Welcome to our first webinar, Getting Started for Give Out Day. My name is Linda Gerhardt. I'm the Senior Community Engagement Manager here at Mighty Cause, and I've been with the company since 2016, and have helped a lot of giving events get started and hosted a lot of webinars, so I'm really happy to be here with you today. And I'm also joined by Nicole Pagan, the Program Officer at Give Out Day at the Horizons Foundation rather. So hi, Nicole. Hello, everybody. I just want to welcome you to the webinar and say thank you for joining us this afternoon. It's really exciting for us to put on Give Out Day again. If you don't know about Horizons Foundation, we are the world's oldest LGBTQ community foundation. We are celebrating our 40th anniversary this year. It's our Ruby anniversary. And we have been the host of Give Out Day since 2016, although we have been involved in the project since its inception in 2013. We were previously wrangling the Bay Area organizations to help get them up and running and provide support and social media and all of that kind of stuff for them. And so when we took over Give Out Day as the organizer for the national project, it was really just kind of building on that, building block in and going national with it. So as I said, we're very excited to have you participate in Give Out Day with us this year. Go ahead and type your questions in. If you have questions as we're going along, as Linda said, and then we will try to answer them all at the end. And if you have any questions afterwards that don't get answered in the webinar, if you think of something else, you can email us. The better email to use for me is notmynpagan at horizonsfoundation.org. It's the Give Out Day at horizonsfoundation.org, but either one really works. So with that, I will go ahead and pass it back to Linda and we'll get started. Thank you so much. And just as Nicole mentioned, we're going to do a Q&A session at the end of the webinar, just so we can get through the presentation. A lot of your questions may be answered during the course of the presentation. So if you think of something that you would like to ask while I'm presenting, just go into your go-to webinar panel and type your question into that questions box and we'll make sure to get to it at the end. Or if it's something that we need to take offline, we'll just reach out to you and answer your question. And just as another bit of housekeeping, we will be, we are recording this webinar and you will have access to it through the Give Out site under the resources tab. And we'll also upload the slides there as well. So here's a look at today's agenda. We're mostly going to be focusing on the basics today. We're going to walk through the basics for Give Out Day. And then we're going to jump into getting registered, navigating your nonprofit page on the platform. And then at the end, as I mentioned, we're going to do the Q&A session. All right, so we're going to start with Give Out Basics. Give Out Day is a 24-hour long event that takes place on April 23, 2020. The event runs from midnight to midnight Eastern time. Early giving for Give Out Day starts on March 26, 2020. And the prize money will be announced soon so that you can start planning. And when the prizes are announced, you'll be able to sort of have your plan for the day coalesce and put together your marketing strategy so that you can target some of those prizes. So before we launch into the specifics of getting into your profile, I really wanted to take a step back and talk about how a giving day works. You know, what are they all about? What are they for? It's really a very unique campaign that's presented by a host, in this case Horizon Foundation, and that allows other organizations to compete with other nonprofits or against their own goal if they're not into competing directly with other nonprofits to win prize money. Giving days are a really exciting way for you to engage community partners, sponsors, peer-to-peer fundraisers, and donors as well. It's very exciting for them to be involved in a giving event, and really just spread the word about your organization and your mission and raise funds for your cause. The limited time frame creates a sense of urgency that donors tend to respond really strongly to, and the prizes that are available give you a fresh messaging opportunity. They're really excellent marketing tools that you can use to connect with your donors and get them really excited about giving. To participate in Give Out Day, you'll want to register your organization if you have not already done so. Once you're registered, you can customize your profile on Mighty Cause. We're the platform for the event, so we handle the technology end of things and provide a nonprofit page, which you can use to create fundraisers if you wanted to engage some peer-to-peer fundraisers and so on, and you can just use that as a static page to participate in the giving event. It's connected to the Give Out Day site, so everything's already connected once you've registered. So once you've registered and you've been approved, you can just start planning for your campaign. You can invite other people who are involved in your organization to participate as peer-to-peer fundraisers. Once giving has started on March 26, you can start promoting your campaign, and of course you'll want to really push the donation ask on the actual giving day April 23. You'll need to raise money to win the awesome prizes that will be available, so raising money and winning prizes are directly connected to each other. This is the homepage for the Give Out Day this year. You'll see the URL here on the left, and I would definitely recommend bookmarking that, so you can get back to it really easily. Excuse me, once the giving day starts, this is where you'll see the leaderboards that will indicate what place you're in, as well as any additional prizes that are going on, so make sure you bookmark it so that you're able to check that easily. This page, as it is right now, has all the tools you need to get started. You'll see the register button is right there at the top. If you haven't registered yet, this is where you can go to do so. The Giving Day homepage also has these tabs that include the rules and resources like the FAQ for Frequently Asked Questions and Toolkit, and just additional information that will help you get oriented to Give Out Day. This is also where you'll find information about prizes once they're announced. Alright, so we're going to move into getting started on the platform for Give Out Day. First things first, again, I'm sorry to be a broken record, but if you have not registered for the event yet, that is the first place you want to start. If you have any questions at all that are pertaining to registration, you can email us at supportatmightycause.com, and we can look into it if you've submitted your registration but haven't yet been approved, or if you have any questions, we're here to help you at supportatmightycause.com. Once you register, first you'll need to log in or sign up for an account on Mighty Cause and claim your organization on Mighty Cause if this is the first time you visited the site. Once you've done that, you'll unlock the registration questions and you can submit the form. Once you register, you'll receive a confirmation message and approval email. After you claim your organization, you'll also be able to add administrators to your organization's account on Mighty Cause, so multiple people can access and help you run your campaign. So that's really great if you have people in your development office who may need to access donor information. You can add them as admins. If you have volunteers who might be helping you out with either creating peer-to-peer fundraisers or organizing for you or helping you with social media, you can also give them admin access if you wish. You can have 10 admins total, so that's quite a few. Definitely you want to keep it to your inner circle because they can access donor information through the platform. But if you have anyone at your organization who needs access to this page either to edit it or use some of the backend functions, you can actually do that through your Mighty Cause page under your settings.  That's that little blue box on the lower right-hand side of this slide. This is located on the home screen on your nonprofit profile right next to your metrics.  There are five basic items to complete. One is to add a background image to your page or use one of the ones from our gallery that's provided for you. Upload your logo, which will represent you throughout the Give Out Day site. Add a story, which we also call a description, that tells visitors to your profile about what your organization does, what your mission is, why you're participating in Give Out Day, and why they should donate to your organization. This is really your space to make it your own and make your case for donating to your organization. And you'll also want to build a thank you page to thank your donors. The thank you page displays right after they complete their donation, so it's a really great opportunity to get that donor say thank you and acknowledge them immediately. And then the last thing you'll want to do on your to-do list is set up electronic funds transfer so that you can get your disbursements through direct deposit. If you click the links in your to-do list, you will be taken right to the spots on your profile where you can easily complete that task. So that's very easy for you to go through this list. This isn't required, but profiles that are filled out on Mighty Cause tend to get more donations. So when you show your profile some love, donors usually see that and are more willing to show you some love in return. When profiles kind of make it in bear, donors can go a little bit, oh, I don't know if this is legit. Obviously, you're legit, but the more love you put into your profile and making it your own and making it represent your nonprofit's brand, the better you will do on give out day. So before you get into the weeds of planning your campaign, thinking about marketing, putting emails together, we really recommend taking the time to complete this list. And you have us here to support you. So if you need help, if you have trouble accessing a feature or understanding how to edit it, you can email us at support at mightycause.com or check our support library. We do have some walkthroughs and videos that can help you out. But we're here to support you so you can get your page looking great for the giving day. We also recommend taking some time to get to know your dashboard. Your dashboard, which we like to call your Mighty Cause manager is the admin bar that appears on the left side of the screen when you're logged in and on your nonprofits profile. You'll automatically land on your welcome screen or your home screen, which we talked about a little bit earlier, but you can go to that bar on the menu on the left hand side to navigate to different areas on your profile. Under profile, which is one of the tabs there, you can edit your page in the page editor or you can adjust your page settings, which is also where you can set your goal for your event and enable a progress bar on your page so that you can display how close you are to achieving your fundraising goal. You can also go into live view to see how your page will look to visitors without actually logging out of your account. And this is really just important to mention because while you're in the page editor and you're actively making changes to your page, you may see things that are not going to be visible to visitors to your page, such as sections that haven't been filled out yet. So if you're curious about how it will look to visitors, use that live page view so that you can see exactly how it'll look to somebody who lands on your page who's not logged in as an admin. Below that on your dashboard is the report section, which is going to be your best friend after the giving event. That's your one stop shop for everything that's related to donation management. You're able to preview and export your donation report, and you can view and manage your disbursements. And one of the things I do want to point out is that when you go to your donation report and you're looking at it in your browser, you'll see an abbreviated version of that because there's a lot of data about each donation that we just can't reasonably fit into that smaller space and keep it mobile friendly for you. So when you want details about your donors, you need to actually export the CSV, the spreadsheet there, and those will give you the in the weeds details about those donations when you're reconciling your report. Part of your to-do list is setting up EFT. You can do that under reports in the disbursement section. Signing up for EFT allows you to receive your funds faster. Funds are also dispersed by check, but there is a $5 check fee for check disbursements. So if you have any questions about fund disbursements, you can email support, and our support team will be happy to help you out. Next on your Mighty Cause Manager is the fundraising view. Your donor experience section, which we're going to talk about in the next few slides, as well as a matching grants tool. We're going to talk more about that later on, but those are accessible under the fundraising tab on your dashboard. You can manage your nonprofit settings like URL customization and add people as admins or remove them if you added somebody that you need to remove from having access to your page under settings. So as I was mentioning before, your profile is really the face of your nonprofit for the giving event. So you'll want to make sure that it looks good and it represents you well. Just so you know your profile link is the link that you'll share with your supporters and ask them to donate to your challenge page. So just copy and paste the URL from your browser into an email or a social post or wherever you're advertising the campaign. So when you're on that main profile, not in a report or anything like that, and you see organization slash the name of your organization, that is the link that you can share with your supporters. So as you're going through your to-do list, you'll want to customize this page to match your brand. There are two ways to start customizing a profile. You can click profile in your Mighty Cos Manager and choose page editor from the submenu. This will open up everything you're about to edit.  The other way to customize as you can see in the visual here on this slide is to click profile and then just use the little pencil icon set up here on the page that indicate that a section can be edited. I'm one of those people who likes to just click the button that has the pencil. So for me, that's easier, but some people like to go into submenus and go down a list. And both of those options are there for you depending on how you prefer to work. The first thing you'll want to do when you're editing your profile is upload your organization's logo. You can set that you can up in the theme sec. I'm sorry, you can use that pencil icon that we're showing you here to open up a section for editing. Logos do need to have a one to one aspect ratio to fit. That means they're square the logos on Mighty Cos are the same aspect ratio as many social media sites. So an easy thing that you can do is just upload a Facebook avatar that you've been using because you can use that here as well. You'll want to make sure your logo doesn't clash with your background image. And on that subject, the next thing you'll want to do is upload a background image. You can see the background image on the example here is of two people sitting on a couch. Your background image will look best if it's mostly text free, and it's a strong image that's representative of your nonprofit. The important thing to remember here is that Mighty Cos is a fully mobile responsive site. And as you know, when you're looking at something on a desktop computer or desktop monitor, it looks very different on your phone, the orientation changes. So keeping text away from that is really the best way to guarantee that your, your profile is going to look great no matter what somebody's using to view it. So if you have a lot of text overlay or things that are very specific to whatever view you're using when you edit your page, those things may get lost because of the mobile responsiveness. And what mobile responsive means is that instead of having a totally different page that loads when somebody's using a tablet or a phone versus a desktop monitor, the site is just built to respond to the device it's being used on. So text overlays for the background image don't really look as great and we can't guarantee that that won't get cut off if you orient it for a desktop monitor and somebody's looking at it on a smartphone. It's just going to look different. So images that kind of fade into the background and make your logo pop are really your best option here. Something else you can do to make your profile match your brand is changing the theme color. The theme color allows you to pick a consistent color that shows throughout the experience, your organization provides supporters. It's very easy to set you just click the button that says edit theme on the background image and it'll open up that section for editing. This is where you'll also choose a background image. And from there you can apply an overlay to your background if you want. You can also pick a color from the color picker. If you don't really have one in particular, you just want to see what looks best, but if you have a hex code for, you know, say the colors that are in your logo, you can also just enter that as well. The one thing you want to avoid is white buttons because they can't be seen against the white background so just stick with colors that are easy to see.  Alright, so the about section of your page is your chance to explain what your nonprofit is all about. It's an inline text editor so you just go right to that section and click into it and all you have to do is start writing. You can add media to your story to jazz things up a little bit. Again, it's inline text editor so you're able just to edit and play around with it and make it look good. You can do things like adding links, uploading images. You can link to videos. Just as a note about that if you have a campaign video you want to share, you will need to upload it first to YouTube or Vimeo, both of which offer free basic accounts. We just don't have the ability to also be a video hosting platform. So you'll just need to upload it into one of those websites first. So they get embedded in your story so that people can view them there. They can view your campaign video there. You can also add bulleted or numbered lists. One thing that I do recommend is as much as possible in your story, breaking up walls of texts, text. You really want people to be able to read what information you make available to them. So using things like headers and images and having, you know, different graphic elements there really makes it more readable for people.  But breaking it up as you can see is was done in this story in the example page on the slide really does help it become more readable and helps you make a better case because people are actually going to stick around and be more likely to read the information that you've provided for them. So this is really a spot where you want to go in depth about your work and make a strong appeal to donors. Tell them why your organization needs their support and show the impact of your work. One very cool piece that you can add is custom tabs. If you have any extra info you want to add that doesn't necessarily need to be part of your story. You can create a custom tab where you can keep everything organized and easier to find and allow people to navigate that if they'd like more information about a particular subject. So you can add any kind of information you'd like into a custom tab, information about upcoming events, frequently asked questions, information about your staff, acknowledgments, resources, links for more information, whatever you can dream to put in those custom tabs so you can make that a reality. You can create up to three custom tabs that you can label however you'd like and fill with whatever content you'd like to make your profile page. Awesome and an interesting experience where people can click around and get more information and learn more about the important work that you do. The meeting a gallery on your organization's profile is where you'll be able to add any additional images that you have that represent your organization. It's a really great way to visually show donors what your organization does and where the funds are going. You can also connect your organization's Instagram, which imports the pictures that you already have there. Connecting your Facebook or Instagram accounts not only provides additional content to make your page a little bit more interesting, which encourages people to stick around. But it also lets people coming to your page know that you have these social accounts so they can easily like your page or follow you on Instagram. You can optimize your social sharing settings within the settings section of your mighty cause manager. And basically what that means is that you can standardize the social template whenever somebody shares your logo or campaign. You can somebody wants to retweet you, you can have them tag you so that you're aware and it shows up in tweet deck or if you have a hashtag that you're using. You can set those up in your settings under your social sharing settings. And you can also add a link preview image that is suitable for Facebook so it doesn't get cut off or look funky. So those are things that you'll also want to take a look at as you're customizing your profile. The last sub menu item within your profile is your page settings. This is a little bit dry but it's very important to understand what's here.  You can also update the calculation period. So if you have used mighty cause before it allows you to sort of reset that number so that only donations that are applicable to the goal you're working toward now count towards your progress bar. The page settings is also where you'll find code for a widget that you can embed on your website if you didn't want donors to move away from your website to make their donation. So for instance, if you have a website that gets pretty good traffic, you can embed the mighty cause donation widget on your site that processes donations through mighty cause and it does count toward give out day as long as that donation is made after early donations are open. So that's something that you can also consider to sort of boost your fundraising for give out day. So you'll definitely want to spend some time customizing this profile, get familiar with where everything is, and take some of the tips into account, because the more work you put into it, the chances are better that you will do well during give out day and make the most of this giving event. You can have the best campaign strategy in the world, but when your profile and the page that actually is where people make donations they click that donate button looks like you haven't shown it any love and it doesn't look like your brand. You may end up losing donors so it really is an investment in doing well on the giving day. So getting more into a little bit of the dry information that's nonetheless important to know, you can access reports on donations and disbursements in the report section of your mighty cause manager. Again, this is going to be your best friend during the giving day so learn where these things are, get used to them, try exporting a report and see what's on that because it's just going to be really important when you're marrying things up and you're getting your disbursement and you're reaching out to donors to thank them. This is where all of that information is. You can find disbursements as an offline donations as well in this section so if you get your disbursement and you're like hey this is a little different than what I thought I was going to get you can get the disbursement report. It shouldn't be that different but sometimes you're thinking the full amount in your head for everything you raised, but because the giving encompasses a few different months. You can get that that money in smaller portions. So if you have questions about your disbursement you can access here as well. Your donation report will be available to you in real time and include any include information about the donor like their name their email, any designations or dedication options you have the gross and net amount of their donation as well as any fees associated with their donation donors as well as any option to cover fees. So, you know that's always helpful to know did they cover fees that they not cover fees, because that also might help you explain any differences that you see in your donation report and your disbursement if you're trying to marry those up. You'll also know what page they donated to as well as lots of other information within the donor experience section which we're going to be going into detail about a bit later on. You can see what you can set what information that you collect during the checkout process that will show in your donation report. So for instance, if collecting phone numbers or addresses from donors is really important to your donor follow up strategy. You can set that during in your donor experience section. The disbursement section of your report center allows you to see your batch disbursement history. You can click on a disbursement listing to open it open up more information about that disbursement like which donations were included in that report, as well as a summary total summary of the total amount, the total associated fees and the net amount that's included in that disbursement. The donations on the site are processed by the mighty cost found foundation, which is a donor advice fund. Your organization can sign up for electronic funds transfer or EFT, which is the recommended method since it allows fund disbursement twice monthly so you'll be getting your donation your donations delivered to you sooner. And you'll also be getting them more frequently. And just to reiterate, you can get your donations by check but there is a $5 check fee. So there is an incentive for you to sign up for EFT, get your donations quicker and more frequently and avoid that $5 check fee. The analytics submenu in your report section shows you a lot of great stats on donations made to your organization through mighty cause. I would definitely recommend checking this section out a few times during the giving day so you have a well rounded view of where your donations are coming from. So most people are giving in the $25 to $50 range. Maybe you want to think about adjusting your suggested donation amounts to what people are giving when they actually donate to you. You can also try to bump them up. So this is really helpful to use during the giving event and after as well to see what worked for you, what didn't, where donations were coming from and so on. All right, so the next item and this is a big one is your donor experience. There are several submenu options to choose from today. So we're going to talk about just a few of them. The donor experience is one of the first ones I wanted to hit on and this is again a very important feature for you to focus on when you're setting up your organization on mighty cause. The donor experience section gives you a lot of control over the donation process on mighty cause. So we're, we want you to be able to control the experience that you provide for your donors. And we also really want you to collect the information that is important to your nonprofit. So through donor experience you can make sure that if addresses or phone numbers again are very important to your, your donor retention strategy that you collect that information. You can also customize the suggested donation amounts. Those are the amounts there's four of them that are suggested to donors when they click the donate button they also have the option of entering in a custom amount. But those are really important because you're catching a donor at a key moment and a lot of donors really they use them they they use the suggested donation amounts they just click $25 or $50 or whatever denomination they feel they can afford, some donors can experience a little bit of choice paralysis if they're not told what what they should donate. So those are really important. Looking at your, your average donation amount is really helpful in determining what is appropriate to put in there as your suggested donation amounts, and then you also can add suggestions that describe what that amount provides. So, for instance, if you have, you know, $30 provides something tangible for your nonprofit, they're able to give to the community. That's a really great experience for a donor. Just as an example I've worked at animal shelters in the past and we could say things like $30 provides a rabies vaccine and a full checkup for a dog in our care or something like that. And that's really powerful because people like to give tangible things. So the more you can do to connect those amounts to tangible things that your nonprofit provides the stronger experience the donor will have. And one thing that you can also do in this section is preview the donation experience you don't have to make a test donation. You can go through that process beginning to end in your donor experience tool, so that you know if you're going through it and you've selected every single option there is for donors and you go oh wow this is way too much. This is a really cumbersome process you can sort of edit out things that are maybe nice to have but not necessary. So make sure you do that before the giving event so that you know what donors are seeing, and that you've previewed your process and you feel really comfortable with it and that you know it's not super cumbersome. We don't want to have a ton of steps there but we also want to provide options for you so we leave it to you to preview that experience and make sure that that is a process that you want your donors to go through and not something that's overly cumbersome or detailed. Alright so the fundraising section on your mighty cause manager is where you will find the matching grants tool. As I'm sure many of you know having a matching grant from a donor can go a really long way in driving donations. So I want to make sure that you're aware of that tool that mighty cause has specifically for that. And we will talk in depth about matching grants in the strategy webinar that's coming up later. I just wanted to introduce you to the tool. The matching grants tool is a versatile tool and you have a lot of options for how you structure your match. While a lot of matches are one to one matches where you give basically the amount that a donor gives is match one to one so if they if you have a grant for $1,000 somebody gives $25. That is matched exactly at $25 but you can also shake it up you can do two to one. You can do three to one and you can also do a match percentage of each donation. So if you have a grant or who says, I want to match 50% of each donation you can set that up through the matching grants tool. Our matching grants tool does the math for you. So all you have to do is really choose how you structure it and that's a conversation you'll want to have with your grand tour. Again, one to one matches are kind of the gold standard but there's a lot of flexibility in there so that if you have somebody providing a grant who has something specific they want to do. We can usually make that happen through the matching grants tool. You can also apply a match when a certain number of donations have been received. For instance, if there was a bonus challenge available for most for the most individual donations, you could say that if you get 100 donations within the hour, you'll get an additional $1,000 for your nonprofit or however your matching grant is set up to help you actually drive donation volume and traffic. The matching grants 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 one after the other. So that probably sounds like a lot, but the tool itself is very user friendly and you have a lot of flexibility and how you structure your match. So I would highly suggest checking out the matching grants tool just to see your possibilities, especially if you're talking to sponsors or community partners about a match right now. If you get overwhelmed by the possibilities just setting it up as a one to one match is the easiest thing that you can possibly do. Under the matching grant section of the fundraiser view you can also find fundraising templates. You can create a template for give out day to help your supporters create their fundraisers faster. Definitely on a giving event peer to peer fundraising which is where your supporters are fundraising on your behalf they're asking their social network to help you raise funds and make a donation to their specific page that they create. That really helps you increase the amount that you give and reach more people on a day where time really matters on the, the, the fundraiser templates tool. Sorry, I'm sorry, I was behind one slide. The fundraiser templates tool really allows you to make that process very easy for your fundraisers. It allows you access to one free template, and it basically allows you to pre fill some sections of their fundraiser so that they don't have to do it, especially with board members this is extremely helpful. The more work you can do to help them get up and running a lot more easily and more quickly is it makes it more likely that they'll actually participate so when people create a peer to peer fundraiser for your nonprofit. It gives you the information of using this template that you've provided for them that has some information filled out for them. And then they can go back in and they can customize it later, or they can opt not to use it or they can just publish it with what's there. So there's that gives your your fundraisers some options and gives them the flexibility to get started get published and get fundraising sooner without spending a lot of time investing in creating at this page from scratch. The page creation process is very easy, but as we all know sometimes board members and people involved with our nonprofit, they're really busy and this just gives them a head start. So fundraising templates are a really great way you can engage peer to peer fundraisers and can be a nice incentive and say hey, we have a template that you can use in there that fills up the most important parts of your page. And that can sometimes be the tipping point that says, okay, I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to set up a fundraiser for give out day for your nonprofit. So make sure that you know where templates are and spend a little bit of time creating a template for give out day. You can plug some language in there about your nonprofit as well as some information about give out day that pre fills their story for them. So it's really easy. If you have a video or a photo that you're using for your campaign, you can add that there as well so that they don't have to find a photo for you. Another bonus of fundraising templates is that it really gives you some say in how people fundraise for you. You are giving them information and talking points and visuals that they can use. So fundraising templates are a really great way to start engaging peer to peer fundraisers and getting people on board so that when early donations open, you have a lot of boots on the ground telling people about your important work and asking them to make a donation. The last section on your admin part is the settings. If you click settings, it opens a sub menu where you can update your organization settings. You can customize your organization's URL, manage your electronic funds transfer so you get all the money you raised during the campaign, update your legal information if needed. Sometimes we've pulled in your information from the IRS database. If your address has changed, for instance, you can update that here in your settings. And you can also edit your social sharing options if you wanted to add a tag for people who retweet from your mighty cause account. The settings section is also where you can add or remove admins from your account. So moving on from the admin bar in your mighty cause account, I want to make sure that I mention the really great tools you can use as you get ready for give out day that is the nonprofit toolkit. The toolkit has tips and tricks, FAQs, walkthroughs, and it also has templates where you can get email and social media templates so that you can use them, customize them, and you don't have to think as hard about it if you're having a little bit of writer's block. It's a really great place to get inspired and get into the weeds of planning your campaign and learning about it. There's a ton of great resources there. As well as some graphics that you can use to sort of customize your nonprofits brand for give out day. So definitely take a look at your toolkit resources, utilize them. They are here to help you. And the Horizon Foundation and Mighty Cause work together to provide these for you. So please take a look at what's there and see what's of use to you because the more you utilize these, the better prepared you will be for give out day. All right, as we wrap this up, I want to make sure that you have our support teams contact information. They're a really great resource before and during the challenge for anything campaign related. So if you need help setting up your EFT, if you need help with strategy around the prizes, or if your donor just needs a receipt, the Mighty Cause support team is here to help you out with that. So you can reach us at support at mightycause.com. We are Monday through Friday, nine to five Eastern Standard Time. And you can also give us a call at<PHONE_NUMBER>. Just if you need any help from us, please let us know we're here to help you and our team is, they're all experts on the platform. So there's no question that's too dumb. We can always help you and we're happy to share our knowledge with you and help you get oriented on the platform and do the things you want to do so that you can raise a ton of money for your important work on give out day. And I mentioned this a little bit earlier, but if you want to move on to strategy, I recommend that you register for the second webinar, which is all about strategy. That is Wednesday, February 12th at 3pm Eastern Time. The second webinar is really where we're going to get into the weeds about how to use matching grants, prizes, how to set up your marketing for give out day. So kind of less of the dry informational platform oriented stuff and more of the strategy that you're probably going to be really interested in. So go ahead and register. That is on the, in the toolkit, I believe, on give out days website. And before we jump on to questions, I just wanted to check in with Nicole and see if there were any other pieces of information that you wanted to share with our registrants and the people on this webinar. Hi, thanks. Thanks Linda. Yeah, I do. I wanted to circle back to some of the leaderboards just really quickly. We will be making announcements about what leaderboards are going to be available this year in the coming weeks. But I just wanted to make sure that folks know that for give out day our leaderboards, at least the ones that we currently know about are all based on the number of unique donors and not on the total dollars raised. So it's really about, in addition to, you know, fundraising for your nonprofit is really about sort of growing your donor base. So that's why we'd like to do it based on the unique donors versus dollars raised so that like some major donor can't come in and give one extremely large gift and then, you know, that that organization gets surprised because of that. So that's about all that I have to add. I'm just here to answer any questions that are more about the, you know, rules and regulations or anything like that and Linda will handle anything that's about registration and the the platform. Absolutely. So we've got smart some questions already in the queue. If you have one that you want to ask while you have both Nicole and myself on the line. Feel free to go into that questions box and type your question in. So we'll get started with a question about a monthly donor on the old platform click and pledge transferring them over to mighty cause we have at least one monthly donor. So on the old platform, is there an easy way to transfer them over from click and pledge. That is a really great question for our support team they can help you through that. Typically, just as a general rule when it comes to people's credit card information, we can as a platform decide okay well you're going to get charged on our website now, because that's just not how credit card donations work. So you will need to work with the donor to get their donation moved over to the mighty cause platform. But if you want to contact our support team, they can help you with that. But just generally as a rule we're just not able to take somebody's recurring donation they set up through one payment portal and move it over to ours without their informed consent. So we do need to work with the donor to do that but just contact our support team at mighty support at mighty cause calm, and we can help you get that set up. All right, so this is a great question for Nicole. When is a good date to start promoting our campaign. We're going to as we talked about earlier we're going to be opening early registration I mean early registration early giving on March 26. So that's kind of when the sort of social media push will really really kind of amp up. But in my opinion it's never too early to do a save the date let folks know that it's coming. We're posting on social media so folks so there's content that people can follow. Don't overdo it obviously, but as soon as you are, you know, have your page set up and are ready to go. You can start promoting it across your channels and to your email lists and to however, however else you communicate with your current donors. Yeah, and just to piggyback off of that one thing that I think nonprofits are often concerned about with early donations is that they only have one shot with each donor. And that's their only chance to get donations they want to save it for the big day. But that is usually not how donors behave what we tend to see is that your biggest supporters will be happy to donate more than once. So don't be too afraid to tell them about give out day and get them donating because typically your biggest supporters are going to come back on the giving day itself when you have a lot of activity happening. You're going to have matching grants I hope and there's going to be prizes available. So don't worry about only having one donation from each person that's generally not how donors behave on giving events you'll usually see a couple of donations from your supporters. So don't be too afraid to once donations are open to solicit them and you know, ask them to make a donation. And one thing that can also be really helpful is sort of getting some seed donations from your biggest supporters for instance your donors, the people that you can really count on to be there for your nonprofit and show up to support you doing some targeted marketing to those people to ask them to help you build up momentum for your campaign can be a really great way to get that number a little bit higher before the event and also reach out to these really valuable supporters of your nonprofit. Alright, so there is a really specific question that I'm going to pass on to Nicole in an email about the requirements for the event, but it's a really specific question so I'll just pass that on to her to go offline with that question. Oh, this is a good one is there a penalty for not reaching our goals. As the mighty cause representative I can tell you absolutely not we are not an all or nothing platform. So whatever money you raise for give out day or outside of give out day you receive there's no there's you are not required to reach your funding goal that's really something that you can use as a marketing tool and to help build up excitement, but you know if you set your goal at $500 and you raise $200 you get that you get those $200 there's no penalty or anything like that, everything that you raise you will get. And I just want to add that with the metrics on your site you have the ability to change the goal in real time on the day. So say you set a $10,000 goal and you're, you blow past that, and you're at $12,000. If you want to discourage people from giving because you already made your goal you can raise that goal, or conversely if you know you set a kind of stretch goal and you feel like you're not getting there and you want it to seem like you're actually meeting your goal then you can lower it as well. Yeah, absolutely. And you have total flexibility to do that we want you to keep every cent that you you raise and everything else on the platform is really just to support you in that including the goal amount that you set so there's no penalty whatsoever. And one other question I'm happy to take is our donations available right away for they're not available right away as in like you can cash them out and just put them into your bank account as I was mentioning with the disbursements. We batch them together and we we either send them to you via EFT.  We do that to make it easier for you to account for all of these donations, so there's not a million different deposits for each donation so we'll batch them together, and we'll send them to you and you can access a detailed report of that disbursements that you can see exactly what was included in that but you won't get them immediately but you will you will get them. If you're you want to get them as soon as possible I really recommend signing up for EFT so that you can get them just direct deposited into your account. And correct me if I'm wrong but there's the you guys have specific dates that you do the disbursement is that correct. Yes, so for a check, we send it out on the 10th and there's a little bit of fudge factory from there because it has to go to a mailing house and then get to your organization's address through the US Postal Service but we process it on the 10th. And it'll get there whenever the Postal Service gets it there for EFT we do it on the 10th and the 25th and because that is direct, they just show up in your account on those days 10th and 25th. If for some reason the 10th is on a Sunday you'll get it, usually the day before, because banks are not open on Sundays, but yeah you EFT is really the easiest option you'll get those disbursements regularly on the 10th and the 25th. If it's a check, you will get it will cut it to you around the 10th, and then it'll be mailed to you which you know can take a little bit of time, but that'll be for the previous calendar month so on the 10th of, say, April, you would get a check for all of the donations that took place in March. And if you have any questions about when to expect a disbursement or if you have, you're not sure why you haven't received yours yet, you can always contact support and we're happy to look up that information and let you know what's happening. But it's generally very, very much like clockwork we just process them, we batch them together we send them to you through whatever you've chosen. All right, so what is a good goal for an org with a small budget less than 25,000 per year. I'll let you tackle that one Nicole. The goal setting is really less about what your annual budget is I think and more about how engaged you think your donors and your network who are going to be helping you get the word out are going to be engaged on the day. So, you know, I would say, you know, maybe think low like 5000 if you want to set it at 10000 that would be, you know, have almost half your budget for the year which would be fantastic. And I've actually seen organizations very small actually hit goals like that, because they have done such a fantastic job of building out their page and running a really good campaign both via email and social media. So, but again, because that that metric can be changed. It's really just about what you think your network and your potential donors are going to going to do. Yeah, and you know one thing that I like to tell people when they're concerned about like what do I said is my goal what do I aim for is generally speaking most nonprofits will raise about the same as they did with not a little bit more in their last fundraising campaign so take a look at the last time you were doing a fundraising blitz for whatever purpose whether it was giving Tuesday end of year or if you have like an event happening and see what you raised and it'll typically be around that amount. If you have peer to peer fundraising happening you can push that a little bit because you'll have more people out there, you know talking up your nonprofit and you may be able to acquire some more donors, but whatever you did for your last campaign is a really good place to start. In terms of you know what you can expect to raise. You usually do pick up some donors through participation participation and giving event but that's if you're just kind of lost on the goal aspect looking at your last fundraising campaign and what you're able to do there. You're going to have the same donor base to start out with so that's usually a good place to start. So there's a question about fiscal sponsorship so I'll just read the whole thing and then we'll all fiscal sponsorships on mighty cause can there's a process for that so I just wanted to tackle this question. If my nonprofit wants to ask act as a fiscal sponsor for multiple LGBT filmmakers who would have their own individual pages. How would I go about doing that I've seen other fiscal sponsors do that before on give out day. So, I don't know for sure that you would need in this particular particular situation need to have a fiscal sponsorship set up it kind of depends on where you want the money to go. So if you want the money to go to the filmmakers, you could just have them set it up as pure to pure fundraisers and then they you could see where the source of those donations is in your donation report so you can see. Oh, you know, Joe Smith he raised $500 on his page and then you can disperse that to him however you'd like at your organization so treating them as pure to pure fundraisers is typically a little bit easier than setting up a full fiscal sponsorship situation because typically how that works is we basically create a full nonprofit profile for them on our platform which doesn't sound like it's what you want here if you wanted to get some individuals involved and you have some sort of arrangement with them, but you want the money to still come to your nonprofit. They would just need to create fundraisers. If you have an organization who, for some reason does not have their 501 C3 yet or they have some other kind of situation with tax tax exempt status. You and you want to set up a separate formal fiscal sponsorship with them contact support and will help you take care of that there is a process that involves a memorandum of understanding. So that's a little bit dense but typically if you just want to get a lot of individuals involved in raising money and have the money go to your nonprofit and not say go directly to that filmmaker. So if you just want to have them set up as pure to pure fundraisers. We issue the disbursement, it needs to go to a 501 C3 nonprofit because of the mighty cause charitable foundations position as a donor advised fund. What you do with the money once you have it if you're divvying it up to different filmmakers. That is 100% you. But if, if for that particular situation where you have multiple filmmakers. I would set them up with their, their own individual fundraiser pages for your nonprofit and that way the donations are tax deductible and whatever you do with the disbursement is, is totally up to you. But that would be the way I'd like to handle it if for some reason, your nonprofit has your 501 C3 and you want to help another organization who does not have a 501 C3 participate and give out day as as an organization. We can also do that so that's something that you can contact support about there's a process that's a lot easier. If we give you a list of the different steps. It's not that complicated but we do need some some paperwork for it. So just that doesn't sound like it applies to this specific situation but just I wanted to let everybody know if that is something that you're interested in that is a possibility on mighty cause. If you wanted to help enable another organization that has a similar mission participate in the giving event. So, I hope that answers your question, but I think that peer to peer fundraising and just having all of the money. Go to your nonprofit funneled through your page is the best way to handle that specific fundraising quandary. Can I actually I want to I want to break in because for for at least for horizons giving event. We would prefer that each of the filmmakers participate separately from the fiscal sponsor, because of the impact of the leaderboard and the unique donors situation. So if they're going to if the filmmakers are fundraising for the fiscal sponsor and it's not going to be dispersed broken out to the filmmakers, then that fundraiser way is perfectly fine. But for our rules and regulations for leaderboard inclusion, the filmmakers would each need to participate separately as a fiscally sponsored project. So that the unique donors are not all rolling up into one account. Okay, yeah, and if that's the case and you need to set them up as their own basically their own organization on mighty cause. Your first step would be to contact support because we do need a paper trail in order to legally dispense funds to them so that the IRS understands why we diverted donations to this particular organization that is not 501 C3. So contact support at mighty cause comm and they can help you get set up with that. Okay, so just to clarify the minimum donation to count toward the donor total is still $10. So from a platform perspective we can't the minimum that somebody can donate on the platform is $5 for the event the suggested minimum is $10 I believe we can't prevent them from giving $5. But that's the $10 is the suggested minimum for the giving event, if I'm understanding correctly. Yes, that's right. Yes. Okay, so this is a good question for Nicole. Do fundraising campaigns need to be specifically for LGBTQ plus program, or can it be for something else. It needs to be specifically for an LGBTQ plus program so anybody that's participating in give out day, if they are participating as a organization that is not an LGBTQ primary organization which we define as having LGBTQ explicitly as part of your mission. So if you're serving LGBTQ majority staff and leadership and serving primarily LGBTQ people, if that's not your organization but you have a program that is specifically targeting LGBTQ people then you can fundraise for the program, but the fundraising page would need to be reflective of the program and not the overall nonprofit. And you can easily set up your organization page for that so for instance, if it's just a program and it doesn't have its own IRS tax exempt number you can just set up your profile to reflect the specific program that you're fundraising for, like changing the name so that it's you know, this particular program of our nonprofit and all of your information reflects that. And you can also set up a fundraiser page for a particular program and use that if you would like to but if you're not planning on using mighty cause year round. You can easily just customize your profile to reflect the program and specify that in your, your about section your description so that people understand that that this donation goes toward that particular program. And then I think the last question we have is, do the prizes go to the organization or to a donor. So Nicole did you want to take that one. Yeah, the prices go to the organization. This is a pretty easy one for unique donor prizes. You will, especially when it comes to golden tickets which are the hourly prizes, you'll see them associated with a particular donor and donation. If the donor chooses to be anonymous then you won't see their name but people like to see that they helped their favorite organization with an extra 100 $200 whatever the prize worth is and that's a great tool to reach out to that donor and thank them for their help in winning that prize. But the money goes to your organization. All right, so I think that is all of the questions we have for today. Again, if you have any other questions you can always contact mighty cause support or you can contact Nicole. I'm also happy to answer any questions we did record this webinar. So you will have access to the recording if you wanted to share it with anybody at your organization who's helping you with give out day. And we'll also put the slides up as well so you can have those to review or share them with anybody who's helping you as well. So thank you Nicole for helping to answer some of these questions. And thank you all for for coming to this webinar and spending so much time with us today to talk about give out day. Great. Thank you everybody. Have a good rest of your day and we look forward to supporting your give out day campaign. Yes, happy fundraising.


So, we work at Urecom and I run a research group there. We are looking at 5G and beyond 5G wireless networks and we think there's a lot of potential for machine learning applications in such networks. We think of two major challenges that could be solved with machine learning. One of them is any scenario where we don't have a proper understanding of physical model to be able to come up with a non-machine learning solution and the other type of scenario where we think machine learning can play a role is anything where we don't have the mathematical tools to really write down equations and solve them properly so machine learning can be used there to be able to come up with flexible solutions. We think of several scenarios really. The one that we are looking at these days mostly is the one where we have radio devices on independent, sorry, autonomous devices that carry radio antennas and that have to come up with decisions mostly on their own so these could be antennas that are mounted on mobile devices or mounted on a piece of infrastructure that are not connected to the rest of the network. For example, flying relay that could be used to provide connectivity to ground users for a number of use cases. The main scenario we are looking at right now is the use of a flying relay that uses machine learning to have the intelligence to position itself, to place itself at the right place to provide connectivity to the ground users. This could be useful when you have a disaster you need to recover from so you have lost infrastructure and you want to send some flying relays to provide connectivity to people on the ground or if you have flash crowd events, spot events, we need to follow people when they move around and you don't necessarily have again the fixed infrastructure to provide the connectivity. Those are the main applications we have in mind. Well I think the big challenge in machine learning is to understand the potential and also the requirement in terms of complexity. Could we implement such algorithms in radio devices and I'm talking about mobile devices that have to be of small size and have to cope with limited energy supply. So this is I think the biggest challenge.


Okay, Alex, I'm going to read your comment on censor 2. Quite light, I guess. You won't know because you're just... Okay, I'm going to read Alex's comment on censor 2.  Why do you live in the... Oh, God, not this argument.  Oh, grow up. Alex, how old are you? Why aren't you in Russia? Oh, how old are you, Alex? And you do praise Russia and talk about, talk bad about the West. Also, you're immigrant too, which makes you...  Okay, now we know what level of intellect you are. So you definitely didn't watch the full interview of Tucker Carlson and Putin.  You gotta be a clown, man. You gotta be a clown, right? Are you kidding me?  Hey, in a family, right?   That the one criticizing it should leave the family. No, you have to sit down and talk and go, hey, listen, what's going on here? Why do you want to burn down the house, right?  Excuse me?   Grow up, man. Low, acute, low, acute. That's, like, wow. Wow. Oh, like, Chico, do you expect any escalation in the Balkans? Especially, sir, yeah. Yeah, unfortunately, unfortunately. I do. Larkbark, Alex Smith, Chico. Chico has kept an open mind throughout his platform just because you disagree with someone, doesn't it? Yeah, Larkbark, the lowest, acute thing I've ever heard people say is don't criticize the West.  What? What? What?  Right? Idiots. Idiots.


Hey, there's all the fans, it's L here from Zelda Informer and today I thought of doing a unboxing of the Link from the Wind Waker, Toon Link, Nendoroid. It came in my mail today, my mailbox today, and I thought I'd do an unboxing of it because it's pretty awesome and action figures are always nice and the Nendoroids come with lots of cool little extras that are very nice, basically.  It is number 413 in the Nendoroid series. This is obviously a Japanese import from the Good Smile Company, licensed by Nintendo with the Wind Waker HD logo in the top left as well. In the box itself at the moment you can see Link, well the figure, the sword, oh his Kokiri sword or whatever sword, wooden shield and a heart piece. On the side of the box you can see a side animation and a side slash. On the other side he's holding his Wind Waker and he just got a heart piece. On the bottom you can see him in a ready, well not really ready for combat but about to go into combat stance with the gigantic number on it again and the title etc. At the top exactly the same and on the back you get the same image to other same images. This is obviously a German import as it was transported to Germany first so there you go, this is the European version although it's basically exactly the same as any American import as it is still an import. Some Japanese text that I have no idea what it means, yeah it looks great for collecting already because it should look great in your cupboard like this. Over here it says Link, the Wind Waker version, would go great alongside a Figma Link. So yeah, let's get into the box itself because the figure is of course the most important part. I'll just open up my knife here.  Let's try to get into the box itself, there's a damaging, nah it's just, well slight damaging.   So pretty standard packaging, nothing to say about that. This just folds over, nice blue color over there. Let's flip it around and pull out the figure itself. There you go, on the inside there is a nice little manual which I can't read as it is in Japanese. And gigantically it says 413 in the background with the rest just being the nice baby blue. Any nice pictures in the manual? Just explaining how to put the sword into the woosh thing, posing mechanics, removing the face, the items inside the box obviously and the back is blank. Let's put that over there, right. Figure itself, what do we have in the box, let me open it up first. Actually there we go, that's the top off, just the standard top whatever. Here we have the base, this is used for posing so that you can pose your figure in any way you want and place it in your shelf, which I will do. And there's also another slight joint there for later on.  So in here as I said the little joint piece and then the posing stand, I dropped one. And where did it go, oh no, oh here it is, alright. Several posing figures, these move as well, just so you can pose your figure in any way you want, they look nice. Quite see-through, do these twist as well, yeah they all twist. Yeah that's quite nice, the stand itself has several holes in it so you can put different ones of these in here in the separate holes. Now of course the main gill, the figure itself comes in a little bit of plastic, right the face is stuck on there, so let me just take out the hair so I can get that piece of plastic out, there we go, okay there's another piece of plastic over there. And the legs like that, get that plastic out as well. Right, put them back together because we don't want a weird link. Wow, okay this figure feels very sturdy, like any normal PVC figure should feel. The paint job is very nice, if it would focus, come on camera, there you go. Paint job is very nicely done, nice shiny little button there, the joints, the joints are all, well, jointed so you can move every piece, arms as well, swing around and detach. The head is on a ball joint so you can just move them around as you want, look them up, look them down, look them down, whatever, there's a slight swivel in his hat as well so you can twist that around, if you can see, yeah there you go, so you can pose that as well, seems like there's a little bit of damage there on my figure, but that could change from figure to figure right there, although that might just be part of the sculpt. Anyway, very nice looking sculpt, it looks and feels very much like Link, or like any figure should. I don't know what Link feels like, that came out wrong. Anyway, let's put him over here with the hair so that he can sit down. Right, you get three extra faces so that he has different expressions, they all look very nice also. So you have a attack mode face and a suspicious face, like he's suspicious of someone, or trying to be inconspicuous, and a very happy face, happy Link is happy, yay. Here's the shield with the Triforce kind of popping out, really F, so back, this is also a joint so that can swivel and come off, everything seems to come off quite easy. So you should watch out with that, be very careful when you're handling this because it does come off extremely easily. But it's very detailed and feels very nice and looks very nice, the print is also extremely nice. On here, come on camera, anyway. Heartpiece, here you go. Nice indented look like Wind Waker heartpiece, there's a little hole in there, so you can actually put one of the joints inside the heartpiece, so that it can be floating above Link's figure, get that back up, there you go. Then the sword, yeah it just falls out, everything just falls out really. Sword is a nice metallic shine on the blade itself, while the hilt is just normal matte with a slight swirl in the bottom there. Don't know why they didn't choose to use the master sword for this but it still looks very nice, looks like a sword that Link would use and looks like the sword from the game. Then of course the, I don't know what you should call this wave slash, I'm just going to call it slash. The slash trail, yeah something like that. Which you can easily with the hole that's in the bottom there, slide into your sword. You don't want to do that too often or the paint job will go off from the sword, but then it looks like you're just slashed and it looks very nice actually. I really like that the trail also coming out in front of the sword as well. And you can slightly see the sword through it.  I don't know how to get these out. Is it a separate piece that you can just, yep, right this is a separate piece that you can pull out like that. And they should just fall out very easily. You should really watch out with that because otherwise you will lose pieces. So be very careful with that when you take that out. That's the base piece, I'm going to put that to the side again. Right, you get two extra arms. One for both like holding something. This one has his hand open while the other's had his hands, no close I mean like he's gripping something. While these had his hands, well this one, oh his bottom fell off again. This one's kind of like loosely closed. If I can get that in picture better. Focus. Okay everything's just falling, I guess that's fine. Put Link back together and put him down here. Right, it's kind of loosely open, this one. While this arm is actually holding the Wind Waker and the Wind Waker looks very nice. Yeah, this one's specifically designed for that. Two extra arms because they're bent while these are straight. The hands are removable obviously. So I can take these off the arms, they just decided to ship them with the arms in. Also Link has a little indentation on his back so you can put another joint in there. There is three more hands that are all gripping. It looks like, yeah. Nearly all of them, well they are gripping all of them but done with just slight differences. For example this one has a straight hand upwards. Grip is the normal grip. Can't really see it well because it's very small. There you go. Well this one has a tilted grip. This hand is slightly tilted from the bolt joint there down below. And this hand is also, these two are the same just left and right handed. Yep, those are the hands and then also bent legs instead of the straight ones that he has by default. So bent legs down here, yeah. And then it's possible to obviously remove every single item that I showed. So for example if I want to take out a leg and do that very easily, replace it with another one, take off his side, replace it with another leg, and have him for example, I'm going to take off both and insert both. Gonna have him skipping along. La-de-da-dee. La-de-da-da. Na-da-da, I am Link. Anyway I wanted to show you can remove the face. Obviously you can take out the hair like I showed earlier. And then you can very easily take out the face as well. It all just slots into each other. It's kind of rough on the inside here, but that doesn't matter very much. There's a little smile there which represents the Good Smile Company, which are the distributors and producers. So, whoops. The back of the head actually also comes off, which is kind of strange. But you can just insert that back in there. So if you have any other Nendoroids you can mix them up, whatever. So this was the face that came with it. Just take that out and insert any other face that you want. So I want him looking happy because he's skipping along, remember? So, we just insert the hair again. And hey, Link is happy and skipping along. Yay. Anyway, that about covers the Nendoroid, everything that's inside. Very nice, feels very nice, looks very nice. Everything's very highly detailed, especially like the shield, strangely enough. The faces are very nicely sculpted as well. Slight nose coming out with the indentation in the mouth. Yeah, it just all looks very nice. Do watch out with these because fakes will be made of action figures and collectible figures. I bought mine for around 40 euros, which is quite steep in price. I would have liked to see it less, but it is very high quality. Nah, it just all looks good. So, came out recently in Europe, I believe, but I think it was available in America already. Anyway, that about covers up, wraps it up. This was the Link Nendoroid, Wind Waker version. Check out Zeldinformer.com for more, and thanks for watching. See ya.


The motor function assessment of post-stroke patients is important for their recovery. However, conventional methods are subjective and rely heavily on the experience of therapists. This paper proposes a novel approach to automate the assessment process by analyzing the patient's performance during three common activities of daily living, ADL's tooth brushing, face washing, and drinking. The authors systematically searched for the best parameters for the data segmentation, feature extraction, feature optimization, and classifier selection. They found that the best results could be achieved with three sensor modules, simple square integral, slope sign change, and modified mean absolute value one and two features, principle component analysis for feature optimization, and logistic regression classifier. This approach can accurately identify the stages of stroke patients using only these parameters, which is more cost effective than other approaches. Furthermore, this study is the first to explore the use of sensor configuration and parameter optimization in the BRS classification framework. This article was authored by Long Meng, Sinyu Jiang, Hai Baqin, and others. We are article.tv, links in the description below.


Hi everyone. Thanks for having me and welcome to the session on qualitative research 101. My name is Pam Brown and I lead the product management team for AWS certification. Previously, I was director of product management at the graduate management and mission council. I've been in product management for over a decade and I have experienced managing all parts of the product development lifecycle. My path to product management is a meandering one. I have a master's in public policy and I used to work in international development. My first job out of grad school was as a researcher looking at the impact of microfinance programs on the poor. It was actually in that role that I really got my feet wet in qualitative research. I use a lot of what I learned then in my current work as a product manager. I'm a big fan of qualitative research and I believe all product managers could benefit from understanding how to use qualitative data. Now, how did I become such a fan of qualitative research? I'll take you back to 2004 when I was living in a rural village in India working at a microfinance bank. The woman in the middle of this photo was my mentor and she remains a close family friend to this day. The women around her are some of the bank's customers. I was there trying to understand how these women managed risks, specifically health risks, as in how did they protect themselves against the financial impact of getting sick? Now, on the surface, it would be easy to assume that they simply didn't. At the time in India, there was no such thing as health insurance for the rural poor and even for the middle class in India, having health insurance was rare. But I knew from having studied about the financial lives of the poor that there's more to this than meets the eye. I knew that they had ways of saving, borrowing, lending, and all of this took place outside of the formal financial system. So, were there ways that they insured against risk without the proper health insurance, as we know it? Now, I spent a lot of time that year observing, listening, and asking questions. I visited health clinics, attended meetings of groups of women called self-help groups, and I talked to women just like those who are in this photo. And what I learned was that even though they didn't have or didn't even understand the concept of health insurance, they had ways of protecting themselves against the financial impact of sudden illness. But you wouldn't see it if you didn't know where to look. That is, if you were looking for, say, financial records or written policies, you wouldn't find anything because they didn't exist. I had to use qualitative research methods. Now, you may be thinking, okay, Pam, I get it. Use qualitative research where there is no quantitative data. But what if you manage an application, and you've got lots of quantitative data, you can see all sorts of metrics like number of active users or activation rates. You can even run AB tests and get hard data that way. Would you still need to do qualitative research? I would argue enthusiastically that yes, you do. To make this argument, I'll start with what is qualitative research. I'll then talk about why use qualitative research in product management. Then I'll discuss when to use qualitative research, and I'll move on to how to conduct qualitative research and end with some key takeaways. Let's get started. So what is qualitative research? Qualitative research involves the collection of non-numerical data. They include customer interviews, focus groups, and open-ended questions and surveys. These are all examples of qualitative research. So our product reviews, customer service feedback, and even direct observation of your users. Now, this is different from quantitative research, which relies on quantitative and numerical data. This includes everything from sales and usage reports to AB test results. Quantitative research analyzes numbers. Qualitative research gets a bad rap sometimes because some people see it as subjective or lacking in rigor. For example, if you sift through your customer service tickets for your product, you're likely going to find a lot of negative feedback and complaints about your product. That's because people who bother with contacting customer service are typically dissatisfied with your product in some way, and they don't necessarily represent the general population of your users. So there's only so much that you could extract from that. Maybe you talk to a customer, and that one customer raves about a specific product feature that you're thinking about, but that's just one customer. Again, what weight do you give that feedback? So it's true that qualitative research has limitations. It involves small sample sizes, and you can't really extrapolate it to represent the entire population of your user base. Interpretation of data can be subjective and hard to replicate, but quantitative research also has limitations. And as a product manager, you should understand the limitations of both and figure out when it is appropriate to use which type of research or data. Let's talk more about the reasons for using qualitative research. So why use qualitative research methods in product management? Well, to put simply, numbers don't tell the whole story. Numbers can tell you what is happening and when it's happening, but they can't really tell you why something is happening. Here's an example, and I've made this up. The numbers are fake, but you'll get the idea, right? Let's suppose that you manage a product that, compared to historical performance, is just not doing so well. This is a chart of sales that is going down year over year, but let's say you've got other metrics, say activations or average time of usage, and everything is sort of just going down. Let's say that is a fairly mature product. The product has been in the market for several years, so you hypothesize that maybe part of the reason for the so-so performance is because, well, the product is old and it needs some sort of updating, maybe the content to stale. Now, before diving in and just figuring out a plan for updating the product, you figure it'd be wise to do some qualitative research and get the voice of the customer.  And sure, there can be improvements, but it doesn't seem like updating the content will necessarily have a big impact. So instead, what you find is that people are actually having trouble discovering the product or understanding its value, that these are the bigger challenges. You find people who didn't use the product at all because they just didn't understand it. They either were confused about what its value was or they confused it with something else that you offer. Based on that insight, you change your hypothesis and take a different approach. This is actually something that happened with the product that I managed. Based on the voice of customer work that I did, I actually changed my approach and focused on developing a new name and positioning for this product. I then tested it through one of our sales channels to see if I was right. The test went well and so then I moved forward with rolling out a brand new name, a new look and positioning for the product across all of our channels. The result was increased product awareness, which translated into higher sales. Had I relied on just the numbers and had I just been guessing and what the underlying problem was, I would have wasted resources on something that didn't address the core issues. Instead, I used qualitative research to understand the numbers, formed a hypothesis, conducted a test to gather more quantitative data, and then I used the quantitative data to validate my hypothesis. I'm actually a big fan of quantitative analysis. I was even a statistics TA in grad school, but I'm careful not to use it for everything. I advocate for using both quantitative and qualitative research methods to generate customer insights and drive product development. Let's talk more about when to use qualitative research methods. So when do we use it? I use it in several ways. One, I use it at the beginning of the product development process when I want to understand the customer problem. That's what I was doing in India, using qualitative research to just understand what is. I then use this information in combination with any quantitative data that I might have or maybe relevant to build my personas and customer journeys. I'll give you an example. This is a side project that I worked on a few years ago. It wasn't directly related to my job at the time, but I was asked to look at ways of improving the public bathroom experience. I focused specifically on parents of young children. I was the parent of two young children at the time who are now a little bit older, and I knew firsthand how awful the public bathroom experience can be for parents of young children. I interviewed eight parents of young children, both boys and girls, in Washington, DC, to understand their experiences at the playground, rest stops, restaurants, basically anywhere that a child may need to use a public bathroom. The findings were fascinating. I heard about all sorts of workarounds that parents have to come up with to deal with the challenges of public bathrooms. For example, I learned that the handicap bathroom stall is quite popular with parents because it's bigger and it has a bar that kids can hang on to so that they don't fall into the bowl. I also learned that parents of boys have come up with all types of creative ways to get their kids to aim properly. The most creative one that I heard was from a parent of a boy who needed to use a bathroom on a plane. Because the space was so tight, the parent ended up having to lift the child horizontally above the toilet like he was Superman so that the child could tinkle into the toilet from a prone position. Now, for this project, I used a qualitative data I collected to build a persona. I gave her a name, Annie, and described in a few sentences the key behaviors and motivations that I observed in my interviews. The persona represents a composite of the parents I spoke with. Annie is 35 and mother of a three-year-old. She's relieved that her son is finally potty-trained but dreads the fact that he often waits until the last minute to go potty. She prefers not to use public bathrooms at all, but is resigned to the fact that she will because of her son, and she always likes to feel prepared, even though her son is potty-trained, she still carries around a diaper bag. I then built a journey map to document the highlights and lowlights of the simple experience of using a public bathroom. I broke it down into multiple steps and identified the opportunities for greatest impact. Now, what you see here on this slide is an abbreviated version of the journey map that I created based on the qualitative research that I did. The gray solid line represents what most parents experience when taking their kids to public bathrooms. The orange dashed line identifies opportunities for delighting them. Now, take a look at the last few steps. Something as simple as washing hands can be very challenging for parents of young kids because most things are at an adult height. Parents have to lift up their kid and hold them with one arm while turning on the faucet with the other so that their kids can wash their hands. Now, this can be even more challenging when the soap dispensers are placed far away from the sink. From a design and product perspective, something as simple as creation of a step stool beneath the sink and a soap dispenser that's closer to the sink can be a huge relief to parents. Now, this is not stuff where you can find quantitative data on. You may be able to get a quick pulse check on satisfaction. I've seen public bathrooms asking me to rate my experience with an emoji as I'm walking out, right? I just kind of hit a button. But that is not going to give you the depth of insight that good qualitative research can yield. Even asking someone in a survey, how would you rate your experience will provide just limited data. And that's because most people have come to accept their reality as is. They may think in this case, well, the bathroom was clean, so I was satisfied. But that's a very limited view of customer satisfaction. The fact is, most people wouldn't be able to articulate their pain points because they're not even aware of their own pain points. Only when you're diving deep and really listening to the customer, can you uncover them. And that's really when you as a product manager know that you've hit upon something. When you can identify a pain point that even your customer doesn't know that they have. Qualitative research is great at helping you identify unarticulated customer problems. And these are the problems that I as a product manager find the most interesting to solve when customers don't even know that they had a problem in the first place. I'll give you two other times when I use qualitative research. One is to test out product concepts. Let's say I uncover some unmet customer need, and I have an idea for a solution. I'll then work on a prototype. The prototype is usually pretty low fidelity. Sometimes it's a clickable PowerPoint where you simulate an online experience using PowerPoint. I've also done this using drawings and video so that you can show someone what the end to end experience would feel like. I'll take this back to customers and just see how they react. Does it make intuitive sense to them? What questions do they ask? Do they get stuck? Are they confused? All of this is incredibly helpful feedback as you, the product manager, continue to refine the product concept. I'll also use qualitative research when I want to dive deeper into the quantitative data. I gave the example of the sales going down and you're just trying to figure out why this product has not been performing. I'll give you another example. I was once looking at sales and usage data for a product that I managed and there were stark differences in patterns across regions. Specifically in this case, China just stuck out. It just seemed like an anomaly. My colleagues and I had theories for why China stuck out. One of those theories was that our product was all in English and maybe the Chinese wanted something in their native language. I wanted to hear directly from the customers though. These were just hypotheses. I conducted interviews and focus groups with Chinese users of our product, as well as non-users. While it's true, what I found was that some users did want it in Chinese, there were also a fair number that just didn't. They actually insisted on it being in English for a variety of reasons. I won't go into what happened with that particular product, but the point is that if we simply relied on the quantitative data and made guesses, we would have been guessing at the reasons for why certain users behave differently. Let's talk about how to conduct qualitative research. Now that we've gone through reasons and situations for conducting qualitative research, let's talk about the how. How do you go about doing it? I recommend starting with a research brief because it walks you through all of the key steps. I always insist on a plan because I find that without it, it's really easy to get sidetracked or lost. Before you know it, you've lost sight of the original objective and you get back a bunch of data that either doesn't make sense or doesn't matter anymore. Or you may think that you need to do qualitative research when really based on your research objective and key questions, numbers are the way to go. Articulating a plan up front keeps you honest and align stakeholders to what you're researching and why. If you Google research brief templates, you'll find different ones out there. This outline is based on one that I use the most, but really you can use whatever you find to be the most helpful to you. The important thing is that you should use one so that you put a plan down on paper. Let's talk through the key sections. The first is the research objective. This is a statement of why you're undertaking this piece of research in the first place. It can be broad like trying to just understand how parents with little kids use public bathrooms or more specific, like what users think of a specific product that you just launched. It should be succinct and communicates the purpose of the research. Let's say I'm product manager of an e-commerce platform and I want to know whether people like using it. I would probably consider doing a survey and asking, well, how would you rate our platform and would you recommend it to others? But if I want to dive deeper to understand how people are using our platform and why they use it or don't use it, I'll also want to undertake some qualitative research. The next section contains hypotheses and the key research questions. It states the assumptions going into the research. It also states the specific research questions that we're trying to answer. I recommend for the number of questions, keeping it to one to maybe three questions at most, keep your research questions focused. The questions should flow from the research objective and articulate exactly what it is that we're trying to answer. Let's say that your objective is to understand how people are using your product so that you can increase product usage. You may want to ask, one, how are users using your product? And two, how are users using your product alongside other tools that they have? The second question is an interesting one because you'll see if users are relying on other tools in order to compensate for features or functionality that may be lacking in your product. The third section is a summary of background information that relates to the research objective. It includes any previous research or data analysis that was done on this topic. I recommend having it because it grounds your research with context and data. The fourth section is the target audience. Who do we want to talk to? Are they current customers? Are they lapsed customers? Are they potential customers? It's important to think through who you want to speak with. Don't assume that you always have to start with your current customers. Depending on your research objective, you may want to talk to people who used to be your customers or who aren't your customers at all, but meet some other criteria that you care about. In this section, you should also articulate a sampling plan. That is, how are you going to find the people that you want to speak with and how many do you want to speak with? There's no single right answer, but there are some guidelines to think about. How specific is your target audience? If it's pretty specific, then six, maybe eight, interviews is generally sufficient. If you're targeting a broader group of users that spans, say, age, gender, geographic location, you may want to consider grouping these into sub-segments and structuring your research based on these sub-segments. Building on that bathroom example that I gave earlier, if I were interested in talking to not just parents of young children in Washington, D.C., but parents of young children globally, well, then I would probably create a separate sampling plan for each target sub-segment based on geography. As I mentioned, you should also think about how you're going to find these participants. Will you draw from a customer list? Recruit participants through social media, would you hire a firm to create a panel? Also, be aware of customer consent and data privacy laws. In some places, you can't just reach out and ask if someone would like to participate in your market research. If your company has a legal department, I'd recommend consulting with them and making sure that you're in compliance with these laws. All right, on to the next big section. This is methodology. This is where you're going to articulate how you will go about collecting and analyzing the data. Will it be through a survey, focus group, customer interviews, or some other means? It doesn't have to be just one. Depending on your research objective, you may want to combine, say, interviews with a survey. I do this quite a bit, actually. For example, if you're interested in speaking with a very specific type of user, but you have no way to actually filter out for this type of user based on the data that you have, you can use a survey as a screener and ask questions that will help you identify people who will meet your criteria. You can then follow up with a subset of users through interviews. Bottom line, this section should spell out clearly what you're going to do to collect and analyze the data. Once you've articulated how you're going to collect and analyze the data, you should spell out what you're going to do with it. What's going to be the output? Will it be a paper, a presentation? Who's going to receive it? By spelling this out ahead of time and circulating it with your stakeholders, you can identify any missing pieces up front. So for example, maybe in your mind, you think you'd be fine with an email summary of your findings to your manager, but she thinks that you need a full presentation ready for the CEO. Well, that's probably good to know ahead of time. The last two sections are timeline and budget. Think through how much time you'll need to gather the data. Depending on the target audience and methodology, this may vary between a couple of weeks to a couple of months or longer. If you need to hire a firm or resources ahead of time, we'll build that into your timeline. Also, figure out the budget. What do you need supplies? Travel, incentives for participants. Think through what you need and create a budget. Now, with all of these sections, it should cover 95% to 100% of what you need. But again, there are other templates out there. Take a look and see what works for you. After you've developed your research brief, it's time to carry out your research. I'm not going to go into how to conduct specific types of qualitative research in detail, but I do have a few tips for you. One, always buddy up. If you've never conducted customer interviews or focus groups, I'd recommend shadowing someone who has so that you can focus on listening and taking notes. If you're comfortable running interviews and focus groups yourself, still find someone to take notes for you. Don't take these tasks lightly. Finding unarticulated customer problems depends on your ability to really listen and empathize with your customer. It's easier to do this when there's someone else to help you along. Also, practice writing and asking open-ended questions. For interviews and focus groups, I like to create interview guides that contain my main questions alongside a set of probing questions. This way I'm prepared with follow-up questions regardless of what answers I get. I find this to be a better way to prepare for an interview or focus group than having just a sequential list of questions. With many questions and a set of probing questions, I can be more flexible and react to or follow up depending on what answers I get. Be comfortable with the fact that you may not get through your full list of questions and instead focus on getting through the insights that you want to tease out from your interviewee or focus group participants. Three, take the time to reflect on what you heard. Don't simply take what you heard verbatim. Remember that customers don't always know what their pain points are. Consider the body language gestures, tone of what you heard, and build upon that. Now, some people would argue that that's too subjective, but I find that these are valuable data points when I'm trying to figure out not simply what works, but what really wows a customer.  One, qualitative research is great for customer discovery and understanding the whys in the house. Two, qualitative data can complement quantitative data to generate really powerful customer insights. Get comfortable using both. Three, use your research objective and key questions will determine how you conduct your qualitative research. Think through these carefully. And lastly, I encourage you to dive in and just start talking to customers. It may feel odd or uncomfortable at first, but I guarantee that once you start doing it, you'll begin to understand your customers in a deep and more meaningful way. Thank you.


I think it's about time I start using my disability to guilt people into doing things. Now I've always known that this was well within my power. I've got the amputee card to pull at any time in any conversation, but do I do it? No. I tried out and we're gonna see how it feels. If I don't skip leg day with one leg, what are you skipping? Don't, don't skip it. You have two legs. Don't oppress me like that. Don't disrespect my disability. Don't skip leg day because you have legs. Use them. This has been guilty disability motivation with Joe. Go ahead and hit that like button if you'd like more.


Alabama it's a win maybe not maybe not as big as I predicted last year maybe like 35 30 texas Well they just beat tech so they're obviously a powerhouse But I think texas take care Baylor it's a win Kansas it's a win not as easy as it used to be Yeah, hopefully just like last year Houston Win CYU Win Kansas State Win GCU It's a win this year Iowa State Win Texas Tech Last game of the big 12 ever we'll get the best version of them but I think we'll take care of them in Austin a winning season


I'm really excited about winning this award. It is a real testament to the fact that working together in partnership between academics and support staff does create great outcomes and this is both for research and for teaching and other activities. I'm really pleased to say that after this award there's a whole new world that's waiting for me because I'm taking up a research post in the Astrobiology Unit at DOU so I'm going from a support function to a full research function. I think having an award is really motivating and so it will be motivating for me going forward to be recognised by the institution I work so passionately for but it will also be motivating for other people to see that there are ways in which the OU looks at their stuff as a really important resource.