tl;dr - get creative with fundraising on #GivingTuesday. This year, we’re trying peer-to-peer fundraisers on Facebook and Thunderclap.
UPDATE: Learned a ton from #GivingTuesday2017. Main takeaways: personal outreach via Messenger is very effective. Inviting friends to your FB fundraiser is effective. Mass emails are not very effective. And Thunderclap feels like more trouble than it’s worth (at least for our use case), so we cancelled it.
Tomorrow is #GivingTuesday, one of the largest charitable giving days of the year. In 2015, $177M was raised online from 1.64M total online gifts and 2.4M social media engagements. Pretty impressive!
If you run a nonprofit in the United States (or one of 97 other countries where #GivingTuesday now seems to be a thing), chances are you have read about the importance of #GivingTuesday, or at least witnessed your Facebook newsfeed taken over around 2pm on the day before #GivingTuesday.
This year, each donation made to your organization will be DOUBLED by the Gates Foundation and Facebook, up to $50,000 per nonprofit and $1,000 per donation or fundraiser (up to $2M overall).
Here’s a short guide for how we are activating our networks this #GivingTuesday – feel free to use these ideas for your own nonprofit organization, or join us by participating in our efforts this year and learn by doing!
Either way, please feel free to post in the comments below to let us and others know what techniques work, and we’ll add the best ideas to future iterations of this crowd-sourced guide!
Remember: we’re all in this together. :)
We will update this post from time to time as we experiment with new techniques and gain new learnings / ideas.
[Miracle Messages reconnects people living on the streets with their loved ones (and us), through short video messages and social media. If you’d like to learn more about our work, visit our website or Facebook page!]
Who cares about your work the most? Whose encouraging emails do you read and re-read in your most dismal moments? Who are your “Nancys”?
This is the original “Nancy.” Her name is Nancy, and she lives in Boston.
Start by putting this list together. You will need them to believe in you when you don’t believe in yourself. Plan to reach out to this group early, often, and individually with ideas for #GivingTuesday. Bring them in from the get-go.
Ideally you already have this list with anywhere from a few hundred to thousands or tens of thousands of names. Use an opt-in newsletter platform like MailChimp or MailerLite to compile and track this list, and ensure that you won’t be spamming people. Because no one likes to get spammed.
In our case, we link our MailChimp with our Get Involved page, and so anyone who signs up to learn more about our work or volunteer has the option of subscribing to our email newsletter. We rarely send mass emails, but for #GivingTuesday and other big events, it’s essential to have all the supporters in one place.
There is no single way to take advantage of #GivingTuesday. But most plans involve a way to gather lots of small donations from individual donors, rather than a few large contributions.
If you have a corporate sponsor or two, consider asking them to match donations on #GivingTuesday to triple or even quadruple your amount raised. We didn’t think of this until just right now, so maybe next year. :/
Here are 4 great ways other orgs built momentum into #GivingTuesday:
- PETA created a cool simple webpage inviting people to create fundraisers on their behalf.
- The founder of Beacon Hill Friends House wrote a heartfelt Facebook post on the values behind why he does the work around social justice
- The 92nd Street Y (one of the founders of #GivingTuesday, so they must be an expert) invites their supporters to take the #GivingTuesday pledge via their website
- Downtown Streets Team sent around an email to all of their supporters inviting them to double their impact by creating fundraisers on their behalf.
This year, Miracle Messages is doing a mix:
- first we put together a Google Sheet inviting 50 of our supporters to create fundraisers on our behalf.
- then we realized our step-by-step process was probably too complicated,
- then I wrote a candid post sharing my trepidation toward fundraising, but how I got over it (sort of)
- then my Director of Operations Jess Donig and I ate popcorn and brainstormed other ways to engage our audience: Facebook Live, Facebook Events, an email blast, Twitter, Instagram, GroupMe, and Thunderclap.
After much discussion, we settled on:
- an email campaign inviting 5,700 of our supporters to create fundraisers on our behalf (below)
- a Thunderclap (here’s a link to ours, TBD if it’s effective; seems to have worked well for Marina Abramovic!)
- personalized Facebook messages via Messenger to our friends on #GivingTuesday itself
We also created a few Facebook fundraisers and invited our friends to donate. And we launched an awesome #StreetWalks event series in real-life, which isn’t exactly tied to #GivingTuesday but is something we really enjoy doing: reconnecting the homeless with their loved ones, and inviting our neighbors and friends to join us!
TBD if we do a Facebook Live. Okay, we probably will. TBD if it’s effective.
Most of the success of your #GivingTuesday will happen before #GivingTuesday. The prep work of compiling names of top supporters, putting together email lists, and planning out your peer-to-peer fundraising campaign.
This year, Miracle Messages tried to make things as easy as possible for our supporters to create fundraising campaigns on Facebook on our behalf, either by following our super simple step-by-step instructions, or by just replying “I’m in” and letting us create the campaigns on their behalf.
Here’s the email we sent. Note the phrase “special announcement” ranked high on MailChimp’s recommended subject line posting auto-tool, so I sort of found a way to incorporate it.
Our email
SUBJECT: Special announcement for this #GivingTuesday
Your generous support could transform our ability to scale in 2018. As the homeless crisis continues to skyrocket, we will soon reach 100 reunions, and have seen 25% of our reunions result in getting a client off-the-streets!
So... are you in?
We need you! Please take 2-3 minutes to create a Facebook fundraiser on our behalf today, and rally your friends and family to donate tomorrow. Here's how to create a fundraiser on Facebook:
- Click on this link to create your fundraiser on Facebook.
- Click on the dark blue "Raise Money" button.
- Click on "Nonprofit," and search for "Miracle Messages."
- Set your fundraising goal – every dollar up to $1,000 will be matched!
- Share it on your FB wall, and invite your loved ones to do the same!
- Click on this link to join our Thunderclap to spread the word further!
Or just respond with a quick "I'M IN!", and we will create a #GivingTuesday fundraiser in your name and tag you in it tomorrow. :)
Thank you!
Much love, Kevin
It’s easy to become too narrowly-focused on your own nonprofit or the 1-2 that you support on #GivingTuesday. But that sort of misses the point.
By uplifting the great work of other nonprofits, or at least trying to find creative ways to help other organizations to maximize their visibility and impact on #GivingTuesday (e.g., this short guide!), you will feel good. And more likely than not, you will find others step up out of nowhere to help you out in ways you could not expect!
Case in point: Torin Perez, a dear friend from the TED Residency, is the founder of DreamAfrica – an awesome inclusion project focused on celebrating cultural diversity in animations and films from around the world. And yet, here he is tagging me in a post on Facebook when a Forbes writer asked for leads to projects for #GivingTuesday
How could anyone not love that face?