Hey everyone, it looks like we've got a few people signed on early. This is our first webinar with Zoom. So if you can hear me and see my screen, you should see the title slide, which is Five Tips to Streamline Your Fundraising. If you could just let me know in the Q&A box, that would be really helpful. I just want to make sure that everybody can see me and hear me. Okay, great. Thank you. I am just going to put myself on mute for a few more minutes and let everybody get logged in and then we will get started right at the top of the hour. Thank you. All right, hello everyone and thanks for joining me for our first webinar for the month of June, Five Tips to Streamline Your Fundraising. My name is Linda Gerhart and I'm the Senior Community Engagement Manager here at Mighty Cause. June is actually my five-year anniversary at Mighty Cause. So I've had a few years of working with nonprofits all over the country with Mighty Cause of all sizes and capacities and helped them find ways to streamline their fundraising and be more effective in fundraising. So I hope that everybody here, regardless of your size and capacity, is able to take something helpful with you from this webinar that you can start implementing right away. Here's a look at today's agenda and what the actual tips are. Just as a bit of housekeeping, I like to get through the presentation and take questions at the end. So if you have something that you'd like to ask while I'm presenting, just put it into the Q&A box or the chat and we'll make sure that we have time to get to it at the end. Also, sometimes the Q&A's push us a little over 30 minutes. So if you have to leave, we are recording this webinar and you'll get a link to the recording. So you'll be able to come back to it and review anything that you may have missed. And with that, let's move on to our tips for streamlining. Our first tip to streamline your fundraising is to focus on one donation processor. So a lot of nonprofits, especially ones that are on the smaller side, can get stuck in the trap of providing too many ways to donate. I've seen this in the wild a lot of times I go to a nonprofit's website and they've got this big landing page that has a widget. It's got a PayPal button. It's got a physical address or a PO box to send checks to, how to drop off in-kind donations with a wish list and times that you accept in-kind donations, a link to your Amazon wish list, a link to your Amazon smile account. And it's just a lot. Now that sounds like it would be a good thing that your donors have lots of places in different ways to donate. But in reality, it ends up being confusing to the donors who have to sort through a bunch of different ways to donate and make a decision. Decision paralysis is a very real thing and it has been studied. In case you haven't heard of the Jam Study, it's a study from the year 2000 where researchers were trying to understand if more was better for consumers. They had two different displays in a grocery store on two different days that had different kinds of jams. One display had over 50 kinds of gourmet jams and the other had only six. And what they found was that people looked at the larger display more often but when it came time to actually make a purchase and make a choice, they became overwhelmed by all the options with the larger display and they chose nothing and they didn't make a purchase. However, at the display with the six types of jam, shoppers were much more likely to actually make a choice and complete a purchase. So more is not always better with people when you're trying to get them to take a specific action because people can shut down when they're given too many options. And finally, having a whole bunch of ways to make a donation ultimately means more work for your nonprofit and your team because you'll need to track the donations and get the reports and the donor data and do a lot of manual work just to make everything line up and get your books in order. So hopefully this should be an easy place for you to streamline and simplify. First, think about what you actually need. You need a place to give online, you need an online donation processor, whether that is a donation page or a widget or some other type of online form, and you need a place for in-kind donations since people love to give those and people may look on your website to see where they can give in-kind donations and some instructions for sending cash or a check, although to be honest, most people can figure out pretty easily where to send the money if they prefer to give by check, but take a look at any single use donation tools that you're using and if it all possible, get rid of them because they're just going to add confusion. Because you're looking to have just one main online donation processor, you want to make sure that you choose a versatile tool, which Mighty Cause is a great example of. A PayPal button, for instance, can only ever be a PayPal button. It really can't be anything else, but Mighty Cause gives you a widget, a donation page, all the reporting that you could ever want, peer-to-peer, teams, events, and so on, so it actually serves a lot of purposes while only being one tool. And you want to give your donors clear direction. Donors actually love to be told where to go and what to do because it simplifies things for them. So your goal is to provide a clear and clutter-free path to making a donation so that they don't get confused or overloaded with too many choices. Just a few additional tips for streamlining your donation processing and options here. First, keep your donation web pages short and focused with a clear path to making a donation. If you have a landing page with every way someone can possibly donate listed, pair that down. And my suggestion is that you have one page for each type of donation. So that they, you're not listing all of them on one endless page that they have to scroll through. You have one page for your online donations, one page for your in-kind donations, a separate page for cash and check donations, and so on and so forth. And you should also have a donate button on your navigation bar on your website, which will follow users no matter what page they're on on your site that says donate and takes them right to a place where they can initiate a donation. Donors, especially online, have a short attention span and a lot of them are not going to spend the time trying to figure out how to donate or where to donate. And so you should aim to empower them to donate in as few clicks as possible. And if you've got a lot going on, it's really helpful to do an audit of everywhere you accept donations and examine how much money they bring in. Small nonprofits especially can have a lot of different tools and trying to set up lots of different channels, but it's good to take an audit of those and actually look at how much they're bringing in and how useful they are to you. For instance, Amazon Smile may sound like a great idea, but it may not be a significant contributor to your revenue. So the question is, do you really need to continue using that or can you make it simpler for donors by just eliminating that from the options? So just do an audit, make a list of all the places people can donate and see where you can edit. The next step is a biggie, which I'm going to do my best to distill to just a few slides. But if you want to streamline your fundraising, you should use and create a donor pipeline. So the big problem here is that if you're not using a donor pipeline, you are likely not stewarding your donors very well because there's no clear path for donors and many of them are likely going to be lost to attrition. Organizations and companies that use a pipeline are much more likely to experience growth by a not insignificant amount by 18% to 28% according to Harvard Business Review. So if you don't have a pipeline, you're probably not growing as much as you can. And lastly, if you think of your staff or development team as shepherds of your donors, they're trying to herd the flock with no idea where they're going. So their job is harder than it would be if there were a clear path in place for them that they could lead the donors through. Non-profits can get really overwhelmed by the thought of a donor pipeline so I'm going to try to break it down as simply as I can because it's actually not that complicated. A pipeline is just a process where a donor enters, completes a phase of the process and moves on to the next phase. It's very much like Super Mario Brothers, which I grew up playing and whose imagery I am borrowing from here. You complete one stage and then you move on to the next and that's it. That's all it is. It's just a process. Stewarding is a word you'll hear a lot particularly as it relates to donor pipelines and that is the process of your nonprofit moving the donors through this process and through the different phases of your pipeline. Moves management is another phrase you'll hear a lot and moves management are the moves rather are the things you do to move the donor along and get to know them better. For instance, if you have an info session at your nonprofit, that's a move. If you send a new donor a welcome packet or call them on the phone for a quarterly check-in with a recurring donor, that is a move. The donor lifecycle is basically the span of time from a donor's first donation to their last. Your goal with a donor pipeline is to make that pipeline as long as possible. You want that first donation, that last donation to be as far as part as possible and make it so that their first donation is not also their last donation, which unfortunately happens more often than we would like in the nonprofit sector. I hope these basics kind of help and we're going to go into a little bit more about pipelines. There is a formula for a donor pipeline, which is really not any different than a sales funnel if you've ever worked in a sales environment. The first step is prospecting, which is identifying and understanding your donor profiles. Who are your donors so that you can identify opportunities for a deeper relationship with a donor? We'll talk about CRM's more later, but they can be extremely helpful for this. You're basically looking for who is our typical donor and who fits this profile, which is the process of qualification. Qualification is evaluating whether the prospect is likely to give, which is determined by basically two different factors, the first being affinity, which means the strength of connection to your cause, which can mean anything from knowing somebody on your board to being a donor already, to making donations to similar types of causes. The other factor is capacity, which basically means wealth. Are they capable of giving and at what level are they able to give? Qualification is done so that you can make sure you're focusing your efforts on where they're likely to pay off and not spending time courting people who are not likely to give to your organization. The next phase is cultivation, which is the moves management that we talked about earlier, where you get to know the donor, you make your moves, they get to know you, you start building a relationship with them. And the purpose of all of this is to build a relationship so that they will be warm to the next phase of the process, which is solicitation. Solicitation is obviously your ask. And that could be anything from an email asking for a donation to a phone call, asking if a donor is willing to make their donation recurring to renewing a yearly membership or securing a major gift or bequest. And stewarding is the ongoing process of donor engagement. At the very least, you want to personally check in with high value donors once per quarter. So that is the basic progression of a donor pipeline. When you're creating your pipeline, you'll want to identify a goal for the donor. What point are you trying to lead them to? Is this a major gift prospect or a prospect for your recurring giving program? Are they a potential volunteer? The process of getting them to that endpoint will vary based on where you're trying to get them to go. And then you'll create a plan once you have your goal in mind, which is how you're going to get them from point A to point B and what moves you'll be using to get them there. Identify the different stages, which would be the basic sales funnel we just talked about. You want to get them from being an opportunity or a prospect to actually closing the deal, which in this case would be either making a donation, making a gift, signing up for a recurring donation, and so on and so forth. And finally, you want to track what you're doing. This is an area where a CRM is a really fantastic tool, but you can always use other spreadsheets, like methods like spreadsheets, if you're just not at the point where a CRM makes sense for you yet. So I did want to go over a few frequently asked questions about donor pipelines, just so you know we are going to do a fully dedicated donor pipeline presentation later on in the summer, so keep an eye on any emails about that. But here are a few common questions people have about donor pipelines. The first is, aren't these just for major gift donors? And that is their most common application, but the framework is applicable across your donor base depending on your goals. And the truth is that most donors usually don't start off making a major gift, you're a bequest. They are ushered to that place over the years through lots of relationship building and stewarding on the part of the nonprofit, which is how you use a donor pipeline. So the major gift or the bequest is at the end of the donor lifecycle, typically, but you can start with their first donation. You can start moving them down the pipeline. There's always some concern that this is just more work. And it is true that setting things up takes some time, but it's definitely not more work than losing donors having to spend time. Oh, I don't know if people can hear me. Okay, I hope everybody can hear me. I'm sorry if my audio just went out. I'm going to switch to my computer audio. So sorry if the sound changes a little bit. I heard a beep in my headset seemed to go off. So anyway, we're talking about it being more work. And it is a little bit more work than doing nothing, but it is less work than constantly being a cycle of having to attract new donors. Because you're kind of stuck in a revolving door where you don't retain the donors that you get. So the next campaign you have, you are in the position of attracting more new donors. That's exhausting. That's expensive. And it is more work than just working to retain and grow the donors that you already have and build relationships with them. People do like to ask for a template for this, but the process itself is the template. You'll need to spend some time talking about your goals for your donors and as a non-profit and just customize your pipeline. So unfortunately, there's not really a plug-in-place solution aside from a CRM because many of them have a pipeline built into their products because they're built to manage sales and opportunities and leads and deals. And that brings me to our next tip to streamline, which is to use a CRM. So the last tip and this tip really go together. If you're looking to streamline your fundraising program, these two things go hand in hand. If you're not using your CRM system to track your donors, you're most likely using spreadsheets, which is unfortunately a very scattered and cumbersome way to track your donors. And it's really not sustainable as you grow because that spreadsheet's going to very quickly become quite unmanageable. Your donor data is probably all over the place because you don't have a centralized home for all of it, which gets in the way of you actually using the data that you collect. And everything is manual. You're exporting lists, you're sorting data, doing all this manual work, and you don't actually need to.  That doesn't help your cause. That doesn't help you fundraise. So it's really not worth doing. The manual work is sometimes necessary, but a CRM makes that a little bit less necessary. The biggest source of confusion when we talk about CRMs, and I maybe should move this slide up, is what is a CRM? It's an acronym for Client Relationship Management, and it's a piece of software that does exactly what you think. It helps you manage your relationships with your clients, or in the case of nonprofits, your donors. Most modern CRMs are completely web-based. So in most cases, it's not an expensive piece of software that you need to purchase, have installed, and have a specialist train your staff to use. That used to be how donor databases function, but most of them are web-based now, and you can implement them yourself with a little bit of work, and most of the CRMs available also will help you set up your CRM system. So the magic of a CRM is that it's a centralized, uniform way of tracking your donors, so that you can lose the spreadsheet for good. A CRM will hold all of your donor data in one place, track what they do, track what you do regarding your moves with that donor, and allow you to make notes so that your knowledge of a donor doesn't disappear if the staff member that they were in contact with moves on. So for instance, in development departments, especially a lot of people can get into the habit, which is actually a good thing, of talking to one person. But in a CRM, you have detailed notes about everything that person knows about this donor, so that if they do leave your nonprofit, somebody can step in and they can retain that knowledge and communicate with that donor well. And beyond just warehousing your data, CRMs also help you run data analysis so that you can spot trends and really leverage your donor data in a strategic way. And finally, if you are like this pipeline thing is really confusing and intimidating to me, the good news is that a lot of CRMs have one built in, as I was saying earlier, so you don't have to create one or start from scratch. They have sort of a funnel that's already in place for you through the CRM. So I would be remiss not to mention that Mighty Cause has a CRM you can use that is available to our advanced customers, which is a $99 per month subscription. And again, that includes a lot more than just a CRM that includes peer-to-peer events, teams, and some other things we're going to talk about in just a minute. So it really is an affordable option for a multi-multi-tool that you can use as a CRM as well. So if you already use Mighty Cause or want your donation processing to happen in the same place as your CRM, I really recommend checking out advanced. You can get a free trial from your organization settings if you're already on Mighty Cause, it's just under plan management in your settings. And you can also request a demo if you want to see it in action. And the other most popular option is Salesforce, which is a standalone CRM, which means that all they do is manage these relationships, but they do have a lot of integrations available. They're very open to integrations. And Mighty Cause has a Salesforce integration. So there are definitely a lot of other products out there. BlackBod is one that you'll come across a lot in the nonprofit sector. But for smaller nonprofits, a lot of BlackBod options are really just too big and expensive and not really necessary at this point when you're at the smaller stage of fundraising. So these are two options that are really great for any size nonprofit, but they're especially well suited to smaller nonprofits. So speaking of integrations, the next tip we have is to streamline your fundraising is automation, which is one of my favorite things. So a lot of nonprofits, especially small ones in my experience, have a problem with data isolation. And that's a result of using multiple tools to accomplish specific things.  You have data in a bunch of different places, and those different programs are not talking to one another. And again, everything is manual.  And that can really turn into an albatross if you're using a bunch of different tools. And you have to do this daily or weekly over and over again. It can really be a huge time suck. And time is money. Moving data around doesn't help you get more donations. It doesn't help you build a better relationships with donors. It doesn't help you fundraise. It doesn't help run your program. So time spent on data shuffling is time that could be spent on other things that would be more immediately helpful to your nonprofit. So the solution to this is automation, which is basically just finding ways to automatically move data around and to do tasks without actually having to do it yourself. According to Zapier, pardon me, which is a software, an automation software company, you can save 32 hours per month by automating small tasks that need to be done. So that's a lot of hours that you could be used for another purpose. And that frees up time for focusing on donor engagement and fundraising. And it also resolves the issue of isolated data. Because automation means that your various apps and programs will be talking to each other. And data isn't the end all of automation, like data moving one data from one place to another isn't the only thing that you can do. You can actually automate tasks like sending emails, posting on social media, so on and so forth. There's a lot of things that you can really just automate. So you set it, you tell a program what to do, like Zapier, which we're going to talk about in a minute. And then you just let it go so that you can kind of offload that task. We have a lot of automation options through our integrations on Mighty Cause. So first we have a Salesforce integration, which I was talking about earlier, so that you can move your donor data over to your CRM if you're a Salesforce user, without having to manually export it and import it into Salesforce. We will do that automatically for you. You can just connect your Salesforce account to Mighty Cause and get that data over automatically. We also have a MailChimp integration so that you can add donors to your audiences. You could, for instance, start an onboarding journey automatically every time a new donor makes a donation. You could use custom fields to trigger specific journeys in MailChimp. There's a lot of cool stuff you can do with automation in MailChimp. We have a Slack integration so that you can get notifications every time somebody donates. We also have a Google Analytics and Facebook Pixel integration so that you can track your donors on the web. Basically what Google Analytics does is it tracks what they do on your website, where they come from, what they do, and then where they go. A Facebook Pixel tracks people who come to your website from Facebook through an ad or something along those lines. You can have both of those on your Mighty Cause page. We integrate and you can just add Mighty Cause to your Google Analytics and you can advertise to your Mighty Cause page and use your Facebook Pixel to track your results. Finally, we have an Eventbrite integration so that you can manage registrations and tickets for events. Zapier, as I was talking about earlier, is really the automation workhorse on Mighty Cause. They're a really helpful tool and integration and automation is basically all Zapier does and they do it very well. Zapier is a platform that essentially builds a digital bridge between apps that are not designed to talk to each other. Through Zapier, you can create Zaps, which are automated processes that are triggered when an action triggers an event. For instance, you could set up a Zap so that every time a new donor makes a donation on Mighty Cause, an email is triggered from your executive director's Gmail account that thanks and welcomes them, but your executive director doesn't actually have to sit down and write that email. You're automating it and it's coming from her account, but it's doing it through Zapier. To the person receiving it, it looks like your executive director is personally emailing them, which makes them feel great, but she's not actually doing that. You're setting it up through Zapier. So that's just an example of the kind of process that you can set up through Zapier, which is going to save you a lot of time. There's a lot of really cool, interesting stuff that you can do with Zapier. We do have an integration with Zapier so you can connect Mighty Cause to your Zapier account, and there's literally thousands of apps available in Zapier. So you can connect Mighty Cause to pretty much any app you can think of. Like our CRM, our integrations are available to nonprofits with an advanced subscription. So if you're interested in automation, it's definitely a time saver. It definitely streamlines things. I definitely recommend getting a trial of advance so that you can test it out. Our final tip is to start a recurring giving program. So the problem here is that donor retention is really low across the nonprofit sector. It's pretty common for nonprofits to retain less than half of the donors they acquire. So for every donor you gain, you basically lose one or more. It costs much more to acquire a new donor than to keep the ones you already have by 50 to 100 percent or more more according to double the donation. So that's completely unsustainable. Eventually, you end up losing money because you're sinking costs into acquiring donors that you're not keeping, not stewarding, and then you end up in the red along with having an unpredictable stream of revenue. So recurring giving is vital to streamlining and strengthening your fundraising. Most major gift donors make their first big donation about five years after their first donation. So failure to retain donors today means missing out on major gifts and requests down the line. So if you're not retaining donors, you're missing out on a lot of future donations that could be game changers for your nonprofit. Recurring giving also creates stable, sustainable, and predictable revenue. And recurring donors have a much higher lifetime value, meaning that they give more over the time they spend as donors at your nonprofit. So you're getting more bang for your buck basically with recurring donors in terms of the amount of money that you spend keeping them and the amount of time you invest in building relationships with these donors. And even a monthly gift of like $20 per month can really add up over a donor life cycle. So if they give $20 per year for five to 10 years, that's a lot of money. Even though on a monthly basis, it's really, it doesn't seem like very much, but they really can become really important sustaining supporters who are the glue of your nonprofit. And it's a very predictable way to grow your nonprofit. The more recurring donors you get, the more sustainable income you get, the higher your revenue goes and the more you can do for your cause. So if you're interested in growth, recurring giving is extremely important. But beyond that, there are reasons why recurring giving just helps you streamline your fundraising. First, these donations process automatically. So once your donor sets up a recurring donation, it just goes on and on until they stop it. And almighty cause donors can actually independently manage their donations. So they can change the amount or the date of their donation, they can update their car. So it really does make a lot of things easier. It's less work for you. And it's also less work for the donor. It's a low effort, high reward thing. Because outside of your donor engagement and your ongoing attempts to engage them, you really don't have to do much with these donors because you've got them. They're already giving to you on a regular basis. Of course, you should be checking in with them and trying to keep them engaged in your cause. But there's not anything you need to do. There could be months where you don't interact with this donor at all and you still get the donation. So it's a lot easier than trying to acquire someone new and make the case that they should give to your nonprofit. And it's also very cost effective. Basically when we're thinking about donors, they're all important. But recurring donors pay off the costs of requiring them and engaging them very quickly. And they end up giving more during their life cycle as donors. So it's definitely a way to streamline and make things easier if you set up a recurring giving program. So we do have a whole hour long webinar on how to start a recurring giving program. And it's in our webinar library. If you want to go to mightycause.com slash guide slash webinars or just go up to resources, you can access our webinar library there. But I really don't want to make it sound like it's an extremely complicated thing, because it's actually pretty simple. You can go kind of as simple or complex as you want. But if you want to start a recurring giving program, you start with a name and some donor levels. And that's pretty much it. So if I'm an animal rescue, I could name my monthly membership program animal champions. And I could pick four donation levels to start with. Let's say that friends is the $25 entry level monthly donation. Guardians is a step up. Heroes is a step up from there. And superstars are really people who are giving monthly at, you know, let's say $100 or more. And then I need some membership perks, because you want to make people feel like they're joining a club. So I could think about things like key chains, stickers, buttons, t-shirts, whatever is cost effective and easily manageable. And then there's recognition as a reward as well, like listing them in your newsletter, or having some sort of display in your lobby where you can list all of your sustaining donors. And then you need an engagement plan, maybe a welcome packet when they start making their donation. And then a plan to reach out to them at least once per quarter and some ongoing opportunities for them to get involved in your cause. And then you promote it. And you can promote it on an ongoing basis. And it's something that's very easy and simple to do. So recurring giving is kind of the backbone of any sustainable nonprofit fundraising program. And it's also really one of the easiest and most streamlined things that you can do for your nonprofit is to set one of these up. All right, so that is it. I want to go ahead and take some questions now. Just hope my, I'm going to stop the share so I can get to the Q&A. All right, awesome. Let's see. All right, so if you have any questions for me, just go ahead and pop that into the Q&A box on your Zoom panel there. I would love to have the opportunity to answer any questions that you might have. So if you have anything you would like to talk more about, please just let me know. Okay, and I'll give everybody a minute just to let you know if you are interested in advanced, what you can do is you can go to mightycause.com slash pricing. You can learn all of the things that are included in Mighty Cause advanced and see if it's a good fit for you. You can also start a free trial of it. You can set up a demo. There's a lot of really cool things that you can do with advanced like using our CRM tool, like using our integrations. You have access to unlimited teams and events, so advanced is a really great option if you're looking to streamline. It looks like we may have a question. All right. Thank you, Myron. Myron said the great webinar, so I appreciate that. Oh, there's a great question from Angela. What goes in a welcome packet for recurring donors? That's, you know, there's really a lot of flexibility there. One thing that I like to do to look at is like what when you're watching TV and you see an ad for St. Jude's or the ASPCA, what are they offering? In most cases, it's something very simple like a t-shirt. Sometimes animal nonprofits will send a picture of the animal, some sort of story, just little tokens is really the kind of like membership token if you have a recurring giving program. If you're not talking about recurring giving, a welcome packet could just be some information about your cause, the different things that you do, some stories about your impact, what you do in your community. So that could be something that you include in a welcome packet. It can just be a letter. If you want to keep it really simple, it could just be a letter, but including some nice things to get people engaged, you know, sometimes getting some feedback from them, like how they found you is a great way to start a conversation with the donor. But it can be anything from like tokens from joining your membership program to stories about your impact to just a letter saying, hey, thank you so much. We really appreciate you. And here's some more information about our nonprofit. We look forward to, you know, getting you involved in our cause. So it really can be as simple or as complex as you would like it to be. I always look to the big nonprofits just to kind of see what they're doing to welcome their donors. But those are a couple of ideas. Starting off with a, you know, maybe a letter and a newsletter is the simplest thing that you can do, just put a little newsletter in there that has some current events and some stories about your nonprofit with a letter from somebody at your nonprofit thanking them. Cards are also a really nice way to thank people. A handwritten card from somebody at your nonprofit goes a really long way. So yeah, if you, you know, want to check out any big, big nonprofits, they usually are pretty transparent about what they offer. But those little tokens mean a lot to people, especially with recurring giving programs. And really a handwritten card means a lot to people. So that's one thing that you can do pretty easily is offer them a handwritten card, welcoming them and thanking them. Okay, so let's see. Oh, all right. So I think that's all the questions we have today. If you guys have, oh, never mind. There's one more. Does Mighty Cause work with brown paper tickets platform? I've never heard of that one. So I'm going to say no at this point, because I'm not too sure what it is. If it's a ticketing platform, we do have the Eventbrite integration. So we don't integrate with that at this point that I'm aware of. But you can always check the Zapier library and see if they're in there. Because if they're in Zapier, then we can connect to them. But I'm not too familiar with them. So unfortunately, I'm going to say tentatively no, just because I think for ticketing, we only use Eventbrite. So our Eventbrite integration would fulfill any sort of ticketing integration on our end that checks Zapier's library. They have integrations with a lot of apps. So they may be on there, in which case we might be able to help connect you to brown paper tickets. All right. So I think that is actually everybody. Thank you for joining me today. I really, really appreciate you spending this time with me this afternoon. I will make sure that everybody gets a recording of the webinar. And I hope I didn't lose my audio too badly in the middle. I'll check the recording to make sure. But thanks for bearing with me. It was my first Zoom webinar and it's very easy. But thanks for bearing with me and for joining me. I really appreciate you. Happy fundraising.


So it was Tuesday just a regular day at work. I'm just working hard There was nothing strange really about the day until I felt a presence behind me And I look back and I see some Just thinking about it gets me gets me all worked up, but I saw this crazy package They look like it just looked weird with these scary weird like different universe toys on top of it I was like this does not seem normal and said corrupted metaverse EXE what is that so I had to open it up of course it looks scary and kind of glitched a little bit too It was weird, but I opened it up and they had a VR system that said corrupted. What does it say? Corrupted metaverse so, you know, I had to put it on corrupted metaverse What's up everyone welcome back to realistic gaming it's Junior's birthday today So he's actually doing stuff with his family So put happy birthday to junior in the comments below. He would appreciate it But today as you guys saw I'm in the corrupted metaverse right now. Look at this I'm looking at this right here 360 VR and it's huggy-wuggy. We're gonna check a few videos out Some of the videos quality like it looks like a little Like a little bad, you know, it doesn't look as good as as it does here on the oculus But it's just to give you guys an idea like I'm literally gonna be in the videos Let's see what happens. I'm gonna check out a couple of the scary videos and let's see Let's go. Okay, so this video is by MVR and it's called 360 giant huggy-wuggy chases you. So let's go Let's just check it out right now Bammers Okay, so right now Walking, you know on this grass field. Wait, hold on. Let me make sure make sure the quality is all the way up All right, here we go. It might not look as good for you guys as it does for me Here we go All right, just walking up this field. Oh, is that Hold on. Let me Is that huggy-wuggy eating like Is that the female titan or like a titan?   How you how you doing you eating or what? Is there anyone else around me? Woo Yo, huggy-wuggy turn super saiyan or what what is this? What up my boy? Hey look, I'm just here in VR, bro I just put this corrupted metaverse thing on and you just pop that Oh, oh dude Wait, if I turn around I don't want to turn around too fast because the graphics kind of mess up All right, so we're running downhill I'm gonna keep staring at this dude though. He looks dope Look at his eye. He got he got pink eye y'all Somebody farted on his pillow Yo, he's still chasing us Damn, I'm gonna keep looking at him though. He looks cool. They go. Yeah, I'm running. All right Under these trees feel safe Not really. Oh, okay. I'm hiding behind the log. I'm pretending like I'm hiding Huggy-wuggy got a chill, bro We just oh look look at him. He's going around Rizzy He went around me Oh, he gone gone. All right. There's some mushrooms down here. Oh, I'm running Okay. Okay Look, it looks crappy right now guys, but I promise you it looks better in on the oculus All right, we running Dude, this dude's running fast right now kind of Honestly, I'd be running a lot faster if a dude like Huggy-wuggy was chasing me They look back. What's up? All right. Nobody chasing us. We good. We good Okay We walking up here now Are these like Okay, we chilling right now Whoa, dude, what?  He looks like a pinata from down here Yo, huggy. What's up my boy?  What's up, bro?  Whatever you can imagine can become a reality Mvr. All right. Be sure to subscribe for more exciting experiences. There'll be a new video right here Thank you for stopping by and I hope to see you back here soon Two you you you nice girl. Thank you All right, let's see.  Maybe they got some better stuff. All right. So this one's pretty cool It says 360 vr. Halo infinite you are master chief Yo, I've been playing a lot of halo honestly So let's check this out. Let's see what they got for us. Oh, well, let's make sure we got the highest quality Oh, we in halo I salute you Salute you guys. Where are we right now?  Oh, look I am master chief. They weren't lying Oh, dude, it's my face right here. I'm literally in the game All right, this looks dope Oh, dude, what's up? How y'all open the door and that's there just chilling Oh, look at my gun. Oh Okay, I'm pretend I'm shooting right now Looking around Well, this looks crazy. Is this supposed to look like this? It really does look like the corrupted metaverse right now a little key All right, I'm just keep walking. Let's see. Well, it's not like I'm controlling it, you know, but We are in the corrupted halo first. Oh shoot them. Oh Oh Okay So I'm talking about Hey, this is pretty badass. Okay, mvr. I see you. Hey, what's up, bro? How you doing a nice hair? I like He covered his hair. Hey, don't don't cover it up I was being honest. I like your hair, bro Oh The heck Did he just blast me into space with the And why not take so long to shoot I should have been shooting honestly Oh, look behind me Hey Look at us. I'm blowing stuff up in vr. Hello. Hey, what's up? I remember you Thank you. Yeah, I did your favorite moment was down in the comments Okay, let's see what else they got real quick. Be sure to subscribe and let me know what experiences you would like to see I might check out one more from them. Have a great day 360 fear of heights of all of huggywood. I see it. I'm gonna see how it looks first and if it sucks then we'll do something else Oh, okay, so far so good I keep hitting the blue screen behind me All right, so we climbing up I kind of want to stand up if I stand up. Oh Okay, okay How high are we going? Gee Wait, let me get the best quality quality 21 60. All right, let's go Oh, dude, I'm gonna be walking on the plank I should be standing up for this honestly, but I don't have space I was about I was trying to walk right here Okay, let's pretend we plank be on the plank Balance ourselves as we walk Nice and steady Okay Nothing crazy right now. Let's see behind us There's the platform. Okay Wait, what happened?  What's up my boy? How you doing, huggy? You're looking for somebody to hug or what? Okay, I see you my boy Who else is here? Hey, don't bother us though. We just walk into the end of the plank It's really nothing. Okay, please What's up?  Why are you sliding down a little bit?  No, I do not want you under me Why are you slobbering? You're good. What is this squid game? What? All right, we good. I got my eye.  We walk. We good. We good. All right Like real quick. Nobody behind me. Okay. We good. We good. Stop it All right. Yeah, go run run to the back I gotta keep looking at him though because Enjoy that experience. Let me know what you think about me once down in the comments If you liked this video, be sure to subscribe and let me know what experiences you would like to see next All right, let me see you about to find like one more from here All right, so let's try this one out. This is 360 video squid game short movie vr All right, so let's see let's check this one out. This one is by game world cinema. All right, let's see Oh, let's put the quality up a Okay squid game All right, three uh, it's the 86 50 4006 go somebody call Okay, we call him let's go Oh Yeah I would like to extend a heartfelt welcome to you all Everyone here will participate in six different games over six days. Oh, they're behind me too Those who win all six games will receive a handsome cash prize All right, we do not disclose the faces and personal information of our staff to any of the participants It's a measure we take to ensure fair games and confidentiality Please understand. Why are you so close to me though? Back up homie? Oh, that's the boss. I forgot his name Hey, have you guys seen my boolex squid game uh from class speaking could check him out Preparations for the first game are complete You can dig in now And this song's kind of cracking though Brad oh what up Is this me it's not funny. We're all gonna die What what is going on right now? Don't worry. Everything would be okay So random What's gaming it is like gta kind of see what's gonna die Dude that guy's still running.   We got 19 seconds Don't move. Hey, that dude dancing over there. There's people dying Oh, y'all got six seconds three two go Yeah Hey, okay. I joined the party. Hey Yo, don't move Well, y'all that's it for today. Hopefully you guys enjoyed that or something You know something we're trying to do the erupting redovers So like I said say happy birthday to jew here. My boy is churning 15 I don't know how old he's turning actually he's like 20 something I don't know but go subscribe like and everything if you enjoyed this Let us know if you saw anything here that you want us to try because this is all new This is all new stuff you all for us is new so we'll check it out. All right. Thank you very much God bless you all happy holidays. See you later And by the way, I'm doing the giveaway on the other channel called bule heroes Where I talk about my funkos and all that I'm a giveaway a black light spider man So if you guys are interested go and subscribe. I'll leave the link below. Okay


ausa, you know, it's like an entrada when I could get, I'd rather have tamales, you know, I'd rather have, what else we got here? Like, I'd rather have a paparriena any day. I'd rather have tequeños or woncainas and entrada any day. You know, if we're going seafood, give me chifles. Just give me a bowl of chifles. I would rather have that than a causa any day. No questions asked. Like, easy peasy decisions, man. Easy peasy decisions, but y'all are free to disagree. You know, it's okay to be wrong. I don't have a problem with that. Yeah, I'm doing a little like last minute evaluation. I feel pretty good about this. I don't feel like there's anything here that doesn't make sense. Like I got, you know, again, B tier foods are like foods that I order from time to time. I don't get them super frequently, but like I like them and I will eat them.  And S tier is like, this is the, I mean the best of the best, right? So that's where we're at. C tier is the stuff that I don't order, but like if you give it to me, I'll eat it. And then D tier is like, I don't wanna see that.  Like, you know, so that's how I feel. That's where we're at. So anyway, that's all I got for Proving Birthday today, people. I appreciate you hanging out. I'll have to figure out something more fun to do next year. Next week we go back to our usual Thursday programming. I got a video talking about big changes in Denmark. I'm also gonna be talking about sports scholarships soon because I got like some, I'm gonna be recording some people's athletic videos over the weekend. So I'm gonna be recording also some episodes about sports scholarships, about like how you can get them, what you gotta do, how you make a video. So like all those things, that's gonna be coming up. That should be a lot of fun. There's a possibility that I will be in Albuquerque soon. And I'm going to Texas soon as well. So like, I might have some videos coming out of those events. I'm not sure yet. I'm working on that stuff. There's a lot of variables to figure out still. So we'll see how that goes. What else? What else is on the works? I mean like, I'm definitely going to the States in September and we're going to Spain in October. So there's gonna be a ton of university content down the road. For now, we're just like covering some of the things that, you know, how to's little new information that is relevant for the college application world. And you know, we're gonna be getting into some travel later in the second half of the year. I'm looking forward to it. So hopefully you guys will be checking that stuff out. But thank you so much for hanging out and accompanying me on my Peruvian birthday. Salute me familia. Salute me familia. All right guys, I'm logging off. I'm heading out. See you next week.


The short of it is, this is a complex and challenging text addressing a distinct tension about the consequences of human cloning, while also touching on post-colonial and post-modern issues. One is three and three is one, and five is not as you might think it is. The long of it. Gene Wolf creates a complex, Mose, whose description is at least in part subject to the reader's ability to put clues together. I won't pretend to have understood everything going on in the fifth head of Cerberus, but I'd like to think I've grasped enough to tell you why this book is worth reading. After writing it, I realise there are some spoilers in this review, but this isn't a book worth talking about without touching on all the text. I don't discuss too much, that doesn't become evident fairly early on, but you've been warned. Some background first. Cerberus, as I will be referring to the book, is not a novel but three distinct novellas. The first one, after which this collection is named, reads as a first-person memoir in a voice reminiscent of Gene Wolf's Severian, the protagonist of his much-beloved and critically acclaimed Book of the New Sun sequence. If you've picked that up, you know what to expect. Penetrative intelligence, unreliability, allusions to what's to come, the reader's dramatic irony on a reread. Here of course, Wolf doesn't have the hundreds and even thousands of pages he does in telling Severian's story. That doesn't mean that number five, as we may refer to the protagonist, is less interesting. In fact, Wolf's stylistic mastery shines all the brighter when he has only 70-ish pages to work with. The question Wolf is engaged with throughout this first novella is that of cloning, and the issues of identity that cloning opens up. Number five is a clone of the man he calls father, which I can only imagine complicates an already fraught relationship with a man who spends much of number five's childhood experimenting on him. I have to wonder if the recent adaptation of Isaac Kuzimov's Golden Age era foundation series was not inspired by a concept to be found here, namely a process called relaxation. One secondary character and the protagonist of the third novella, Dr Marsh, describes this process thus. As the levels of approximation between clones progress, the successive sets become more and more similar until there is essentially no change. That is why I said the two of you are essentially one individual. This recalls a quote I came across from the literary theorist and researcher Paul Sheehan's excellent article about the post-human body. Who writes, again, for Soren Holm, a professor of biotics, the widespread belief that genotype, i.e. genetic code, determines phenotype, i.e. personality or psychological makeup, raises the possibility that a cloned individual could be forced to reenact the life of its progenitor to live, in effect, a life that is not its own. This is what number five ultimately does, the reader has led to believe, despite his own arguments to the contrary. When number five's narrative ends, what number five does, the specifics of how he ends up in the place he does it are different, yes, but does that ultimately make a difference? The second novella is one I will struggle to talk about. It masquerades as an anthropological report by the same Dr. Marge, though further speculation on the doctor's role might make this less reportage and more folk storytelling. Anthropological report of what, you ask. You see, one of the core concepts of the fifth head is that the aboriginal populace of one of the twin planets in which the book takes place, Saint Anne, are shape-shifted. The core idea where these unease are concerned is captured in the fictional Veil's hypothesis, which, I quote, supposes the abos to have possessed the ability to mimic mankind perfectly. Veil tells that when the ships came from Earth, the abos killed everyone and took their places in the ships. So they're not dead at all, we are. This is the most challenging part of the collection to read. It engages with questions of memory while taking a different approach to identity. If the previous novella is interested in individual identity, this one is concerned with that of the collective, who is human and who is shape-shifter. How do perceptions play into this question? You'll find no certainty in this strange psychedelic text. The third novella extends the concepts of both the first and the second. It is also the longest of the lot at nearly a hundred pages, an unnamed political officer. Of the government is reading through the daries of Good Doctor Marsh, who has been imprisoned over suspicions that he is a spy for the other world's government, rather than the earth-born anthropologist, he claims he is. Totalitarianism, slavery and more, are hinted at or at the very least discussed here. While the charges of spycraft do not seem likely, the truth is more disturbing. Implied in this text is the possibility that the doctor has been replaced by his guide, a half aboriginal boy. The writing presented in a non-linear way hints at a total melding of identities. This is not, however, a seamless coming together. Instead, uncertainty and confusion create the sense of a distinctly post-modern subjectivity, an individual deeply fractured, fragmented and falling apart at the seams. Throughout each of these novellas, Wolf shows a great degree of anxiety about issues both prevalent at the time of writing and issues he feared society would face in the immediate future. In the first case, the issue at hand is globalization and its new colonial aspects, which the exploitation recreated in ways that, while different from older modes such as slavery, on paper, are all too similar in practice. I trust I don't need to draw parallel to the realities of slave labor half a world over or closer in our own contemporary society. That's when worlds of Saint Anne and Saint Croix have very different conceptions of slavery. One of the most memorable passages in the third novella sees an investigator explain what he sees as the benefits of honest slavery on Saint Croix versus the supposed freedom of many on earth and Saint Anne. It's blood-curdling stuff, of course, as most slavery apologia is. But you can see the terrible logic at work within those who subscribe to this kind of view. Finally, and I cannot stress this enough, the SF Masterworks edition, which might well be the only edition of the Fifth Head of Cerberus, has a stellar introduction of the book, courtesy of Adam Roberts. That introduction, though spoiler-heavy, does a far better job than my own review might of penetrating Wolf's text and bringing to the fore what makes this such a riveting speculative read. A song recommendation, something for your mind by Superorganism because, well, this book certainly is that. You will enjoy the Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolf, if you like. One, speculative fiction that investigates the human condition and how future developments might threaten it, especially those developments have anything to do with cloning. Two, the idea of experiencing three tonally different texts, each of the three nonetheless reinforcing the others in intelligent ways. Three, stylistically exciting writing. Four, if you like intertext, this one has plenty to keep you on your toes. And more, probably. I hope you've enjoyed my review. You'll note I ask more questions than provide answers for in this one. Between the two of us, I think this is the best way to go about it, especially where Wolf is concerned. Don't forget to press the like button and comment down below. Have you ever heard of or read any of Gene Wolf's works? He is one of the finest American authors out there, especially of science fiction and fantasy. No one would deny him that at the very least. And I don't think that anyone who would deny him the mastery over the English language, over a style that he shows, well, I don't think they would be very fair to him at any rate. I'm Philip Magnus. Thank you for watching. Please, don't forget to subscribe and I will see you again next time. Bye!


Hi guys, welcome back to my channel. It is Drew here from Lone Fox and today I have my first ever video That's not a DIY on this channel This is going to be a home decor haul and I used to do these on my old channel Which is definitely home related and this is my new home channel You know a majority of it's from Target because their new collection is in like an app on I'm speechless like I'm just speechless and I'm also super excited because this video is actually in partnership with shop Tagger which I have done multiple videos on my actual main account with shop tagger before because I just love their service that They offer and if you do not know what shop tagger is it is essentially a website and also a mobile app You basically create an account on their site It's super easy and free to sign up once you create an account Which I'll also have linked in the description box below so you can take a look there after you have an account And you're just randomly online shopping You're going to have a little widget in the top of your toolbar and whenever you're shopping online You find an item that you like but it might be too expensive or you're not really sure about it Or you just want to save it in general you could actually add it to your shop tagger account It will notify you when that item goes on sale Another thing that I also love is that it notifies you if items come back in stock So if something's out of stock on the site, but you want it you can add it to your shop tagger And it will notify you when that item is back in stock I love the fact that you could also get it in app version because it sends you push notifications when items go on sale Which is amazing because I personally use it mainly for a lot of fashion items But I'm going to start doing home stuff I personally bought multiple ysl pieces which is one of my favorite designers on shop tagger at such an affordable price Like I got a pair of $900 boots on sale for like 350 almost $400 which is like 60% off And ysl pieces typically don't go on sale that often so that was really amazing But I want to get into the home decor because I got so many new pieces that I'm so excited to start putting in my room Because I'm kind of um just altering a couple things It's been the same since I moved in and I just did an apartment tour on my main channel If you didn't see that and I just want to change it up a little bit So I got a couple new pieces But the first item is this amazing pillow And I love pillows that are like shapes differently than just a square pillow So I think adding a circle pillow to like a mixture of squares just breaks it up a little bit So I got this one at Target. This one was a little bit expensive. It's 26.99, but it is velvet It does like have a lot of detail It's toughed it all around the edges and then it's also pleated all around here And I think it looks like one of those vintage inspired pillows that you've seen in like the 70s So I picked this up just to like throw in my bed or I might even put it on my bench or something Next up is um, whoa saw this. This is just like from their main collection I believe this costed $19.99 from their project 62 line, but I loved the graphic high I thought this would look nice on my bed as well I love how it was black with a really large high on it And I love this font as well. I thought it was nice. It's embroidered around the edges Stop that instead of just having pattern pillows I would have one that sort of had like a quirky element to it and this high one seemed perfect for that And then last pillow I couldn't pass this one up. It was so soft So cushiony so fluffy and like just I don't know. I loved it It is another black and white one. Wow. I really went in with the black and white But I do have a lot of colored pillows on my bed right now. I just really love the pattern on it It's black and then white and the backside is actually reversed of that. So it's white with the black on it So it's pretty simple, but I thought it has a nice bold touch any space that you have in your house And I also love the size of it. It's like one of those euro sized pillows It's like probably a 26 by 26. Wow I just want to show you guys this So badly because I thought first of all I picked this up without getting the price of it because I was just So obsessed with that. I didn't even care it is a stool and I know it's probably going to be hard to see on camera But I will show you guys an actual little cutaway of it I thought that this would look so incredible with a plant on top of it and I loved this Like raton vibe of it. I don't know what it was the black legs are super cool But this was only $55. I think which I think it's really a great price for something like this It has a lot of interesting details to it and it's probably handmade as well Which is also a nice little touch a couple little knickknacks I got was first this one here. This was $16 and it's a little like marble With tiny little bits of like something just pressed into the surface But it's like a very heavy style kind of catch all I guess you could say you can just put this by your door Throw your keys in it whatever it was. I just like that it was white and clean and fresh So I'm gonna probably put this in my bathroom and just like put my rings and jewelry on top of it I did get something at the thrift store today too We stopped by because it's right by target actually and this was just a $1.99 And it's this tiny little green bowl and I just thought it was so pretty I love like colored china like this in the future I want to shelf in my kitchen that has rainbow colored pieces of glassware because I think that colored glassware is just so pretty Especially when it's in this kind of format. I don't exactly know what this is It's like that crystal-esque vibe and I just love this olive green color It's always just nice to have things like this and for $2 like I was not going to pass this up I kind of got a similar one actually right before at target This is a dessert bowl from heartthin hand, which I just love the whole magnolia range there And I was so obsessed with this. I thought it was super cute I definitely would like to use it as a dessert bowl, but I'm probably going to use it again as another ketchup I don't really know Melt glass as well is a huge favorite of mine, so I thought this was really nice I'm probably saying really nice take a shot when Drew says really nice Take a shot when Drew says self-explanatory take a shot when Drew says, I don't know Beautiful good fresh lovely anything like that just do it Next up is a picture frame and this is again from target This was $14 from the opal house range and I loved it. I love the leopard on the top I love the gold. It's very Gucci inspired also completely obsessed with brass It's my favorite metal for home decor staying with a theme of brass I got this bookend because I do need a bookend for one side of the books that I have on the shelf in my room Yeah, I don't really know what else to say about it other than I'm going to put my books against it I got this vase and I put some flowers in it. These are moustaches flowers But I put them in it for the little um just to show you guys how pretty it would look I love this face. It's just a ceramic face. It was $14.99. I believe it's also from the opal house collection It has this really pretty splatter technique on it And it also has these like scallops that throw a cascade down and give it a nice little bit of texture to it And I thought it was a really nice height as well to put like flowers in or to put Really anything in order to leave it as a standalone piece like next to my tv console I forgot to share with you guys this too. I got this at the um thrift store too This is just a picture frame. It was $12, which is kind of expensive But I love the detail in the actual frame and I'm gonna probably spray paint it either brass or black or white And just give it a whole new look. This is very like vintage and distressed And I don't exactly like it in the picture inside. It's kind of spooky And we're moving down to just the last couple of items me and the stash I saw this basket online We like freaked out when we saw it because it's freaking $25 and it looks like this I have one from cb2 that was $100 and it looks exactly like this And I think I like this one even more and I wish I was able to make something like this But if it's $25 I'm just gonna freaking buy it because who can make this for $25 and spend the time to do that They have this in the natural color and they also have it in black and last but not least just two random items I got a new sheet set. This is the cotton per cal sheet set Which I love the per cal sets from target. They're my favorite ones And this one's just super pretty because it has these tiny little Almost looks like dividing signs on it lines and dots and then it has an embroidery cross hatch thingy at the top of it Imagine these together. Yes. Love that And I also got just one towel for my bathroom because I just love having a mixed match of towel So I thought that this would look super pretty hanging on one I love the tassels on the end and I also just love this geometric pattern on it. So guys, that was my home decor haul I hope you did enjoy this video. Definitely give it a thumbs up if you'd like to see more I'm not sure exactly how interested you are in me doing home decor halls But I thought I would just test it out So definitely let me know in the comment section and thumbs up this video if you liked it Don't forget to also check out shop tagger below and I can't wait to put these in my room Maybe I'll post a photo on my um instagram with the new stuff in my room once I do have it down Again, everything I did feature in this video is going to be linked in the description box below And you can take a look at those and then I'm sure shop tagger whatever you want to do But I will catch you on my next one. Thank you so much for watching and have an amazing day. Bye guys


nd there is always the possibility of exogenous shocks, et cetera. I hope that we do not have that. Can I finally come back to the issue that I was asking our previous panel about productivity, because that is absolutely critical to any future success in the economy? It strikes me that Scotland is in desperate need of more higher-paid jobs, and particularly those who could see people transitioning from currently fairly high-paid jobs in the energy sector, for example, to other higher-paid jobs. In your analysis, do you predict that we are on the right path to get more higher-paid jobs and therefore to address the productivity issue? A couple of things I would say on that. We do not comment on policy and whether that is feeding through or not, but you are entirely right that the way the fiscal framework works, in the way income tax works, means that the disproportionate amount of income comes of tax revenue from higher earners. Therefore, if you want to have more income tax, it is not just about growing the total number of people, but it is about growing high-earning jobs, because that is where you take the higher taxes from. That comes down to a high-productive economy that is creating lots of those jobs. A couple of interesting things that we have in the report, so figure 3.6 and then figure 3.12, is to decompose our projections for the economy. You see that, essentially, because we have the demographics that we have spoken about before, we will speak more about it in March, about the challenges that Scotland faces in terms of its population and its ageing population. Productivity is key. It is the one thing that is there, that is driving the growth in the economy. That has come down in most global economies, but in particular in the UK and Scotland, since the financial crisis. The evidence shows that one of the reasons why Scotland has caught up with the UK in productivity and does quite well relative to the UK in productivity, is that we are overweight in two highly productive sectors—financial services and energy. The success of having those sectors in the economy is really important again for feeding through to productivity and then feeding through to earnings. We know that oil and gas is going to go through a transition, so you are entirely right. How do you get those highly valued jobs into other highly valued sectors is crucial for what that means for income tax revenues going forward. It is interesting that we consulted quite a bit with different people during those forecasts, and that is where we think that we have got some evidence to suggest that earnings are actually holding up a bit better in the north-east because of the changes in energy. Some really interesting reflections on people about the future composition of energy jobs going forward relative to oil and gas and whether they will be as highly paid as the high-paying oil and gas jobs that we have had in the past. There is an open debate about that and it may not be as highly paid for a whole variety of different reasons, at least a lot of them are in really oil and gas jobs and are in really difficult circumstances, so therefore it requires a wage premium. It is a really interesting thing, and we have spoken about that in our fiscal sustainability work, about if we are overweight in a sector that we know is going to ease off in the next 10 to 15 years, how do you make sure that we can maintain that productivity performance by growing newly highly productive jobs to create the tax revenues? John Finch-East, just to keep on the inflation theme, which seems to have been quite dominant, we did, I get mixed up now which witness told us which evidence in the past at previous sessions, but someone at least was suggesting that inflation would fall become negative quite severely, and somebody used the word permanent in there, but is it possible that oil and gas prices come back down to where they were? Yes. If you look at figure one in our chart, we show the forecast of the fall inflation, and we think that it tips slightly negatively in 2020-25. We write that inflation prices will come down. We are all pretty confident about that, and the Bank of England will make sure that it comes down because that is their job. However, it is the point about the difference between inflation and the price level, and I guess our assessment is that the price level would be higher as a result of the different shocks that we have seen. Some of that is the energy shock, some of that is the supply, on-going supply chain challenges, in particular the effects in China. Again, that is global trends. One reason why global inflation has been low is because China has been producing very large volumes of manufacturing products at very low cost. That is not likely to continue over the next 10 to 15 years to the same extent, so that effect on the price level inflation will be there. Yes, inflation will come down, but the price level will be higher. That is why, when we talk about the cost of living crisis, it will not go away overnight. When inflation comes back down again, suddenly we are all not going to be back to where we were in living standards, because our cost of living has gone up 10 per cent, 15 per cent, say, for people in lower incomes, but their earnings and their social security will have gone up by much less. Even though inflation is really low, it will still feel much more challenging because the actual cost of us living is now higher. Normally, negative inflation would be seen as a bad thing, but maybe not necessarily in this case. Normally, you would be quite worried about negative inflation because it changes people's incentives, so what you do is that you do not buy something today, because you think that it is going to be cheaper tomorrow, so it actually acts as a break on growth, it actually acts as a break on investment. Normal times, negative inflation is something to be concerned about and avoided about and really avoid. There is a question about, in the short run, just the volatility in it. Actually, there is a huge spike, and because the energy price has come back down, it might hit the negative. If what the bank will be really concerned about or really watch is to make sure that any negativity inflation does not feed through to expectations, it is purely just volatility. Yes, it is negative, but in a few months' time it will come back to being, it will come back towards trend. I think that it is worth having a point about that. Any energy prices, not only are they risen, they have just become very volatile, and therefore the inflation forecast is very volatile purely as a result. It is not anything that the bank of England does not know or anything else is going on. If gas prices might have risen 20 per cent, we are supposed to be sitting here, and that will then suddenly change these forecasts, so it is that sort of environment worry at the moment. We had the expert panel earlier, and they made the point about the UK's failed to address the accumulation of debt following all the different crises that we have had. Now, when I was younger, if I remember correctly, and I believe that I am the oldest member in the committee, the interest rates had to rise because the pound was getting weak, and the UK debt was so great that the interest rates had to be above inflation. I just wonder if there is any risk of that happening again. I think that that is what the bank of England is very much trying to avoid. In a sense, I think that you will see in their internal debates that they have the same profile that we have, which is that inflation is very high now, but they are not expecting it to go negative, but they are expecting it to fall naturally. Therefore, there is a debate within the bank of England saying why are we raising interest rates when inflation is going to fall anyway, and the answer is very much the answer to your question, because we have to be very careful that that brief surge in inflation does not become one of those embedded surges in inflation that we had in the 70s and early 80s that we then had to raise interest rates above to control. That is the debate exactly on what is going on in the bank of England right now. In your report, you talked about that, in the longer term, the size of Scotland's economy is determined by its potential output in the current context, both the underlying capacity of the Scottish economy to produce goods and its potential output. I was just a lot unclear about that phrase underlying capacity. Can you maybe explain what that means? The way that economists try to think about how our economy grows, I think about it on the demand side. That is how much is being spent at a given point in time, how much Government is spending or how much consumers are spending. Ultimately, in the long run, what really matters is what we talked about on the supply side. That is essentially the stock of your population, how many people are working in your population, the demographics, the unemployment rate that you have in your economy and productivity. It is the fundamental drivers that determine the long-term potential of the Scottish economy, not day-to-day spending but, ultimately, things such as productivity, how many people do we have in our economy, how many hours are they working, what is the participation rate and that is what we mean about the underlying capacity of the Scottish economy. That, in the long run, is the key thing that drives economic growth. Presumably it does not normally change very much from year to year. It is basically driven by what we call fundamental. Your population, participation rates, unemployment rates, those things do not tend to change. For decades, that was giving us growth of around about 2.5 per cent in real terms. The big change that we have seen that has not changed year to year but has changed in the last 12 years has been the falling productivity. That is why we are having much slower growth in our economy, because that core trend element, which is productivity, has fallen in Scotland and the UK. When you were answering Daniel Johnson, you mentioned the change in the retirement age, which would be a factor, I assume, in this. Is it a big factor or just...? For Scotland, relatively speaking, because we have talked about the demographics, there is a bigger group in that area, but it is not a big effect. It is an open... Before we have observed it, it was a slightly open question of how much does a raise in the state and proud age affect participation, because you might say, you can carry on working and have a pension. Why would it... We have observed, in practice, that there has been a quite noticeable impact on participation of raise in the state and proud age. Obviously, there is a whole set of plans and raises coming out in which we will then raise the participation of that group. I think just two other points. The point was made that there is no public pay policy for 2324. I think that we all understand, because we do not know what the pay policy is for 2223. Was that a problem for you, forecasting, or how did you take that into account? No, not really. Usually, we would factor in specifics of a public pay policy, but we just have it as it comes back to the point to Ms Smith about the additional dwelling supplement. You are dealing with macro numbers here, so we put in a forecast for average earnings. Our expectation is that that will not really be influenced significantly either way by the specifics of the government pay policy. My final point. I mean, we have mentioned capital expenditure before, and there is this borrowing limit of £3 billion. Where are we now with that? How close are we getting and how scared should we be? So, on the... We have a discussion, which I can't for the life of me. Actually, on page 35 of the report, we talk about where we are on the trend for borrowing. So, I think that Sit, Toxy and Paragraph 2.50, the capital debt stock is currently at 6 per cent of the overall limit. I think that what we talk about in there is the government's policy of trying to borrow £250 million and then top it up with £200 million of other. We didn't have two more than the other last time, so the plan is to use a full 450. Again, going forward, the plan is to use 250, but if that doesn't come forward, then we're going to have to use the full 450. That comes back to the point that I was making to the convener in that regard, in that capital budgets are going to go down in real terms, probably more than what we state in here because of the effects of inflation. That obviously increases the potential pressure to try and do more with the existing budget that you have and to maximise borrowing powers. However, if you do that, as we talk about in that part of the report, you're going to rub up against the borrowing limit much more quickly. You wouldn't have a date that's when we're going to hit it? No, but we do say that the current 2022-23 borrowing plans, which are to actually borrow more because of the shortage of money, would take the ratio up to 73 per cent, so you can work it out with that. I think that there is somewhat of difficulty that this idea of borrowing 250 and then having other income, we're not entirely sure that other income will actually transpire. Therefore, we could reach the debt a bit faster than the current plan. That's a bit uncertain. Okay, thank you very much John, and Daniel wants to come in with a final question. Just following up on one of the exchanges between John Mason and himself regarding figure one and your assumption around what will happen to utility prices, can I just clarify? Is your December 22 position that we will see a fall in utility prices? If so, what assumptions is that based on? It strikes me that we are in a classic supply and demand situation in that supply has been reduced because of essentially the tax from Russia being switched off. Therefore, the only way that we would see significant fall is either by a replacement of gas or that supply coming back on, or alternative supplies. Those seem like very big counterfactuals. Is that the case then that a fall in utility prices is factored into that forecast? So a couple of things. We largely draw on UK forecast, OBR forecasts for that, because we do not think of the difference between Scotland and the UK in that context. There are a number of things going on in inflation at the moment. We have spoken a lot about energy prices and utility prices, and that is obviously the key driver. I also mentioned the supply side shocks that we have seen as well, the legacy effects of Covid coming through in all of that as well. The general expectation is that we have had a huge spike in energy prices. Essentially, they will come down slightly but remain higher. If you think about how you calculate inflation, if you have a price of 100 and it goes up 10 per cent, so you get inflation of 10 per cent, it is 110, next year if it falls back to 108, you get negative inflation from that year to next of approximately minus 2 per cent, but you have still gone over two years from 100 to 108. It is the price level that is really important, not so much to inflation. Inflation is measuring the change. As Francis was saying, the fact that the energy prices have spiked and might come down slightly, that will be reflected in initial spike in inflation and are coming back down. It might tip negative, but the prices are still that level shift up compared to where they otherwise would have been. That is the debilitating effect on Government spending and it is also the impact on households as well. It is interesting to your point about utilities because the price that I was talking about was basically the future price and the supply price in the market. With oil prices, there is a pretty strong relationship between the market price of oil and the price of petrol pumps. We are already seeing that effect come through with gas prices, to the extent to which that comes through into your electricity bill and your gas bill is more complicated. The companies themselves are a huge amount of hedging and therefore when you see the price comes down, they immediately say we can cut our prices because they probably already have hedged their future supply and I have already paid for it. The effect on the actual utility prices that we pay, I am not 100 per cent sure that those will fall even if the market price has fallen. I thank our witnesses for their answers and colleagues for their questions. I now close this meeting and wish everyone a very Merry Christmas, a restful festive break and a happy and prosperous new year.


Everything that Jesus was anointed to do while He was here upon the earth, you and I, in principle and in practice, are anointed to do today. When you step into the divine authority that God has given to us vicariously through Christ, when you step into that divine authority, you step into His office, you step into that power, and He releases unto you the ability to do


Welcome to In the World of Winooski for our October episode. We are here at the Winooski Senior Center in preparation for Halloween in Winooski, a big event in our city every year. I am currently with our community services director, Ray Coffey, and we're going to chat a little bit about this important community event and what you can look forward to this year. Ray, welcome. Thank you. Yeah, happy to be here. And as you can see in the background, we are well underway with our carving. So this is over 20 years we've been doing this event in the city and it's really grown quite a bit. So we are the last few years targeting 1,000 pumpkins carved and displayed in Rotary Park. We are looking for volunteers who want to come out and help us today. So Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, anytime between 12 and 8, we welcome the public to come in and help us carve. And it's a fully volunteer run event. So it's a lot of labor that goes into it. We've got a ton of kids inside right now, schools off today. So yeah, everybody's welcome and the more hands, the better to get this done. Ray, thank you for that introduction because the volunteer portion is really important. It takes a lot of folks to make this happen. You know, as you said, it's been many years this event's been ongoing. We have this great display of jack-o-lanterns in Rotary Park. How long have you been helping out? So we've been involved for quite a while. The event was put together initially by a group of volunteers from the community called Seasons Greetings and Sally Tipson, who is a former city counselor and sort of volunteer extraordinaire for the city, was really led that charge for about 15 years. And a few years back kind of approached us and said she was done and the group needed to sort of step back because it's a big event, takes a lot of work. And so at that point, the community services department stepped in for a year and kind of carried the event forward. The following year, we partnered up with our friends at Downtown Winooski and are now running that as a joint event. And that's been great. So it's been a bit of a shift, but we are in the same spirit as Seasons Greetings and trying to keep that spirit alive. And I always like to say we're standing on the shoulders of giants. Sally and her crew really set the bar high and we are just trying to meet that every year. Yeah. So Saturday and Sunday, we will have these thousand or so pumpkins, lits, decorating Rotary Park. Yep. How, what are the carving hours and there's a take home option? Yeah. So curbside is available. So that's something we started up during COVID as many people did. But yeah, if folks want to carve at home, you're welcome to come grab pumpkins and bring them back. You can drop them off anytime before Friday and take as many as you like. It's great when people take them home and carve them and bring them back ready to go. So that's an option anytime we're here, like I said, we're here 12 to 8 doing carving. We're welcome to come by and either grab pumpkins to take home or come and carve here. The nice thing is we, we gut them and prep them for you. So we do the sort of nasty part and let you do the artistic part. So it's a, it's pretty nice, pretty nice deal, I think. Melissa, welcome. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for having me. Um, so Melissa, you started as the downtown Winooski executive director this year. This is your first go with the Winooski Halloween. Yeah. It's really amazing, amazing operation that they have going on here. I've really been enjoying my first few hours on the job here. So you've been helping with carving, um, kind of what are your expectations for the week? So I'm really excited to see how many people are already here because the kids are off school today. It's really been a great turnout and a really good start to the carving process. So we are really hoping that we're just going to have to go through Thursday night. We're doing it a little bit differently this year. We used to just, um, they used to do it in the past, um, on a weekend and it really seemed to burn a lot of people out. So this year we're spreading it out throughout the week, um, over, uh, four days. And so we'll be hopefully finished on Thursday night and we're going to have a DJ and a cash bar here on Thursday night to get us over the finish line. Hopefully that will incentivize some people to come out and help us finish up. That's a really exciting way to sort of wrap up the pre-work fun. Yeah. Um, so just to confirm, we've got carving going basically from 12 to 18 each day down here at the senior center. Yep. Down here at the senior center and pay attention to social media to see if we still need help on Friday, but we're hopeful that we'll be done on Thursday. Okay. And then, um, so we've got that DJ party that's new. I know there's a costume exchange too that maybe started last year, but can you tell us a little bit about that? Yeah. So it's, if you have a costume that you would like to, um, donate Missouri Loves Company is accepting donations. And then if you want to switch out and get a different costume, you can do that as well. And that's all just free. And, uh, volunteers are handling that both at Missouri and at the senior center. That's great. Yeah. And then during the event, so Saturday and Sunday, we have pumpkins lit up both nights. Um, you know, you can walk around. It's free open to all, but there's also a competition I hear. Yeah. So we've asked local businesses to carve pumpkins in a theme. And then on each of the, um, concrete blocks underneath the flag poles, we're going to display those. And then there will be a competition for the best display by the downtown businesses. So we're really excited to see, um, what they all, they're keeping it secret. So I haven't heard what the themes are yet, but I'm excited to see what they bring out. Very exciting. So limited space. There's an entry fee, I believe. Yeah. It's $25. Yeah. And then you get 25 pumpkins. So it's a pretty, pretty good deal. That is a great deal. Very exciting. Um, before we move in indoors to talk to some of the carvers, is there anything else you want to share that you're excited about or you're learning about this new event? So, um, we will have... New to you. New to me. Um, we will have a DJ and a band on Saturday night. So that should be fun. We also have a scavenger hunt for the kids that starts at 1.30 on Saturday afternoon. So before we, before we light all of the jack-o-lanterns, um, there's a scavenger hunt so you can go and find, um, you know, a cat carved in a pumpkin or find something with letters or words or the word Winooski in it or something like that. Um, so, and there will also be trick-or-treat in the, um, downtown businesses from 5 p.m. till close. 5 till close. That's excellent. Yeah. So there's something for everyone, all ages, day to night, um, come on down to Rotary Park and check out this great annual event. Yeah. Melissa, thank you so much. Thank you. I'm super excited for my first lighting. I can't wait to see it. We really appreciate all the work of, um, the downtown Winooski organization and of course our team here at the city. Before we move indoors, I do want to just give a shout out to, uh, as Ray Coffey mentioned earlier, the season's greetings resident volunteer group that sort of founded this event all those years ago. Um, you know, Sally Tipson, as was mentioned, was a big part of that as well as the Maynard family, Nan Spence, Lorraine Gabit, Clement Sharon Bissonnette, Chris and Paul Burnett, Diana and Peter Dianne, I'm sorry, Dianne, Jane and Mike Viennes, Bernie and Stephanie Frajo, Leslie Turner, Jeff Brasso, Irene Bowman, Marie Miller, and Linda Jelinas and the support of many residents over the years. So let's move inside and talk to some of this year's carvers. So we're here with some of our community carvers. Um, do you want to introduce yourself? Yeah. I'm Mason. Um, I go to Two Roads Academy. We do a lot of, like, outdoors stuff, and today we just came to carve pumpkins and just help out with the community. Have you come before? Have you done a pumpkin before? I've carved before, but I've never come here. Okay. And are you gonna, do you think you're coming this weekend to see the display in the rotary? I might be able to. I hope so. Are you guys having fun? I'm having a lot of fun. We have cool skills. That's awesome. Thank you so much for coming down. Do you want to tell us what you're carving? I'm carving Michael Myers. Oh. So it's not done yet, but it will turn out like this. That's off to a good start. I'll be sure to look for that one. Thank you. I'm Rhea. Do you go to Winooski or Two Roads? Winooski. Winooski? Are you excited to have the day off to carve pumpkins? Yeah. And what are you working on? That is interesting. You want to turn it a little for us? Okay. I like it. Well, thank you for coming down. Are you excited for the weekend? Will you come out and see all the pumpkins? Fantastic. My name is Henry Wagner. Henry Wagner? I'm from Two Roads Academy. Okay. For outdoor program. Kind of outdoors. What are you carving? Nothing at the moment. I'm in between projects. Thinking about your inspiration? Yeah. Have you come to the rotary festival before? No, I have not. This would be my first time. Your first time? Are you excited? Yes, I am. Awesome. Well, I look forward to seeing what you come up with. Okay. Thank you. My name is Phoebe. The reason I come here is my dad who runs this program. And I really like to come here with him and carve pumpkins. And, yeah, that's the reason I'm here. My name is Zola. I like to come here because I like the rotary ones. My name is Venn. I like to come here because I love being... What are you guys carving? I see. Like a fountain face. And then over here? I'm carving a sun. Okay. That looks great. And I assume you'll all be here this weekend to check it out? Yes. Awesome. And I'm going... I think we're all going to the Rusky Circle to see our pumpkins. Maybe they'll be in the scavenger hunt. Hi. Thanks for coming down to carve. Of course. Did you finish one yet? Yeah, I already finished one. What did you carve? I just carved, like, letters. You know? Yeah. And where are you joining us from today? Here. Like, just... Wynusky. What's your name? My name is Yozna. Yozna. Well, we're so happy to have you all down here helping out. Thank you. Will you all at least be out this weekend to see the carvings? Awesome. Thank you.


In the previous part of our MOOC, we talked about the ethical issues that professionals in the field of entertainment communication and political communication and journalism could face. In this part of our course, I would like to talk with you about the ethical issues for corporate communication professionals. Corporate communication aims to embrace all the organization's communication activities. It can be considered as a part of strategic communication. Corporate communication focuses on how the organization presents and promotes itself towards the stakeholders and the general public. Corporate communication professionals fulfill a boundary spanning function between the organization and its environment. This means that they, metaphorically speaking, try to form a bridge between the organization and its stakeholders. They translate corporate information to the outside world and vice versa. That is why they frequently face ethical dilemmas. It is difficult to serve the organization's interests and the interests of society at the same time. For example, how do you act as an organization when your very profitable new product seriously injures multiple and if used inappropriately or without guidance? What is the right thing to communicate? We will use the metaphor of a bridge to explain different ways of dealing with the situation. As a corporate communication professional, there are at least three approaches you could use to deal with this issue. First, you could use a deontological approach. This means that you focus on the motives for your action. As a corporate communication professional, you could ask yourself whether you would like it if your behavior were to be copied by similar organizations. Is that a desirable situation? If you were not to recall your product because it benefits your organization even though it harms the well-being of children, would you wish that all other organizations would act in the same way? Second, you could use a teleological approach. This implies that you evaluate the outcomes of your behavior. In this case, you could choose for the communication strategy that tries to achieve the greatest happiness for everyone. If your organization were to assess the situation and decide what is most beneficial to everyone, so not just the organization itself, you might well arrive at the conclusion that you should take your product off the market. Third, you could avoid making this choice and design a communication system that promotes ethical communication. This is a typically idealistic situation, which is probably difficult to use in practice. An organization could establish rules for communication about its ethical issues with the public. These rules could be adapted from both sides. In this way, dialogical and symmetrical communication would be safeguarded. If we apply this to our case, stakeholders could state that the product harms children and your organization should react responsibly to that. In our next clip, we will deal with ethical issues that professionals in the field of persuasion of communication could face.