my first time watching the Lord of the Rings. Hey what's up guys it's Josh here today I want to share my experience watching the Lord of the Rings trilogy a trilogy that I have never seen they're all about three to three and a half hours so it is a pretty lengthy investment but I watched the normal version of the Fellowship of the Rings the first one and then I watched the extended versions of Two Towers and Return of the King. I thought I had watched the extended cut of the original movie because I'm like oh it's three hours but I'm like oh not this one so I watched the normal version of the first one the extended cut of two and three so maybe I should go back and watch the first one I have three movies here so I'm going to do a big pros and a big cons and within those pros and cons I'm going to list which movies the pros applied to and which movies the cons applied to if they apply to a specific movie so anyways let's jump right into it so the pros is all the scenes with the ring are just absolutely money in my opinion and it's probably the the best parts of these movies these movies have a very light feel almost like a boyish childhood just so light it's hard to describe but when that ring comes out it's like everybody's acting jumps up to attend every how serious all the scenes jumps up to attend the direction and the actors every time the ring was out was just impressive and you could kind of see each actor you know how he would respond to it everybody has a very strong response to the ring and almost everybody is overtaken by its power you know anybody a good person anybody just wants to be taken over by this ring so anytime the ring was in play the scenes were just absolutely 10 out of 10 intense and I loved it another thing I liked was the wizard battles now this is mainly in one and two I had actually never watched any of the Harry Potter movies and because I like the wizard stuff in this movie I kind of was thinking maybe I should watch the Harry Potter movies just because there was so little wizard type stuff in this movie and every time there was wizard stuff going on I actually thought it was really good the different powers the different wizards for some reason I found it pretty interesting but again it's only for the first two movies almost nothing in the third one now I remember talking to one of my friends and we're talking about movies that just have good scenery and take you away to other places and he said that's one of the best movies for him or the movie that comes to mind when I'm saying that is the Lord of the Rings I gotta agree with them there is a lot of green screens I will get to that in the cons but there is some phenomenal scenery in this I mean just I think the whole movie there's always a big journey there's always these mountaintops I believe they shot in New Zealand and it's just absolutely beautiful some great shots epic high up shots it's just I can't say enough good stuff about the scenery they does go to some dark kind of grimy spots for a long time but there is some great scenery mixed in as well another thing I liked was the contrast between the first movie and the second movie so the first movie is much more light family oriented the whole hobbit son like that's the only real time you get this kind of a vibe it doesn't come back in two or three in my opinion I just really liked how light and how much of a character I felt the first movie had and then the contrast from one to two as two is much more darker you don't actually see golem at all in the first movie you just see little hints on the second movie it's where he's revealed Frodo is always the best person to hold the ring but you don't actually see him frustrated or angry at all to the second movie the second movie has a much darker tone which kind of fits along with you know this journey that they're on and how it's getting tougher it's getting darker they're getting closer there's only two people and they have golem with them I just really like the contrast between the first two movies because it does they just complement each other so well the first one being so bright and like a fun adventure and the second one just being a little bit more tough and dark and these are great epic all day movies especially after I've seen them all and I don't really need to pay attention to each scene just put it on all day kind of watch a few scenes get up and do things because it is so lengthy it is such a unique kind of world they got they got going on here so I could see you know every once in a while just putting it on going and do about your day cleaning some stuff doing some stuff having it on the background I totally see that and then the last one is that it has an epic cast like I kept seeing so many cameos from so many great actors and movies like you have you have live tyler which is the singer of aerosmith's daughter you got mr smith from the matrix in this movie you've got I mean the bad guy in golden eye james bond the bore mirror and the list just goes on there are so so many good actors and actresses in this movie and they totally did their job well okay let's jump into the mixed aspects I had the mixed was the hobbits were a little bit too boyish now I actually did like this a little bit as weird as it sounds there was a little bit of this childhood fun type of vibe that you could kind of catch just a little feeling of but I do feel like and again I watched the extended versions it was just a little bit overkill you're seeing so much of them be boys that it's just a little bit too much and again I watched the extended cuts so maybe they cut it down because I actually wanted more from the first movie second and third kind of felt a little long but I just liked two towers so much that I don't mind watching it all and then another mixed aspect is the gore and the violence there's times in this movie where it seems like it would feel so much more realistic if you could see more of what's happening see more of the sword going in and you know it feels very tame like oh you know kids are watching this we got to like tame it up right and then you go to the third movie and you see tons of more aggression you see beheadings you see all sorts of stuff so there was times where I felt like it was too PG too safe and like oh I just like for how epic this battle is it'd be nice if there was a little bit more you could see with the violence and then there's times where it was cranked up so I was kind of mixed on those aspects okay let's jump into the cons that I have with these movies the cons was I felt return of the king was way too similar to two towers now I was seeing some people gripe about it and apparently in two towers Frodo and Sam are supposed to be farther along in the journey than they are in the movie and so part of the journey that they go in two towers was saved for return of the king and I actually don't like that because it feels like too similar of a movie they both feel dark they both have this long journey of Frodo and Sam and bleed up to a battle they're just in my opinion they're so so similar and I was hoping we'd go back to a much more bright feel like the first one but the third one it just it to me it feels just like two towers but we'll make everything feel good at the end and then another con you kind of guess was there's no wizard kind of stuff in the third movie I absolutely loved the idea of this and apparently in the original Lord of the Rings and I don't know why Saruman and Sauron are both the enemies here because there's names are so similar Sauron and Saruman but apparently Saruman which is the wizard was supposed to take over Sauron which actually would have been way better because Sauron is just this eye in the sky and that's great but it's like you kind of want like a villain to fight after and that's what you had with Saruman the wizard but then he dies in the beginning of Return of the King so I wanted more magic kind of stuff in these movies and they really killed it by the time that their movie came okay the excessive green screens in two and three now I just thought green screens absolutely all the time and it just kind of took away from some of the fantasy because there's times where like oh like you see just this great land but it's like so obviously fake or when they're on top of the tree guy and the tree guy is walking around that looks fake there's so so so many times and again it's not the worst green screen I've ever seen but it's just I feel like I'm constantly seeing green screens in this movie and again that's just because it is older I think these came out like 2001 to 2003 and then another thing I didn't like was changes from the book now I've never read the book but I saw people were complaining about Peter Jackson changing things in the movie that were not from the book for every time that they listed something that was actually in the book I'm like wow that would have been better for the story I see why they're pissed I'm like I could see you know if that was the original story the way that they're talking about in the comments I could totally see the frustration and I have no idea why you didn't just keep it like the book I felt like the book the story was a little bit better every little tweak that I heard I really wish there was more time as Sauron as this big hulking beast basically the witch king is kind of a pretty good villain built up in the third movie I think he's one of the Nazgul which is from the very first movie I don't think the Nazgul are barely at all in the second movie there's a bunch of rings and then there's one ring that rules all the other rings so these evil Nazgul guys they have like basically like a mini ring that it gives you lots of powers but it's not as good as the main ring that Frodo has one of the main bad people that have this ring becomes the witch king they become he becomes basically like the leader of the army and he flies on a dragon he basically can do all this magic he literally looks at Gandalf he snaps Gandalf's wand little staff thing just by looking at him so he's super super powerful and then he dies in the most easy dumb way and I guess the person who killed him was just she was a good warrior girl but it just seemed like man this guy you know he could just mess with Gandalf so easy for you to just take him out in a couple slices was just it felt anticlimactic I know that's how it happened in the book so I'm actually glad that they kept that character defeating the witch king like that so I have no problem with that at all I'm actually glad they kept it I just felt like it was really really underwhelming.  My big problem with this was that we barely saw any of any of them together they're together in like the first movie for like maybe five, ten, fifteen minutes and then the whole other time Aragorn is meagling with this other girl and you end up liking the other girl who ends up taking out the witch king you end up liking her a lot more with Aragorn because there's so much time with them and almost feels like an hour hour and a half two hours with this girl by the time that they get together at the end I just don't feel anything. Gandalf would use magic against other wizards or he would use magic against the Nazgul you know that was pretty much it he has all these powers he can like stop stuff and do all this crazy stuff but he never uses them and then at the end Gandalf is like flying on like a goose thing or something he's flying on some big thing but he never uses that the whole time he just goes on a horse the whole time and fights like with pans and punches when it's like but you could fly on something you don't use that you could use magic but you don't use that when people are trying to fight you I just was not feeling that then the Nazgul I wanted the Nazgul to be in all three movies they were absolutely epic in the first movie and they pretty much just get rid of them and by the second and the third they do have the one person basically in the third movie but his ending is just so anticlimactic it's like how do you get into it there was a few times where it was obviously not the actors like it would be funny like Gandalf would be on his horse and then all of a sudden it would cut to this guy just completely hauling ass on a horse with white hair and it's like oh that's obviously not Gandalf or like the hobbits would go into like war and they're just so tiny like they're like little tiny boys but then like when they're acting like they feel like they're normal size you know so not really too much of a nitpick there wasn't too much sustained fighting scenes either now again this is a kind of a product of the time but there wasn't that much sustained you know like he like swords him he turns around and swords him and that's it it's like sword and so it's just a bunch of these cut scenes of like couple slashes I would have been nice to have maybe like a 20 or 30 second scene like walking through and seeing them take out multiple guys because the cuts were very they were kind of prevalent but again that's a factor of the time if I were to rate them I would probably rate them all as a series in between a seven and an eight out of ten they were on par to being maybe an eight to an eight point five if return of the king had been better and that's what's actually funny is that return of the king is like supposed to be the end all be all best lord of the rings movie and to me I would much rather watch number one or number two because I enjoyed those much more but I'll be very interested to see what you guys think down below if I were to say buy try or pass I would say these are worth watching but I would definitely get the theatrical cut because the theatrical cut is so so so long and if you find yourself wanting more of the scenes then you could go switch over to the longer one but anyways guys this has been my first time viewing all of the Lord of the Rings movies it has been quite an experience let me know if you've tried them out down below if you have not tried them out I'll be very interested to see I had that stigma of it being this big nerd movie and I just had to get over it this movie does get really really top level intense and I do appreciate that but anyways guys let me know what you think down below we're on the road of 50,000 subscribers and I couldn't do without any of you guys hope you guys are the best I'm having a great day out here hopefully I'm having a great day at home see you all in the next video peace


Hello everyone. As you guys are getting into the room, feel free to utilize the chat to introduce yourself, the name of your nonprofit and also where you're located. Hello everyone who's joining in. As you guys may see in the chat, please feel free to introduce yourself, who you are, your nonprofit and where you guys are located. We'll get started in just a couple of minutes. Awesome. I'm seeing so many people from just across the country. We have Colorado, Georgia, Virginia, Florida, Texas, Ohio, so many places. Welcome. All right. So I'm gonna go ahead and get started. As you guys come in, please feel free to continue to introduce yourselves within the chat and also feel free to utilize the chat throughout the webinar for any questions, opinions, thoughts that you have. There is a Q&A tool as well that you can use if there are specific questions that you want to have answered at the very end. So let's get started. All right. Hi everyone. My name is Lisa. I'm the Senior Community Engagement Manager here at Mighty Cause and I'm so excited to start off this season's Giving Tuesday with everyone. So just a brief overview of what we're going to be talking about in today's webinar. We're first going to be talking about what is Giving Tuesday, why participate, but also why participate on Mighty Cause as opposed to anywhere else. We're going to look at some insights from 2022, what we can learn from that, and what does that mean for this year, how in general to get involved with Giving Tuesday, building your road map towards your Giving Tuesday campaign, some strategies that you can implement for Giving Tuesday, and then how do you spread that and go into end of your fundraising for Giving Tuesday. So before we jump into all of the details about Giving Tuesday, for those of you who are not familiar with Mighty Cause or are brand new to Mighty Cause, we've been around since 2006, we're a year-round all-in-one platform specifically designed for nonprofits looking to fundraise. We have a bunch of different tools and resources that nonprofits can utilize to facilitate their fundraising, and in particular to facilitate their fundraising for Giving Tuesday. So why Giving Tuesday with Mighty Cause on our platform? So before I get into Giving Tuesday and Giving Tuesday on Mighty Cause, I have a question that I want to pose for everyone, so I'm going to launch a poll question. So out of curiosity, how many of you have participated in Giving Tuesday before? This could be on Mighty Cause or on a different platform, but how many of you have experience in Giving Tuesday? Wow, it's like a lot of you have experience, but also there is a significant amount that have not participated in Giving Tuesday before. Okay, awesome. So it seems it's a 5743, so a little close, but that's awesome that we have some people who are experienced and some people that are brand new. As I mentioned in the chat, feel free as we go on to provide any, you know, insight or questions that you guys have as we go on. So since we have a large group of people that have not participated in Giving Tuesday before, let's put some context and history about Giving Tuesday or if you have, maybe you weren't familiar with the background. So Giving Tuesday started back in 2012. It was created as a response to all of the consumer days that happen around Thanksgiving. We have Cyber Monday and Black Friday. So it was really a day that was specifically reserved to do good, to give back in the world. And it's not just dedicated to giving donations. It also means giving your time, giving material goods, etc. And throughout the years, it's become one of the highest volume giving days in the world. So because it is one of the biggest giving days in the entire world, it's a huge engagement opportunity. It's become synonymous with donors and supporters that it's the day to give to the causes that mean the most to you, to give to the nonprofits that you were thinking of giving to but you haven't given yet. One thing that also I think sometimes gets overshadowed when we talk about Giving Tuesday's end of year fundraising. So according to report, 30% of annual donation volume occurs between Giving Tuesday and December 31st. That's a huge volume of donations. And according to M&R benchmarks, nonprofits in 2022 receive 5% of their 2022 revenue on the last day of the year. A lot of times nonprofits think that Giving Tuesday and their end of year fundraising campaigns compete against each other and can sometimes choose to do one or the other when that's totally not the case. Giving Tuesday is the perfect opportunity to really start the end of year messaging and flow into your end of year campaign. It's something that you should utilize to your benefit and not as something that will compete with any end of your fundraising that you've done in the past or you're planning on doing. All right. So what does it mean to participate on Giving Tuesday on Mighty Cause? Well, in general, Giving Tuesday always happens on the Tuesday after Thanksgiving. So it's happening on November 28th. Registration for our Giving Tuesday event opens up today. It'll open up right after this webinar so that you can start your registration process and get registered. Early Giving starts on November 14th. So what Early Giving refers to is that starting November 14th on our platform, any donations you receive will count towards any prizes that we are providing for the event. So our event starts midnight of the 28th and will go until midnight Pacific time on the 29th. We provide resources, trainings, and support available to you. And again, this is just one of the ways that your nonprofit can participate in Giving Tuesday, which is being part of the Mighty Cause platform and fundraising on Mighty Cause. So when participating on Mighty Cause, what do you receive or what do you get? Why should you sign up to participate in our event? So one, if you haven't utilized our platform before, we've created a platform that's really kind of perfect for giving Tuesday campaign, where you have access to a lot of different fundraising strategic tools like peer-to-peer fundraising, matching grants, the ability to customize your checkout experience, et cetera. We also have a whole nonprofit toolkit that you can find on the Giving Tuesday website currently. And let me just go back. Again, that website is giving Tuesday.mightycause.com. And on our toolkit, you'll find not only webinars that you can sign up for, we'll also have office hours in the fall time for you to come in, ask any questions you have, et cetera. We have templates, graphics, images, email templates, social media templates. We also provide customer support. And also, we'll provide you the ability to chance to win one of our prizes. Our prizes are typically announced within closer to the beginning of fall. So be on the lookout for when our prizes are announced. So one of the options that are available to the platform, it is not required. Just available is our advanced plan. And I wanted to highlight it because for a large majority of you, whether it's new, whether you're new to Giving Tuesday or this is, you know, you're a seasoned vet and you're returning back, our advanced plan also has a ton of different tools and features that can help make your Giving Tuesday campaign more seamless and easier. So we have integrations available with Salesforce, MailChimp, Google Analytics, et cetera. We have a supporter CRM system, the ability to have volunteers sign up for volunteer opportunities, et cetera. We'll have a webinar that talks a little bit more about this if you want to sign up and learn more. But one of the benefits of being an advanced subscriber to our platform are a couple of things related to Giving Tuesday. So one, all of our advanced nonprofits do have access to additional webinar training that we'll have, as well as one-on-one specific coaching, whereas our office hours are more group, extra prize opportunities specifically for our advanced plan subscribers, as well as dedicated resources to the tools available. And as well, for Giving Tuesday, we're offering one month free towards your annual subscription. So a couple of resources, a couple of benefits for signing up for our advanced plan for Giving Tuesday. All right, so now that we've kind of covered the basics of Giving Tuesday on Mighty Cause, let's look back into 2022 and some insights that we can take a look at and learn from. So in 2022, and this is related to the Giving Tuesday look back report, total dollars and donors actually decreased in 2022. Now this is very unique. It's abnormal. This has not been seen since 2010. Some of the causes related to total dollars and donors decreasing in 2002 were obviously the recession and stock market. And specifically, dollars from large donors really decreased at the end of 2022, which was really led that decrease in total dollars being down for the overall year. What was shown in their report was that a lot of nonprofits were banking on those large donors at the end of 2022 and some of them didn't come through, which is why there was a decline in that last quarter. One other also interesting insight found from that report was winning donor participation. Many acquired donors in 2021 did not return back in 2022. The number of new routine donors fell drastically last year, decreasing 26.4%. According to M&R benchmarks, the overall retention for 2022 was 29%. Now this may seem a bit of a scary stat. However, if we put also some context in regards to this statistic is that with the pandemic and with COVID-19, from 2020 to 2021, a lot of nonprofits saw a consistent increase in donor retention. A lot of individuals were really supporting causes as well there were additional other social justice issues occurring. There was a huge anomaly in terms of the increase in donations at that time. Although there was waning donor retention, we have to make sure that we're also acknowledging that there was a very large increase previous to that. That was a bit abnormal. All right. Additionally, what also they found was that donors were giving in other ways. As I mentioned, giving Tuesday isn't just a day that meant for just giving donations, but what they found was that in the substitution for giving their dollars to a nonprofit, there was an increase in actually the amount of people that signed up for volunteer positions that gave material goods for nonprofits that collected materials, et cetera. As well, there was an increase in younger generations who were also giving funds. Younger generations were stepping up up to the plate and giving to more nonprofits. What does that mean for 2023? What can we take away from that brief overview of 2022? One is honing in on monthly donors. In 2022, there was a drop in overall one-time donations. However, there was an increase actually in monthly gifts. It increased overall by 11% within nonprofits on average. Honing in on monthly donors is a really great way to also set yourself up for the rest of the year. As I described in the last slide, one of the reasons why overall on average there was a decrease in donations in 2022 was that wait for those large donors at Q4 last year. But if setting yourself up for sustainable fundraising throughout the year is also setting yourself up for success so that you don't have to wait for those large donors at the end of the year. As I also mentioned on my last slide, focusing all of your energy on large donors, you want to make sure that you also branching out. As I mentioned, younger generations are stepping up to the plate. As well as your small to mid-level donors are also there to support your nonprofit and could be your next monthly donor. As I talked about in the last slide, as well, donor retention is still worth the effort. Because at the end of the day, recruiting new donors is a substantial amount of resources and time. Although there was a decrease in donor retention last year, as I mentioned, the anonymally from the year before, it is still worthwhile to focus on donor retention. Donors that have made a donation in the past are more likely to give again because they've either understood the impact of your nonprofit or they can see the impact that their gift has made. So now that we've talked about some lessons from 2022, I'm just going to take a minute and pause here for some questions that people may have because I know that was a lot of information. So we raised donations for Indians' critical healthcare funding. Is our NGO eligible to participate in Giving Tuesday? That is a really great question. So to participate in Giving Tuesday on Mighty Cause, your nonprofit does have to be a 501c3 public charity. If your nonprofit is a 501c3 public charity, you can go ahead and start the registration process. If your nonprofit is not a 501c3 public charity, one thing you may want to consider is looking for a fiscal sponsor. A fiscal sponsorship is basically an agreement between two nonprofits, and it's when another nonprofit agrees to sponsor your nonprofit so that you can raise funds. We have more information about that in our support articles, and you can always contact us if you have any other questions, but that's one way that you could participate on our platform. All right, we use Mighty Cause for North Texas Giving Day. How will the system flip to prepare for Giving Tuesday? So within our system, it's actually all automatic starting on when donations start counting. And as well, you do want to make sure that you are always using the right URL when you're on either platform if you do participate in another Giving event. But when early Giving starts for our event, which is November 14th, your site will automatically redirect. But again, always make sure that you're also sharing the right links to your donors where you want them to donate. If you're already on the platform, can you sign up for Mighty Cause Giving Tuesday? Of course, yes. Anyone can sign up on that is already on the platform. You are more than welcome to sign up on the platform. Okay. What are some pointers for getting folks to match donations and how do I obtain a sponsor? All right, so we'll get to those questions in a second, but I just want to also highlight Deborah's comment. We have noticed a decline in donations, but we are happy to get back to holding major fundraising events now that COVID is pretty much behind us. Yes, that's also something that is really strong to consider in terms of winning donations and participation is that a lot of nonprofits still haven't gone to back to their live events, and this might be their first year going back to some of the live events that they've held previously. All right, so let's go back into our slide deck and talk about building your roadmap for Giving Tuesday. And we'll go back to questions in a second. All right, so when you are thinking about your Giving Tuesday campaign, it can feel overwhelming. So the first thing is, is you really want to look at your data and determine what are your priorities as a nonprofit. We have so many different nonprofits here in the webinar, as we saw a lot have participated before a lot haven't. A lot are in different categories and missions. So what is important for you is going to be different for someone else. So look at your donation data and see where you want to go. What are the good things that you saw from your donation data last year and what are you looking to improve upon? So this could be donor retention, donor acquisition, work bring giving, engaging partnerships. What exactly do you want to grow in based off the goals of your nonprofit? And I think it's always helpful to also collect feedback from your staff and your donors of what they, how are they interacting or what have they seen about your nonprofit. So when you're looking at your donation data, you also want to think about what is your overall goal for your Giving Tuesday campaign? What are you looking to raise? If you're not sure, maybe talk to your treasurer or your board of directors in terms of how much you want to raise for this year. Take a look, as I mentioned, to also last year's data to understand what you should expect. What is a realistic goal? You want to make sure that you're setting smart goals up, so specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and time bound. As I mentioned, everyone's going to have a very different goal. Some maybe to raise 50,000, where others maybe to raise 5,000. Everyone has different goals and that's perfectly okay. But also goals can be non-monetary. They don't just have to be, I'm looking to raise X amount. As I mentioned, we talked a little bit about donor retention and donor acquisition, but it could be we want to increase our social media following. We want to increase the amount of volunteers that we have, because once you have a specific goal in mind, it's easier than to think about, well, what do I want to then actually do in terms of a Giving Tuesday campaign? So when you have a focus for your Giving Tuesday campaign, you then know what exactly you're fundraising for. And then once you have that idea of the focus of your campaign, you can then consider, well, how can my idea stand out amongst everyone else? And of course, and we'll talk about this a little later, is utilizing when you have this focus and idea of exactly what you are fundraising for, you can then utilize this throughout your communications with donors. We'll also have a communications webinar in November, so feel free to sign up for that webinar after this. So I want to pause here and do a quick little challenge. I did this last year and I thought it was really helpful for a lot of nonprofits. We'll also do this in the communications webinar in case any of you sign up for that one. But in the chat, I want you guys to put your answers down. But I want you to, in a brief, one brief sentence, answer this how you would describe it to a child. What does your nonprofit do? How would a donation affect your organization? And how can a donor support my organization? So you can choose one of those questions, as I mentioned, or not all of them, just choose one and write it again as if you are asking a child. All right. I'm going to give one more minute just for people. All right. I see some awesome sentences coming in now. Awesome. So I'm going to continue, but keep putting in your responses, because I think it's really great to see, and I think it's really helpful for everyone to see how everyone would describe or answer these questions. And so the reason why I love this exercise is that I think it's really helpful for yourself to really just bring down or kind of circle in on exactly why are you raising money for GivingTuesday. It's so easy to kind of get into the cog of we need to raise funds, but why are you doing that? And you can even now that you're kind of answering some of these questions of what does my nonprofit do, you can then even evolve it to why give to my nonprofit on GivingTuesday, right?  If you're looking, why would someone give a donation? We build a new kennel to save more dogs straight to the point and kind of helping you break down exactly what is the impact that you want to make for this year's GivingTuesday. Awesome. So many great, so many great breakdowns in the chat. All right, so I'm going to continue. So when we look at GivingTuesday campaigns that we've seen before previously, what we've learned from Great Campaigns is they have relevance. So why their work matters in the current moment? Again, with GivingTuesday, people are going to be inundated with not only just asks from other nonprofits, but people are inundated with asks about everything. They're Cyber Monday, Black Friday, they're being asked for a lot of things. But why is this moment important? As I gave the example with, you know, an animal rescue that gives dogs a new home, why is now the important moment? Because we're looking to build a new kennel to save more dogs. Now is the time that we need to do it, to have more dogs, save more dogs lives, etc. Authenticity. So examples of the challenge and how you're responding to it. You know, donors really like transparency. They want, you know, donors are smarter than you think. They want to know what exactly is the issue and how can they help? Again, it's much easier when you can simplify that, as I showed before, in a small condensed way. But how are you responding to the overall issue that you're looking to solve? Urgency. So the impact that a donor can make, I think that's really important to think about it in that way. And that's why I'm a big proponent of giving donors like donation levels or tangible donation amounts and what that means. So for $20, they can means one backpack for one student who needs to go to school. I think when you are able to make it super tangible, it adds more urgency in addition to, you know, the overall ask that you're asking and creativity, right? So standing out to show your unique value and that can be through the type of fundraising campaign you're doing, or that could be in regards to your communication, to your nonprofits or the story that you're sharing. Just as an example of a different way that to show creativity was a couple years ago, there was an animal organization that throughout their Giving Tuesday campaign, they shared the story of one specific animal that they were, you know, related to their cause. And even after Giving Tuesday, they in their communication continued the story of this animal to again kind of share the full story of the impact that donors were having with their organization. So creativity can be the type of campaign or it can be in how you tell your story. So once you've kind of thought through of what are your goals, what are you asking, what are you focusing on, you can then build your timeline. So we have the checklist for success in our toolkit that you can utilize that will help you keep on track until Giving Tuesday to help you set benchmarks for yourself each month and track your progress. It's also helpful to in addition to that, you know, based off the goals that you've said, if it's engaging more, you know, supporters online, setting benchmarks for yourself each month and tasks or goals so you can make sure you're keeping track for Giving Tuesday, because as we all know, Giving Tuesday will be here sooner than we think. And of course, you know, a lot of people here, they're one man show or one woman show, they're volunteers, but try to create a team around you that can help in whatever way that they can. If that means that, you know, one person kind of helps with social media on the day of, but you can handle the like planning of the campaign, etc. Make sure that you can kind of seek support within your nonprofit or your support network to see who can, you know, help you towards your Giving Tuesday goals. All right, so let's talk about some strategic fundraising, the strategic tools that you can utilize for Giving Tuesday. I know there's some questions about matches, so we'll talk about that right now. So matching grants is a really common and really popular fundraising tool that's utilized specifically for giving events or giving days like Giving Tuesday or in general fundraising campaigns. So what exactly is a match? So a match is really a marketing tool that helps motivate donors to give, and that's why it's used so often for giving days and giving events. It gives donors the opportunities to double their money and make their donation go farther, right? So it's a way for a donor to feel incentivized to give or even give a larger amount. And just to break this down further, again, for those who are not familiar with matching grants, a match is when an individual will agree to have their donation that they make be matched by other donors for your nonprofit. Now matches can come in all different shapes and sizes. We also have another webinar specifically dedicated to matching grants, because I know that's a big topic. So if you are interested in that, also please turn up for that webinar where we'll talk about it. All right, so there are lots of different types of matching grants. So the most common is one-to-one. So when we talk about one-to-one, that means that it's dollar for dollar. If I give $5, that means my donation is matched and it's really a $10 gift. Again, that's where the incentive to donors comes in. Percentage match. So this could be a portion of each donation is matched. So maybe it's actually 200%, not 100%. It's even being doubled even more. Or a cumulative threshold match. So that means that in order for you to receive your match, you have to meet a certain amount. So that could be for us to get $1,000, we need to raise $1,000. Or for us to get $1,000, we need to have 50 donations come in or 50 donors. So again, it's meaning that you have to meet that requirement in order to get the match as opposed to just dollar for dollar. So these different types of matches are all different types of matches that you can build on the Mighty Cross platform and on your page. Like I said, we'll have a webinar that goes into this more. And as well in our toolkit, we have more resources that talk about matching grants as well. So one of the questions I think that also we often get is what are the general overall other benefits of matching grants and in terms of donors. So as I talked about, it's really the opportunity for a donor to feel like they're really maximizing their donation. And again, why it works so well, especially for giving events and giving days is that you want people to give during this timeframe. So how do you ask people to give is you make an offer that is hard for them to refuse. So if you are asking for donations on Giving Tuesday or in general for any campaign and you want donations to come through for that campaign, when you tell a donor that they're going to make a bigger impact by giving now as opposed to later, they're more inclined to give. And that's why matching grants are so powerful. In terms for a grantor, this is also an opportunity for a large donor to give in a different way. So if you do have a large donor that let's say does write a check out to you every year for $1,000, this is the way for their donation to go even further. Their donation is going to make a bigger impact. And it's a different way to engage with your large donors and also make a different ask as opposed to just writing another check. So how do you ask for a matching grant? Where do you go? How do you get one? What should you say? So a matching grant can be also a really great icebreaker for a new or prospective sponsors. And sponsors can really be anyone. This can be your board of directors that are pooling your funds together, your local business, a business that you worked with in the past. This could be, as I mentioned, a large donor. A sponsor can be anyone. It doesn't have to be a company or a business. But it's a really great way to start the conversation with maybe a local business or company or organization that you want to work with. Again, it's a different ask then to just simply write a check, right? You're asking them to make a large impact for your nonprofit. You know that with a matching grant, more donations are going to come through. Matching grants also provide the ability for sponsors to get their name out about their philanthropic work. A lot of companies in particular, a lot of individuals, very particular companies, are doing more work in the philanthropic space of creating a philanthropic arm. So this is their way of kind of sharing what their company does with the public. So this could mean agreeing to share their logo on social media. On the platform, you have the ability to add their logo on our match tool, including in email communication, et cetera. All right. So how do you go about then securing a matching grant? We talked a little bit about who exactly can provide a match. So create a list of who are potential people that could make a match. And again, use your team to your disposal. Maybe have a quick meeting with other volunteers or other staff members of poor potential people that you can pull together to provide a matching grant. So once you kind of have that general list, use make the ask. So do personal outreach, either via email, a phone call, and let them know what is giving Tuesday, and as well what exactly you are asking them to do. I think one of the most common mistakes I see is a lot of nonprofits will maybe not specifically kind of explain what exactly a matching grant is or does to their donor or a donor that they're asking. So it may be not even using the term matching grant, maybe using it once, but really defining it in your own words of the impact that it would make. So as I mentioned, we'll dive into this more in our webinar, next webinar, and as well we have resources that kind of talk about this more, but that is definitely something to consider when you are reaching out is the explanation of what a matching grant is and the impact you're looking to make. All right. So before I jump into peer-to-peer fundraising, I just want to pause and kind of go back to some of those matched questions. All right. All right. So just another question, how do I get my executive director to get ready for giving Tuesday? That is a great question. I'm not sure your position with your nonprofit, but the first thing would be to just register your nonprofit on the platform. That's probably the easiest step you can take in the first step. So start that. And then the next step would be maybe just having a call of what are you guys looking to do in 2024? Like, what is the impact you're looking to make? As I mentioned, when you have a general goal for your nonprofit, then creating a fundraising campaign is easier because you know what you're trying to reach. And when you can get as specific as possible, it's much easier. All right. If you don't, so there was a question about match. If you don't get the match, do you have to return the funds to the grantor? So that is totally up to you. Again, the our matching grants tool specifically on our platform, it's really a reporting and like visual tool on the platform. We're not keeping track.  So that is totally dependent on the agreement you have with the grantor. I would say typically I have not seen that that grantors will, you know, have forced you to return funds, et cetera. So I have not seen that. But again, that's totally dependent on the arrangement and agreement that you have with your grantor in terms of what are the details of your matching grant. So our matching grant donation amounts generally share it to the general audience potential or audience to giving Tuesday donors. So yeah, so typically you do want to advertise like the total donations. And again, it depends on kind of the setup of your match. But if you have a thousand dollar match, you do want to kind of include that in your communication. And also it's a really great communication tool in terms of as you start getting, you know, for example, donations coming in, let's say you have, you know, you're 75% there until your thousand dollar match. That's a really great and easy communication topic that you can use of, hey, we're 75% there, 25% is left of this match, like donate now to complete the match and make a larger impact. Okay, is there a difference between a donation and a grant? So that is a really good question. And I always encourage that questions those type of questions, because I think especially in the nonprofit space, there are a lot of words that are used very differently amongst different nonprofits and also different platforms. So I always encourage questions like that. So essentially the difference between a donation and a grant, I mean, essentially a grant is a type in terms of this, a grant is a donation, right. So a grant is essentially just typically a larger donation that someone is offering that will be matched. So essentially, they're the same basically in this context. All right, if I missed any questions, please feel free to re retype your question in here, but I'm going to and I will continue and we'll still go through questions at the end. All right, so the next common type of fundraising strategy used in Giving Tuesday is peer to peer fundraising. So peer to peer fundraising is basically a strategic tool where you are leveraging your existing supporters and having them bring in new supporters and new donors to your nonprofit. It's having your network of people create fundraisers and because they're sharing that with their social network, with their co-workers, employees, employers, their friends, their family, etc., you're now accessing new donors that you wouldn't have been able to access previously. So also common question we get, why would supporters be interested in peer to peer fundraising? So one, it's another way for donors to be part of your nonprofit in a different way. It's a different ask and it's also another fun way that someone can participate in your organization. I mean, I think the most common example is a fund run or a walk-a-thon. So many people participate in fund runs and walk-a-thons, maybe who wouldn't have just given a donation to those nonprofits, but because it's a different and fun way that they can support a nonprofit, they're more inclined to participate and raise funds. And also one thing about peer to peer fundraising that I think that is also sometimes overshadowed is that it's an opportunity for people to share their story about your nonprofit and why their work is important to you. So for example, if you have, let's say you're an animal organization and the parents of your adopted rescues, that's who's fundraising for your nonprofit, it's their opportunity to share their story of their pet that they rescued and why your nonprofit is important to them. So it's again kind of sharing the work that you're doing and the impact it's making. So one common peer-to-peer type of fundraising campaign that we've seen on the platform is board peer-to-peer fundraising campaigns. So if there are any yearly commitments that your board members have, this could be an opportunity for them to kind of count towards any of those yearly commitments. So it is an opportunity for them to really get involved and support your organization again in a different way. And it doesn't just have to be peer-to-peer fundraising regarding your board, they can support your organization in a lot of different ways. However, this is a really easy way for your board members to again share their story about your nonprofit. Why do they spend their time or why do they want to be on the board of your nonprofit? They get to tell their story and again it also kind of creates that sense of friendly competition among your board members. We'll also have a specific webinar on peer-to-peer fundraising if you're interested in delving into peer-to-peer fundraising. All right so we're almost in the homestretch. So spreading the word about your fundraising campaign. So there's lots of different ways to engage donors on GivingTuesday. So in the past we've seen virtual kickoff calls. We've seen contests. We've seen, as I mentioned, a funny pants runway. We've seen so many different types of ways that organizations have engaged with their donors online. So when you're thinking of content planning for your GivingTuesday campaign, there's a couple of things that you should consider including in your communication. So one is what is that story that you want to share regarding your nonprofit? As I mentioned that one story about an animal organization who shared the story of one specific animal throughout their whole GivingTuesday campaign and even after. It doesn't just have to be about animal. It could be about a specific work, a specific project that you guys have focused on. What, again, based off the goal and the focus that you're working on, what is that story that you can tell? Videos are also I think really helpful and especially with social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook. They do tend to prioritize short videos like reels. There's also a lot some easy video editing tools like CapCut and iMovie will also have a communications weapon as I mentioned to go over some of these. But videos don't have to be complicated.  Images in terms of again what exactly the work that you're doing and maybe also not only the work that you are looking to do but success that you've seen in the past and also any stats and important impact information that you think is important related maybe to your cause or your mission. So there is going to be a lot of planning related to your giving to the campaign in terms of fundraising, etc. So you want to make sure to keep it easy for yourself. So really stick to two or three ideas about the work that you do and how you're going to present it to your audience and to your donors. So meaning if there is a video and, you know, that you want to focus on that first, again work in small steps and stages. And use imagery colors and recurring themes to tie your campaign communications together. Again, if there is a specific photo that you're using, keep that consistent on your email or your social media or if there's a statistic that you're using in the infographic again using that same statistic in one of your emails. You can reuse communication that you have on social to email, etc. Because people are going to get information related to your nonprofit and more than one place. And also you really want to drive home what you're saying. So just some quick tips is keep your communication simple, short and sweet is always the easiest if we go back to again the challenge that we did of how would you describe it to a child. That's how I would look at your social media. What's the shortest and quickest way you can get your message across. Focus on channels where your donors are. If your donors are not on Instagram and they're only on Facebook, then that is okay to focus on Facebook. You want to focus on where your donors are of where they're going to see your message. Mailchimp and Buffer are two free platforms that you can use to pre-schedule your emails or any social media posts. And as well think about who you're sending this to or who you're trying to reach. So let's say your goal is getting more recurring donors. What is the call to action that you may want to tell a recurring donor this year? So maybe it's your list of recurring donors and you want to see who's willing to make a match, make a larger impact this year. Or if it's two donors who gave last year and you want to reach out to those, make an impact again or make a larger impact or etc. All right so closing the loop. All right so one thing just to keep in mind and also as I said a couple times we'll have a specific webinar also dedicated to this topic as well. The end of giving Tuesday going into end of year. This is your opportunity to keep donors and keep donor loyalty and have that go into end of year and 2024 right. So you don't want to just do this all in vain. You want to have keep donors engaged and have this as an opportunity to second to your end of year 2024 messaging. So after giving Tuesday how can you continue that story that you're telling? How can you show the impact that someone's donation made? So a couple of ways to follow up. So one I think it's helpful and important to share with donors what you've raised or in general like what are what were the goals that you've reached. Maybe you wasn't total donations. Maybe it's you receive new donors or you increased your donors by X amount etc. What are some of the milestones that you met through your campaign and how they were able to help? As well I think always picking up the phone and specifically thanking any large donors, grand tours, volunteers is really essential and of course sharing also on social media or even sending a letter I think is really helpful for those important donors that you want to make sure that they're really getting the personal thank you. All right so as you're thinking about your giving Tuesday campaign as I mentioned this is a really great moment to kind of segue into your end of year campaign. So what is your end of year campaign and how can that segue kind of seamlessly move into that? Are you going to have the same focus, same overall theme, same story or is it completely new effort? How are those two things connected? Those are all things to kind of think through as you're planning out your giving Tuesday campaign and as you are going into your end of year giving season as I mentioned thanking your giving Tuesday donors and talking about your end of year giving and what you're trying to do I think is really helpful and important in kind of cultivating that donor loyalty and communication. All right we're towards the end just a couple of key things one today registration opens will open right after this webinar we'll send a recording of this webinar and this will be also on our toolkit as well. November 14th early giving opens and then Tuesday 28th is giving Tuesday. So I want to get to questions to answer. Okay so how does a first time non-profit get into giving Tuesday? That's a great question so like I mentioned first thing to do is just to register for giving Tuesday on Mighty Cause. So if you go to givingtuesday.mightycause.com first step is just to register. You will get added as an admin to your ORIC page where you can start customizing your ORIC page and putting together your page and then as I kind of went through in this webinar first step is kind of thinking through what is your overall goal that you want to have for this year. We're going to also have a webinar that is a platform training so if you are brand new to the platform and you kind of want to get more acquainted please feel free to join that to learn how to use the system for your giving Tuesday campaign. So someone says peer-to-peer fundraising is a great avenue we've started using this I recommend giving your system a name we call ours Connections. I love that idea and that insight and advice I think that's really helpful. On the platform we have two peer-to-peer fundraising tools that you can utilize to make participating for your participants a lot easier and again we'll kind of our toolkit talks has some resources about them but we'll talk about that more in our webinar. Does a non-profit have to have a webpage to participate we only have a Facebook page no you don't need a website in order to participate so if you are brand new to the platform we do have to we do verify that every administrator or everyone who's asking to be an admin of a non-profit on our site is verified to be an administrator of that organization. So we may have to ask you just you know clarify and confirm that you are the administrator for your nonprofit if you don't have a website depending on again your Facebook page and additional information but no you don't have to have a website in order to participate. On our platform you'll have your own organization page that you can utilize to collect donations and yes I'll send all of these points to also know this the PowerPoint presentation to everyone and as well a copy. Doesn't a grant have to be used for the reason that it was granted where a donation does not um I think it depends on the type of grant in terms of a matching grant again that is kind of an agreement that you're striking with either you know whatever entity or individual because there's different types of grants that can be provided to a nonprofit and specific a matching grant like let's say your board of directors come together and say we want to pool money to provide a match again the agreement for that is just based between you and your board of directors or a large donor. There are some nonprofits that do have large donors where their large donors want the match to count for a specific project or a specific goal so again that is just dependent on your agreement with the grantor in terms of again matching grants. Okay does Mighty Cause integrate into Salesforce for CRM purposes and Quick Book for Tax purposes? Yes so we have a direct integration with Salesforce we have a um integration tool called Zapier which essentially is um a it's a third-party platform that essentially is meant to create integrations and you through Zapier you can create an integration through Quick Books online not the desktop version but the online version but we have a direct integration with Salesforce. Okay any other questions and this doesn't have to be the end of questions if any questions do come up please feel free to reach out to our support team I'm going to put the email in here support at MightyCodes.com we're always here to answer any questions you guys have and support you whenever any way we can additionally there is a survey that will pop up for you when this webinar ends it's really helpful for us to know what are resources that will be helpful for you guys we are here to support you guys and we want you guys to succeed so please let us know you know what you need in order to make your giving Tuesday a success so I'm going to end the webinar here but thank you so much for everyone attending I hope this was helpful and yes welcome and excited to start this giving Tuesday season all right bye everyone


Get your downward pointing thumbs ready kids because this is going to be an unpopular review. I do not like this book. I have nothing positive to say about this book. It should be renamed a couple of Hindu gods sitting around talking because that's all that happens in this book. Two characters standing in a room or standing in the woods or standing on a mountain and they talk and they talk and they talk and they talk and they talk and they talk and that's all that ever happens. There will be the occasional fight scene whereas the Lazzney very meticulously explains exactly how every character's arm is posed and exactly where their hands are and exactly where the strikes happen and then they'll stop fighting and they'll say to each other and now we will converse and they will talk and they will talk and talk and talk and talk and talk. There was one scene where this guy was struggling with a shape-shifting alien who was taking over his mind. So Lazzney said and as they struggled they spoke and then they talked and they talked and they talked and they talked and they talked and they talked and they talked and they talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and talked. If you think it's annoying hearing me say that so many times in a row just imagine trying to listen to an audio book that you can't stand. That's what the book sounded like to me. I do not like Roger's Lazzney style. There's something about his style that even even in his short stories makes me pull my hair out. I can't stand Roger's Lazzney's work and this is the absolute worst example of it if you ask me. People recommend this book all the time. They say it's the greatest book they've ever read. They say they can't put it down. They even say that it changed their life but I don't understand it. I would never recommend this book ever. You can support 30 Seconds Sci-Fi and my other projects by becoming a patron. There's a link in the description below. And now to make things a little more pleasant my next review I will talk about as a Lazzney book that I actually do like strangely enough.


Hey guys, what is up? Welcome to my channel. So for today's video, I'm going to be reviewing the brand new Dominique Cosmetics Rustic Lamp Eyeshadow Palette. So if you're interested in hearing my thoughts on this palette as well as seeing some swatches, and of course the look on my eyes right now, then just keep watching. Dominique Cosmetics has released her fourth eyeshadow palette in her line.  I haven't bought any of her highlighters or her lip products and with this palette she also came out with some brushes. Did not purchase those, I just purchased the palette. I picked this up in stores at Sephora a couple days after it released. I originally wasn't going to purchase this palette and then I saw it in person and I was like, never mind, I want it. So let's just go into the major details of this palette. It is $44. You can get it right now at Sephora and of course the Dominique Cosmetics website. It is described as a day-to-night 12-pan eyeshadow palette to help you create a variety of looks from neutral, smoked out to fierce and glam. So the packaging of this one is, oh my gosh, so beautiful. It has rustic glam, Dominique Cosmetics embroidered in like gold and it's just super pretty. I think this is a very unique packaging. If we're just being a regular square kind of cardboard casing, the design on it is so beautiful. So you open it up and you're getting a mirror that's pretty decent size. I think it could be bigger. I know they wanted to go with that shape but it could have been bigger. I know how some of us feel about mirrors.  In here there's a mixture of textures. Generally speaking, you're getting nine mattes and three shimmers. Two of those mattes though do have microglitters in them but the base of it is matte. This is described as a day-to-night palette and I would definitely agree with that. What I really like about this palette is that there are such a variety of colors so you can create that day-to-night look. Just a different variety of looks as well. I really like the layout of the palette so honestly, you can pair the top and bottom colors together and it would create a beautiful look. You have a pink and purple look, a blue smoky eye, a green eye. You could do something with this orange, blue and bronze. Always looks really good together and you have some matte colors. Then you have more of a neutral eye kind of in this area. So I do think the layout of this palette is really nice. I think that the ratio of matte shimmers is really nice. At first this palette didn't call out to me just because I thought the arrangement of colors was a little bit odd but the more that I looked at it, the more inspired that I felt by this palette. You can just create so many different kinds of looks. You guys have no idea. So let's talk about the formulation of this palette. If you do not like a more powdery, loose packed formula, you will not like this formula. Her mattes especially are, they do have quite a lot of kickback. I personally don't prefer a formula that has a ton of kickback but if it works and it blends and it's not patchy, I'm okay with it. I think her matte formula is really nice. I had originally fallen in love with Dominique Cosmetics with her latte palette. I thought that that palette was amazing. It's one of my favorites. I think just because she has such unique colors in here and not all of the formulas are amazing, some shades are better than others. So I'm just going to talk about her matte formula right now. Generally speaking, this is a very good matte formula. Like I said, very loosely packed, very soft. Some shades are much more soft in consistency than others. For example, Evil Eye, Free Spirit, Desert Queen Cactus, and Dreamcatcher. All of these guys in this area, I noticed to be incredibly soft. I feel like if this had a rough travel, those shades would break. Especially Free Spirit, it's almost chalky feeling. It is that loosely packed. I personally don't mind because I do just like to use this as kind of a base color or underneath my brows. So it's a little bit more messy than I personally would prefer. Desert Queen as well is one of those extremely soft shades. Another shade worth talking about is Cactus. This one was not my favorite. Tone wise and shade wise, this is actually my favorite matte in the palette. I think it is so unique. It's kind of like a seafoam aqua and it is so gorgeous. But it can run a little bit patchy.  That's for sure. You can kind of build onto it to make it not patchy anymore. So it is workable, but just be aware upon initial application. This may come out a little bit patchy, but it can be fixed. Dreamcatcher and Moonshild, they do have microfine glitters in them that may or may not show up depending on how you use them. If you use Dreamcatcher all over your crease, you're not going to get those glitter particles, but if you pack it on, you will see it. Same thing with Moonshild. This, the glitter particles are much more noticeable in the pan, but I have it in my outer corner. You can't even tell there's any glitters in it. I did pack this on over my eyeliner, however, and you could see little blue flecks. But personally, that doesn't bother me at all. Which by the way, Moonshild right here is a really great shade. For the most part, I really do like the mattes on here. I think they blend super easily. They're super soft. They're very pigmented and they're buildable. I think at some point, some shades may be a little bit more crumbly than I would prefer, which makes them a tad bit harder to work with. But they're a good formula, especially for these more weird colors up here. It's a good formula. I do want to talk about her shimmers. Personally, I don't think the shimmer formula is as good as in her latte palette. For some reason, there was a couple shades in the latte palette where her shimmer formula just killed it. Gypsy right here. I really do not like this shade too much. While it is beautiful on the lid, it's one of those shades that is extremely powdery and it kind of separates on your eye and it doesn't really melt into your skin or glide onto your skin. This is that shade that you really have to be careful with and press into the skin. It doesn't look very uniform on your lid. You can kind of see those pigment particles separating. You can work it into your lid. No problem and it does look okay. This shade does require a little bit of extra work. I would recommend using it on top of a glitter glue or maybe even using it wet is gonna make the shade work. But yeah, this one, it falls apart and crumbles. So just be careful when using this one. Wonderlust is definitely my favorite shimmer in this palette. It is what is on the inner half of my lid. Super beautiful. You're definitely going to get a very metallic cake when you use the shade wet. Bohemian I do like. I was a bit underwhelmed with it just because I felt like it did fall a little bit flat. I have so many bronzes that show up much more reflective and give off so much more payoff than this shade does. This one I had to kind of build up to get my desired opacity and shy. And I was surprised by this because usually at this company it does a great job with these types of shades. But yeah, I was a little bit underwhelmed with that shade. With the exception of Gypsy, this is a really good palette formulation wise. I do enjoy it and for $44 and the amount of product you're getting, I do think it's worth it. And though this palette may look intimidating at first, it's not laid out in a way that's just going to be confusing. If you look at it you can really see the different types of looks you can create. You can create a neutral eye, you can create a blue eye, a green eye kind of what I have going on right now. This purple and pink would be beautiful. You can just really go in a lot of different directions with this palette. And I didn't see it at first, but when I really looked at it I was like, wow this palette is very unique. I have been creating some looks with it over the past couple of days. I've been sticking with more of the neutral colors, but for my look today, I did want to do kind of a crazy fun look. So here's how I got this look. So I started off with the shade Free Spirit right here, and I just used that to set underneath my brow and kind of that base light color underneath there. I then went in with the shade Cactus, which is that color you will see kind of comes off a little bit patchy at first, but it can easily be remedied. It looks fine after you work with it just with the second layer. So I really like Cactus. Like I said, it's my favorite matte shade and it's very unique. And then I went in with the shade Moon Child, and I just packed that onto the outer corner of my eyelid. I decided I wanted to make a smoky eye today, so I packed that on and I blended it. This was a very easy color to work with. And then I finished off with the shade Wunderlust right here, and I used my finger initially to apply and though that worked, I found that this actually played really well with a flat shader brush, and then I did wet my brush at the end just to kind of give it that extra punch to the eyelid. And on my lower lash line, I basically kind of repeated what I did on the top on the bottom, and I put on lashes and liner and all of that. So if you are curious about anything else that I'm wearing, it will be in the description box, but I'm so obsessed with this look. And it's insane the different types of looks that I can get with this palette. I can go in a complete different directions, and you wouldn't have guessed that they were just all from this palette. So I think if you're wanting to add something a little bit more different to your collection, or if you're wanting to experiment with some shadows and just create different kinds of looks, then you're more comfortable with normally. I think that this is a great palette to go with, because you can create neutral everyday looks. This is very encouraging of playing outside the box a little bit and doing something you're not normally used to, so I do like this palette a lot. Is it my favorite palette from Dominique Cosmetics? No, I love her latte palette so much, and I really enjoy her berries and cream as well. But I do think this is a very nice, unique palette out on the market right now. There really isn't one at the moment out with this color story. So yeah, I don't regret purchasing it. If you are interested in buying this palette and this color story interests you, you won't be disappointed. It's a very nice formula. And it's also supporting a really nice and lovely business owner as well. So anyways, I hope you guys enjoyed this review. I hope you found it helpful. Let me know down below if you picked this guy up or if you are thinking of it. And I will see you guys in my next video. Bye guys. Have a great day.


Hi everyone, so my name is Brian Carey and I'm pretty new here, so I work for Red Hat and I'm the upstream QvertCI maintainer. I'm here today to talk to you about how we build QvertCI with CentOS Stream. So just for some background for anybody that doesn't know, what is Qvert? Qvert is a virtual machine management add-on for Kubernetes. It allows users to create, run, manage VMs in Kubernetes clusters. It's considered a production-grade hypervisor, and as far as I know, it is the leading virtualization add-on for Kubernetes, so it's the leading way to run VMs in Kubernetes. Last month, we had a very big milestone in that Qvert finally reached version 1.0, so that was a big release for us. Testing a project like Qvert comes with its challenges as it integrates a large number of different projects and sub-projects, but in Qvert proper, our testing can be broken down into two main categories, which is unit tests and our larger E2E tests, so our end-to-end tests. The end-to-end tests actually require running against valid virtual test clusters that we spin up. One of the other aims in the project is that we try to stay as close as possible to the methodology used in the upstream Kubernetes project, so they're testing methodologies upstream. This means that we end up using their kind of ecosystem of tools like services like Prow, which is basically like a Jenkins for orchestrating CI jobs against Kubernetes clusters. So I can hear you thinking, okay, that all sounds great, but where does CentOStreme come in? So CentOStreme is the solid base that we use for our virtual test clusters, which are then schedules to larger workload clusters. So these clusters are spun up for our end-to-end testing. The test cluster node images, there's a specific project that we have, a sub-project within the Kewvert organization called Kewvert CI, and this project is responsible just for building these cluster providers, as we call them. Overall these cluster providers, the virtual ones are based off of CentOStreme vagrant images. So we basically take the latest CentOStreme vagrant image continually as much as we can. So the building process, all of this is done through automation, but the general guideline for it is we basically have Fedora containers spin up. This Fedora container has all the tooling required to start up the CentOStreme vagrant image. And then we have a tool for orchestrating the provisioning of these images. We call this tool, it's written in ghost, it's called Ghost CLI. This tool basically just orchestrates which scripts are run where, as some scripts are run during provisioning, and some scripts are run as cluster runtime, basically. Once the provisioning scripts mainly focus on setting up network and storage requirements, there are many dependencies that we have for installing Kubernetes with QBADM. So these scripts are all run against the VM at provisioning time. Once these scripts complete successfully, the VM inside the container is then shut down and we then commit that container image as an image, as a container image. So that image is then committed with the updated VM image inside. So okay, that's great. We have a node image, but how do we know what we built is actually a valid Kubernetes cluster? So within the QvertCI repo, we have a number of test lines that run against these new, any changes that are pushed into the QvertCI repo as pull requests. So these run a subset of the Qvert end-to-end tests, and they also run the suite of Kubernetes conformance tests. So that we know what we're building is an actual valid Kubernetes cluster based on center stream. Any merge changes to this QvertCI repo leads to new cluster provider images being published to Quay. So they're always available there. When our automation picks up that there's a new image in Quay, this image is then picked up, and a PR is created against Qvert-Qvert proper, so that we can run the full suite of end-to-end tests against this image as well. So we do have some protections there against running against the latest center stream where we rarely hit on the issues. So this is kind of a picture I drew up, part of the reason why I wanted to do this talk was to spend some time drawing this up from my own mind. So this is how it looks when it all comes together. So these end-to-end test pods, they're basically scheduled to our worker nodes. The ones here below just reflect the top one. It's the same thing throughout. Generally, within the end-to-end test pod, we have a podman instance, which spins up our node container image that we've just published, and then this node container image in turn starts off the center stream VM, and then the Kubernetes cluster gets to a running and healthy state following some runtime scripts, and then we basically install Qvert against it, and we run our test suite, which basically Qvert uses this vert launcher pod concept for spinning up VMs within these vert launcher pods. So basically those test VMs that we spin up inside that test suite are running in nested virtualization. The bare metal nodes up until recently were also running center stream as well in production. Some of the benefits we saw from using center stream, first of all, it's an extremely stable base, so 99.9% of the time we don't hit any issues. So it's just smooth sailing 99% of the time. It allows us to catch any potential issues earlier than we would have previously using the old Centus 8 model. So previously the providers were built with Centus 8, but we've moved to stream. We've moved to stream 8 and stream 9. Over the last year, we've hit a couple of issues, really only a handful of issues. A couple of examples here. So we hit a couple of kernel bugs. We hit an issue with network manager and some DHB clients. And then SE Linux policy changes can trip us up every so often. There are components in Qvert that basically require certain privileges and center stream can't be aware of that. So then we have to talk between projects to see what is the best way forward in that way. Sometimes we make changes on our end, sometimes center stream makes changes. So overall, center stream is a very good target for us for testing as it really reflects our main downstream product, which will be OpenShift container native virtualization. So it's very good at reflecting the environment and it also allows us to catch issues very early. And so problems we've hit, I really struggled to come up with any major problems here. I had it on my overview for the talk, so I said I'd better include it. So issues are very rare, as I said on the previous slide. Sometimes we get blocked with center stream issues, but they're not center stream issues, but issues that we hit. And that blocks us from delivering new providers. So if a new version of Kubernetes comes out, sometimes we could be blocked from testing against the newest version of Kubernetes because we have some issue back here in center stream. The second point is just a pet peeve of mine because we're always testing against latest. Basically, we have the latest kernel in center stream, and then we're running our automation, and the automation fails because the kernel modules aren't there yet. So that's just the best moment we hit every so often. Then I have community members coming to me and going, why are these lanes failing? And I'm like, just give us 20 minutes and they'll be there. So this always starts up the conversation. Within the Kuber community, we want to pin to a certain version of center stream or not. In my opinion, we get way too much value from running against the latest in order to pin it, and we do not want to be managing uplifts of center stream because we will fall behind. So I generally just prefer just to go to latest. Sometimes we'll pin an individual package for a certain period of time just to get around the problem, but that's always a temporary measure. Running off the latest just gives us too much benefits. So yeah, as a bonus content slide, I said I'd show you where to get center stream VM images for Kuber. So if you have a Kubernetes cluster and you have Kuber installed somehow, and you want to run a center stream VM, we have container disk images that we build and publish in Quay as well. So these container disk images are used for ephemeral VMs normally. They're very handy for CI or any kind of testing that you might be doing. They're basically based off of the center stream cloud images. So they're loosely wrapped around those. So basically any of your configuration will be cloud-net config that you would need for that. Yeah, and the image registry also includes a handy YAML example to get a stream VM up and running very quickly. I was going to attempt to do a demo on it, but I chickened out towards the end. So yeah, here's just a screenshot of the landing page as a result. And as you can see, the YAML is quite brief and it's probably the small on the screen there.  That basic example will get something running, but it won't be much used to you. You won't be able to sign into it. You won't be able to get into the VM or anything like that. So you add your SH keys, your authorized keys or whatever to that cloud-net config. So yeah, just to conclude, Qvert loves CentOS Stream really. It's not just, as I alluded to previously, it's not just using Qvert CI. It's used all over Qvert. So all of our Qvert artifacts are built in a CentOS Stream workspace. Qvert actually relies on the CentOS Stream virtualization stack. So we actually take Levert and Kemu from the CentOS Stream 9 repos and we actually use those and build those into our virtual launcher pods that I mentioned earlier. So they're actually the components that are actually starting up the VMs in the Kubernetes cluster. So that's all Stream 9 virtualization stack. And our production CI workloads cluster was deployed on CentOS Stream to very recently. Unfortunately, the burden of maintaining OS updates and Kubernetes updates on that cluster was too much. So we moved to OpenShift just recently. The updates were on me to do so. It was too much. Yeah, so then just to finish up, just to say thank you to the CentOS community and if there's any questions. Q I asked about the vagrant layer. Was that a decision you made? I'm curious a little bit about the vagrant layer. Was that a traditional decision or is that something that you chose? Yeah, it was a long term decision. It was a long decision made a long time ago and it's been carried forward. The vagrant image gives us kind of a handy user setup and login details into the vagrant image and we just use those then throughout our automation. So to change it would involve a bit. But the vagrant images have been working quite well for us. Awesome. Yeah, it's good to hear from vagrant users for sure. This might be a basic question. I missed the beginning, unfortunately, because I was between rooms. Can you explain to me what's the elevator pitch for KubeVirt? It's your virtualizing inside virtualization? No, no, no. So the KubeVirt product itself will be, that's only KubeVirt CI. So that's only how we're running our E2E, our end-to-end tests. So that nested virtualization only happens within our test suites. But KubeVirt itself, for anybody that has large Kubernetes clusters that they want to run VMs alongside pods, for large organizations who might be migrating to a Kubernetes workflow and they have existing VMs, they can easily just take that image and deploy it straight onto their Kubernetes cluster or OpenShift cluster. And then they basically, it helps to transition to that Kubernetes kind of way of working. So the VMs are basically treated as a container, well, not the word container, but a place that apps go. It's not that the containers are running on top of that VM. You could. You could run, you could go all the way down, but no, generally the VMs would be, yeah, just running inside pods and they'd be more or less, they'd be kind of like, like, monolithic services that would be running there. Okay, okay. And then the other question that I had was when you're doing nested virtualization in your CI. Yeah. Is the environmental difference when you're doing that, is that limited in terms of you don't find certain things because it's not quite the same environment? Not really. There is a performance impact. So there's a slight performance impact. So when we run our test suite on bare metal, it runs a lot faster. But the nested virtualization, there's a small performance impact there. So some of the tests may have, may take longer. So we do have kind of, we have a flaky test process that we have to try and identify these tests and make sure that they're kind of fixed to fix those kind of flakes. And then is it running on open QA in Fedora? No, no, no, this is all running on a big, large bare metal workload cluster that we have. Okay, thanks.


stories have always been one of the most powerful ways for human beings to transfer wisdom from one person to another or from one generation to another. And in this video today, I'm going to introduce to you a really just one of the special story that I've come across. It's a book called The Little Light by Deepa Sanathani. And you may recall, if you've been with me for a while, I interviewed the author a couple months ago.  This book is about spirit animals, but it does have a spirit animal character in it. I'm just going to start with a quick introduction to the book. I'll read you a little passage. And then I'm going to share with you why this book is so special. And be sure to stick through to the end, because there's a special event associated with this book that I'd like to invite you to. Okay, so The Little Light is the name actually of the main character of the book. And it's not her real name, but it's what she's referred to. And it's because it's the story of a little soul. And it kind of tells the story of what happens when the soul's about to come in to the manifestation and all these celestial guides. So let me just start with this passage here, from the middle of the book. Maya, a voice whispers. Maya, it's time, time for you to emerge from the womb. It's approximately midday. The sun is at the highest point in the sky. The rest of the planets watch silently at the little light manifest itself into the physical world of matter. It's a girl, the doctor says. Not that he had to, the gender of the baby was known well before it was born. After the nurses cut the umbilical cord, they hand the baby to the mother, who feeds her for the very first time. Despite the pain of the labor, the mother feels a deep love growing inside her for the baby that she brought into this world. It is like I loved you well before you were born, she thinks. Perhaps we were tied together in a previous life. A black owl with turquoise eyes silently sweeps into the room. Only the baby can see it. I am Parusa, the owl says, the spirit guide of your paternal ancestors. I am here to guide you in this world so that you may fulfill your destiny. It is not a path that has been laid out for you, but one you will have to create on your own. The baby looks at the owl and blinks. The journey from the cosmic womb to the physical world is a painful one for the mother and for the little light itself. You have inherited a great legacy, Parusa says, but by the time you are old enough to inherit it, the old ways will have turned to dust. Know that you have been born into this world so that you can bring forth a new legacy, one that will survive for generations to come. To help you in this task you will meet your twin when the time is right. You may not recognize him, but he will recognize you. Together you will bring forth a new age for all mankind. But for now, sleep, little one. The baby closes its eyes and falls asleep. Maya, voice whispers, Maya, your time has come. Okay, so there's a lot that happens in the story before we even get to that point of birth. Okay, so when the story first begins she has a couple guides that kind of usher her in and then she's brought into the space of this cosmic womb and the planets all come in and they have a party and during this party we get to learn the kind of the personalities of each planet as they bestow their blessings upon this little soul. And I just have to say that I found it to be a very both entertaining but also extremely informative way to learn about the planets is sometimes when you start learning about concepts like astrology, it can be just so much information packing in your head. It's like really, really hard to figure out, okay, what does Jupiter mean again? You know, what about Mercury? What's the deal with the retrograde? All this stuff. I don't consider myself an astrologer. I just have a sort of a basic understanding of the planets and the houses. So to me this was a very, very easy way for me to start to understand the planets at a deeper, more visceral level and then all the interactions between the planets were first of all really entertaining and second she used the story an amazing way to both tell the story and to help us to understand what the dynamics can be like between planets. So it was like they were actually embodying the aspects and the chart of this little soul. Later on in the book, we delve also into reincarnation and past lives and some of the concepts around that. We actually discussed this book in my Patreon group, the Wolfpack and in fact it was one of my Wolfpack members who suggested that we read this together and it was just everybody just really, really enjoyed the little light. What it did for I think every one of us who read it was like we all dug out our charts and started to really read this book and start to look at our own charts in a different way. I was only expecting it to be a fun story but what came out of it for me was a much, much deeper understanding of the planets and certain aspects of astrology that I had no clue about. There were just a lot of aha moments that came out of the dialogue of the book and it was like oh now I understand what the North and South nodes are and it really sparked a big stream of inquiry for me looking into my charts and it just kind of popped up all sorts of like wow I suddenly realized this about myself and that explains all the stuff that I had been really kind of clueless about before. So Diva tells me that the book is actually written for a younger audience. A lot of people have been purchasing the book for their children or grandchildren as just first of all it's a fun alternative to a lot of the really dark stuff that's being marketed to that age also as an introduction to astrology and but I think any age could really appreciate this because it tells you so much about yourself. So if you are interested in this little book check it out and if you do find yourself reading it and if you're free on the evening of Wednesday November 17th I'll be hosting an open host Meet the Author event with Diva Sanatani and we're just going to have a book discussion about The Little Light. You are welcome to join it'll be free of charge and I would love to see you there. If you do read the book, post a comment below and love to hear what you think and as always remember you are going to be free.