Hi, everyone. I'm so glad that you're here. Thank you for doing a little sound check with me. I really appreciate it. We've got a relatively small group today. So what that means is that I'm gonna ask you to talk to me a lot because it's much more fun to actually have conversations with people than it is to just talk at them into a camera. So if we haven't met before, hello. My name is Abby. I am on the Neon One team. I've been here for a little over three years, and I've been in the nonprofit tech sector for quite a long time. I've been, in the nonprofit tech sector for about twelve years. And over the course of that twelve years, I've gotten really interested in why people support the causes they do, how they wanna support their favorite causes, and what you can do to give those people what they want. And today we're gonna be talking about peer to peer fundraising, which is one of my personal pet topics. It's such a cool way to raise money. Before we get into it, though, a little couple of housekeeping items. You're gonna see some screenshots and you're gonna probably see some examples. And all of them, if you are a Neon One user, are applicable to you. However, if you are not a Neon One user, everything we're gonna talk about today is applicable to you also. And then just so you know, out of curiosity, let me know in the chat if you are currently running or have run peer to peer events in the past because, I I have included some options for using peer to peer fundraising tactics even if you don't have dedicated peer to peer fundraising tools. So if you're like Kristen and you have not or if you're Nicole and you've done both, I have I'm gonna have some options for you. So if you don't have peer to peer fundraising tools dedicated, don't worry. I'm gonna show you a couple of alternatives that you can use to use some of these tactics in your peer to peer fundraising campaigns on GivingTuesday. Okay. You're probably picking this up already. I like to talk to you all. I hate speaking into the void. So please be, talkative. Talk to me. Put your put your input and your feedback and your comments in the chat. I love seeing it. It makes me so happy. However, the chat can move really fast. So if you have a specific question, please drop that in the q and a box if you can. I do keep an eye on the chat. I will try to catch questions as they land there, but I can miss some questions sometimes, especially if we've got a chatty bunch today. So do try to drop your questions in the q and a box. And then the perpetual question, are we recording this webinar and will you get my slides? Yes. We are. I don't know if you heard it, but I heard the woman say recording in progress. So that is being recorded. I will send you an email tomorrow morning. It will have a link to the page where you can get both the recording and the slides. So you'll get that tomorrow morning. Okay. Before we get started, I wanna open by asking you how you are feeling about GivingTuesday. It's kind of a big day. It's the unofficial, like, kickoff of the end of your fundraising season. Some people get really stoked about GivingTuesday, and they get really creative, and it's their favorite day. And others get stressed out thinking about it because there's a lot to do in December anyway, and the GivingTuesday can sometimes feel overwhelming. Jerry, doing great, fairly confident. Meghan, struggling to find new ideas. I feel you. Gonna have some have some, some pointers today. Hard to stand out from everyone else participating. I hear that for sure. I can say I'm gonna tell you this, Diana, and anyone else who's feeling like it's hard to stand out. I get a lot of fundraising emails. If you have an interesting fundraising email on GivingTuesday, I will look at it because there are some very boring ones. Dorothy is feeling unprepared. I feel you. Okay. So we've got kind of a a mix here. So, my goal is in this webinar to make you feel a little more confident about GivingTuesday and give you some creative ideas that will help you stand out, and really get your community engaged in raising money with you and not just collecting money from the people in your community. So, first questions first. We know a lot of you are familiar with peer to peer fundraising, but maybe not necessarily familiar with using peer to peer fundraising in the context of GivingTuesday. So why is it such an interesting fit for GivingTuesday? Well, there are probably a lot of reasons. My personal opinion is that because GivingTuesday is an inherently social event, it's very community oriented. And because peer to peer fundraising is very community oriented, I think they're kind of a match made in heaven. So, GivingTuesday is a global celebration of generosity. It usually involves people like you, using social media and email and other channels to really get their community aware about what you're raising money for, get them excited about supporting your work, and then giving them a way to make a difference. It does kind of kick off the year end fundraising season. So, building that community and getting people really engaged and keeping your organization top of mind is a really great tactic at the beginning of December. And since peer to peer fundraising involves equipping your supporters to raise money on your behalf and to connect with their communities to do so, I think it's a really good fit for GivingTuesday. Now that said, it is really easy to associate peer to peer fundraising exclusively with things like five k's or longer, more labor intensive events. So if you've done them before, will you please let me know in the chat? Are you are you typically kind of having your peer to peer campaign culminate in a five k or something like that? Or are you doing something a little different? What I would like to do is give you three ideas for use they're related to each other, but they're distinct. Three ideas for using peer to peer fundraising in a way that won't overwhelm you. You don't have to put together a five k or like Kristen, a fun run or a gala. Oh my gosh. The thought of planning a gala at the beginning of December just made my tummy hurt. We're gonna we're gonna look at some simpler ways to use this fundraising tactic. It occurs to me that some of you may not have run these before. So I wanna give you just a real quick definition of what peer to peer fundraising is at its heart. In a peer to peer fundraising event, you are recruiting people in your community to raise money on your behalf. In a standard peer to peer campaign, I'm gonna I'm gonna choose names. I say I'm the fundraiser. I'm going to recruit Tori and. Kristen and Kevin and Dorothea to raise money for my organization. They are going to create their own personal fundraising pages, and they are going to ask their friends and family to donate to me through them. And, typically, that fundraising activity is associated with a goal. So you're gonna hear me put out a pretend goal of three hundred dollars a lot. I'm gonna ask Tory and Kristen and Kevin and Dorothea all to raise three hundred dollars for me, and that will roll up into the greater greater fundraising goal. Okay. We've kind of already said it with traditional peer to peer fundraisers, like the ones you would you would plan for, like, galas or five ks or fun runs or something like that, you would generally focus on recruiting lots of people to raise money for you, and that would generally happen over the space of, like, weeks to months. I, for example, have participated in a peer to peer event in the past, and I was recruited as a fundraiser five months before the culminating event, and I had three months to raise money. So it was a lot of people over a long period of time. With the kinds of campaigns that we're gonna talk about today, my goal to give you ideas that are less labor intensive and can be executed in a shorter period of time. So we're gonna turn that playbook on its head. You're gonna focus instead on recruiting as very small but very dedicated group of fundraisers, and you're gonna equip them ahead of time to raise money either on a single day on. GivingTuesday itself or maybe, like, in a few days leading up to and maybe even after the fact. So that said, we're looking at smaller scale fundraisers, but using the same general tactic of equipping people who love you to raise money on your behalf. Okay. First idea, get together a group of small a small group, sorry, of dedicated supporters who are willing to be ambassadors for you. So with this format, instead of doing that kind of broad recruit hundreds of fundraisers to raise money for you, you're going to hand choose, some, small, very curated that's the nice way of saying exclusive. It's a very curated group of people who you can count on to participate with you on GivingTuesday. So who do you actually talk to? You look for your most active supporter. So I would look at volunteers who reliably show up for you over and over again. They've already proven to you that they're willing to dedicate their time to you. They are probably going to stay very active. They're also very familiar with your work, which is a plus here. You may be looking at donors with whom you have a very good relationship. You may even be, reaching out to people who are ambassadors for you. Maybe they're very active on social media and talk about you a lot. Your goal is to recruit, again, a small number of people, maybe even board members, but we'll get to them in a second, that you think would do a good job raising money for you. If you think that your staff won't be too slammed in December, that's a big if, you may try recruiting them also. Regardless, you're gonna get this small curated group of people. You're gonna create a peer to peer campaign in whatever platform you're using, and then you're gonna reach out to those people in very personal, very targeted, ways. And you're gonna explain why you want them to help you raise money. I'm gonna pick on Kristen again. Kristen, you've been one of our most active volunteers this year. We know that this is a really important cause to you. Would you be interested in working with our team to raise money on GivingTuesday? Here's what you're going to achieve when you do. Once you've got your little group, you're gonna help them get their personal fundraising pages set up, and then you're going to equip them to ask their friends and families to to donate. You can do that, have them focus entirely on fundraising on GivingTuesday. You may also be able to, again, kind of have them fundraise or get people hyped about it in the days leading up to GivingTuesday. Kelly asked, does Neon offer peer to peer fundraising? Yes. And I have interesting news about that, that I'm going to share at the end of this. Okay. How many of you have ever looked at your board and thought, wow, you are great people, but I really wish you were more involved in fundraising. This is a great tactic that you could use if you really need to get yes with many s's, says Diana. If you're like Diana and you're really looking for a way to get your board members to raise money, try asking them to participate in a peer to peer campaign. You can do this instead of or in addition to recruiting volunteers and other community advocates, but you're gonna follow some some of the same steps. You're gonna create your peer to peer campaign. You're going to, spin up participant pages. Now between you and me and everyone else who is watching this, I don't know about you. I have certainly served on boards and worked with boards that are not tech savvy in the slightest. You may want to do some, extra work with them to help them get their their fundraising pages kind of personalized and ready to share. But, you can try that. You can try doing it for them. I would suggest if you do this, like, dedicate an upcoming board meeting to this. Say, okay. We're gonna put together this peer to peer campaign. This is what you're expected to do. Here is your page. We're all going to together update our pages to make them more personal and compelling. This is something. I've done personally. I was on the board for a local nonprofit here in my hometown, and I made other board members little toolkits that they could use to raise money for our nonprofit on GivingTuesday. So they were not super tech savvy at all. They were very nice, but they did not know how to create a personal fundraising page. But they could post to Facebook. So we created the the personal fundraising pages for them, and then we gave them I gave them some resources. I told them how to communicate with people on GivingTuesday. I we did some coaching out of board meeting, getting them up to speed on how to do it. And then on GivingTuesday themselves it themselves on GivingTuesday itself, the board went out and they were sharing with their networks. They were emailing their colleagues. They were posting on Facebook, and we actually saw some really good results. Lucy asked, have you ever created one page for all the board together? I haven't done that, but I do have some later on in this session. I do have some ideas for tactics you can use if you don't have a dedicated peer to peer fundraising platform, and I'll show you what we can do there. Okay. So small group of people or boards. This is where if some of you are feeling creative, this could be cool for you. So if you're feeling creative, you can do some really fun stuff that will get your community a little little psyched about getting involved with your work. Now this this option might take a little longer, but you're gonna follow a lot of the same steps that you followed, for the other two tactics. You are going to set up your peer to peer event. You're gonna come up with a fun activity, TBD on that. And in the weeks before GivingTuesday, you're going to invite people to participate by raising money. And then on GivingTuesday itself, everything, the fun activity that you have planned kind of comes to a head. Everything happens on GivingTuesday. Now, because this is such a broad idea, that sounds a little esoteric when. I just talk about it as a concept. So I'm gonna share some examples. One I saw that didn't take a ton of time, in terms of event planning was a cutest pet contest. I think that was it was either an ASPCA or, like, a local animal shelter. So people signed up to participate. When they customize their personal fundraising pages, they, added pictures of their pet. And then every vote or every dollar that was donated to that person was a vote for that pet. So the cutest pet raised the most money. At the end of the culmination of the event, the the winners of cutest pet titles were announced. So you could do something like that. I saw one organization. I don't remember the name of them. It doesn't matter.. They did something. It was like a virtual. Everest climb. So it was in twenty twenty. They usually had a larger event. Obviously, they couldn't do it that year. So what they did was they had people raise money. And then on the day of the event, the participants committed to climbing. It was the elevation of Mount Everest. They climbed that many stairs or they walked that many yards. So I think it's I don't remember how many stairs they had to climb, but people raised money for a week or two, and then they it culminated in this remote event where everybody participated in the same activity together. That was very popular. We all probably remember the ice bucket challenge. Something like that might work, especially if you've got, like, a really great group of fundraisers. A participant could say, in the week leading up to Giving Tuesday, I'm raising money for Lucy. Loveless' organization. If I raise three hundred dollars, I will dump a bucket of ice on my head or shave my beard or do something silly. They raise money leading up to GivingTuesday. On GivingTuesday, they all participate in whatever activity they have planned, to engage in. So there's a lot of room to be creative here. But because there is no greater, like, great culminating event and because you've hand selected a small group of people, this doesn't require a ton of, like, event planning time or a lot of coordination with lots of different schedules. This is something that can be done a little more simply. If you have done something like this or if you've seen someone else do something cool, drop please drop ideas in the chat. This is a cool way to brainstorm. And, really, people can get so creative with these. I really love the voting the voting thing. An organization here in town does something similar. They have basically a mister. Polk County or mister Lakeland. That's where I live. And people raise money and whoever gets the most vote, like, wins the title. They really tap into some some competition there. Okay. So those are some ideas, but how do you actually make it happen? So here's the thing about peer to peer fundraising. Right? It's not it's a harsh reality. We don't love it, but it happens. It is absolutely not. And if you build it, they will come kind of fundraising tactic. There is a secret though to actually getting people to raise money for you, and it is to help people overcome the two obstacles that will prevent them from succeeding in in their their goal to reach a fundraising goal. Unless you are exclusively recruiting people that you know are familiar with fundraising, know how to do it, and have the time to do it well, you're gonna need to be proactive about giving people tools and resources that they need to raise money for you. And the easiest way to do that is to proactively give them some specific tools. So here is what I would suggest giving them. You're gonna when you're putting together your resources for your fundraisers, you're gonna wanna remind yourself, like, they're not professional fundraisers. You are. You're the expert. So put yourself back in your little baby fundraiser shoes and think about what you needed when you were sending your very, very first appeal. I would recommend giving them maybe some templates that they could use for email and social media. That is what was really helpful for for the board members that I was organizing to raise money for on GivingTuesday. They they didn't need the talking points, everything. They already knew those, but, what was her name? Elise. Elise wanted to raise money. She was enthusiastic about raising money. She had no idea what to do. So I gave her and the the rest of the board some email templates where they could just fill in certain parts of the email and then send it to their friends and family. That was very helpful. Sharing fundraising tips, really great. For we we know some of the best practices when you're sending an appeal focused on using the word you more than the words me or I, that kind of thing. You could sharing I mean, sharing talking points is my personal favorite. When I've participated in in peer to peer events, that's what I needed. So tell tell your fundraisers. These are the talking points that you can use. What happens when someone donates twenty dollars? What will happen if I meet my fundraising goal of three hundred dollars? What will the what will you as an organization be able to achieve for your community when people give? That kind of that kind of guidance, those kinds of talking points are gonna make your peer to peer participants much, much, much more successful. So I'm actually curious if you if you have done this before. I know a few of you have run these campaigns before. What have you given your participants that have been very helpful? Examples are always great. Talking points, prompts, templates, all of those things are really helpful, but no two organizations have the same bases. So the way you equip your community to raise money on your behalf is gonna be relatively unique to you. Okay. Here's the next pointer. Especially in December when everyone is very busy, you're going to want to be proactive and consistent in your communications. So whatever tools you decide to give your community, you're gonna want to communicate with them in addition to providing those tools. Simply linking to a toolkit on your, like, registration confirmation page is great, but it's not gonna be enough. So my tips for you, start recruiting people early. So this year, GivingTuesday is on December, so you have three months minus one day, to just start thinking about it. So if you're gonna get your board involved, if you're like, ah, yes. My board is awful at raising money, but this is something that they would probably be comfortable with. Bring it up at your next board meeting. If you're gonna recruit volunteers, bring it up in your next, like, recruitment communications or send it if you have a volunteer newsletter or something like that, include it as an option. So early communication is key, but I would encourage you to keep that communication very targeted. You don't want I mean, unless you have a lot of time and resources, which do we have it that ever. You're gonna wanna keep your your group small and focused. So this is gonna be easiest for you and for them. If your group is small and focused, they're easier to coach. So communicate, but don't don't open the floodgates. Alright. After you've got a handful of people that are willing to get involved, be proactive about keeping in touch with them between when you recruit them and. GivingTuesday itself. Get them hyped about what they're doing. Make them feel like you they're on your team. Make them feel like they're on each other's team. Make them excited, give them the tools, and encourage them to be creative, and then stay in touch with them. And then while you're doing this, I would really highly recommend also giving them a point of contact that they can reach out to if they need help. You could be the most proactive communicator alive. You could give them the tools and the talking points and connect with them weekly and do whatever, but I promise at least one person is going to forget their password or have a question or something. They need to know who to contact. When I was a participant, my contact was Sonia, and Sonia was an angel. And she is who I had to contact when all of a sudden, my donation page seemed to have disappeared. It didn't. I just had the wrong link. But Sonia helped me figure it out. Okay. Call out in the chat. There are two really great ideas in the chat. Diana offered to do, or suggested offering headshots for peer to peer participants or setting up a photo op so people had pictures to share on social media. Amazing. I love Nicole's Nicole's idea here. Absolutely fantastic. Check those out. Coming up with ideas is hard, and we have some really creative people on this call. Okay. So we've kind of alluded to this section, and I'm gonna keep it snappy because we got seven minutes. But what about tools? So what if you don't have a dedicated peer to peer fundraising tool? What if you don't have a board where you want to give them individual fundraising pages? What can you do?. Couple of options. One would be to go the crowdfunding route. So instead of setting up a peer to peer event, a traditional one with individual fundraising pages for each participant, you'll do things a little differently. So first, set a goal. Peer to peer fundraising campaigns almost always have goals associated with them. GivingTuesday campaigns usually have goals associated with them. And the reason this is effective is because people like to reach a goal. Set a goal. And then instead of spinning up a peer to peer event and a peer to peer platform, you're gonna spin up a unique donation form for GivingTuesday, and you're gonna add a fundraising, like, progress tracker, with your goal. So, sometimes that looks like a thermometer. Sometimes it looks like a little progress meter. So at the end of that setup, you're gonna have a group of people who are dedicated to helping you raise money, and you're gonna have a donation form specifically for GivingTuesday with a progress meter on it. You're gonna give your participants the tools that they need to ask for for donations. They're gonna give them the social media templates of the talking points and all of this. But instead of asking them to point to their individual peer to peer fundraising page, You're gonna ask them to point to your unique GivingTuesday donation form. People who donate will still be able to see the progress. You're still getting that those peer to peer interactions. Nah. But you don't have to spin up a whole new peer to peer campaign if you don't want to or if you can't right now. So, who was it that asked? So, Lucy, if you were asking about setting up a single page for all of your board together, that's what you would do. Now this I'm see this highlighted in green? What I'm about to share with you only works if you have a very small dedicated group of people. So if you have a small dedicated group of people like your board, you can spin up individual donation forms for each participant. Now again, this can be a lot of work. So really only do this if it's a small group. So you're gonna do something similar. We did to the last one. You're gonna set up an individual fundraising goal for each person. You're going to set up a unique donation form for each person. And here is the important part, and I need you to hear me if you hear nothing else. If you do this, make sure all of those donation forms are associated with a GivingTuesday campaign. Because if you don't, it's gonna make reporting a nightmare. So create individual donation forms, but associate them with a single campaign. Add your progress meter to each. Now this is gonna be individual's fundraising goals. So if you are asking your participants, your board, each to raise three hundred dollars, they're each gonna have a progress tracker toward their three hundred dollar goal. And then make sure each person, again, has a link to their unique fundraising page. They're going to use the fundraising tools and resources you gave them, but instead of linking to a peer to peer campaign, they're gonna link to their unique donation form. Then you can keep an eye on their progress throughout the day. Now this is not the ideal setup. Okay? Just to be clear. But if you have a board, this might work for them. This is also something that you could do, honestly, year round. Round. Like, each each board member has their own donation form that they share with their friends and family throughout the year, not just on GivingTuesday. Okay. I'm gonna I have something for those of you who have some questions about Neon One specifically, but first, I'm gonna look at some some questions. Nicole, look at this. Nicole, when is Neon Fundraiser's new peer to peer platform launch? I cannot wait to show you what's on the next slide. I'll get there in a second. And then, Diana, what would you think about adding a custom field on the form where donors can select from a drop down which person is their ambassador or, for example, the cutest pet they're voting for? That's a phenomenal idea, and I love that. One thing I would caution you on that is that a drop down form can very quickly be overwhelming if there are a lot of options in that drop down form. For example, this is a dramatic example, but for example, I went to a donation form recently. It was for I don't remember who it was for, but it was for a larger, it was a school. And, I was asked if I wanted to donate to a specific scholarship fund, and then there were, like, seventy five scholarship funds that I could choose from. I was not gonna scroll through seventy five scholarship funds, so I just directed it to, like, where my gift is needed most or whatever the default option was. So you can totally do that. If you only have a handful of people if you've got five board members, that's fine. You can drop that in there and see if that works. If you've got more than a few, I would maybe consider doing something a little different. And then Ailet asked, how far ahead of GivingTuesday would you start sharing and pointing people to the unique GivingTuesday page? That's kind of up to you. I do have, so I know that a a normal thing a normal thing is, sending save the dates. So you could send if you don't have a unique GivingTuesday page spun up yet, you could send a save the day. Like, hey. On December second, we're gonna be raising money for this really cool initiative. Keep an eye on your inbox for further details. I've seen maybe a week or two out. I've seen some folks say, like, GivingTuesday is around the corner. We're raising money to do this cool thing. If you want to make your gift today, you don't have to wait for GivingTuesday. Here's a link to where you can give. I've seen it I've seen it work both ways. A lot of it honestly will depend on your communications calendar and when you're sending other appeals throughout the month of December. Okay. So I've, so Nicole kinda teed this up for me. When is when is Neon's new peer to peer platform launching and that it is launching at the end of this month. So if you're not a Neon One user, just hang with me for a second. If you are, I can tell you that the new peer to peer tools are coming to Neon CRM this month. There's no extra cost to turn it on as is the case, though, with most peer to peer platforms out there. The processing fees for peer to peer are gonna be a little different than the standard, processing fees. So I don't have all the details in front of me right now. This is coming, though I can say that confidently. If you're interested in seeing more seeing it and learning a little more about it, there is a webinar coming up where you can learn about the new tools. I'm gonna drop a link in the chat. And, honestly, like, if you're if you're right. Send it to everyone. Okay. Whether or not you're a Neon One user, you can attend this so you can see what the tools look like. But this is this is coming at the end of September. So if you got ideas during this session, if you decided you wanna set up a board fundraising campaign or if you want to explore putting together a street team of people who will advocate for you, this should be available to you in time to set that up. If you if you're not using this, if you decide that this is too much, if you don't wanna set up a full peer to peer fundraising campaign, you have options. Try the crowdfunding route where you send set up one donation form for GivingTuesday. You have your GivingTuesday fundraising goal. You've got the progress tracker, and then you assemble your group of ambassadors, all of whom will share their stories and why you're special to them. And then we'll link to that single page. If you've got a small group of very dedicated participants like your board, you can try spinning up unique donation forms for each of them and tying them all to a single campaign. So you can track your progress across everybody. And then if you are using Neon CRM, check out that webinar, and and see what you can do with the new tools. So options for everybody. I know we are at time, but I did cover a lot of information in a very short period of time. I have answered all of the questions that have popped up so far, but I'm happy to stick around, and answer any questions for you that I can. Otherwise, thank you so much for being here. I know taking a half hour out of your day, especially this time of year, is a huge commitment, and I really do want to thank you for for spending time with me today. Keep an eye on your inbox tomorrow. I will send you an email to, the page where you can get this recording and, the slides. It will also have a link to that webinar if you do wanna check out the new fundraising tools that are coming. I hope this gave you some ideas. You guys are great. Thank you for talking with me, and, have a great Wednesday. I will talk to you all later.