Giving Tuesday, a big day for non-profit fundraising, is right around the corner this year,
and many non-profit organizations are getting ready to launch a Giving Tuesday fundraising
campaign or preparing their plans to do so soon. But how exactly do you launch an effective giving
tuesday campaign to bring in the funds you need to support your awesome cause? In this video, I'm
going to talk through just some of the basic steps to plan your giving tuesday fundraising campaign
as well as share some tips for how to make that fundraising campaign a success. Welcome or
welcome back! I'm Amber Melanie Smith, and I'm a non-profit founder and executive director. I make
these videos here on YouTube to share all sorts of tips about starting a non-profit or fundraising or
doing other types of social impact projects, etc. As always I hope that you find this video useful,
that you glean some helpful tips from it, and don't forget to give it a like and subscribe to my
channel for more content like this, and ring the bell for alerts for the next time I post a video.
And of course, if you're looking for additional resources and help on how to fundraise or how
to start a non-profit be sure to check out my website, FounderToFullTime.com. Okay! So let's
jump in with just a little bit of background about giving tuesday. Giving Tuesday is an
annual day of giving. It takes place the Tuesday after Thanksgiving according to the united states
calendar. Giving Tuesday was established around 2012 by a handful of leaders in the community and
in philanthropy who just wanted to inspire people to donate more in general, but especially at the
start of the holiday season. And today, Giving Tuesday itself is a non-profit organization,
and they would call themselves a "global generosity movement" and say that their mission
is to inspire people to make giving a bigger part of everyday life. So as I mentioned before,
today giving tuesday is a part of many non-profit organizations' fundraising efforts at the end of
the year. But before you launch a giving tuesday campaign, you need to think about
if it is the right fit for your organization and if you'd like to participate by taking a look at
some of the pros and cons of doing so. So, there are a couple of pros to participating in giving
tuesday. The first is that the timing is conducive to possibly raising a good amount of donations if
you've got a good base of supporters. In the U.S. at least, over 30 percent of all giving throughout
the year from donors happens in the last month of the year according to Nonprofit Tech for Good. And
the other pro to participating in giving tuesday is the possible opportunity to capitalize on some
of the other things going on around that day for example Facebook and possibly other brands are
matching dollars donated on giving tuesday up to a certain amount so you might have opportunities
to increase your donations if you do participate on that day now the major con of participating in
giving tuesday is saturation a lot of the time when organizations say that they are not
planning on participating in giving tuesday it's because they feel like there's so many
organizations participating that they will not be heard on that day so it's ultimately
up to you and your organization if you'd like to participate if you do here are four basic steps to
plan and launch your giving tuesday campaign step one is to choose your fundraising campaign format
and set a fundraising goal so in terms of format we're talking about what kind of campaign are you
going to run will you do a crowdfunding campaign will you just do a straightforward simple appeal
for people to donate towards your goal will you host an event will you ask for donated items
you've got lots of options then set a fundraising goal for your campaign
you want to pick a number that's going to be reasonably realistic for you to be able to achieve
and if you happen to exceed your goal then you can always get your donors and supporters excited
by letting them know that they've met the goal and seeing if they will contribute further to get you
even higher or to another goal another format question is what platform you're going to use
to raise your money you can accept payments through various payment processors paypal,
stripe, square, etc. and host the donation form on your website perhaps you already have
a fundraising system or CRM set up for that you can also use one of the various options out there
to raise money through a site like RallyUp, for example. Step two is to plan your campaign
messaging and create any graphics or media that you need to associate with the campaign.
so once you've chosen the format of your giving tuesday campaign you want to take some time and
really plan out your messaging and strategy around how you're going to do outreach and marketing to
your donors and to the general public so sit down with your team and take some time to write out
the answers to some of the following key points in clear and compelling language and ideally language
that's not too long also your messaging should address what is your non-profit's mission and
why should people care especially people who are not familiar with the cause and why you exist how
will the funds raised help your cause will they enable your organization to increase its impact
feed more people find homes for more animals you know stuff like that or perhaps the funds raised
will allow you to increase your capacity investing in new technology or team members or training
things that will grow your organization's ability to help even more people and finally and this
one's really important you want to provide a clear explanation for how literally how logistically
people can donate to your cause go to x website click the button enter your donation amount etc.
it seems simple but you never want a donor to turn away from giving you a donation because
they found the actual process of making a donation too frustrating or confusing step
three of your giving tuesday campaign is to launch and keep your donors up to date on your progress
towards your fundraising goal so once you launch your giving tuesday campaigner honestly this is
good advice for any fundraising campaign you want to keep your donors and your supporters
and the general public up to date on your progress because people will get really excited
as you get close to reaching your final goal and will feel more incentivized and motivated to
make those donations to get you over the finish line step four is to thank everyone and share
the impacts of the giving thanking donors after a campaign is just the right thing to
do but also it's critical to maintaining your relationship with your supporters
you don't want to be that person who just asks for a donation once a once a year and then people
never hear from you again so thank them stay in touch with them throughout the year and share the
impacts that their donations will make okay those are the very basic steps let's now talk about
some tips and strategies for ensuring that you can make your giving tuesday campaign a success
the first tip is to personalize your organization's giving tuesday campaign to your
organization's brand and this goes beyond just using your logo or your non-profits brand colors
you can really get creative with things like the name of the campaign or specific ways people can
engage creatively for example one non-profit i know of focuses on getting clothes to kids who
are in need and instead of calling their campaign giving tuesday they're calling it giving shoes day
so they're focusing their campaign on getting people to donate shoes which I think is pretty
awesome but there are other ways you can get creative from engaging with your audience through
video or other unique communication methods or inviting them to participate and interact in
some kind of event you can really get creative the second tip that can make your campaign a success
is to make it easy for your board and your team members and your volunteers
and your other donors to share your giving tuesday campaign so one of the reasons that i have learned
through my experiences doing a lot of fundraising is when I'm asking people to help share our
fundraising campaign or even asking board members or some of our other team members to
make asks and and request donations from other people that they know the one of the top things
people struggle with is what to say so what I found is if you can just write a template
or talking points or you know something that that people can customize and personalize but you've
given them like a foundation to go off of that that makes their participation far more likely
so I always recommend creating almost like a fundraising campaign communications kit where
you write out sample language that people can send over email you write out example social
media posts you can provide your team members with photography or pre-made graphics that they
can easily share just make it easy for people to share and that will like I said increase the odds
that they actually will now tip number three I alluded to this a little bit before but it is
to find interesting ways to communicate with your supporters video for example can be really helpful
when sharing your organization's mission and fundraising campaign a few other ideas
include possibly some live streaming of various various aspects of your campaign
or even inviting people that your organization has made an impact for to be a speaker and that's
kind of a good segue into tip number four which is tell stories this one was really hard for me
to latch on to because i'm a very data oriented person and i didn't understand for a long time how
impactful and important stories were in inspiring people to take action but i think i get it now and
there's actual research to back this up telling stories rather than just sharing statistics about
the need in your community that your organization is tackling or
stats on how many people you've served telling stories can actually increase the amount of
donations your organization can bring in there's one study about this that they actually describe
in the book made to stick by chip and dan heath you might have heard me mention them
before because they're also the authors of one of my favorite books switch by the way but they
talked about a study in this book made to stick where researchers wanted to compare how many
donations and the amount of donations that could be raised by these two different approaches
one sharing data and statistics about the problem and and how donations can help and
the second one the second way was telling stories and sharing how donations could help so they
did this study where they had fundraisers take both approaches with groups of audience members
and they had some pretty awesome results it turned out that the audience members who heard from the
fundraisers that focused on storytelling telling the story of someone a child impacted by the
problems described in this in this organization's work those audience members donated twice as much
as the audience members who just heard about the statistics surrounding the problem and i think
what we learn here is that making a donation is largely an emotional action and you've got to
inspire people and tap into a sense of empathy in order to encourage that giving and the fifth
tip i'll share is to leverage opportunities to increase the funding that you can raise during
your giving tuesday campaign i've talked about this a little bit in one or two other videos but
when you can secure a matching gift when you are doing a fundraising campaign that also increases
the amount that you can raise not just because obviously you've got the matching gift but when
donors hear that you have a matching gift they're more inclined to give themselves and on
giving tuesday brands like facebook and possibly others are offering up these matching donations
to help nonprofits out so if you're going to be planning a giving tuesday fundraising campaign
you want to check out what opportunities exist not just from major brands but also from your existing
supporters maybe you have a generous uh donor or even your board of directors might be willing to
match whatever is raised by individual donors through your campaign as a way of encouraging
people to give okay so i want to hear what you are thinking now are you planning on doing a giving
tuesday fundraising campaign um what stood out to you in terms of the tips and strategies or do you
have other tips and strategies that you can share with others in my audience love to hear from you
share in the comments below as i mentioned before if you're looking for some additional help on
learning how to develop a sustainable fundraising plan or starting a non-profit definitely check out
my website founder to full time for some resources on that i also have a newsletter that i send out
regularly for non-profit leaders and change makers that could be all of you change makers with some
tips resources reading that can help you out in your social impact journey so i usually leave
the link to subscribe to that in the description below you can check that out and join and opt out
anytime if you'd like and I hope to see you there one more thing i swear if you are on Facebook,
I have a group, change the world or bust. We've got thousands of people from around the world
all trying to make an impact in their own way and it's a great community so i hope you will consider
coming on by and joining our little community of change makers over there and if you do i will see
you there that's all i got thank you so much once again, I'm Amber Melanie Smith. See you next time!