all of a sudden, I'm like, oh, what? Are you kidding me? I've got insurance. I mean, just think of that experience as a shopper. You're trying to make it as easy as possible. You don't need to maybe take Apple Pay, but, like, you need to make it as easy as possible. And, this great platform is virtuous. You've got great tools for it. So, by all means, you should definitely know. Alright. As we think of the elements that make this successful, right, one is this idea of consistency. You know, we've mentioned this earlier, getting sort of one voice, one thing. I'll try and mute them some other questions, that you asked them to see if we can answer them as we've talked about this. Right? So like there's a question that we received around, like, when do you start? When does 2 hour? Right? So, I agree. And it was funny. I just got a couple of solicitation emails as we were sitting here. I was like, oh, wouldn't it be perfect if one of them referenced gigging Tuesday? They didn't Yeah. Me, it would be too rare. That's true. But probably once you get into November, if you've got a real sophisticated sort of approach and idea, I think you can launch then. The latest I would launch is sort of that, like, week before Thanksgiving. But I would I I'd I'd be comfortable, you know, November 1st if you told me that's where you wanted to start hearing your messaging. Maybe you drop a few hints in October, something like that. I'd totally get to that. But again, that consistency is what really is important. The next opportunity is really segmentation. This is also getting easier and easier. It used to be like, yeah. We can segment our donors. They're the ones I keep in this drawer, and then there's the ones I keep in that drawer. Right? That's the segmentation. Now, you know, whatever platform you're on, you should be able to sort of figure out. You can segment by time of year people give. You can segment by how they give. Right? Who generally comes through the mail versus online versus stock transfer. Certainly amounts, that's the way we've always thought about donors. Though I would encourage you not to think of a single gift amount, but if you will have a gift, right? Like over a 12 month period. And also I would encourage you not to segment based on calendar year giving necessarily. I do think a lot of people are prompted to make action by year end whether they realize it or not or it's just out of habit, but also understand, like and you probably had this experience if you've fundraised for for very long. Like, people think they already gave to you this year. Right? So, like, people aren't always even cognizant of what year they're making gifts in. So I would segment gift total cumulative gift total on a 12 month period. Not a that doesn't have to accumulate you know, that doesn't have to match to account. But you just could segment that way. You could segment by their original source. Right? How do they originally come to us? Were they an alumni of our program? There's all sorts of ways. And I think there's as you do that segmentation, it changes the type of communication. It certainly could change the level of the ask. It could certainly change if you're sophisticated enough, the type of story that they're hearing. Right? Let them hear the story that is most resonant to them. Again, it can change the method or the channel by which you contact them. What else would it it it can really it can impact to the sort of personalization. Now you would say, if I have the technology to personalize to everyone, why not? Yes. But and this I'll use this email that I just got. It was from an organization I haven't given to in years, and I think I gave them, like, a 100 bucks, you know, like, 5 years ago. The email was highly custom, which I know is total BS. Right? Like, it wasn't actually custom. I think it's just a program and they insert Craig and it's fine. But if you really wanna, like, have a custom conversation with someone, you've gotta take it just that little bit further. Right? So, as you do that segmentation, it allows you to do that. And then, of course, you wanna have engaging material as opposed to unengaged material. Right? Everyone thinks their material is engaging, but really be thoughtful about that. Right? Just because you like the way you talk about it or you like the way that that this engages you, doesn't mean someone else will. I always like to, she doesn't always like to participate, but I like to try and test things like this on my wife. She is generally apathetic about what I do for a living, so she has no bias about, you know, any of this. And I'd be like, hey. Would you read this? Would you respond to this? If I said this, how would you react? So test that on other people in your life that aren't as close to it. Yeah. But, again, there are tricks, and we'll get into a little bit of of, you know, like, how do you make it fun every day of aging, but you absolutely have to. Yeah. Yeah. That that's I I think bringing in people too who who aren't in it every day who can, like, kinda give you some of that perspective, I think is so helpful because sometimes you're in it, and it's like, well, this this email is better than the last one I wrote or, you know, it but having fresh perspective like that's so important. One thing too I wanted to touch on, you mentioned video, earlier, and I think that the one thing I've I've learned about video, especially in campaigns and marketing, like, the the quality of the video is is usually not near as important as the content of the video and the story that you're telling. And we've seen this. Right? I mean, we're so accustomed to social media, and social media is so video heavy today that the the quality of the video usually is not what people are, you know, listening to, watching to, getting getting drawn in by, but it's the content and the story. So just some encouragement for those of you who feel like I don't have a video team. I don't I can't do this production, all that stuff. If you if you have one of these, cell phone, not necessarily an iPhone, it will make it a little bit easier. I am biased. But regardless, then you have everything that you need to kinda create, that content. Craig, I'd love if we could. We we do have some questions, and I wanna make sure that we don't miss some kind of before we go, on further. But one one question from Josh, I love to toss this to you. How do you avoid communicating so much for Giving Tuesday that you miss out on the last week, the the day of, day of your giving? Yeah. So the ideal thing, and I'll just be sort of candid with you, and I think it's one of the reasons that it's placed where it is, at the beginning of December is, wouldn't it be great if you can move as many of those people that usually give at the last minute to sort of move to give earlier? So I think part of what you wanna do, Josh, is, like, not worry so much about that. Try and focus on, like, how many people can we get to give by this period of time, then you should have some sort of cleanup campaign that people haven't given yet or, you know, live on, side on, some generic messaging that goes out, then, you know, give it a week break and then sort of hit those last couple of weeks, with a sort of slightly different message. But I think that's the main thing is you differentiate the message and you segment it a little bit differently, and that and you give it a couple of days, a week break. And I think that's how you sort of can can differentiate that. But in a perfect world, do your campaign well enough that you're gonna get the people to get earlier. Because while I know, we all do see those end of year gifts, and that is still a thing. It's not as much of a thing as we all like to think it is. Right? Like, I mean, that this whole period for now at the end of the year is high and, yes, should you kinda hit that, like, big surge at the end of the year. But I've often thought that's as much much because we condition people for that behavior. Right? Like, we're messaging them like, oh, it's GRN. Hurry up and give. I I I do think people give for tax purposes. I'm not naive enough to think that, but very few of us itemize in a way in which, like, we're on December 27th thinking, oh my goodness. I still need to get away 500 more dollars. Right? Like so it's not, I think what you wanna do is change behavior as much as you can to get that a bit earlier, then take a little bit of a pause, differentiate your message and your segments to make sure you clean up anything you didn't catch by giving Tuesday. But they're not you don't need to think of 1 cannibalizing the other. If it does, great, you gotta think of it earlier. Another question, Craig, that was was asked by, Jonathan. We have competing fundraising events between GivingTuesday on December 3rd and Colorado Gives Day on, December 10th, I think it was he mentioned. Promoted both, but think that it's confusing. So any advice on kinda how to think about that when you have those 2 events, kinda close to each other? Yeah. I was thinking about this earlier too when I was using my broad sort of, like, you know, Black Friday, Cyber Monday examples of, like, you know, why does Amazon also have those Prime days. Right? They're doing well. They pick days when they typically been slow, so they're trying to spike their sales. But they are also trying to, a little bit, have their cake and eat it too. Right? They'll participate in the big thing, but then they're also trying to have their separate day, which is a little bit the point of giving days. Right? Whether it's the, you know, anniversary of the founding of your college and that becomes a giving day or the day day 1 of NCAA or it happens to be, you know, giving Colorado on on on Colorado Gives Day on December 10th. No one asked my opinion, but it probably I wouldn't have had Colorado Gives Day beyond December 10th. I would have tried to keep them a little bit more separate. That's just me. Right? They don't do Prime Day on December 10th. But, that being said, it's there. I think you just try and capture both things. My guess is they landed it there in an effort to sort of capture the momentum of GivingTuesday, but allow it to stand on its own. So I think you what I would do is I would try and create 1 campaign, like, one campaign total and one sort of message total that's saying, like, look at these great options to give for Giving Tuesday and Colorado gifts. Like, I would almost promote them simultaneously in all my messaging together. That's probably what I would do. Yeah. I would say I would say I wouldn't move out of Colorado. I like Colorado. I'm trying to get my son to go to school there. So I was like, maybe you should just go somewhere else. No. Stay there. I would just you have to move it altogether. Yeah. I think that's really smart. And like we talked about, like, you know, you can use Giving Tuesday as a springboard for end of year, but, I mean, it sounds like in this case to use it for springboard into Colorado Gives Day and just sort of bring bring those together. I think that's I think it's really smart. Alright. We do have more questions coming in, but we wanna answer more later. We wanna get through some more of this content. And so, we're gonna keep going and then hopefully have some time to answer these questions. So, we do have another poll that just opened up, and so would love to you would love for you to, again, click that poll tab with the red dot that you see, because we wanna know kinda what has been the biggest challenge that your organization has faced, on Giving Tuesday. So is it engaging donors? Is it securing matching gifts? Is it kinda standing out among other organizations, causes, trying to help your message, your campaign be heard? Maybe it's a lack of resources and support. So things like marketing, outreach tools, fundraising platforms, like we talked about, online giving platforms that can really do what you need it to do, volunteer coordination, all of that. So we have that poll up. We're gonna leave that up for another couple minutes, but we'd just love to hear your thoughts, get to know where you're at, because, again, that helps us then in creating resources, and then helping, you know, in the things that that really you need help with. So, we're gonna keep going. We're on to number 4. I think our pace is good here. We're gonna have some q and a time. We're gonna talk about some ideas and strategies, to implement, and I'm gonna toss this, one over to Craig as we continue. Yeah. Sure. And I just, round out. Looks like Josh had a follow-up question, you know, an aside here of, like, end of year and segmenting it. And would you ask the same people again? I think it depends, and I would focus there on the segmentation. Like, if if someone gave me $5,000 for Giving Tuesday and that was their biggest gift they ever gave us, I wouldn't go back a week later and ask them again. If they gave me $10, I probably would. Right? So I think that's a big it depends answer there. Josh will hope that helps. Alright. Couple of sort of ideas. You see this a lot, this idea of matches. Right? Particularly around getting Tuesday. And if I'm if I remember back to 2014 again when this was all kinda starting and we were at 92 y, we were working a match. That's why I was on all those phone calls. Oh, we've got this match. We've gotta unlock it. Personally, I like matches. I've always kinda felt like my reaction was like, well, if you wanna give them the money, just give them the money. What does it have to do with me? But they work. Donors respond to it. If someone say, all you gotta do is look at your text messages. Whatever your political affiliation, my guess is you've been challenged to a 100 matches to give in the past 6 months. Right? And if there's anything that sort of political fundraising does better than philanthropic fundraising, it's understanding that sort of like, immediate behavior, and that sort of low dollar sort of catch. So trust me, if they're doing it, it works. And we've all seen it. It works. So I absolutely would try and get a match, to say, you know, we wanna raise a $100,000 on Giving Tuesday. The first $25,000 is matched, 50¢ on, you know, whatever it is. It works. Now that's some of the work that hopefully you've already done, right? Because you've got to line up that donor. And there's a tendency to just go to, you know, oh, Lauren always gives us $10. Let's just ask her if we could use it as the match. Sure. But wouldn't it be better if you found a new donor who was super excited to bring people to the table or probably not a new donor, but a donor who gives you a new additional gift to be the match. So try and do it the right way. Spend the time, the donors are out there. And that'll sort of increase your yield. Other things, games and polls. Right? So I've seen organizations do, you know, help us rename our mascot, you know, make a gift and get a vote for, you know, the whatever what what we're doing. Help us, you know, understand, you know, we've got these three things we wanna work on next year. When you give your gifts, help us, you know, give in give input or vote on the thing. Try and make it interactive. I'm not super creative like that, but there are people that there that are. Right? But this is a great way to engage your whole staff, right? Sort of crowdsource amongst the staff like, hey, what are some things that would engage you that we can do relatively simply throughout this campaign that'll get people involved? Ask people their opinion, anything like that. And then, you know, kind of a a hallmark of most good fundraising, tie the dollars to output. Right? Say for every $100 we're gonna do x, for every $50 we can do y. People really understand that. Right? You look at a nonprofit like, we'll pick up like a cherry water. Right? Like it's very we'll do a well for this much money. You send us this gift, a well is gonna get built. Anytime you can do that, people respond to me like, they don't have it as much as they used to, but sliders go up. You have the the commercials on TV all the time. Right? So, you know, cup of coffee a day, send the money. But it was like, this is what it was gonna do. The more precise you can get with that outcome limit. Yeah. Yeah. I I think one thing too, that that I think is sometimes, again, depending on your staff, depending on the resources that you have, you might feel like, how do we get how do we get our voice heard? And I think especially when you think about community, when you think about your existing supporters and donors, thinking about okay. Instead of how can we amplify our message ourselves, maybe how can we equip those people who are already passionate about what we're doing, already supporting us to be megaphones for us? So instead of kind of one voice, like, what would it look like to have, you know, 10 or a 100 or a 1000 voices who are helping on that day. So almost like an organic social campaign or say, hey. Do you wanna help this Giving Tuesday? Maybe you can't give, but you can help somebody that you know, who might be passionate as well to give. I think that's something that can be effective and and sort of, again, multiply the the time and the energy that's involved. Absolutely. Right. Anything you can do to activate your audience? Right? Like, I've even seen challenges of, like, you know, introduce us to 5 friends, forward this email. I mean, that that's a little bit like the like, forward this email to 10 people and, well, good luck for life. But, like, you know, forward this email to 3 people. You know? Any any of those types of things. I think you're gonna be able to wanna help. Right? People are engaged with you, believing. They wanna do something for you even if it's not good. Absolutely. And, hey, maybe try to forward this email, and you have good luck with the rest of your I mean, I don't know. You know? Experiment. We'll see. Well, hey. We wanna keep going with, ideas, strategies to implement, but just talk about some tools that will help, with Giving Tuesday. Again, we talked about already an online giving platform. I'm assuming most have that. The question I think you should ask yourself, though, is do you have the right one? Do you have the one that meets your needs? And and some of this too, like, we understand the timing. Right? Like, you're probably not changing your giving platform, your CRM, certainly by Giving Tuesday or by the end of the year. Like, that's not happening. But one of the things that you can kind of do is take notes and understand as you're going, hey. This is a roadblock we ran into, or this is something that we can't do. Maybe we need to start to think about this kind of for next year. So, you know, a platform, for instance, like raised donors that gives you that power, flexibility, just to create simple, frictionless donor experiences. Think about your CRM. Do you have a responsive CRM? What do I mean by that? I mean, do you have something that can, reach out, create these nurture campaigns and automation, so that you can do truly personalized outreach and communication? Like Craig said, not just insert donor's name here, but understanding this is this is who this person is. This is their lifetime giving. This is how long they've been supporting us, when their last gift was, and understanding the that information and then automate and create the right communication at the right time to the right, people. And especially think about what you're using now and creating something for Giving Tuesday that follows up, a series of communication automation that follows up to not only thank them, but then to bridge that gap into end of year giving. I think that can be something powerful or, into another day like Colorado's give day or whatever you might have, coming up. And then, again, asking yourself that question, how do we use our technology, as a launching point for end of year? Whether that be your CRM, your email marketing, you know, we're gonna jump into social media here. But, again, as you go through this and you're kinda thinking about your tools, my my question for you is if your software isn't helping you listen to your donors, so, like, really truly hear them, understand them, who they are, where they're at, connect with them in a way that's super meaningful and personal. And, again, I define that a little bit, not just, oh, we know your name, but but we know who you are, how you support us when you started, you know, a software that can suggest the next steps. So to say, this is who you are, but this is where we we think is is right for you to kind of take the next step in getting connected with us. Then, ultimately, continuing to learn along the way and and refine that process. If if you're not able to, it might be time to explore a platform. Obviously, I am biased, but I think Virtuis is a great place, to start to see if you need a tool that can kinda help because this is not the last Giving Tuesday that your organization is going to do. You're gonna have more campaigns next year. And so just be thinking about that as you go through. And then finally, as you start to use social media on Giving Tuesday, one thing I would say is think about and really do some research around where your people spend their time on social media. Not everybody's the same. Not everybody spends all their time on one channel, one platform. And sometimes you can spend too many resources to kind of be everywhere instead of getting really focused and specific, on one channel, whether it's LinkedIn or Instagram or Facebook or or x slash Twitter or whatever it is. So I think thinking through that ahead of time, can be a really helpful way to then put those time and resources, you know, to it to its best use. And I think there's some more on this point on on CRM. Right? Like, I remember the first time I ever got an organization on doing good CRM long time ago. But, like, the very first thing to unlock was an ability to better manage your teams. Right? Understand what they were doing, see data in a way to understand when gifts are coming, who was having meetings, who was doing that was fantastic. This new iteration, what Scott's talking about, like, the next sort of wave of what serums can really do for you is instead of listening to your donors. Right? So, like, for years, it's helped us manage our staff. Now I think the real power is starting to come to the forefront of, like, oh, wow. We're gonna make it understand our donors better, not just what we're doing. So I cannot agree with the virtuous, that's good option. The virtuous is certainly a great one. Yeah. Well, we're gonna jump into some tips and best practices. Just, again, some few thoughts here that we have, before we jump into our Q and A. And so the first one is it's not just one day. Craig, will you kind of expound a little bit on the fact that Giving Tuesday is not just one day? Yeah. Absolutely. And I think somebody had a question here too. Like, the accountant gives just one day or the other days. And, yeah, at this point, it's become a season. Right? So, yes, you should count for whatever you decide counts to whenever you decide ends, whether that's, you know, 2 days later, of course, it's Colorado Gives Day or it's that day. But yes, you can determine the period by which you wanna measure and it should certainly not just be one for sure. Even like, again, to depart on the Black Friday thing, those sales start like by the Monday before you can start getting some deals. So you can make the time period whatever you want it to be, and it behooves you to make it more than this one, though. Yeah. Yeah. The second is develop a Giving Tuesday specific follow-up plan. So have you thought about here's again, like, you build this campaign, you have this action you want people to take. Like, have you thought about what's next then? Because I know a lot of energy can be put into building the campaign, calling people to action, but have you thought about then what happens? How do you nurture that person? How do you thank them the right way? How do you give them next steps? And how, like, how might they be interested in participating further? Because, again, that might be somebody's introduction, first donation. That doesn't mean that they're not gonna then turn into a recurring giver or somebody who shows up to volunteer or an advocate for you on social media and that sort of thing. So think about a specific plan for people who take that action and and start to kind of formulate that and design that. Yeah. The thing that goes so there was a question as well around, you know, how do you steward new first time donors that come in on getting Tuesday and and this is exactly it. It's like, what is your plan? And in many ways, it's not that different than your regular stewardship involvement. Like, if you generally call donors that give more than $500, all the donors that gave more than $500. Right? Like and by the way, that is an amazing thing and important thing and extremely effective thing to do. Pick a level and just make those calls. You never get anybody on the phone. That's perfect. Then you don't have to talk to them. You leave them a voice mail. They get it whenever they get it. And they're like, oh, that was really nice they thought about. Right? So you need to do those types of things. But whatever your plan is, know what it is. Don't wake up on Wednesday, December 4th and be like, great. Now what do you wanna do? Right? Like design that now and know 2 days after they're gonna get this, 3 days after they're gonna get that, the end of the year they're gonna get whatever. Have that all planned out for sure. At this point of celebrating, I haven't really thought this much about this time in 2014 while we were working on this. But, now that I have, I remember that day, they had a number of celebrations. So I went and covered one for the client, and I went and they sort of and I'm still, like, talked to 2 people I met at that party. Right? So whatever celebrate looks like for you, whether it's with the staff, whether it's something you invite donors into, whether it's just something you announce and share about on your socials and on your website, like, whatever it is, do it. People wanna know that we won and, you know, this is great. And, again, have it be part of your plan. Yeah. Yeah. I would say too, like, celebrate, celebrate externally and celebrate internally. I think, you know, Craig, you mentioned sort of some of the the questions from the board around like, hey. I see see this happening, elsewhere. What are we doing? I think some of that proactive celebration. Hey. Here's what we planned. Here's what we pulled off. Here's the here's what we did with your team, with your board, but just just having that because, again, it's so easy. Right? We're done with this. We gotta move on to the next one. End of year is here. There's so much to do. But just take that time just to celebrate internally as well to to help, you know, with with that morale. Number 4 evaluate it. Right? Like, you know, we said at the beginning, understand what happened last year, whatever you did to to learn from it. Do that, you know, in December or January at the latest. You know? Don't don't wait to do that until next, you know, August when you decide anything like it'll be Tuesday again. Understand what worked. Understand what emails got opened. Understand what social messages got liked. Understand what mailers got responded to. Understand what phone calls got answered. Right? Like you can do it while it's fresh. Yeah. It will be my it will be my recommendation. Yeah. That's really good. Even too, if if you can't execute a full donor campaign, a matching gift kit, like, even just a thank you campaign to your donors who are again, so that there's that activity, your front of mind. Yeah. I think that that could be really powerful. Alright. We we've officially saved some time for q and a, which is awesome. And so we want, we want to answer I think there was one outstanding question, from Natalie. Should you tell the donor that a gift, any day between now December 3rd counts as a giving Tuesday gift? That's a good question. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. You know, again, I mean, you can define what you want that period to be, but you should define a period, and it should be more than just one day. And, you know, like any campaign, you could get a little cute, count some things from the week before we've decided that or or not. But yeah, I would run it through the day. Might even run it through the next day. Right? Because you're gonna be getting gifts all the way through through the evening. So you don't wanna have to say, let's sit here and wait till midnight to announce what we raised. Like, you know, you can wait till mid afternoon the next day to say, hey. This is fantastic if you raised x y z, and we can count the things that came in the next morning too. Yeah. That's great. I believe we answered most of them. Yeah. I'm kinda skipping through them. I don't see any that we didn't get to either directly or kinda that we talked about. Yeah. Let's see here. If we didn't, feel free to post your your question in the chat. Did Craig, did we answer this one from Jessica? Does the match have to be new money, or can it be existing donor that you asked to use their gift for the match? It's better if it's new money because new money money is always better. But, you know, yes, it's very common to go to someone. I mean, we've seen it whether it's your auction at your gala or your funding need or whatever. You get your direct mail matches. Often, we do end up going to dealers and say, Scott, you're gonna get tender in any way. Can you use it as your as as a match? But I would try and use it to motivate a new gift probably from an existing donor. Right? Like, you're not gonna probably get someone off the street to do this, but go to your loyal people and say, you really wanna use do this to motivate people. Would you give, like, contribute to it? Serving as that match? I also find it does help if the person is willing to be named as the match. Like, when there's an anonymous match, that's something we really like, really? You know? So, like, if you can name the person better, a lot of people aren't comfortable with that, so you may have to make anonymous. But if it's new, that's that's something. Yeah. We got an another one from Cole. It said if you're running, your Giving Tuesday campaign for a few days, would you send communication to your donors each day? It depends how long you're doing. If you're doing it for a 3 or 4 day campaign, I would. If you're doing it as Bev is asking if she could start today, I probably wouldn't do it every day. And Bev, I probably wouldn't start today. Like I said, sometime after November 1st, I think you can kind of start using this messaging and this approach if you want. But I don't know that I get much early. You know, you wanna be kind of on the front end, but you don't wanna be, like, the first person. Right? Yeah. There are a couple questions just, hey. Can I get this, PowerPoint or the this deck? Can I get a recording? Yes. We'll be sending all this out to everyone here. Anyone that that might have missed this, we'll we'll definitely, get this to you. But we do have another poll that's opening up here. And so, yeah, we we'd love for you, to to check this one out if you can. Craig, Yeah. If you just wanna kinda invite people, kind of remind them how they can kind of engage with our group from here, that'd be great. Yeah. We would, we'd love everybody to vote yes on proposition or group. Yeah. No. Yeah. We we do we also host the services all around the business plan that we from your standard kind of campaign consulting, development planning, strategic planning, do some outsource fundraising work, events. We do outsource HR work. We do recruiting. So, you know, you can check out our website or group.com. You can, you know, kind of Google us, check us out on LinkedIn, Twitter, we have an Instagram page. Not sure if that'll get you all the information we need. You can kind of take a picture here. I'll jump into our website. But yeah, we'd love to hear from you. If we can be helpful, we'd love to, But always just a year to meet and connect with other leaders, in the sector. And, I find they always learn from each other, so I'm I'm having a chat with anybody who's interested. That's awesome. We did just get one more question I wanna ask, because I I think this is this is, yeah, I think it's it's helpful, just to kinda think through. But how do I persuade supporters that Giving Tuesday is a good idea to give when they're expected to give to missionary support, in December? So sort of that, they already have kind of this big call coming up. How do I kinda still do Giving Tuesday? That comes a little bit to knowing your audience. Right? And if that truly is your audience and you know that they're you know, that's where their focus is gonna be, maybe your messaging around is around, like, giving Tuesday is about giving time and you sort of talk about whether they can volunteer or giving Tuesday is about giving the gift of your network to the organization and use it to invite and to to introduce us to new people. Yeah. There is a point at which this might not be right for your audience. I think, you know, it's we're all in the same church and then then, yeah, our big focus to give in December. Fine. I get that. So you can adjust. It doesn't have to be giving dollars. That's what we talk about because we're fundraisers and fundraising software people, but, like, it can be other types of gifts for sure. Yeah. Yeah. I think too maybe it's an opportunity to leverage your audience. So you're gonna ask them to give in December. So maybe the ask is, hey. You know, support us in this way and and helping kind of, the work that that you're doing personally or that your organization is doing to help more people kinda gain awareness, I think that, you know, you can do as well. So, I know Craig mentioned org group and and and, kinda some ways to kinda take the next steps. I know we would love to do the same here at Virtuous. And so, as we've talked about some of the ways to use software, if you felt like, yeah, we're we're not really, able to do that and we'd like to, our team would love to connect with you. So you can go ahead and scan that QR code. You can also click the get a demo button or schedule a demo that you kinda see up above the screen here. That'll go to our team, somebody will reach out. Even if it's just a conversation, honestly, to look at your technology and to help you understand, here's what you can do, and here's, some of the things that are possible because I know sometimes we get stuck in our our this is how we've done it always. This is how we're always gonna do it. And sometimes it can just be helpful to see that there's actually a better way, and there's some tools out there that are built to really help you, as a responsive fundraiser. So go ahead and scan a QR code, click schedule a demo. We would love to connect with you and just wanna thank everybody for being here. We really hope that it's been helpful. Again, the recording will be sent out so you can get this to watch again if you just wanna hear Craig and I's voices, speaking to you. No problem at all. We'll send the deck out as well, but we are wishing you just a really successful giving Tuesday this year, springboard into end of year, and really hope that, yeah, that that you accomplish everything that you're setting out to do. So thank you so much, for being with us, and, we'll see you next time. Yeah. Thanks, everybody. Bye.