Want to take advantage of Giving Tuesday? Here’s How

After consumers shop on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, Giving Tuesday purpose was to be the “Opening day of the Giving season.” Taking place November 27^th but before the holidays! Giving Tuesday gives you the chance to get donors to participate before spending money on retail products.

Why Participate?

Some of you may be concerned that this giving day will either decrease your overall fundraising activities. However, you will find that this is not the case. Overall for an average year-end giving (from 2012-2016) those who participated in #GivingTuesday saw an increase of $17.7K donations. As opposed to those who did not, with a $1.2K increase of donations. In Canada, more than 6,000 charities and business participated in 2017. Globally #GivingTuesday is celebrated in 150+ countries. Last year, it had 21.7 billion Twitter impressions. #GivingTuesday (in 2017) broke the record from 2016 with total donations of $274 million, with an average gift of $111. In 2018, it is expected to reach $331 million.

The great thing about #GivingTuesday is, first it’s growing in popularity year after year. Secondly, you do not need a huge budget to participate by any means. The main things you need to ensure is set your goals to make them SMART, develop an action plan, plan communications in advance, and actively communicate to donors online/social. Particularly social media as #GivingTuesday is how some donors may find you.

Top 10 GivingTuesday Tips

Join GivingTuesday’s organization

To participate in #GivingTuesday first join their organization. GivingTuesday is committed to helping charities and nonprofits be successful in their campaigns. It’s completely free and they provide you with many toolkits to get you started. Link to create your profile is below!

Create a SMART goal.

Your campaign goal must follow this structure regardless of the type of the campaign. But it is particularly important this day. There are different charities participating, your goal should make sense to the donor.
Have a clear understanding to why you’re doing this campaign. What’s the purpose? Where do the donations go? Once you have that information it will help you structure of the how much you need for this campaign.

Determine your target audience – who do you want to give to you?

Use your data, who typically donate to you? Google Analytics and social media audiences will help provide a good understanding of your donors. Also, think of new donors, make sure your campaign message fits both new donors and current ones.

Test all clicks prior to the campaign – more than once.

Ensuring your website is working is highly important. This is something that must be done several times prior to the campaign. To make sure everything is working. Luckily, if you are a Make Giving Happen client this is something you do not have to worry about. Make Giving Happen hosts and provides tech support for all of our clients. On this international giving day, Make Giving Happen pushes the platforms to the cloud to handle a large number of donations. Which makes sure that your site does not crash due to an increase in website activity.

Create a timeline of activities (deadlines, who’s responsible for emailing inquiries or responding to social media).

It is important to have a clear understanding of when the campaign content, images, videos, and social media content gets done. All of these needs to be done in advance. To ensure it is all ready for your launch.
Your team needs to know who’s responsible for what on this day. Who’s in charge of advertising the campaign on social media? Who’s responsible for responses on social? Who’s in charge of responding to inquiries? Once your team understands that, it will be much easier for your campaign to be successful.

Pre-launch your #GivingTuesday Campaign.

On Make Giving Happen you are able to post the campaign but do not enable donating just yet. First push out the campaign prior to #GivingTuesday. Then tell donors to subscribe to the campaign. Once they do, they are on your email list and can be reached out to advise the campaign is live and ready to donate. This allows you to create some buzz and give the donor somewhere to go during your pre-reach outs. On #GivingTuesday turn on donations.

Start developing your content – videos, images and blog posts.

It’s important for your #GivingTuesday campaign assets and content to be ready before launch. Images and videos both increase donations. It catches the donor’s attention and summarizes the campaign faster than reading the content. The content is key still, to tell the story of the campaign in greater detail than your video will give.

Promote

At least 2-3 weeks before #GivingTuesday.
Send an email at least a week before #GivingTuesday to your supporters.
Increase frequency of emails around #GivingTuesday. Send at least one email the day before and two the day of.
Promote on all social media channels using content and images you previously created for this purpose.

Set up a Peer to Peer Fundraising system

Peer to peer fundraising has a lot of great potential for your fundraising efforts. These fundraisers are already your supporters or donors. By enabling them to fundraise for you allows you to generate more reach and donors for your cause.
Make Giving Happen allows your supporters fundraise for you. By allowing them (individually or teams) to fundraise for your #GivingTuesday campaign. This feature funnels up, so every fundraiser’s donations will reflect in your GivingTuesday campaign. Allowing all donations to be reflected on your campaign.

Make the Impact clear

Donors now more than ever are focused on impact. Which means that you need to provide detailed content of what their donation gives. For example, it Is not enough to say, Please donate $10 to prevent violence against women in Africa. You must be a little clearer than that. For example, instead of say, Your donation of $10 will equip 1 health care to respond to domestic or sexual violence calls in Africa for one day. This allows them to put context to what the donation gives, so a donor may look and feel that $10 is not enough. Instead of giving $40 to ensure the women are given 4 more days instead of just 1. If you generalize the donation amount the donor will have no idea what that donation will give.

If you’d like to have a customized platform that provides ongoing support there’s still time for us to create a platform for you. To learn more how we can help you please email us at letsgetstarted@makegivinghappen.com

If you enjoyed this blog and would like to read more please read our other blogs:

https://makegivinghappen.com/why-you-cant-miss-out-on-givingtuesday/

https://makegivinghappen.com/get-ready-for-giving-tuesday/

https://makegivinghappen.com/importance-social-media-crowdfunding/