Innovative Strategies for Funding and Sustainability

What’s up everybody? I got a new haircut. I’m feeling good. If you’re not on YouTube, it’s okay. You can just hear how good my hair feels. It’s amazing. Y’all this episode, I’m gonna go over camps, conferences and cruises for prevention. If you have not heard, you’re gonna find out. Like now is the time for innovation. Like funds are getting cut. People are losing their jobs. There’s furloughs going on and we got to find a way to stay in the game and keep saving lives. We can’t let this take our momentum from us. Like prevention is making big moves. It is growing across the nation and we cannot stop. And I know the reality is a lot of us are getting booted from our positions and Vive 18 is with you. If y’all go down, we go down.

And so we’re trying to be scrappy. We’re trying to find ways that are really innovative to stretch every single dollar. And we know that we’re very blessed and not everybody has the same situation that we do. So I wanted to make this episode to give you some opportunities to stretch your dollar further, share what’s been working with 518. Cause maybe I’ll can use some of the same stuff for your organizations. And then also just give you a little bit of a recap of what’s been going on so you can take advantage of some things that we’re providing this year. let’s start, honestly, let’s just start with a celebration. I’ve been so encouraged by our student intern, Reagan McDonald. She is not only a game changer, just a passionate preventionist. She is so funny. If you’ve been listening to our podcast, how about those last couple episodes with a student takeover episodes? my gosh, I was literally laughing out loud watching these episodes on YouTube because of Reagan’s intro. She is not afraid to just jump in there and make fun of me. I love her little intro.

I’m like the more talented and more good looking Jake. I don’t know if that would hurt exact words, but it was so funny. I was laughing so hard. And then her interviews, dang, she was, she was just digging in to bring out this content from these student leaders from all across the country on how they got, how they got 70 students to sign up their prevention for their prevention club in like a week, how they started these movements to fight fentanyl and honestly, like how to get out of your comfort zone and be a better leader. So it’s been really cool to watch that. That’s been my highlight apart from doing these incredible programs to speak with students and help launch new prevention clubs across the country. Like it’s just so cool to see someone else picking up this legacy and running with it. And Reagan, you said it, but you might actually be better than me at my own job.

So Reagan, if you’re listening, incredible work, keep it up and keep the personality too. Don’t lose that because I don’t know, I enjoy it. Even if no one else enjoys it, I love it. I think it’s hilarious. So for everyone out there, this episode, I want to start delivering on some promises. At the end, I’m going to share some special content that’s going to be happening on our prevention crews for prevention professionals. And I’ll share how you can get your cruise ticket taken care of. Yep, taken care of at no cost to you. And I’m putting an asterisk by that. Okay. So you’re to know what that means at the end. So let’s, let’s look at what has worked with Vive 18 and how you can steal it. The first one is there’s a, there’s a story when I started this whole movement, I was in college and at the beginning, my platform wasn’t even called Vive 18.

The name used to be Party.0 or Party.0 if you were like typing it on a keyboard. And I started this and called it that because we were throwing these drug-free events and parties on college campuses. And if you blew in a breathalyzer and you were at our party, you would blow a .0. So I thought it was super clever. And honestly, it was a branding nightmare. Most of the things that I come up with aren’t like that practical, but they mean something to like a few people. So not the best, but here I was as a college student launching this brand. My challenge was how do you make this sustainable? Which that’s a challenge we all face. If you’re doing prevention or coalition work, if you’re working in a school, like you’re always looking for money and you need to do this life-saving work and you got to have someone to fund it.

So I was in the same boat. And I was so lucky when I met my wife, Emily, she taught me how to fundraise. And in four months, we were able to raise $40,000 of annual recurring revenue. Yes, you heard that right. In four months, $40,000 of revenue that didn’t go away, but it would happen again year after year. So this was important because we’re running the nonprofit model.

We were looking for support and I was building this platform that can make a difference, but I wanted to do it full time because I knew the potential. I didn’t want to go have to change the world after I worked a nine to five job. That only leaves like two or three hours to make a difference. And then I would have no life. Now, some of you have been in the same exact situation and your movement could grow if you could find some more funding. So I’ll tell you.

I didn’t do door knocking. I didn’t ask for giant sponsorships, which honestly, that is the strength of ours. So we could have done that route. But instead, I went the route that most missionaries, like people who are going on a big trip might use to raise funds. If you’re going on a mission trip overseas or anything like that, at least as a Christian, how we would do it is, you know, we’d ask friends, ask neighbors, ask for referrals, go speak in front of people, go to different clubs and organizations, tell them what we’re doing, and then ask for support. So she taught me how to do that. And basically I would show up, meet somebody new, and there was times when I didn’t receive anything. There was times when they’re like, hey, this is really cool. I have a friend you should meet. And there were times when the person wrote a $10,000 check on the spot. That literally happened. A new connection, know, a connection of a connection of a connection. And at the end of the meeting, they wrote that check. And here’s the cool thing is today, we don’t run ourselves as a nonprofit, but we saw what worked so that we could benefit our partners.

And this is going to be something I go into depth on is I’m going to teach y’all the exact method, we’re gonna put together a pitch just like I did that was able to raise that much money and you’ll be able to do it in your community. And here’s the cool thing. You don’t have to live in a really like ritzy area. The town I grew up in did not have big industries with a lot of funders and big wealthy people. We drew like kind of a mid-sized town around 50,000 people in the town which maybe to some people actually that is pretty big. But no tech companies, no giant employers or anything like that. It was most people donating, you know, 50 bucks a month, the high dollar, know, a hundred dollars a month, things like that.

Empowering Youth Through Leadership Camps

But I’ll be breaking down exactly how we can do that. If you are going on the prevention cruise with us, you’ll be learning and we’ll be putting together that pitch so that when you get back, you can start raising money in the exact same way and it’ll be really, really, really cool. So I think that’s really important as we lose some federal funding right now. And honestly, even when we have it, we want to be looking at sustainability. So we should be doing this all the time. It can be part of our weekly or monthly process. the second thing that I want to teach all that comes from what we’ve learned this year is we were able to say yes to a couple things this year because we said no to a couple things this year. And the big outcome that happened was we got to host, excuse me, we got to host a prevention camp. And it was incredible. We had about a hundred students from across Arizona come learn leadership, skills for prevention and mental health, and ignite their clubs go back, win money for their prevention initiatives, learn skills. So we had peer-led sessions where the students were teaching each other. We had time for them to plan prevention events. We had Vive 18 speakers, of course, to ignite that spark and interest in prevention. And then we had practice time where they could create PSAs. They could create relatable social media content around positivity and influence and prevention and mental health. And then we gave them time on stage to practice their public speaking skills. And it was incredible.

Seeing all the students share and be on stage and just the growth that they experienced. It’s so, so awesome so what was really cool is we were able to gather data from the event and check this out. This is so cool. So when we look at the results, of the impact. We saw significant changes in, I feel confident speaking in front of a group. I have ideas about how I can help my community. I believe I can be a leader in my school and community. That’s a big one. That jumped up huge, the sense of leadership. I feel confident or comfortable talking with others. I’m excited to make my community better with prevention and mental health and I feel connected to other youth in my group. So those were just the like giant jump off points that were like, whoa, this made a big difference. And what’s really cool is like when we look at self-efficacy and the reasons why students don’t use, those are being increased, right? But also think about the asset of having young people doing prevention in your community.

Like we know that peer led programs are the way to go. Like they’re the most effective. So now when we increase the capacity of youth, not only in the numbers, but in their skills and their belief and abilities to actually go back and do it, that’s world changing. So it was really, really cool. They, some other things that we saw is they, the people that came to the conference, they were involved in some prevention work already. So, the year two is bringing new people to camp that’s gonna keep the work going. Cause as you know, students turn over. the nature is they’re going to graduate from school and hopefully with experiences like this, they wanna stay in prevention. They wanna continue doing prevention work for the rest of their life. But even if they graduate and go somewhere else or they go to college or they just volunteer with you or they become a supporter monetarily or whatever that is, we have a continued pipeline of talent, of purpose-driven preventionists who are just really, really excited to do this work. yeah, the students loved it. Of course, the coalition advisors and professionals, they loved it. They’re already asking about next year. And big shout out to Arizona Access. They’re basically the health department that distributes all the prevention, SAMHSA grants, stuff like that. Thank y’all for making this happen. And thank you for all the Arizona coalitions that came together to make that happen because although we were in charge of putting it together and things like that, y’all are what made it what it is. Like literally it was incredible because you were there and you were pouring into it.

Enhancing Online Presence and Engagement

And it was a true collaboration to be honest, we were like kind of the puzzle makers and y’all were every piece to the puzzle. So we actually are looking at, we probably have the capacity to do this in two other states or regions in 2026. And it’s just a great way to maximize your prevention dollars because we can get the students to one location, maximize all our efforts and create an unforgettable experience not only leading to more knowledge about prevention, but giving them the skills to bring prevention back. And that’s changing the world. So please reach out to us if you think, hey, we wanna make sure our state is one of those next ones that gets to launch a camp like this. Yeah, let me know. Jake at Vive18.com. can email me or just go to Vive18.com and fill out that form. The other thing that we learned is we’ve been really investing in our online presence. Now, I can’t boast about this because I feel like we’re growing slowly, but I’m just really proud of our team because we’re trying new things. And we’re lucky enough to have some legit pros on our team. Like Tomas, our co-founder, he is so good at what he does. And his son, Giovanni, shout out.

Giovanni and his new business, The League Marketing, we’ve gotten to really just try a bunch of stuff online. We tried geo-targeting, which if you don’t know, it’s basically where if you want to bring a video or a post to a certain demographic, you find out where they are and then you can actually target an ad to show up to them where they are.

So for example, it could be a school, it could be an event or a conference, it could be a concert that they’re going to, right? You know, like, hey, my demographic’s gonna be here, let’s set the ad to show up. And we practiced it at CADCA and saw some great results. It was really, really cool, got to connect with more people. People were coming up saying like, hey, I saw you today, or your profile keeps popping up, like you’re everywhere today.

And it was really, really cool to validate this new technology to see how can we make 25, 50 bucks go really far because it’s being, it’s the money’s not being wasted on people who don’t care about our content. And so that was really, really cool. we’ve also got to, I guess just explore different strategies because like Tomas came back from a speaking engagement and you know, the client loved it. But what was cool is we were getting all these messages from students talking about how impactful it was and that they were going to make a new choice, right? Students literally like, hey, I’m done smoking or I’m done drinking. Thank you for coming. You know, I’m asking for help, which we do hear those very infrequently.

But what Tomas did is he went above and beyond and he actually, any new followers that we had after the presentation, he would send them a quick message saying like, hey, know, shout out to your school. That was awesome today. And then it would start this conversation. So now we can look at different strategies to continue the conversation with students so that their voices are heard. And if they need any help, we can be able to refer them.

So that was just super, super cool to see these different social media strategies and how we can maximize online platforms since that’s where students are spending some time.

The last thing would be our online presence. And this has been something we’ve always of dabbled in is SEO. And if you don’t know what SEO means, it stands for Search Engine Optimization. So if you want to rank on Google, Google is basically sending out all these spiders to search this web, this worldwide web, and they’re looking for content mentioning your name, your topic, your links, and all that good stuff.

For us, this podcast is a good thing for SEO because we’re talking about prevention, we’re posting it on our blog, and Google loves that. Another thing is posting testimonial videos because Google owns YouTube and we are on YouTube talking about prevention. So testimonial videos, this podcast episode, videos of our speakers, sharing from stage, these are all credibility boosting.

And these are helping Google find us and refer us to people when they search for prevention. Now, here’s the cool lesson. You can absolutely do this. Whatever content that you’re doing, if you record it and you post it on YouTube, you can transcribe it and put it in the description. You can put it on your blog. And now there are multiple places that Google finds your content and says, they know what they’re talking about. And also Google loves links. So you can link your YouTube video and put it into your blog or into your social media posts and things like that. So it’s cross referencing and it’s seeing all these things with your name on it talking about prevention. And here’s where the mastery comes in. You want to be searchable based on your location. So make sure you use your location in as in the title or in the video, like literally say your location whenever you can because these spiders, these bots, they don’t just pick up on the description now. AI tools are so advanced, they’re picking up on your voice. So when you are talking about prevention, make sure to use your city and state and county and whatever your service area is. How this translated for us is we started making state pages because people want to know if we’ve worked in their state. So we started having like vive18.com slash Kentucky. Then we can put all our testimonial videos from Kentucky in one space. It helps for SEO and it helps when people ask like, hey, where have you been in Kentucky? We can send them that page and they can see other principals and coalition leaders like themselves talking about working with us.

Exciting Opportunities: The Prevention Cruise

So it makes everybody’s lives easier and it makes us more searchable. So that’s been a cool lesson from this year. Now, what you’ve all been waiting for. What’s up with this cruise? How can I get a free ticket? So the cruise is happening in April of 2026. We are boarding a Norwegian cruise line and we’re gonna have a conference on a cruise ship just for prevention professionals. You’re gonna get some CEUs. So those credits you need for continuing ed, we’ll got those for you. But the real magic is that we’ve built in time for us to connect with each other.

Meaning you’re going to meet your friends in prevention and you’re going to share ideas because you and I both know when you go to these conferences, that’s where the best ideas happen, is you meet a peer and you get talking about a problem and they help you brainstorm some solutions or maybe they have some solutions that they’ve done in the past and you leave with this concrete thing you’re going to do that just, it just skyrockets your impact.

And there’s so much time on this ship to do this because we’re eating dinner together. You know, after the conference is done, we can be in the hot tub or playing mini golf or, you know, like there’s so many things to do on the ship that we could do. And it’s so, so fun. We’re going to build memories. We’re going to make friends and there’s going to be so much time to share with each other. And the way that we’re doing this conference is we’re building in this time into the sessions too. So you’re not just listening, but we’re going to have time to start to do some planning to idea eight with our friends. And this is more of a facilitation model. So you’re going to learn, you’re going to grow, but then there’s some times to really get down to it and say, how do I use this when I get home? That way, when you leave that ship, you will have a ton of new ideas, but more importantly, you’ll have action steps to go implement them. So how do you get free tickets?

Here’s how we’ve done it so far. Some people are like, hey Jake, I’ve spent my money on conferences or I can’t get the sign off to do the prevention cruise because it’s newer. Or it’s on a cruise and my boss is like, hey, are you just going on vacation and you’re having me pay for it? The answer to that is no, by the way. Yes, we are going to incredible destinations, but we’re doing some work what we’ve done so far is if you buy Vive 18’s online training materials, which can include our toolkit with 18 prevention activities that has been flying off the shelf y’all. It’s so versatile. It’s so jam packed. It’s so engaging. Students love it. that’s been flying off the shelf. You can buy that and use it towards your cruise.

If you have a prevention club, we have lessons, online training materials on how to have student-led PSAs, how to teach your students how to create them in a really easy, sustainable way. We’ve got a training on how to recruit more members to your prevention club, how to throw your own drug-free events. So all these are waiting for you in our portal, and we have a bundle, and whatever you spend on that kind of stuff, this online materials that you can bring back and use in your community, I am willing to use that towards your cruise costs. Yeah, so if you’ve got some line items, some things to use for that, we can basically deduct that from the price of your cruising conference. So all you need to do if you wanna take advantage of that is to email me jake at vive18.com. That’s J-A-K-E at vive18.com and ask me about that. We’ll put together a package for you and any of colleagues that want to go. We’ll see what we can make happen. But money should not be an object because honestly, if you have funding, if you’re going to conferences in 2026, this is going to be less expensive than the other conference.

You’re going to have more content time, more peer sharing time. The impact is going to be greater. So either way, it’s saving you money. This is a win, win, win, win, win, baby. And we’re going to Bermuda. So add another win to that. All right. I think, I think I fulfilled my promise to you. We’ve shared a couple lessons from this year and y’all, I want to celebrate with you. We are so excited. We’ve got some new Vive 18 babies happening this winter. And so I’m not, I’m not going to share it. Like let’s steal the joy from our team members to share it with you. But if you’re having a member out, you can, you can ask about it. Hey, who are these new little, little Vive 18ers that are going to be running around? Cause we’re just so blessed to have some awesome team members. The families are growing.

It’s so cool. So we’re looking forward to that. Ask about some babies this semester, this spring semester. And thank you for everyone for trusting Vive 18. Like the fact that we get to partner with you and get more students involved in prevention and save young lives from addiction and overdose while having a great time. Like this is a dream and we want this to be the entire prevention field. So thank you all for making it possible. Thank you for tuning in to the podcast supporting Reagan and her new student takeover episodes. Please keep sharing and let us know whatever we can do for you, whether it’s a camp, a conference, or hopping on this cruise. We wanna make prevention more fun and more impactful so we can get more people on this ship. This is a life-changing ride and thank you for being a part of it. Y’all, I know things aren’t as peachy as we want them to be right now. And I’m just going to say the world needs kindness more than ever. So thank you for being those kind people. Thank you for caring and putting yourself in difficult positions because prevention is not easy. It’s worth it. And we’re better together. We’ll see y’all next Monday for another episode of the Drug Prevention Power Hour.