Aaron Boone just mentioned that he thought after that second inning and really even in that second inning your secondary stuff started getting much sharper. What did you feel like was the difference from the second inning on. You know I just thought. This always settled in really another more than that. You know. Not a some some some big misfires in the first but you know not a not a ton of bad pitches in strikes on. A couple fortunate hit that we had to deal with. And kind of pitch around and then they press this again in the second much better much better grouping of pitches in the second. So kind of a combination of few misfires early and solid approach. You had mentioned some of the misfires you seem very frustrated after throwing a couple of pitches. How do you not let that frustration get to you and continue to stay dialed in. You don't really have a choice to be quite honest like you got to kind of keep the same keep the same mentality keep the same mindset regardless of where the pitches is going and that's that's the best way to give a shot to give yourself a shot to keep pitching. Hey gosh you said on the field that in the fourth inning he felt as though you were completely dialed in in a good rhythm was there a moment where you felt like you were completely dialed in. You know I. I was. You know it was not ideal that to lose gray out that first walk of the second but I thought we really pressured the bottom corner of the zone well with the slider. Quite a bit. Didn't get rewarded for it. And then you know had to make pitches out first and second there so. You know I started to you know I withheld I withheld a pretty good you know pretty good. Pretty good approach first to some stuff didn't go our way and then you know kind of settle kind of settled he said the fourth I don't I know when we got the lead again I thought things. But the dynamic changed we also had a had a couple endings in the middle that were efficient after they were really really being patient and super visible and not chasing and. So we're able to kind of get the pitch pitch cow back in our favor and then we pop to you know on Kyle swing.


Hi, Ebony. How are you? Hi, Ebony. Can you hear me? Yep, I can hear you. I just do some clothes in the dryer. Yes, I can hear you. Okay, great. All right, we've got a few minutes to go. You're on a computer right now, right? I am. Okay, are you able to see my slides? Yes, I can. If I send out like a quick reminder like, hey webinar starting now, if people still join or would they have to register? They can join through GoToWebinar. They do have to fill out the form, but it's pretty easy and it'll just let them in while it's in progress. Okay, let me do that right now. Sure. Say, webinar start. How's your day going? Pretty good. I've got a little bit of cold stuff. I'm echoing a bit. You are echoing a bit. All right, so when we start the webinar, if you want to just put yourself on mute while I'm talking, now I'm not getting the echo, but we'll see. Okay, I'll let you know if there's an echo. And same for me, if you hear an echo while you're talking, just let me know and I'll mute myself. All right, so we've got a couple of people logged on to the webinar already. I just want to make sure that everybody can hear me and see my screen. So if you are able to see my slides and I'm flipping through a few right now, just let me know by going into the questions box if you go to webinar panel and just affirming that you can see and hear me. All right, it is 2 p.m. Eastern time, so we'll go ahead and get started. We are recording this and we will send out the slides and recording after the webinar. So if somebody misses a few moments of it, they can catch up with the webinar recording and the slides. So welcome everyone who's logged on to our webinar today. It's our first webinar for Giving Black Day and we're really excited about it. My name is Linda Gerhardt and I'm the Senior Community Engagement Manager here at Lady Cause and I've been working closely with Ebony to get the Giving Day up and running on our platform. And Ebony is, I'm sure many of you know, is the Executive Director and Founder of Young Black and Giving Back Institute, which is the nonprofit organization that is hosting Giving Black Day. So we're both hosting this webinar together. Ebony is going to speak with you for a bit and then I'm going to take over and handle more of the technical side of getting yourself ready on the Lady Cause platform. And then we're both going to be hosting a Q&A at the end of the webinar. And here's a quick look at today's agenda. We're going to start out by hearing from Ebony. And then I'm going to go into some Giving Day basics, how Giving Days operate on the Lady Cause platform, things you can do to get your page ready on Lady Cause for Giving Black Day. A little bit of campaign strategy. And then, as I mentioned, we're going to be having a Q&A session. So if you have a question while I'm presenting, just type that question into the questions box of your go-to webinar panel. And we'll make sure to make some time for it at the end. We've reserved a little bit of time to make sure that we can get to everybody's questions. And with that, I will turn it over to Ebony. All right. So thanks guys for joining us today. We always like to know who is on. So as I'm just chatting through about who we are and what we do, give a shout out to your organization so that we know who's on. There should be a chat box to your right or to left of your screen. So as hopefully most of you know, I'm introducing to some and saying hello to others is the Young Black and Giving Back Institute. I am the founder and executive director. I've been doing this work since 2009, actually. If you've heard of us, you may have heard of us under Friends of Ebony.  And so the Young Black and Giving Back Institute is an extension of that work. And our mission is to educate, inspire, and empower young black professionals across the country who want to make change in their community with a focus specifically and intentionally on philanthropy. And so so far we have more than 300 summit and training alum over the past couple of years. We've done board leadership trainings and fundraising trainings, mostly in the Washington D.C. area. And we have so far had five cohorts of changing the face of philanthropy summit attendees. And that is our biannual summit where we bring together about 30 to 40 young black professionals from across the country to dive deep into what matters the most to them. Each year our theme changes based on what is relevant, but it all ties back to philanthropy. So we're getting ready as soon as Giving Black Day is over to plan for our 2020 event. So we hope that some of you will be able to join us. And every day we engage with about 10,000 leaders across the country. And we're really excited about that. I've talked about our signature events. What we're going to talk about today is Giving Black Day. And you can always follow us on Instagram and Twitter and Facebook, YBGB underscore Institute, or you can just find us at YBGB Institute. Next slide, please. All right. So what is Giving Black Day? I know many of you have joined Giving Black Day probably hopefully through the advice and urging of your friends and other supporters. But Giving Black Day marks the conclusion of Black Philanthropy Month, which is the entire month of August. So if you didn't know, now you know. The Black Philanthropy Month is a wonderful month that celebrates the unique and diversity of giving as it relates to the black community. And so on Giving Black Day, we are not only celebrating giving, but we are also recognizing the significance of August 28th significantly in the African-American community. It was the day that Emmett Till was killed in 1955. In 1963 was the day that Dr. King gave his I Have a Dream speech in 2005 was the day that Hurricane Katrina hit in New Orleans. And in 2000, and what year was that? Sorry, I just drew a blank. Barack Obama gave his official note or candidacy speech for the president. And so we know what happened after that. And so that is why we chose August the 28th. Last year, last year, we had 114 participants in Giving Black Day. It was the first day that we did it, or the first time that we did it rather. And we didn't really guerrilla style. We wanted to see what giving a day dedicated to black giving would mean. And so collectively across the country, 114 organizations and individuals raised collectively over $12,000. And we heard anecdotally after that it's probably a little bit closer to 13 and a half. So we're really excited about that. On the day and leading up to every organization created their graphics and their means that went up as they celebrated and pushed towards the day. Those are still available in the toolkit, which Linda will talk about a little bit later. But here are a couple of them that folks use on last year. And so we're really excited about what this year will look like. Next slide, please. All right. And so, yeah, August 29th marks our second year of doing the Giving Black Day. We are partnered with our host site, which is Mighty Cause. They have been awesome. And we are going to have one central platform, which many of you know, because you're already registered. And on that day, we are going to take advantage of the light that shines on black organizations that help to solve our community's problems. So this year, we are happy to announce that we have two sponsors, the Central Carolina Community Foundation and the Sankofa Fund for Civic Engagement. Sankofa is based out of Chattanooga and the Central Carolina Community Foundation is based out of Columbia South Carolina, representing the Midlands. And then we have a wonderful group of community partners that are helping to amplify the day, hosting some events across the country. So you'll hear about those as well. We have black benefactors out of D.C., United Way of the National Capital Area, also out of D.C., be the org out of Baltimore, sowing seeds in the Midlands out of South Columbia, South Carolina, and cool kids out of Harlem, New York. And so we're really excited about the day. And we hope that this webinar brings you one step closer to fundraising and doing the good that you do in your communities. And I think that's all that we have. Ah, yes. Our goal this year is to have 250 registered nonprofits so that we could all raise a collective $125,000. That's the goal. So at least everyone gets $500 out of the deal. What's new, as I mentioned, we have the centralized platform. We will have monetary gifts, which we'll talk about. We'll have local community events, as I just said. And we have the preparatory webinars, like we have right now. And of course, we have apparel, which we will be promoting across all of our platforms. So we're really excited about the new things that we have going on this year for Giving Black Day. And we look forward to working with all of you. If you have any questions or need anything, please feel free to email us at givingblackday at gmail.com or info at youngblackandgivingback.org. All right, Linda, I think that really is everything. All right, thank you so much. Let's see. All right. There we go. Okay, so Ebony gave a lot of great information about the context of Giving Black Day, its history, how it came to be, and what you guys accomplished last year. So really, I wanted to take the mic and sort of talk about Giving Days in the context of the Mighty Cause platform. A Giving Event on Mighty Cause is a one-day fundraising marathon that's organized by a host, in this case, the Young Black and Giving Back Institute, and held on our platform, Mighty Cause. We're a nonprofit fundraising platform that offers year-round fundraising for nonprofits, and our mission is really to lift up small to mid-sized nonprofits. But giving events are one of the things that we offer on our platform. And there are a lot of benefits to hosting an event like Giving Black Day on our platform. And the first of which is that it brings everyone together in one centralized platform, so that there's a consistent experience for the donor. And you're all fundraising together. You're working toward a collective goal as a Giving Day, as well as your own individual goals as organizations. And we're also built for high-volume giving events like this, so we can process a large number of transactions and handle a lot of user activity on Giving Days without any glitches, without any issues or bugs. We're built for this. We're scalable, and this is part of what we do as a company. On a Giving Day, a big part of the action is a little bit of friendly competition with other nonprofits. There are leaderboards where you'll compete for the top spots, as well as hourly prizes that we call golden tickets. And Ebony will announce these prizes before the events that you have time to prepare and have a strategy to win those prizes. But beyond that, Giving Days are a great way to spread awareness of your work and your cause. And nonprofits can also actually find new supporters through a giving event. And as participants in Giving Black Day, you'll also be in a little bit of competition, but working together, as I mentioned, and help spread the word about the giving event. So as you participate in this, you can help make it larger. And each year that you participate, you can actually get more out of it. Giving Black Day is also a really excellent time to work with community partners, corporate sponsors, your board of directors to really boost your nonprofit in your community. You can get them involved with matching grants, starting peer-to-peer fundraisers for your cause, or any number of ways. And we'll talk a lot more about that in the second webinar. So be sure to stay tuned for that one. And while Young Black and Giving Back Institute and Ebony work really hard to publicize and organize the event, there are a few things, a few responsibilities that fall to the nonprofit organizations who participate. First and foremost, you've got to register for the event, which hopefully all of you have done at this point. But if you have not done it, you can go to givingblackday.org. During this webinar, it won't hurt my feelings, I promise, and just quickly register for the event. Once you're registered, you'll need to create and customize a profile for your nonprofit on the Mighty Cause platform. We're going to talk specifically about how to customize your page on this webinar and how to navigate it. But all of you should already have a profile set up if you've registered. And you'll also need a fundraising plan for your campaign on Giving Black Day. And that means sitting down with your team, even if it's you and a couple of volunteers, or you have an actual team of fundraisers, to come up with a plan of action to get the word out about Giving Black Day to your followers and promoting it on your social media, through email, and even in-person events, however you choose to do it in a way that works for your nonprofit. And you'll also want to reach out to your biggest supporters to let them know about your campaign and get them involved in one way or another, whether that's starting a peer-to-peer campaign or just helping you publicize your campaign. And then you'll just need to raise money on Giving Black Day. All right, so now I wanted to move more into the technical portion of the webinar and go over the steps that you should take to get ready for the event and help you with the navigation of your Mighty Cause page. Once again, the first step is registering. So there's a short form to fill out, which hopefully most of you have already done, and you'll be approved within a day or two. You do only need to register once. I did want to mention this. And if you need to give other people access to your nonprofit's profile so that they can help you with your campaign, you can actually do that after they've registered, after you've registered. And again, if you haven't registered yet, it really won't hurt my feelings if you take a minute during this webinar, open up a tab in your browser and go to givingblackday.org and get registered for the event. So once you've submitted a registration form, you'll be added to the event. You're officially participating and when donations are open, there's nothing you need to do with your page. It'll happen automatically. And once you're registered, the first thing I recommend doing is spending some time getting used to your nonprofit's dashboard. It's very easy to navigate. It's meant to be for entry-level users. So you should be able to click around and find what you need. And the thing that you'll do to get around your profile is use the side menu that we call your dashboard. And this is off to the left-hand side of your page when you're logged in as an administrator and on your nonprofit's profile on Mighty Cause. At the top is your home screen, which is where you'll be dropped when you navigate to your organization's profile. And that's where you'll see an update about everything that's happened within the last 30 days. And you can also find a really handy to-do list that gives you the most essential things you need to do to get your page ready. So if you haven't already looked at this to-do list, please take a look at it. It has the most basic things that you should do to get your profile ready for giving Black Day. So when you check out the to-do list, if you click on the links on the to-do list, it will actually take you to where on your profile you can add a logo or add a background image or customize your thank you page. So this is really handy and it's an easy way you can keep track of your progress and know what you need to do. The one thing I do want to note is that to edit your profile, you do need to go into profile and then page edit. So you want to make sure that you're in editing mode before you attempt to make any changes to your page. Donations will go into detail about later, but that's also on your dashboard. You have several options there. You have a campaign screen, which you can use to easily navigate and manage any ancillary pages that are connected to your organization. So for instance, if somebody starts a peer-to-peer profile, a peer-to-peer fundraiser, or you have one that's specific to your giving Black Day campaign, which you can do, you can easily use the campaign screen to navigate between those pages and see how much they've raised. And then we'll go into detail about your settings, but your settings are also on your dashboard and they're very important to get familiar with. So as I said, one of the first things you'll want to do is customize your non-profit's profile page. This is basically the face of your non-profit for giving Black Day, and this is the link that you'll share on social media in emails and so on to ask for contributions to your non-profit. Mighty Cause has easy to use tools you can customize the look and feel of your page to make it match your non-profit's brand. Your profile really is the face of your organization, so it's important to incorporate some storytelling elements into your profile to let people know who your non-profit is, what you do, and really make the case for donating to support your work. And in the next few slides, we'll talk about how to customize each part of your profile. Customizing the appearance of your profile is the easiest and best way to announce your non-profit's brand and who you are to people who visit the page. The first thing you'll want to do is upload your logo, which is one of the items on your to-do list. The logo is used to represent your organization on giving Black Day's leaderboards and in the search, and it'll need to be a one-to-one aspect ratio, which just means square, so basically the size of an Instagram photo. You can upload a transparent PNG if you want to add some extra pizzazz to your page, like if you have a circle logo, you can upload that as a transparent PNG. The next thing is to add a banner image, which you can see on the slide here is that colorful image with the guy sitting at a computer. There are a few best practices to follow here. First, it's important to know that Mighty Cause is mobile responsive, which means that the site adjusts to the size of the screen it's being viewed on. For that reason, things like text overlays and collages aren't really the best choice for this particular space because on mobile, it may be cut off to some degree because it has to adjust to a different screen orientation. A photograph that represents your work without a text overlay or some sort of graphic that represents what you do is a really great thing to put as your banner image. We do actually have a cropping tool, so you don't need to worry about editing that image when you upload it through upload care. There is a cropping tool and it will force you to crop it into the image container so you can play with it there to make sure that it looks as good as you want it to. Excuse me. I also recommend testing this so when you upload your background image, test it on a mobile device or just actually shrink the size of your browser because Mighty Cause will actually bootstrap to the size of your browser so you can see what it looks like when it's a little bit smaller. I'm sorry if you're getting a little bit of background noise there. Then you can also add a filter to your background image. If you really want to tone it down or pump up the yellow, you can set your filter color and the filter strength. You can bump it up, bump it down depending on what your preference is and play with it to make sure that it looks great. Then once you're done that, you can change your theme color for the page. The theme color actually carries throughout the page so your donate button, the fundraise button and various aspects of your page will pull in that theme color. If you have a logo with a particular color, if you have a branding kit that you use, you can put that color in there. You can use the hexadecimal code and that will actually carry through your page. You just don't want to make that white or two lights because people won't be able to see it on your profile. You have a lot of ability to customize your page and make it look the way you want so that it matches your organization's branding. A little bit further down on the page, you have an opportunity to tell your story. Your story uses a simple inline text editor. If you can create a Word document, you can easily use our editing tool. You can add formatting like headers, lists, bullet points and so on to make it easier to read. You can also add images or videos, which we recommend because the more diverse media you have in your story, the more likely it is that people will pay attention. Since people online, as we know, have a short attention span and they're not very likely to read big walls of text. If you have a lot of information to share, you can actually add a custom tab that people can toggle to that information to keep your story focused and clean. Best practices for this space is to keep it understandable to the average person. Avoid things like jargon and inside baseball talk that may not make a lot of sense to someone who doesn't know all that you know about your cause. You want to talk about your cause, talk about your nonprofit, talk about what you do and give people an introduction to who you are, what kind of work you do in the world, what your mission is, and punch it up from a mission statement which can be a little bit dry. Make it fun, make it understandable for the average person and sell your nonprofit to them because they'll read this before they make their donation. And if you really want to incorporate some of your nonprofit storytelling into this space. And you can also liven up your page by adding media and integrating your social media accounts. You can upload images to a gallery that will help tell the story of what you do and connect your Instagram account so that your feed displays on your mighty cause page. And another cool thing you can do is go into your settings, which we'll talk about in a minute, and optimize your social media sharing. So if somebody shares your page from mighty cause, you can actually optimize it for social media. Make sure that the image that's being used in the card looks really, really good and is set for social media standards. And you can also tag yourself on Twitter posts, for instance, and you can add a hashtag if you're using a hashtag specific to your campaign. So you can really optimize it for social media so that when people share your page on social media, you can see that they're sharing your page and you can interact with them. So now we're going to move into some of the back end functions of your mighty cause profile. And the most important one that you need to know is your donations report. You access this via the dollar sign on your dashboard. So when your nonprofit gets a donation, everyone who is an admin on mighty cause will be sent an email notification. And you also have a report that updates in real time. So if you want to just check in on how you're doing, you can see a live feed there of donations that are coming in. But you'll see the email address, their name, and you'll also be able to see what amount they gave and what page they gave to. So if you have lots of pages that are going on at the same time, like peer to peer campaigns and teams or events, you can use all of those features for giving Black Day. You can see what pages those donations actually came through. And you have filters there. So you can adjust this report to show the information that you need to see. And this, you're not limited to the information that displays here. You can actually download a full spreadsheet that has additional information about the donation that came in. It'll be a spreadsheet of all of your donations. You can see any designations or does dedication that they left with their donation. So you can really see that detail if you download the CSV. And one other thing you can do is you can add offline donations through your donations report. So those don't count for giving Black Day, but if you do collect any checks or cash, you can add those on your donation report. And then the other section I wanted to point out is disbursements, which is part of the donations area. But it's a separate section and that will track the disbursements. Basically, when you raise funds on Mighty Cause, we send you the money and you'll be able to see a breakdown of everything that was included in that disbursement. And you'll also get an email notification when you have a new disbursement report that's available. But that's how you can track the funds that you've received if you're just trying to reconcile after the giving day what you're expecting and what still needs to come in. And we just talked about this a little bit, but you can add offline gifts through your donation report. So if you have someone who is more comfortable making a check or cash donation instead of going online, you can add it through your donations report. It's just right there where that red arrow is. It is important to note that as I mentioned, you can certainly record these to reflect the totality of the fundraising you're doing on Giving Black Day. But because these are offline gifts, we can't verify them. So they don't actually count towards your leaderboard totals for Giving Black Day and they don't count for any prizes since we can't verify the amount of that donation. And on many occasions you actually have quite a bit of control over the donation process. And all of your donations are there in the donor experience section of your donations on your dashboard. Here you can set what data you'd like to collect from donors when they check out. So if having an address or a phone number is important to your stewarding strategy, you can opt into collecting that information here. You can also add custom donation suggestions and add descriptions to reinforce the impact of each donation. So for instance, if you're an education organization and $30 for instance helps you buy a semester's worth of school supplies for one student, that's a really great suggestion that will help monetary donations really resonate with donors. And once you've chosen your options, you can review the process from start to finish so that you can see exactly what the donor sees without having to make a test donation, which is really handy for editing yourself because sometimes you'll add a bunch of custom questions and you'll realize, whoa, that's too long when you go through the actual process yourself. So you compare that down to the essentials and make sure that what the donors are experiencing is what you want them to experience and they can get in and out pretty quickly and easily. You also have some options for what happens after the donation is made. Once the donation is completed, donors will see a thank you page, which you can customize in the same way you can customize your story. It uses the same editor. So that means you can add a video for them to watch. You can add an image as well as a message thanking them for their contribution. Mighty Cause also automatically sends a tax receipt to each donor right after they make a donation, which is pretty cool. You can automate that process for you and you can add a message to that email that they receive so you can automate your donor acknowledgement because it's really important to acknowledge their donation extremely quickly and get a thank you really quickly. Even if you go back and send them a more comprehensive thank you after the event is over. So we're going to talk a lot more about matching grants in the next webinar, but under donations is where you'll find our matching grants tool. A matching grant is a large donation that you leverage as a match to entice more people to donate to your organization, and it can be really great if you have a specific time you want lots of people to donate. You can have a matching grant that's available between one time and ends at a certain time, and that drives people to donate because they're getting a good deal. They're getting the ability to double their donation and get more of an impact for the money that they give. And this is also a really great way to engage board members, corporate sponsors, and major gift donors. This tool allows you to enter the match and basically tell us how that match works. Set limits for your match, for instance, if you had a $1,000 match, you could limit it so that donations are only matched up to a certain point so that someone doesn't come along and make a $900 donation and eat up that match that you worked so hard to secure. So you let us know how you want the match to function. There's quite a bit of flexibility there, and I just wanted to make you aware of this tool. So as you're thinking about matching grants and incorporating that into your fundraising strategy, there is a tool for that, and getting familiar with this tool will help you maximize the impact of your matching grant on giving Black Day if you do happen to get one. All right, so this is the last slide about your profile, but it's a very important one. As you get ready for August 28th, you'll want to make sure you've checked your settings and make sure that they appear the way you want them to, and that's the little gear icon on your dashboard. And here is where you can add other admins. So if you have a volunteer who is helping you customize your page or you have a bookkeeper who needs access to your donation report, you can add them in your settings. They'll be sent an email with a link to finish setting up their Mighty Cause profile so that they can access your organization's profile, but all you need is their name, their title, and their email address. So here is where you can also update your legal information. Mighty Cause actually imports information from the IRS database, and sometimes the database through the IRS can be a little bit slow to update itself. So if your information is out of date, if you've changed addresses, you can update that information and upload your documentation here in your settings. And this is really important. This is where you can set up electronic funds transfer or EFT, which is the direct deposit option for receiving disbursements. We strongly recommend that you set up EFT. It's just easier if you get your money sooner and you actually get it more often. So you can receive a disbursement via check if that's best for you. But with disbursements, you get them on the 10th and the 25th every month if you have EFT set up and it's just a direct deposit into your bank account. So if you have the ability to set up EFT, we definitely recommend doing it so that you can make use of the funds that are donated to you more quickly. And then again, as I mentioned earlier, this is where you can customize your social sharing settings and you can customize your URL. So if you wanted to change your URL to something that's more reflective of your brand, because right now it's typically the legal name for your nonprofit, you can edit that here. All right, so now we're going to move into some campaign strategy. Our next webinar will be all about campaign strategy. So we're really going to dive deep in the second webinar, but I wanted to sort of introduce you to some of the Giving Day strategy that we recommend at Mighty Cause. So the first thing you should know is that Ebony and her team took the time to put together a really great toolkit for you all, which you can access on the Giving Black Day site, as well as what they put together some frequently asked questions and how tos. So as you prepare for the campaign, it definitely takes some time to look at the materials that they've prepared. They did a really great job putting these together, and I really want you to make as much use of them as you can. They're under resources on GivingBlackDay.org, so just take a look there. You can find the list of training webinars. You'll be able to find recordings there as well. And you can also check the FAQs. So if you're wondering something about the Giving Event or how it functions on Mighty Cause, you can find it in those FAQs. So one of the best strategies for giving events is securing early donations, which might sound a little strange because you have one day that you're going to be pushing for donations, but what early donations can do is give you a bit of a head start. So the main event is on August 28, but you can actually get a head start on your fundraising by accepting donations on August 26. And that's the day you'll see your organization profile switch over so that it has the GivingBlackDay branding added. So starting on August 26, which is the Monday before the event, you can start accepting donations for GivingBlackDay. They count towards your total. They count toward leaderboards. And these donations process immediately, so they count toward all of those things. So it's a great opportunity to get a head start and get some seed donations. We recommend asking people in your organization's inner circle for early donations, such as board members, staff members, volunteers, and so on. These donations will show that you've already got some support when you reach out to your supporters on the 28th. And one thing that we know at Mighty Cause is that people are much more likely to donate online when they see that people have already done so. It makes them feel safe and secure. Nobody likes to be the first one. In a lot of instances, and donating online is often one of those scenarios. So it helps to get early donations. You have a few days to sort of build up some donations and have a few in the bank so that when you go live and announce your campaign to everyone on August 28, you've already got some support banked. An excellent GivingDay strategy that I touched on a little bit already is to use ambassadors to help with your campaign. And this means a couple of different things. It can be as simple as asking somebody to help amplify your campaign by letting their network know that you're having this Giving Event campaign and asking them to donate. It can also mean starting a peer-to-peer fundraiser for your organization. Mighty Cause is a platform where people can easily start a fundraiser on behalf of your organization. And those are really great because it allows people to tell their own story about why they care about the work you do and why they think that you should support your organization and support your work. And so you get these really great testimonials through peer-to-peer fundraisers. On Mighty Cause, it's important to know that any page that's created from your Mighty Cause profile, whether it's a peer-to-peer fundraiser or a team, which is a more complex peer-to-peer fundraising page, they all funnel back to your organization profile. They show up on your donation report and the money goes directly to you. So there's never anybody intercepting that. It's dispersed with all of the funds that you raised directly. But this is a really great way to get people involved and excited about your event, about your campaign rather, to get them involved and allow them to help. So this is a really great tool that you can use for volunteers. If you have some superstar volunteers who are always doing great things for you, if you have any board members who are super well connected, a lot of times tapping them to be an ambassador works on a couple of different fronts. They help amplify your campaign and boost its visibility. And then you also make them feel important because you ask them to speak on behalf of your organization to the people that they know. So it's a really great way to get them engaged in giving Black Day. And we'll talk a lot more about communication strategy in the next webinar as well. But you'll want to plan on spreading the word leading up to August 28th and on the day itself. So you can actually start teasing your campaign now and getting people excited about it now. I recommend putting it in your newsletter, letting people know that you're participating on social media, putting it on your website as an upcoming event or an upcoming date. One thing that's really important for giving events we find is segmenting your communications. If you have a very small base of donors, then this maybe doesn't apply as much. But if you have a larger base of donors segmenting it so that when you email them or when you basically when you email them, you can't do a whole lot of segmenting on social media, but that way it's specific to them and it acknowledges the relationship that they have with your nonprofit. So we recommend thinking about the donor groups that you want to contact to ask them to donate to Giving Black Day and how you want to adjust your messaging for that particular group of donors. So for instance, recurring donors may need a different message because they give on a regular basis than people who've given one time. So thinking about that as you're thinking about your communication strategy for Giving Black Day. And one thing I recommend, I'm from a communications background, plan and schedule these things that you're sending out. So have a social media plan. Have a schedule, schedule as much as you can before the day itself so that you can sit back and enjoy and reserve your energy for anything that needs to be said or posted on that particular day. And I always like to remind people about this. It seems obvious that people do forget on Giving Days because they can be really exciting. Make sure that you have a clear call to action or CTA, donate now, give now, and post a link to your page so that people know precisely where to go to make their donation. And finally, if you have any help, you need any help leading up to Giving Black Day. If you have any questions about your page, if you need help setting it up, if you need help figuring out where something is, or even if you need a one-on-one demo, you can't find something and you need somebody to give you some additional support. Our support team is here for you. We have dedicated support specialists who are ready to help you. So do not hesitate to reach out to us if you need assistance. You can reach us at support at mightycause.com. We have regular business hours, so Monday through Friday, 9 to 5 Eastern Time. And you can also give us a call at<PHONE_NUMBER> if it's easier for you to talk to somebody live. But these are ways you can get in touch with us. We're here to support you. Mighty Cause as a platform is we want you to succeed. We want you to be able to find the things that you need on your profile. So don't hesitate to reach out to us if you need any assistance whatsoever. All right. So that's it from me. Sorry if you got a little bit of background noise in there. But I wanted to make some time to take questions from you. So if you do have a question about giving Black Day or your page, just type it into the questions box of your GoToWebinar panel and we will make time to get to everyone's questions. All right. There's a question about the recording. Yes. You guys will get a recording and you will also get the slide deck so that you can share it with any team members who may benefit from this webinar. There's a question about matching grants. Who provides matching grants? That's a great question. I'm sorry if I glossed over that. So matching grants are basically a large gift. So you would provide the matching grant or you would work with a donor to provide the matching grant. Typically it's a major gift donor or a corporation or a community partner. They plan in advance to give you a large donation. So for instance, if you have a major gift donor who usually gives, you know, let's say $1,000 in September for some reason, you can reach out to them and say, hey, we have this event coming up in August and it would be really great if we could use your annual donation to provide a matching grant for giving Black Day. So it does require some planning, some prospecting, and doing some outreach to people who are already in your donor base. But it can also be a great opportunity to forge new relationships with people in your community, such as businesses, you know, giving them a call or having it sending them an email saying, hey, here's what we're doing. Here's why we think that this particular day and our cause is aligned with what you do as a business. Can you provide a gift? That's a really great icebreaker for talking to people that you haven't really partnered with before. So you would secure the grant and you would just enter it in on Mighty Cause and then promote it to your supporters saying, hey, during this time and this time, you can get your match, you can have your donation match one-to-one up to a certain amount if that's how you choose to do it. But it can be, you know, anywhere from $500, like if you had a board member, and you know, usually board members do have to help with fundraising, that's a great way to get them involved. You could pull together funding from your board members for a matching grant. But it would be people that you already know as a non-profit or that you reach out to as a non-profit. Mighty Cause does not provide a matching grant and I don't believe Young Black and Giving Back Institute does either. So that would be incumbent on you to do some outreach, make some phone calls, send some emails, set up some meetings, and see if you can get a gift for a matching grant. Okay, so there's a question about changing the URL. I tried to change the URL and I wasn't able to do so. Can I get technical help on this? Yeah, I would email support support at mightycause.com and they can take a look at it for you if you're having any issues with it. Most often what happens with the URL for a page is that somebody else already has that URL. Obviously, two organizations can't have the same URL because you know, where do you direct people when they type in that URL. So sometimes adding like a one at the end of it or just changing it one little thing about it can really help you secure that URL. But that's typically what happens is that somebody else has already gotten that URL. But our support staff can certainly check for you and see if, for instance, that an organization is no longer using Mighty Cause, we may be able to secure that URL for you. So just send an email to support at mightycause.com. They will take a look for you and help you, you know, get that set up so that you're ready to go for Giving Black Day because I know you'll be getting materials together and so on. So just email them. They are happy and friendly and able to help. All right. So here's a question. Hope there's a follow up to that. So the URL cannot be personalized. So the full URL cannot be personalized. It's on the Mighty Cause domain. We own that domain. And for the Giving Day, you're actually operating within a sub domain. So it will say giving blackday.mightycause.com in the beginning. But the end part of the URL, you can customize it so that it reflects your nonprofit's name. And so by default, on Mighty Cause, it's going to be your legal name, which sometimes they can have incorporated on the end of that. You can get rid of that and customize your URL. The only issue is that we can't have two identical URLs at the same time. So they need to be slightly different so that our website knows basically which page to direct people to when they type in that URL. But you can customize it. You just can't customize the domain because it is in the Mighty Cause domain. One other suggestion, Alinda, to the team that's asking. You all can look into using Bitly. B-I-T.ly. You can always shorten the link because that may be a little lengthy to share. So whatever URL Mighty Cause gives you as a default, you can just drop that into Bitly. And you can shorten it and make it say whatever you want it to say that reflects a little bit more of your organization's uniqueness. If that's what you all choose to do on that day, so you don't have to use the long URL that you're given. Yeah. And just to jump off of that, that's a great tip. Bitly is a great resource. If you go to the Twitter share button on your profile, so there's a sticky navigation there that has social media icons. If you click on Twitter, it'll kind of pre-populate a tweet with some information. And in that tweet, we do actually have a shortened URL for you. So that's just a little bit of a Mighty Cause hack. We've already kind of optimized for Twitter. And that's where you can grab a shortened link from Mighty Cause so you don't have to go through Bitly so that can actually cut out a step for you. Bitly is also great if you use Bitly all the time and you're comfortable with their platform. So you don't have to share the whole thing necessarily because definitely that can get a little bit large if you're printing out a flyer or you're trying to stay within Twitter's character limits, although you don't count links anymore. So that's one good thing. But yeah, great tip. One more question. Can I use Mighty Cause outside of Giving Black Day? Yes, we are a year-round platform. So outside of Giving Black Day, you can use us for fundraising. You don't have to. You certainly don't have any obligation to. But if you use our platform and you've gotten your nonprofit set up and you want to start using us, especially if you need a peer-to-peer capability, we can absolutely work for you outside of the Giving Day. And the other cool thing I wanted to mention related to that is that people can set up recurring donations through Mighty Cause. So you can think about that as it relates to your strategy. So instead of getting a one-time donation of $10, you could ask people to make their donation a monthly donation. Mighty Cause processes that for them automatically. They can stop their donation, change the date of their donation. They can update their card information if they want to move it to a different credit card or their card's about to expire. So we manage all of that for you. So you can definitely use us outside of Giving Black Day. And you can also use Giving Black Day as an opportunity to get some recurring donations on the Mighty Cause platform. Because again, we send them a receipt. We automate that process for you. And it's really easy for users to manage their recurring donation through Mighty Cause. Yeah, so that I think is all of the questions we have. So if you guys have any other questions that you think of after the webinar, you can email me if it's a platform related question, or you can also email Ebony. And we'll take care of it for you. But it looks like everybody's got their questions answered for this webinar. We will send out the slides and reporting, or rather Ebony will send out the slides and reporting. So you'll be able to share it with people who missed the webinar. And we'll also post it to the Giving Black Day site. So you'll be able to view it in perpetuity, basically. So yeah, Ebony, do you have any closing words? No, we are super excited to have each and every one of you take part in Giving Black Day this year. One small incentive. All of you who are registered, you automatically, you are within the first 100 folks to register for Giving Black Day. And so what we're doing this year is for the first 100 organizations that are registered, you are automatically going to be eligible to win $100. So if you want to have other friends participate or be eligible to win, then have them register. But you all the good news is that you will be eligible to win that $100 on Giving Black Day. Give yourselves a hand for being among the first to register. And I look forward to the next webinar so we can tell you guys about the other financial prizes that will be a part of the day as well. Yeah, definitely. That one's going to be a campus webinar. We're going to go deep into strategy and you'll learn more about the prizes and incentives on Giving Black Day. So stay tuned for that one. You can actually register for that one. It looks like a few of you already have registered for that one. So I'm looking forward to that one. That's always a fun one to talk about strategy and how to go after some of these prizes. But yeah, thank you guys so much for attending today. And again, you guys will get the slides and recordings. So with that, I bid you adieu and thank you so much for attending. Thank you, Linda. Bye.