Giving Tuesday

Your 3 Week GivingTuesday Checklist

November 10, 2020 | 3 min Read

To-do plan for Giving Tuesday

It’s hard to believe that we are now just three weeks away from GivingTuesday! While 2020 has been quite the year, and your organization’s annual fundraising strategy may look very different now than it did on January 1, one thing is certain: people still want to have an impact. Even if your organization participated in #GivingTuesdayNow, you may still want to consider participating in GivingTuesday as the kick-off to your year-end giving season. We’re going into a season of hope, and it’s a good time to give donors (and potential donors) the opportunity to translate that hope into meaningful action.

Hopefully you’ve been able to take advantage of all of Blackbaud’s great GivingTuesday resources to build out your strategic framework. But if not, don’t worry, there is still time to get a plan together and engage supporters.

 

This Week

  • Set your goal. This is important to any fundraising campaign but will also help you more effectively message out to potential donors. Rather than thinking of a random dollar amount, think of a goal tied to tangible impact. You can also consider using this opportunity to raise money for a project that might not normally get a lot of attention – for example, Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary ran an extremely successful GivingTuesday campaign to raise money for new chairs for their nuns.
  • Identify matching gifts. We’re getting close to the day, but you still have time to identify a donor or donors that might be willing to step up and offer up a matching. This can be a very compelling strategy for encouraging more donations. Maybe you’ve had a donor who has been looking to engage again on something new with you, or this could also be a great time to call up your board members (particularly those who might still need to meet their give/get).
  • Rally your ambassadors and most engaged supporters. Now is the time to let this important group know that you plan to participate in GivingTuesday and invite them to help support you, perhaps by creating fundraising pages to raise money from their friends and social media followers. Investigate how your current fundraising solution integrates with Facebook, or you still have time to launch JustGiving® from Blackbaud® for free to make it easy for you to manage in a coordinated way.
  • Start segmenting your audience. Think about what groups might require different messaging – for example, mid-level vs. grassroots donors, lapsed donors, or donors who have given on GivingTuesday in past years.

 

Next Week

  • Plan out your emails. You’ll want to create draft emails and start getting any needed sign-offs. Think about sending out an email next week promoting that GivingTuesday is coming up, and plan for the emails you’ll want to send out the day of. You can find helpful email templates in Blackbaud’s free GivingTuesday toolkit.
  • Plan your social media posts. Of course you can continue to tweak these, but it’s a good idea to have a framework for when you plan to send them and narrow down on the language you’d like to use to encourage maximum support. To get started, check out the sample social media posts in Blackbaud’s free GivingTuesday toolkit.
  • Outline your stewardship plan. You want to retain those new GivingTuesday donors and turn them into bonafide supporters, right? Then it’s critical you are thinking about both the immediate “thank you” for their donation and the subsequent follow up. Need help? Take a look at this example GivingTuesday stewardship plan.

 

Week Before GivingTuesday

  • Schedule your emails. You now have your email templates and your audience segmentation plan, so take some time to schedule out your emails based on your plan. This will leave you time next Monday to take care of any other last-minute tasks that pop up.
  • Schedule your social media posts. You’ll likely want to send out a post or two this week or weekend to start getting followers thinking about your organization on GivingTuesday, so get those scheduled out in addition to your day-of posts. You may need to update your posts on GivingTuesday as the day goes on if you are including fundraising updates, but it’s important to have a schedule for when those updates should happen.
  • Test your fundraising and gift processing systems. This is obvious, but make sure everything is working as it should be and that any donation links on your website are correct. Also test any website updates you plan on pushing live on GivingTuesday.
  • Remind your supporters. If you are executing a peer-to-peer fundraising strategy, make sure you send a note out this week to amp up your supporters and provide them with any last minute tips to help them be prepared.

If you check off these tasks over the next three weeks, you should be in good shape to successfully execute on GivingTuesday. And here are some more resources you might find valuable in these remaining weeks:

Good luck!

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Christine Newman

Contributor

Christine Newman leads brand content platforms and customer advocacy at Blackbaud.

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