58 MINS
Transform your fundraising events
Hear how DonorPerfect clients have used Qgiv and Givecloud to help transform their fundraising events by generating more donations.
Categories: Expert Webcast
Transform your fundraising events Transcript
Print TranscriptAll right,
it looks like our stream has started, we’re getting a pretty full room. So that’s great to see for our topic today. Let me just give it a few more seconds here to make sure that everyone is Read More
All right,
it looks like our stream has started, we’re getting a pretty full room. So that’s great to see for our topic today. Let me just give it a few more seconds here to make sure that everyone is synched up. And we’ll do a little bit of an intro. We are super happy to have everyone here to talk about successful virtual fundraising. It’s certainly been a challenge over this past year. And I just want to thank all of you for being a part of this. I think, you know, one of the sessions when you’ve got a bit of the q&a, and we can see some of the interaction from the group will all help us for the veteran, some of this uncharted territory as we went through COVID. And we had lots of virtual experiences, then everybody starts talking about hybrid. And now we’re still in a state of trying to understand what the best technique may be for, for virtual or by event type, and, and fundraising techniques. So in this session, we’re going to cover those challenges with virtual fundraising as well as the transformative fundraising methods, methods that proved super effective during the pandemic, as well as how to use those techniques and what kind of role they’re going to play in the future. This session is actually going to be split into 230 minute topics. My name is Darrell Moser, I’m the Business Development Manager for DonorPerfect and I work with all of our partner products. And we’ve brought forward a couple of partner tools that have had some exceptional responses over this past year in helping our nonprofits to fundraise. The first is focused on the virtual event experiences of Big Brothers and Big Sisters of Utah. It’s covered by Event Manager Christy Curtis and they do their use of the cue get platform. And then 30 minutes in we will cover the humane Animal Welfare Society of Waukesha, Wisconsin, and the variety of fundraising tools that they use that were effective to remote and distanced donor community. So joining us today from Q good we have Kimberly Fung, who is the channel marketing manager. Kim is a seasoned marketing and sales professional having worked extensively in various industries such as financial entertainments, solar employment, franchising, and most importantly, nonprofit in her free time. She is on the tennis court, Pilates studio and being a dog mom to a rescue puppies. Together with Kimberly from Q give. We will also have Brendan Smith, who’s available to do some additional q&a. But at this time, Kimberly, I believe you can take it away. Well,
thank you so much, Darrell. Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining our session today. Before we do get started, we want to say how honored we are to be a sponsor of this event and a long standing technology partner with DonorPerfect. So who are we? We’re que give and we provide nonprofits like you with a platform of online fundraising solutions to help you raise more money in support of your mission. We’re here to help you in your fundraising journey every step of the way, and are very grateful again to be part of the event. So we do appreciate you taking time from your busy schedules. As Doyle has said my name is Kimberly funk and I am part of the queue give team and I am joined by my colleague Brendan Smith. And together we are here to share some great reasons to keep a virtual fundraising event on your calendar. As part of the community theme of the conference, we are sharing one of our nonprofit friends, Big Brothers Big Sisters of Utah’s story, and how they made the jump to a virtual events. So when you go camping, what do you take a tarp a poncho, maybe just in case it rains, a first aid kit in case someone hurts themselves extra socks in case yours get wet, spare batteries for your flashlight. You kind of get the picture you don’t want to get rained on hurt left in the dark, but you do want to be prepared to navigate the unknown. And so nothing drove home the importance of preparing for the unknown quite late 2020. In early 2020 COVID-19 made its way into the United States and all at once nonprofits had to rethink their fundraising strategies. fundraising events were cancelled or moved online. Facilities closed as lockdown measures were put in place staff adjusted to working from home all the while while they work to meet our community’s needs under these difficult circumstances. So that’s why we surveyed nonprofits and donors to learn how each group responded to the events in 2020. This gave us a bird’s eye view into nonprofits fears and expectations, their strategies and ideas and how donors supported their favorite nonprofits and causes. And the result was our report navigating the unknown 2020 Finding the future proof of your fundraising. So nonprofits added virtual fundraising events to their calendars and explored other ways of getting donors engaged. And even now as we’re hopefully getting back to normal, virtual and hybrid events should should continue to be an important part of your fundraising strategy, as donors are showing that they do want to participate remotely. So your nonprofits donor base is unique. And the combination of fundraising tools you’ve used in the past is absolutely different than what you’re using today, and absolutely will most likely be very different than what you may use in the future. So more than half of the nonprofits surveyed said they offered new giving options to their donors, so fundraisers responded with creativity and the Internet lit up with creative virtual fundraising events. More than half of the nonprofits moved their events to a digital format. So virtual and hybrid events will continue to feature heavily in the nonprofit fundraising calendars going forward. Almost 70% of nonprofits plan on incorporating virtual participation options in their event schedules. Whether they’re running hybrid virtual only, or a mix of virtual and inperson. Nonprofits are focusing on offering virtual participation options to their supporters. And why not, I mean, virtual events are a great option. During times of difficulty, they keep donors safe. They make events more widely accessible to people in a variety of circumstances. And they’re often associated with lower overhead costs. So, relationships play an essential role in the success of any organization, especially those in the nonprofit sector. Whether it’s relationships within your organization, external partners, donors, clients, volunteers, success is dependent on the support from others. We love learning more about what our clients do, what they’re passionate about, and how we can make their jobs easier. And as Darryl had mentioned, one of our clients, Big Brothers Big Sisters of Utah inspired us with what they’ve been able to do to make a difference in the world and we are absolutely happy to help them. Well, going from in person to virtual can be a jarring experience. It can also be smooth and seamless with the right tools and preparation. And Big Brothers Big Sisters, Utah started off with their bowl for kids sake 2020 event as scheduled. They planned a bowling event every Saturday for the month of April. But due to the pandemic, they realized they wouldn’t be able to hold their event as planned and they needed to do something. So they pivoted to a virtual do something for kids sake. It was a four month hybrid event with supporters doing any kind of activity. It could be hiking, biking, knitting, singing, you name it. Even napping if you believe that. So you name it, they did it all to the support the organization and the valuable work that they do. You may be curious to know how their 2021 event went. They did go back to in person and they didn’t make it a two month bowling event reaching 88% of a $55,000 goal. And they saw about 72, registrants 81 teams and 224 donors. So when you look at 2020 and compare it to 2021, it appears that they actually had higher engagement with the virtual format. So given that success with this peer to peer event, they did decide to go ahead and also try and host a 2020 annual auction virtually. So each fall, Big Brothers Big Sisters of Utah hosts what they call chef and child. But in 2020, they pivoted their annual gala to an online virtual event called a magical night in they opted to make the event free for all attendees and they had a creative and yummy option for attendees upgrading their experience by purchasing purchasing a VIP interactive basket or an in home chef experience for that added touch of magic. Some highlights they livestream their event on Facebook Live, they made sure to showcase some of the unique auction items. Like shown here there’s a custom mural or a trip to St. Thomas. They told their story by showcasing video footage of littles and bigs in action and how the Big Brothers and Big Sisters of Utah had changed their lives, reminding the supporters that of the participation. And interestingly, they surpassed their goal. So sometimes seeing is believing so we asked our friend Christy Curtis, Event Manager at Big Brothers Big Sisters of Utah to share a bit about their switch to virtual fundraising with us. And Darrell, if you would please
Okay, we’re just gonna queue up the media here. And I’m just double checking with my tech Ryan, I’m not sure if you’re actually able to go ahead and add that to the stream
all right, he queuing for the video appears to just not want to jump in there. Let me make a few adjustments here
Ryan, let us know if you’re able to get that thing going on go explore a possible option here
all right, I’m thinking what we might want to do is, let’s see if we can get this little bit functional, but to not consume the time of the people that are in our room at this point. Kim, if you could maybe just touch on, you did definitely hit on some of the points as far as what the Big Brothers and Big Sisters was able to to achieve with the virtual events. If you could maybe just give it some, some bits and pieces of closure while we work on seeing if we can cue this up?
Absolutely. Christie, who wasn’t able to join us live today had been kind enough to record with us. And you know, we asked her a couple key questions. Really, you know, what what the jumped a virtual was about how it how did it go? Will they use it going forward? The auction event just so you know, ended up being the second highest grossing event that they’ve ever had. So for a first time virtual event event that was you know, very impressive. And Christie also shared that she was pretty much a skeptic, she was not one in the organization to have opted to go virtual or hybrid. And then, you know, once the team, their Big Brothers, Big Sisters, Utah started talking, they really started thinking, you know, going virtual is the only way that they could have control. It’s, it sounds like I’m hearing her voice. Do you want me to keep going, Darrell?
I think we’re gonna just see what we can queue up here.
She’s gonna say it so much better than I can.
Yeah. All right. Let me see if I can actually get my tab here going. Hey, Ryan, would you be able to see what we’re doing here? Give me the ability to share my screen
Hey, I’m sorry. Did you did you send the request? I can. I can have you share your screen,
Darryl? Yeah, it’s actually just grayed out for the present now button
because I’ve got Kimberly screen still sitting here
it may because Kimberly’s is queued up in here. It may only allow me to share hers.
Gotcha. Kimberly, I’m curious if you can go ahead and grab the tab and show the YouTube via YouTube.
Well, let’s let’s see. Hopefully you can hear it
Yeah, I was thinking you might want to put the link in a separate tab in your browser that the okay
um, I at this point, I let me just recap the video and hopefully maybe you can send out a copy of it to everyone. That I think the the big things and I did include a recap here is that the Utah the Big Brothers Big Sisters, Utah team did really a great job of being creative and innovative. They use technology to pivot very quickly, and they saved two popular events, the peer to peer and the auction, popular and prosperous from being canceled. So they made the jump to hybrid and vert Rule, they moved to an open virtual registration format. And with a few small tweaks, they created two very inclusive events that garnered more support. And as I was sharing, unfortunately, you’re not going to hear it from her, but their auction was the second highest fundraiser in the history of the organization. So successfully engaging their supporters, they included having a big and a little match share their personal story. They utilize their database, they made sure to do outreach, personal outreach and phone calls. to previous years supporters asking for participation be involved supporters by sharing their funding need, so they definitely used our thermometers, and they had an overall event thermometer and a fund and the thermometer with the goals and status and live streams. And they really found that that helps motivate folks in the end. So in summary, what I really wanted to kind of cover is that virtual and hybrid events have proven to be great additions to the calendar. And for nonprofits, that means more opportunities to fundraise without breaking the bank or a sweat. virtual events have proven flexible, cost effective and easily planned versus their in person counterpart. And even though people are looking forward to reconnecting at traditional galahs and parties, having a virtual fundraising event in the arsenal certainly does not hurt. Unlike their in person events, virtual events are accessible to more people. No matter the current state of affairs. With this format, you are able to host your planned fundraising event, there will always be fixed cost but this format has no travel costs, venue set up event breakdown fees, reduces or eliminates costs like decor gift bags, music, catering venue rental. So it really does offer the option to be creative, making it into kind of a new event. And you know, the virtual audience has so many distractions we’re seeing some today, so it’s great to basically bring those folks in as part of an actual experience. Having an annual flagship event is never a bad idea. But just in case the timing doesn’t work. Having a virtual event in a rotation gives your supporters more options to attend and support you and enforce a person events are more challenging to keep track of the activity of each attendee, but the virtual event offers real time user activity, data and contact information. And it gives planners more time to focus on event programming, building sponsorship and creating a smooth attendee experience. And also, technology offers the limitless way to help build sponsor packages. So those were kind of the highlights of virtual and hybrid event. All of the information that Big Brothers Big Sisters Utah collected from their participants and donors during the event was captured in queue give and exported into their DonorPerfect CRM to fill out donor prize profiles and giving history. The integration is pretty straightforward with just a few main steps, but there are a ton of customization options, so you can be sure your data is flowing into DonorPerfect properly based on your different use cases. On the back end of queue give setting up the integration is really simple, you can easily configure the integration to map the data collected on cue give forms to the appropriate campaign or solicitation and DonorPerfect with the mapping interface that you see here. You can also add custom mappings. These mappings allow you to dictate which target objects and fields you want data to go into into DonorPerfect. There’s three custom mapping types, static, custom field and standard field. And for each type you can map to a target object plus field using the data from that custom type. It’s a simple thing to set up to export donor contacts from to give events and auctions into DonorPerfect events and auction attendee status and DonorPerfect is updated automatically when changed in queue give to make creating and tracking these records easy across your queue give and DonorPerfect accounts. I’m sure many of you aren’t web designers and I know I’m not and you know it’s it’s great. And we do need to make changes on the fly with these events. Big Brothers Big Sisters, Utah found that in their peer to peer event builder, it made them very easy for them to switch things quickly to from the live event over to a virtual format. The simple drag and drop capabilities of the system save them time and money that it would have taken if they’d had to hire a third party to help. Additionally through que given DonorPerfect, they were able to easily segment participants and reach out to them through phone, direct mail, email and social media. So they targeted those who were registered for the event and reached out leading up to the event to encourage participation and fundraising activity. Now that the segment or the event is actually over last year’s auction, they’re going to be doing another auction this year, but they’re able to take all that information segment their outreach to thank those who participated and donated during their event. Managing a nonprofit takes patience, hard work, and above all, a lot of organization. It’s important to put the time into searching for the right online platform fundraising platform is that has so much potential to boost your fundraising efforts. There’s so much to consider when choosing your digital fundraising partner and we appreciate that DonorPerfect did the research bedding and due diligence and selecting que give as one of their technology partners for their customers. So whether you work with us now or in the future, we are here to help. As I mentioned earlier in the presentation, que give has been helping nonprofits, organizations implement and grow their online fundraising programs since 2007. And as the importance of online giving has grown, our mission has remained the same and that is to help others fulfill their passion to make a difference. You are at the center of everything we do. So our fundraising technology is designed to help you attract and retain more donors save time and raise more money by offering multiple ways of giving. Our comprehensive suite of powerful online fundraising tools includes donation forms, event registration, text, fundraising and messaging, peer to peer fundraising, and auctions with mobile bidding. We also offer time saving integrations with industry leading CRMs, like DonorPerfect. Also, email automation tools, accounting programs and matching gift platforms. So nonprofits like you can easily export your data, your donor data from cue, give into DonorPerfect and into the third party programs you use to cultivate donor relationships, and send out segmented communications. You heard a little bit unfortunately, not seeing everything from Big Brothers Big Sisters of Utah. But what you’ve hopefully garnered was that just the things that they did, were just a small sampling of what our platform can help you do. All with no long term contracts. Try as you go options. So you can experiment with new fundraising tools in these newly navigated times virtual and hybrid events. You give loves being part of the nonprofit community. And we appreciate being recognized as a partner and leader in the nonprofit space. We exist to help people fulfill their different their passion to make a difference. You heard a little bit about the software platform. But we also wanted to share that we have a robust Resource Center with limitless fundraising resources, best practices, those are free for anyone, anytime, and you don’t have to be a customer to use them. So take advantage of blog articles, ebooks, templates, case studies, webinars, email series and tips. We really do hope that you check us out. If you do have a fundraising need, let us know we are here to help. And we’ve covered a lot in our time together, you may still have questions about whether or not this platform is a good fit for you, or your organization. So if you haven’t already, please go ahead and submit your questions. And thank you. That’s that’s all I have today.
Awesome. Thank you so much, Kim, and our apologies for not being able to actually stream that video, we’ll make sure that everybody that has been in attendance here gets a link. And you’ll be able to hear from Big Brothers Big Sisters, Utah as far as how they were able to make their decisions from virtual to live events and what the impact was. I see one question coming in the chat asking about whether the integration into DonorPerfect and the appropriate fields. Is it direct? Or is it by CSV? And so there is actually an API integration where the data does flow automatically from cute div into DonorPerfect. And there’s actually a field mapping tool that they built so that even certain custom user defined fields can can come across from the active event fundraising pages, great question. Any others four cubed, or perhaps maybe even as it relates to virtual fundraising and your experiences in terms of making the decision as to whether to go virtual hybrid or to actually bring back a live event this year? We’d be happy to make that a part of our conversation today. So feel free to go ahead and enter that in the general chat. And Kim, I was just one Wondering, from what you had heard from Big Brothers and Big Sisters? You know, their their future strategy with this? Does it sound like they’re going to be doing more hybrids, or you had also mentioned sort of splitting out and and almost adding events, some of which might be virtual to complement existing ones? And is that going to be instead of a hybrid that they get a feel for?
I think they’re going to do a little bit of both what they ended up doing was, they reduce their overall event goal for the bowl for kids sake this year, added a couple smaller events. So I think they’re going to as long as you know, COVID permitting to keep the bowl for kids sake, in person, go ahead and do their auction as a hybrid format, and then introduce a couple total virtual events as we go forward.
Great, great. And one other question came up as to what kind of auction support does qu provide? You can talk about whether that’s online bidding real time, you
know, and I know Brendan’s on the call. And I know he wanted to help out. So Brendan, do you want to feel the auction question for me.
From a support standpoint, we are getting back to a lot more folks getting back to in person events. So we are opening that up, we have an in person support options, as well as remote options. So we can be there for you either remotely in the case of a quick call is something that can help or if you’re more comfortable with us being in person to help with any support needs, we have those options as well.
Great, great. Any other questions for you Q give? I see one in there about mapping categories? What were the two custom mapping categories? I don’t know if that was a specific down to two, I thought there was some pretty broad capabilities that might have been in the most recent release, though. I don’t know if you want to touch a little bit on that. Yeah,
I mentioned Lua. And we can happily share all of the mapping options that our integration has, I know if you’re working with this already have access to the great help desk that we have. So I can certainly follow up. But to your point, Darrell, there really is a there’s a lot of options to be able to map accordingly and be able to make sure that the data is flowing seamlessly into DonorPerfect and landing where you want it and need it to land so that you can continue to cultivate and build on those relationships you’re establishing.
Awesome, awesome. All right. Well, thank you all. And again, we’ll make sure that that link goes out so that everyone can everybody can see what Big Brothers and Big Sisters was considering as they as they went with the Q good platform and how they implemented and at this time, I’d like to move to the second segment. So if Joining us today is Michelle Milford, the marketing communication manager from humane Animal Welfare Society, Hans of Waukesha, Wisconsin. Michelle graduated from the University of Wisconsin Madison with a Bachelors of Arts in zoology and environmental studies in 23. And shortly after completed Master’s coursework in sustainable management, from museum work, to environmental advocacy to community commerce, her entire career has been in the nonprofit sector. So Michelle will certainly be speaking from the perspective of Hawes, but also with her today. We have Josh Bloomfield, who is the founder and CEO, and puppy lover apparently was at a Hawes client, Josh from Waukesha.
And unmute here, and thanks, Darrell. You stole my thunder introducing introducing Michelle. But yeah, sorry, this is a little one that bark there during the intro. Sorry about that. But yeah, thank you guys for joining the donor, perfect community for the DonorPerfect conference. And first off, I want to send loads of gratitude and thankfulness for everything you world changes are up to you, especially in the face of a very different world we live in. Our hope our session encourages you. I’m Josh, the founder and CEO give cloud and I won’t be presenting today. Instead, we’ve asked an incredible woman Michelle Milford to share her experience using both DonorPerfect and gift cloud to centralize the wildly diverse things her and her team do at the Humane Animal Welfare Society. Aside from Michelle’s impressive education and inspiring advocacy and community involvement, Michelle understands the importance of streamlining systems and processes to simplify her team’s operations, and focus every minute and every dollar on her mission. So any further ado, please welcome Michelle Milford.
Hi, thank you guys so much. Thank you for the intro. I don’t think I’ve ever had an intro like that. So thank you. I’m looking at the comments quick and can you see there’s Clyde? He’s an English seller sitting in the back there. So he is here with us too, but he is sleeping. Oh, go ahead. and get started here
can you guys see my screen?
Notch? Yeah, I’m not sure Ryan Are you able to pick up on the request that Michelle put into share?
Maybe I can try again.
Yeah, if you could try recruit questing to present your screen again.
There we go. Here we go. Okay,
perfect. So, I’m Michelle Melford with Haas and I’ve been asked to talk about kind of
is Michelle muted? Again, somehow she’s Yeah.
Okay, let’s try again. Okay, we’ll go back. Alright. Better. Looks good. Okay. All right. So I’m Michelle Mulford with Hawes and I have been asked to talk about how we at our organization are kind of diversifying our strategy to build community. So who is Ha’s, where the humane Animal Welfare Society, we’re an open admission, no kill shelter, dedicated to strengthening the relationship between animals and humans through adoptions and education, making a more compassionate community possible. So that last bit is really important, especially for this community conference? As I go through my slides, I kind of want you guys to think about what is it? What kind of community are you reaching? Who are you reaching in your community? And what kind of community do you want to build? You know, for us, we want a kind, compassionate, respectful community that is that way towards their animals and towards their pupil. So what challenges brought us here, and by here, I mean, to give cloud and to DonorPerfect, which we started using about 11 months ago. So we’re still kind of new ish users, we were really looking for a solution to combine all of our diverse needs, and also reach all of our donor segments. We have a lot going on it has. And we’re growing very quickly. And we realized that what we had, what were previously implementing, wasn’t doing what we needed it to do. And then because of that, too, like I said, we have a multitude of programs that have education programs, we have behavior programs, we run our own private dog park, we have all these things that we use to attract and retain donors. But previously, it was kind of all over the place. We didn’t the next point there, we didn’t have any brand cohesion, we were using some forms for PDFs, some were on top form, some were hosted on our website. So we just kind of really lacked cohesion there. And then specifically, related to DonorPerfect, we lacked a robust donor database. Being an animal welfare organization, we had an animal CRM that we were trying to use as a donor CRM as well. Obviously, it didn’t work, because we made the switch has been fantastic. And, and then the last point here about what brought us here is that we needed solutions to reduce our manual entry, and our follow up. And so through gift cloud, we’re able to do a lot of automation, and completely get rid of that manual entry. And then of course, you know, especially with how 2020, when we’re shifting to digital, you know, our whole world is kind of shifting over there. So we want to make sure that we’re keeping up with the times and I’m sure other nonprofits want that as well. So, so how do we build community with diversity? The first, the first thing that we do is, is identify who so we need to understand who our supporters are, what they look like, and who our donors are, and how are we going to how are we going to segment them out? What we did is we segmented our donors and our supporters a couple of different ways. We mapped it out through, you know, their ages and kind of demographics, but then also their interests and how they want to engage with us. I think that’s a really important part is how are how are our donors, donors engaging with us? What do they want from us? What do they want to see from us, etc. And so then after we’ve kind of identified who, you we, in order to build a bigger community decided that we needed to it needed to embrace more variety. So we needed to offer more programs and more and more She lives, more events so that we’re really covering everyone within our community and our supporters. And then related to that is that timely connections there. So we need to connect with our supporters where they’re at, in their lives as it relates to our mission. So I kind of think about that, as you know, right now, I’m a mother, and I’m a working mom. And so like, what, what would cause what would I go to Haas for, and for me, I would maybe go there to adopt a pet, but also to check out their education programs, or maybe their training. But right now, I’m not really thinking about Planned Giving. So you know, that’s the kind of the timely connections is that you’re offering what your donors needed that time. And then, of course, the last bit, in order to do that, we got to invest in some technology. And I think that that’s really what genre perfect and gift cards have helped us kind of elevate is that we finally have the right tech to do what we need to do. So what I’m gonna do is kind of go through some of that tech right now, some of the wonderful features that give cloud allows us to use through their platform. And then and then we can, we can chat about it a little bit. So this page is a split fund page. We use it for gift designations. So you can see we have a bunch of different gifts here. There’s the Annie’s medical fund, animal care, and adoptions, Animal Rescue, behavior, department, etc. And what we’re doing here is offering our donors a choice. So this audience is really for donors who have a preference towards a specific part of our mission, you know, there’s something that they’re really passionate about, we want to make sure that they’re able to give towards that, of course, in the nonprofit field, we all really love the unrestricted gifts. But that’s not always what donors want to give to. So this is one of my favorite favorite pages. I also love personally that a donor can come here and see everything that we do. So they might not know that we do animal rescue, until they get to this page and say, Oh, my gosh, I came here to give to Andy’s medical fund. But oh my god, now I’m gonna give to Animal Rescue too. And the way gift card is set up, it’s a cart like, so they can add all this to their cart, and then checkout, which is really cool. The other thing we’ve noticed with this, in terms of the impact is that we see higher donation amounts, because I think because they have more choices they’re giving to to multiple funds. And then for us way less admin time. gift code integrates seamlessly into DonorPerfect. So each one of these has its own GL that I set up, and it just goes right in. Prior to that we were we had to go back, we had to go into our system and kind of change the gels and stuff it it was incredibly inefficient. So another fun one here is their event item page. And we use this for programs. Like I said, we have education programs, we run events, we also have behavior and training. So a huge struggle that we had I touched on a little bit before is that our programs are forums, rather, we’re all over the place. It’s something JotForm, we had some posts on the website somewhere PDF only. And we needed all of them to be in one place. And this did it for us. This created easier to use forms with so from a donor standpoint or user standpoint, that was huge, we want you to be able to sign up for our programs easily and have no questions. And then again, brand consistency. Again, that was a big piece to this too. You can see that our colors are on here and the fonts we want, we can control that. And you can customize all of that. And then I wrote their cross program, signups on the bottom in the right hand side, it says register and add another child, I love this feature. So if they put in their information for their child, and then hit that, it’ll take them back to the full program list. So maybe for this program, they’re going to register Sally who’s four years old and wants to be in this program. But then they’ll go back and they’ll register Adam who’s seven years old, and he wants to go to camp, and then it’ll all go in their cart. They don’t have to register Sally, go through the whole thing and then go back and register their son, they can do it all at once. And again, less admin time. They have email automation, so all of their all of the emails get taken care of for us. We don’t have to do any of that. And then again, all of the all of the coding goes right into DonorPerfect. The other thing too, that’s really cool about this is because of the way that the integration works, is I can say on the DonorPerfect side. Anyone who signed up for this program, I wanted them put them on my email lists through Constant Contact, so that I can let them know when we have more programs coming up. So I love that too.
This is a fun one, this is one that we kind of got creative with. So this is gift cards, peer to peer fundraising page. And I think typically, it’s used to kind of what I’m showing here. So there’s a campaign that we’re fundraising for, in this instance, it was our ramp and rally. And Madison here, put a put together a collage of her and all the all the pets that she’s worked with, and then people who support her support our work, and donate specifically to her page. And it’s super custom, which is awesome. How we got kind of creative with this is we actually started using it for our corporate partners, we have a lot of corporate partners who like to do fundraising for us within their organization. And we could set it up as a campaign, and then you kind of get this like, you know, employee, oh, well, my coworker games, I’m gonna get a type of thing. So that kind of fun. Why I love this is that we get to control the narrative. I know a lot of people like to do the peer to peer fundraising through Facebook, which is good, and it can be impactful. The problem with Facebook fundraising, is you don’t get any information on the donors. So they’ll, you know, they’ll give and all you get is a name, you don’t get an address, or an email or phone, so you can’t thank them. And you can’t solicit in the future. So I love this. For that reason that, you know, it gives you the option to have these people in your database. Another this is this is a good point here for in terms of like building community, we’ve never been able to offer ecommerce or like a shot before until we got give cloud and we are so happy we did it. This is great for supporters that want like a tangible benefit, you know, they they want something almost something in return for their donation. Or for people who want to like feel a part of the Hawes team. So we’re able to put up all of our T shirts. And then what this has done, less staff time it streamline the process, we’re reaching so many more people, and it’s free advertising, right, and people are walking around with our T shirts that have paws written all over it. You know that? Then someone might ask them, oh, did you get that etc. So we love love this feature that we can sell shirts, through through gift cloud and other stuff too. You know, if you have other kinds of merch, you can sell whatever you would like. Other thing I want to mention about that too, in terms of the integration, we had run into a problem before about taxes. And this is really great, because it keeps the taxes separate. So there’s the shirt cost, and then the taxes will be on its own. We don’t have to do any of the work of trying to apply taxes or anything like that. And then tributes, I know, so many nonprofits offer tribute gifts, and it’s huge. And this audience is really interested in audience because primarily it’s one time donors. So they you know, unfortunately a loved one or someone had passed away. And in the the family that asks for for gifts to be made in there honor. So this is where they would come for that. And what I love about gift cards platform for this is that we can offer so many different options. So you can see we do do a normal tribute gift, which essentially just like a straight donation, but then we also have recognition options. So the tile, the brick, the memorial plaques. And what this has done for us at least is created a higher quality donor experience. So even though a lot of these people are only coming to us to make a one time gift, I want to make sure that they’re even if it’s on time that they’re one time with us is impactful. And it’s it’s a positive experience. And it was easy. So that’s the whole thing. Kind of like with good clothes, why we chose to go with them is because it’s so easy to use. And it’s easy to use on the front end as a donor but on the back end, it’s even easier. I have a ton of I’d say not tech savvy, team members and they can use it no problem. Okay, so membership pages. So I hope you’ve kind of seen seen a theme here at least is like we’re doing a lot and we’re we have a lot of options for people to give to. And so that’s kind of where we’re going with in terms of trying to build build a build a community is that we have so many different ways that people can support Hawes and give to us and membership is another great one. This audience is primarily like our our loyal members, you know who want to give annually. And what I love about gift cloud here is that we can set up membership in a variety Do you have different ways so we can do a yearly gift, monthly gift and then a one time gift. The what we’ve noticed that laying these out this way is that more members are choosing the recurring gifts, which reduces our need to send reminders and mailings that has been incredibly impactful for us. Because it it takes a lot to send out those renewals. And if they’re, you know, if they’re already queued up to give each year, it’s, it’s a win for us. And then lastly, is digital downloads. This was brand new to us with with COVID, unfortunately, but the goal here Isiliye was to stay relevant in an increasingly tech Central Tech centric world, right. So we knew right away, because of COVID, we couldn’t offer our training classes, and we couldn’t do our education programs, it just wasn’t going to happen. And we were going to lose out on a ton of revenue. So what we did, instead of doing like a virtual event, so where people would log in at a certain time and watch the video, we use downloads, and I don’t I can’t speak to other platforms, but I thought this was pretty cool on gift cloud that they’re you know that they gave us this ability. So essentially, what a person would do is they would sign up for basic manners class, and then they’d get an email straight to their email box with a digital download that would have our curriculum that would have homework for them in there, and it would have videos. So it took away all of the the kind of need for us to have to have the events a little bit, we kind of cheated. But what is great about this is that every market is now being included. Because even though you know, things are opening back up, we found a lot of people just prefer this. This is how they want to learn or this is how they want to engage with us. They don’t necessarily want to come to the shelter, maybe their schedule won’t allow them to remember, they’re just kind of introverted, and they want to stay home, you know, so we liked that a lot. So all that said, what does success look like for us, or when when we’re thinking about gift cloud, specifically, it’s that we need a beautiful cohesive website, and a digital experience, so that we can build trust within our community and continue to grow. I think, I suppose this is anecdotal. But just based on what I’ve seen, in our short, under a year with both give cloud and DonorPerfect, we’ve grown, we’ve grown a ton. And we’ve had so much great feedback about how the site looks, how easy it is to use, and all that good stuff. And then specific to DonorPerfect. A solid donor database, helps build community through ongoing engagement and understanding of supporters. Again, because of this super seamless integration, we’re able to then take everything, all the information that we get from the forms, which have a lot of custom fields on and throw that all into DonorPerfect so that we can use all that great information at a later date. I think that just about does it. I think we’re gonna go into a q&a now.
Awesome, thank you, Michelle, for that. And your organization is a great example of how to expand the diversity of fundraising and giving something for everyone, I guess, was curious. You know, from from my perspective, you introduced some new things. Did you see strength in terms of the dollars raised, particularly on the digital digital download piece where you’ve got edge educational components? And that was brand new this year? Is that right?
Yeah, brand new to us. I don’t know for for Joshua was brand new to Google Cloud. But yeah, we did. It was, I would say now, we’re definitely moving away from that, you know, people want to get back into person. But like I said, there’s still people who are choosing it. And for us, it’s there’s there’s no admin, you know, we don’t have to send a staff member there to teach the class. It’s already it’s already all put together, we just throw it to your inbox. So it was really good in terms of saving, saving on staff time.
Excellent. Yeah, no, that’s creative. You know, we get to see a lot of different nonprofit fundraising techniques. And, you know, we’ve certainly been aware of the digital downloads, but oftentimes, we’ve seen that as content that may have been digitized from some other format but for you to be able to create brand new fresh content like that, I think is a is a really fresh approach to this. As well as your your corporate perspective on doing some of that crowdfunding piece. Well, we call it crowdfunding, but yeah, it was a good idea. Any questions from out from the crowd, certainly has been a very thought provoking presentation. You know, I think we’re in a time where if you are a nonprofit that all you have is an online fundraising form, it may be time to expand a little bit and to try some of the things. I know the nonprofit where I serve, we do two events a year. And the rest of it is, you know, direct mail and online fundraising for forms. And we’re talking at the board level to try and figure out how to diversify that, and yet not make, you know, too much activity that you end up getting donor fatigue out of it. Maybe one question for you, Michelle, is as you introduced some of these new avenues for fundraising, how did you promote them? Was it just through constant contact email? Did you do Facebook posts to pointing people back? Or was there some other method that actually really works for you to get the attention of people?
Yeah, so we did a lot of Constant Contact, what I liked about Constant Contact is that we are able to segment out, you know, so we have a ton of different lists in their email lists. And so then, when we’re sending out a specific email blast, I can send it to a specific, you know, a specific list, the worst possible thing is to overload our supporters, like you said, you don’t want them to get fatigued or definitely you don’t want them to unsubscribe, that’s, you know. So, and then in terms of Facebook, we use Facebook a lot to get the word out. But we do a lot of I like to call them like double posts, almost. So what I’ll do is, I’ll post an adoptable dog. And then I’ll say, you know, all this dogs available for adoption, and they are an Australian Shepherd breed that would really excel at our agility classes, and then link to agility. So I’m reaching adapters that way, you know, people who are interested in adopting, and then I’m also reaching people who might be interested, you know, because then that prompts them to say, I have an Australian shepherd or you know, whatever breed it is, I should take agility. So we do a lot of that. We’re will kind of like, because we know we have so much going on, I try to hide, I try to hide little nuggets in here and there.
Sounds good? And do you also end up keeping things fresh on your website? As far as like blog posts and things of that? Or do you do just rely on more Facebook to give that that more up to date content? Yeah, so
we just redid our website, just in I believe it was April is when we redid it. So it’s pretty brand spanking new, and blog posts is on my list of things to do. So we will we will get to that. But yes, definitely. I think anytime that you can direct people to your website, you should that too, anytime you post on social media, make sure that you are putting your website in there. You know, you need to always be sending people there.
Gotcha. And have you experimented with any kind of paid ads on Facebook to try and drive attention up? Or? Yeah,
we have we have? And it does, it does? Well. The research that I’ve done on Facebook, though, and again, this is just my own, my own research that I’ve done. So you know, take it at face value is that Facebook likes you to spend at least $100 A month as part of their algorithm for you to really see a benefit. And so we have it’s not hard to do that by any means to spend $100. And I do think it’s worth the investment in general. And I would just be really strategic about what it is that you’re promoting.
Gotcha. So with all the tools that you have in the cloud, what’s the next promotion that you plan to do either from a fundraising campaign or an event? Oh, what’s coming up? Yeah, what is
coming up? Yeah, no, no, well,
what we just did we put items on sale in our on our E commerce shop. And holy man did those go? That just saying sale, it was like those sold out? And it was like a $3 sale? That was really interesting. So even in the nonprofit world, I think that’s important too, to know that your donors still think like consumers, right? We are hard wired to want a deal. And, and to, you know, to want to know exactly what our money is getting us. So I think that that, I don’t know if that really answers your question at all. But it’s another tidbit just for people to think about. Yeah,
no, no, it’s helpful and you know, to sort of understand how you’re approaching the What are you going to do next and what campaigns are working for you and what did you just come off of to keep it fresh to your donors so and And Josh, I guess, you know, we’ve certainly covered a good bit of ground in terms of the feature set what give cloud can do what what would you add it, as far as you know, what you’re seeing some of the other good cloud clients doing right now during this time?
Oh, it’s your question. We got a handful of organizations who’ve pivoted to virtual events. And so we were able to develop a giving template, where instead of, you know, the giving, being the center part of the experience, your virtual event is, and off to the right, you’ve got your giving, and you’ve got emojis that your your supporters can click as and react to your event, you’ve got live chat in there as well. So it’s our way of helping organizations pivot. And they’ve had some success. I mean, the React, I think one of the things we’ve learned, though, is that running events takes a lot of effort. And so to think that you can just throw in your webcam and throwing throwing a virtual events, is, is wishful thinking. So, but we have had organizations who make the right investment in, in producing a virtual event coupled with that ability to have chat and so on, coupled with the fact that every interaction that happens there is represented live inside their DonorPerfect system, see some really great success.
Excellent. And you certainly had great success with that virtual platform. Right upon release, I think you launched it to a very large nonprofit that had huge, huge response. Is that something that you continue to see, or you feel that virtual is not going to go away? But But is the enthusiasm of it, you know, filling in the gaps as opposed to being the headline? Yeah,
that’s a good question. I mean, it’s tough. I feel like we have a pretty big craving to get back to life the way it was, I think one of the things that was really special about that event was the individual hosted it, you know, high impact celebrity who spent hundreds of 1000s of dollars on producing that event. And so, and they had an incredible outcome they raised I think, $750,000 in a single evening, through through that experience. But again, I kind of I kind of fall back to, I think, I think what a lot of nonprofits are learning is that doing that virtual event and that virtual content can be tough. And the quicker we can just get back to doing things, the way they used to be able to do it is is the vibe I’m getting from a lot of our customers.
Gotcha. Gotcha. Sounds good. All right. Well, with that, we’re at the end of our session, I want to thank everyone for attending and listening into what the future of events and virtual fundraising is, is bound to be. Thank you so much, Michelle, Josh, Kim Brendon, our whole team here and we are now headed for a 15 minute break. During that time, please feel free to visit the good cloud and cute good booths, stopping at their lounges. Have a one on one chat with them. And I think you’re going to be able to pick up a whole bunch more in terms of what we were able to cover here. And it looks like the puppies may also visit as well. So thanks so much, everyone, and we’ll see you at the next session. Thanks, everyone.
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