Good morning, everyone, as you're coming in. Welcome to this case webinar, the Best Giving Days of 2023 and How to Replicate Their Success. I'm Kristi Grim, Case Director of Online Education, and I'm delighted that you could join us. Before we get started, I just have a couple of housekeeping notes. This webinar is being recorded and all registrants will receive access to the recording after the event. Look for a follow-up email with instructions for accessing that later today. We will be taking questions, so please do use the Q&A box to submit those as they come up. At the end of the session, we'll get through as many of those as we can. And for those of you who need points for CFRE, this is approved for one continuing education point. And without further ado, I'm going to pass it over to Colin Sylvester to kick us off. Hi, everyone. Thanks so much for joining us, and thanks, Christy, for having us on this case platform. We're excited for the presentation today. I just want to get to a couple of other housekeeping things before we launch into our presentation. There is a Q&A box right there at the bottom for you, so any questions that you have, please. It doesn't need to be super broad or specific. It can be both of those. We know we're getting into some specific examples today of really successful Giving Days. So if you have questions about what that looked like or how the page was laid out, we can answer those questions, and we can answer questions that are more broad and kind of strategy-based as you're planning your upcoming Giving Days. We do have a poll question, which we would love your feedback on. So when that pops up, we would love to hear from you, because we'd love to keep improving our webinars and our content so that hopefully we can be back presenting with CASE again soon. And lastly, in addition to the slides and the recording, we do have a companion blog on our website, gravity.com, that's really a lot of these examples that you'll see today, but more as well. So you'll get that in your inbox. You can certainly go on our website and find it, but just keep an eye out for that as well. And without further ado, I will introduce our topic and also the Giving Day experts that we have on the call here. For the most part, I'll be in the Q&A, so you'll see me again towards the end, but by all means, enter those questions during the presentation, too. So we are going to be talking about the best Giving Days of 2023 and how to make yours a success in 2024, and we have three speakers with us today from Gravity. I'll start it off by handing it off to you, Alexa, take it away. Awesome. Hi, everybody. Thank you so much for being here today. My name is Alexa Schwartz. I am an account manager with the Gravity team. Before I joined the team here, I worked in alumni relations at Rice University here in Houston, and I love being able to connect with our current partners in higher education and nonprofits around their goals of fundraising and engagement. I'll pass it to Austin. Hi, everyone. Thanks again for being here today. My name is Austin Monn, Director of Customer Success here at Gravity. I've been with Gravity for almost four years now. We've worked on hundreds of Giving Days with our partners and really excited to share with you all some of the best practices that we've seen in 2023. And hi, everyone. I'm Joe McClanahan. Thank you so much for joining today. I'm Assistant Director of Enterprise Sales. I'm based in our Seattle office and have been with the company for a number of years as well, working with our partners across the country. So I'll be talking first about what we saw in 2023, some of the stats and trends. We actually saw a nice increase in the donation amount per donor, 17% per donor across our Giving Day partners in 2023. We saw a large number of our partners also utilizing alumni volunteers and ambassadors at 63%. A lot of additional build out in some of these ambassador pages, ambassador leader boards, using video and email, multi-channel approach to recruit ambassadors and pull in ambassadors year over year. So encouraging ambassadors to return and help with the Giving Day. We're seeing a lot of direct video outreach. So in addition to maybe a main homepage video, a live stream, other content, we're seeing a more personalized, hyper-personalized video for direct donor outreach. That was a big trend in 2023. And that can be done through some integration methods, pulling in ambassadors for that as well, or leadership to record a video or anyone who is participating in your Giving Day that might record a video that can be sent directly out to donors. And then we just really continue to see matches being such a large and important part of Giving Days. 84% of donors are more likely to donate if offered a match, a stat we saw from double the donation. So we're continuing to do everything we can to highlight matches, either put them on the homepage, have a full separate landing page for them. So a lot of customization around what the match pages look like, what you highlight, kind of how you display those on the Giving Day. We're a big focus in our Giving Day reviews in 2023. And in the next slide, I think I'm going to turn it over to Alexa to discuss some of the Giving Day themes and strategy overall. Thanks, Joe. So after we've covered some of the 2023 by the numbers, I want to highlight a couple of key themes and strategies that we picked up on from our successful Giving Days this past year. So those themes are volunteer engagement, matches and challenges, and in-person programming. Of course, some of these themes may be more relevant for your constituents and planned fundraising initiatives than others, and that's okay. You all know your communities best, and you're going to know what fundraising strategies will work best for your communities. So the first theme that I want to highlight is volunteer engagement. So we can go to that next slide, please. So all of our successful Giving Days from 2023 utilize volunteers in some capacity. And helped connect them to the opportunity to promote and support the causes that they care about. So as you can see from the screenshot here from our donor benchmarking report, over 60% of fundraisers say that they leverage faculty, staff, and alumni volunteers for that donor outreach. I'm sure everyone on this call knows the value and importance of volunteer engagement. And so our ambassador signup tool, which you'll see on the left, makes it simple for anyone to be an ambassador. Without logging in, they can be an ask ambassador, so they could be a champion for a particular fund with a specific link to track donations. Or a social ambassador, so they can just help spread awareness through things like a social media toolkit. So whatever volunteer engagement looks like to you and for your Giving Day, all of our successful Giving Days successfully leverage volunteers to help spread awareness for their fundraising initiatives and recruit those new donors and gifts. Go to the next slide, please. Awesome. The second theme that I want to highlight is the gamification via matches and challenges. So our sites through the advanced tool are designed to create competition and excitement through gamification. And it can be a great way to incentivize donors, especially those first-time donors and young alumni donors. So Austin will be speaking to this a little bit later, but the matches and challenges page is consistently one of the top-viewed pages that we see when we're reviewing the Google Analytics for our site's post-Giving Day. Additionally, as Joe shared earlier from some of the research from our partner DoubleLift Donation, 84% of donors are more likely to donate if offered a match. And one in three donors would give a larger gift if there's a match applied. So our DoubleLift Donation integration with advanced can also help maximize those impact of those gifts and matches. And so if you're working with us, your customer success manager and account manager can help you talk through the different ways you can incorporate gamification during the planning process leading up to your Giving Day based on the goals that you have for your specific fundraising initiatives and how you want to track that progress. There's a whole variety of ways that you can incorporate that gamification through matches and challenges so we can help you figure out what will work best for your goals. Lastly, the final theme that I want to highlight is the increase in in-person programming, particularly related to promoting those Giving Days. And so as we can see from this snapshot from our donor benchmarking report, nearly 77% of the fundraisers that we surveyed noted that attending in-person events is the main indicator that they're ready to be assigned to a portfolio. So some of our successful Giving Days had on-campus programming to promote giving to students or faculty and staff, while others had different regional events to help support promoting their Giving Days. I've included a screenshot here from Florida Tech's 37 Hours of Giving that includes in-person events and games, including the very famous Rock, Paper, Scissors tournament and the Cash Cab trivia that was new for them for 2023. So as in-person events are more and more prevalent post-COVID, as I'm sure everyone on this call is aware, it's great to brainstorm how you can bring your Giving Day directly to your community from online into the real world. So that is what I wanted to cover here. I'm going to now pass it to Austin to talk more about digital engagement and how these themes are showing up in those Google Analytics statistics. Thanks, Lexa. I love transitioning from the taking things online to in-person, and now we're going right back online. So this is one of my favorite areas of Giving Day to talk about is the digital engagement piece. How are people engaging with your digital fundraising website? Here at Gravity, we really like to work with our partners to get the most out of their advanced platform that are in line with a lot of these metrics and trends that we're seeing from a digital engagement lens. Now, all of these stats here come directly from our own platform usage in 2023, so that's what we're using to kind of shape how we're building these platforms. So first out here, the average session duration on your Giving Day site is going to be around three minutes, which is really not a lot of time. Oftentimes, we want to put heart and soul into building out a Giving Day platform to be really robust and have a lot of information, but frankly, at the end of the day, our donors aren't spending a lot of time here, and that's totally okay. We have no correlation between time spent on the platform related to number of gifts or even gift size. So one of our main takeaways there is we want to make it as easy for donors to get to the platform, access the giving form, make their gift, and be on their way. To back up that strategy there, we're seeing that donors will visit an average of 2.6 pages per session that they're on the platform. Let's round that up for all intents and purposes and say they're going to three pages. Those three pages across the board, most popular, are your homepage, your donor wall, and match and challenges. Almost never in the top five are any sort of fund page or place where you're really describing where donations to a specific fund are being used, which, again, is a-okay. Most of our email solicitation is going to be directing people to either the homepage or to one of these matches and challenges page where donors can learn about how their gift can go the extra mile. And then, of course, donors love seeing their name in lights. Who doesn't? It's fun to see who else gave on Giving Day, which is why that donor wall is always really popular. Last night here, about 60% of your site traffic is going to be on mobile, and that number just keeps going up more and more and more every single year. One of the things that we like to talk about with our clients is that your promotion for Giving Day is going to be what gets people to the site. Once donors get to the platform, they've already decided that they're going to make a gift, and likely to one of the areas of support that they've already contributed to either last year or in years past. So we'll talk about some ways to do that here in the next couple of slides. But again, key takeaway here is that we wanna make engaging with your digital platform as easy as possible for drivers. Now let's look at some site examples to see how some of these trends are coming into fruition. First example here is gonna be Grand Canyon University. I've worked with Grand Canyon University for three years now from their very first day of giving where they raised about I think 220,000. This last year, they were up over 640. So really impressive growth year over year here. One of the things and ways that they lay out their site that is different from some of our other partners is that they keep all of their 85 funds organized on just the homepage. So in the screenshot here, you're seeing an element that we call campaign tile sections. They feature little campaign tiles and these tiles then open up to full pages that describe each of these funds. But by keeping all of these tiles organized on a central landing page, it makes it really easy for donors to find the exact area or unit of campus that they wanna contribute to, all the areas that they can give to, make their selection and then proceed through checkout. GCU here had around a 90 second session duration to about half the average that we're seeing across other partners. And from 2022 to 2023, they still saw a 35% increase in donations. So again, impressive growth there, but doesn't have to be a really complex site. The next piece that we'll talk about here is their ambassador program. GCU really leverages their ambassadors. It can get over a thousand register in October, 2023, really strong campus participation here from student organizations and almost all of those students from the student orgs sign up to become ambassadors. And we saw 17% of their online donations came from ambassadors, right? So huge testament to the power of ambassador promotion here. And I think we can all agree that when someone that we know or someone affiliated with an organization that we support personally comes to us for an ask, we're more likely to give than when that's coming directly from the institution. Where GCU also goes above and beyond here is they do a great job hitting the basics of a really strong ambassador program and then going the next step further. So for those of us on the call who maybe are looking for ways to introduce an ambassador program or just some best practices, we can talk through some of those now. So first, when you're working with ambassadors, it's really important that you're setting a clear expectation of what it means to be an ambassador. So here we wanna talk about what's the purpose of Giving Day? What is the expectations of being an ambassador? And then on our end, how are we giving our ambassadors all the tools that they need to go out and do the job that we're asking them to do? So that can be providing them with sample social media post captions, maybe even a timeline of when to post. If you really wanna go that extra step, providing specific email templates that they can reach out to constituents on their own. If you have a more complex ambassador program where we're really leveraging Ask Ambassadors and having ambassadors specifically reach out to a group of people, there we can look at having them reach out to constituents of the same class year, on the same major and campus, or even people who come from specific or similar organizations on campus. On the right here, you'll also see some examples of a social media toolkit and different graphics that we're providing to ambassadors to share out. Now, there's a lot of examples here, and I think this is really strong and a great option that you can do. If you're just getting started though, don't feel like you need to provide your ambassadors with 12 or 15 different graphics. When in doubt, a square graphic is always gonna be best. It's gonna fit really well across almost all social media platforms, especially as how we're engaging with social media, especially for student ambassadors, is moving more towards an Instagram stories or short format sharing option. So I recommend having those pieces in there. Typically, people aren't updating their Facebook banners or profile pictures for Giving Day, unless they're working very closely with it, but giving them other options that they can share out here is really, really helpful. Something that GCU does here as well is on their ambassador page, they provide specific graphics for ambassadors to share out leading up to Giving Day to build hype, and then different graphics during Giving Day to share out to say, today's Giving Day, come on in and show your support. Move to the next slide here. Next school we're gonna talk about is Wake Forest University. This is definitely gonna be a larger one of our partners, raising over $2 million on Giving Day. Colin mentioned our blog post at the top of this webinar. We talk more about Deke's Day of Giving in that, but we'll talk about some highlights and some strategies here as well. So the first piece that I'll call out here is the way that they organize their funds. And they use an element that we call link boxes. They are boxes that link places, so very technical. And think of them like file folders, right? So when we click into the athletics link box here, it's gonna take us to another page that then has those campaign tiles that link out to all of the athletic funds. This is a really helpful layout when you have units on campus who are also really involved in their own promotion. So if we know that athletics is also gonna be reaching out to all of their donors on their own, it can be good to have a place where they can direct them that is just athletic funds, and their donors then aren't gonna get entangled with the clutter of other funds on Giving Day. Now, on Advance, we still absolutely have an option that those donors can contribute to multiple areas. So don't think that they're gonna be pigeonholed into one specific space. But again, in alignment with those Google Analytics stats that I shared earlier, we wanna get donors directly to the place of making their donation. And if we know that they're gonna give to a certain area, let's get them there and on their way. So next we can talk about some of their challenges and incentives that we do here. One of the challenges that they do that I absolutely love is they do a sharing challenge on Giving Day. So I have it open here. We'll share out these slides afterwards, you can see this. I know the text is a little small if we're on smaller screens but in summary, the, I think it's a family, the campaign on campus that has the most number of shares between 9 a.m. and 1 p.m. on Day of Giving gets extra bragging rights for winning this challenge. On your Day of Giving, you can easily add some sort of monetary prize here but I love seeing challenges incorporated that are just for bragging rights. Oftentimes constituents are really motivated just by the competition of it all. And that's a great way to leverage things that we're not, we don't have to add another dollar amount to them. Specifically what I like about this is not only is it engaging the community but it's also helped spreading the word about Giving Day in a really organic way and is in line with our overall objectives. Some other pieces that they do in here for time-bound challenges is they have a prize for the first donation of the day and the last donation of the day. Doing time-bound challenges is a great way that you can keep up donor engagement throughout Day of Giving to make up for some of those natural lulls in the day. Now, in the past people have asked what are those natural lulls? I think it's easier to say what are gonna be your natural peaks on Giving Day and typically those are in line with when you're sending out emails. But organically, they would be between eight and 9 a.m. when people are just getting into the office or starting their day. Around lunchtime at happy hour, towards the end of their day, happy hour challenges are a great time challenge for people to do. And then the post-dinner rush. So having time-specific challenges outside of those hours are a great way to kind of keep momentum going or you can capitalize on those natural peaks and have one-to-one matches or other participation-based challenges to help those gifts go the extra mile. Now, the next group of challenges that we're seeing here are really community-centric and is an awesome, awesome, awesome way to leverage, again, the natural competition that exists between constituents. So the first one here is a participation-based challenge. So the community that has the highest participation on Giving Day gets bragging rights there. They take the crown home. We see very similar challenges like this related to Greek life challenge that you see at the bottom here or even athletics. And doing a participation-based challenge or a percentage of the participation is a great way to kind of equalize the playing field there with a lot of athletics challenges. We often see football takes the cake just because they have a really large roster, really devoted donor base. So kind of playing with some of those levers helps your smaller teams or organizations on campus still get recognition and encourage them to participate in Giving Day. The other thing here is another participation one that is specific to affiliation. So we're seeing the most loyal alumni, parents, and friends. Having different affiliation groups and to compete against each other is another great way to leverage organic competition on Giving Day. We see this a lot with faculty and staff challenges too or between different departments or units on campus. All right, so with that, I'll pass it over to Joe to talk about our last Giving Day example. Awesome, thank you, Austin. So wanted to share this example. I think it ties in really nicely with what Austin mentioned on the Google Analytics stats and having a site that is direct and to the point, focusing on the areas that you know your donors are going to give to. This is Bellarmine College Prep using our Giving Day platform. So Bellarmine Fund, Direct Tuition Assistance Fund, directly on the homepage along with an animated progress leaderboard. And then we're seeing more and more of our partners really edit the top landing pages that they're having at kind of that top navigation bar of their Giving Day website. So Bellarmine College Prep just kept it really simple and had just kind of affiliation landing pages. So for parents and alums, they can click directly into their individual landing page, see leaderboards, have some competitions, provide like swag giveaways for people that are performing at the top of those leaderboards. So just a way to really highlight the top funds right on the homepage and then maybe split out some landing pages, but really looking at reducing the total amount of clicks that it takes to make a gift. So that's, I think, a trend we're seeing as we're going into 2024 is how can you get people to that fund, to the highlighted fund you want them to donate to as quickly as possible. Also providing a great mobile experience. So oftentimes a simplified site is a great experience on mobile as well. And then with those donation forms for kind of a simple multi-gift in a mobile friendly donor form really helps out with the overall experience there. So yeah, I think that's kind of my coverage on maybe the next slide there, Colin. Thanks. So we'll go into audience poll question and I think that'll pop up for you all here. Thank you. Just a reminder for everybody as you answer that poll question to get your questions in in the chat. We can jump in as we're discussing if we can get to the question then or at the end, we have time dedicated for questions at the end. So by all means, fire away and thanks so much for responding to the poll here. And while we wait for that poll, there is a question in chat. So I don't know, Austin, if you, there was a question around happy hour challenges, hourly challenges, if we want to kind of address that one. Oh, why not? So happy hour challenges, lots of different options that you can do here. We might talk about this more later in terms of like challenge strategy and way to build those out. But common ones that we would see would be like one-to-one matches from four to 6 p.m. Some sort of challenge around donor participation. If we get 500 donors between four and six, it'll unlock $1,000 towards scholarships. Just some examples there. Generally, my recommendation when it comes to challenges is challenges should exist to help you meet your goals and objectives for a giving day. So if your overall goal for giving day is going to be dollar specific or donor specific, challenges should also be in line with that overall metric to help you meet that goal. Hope that answers your question. If we have more questions about challenges, throw them in the Q&A below. Yeah, it looks like there's a couple. I'll take one. There was one that just came in after too about limiting the number of funds. And Alex, Austin, Colin, feel free to jump in on my answer here. But yeah, this is an interesting one. We do see some of our partners limiting the number of funds, but the way that we do it is a little bit unique. So there's option to build a full landing page per fund, or just maybe one that you're not expecting as many donations for. You don't want to highlight as much potentially. That one can just show up in the search bar. So there's a couple of ways we can handle that from kind of like a user experience perspective, maybe build out full landing pages for all of your top funds. If you do want to make sure that every fund you have on your list is included, you can have them available in the search bar. So we kind of see a mix, and it really varies by organization. That's probably my best answer on that one. Then there was a question around suggested times for challenges. I don't know if we want to go through these or save them for the Q&A. What do you think, Colin, Austin? I think we can answer them now. Why not? So suggested time for challenges, like I said earlier, I would recommend doing them during the natural lulls in your giving day. So either like mid-morning challenges, mid-afternoon challenges, really good way to get people to kind of come back during the times when they wouldn't naturally be there. And it can also be a good idea to do one like overall match on giving day. We see this oftentimes be a success if you have a fewer number of funds. But if you have multiple funds around for different areas of campus, it can be good to kind of split those up and make sure that everyone's getting a small piece of the pie. I see a question here about ideal time of year for giving days. A great question. So really, this answer is going to depend on your specific institution. No one knows your institution better than you do. We see giving days in the higher ed space being most successful in March and April, if you're looking to do something in the spring, and then in the fall in October. With Giving Tuesday being such a huge beast that it has become, we no longer recommend using Giving Tuesday as your official day of giving. It's just a lot of space to compete and you want the spotlight to be on you on your giving day. So really having things in October can get a little muddy there. But October is a great time of year. It aligns really well with homecoming where there's naturally a lot of school spirit and in the air you already have donor and alumni attention. So that's a great time of year to do giving days as well. Okay. Next one is student ambassadors. Alex, I don't know if you want to cover that one or I can. What are some of the best ways to get students engaged as ambassadors? Sure. So I think in terms of the student ambassadors, I think as we all know, I think students love swag. I think they love the opportunity to raise funds for their particular student organization. And I think that encouraging that gamification and those challenges with students can be really impactful. I know we talked a bit about the on-campus events. Some of the schools that I work with incorporate things like scavenger hunts to kind of generate excitement. But those are a couple of ways that we've seen the engagement of students. But it's always a great idea to connect with your campus partners primarily that are working with students and utilizing if you have like a student alumni ambassador program or a student philanthropy committee, integrating those groups into your planning leading up because they may have some other ideas that may not have come up for y'all in the planning. Thanks Alexa. Kind of piggybacking off of that, I see we have another question in here about why in-person programming matters, especially if students aren't your focus for Giving Day. Simple answer here, your current students are eventually going to become your alumni. So being able to get them excited about Giving Day and in a way that is non-monetary means that eventually when they have the expendable income to give back to the university, they already have a strong emotional appeal to this specific day. Thanks Austin. I see another one here, next one on my list. Looks like creative challenges. I really like this question too. So in general, what I've seen is most improved leaderboards are pretty interesting. It's kind of like participation year over year. This is something that helps keep the experience fresh on a Giving Day. Just kind of a unique one that we offer on challenge pages. So that one I always like to see it can help funds that maybe don't have as many donors. You're not competing on total donor count per fund on a leaderboard, but maybe most improved from last year. Then some other ones that are really creative are competing with a rival school or doing kind of a challenge with multiple institutions are ones that always stand out for me as well. I have one more that I want to share there. Shout out to Cornell College if you're on the call, but one of their challenges that they do during Giving Day is the I Miss the Squirrels challenge, which I think is just a hilarious title for a challenge. It's not the complexity of it. It's just a donor participation challenge, but it's a really fun way to leverage kind of this unofficial mascot that they have on campus of these squirrels that alumni feel really strongly about. So sometimes the creativity doesn't have to be in the setup of the challenge, but just in the way that you position it. Thank you. I saw a bunch of questions come in. We'll try and get to all of those in the Q&A at the end. There's two more slides on 2024, what we're looking to see, and then we'll open up the Q&A, but just wanted to cover this here and kind of the overall comprehensive strategy we're seeing around Giving Day success and what we're planning for with our partners for 2024. One thing we're seeing in general is donor engagement, focusing on young alumni groups, millennials, and then enhancing pipeline development. So not leaving your Giving Day in a silo for, you know, it happens and then you don't know what to do with the donors afterwards and all that great work you've done on your Giving Day. We want to make sure that that's capitalized on. So that's something that we're seeing a lot overall in our discussions with partners, people coming to us to ask about multi-channel approaches, pipeline development, email, text, video, that's coming up more and more in all of our discussions. And ambassadors are always kind of underlying that in matches and challenges. And then just accountability around goals, switching into like leadership annual giving major gifts. So that's a lot of what we're seeing in 2024. And on the next slide, I'll kind of break down overall some of the things that we can do, some of the things that people are focusing on with that comprehensive approach for 2024 and just for online digital fundraising in general. So the first box here is around engagement. This is another way to potentially involve student ambassadors and volunteers, alumni. If you do have an alumni portal, or if you have any kind of foundation site, cross-promoting your Giving Day, enabling giving forms within the Giving Day can help with donor acquisition. So it's kind of a year-round approach to donor acquisition, marketing. A lot of that can be done through an engagement portal through other channels. So just focusing on engagement, what you can do there is conversations that are always coming up, promoting things in automated newsletters or promoting campaigns automated newsletters. The second one is campaign management. So this comes up more and more in a lot of our discussions. Something our team heavily focuses on is appeal tracking. So are you working with a platform, a software stack, technology stack that has some of these options around appeal tracking, built-in emails, videos, abandoned cart. So kind of a more advanced like E-commerce approach to digital fundraising and online giving. That's really one of the trends we're seeing and planning for. Personalized video, the next one here, and I mentioned this, I think, just at the very beginning of the presentation, is how do you do this one-to-one, but how do you also do it at scale. Another discussion that comes up pretty much on every call that we have around how are you doing direct outreach to donors? What are you planning kind of directly after your Giving Day? You're promoting the Giving Day with video and year-round if you're doing crowdfunding and other initiatives. Last one is connecting Giving Day to pipeline development. So this is kind of a top priority we're seeing across advancement offices. Mid-level giving is a really strong focus for 2024, Gen Z, Millennials, how do you reach them where they are, and then recurring giving. So looking at making it easy to have those monthly donors, but also moving people into pipelines automatically following a Giving Day. So these four things are high-level topics on how do you have a comprehensive year-round approach to make the most out of all the work that you put into a Giving Day campaign. And then Q&A. I know we had a good number of questions, so I wanted to open up with the remaining time on Q&A. So many really great questions here, y'all. Thanks for contributing. I see a question here about heat maps, so we can see global audience. Yes, absolutely. That's one of the really fun ways that we can use to display data. Visualization on Giving Day is a really cool way to show progress and also feature your community. So yes, certainly we recommend doing that. And it looks like there's another question around basically asking what other types of constituents make good ambassadors, in addition to, we mentioned students from different clubs or organizations participating as ambassadors. So of course it's going to depend on your constituents in your community, but of course I think alumni ambassadors can be a particularly useful population to recruit for those ambassadors. It's a great way, especially if they're not living in the area, to participate and give back and volunteer with their alma mater. I'll just do a shout out to my alma mater Tulane. I just signed up to be a Giving Day ambassador and they said something that actually was my reason why I signed up, apart from my desire to give back of course, was that they were going to enter any ambassadors who signed up by, I think it was February 6th, they would be entered in to win a king cake and we know it's Mardi Gras coming up this weekend. So fingers crossed if anyone from Tulane's on the call, I would love to be a recipient. But of course, so alumni ambassadors is a really great population, but particularly the parent ambassadors can be a great population as well, especially if you're at a maybe a high school, K-12, and we've seen a lot of ambassador success with faculty and staff as well, particularly if they're interested in kind of leading the initiatives, raising funds for a particular program that they're responsible for, so that can be another great population to focus on. Thank you. I see another question here, challenges within challenges, and this is a great one too, and Austin, you have a lot of experience working on these build outs, so do you Alexa, this is, it depends really I think on the number of challenges you have, so you can display them in different ways on, if you want to have it maybe on the home page, but if you have a huge number of challenges, then maybe a separate landing page and some more categorization and stacking can be effective. So Austin or Alexa, do you want to cover any of that? Yeah, I think a lot of that is going to come down to how you promote your challenges to the community. Yeah, certainly it can be confusing if, you know, you have hundreds of challenges going on on Giving Day, and Giving Day in itself is kind of a major challenge, but how you kind of promote that out to your constituents if you're segmenting, so that it's only going to certain populations, is a great way to kind of clean things up there. Again, what I would say with challenges is really think about how they're being used to achieve your overall goal. I think sometimes we get swept up into, you know, we have a lot of major donors who want to do challenges, which is awesome, but sometimes it can distract from what the institution's real priority for Giving Day is. So just something to be mindful of there. I see another question on, do you recommend using ambassadors for a private high school? And I'd say absolutely. I've seen some really unique rollouts of this. One that I can remember is kind of like a class year, almost like a yearbook type display for having a leader from each class year that can help recruit other ambassadors for at a private high school, Jesuit high school. So absolutely would recommend. Next one is, what funds do you all see that work best, passion-based programs or general funds? This is really a mix, and I think the organization, those link boxes that were shared earlier can really help display that, but I think there's always going to be a top few funds, and we offer the option to, as part of the checkout process, to focus on maybe your top three and put those as kind of additional donation amount. Any other feedback from Alexa on that question? I would just add that I think the site design offers your campus partners, your ambassadors, the opportunity to tell, really tell the story about why that fund is important, regardless of whether that's a passion-based fund or even like a scholarship or general fund. So many of our partners utilize pages like an impact page or testimonials or, you know, we have the ability to embed videos where people can share the impact of donations to that fund or what they're specifically raising money for. So that's just something to keep in mind in your planning process, is how can you tell the story about why that fund is important, regardless of really what it is. Thank you, Alexa. I see, can you speak about a bit about incentives and if they boost participation? So this one we do see a nice increase from. It can be physical swag, it can also be digital swag, and that can be really interesting because you can set it up as like a free download, so maybe assets, wallpapers, phone backgrounds, that sort of thing, Zoom backgrounds, and that can just kind of be like a donor acquisition tool. So that might be on a year-round site or a giving day site, and that can help boost participation as you're collecting updated contact information, maybe if you offer like a free download. And also with the swag giveaways, that can be really effective for the kind of like leaderboard competitions. All right, I see a question here about what medium is most successful for driving traffic. That's going to be email. You know, email still reigns king there. And off the top of my head, I don't have specific metrics, but we can certainly find those out for y'all. But yeah, most of your site traffic is going to come from email, followed by social media. Depending on your constituents, mailers are also a huge driver of traffic for giving day, and a lot of our partners use specific appeal tracking links to see how many gifts are coming in from mailers or other mediums there. But so right through email is going to be your top. I saw a question around effective strategies to keep your donors engaged pre-giving day. There's a lot we do here. So the question mentioned six months out, three months out. We really do take a year-round approach on this. Six months out would be email, video, and your engagement portal, promoting it there, newsletters, in-person events can also be big. Three months out, you're looking at Austin or Alexa, if you have any stories here too, maybe at early give, VIP giving, having a platform that's flexible to enable those type of, maybe like a private early give or VIP page, or even just turning on early give for the wider population of donors. There's a lot we do on this type, on effective strategies pre-giving day and year round. And then minimum gift level. Yeah, we typically do have suggested donation amounts and those are editable. I'll turn that one to Austin. Yeah. Do we have a recommended minimum gift amount? Short answer, no. With most giving days, a key strategy or a key strategy is to Short answer, no. With most giving days, a key strategy or objective of giving day is to build your donor pipeline. This is a really great time of year to bring in recent donors, non-donors, lie bunts, because there tends to be a lot of and strong emotional guilt campaigns going on. And so by giving them the option of giving a gift as small as a dollar and saying, you know, every gift counts and makes a difference towards giving day is a more inclusive financial strategy there. And sometimes I do think it's worth considering what your payment processor is charging you for processing fees too. Because ultimately, if they're taking 3.5% of every dollar, that takes a hit with smaller donation amounts as well. So no wrong answer, but $1 to $5 is usually what we see clients using as a minimum donation amount. On that same note, I see another question in here about engaging recent and non-donor graduates by encouraging smaller gifts. Example, in honor of class year, so a gift is $20.21 for class of 2021. Yes, absolutely. We see lots of people doing that. And I always love seeing when those like sent donations come up on the donor wall. And it's also a great way to kind of feature your class year and in that capacity. So yes, great strategy to do that. Next, I see a question about campaign management and utilizing texting. For the initial list of constituents, we can upload your existing list through integration with your CRM potentially. And we have options to send kind of like mass texting or video text out. So we have a couple of options around texting. So thanks for bringing that piece up. You can send out a video or send out custom text strings. So that's something we could definitely share more about with you. But yeah, people can also opt in for text communication through our engagement portal and some other methods. But generally, it's done through kind of like a donor constituent upload into our system. Wow, this is great engagement. Thank you, everybody, for lots of questions. Glad this is an interesting topic. And thank you to Austin, Alexa, and Joe for your expertise and your time. Thank you to Austin, Alexa, and Joe for your expertise and your knowledge. For anyone, if we didn't get to any questions, we get the full Q&A report after the fact. So if there's any that weren't answered, we will follow up personally with you. I want to make sure you get your questions answered. Thanks again for joining us. And thank you to CASE for this platform. Hope it's been valuable for everybody. And we hope to see you again soon. And best of luck on your upcoming Giving Day. Thanks so much, everybody. Thanks for joining. Thank you all.

Giving Days

2023

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