Preparing Nonprofit Websites for the Giving Season

5:30PM Aug 24, 2022

Speakers:

Nathan Ingram

Amanda Gorman

Keywords:

givingtuesday

donors

organization

donation

campaign

givingtuesday campaign

nonprofit

giving

wp

tuesday

crucial

website

goals

questions

folks

peer

landing page

form

share

create

Well good afternoon everybody and welcome to another live AI iThemes Training event. My name is Nathan Ingram. I'm the host here at I iThemes Training and today I'm joined by Amanda Gorman. Amanda is the customer Director of Customer Success at gift WP and she's going to be talking to us today about preparing nonprofit websites for the giving season. Everyday Amanda works hard to help nonprofits grow in their communities and receive more online donations so they can make a bigger impact. In their world which sounds like really fun work. Welcome to iThemes Training Amanda how things going today.

Thank you so much for having me. Everything's great. I'm happy to be here.

Absolutely. So I'm really excited about this topic today. Just personally, I work in the nonprofit space for a long time. Nonprofit clients were the first that I use to start to build and grow my business. And we still on the agency side serve a lot of nonprofit clients today just by choice. So I'm looking forward to this we wanted to have some give WP focus on for a while. And by the way, we did have been Meredith who is the director of support for give WP on a few months ago. That's kind of a give WP 101 kind of talking about the plugin. I'll drop the link to that webinar and if you missed that one, but Amanda today specifically, what is the giving season and why should nonprofits start preparing now?

Yeah, great question. So in my perspective, the giving season really kicks off with giving Tuesday so that's what this talk is going to be really geared towards. But I want to just kind of preface it with really the foundational strategy that's laid out in this presentation is really intended for any kind of large fundraising action that you're taking throughout the year. So Giving Tuesday is the primary kickoff for the giving season. At the end of the year. It's the Tuesday after the US Thanksgiving, and it's been going on since 2012. And that really is what has kicked off this giving season mentality through the holidays and it kind of really goes into January as people are thinking of the new year and how to contribute as they're going into the new year.

Yeah, for sure. This is gonna be a great topic. As I mentioned, we did have been Meredith who helps with support with give WP on about three or four months ago giving kind of a primer about how give WP works and setting up donation forms and so forth. And I just dropped that link into the chat. So if you missed that webinar, this is not really a how to use give WP plus webinar so much as more of a strategy talk, which I'm looking forward to. But if you'd like to learn about the plugin itself, that link is there in the chat. I'm going to drop in our link bundle again for those of you who are just joining us as well. If you'd like to learn more about gift WP you can do so at gift wp.com Give WP of course is another of the stellar brands just like I theme I themes is and happy to be in the family with them. The link to today's slides is in those links that have dropped in the chat as well. And the replay would invite you to ask questions throughout into chat in the chat area. So pop that open and zoom and have that going. But particularly in the q&a, if you want to ask a question, please use the q&a link in zoom rather than the chat and just keep that open because you'll see questions as other people and ask them. And if you'd like to hear the answer to that question as well just press the thumbs up icon. And that will let you upvote the questions of others. And we'll take those questions in order at the end of the webinar in the order of the votes that they get. So be watching for that ask your questions as we go. And with that, Amanda I'll turn it over to you let's talk about giving season.

Awesome. Thank you so much. Alright, so thank you everyone for being here. I'm excited to dive into this this conversation. This is something that I really am simmered in, not just in my day to day work I give WP but also in the work that I do for clients on the side. So a lot of my life has revolved around helping nonprofits and putting a lot of this strategy into place. And I'm excited to hopefully offer some value to you today. So first, I just wanted to talk a little bit more about giving Tuesday and what it actually is and why you should care about it. So as I had mentioned before GivingTuesday started in 2012. And since then it's really just snowballed into this massive event that is now today. There's been an annual event every year, the Tuesday after the US Thanksgiving. And this really kicks off the giving season, where folks are inspired to really spend their dollars towards the charities and the organizations that they care about, especially after something like Black Friday, trying to bring the focus more on to selfless service than just a selfish kind of mentality. I suppose. It really started with the power of social media as well. So social media is what really piqued this movement and the ability for GivingTuesday to reach such a broad global audience. And this concept is all around social media and the digitalization of fundraising that can help generosity go viral. So bringing this event into one day a year helps other nonprofits to create similar campaigns throughout the year because they're garnering support at this one event of donors that will hopefully last a lifetime. Even if it's somebody that might just donate once, even if that person just has that word of mouth to then speak about the charity that they donated to that one Giving Tuesday that has immense power in and of itself. I wanted to bring up these two main points about GivingTuesday. And that is really what their mission is all about and what they're trying to promote in the resources they provide to organizations which are plentiful. GivingTuesday promotes a guilt free positive interaction with organizations. So whereas Sometimes organizations might be leaning in on severe crisis's as they should, things that need urgent attention, things that are a little bit more demanding on their donors. Those things are absolutely valid at certain times, but we don't want to exhaust our donors either. We want to provide them with an opportunity to engage in joy and a positive feeling in interaction throughout the giving process, which is what GivingTuesday really presents because it's like a very stress free sort of engagement. You're able to join with your community and share really globally across social media. It leans into the growth of collaboration as Giving Tuesday provides so many resources for organizations to collaborate with one another. There's amazing stories on the GivingTuesday website about how organizations have collaborated to do incredible things across borders. It's amazing to witness and the resources they provide really helped to empower organizations to do things they probably wouldn't have been able to do without those resources. So if you plan well for giving Tuesday even if it's a small campaign this year, even if it's next year, if you don't have time for this year, you're starting a foundation to be able to participate in the event for the long run because it's going to keep going just to give you some stats 35 million adults participated in Giving Tuesday in 2021, which is just an incredible number. I think it was about 16% Since last since 20 $22.7 billion raised in the US alone, from giving Tuesday in 2021 and 82% of growth in donations was attributed to recurring donations, repeat donations. So the donors that you experience on Giving Tuesday may be one time donors may maybe they turn into recurring donors. Either way organizations have the opportunity of creating that relationship with those donors that they might not have had ordinarily, Giving Tuesday. presents an opportunity for organizations to get eyes on them that maybe they wouldn't have normally seen throughout the year.

It's really important to define your goals for giving Tuesday and embarking into a campaign. So defining your organization's goals. Of course is first and foremost. Things like understanding if you want to really embark on achieving awareness, financial gain more supporters community growth, or you just want to get some PR attention, really getting clear about what those specific goals are for just the GivingTuesday campaign is clear, needs to be clear. And it needs to coincide with the goals that you have throughout throughout the rest of the year. So if you're planning for GivingTuesday this year, you might look at what your your goals are for 2023 and how that lines up. How would your goals for giving Tuesday support a 2023 campaign an initiative throughout the year so something like bringing in more supporters more awareness more social media attention on your social media platforms will set you up for an annual appeal next year? Maybe that you're running in the spring or summer now defining specific campaign goals is a whole nother subject. So understanding if you want to focus on dollars raised donors that you reached in that contributed the number of new donors that you were able to reach number of recurring donors, you're able to get into your community, young donors, event attendees if you're planning an event, social followers and collaborators. So all of these metrics can come into play and you might have a couple that you really want to focus on but I would really have a top a specific campaign goal to really nail down on which is going to the kind of the foundation for everything else that you're going to build in your strategy. The next thing to do is to choose your donor goals for clear messaging. And what this means is you're presenting to your donors why they should care about your GivingTuesday campaign. This campaign is different than an annual appeal or a general giving campaign you may be running throughout the year. Different than an event are different than something more specific to a need that your organization has during your year fundraising. Giving Tuesday has to be a little different. It can just be we're just fundraising for GivingTuesday. It has to have some kind of emotional attachment to it. personal ownership of why this campaign and why now and why it's so important to your organization that you raise dollars funds more attention now. There's a workshop that you can kind of do in the Giving Tuesday workbook that give WP is created our marketing team is quite incredible. And they've put together a free resource for organizations to really workshop through these goals and to do writing exercises, either individually or in a small team or in your larger team. Ideally, the more minds the better. The more you can brainstorm at these early stages, the more you're going to feel clear about every step of the way throughout the process. Just to pause there. I like to slow down a little bit because I tend to go a little fast. So it's important to break down these bowls. Because when you start to get into developing all the different kinds of forms and types of fundraising that you can get into it might get a little overwhelming of what your priority focus is, especially for just a GivingTuesday campaign. So this work again really solidifies things. So we're going to talk about four key elements here. Building a strong foundation connecting with donors. In then you're going to be able to craft your messaging and all of that learning adapting and growing is next. So knowing what to do after the campaign is a very crucial piece as well. So first building a solid foundation, through website hosting SEO. These are really the foundational pieces that I'm going to speak to you today. There of course are others in terms of general maintenance of your websites, this tools that I themes, presents, in terms of security and backups is absolutely crucial. But today we're just going to really focus on on hosting and SEO.

Creating this foundation starts with your host because you need to have a solid foundation to work from to build your website up and especially if you're planning on bringing in a lot more eyes and a lot more attention on your website during Giving Tuesday. your website's gotta be ready. So you've got to have a reliable place where you can send your donors to experience a fast websites, keeping them engaged in not needing to bounce off any page out of slow performance. Having a staging area to work with for your website is really key during Giving Tuesday as well because you might not want to interrupt your general donation campaign on your live website while you're building out your Giving Tuesday landing page typically your GivingTuesday landing page would replace your general donation page on the Day of Giving Tuesday or leading up to it. So it's important to make sure you have all of those pieces ready to go to flip the switch if I can make it sound so easy to bring your staging site to live when you're ready. It's a busy time of year. So automatic updates or just having a hosting provider that you can lean on with managed WordPress hosting can be really crucial, especially if you have a small team which I know that there were some challenges spoken about in the in the chat before we started about low budgets, marketing budgets, not having a big team to work with for these kinds of things. So making sure you have the tools in place to have reliability and something to really lean on and not have to worry is really crucial and updates are definitely crucial to maintain through the giving season and always for your website. Being able to manage your website from a from a dashboard and the hosting element if you do need to go in and handle anything that's going on is super crucial as well having a key person that's managing that or at least a key contact to reach out to your hosting provider is really crucial. Nexus is my preferred host, another brand within the liquidweb Family of Brands. So I definitely recommend checking them out if you are shopping around for hosting providers or my personal hosts that I love to use as well. I want to I can't I can't really do any presentation when it comes to websites without mentioning SEO SEO was really my first like kind of love in the in the internet world. And it's just so crucial and it should be something you're talking about with your team all the time. Not just the giving season, but there is a priority to place on SEO for the giving season when it comes to optimizing your donation forms and your landing pages for giving Tuesday or for any donation appeal that you're creating. So obviously optimizing forms with keywords and landing pages with the phrases that you want to rank for in Google is key but also ensuring that your website is social ready, so that you're able to share your website landing pages easily on any social platform and it's gonna look great. There are lots of tools out there to accomplish this SEO. Yoast has one and there's several out there to be able to utilize but making sure you have that in place to make sure that your social cards look good. And that folks are going to experience your landing page on social media in a really positive and beautiful way is crucial especially as GivingTuesday is so focused around social media. This is also an opportunity to reach out to local media and public officials for a boost and a backlink. This Giving Tuesday season presents an opportunity to to really put yourself out there and get some newsworthy content and some attention on your organization maybe in some ways that you normally wouldn't. I our SEO for nonprofits, fundraising blog posts and SEO EBook is a really great place to get a little bit more information about how to implement SEO for nonprofits specifically. So I definitely recommend checking out that free resource. Next, I want to talk about the types of fundraising that you can engage in for GivingTuesday specifically, choosing the correct type of fundraiser that will create the biggest impact. It can seem daunting in the beginning, so we're going to break it down

so your GivingTuesday campaign should be innovative and should be built to inspire giving. So that's why it might seem a little daunting. You want to really put a lot of thought into this. No matter your level of involvement with a nonprofit whether you're the actual volunteer for the nonprofit you're an agency working for nonprofits, wherever you kind of land in this spectrum. More collective brainstorming and know how around what is best going to serve a nonprofit in their given needs is crucial. You're gonna be able to demonstrate your value to the shareholders, the board, the nonprofit that you're working with, if you can really come to the table with some solid ideas and reasons why a certain type of campaign will work for an organization versus while some other campaign may not. There's a lot of things to consider and it really is subjective to what the organization is, what their goals are and what they're working towards at that particular time and what resources they have to work with. So the first type of fundraising that you could engage in for GivingTuesday is peer to peer. Now I will say this one will be the most work because peer to peer isn't something that you can just set and forget. It's something you need to be actively engaged in. to step back a little bit peer to peer is a community fundraising. It's the opportunity to ask your supporters, your volunteers, your staff or board members to come and become fundraisers for your organization. So they can come to your peer to peer campaign. They can start fundraising by joining a team or creating a team of their friends and family collective people to come together or just as an individual and this gives them the opportunity to have a unique URL that's associated with their donation page on your websites that they can share with friends and family to garner support all coming in to the mean organization into your main GivingTuesday campaign. I've seen a lot of folks do this in some really powerful ways that give WP specifically where they tie it to an in person event or a virtual event somewhere where you can connect with your supporters, not just in the peer to peer space, but in an container where you're communicating, sharing your goals. helping folks understand what peer to peer is what the benefits are, and gamifying it a bit so there's a leaderboard on give WPS peer to peer fundraising campaign, where you can see the top fundraisers and top teams. This can be tied to perks so providing perks to the top teams or to the top fundraisers. It could be swag from your from your nonprofit. It could be gift cards. It could be any kind of benefit, maybe a tour of your location. If you're running a sanctuary or something like that where people can come visit one of our customers is an animal sanctuary so they come to mind for me. Whatever perk you can kind of think of even if it's just engagement with your organization a little more deeply, maybe connection to a newsletter that you're they're gonna get exclusive content something that they can really find value in. And then there needs to be motivation to keep going to reach their goal. So a lot of folks tend to do this over a few weeks before giving Tuesday. Getting a strategy in place to help folks understand what the period of your campaign end goal is. And then to walk their supporters through each step of the way, and to incentivize them throughout the process. So that's going to look different for everybody.

I think that's all I want to say about that. Another type of fundraising you can consider as matching gifts. So with gift WP, you have the opportunity of using double donation to encourage your donors to double their donation through that software. So this would require the 360 match pro account with double the donation and what this allows your donors to do is to search for their organization on your donation form directly to see if they're available and will match the gift. Now this works really well when you're able to display lots of marketing content alongside your donation. Form, gearing your donor up to understand how powerful a matching gift can be. So a match gift will represent far more for your organization. If you're letting your donors know exactly what it will achieve. So you could break down your donation levels you could say $25 will be turned into 50 which equals this much immense value in our organization. Or you know, $500 doubled will allow us to accomplish XYZ goal. So these sorts of tangible goals really need to be communicated well to donors. So we're going to talk about messaging again in a little bit. But really thinking about how your donors experiencing what you're providing is definitely crucial. Being transparent about where donations are going to be used is all part of this. Another type of fundraising you could consider for giving Tuesday's honorary giving so utilizing a tribute function where you can ask your donors to make a donation in honor of somebody. With gift WP This allows you to create a postcard or an E card that you can send out to recipients the donor would be able to send those items out the e card is more common. I would see among a lot of our users, where folks are able to create their own customized beautiful e cards that the donor can select from and we're going to talk about this a little bit more in a bit as well. But the card is a incentive to get somebody to engage with the organization a little bit more the recipient that receives it can pass it on. If you're creating that kind of campaign where they're sharing the donation, maybe it's a gift. Really being able to create that emotional element is key for the sort of campaign and using an example from your organ organization can really help with this. So demonstrating why you're maybe running this campaign. And maybe if you're running the campaign in honor somebody can work really well and what I've seen others do another couple ideas, and we've got lots of lots more of them on our blog if you're interested in I'm happy to answer any questions if more ideas are coming up. A calendar fundraiser is a really unique idea. So kind of thinking of these unique ways you can get your community involved on GivingTuesday something that you don't normally do throughout the year. Maybe you can run a calendar for the following year since GivingTuesday is right at the end of the year. You can have your donors upload a photo while donating maybe there's a certain minimum amount that they need to donate in order to participate in the calendar submission process. They submit their photos maybe there's a certain criteria around what that photo must contain maybe certain types of photography that you're looking for theme that you're running through your calendar. And you get to have this contest where you select the top photos for this calendar, where donors can then get updated after they make their donation over a period of time to stay engaged. With the campaign and see what photos were selected.

Similar idea to the tributes is the setting up an E card campaign. I love this idea and it works really well with our donation form grid with gift WP which is just a way of displaying multiple different donation forms all in one page. And with different e cards associated with them. So in this example here you see on the right hand side is a Valentine's Day fundraiser with different Valentine's that you can send out. Now this can really be reworked for any kind of purpose. Happy Birthday Card or Christmas card or some kind of holiday. It could just be a tribute different tribute options. You could provide something where you can use your own artwork that you have within an organization maybe you can hire or an artist would allow to share their artwork with you to promote themselves through the E card have seen some organizations go that route, something that's going to really catch your donors attention that they can't help but share this E card with somebody they love. And ideally, if you're able to configure this campaign in a way that's in encouraging sharing, this ecard can be considered as a pass it on sort of thing. So the recipient will receive the card in their email box. And within the body of that email, they can be shared, they can be encouraged to make their own donation to then send their own recipient tribute card. There's a lot of power in this and the ability to really help it go viral. Again, lots of preparation, lots of thought should go into that in terms of our work. So next, connecting with donors is where we come. This involves form placements, where your donors are actually experiencing the donation forms in your donation messaging, the messaging itself and how you're creating that and thinking about that and then email marketing. So first to dig into form placement. So you don't want to make your donors hunt down your donation form on your website. I'm honestly a little surprised sometimes how often I have to hunt down a donation form on a nonprofit website. It's sometimes buried in a sub menu, it's in a footer, it's in a sidebar. It's not always in the main navigation and it always should be in the main navigation. I like this example here from art smart one of our gift WP customers. They've got a great call to action in two different places here on their homepage. So they've got the main navigation with a donate button. In the far right hand corner with a little extra flair added to their donate button which I love. They also have that same flair on the mobile menu as well which is important to keep as well. They also have this call to action right on the homepage where they have a nice video some copy and then the donate button as well and that donate button specifically opens up in a modal pop up. Whereas the donate button in the Main Navigation leads to a landing page. So you can kind of play with these different elements and see what works best depending on where you're displaying your donation buttons and call to actions, but absolutely have your donation button in the Main Navigation where it's easy to find for any device. You could consider featuring a call to action for giving to your GivingTuesday campaign on your homepage. Maybe it would look something like this call to action here underneath main navigation on art smarts website. Maybe they could replace this with a Giving Tuesday. specific campaign during that time of year. You should also consider adding the Donate option in the footer in the sub menus at the bottom of your blogs within your content where it makes sense. Those are absolutely crucial. But just make sure you don't miss the most important sections as well.

crafting your message is next. So finding the story that speaks most to your desired supporters is absolutely crucial. Just having a donation form on a donation page is not enough. It's not going to engage your donors. It's not going to make them feel heard or seen. You want to I provide your donors with that reason why why should they care about your campaign? Why should they care about your organization? And why should they connect with the needs of your organization at that given time because that's going to be fluid. You know your needs are going to be ever changing the people your support are going to be changing or the the animals of whatever you are supporting might be evolving as your organization continues to grow. So providing details of your specific campaign on the GivingTuesday page, of course is important but what kind of details is that? statistical facts and data that might support your work. Volunteer stories and impact stories are really crucial. Being able to get those stories really communicated well on your landing pages can help make your donors really feel connected with your organization even if they're brand new and they never heard of you before. They can read an emotional story. They might be really, really willing to invest in your organization. This key messaging does need to be brainstormed and reworked and constantly tweaked. And as I mentioned before, even if you're just embarking and giving Tuesday this year or you're planning for next year, it's a foundation it's a place to start, see what works and then work on what doesn't work. Ask your donors how they're experiencing your website. Folks that are close to you such as volunteers, board members, shareholders, you know, whatever these people are that care about your organization. You can ask them to give you some tangible information to work with and really get an experience of how others are experiencing your story to make sure it's coming through. Utilizing written process, especially in a group setting can be really helpful with this and we've got another strategy in our GivingTuesday workbook where you can write three different stories about why somebody should give or participate in your GivingTuesday campaign. So writing out these stories, these different like, it's almost like a brand scenario, these donor scenarios as to why somebody might be invested in your organization can really help you get clear about what how that person thinks what messaging is going to be really sticking out to them and what's going to help will hopefully get them to convert. Next is email marketing. So the conversation doesn't end after the landing page and after they make a donation. Customizing your email receipts from the donation itself is absolutely crucial. Making sure that that is personalized and includes your branding, gives them some next steps or lets them know how you're going to continue to communicate with them. And in making sure that they're opting into your newsletter at the time of donation is really part of this as well. Tools like gift WP will provide you with that right built into the form so it's a no brainer that they just opt right into the newsletter. Opting don't folks into specific newsletters and segmenting your lists is the next step to really take things further, especially for giving Tuesday because you don't want to bombard your regular donors throughout the year with a GivingTuesday campaign that you're creating to really focus in on new donors, especially for you folks out there that are trying to get new donors and on GivingTuesday. Your messaging is going to be very different than how it would be for recurring donors you already have. So segmenting those lists can be really powerful so that you can really go go at those new donors. Those folks that are volunteering that are interested in your organization, maybe they haven't made a donation yet. They're interested in participating in your GivingTuesday peer to peer campaign, or they're interested in event or something like that, get them on your list and start a funnel where you can really get them engaged in your content. So the landing page that you create to promote your GivingTuesday campaign before it launches can be that place where you're actually collecting email addresses. So that would just require a lot more planning ahead of time making sure you have that page ready to go and a reason why somebody would come to it without making a donation at that point. It's really geared towards just getting interest in peer to peer really works well for that. gauging an interest of how much somebody would participate in a competitive kind of fundraising campaign like peer to peer.

Using your existing audience can generate more awareness for GivingTuesday as well. So being strategic about how you are communicating about GivingTuesday to your current current audience is also very important. And that messaging is going to look different for everybody. But generally it's going to be really demonstrating exactly why this GivingTuesday campaign is important to you and specifically what it's going to do for your organization. Engaging your team like your board of directors, your vote your your folks that are helping your nonprofit or the nonprofit you work for really work every day is crucial as well. So that's where the awareness can really start to spread because you already have folks that are super engaged in the organization and the day to day work, teaching them about how and how impactful GivingTuesday can be. can get them to share it on their social channels, talk about it in their communities, and get more attention ultimately to your organization, email templates are really crucial at this point, making sure you have a solid email template with your brandings and beautiful imagery. So unique ways that you can really stand out in email is definitely important and use the same template for all your correspondences with some tweaks here and there, depending on who you're emailing again, we've got some great email templates in our GivingTuesday workbook if you're interested in learning more about that. So next is the phase of learning adapting and growing in terms of utilizing donation reports to communicate success and understanding where you might need to improve next time around. So donation reports are essential to own and to own your donor data is something that will allow empower you to use that information year over year to see what is working with any given campaign. So maybe you try peer to peer or you try a matching gift campaign attribute campaign and you want to try something new the next year, or you want to try that same campaign at a different time of year. During your year fundraising. Your donation reports are crucial to understand how many donors you got you had coming in, be able to share that information across your team and make sure that information is easily accessible. So sharing your success is crucial to understanding how your data is working for you for the next time around. So understanding who you need to report your information to first decide that for your organization. Definitely your core team should be in in the know how well the campaign did. The Board staff volunteer supporters of course in your community. So these things are all going to be kind of messaged a little bit differently in how you're communicating what your goal was. Did you reach your goal? Who helped you to reach your goal? How many donations Did you receive? How many donors Did you receive? What was the average gift size? Did you have sponsorships involved? No all these different elements are going to come into play and certain stakeholders are going to have more interest in some of this information than others. So for example, your board is going to really want to know the nitty gritty of exactly how this campaign was designed. What happened and what are we doing next time. Your volunteers supporters and community is going to want to know about your success and what you're doing with that success. So really elevating your marketing strategy and social media to share your success and to get people excited. About the participation in your campaign is crucial. Sharing the highlights of your campaign. This is where those impact stories come in. So this is an opportunity to garner impact stories from volunteers from donors to utilize photos from an event or from a virtual event. Whatever you can get your hands on to really get people to feel involved in this past campaign and then hopefully to continue that involvement after giving Tuesday. You want to share this information on a couple places so directly on your website is great a blog post announcement after giving Tuesday to really tell folks what happened during the GivingTuesday campaign is really a nice way to be transparent about exactly how your organization handled everything, what you're excited for for the next time and how you're able to get people to continue being involved, because you don't want the inertia that you're building up at GivingTuesday to end right after the event. You want to keep people involved. We mentioned via social media via your newsletter and emails to your team. So those templates that you used for the actual campaign, and getting people interested in giving Tuesday can be used in a different way to share information, you can use the same templates and just rework the information to share the success of your campaign.

Now if you didn't reach your goal, which isn't uncommon, especially if you have an ambitious goal for giving Tuesday, it's okay it really is you need to celebrate your success or anyways. Because you still went about something and you chances are did reach more, more eyes on your organization. You had more people talking about your organization, and you at least created a foundation for more growth to come year over year. communicating the results of your campaign really aligns well with that transparent value that your donors definitely want to see from you. That transparency lets them know that they're going to be communicated with no matter what happens with your organization. And they're going to know where their dollars are going and how it's being used. You can let them know where things might have fallen short. In maybe you need some more volunteers. Maybe you need some more support from your community and maybe those donors that participated would be willing to share that with their community. To get you more support for the next time around. You can elaborate why your goals were so ambitious to start with as well. That can really help you to connect with your donors to help them understand the great impact that you're trying to have and help them line up with that a little bit more closely. Make sure that your community knows how they can continue to share your story even if they can't donate any more. Let them know how they can share what you've got coming up next. What's coming up next quarter. There's always going to be something going on so make sure that your donors know how to continue to support you. And with that, that's everything I wanted to cover today. It's a lot of information. There's a lot to dig in here. And I know that with small teams it can be challenging, but even just taking a small chunk of this information working with a devoted amount of it can really produce impactful results. So I'd love to hear any questions you have.

Absolutely So Amanda, this has been fantastic information. I I'm just I'm still kind of taking you there. There's so many ideas here to to execute strategies for for GivingTuesday. It's really, really exciting. So folks, if you have questions to ask of Amanda, please use that q&a feature now. And we'd love to get those over to her. I did drop a few links in the chat area. Throughout today's webinar. The the workbook link is there. The SEO blog post is there. I'll link those also to the webinar description for those of you watching this on the replay you can just click those down below the video. I mean that we don't have any questions which means you did a great job. unpacking all of the all of the ideas. Forget for giving Tuesday. I had super exciting

so yeah, I hope it was helpful. You know, there's so much to gain here, like I said so. And the resources are out there. So I hope that folks if you do have questions, even if not now, feel free to reach out. We're here.

Yeah, for sure. So let me I'll ask a question here. So one of the one of the things you talked about early on was the importance of sort of special well in you didn't use these words exactly. But really defining the audience for the donation ask, what do you do for a nonprofit client that says we want we just want everybody to give we don't want to exclude anybody from this. How do you handle that conversation?

It's a great question. It's a great question. And it's a it's a concern or challenge that many nonprofits face because when it comes to ending suffering, you want to end suffering for all right, I think that's a huge human poll. And we work with what resources we have. So I think really getting humble about who you're already supporting and what they look like, can help you understand a broader donor audience that you can tap into, because the more specific you are that actually the more helpful you are, because then that person is actually going to be heard more and seen more than somebody that might just be like, Oh, they're just talking to everybody. Like I don't know how I fit into this group. You know, it needs to be personal. It needs to really touch home with somebody's emotional interest in their core values. Really.

Yeah, I can't agree more. And it's that's something that I've had to have that conversation with nonprofit leaders and it seems like a basic marketing concept, but sometimes it's hard or whatever reason to harder in the nonprofit space to get that to get that message sharpen just for particular audience.

Absolutely. And I think just really putting the emphasis on you're going to be able to do more like the impact is available to you and when you actually bring your circle and a little smaller, because then you can broaden out you're not going to discourage anybody by doing that, really? Because whoever needs to be heard will be heard in that. Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. So there is a deal that's on the screen right now. 30% off of any give WP plan with the code Giving Tuesday. 22. You want to talk a little bit about that?

For sure. Yeah, so this 30% off is good for any of our plans, which include a bundle of add ons. So from the basic to the agency, depending on what you might need. The most common plan is the Plus plan and the Pro Plan. The Plus plan when you go to our website, you'll see includes all of our add ons except for peer to peer fundraising for one website. And the Pro Plan includes all add ons for one website, including peer to peer so if you're just looking for everything give WP has to offer for one website. Pro Plan is the one for you. And if you're an agency out there looking to work with multiple clients, our agency plan will provide you with a five site license where you can get started with that and we can always add additional license if you're super ambitious and have lots of clients to work with.

Yeah, very good. So if you're not to give them p customer check that out. It's a great deal on all the things that give WP offers. Quick question here from Stephanie. She says, Oh, by the way, a lot of comments in the chat. It's great information really appreciate all the shared shared knowledge. Stephanie says Do you have international users? I think of use in for example. The EU where there's legal restrictions on, you know, information sharing and that person personally identifiable information. How does that give WP work with those sorts of requirements?

Yeah, it's a great question. So GDPR and PCI compliance come up quite a bit in my conversations with folks and one of the benefits of using give WP is that your payment processing is actually handled through the payment gateway that you choose to work with with give WP that just keeps things really secure. Everything's operated over an SSL certificate through your hosting provider and the credit card fields that exist on your donation form with give are actually served up by the payment gateway themselves. So there's really no chance of malicious behavior there. So those questions do are still relevant when it comes to collecting personal information. So you're collecting your donors first name, last name, email address, and maybe some other information like an a billing address. Now you still have to have a really solid website, write good security, make sure that you're doing all the right things, checking all the boxes, and you do need to get specific about your requirements and the requirements that you're up against. And we've got some great documentation, which outlined this a little bit more clearly. But I will say that the heavy lifting falls on the payment gateway and you should take those questions to the payment gateway provider that you plan on using.

Yeah, very good. All right, folks. Since there are no more questions, we're going to start to wrap it up Amanda once again. This has been excellent. I've learned a lot listening to your presentation today. I'm really excited about suggesting some ideas to nonprofits. We're working with any final thoughts as we're closing.

I'm just grateful to be here. Thank you all and thank you for all the nice comments. I'm going through those and feel very, very nice. I'm excited to see what you all create. I would love to see how you're taking these this information and and running with it. So feel free to share that whether you're using your Wi Fi or not. I'm just interested in your success. Honestly, I am very passionate about this work. And especially when people are slowing down in their strategy. I think that's my biggest takeaway is to slow down in your brainstorming sessions in your communications with your team and really put that emphasis on the value that you're presenting and how that comes through in every action that you take. Yeah,

very good. All right, folks, thanks for being with us for the last hour or so hopefully pick up some good strategies for the nonprofit clients that you work with or if you are a nonprofit, hopefully pick up some things you can start to immediately use in your fundraising efforts. Thanks again, Amanda, for being with us. And thank all of you for being with us as well. My name is Nathan Ingram and from everybody here at iThemes. Hope you have a great rest of the day. I'm back for our members for office hours, one o'clock. Tomorrow. And until then, yeah, have a great rest of the day. Good night and we'll see you back here on iThemes Training where we go further together. Thank you