Hey everyone, welcome to our first webinar for Give Big St. Croix Valley. We'll just give everybody a few minutes to get logged in. Sarah, I see that you're listed as an attendee. You should have gotten a presenter link. So before we get started, if you can try to find the email from GoToWebinar with that link and join as a presenter, you'll be able to talk on the webinar because unfortunately attendees are not able to speak. If you can find that presenter link and log on with that, we can go ahead and get started. And before we get going, I just wanted to make sure that everybody can hear me speaking and see my screen. So if you're able to view the slides and if you're able to hear me, if you could just go into the questions box of your GoToWebinar panel. And I'm going to flip through the first couple of slides and just say yes to let me know that you can hear and see. That would be a huge help to me. All right, I'm not sure if, okay, it looks like people are able to hear me and see my screen. So that's fantastic. And we are going to be recording everything today. So if you miss any part of it, the audio and visuals will be available to you in the recording, but it looks like my audio and my slides are working. So we'll just go ahead and get started. So thanks for coming everybody today. This is our first webinar for Give Big St. Croix Valley. At least on the Mighty Cause site, I know that you've been working with Sarah on some training. You've had lots of meetings and she's been working hard to get you prepared for this year's giving event. My name is Linda Gerhart and I am the Senior Community Engagement Manager at Mighty Cause. I believe this is my third year helping out with Give Big St. Croix Valley. It's always an excellent giving event and a lot of really a lot of fun to watch. Lots of great fundraisers and activities. My email address if you need to get in touch with me is lindaatmightycause.com. And what Mighty Cause basically does is we handle the technical side of things. We provide some technical trainings, support, and we work with the Give Big team at United Way St. Croix Valley to help everything run smoothly. And I should hopefully be joined by Sarah. Let me see if she's logged on as a host. Let's see. All right, Sarah, if you are here, please say hello. You do need to log in with that presenter link. But hopefully we'll get her online before the Q&A portion of the presentation. I'm going to go through the presentation. And if you're able to log on with that presenter link, Sarah, before the Q&A, just pipe in and hopefully you'll be here to answer some questions for us. All right, so this is a look at today's agenda. It's going to be a pretty basic webinar getting you up to speed for this year with some extras thrown in. We're going to start off with the basics of Give Big St. Croix Valley, how to get started on the platform, and then we're going to reserve some time for questions at the end of the presentation. So since we have quite a bit to get through today, if you do have a question while I'm presenting, just go ahead and put your question into the questions box on your GoToWebinar panel, and we'll make sure to get to it at the end of the presentation just so that we can get through what we need to get through. And sometimes questions end up being answered in the course of the presentation. So go ahead and use that questions box if you have anything you want to ask me during the presentation. All right, so we're going to go into Give Big Basics first. Give Big St. Croix Valley is a 24-hour long event that is taking place on April 28, 2020. That is a Tuesday. The event runs from midnight to midnight central time. Early giving for Give Big St. Croix Valley starts on April 1, 2020. So that's coming up soon. We've had a little bit longer in the past, but this should hopefully help you build some good momentum starting in the month of April. And prizes and the structure for prizes should be announced soon. So that's currently in the works. Sarah's working very hard at that. A Giving Day, if you've never participated in one before, is a unique campaign that's presented by a host in this case, United Way St. Croix Valley. That allows other organizations to compete with other nonprofits or just against their own goal to win prize money, build a following, gain new supporters and so on. Giving Days are a really exciting way for you to engage sponsors, community partners, peer-to-peer fundraisers and more. It gets donors excited. It builds a lot of community excitement. And that's really the main goal of a Giving Day is to get a community excited about supporting nonprofits in their area doing important, fantastic work. The limited timeframe also creates a sense of urgency that donors tend to respond to really strongly. It gets them excited. It gets them, you know, really amped up about giving to nonprofits in their area. And for that reason, it's a really great marketing tool for your nonprofit can help you bring in revenue and really just get your donor base stirred up.  It'll get supporters excited to help you win those prizes. And of course, it's just an added bonus for your nonprofit. That's more money for you to put towards your important work. So to participate in Give Big St. Croix Valley, you'll want to register your organization if you have not already done so. This is really the first step in participating in an event like Give Big St. Croix Valley. Even if you have participated in years past, things change from year to year. So we don't assume that you're going to participate. You do need to register to let everybody know like, hey, I want to participate in Give Big St. Croix Valley again this year. There's a very simple form on the Give Big St. Croix Valley site that you can fill out. And if you've used Mighty Cause before, your information or a lot of your information should already be pre-filled. Once you're registered, you can customize your profile on Mighty Cause and start planning your campaign. Really today, we're going to talk a lot about customizing your profile on Mighty Cause. And in our second webinar, we're going to go into campaign strategy. You can invite people involved with your organization to participate as peer-to-peer fundraisers, get them involved, think through how you're going to get your biggest supporters involved in your Give Big campaign. And once early giving has started on April 1st, you can actually start promoting your campaign and get people to make early donations to your nonprofit that will count toward prizes on Give Big St. Croix Valley. So you'll need to win those prizes. Early giving is really important for building momentum and building a base of donations that you can work on during the big day. So you also want to take a look at the Give Big St. Croix Valley website. It looks great this year. Sarah has done a lot of excellent work on it. So go to givebigscv.org, take a look at everything that's there, get the information, get a feel for what this year's event is going to be like. So that's also where you can find the registration form. So if you have not already registered for Give Big, you want to take some time to do so and make sure that you're signed up for this year's event. All right. And here is how to get started. So to sound like a broken record a little bit, the first thing you do need to do is get registered for the event. If you have any questions at all pertaining to your registration, you can email support at mightycause.com. As in years previous, there is a registration fee for participating in this event. And there is a link that you can follow to make sure that you pay that fee before the event. If you are not able to pay that or there's some issue, Sarah will be in contact with you just so that you've got that fee paid before the event actually begins. And to register, you do need to log in or sign up for a mighty cause account if this is the first time you've visited the site. And once you've done that, what either logged in or signed up, you'll unlock the registration form and you can submit the answers. And then we'll take a look at your registration and in most cases just approve you to participate. So you'll get an email letting you know that you successfully submitted your registration to us. And you'll also get an email once you've been approved just letting you know that your registration is good to go. And just as a note, there is a tool that we'll be talking about in a few slides that you can use to add other administrators to your nonprofit. So you don't need to worry about who else might need access. Just log in with your mighty cause account fill out the registration form and if you'd like to add somebody to your account so that they can help you manage your page. You're able to do that later through your organization's page.  This is not required, but definitely profiles that have their five to-do items built out tend to do a little bit better on giving days because they've shown their page some love. So you can find your to-do list on your nonprofit profile. Once you go to your profile, it'll take you to a dashboard that has some metrics. And there are five basic items for you to complete to complete your profile for Give Big St. Croix Valley. You'll need to add a background image to your page or use one from our gallery of stock background images. Upload your logo, which is going to be used to represent you throughout Give Big St. Croix Valley. If you already have one, no worries, but you may want to update that if there's been any change to your logo in 2020. You'll also want to add a story, which we also call a description that tells visitors to your profile about what your nonprofit does. And you'll want to build a thank you page to thank donors, which we're going to talk about more a bit later. And then finally, you'll want to set up electronic funds transfer or EFT so you can get your disbursements through direct deposit. This is not required. It's just something that's recommended so that you can get the money you raise more frequently and get it a little bit quicker since we don't have to mail out a paper check. So again, that's not required. You don't have to complete your to-do list, but it is super highly recommended. And if you have any questions about how to complete your to-do list or anything related to your dashboard, just let us know at supportatmadycause.com. We also have a pretty robust support library that has some video walkthroughs and step-by-step instructions to finding things like your donations report. So definitely take a look at that if you're trying to get reoriented this year or if you've never used Mighty Cause before. And we also take some time, we recommend taking some time to get to know your dashboard. Your dashboard, which we like to call your Mighty Cause manager, is that gray bar on the left side of your screen that you see when you're logged in on your nonprofits profile. You'll automatically land on your welcome screen, which is where you'll find those metrics and your to-do list. But using the dashboard, you can navigate to edit your page, check your page settings or make changes to your page settings. You can view the page as it appears to your visitors, your live view, which is sometimes important because if you haven't filled out a page that is part of your page that's available to you, sometimes you'll see that as an admin, but visitors to your page won't necessarily see that. So take some time to get to know your dashboard. Just to give you a heads up, there are going to be some changes to your dashboard, but it's actually going to be easier and more intuitive to navigate and things won't be drastically changed. But this is basically your main control panel as you're using Mighty Cause and preparing your organization's page for GiveBig. Alright, so the next step once you've gotten logged in and you've gotten yourself oriented is to customize your profile. Your profile is really the face of your nonprofit for GiveBig St. Croix Valley. So you'll want to make sure that it's looking good and it's representing your organization well, especially for events like GiveBig, which have been going on for quite some time. You'll want to make sure that you check in with your profile and make sure it represents you in 2020. Sometimes we can sort of set it and forget it, but you want to show it some love. You want to make sure that it reflects the work you're doing now and make sure that it's up to date. So just so you know, the link that you will share with your supporters unless you're using a separate fundraising page, a campaign page, is just the URL to your organization's page. That's typically where you'll ask them to make donations. You know, you'll just send them straight to this profile page and they can click the donate button and make a donation to your organization. So as long as you're going, as you're going through your to-do list, you'll want to customize your profile to match your brand. There are two ways you can start customizing your profile. You can click profile in your dashboard and choose the page editor from the submenu and this will open up a menu of everything that you're able to edit.  The other way to customize, as you can see in the visual on this slide, is to click profile and use the little pencil icons that appear on the page to indicate that a section can be edited. So you just click the pencil and you'll open up a tool to edit that particular part of the page. So it's very easy, very intuitive, and there are some redundancies built in that will help you, you know, no matter where you go, you can sort of figure out where you can edit and how to access the tools that you can use to edit. The first thing you'll want to do when you're customizing your profile and trying to make sure that it matches your brand is upload your organization's logo. You can use that pencil icon to open up that section for editing. Logos do need to have a one to one aspect ratio to fit, and that's just basically a fancy way of saying square. So the same thing is a Facebook profile photo or an Instagram photo that should fit beautifully in that spot. And we do have a cropping tool when you upload your image that will help you crop it to fit to the one to one aspect ratio. If you do have a logo that is landscape or is just not fitting the way you want, you can always contact us at support and will help you make sure that that logo fits and looks great on your profile. And you'll also want to make sure that your logo is not clashing with your background image because this is going to be used to represent you. You want to make sure that you have a visually simple logo where people can look at it and they know it's you if there are words there that they can read it. So that's something you want to keep in mind as well. It's best when you're uploading your logo, you know, not to get too fancy, just a simple logo without too much extra stuff that can distract from who you are. The next thing you'll want to do is upload your background image. You can see that the background image here on the slide is just sort of a photo of two people sitting on a couch with a dog. And that is intentional. It's meant to be a background image. Sometimes the temptation is to put lots of text overlay on the background image. But one thing that's important to know is that Mighty Cause is fully mobile mobile responsive. And what that means is that the website adjusts to the device that it is being viewed on. So if you have a phone, which is vertical, the site will look a little bit different than it would be if you're looking at it on your laptop or your desktop computer monitor, which is horizontal. So that's one thing to keep in mind if you have an image that can adjust easily that will look best on all devices, lots of text overlay and things that are very specific to, you know, the placement on your monitor tend to not work as well. So if you're confused about the background image, a simple photo is best and you can use a cropping tool. It's kind of a strange aspect ratio, but you can use the cropping tool to make sure it fits in that image container. And if you have any issues or questions whatsoever, just contact support. We're here to help you and we want your page to look as good as it possibly can. And the last thing you'll want to do is to set your theme color. You can do that through the same tool you would use to upload your background image if you have a, you know, a color that you use for your brand, like the black there or the blue that's in the logo. You can either use the color picker to choose that that's the box below, or you can just enter in the hex code, which you may have in a branding kit. And if you're not sure, you can always contact support and we're happy to help you out. The default is sort of the mighty cause blue, but you can use any color that you want there. So just, you know, coordinate your page, make it look nice, make it match and you'll be good. That's that's what your theme editing is for. The about section of your page is your chance to explain what your nonprofit is all about. The text editor is right next is right in the sec is right in the section. It's an inline text editor. So all you have to do is just click into that section and just start writing. You can add in media there to jazz things up. You can add videos, you can add headers, you can add buttons. You can do all sorts of things with that text editor. You can add hyperlinks. So really using that formatting is helpful because it breaks up the wall of text. So a lot of people will put their mission statement there. Mission statements are often not super exciting to read. So adding some extra visual interest there like images, a campaign video links to your website or whatever you would like people to know about you is really helpful. It keeps people on the page. It makes it interesting to look at and the more interesting it is to look at and the easier it is to read the more time more time people are likely to spend there absorbing the information that you've put together. You can also add a custom tab. So for instance, if you have more information that you wanted to share, you know, whether you're giving thanks to your sponsors or you have information about dropping off offline donations or checks to your organization, whatever you want to do. You can add a custom tab if you would like to put some more information there that isn't quite right for your story. So that's another option that is available to you is to add a custom tab. It's basically, you know, a whole other bit of information that you can use to communicate with your donors. So the last sub menu item within your profile section is your page settings. This is where you can go to update your metrics that show on your page publicly. This is always a point of confusion. We don't automatically reset that information for you. So you do want to go into your page settings and make sure that that number is reset. If you would like the amount that's raised on your page to only show what you've raised for this year's give big. So you don't necessarily need to do that right now. But before April 1st when donations open, you'll want to go into your page settings and just reset that date there so that it's set for April 1st 2020. And that way it'll just make sure that the amount that you've raised on your page just displays what you've raised this year instead of cumulative cumulatively everything that you've raised since you've had a mighty cause profile or during last year's event. And you can also set your goal there so if you have a funding goal, you can set that there you can add a goal in progress bar to your page that shows people how close you are to raising that amount. So this is a really important page to pay attention to to make sure that you have set up for this year. And the other thing that you can do is you can find options to embed the widget on your site. So if you would like to direct traffic to your website or turn all of the donations through your website into give big donations starting on April 1st. You can just embed the widget onto your site and you can make sure that any donations that you capture through your website also are tracked on mighty cause and you're giving credit for them on the leaderboard. So that's something else you can do within your page settings. And a really important section the next one down is reports. So you can access reports on donations and disbursements in the report section of your dashboard. I'm clicking on that section will give you a sub menu where you can choose all donations a report on your recurring donations, as well as a donor retention report which we're going to talk about a lot in our next webinar when we talk about retaining donors from previous give big campaigns. You can find disbursements as well as offline donations reports here. So if you would like to track if you'd like to enter checks that you may have received your cash that you may have received. You can actually download a separate report that will tell you, you know what offline donations have been added. So your donation report will be available for you in real time and include information like the donor name their email, any designations or dedication options that you've set up and the donor has chosen the gross and net amount of their donation, as well as the fees associated with their donation. Now I do want to mention that when you go to the donation report on the mighty cause website, you're going to see a limited view there there's only a few pieces of key information that we have listed actually on the website, but you can download a report, and that will give you a ton of columns that you're just not able to see, because there's no way on this green earth that we could have fit them all in that one view so if you're looking for something specific, like the time they gave or the breakdown of the fees. You can just download that full donation report, and you can view all that additional information that we just don't have space to include on the view because obviously we have to make sure that it fits on phones and tablets as well. Another important thing to know is that you can set you can see your disbursements. When you have EFT setup that's the direct deposit option I was talking about earlier, you'll actually get your, your, the money that you raise on the 10th and the 25th and it'll just appear in the bank account that you've linked checks are sent out around the 10th of each month, and there is a $5 check fee for paper checks so we do recommend setting up the direct deposit option. And once you start getting money, you will get them on that schedule it's not going to all come after the event is over if you start raising money on April 1, you will get a disbursement on the 25th if you've set up EFT. You can reconcile those numbers with your disbursement reports. So those are really important to know where they are so when you get your deposit or you get your check, and you say what's on this or there seems to be some missing because sometimes because of the schedule. You can get a little bit of it now and then a little bit of it later based on when those donations were made. So you can use that disbursement report to understand what's included in this report and you can also see the breakdown of fees and any refunds that took place, and so on so that's a really helpful thing to know exactly where that is. Alright so the next item on your mighty cause manager, or your dashboard is the fundraiser section. There are several sub menu options to choose from, and we're going to talk about just a few of them today. The first I wanted to hit on was the donor experience section. This is probably one of the more important features to focus on when you're going through your profile and setting it up for this year's event. The donor experience section gives you a lot of control over the donation process for your organization on mighty cause. It allows you to opt into collecting the information that you want from donors. So if addresses are really important because you want to get people signed up for your, your mailing list, you can collect at you can opt into collecting addresses by default we just collect email addresses but you can opt into collecting addresses. You can also add custom questions like phone numbers and you can really customize that experience to make sure that it looks and feels how you want and that you're getting the information that is most important for your organization. The other thing that's really key on this section in donor experience is custom donation suggestions. So you can put in amounts those are when people click donate, they're going to be seeing four different amounts, plus a custom option that they can choose. You know their amount to give they can enter in whatever they want, but people really do look to those amounts to determine how much to give to your nonprofit, it sort of helps them it gives them some some guide posts and it makes it a little bit easier for them. So it's really important to set those donation amounts if $25 $75 and 100 is fine for you you don't need to necessarily do anything there. But if you wanted to customize it, you can definitely do it and one thing that we do recommend is also filling out those impact descriptions so that is the short little bit of text that sort of explains what that amount provides. So for instance, if you're an animal shelter or an animal risk rescue and $30 helps you provide, you know, food for a week for X number of animals, that is a really helpful thing to put in there. People like the idea of being able to give something tangible. It's not a restricted thing where you have to use it for that purpose, but it really helps make the case that they should donate in that particular amount. So that kind of impact description is really helpful. It'll help bump people up to the next level of giving in a lot of cases, and it just helps give people a great experience they feel like they're giving something tangible like an in kind donation almost to your nonprofit so take a look at those amounts and also take a look at those descriptions and make sure that you're giving a cohesive message about donating to your nonprofit. It's really, really important. It hits people at a key moment when they're deciding how much to give. So there's really nothing that's more important than that. And then the last thing you'll want to do in donor experience is preview the donation experience. So you don't have to make a test donation. You can actually preview that whole process through the preview button that's in donor experience, you can see the view checkout button in that slide real quick, it goes away quickly, but it's there. And that'll take you through the process with the options that you've chosen. And that gives you a really great way to edit yourself and make sure that you are not creating a cumbersome experience for your donors. You want it to be as easy as it can be while you're getting all of the information that you want. So take a moment and preview that donation experience after you have gone through and chosen your options. And just make sure that that's simple and easy for your donors. We give you a lot of flexibility in terms of what you can present and what you can opt into. But obviously you just want to make sure that you're not making things more complicated than they need to be for your donors. Donor experience is also where you'll go to set up your thank you page and to customize your donation receipt, both of which use the same text editor as your story on your profile so you can add text, links, a video or image and you can also add a custom CTA button to your thank you page. And the thank you page is really important. That's a fairly new feature that I think we added at the beginning of last year, and it just hits them right after they've completed their donation. So in a lot of ways, it automates the thank you process. Statistically, it's really important to donors to be thanked quickly after they make their donation and the speed at which they are thanked actually does play a role in whether or not they're likely to give again. So it just creates a cohesive experience for your donor when you fill out this thank you page, it reinforces your messaging. And so it's really important to show that page some love, make sure that you're thanking them and showing your appreciation for them, and then also giving them a, you know, jumping off point if they want to learn more about your work. You could, for instance, link to your Facebook page and say, hey, follow us on Facebook. And you're getting them at a key moment when they are feeling warm to your organization and have just completed their donation. So it's really important to show that that page some love that's in the post checkout section under donor experience. And then you can also add a custom message into your automated donation receipt. Once somebody completes their donation on Mighty Cause, we will email them a tax receipt. Basically, it's pretty dry. It's got some boilerplate legal language on there. And it's another opportunity for you to show your appreciation to that donor. So sometimes we forget about this or we've said it once in 2018 and we forgot about it. So make sure that it's updated for 2020 and then it's consistent with your messaging this year or for this particular campaign. And then you can also preview the donation, the thank you experience, rather, and see what that page looks like, what the donor is going to see and what they're going to experience and make sure that it's, you know, thanking them for all of their important contributions and maybe also giving them a place to jump off to and do the next thing. All right, so we're going to spend some time on matching grants. This is always a favorite subject for every giving day. The fundraising section is where you will manage matching grants and access the matching grants tool. As I'm sure many of you know, having a matching grant from a donor can really go a long way in driving donations. So I want to make sure that you understand what this tool does and you know how to access it and you know how to use it because this tool is specifically for driving donations with a matching grant. The matching grants tool is a versatile tool and you have a lot of options in terms of how you structure your match. While we have a lot of matches that are one to one, where if someone gives that exact amount, the amount is matched, you can also do two to one, three to one or match a percentage of each donation. The matching grant tool does the math for you. So all you have to do is choose how you want to structure your match. You can also apply a match when a certain number of donations have been received. So for instance, if there was a challenge or a prize available for the most individual donations within the hour and you'll get an additional $1,000 for your nonprofit or whatever that may be when we announce prizes. Or however you set it up, you can actually drive donation volume and traffic with the use of a matching grant. The matching grant tool allows you to post multiple grants at the same time and also in sequence so you can set a bunch of grants to fire off one after another. So that probably sounds like a lot, especially if you're new to matching grants. But the tool itself is pretty user friendly and you have a lot of flexibility in how you structure your matching grant. So I would highly suggest checking out the matching grants tool just to see your possibilities and start brainstorming as you're gearing up for the campaign. You can also add a logo, which is new this year. So if you have a sponsor that you want to shout out and have them listed alongside that matching grant, you can add a logo. So of course, if you get overwhelmed by the possibilities, setting up a one to one match is really just the simplest thing that you can do. And we're going to talk a little bit more about that, but the matching grants tool is under fundraising. Open it up, take a look at it, see what the possibilities are because when you're talking to donors, you'll want to have a good handle on like what is available to you, what the possibilities are, because there's really a lot. And you can get really creative in how you use matching grants to fuel your fundraising on a gift bag. So in the next few slides, I wanted to go through some common questions about matching grants so that you leave this webinar with a good understanding of what they are and how they work. One of the most common questions we get is what kind of matches best, especially because we have a lot of options built into that tool. And the truth is that there's a lot of flexibility, so there's no real best option. It's down to what you and your grant tour decide upon, but the most common structure and the most familiar, both for people providing the grants and for donors is one to one. So that means that a donation is matched dollar for dollar. That means if they give $25, $25 is matched. If they give $50, $50 is matched and so on. One thing that I do want to mention is that you can set a cap on that through the matching grants tool. So if somebody comes through with $1,000 donation, that's awesome, but you're not going to match $1,000 if you set the cap at $200 just so it does not wipe out your match. So that's something you can also do if you want to limit it and say donations up to $200 or whatever your amount is will be matched to one to one. That is something you can do to sort of keep it in control and keep somebody from coming along, making a huge donation and wiping out your match. Another question we frequently get is whether we can edit matches once they have been entered. Yes, you can edit the grant while it's either if it either hasn't started yet or if it's active, but you cannot edit it if it has been closed. So if you need to make a change to a grant that has been closed, contact us at support will help you out will assist you, but you can edit it. Once you enter it, if you're like, oh, I did that wrong or I don't like that logo, you can change the information before the match has started. And you can also make changes to it while it is active, but once it is closed, you can't make any edits to it and you'll just need to contact support. I answered this in the previous slide, but if you have multiple matching grants for Give Big, that is awesome and you can set them up to be running at the same time. So for instance, if you were able to secure a large match that's going to run for the duration of the event, you can have that running and then you can also have smaller matches running throughout the day when it's important for you to drive traffic to your Give Big page. So you can do matches simultaneously and you can have them sequentially as well so that you can just set it up and let it go on Give Big. And then another big question is when and how should my grantor provide their match? How should they fulfill it? Typically you want to have them fulfill it after their match has closed. So definitely if they're making their donation, if they're fulfilling the match online, we actually send them an email to the address that you provided to us when you entered the grant, saying that their match has been met and prompting them to go to a specific link to fulfill that match. But generally speaking, you want to wait until after the match has been fulfilled in order to process that. And you can also use an offline donation. So if you have a grantor and they want to provide you a check, you can absolutely do that. And that is between you and your grantor. You can do that at any time. We don't need to be involved with that. But if they are fulfilling it online, wait until after the match has closed in order to have them fulfill it. Alright, so more frequently asked questions. Oh, no, I messed up my matching grant. What do I do? Just keep calm and contact us at support at mightycause.com. It's important to keep in mind if you do something wrong, it's okay. This is just a display tool. This is not real money. We can help you fix your totals on your page and fix the grant. So just let us know what match you're talking about and how much it's off by what you did. And we will help you fix it. So just keep calm. It's not real. This is not real money. This is just display money basically and will help you undo anything that you might do that causes an issue on the day. I do recommend playing around with it a little bit before leading up to the event so that if you have several matches running on the big day, you're not trying to figure out how to use the tool and what you can do if you make a mistake. It's not a big deal. If you mess something up, it happens. We're all human and support is here to help you out. So the next question is a bigger question that we're going to talk about more in our strategy webinar. But how do I get a matching grant? And basically a matching grant is just a large donation. It's a major gift. So you want to work with your large gift, your major gift donors, or your sponsors to talk about providing a grant. So register for that next webinar. That's already in the nonprofit toolkit on the give big page. But you're going to just be working with the people who support your nonprofit or the businesses or organizations that provide ongoing support for your nonprofit. Another thing that you can do is you can contact your board and have them provide a board match so they pool together funding and they are able to provide a matching grant on behalf of your board of directors. So basically you want to start asking for a matching grant wherever you would look for a major gift. That's where you want to get going. If you haven't really approached that kind of issue before.  You could also talk about pooling funds together like volunteers if you have a really robust volunteer base. You want to be able to pool together smaller amounts and provide a nice sized grant. So there's a lot of things you can do. We're going to talk a lot more about that at the let's talk strategy webinar. But the important thing to know is that your nonprofit has to secure the match. We just provide the tool to enter it and display it and provide some marketing tools to you so that when people go to your page. You have a matching grant available. So it's really something that you do off the platform. And then once you've secured the grant, we provide tools so that you can display that you have this awesome grant. Moving on from that topic do offline donations count toward matches. And the answer is if you want them to that is something that you can set when you are setting up your match. You don't need to have offline donations count. You as an admin are the only one who's going to be entering in offline donations and you can change that while the grant is active. So for instance, if you're not really getting to the point that you want to, but you do have some checks, you want to enter in to count toward the match, you can certainly do that. You just want to be careful about offline donations. If you opt into having them count toward your match, eating up your grant, because the whole idea behind a matching grant is motivating people to donate online. You need online donations to win prizes and you need them to climb up the leaderboard. So offline donations don't really help you as much in the grand scheme of give big, but you can certainly set up your match so that includes offline donations. So you want to be mindful of not entering those offline donations when you have a grant active unless you specifically want to do that. I've had situations not with give big but with other giving events, where someone enters in $1,000 matching grant, and then someone else comes along and they enter in a $1,000 offline donation and their grant has been wiped out. So you just want to be mindful of that if you do opt to include offline donations. And then the last question I'll go over is should I include the match in my pages metrics, which is one of the options that's in the tool. And the general rule of thumb here is, if your donor is fulfilling the match off the platform, like they're giving you a check. So that's included in your metrics because basically what we're going to do is we're going to treat each match as an offline donation so that the whole thing gets added to your total. So if somebody gives $25, you have a one to one match, and $25 is this match $50 is added to your total and you'll be able to see the breakdown of this in your donation report. But if your donor is fulfilling it online, then you don't want to include it in your page metrics because we're going to count their fulfillment of their match as a donation. So if you add it to your pages metrics, while the grant is active, and you have the donor make their donation to fulfill the match online, you're basically counting the match twice. Only one is going to count toward prizes and one is going to count toward your leaderboard and that is the online fulfillment, the matched amount doesn't count for those things. But generally speaking, the rule of thumb is if you're getting it offline, include the match in your pages metrics. If you're not in doing it offline, if you're doing it online, then do not include it in your pages metrics. And again, if you have any questions about this, I know this is a lot of information. And I'm doing this at a little bit of a higher level because I know a lot of you have been doing give big for several years at this point. Contact support will help you out will get you straightened out and we will help you find the best way to fulfill the match or whether or not to include in your pages metrics based on your situation. All right, so one thing that is new this year is we have fundraiser templates fundraiser templates are under the fundraising section. And basically what these are our peer to peer fundraising page templates that your your peer to peer fundraisers can use when they go to your page and you are engaging them and getting them to set up a fundraiser where they share it with all of their friends in their family and their social network to raise money for your nonprofit, you're pre filling certain parts of their page to make it much easier for them to get up and running and publish and raising money. So everybody has one free template. So you want to keep it pretty general, but it'll allow you to put in a title, an image, a little short story, some of the description. And it's just a really great way to motivate people, especially people like board members they're really busy usually, and having the ability to say, hey, certain parts of your page, if you use the template, are already filled out and you can just use it and it'll help you get published without a whole lot of work. That can really be helpful and getting them to make the leap to becoming a peer to peer fundraiser. And we're going to talk more about peer to peer fundraising in the strategy webinar. But this is a tool that's really great. If you want to, you know, be able to put some information in for your peer to peer fundraisers and make it easier for them to start raising money for you. They do have the option to use it when they start to create a fundraiser. They don't have to use it. And even if they use the template they can still customize their page to talk about why your work is important to them. But it helps gives them a running start basically. So take a look at fundraiser templates fill out this information. And when you're asking people to be peer to peer fundraisers, it'll definitely make it easier for you to make that case that it's fun and easy. And there's not a whole lot of heavy heavy lift involved in being a peer to peer fundraiser. Right. So the last section on your admin bar is your settings. If you click settings, it opens up a sub menu where you can update your organization settings. You can customize your organization's URL. You can manage your EFT. So you get all of the money you raised for your campaign and you have the correct bank account linked. So if that has changed, this is where you can update that information. You can update your legal information if you need to. So if your address has changed, if something has changed, if you've tweaked your name, and there's something about your legal name and address and information that has changed, you can fill out a form on this page and let us know, and we'll update that for you so that it is accurate for this year. And you also have a social sharing section, which I definitely recommend taking a look at. You can upload an image that's optimized for like Facebook, link preview images. You can set some, you know, you can set the description there. You can also set it to tag your Twitter account. If someone uses your org page to tweet, you know, please support this organization. It'll tag you. So if you use tweet deck or another dashboard, you'll get a notification that tells you that this person retweeted your organization page. And you can also use the give big hashtag. This is also where you can access your integrations. And one thing that's really important here is this. This is where you can add or remove admins. Definitely pay attention to the section year to year if you had a volunteer who is helping you and they're no longer helping you with your campaign for give big, or if you've had some staff turnover, and you need to take access away from some people and give it to other people. You can add and remove admins in your settings page. It's very easy to do. And definitely if it's been a year or so since you've looked at your mighty cause account, it's worth doing a little bit of maintenance and making sure that that is everybody who has access needs it and everybody who does not need access is removed. So it's always worth doing a little bit of spring cleaning to make sure that you're on top of who has admin access to your page. All right, so moving on from the technical walkthrough of your options on your mighty cause profile. I just want to point out that Sarah has worked really hard to put together a fantastic nonprofit toolkit that's available on the give big site. So definitely take some time. Look through this. There's templates that you can use to write emails and social media posts. There's logos. You can get an FAQ. So if you're like, when does early donation start, you can go to the FAQ and you can find out there. So if you have a question about the event or you need some help with something, this is your first place to go, the nonprofit toolkit. So take a look at the nonprofit toolkit resources. There's a lot there to parse through. And it basically tells you step by step everything you need to do to make sure that you're making the most of give it give big St. Gray Valley. So take a look at the toolkit. Use the resources that are there. You'll also find this webinar and the slides uploaded there once I have a chance to upload the video to YouTube. But you can also send people there if you have somebody who's helping you with your campaign. You want them to get familiar with the mighty cause platform. This webinar will be there. And I'll also make sure that the slides are available there as well. And I mentioned this every year. It's important to know that we provide support to all of the nonprofits that are participating in give big St. Gray Valley. So our support team is here to help you. The email address is support at mighty cause.com. The phone number is here as well. It's<PHONE_NUMBER>. It's a 24-hour support situation except for the giving day itself. We will have people available. So if you're online at 3 a.m. on give big St. Gray Valley, we will be there and there will be someone who can assist you if you have something happen and you need immediate help. So this is all of our support information. We're Monday through Friday 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. We are on Eastern time because we're in Northern Virginia. So just outside of D.C. So there is a little bit of a time zone difference. But please do not hesitate to reach out to us if you have any questions whatsoever. We're here to help and we are here to provide assistance to you so that you do a great job on give big St. Gray Valley and you have all the answers you need provided to you. And I just wanted to mention this one more time. We are having a strategy webinar on March 18th at noon central time. That is a Wednesday. And that is really where we're going to dive deep into how to use a matching grant, how to win prizes, how to promote your campaign. So that's really more what you're interested in. If that's more your speed or you just, you know, you're interested, you feel comfortable with the platform after today's webinar and all of the training that Sarah has done. This is the webinar where we're really going to dig deep into how to market your campaign and how to win prizes and make it a huge success for your nonprofit. So that is on the toolkit page. You can register for that now. So definitely take some time to do that. Get it on your calendar and bookmark it and make sure that you know that when that webinar is coming, because that's really where we're going to dig deep into marketing. All right. So if you have any questions, I do want to make some time for questions. Just type it into the questions box of your go to webinar panel. And I, it doesn't look like Sarah was able to find the link with the presenter link. So I, if there's any questions that I can't answer, I will pass them. Are you there? Yep. Yeah, I was just reading through the questions and I saw, oh no, she wasn't here. I was able to get the link. So thank you for that. Oh, absolutely. I'm sorry. I didn't check in before to give that link to you. But let's see. We, if you have a question, it doesn't look like we have any questions right now, but this is the time to pick my brain and pick Sarah's brain for give big. So if you have something you want to ask us, just go ahead and put that into the questions box in go to webinar, and I will just give you a minute to do that. And while people are typing in their questions, Sarah, did you have anything you wanted to add or communicate to people attending this webinar? I don't think so. I did get all of the community meetings from now until the giving day out on the website as well as I just put them all on Facebook last night. If you are confirming your attendance on Facebook, you still do have to follow the registration link to constant contact so that I have you registered on the actual event itself. Every meeting has a zoom option. So if you can't be there in person, you can attend via zoom. So get registered for those. I see I sent an email out yesterday the day before and I already have people registering. So that's great. And so this next, we are going to be having a webinar later this month. And that's going to cover matching grants from a nonprofit perspective and kind of she's going to talk about how they do their match and kind of how that works and just give you some tips there. Because I know that is one of the biggest, one of the biggest things that nonprofits have questions about every year. So I just want to make sure we are presenting something from a, from a nonprofit standpoint. So that I will be setting out which webinar she'll be on and then next week or next month's meeting March and April will be different topics and then depending on the date of the meeting we will be handing out. So I'm going to start handing out signs and things like that at the March and April meeting. So you will want to get registered and attend April at minimum. Excellent. Yeah, you have a lot of really fantastic trainings planned so there's lots of stuff to get up to speed on and the matching grants issue is always it's a combination of you know, a technical issue like how do I set it up but it's also this larger issue of, you know, how do I reach out how do I make my ask how do I, you know, actually secure the grant so that's really awesome that you're giving some training on that. It doesn't look like we have any questions, but you can always contact us after the webinar. If you think of something that you weren't able to enter into the questions box we're here to help you I'm here to help you. My email is Linda at mightycause.com. And again I've been helping with St. Croix Valley for a few years now so I'm always happy to talk through any questions you have whether they are technical or strategic. And one thing I did want to give everyone a heads up on is that there will be some changes to your dashboard that are coming probably by March. And the reason for that is very boring and technical and we're basically transitioning over to angular seven which is a programming language I don't understand. But we had to do it for technical reasons so you just want to I just wanted to mention that that's happening you will get a notification from us when that changes, and it should be more intuitive that it is right now. But I just wanted to give you all a heads up so things might look a little bit different once that change goes into place but we will keep you in the loop about that happening you'll get a notification from us and it should make make the whole process of using mighty cause even easier. Oh, and we do have a question. Alright, so our nonprofit does not have a website yet. Do you have any recommendations on how to build a website or a company that is reasonable cost wise. I'll let Sarah weigh in as well, but a really great way to build a nonprofit website. If you're new to it and you don't have it Wix is very easy. And you can purchase your domain through Wix and sort of the gold standard for nonprofits for many, many years now has been WordPress. So having a self hosted WordPress site is really easy to set up it doesn't take a whole lot of lift and WordPress is generally quite user friendly. And there are a lot of specialists who work with nonprofits at discounted rates to build a WordPress site, and that can be really helpful if you, you know, really just want something that you can manage you can have a blog you can make changes to without having to know how to code. But Wix Squarespace these are all sort of drag and drop services where you can sign up for a domain so you can get the URL that you want, and you can just build a very basic website. And WordPress allows you to do a little bit more. So those are some places to start I we have no affiliation with any of them here at mighty cause, but Wix Squarespace and WordPress are really great options if you're looking to build your first website. And I do want to mention that we actually have a webinar that I gave last year about building a website for nonprofits web design for nonprofits I think it's called.  You can find out an hour long webinar about choosing your web hosting platform and choosing what you want on your website and how to actually build it. It's not coding so it's totally entry level tools that you can use where you don't have to have any special training or knowledge to start a website so that might be a great resource for you if you're also as you get ready for give big looking for to build your web presence in general. So Sarah did you have any suggestions about websites. No, I that's that would be my suggestion I mean if, if trying to create a website this year sounds daunting and frightening I mean the reality is you can use your mighty cause site as you know what your website to your go to you can update it it's easy.  But if you're looking to make a separate website yeah I use Wix. I've never used WordPress but I understand it's it's fairly straightforward. So those would be my suggestions to. Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, there are a lot of nonprofits who are small that use their mighty cause page as sort of their main web presence. And that's absolutely acceptable to do that's what we were designed to do we we were started as a platform to provide an easy way for small nonprofits to start raising money. So don't feel like you have to create a website, but if you do want to start like your own website that you have full control over, you know the look and the feel of it Wix Squarespace and workspace workspace and WordPress are good places to start. All right, so I think that is it. Thank you Sarah I'm so glad you were able to get logged on so that we could have this Q&A session. If you guys have any other questions, feel free to email us. Sarah's email address is on the first slide and I'm sure you guys have been in contact with her a lot, but you can always contact me as well. Linda at mighty cause.com and Sarah is Sarah dot house at give big a CV dot org, and we're here to help you. And just to mention it once again I am recording this webinar we will put it up on the nonprofit toolkit and also make the slides available to you as well. Thank you Linda. Thanks everybody for spending an hour with me and happy fundraising.


Dr. Watts. Thank you once again for joining me. How are you? Thank you? Very good. Awesome. So last time in our dialogues we discussed two topics that are actually going to converge in this one individual. We discussed what quote-unquote we would call the pagan generation, the final pagan generation and the concepts of Paideia which was a social bond, a social glue that helped these things together and what was expected of somebody. So the figure that we're talking about today, Hypatia, she comes a little bit after this period of time but she really inherits and lives and passes in the world left by the final pagan generation. So before we get into the person herself, in our discussion of Paideia we focused a lot on Athens but can we focus on Alexandria? Because I know you touched on both of them but we only had time to discuss one. So what is the world of Alexandria at this time that Hypatia is born into? Yeah so in a way if we were to think about the educational world of the Mediterranean you could maybe call Athens Oxford and you could call Alexandria Cambridge, Massachusetts. It's the newcomer in a way. It was a city of course founded by Alexander the Great in the fourth century BC but the educational culture and the intellectual culture there was something that was kind of astroturfed by the first king of Egypt after the breakup of Alexander's empire. He put a bunch of money into building the greatest library in the Mediterranean and a bunch of money into building research institutions that attracted the best scholars across the Mediterranean. And so the Alexandrian educational environment was something that was really designed from the top down to appeal to the cultural needs of a very large city. And so Athens was by late antiquity a small city maybe 15-20,000 people in it. Alexandria was the second biggest city in the Mediterranean. It was 500,000 people perhaps and it had been a large city for a very long time. So by the time Hypatia was born around 355 the city of Alexandria was the second largest city in the Roman Empire for you know almost 400 years. It had an infrastructure that was an intellectual infrastructure first built by the Ptolemaic kings but also later superintendent by Roman emperors and it was a big city and a dynamic and vibrant city. So it was a city that was the only port in the entire Mediterranean that was on one side on the south side of freshwater port that connected to the Nile and on the north side a Mediterranean port. And so there was a saying that Alexandria was the only place in the Mediterranean where you could buy both freshwater and saltwater fish because you know you just have to walk seven miles across this sort of sandstone ithsness to go between the two of them or limestone ithsness to go between the freshwater and saltwater. But because of this all of the the produce of Egypt would go be offloaded on the south side of Alexandria trucked across the city and sent on across the Mediterranean the same was true of trade coming from the Indian Ocean it really was a world-class metropolitan area. And so when Hypatia was born this was a city that had probably the biggest in terms of numbers and maybe even in terms of percentage Christian population among the major cities in the Mediterranean. It was still early in her childhood imagined to be a pagan majority city but it probably wasn't and it became clear in 360 around 360 that actually the Christians were at least as numerous as the pagans and they also could win in a fight. And so it was the first city that reaches this tipping point where pagans realize we're a minority now. You know this city is not our city it belongs to these other people who have very different ideas about how religious practice works and we need to figure out how to make that something that we can tolerate. And so Alexandria is perhaps a generation ahead of the rest of the Roman world in coming to terms with the fact that this is going to become a Christian world. And for Alexandrians like Hypatia this is their life you know they need to figure this out and they need to do it in a way that causes as little disruption as possible. And Hypatia was very committed to this idea of living in a city that is changing dramatically. It's a dynamic city it's a young city because a lot of the people coming into Alexandria they tend to be young people coming into work and so demographically it is a city that is very very dynamic in the fourth century. And Hypatia is among a group of people that are very interested in being sure that the structures that make the city work can be adaptable enough that this dynamism doesn't really throw the place into chaos. Fascinating thank you for that answer. Yeah and Alexandria like most cosmopolitan places the experience of one person versus another can drastically differ depending on social social and economic class you know whether you're a Jewish Roman, a pagan Greek speaking elite versus a Demotic Indigenous person right so she's born into this kind of inequality for lack of a better term that you know you see happens in any major city like I live in a where you live you can go from from the barrio to you know the million dollar homes on the hill or whatever so same thing for Hypatia there too so she's inheriting a very dynamic world as bustling with culture but also with perhaps not always the best kind of situation for everybody involved. So Hypatia becomes kind of a symbol after her passing we'll talk about the symbol later but like you emphasized in your biography of her Hypatia is a person first so who is that person who is Hypatia what was her educational background like I want to get to know the person before we touch on what she came to represent for vastly different types of people. Yeah this is why Hypatia I think is so fascinating because the person has been lost historically people don't want to talk about the person unless you're talking about the symbol but the person is fascinating so she was the daughter of the most prominent scholar of mathematician scholar and mathematician in Alexandria at that time and the daughter of an intellectual in the fourth century generally was educated at a pretty high level so they needed to know how to write obviously they needed to know literary references and the sorts of things that equipped you to participate in a world of Hypatia and they needed to also have enough background in composition and rhetorical performance that they could take on an advocacy role if they needed to and we know of a lot of women in the fourth and fifth centuries who are capable of doing this and actually do perform this kind of public advocacy role but it's usually an advocacy role that they perform on behalf of their families so they will go and make appeals for their children to be treated well they will go and make appeals for you know for other members of their family or their community to be treated well but they tend not to have a public role what is different about Hypatia is she gets this training and it becomes really really clear that she's you know better than her father far better than her father Alexandria in that particular moment had embraced a brand of philosophical teaching that privileged mathematics over philosophy this seems all very weird to us but to an ancient audience philosophy represented the pinnacle of all knowledge and so you would learn things so that you could progress to that pinnacle and the question was what is the highest point in that knowledge what is the highest point of you know a human's ability to understand the dynamics of of his or her world and for Alexandria in the fourth century they said that the the highest point you can reach is a understanding of pure numbers and so when we think of things like the concept of justice we tend to use things like the idea of the Plato develops of the forms a kind of absolute understanding of like what justice is for an Alexandrian mathematician in the fourth century an Alexandrian philosopher in the fourth century they would equate that actually with a number you know they would say that you know you can see in this particular number the purest manifestation of this idea and so the forms are imperfect because they're vague they're abstract like what is a form the number five you can understand the number five right it's tangible and so therefore there's a perfection in that tangibility what Hypatia was able to do was overturn like a century of Alexandrian consensus that you put numbers above concepts you equate numbers with concepts but the concepts can best be understood through numbers Hypatia said that's not right actually mathematics is very important but it's secondary to the Platonic idea of the forms there is a higher level knowledge that comes through an understanding of the forms and my father and his teachers and you know the past few generations of Alexandrians have done it wrong the thing that's so remarkable about this is Hypatia makes this argument while her father is still alive you know she is trained in his school she does the equivalent of a dissertation on a mathematical topic and he then steps aside and gives her control of the school and she redirects Alexandrian philosophical training so that it's now about platonic ideas and not about numbers and she has she succeeds in doing this by the time she's in her 30s and so we have to understand this is a figure who is brilliant incredibly talented and incredibly capable of explaining her insights and making cases that overturn literally a century of kind of received wisdom of how one understands intellectual culture in one of the two most important centers of intellectual culture in the Mediterranean world and she does it while she's young and so we have to see in her a really really incredibly powerful intellect and a really really incredibly powerful personality and you know and we haven't even mentioned the fact that she does all of this despite the fact that as a woman she's not supposed to run her own school absolutely she's a she's a we as when she becomes a symbol of something more we kind of lose sight of the fact that just taking Hypatia on her own terms as a person is just extraordinary this is a person who as a woman in antiquity in the eastern part of the empire is overcoming obstacles in a male dominated situation for centuries for millennia right she is she's writing I mean this isn't like I mean nothing against cornutus I love my cornutus but you know cornutus is making little commentaries on Aristotle and things but Hypatia is writing commentaries on complex mathematical texts that are just completely you know out of probably out of most people's pay range at that time so it's out of my range yeah I mean it's all great it's all great to me but you know like and her dad is using her texts in his own writing it's just amazing just what she accomplished and you're saying all this before she was even turning 30 and as a woman you know it's just it's really really amazing when you take this person on her own terms just doesn't have a person I think the gender aspect of what Hypatia accomplishes is is so important because we do have other women who are teachers but they're but they don't quite achieve what Hypatia does so there is a woman named Androsion who is an Alexandrian mathematician who is teaching you know generation actually two generations before Hypatia and she does have students but the male establishment in Alexandria attacks her so viciously I mean we actually know about her because there is a text written by somebody else that attacks her method of solving mathematical problems it turns out her method is better than his method it's actually wildly better but the attack is so significant because she is an outsider and she cannot be anything but an outsider it doesn't matter how good her work is as a woman who's a mathematician in Alexandria she's not going to be accepted by the establishment and so seeing the case of Androsion and seeing what Hypatia is able to do where she not only is accepted by the establishment but she revolutionizes the establishment she gets them to completely change what they understand to be the appropriate way to do philosophy and mathematics that's breathtaking you know there it's not just that she was teaching it's not just that she was running her own school it's that she was running her own school and was so impactful that she changed the entire direction of you know Harvard of antiquity it's remarkable and you know and the the sorts of obstacles that were stacked up to prevent her from doing that that she overcame I think are really formidable I mean there's nobody like her in antiquity well said well said um so you write in your biography of Hypatia that a late antique philosopher was not primarily measured by her command of the details contained within the canonical texts people instead evaluated the degree to which her life in conduct embodied the philosophical principles those texts taught this is something that I remember from further kind of adjacent but Garth Fowden's text about the pagan holy man in antiquity which is basically just the teacher you know he was saying the same thing whether it be Yemlichus or the later figures you know they're the they're almost being created as neoplatonic saints so where does Hypatia fit into that um just in terms of herself um you know we uh we see it in the lives of Edwards right a neoplatonic saints porphyry proclas and you know it's all over eunepius right so where does Hypatia fit into this so I think you know this is um in a way Pierre had those idea that the philosophical life is a practical life um you know you can read these things you can understand these things but that doesn't make you a philosopher the philosopher somebody who lives these things um there's a great passage in eunepius or in um Damascus's life of Isidor where he he says that um a philosopher named Amonius was the greatest commentator who ever lived but he also makes it completely clear that he doesn't live it you know he doesn't live philosophy he understands it he writes it his insights into the text are unparalleled but he doesn't live like a philosopher and therefore he's not a philosopher and so the purpose of a philosopher was both to understand the texts and understand the systems that allow you to get at the deeper knowledge of the texts but then to apply them you know and apply them in a way where you lived your daily life in a way that embodied those true philosophical principles because in the end philosophy was not just about getting knowledge it was about gaining um access to something that was more real uh and more holy and more divine um and what what the philosophical life was supposed to lead to was a higher level of a higher level of existing um in this world but also a higher level of existing beyond the sort of physical and bodily plane and so what hypatia was doing um was first of all realizing even though she was trained in this way by Theon that didn't emphasize philosophy in the same fashion she realized that philosophy did have this potential to lead to a higher level existence in this world and also lead to a connection with the divine and her teaching was about training students so they too could live this particular type of lifestyle and she personally believed that philosophy meant practicing I mean literally practicing what you're preaching right you if you're going to teach these things you need to live these things but it isn't just about not being a hypocrite it's about truly getting the the absolute benefits from um living a way that is true and honest and and is consistent with what the gods wish of you and so this is what hypatia is is doing you know she is embodying in her conduct the ideas that she presents in her classrooms um and her students absolutely understand that's what she's doing absolutely respect it and they really try to emulate her because they see in this a path to a higher level existence and it's an open path and it's a path that involves contemplation and it involves understanding and it involves knowledge and this makes it very very appealing to people in Alexandria who particularly want to follow that kind of a contemplative path towards enlightenment absolutely um thank you for that answer uh it kind of um i'm not really sure as is neo it's the the kind of uh yamblican neoplatonism still in vogue at this time is this so that this uh the story of the yamblican neoplatonism after julian is a little bit um it kind of nearly dies uh you know it is something that um the people the main practitioners of it in the 350s and 360s sort of fade away uh and it's sort of fading out and it gets um revivified in Athens because a person connected with the amicus who's named the amicus but is you know only connected with the amicus comes to Athens and introduces a couple of Athenians to this this style of teaching and it takes root in Athens and then there's an yamblican neoplatonic revival that is sort of catalyzed by this colonization in Athens in the 390s. Hypatia is a different tradition so there are yamblican neoplatonists in Alexandria um we first see them around the 390s um and they have a very very different approach to what philosophy is and what kind of public role philosopher should play than hypatia has. So hypatia actually is a a devotee of the tradition that is much more associated with porphyry and platinus um a contemplative rather than a ritual influenced or ritual inflected tradition and so for hypatia and her disciples a sense to communion with the divine comes through contemplation and it comes through thought and it comes through a kind of meditation about higher principles whereas for yamblicans there's a ritual aspect to it um right that if you're right and if you are a Christian the ritual aspect is a problem because it's sacrifice um if you are a Christian the contemplative approach doesn't need to be a problem right because what you're doing is you're ascending to a supreme deity and so what hypatious tradition is able to do is appeal equally to Christians and non-Christians um you can be completely consistent with what porphyry is saying and with the practices that um platinian and porphyrian Platonism are encouraging it and be a pagan and you can also be completely consistent with it and be a Christian um and there's even origin for example who does that right so yeah yeah I mean and so origin for example is probably I mean I think um some people disagree with me but I think origin was a student of the same teacher as platinus you know I think they were in the same they were both studying an harmonious sacrosse oh so you fall into that camp where they're both studying out under Ammonis yeah okay yeah that's interesting because I know some people are like well maybe it was a different origin I think there's two origins yeah there are two that are that are associated there um and I think that what you know that teaching is something that can work with Christianity and so when you read the hymns of synesias um who is hypatia's most famous student some of those hymns you know could have been written by porphyry some of those hymns absolutely could not have been written by porphyry they are very clearly Christian but philosophically they don't contradict each other right I mean the principles the philosophical principles in there don't need to draw a line between the hymns that are explicitly Christian and the hymns that are not and so for years people read it as well synesias converts to Christianity in the middle I don't think so you know the system works hypatia system works for both sets of hymns and so I think that what hypatia realizes is she is in a way a convert to this way of approaching philosophy she realizes that there is a tremendous appeal to this way of approaching philosophy in a city that religiously is going through tremendous turmoil because this is a way to embody the promise of paideia to bring together everybody who is educated Christian pagan doesn't matter but to do it not just about rhetoric and you know performance of traditional traditional Greek public speaking but to do it through philosophy and there is a way for philosophy too to continue to serve as this high level sort of capstone of knowledge and education um and not make it fall victim to the confessional politics and the division that the conversion of the empire to Christianity is creating and so what hypatia has is a vision for philosophy as something that is 100 true to her convictions of what platonic interpretation leads to and also completely accessible regardless of the religious tradition that you belong to and this is what she's teaching she's teaching Christians she's teaching pagans she's teaching them in the same sort of contemplative influence system the only thing she's not doing is saying what that supreme god is and as long as you don't say what that supreme god is it can be Christian it can be the platonic it can be the platinian one it can be whatever you see it as but there's a supreme god at the center of this system and hypatia's philosophy is something that allows you to understand that god's knowledge that has been conveyed to humans and helps you sort of commune with a higher level reality that is closer to that god and if that's a Christian god good for you and if it's not a Christian god good for you the tradition works and you can be part of this family and this tradition without asking or answering that one question and as long as you don't answer that question or ask that question this is a training that works for Christians and pagans theos hipsistos right like well what kind of god is it oh it's just pious god you know you don't know but um but yeah she really was a really trailblazing ecumenical figure especially at this time of flux in the world um you know thank you for that clarification also on her uh the you know the difference between the yambokin and the the platinian concept of the contemplation versus the theological ritual i always found that fascinating because it was also a point of you know just some little side observations before i get to the next question just i always found that fascinating because uh you know even even in within neoplatonism or quote-unquote neoplatonism itself you could tell there was a huge um tension there between you know yambokis is on the mysteries is all about you know how uh perhaps blotinus doesn't have it all right and uh i always found the porphyrian contemplative part interesting as well because you you don't need to theorize about it in terms of like oh this could you know just as well be this as as that you see it in nakamadi like porphyry or later porphyry is using the same kind of florilegium uh that became the sentences of sextus and nakamadi you know they're both drawn from the same traditions and they're both just kind of uh feeding off of each other and they get they're equally working as well so um perhaps another another time on that though but uh uh yeah so spoiler alert for our audience a patient does pass in the senseless senseless act of mob violence in march 415 um so dr watz what were some of the factors that brought this all to ahead especially if you could touch upon the tensions between arrestees and syril yeah so the the problem that we have in um alexandra as you get into the 410s is there had been an eruption of violence between the yambokin neoplatonists and christian authorities in the in the early like in 392 um where neoplatonists were uh in a sense they were provoked by actions of the bishop there was a riot and they seized and fortified the sarapan temple which was on a the highest point in alexandria and very very difficult to access and so there was a standoff um that was resolved by the students of this yambokin neoplatonic group agreeing to leave the sarapan they were they were given amnesty for the violence they committed they killed people i mean they killed a significant number of people um they were given amnesty the teachers fled alexandria and then christian stormed the sarapan and tore the temple down and hypatia was instrumental in bringing the city back i mean there was a a working relationship that was developed between hypatia and the bishop in alexandria hypatia of course was not any amnesty there's no indication that her students were involved in this she certainly was not involved in this kind of thing um and so she represented a a establishment that was looking to build back some kind of consensus about how alexandria should work and what sorts of people should be running the city and theophilus who was the bishop who had in a way proved his point also was looking for some sort of way to to calm the city down and make it governable and so this prevailed for about 20 years until theophilus's death but when theophilus died he had been preparing things so that his nephew zero could take over for him but the illness that theophilus had it seems like he probably had a stroke and so he was incapacitated but he didn't die so syril couldn't make any moves to officially take over control of the alexandrian church because the office was still alive but it gave rivals enough time to build a power base to try to challenge syril and when theophilus finally finally died there was a pretty intense though short-lived outburst of street fighting in the city that lasted long enough for certain communities to line up either for or against syril and once that ended and syril became bishop of alexandria he began settling scores and this led to a conflict with the the governor in charge of alexandria it was a man named arrestees arrestees tried to sideline syril by working with the city council and in particular working with hypatia and the bet that arrestees was making was that hypatia is a philosopher hypatia is a woman hypatia has no there's no way hypatia can hold office in the city although she does work with the city council and she serves as a emissary and expresses concerns on behalf of the city she's never going to hold office in the city she's never going to hold office in the empire instead she is seen as an honest broker who behaves publicly in a way that's totally consistent with her philosophical principles and so there's a certain power there that that comes with this status as a philosophically influenced on the philosophically informed speaker of principle and so when arrestees is trying to negotiate some kind of a solution to the problem that syril is posing with this problem of disruption and and regular violence in the city he starts working with hypatia to build a coalition of people who are anti-syril and hypatia serves as a liaison linking the city council to arrestees and she becomes seen by supporters of syril as the locus of resistance to syril and so supporters of syril attack her when she's out in public and hypatia had a tendency to travel in public and go in public without a lot of attendance most people in in roman city if you are wealthy and well off i think we can imagine kind of like how cersei lannister travels in king's landing and game of thrones you know you don't want to actually set foot on the ground you don't want to be kind of like out there exposed you want to be carried or protected and have lots of attendants around you hypatia wasn't like that hypatia just traveled in the city even though she was elite even though she was important even though she was prominent and well known she just traveled in the city by herself and she was set upon by a mob as she was walking home and they tore her apart i mean literally tore her apart we're told that they used roof tiles to cut her body to pieces and then they burned her body alongside the seashore at the site near to the cathedral of alexandria and this horrified people it horrified everybody in alexandria because hypatia represented the kind of embodiment of honesty and principle in public life she didn't do these things because she wanted to gain anything from doing them she did these things because her practice as a philosopher obligated her to be publicly involved it was the obligation of every philosopher who took the position seriously to do what they could to make the society around them more philosophical and that meant they had to play a public role and some of that was teaching but some of that was also standing up before their fellow citizens and saying you know what you're doing is it's inconsistent with a higher level principle or what you're doing is unjust or what you're doing is unfair and what you're doing is unwise and they are supposed to speak from their sense of how the larger principles of the world fit together and give you a sense of how the smaller things that you are focused on fit into a bigger picture that's influenced by by the divine and influenced by knowledge and influenced by the kind of higher principles that only a philosopher can really understand that's what hypatia was doing and so what philosophers were supposed to do and she was killed for it and not only was she doing that but unlike some other philosophers like Themistias and some other contemporary philosophers in the fourth and early fifth century she wasn't pretending to be a philosopher for her own gain she wasn't getting rich from this she wasn't becoming important from this she didn't intend to get any like government offices she couldn't she couldn't get any of those things she was doing this because it was her job it was her obligation it was her passion it was her way of life and they killed her for it and so this becomes symbolic of a general social breakdown where nobody was sure what rules are now governing things and so it's a tremendously disruptive thing for people in Alexandria to see that somebody like hypatia could be killed you know they understood partisans in a religious conflict they understood that maybe you know monks or people who work for the bishop might fight other monks or people who work for the bishop they might fight militant pagans but they didn't fight people who were non-combatants and so when hypatia was killed it really emphasized to people that something was dramatically out of line and probably the thing that emphasizes that best is there's a historian named Socrates who writes a church history and the principle that's guiding his church history is the idea that whatever when the church is healthy the empire and the world is healthy and when the church is too concerned with material gain or political power then the roman world gets kind of thrown off its axis and there are all these problems and the evidence that he uses to show that the roman world was falling off its axis in the four tens is a set of events one of which is the sack of Rome by a lyric something that everybody who does roman history knows about that's less important in Socrates mind than the murder of hypatia the murder of hypatia is better evidence that the world is messed up than the fact that Rome was sacked for the first time in 800 years and so that shows how shocking it was that she was killed in this particular way right this is probably the point like like you mentioned in your book very quickly hypatia becomes a symbol and we're going to get into the symbol right now that you write a quote hypatia's death was so shocking so frightening that she quickly became a symbol of an older more functional time that seemed to be slipping away in the early fifth century and you mentioned the sack of Rome the general instability of the empire for more on that go to dr wasa's channel it's amazing but more on that at the end so yeah we'll get into the symbolism right now hypatia seems to after she becomes a cipher for vastly different people this kind of tends to lead to her being a very misunderstood figure in general she's incredibly important but people tend to just imprint their own ideas and identity onto her most for the most part and this is something you really focus on in the last couple of chapters of your book so going from scholasticus to today with hypatia as a feminist symbol or as a any of the other kind of symbols people want to appropriate her for you know pagan identity anything like that can you elaborate on you know just hypatia as a symbol and are people necessarily getting her right uh yeah i think that the thing that we get is this one image of hypatia this philosophical woman being torn to pieces and then that over time can mean anything that people want it to mean so hypatia becomes a symbol of in the fifth century to many people hypatia becomes a symbol of a society that doesn't value rules anymore it doesn't value the things that govern behavior it doesn't value the protections that people could expect to have and so in fifth century authors are talking about hypatia they just say enough about her to set up that she belongs to a kind of society that valued rules and certain behaviors and that society was torn apart when she was killed by the time you get into the sixth century she becomes much more something that pagans want to talk about so pagans talk about hypatia's murder in the early sixth century in the context of justinian's actions against paganism and then she becomes this a sort of symbol of christian intolerance more broadly not like socrates is a christian socrates believes that the empire should be christian he just believes that it shouldn't be christian in the way that it happened in alexandria where you're murdering people who are basically innocent non-combatants just doing their job in the sixth century pagans say that this is a symbol of you know christianity's natural violence and the way that it overturned social norms by the seventh century you see this as a way of emphasizing the distinctiveness of a certain brand of christianity in egypt and hypatia becomes the villain in the story as it's told in the seventh century um where ciril is a hero and he's working with governor or he's working um to try to make the church viable and governors work with the evil magician hypatia to prevent ciril from doing what he needs to do um that's a seventh century perspective that in some ways is shaped by you know the fact that the author has lived through persecution of the egyptian church um and is also actually writing under um the first sort of beginnings of um antichristian activity by muslim rulers in egypt so you have a perspective there that again is a perspective that influence that that filters a seventh century reality into the story of hypatia as you move through time you see like a 17th century reality filtered through hypatia you see in france in the early 18th century you see a biography of hypatia that's written at the behest of a woman who wants people to take seriously the idea of women as scholars um what's interesting about that text is the person who writes it does not give this this woman the text that she wants and so it's published in this literary journal um in the 1710s and the next issue has a letter from the woman that is a kind of um passive aggressive shade throwing on the person who wrote the article the biography saying well actually that isn't what i wanted him to write and really what we should see in hypatia is a legendary woman who stands for what women can accomplish and instead he wrote something that was like a christian polemic um by the time you get into the 19th century some of the stories about hypatia that are told are colonialist stories about um greek sort of european uh culture in an environment that is orientalized and violent and so you have the reflection of colonialism in the way that hypatia is presented a totally ahistorical understanding of what hypatia was but charles kingsley was not interested in history he was interested in a particularly racist and noxious victorian way of seeing the other um and he uses the story to tell that uh in the 20th century you you get hypatia as a symbol of feminism um and in some ways the some of the portraits of hypatia as a feminist icon are things that hypatia herself would have been appalled by um there's one that talks about her as a sexually liberated um woman who you know who chose her own sexual destiny and uh hypatia was a virgin very proudly so um yeah so for a senior right like that was a very big thing among those philosophers back then yeah there's actually a story that i think originates from hypatia herself that says that there was a student who um fell in love with her and she tries to convince him that this is just a bodily thing she tries to actually use it said she's she uses a therapy that Pythagoras develops that uses music to calm the passions of somebody and she tries it and the student is too far gone for this to work and so she takes a menstrual pad and shows it to him and says this is what you're in love with to emphasize to him that his his attraction to her is bodily and the emotional attraction that a philosopher has exists on the level of the soul has nothing to do with the body and he needs to snap back into that because that kind of love is something that her circle embodies physical love is not something that has any part in it so seeing hypatia as an embodiment of sexual liberation that's not who hypatia was but it's a way of understanding hypatia that reflects a particular 20th century set of concerns and so what we see with hypatia and even now i think the example probably people are most familiar with is the movie agorah where you have hypatia presented as like this person who discovers what is it like a Copernican universe and then is attacked by a group of people who look a group of christian monks who look a lot like the taliban and so you have a 21st century view of hypatia as you know like a stem person when you know actually she does the opposite and moves you away from stem to higher level principles of philosophy attacked by you know movement that is very very clearly dressed up in noticeably 21st century garb so you see in each moment just the simple fact that you have with hypatia a person who died and had this status as a philosopher you see her reinterpreted based on the ideals conditions and tensions of whatever moment she needs to be reinterpreted whatever moment whatever conflict she's being introduced into but when that happens you lose the person and when you focus on her death you lose the life and you lose the agency and you lose the the power and achievement and bravery of this this woman and i think that what i was hoping to do in the book is to show that when we tell these stories we're keeping the name of hypatia alive but we're not keeping the legacy of hypatia alive you know the the legacy of something that should belong to her it shouldn't belong to the people who killed her and so the story of hypatia has to really focus on what she had control over and the fact that for like 60 years she had control of her quite a bit and she achieved quite a bit that was completely consistent with what her objectives were we should not focus on the last minutes of her life when she didn't have control over what was going on and to do anything but that is to not do justice to this person who's a remarkable person who very much deserves our attention and our respect absolutely well said and just the side observation before we go here yeah and essentially reminds me of another alexander here to figure phylo people really take phylo and they lose sight of the person and they use him for a vast multitude of things they don't really take phylo on his own terms uh i think david runia and uh i've read a biography of phylo phylo an intellectual thinker and the jewish diaspora by haras ladel but she they both mentioned you know just phylo be phylo let's in the same here let let hypatia be hypatia they're both far more fascinating than any other imprints we kind of cast shadows we cast on them um but dr watz this has uh been incredible thank you for uh giving us this uh portrait of this remarkable human being um i would love to do this again sometime so sure perhaps i'll have you back shortly um in the meantime though um i know you have an awesome youtube channel which i watch quite a bit uh where people find that where can people find your book on hypatia uh so the hypatia book comes from oxford university press you can get it from oxford university press it's also on amazon and barns of noble and probably wherever you look for books uh and then the youtube channel is the eternal decline uh rom and that has a whole bunch of things about roman history and people and events associated with roman history um and i think we're we're starting up something on roman sites and and probably roman coins so those should be appearing hopefully in the near future so check out check that out for sure i think you released one of them already haven't you um yeah yeah we're trying to do um a discussion of roman sites that people might not know about but are really fascinating to look at and then we're going to do some shorts on roman coins which is a passion of mine so awesome awesome and in the meantime dr watz this has been absolutely a pleasure thank you so much for being generous with your time and your knowledge thank you so much


What's the key to staying mentally tough when attempting that next kick after you miss? Well, I think that's one of the most difficult kicks is after you've missed one, you've got a lot of stuff running through your mind. You really almost just have to get out of your own mind. I think that's the biggest issue is trust the guys up front, press your snap and hold that it's gonna be there where it's supposed to be. And we've done it so many times, just let your body take over. And when a miss happens, if you can forget about that and move forward, I think it's probably the biggest key to being successful at that point, you start thinking about it and you're letting that into your mind and then self doubt gets in there a little bit and then you're, you know, I mean, gosh, she's probably made a million 33 yard field goals, but not all of a sudden when it's in a game like that and you've missed one or two, the next one becomes ultimately much more difficult, which shouldn't be, but you gotta get out of your mind at that point.