Post-GiveBIG update

 

Hello! Sorry we have been out of touch for a while!

First of all, thank you again everyone for helping make GiveBIG such a success this year. $7.4 million in 24 hours is amazing! (For more May 2 results, check out our website.)

We also wanted to give you an update of where we are in terms of processing donations and “stretch” dollars. As you may have heard, thanks to last-minute contributions by some amazing donors, the stretch pool is now at $800,000! Thanks again to additional donations by Wyncote Foundation NW, Boeing, David Jones & Maryanne Tagney-Jones, the Anne Y. Petter Family, Elizabeth Rudolf, Judy Pigott, Ann Ramsay-Jenkins, Brad Smith & Kathy Surace-Smith, and Maggie & Doug Walker! Because of the increase in the stretch pool, the “stretch” amount works out to approximately 11 percent. Pretty amazing considering we more than doubled the total amount raised last year!

Also, all nonprofits that do not have Click & Pledge have been notified of the total amount they raised in donations on May 2. If you still do not know how much your organization raised, please feel free to contact givebig@seattlefoundation.org to request that information.

Our office is processing checks as fast as possible, and we anticipate that they will be going out in the mail this week! The checks will include the “stretch” dollars, any Golden Ticket winnings, and reimbursement by The Seattle Foundation and Click & Pledge for the $.25 per transaction fee. For those of you who do not have Click & Pledge, your checks will also include all donations received on May 2, and donor contact information will accompany your checks.

If you have any questions, please contact us at givebig@seattlefoundation.org and we’ll do our best to respond as quickly as possible.

- The GiveBIG Team

For Click & Pledge accountholders only: late-breaking news!

Great news! In response to your requests, Click & Pledge has added a Quick Report option to help you get just the information you need.

1. Log in to Click & Pledge: https://portal.clickandpledge.com
2. Go to Account Info>Reports>Search and Download
3. On the pulldown that lists Detailed Transaction, choose Quick Report

This new, streamlined  report lists transaction date, name, address, phone, email, total, and referring URL, which we hope will be really helpful for more easily tracking your GiveBIG donations tomorrow!

Looking for Media Opportunities

With GiveBIG just around the corner, we wanted to share with you a great opportunity for your organizations. Our media partners are looking for innovative activities on May 2 that your nonprofits are organizing around GiveBIG. We are sharing specific examples with our media partners, and your organization could be featured as part of a GiveBIG news story, social media post, or online update! So if you are planning events on May 2 specifically pertaining to GiveBIG, please email us at givebig@seattlefoundation.org with the following information:

• Your name/title
• Your contact information
• Your organization’s name
• A brief description of the event
• Event time
• Event location

We can’t guarantee that your organization will be profiled in a news story, but if you don’t let us know about your events, then of course we won’t be able to share them with our media partners!

Hope your GiveBIG planning is going well. We can’t wait for May 2!

How GiveBIG Works

We’ve gotten a lot of requests for ways to help your supporters more easily make donations on GiveBIG day, so we developed a new tool that we hope will do just that. This one-page document outlines how easy it is to find nonprofit organizations and make donations through our website. Check it out here: How GiveBIG Works: Making an Online Donation. (It’s also posted on our GiveBIG Resources for Nonprofits page, along with another new resource: a sample email for your donors.)

Also, just a reminder that all edits to existing nonprofit profiles on our website must be submitted by this Wednesday, April 18. Which, by the way, is only two weeks before the big day!

Hope you’re getting as excited for GiveBIG 2012 as we are!

Our partnership with Seattle Sounders FC

We’re excited to join forces with Seattle Sounders FC again this year for GiveBIG, and we thought our nonprofit partners might be interested in hearing more about what Sounders FC brings to the event.

Seattle Sounders FC is a vital partner to the success of GiveBIG for many reasons. Much of what the team does is visible, yet it also provides a great deal of behind-the-scenes support that is critical to the community groundswell that makes GiveBIG so much fun and so effective.

Since Sounders FC’s inception in 2009, the organization has been dedicated to making a positive impact on the Pacific Northwest community through its charity partners and soccer programs. It uses its visibility, players and positive brand recognition to promote the healthy development of youth in our region and around the world.

The team’s philanthropic work is integrated with every aspect of team’s activities. Community engagement is as much a part of the team as the sport of soccer itself. Sounders FC has five ongoing charity partners, focused in the health and wellness area: America Scores Seattle, Boys & Girls Clubs, Special Olympics, Washington Global Health Alliance, and Washington Youth Soccer Association. Through a wide range of initiatives, the team promotes these organizations to its fans and the greater community.

In 2011 Sounders FC expanded its community commitment by signing on as a Presenting Partner for GiveBIG. In a BIG way, the Sounders went above and beyond its ongoing philanthropic programs in a way that could benefit any nonprofit in King County. The organization’s courage to embrace the untested idea of GiveBIG and the way it willingly and enthusiastically backed every aspect of GiveBIG was amazing!

Here are just a few ways Sounders FC supports GiveBIG:

• Match day tie-in at CenturyLink Field (Last year with record-setting attendance of 45,000!)
• Pre-match soccer celebration featuring GiveBIG booth, March to the Match, etc.
• Views of special GiveBIG video on HawkVision in the stadium
• GiveBIG email to 800,000+ fans
• Promotional content on the Sounders’ Facebook page (nearly 250,000 followers) and Twitter feed (more than 39,000 followers)
• 6+ weeks of featured content on SoundersFC.com

All of this promotional support, and the production and creative assistance to make it happen, provides tremendous visibility to GiveBIG. This ramps up awareness and generates online contributions. In fact, we saw an uptick in contributions last year after the game was over, when fans returned home and got online to donate.

The Sounders “Give Us Their Full 90″ when it comes to GiveBIG! Please join us in thanking the team – and supporting them on and off the field – for all they do to make King County a better place to work and live!

Four weeks away!

It looks like we’re all entering GiveBIG promotion mode, and it’s very exciting to see your emails and posts on Facebook and Twitter. Be sure to tag @TheSeattleFoundation on Facebook and @TheSeattleFdn on Twitter, and use #GiveBIG on Twitter so we can more easily follow and share your communications! Also, if you haven’t already, please RSVP (and encourage your supporters to RSVP) for the GiveBIG event on Facebook to receive reminders and updates.

We’ve also posted some new tools to our GiveBIG Resources for Nonprofits page, so be sure to check those out, too.

Now that we’re all working to get the word out about GiveBIG, we thought it timely to remind you that a lot of your supporters are going to be getting multiple messages from multiple nonprofit organizations over the next four weeks, which can cause some donors to feel overloaded by GiveBIG messages. While often all the “chatter” is viewed as adding to the buzz and excitement of GiveBIG, we have gotten word through our donor survey from last year and our own fundholders that it can be a little too much for some. We just ask that you be mindful of this, and perhaps keep the more frequent communication to your social media channels and be more selective in your email communications.

As always, if we can help or answer any questions, post a comment or email us at givebig@seattlefoundation.org!

Important dates

Just a reminder of some upcoming important dates:

• Our public launch date of GiveBIG 2012 is Monday, April 2. We have asked that our nonprofit partners wait until then to alert your networks and begin the push for GiveBIG, to maximize impact and create excitement around the event.
• If you don’t have a profile on our website yet, you must submit a new profile request no later than Wednesday, April 4 for GiveBIG on May 2. Please visit our website at www.seattlefoundation.org/nonprofits to get started with a new profile request.
• The deadline to update an already existing web profile is Wednesday, April 18.

As always, if you have any questions, please feel free to post a comment here or contact us at givebig@seattlefoundation.org. Thanks!

New NPO Toolkit

Just a heads up that we’ve posted a new NPO Toolkit and GiveBIG logos to the GiveBIG Resources for Nonprofits page: http://www.seattlefoundation.org/nonprofits/GiveBIG. In the toolkit you’ll find tips on what to do in preparation for GiveBIG. There’s also sample messaging and social media strategies to help with GiveBIG promotion. Please do keep in mind, however, that we’re recommending that you wait until Monday, April 2 to start rallying your communities for GiveBIG.

We also wanted to reiterate what was talked about in yesterday’s webinar and encourage you to use this blog as a forum to share ideas and best practices with your nonprofit peers, and will use Scott F.’s comment on a previous blog post to jumpstart that conversation:

“It was suggested that we nonprofits communicate via this blog to get ideas from each other about what GiveBIG promotions were the most successful last year. So, I’d like to start a discussion to generate ideas. We used social media last year, but I’m interested in what other ways organizations successfully generated donations to earn larger portions of the stretch pool.”

Feel free to add comments to this post!

Webinar technical difficulties

Well, our GiveBIG Webinar for Nonprofits was scheduled for today, but…we experienced unforseen audio difficulties, which unfortunately meant we had to reschedule the session. Apologies for the inconvenience!

If you want to brave it and try again, please click on a link below to register for one of the following webinar times: 

Thursday, March 8 at 3:00 p.m.

Monday, March 12 at 1:00 p.m.

The same material will be covered at both sessions, and the webinar will also be posted in its entirety on our GiveBIG Resources for Nonprofits page.

Also, please note that we are limited to 200 participants per webinar. If you are unable to register for one, there still may be room in the other.

Thanks for your understanding!

GiveBIG update – February 24

Happy Friday! A few reminders:

• WEBINAR: We are hosting a GiveBIG webinar for nonprofits on Tuesday, March 6 at 2 p.m. (Pacific Time). This is a chance for you to hear about GiveBIG and how it will work, what’s different this year, and tools and tips for making the most of this fundraising opportunity. There will also be plenty of time to ask questions and get answers from the GiveBIG team at The Seattle Foundation! You can register for the webinar now and you’ll get email reminders leading up to the day. If you can’t make it on March 6, we’ll also be posting the webinar in its entirety on the GiveBIG Resources for Nonprofits page on our website.
• WEB PROFILE: The deadline to apply for a new nonprofit profile on our website in time for GiveBIG is Wednesday, April 4, and the deadline to update an existing profile is Wednesday, April 18. (Both require you to register for a login and password on our site if you don’t have one yet.) For those of you who were part of GiveBIG last year, you may notice that both deadlines are significantly earlier than last year’s. There are a few reasons for this, but mainly, we learned our lesson that we did not give ourselves enough time to process the flurry of profile requests we got right near the deadline. This affected how quickly nonprofits got confirmation that their pages were live and when they received their donation page URLs. And, while we were expecting a lot of new profile requests right at the end, we were more overwhelmed with requests than we even imagined! Of course, this is a good thing because we want to accommodate all the organizations who want to have a profile on our site, but if you don’t have a profile yet, we highly recommend that you sign up earlier rather than later. This will give you enough time to make edits to your profile, sign up for Click & Pledge to receive online donations and track your GiveBIG donations in real time, and test the online donation feature before GiveBIG on May 2.

As always, if you have any questions or feedback, please feel free to comment here, or contact us at givebig@seattlefoundation.org.