Growing New Hampshire’s Giving Day By 526%

Giving & Gabbing is GiveGab’s official podcast, featuring interviews with our philanthropic partners that highlight their unique digital fundraising and engagement stories. By offering this podcast, we strive to educate and inspire fundraising professionals from across the country – and perhaps even provide [a small morsel of] entertainment.

In episode 7 of Giving & Gabbing, Jackie is joined by a very special guest co-host, Charlie Mulligan, CEO of GiveGab. Together they interview Deborah Clark, Information & Technology Director at the NH Center for Nonprofits.

Her team has hosted their annual state-wide Giving Day, NH Gives, with GiveGab since 2016 and saw an unimaginable 526% year over year increase in dollars raised during their most recent day this past June.

Their 5th NH Gives took place amidst the Covid-19 pandemic that left nonprofits throughout New Hampshire vulnerable and in need of greater support. The NH Center for Nonprofits took this as their driving motivation to work more closely with community members to generate a greater sense of unity and involvement. Because of these new community partnerships, NH Gives was able to flourish and raised an incredible $3,372,355 for nonprofits participating in the day.

Check out this incredibly fun and uplifting video that highlights New Hampshire’s dedication to creating a community that cares through a song produced especially for NH Gives.

In this episode of Giving and Gabbing our guest, Deborah Clark discusses:

 

 

Check out the full interview with Deborah Clark on Growing Your Giving Day Through Community Involvement by listening to our Giving & Gabbing episode below or wherever you get your podcasts!

Read the Interview Transcripts

 

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Podcast episodes include nonprofit communication and marketing strategies and interviews with fundraising professionals from across the nonprofit and education sectors.

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Interview Transcript

Jackie: Today we’re here with Charlie, our CEO of GiveGab, as well as Deborah from the Giving Day NH Gives. She is the organizer of this long-running Giving Day on our platform. Charlie, would you like to go first and introduce yourself to our listeners and let them know a little bit more about who you are?

 

Charlie: Yeah absolutely. My name’s Charlie, I’m the CEO and co-founder of GiveGab. I started GiveGab several years ago, originally as a social network for volunteers, but then eventually we morphed into be a fundraiser for nonprofits and especially for fundraisers as scale, we like to say, which is fundraisers that involve hundreds of nonprofits at the same time, or large organizations that have fundraisers for several subordinate organizations at the same time. So one of the key things we do is Giving Days and that’s part of the reason why we’re talking about Deborah. I’m happy to share the history of it, of our…how I met Deborah if you want, but maybe Deborah could introduce herself first?

 

Deborah: Sure! I am the Information and Technology Director at the New Hampshire Center for Nonprofits with many other functions, I like to say. I’ve done everything from soup to nuts and when this opportunity came along in 2015 to do this Giving Day, I drew the short straw, or the long straw, and it was awesome, it’s my favorite thing. So it’s one of the things I love doing, but I have many other tasks that I work on at the Center as we advocate for nonprofits and provide capacity-building services.

 

Jackie: Awesome, thank you so much both of you for being here. I think we have a really exciting episode coming up because NH Gives has seen explosive growth just between 2019 and 2020 and we’ll talk about that a little bit more later on, but first I think since we have Charlie here, I think it would be a great opportunity to hear from you, Charlie, and have you talk a little bit about how Giving Days and NH Gives specifically got started on the platform and tell us a little bit about that story and what that was like.

 

Charlie: Yeah, I think, you know, so like a lot of startups we started with an original intention, and then we ended up kind of evolving as we went along and so, originally GiveGab was a social network for volunteers. So we grew in that regard, but we had trouble becoming sustainable as a company and we also just realized, talking to nonprofits, that, you know, while they like volunteers, they spend 80% of their time fundraising and they spend the other 20% of their time fundraising. So we thought we better help out in that regard.

So we realized pretty quickly that when we started adding fundraising that we were kind of uniquely and accidentally super well-built to handle Giving Days and so we were looking for people to partner with and we…we were small, we hadn’t done any Giving Days yet, so we’d go to local universities and other places and say hey, we’d love to do your Giving Day, and they’d ask us how many customers we had and how much we had done in the past and stuff like that and we had to say well, we don’t have any customers yet, but we would love to start off. And so we were looking at places that might be a good fit and, you know, I don’t know if…Deborah answered our email, or I forget how that worked, but I kind of reached out and I think she was, like, foolish enough to answer my email, I don’t know what it was, and so I said hey, I’ll come up and visit you guys. And so I drove up, I think it was in the winter because I remember, you have to drive across southern Vermont to get to where we were going and it was quite a drive on the way there. And we came and chatted with Deborah and her team and explained to them what a Giving Day was, which is interesting because I was still trying to figure out what a Giving Day was myself, so we kind of went through it and I think, you know, they looked at me like I was a little crazy which was an accurate view of that, and so…but they were interested, and I think they just liked the fact that I came up there as well.

And so then we came back with our…kind of our executive team including my co-founder Aaron and our VP of Customer Success, Casey, and had a long conversation and they said yes, they said they’d run a Giving Day, which was super exciting for us because it really made them the first kind of outside customer that was willing to deal with us. And so the fact that they’ve gone from that, to just…not just being kind of a really long-term great partner and really friends of ours at this point, but the fact that the day has grown so much and had such a huge impact on New Hampshire, and so it really worked out for everybody and it’s…it’s why you start a company. Relationships like this is the whole reason why you start a company. It’s really exciting and, you know, we were literally cheering and hooting and hollering during NH Gives this year because the growth was unbelievable, we’d never seen a day grow that much. So it was pretty exciting.

 

Deborah: Well I can add my origin story. You actually reached out to my colleague Lorette, and so, right before you got there that day that you came up she said, can you just come into this meeting with this guy? He has some sort of platform. And that’s all I knew going into the meeting. And it was Charlie and it was GiveGab and we weren’t even in the market for a Giving Day. We hadn’t thought about it. So that’s how well he sold us on it and how much we kind of believed in his passion and when we met the rest of the team, you know, he brought some more people up, everybody just had this genuineness and this caring that it bled through everything that they did and it always has, it’s always been there. So we took a leap of faith and have never been sorry that we did it.

 

Jackie: Wow, we’re really glad to hear that. Yeah, Deborah, can you speak to how that relationship with GiveGab has grown throughout these years, you know, since that first meeting?

 

Deborah: Yeah, I always talk about GiveGab as if they’re a part of my team, because I feel like they are. They’re an extension of my team and they’re there to support us every step of the way. It doesn’t matter…my first year I worked with Casey and Alyssa and they were awesome, and every year I think I’ve broken in a new program manager, coordinator, whatever, and the same ethic has carried through the whole time as to they give good customer service to us, they’re great with our nonprofits and they’re great with the donors. I never have any reservations saying oh, GiveGab can help you with that, just go to the blue chat bubble and, you know, they’ll be able to help you and people come back to us and they’re like, they were awesome. And that is…it’s just so nice to have because we’re a very smaller organization, we have 4 ½ staff right now, and um…so when you have hundreds of nonprofits with questions about a platform, it’s nice to be able to say, you could go ask GiveGab. They’ve taken a lot of that pressure off of us throughout the years and I think…I was counting the number of program coordinators I’ve worked with and I think it’s about seven through the years and have fond memories of all of them. Every once in a while I had to break them in and teach them what my sense of humor was, but that was it. Other than that, they were good.

[Laughing]

I know I’m funny! So it’s just been great.

 

Jackie: Well that’s really awesome to hear that the…the values behind GiveGab and the…the ethic I think you called it has remained consistent even though you’ve worked with so many different people in our company.

 

Deborah: And the company’s grown so much, I mean when we first started with you guys, you guys were tiny. And…you just expanded hugely and it’s still there, it’s still, with any person that I’ve interacted with…that belief that the customer is valuable and not stupid, that you treat everybody with respect is just, it’s so critical to our belief and our ability to work with you.

 

Charlie: That means a lot you say that because we, um, you know, as Jaclyn knows, we obsess over that and I think we have to, because we don’t wanna lose that as we grow. I think some companies it’s…you get bigger and you kind of forget who you were to start, so that’s why, you know, I always…I actually tell the story of you all quite a bit because that is who we are. We only won you over because we cared more. That was it, you know, and so we can’t forget that. And it’s been great. I mean, the whole time we’ve learned as much from you as I think we’ve…it’s been a good relationship where we’ve taken feedback from you and other partners and the more partners we get the more unique and interesting ideas and, you know, those relationships are all we have at the end of the day. There is nothing else.

 

Deborah: I remember that first year, talking to you guys about the, um…charitable state registration. And you guys were like, what?

 

Charlie: Yeah, exactly.

 

Deborah: Now you guys run circles around me about that stuff, so it was fun, watching you grow. 

 

Charlie: Yeah, I mean, you have to learn by doing in this space. That’s definitely how it works and so it’s been great that you’ve been willing to do that because there’s been a lot of times where we’re like, we’ll try this, I don’t know what will happen and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, usually it works really well, you know, and…but we’ll tweak it, and you’ve always been willing to give feedback and be helpful and kind of experiment with things. That’s, I mean, that’s how we get better. It’s been great.

I also just really love coming to New Hampshire because I can bring my mountain bike up there and find some amazing trails.

 

Deborah: I think that’s really how you picked us, isn’t it? Where can I go mountain biking?

 

Charlie: It was close to trails I liked, so that was definitely a part of the logic.

 

Jackie: Yeah, let’s fast forward a bit to your planning of New Hampshire Gives for this year, Deborah. Um…what kind of strategies did you employ leading up to the Giving Day to hopefully increase that participation from nonprofits?

 

Deborah: Yeah, I’ll give you a little bit of perspective first. In 2016 for our first Giving Day, we raised $188,000, which was great, we were like, cool. And then we grew a little bit each year until in 2019 we raised half a million for the first time, which was pretty exciting. So this year, we added some things, and um…prior to 6 pm the day of the Giving Day which starts at 6 pm, I was asking staff, you know, what do you think we’re gonna hit this year? I asked my GiveGab team, um…the highest I could get anyone to guess was $1.7 million.

So starting at 6 pm on the day of the Giving Day, we had $260,000 in matching funds, which was totally new this year. Those were gone in under 3 minutes.

 

Jackie: Wow!

 

Deborah: We hit $1 million in under 9 minutes. And we hit that $1.7 million in an hour and 20 minutes. So it was beyond anything we could have imagined. There were people crying at the beginning, like when that was gone, our whole team was like, I’m crying, I’m crying, I’m crying. And we ended up with $3.3 million. So, the biggest thing that we did was the matching funds. Um…the matching funds were announced 10 business days before the Giving Day, which was very last minute and we hoped to announce them earlier but we were having some difficulty getting them finalized, and more than 50% of the nonprofits that ended up participating that day signed on after the matching dollars were announced. So it was a huge, huge factor in getting people to sign on and I think there were a lot of people this year particularly that were a little hesitant about participating in a Giving Day, given the pandemic and that there were so many organizations in need and, you know, people were struggling to think about marketing it.

And so, one of the things that we did was we had, um, Jen from Rhode Island, who…they had their first Giving Day actually right after the pandemic started and they were quite successful. And so, she joined us for a webinar to talk about how she marketed, how their nonprofits talked about it, and how successful they were and that was…that was really helpful in getting some of the nonprofits that were maybe a little on the fence about how they felt about it to come on.

Um…but, definitely the matching dollars, the marketing that we had increased this year because we had a team. As I said, we’re very small, so not only do we just not have the capacity to spend as much time as we would have liked on a Giving Day in any of the past years, we don’t necessarily have all of the skills and the connections that are really…that can really make a day successful. So this year, it was kind of that perfect storm of…a lot of people who may have been interested in New Hampshire Gives in previous years suddenly found themselves with a little bit more time on their hands because of the pandemic. We had somebody whose big event for the spring, which usually happens right before New Hampshire Gives, was canceled. She was like, what can I do for New Hampshire Gives? We had a marketing company that…they’re like, you know, nobody wants to rebrand right now, it’s a little iffy, and can we help out with New Hampshire Gives?

And then we had a university Communications & Marketing department that sent all their students home. So they were like, what can we do? So bringing in all of those people, so we had a communications expert who had connections, she knew who to call in the media, she knew how to get the right ad placement. She was also…she was the Communications Director for our Community Foundation, the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation. And so she was instrumental in securing those matching funds. She knew who to ask, she knew how to get that process moving. And then the Browning Company, the marketing team that…they always do a pro bono thing every year for nonprofits, and this year, really no other nonprofits could focus on marketing projects in April, in May, and so they have always been interested in New Hampshire Gives and wanted to see it get bigger, so they jumped on board full force.

When you said…when you said New Hampshire Gives’ growth was explosive this year, that is just the perfect word, because it felt like an explosion. We had all these people, we had Franklin Pierce University, they had just gotten this broadcast software that they were still learning and wanted to try out. They could broadcast to multiple channels, and they could do it all remotely, so they were able to talk to the nonprofits, get them set up with the technology, do the troubleshooting, do the testing, and all of these people had a really good understanding of the fact that we are a small team and our focus had to be on getting the nonprofits on board, communicating with the nonprofits, and trying to get the nonprofits to promote it and bring in the donors, while we focus on administering the Giving Day, doing the prizes, making sure that things are going out on social media. So having those people was as important to the Giving Day as the matching dollars. Without them, the matching dollars wouldn’t have happened, the matching dollars wouldn’t have gotten promoted. We had two full-page ads in the Union Leader, which is the largest newspaper in the state, and the first one was totally promoting the matching dollars. And then we were able to do a thank you after the Giving Day, a full-page ad thanking the donors for just coming out and being the heart of the day.

So we had six weeks together, and we did a whole unified branding and messaging. We had a graphic designer who was basically just making things on demand, like hey, we need a social media message that says this, hey, we need an ad for this, and he’d be like, okay, and he was awesome to work with. We decided to do a video with all kinds of nonprofits participating, and we initially had our eye on a song that we were trying to get the rights to, to use in the video, and that didn’t work out, so Browning Company had connections with the arts organizations in the seacoast, so they had somebody write a song, produce it, record it, and have it ready for this video.

It was amazing, it came off really nicely. So the other thing that the team brought was social media savvy. They were all very into social media way more than any of my team. My team was not a very social media savvy group, we don’t really enjoy social media all that much. So they were on social media, they were sharing, they were promoting, they were… a couple of them actually, you can go to the Facebook jail, I don’t know if you know that but if you like too many things or share too many things, Facebook will put you on hold so you can’t do anything for a period of time. So we had two people who actually were doing so much that they got put in Facebook jail.

 

Jackie: Wow, I did not know that.

 

Charlie: Me either.

 

Deborah: I did know that, I had never known anybody other than, like, some really big Facebook people that…they’re on Facebook all the time, they had never had it happen to them but um…yeah, so, you know, when you get the message, hey, I’m in Facebook jail, can somebody else take over on the posting? Kinda cool.

So, that team was great, they made a lot of things possible that had never been possible before. We ended up getting media partnerships that we hadn’t had before. One of the fun things was we had a site takeover on New Hampshire Business Review. For the first day of the Giving Day, every ad on their site was New Hampshire Gives, so banner ads, side ads, bottom ads, they were all New Hampshire Gives.

 

Charlie: Wow!

 

Jackie: Awesome!

 

Deborah: Yeah, so that was really cool, and they came through. It was intense, it was an intense month of meetings and concern and being able to let go of some things, and it was all worth it within two minutes of the Giving Day starting.

 

Charlie: Totally. It was funny, I had emailed Deborah back and forth a little bit, and you were saying that you thought it could be a big year. I think you were understating it a little because, you know, you didn’t want to jinx it probably, but um, you know, I was planning on checking it out throughout the day and stuff like that, and then Casey sent me a text, she’s like, you gotta watch this now, and it was like…I’m like, it just started a minute ago, like how much could it be? And you were approaching a million dollars already, I’m like, what is going on? I mean, it was so fast, and what you did to get that buzz and to get everybody excited right out of the gate, it carried through the whole day, you could just like…and like I said, I was literally cheering and shouting out loud, by myself, I was just like…you know, so…

 

Deborah: My first reaction when I saw it, I was on Slack with my team and Laurel like, did the site break? What’s wrong? The match is gone, it says the match is gone. She’s like, no…it’s gone. It’s gone.

 

Charlie: Yeah it was amazing, just to see how many…I forget how much it was but I think you got more donors in the first few minutes than you got all of last year or something. When I saw the number of donors, I said, wow, just the engagement you managed to get to was phenomenal. It was exciting, you know…

 

Deborah: All kinds of kudos to the nonprofits, watching them grow over the past few years has been amazing because when we started they didn’t know peer-to-peer, they didn’t know matching funds, they just weren’t using those tools in the first couple of years and we had 94 organizations engage 471 peer-to-peer fundraisers that raised funds. There were more peer-to-peer fundraisers that had signed up but didn’t raise anything. They raised $337,000 from peer-to-peer fundraising.

 

Charlie: Wow, that was…it was awesome.

 

Deborah: Yeah, we had 48 organizations that had matching dollars that actually exceeded our site-wide matches. So we had $264,000 in organization matches on top of the $260,000 in site-wide matches.

 

Jackie: Wow.

 

Deborah: Social media was so much more sophisticated and so good with images and manipulating images and they just…they rocked it.

 

Charlie: Well, I mean, it honestly felt like watching a kid you coached in Little League hit a home run in the World Series, that’s what…it was pretty awesome. You know, I remember after the very first Giving Day we did for you all, this was, I mean, a lot of people were just newer to fundraising in general, and I talked to a nonprofit afterward, after we had our debrief, and they came up to me and they said they raised $800. And at first, I thought they were gonna be upset that they only raised $800, but they were…they were crying because it was the most they had ever raised online and they were so elated and something I’ll always think of is that every little bit makes a huge difference. When we get these huge numbers sometimes we forget that every little bit makes a huge difference, and so to see your nonprofits go from that to, you know, someone raised, well, almost twice as much as you raised in the first year by themselves, I think…it’s awesome.

 

Deborah: Yeah. Yeah, and I think, you know, we had great stories come out of it. We had one organization, they participated every year, they’ve always been fairly successful, but they’ve recently hired an Executive Director, and through New Hampshire Gives, just the money they raised in New Hampshire Gives, they are able to make sure that they can keep that Executive Director employed for the next two years.

 

Jackie: Wow.

 

Deborah: So, it covered, you know, they don’t have to worry about it. They don’t have to worry about going out and raising funds to pay that salary. So it was…that was pretty awesome.

 

Charlie: Yeah, that’s great.

 

Deborah: Competitive people out there, they’re fun to watch.

 

Charlie: Yeah, it was unfortunate this year had to be the year that everybody was remote so we couldn’t be there in person, because I just…I know your whole team and how fun they are normally, so that day must have been extra fun.

 

Deborah: It was! It was a great day. It was exhausting.

[Laughing]

This year, we had a funny story. The morning of the Giving Day I went out for my run like I normally do, and a bunny crossed my path and it stopped in the middle of the path, and just like…I kept walking towards it and it just didn’t walk away, so finally, I’m like, I’ll get out my phone and take a picture. And so I got pretty close and got a pretty good picture of this bunny and so I posted it on the Slack channel for GiveGab, I’m like, you guys, this is a bunny, this is a sign, we have to name it. 

[Laughing]

So they came up with the name Money Bunny, and so Money Bunny was definitely the good luck charm of the day. And you know, just that kind of interaction with my GiveGab team, just being able to share stuff like that with them and have them, you know, engage and have fun with it with me, that is just awesome.

 

Charlie: Just imagine what you guys could have done if we had used my original suggestion for a tagline, which was “Give Free or Die.”

 

[Laughing]

 

Deborah: Yeah.

 

Charlie: It seemed a little harsh, so I understand why you nixed it, but I thought it had a good ring to it.

 

Deborah: It does, I think, you know, we just maybe aren’t the right organization…

 

Jackie: Love it. So it sounds like you had, you know, your whole team, your team, as well as the interaction with the GiveGab team was really what changed this year and helped you expand the Giving Day itself, and especially, maybe people in the community, maybe lower capacity donors were more involved because of that social media outreach and the more…the more people that you were able to connect with this year. What do you see as far as any changes in the New Hampshire community or your community as a result of the Giving Day and the recent success of the Giving Day especially?

 

Deborah: I love the way our nonprofits interact with one another. There are nonprofit leaders who have participated for years who would not know each other in any other way, but they’ve become friendly but fierce competitors through New Hampshire Gives. And so they have these little, like, jabs going on with each other like, you know, I’m gonna beat you this year, and I’m gonna get the most donors, I’m gonna get the most dollars, but it’s all friendly, and when we get those leaders together to share what’s been successful for them, they lay it all out on the table. They share everything. I remember, I think it might have been the second or third year, Bridget and Rebekah from GiveGab were up for a training and we had a nonprofit panel and they were just sharing all their secrets, and Bridget and Rebekah were like, do they share like that all the time? That’s just…unusual because they’re just giving away all their secrets. And it is. It’s normal, it’s how these people…they want, they know, that the more successful every organization is, the more successful the day will be and the more successful they will be, and so it’s that sense of community around New Hampshire Gives that is awesome. When people think of it as a competition in some way, I know that they don’t get it. They don’t get what New Hampshire Gives is about, because it’s really about coming together as a whole community. When you see…when you watch the donations that are coming in and you see so and so gave to this organization, so and so gave to this organization, I’m seeing Executive Directors of one organization giving to another organization. I’m seeing staff members give to other organizations. It’s…everybody just comes out for each other, so it’s not like, me, me, me, me, me, it’s us. It’s the whole sector. So that is one of the things that has been the most wonderful thing to be a part of and to observe in our Giving Day.

 

Charlie: I mean, I think one of the neatest things about a Giving Day, you know, it’s always been this way but I think especially needed now is that…it’s no secret, our country is pretty divided and we fight over the dumbest things at this point, where it’s hard to find things that bring everyone together, but a Giving Day…everyone in community loves the Giving Day. There’s no…you can’t find a group that isn’t happy and excited to be part of it and it makes you feel great about your community in ways that just, we need more of those types of things now. And so, that’s what I love most about Giving Days, is they just remind everyone about all the…most people are really good and really want to help each other and it reminds us of that.

Yeah, I just…you especially see it with an entire state doing it, like what you did, I think it’s pretty awesome.

 

Jackie: The success of the day this year I think is really special. And is there anything that you have thought of as far as how you plan to maintain that growth and keep that momentum going into next year, 2021, which seems, you know, really far away, but…I know it’s important to think about.

 

Deborah: Well, through this whole thing, I was like, well, we’ve got these people for this year, you know, this team of people from New Hampshire that are here for this year, but I feel pretty confident that we’ve hooked them all. I think that they’ll be back. In our debrief for our team here in New Hampshire, Kristen was already talking about reaching out to Donor Advised Funds earlier to try to get matching funds. Mary Jo can’t wait to see what GiveGab has done with the ability to customize that homepage a little bit more. The design person in her really wanted to change it this year but she didn’t sign on until after the code freeze so I didn’t let her do anything. And Franklin Pierce University is talking about getting their students engaged in a semester-long project to record and produce videos for the nonprofits to use during NH Gives so we can have more content in the livestream. Which…livestreaming was great. We did, like, every half hour for most of the waking hours, a different nonprofit had an opportunity to present, and this year we had to kind of…we had to do it really quickly because they came on really late, so we kind of chose a bunch of nonprofits and said hey, are you interested in doing this?

 

And next year we’d definitely like to have more, but having those spread throughout the day…you want to talk about getting emotional, I couldn’t watch any of them without tearing up. They were just so good and they just…showed how nonprofits were coping with this new way of doing business. There was one, it was a…an arts group that does dance and they do dance lessons with young kids, and they do more than that, but the thing that they were talking about was how they had transitioned these dance classes to be virtual, and they were showing this one girl they’d obviously been able to go and film at her house, with the Zoom set up, and her doing the dance movements along with the Zoom, and it was just…it was just really well done. They did a great job. So I can’t wait to see what people can do next year with a little bit more notice.

 

Charlie: Definitely.

 

Deborah: With some Franklin Pierce University students potentially helping them out, I think we’re gonna have a lot of things that are gonna be really…they show the mission, they highlight the mission so much better than words and just static pictures can. So, I enjoyed, at the Giving Day Leaders Forum this year, listening to Missoula Gives talk about how they did and the different ways that they utilized that. They had a little bit more time than we did to plan it. So I have some great ideas and I can’t wait to talk…more about what could we do, what’s possible. So I think that getting those people booked, pulling them back in earlier this year…I mean, really, we had a month and a couple of weeks to do everything that we did this year, and if we had…if we started in January…it’s gonna be…the potential is there. You know, there’s some concern, like this year, the pandemic, people were feeling generous. One of the really engaging stories that I heard was somebody who, you know, she got the stimulus check that came out and she said, you know, I didn’t lose my job, I haven’t lost any income. I’m gonna give my stimulus check to a bunch of organizations during NH Gives and I challenge all my friends who are still financially stable to do the same. And so, having donors come at it like that was really cool, and I hope that that can continue on even when we’re not in the dire straits that we were in this year. Hopefully, we won’t be, but…so I definitely think that the atmosphere of understanding the need that was out there was strong this year and contributed to some of our success, but I think that…I think that New Hampshire is starting to really understand…more of New Hampshire is starting to understand the value of the Giving Day.

 

Jackie: Definitely, and…and what…thinking about all those years ago when NH Gives was starting out, is there any advice that you would give to Giving Days that are just starting out now? Anything…any wisdom that you would like to impart to them, ah….from what you’ve learned in these years?

 

Deborah: I would say to…to understand that there is a learning curve, for you, as a Giving Day leader organization, for the nonprofits, and for the donors. For some nonprofits, fundraising online at all is new. And then the ideas of things like matching dollars and peer-to-peer fundraising, they don’t necessarily get it until they see it in action. So once they see it in action, see a few organizations being successful with that, then they start to ask more questions about it. So…know that it’s not gonna be as big as it can be the first year because you’re all just learning. And hopefully, every year will get better from there. I know that, you know, as a small Giving Day for the first four years, there were times when I was like oh, look at all those million-dollar days and blah blah blah, we’re never gonna do that, um…and you just kind of sell yourself short when you do that, because if you can figure out how to get the right configuration in place, and sometimes that means going outside of your organization to get skilled volunteers who can help you out with stuff…once you get them in, people do get hooked on it pretty quickly, so pull people in, give them that experience of knowing what it’s like to know that you contributed to helping nearly 500 nonprofits raise $3.3 million dollars. That’s something that they take with them and it stays with them for a long time and they want to be a part of it again. So don’t be afraid to ask.

 

Jackie: Those are great points, thank you so much, Deborah, and this has been a tremendous episode, I think this is gonna be really something that a lot of Giving Day leaders and also nonprofit leaders, even community leaders in other spaces, are going to be really excited to hear about and just really excited for you and the growth that you’ve seen as well as hearing about what really went into it. Thank you, again, so much for telling us about that and in these last few minutes here, I’d be happy to open it up to either of you if there’s anything else that you’d like to add to today’s discussion.

 

Charlie: Thanks for being a great partner and a great advocate for GiveGab, I think, um…a big chunk of the earlier customers that we got all talked to you first and you gave us a ringing endorsement that made a huge difference to us. So, you know, we’ve helped each other a lot over the years and we want to just keep doing that. I mean, we never thought we could get to this point, so who knows what we can do, right? I mean it’s really exciting to think, when we look back and go, wow, that was so much smaller than what it is now, you know what I mean? Like, it can keep growing and it’s exciting.

 

Deborah: It’s great to have you guys as a partner and it makes everything so much easier and enjoyable. It’s definitely been my favorite partnership of any partnership that I’ve had in my employment.

 

Charlie: Thank you, that means a lot and it’s really…we love working with you guys. So I really, really, I think we all hope this, but I hope that somehow we can find a way to have this pandemic go away and come see you in person next year, because we really love coming up there and hanging out with you guys and hopefully we’ve got the Leaders Forum in person next year.

 

Jackie: Sounds great, thank you both for being here and sharing your insights. For everyone listening, please look out for our next episode and we will talk again soon!