Welcome to the session troubleshooting your annual giving day. How to address Setbacks and get Creative On the right hand of your screen you'll see a window with a chat, Q&A, feedback and notes tab. You can use the chat box to chat with other attendees, but please use the Q&A to send questions to the presenter. You can also ask the questions in the Q&A panel if you'd like to see a question answered at the end of the session, we will answer as many questions as we can. Please join me in welcoming presenter Makenna Daniels. Great. Thank you, Myra. Welcome, everyone. So sorry for the delay there, but we will jump right in. So glad to have all of you joining me this afternoon to talk a little bit about or this morning, depending on where you're calling in from to talk about how to troubleshoot. One of the most essential parts of our annual annual giving strategies every year, our giving days. So I think it's important to know a little bit more about the specific contracts, which I will be sharing about Ohio Wesleyan Giving Day and a little bit more about me. So as I said at Makenna, I'm associate director of Advancement at Ohio Wesleyan. I've been on staff for a little over three and a half years, but I'm also an alum of the institution, so very much dedicated to all things Ohio Wesleyan. Outside of work, I know I'm very mission driven person and outdoors person. I like to spoil my dog. So of course, that's why you're all here, right? You want to see Ellie? Not. Not really. I know that this is Ellie, but this is my chance to get to learn a little bit more about you. Our session today is going to be a little more interactive. This is the kind of program or giving day campaigns that I think are best when they're collaborative. And that is certainly true when we are sharing stories about what works and what doesn't work. And so if you would get out your phone and scan the QR code, we'll do some interactive polling using the poll everywhere software. You can also just pull up a tab on your devices. It's poll eve dot com slash my name again and Daniel's 598. If you miss out on this or have to pop out and pop back in it will be displayed at the top of the screen when these moments come up again later. So don't worry about that. But I hope you've all gotten a chance to get in here now so we can do some idea sharing as a group and rely on our collective wisdom when we're talking about giving do so. With that, I'll start us all off with a practice question. So if you have this up now, then you should be asking a question. And I see some answers are already starting to come in which case district, you know, is your introduction. And so we've seen all the dots popping up on the screens, lots of fun. So if you would just please practice using the software, just select which of the areas is your institution and hit submit. I'm seeing a lot of folks in District three. Looks like Ohio Wesleyan is part of District five. We are just north of Columbus, Ohio. Give it a few more seconds to let everyone get a chance to answer, but thank you all for practicing here with me. We've got a pretty good a pretty even distribution, actually. So it's fun to see this part of District eight as well. Okay. All right. After this finishes, then we'll have a another practice question. So I'd love to hear a little bit more on this next slide. What it is that is most important to you for giving days today, in one word, why do giving days matter to your organization today? This is obviously a tool that we have used in our annual giving programs for many years now, usually for the last decade, and it doesn't look like it's going anywhere any time soon. But we're always innovating, always trying to improve on these giving days. And I know their meaning can change year over year to your institution, to what's most important. So I see some answers starting to come in. Thank you all for that. Participation engagement. Those seem to be some common themes here. Engagement definitely one of the biggest so impact earlier it's still in there. Fundraising, awareness, transformation in lots of good words popping up on the screen, but engagement and participation seem to be our biggest one so far. So definitely a lot of interest in how our giving days are a place where our philanthropy can shine in front of the largest audience of the year in a lot of ways. So we can engage our donors, our alumni, through these campaigns, not just for giving but getting involved. Participation, though, is definitely key Here at Ohio Wesleyan. That's been our focus and we've seen as we'll talk more later about how participation really does still lead to the dollars, too, right? Well, this looks like it'll just keep growing, so I'll have to cut it off. But thank you all for this thought experiment as well. Engagement and participation. Okay, so we know that giving days matter. Sometimes we get stuck. That's why you've all chosen to attend a session called Troubleshooting and giving Dates to right. We get stuck along the way. We try new things. They don't always work. We have problem areas that no matter what we do, we can't seem to make a lot of progress. And so this is the kind of conversation that I think is most valuable when we talk about not just what went well, but what didn't go well. Those can be our greatest learning moments sometimes. So today we're going to talk about where we get stuck. We'll share a little bit more about Ohio Wesleyan giving Day journey over the last 13 years. Now, the sticking points that we've found not only at our institution, but together we can identify some sticking points for this group today, and then we can do some idea sharing and talk about opportunities for growth, what's worked for us, but ways that you can adapt that to to your institution. So our goals are identify these opportunities for improvement, to discover some of the proven strategies that have worked for Ohio Wesleyan and then to crowdsource solutions. I know sometimes the most valuable information I bring back from conferences and different sessions like this are those little tidbits where someone mentions just a specific idea that they used at their institution and it turns on a light bulb. And so I want to have a lot of different light bulb moments for all of you. Of course, we have to recognize where Ohio Wesleyan specifically located and how that can or cannot be adapted to your institution. So we have a long history of giving guys. We actually just finished our 13th year in February, and so we've been running giving days since 2011 annually. Ohio Wesleyan is a private, undergraduate liberal arts institution that is a little over 180 years old. And so we have approximately 1400 students in our student body of all undergraduates and a solicitor base of 23,000 or so alumni. And so keep that in mind when you're hearing some of the things I have to say today. How that does or does not compare with your institution in your own context. Everything I share I recognize is something that needs to be adapted to each of our individual locations. And really, that is the central tenet of what I'll be talking about today is how we've heard some of these best practices at Ohio Wesleyan over the years. And we've had different results when we try to adapt them to our own context. So the big piece I do want to share, though, is that we did change our giving day model in 2021. So we had a lot of different themes over the years that varied from year to year and with different success. We had some real high points with one theme that just ran its course over a few years, and in 2021, following a not so successful 2020 giving day where we we hosted ours the week the pandemic really hit and the world shut down that week in March that everyone has seared into their memories. I think that was the week we had our giving day scheduled in 2020. So we learned to pivot and we kept the Giving Day live that week. But we changed the theme entirely and totally changed our messaging and that really provided us a moment to step back afterward and rethink what we want our giving days to be and how we can make them more flexible and more pivotal when we do need that. And so in 2021, we launched our first. We are a will giving day and we've just completed our third iteration of that new concept. It's been very successful for us and now a lot of what I'll be sharing today has to do with that reimagined campaign which we hosted on campus. So a little bit more about we are we do hold our giving days in February each year for 1842 minutes in honor of our founding year and this is something where that that ends up translating to a little over 30 hours. So it is intentional. And for when we chose how long, we chose the giving day to take place, that works both for our alumni and for our staff. So our rebranding really focused on broadening our theme and making it what we hope to be a broader based, wider appeal to anyone among our community. Be the current student or an alumni of many, many years, wanted to widen that theme and focus a lot on volunteer advocacy, that peer to peer outreach, making this a community showcase and really turning it into like a holiday on campus. We don't have many of those traditions at Ohio Wesleyan and are working to build them over time. And this is one we definitely were trying to build up. So as I said earlier, we focus on participation with our giving days. Like many of you who mentioned participation and engagement as the most important part of their campaigns today, we focus on that, but we've still seen the dollars come through by setting a participation goal each year. So this past year we raised a little shy of 360,000 new dollars raised and really saw a spike once we had this new concept. So it's been a really successful campaign. I wanted to make that clear upfront that it is working. It's working very well. There are just some things that along the way, you know, we got 111, so how did we get to We are a few. We tried things that didn't work, and I know that all of you have done the same and have tried things that maybe sounded wonderful from some other institution. And when you tried it at yours, my goodness, like no one paid attention or this was so much work, is it really worth it? So we'll talk about some of those challenges. Ohio Wesleyan based at this point, I hope you still have that poll everywhere. Software up. We're going to go into our next question. This will help guide the rest of our time together. Really. And so if you would, please rank the below areas in order of what is most challenging to your institution to do that, just tap on the different categories that I've created here, just generally, and you'll see the arrows to move the answers up or down. So the top being the most challenging and the bottom the least challenging, I would love to see what you all are facing now are the areas that you know you'd like to hear most about today. And so we'll focus a lot of our presentation around the answers to this question. Each of these categories are in the slides that follow, but I will definitely want to spend more time on the areas that you all find most important. So it's valuable for everyone. But so far I'm seeing a lot of bouncing around. We don't have a clear winner yet, but student engagement and faculty and staff involvement are rising to the top. I can understand why so we'll give it a few more seconds here. Let this come through. Faculty and staff involvement, Student engagement or back and forth and volunteers keeping energy high so far. Okay, Thank you all for I'm for answering this. I'm actually noting this down right now so we can and then energy or we can use this to guide our time off for the rest of the session. Okay. So we'll actually start with volunteer advocacy. I can't re-order my slides, unfortunately, but I, I do want to share a lot about what we've done with our volunteers since this has been an area with probably the most investment from the get go three years ago. And then we've seen those effects the last couple of years continue to point out. So I know volunteer advocacy was one of those middle ones from our off our poll just now. Some interest in this. So this is our giving day fan club. Some of them at least this is our we are a woo crew as we've come to call them. And I'll talk more about that in a minute. But your volunteers for your giving day really are your all stars and I don't think you can do too much when it comes to investing in this group. They can make those peer to peer asks that you can't staff, and it's completely different when it comes from a peer, from someone passionate about the university with connections that are decades old. And we have had a lot of fun putting this group together and building it over the last few years. So this is them now. We'll talk a little bit about sort of how I approach this is what is it that we think we're supposed to do with volunteers and what have we actually found to be important at Ohio as land? So for volunteers, we were told, okay, ask your number one fans to be your advocates. You've probably heard this a lot. These are your trusty your alumni board members, your class leaders or class agents, those volunteers who show up to everything they say. Yes. Every time they come to all your events, ask these folks to advocate for you. Right. And then provide them with lots of resources, lots of training. Make it easy for them to get involved in a giving day. Of course, that's true. We have found that mostly to be true at Ohio Wesleyan. But this is where the book comes in. We've learned how to make that work for our alumni and our contacts. So what we had done for several years before we switched to the We are a will concept, we would go to those number one fans, those different groups that I just mentioned, and ask them, Hey, our giving day is coming up. Would you be involved? Like, would you be an advocate for us? Why don't you come on and make a profile on our website or record a video or somehow get involved, make ask, make this part of your volunteer roles that you're doing elsewhere. And what we found was sort of a lackluster response for for many years. And I think a lot of that came from it not being totally clear what this community was doing as a unit itself. So the value of giving this group a name has been incredibly important to us. We named them the We Are a Wu crew rhyming on purpose. Of course, but naming this group has been incredibly valuable to us because it gave our staff a new lens for how to interact with this group as if it was any of our other volunteer roles. But it also, more importantly gave our volunteers and I a sense of identity as a community working towards this. So they may also still be on the alumni board. They may also be doing something else. But this is an easy ask. Join the crew, be part of this. Alumni community and parents and sometimes other friends involved in this community who asks for support during our giving day. We're giving them a name. They have more of a clear sense of how this role interacted with their other volunteer roles. And then it also gave us a chance to celebrate them as a collective community. So all of our Zoom calls, we've tried to minimize how many there are a lead up to this. We always make them lots of fun and lots of high energy. So we, for instance, we always play music like pump up music. When they enter the Zoom room, there's something playing we make it celebrates. Re We give out door prizes for people to show up. We bring VIPs to the virtual event so that they can have that insider feel and get an extra special thank you From someone recognizable at Ohio Wesleyan. It's really about celebrating this group and making them feel so invested and it sort of outpour into their work. Then when they advocate on behalf of the campaign, we found that doing that and not overcomplicating the process there are such that there is such a thing as too many resources and too many trainings, and it gets a little muddled and a little confusing, giving them a roadmap upfront so that there's only a couple of steps that they know they need to take between now and the giving day and a month from now or two weeks from now, knowing exactly what they need to do along the way to prepare and then participate during the campaign has been really valuable to us. So you see one of our recruitment spring fliers here on the slide from last year, but we've invested a lot in this group and found that it's been really valuable. So at this point, I'd love to hear how your institution has inspired volunteers for giving A's. Is there something clever that you do or do you give out stocks like Ohio Wesleyan started to do? We heard from so many other institutions how Sox were so motivating and goodness, you all are correct. Sox are so motivating to our alumni, especially our volunteers. So we've done that. We've done this a high energy zoom kickoff at the beginning of each cycle. Incentives. I see that coming. In. What other ways do you inspire your volunteers for giving days? Sox are an incentive and that has helped certainly any others. I know swag can be challenging too, depending on what your institution is able to budget for something like this. And so it doesn't have to be big. I think kudos that is posted online on the campaign page or on social media or something as simple as Sox t shirts are coming up a lot. They do want to see that. I think they want something fun that's exclusive to the giving day. That's not something they could just get any other time or available at the campus store or something. A lot of recognition drawings. This is very interesting. Thank you all for sharing. I hope others are finding these helpful to see. I love the you plus two incentive. We've tried that at Ohio Wesleyan with mixed results, but I don't know that we focused on that as much as we could. So what was shirts? I like that. Turning the office into a mini party for volunteers. If you're able to do something in person, that's a lot of fun. It looks like our inspiration is largely in the stuff here. So it's funny sometimes, you know, the stuff isn't supposed to be the most motivating and other times it really can be. So I think that mix of recognition and something exclusive, something to work for or even earn as an incentive, different prizes can be fun to sort of make a game out of your campaign. So thank you all for these different answers. We'll have to move on to some other topics here, but I know there's so many other ideas among this group. I appreciate all your participation. Thank me. Energy. Hi. That sort of flows naturally into this next section, right? When we're talking about keeping volunteer your energy high. How do we keep energy high not only within our campaigns but year over year when we're doing this for ten years or more? For some of us at Ohio Wesleyan, this can be really intimidating, right? We have heard so many times like we have to be on the cutting edge. We have to reinvent ourselves so that the messaging is fresh. What's our concept going to be? What's our theme? You know what? We're doing all of this work for years to try and come up with something new and fresh and exciting for our community. And it's a lot of work on the staff side, a lot of pressure. You know, I had once heard that if you were setting a record with every given day, you're doing something wrong. And that is a lot to hold on your shoulders. That's not how we've addressed it. At Ohio Wesleyan, we've learned that big energy comes from a lot of different places, not just your messaging. So in our case, by switching to this, we are a new concept seeing new, much stronger results. The last three years, we've learned that by creating this wider, more broad umbrella of a brand, this we are a brand, we can do a lot within that. So we talk about how, you know, we all come from different places, walks of life. We all have our each story, our individual stories, but together we are a little that together we are a glue has been essential to our brand. But anything you say before that can change year to year and still fit the wider brand. So that tagline has been super helpful to us, even to our our marketing. We've tried to, you know, keep things consistent year to year but still fresh and so I think for those of you, depending on where you are in your giving day journey at your institution, maybe you've been doing this for years and this is bread and butter and you know, to do this wonderful, maybe you're just kind of starting out or you've only done it a couple of years and it seems like a lot of work each year to reinvent yourself, find that consistent thread to build a brand and build familiarity that you can carry year to year so that you don't have to do all of that work every time. And you're alumni come to anticipate your giving day. So that has helped so that we can keep the energy high by changing the message within that larger umbrella and still be consistent. We plan surprises throughout the campaign. So a matching gifts and especially those matching gifts and challenges have been pivotal to that. And so we'll talk more about matches in a moment. But things like our giving day runs into two days. There is an overnight when we start on one author's Wednesday and end on a Thursday when there's an overnight, you have to have something splashy on Thursday to really bring the energy back after things have cooled down for a while and that as an example. So we use matches and challenges to do that. But there are lots of ways that you can put surprises along the way or offer new incentives that are, you know, just for this hour that's been super effective in our athletics, giving days separate from this, and then ask your volunteers and your students for input. We have learned so much from doing this. And one thing that I think as just a quick example that we learn from our volunteers is more than once we've heard that the energy our team brings to all of our different events with our volunteers, to our trainings and the resources, even the emails that we're sending out when we're getting excited for the campaign that can get really contagious. And so that energy that you find, you know your why in yourself, I know we're all doing this work because we think it's valuable and important to the world to have higher education as strong as it can be. And so find out why. Dig in and find it and really harness that for your giving day. I think the energy that you bring will carry not only into your colleagues and your campus partners. We'll talk about that to your students, but your volunteers and your alumni. They will feel that energy if you're putting it out there. And so I think that's been really helpful for us to hear that kind of feedback from our volunteers about what we're able to do to inspire them. So how is it that you have a momentum going at your institution? Have you also used matching gifts or challenges as surprise, you know, unveiled challenges or matches throughout your campaign? Have you offered more incentives? Do you come up with a new theme year over year to keep it fresh or change something about your campaign every year so that people are excited for it? And, you know, it doesn't just become one of their one of their habits that they're maybe doing, maybe not. We want to build a habit with our donors for sure, but we want them to be excited about it too, for that engage that challenge is I see that starting to come in matching gifts for sure. Okay. We'll talk more about matching gifts and what we've found to be important with these at Ohio Wesleyan to keep energy high in just a minute. So that's going to be really helpful. Changing the branding to be more fun and lively. Agree? We have done that. We have by changing to the we are a role model. I think we're able to be so much more excited on our social media and in our emails and we had before and so much more inclusive student videos. I like new incentives overnight and unlocking things gamifying it. These are fun, right? We do work in our offices, our annual giving, our alumni engagement in our advancement offices all year long to support these same funds, these same causes. But this is our chance to really make it fun and remind people that philanthropy can be fun right? So new themes, it's interesting. So art are themes as an example, are giving day is going to fall on on Valentine's Day in 2020 for the first day of it. Well, just the way that the calendar keeps moving in February. And so we're leaning into it. It's going to be we are a woo, but it's going to be we heart woo as well. And I think there is some flexibility there to think about new themes that still fit within a wider framework. So make sure you still keep building that brand. You don't want to completely reinvent the wheel each year. Okay, Thank you all. We'll move now to student engagement. I think that was our second highest here. So we want to spend some time thinking about ways to engage students. These are some students who are engaged with one of our activities on campus this past year, just a few months back. I think this is an area that can be really challenging and certainly an area of opportunity for Ohio Wesleyan to continue to improve to. But we were told, you know, when we hear things like social media, Ohio Wesleyan doesn't have a TikTok account yet, does that mean we can't reach our students? You have to be on social. If you add Venmo, they'll come and they like to they make their gifts through Venmo, make it easy, make it like a technology just embedded because these are digital natives. Our students are used to all of these services and opportunities. And while that all may be true, we've learned at Ohio Wesleyan, at least that as an example, paper marketing totally still works for us doing those things in-person, tangible things can be so important to break through the noise when our students are following a ton of different accounts across all these different platforms, they're not necessarily checking their email or their emails are getting varied things like door hangers that we put in all of the residence halls for our seniors to let them know about a special senior class match or this balloon drop that we did this year was really successful. A lot of fun. And it's not just about it being fun at this level. The at a more high level, more shallow fun. It can be really honest and really impactful while you're still having all this fun. And so my example to share more about that is we for the first time in trying to build this holiday on campus and build a campus presence, are in our third year. We did this balloon drop, but it wasn't just a balloon drop. It was something where the week before we were tabling in our campus center and sharing with students about the giving day that was coming up and how we were going to kick it off with a balloon drop, but that there was a way that they could all already demonstrate what they care about and the causes they're already supporting. And so they were able to choose to place a red or a black balloon into different categories just at the table, no cost, no strings attached. They were just asked to say, you know, do they like to support higher education? Or maybe it's environmental causes or social services or different areas that matter to them. And then one color balloon indicated that they've donated or have supported philanthropically one of those causes, and the other color indicated they'd given up their time and their volunteering and supported that cause in a different way. And so when all the balloons dropped, then we got to see our students are already making donations, giving of their time, and we're really celebrating the impact of our student body before it even kicked off. I think that really resonated with students. The other piece that really resonates with them is again, visual impact paper. You know, this is getting in front of them that at a high traffic area on our campus, we for three years have asked them just a really simple but honest question and been really impressed with the vulnerability and transparency that our students have shown us when prompted with a good question like this year was Oh, will lead me to work in the past we've done because of Ohio Wesleyan I can link and it just left it open for students to, you know, draw right whatever they wanted. And this has turned into sort of a signature component of our giving day and something that I think while being super impactful for our students to see and watch as these different answers cover the walls and we sort of make collage all over the students center with them, they see that impact that Ohio Wesleyan has, and them are alumni. Also see these stories and see what their dollars are going to. It's so easy. It's such a simple way for them to participate when they walk by, but they learn a little bit more about what philanthropy does at Ohio Wesleyan. So socks have been incredibly motivating to our students as well. So we introduced that this year. I think that is going to stick around for the long haul. But we've really learned you got a strong education about philanthropy. Is key as a foundation for our students. We have a lot of work to do here. I think we're set on a really good path as we've continued to build this over time. But this is a long game, right? You have to start working now and in four years, the current students who will be seniors will finally have a good sense between your other events and your Giving Day campaign, what it is that philanthropy is doing. So it takes some time, but we we have seen some movement. The needle is starting to move here for engaging with our students from some of these on campus events. So I'd love to hear at this time how you all encourage students to participate in your giving day. It doesn't have to be through making a gift that may not be in a year, two or three that you're planning to ask your students to give. Or maybe you're only asking your seniors and you would like to move to asking your juniors and sophomores. And first your students make these different steps along the way and you can eventually reach, oh, we offer volunteer hours. That's really interesting. I love seeing some of these answers start to come in so you can do a separate student day of giving. That's really interesting. I'd love to hear more from that institution how they've found that to be effective. Free food. You can never underestimate the power of free food or other freebies in general. So the Sox have definitely been a free thing. They like to see a senior point night we do at Ohio Wesleyan. I'll also do some of those events for seniors. They're not always directly connected to the Giving Day campaign, but that's a great idea. They play money. Oh, let's see. Cash clubs. They can win money to donate to the campus, cause that's really fun. We did a trivia bus one time. We had a little golf cart thing that ran around campus and asked some trivia. Was fun to film that and share it with our alumni too. They write thank you notes. Okay. Ambassador Prize The students with the most donations receive a class ring. Oh, my gosh. So this is what is most valuable. I think we all get to share ideas together like this. Cupcakes, more free food. So lots of good ideas here in the comments. I hope you all are again making note of your favorites and maybe some of what I've shared or maybe some of what you're seeing here will be helpful to your own campuses. Okay. Moving to faculty and staff involvement, that was our number one. So we'll focus a little more time here. I know we're getting close, so I want to make sure we allow some time for questions, too. But faculty and staff involvement, we have Ohio Wesleyan. We we have had some challenges in this area. Right. So we had heard, you know, we want to involve your faculty and staff every step of the way or, you know, invite them to be part of your planning committee. Maybe you go to them and go to their different campus departments, their departmental meetings, and host a presentation. We did that. We tried that two years ago and I had, you know, sort of mixed success. It ended up with us just coming to their meetings, presenting about why we are even hosting and giving day, asking how we can help them partner. And it didn't really result in the kind of increase or participation that we had hoped to see. So what we've learned at Ohio Wesleyan at least, is to really step back and think about you meeting our campus partners where they are doing a temperature check, at least in our situation where we started this new concept in 2021, and that is definitely it was a time when we were still in the throes of the pandemic and hybrid learning. Our campus had some on campus classes and we were able to bring students back safely, but our faculty were just stretched as thin as they possibly could be, and so we needed to do a temperature check and rolling things back a little bit and think about what really is effective. Two years ago and three years ago, we were bringing donuts to all of their different departments. At the start of the campaign and left a little flier saying, Hey, free donuts, just we hope you'll participate. Like, what's that actually resulting in anything? This is where I hope you use unique links. We learned that nobody scanned that QR code one year, and so it didn't seem to really have the aura why we hoped for. And by doing this temperature check, I think we learned that we needed to just make things really simple and be really authentic with our campus partners about why we're doing this and understanding that they are likely at your institution as well. Already stretched at their maximum, they're very busy doing very important work for our students. So one thing we did this year that I think resulted in some great success is we have an annual award ceremony for the staff that's hosted in the beginning of the spring semester before classes began, and it's sort of a luncheon to get all the staff together, but then they give out some annual awards and we decided to tack the campaign on to that. So we came some of our staff in Advancement table, the event we shared about the upcoming Giving Day the following month told them about the opportunity to win free socks if they participated in some way. And it's just a way to sort of hit the ground and be in front of them where they were already going to be without asking them to do anything additional or adding to their calendars. And we saw some success there between the socks, the extra competition that we had between departments and divisions and coming to event, we saw the greatest participation of our faculty and staff of any of our three years this year. And so we had online participation of like 3 to 5% and our online gifts were 10% were made up of faculty and staff gifts. So this is where I'd love to hear, too, how you all have involved faculty or staff at your institution. Do you incorporate representatives on your committees that plan your giving day, or do you have a committee have plans? You're giving day? I recommend having one. Do you give free incentives to them or gamify this by offering a challenge between different faculty or staff members? Leaderboards maybe for different funds? That's a great way, especially for some of those larger institutions between different colleges. That would be a great way to incentivize for your involvement. At Ohio Wesleyan, we're a bit smaller, and so we have to think about what is most effective for our students. Any area or gift account to have a page on the Giving Day website that's really interesting. So you extend beyond just annual giving funds, is my understanding. Bonus vacation days. Oh my gosh. I might want to save that one. I have to borrow that idea right. Copy and steal everything and run leaderboards. Okay, Lots of great ideas coming in. So I know we're getting close on time, so I'm going to move on just to share a little bit on matching gifts and gamification, because I think that's been most important. At Ohio Wesleyan, we tried to do more and more and more here and we added an overall match. We broadcast it proudly, but then we have all these smaller matches for different target groups. Or maybe it's just for students. Maybe it's just for this time period that we use it as a splash. And what we found out last year, not this past year but last year, don't sacrifice clear communication by having too many things. It can get very confusing in the weeds. If you are saying, well, your gift is two times here and then you get an extra $10 here, that means your $10 gift could turn into $76.23. It could get really confusing if you get super in the weeds by having too of these that get muddled in your communication. So think about which matches you need to share with which groups you don't have to share them all at once, and then think about mixing both matches and challenges. And so we share our overall match widely in advance. But then the smaller ones usually come in during the campaign itself, and that's been most effective for us. So I think at this point I would like to just open for a minute or two of questions since I know we're coming right up on time. But I wanted to thank you all for joining me today and sharing your insights as well. Before you go, if you haven't completed the session evaluation, please do so. Thank you, Makenna, for a great presentation. You can return to the agenda to find your next session.

troubleshooting

creative strategies

annual giving day

engaging volunteers

keeping energy high

involving students

matches and challenges

successful strategies