Giving Tuesday & What It Means For Your Charity

What is Giving Tuesday?

Giving Tuesday was started initially by the US-based nonprofit Mary-Archie Theatre Company in Chicago. The concept was to encourage people to give to charity after they had finished their Cyber Monday shopping. Because of this, charities started seeing a spike in donations on the Tuesday after Thanksgiving, which lands on the last Tuesday of November.

To begin with, Giving Tuesday was primarily an American tradition, but, like Halloween, the influence of Giving Tuesday has trickled over to the land down under as well. Google’s data suggests that in the last week of November, Giving Tuesday searches in Australia reached the highest point of the year. This year Giving Tuesday will fall on the 30th of November, 2021.

How can Giving Tuesday benefit your organisation?

Get more donations: This yearly event, if planned well, can bring in some serious donations. It’s an opportunity to communicate the impact of the work you’re involved in, get them to become a part of your journey, and continue to make a difference in the world.
Awareness: As the online space for non-profit organisations grows to become more and more competitive, this is the ideal opportunity to increase awareness of your cause whilst people are “tuned in” to the charity space.
Increase your donor pool: there’s never a wrong time to acquire new donors. Giving Tuesday is one of the occasions during the year where people are actively looking to be a part of a cause that they feel deeply passionate about.

How can your charity be involved?

Be prepared: There’s a lot to do when preparing for an event like Giving Tuesday. Planning will always reap benefits. Make sure that you have a strategy for every channel that you’re actively using. If your charity has social pages, have some content ready and scheduled to go out on the days leading up to the event. Create hype and when the big day arrives, direct your audience into the donation journey.

Here are four easy steps to prepare:

Have a plan: Knowing precisely what you’re going to do and breaking it out in phases can help your audience absorb the message your organisation is trying to spread. Make sure that your budgets are divided between platforms based on the type of audience you’re trying to reach. For example, your search budget can be laser-focused on lower-funnel traffic looking specifically to donate. In contrast, your Facebook budget can be used for prospecting to reach new audiences as well as remarketing to people who’ve been to your website but didn’t necessarily end up converting to a donation.
Create content: make sure you’re ready to speak to the audience that follows or discovers you. Platforms like Instagram, Pinterest and TikTok are great to reach people. These platforms also play an essential role in generating some traffic that will end up on your website.
Paid Promotions: Whether it’s ads or simply boosting your content to reach a wider audience, paid promotion ensures that you reach the right people at the right time. As platforms move towards increasingly limited organic reach, a bit of budget behind the right piece of content can do wonders.
Test and Learn: The result of an A/B split test is the most valuable data that never show up when the ROI of a campaign is calculated. However, even the smallest learnings can go a long way in making sure your conversions slowly inch higher and higher. Whether it’s audiences, ad copies, or landing pages, make sure you’re testing and learning. Just follow the cardinal rule: only test one variable at a time.

2. Run paid ads: If you’re not lucky enough to rank organically for “Giving Tuesday” (and don’t worry, very few organisations are), then it’s time to invest in paid media. To get the best bang for your buck, you should test multiple media channels. We know from previous years that there are tonnes of search interest. However, make sure you’re also visible on social media platforms and even consider running display ads.

3. Create urgency with your messaging and proposition: A few charities use matched giving campaigns to generate urgency. For example, “The first $XX donations will be matched dollar for dollar”, from the user’s perspective, this is a great incentive to donate, knowing that your $100 can have an impact worth $200. If you don’t have a promotion like matched giving, you can create urgency in other ways, such as making the impact your supporters can have by donating clear, for example, by using dollar handles that tell the donor exactly what their donation could be used for

4. Make it easy to donate: Make sure that you’re offering multiple methods of payment. While traditional credit and debit card payments are still popular, they’re often slow and not necessarily favoured by a user. New payment options have made their way to the mainstream. More and more Australians are adopting payment platforms and eWallets like ZipPay, Afterpay, PayPal, Apple/Android Pay. These eWallets often reduce the level of effort involved in processing payments (no more fishing around in your purse for your payment card). You may even want to consider accepting cryptocurrency donations. Although not a mainstream donation method right now, more and more charities are testing crypto.