Tips to Make Giving Tuesday More Successful: Going Beyond the Basics

With Giving Tuesday coming up in just 60 days, we asked key fundraising experts to share their thoughts on what nonprofits can still do to boost this year’s results. By now, you should already know the basics. However, with inflation, recession and digital promotion fatigue on everyone’s minds, it is important to do everything possible to unlock the doors to donor generosity. Here are the experts’ top tips to make this year’s campaign more successful.

Tips to Make Giving Tuesday More Successful:

Going Beyond the Basics

1. Refocus the digital ask away from the typical high, medium, low ($100, $50 and $25) ask to one tied to the delivery of cause-related services. For example, by asking for $110 to feed three families for a week, $55 for two weeks or $30 for one week, you can more easily adjust your ask to compensate for inflation. This can also help combat declining average donation amounts some are seeing due to pressure on family budgets.
2. Turn new donors into monthly recurring donors. In doing this, make sure your enrollment process is in full compliance with the new MasterCard requirements that take effect on March 21, 2023. Recurring donors now must be treated like subscribers to a service and receive an email confirmation letter with enrollment terms and cancellation provisions.  One more tip: putting a red heart in front of the monthly donation checkbox often increases results.
3. Remind donors who missed the event date that it is never too late to give. Stay in front of late donors for several days after the November 29th event date to pull in their contributions.
4. Make it easy for people with 401K Required Mandatory Distribution Requirements (RMDs) and Donor Advised Funds (DAFs) to use these funds on your website donation page. People over 72 years of age can direct their mandatory 401K withdrawals to fund Qualified Charitable Distributions, tax-free, to their favorite charities. Similarly, people with DAFs can use them to fund their Giving Tuesday contributions.
5. Provide flexible mobile giving options. With 12% of all giving made online and 28% of online donations made using mobile devices, it is important for your website’s donation forms to work seamlessly with virtual wallets like PayPal, Venmo, Apple Pay and Google Pay.
6. Include a link to databases of corporate matching programs in your messaging to help donors know if their employer will match their contributions.
7. Test new marketing ideas. A one-day event is an excellent opportunity to test new low-cost, low-risk techniques in a measurable way. That is part of the reason Amazon is introducing a second Prime Day this year on October 11^th.
8. Build awareness of your Giving Tuesday message. This year, Connect360 introduced a group of promotional tools that deliver promotional messages to key target audiences during the countdown to Giving Tuesday. These tools also link targeted donors to your donation page. Please contact me to learn more.
9. Have several of your organization’s executives test the donor website by making a test donation using their mobile phones. This will help ensure that your user experience is simple, friendly and meets your goals.

Nonprofit organizations raised over $2.7 billion in the U.S. alone in 2021 by participating in Giving Tuesday. That makes managing your efforts wisely during the lead-up to this important one-day event crucial to maximizing your success.