Hello, everyone and welcome to our second webinar for Give Bigs and Bernardino County. This one is mostly going to be focused on fundraising strategy. My name is Linda Gerhardt and I'm the senior community engagement manager here at Mighty Cause and I'm the project manager for Give Bigs and Bernardino County on the Mighty Cause side. And joining me on the phone is Cherie Gillins who is the marketing and communications director for the Community Foundation. Hi everyone and yes, the marketing and communications director community foundation and on behalf of the community foundation, we are excited that you are participating in the Give Big Campaign 2018. We're looking forward to, you know, record-breaking success and bringing in a lot of money and attention and awareness of the nonprofit in the county and we're just pleased that you're taking advantage of the opportunities, the training opportunities to be more specific. So it does go a long way. Thank you. Yeah, we're all excited that you're here today and there's a lot of cool trainings that the Community Foundation is working hard to put on. So this is just one piece of all of the things that they're doing to help with this event and help get you trained and ready for this big day. So Cherie is going to stick around throughout the webinar and we'll sort of tackle questions at the end of the webinar. So Cherie, I'm just going to go ahead and put you on mute so you don't have to worry about talking for the majority of the presentation. Okay. All right. Okay, and just to get back to the presentation, I just wanted to give you guys a quick look at the agenda for today. It just says a tiny bit of housekeeping. As I mentioned, we'll be doing a question and answer session at the end of the webinar. So if you think of something while I'm presenting, if you could just type that into the questions box of your GoToWebinar panel, Cherie and I will make sure to get to it before the end of the webinar. All right. So before we get too deep into strategy, I wanted to go over some basics for those of you who may have missed our last webinar or just need a quick refresher. The most important thing to do to participate and give big is to register. There's just one short form to fill out, and it shouldn't take you more than a minute or two. And you'll hear back from us within 24 to 48 hours of completing your registration form and paying the registration fee. The registration fee at this point is $150 that just went up on October 1st. And your nonprofit must pay the fee in order for your registration to be considered complete. If you haven't heard back about the registration form you submitted in a few days, one reason for that might be that if you haven't paid the registration fee yet, we're still waiting on that to approve your registration. So if you have any questions about that, I'm happy to answer that, as well as the community foundation they're available to you if you're having issues figuring out where to go or where to pay the fee. In previous years, you had to, sorry, in previous years you could not add administrators to your own Mighty Cause page. That has changed this year. So one great thing that you can do once you're registered is you can add any other people who need access to your page as administrators in the settings area of your page. So there's no need to fill out any additional forms for that. Once you have been approved for the event, you can go in and you can add anybody who might need access to your page. Once you're registered and you log into your Mighty Cause account, you'll want to take some time to get oriented to your Mighty Cause dashboard, which is also called your Mighty Cause Manager. Your home screen will give you a quick snapshot of the most important metrics since you last logged in, as well as any news related to Mighty Cause. And the profile is now your, the profile, what we call the profile, is what we have called in the past your organization page, which most of you will use as your main fundraising page for Give Big. This is a little bit different than last year. So to access your page editor and your page settings, you need to go to profile on your dashboard and then click the, to edit your page. You'll also be able to access your donation report and your disbursement report under the donation section of your dashboard. These are super important, so you'll need to know where these are and how to export reports. So once you're registered, I really recommend taking a little bit of time to click around, see what's there and get used to your new Mighty Cause Manager. You also have some new donor experience settings you can tweak as well to make changes to donor's checkout experience, which we'll talk a little bit about in a few slides. You also have a campaign screen where you can see any pages that are connected to your nonprofit and you can create new pages, track peer-to-peer pages, and any teams connected to your nonprofits. That thing nonprofits have been asking us for for a very long time, so we are happy to provide it to you now. So again, the campaign screen is your one-stop shop for any pages that are connected to your Mighty Cause page. And you also have settings, which is where you can add other admins as we discussed, manage your fundraising settings, set up EFT, which is your direct deposit option for disbursements. So just get comfortable with your dashboard, figure out where everything is, and take a little time to get reoriented to Mighty Cause. And after you're logged in and you've navigated to your profile from your dashboard, you'll want to update your page on Mighty Cause. If this is your first year, you'll need to fill it out. It'll be pretty much a blank slate.  This is the main page you'll share for Give Big, so use your story and your gallery to engage in some fundraising, storytelling, talk about your campaign, and make your appeal to donors about why they should support your organization. One of the great new features we have available this year is under donations, and it's called donor experience. This feature gives you more control over the donation experience, so you can make sure that the checkout process works for your donors and your nonprofit. You can decide what data to collect from your donors. For instance, if you always follow up with a letter that you stick in the mail after somebody makes a donation for the first time, you can make sure you're opted into address collection. You can also opt into collecting phone numbers, demographic information, whatever is important to your nonprofit. Donor experience is also where you'll customize your suggested donation amounts, which we highly recommend taking the time to do so that you can tie monetary donations back to tangible real-world things that they help your nonprofit do or provide. I always recommend actually previewing the donation process personally, so you can put yourself in your donors shoes and see what they see when they're checking out. So now you can actually preview the whole process from beginning to end in donor experience, which is valuable because as you go through the process, you may find that you've opted into a bunch of different things, and they just make the checkout process more cumbersome for donors than you might have realized. And the top reason people opt out of the donation process or completing any activity online is because it's too long or it's too complicated. So being able to preview that process will help you find that balance between getting all the information that you want and making sure that donation process is as simple and easy as possible for the people doing it. And lastly, you'll want to make sure you create your custom thank you page, which is a new feature this year as well. You can still add a custom thank you message into the receipt, which Mighty Cause sends to each donor. But the thank you page gives you an extra opportunity to express your gratitude to donors. You can embed a video, type a message, you can even make use of a custom call to action or CTA button to link them to whatever page you'd like. So whether you'd like them to go back to your Mighty Cause page or if you have a page set up on your website, you can do that all from your thank you page, which is where donors will be directed after they complete their donation. The Community Foundation has worked hard to provide a really robust toolkit for nonprofits that you can easily access on the Give Big site. So this is all freely available to you and we recommend making use of it. From the toolkit, you can sign up for trainings like this one, access tips and how-tos, find templates for social media and emails and so on. You can also find the Give Big logo to add to your own communications for the event. All right, and with that out of the way, we'll move into some campaign strategy for Give Big. So the first big strategy tip is to start securing early donations. Donations opened up for Give Big on September 30th. So you can begin accepting donations now. These are not secured pledges, which is some of the terminology we've used in years past. These are immediate donations. They process immediately. You'll be notified if you get email notifications and you can view them on your donation report. And just when you're messaging this to your donors, you want to make it clear to them that this is not a pledge to donate on October 30th. It is an actual real-time donation. Just they're prepared that this is going to be taken out of their credit card immediately. But this is a really great way to build momentum for your campaign and to basically seed your campaign so that when you go live on October 30th at midnight, you will see that you've already got donations in your campaign. You've already got a good spot on the leaderboard. It's a really great way to sort of lay some groundwork for a strong campaign. Matching grants are a proven driver of donations and traffic on giving days. And even though it's October 1st and we've got the event this month, there's still plenty of time to secure one for Give Big Xamber in Dino County. A matching grant is a large donation that you leverage to bring in other donations by using it as an incentive. The mentality that makes matching grants so effective for donors is the same one that helps stores bring in more customers when there's a sale happening. A matching grant allows donors to make their money go further. So instead of just donating $25 when there's a match available, they can turn that into $50 and make it go further for your nonprofit. The process for securing a matching grant is pretty similar to how you would manage a major gift prospecting journey you prospect, which is finding potential grand tours who can be business partners, major gift donors that you have strong relationships with, board members, or even your board as a whole. We have seen organizations for giving days have their board actually chip in to provide a matching grant together. In a lot of nonprofits, they usually go around and sort of pass the hat at the end of the year. But if you use that strategically and board members pool together their money to provide a matching grant, that can be really effective at bringing in more donations. And you can just start cultivating those relationships either by, for instance, asking your board, sending an email, giving them a call to see how they're doing, setting up a breakfast meeting or meeting them over coffee just to see what's going on with them and to get a feel for whether or not they might be open to providing a grant. And then once you've spoken to them and gotten a good idea of how warm a lead they might be or how hot a prospect they might be for a matching grant, you just ask. Something that could help, especially with corporate partners or businesses in the area, is the recognition that comes with providing a matching grant, tagging them on social media, giving them a shout out and a link on your mighty cause page and so on, because that's a great PR for them. They're helping their community, they're helping your nonprofit and helping your cause. So find out what appeals to them, what would bring them in and tell your ask to whatever is most appealing to them. I recommend keeping the options open-ended and seeing what your donor can provide and what they're willing to do. Pardon me. Our matching grants tool is very flexible, so nearly any arrangement you come to with your grant or can be entered in with our matching grants tool. There's a lot of options there you can do pretty much anything you want in terms of matching grants. So you're much more likely to land a matching grant. If you keep it a little bit more open than if you go in looking specifically for say a $10,000 grant with very specific terms. So you sort of let the grantor drive that conversation and see how they would be interested in providing that grant and helping you leverage that to bring in more donations. Now after you've actually secured your match, the next part is promoting it because just like if a tree falls in a forest nobody likely hears it. If you don't promote your matching grant it does not do its job of getting donors interested in making a donation. The first thing you'll want to do once you've gotten a matching grant finalized is enter it onto your Mighty Cause page. The tool allows you to recognize the donor right on your page, although depending on the donor you can always go in and add an acknowledgement in your story as well if they'd like to have some more acknowledgement and you can also make it anonymous if your grantor prefers not to have their name attached to it. And when you enter it in through our matching grants tool it puts a little sticker on your donate button for the duration of the match which you can see on the slide. And also adds a countdown to your page and the countdown to the match ending adds urgency which is important on a giving day like give-bake. Giving days generally operate on creating urgency so a matching grant is a way to create some extra urgency for people to make contributions. Our matching grant tool will also allow our system to auto calculate the match if you opt to do that so that you don't have to worry about adding the grant as an offline donation or doing any reconciling with the totals displayed on your page. The only thing I'll note on that is that if you have your grantor fulfilling the match online making a donation through your Mighty Cause page to make sure that it gets counted on leaderboards and helps you win prizes you'll just want to make sure that you opt not to have the grant automatically added to your total because that will result in the grant being counted twice. So you just want to make note of that how your grantor would prefer to fulfill the grant. In order to get people to the page to view the match and make the donation you'll want to make sure that you promote your match on social media and send out emails alerting your donors about the available match. On social media if you have a corporate partner or a business providing the match it's always a nice touch just to tag them in any posts about the match or add their logo to any images about the match. Great way to boost your campaign and reach more people on GiveBig is to activate ambassadors who are engaged supporters who start fundraising for you. This can help you reach new people raise more money and engage your biggest supporters in a meaningful way. You can ask them to fundraise for you on social media and in emails and it's a really great way to go beyond your existing donor base and have new people hear about your work. Peer-to-peer fundraising is all about people telling their own story and about their connection to your work and why they support it which has a great testimonial effect and helps build grassroots support through their social networks. Pardon me. Peer-to-peer fundraising is a fundraising method that uses your nonprofit's biggest supporters to bring in new supporters by empowering them to fundraise for you. These are your ambassadors. This helps you expand your reach build word of mouth and grassroots support and get your message out to people who wouldn't otherwise hear it during GiveBag. You may not have permission to contact somebody's aunt and ask them for a donation but they certainly have permission to contact their aunt and ask them to donate to your nonprofit. So it kind of gets around the limitations that you might have in terms of who you're able to reach. To recruit peer-to-peer fundraisers it's really a lot more simple than you think. Sending an email out to supporters saying hey, you should find out to fundraise for us. Here's how you do it. They just have to go to your mighty cost page and click click fundraise. Ask on social media and just let them know but this is one way they can really help you out. It helps people like to peer-to-peer do peer-to-peer fundraising because even if they don't have much money to give on their own they can certainly help you in terms of reaching new people. So a lot of people who maybe don't have a ton of money to give on their own can lend their voice and put their boots on the ground to help you raise money during an event like Give Big Stamford and Dino County. One thing that's a really great way to support your ambassadors and support peer-to-peer fundraising is providing some quick resources to the people who are fundraising for you, your ambassadors. That includes just a document of talking points about your work, photos that they can use when they're fundraising for you, images, your logo and so on that helps them tell the story of your nonprofit a little bit better. You could also ramp up peer-to-peer fundraising by using gamification and prizes to help incentivize fundraising and get people engaged. Something really as simple as a t-shirt to the top fundraiser or bumper stickers to everybody who signs up to fundraise for you or even just a button can go a long way to help to incentivize people to volunteer to fundraise for you. All right, so now we're going to go on and move on to email strategy. One thing that is consistent among every giving day that might be cost hosts is that emails are the biggest driver of traffic to pages and the biggest driver of donations. That's because the people on your email list have typically taken some action to indicate that they care about your cause and want to support your nonprofit, even if it's just by signing up for your emails. So these are warm leads for donations during Give Big. First, we recommend keeping your email messaging concise and deliberate. Most people won't read an email that requires them to scroll down multiple times. So you'll want to get to your point quickly, tell your story in a streamlined way, and make sure you have a CTA button prominent in your email, not just buried at the bottom and underneath a lot of text that people might read that could also include linking your images to your mighty cost page so that if somebody clicks on an image, which people generally do, they can get to the correct place. We also recommend segmenting your emails, which means instead of sending out blasts to everyone on your list, taking the time to split that email list into different groups of donors you have, like board members, recurring donors, major gift donors and sponsors, one-time donors, last year's Give Big donors, and so on. This allows you to speak specifically to them and acknowledge the type of relationship they have with your nonprofit, which increases the likelihood that they will read and take action on the email. You don't need to segment every single email, like for instance, the one that you send when you kick off the event can go to everybody, but we do recommend or encourage that you send out some segmented email communications throughout the day and leading up to Give Big so you can send targeted messages to key groups of supporters. Take into account the schedule and timing of your emails, you can schedule emails well in advance, so strategically plan emails during key points before the day and throughout the day. So for instance, the week of the event, you'll probably want to send out a reminder, hey, Give Big is happening on October 30th, be ready. And then you'll want to send one the morning of when the event kicks off so that they know that every donation they make counts toward your Give Big totals and helps you win prizes. I recommend actually writing out the email plan in a document or a spreadsheet so you can consider it as a whole and find any gaps in your plan. When you look at it all together, you may realize you missed a key email or you missed a key hour where you want to be sending something out. So I always recommend taking that step and then just putting it into action your email marketing software. Most Mighty Cause donors give with phones or mobile devices like tablets so it's important when you're building your emails to make sure you're using a mobile friendly template and to test it on a mobile device to make sure it's looking the way you want to. And on that note, please make sure you test your emails before sending them out. Check for typos, formatting issues, test links to make sure they work and go where you want them to go, test in different browsers and on different mobile devices. A good rule of thumb is to have at least two people besides yourself reviewing emails. And finally, be thoughtful and deliberate with your call to action or CTA. Stick the link to your Mighty Cause page in the button, the CTA button and use urgent direct copy to entice people to click. Passive CTAs like please support us or thank you for your support generally don't work as well and get as good results as direct language like donate now or give today. So keep that in mind when you're drafting your emails. You don't want to use passive language you want to inspire them to click on the link and donate now. And I'm sorry for the coughing I'm recovering from a little bit of a cold. Social media is the other biggest driver of donations and traffic for give big and giving days in general. So you'll want to build a social media strategy for give big. I often get questions from a nonprofit about whether they should try this platform or this other platform or pay more attention to this platform that they've heard about. But on a high stakes daylight give big it's best to focus the majority of your efforts where your audience is. So if your biggest audiences on Facebook spend the most time working on your Facebook strategy. If you have the most followers on Twitter make that your focus. I've been managing social media for nonprofits and businesses for years and one important tip from me to you is to schedule posts ahead of time. On Facebook you can do that with publishing tools. Tweet deck allows you to schedule tweets ahead of time. Instagram is a little bit trickier but if you're posting them from the app in your phone you can actually save them as drafts. And there are certain programs like HubSpot that they have integrations with that allow you to schedule posts. But it makes it a lot easier for you to manage the day and to make sure that you hit all of the key points that you need to hit if you schedule that key content ahead of time. And that also gives you more space to interact on the day. Respond to comments retweet people thank people for their support on social media and celebrate milestones if those key pieces are already in place when the giving day begins. So as much as possible get that key content lined up so that it can just fire on October 30th. On Facebook especially a small budget for advertising is something that is worth thinking about. It can really help your posts reach more people. And it doesn't have to be unfortunate can be something as small as 10 or $15 for a key post here and there. And that can make a huge difference in the amount of people that you reach with your post. So if you do have a smaller budget for boosts and generally just when you're boosting posts on Facebook in general you'll want to make sure that you target it properly. A lot of times when people boost a post and they don't use Facebook's targeting tools they'll come back and say hey I tried to put money behind this but people from across the country were seeing it and I don't understand why and it seemed like a waste of money. The reason for that is that they were not targeting their ad. So you can use lookalike audiences. You can just boost it to people who already like and follow your page. And you can also use location targeting. Those are kind of the easiest ones if you want to target people who are just in the area that you serve in San Bernardino County. That's a great way to get your message in front of the right audience. And then of course you can do some different targeting like demographic targeting and targeting by interest if you're comfortable doing that. But those are just a few of the ways you can target your ad. The worst thing you can do is really just not target your ad because it may not get your ad in front of the right people. So that's not money well spent. In terms of what kinds of content to post we always recommend a video which I said should mention does not need to be a slick professionally produced video. It can be as simple as a video made in YouTube with cell phone footage and images that are spliced together and have text added or even just a cell phone video. Most of us have really powerful cameras just in our pockets on our smartphones. They've come a really long way. And the reason a video can be so important is that Facebook's algorithm in particular really likes videos. And it's just dynamic interesting content. Images are great too because they add extra layers to your storytelling instead of just telling us about the great work you do you can actually show us with an image or a video. And we also recommend looking for a few good stories that you can tell on social media and through emails. Stories about the people you've helped or animals that you've helped if you work in that field change your nonprofit was able to create or the effect that you were able to have on your community. Those are the kinds of compelling stories that people love to hear and compels people to donate. So that also inspires them to share when they hear a great feel good story about change in their community. They're more apt to click that share button or click that retweet button and get that message out to more people. All right. So one thing that can easily slip by the wayside on a giving day when you've got a lot of moving parts happening is showing some love to the people who gave to your nonprofit for Give Big San Bernardino County last year. It is a huge mistake to forget about outreach to people who gave in 2017 because these donors are low hanging fruit. They already support your cost. They've already shown up to support you and shown you that they care. So it's really important to plan on reaching out to people who gave to you last year for Give Big San Bernardino County. If you participated before obviously if you haven't participated in previous years and this might not apply to you but donor retention is something that can easily slip and it's such an easy thing to do and these are low hanging fruit donors. They are people who already support you. You can find a report of all of last year's donors by going to the donation section of your dashboard and then just clicking on donation report and filtering the dates. And this report should have all the info you need to follow up with these donors. You can reach out by phone. You can email them. Contact them however you'd like but you work with them to increase their gift this year using messaging like we know we can count on you or we need your support again. It can be really effective with these donors but however you do it just make sure not to forget them. Donor retention is actually a really great goal for a giving event especially if you've participated before and always do well. So in addition to financial goals and fundraising goals setting a goal for retaining donors from year to year is a great way to keep yourself motivated and also report back on your success. It's a great metric that you can share with your board of directors or your executive director saying hey we got this percentage of donors to come back to us this year because that's something that the nonprofit sector in general just struggles with. So if you can show that you're doing well and you're paying attention to it and you're showing love to those donors who've already shown up for you that reflects well on your organization and since everybody who's registered for Gift Big San Bernardino County has access to our premium tools you have access to premium analytics on your dashboard. So once you're registered you can check that analytics analytics tool in your dashboard and actually see what your donor retention rate is at least on the mighty cause platform and monitor how that has changed since after this year's event so that you can report back on that and see how you did. Another important piece of this is to follow up that's the giving day doesn't really end after October 30th it's important to follow up with your donors. The worst thing you can do is get a bunch of donations on Gift Big and then fail to follow up with them or engage those donors that kind of makes it beside the point is the point is to help you build capacity and pick up new donors and pick up new interests from new individuals. So it's important to come up with a plan when you're planning the rest of it your social media strategy your email strategy think about how you're going to thank people for the events for contributing during the events plan on sending a prompt and personal thank you that is statistically important people are more likely to give again when they get a quick thank you for their donation and when it's personal as well that's an important part of why people come back to organizations to make additional donations so you'll want to plan on doing some personal follow-up for the event so make sure you have staff lined up or reach out to volunteers who might be able to help you write note cards or make phone calls or however you want to do it it's also important to close the loop with donors report on your totals if you were fundraising for something specific like a new program or repairs to your building something like that letting donors know how their contribution helped you achieve that goal goes a long way and it doesn't need to be immediate that can be whenever you finish the goal that you set out for if you were fundraising for a new building for instance and it took you a year to build that building and get that funded invite them to the opening the ripping cutting ceremony it doesn't have to be immediate if it takes you a little bit of time you can still use your give big campaign to follow up with them and close that loop and make sure that they get that satisfying experience from donating to your campaign so the other part of it is starting the stewarding process so think about how you are going to steward these donors so taking them from a one-time give big donor to becoming a recurring donor to becoming a sustaining supporter of your organization that can start with a welcome packet for new donors or a welcome series of emails but making sure that you steward these new donors that you get or even just steward the existing donors you have is sort of the last piece of strategy for give big San Bernardino County all right so now that we've got the bulk of the presentation related to strategy out of the way I just wanted to go over the prizes that are available since that is a big part of your strategy the community foundation has done a really amazing job of putting together a good number of prizes and a diverse amount of prizes and they have $40,000 available this year which is a really huge amount this year there are $13,200 available in regional prizes which will go over in a minute more than five grand for nonprofits that raise the most money over 20 grand in golden tickets which sort of levels the playing field and can be a game changer for your nonprofit and prizes for nonprofits that raise the most money before the event on October 30th so there's lots of chances to win these are really diverse interesting prizes and in order to be strategic about the event you'll need to fully understand the prize structure and just as a note about that you can refer to the prizes at any time on the rules and prizes page on the gift big site you can find tables and all sorts of helpful information about the way these prizes break down so that you have full understanding of how to win prizes and bolster your participation with winning prizes all right so first I wanted to talk about the regional prizes which are pretty unique for a giving day the community foundation will be splitting the participants up into the six super I always have trouble saying this word the six districts that you operate in and the nonprofits that raise the most money from each district will raise a prize will win a prize so the first place is $1,000 second place is $700 and third place is $500 which equals $13,200 total so there's 18 regional prizes total for the six districts so if you are curious about how this breaks down you can always check the rules and prizes page for more information or direct questions to the community foundation if you're curious about these prizes next up is the leaderboard prizes the leaderboards are the main component of the live give big page and you'll be ranked according to who raises the most money the top five spots will take home a prize using messaging about helping you win a leaderboard prize and giving updates about your position can be a really great way to get donors engaged in and excited about your give big campaign so be sure to leave room in your plan for some live posts and tweets about the leaderboard race especially if you crack the top 10 you can sort of use that as leverage to keep your donors interested and get competitive and lastly we have golden tickets and the community foundation has put a lot of money behind these golden tickets there are 48 opportunities to win throughout the day sometimes multiple chances in one hour and each golden ticket is worth a walloping of 425 dollars so there is a limit of three golden tickets per non-profit but even if you were to win three golden tickets that is $1,200 for your non-profit these golden tickets are randomly pooled by our system so part of it is just luck but the strategy for winning golden tickets is all about driving donations each golden ticket is tied to an individual donation so the more donations you have in the space of an hour the more opportunities you have to win and that is to say during a particular hour if you are not getting donations you are not eligible for a golden ticket our system looks for all of the donations happening in the space of an hour randomly chooses one of the donations and that donation is afforded a golden ticket so you'll be able to see who the donor was in the table and you'll also be able to see that your non-profit is the beneficiary of that golden ticket so for instance one of the things you could do is target one of the hours where there are multiple golden tickets being awarded just because there's more chances for you to win just keep in mind that the minimum donation for the event is $10 and make sure you message that to your supporters so you don't want them to think that donating a bunch of $1 giving a bunch of $1 donations will help because they can't actually make a $1 donation on the Mighty Cos platform so the full list of golden tickets is available on the rules and prizes page with 48 of them available it didn't really make sense for me to stick them all in a slide it would be several slides just by itself but you can find the full breakdown on the rules and prizes page and plan accordingly all right so let me just unmute Cherie all right Cherie are you there I'm here all right so now I just wanted to open the floor up for questions hopefully that presentation wasn't too painful for everyone thanks for sticking around so if you have a question for me or Cherie or just in general just type that into the questions box of your go-to webinar panel okay so there's one question about receiving training about how to set up your personal Facebook page so there are what I would say Google is probably the best resource for that for your personal Facebook page you can just go and sign up for an account creating a page which would be for your nonprofit is pretty simple if you have an account on Facebook you can just go to create a page it's right there usually at the top of your theater at least I think on the left hand side and you can just create a page there but I'm happy to help with this I've been working in social media management for quite some time so you can always feel free to email me at linda at mightycause.com and I am happy to help you help you out point you toward resources and so on all right once again if you have a question for me or Cherie just type that into the questions box of your go-to webinar panel we've got one question about entering multiple matching grants you can enter multiple matching grants at the same time so that's changed you can enter them to start consecutively you can enter multiple grants to run at the same time so I would definitely recommend taking a look at that matching grants tool you can also change the ratio of the match so if you wanted to match two to one or three to one you could do that you could also cap the amount that is matched so if you for instance had a five thousand dollar grant you could cap that at say a hundred dollars so that way somebody doesn't come in they could giant donation and use up all of your matching grant money so that's also another possibility for you all right I think we've got one more and again if you have a question for me or Cherie we are at your service so just type that into the questions box the last one is is there a best time to send an email Cherie do you have any thoughts on that since you're the communications director for the foundation? Yes and we send out multiple emails on the community foundation side we can send about two a week for the campaign and we have found that like Fridays aren't the best days because folks are kind of checking out getting ready for the weekend so I would say Monday through Thursday but really looking at maybe the best window between Tuesday and Thursday and the morning is about nine o'clock though you will see a number of emails from us that do pop up at different times but we've been kind of testing it out so if you're using some of the platforms that are out there one of them being MailChamp it'll give you some analytics and tell you you know when folks are generally opening up if you kind of look at the open rates and look at the time that you're sending them that'll give you some clues so I would really just kind of test it out and try to get to know your audience better and get a sense of when they want or what you know when the best time it is to send out the email your audience will pretty much tell you based on the analytics yeah and that's great advice that's what we see here at Mighty Cause as well there are some general guidelines most email marketing software has analytics available to you both for your own account and for like just your industry in general the only thing I will say is don't get too fixated on this on a giving day so for instance if you want to send out an email to kick off the event at midnight then you need to send it at midnight because it doesn't make sense for you to send it at 10 o'clock the following morning or if you're going after a certain golden ticket hour then you would want to make sure that you time your email appropriately for the hour that you're targeting so on a giving day the rules can kind of change based on you know what you're trying to achieve with the email but definitely in terms of times look at when your when your analytics are telling you is the best time based on your open rate your click-through rate which is the amount the percentage of people who are actually clicking the links that are in your email but there's really no like magical email witching hour I feel like that's one of the things that we always look for but yeah as Cherie said your analytics will be your guide there so that you can see what your donors are telling you about when the best time to email them is all right so last call for questions again I don't want to take up anybody's time but we've got a few minutes here so if you have a question about getting to San Bernardino County just type it into the questions box and we will answer it as best we can all right it looks like that might be it Cherie so I think that's all of the questions we have but if you guys think of a question after the webinar is over you can always email me linda at mightycross.com or email the community foundation and we're certainly happy to help you out one on one but I think that's it for the questions for this webinar so I'll go ahead and Cherie any last parting words or anything you'd like to let the attendees know no other than you know thank you for being on the call and getting all the information you need to have a successful campaign as Linda mentioned please reach out to us for any burning questions that you have we're here at your service and remember to keep October 25th on your calendar that's our lunch party at the government center in San Bernardino so we are putting together a great rallying program and again we just appreciate all that you do and wish you the very best absolutely that's it for me thank you guys so much for attending this webinar we will have the reporting available to you in the nonprofit toolkit in the next day or so so you can share it with any staff members who are interested in watching this webinar but again good luck happy fundraising I'm hoping everybody has a really awesome if Big San Bernardino County yep thank you great thank you


Live from the Oracle Conference Center in Redwood Shores, California. It's theCUBE, at the Next Generation Engineered Systems Launch Event. Brought to you by headline-sponsored, Oracle. Okay, welcome back, everyone. We are here live in Silicon Valley at the Oracle headquarters for the special Larry Ellison presentation coming up at one o'clock here for a big Oracle announcement. This is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier. I'm the host, Dave Vellante. Our next guest is Dennis McCormick, Deputy Director of the City of San Francisco. Obviously, the City of San Francisco is in the news these days across the board. Hot startup environment. Huge population explosion in terms of urban activity. Uber's started in San Francisco. Dennis, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for having me today. You know, I just was getting a story about Uber now doing more business than the taxi cabs combined. But that really highlights, I know it's a top story, but it really highlights San Francisco's role and the diversity of San Francisco over the years has been very open, very transparent, but really it's a hotbed right now for technology. The parking issues, the challenges. You run the backbone. What's going on? What's the scene like right now for you guys running the tech in the San Francisco? So as you said, you know, we run the city's financials and HR systems. That's not cutting edge, right? It's not the Uber's the disruptive nature of it. What we need to do is every day come in and make sure that we're getting payroll cut, making sure that all of our transactions are posting correctly. There's nothing really sexy there. So our biggest challenge to be quite frank is how do we hire in this environment where you have a programmer or infrastructure engineer, they have a job offer from Google, they have a job offer from Uber. I mean, this is the real reality that we live in. So that's something that we're trying to... I hope I have salary requirements too, by the way. They do. Salary and equity, right? So how do we compete with that? One of those tools that we think that we can really start to use in the future is, okay, let's get people running on their latest and greatest hardware. Let's give them those new challenges. Let's let them know that they're on the cutting edge. You know, we don't want to be in the mainframe business anymore. We don't want to just be supporting access databases. We need to be able to bring in engineers who can support our systems that are running on the latest and greatest. Just generally living in San Francisco now, it's a strange place. It's changed a lot. I've been there for 10 years now. You see the Uber buses coming in all the time. You see the Google buses. It's a different world. What's the guiding principles now? Talk about, like, division. Because obviously, you know, you see the mayor and it's very progressive. They know they have channels, certainly in the housing stuff that's being talked about. But just from a vision standpoint, do you have a direction? Do you have a guiding, even a hill to take? Or is there a philosophy? The biggest direction, you know, working in the controller's office is a financially secure city. So what does that mean?  You see all these new businesses coming in. We don't expect this to last forever. So we want to be prudent about the way that we spend the tax dollars that we're getting in right now to get the biggest bang for our buck for the next future downturn. It's a cyclical world San Francisco is. So when there's a boom, there's also going to be a bust. So we're trying to prepare for that. And then really the biggest challenge is housing. So we've been working a lot with the mayor's office to see how do we solve that question of what is affordable housing? How can we provide that to the workers and the residents of the city?  But you want to be, you know, future four. You want to have a vision. And obviously big data is coming into play.  What are some of the conversations you have around that?  So you have their stuff. Yeah. They're talking cloud. What's your vision? Do you see cloud in your future? Everybody's talking cloud, right? I'm not even convinced that everybody knows what cloud means right now. And so cloud means different things to different people. So when we look at the cloud, when we look at our financial data, all of our financial data is, it's transparent, it's for the public. So you can go and you can put a sunshine request in at any time and get all of that financial data. So we have less security risks there. When we're talking about HR, we're maintaining private confidential information for public safety and other city workers. We have a very low tolerance for risk there. So would we want to move to the cloud with that information? Probably not. But we're also looking to see how can we leverage the cloud around those core services to take advantage of some of the flexibility the cloud allows. So online recruiting might be a good example of moving to the cloud to a demand-based model. The entire financial systems, that might be a way that we could move forward with it. But we've made the real strategic decision to say, with core HR data, it's just too much risk right now for ourselves and our stakeholders, including the unions, the attorneys, to really sign off on that. Well, there's a lot of things you'd have to actually get done. You mentioned the budget issues and also personnel challenges. Higher in some killer node, JS integrated stack engineer in the cloud, you know, between whether there's some sort of Amazon or Combo. Security, huge issue. How do you guys look at the security piece? Because with all that sensitive information, I'm sure the hackers look at San Francisco as a prize. Say, let's hack this system. Yeah, I mean, we always see the data on how many hacks or attacks are always going on at any one time. And it's disconcerting to say the least, but we're very confident in the network security that we have in place. We're confident in the encryption that we have on our core databases. So we don't really, it doesn't keep us up at night, but we're definitely very proactive about it. Applying like the patches, making sure that we're ahead of the game in terms of the technology. But it's something that it's always a background risk. And the conversation really has always been around, are we better off managing our risk in-house on-prem, or are we better off transferring that risk to a third party? How would we be able to do that with moving into the cloud? So we've looked at how some other public sector organizations have handled that, and we've really just made the decision that our current status quo is better, and it affords us better protections than moving into the cloud. So Dennis, at the end of the last decade, you know, the entire systems business started moving toward this notion of what Oracle calls engineered systems, other call it integrated, converged, what do you want to call it? And Oracle did, in fairness, start it, or was it Oracle as sort of an HP originally? And then of course the sun acquisition changed that relationship pretty dramatically. But so talk about your environment, what you're doing with those so-called engineered systems, and maybe take us back to the decision point. Sure, so about two years ago now, we were faced with the challenge that everybody's faced with. Aging infrastructure, we were running about 50 IBM Blade servers, we needed to replace those. So what we did is we went through the classic procurement analysis. We looked at cloud very quickly, as I already said, that was not really going to be a viable option for us. We looked at simply replacing the IBM Blade servers with the latest generation. We looked at a full UCS model, and we looked at a hybrid UCS IBM Blade model, and then we also looked at the engineered systems. So we ended up going with the engineered systems. Biggest differentiators there were really the one-throw-to-choke model, which is something that really did work for us. We didn't want to go breath best and breathe. We didn't want to be struggling with all these different vendor support models and testing and retesting. We wanted one system to be able to really move over to, and then the scalability aspect of it. Having the commonality of the language would allow us to hire staff more easily. So if all of our engineers are speaking the same language and they're all being trained up on the same platform, it allows us to overcome our biggest challenge, really, which is hiring. How do you hire people if you need them to support one type of storage here, one type of server there, one type of network connection there? It's a lot more difficult. We thought by consolidating the platform, bringing that all in, we could make hiring a lot easier. So that was another one of our big challenges. And we also wanted to make sure that when we moved the data centers, so in addition to replatforming, we moved data centers. We needed to get robust disaster recovery business continuity in place. We didn't have that before. We live in San Francisco, home of earthquakes. So we know it's coming. It's only a question of when. So what we wanted to be able to do is create a platform that allowed us to have real, robust disaster recovery in place. So by using the engineered systems and active data guard, we've been able to prove that out. So obviously attacking the labor component. And then you mentioned the one throat to choke. It's interesting because when VCE came out, that was the whole concept was one throat to choke. IBM has its version of integrated systems. Why did you feel that the exadata systems and Oracle were more of one throat? Well, because we're running Oracle database with Oracle HCM on top of it. And then now we're running the Oracle hardware. So we really have been able to cut down on the amount of time that it takes to troubleshoot an issue. Before, even if it is IBM hardware, then well, oh, is it Oracle software? Is it the Oracle application? All of that is really gone now. You know, you put in that my Oracle support ticket, turnaround time is really, it's been awesome. We've been working with the engineers at Oracle. We get some webinars going, we get the problem tackled, and we're moving full. So true full stack is really. True full stack, it's all the way through. And that's really the biggest, one of the biggest differentiators between the Oracle engineered systems running Oracle hardware, running Oracle software that we couldn't get without. And I mean, I asked the lock-in question, right? Because that's the one thing that people get is concerned about. How did you sort of address that internally? Did it come up in the procurement process? So we're afraid of sort of, you know, lock-in and getting gouged. That definitely came in. And one of our thoughts on that was it was a shotgun wedding to begin with. But we're here and let's make the best of it. So there was definitely, that voice was heard at the table, but the thought was, we're already so far into this. If we go farther, we might expect to see some benefits. And by and large, we have. We've seen those benefits in terms of our ability to better troubleshoot the application. We haven't had any downtime. So the fact that we only have one vendor as opposed to two or three, we saw it as a net positive. So you've got Exadata and an Exologic? Correct, we have, the original purchase that we made of the engineered systems was a quarter rack Exadata and Exologic in our primary data center. And a quarter rack Exadata and Exologic at our disaster recovery dev test data center. Since then we've doubled that footprint. And we're also bringing on identity management. So. Okay, and so what are you using each for? What do you do with Exadata? What do you do with Exologic? Running on Exologic is the HCM layer. So that's where we have, I think we're up to about 35 different environments right now, all in support of our HCM and e-learning, e-performance, or the whole self-service suite. So we have that all hosted up there. And on the Exadata, you know, we're just running the database layer. We're connecting the two data centers with active data guards. We're having that real-time replication. When prior to going live in June of 2014, we had to show to our stakeholders that we had business continuity in place. So nice little story here is when we tested our financial systems running on a mainframe, in order to be able to test that disaster recovery ability took probably 500 man hours to get in there to test it all out. We were able to do the same thing on the engineered systems in about $8. So we were able to cut the replication, be able to show to our stakeholders, okay, we can deal with that. We can deal with an earthquake. We can deal with being able to run our systems out of the other data. You do a failover and failback in the test. Correct. And did you do that previously or did you sort of test it? We've never been able to do it before, right. So that's another just big benefit of the simplification of the hardware. Okay, and this is an asynchronous distance? Yeah, it is asynchronous because we're around 100 miles apart. We wanted to be in a different geological zone. So we made the choice to not go active-active. We went asynchronous.  Can you double click on that a little bit and maybe give us some, have you begun to quantify them or even subjectively? The biggest benefit that we've really seen is our ability to support more environments. So in the past, our businesses always wanted different environments to do testing of whatever. We could not provide that for them. The turnaround time to be able to bring a server online, provision that, procure it, could be three months, lots of man hours there. Now we can do it within a day. So if we have a compelling business reason to say, okay, we need a new environment to be able to test out this functionality for our end users, we can turn that around like that. That has been the biggest win. That really changes the whole paradigm when we're now able as the backbone system to be able to provide to our end users the functionality that they want and demand. And to be honest, there's the expectation that everything is click on the button. We know that's not the case, but to our businesses, they think that it's just that simple and we want to come as close to meeting that expectation as possible. And you couldn't do it before because you didn't have enough people or the infrastructure was too inflexible or accommodated. So we were already tapped out on our infrastructure. So if we wanted to expand that there was, within the physical infrastructure, there was an ability to do that. So we have to go through the whole public procurement process to buy something. So that's where we're talking months. Okay, so the experience overall has been pretty good. It's only six, seven, whatever months, but what kinds of things do you want to see Oracle do going forward? What could they improve? So one of the biggest challenges that we run into on the exologic layer specifically is just the ease of use of the provisioning software. We're also a VM shop. So we're very familiar with a lot of the work that VM has done in terms of provisioning and creating and destroying servers. That additional flexibility there in terms of how we allocate servers in the clouds, that would be something that we'd love to see come out of Oracle. That's really, in all honesty, our biggest gripe right now. But otherwise everything has really been as advertised and we're pretty happy with the product. How are you guys looking at the internet of things or mobile aspect for your user base? Obviously the edge of the network is changing. Any comments and how you guys see that evolving? For us, for our core users, what we want to do is be able to provide all 30,000 of our employees the ability to, this sounds pretty simple, but we're unable to get there to check their paycheck from their phone from anywhere in the world. So that's something that we're working on rolling out identity management in order to be able to have that secure single sign-on experience all the way through. That will be a big win for us. We're also in the business of getting rid of paper. That's a small thing, but the Ceding County is very serious about that. So by using the functionality provided by the engineered systems, we're able to increase our user count in a way that we never could before so we can expand outward. We're also looking at bringing on more e-performance, e-learning applications so that the users, our 30,000 city employees, can actually use the product to create more professional development content. We could load that up there for them. We could use it for additional reviews. Let the employees really see the challenges that their managers are trying to solve for, get those 360 reviews going on. And then down the line, the Ceding County has an entire goal of making public services more transparent. You've been at the City of San Francisco for how long? Almost five years. What keeps you there? I like doing the work that when you step back and you look at it, we have a large community of 800,000 people in the city. We have to keep the lights on on. For all of them, our job in the controller's office is to make sure those people can go out there and do their jobs. So we're really in the business of giving them their tools so that they're not worried about their back office support so they can go out there and do the public safety work, do the cleaning of the parks, be the attendance at the mall. I mean, that's really what we're about. Still a Red Sox fan or a Giants fan? Definitely Red Sox fan. It's not hard to be a Giants fan. Different league, A's, that's a whole other story. Notified loyalty, notified loyalty. It's still great. And now about the Niners and Patriots, same thing? Yeah, hoping the Patriots are able to get it done in two weeks. And then the Niners, good luck with their new coach. Dennis, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate City of San Francisco's great place and it's been that way for the history. And being ready for an earthquake is a big deal and having that capability now with Oracle, I think that's a big ah-ha and having all that transparency for the citizens is also great. And we are here live bringing the data to you here at theCUBE live in Silicon Valley at Oracle's headquarters. This is theCUBE, I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We'll be right back after this short break.


The Bible does not teach that sex outside of marriage is sinful.   But it would be unloving of me to try to convince people that God has no problem with sex before marriage. Rather than using fear tactics that the purity culture uses, I'd rather encourage people to know Christ and have a connection with Him because I think obedience comes through connection, not coercion. And when we begin to truly know Christ and have a connection and relationship with Him, we stop twisting His words in order to fit our lifestyle and we start shifting our lifestyle to fit what He has commanded. Follow for more Christ-centered content.


The one is crazy. It takes like 12 or 13 weeks. Yeah, okay The four takes 12 ish weeks. Usually we have a buddy pip That you know, he takes it 84 90 days every time. Yeah, okay. It grows long running spears And so it's really interesting because the D is a very short squat Afghan line green Super skunk looking thing, you know The dog is a very weird-looking non-frosty Afghan The four is a super frosty long spears like your arm 12-weeker So how do you get a nine-weeker and a 10-weeker and a 13-weeker and a 12-weeker and stuff that wants to be two feet Tall and stuff that wants to be six feet tall I mean it's possible and the one's all mercy and dominant like no Kimmy dial