Introduction to Givsum

New to Givsum? Welcome to the first course of our Ambassador Program. 

Introduction

Cailyn: Welcome to Course number one of the Givsum Ambassador Program. My name is Cailyn and I’ll be your host, making the journey alongside you as we navigate through the power and complexity of the Givsum platform. Today’s course is an overview and introduction to Givsum, as well as an exploration of Givsum’s unique design, as a user-facing platform. Joining us today is Joanne Gibson’s onboarding specialist and product manager, as well as Sean we can give some co-founder and CEO, they will be helping us examine the gifts and platform from a 30,000-foot view and set us up for the more in-depth courses they’re soon to come. Let’s start with Sean Sean’s going to give us a brief history as to how and why Gibson was designed and engineered as a user-facing platform.

The Vision Behind Givsum

Shawn: Thank you Cailyn, and thank you to all of our club and charity admins for participating in the Givsum ambassador program as an overview for course number one I want to start by talking about the origin of the gifts on platform, and why we built the platform, the way we have.

First and foremost, I’ve been a philanthropist my whole life.

I’ve always enjoyed volunteering in the community, attending charitable events, and donating to extraordinary causes. And sometime in the late 2000s, I was first introduced to Facebook. And very quickly I began asking myself. Hey, where’s the Facebook for philanthropy. In other words, where are the user-facing platform that will track all my philanthropic giving my volunteer hours my donations my events attended campaigns that I’m running, etc, and create a philanthropic profile and resume that I can share with others?

Tracking Philanthropy

This got me thinking as to how powerful such a platform could be not only for a donor like me but also for the data it would generate for clubs and charities. So I was wondering, who was going to build such a platform, and ultimately my friends and I decided that we wanted to build and understand why Givsum is different from traditional fundraising platforms, operate as a siloed tool for a single organization to manage donors can’t log into these platforms to view all their philanthropy, not only for one organization but for many, the organizations can’t be linked together to co-market and data share information, nor can chapter organizations be stacked from donor or member to the organization to the international organization. However, you can do this with Givsum because Givsum was engineered from the bottom up, starting with the individual user.

This is the power of the Givsum platform, and I believe it’s a smarter way to approach philanthropy. Of course, we want to provide our admins with the best donation ticketing membership and fundraising tools on the market. But it’s your supporters and members that make up your organization, and we want them to have great tools to not only track their philanthropy and have good reporting records for their end-of-the-year taxes, but we also want to give them the power to inspire others to give. We believe the more we grow this donor ecosystem, the better the platform will become for our clubs and charity admins, the more donor tools means there’ll be more successful. And if they’re more successful, so will our clubs and charities. Thank you Cailyn back to you.

Cailyn: Thank you Shawn, that gives us a great idea of what gives them the reason why it’s so powerful. Now let’s jump over to Joan, who will give us an overview of give some features and operations.

Full Suite Of Tools

Joan: Thank you Cailyn, I’m really excited to show everyone how our user-facing platform and our admin-facing platform work together. So let’s give you an overview of the full suite of tools. Since the majority of you are admins, let me start by first introducing you to the admin dashboard. Overall, all of these tools are just going to help you communicate to your members, communicate to outside supporters, save you time and help you raise more money for your club because you’re interacting with your supporters and donors in an individual way. That being said, with Givsum you can do everything from event ticketing fundraising contacting your supporters, membership invoicing, and managing all of your contributions in your ledger.

Donations

Let’s start with donations. Donors have a variety of ways they can donate to your club, whether they want to donate to a specific event or to your club in general, your supporters can choose how much to donate and the frequency that they’d like to on any page.

Ticketed Events

Moving forward to ticketed events you can structure and have as many tickets as you’d like on your event, you can classify tickets as sponsorships or even build a package that bundles your items and tickets together.

Membership Management

Going over to membership management, you can create membership packages, send invoices and manage your members from one place. You can also display your members on your club page from the admin perspective, you can view all the activities they’ve done in regards to your club, including donations events attended, and more on the public side, your members can showcase all of their philanthropic activities, add a bio photo and a header to their profile. Keep in mind that this can all be as public or as private as you’d like.

Volunteer Management

Let’s jump over to volunteer management. You can manage your volunteers. Create shifts and roles. Sign them in at your event and send them acceptance emails all as a part of volunteer management tools.

Data and Reporting

Now on to another really important part of Givsum which I personally really love is the data and reporting. So, on every opportunity that you run, you will have a summary page and analytics page filled data, the summary page will go over all of your transactions, all the volunteers, your tickets items packages sold, and you can send invoices from there as well. Another neat feature is you can see the total raised in one place and have the ability to download it, print it, and email it. This will streamline the treasurer’s role and your club going hand in hand with that is the analytics page. This page will give you insight on what’s working best for your supporters, how they’re finding you, what pages they’re more interested in, and more. This data empowers you to make future event planning decisions, not just based on intuition but based on what you already know works.

Co-Marketing

Another cool feature that will help you do that is co-marketing, an event. Let’s say you’re hosting an opportunity with another club, whether they are on gift some or not, you can call mark at the opportunity with them, so that your opportunity shows up on their page, or vice versa. Overall, one of the biggest advantages of your club page, is that your supporters, your donors your members can actually know everything that’s going on with your club at any given time, they can view all of the opportunities you have going on, sign up to volunteer, donate, pay their member dues log their in kind donations, all in one place.

To wrap this up using all of the tools that give some provides will help you save time, raise more money, connect with your supporters, manage your members and donors and run opportunities, all in one place. Thank you so much for listening and back to you Cailyn. 

Cailyn: Thank you, Joan. That concludes course #1! Don’t worry, I know that was a lot at once, but that’s why I’m here and that’s why we will be breaking down each feature in courses to come. Congratulations, you are one step closer to becoming a Givsum Ambassador. Thanks for joining and I’ll see you at course #2!