Upaya’s annual Gala is our biggest fundraiser of the year. We count on it for about one quarter of our operating budget, and our small-but-mighty team and volunteers prepare for it for many months. This year, our annual Gala was meant to be on Friday, March 6th, and we had 225 guests registered as of Monday, March 2nd. Our fundraising goal was $200,000.

Unfortunately, we began hearing from guests over the preceding weekend that they were concerned about large gatherings, and our keynote speaker was understandably nervous about travel from India to the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak in the United States.

After evaluating the facts as we knew them at the beginning of the week, we made the decision to cancel the in-person Gala and attempt to engage with our donors in a way that might recapture as much of our goal as possible.

Our “Virtual Gala” was a remarkable experience and a much greater success than we could have imagined on Monday, when we were honestly very afraid of the outcome. So far, we have raised $295,000 through an online fundraising campaign and online auction. Although the campaign technically ended on Friday, March 6th, checks and online donations continue to arrive.

Unfortunately, it appears that the necessity of cancelling large gatherings may be a challenge for nonprofit organizations for weeks to come. Knowing how reliant our fellow nonprofits are on such events, we thought we would share some of our learnings. Some of them can be replicated and some of them, we readily acknowledge, we got very lucky with.

8 Learnings from Our Virtual Gala

1. Be Decisive.

We decided to cancel our Gala on Monday and communicated to our donors that afternoon. Donors have told us they appreciated the clarity of that decision. It also gave us at least a few days to unwind some of our vendor commitments.

2. Be Fun!

One thing that we determined early was that if we were going to have a “Virtual Gala” it needed to be more than simply an online fundraiser. We tried to replicate our program through a series of videos. We also put our auction online, eBay style using GreaterGiving, and filmed introductions to each of the items with the auctioneer that our donor community knows and loves. Each of our speakers dressed as they would for the Gala, which we have heard added to the fun. We did not have any particularly fancy equipment. All of our videos were filmed on iPhones and Android phones, with a basic tabletop tripod.

3. Communicate Often to Your Community.

From the first email that we sent on Monday, we established a pattern emailing all Gala guests -- and a few friends of the organization who had declined because of conflicts -- once a day through the campaign, ending on Friday, the day of our original Gala. The emails included updates on the campaign but also something new and interesting each day: key videos, announcement of the match, opening the online auction…

4. Don’t Forget to Call.

While the broad emails were valuable for communicating to the audience at large, it was also crucial to have board members and team members calling key donors and making sure we could count on their support.

5. Stay Organized Internally.

We had a small team of six people focused on this and we kicked off each morning with a critical project management call. We reviewed what had happened the day before, what we needed to accomplish on that day and answered any questions that were causing people to be stuck. Then we kept each other updated throughout the day through our project management tool; we used Trello, but others truly work as well.

6. Anticipate the Rhythm of the Campaign.

While we tried to keep momentum going each day, we imagine that there may be some natural slowdowns. We held back some gifts and matches to announce at a point where we felt we needed to show momentum: at the very beginning, on the second to last day, and on the last day.

7. Count on Your Network.

Like all fundraising, this is about relationships. While the team could do some outreach, we were deeply supported by our board and table captains who were reaching out to their own guests and broader networks to encourage supporters to give. They amplified our message, and -- people give to people, not to emails. We use a donor software called Classy that allows supporters to create their own fundraisers on our website, which was a great tool to have in this campaign.

8. Don’t forget your vendors.

Many of your partners in event planning are watching their bookings cancel right and left, with devastating effects on their businesses. One of the great joys of our week was finding a way to still partner with Fred Granados, who has been our MC and auctioneer for the past four years. When Fred came into our office to shoot videos about our auction items, it brought a real sense of the event to life online.

Lucky Breaks

Finally, we recognize that there are some parts of our story that are hard to replicate that go beyond the fact that we have the most wonderful donor community ever. In Seattle, we were one of the first organizations to cancel our gala and make an announcement. That novelty clearly elicited significant sympathy for us and probably helped us in our campaign. We also had the benefit of urgency since our fundraiser was only five days away, which encouraged people to act promptly. Finally, our announcement came just as the broader community was becoming more aware of coronavirus and the implications. We sensed that supporting our organization was a positive thing our community could do in the face of a lot of uncertainty.

webinar with globalwa

To our nonprofit colleagues, We've been blown away by the number of nonprofits facing the same difficult situation we found ourselves in due to the current covid-19 health crisis. We decided to set up a webinar to answer questions we've been receiving about our virtual gala.

The webinar was hosted by our friends at Global Washington on Friday 3/20. A recording of the webinar is available here.