Tuesday, May 5th was the Big Day of Giving (BigDog), and I was up all 24 hours of it, 12:00 am to 11:59 pm “womanning” Tuleyome’s giving portal, so I’m kind of “buzzy” from sleep deprivation, coffee, and adrenalin. We did much better than we thought we would, and I actually had a lot of fun but, man, that 24 hours straight is a killer. Sara gave me today off so I could sleep all day or work from home, whichever I prefer. I slept in a little bit, but then was still feeling wired, so I put together a report for Sara about the day (which ended up being about 10 pages long). Here are some of the highlights. Over the evening, I kept an eye on the donations we got in.
Kimbia, the company that’s running all of the software and giving portals for the event, gave everyone real-time information, but you had to keep downloading it into Excel spreadsheets, pull the information from there, go back on line, download the information… So, I pulled the reports every 5 to 10 minutes, and then moved the information onto a spreadsheet of my own, so I’d have it all in one place and could watch for trends and periods were donations were falling flat. While I did that, I also made sure that every donor was sent a thank you email within minutes of donating, and then also posted a thank you to them (with their first name and last initial) on our Facebook and Twitter feeds…
Jordan had done a great 15-second video about why she was giving to Tuleyome, so I posted that a little after midnight, and spent $20 to boost it on Facebook. It ended up reaching over 10,000 people and got over 2000 clicks and “likes”.
You can see it here: http://youtu.be/z-D3DB3gSOY
A little bit after that, we all got word that the Cutler Family Foundation was adding an obscure challenge to the mix that they called the “19 for 19 Challenge”. The nonprofit that got the 19,155th donation of the day would win $1900. There’s no way any of can control when that happens because we can’t see a ticker of how many donations have come in for everyone during the day… but I posted a thank you to the Cutler family for making the funds available… And we WON this one. It was weird, but the stars aligned for us, and we got the $1900!
I also posted thank you’s to the Nonprofit Resource Center and the three regional centers that were helping to host and sponsor the event. The NPC returned our post with one that read: “Thank you for your support!! @nprcenter *hearts* @tuleyomeorg!” Hah!
By about 9:00 am we hit the $5000 mark in donations for the day, so I started really pushing for other higher milestones. Right around noon, as the halftime event was taking place in Woodland, we hit $7000. Jordan and Robert were at the halftime event, and sent me photos of people stopping by the Tuleyome table to hug our bears. One of the huggers was a gal from another nonprofit whom I’d met through the BigDog partners’ site on Facebook. Her nonprofit was using a small Godzilla toy as their mascot, and just started communicating with one another and supporting each other’s quirky take on the BigDog. She posted her photo with our bears on Facebook and said that Godzilla was looking forward to meeting them. Hah! We’ll have to do lunch sometime.
Oh, and a nice thing to see: Tuleyome was featured in an article on the BIGDoG halftime event in Woodland.
You can read it here: http://www.dailydemocrat.com//general-news/20150505/a-big-day-for-yolo-county-nonprofits.
By around 3:00 pm we’d gotten up to $8000, and then by about 8:00 pm we were up to $10,000 (which was the goal I’d set for myself for the day, so everything after that was kind of like gravy). Around 9:00 pm I posted that we were only about $200 from the $11,000 mark… and within second of that post going up Friends of the Red Rock Canyon notified us on Facebook that they were donating $150 to get us closer to the $11k… and we hit $11,000 before the hour was out. Just as the fundraiser was heading toward midnight we hit $13,000+. Wow! What a great way to end the day!
Sara’s donation for the Landing Challenge came through at 11:59:51… She was sooooo close to being the very last donor of the day, but someone else edged her out by just 10ths of a second. Dang! Maybe next year.
Our unofficial total for the BigDog was $13,680.00… but our final number will be higher than that once all of the prizes and incentive moneys are disbursed by the regional foundations… (Some of the prizes – like those for the memes and the videos — haven’t been awarded yet.) I was VERY pleased with my efforts on this… I pushed for our participation, I spearheaded this campaign, I wrote all of the press releases, email blasts and social media posts, I was the one who stayed up all night babysitting the giving portal, thanking donors within minutes of the giving (via email and on our Facebook page), doing minute-by-minute posts like a telethon… Oh, and my efforts on Twitter got Katy Perry, Shakira, and the cast of the TV show “The Replacements” to follow Tuleyome on Twitter. I am totally patting myself on the back for this. I got my nonprofit almost $14k in donations in one freakin’ day! I ROCK! …And I’m exhausted.
Here’s an album of images from the day:
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