0:00 Hey everyone, this is Tim Sarrantonio, director of corporate brand at NEON one, I am excited for a little interview that we're doing to help make Giving Tuesday amazing for your organization. And there's no better person to talk to than John. And, John, I would love for you to introduce who you are and your organization. And and then that will give us some really easy context on why I'm talking to you about what a nonprofit can do to be successful and giving Tuesday, because 0:35 thank you so much for the kind words. Again, my name is John and John Houseman is my full name. I work at palmas School, which is a private school out in Salinas, California. And I'm the Director of Institutional Advancement here. And how long have you been with the organization, actually, just under a year and a half, I've been in development for 30 years, but new to this organization. 0:57 And so tell me about kind of the people who, who, as you've settled into the role are typically supporting your organization? 1:06 Well, we've been around for 70 years, you can see the shirt here. One of the things that like any other educational institution, whether it's, you know, college or high school like ours, you know, we've got a great alumni group. So the men and women school at the school actually started co ed that have come out of here, we're currently not co Ed, but are very dedicated to Palma. So a large part of our giving comes from our alumni. But we also live in a an agricultural community. So we also have a lot of dedicated corporations and foundations and companies that really believe in Palma, and they support us as well. And what are the big things that when you're putting your message out in general, you know, why donate to the school, I actually worked at a school too. And there was always that push and pull of like, you know, I'm already doing things when it comes to programming and tuition and stuff like that, for instance, versus donation. So why why? Why does that appeal to people? Well, I think one for us is the mission and the vision of what we do, you know, is really unique. When I was of the age of a student of that could have been here, you know, I wouldn't have wanted to be here simply because of who I was at that time of my life. Yeah. But now I look back at it as an adult, and I see what these boys do, I see the product that comes out of this school. And I think, Man, this would have been so good for me at that stage in my life. You know, we have the boys that go and I had the pleasure of going with them this summer and building a house in Mexico. Wow, we have teams that boys looking down to Peru, we do community service, and there's just so many parts, components, pieces of this school, above and beyond it being a school where 98% of the kids, you know, graduate and go on to college, there's just Palma enough in and of itself. So people that know the Palma product stand behind it. But also, I think people that really understand the diversity of our campus. And the amount of kids that are here on tuition assistance. Yeah, you know, want to get behind that. So, you know, Palma is is is a school where we try to include anybody who wants to come here, we want to make it available for them. And, you know, obviously, it's a private school, it's got a different price tag. Yeah. And so there are people out there that want to support students that want to give him the opportunity to go through Palma and come out the other side as a chieftain. So that's another big selling point for us. So that's a big, tall order, John, you must have, like, hundreds of people working for you in order to get that done. Right. How big is your development department, it's very small, we actually worked directly for the President, which of course, is the most important person in the development process myself. And then we have a person who kind of splits her time between Alumni Relations, and events and scholarships. So the three of us really are the tip of the spear for all of the fundraising efforts. And and it's always fun. There's always something going on. We're always focused on a different piece. But by no means are we a big staff, but we are a mighty staff. There you go. Love to hear it. So one of the things that we're specifically going to dive into is giving Tuesday. So you've been there, settled in now you have some time to reflect. Talk to me specifically about giving Tuesday and how that came about at your organization? Sure. Well, maybe the easiest thing to do would be to kind of share some documents that I can pull up on the screen and go through that. Yeah, let's let's do that. Give me a second. And full disclosure, folks. John did give me a 4:59 peek it is like you absolutely have to show this. So yeah, this is going to be great, because a lot of times as he's getting that ready, it's so hard to find inspiration because it seems like Well, other people did it. How am I going to do this type of thing? And the reality is, is that anybody can plan an amazing Giving Tuesday campaign from scratch. 5:23 If you think that's fair, oh, shit the right way. Yeah, I think that's fair. And that's what we did. You know, what you're looking at is a GivingTuesday planning doc that was literally from scratch. When we opened this document was obviously obviously a new document. We took some time as an organization, I really tried to dig in and get some facts and figures about, you know, why, why do we want to do GivingTuesday. And, you know, there's lots of statistics on here about the amount of people that participate when they participate, you know, that the end of year stuff, again, I've been I've been into development for a long time. But building a Giving Tuesday campaign at a private school was new. So I did some research, there are some facts and figures, we've did we did, we looked at all these different resources. So these were all links, obviously, neon put some great stuff out last year with giving Tuesday on emails and statistics, we looked at other places that were similar to us, like St. Lawrence and rumble Raiders. We talked to some folks at classy, you know, looked at some different blogs, and so on and so forth. But each one of these were kind of meant to inspire us to, you know, what do we want to do with our own campaign. So, we went through that process, we looked at some best practices, you know, the actual day of giving Tuesday's so sending, you know, three to five emails leading up to it, making a school wide day, we talked about matching challenges, and we're able to kind of program that before we ever actually kick the campaign off. So we had all those things in place when added to our donors. You know, we talked about giving thermometer and some of those resources. Anyway, what we did there is looked at best practices, and then we built a timeline. So leading up to Giving Tuesday, you know, these are all the things that happened. You know, I looked at the Edmund rice Christian Brothers North America group, which is our school system. So Palma is part of that group, we had a team wide zoom call and talk to all the folks that are in that group. And you know, it learned from what they did. And then we built kind of a program, starting with the planning meeting with our team and coming up with logo design, you know, discussing how we were going to you utilize all of the backend stuff, and just went from there. So this is all pieces of our plan that led up to Giving Tuesday itself, obviously, planning meetings and all of that, as you go through the document, obviously, we built on the document and added more resources. And then, you know, got to the big day, we decided that we were going to celebrate our 70 years through giving Tuesday, and our goal was to raise $70,000, we had never done this before, I had no idea, you know, if what we were, we'd end up at the end of the campaign. And, you know, I will say as we get to the bottom here, it was fantastic. We had a wonderful campaign ended up very close to that a number actually. And down at the bottom here, you'll see that we kind of have some thoughts and ideas that came out of that for this coming year. So we can go back to this document or revisit it, you know, and then these are all the assets that we built. So we this is this is cool. I'm happy that we're getting into this. Yeah, we put our, our all of our campaign online. So we use our own website, you know, palmaschool.com GivingTuesday. And these are all the pieces that we built through our marketing team. I guess I failed to mention in terms of our staff, we do have a person that does marketing, but he Mark, he does marketing for the whole school. So we share his time. So he you know, we built all these assets out you'll see like, you know, the date of Giving Tuesday, then we had reminders leading up to Giving Tuesday, seven days until ih and then this was actually early early on, but we actually ended up when you when you include all the matching gifts at a double check this number. I think it was closer to $67,000 at the end, but out of a first time $70,000 goal. Yeah, yep. Absolutely. And, you know, we had videos that played throughout the campaign. We also built a GivingTuesday media schedule. So this will show you basically, before the campaign what we wanted to do with social media. So, you know the Friday before the campaign I sent an email out via HubSpot You know, the Wednesday we had a social message, social media message saying, you know, 12 days until Giving Tuesday, we added some stats in there, you know, 34 point 8 million people in the US participated in Giving Tuesday, we wanted to make people feel like, Hey, I'm a part of something bigger, you know, and to be able to give to our school through that. So, you know, this is what went out, is the second video went out here via HubSpot that we used, and we had all this pre scheduled. So it would go out to our social media. And here's what happened, you know, the Monday before and then the kickoff the day up. So 12:01am, video went up, our president spoke, we put that out to stories. And you can see each each hour we had programmed out throughout the day, you know, we were going to what we were going to do so the first thing we kicked off early in the morning, when people are starting to get this, you know, we had a generous $10,000 match that helped us move forward. And so people wanted to be a part of that they want to get on board, and so on and so forth throughout the day. These are all the things that happened social media updates, number of donors on the website, those type of things. It was it was our first time doing this, like I said, we built it from the ground up, feel super excited about the results that we had. And of course, we learn things from that. And looking forward, actually, quite honestly, Tim to utilizing more of the neon resources this year, because we were literally a brand new neon client when we started this last year. So that's why we decided to do all this through our own website. And I know you guys got a great partnership with giving Tuesday, the organization and saying we're excited about seeing what we can make happen this year. Well, it's hearing. 11:48 It's hearing stories like this, that that not only inspire us, but I know you're going to inspire other people. I did see at least a wishlist item on something like Apple Pay. You're covered on that this year. So there you go and google pay two, I'm still not I'm still not sold on people using Venmo for nonprofit. 12:11 I'm still here. I just turned off the stock chair. 12:15 Oh, yeah, no, my, my, my Italian kicked in and it clicks off my stuff. We'll just edit that out. Yeah, no worries. Okay, so John, this was fantastic. This is great. This is also something that I know will help inspire others. But is there any kind of final notes that you want to make on why people can do this themselves? Kind of like, why they should feel that they can do it? 12:46 Well, I would say this, you know, we, we started from scratch. And there was a lot of information that I just shared with you on on that Google Doc, you know, whether it was a social media piece. So they are the planning doc itself. But we had nothing to begin with. And we did the research, you already heard We're a small team. You know, I think what I would say is, it's possible, you know, you can do it, and you got to start somewhere. I think that's the most important piece, you know, for us to shoot for 70,000, because it was our seventh anniversary made sense. But I think giving people an opportunity to be part of something bigger and also support your organization is doable. And I think all organizations should do that. There was a little bit of concern on our end, you know, initially that, hey, if people give to Giving Tuesday, they're not going to give their, you know, their annual fund gift, or they're not going to give a gift that they would normally give to athletics and that absolutely was not the case. I think it was it was rather the opposite. You know, so we're excited again, about what's going to happen this year. And I think people just need to think about what they want to do on their own Giving Tuesday, you know, jump on board and just start somewhere, start somewhere and do your best and then just go from there, tweak it make it better. And the resources are out there. Just takes a little creativity and some time and energy. 14:17 Well, that's why we've started building out a full Resource Center for people to in product as well as these great interviews with folks like you, John. So, John, I'm so grateful for your time. I'm, I know you are going to kick some major butt on Giving Tuesday this year and beyond. I want to thank you again for your time today. 14:39 Thank you so much, and thanks for the kind words. 14:41 Absolutely. All right, folks, we'll talk to you soon see on GivingTuesday and beyond. Transcribed by https://otter.ai