Hey, my name is Carl and today I'm going to be showing you how to make DIY Popery. Sign up for our summer reading program by visiting the long beach dot beanstack dot org or any of our open locations. If you've already signed up for the summer reading, be sure to enter the special code scarlet and the activity tab of your beanstack challenge to earn a point for joining us for today's crafts. Okay, let's get started. We are going to be making homemade popery, DIY. It is super simple and super fun to do. Popery in its original language actually means rotting pot, which I thought was very interesting because it is not. It smells wonderful. So in order to make popery, you'll need three basic ingredients. You'll need florals, any type of florals, herbs, anything that smells good to you. And we'll get more into that later. You'll need wood chips. These are actually the same wood chips they use in like hamster cages or pet cages. You can get this at any pet store. You can get a ton of it for like five bucks. Super simple. You'll need some essential fragrances and those are up to you right now. I have lemon, mint and tea tree, I think. And last but not least you'll need a container for your popery to go in. I have a mesh bag here and I like that a lot because it lets the popery breathe and you can put it in cabinets and you can put it in your laundry. But you can also choose glass and this can look really nice on a coffee table or in a bathroom or in a kitchen or something like that. Okay, so let's get started. You're going to start off with your fresh florals. And it can be a mix of things. Just really whatever smells good to you. You want things to have natural scent. Some of the things I use are like orange tree leaves, rose petals obviously. I think in here we have some pine needles. And you can really get this from basically any public park. As things expire you want to do responsible foraging and you want to look for things that may be on the ground, things that have fallen. You only want to take enough for you and we never want to take anything from anyone else's private property. So that is what we call responsible foraging. Okay, so I have a mix of stuff in here that I got from a walk in the park and what you're basically going to do is you're going to let this air out. Now there is a way to bake this and if you want to bake it low for 200 degrees for a couple hours until all the moisture is out of it. You don't have to wait for your floral to dry. But I didn't want to do that. Normally when I make potpourri, I just put it in an open air container just like so and I just kind of put everything in there and I, you know, let it dry out. There's no wrong way to do it. You know, I just sort of just let it dry out by a dry cool place. It takes about a week, maybe two. The reason why we do that is we don't want our potpourri to mold. So we want it to be really dry. We want no moisture to be left in there at all before we add in our wood chips, which we are calling a fixative when you're making potpourri. There's lots of things you can use when you make potpourri for a fixative.  So once you have your potpourri in an open air container you can set that aside and you can come back to this video. But we're going to go ahead and continue and we're going to say we've done our week or two week time lapse and now we have our dried florals. So once you have your dried florals, it is pretty simple.   We're going to look at what we're putting in there because you know, even if we are very careful and we try very hard, some things can still expire in mold. It's pretty much anything that is wide or filmy or mossy. This one has a little bit so I'm going to discard it. You want to just be careful that you don't include any of that in your potpourri mix because it's not healthy to breathe in and it also doesn't smell very good. So we're just going to keep it light and fluffy. As you see, as things dry, they turn brown and they're just really hard. That's how you know it's ready. There's no moisture in these whatsoever. They still smell great though. Like it still smells very floral and this is just a mix of rose petals and pine leaves and mint leaves and cinnamon and I think there's also some lemon zest in here and I'm not making a lot because we're only going to make one of these satchels but once you have everything or you have enough in there about a cup of florals, you can add half a cup of, half a cup of your wood chips to the whole mix and I'm just measuring by eye. It doesn't take an exact measurement. I'm just going to mix that in there. You want it to be mixed pretty well. Okay, so at the end of the day, you should have something that looks kind of like this and it's nice and fragrant and what we're going to do is while this smells good by itself, we're going to punch it up a notch and we're actually going to include a few drops of whatever essential oils that you fancy. So I'm going to do a mint and tea tree even though those smell very similar. So maybe I'll do a citrus and mint and you just want to do a couple drops, maybe five or six of one cent and then a couple drops of the other. I'm going to do five and five and I'm just going to mix that around a bit, try to keep them in here and really crush down any long pieces that you have. You can break this down with your hands or you can break it down with a tool.  Okay, and I'm just going to give that a smell. Yeah, that smells amazing and what's happening here is that the essential oil is going to be soaked up by those wood chips and those wood chips. Remember they put them in hamster cages and pet cages. They are going to soak up a lot of the scent and any of the moisture that may be left in there. And now you can't take anything out. You can't take out any essential oil. So you want to be careful. I'm going to go ahead and put in some more mint because if you put in too much it can be very overpowering at first and then you won't be able to enjoy it right away. You'll have to wait for it to die down but this way you'll be able to pretty much enjoy it right away. Smells amazing to me and just like that we're done. So now you can take your potpourri, you can take your mesh bag. I got this off of Amazon. You can get like a hundred of them for six bucks and you can stuff your bag with it. You put everything in there so nothing gets lost and they look beautiful and amazing and they just really bring that scent to whatever they're in. I keep mine and my shoes. I keep them in my dresser especially these mesh ones because they work really well because the scent comes through. For the bathroom though I keep it in a glass jar, a mason jar with the lid off and I just keep it a far away from any water because again we want to avoid water in these and that's it. That is the whole trick to it. It's that simple. Once you've got a full you just close your mesh bag and boom we have made potpourri. I hope you enjoyed your time with me. I hope you make some amazing sensual oil combinations and I hope that you have fun with it. I'll see you next time. Thanks.


Pick the right frame for your face, your image, and your outfit is a definite skill. Far too many guys just have one pair of sunglasses that they wear with anything and this is where you are missing a huge opportunity. Remember the three Fs, frames, fragrance, and footwear. Notice how I'm dressed right now. Power suit, white shirt, power tie. As we adjust like this, you don't want to be wearing a big chunky pair of acetate frames as a sunglass. This is great for an indoor frame as far as optical, but when you're going outside in the sunglass, I prefer a great aviator.  You guys when I'm dressed in gray, I tend to want to go with silver because in my mind, it's a little bit cooler of a metal. With you want to wear black, black you can either wear silver or gold. I prefer gold when I'm wearing black because it's warmer. Notice how each one of these silver frames changes and complements exactly what I'm wearing right now. Three different frames from Jacques Rémyche. I will leave a link down in the description describing each one of the frames. Do me a favor. Tell me which frame you like better and why. Frame one, frame two, frame three. Inquiring minds would like to know.


The managing director of Port Harcourt Refinery Company, Ahmed Dico, has assured that old Port Harcourt Refinery, when we are fully operational in March 2023, barring any incomparances, decommissioned our investigative hearing on the state of the nation's refineries by the House of Representatives, our docket committee, on the state of the nation's refineries. Emmanuel Higiene completes the report. The investigation is a continuation of series of ongoing probe into why the nation's four refineries, namely Port Harcourt, which has two Worry and Caduna refineries, are still inactive, despite huge terms approved by government to rehabilitate them. Chairman of the committee, Honourable Ghaniu stressed this point while welcoming the NNPC management. Members were not pleased with the pace of work despite government releasing funds for the rehabilitation work. They were interested to know when the Port Harcourt refinery will start operations, since what can it as fully commenced? Even if Caduna refinery is working, you cannot send crude to Caduna refinery because of vandalisation or whatsoever. So pipeline work. So why spending one million euro on Caduna refinery when you know that you cannot send crude to that refinery? We are period to deliver the rehabilitation. It's 32 months. Even if I heard you correctly, sir, how long does it take to deliver a brand new refinery of equivalent capacity? How long does it take, sir? Meanwhile, Deco assured that work will soon commence on the Worry and Caduna refineries as soon as the pipeline issues are sorted out, since the Federal Executive Council already approved funds for the takeoff of work on both refineries. Where we can finish the old refinery and begin to run it with 60,000 barrels capacity while other works are concurrently going on on the new refinery, which is the big one with 150,000 barrels capacity. But there are very common facilities all that has to be utilised. Utilities, wastewater, off-size and other things. The committee adjourned to the 9th of June for further inquest as the NNPC was asked to produce documents to back up its claims. Hello, hope you enjoyed the news. Please do subscribe to our YouTube channel and don't forget to hit the notification button so you get notified about fresh news updates.


I'm in the car about to set off on quite an epic journey on my drawing course for the next week in Wales. I can't draw yet. I'm going to take you along on the journey so you can see how it goes. So I'm not going to do loads of like filming and vlogging of the actual thing because I think that will stop for me kind of living in it but I do want to document it a little bit and partly so that anyone who might be thinking about going on this course in the future could get a little bit of a feel for what it's about. I think each day we're learning a different skill and day one was about the perception of edges which right away actually has made me start looking at things a little bit differently but before we even started thinking about edges we had to do like a pre-course task. Now if you've ever looked up the Betty Edwards drawing on the right side of the brain book or course which has been around for many many years you will have seen these amazing like before and after portraits where people draw themselves at the beginning of the course and then five days later at the end of the course they draw themselves again and this is done just purely as a record so you can see what progress you've made but it's also quite a lot of fun. Now this is probably the thing I was most worried about because it's fine trying to do something once you've been taught how to do it and even if you don't get it right but you've got some idea about how to even try and approach the task but for me sitting and staring at my face in the mirror which makes me feel pretty bloody uncomfortable and then having to draw it when I don't know how I've never ever been taught how was quite hard and you know I yeah it's so there's a moment off but then I just kind of got on with it and remembered that we you know what the worse this is then the better the before and after comparison will be so you know let's just roll with it and I did my best and well and when Anna our course leader bought the big pictures in afterwards she then gave them out so everybody could look at everybody else's pictures which again I think made us all go ooh don't know about this but again this has become a really important part of the course right in the beginning is actually being open in our learning and sharing our stuff with each other and also realising that when you look through all the pictures so we look through the 12 pictures including our own and you found many people sorts of the same when you got your own you kind of were quite harsh and self critical of your own picture but actually you looked at everyone else's far more inquisitively and you found the things you liked about it and the rest of the day was spent looking at so this perception of edges and shapes and Anna was teaching us to look for the spaces between things rather than just to see the things so we did a copying exercise where we took a well known line drawing and we actually had to copy it very accurately using measurements and stuff but we copied it upside down and we were always looking for the shapes and the spaces so instead of thinking you know I'm drawing a hand or a chair or a jacket you were just thinking okay that's a triangle and it's about you know this shape and this angle in relation to the next shape is this and we worked through it and again we then all looked at each other's and we were able to discuss what we found difficult and easy and how we found the task and I then went back in the evening and did another upside down drawing using a little bit more of what I'd learnt since the first one and this was someone on a horse and actually I really enjoyed that so now I'm going to talk about day two on the course which was really hard and according to our instructor Anna it is the hardest day is the day when lots of people want to give up and that was reassuring so I kind of came along because I wanted to enjoy it and have fun and I wanted to learn to enjoy the process of drawing I don't really care about being able to draw but yesterday was a day where at times it felt really frustrating. We drew a picture of our own hand so we used a picture plane and we had to place this kind of perspex over our hand I'll put together a bit of video to show you but it's a kind of hold of pose with our hand to foreshort and view which is where you get like distorted because some of it's closer so you'll see here that the fingers aren't exactly all the size you'd expect if you were to draw them because some are closer to you and some are further away you'd essentially put a perspex over that and then we drew round it with and then we transferred that onto the page and use that as the beginning of our drawing for our hand and then we learned how to add in the light and shade and that sort of thing but we learnt really the importance there about really carefully transferring across measurements so we didn't do what our brain was telling us to do we actually had to do what we knew were the correct measurements having literally transferred it onto the perspex and then across to the paper and I found that tricky but okay it just had to keep checking myself and all my assumptions were wrong we put all our pictures up we're doing this for everything putting all our pictures up so we can see what everyone else did at the end and it was like whilst I could see lots of problems with mine I was quite proud that I produced something that you can tell it to hand and also when I looked at everyone else's we'd all done something different and actually I really enjoyed hearing about everyone's hand and how the process was for them I was quite impressed that I was able to produce that and it's not you know if you just show me that day and a half ago and said you'll be able to draw that tomorrow I wouldn't have thought I could in the afternoon we then went on to do the task that made everyone want to cry which was we were drawing negative space so we had to draw a chair or a stool and then we had to draw the the object by drawing the spaces rather than by drawing the objects and by doing that very carefully measuring and moving across from a small scale to a larger scale which was all very hard and I think it's fair to say I totally cocked it up I just I don't really know what it was about it that went wrong for me I was getting the angles wrong and the side anyway anyway I I tried and kind of got to a point where I felt I was at point of no return or I was absolutely going to have to start again and I'd already started twice but we were also quite a long way into the task and there wasn't going to be an opportunity to carry on in the evening because the room had to be reset out so I was kind of in the slightly panning is like it's fine I'm going to go away I'm going to have a walk maybe have a cry I didn't have a cry but I felt like having a cry I was really frustrated and feeling like I can't do this I don't know why I can't this everyone else was drawing away happily and I thought I'm the only person here who's struggling with this what's wrong with me and really loads of negative self-talk went outside it's amazing the scenery is beautiful took five also then a couple of other people came out and I discovered that they weren't enjoying it either they also were finding it really hard they also wanted to cry and felt they weren't doing it at all even though I looked over and they seemed to be doing really well so I realised um I was not alone how I felt um then I went in and I actually asked the teacher to help me and she she helped me get back on track so she actually doesn't like to draw on our drawings but I was like I can't I can't fix it so she helped me to work out a little bit where I'd gone on with the angles um and plotted some of the major kind of points of the chair to get me back on track I was then able to fill it fill in the rest of the spaces myself um and I had something that resembled a chair that wasn't entirely distorted it looked like you could sit on it and then I really enjoyed the process of beginning to add in the light and shade now I didn't finish this as much as I would have liked to you know I got I got close to finishing and I felt actually there was an immense sense of pride having gone through that real frustration to then asking for help which isn't historically something I've always been good at so asking for help and then creating something that in the end something that was okay and that's a really really important learning for me I think so yesterday was day three of course and it was hard actually it's all been really hard um not in a bad way I really like being challenged and actually having to go back to the beginning and feel like a beginner again and really work hard has been incredibly good for me and the other thing is that normally I'm the teacher rather than the one being taught and realizing how tiring it is learning new stuff and how much chance you need to put things into place and how sometimes just a bit of quiet and contemplation is okay and things need repeating I'm learning a lot about teaching from being taught let's put it like that anyway so yeah it was hard work um but it was good we were learning about the perspective and how to make things shrink into the distance and the angles that things are at and the fact that we're often wrong when we think what's going to happen um so we we learned a bit about the theory of that um and we learned how to put down the marks on a page if we were going to draw kind of we we were learning to draw like a structural picture so we were looking at lots of people were looking at the corners of rooms I was looking at the corner of a building from the outside um and then drawing that and it was a really interesting exercise being we were being quite methodical like plotting the image that we could see onto the page which we've done throughout been quite methodical and and you had to kind of we were told you know measure or or check twice draw once um and I was more like check 10 times draw once rub it out draw again sort of thing but I got there in the end um and I I found that um your brain really plays tricks on you so when you're looking at something you think you know what's happening like in particular I was drawing um a building and I thought I could see what's happening with the roof sleeping sloping around the distance I thought the angle or something like this and actually when I drew it was something like this and it just looked really wrong when I first plotted it but when I kind of got all my points down and I drew the whole thing and I shaded it in I mean it was a strange looking drawing but then when I looked at the actual thing I was drawing it just was a bit strange I'm getting more confident in my drawing so I stayed on again last night and I did a couple more drawings um on day two we'd used uh lots of lighting and a couple of those lights were quite like old lights and they were lying around and um I thought they were interesting to draw so I I drew each of those and I I consciously did each of them in less than an hour because I wanted to try and push myself through to draw quite quickly I was able to get something that resembled the thing it was meant to be. Yesterday was day four and it was a lot of fun so we were really beginning to consolidate the skills that we've learnt over the beginning days and we did that by drawing a profile portrait so a silent portrait like this uh of a classmate um it was it was interesting the way that the classroom had to be set out very precisely because we were a group of 12 and basically we sat in kind of groups of four with you know this person drawing this person this person drawing this person this it was very confusing to describe um but it worked um and at any given time one two people in the group of four would be drawing and two people would be posing and then you would switch over um one of the most interesting things about that actually just as an aside um was how it made you question your concept of time when you were drawing um the time went by in no time at all um and then the timer would go and she did set a timer to make sure it was fair the time would go after 20 minutes and you'd feel like you've been drawing for no time at all and then it would be your turn to pose for the person drawing you and the next 20 minutes would feel like days like ice ages occurred it felt very very slow I learned as much in those 20 minute pauses um which really made you really stop and think about what you were drawing then yeah by the end of that 20 minutes suddenly um you'd be full of ideas you almost wouldn't know where to start because you had so much that you needed to do it was really interesting so the very initial stage of just getting this very basic outline of the profile phase was was slow um it felt frustrating it felt like you were never going to get it right and it was really difficult to relate that to what was in your head and what you thought you could see in front of you but as you then began to add the light and the shade and the texture and the negative spaces and all that kind of thing it then began to come to life I was drawing a guy called Mike who had um bright white hair which I found beautiful I hadn't noticed his hair um until I was staring at it intently and it was just beautiful I came really fascinated by his hair and I heard other people say similarly oh I got really taken by my model's forehead or their nose you know they really like the shape of it and the angles of it just made you really appreciate people in a different way I guess and one of the other delegates had kindly let me take a profile picture of him so I drew him and I actually this time instead of having all afternoon to do it I just gave myself an hour and just said look you're just going to do what you can in an hour I learned something doing it and I enjoyed doing it and yeah so yeah I'm going to try and draw every day draw every day so I came here five days ago and I couldn't draw five days later and I can like I've put so much more to learn and I'm really excited about practising and learning and developing my skills but I can actually draw um and that's pretty cool


Nearfield tichographic nanotomography was adapted for institute visualization of the hydration of commercial Portland cement in a record thick capillary. At 19 hours after mixing, a porous CSH gel shell, 500 nanometers thick, covered every alite grain, leaving a water gap between them. The spatial dissolution rate of smaller light grains during the initial acceleration phase was about four times higher than that of larger alite grains during the subsequent deceleration phase. Additionally, etch-pick development was mapped out. Laboratory and synchrotron microtomographies were used to measure the particle size distribution over time. Nearfield tichographic nanotomography will enable mechanistic studies of the dissolution precipitation process, including the role of accelerators and superplasticizers. This article was authored by Shiva Shirani, Anaquesta, Alejandro Morales Cantero, and others.


All right, hello everyone. We're just a few minutes before the webinar's start time. I hope everybody's doing great. Since you're here a few minutes early, if you could just let me know that you can see my screen and hear me, that would be really helpful so I can make sure that everybody can actually see the slides that I'm presenting. So if you don't mind going into either the chat or Q&A, it looks like a few responses have already come in. Awesome. Thank you, Darcy, Tina, Tanya. I really appreciate that. So we'll get going in just another minute and I just want to give everybody a minute to get logged in, but we'll get started right at the top of the hour. All right, it's just about the top of the hour, so we'll go ahead and get started. Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining me today for four secrets to getting more donors. I'm really excited to share this information with you. We got a lot of interest from our existing Mighty Cause admins, so I'm hopeful that this will be a really helpful webinar for everyone. My name is Linda Gerhardt and I'm the Senior Community Engagement Manager here at Mighty Cause, and I'm going to be taking you through the four secrets to getting more donors today. And here is a quick look at what those secrets are. Unfortunately, there aren't any easy gimmicks here. These are all tried and true strategies that nonprofits use to grow, and my hope is that everyone who's attending will leave this webinar with some action items and ideas that you can take and get to work on immediately at your nonprofit to start getting more donors. Just as a little bit of housekeeping, we are recording this webinar and we'll make sure that everyone has access to the recording after the webinar is over. And just because we have a lot of content to blow through today, I'll take questions at the end. So if you think of something that you'd like to ask while I'm presenting, just go ahead and pop that into the Q&A box of your Zoom panel and we'll make sure that we have time to get to it at the end of the webinar. So the first secret to getting more donors is partnerships and coalition building. Before we really dive into how these methods can help you get more donors, I really wanted to go through the differences between a partnership and a coalition and understand what these vehicles are. A coalition is formed around a specific cause or initiative. You'll often see coalitions formed for the sake of political advocacy, but that's not the only cause you can form a coalition around. A coalition can really be any group of organizations that come together to advocate for a cause and maximize their impact. So just as a personal example, when I worked for an animal shelter in Baltimore City, the local shelters who were otherwise completely separate entities, there was a government shelter, there were a couple of private shelters. They were fully separate, but they formed a coalition that came together every year during the spring to help promote cat adoptions because there were a lot of cats in the shelter system at that time. And the shelters worked together on that initiative. So there really just needs to be a shared mission or idea at the center of a coalition, as well as a clear goal, like getting an ordinance passed or getting all of the adult cats in the shelter system adopted. Whatever the issue is, the coalition kind of forms around that. Coalitions are all about collective impact and mutual support. Coalition members share resources, ideas, contact lists, and opportunities. These are really not competitive endeavors at all. You're working together for a specific cause. A coalition can be ongoing or it can be temporary and dissolve once the goal is achieved or it's no longer relevant. And the spirit behind them is really just joining forces to have a greater impact for the greater good of all of the organizations involved in the coalition. Partnerships are mutually beneficial agreements between a nonprofit and typically a business entity. It's an arrangement that you're both getting something out of. These partnerships are not typically cause-based, but ideally there is a value alignment between the organization and the company. For instance, a food bank in a farm to table restaurant that's focused on community-sourced ingredients and supporting local farmers might be a natural sort of partnership or an animal rescue and a local pet supply store. Not every partnership needs to be quite that cute or quite that well-aligned, but in most cases, there is some sort of alignment in terms of their values. In most cases, there is funding that's flowing from the business partner to the nonprofit, though there are a few different ways that can actually happen. But the thing these two ideas have in common is that you're teaming up with others in your community, which can really help you gain visibility and lead to growing your donor base. And we're going to talk through how that works for both coalitions and partnerships. Nonprofits can use these arrangements to not only further your mission and further your cause, but lift up your organization and grow as an organization.  Partnerships can be extremely powerful for nonprofits that are looking to grow. First of all, a business partnership usually involves bringing revenue to your organization, which we all know is extremely important. And it's often a way to tap into a whole new base of donors. A partnership can increase your visibility in the community, which is incredibly important if you want to gain donors and grow your base of supporters. Every business is made up of individuals, and we're talking about participating in a workplace, if we're talking about participating in a workplace giving program with a mid-sized company, that can bring you a ton of donors who are likely totally new to you. So this partnership works as a bridge to get you in touch with new donors. A solid partnership with the right company can be a great way to grow your nonprofit, and it gives you all kinds of new opportunities for reaching new people, getting publicity, building your brand, and basically laying down roots in your community. If you're a new nonprofit or your growth is stagnating or has plateaued, the right partnership can absolutely be a game changer for your nonprofit. So this is by no means a comprehensive list, but there are two main types of business partnerships that we typically see, and these are also easy ways for you to get started if you're new to business partnerships. Workplace giving is pretty common. It's a solid way to get revenue coming into your nonprofit, and it can look like companies encouraging employees to devote a portion of their paycheck to nonprofit causes. That's something that I've done at previous employers. We had a list of nonprofits, and we could choose to donate a percentage of our paycheck or a static amount to that nonprofit every time we got paid, and many not many companies will also offer matching donations. So they'll match their employees' donations to nonprofits, and a lot of companies actually do both, especially bigger companies. An example of a big workplace giving program is the Combined Federal Campaign, or CFC, which is a program for federal employees to give back to nonprofits. And in my area, I'm in Northern Virginia. We have a ton of federal employees, so for nonprofits that are local to me, participation in the Combined Federal Campaign is actually really important to revenue. Another type of partnership is sponsorship, which can often be campaign-based and temporary, but it can also be ongoing, where a business partner makes a financial contribution to your nonprofit, either for an event or a campaign, or even on an annual basis. And in return, you really talk them up, share their logo on your website, and any materials you're putting out, and tell everybody about how meaningful their support has been and how philanthropic their business has been. This is a really common arrangement for things like charity walks. You'll often see the sponsor logos on t-shirts and swag bags. And Giving Tuesday is also a really great opportunity to engage sponsors. There's a lot of different ways you can get them involved, whether they're providing a matching grant or something else for your organization, but Giving Tuesday is also a really big sponsorship opportunity for you to break the ice with a new organization or a new company. The process of finding partners is not very different from a lot of donor prospecting. First, you start with research. Who is in your community? Who are the major employers where you live? You want to start locally and research workplace giving programs, and think of any natural partnerships that you can think of. One thing that can be really helpful if you're not quite sure where to go with this is asking your board of directors. Many times, board members will have business connections, or may even be business owners. So they can be an excellent source of information and connections when you're thinking about partnerships. Then you'll want to put out some feelers, make contact with your prospective partners, which could be setting up a phone call or a meeting, or even just filling out the paperwork you need to be included in a workplace giving program. If you're looking to reach out to a company and there's not a lot of clear information on their website, or they don't have a specific program for that, you generally want to start with their human resources department, since those departments are often in charge of those programs. And then the last step is you'll want to hammer out an agreement. Of course, when you reach one, so that you can set expectations and determine the terms of your partnership.  But it is important to make sure that everybody is on the same page that you have a formal agreement and that expectations are set. So moving on to coalitions. A coalition is really all about strength and numbers and working together to achieve things collectively that most of the organizations would not be able to achieve to achieve on their own. The really cool thing about coalitions is that you're a nonprofit can sort of end up borrowing credibility from another nonprofit organization, linking yourself professionally to other organizations makes your organization more credible in the eyes of the public. So when someone supports nonprofit A, and you team up with nonprofit A, people who support nonprofit A are much more likely to be warm to your organization and see you as credible and trustworthy, which makes them more likely to donate to you. But the sharing of knowledge, resources, and ideas is the real benefit to working as part of a coalition. Working with other organizations will make all of you stronger because everybody has something valuable to bring to the table and something to contribute. Sometimes coalitions can be really innovative and find incredible solutions to problems and issues that all of the coalition members are working on solving. And sometimes nonprofits, especially smaller ones, can be a little hesitant to work with other organizations. And sometimes there can be a sense of competition, but it's definitely better to be willing to team up and work together rather than taking an antagonistic stance. So if you're all working on the same issue, even if you have different approaches, sometimes joining together to solve a particular problem or advance a particular cause can really make both of you stronger. So even if you're sold on the idea of coalitions, you might be asking how this actually results in more donors. And to be sure, forming a coalition or joining a coalition for the sole purpose of getting more donors doesn't make a ton of sense. That's not something that you would do for the sole purpose of getting more donors. So you do need an initiative to rally around, but more donors is a bit of a fringe benefit. The biggest thing that you'll gain from being part of a coalition is being more visible, and that helps you get more donors. One of the things that's really important when finding new donors is affinity. How is someone connected to your cause? How do they know your organization? And participation in a coalition creates a connection with a whole bunch of people who are connected to your organization through the other organizations you're working with in the coalition. You also become familiar to a bunch of new people, people who support nonprofit A, may never have heard of nonprofit B, but when nonprofit A keeps mentioning their work on a coalition with nonprofit B, they get exposed to them through the efforts of nonprofit A to promote their coalition work. And nonprofit A's followers become much more familiar with nonprofit B, which makes them much more likely to support that organization. And that's really a common path for donors. They'll find out about a nonprofit working on a cause they care about through another organization that's working on that same cause. So this is a really common path that donors take to find a new organization to support. So it's definitely something that we know works. And finally, a lot of coalitions will explicitly engage in lists sharing and list renting among coalition members. So that can be a really powerful way to build your list and reach out to new people. So if you've ever made a donation to a political candidate, and then you start getting emails from a bunch of other candidates you haven't heard of and phone calls asking if you're planning to vote for so. And so what you're seeing is list sharing. So if you're working with a coalition or even building one and you want to grow your list, you'll just want to make sure that that's on the table at the outset. You shouldn't assume that, but that is a part of a lot of coalition work. Now there are some important things to keep in mind about coalitions before you dive in. The first is whether or not you're engaging in political lobbying, because public charities have some guidelines to follow regarding political activities. There are sometimes things that you absolutely cannot do, or you do need to approach things in a particular way. And sometimes you just need to log certain activities like phone banking. So before you start doing anything related to a coalition or gathering, attending a gathering at City Hall, you'll just want to make sure that you have a good understanding of the rules and consult with your nonprofit's legal counsel just to make sure that you don't cross any lines and you know what's going on. Coalitions share resources, and they also share costs and work. So you'll want to make sure that you have the capacity to equitably contribute. Sometimes one of the problems with coalitions is that one or two nonprofits or organizations that are involved can end up bearing the brunt of most of the work and the cost. And you generally want it to be spread around equally so that everybody in the coalition is happy. So don't get in over your head and make sure that you're only promising what you can actually deliver on. And then the other thing that's a little bit tricky is that sometimes when you're borrowing credibility from an organization, you're also linking yourself to the public perception of them. So you just want to make sure that you're working with organizations that you are comfortable linking your nonprofit with. You're all separate entities. You do not have to agree or take accountability for everything that that nonprofit does on the coalition. But there is a little bit of risk involved. So it's just good to understand that and do a little bit of extra work to make sure that it's a good fit for your nonprofit before you dive in. So moving on to the next way to acquire new donors, the next secret is peer-to-peer fundraising, which is probably a concept that's familiar to everybody who's ever attended one of our webinars. So peer-to-peer fundraising is a technique where you leverage your existing supporters to bring in new supporters. With peer-to-peer fundraising, your organization is not reaching out directly to donors to ask for a donation. You're using a supporter as a proxy. They are reaching out to their social network and asking them to make donations to your nonprofit. We talk about peer-to-peer a ton at Mighty Cause, and that's because it really is a fantastic way to acquire new donors. So here's a little visual of how peer-to-peer works. So your nonprofit is at the center. You are the hub of the peer-to-peer fundraising, and then you ask a supporter or two or 10 or 20 of yours to fundraise for you. And then they ask their friends, their family, their colleagues, people they know on social media to make a donation. And through that one person, you're reaching many more. The amount of people that you're reaching multiplies. So from one fundraiser, you're gaining access to an entire network of people who are likely new to your nonprofit. And the link to your nonprofit is that person who supports your nonprofit and agreed to fundraise for you. And so instead of just asking that one supporter to make a donation and then caching that check or taking that home to the bank, you're getting a bunch of people to make a bunch of donations. Peer-to-peer is really designed for donor acquisition and is very good at getting that done. And there are a few reasons why peer-to-peer is so awesome for donor acquisition. And a lot of it relates to why people give. One of the most common reasons that people make their first donation to a nonprofit is because someone they know asks them to donate. It really and truly is that simple. They know someone and that person asked them to make a donation and they did. There have been a couple of studies that have shown that people are much more likely to make donations when they are asked by somebody that they know, rather than an organization that they don't have a relationship with or have very little relationship with. So in the same way it helps with sales to have a personal connection, which is why if you've ever dealt with a salesperson, they might ask you for the names and numbers of some people you know, especially if it's a multi-level marketing situation. It does help to acquire new donors as well. It helps to have a personal connection. People asking their friends to donate is actually more effective than your organization putting together a masterful appeal and throwing all of your best tricks at getting them to donate. So they're actually a little bit better at getting people to actually take the plunge and donate if they're not super familiar with your organization. And the magical thing is that the people your fundraisers bring in are typically people your nonprofit does not have access to. You don't have permission to solicit them for donations. So for instance, your nonprofit does not have a connection to my aunts and uncles, but I do. So I can ask all of my aunts and uncles to donate to your nonprofit and because they know me and trust me and I'm telling them that this is important to me and I would like them to donate, they are much more likely to donate, which means that you can now include them in your fundraising communications and work to get additional donations, which is the important thing. Not everybody coming from a peer to peer campaign will become a lifelong donor. Some of them will remain one-time donors, but each one of them presents an opportunity to become a lifelong donor if your nonprofit really works to cultivate that relationship with that donor. So a lot of times the first thing I hear from nonprofits, especially ones that are on the smaller side, is that they don't know if anyone would fundraise for them. They can't think of who to ask and they wonder, do I even have people who will fundraise for me? And the truth is that you do. There are natural peer to peer fundraisers that are built into the fabric of pretty much every organization. First, we're going to be talking about this a lot more in a minute, but your board can fundraise for you. So ask your board members first and foremost. Your volunteers will often be more than happy to help with peer to peer fundraising. These are people who care about your work and they want to help out and they have demonstrated a propensity to volunteering their time and efforts. So tapping into your volunteer base is also a really great way to get peer to peer going. If you have paid staff, these people can fundraise for you. I wouldn't require it, but it's certainly worth asking since they're invested in your cause. They show up for work every day and they do a lot of hard work for you. So a lot of them are perfectly happy to talk about your work to people they know and ask them to make a donation. And I would especially consider asking people who are at the C-suite level to fundraise for you because those people can be extremely well connected and have big powerful networks. And then recurring donors are people that you can count on to support you and it can actually be really fun for them to get more involved and run their own campaign. So don't be afraid to ask your tried and true donors to get involved in this way. A lot of nonprofits are afraid that it's too big of an ask, but it's not. It's fun for a lot of them and the worst thing that will happen is that they won't fundraise for you, but you might get some donors who are happy to. On Mighty Cause, we really are built for peer to peer fundraising. So we have several tools to help you out. Charitable fundraising pages are easy to start if you're already on Mighty Cause and really anyone can figure it out. There is no special skill required because we've designed all of our charitable fundraising tools, our peer to peer tools, to be easy for all levels of users to use. We've also given you the ability to create a fundraiser template, which gives your fundraisers a head start by allowing you to pre fill parts of their pages for them so they can get published more easily and they're not starting from scratch. And it's a really great way to facilitate fundraising for busy board members who really want the process as streamlined as possible. So if you are trying to get your involved, a great way to do that and facilitate that can be the use of a fundraiser template. And we also have teams and events, which are for group peer to peer campaigns, which is taking it up a notch and it's usually going to result in even more funds being raised. With teams, you can get multiple people working together to fundraise. And with events, you can get individuals and teams of individuals fundraising together in one central location. So these tools could be really cool for your board, your volunteers, you can get people together and get really creative with how you utilize these tools for peer to peer. So it is the end of July and it feels weird talking about it, but believe it or not, Giving Tuesday is right around the corner. It will be here before you know it. This year it is on November 30th. And in case you're not familiar with Giving Tuesday, it's a global philanthropic event and peer to peer fundraising is usually a big part of it no matter how you're participating. So it's a really great opportunity to dig in and try a peer to peer campaign this year, doing a board challenge. And you can also organize a team where you get your volunteers, your staff, your biggest supporters involved in fundraising for you. Giving Tuesday is a social media based event or happening and it gets a ton of traction on social media. So you can even cast a wider net by asking social media followers to fundraise for you. And for a lot of people who are younger and maybe don't have a lot of individual funding to contribute, this can be a fun way for them to have an impact and give back to your organization. Mighty Cause has a lot of events happening on Giving Tuesday. There's Rich Link gives, there's Georgia gives, there's a whole lot happening. But if you're not part of one of those events and you would like to get involved in Giving Tuesday, we do actually run our own event and you can register for that now at givingtuesday.mightycause.com. Just click register and fill out the form. And we've got a lot of great training planned for the event. So there will be lots of content to help you plan out your strategy. We'll definitely be talking more about peer to peer. So this is a really great opportunity if you are new to peer to peer or you just haven't really tried it out yet or you want to take your campaign up a notch is trying peer to peer for Giving Tuesday. All right. So I said I would be talking more about this, but the next secret is tapping your board of directors. So one thing that I really want to make absolutely sure that everybody on this webinar knows is that it is 100% appropriate to ask your board to help you with fundraising. In fact, it is one of their primary responsibilities and commitments to your nonprofit. Often board members have lots of ties to the community and large networks and can be really essential in helping you make important connections. Your board members are public representatives of your organization. So they should have the organizational knowledge and ability to speak well about your work and your mission. And they should be well suited to fundraising for you. Really if you're not sure who to ask your board members should be the first place you go. And I say all that knowing full well that there are a lot of boards who don't engage in this way. And I wanted to spend a moment talking about why a lot of board members report simply being confused about their role in the organization. They may not realize that this is part of their job or an expectation that your nonprofit has of them. So they don't participate in fundraising because they don't know to. Sometimes they honestly don't know where to get started and don't get any guidance on it. So they just opt out all together because they aren't fundraisers and they don't quite know how to do it. Communication across the board, so to speak, is a common problem with board relations. So board members simply may not be informed about the day-to-day operations at your nonprofit, any upcoming initiatives or campaigns you have going to get fundraising happening and how they can get involved, which is in many cases because executive directors look to their board for governance and bean counting and big picture stuff, but they fail to include them in conversations about fundraising. And on that note many boards don't engage in fundraising because no one ever asks them to. So if you don't ask they're likely not going to volunteer to fundraise for you because they're not thinking about it. So a lot of times it's really as simple as just asking them. So then the question becomes how do you fix that and get your board involved in fundraising? The first thing you may want to do is start a fundraising committee that your board members can join, which will help you find the board members who are interested in fundraising and sort of put it in their hands a little bit more to be thinking about fundraising and how to integrate the board in those fundraising efforts. If you have fundraising staff or even just volunteers who do most of the fundraising legwork for your nonprofit, get them involved.  They can show your board their ropes. They're really the experts and it will help your board feel more comfortable in the fundraising realm. Carving out specific fundraising roles can be a really great way to get them involved. Having a job description is always helpful, especially if you're going to be talking about committee work. What are the expectations and what do you want to bring to the table for a particular role? And you can also just be informal and find out what people are good at. You may have a board member who's a really fantastic graphic designer who can help you with marketing and you may have a sales wizard on your team who can really help you get out there and make connections, get sponsorships, find partners for your campaign. So there's a lot you can do to get your board involved. And really, the most important thing is to set expectations. As I mentioned before, a lot of boards just don't know that it's a key responsibility. So set expectations. A lot of nonprofits will have a fundraising requirement for board members. So that's something that you can incorporate if you don't currently have that. Some nonprofits, if they have board members paid dues, they may allow fundraising to count for part of those dues. So there's a lot you can do to set expectations with your board to get them to fundraise for you. Excuse me. One of the easiest ways to get going is to start with a peer-to-peer campaign. Peer-to-peer is an easy way for you to dip your toe in and for your board members to dip their toe in. And one of the easiest things that you can positively do is just add a peer-to-peer component to your next campaign, including your board. So teams and events are really perfect for this type of board challenge. It's something that we see a lot on Mighty Cause. People use the platform for this kind of thing all the time. And Giving Tuesday is a great opportunity to give it a try. That way, you don't have to have them start their own campaign or run it entirely themselves. They're just adding on a campaign, adding on a component of an existing campaign. And something that can also really help is hosting a training session to help them get up to speed and know what they're doing. Sometimes what the problem is is that board members feel a little bit lost. So using a fundraiser template and having either a lunch and learn or a special dedicated meeting where you are helping them get onboarded into the process can be really helpful. Providing image assets and talking points, a timeline, a fundraising guide. These are all things that can really help them know what they're doing and feel confident in what they're doing. And you can also set a fundraising requirement. So you may require that for Giving Tuesday, you want all of your board members to raise $500. So setting a goal with them and setting expectations is a great way to get going and to make your peer-to-peer campaign feel manageable for them and help them understand what their expectations are. Some other ideas are a meet and greet, like a happy hour, a dinner, a facility tour. And you can also try friend-raising. It's kind of a corny term. But basically the idea is that you have some sort of event where each board member brings some people, at least one person who's new to your non-profit, and kind of introduces them and acts as the conduit to get them involved. That can be a really great way to get more people into your non-profit and donating to your non-profit. Including fundraising in your onboarding process for new board members is a great way to set expectations at the outset and make sure that your board members feel confident fundraising. Sometimes if you don't quite know where all of your board members stand in terms of their interest and skill set, you can conduct a survey just to kind of find out what they're feeling about fundraising and where they would feel interested and confident. And then just keeping the lines of communication open with your board, empowering them to have ideas about fundraisers and brainstorm ideas, having a dedicated section of your board meeting for fundraising. There's a lot of things you can do, but it's really just important to make sure that they know that they can have fundraising ideas. You're open to that. And you want to include them in the process of raising money for the non-profit. So hopefully this has become clear, but in terms of how this means more donors, each of your board members has a network of contacts just like in peer-to-peer fundraising. The only difference is that board members often have a really powerful network of people that can open a lot of doors for your non-profit.  They're a personal connection. And board members are very highly invested in your non-profit. At least I hope they are. So they can do a great job of advocating for the importance of your work. And they can bring people on board. Friend-raising events are a mainstay for that very reason. And your board members are natural spokespeople for your cause. They help set the big picture mission for your organization. So they can be really powerful fundraisers because they have an in-depth knowledge of the work that you do. So definitely tapping your board for fundraising and including them in the process can really help you grow your donor list and grow your fundraising program. So last on the list, and I know we're going a bit over 30 minutes, if you need to head out, that's absolutely fine. You'll get a recording of this. I'm sorry for going over my time. But the last secret is community outreach and list-building opportunities. So really the trick to building a list and getting a big donor base in support of your non-profit is being a presence in your community. As we were talking about earlier, familiarity is a really important factor in why people donate to non-profits. So the more familiar people in your community become with your non-profit, the more trust that they'll have for your non-profit, and the more likely they'll be to make donations and feel comfortable getting involved in your non-profit.  So when you see every touch that you make in your community as an opportunity to cultivate a relationship with a supporter, it really makes it important to be out there, get out of the office, get offline, and start making connections in person with events. Your non-profit can really make important connections through community outreach, through being part of the community and being present. So this is just a really important tip and trick to get people invested in your non-profit is to be present, be there, be out in your community, and be talking to the people. And what I mean by that is taking it offline. So me personally, I am an online person. I'm very online, but human interaction is really important. So even though I, you know, love having relationships with people and organizations online, meeting somebody face to face, having a phone call with them, that's really important for relationship building. Across an email, it's kind of a faceless organization. But when somebody can think of a face at your organization that they've had a great interaction with, that really helps make the connection between your non-profit and the work you do. And it makes it the connection, the personal. So that human interaction is really important. We forget about it a lot in the digital age and we're just getting it, getting back into it in society right now. But as we ease back into it, finding opportunities to engage one-on-one is really important. And the other thing that I want to make a point of mentioning is that not everybody is online. So a lot of nonprofits will focus all of their efforts online. But there are a lot of important people in your community who are potential supporters, who don't have reliable internet access, who are not digital natives and don't spend their whole lives online. And they might be able to, you might be able to reach them better through an in-person event or other types of outreach that are not online, than you would just sending them emails. They may not read their emails, but they may be willing to talk to you at a booth at an event or something along those lines. So when you're thinking about community outreach, you really want to start with a plan. And the first thing you'll want to do is defining your audience. Who are you trying to reach? So obviously you don't want to make a plan to go somewhere and interact with people when it's not appropriate and they're not likely supporters of your organization. So find, you know, where your audience is, who you're trying to get in touch with, and then where do they go? So you want to do research. Where are you likely to encounter the target audience? Stay in touch with community happenings. Stay tuned into what's happening in your community. Get calendar updates sent to your email. And make connections with organizations that are really keyed into things happening in your community. And you want to set goals as well, like you can't create a plan without a goal. So what is your purpose? What are you trying to do by participating in something or by reaching out to a particular audience in a particular way? What are you trying to do? And how are you going to measure your success? And then just create an action plan. Plan out what you're doing each month, each quarter, and make sure that you have a presence in community events, whether you're creating them or just tag teaming onto an existing event. So that brings me to my next topic, which is some ideas. If you're not really into creating your own events at this point, and if you're small, that doesn't necessarily make sense. But working partnerships, teaming up with like-minded businesses, nonprofits, and working together to reach out to the community and other stakeholders to make plans to reach out can be really more effective than trying to do this on your own. Joining existing events is something that I really recommend, especially if you're small, being a presence at places like farmers markets, first Friday events, outdoor movie nights, main street events.  Meet people, talk to them about what you do, and have them sign up for your email list so that you can start cultivating a relationship with them. And then community service days are something that a lot of communities have. So find out if there's any service days coming up and participate in those and get involved in those. So tag teaming onto events that already exist or teaming up with other people in the community who have an interest in outreach and getting out in the community is a really great way to tackle this so that you don't have to start from scratch or plan a big intensive event. So in terms of what you're doing, you want to make sure that you're getting what you need out of it because it's not worth doing if you're not going to be getting anything from it. So you really want to think about what you're there for and you want to make sure that you're educating the public about what your work is. So bring your collateral with you, any brochures, any flyers that explain what you do and what your work is all about that people can take with them. Make sure that you have those materials with you when you're reaching out to the public. And definitely service is a part of outreach. What are you providing for the community? A lot of times that can be the main thing is you're going to an event and you're providing a particular service. When I was working in animal sheltering, rabies, vaccines, microchips, those kinds of things were great community outreach purposes. We were doing things that advanced our cause and our mission and we were also interfacing with the people in our community who have an interest in what we were doing. So there's a lot of things that you can do, but focusing on how you're serving them and even how you can provide those services at an event is a really great way to make sure that you're getting the most from your outreach. As I mentioned, bring an email sign-up list to each and every event. Get people's names, their addresses, their phone numbers, and make sure that you have some way to follow up with them because you can have a fantastic conversation with somebody at a farmer's market. But if you don't have any way to continue that conversation, then that was just wasted effort. So you want to make sure that you have some way to follow up and that you have a plan to follow up. You got a big list from attending a First Friday event. You got lots of great names and had lots of great contacts with people, but what are you going to do with them now? That may be sending out emails, giving them a phone call, whatever you have on them, just using that information to keep the conversation going so that they can become enmeshed in your organization. You can pull them in with other efforts. I did want to mention, obviously we're still in the middle of a pandemic, so make sure as we all tiptoe out of our homes for the first time in over a year, make sure that you're following any local guidelines in terms of safety and that you're keeping your staff, your volunteers, and your community safe. Keeping things outdoors is safer than things that are indoors. So if you can show a preference to outdoor events, then that will keep everybody safe. Consider wearing a mask if you're indoors or even if you're outdoors and even if it's not required, you can probably hear that I'm a little horse and stuffy and that's because when I entered the world again after COVID, I caught a cold. So even if you're not worried about coronavirus, masking up is always a great idea to protect yourself and just remember that you are setting an example for your community. So make sure that you're keeping everybody safe and that you're following safety precautions and if you have volunteers going out into the public for you that they know what they're doing and they're not taking any unnecessary risks. Obviously we're all kind of in different places in terms of safety, but just make sure that you're being safe out there as you get reintegrated into society. All right, so I wanted to make some time for questions. I do have to, let me just take a look at what we've got so far. I have to stop sharing in order to see them. Let's see, we've got a handful of questions here. Do we have a PowerPoint that we could print out? So what I'll do is I'll share the slides with all of you. So when I send out the email with the recording, I'll just include a Dropbox link that has the slide deck for you so that you can download the slides. So yes, you'll have access to the slide deck. Let's see. Oh, this is actually a great question. This is a question from Sue. Has anyone else had problems with Facebook blocking posts that use a non-Facebook fundraiser? We have had our posts seen by almost no one. So Sue, you're not imagining that that is 100% happening. And the reason for that is that Facebook, what they're doing as a company is they really want you to use Facebook for everything. If you're doing something online, they want you to be doing it on Facebook. So a lot of nonprofits have had a hard time with having their posts that have links to outside fundraising platforms seen because Facebook wants to gear people toward using their own fundraising tools, which in my opinion are not nearly as comprehensive as mighty cause. You don't get the same donor information from Facebook. You don't get the same control over your fundraiser and you don't have anywhere near the number of tools. So yeah, that's a problem. One way that you can get around that is paying a little bit of money to boost posts. It doesn't take a lot of money to help your posts be seen by more people. You can actually just target the people who follow your page. I wish that wasn't necessary, but sometimes that is necessary to be seen. And just make sure that you're posting engaging content. So things like videos that you upload directly to Facebook will help your posts be seen by more people.  So if you have any volunteers who are working with you on social media, just ask them to give your posts a like if they see it or let them know. Like, hey, we're sharing our fundraiser on Facebook. If you could go over to the post and like it, share it, make a comment on it, that would really help our posts be seen by more people. And the other thing to note is that Facebook has not had sort of chronological news feeds for a while. I think that was, gosh, like at least five years ago, that they switched to, you know, basically they're showing you what they think you want to see. So doing some things like making sure that you're uploading videos, images, and getting that interaction, especially early interaction is really important to helping those posts be seen. What a lot of nonprofits have done, especially if they've leaned on Facebook, is they've really just kind of focused those efforts to email, because, you know, email, you have direct access to your supporters through their inbox. So if you can try to get as many people signed up for your email list from social media as possible, that's a great way to make sure that you're actually being seen. Not everybody in the world reads their emails, but at least you're not being blocked by an algorithm that wants you to use Facebook's fundraising tools instead. You can send them whatever you want. So yeah, that's not a problem that you're imagining. There are some different things you can try to get around it, but everybody's reach has been declining for years, especially if they're linking out to other platforms, unfortunately. Let's see. Moving on, there is a question from Danielle. We've had a hard time getting peer to peer to work. How do you recruit ambassadors, any tips or ideas? So again, I would start with your inner circle, people at your nonprofit that you know will show up to support you, like your board of directors, highly engaged volunteers. If you have any staff, get them involved, getting people who are really tight knit with your organization to fundraise for you is the first place you want to look, because somebody who follows you on Facebook but doesn't really interact that much, is going to be less effective as a fundraiser than people who are very involved in your nonprofit's work. Something that I have seen people do is they'll sort of sweeten the pot, especially if there's a campaign where they're trying to get peer to peer going for a giving event that we host on our platform. One of the organizations said, hey, the first 10 people who sign up to start a fundraiser and raise X number of dollars will get a t-shirt with our logo on it or something like that. Little tokens like that you can use to incentivize people. It doesn't have to be a big prize. Sometimes people will go to great lengths for a bumper sticker just because they like to win. You can always think about things that could sweeten the pot. Not all of them have to cost you any money. You could think of other benefits that are non-monetary that you could offer in exchange for helping you out by starting a peer to peer fundraiser, but really by focusing on people who are close to your nonprofit, you're generally going to find more interest from people. And then it may be worth talking to the people who have had issues in the past. Maybe they signed up for peer to peer, but they didn't raise much money or didn't have any luck talking with them, sending out an email and just getting their feedback and seeing what the barriers were. If there were technical issues, you could always host a training. You could do a Zoom meeting to show everybody how it works, or you could even help them get set up hands on. A lot of nonprofits will actually set up pages for their peer to peer fundraisers and then just sort of hand them off. So that's something that you could do. But it's really more a question of what the actual barrier is because you most likely have people who want to help you out in this way. So you just need to find a way to facilitate that. And the easiest thing to do is just to talk to people who you maybe have asked in the past and see if there was any particular thing that inhibited them from doing it or inhibited their success and make it as easy as possible. So using fundraiser templates is a great way to go. Sometimes when people hear, oh, well, you need to create a fundraiser and run this whole campaign, that can sound like a lot of work. But if you're like, hey, we've made it as easy as humanly possible, you can use a template. You don't even have to put anything in yourself. You just have to create the page and publish it and share the link. Sometimes that can be really helpful in getting people to actually make the plunge. There's an anonymous question. How do you encourage donors and board members to ask friends and connections? We've had trouble motivating people to participate in peer to peer campaigns. Yeah, so that's a common thread that's showing up is that there's a difficulty with getting people to participate and encouraging donors and board members to ask their friends and connections. You just want to be genuine about it. You don't necessarily need to provide an incentive for them to participate, but let them know how meaningful and important it is, especially board members. These are people who agreed to represent your organization. So they should at least be willing to reach out to their friends and their connections. And a lot of times I was just reading something on board source, I think. Most board members are more than happy to ask their friends and their social network to make a donation. They're proud of their involvement in your nonprofit. So they're happy to ask people to get involved because they're involved and they work hard for your nonprofit. So it really depends on what the barrier might be. You might want to just at a board meeting ask, you know, we would like to incorporate more peer to peer and get you more involved in helping us promote our fundraisers. Is there anything we can do to help you facilitate that or what is the barrier that's preventing you from doing that? You will find some people who just kind of find it awkward. So helping them with a script can be really helpful. People love scripts that they can just copy and paste. So if you can provide something like that for people who don't quite know how to ask, that can be really the thing that gets them to do it. They just have to copy and paste. But talk to your board, see what their issue is with that, and just, you know, see if there's anything that you can do to facilitate it and make it easier for them. And just let them know that it's not that hard. Hopefully they can reach out and let people know about your organization since they're part of your organization. So hopefully they should be proud of the work that you do and happy to get people involved. There's a comment from Dominique, sorry about speaking fast or I speaking fast. I really, I do try to slow down, but I apologize. I'll try to speak slower for the duration of the webinar. Let's see. Oh, this is a really great question for Nicole. What if our board is predominantly low income people of color? Is it appropriate to require that they meet a fundraising minimum? Well, every board has its own culture. Generally speaking, a board of directors does make a commitment to your nonprofit to be involved in fundraising. One of the things that they do as a board is they are the stewards of your organization's financial health. So that can look different for every board if you have people who really don't have the ability to ask people to make donations. Then you can work with them about other things they can do. Maybe there's some way that they can get involved in your fundraising that doesn't require actually starting a peer to peer fundraiser. Maybe they can provide some marketing support. Maybe they can do something else to help with fundraising and help facilitate it. Obviously, every board has its own culture. If you really don't feel like it's appropriate to ask your board to fundraise for you, then that is your decision to make. But I would also look to integrate some more people onto your board who have the ability to fundraise. So you can have a mixture of people there. If you find that overall, they're not great fits for peer to peer fundraising. How else can they get involved? Are there other people that you can get involved in your board who are maybe a little bit better set up to do that? But as far as is it appropriate, like you know your board best, but it is one of the commitments that they make. So even if they don't fundraise a ton, even if they just ask all of their friends to donate $5 on Giving Tuesday, or they just share your campaign on social media, that can be a way to help you. So there's a lot of things that you can do and talk to them, see how they feel about it. They may be willing to do it because a lot of people who don't have a ton of money to give on their own are more than happy to do peer to peer fundraising because it's a way for them to maximize their impact. So I may not have $1,000 that I can give to your nonprofit, but through some legwork on social media and asking the people that I know to donate what they can and putting that effort in, I might be able to get to $1,000. So really, it's up to you, but it is part of the commitment that they make. So you may want to get some people on your board who are maybe a little bit more able to do that if you're finding that that is a huge barrier to participating in fundraising. Let's see, there's a question from Tiffany about community thrives. I don't manage that event and they have their own specific rules. So if you are participating in a community thrives and you would like to get some information and you have a question specific to that campaign, please reach out to support at mightycause.com. Our support staff will be able to help you out. Unfortunately, I'm not really involved in that campaign, so I don't have the knowledge to share with you, but our support team will get back to you as soon as they possibly can. Let's see. This is a question from Darlene. Does mightycause meet with organizations for this type of training? So what I would recommend is reaching out to us if you have a particular concern. We are always willing to have calls to talk about your fundraising strategy and technique. We don't do any consulting or that sort of thing, but we can certainly talk with you about your plans and how you can utilize mightycause to assist. We provide a lot of training on our webinars and through our blogs. So those are the primary ways that we sort of help provide that sort of information to our audience, but just reach out to us. And as a note of all of our advanced subscribers, so nonprofits that subscribe to our advanced program have a dedicated account manager who is a person that you can contact when you have a question and you want to set up a call and you're having a fundraising issue. So that might be a way for you to get some one-on-one assistance if you feel like you need a little bit more help from mightycause is sign up for advance. You'll have your own dedicated account manager who is at your beck and call and can set up a call with you to discuss your fundraising. Let's see. All right. So we have a couple of chats coming in. So I'm just going to switch windows real quick. Okay. So let's see. Oh, okay. This is a really great comment from Angela. Angela's, I've been in touch via email and she's attended my webinars in the past. So hello, Angela. She has a response to the question about the board that is mostly low income people of color. And her comment is I would allow them the option of saying yes or no to fundraising versus assuming no or that they are not capable 100%. That is absolutely great. You know, you want to ask, give them the opportunity to step up and fundraise for you. And if they say no, they say no. But it's worth asking. You're not insulting them by asking them to fundraise for you. And I personally know a lot of people who don't have a lot of money to give who love doing fundraisers for causes because it's a way for them to help signal boost without putting a ton of money into it. So definitely ask them if they say no, don't pressure them. But it's certainly worth asking. And there's a really great conversation happening in the chat that I hope you all can see. But yeah, it doesn't take a huge commitment. And it's a really great way that people who don't have a ton of money can still contribute and make a big impact by reaching out to their network. And there's a really great comment from James Oliver. Thank you so much. I'm so glad that it was a helpful webinar. I will make sure that all of you have the recording to this. Thank you all so much for attending today. I hope this was an informative webinar. I apologize for speaking fast. I'm a fast talker. I'm trying to work on it. But I'll make sure that you all have access to the recording and slides. Thank you all so much for all of your great questions and contributions. And I will follow up with you as soon as possible. In the meantime, happy fundraising. Take care.