Finding Success With a Virtual Fundraising Event

Season 4, Episode 1 of the How We Run podcast examines a successful virtual event.

In this episode, Trent Stamp and Julie Lacouture are joined by Alexis Madrid and Amanda Willms of The Painted Turtle who talk about their amazing Giving Tuesday 2020 event that raised over $450,000. The 24-hour Camp-a-Thon was a huge success for the organization and Alexis and Amanda share why it was successful. 

Listen:

Julie: Today, we’re talking about virtual events. I know that you don’t like a virtual event that is just an in-person event put to a live stream. So, you don’t want to see a two-hour live stream with speeches and stories and a band playing.

Trent: That’s correct. That’s exactly what I don’t want to hear. But let’s be honest. The most important thing that you said there was two-hour event. I have no interest in sitting in front of my screen, no matter how interesting the topic might be for two hours. And I realized that good organizations have figured out a way to adapt and change their programming and change their gala structure for the new reality of us all being tired in front of our screens.

Julie: So today we have Alexis Madrid and Amanda Willms from The Painted Turtle who did a virtual event. This was their first time doing one last year and it raised $450,000.

Trent: I’m obsessed with this for a variety of reasons. What exactly is a Camp-a-Thon? And how do you raise that kind of money? And did you figure out with what they did was replicable for other organizations in any way?

Julie: The Painted Turtle is a camp for kids with medical conditions where they can go and just be free at camp under some very good supervision and support. It’s a great organization they raise a lot of money through events where they can bring their funders and their donors to camp, to experience camp.

So last year, when everything was shut down and they were doing camp virtually, they thought what are we going to do with our event fundraising if we can’t anymore? So Camp-a-Thon was something they created, which was basically a 24 hour period of camp content that they did on Giving Tuesday.

So here’s what I think is replicable. They were really smart about activating their corporate and foundation sponsors around this event.

Trent: It’s fascinating to me because one of the reasons why corporate and foundation leaders often give to organizations, let’s be honest, is that they’re able to create high-quality visuals. They’re able to put their CEO with a kid or they’re able to put one of their major funders out there into the camp setting where you can see them doing good work. So I’m curious how Painted Turtle was able to satisfy that kind of narcissistic view of fundraising and giving

Julie: I think for them, it was really about creating a whole day of stuff. I think the thing to listen to in this interview is the fact that they weren’t sure what they were going to do – they just knew they had to do something online and how they worked backward and figured it out. And then as it started to come together, they started to add on more and more things and let it snowball into a much bigger event. I think the lesson here is plans are great, but also at some point, you just have to start reaching out and doing.

Trent: That’s super cool that they were able to adjust. I’d be curious to hear what it looks like moving forward.

 

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Alexis: My name is Alexis Madrid. I am the Director of Development at The Painted Turtle. I’ve been here about 12 years. The Painted Turtle is one of Paul Newman’s medical specialty camps. We are one of 16 throughout the world. We were the first on the West coast.

We started in 2004. Since then, we’ve served over 80,000 campers and family members through illness, specific summer sessions, as well as spring and fall family weekends, where the entire family can come to camp. We have traditional camp activities from horseback, riding, fishing, arts and crafts.

Everything we do is free of charge to campers and family members.  That is what makes fundraising so important is to ensure we can provide these experiences. And lastly, we have a hospital outreach program called Outpost, so we go to 22 hospitals and clinics throughout California to bring camp to them in playrooms or in during bedside visits.

 

Julie: Amanda. Will you introduce yourself and tell us what you do at the organization.

 

Amanda: I am the events manager at The Painted Turtle. I have been involved with camp in various ways. Since about 2012. I started as a summer cabin counselor. I flew out from Southern Ontario thinking that I would go for one summer placement and I fell in love with it. And now over eight years late, here I am and in various roles throughout the organization.

 

Julie: Yeah, that’s a great segue into the first question. You’re the events person. It was really hard to do events last year. So probably January, February, March kind of felt like, okay, I’m going to do this plan. And then what happened?

Amanda: And then our entire calendar of planning and our blueprint kind of went out the window and we had to learn to be okay with that. And I feel like that was the biggest step in any of it was knowing that it was going to look entirely different than what we had expected.

It was definitely a big shift, but it also allowed us and kind of forced us to think outside the box. I definitely don’t think we would have ever come to the event that we did if we hadn’t have been in this position to completely shift our current path than maybe what we were used to every year, I think it definitely never would have come to fruition because it never would have been a requirement to.

 

Julie: Tell me what you had planned for the calendar year, in terms of donors, what was the thought process. Did you have that set out?

 

Alexis: Yeah, I would say we’re fortunate in that one of our most major events – Bingo – we snuck it in, we were able to hold it in person. And so what our calendar looked like included the LA marathon, which was a peer-to-peer fundraiser for us. As well as what would have been our largest event and something we had just done for the first time, the year before, which was our Harvest Moon Concert at camp in person in 2019. So that was in our head – how do we continue that momentum? It was very successful in terms of sponsorships VIP ticket buyers general ticket buyers. And so we were trying to figure out how we create an experience and then an event that could create some continuity for them.

Amanda: So we started, as a team and throughout different departments as well to sit in on different events and it didn’t even have to be a virtual fundraiser, it could just be any kind of virtual event.

And then we would share what we liked, what we didn’t like, what was engaging, what made it feel slow, moving, like anything like that. The more that we started participating in different events. I think the more we then were realizing the events that we were sharing feedback on, they were all so similar.

 

Julie: What were your takeaways from the events?

 

Amanda: I think the biggest thing and Alexis had touched on it as well, is that we wanted to keep consistency amongst donors. And so, you know, for different events that they anticipate happening, or groups of donors that are used to coming together, we wanted it to facilitate that still. But at the same time, I think what we discovered going along in the planning is that as much as we wanted things to be consistent, we also were given the opportunity to showcase different parts of our programming or things like that. That typically donors wouldn’t be able to see.

Julie: Can you give an example of that?

Amanda: The Outpost program. The Outpost program is going in and out of hospitals and clinics and dialysis centers. They’re not able to just take groups of people in. They have a couple of volunteers go with them, each visit. But in this sense, we have just wrapped up this new Outpost video and we could showcase that and have a camper speak to it.

And there was just so much that we could show without there being a geographical barrier that there typically is. And we could bring donors from different parts of the country, and the world, together for the first time.

Julie: When you were watching these other events, you made a choice. What persuaded you to not do a live event?

Alexis: I think for us, we had a lot of research to do, and we didn’t have very much experience with live tools and live technology. And so in watching some of our sister camps and other organizations, you know, we didn’t want to risk being live and just flubbing, and not having the right experience to know and manage.

What we did learn from one of our sister camps is, it’s a stressful thing to take on, to begin with, a production like they did, like we were attempting to do, and that having it prerecorded really gave us that confidence that what we wanted to show would be shown.

There wouldn’t be any glitches if someone’s internet wasn’t working. We had many people involved and we’re bouncing back and forth from different videos to event MCs and hosts. Pretty early on and through some research that Amanda and our communications team did, we honed in on technology, and the benefits of being prerecorded far exceeded our comfort level with being live. We were very intentional and Amanda can speak to this about trying to make it seem live and trying to make it seem that the banter or things happening were happening in real-time.

 

Julie: So let’s talk about how you came up with the idea. So where did you start with this event? What came first? Was it the date? Was it the concept or was it something else?

Amanda: I would say the date definitely was not the first one.

Julie: You’re both laughing.

Amanda: We’ll just we’ll laugh so that people can still hear it and know that they are not the only ones if they have to reschedule dates along the way. But I would say the idea was definitely there first. And it was such a broad idea when we started with it.

Julie: Tell us about the big concept.

Amanda: the big concept was having it be something different that we maybe hadn’t even seen anywhere yet. And I think, you know, Alexis had said that we wanted something to stand out and something to be different. And so Camp-a-Thon came about. There were so many different aspects that we were like, we could highlight this area of camp, like, oh, but we could also highlight this. And all of a sudden we were like, well, we don’t really need to only do one or the other, like it’s virtual, you know, we’re not going to have people coming on-site for a 13-hour visit or things like that, where like your virtual people can be at home, be in the comfort of their own space.

It was so broad in the sense that we really could do anything with it. And we’d have so many ideas that were like, let’s just make a full day of it.

Julie: Okay. So your idea was Camp-a-Thon and it was a 24-hour fundraiser that happened on Giving Tuesday, which is a crowded day. And I have to say, when I first heard about this, I was like, that’s risky.

Amanda: We had talked about it – do we want that Camp-a-Thon to be its own day? Because if we are looking at, four, six, eight hours, whatever it was going to end up being. Does it overlap with something or do we give it the space to be its own thing?

And I think because it was a completely new event that we were putting out there, we felt comfortable pairing it up with a day that was already known throughout the community and that we would already have awareness for that day, people are coming to the page or they’re looking to give on that day as it is.

So what could we do to enhance that and stand out?

Julie: Because you knew your donors would come looking for you on Giving Tuesday, so you’re going to give them something. It ended up being a smart move because you certainly couldn’t have done it later. It was kind of the last day, especially how last year (2020) ended up finishing, which was in a ball of fire, right? Any virtual events I saw after Giving Tuesday kind of were struggling to get attention. Do you feel that way too?

Alexis: Yes. Another part of it as we kept doing our research and trying to figure out what our backward timeline looked like. Before you knew it, August was too soon, September was too soon. And so as we kept on feeling like that, we’re like, okay, what is the latest we can do it?

As Amanda said, Giving Tuesday is really a strong day for us in terms of people waiting to give until that day and we’ve always had a matching grant tied with Giving Tuesday. So they liked that matching component and, and similarly, you know, Harvest Moon was an event in the fall. And so again, trying to capitalize on that fall period was really important.

I think also in maybe it’s more just of a personal feeling, but I would say. I felt this in calls with donors, Giving Tuesday happens right after Thanksgiving, and it being the year of COVID people were very grateful for where they were at personally. And I think through that, reflecting and being grateful and seeing the work that we had done throughout the year It was this cumulative feeling of gratitude that I think we were able to harness during that period.

Once we got into the rest of December, it would have been really hard for us to, along with other mailed end-of-year appeals as we were doing kind of end of your giving follow-up things along those lines. It provided the right separation for us for some of our different initiatives.

For us Giving Tuesday really spoke to us and luckily I think worked out well.

 

Julie: So when did you start planning this event? I’m sure you’re doing research as you’re planning…

Amanda: The research started in the summer and research, even at that point, being, just participating in different virtual events or hearing from family, friends, coworkers, anyone that had participated in virtual events, like what were their thoughts? And so that, that was a whole first piece because there are so many different ideas that are out there and there are wonderful ideas that are out there.

So once we decided on Camp-a-Thon, that’s when more of the detailed research started, and had to think about how we were going to execute it. So tech-wise, how would we get it out there? Do we want to do it live on film or prerecorded? And all of that has these micro-steps that you wouldn’t necessarily think of until you go to plan it and put it together.

The run of the show, how to run a show and there were all of these subcategories to get it out there successfully that it just, it was a lot of research happening at the same time in different aspects.

Julie: Break that down for me. What are the pieces that had to come into place to get this off the ground? Cause you did not create a 24-hour video. How long was the actual video?

Amanda: We probably had closer to two hours of actual. Video content. We were able to use videos that we had from our summer programming, the “camp at home” programming that we did with campers and families, children, and clinics. We were able to use some of that between our main segments throughout the day.

Julie: So you have about two hours of video to make. So is this the first piece you start working on – the video content?

Alexis: You know, we’re a small but mighty team. Amanda was a great leader in delegating to each of us, our responsibilities. And so, you know, while communications and Amanda were working on technology and the way in which we were going to deliver it, you know?

Julie: So you started thinking about distribution first?

Alexis: Distribution first, so that we didn’t get too far down the line and say, this isn’t going to work and we have all these videos and they’re on Vimeo or YouTube, or, you know, and then does this work with restream, which was the tool we were using to push it out.

And, you know, we learned it wouldn’t push out to certain social media channels like Instagram, but it would on Facebook. But then all of these variables came about and it’s like trying to shoot a moving target.

Julie: I love that you start with distribution because when you start with distribution, what you’re doing is you’re putting your audience first, right? You’re saying, how will my audience receive this? And so what I’m hearing from you is you wanted them to be able to access your content all day. But that they could get it all day on multiple platforms. You’re starting with that and you chose to use Restream, which is a powerful tool because you can schedule a video to launch at a certain time and it will go out to all channels. It’s nice, did you look at anything else?

Amanda: I guess I would say there are a few of the different social media channels, like Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn. Once I got that, we are all on, but that we found needed an additional tool through Restream in order to be able to push it out that did add an extra step compared to just pushing it out to YouTube, to our website, page to Facebook. Because we also were limited on time we didn’t want to have to spend more time than necessary to make the event even bigger than maybe what we could handle in the amount of time that we had.

So we decided, okay, we know that we can put it out on these three different platforms at the same time. We’re not able to do it on, you know, maybe a, B and C platforms. At this time, but we can still use those channels to promote watching the video somewhere else. And so we still made sure that we used those channels that we had.

So on Instagram, we had a post 10 minutes before each of our five daytime segments that said, don’t forget, the kickoff with Danny DeVito and Herb Alpert at 11:00 AM – tune in! And here’s the link in bio. It maybe looked a little bit different than what we had initially hoped for, but we were flexible in that our main event is just getting it out to our entire community and how can we reach everyone on these different platforms? And it didn’t need to be the exact same way on every platform. We just wanted to put it out there. That it’s happening.

Julie: Awesome. So I think your main channels were Facebook, your website, and YouTube, right? Those were the main places to find it and that your other social channels push people towards your website, which was home base.

Alexis: That was another thing we grappled with and learned. We wanted only one place, that there could be different channels, but having one place where they could go to watch, where they could go to comment, and interact with other people, and not needing to go to different places to interact in that way.

Simultaneously, while we’re talking about how it’s going to be distributed, we were also talking about what is the giving page and the platform we should be using? For us, we typically use Classy. For our peer-to-peer and event tools. But one thing we were exploring and reading were that text-to-give was growing and popular. We’ve sometimes struggled with getting lower-level donors or volunteers to engage. We thought it was worth trying. Amanda had researched Give Lively, which was an incredible and free and a pretty awesome tool for not having a real cost associated with it other than, you know, the credit card fees for processing.

Julie: And the reason why this is so important is that this event is available for free. Everywhere. So the risk you’re taking is this event will be happening all day. We’ll be putting it out there and hopefully, people will donate. You knew they would cause you know your community, but, but can you describe that moment of doubt?

Alexis: Going into it before any money was secured for this event, there was that concern or that nervousness and “How are we going to pull this off?” Pretty early on we knew we wanted to continue the matching gift concept. We decided was to procure matching gifts for sponsorship dollars, as well as matching gifts for the day of.

Typically we raise between $30,000 and $40,000 on Giving Tuesday. So that’s kind of what we thought and estimated plus a little bit more because we were doing a much more robust program. Our matching donor pledged $30,000, so that was fantastic. And they were willing to roll it over to this Camp-a-Thon event. For us, the snowball effect that happened that blew us out of the water is that on the sponsorship side – a couple of donors in particular – were very gung-ho about matching gifts.

Julie: Matching gifts of other sponsors and of individual donors?

Alexis: Yes, it was incredible as we were having these conversations with donors, they’re like, I know there’s a matching gift for the day of, but is there a matching gift for sponsorship? And at the time we had already met our initial $50,000 sponsorship, and then we got another $50,000. So we’d already matched $100,000.

Julie: So you’re saying you address the risk of not raising anything out with this video by procuring gifts before the event. That is the way to take an event from a $5,000 fundraiser to a  $100,000 fundraiser. Can you talk about those conversations and how you’re having those conversations with your sponsors? And are you going back to previous sponsors or are you reaching out to any new people?

Alexis: So for the first two matches they were prior gifts and one of them actually came in the summer. And as we were planning that was our ask of them, “When this event is more firmed up and we have a full idea of what it’s going to be. Can we use your gift as a match?”

They were a corporate partner that we also wanted to recognize in this fashion to give them some recognition and steward them. So that was fantastic. The other was a board member who had given the gift a little bit before Camp-a-Thon and we said, “Hey, matching gifts are a unique incentive right now we have this Camp-a-Thon event. Can we use it for that?” And that board member was on board as well. So as this is going on, I’m also having phone calls and conversations with other major donors that typically give at the end of the year. They had additional funds in which they wanted to give us this year.

And so in talking through the different options and the, you know, different ways in which they could support programming, they also said, “and if you are interested, you’re welcome to use our gift as a match.”

They beat me to the punch in terms in having that conversation. Within, I think a day and a half, I put together a proposal and sent it off to them. And later that evening they replied with. Yes and approval. And you know, that it could be used as a matching gift for Camp-a-Thon.

This was happening simultaneously to a prospective sponsor being interested and navigating on their own how much they’d be able to give to support this event. As this donor was asking, can it be matched? I was simultaneously ensuring that we could offer this additional hundred thousand dollars as a match.

Julie: I’m imagining you on two telephones. But that’s how it happens. That’s really interesting to see that one donor asks you a question and what they’re signaling to you is like, this is a way to make more my gift more meaningful? And then you say, let me see if I can make that happen. And so you’re able to go back to other donors and say, if you say, okay to this, we can inspire this donation over here.

Did you reach out to people that you weren’t already in conversations with?

Alexis: That’s kind of how we then shifted aside from our board. That’s how we kind of shifted to this focus on the continuity of the sponsors from Harvest Moon. They were our priority supporters to go to and speak to the fact that because of COVID and having to pivot, we’re so grateful for their support of Harvest Moon, and we have something new and special coming this year. You know, I think it was also very important. Because it was new to everyone to be clear and succinct as to what the event was.

Sometimes it was a challenge trying to describe a 24-hour campaign and then saying you’re really going to be showing video and content for 24 hours. What I personally did with my outreach to major donors was really focused on, what we called the closing campfire, which was the longest portion and the closing of the event. That was going to run at seven o’clock. In communicating with major donors, that was the crux of the show. The recognition that I really wanted. Them to focus on and understand what was going to be presented and how it was going to be pushed out.

Julie: You didn’t want them to feel like they needed to commit to being content creators for 24 hours, or you’re going to focus them on the big end of the thing fireworks, the finale.

Alexis: I think we were also trying to be mindful of their schedules and the busyness of being in this pandemic and having kids and school. Because it was a Tuesday, it was a weekday, which I think was concerning to us. Other events had been on weekends. Homing in on that 7:00 PM closing period, it was this finite period of time when we hope to get their undivided attention.

Again, reaching out to all the past Harvest Moon sponsors and explaining and sharing who the celebrity guests were going to be, what performances were going to be involved because that was an element in which I’m guessing was intriguing to them about Harvest Moon. Not only being at camp and getting a taste for what we do but also the performances and the celebrities that they were going to get to see.

In talking with donors it didn’t end up being really about that. They wanted to support our programs and they knew how challenging of a year it must have been. Many of them were very impressed with our prior communication beforehand showing videos of what virtual programming looked like us piloting virtual visitor days. That proved to be very helpful in terms of their commitment, to what we were trying to accomplish.

Julie: You’re approaching sponsors that sponsored your inaugural Harvest Moon event in 2018 and you thought we’re going to do this every year. Then the world was like, “I don’t think so.” But you’re coming back to them and you were not saying, look, I know that was great, but we had to change it this year. You said we have something new and special, and I think that’s a really important distinction in asking for those gifts, you’re coming at it from just a little bit of a different point of view.

Amanda: I think anything camp-related, we always want to put it out there that it’s positive and it’s something fun. That was our take on it. Everyone’s already aware of what’s going on so how can we present this in the most positive light so you’re not also thinking about what could have been right.

It was really successful doing it that way. And I think it just got people excited and onboard from the start.

Julie: Before the event started, how much was committed?

Alexis: Quite a bit. So we had about $375,000 in sponsorship. A smaller component of what we were doing simultaneously was that Sam, our development coordinator, was putting together a peer-to-peer fundraising component. We were reaching out to ambassadors or champions to create their own fundraising pages to share the story, to share on social, reach out to their family, friends, and colleagues to fundraise money.

So that was another component. So going in, like you said, with that much in sponsorship I think it truly boosted our confidence.

Julie: I mean, it was more than 10 times you would raise normally on Giving Tuesday so yes, I would imagine that boosted confidence.

Alexis: The real focus was giving Amanda and communications the space to fine-tune everything because, you know we had plenty of content from prior years and summers, and we had two new videos that were just finished by outside people that we used a new general camp video, the new outpost video we had past gala’s that we had performances recorded. So we could incorporate those.

Julie: I want you to share your robust communications plan leading up to Giving Tuesday. And then we’re going to talk about what happened on that day.

Amanda: It was certainly a team effort. Our co-worker Beth was great and set up a communications timeline. So the wonderful Beth had created a communications timeline early on, so we could have these deadlines of and we kind of worked backward from Giving Tuesday. We started by saying the morning of we want an email to go out and then we’ll have another reminder for the big closing campfire that’s happening. Okay. How many days before that, do we want to have another reminder? Working backward helped a lot. Once you start putting it on a calendar, you go, Oh my gosh, I need two more weeks still. So you have to backtrack it all. So that was laid out, which was really nice. And that was helpful to have those internal timelines, to know what our goals were for communicating it to the public as alongside, you know, our internal timeline of video production and sponsorships and peer to peer pages and all of that.

Julie: So talk me through when you started messaging about this event and then the journey you took somebody on. I hear you loud and clear about like a day of reminder and then reminders about like the big events.

So you’re not pummeling people on the day of, but you had a pretty robust communication schedule leading up to that. So can you walk me through that in a broad way?

Alexis: Sure. To Amanda’s credit, she started this massive Google document for all of us. There had to have been over 20 tabs on this document that included, sponsorship offline gifts, run of the show. All sorts of things. So one of them was the communications timeline. And so again, with communications being so busy, Beth kind of charted everything out, not just email it was social media posts that we would do and personal outreach that we would do to the committed sponsors to board. Chris, our CEO would communicate and remind the board, separate from each of these different things. I think it was seven emails in total from the save-the-date that went out. One thing we played with in MailChimp is an RSVP function where they could click and through the action of RSVP us having a sense of how many people would be watching, but also, you know, when you commit to something and you share with others, it’s more likely that they’ll actually follow through. So we did the RSVP link and we provided the calendar reminder options so that it could push to their calendar. Then each of the emails or each time we posted, we wanted to announce something. So we used each of those to announce a different celebrity or celebrity duo that was going to be featured and what they were going to be talking or sharing about.

Julie: It wasn’t just seven emails about like, just don’t forget, don’t forget this. It was new information in each one.

Alexis: Correct. And we scrapped some messages or combined some messages as things transpired based on, the information we had already shared, and getting the right headshots for the celebrities and different things. We had to be agile, even though we might’ve had a game plan for eight emails. At certain points felt like this is too much, so we adjusted. All of the emails were usually supported with a social media post. Social, we did a bit more often.

On the day, after a segment, we highlighted again to allow people to share and view without having to watch and stream it live. Alongside that was the actual landing page for Camp-a-Thon and updating talent, who was going to be on next, the timeline that Amanda meticulously kept track of, and what was going to happen. Every time a video aired on our landing page of our website we created a library: every time a video was done airing, we added it. So people could go back and watch it any those were kind of the different components of email social and the landing page itself and how we tackled that.

Julie: That’s amazing. Okay. So how much did you raise?

Amanda: We raised just over $475,000.

Julie: How many individual donors did you have?

Alexis: I’m counting just over 330 individual donors.

Julie: And how does that compare with the number of individual donors and the amount raised from past Giving Tuesdays?

Alexis: The last Giving Tuesday, we had 150 donors, so we more than doubled. We raised between $30,000 and $35,000 the prior Giving Tuesday as well. So tripled and doubled.

Julie: Congratulations. If you can share, Alexis, how much did you spend making this happen?

Alexis: Aside from raising what we raised, I think our second proudest, element of this event is how few expenses we had. We were just over $4,000 in total. We did outsource some of our editing – we hired an outside person to do some video editing for us.

We did do watch party kits for the sponsors. So again, nothing too expensive. I believe they were less than a hundred dollars per sponsor in terms of the value, but it had a camp blanket. It had our camp songbook for the higher-level donors, a bottle of wine. It was very campy and within our Painted Turtle kind of vibe.

As Amanda spoke to and give lively was free, the technology portions were pretty –

Julie: Restreams is probably a hundred bucks or so, right?

Amanda: We even had an add-on to have that scheduler to help us still with only $130. It was a monthly charge too. So we’re not like committing to commit to too much right away. And I mean, yeah. Our expenses to come out. Less than 1% of the revenue.

Julie: And how many kids get services from that amount? How many kids are impacted by that dollar amount?

Alexis: Close to 600.

Julie: Amazing. Will you do this again?

Amanda: We definitely want to, it is on our agenda and looking ahead to future events coming up, but it was, there was so much success that came from it in so many different aspects. So many that we have talked about expenses but also including so many different members of our community at the same time.

And even internally, you know, being able to bring staff in from different perspectives too, because everyone was working virtually in a different manner. It was just such I think both internally and externally, people walked away from just feeling camp again. And that’s, what’s so important to us, in raising funds is getting the message of camp out there.

And I think we were. Extremely lucky and successful in doing that, that it’s, I mean, that’s half the battle there is getting the story across. I think we found a way to do that and successfully, so we definitely want to continue with it.

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