Use Marketing Automation to maximize your GivingTuesday strategy

For nonprofit marketers and fundraisers, GivingTuesday has been providing a huge bump in revenue since its inception in 2012. With its timing after Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday, it has also become synonymous with kicking off the year-end charitable giving season. It is a critical time for organizations to engage with donors and supporters by using tools like marketing automation and donor suppression as an estimated 35% of all charitable giving is done during the month of December. 

With over $2.7 billion raised in the United States on GivingTuesday in 2021 (an increase of 9% from 2020), participating in GivingTuesday is no longer a question. However, at Engaging Networks the question we are asking our nonprofit client partners is – “How can we help you maximize your GivingTuesday campaign strategy with tools and efficiencies to get the best possible influx of revenue to support your mission?” 

Don’t people hate getting all those emails?

GivingTuesday presents nonprofit organizations with the chance to raise even more money than they would on an average day of giving. Most organizations engage donors and supporters in a variety of ways – with campaigns on social media, special landing pages on their website, SMS blasts and especially through email. 

Yet some organizations now ask themselves if it is worth participating in GivingTuesday because it is such a busy day for email inboxes. They worry it might feel cringy, overbearing, or rude to add to the noise that is one of the busiest email days of the year. Maybe it is best to skip it altogether and focus their limited resources on larger year-end giving efforts. 

The problem with letting hesitation creep into your 2022 GivingTuesday strategy is that it does a disservice to the people who have chosen to sign-up to receive information about your organization and care about your mission. Most people really want you to tell them how they can help. For online donors, email is the tool they say inspires them most to give. Recent data shows 48% of donors cite emails as their most preferred method of receiving updates and appeals from organizations. 

So yes, your donors want you to email them! At Engaging Networks we recommend you fine tune your strategy to your audience by using your own email CRM data to show your donors that you understand when and how they want to hear from you, but rest assured they very much do. Check out Oceana’s 2021 campaign for more GivingTuesday email campaign ideas.

Pro tip: Send fewer emails on GivingTuesday by suppressing early donors

To reduce donor fatigue, you can easily suppress your GivingTuesday donors from the next appeal later in the day. Let’s say you sent an appeal at 9 a.m. and many people donated since then, but now it’s 1 p.m. and you want to remind those who did not give. For your 1 p.m. email, use the same audience from your 9 a.m. email, but suppress those who converted the 9 a.m. email. To see how, please watch the short video below.

Use segmentation and marketing automation to maximize your GivingTuesday strategy

The Engaging Networks Marketing Automation module can help you maximize your donor email strategy for GivingTuesday. 

One important trend we are recommending our nonprofit clients pay close attention to is the year-over-year ratio of money raised to total donors participating in GivingTuesday. It is likely that the total amount of money raised on GivingTuesday will continue increasing; however, the number of donors participating has been decreasing since 2019. 

This trend highlights the increasing importance of audience segmentation. Segmenting your audience for your GivingTuesday campaign can help you maximize your revenue by following the data of these recent trends. On GivingTuesday in 2021, 85% of donors made gifts of less than $500 and donors who had given to organizations within the previous 12 months had a 26% retention rate. 

The marketing automation solutions in Engaging Networks can easily help you treat each donor in an optimal and personalized way. You can send specific messages to each audience, like new and recently acquired donors with a call to action focused on driving recurring gifts. Some organizations are seeing success engaging young donors by likening a recurring gift to a digital or streaming subscription. 

Segmenting can also help you keep recent donors engaged on GivingTuesday. While the day is mostly about monetary giving, it is also about giving time and talent. Marketing automations make it easy to provide tangible actions donors and supporters can take on GivingTuesday to show their support for your cause.  

To make sure all of our nonprofit client partners are successful in their strategies, we teach them how to leverage the right tools in our Engaging Networks Academy. The tutorials are free to anyone who wants to watch. Our Academy has an entire course section dedicated to email where you can learn how to use our email broadcast (and soon-to-be-released email/SMS automation tools). You can even jump right to the Marketing Automation section to learn: 

• Creating & Using Email Marketing Automations
• Selecting Supporters for Email Marketing Automations
• Troubleshooting Email Marketing Automations
• Jump to Journey Email Marketing Automations

Our Client Success Team is here to help empower you to create and execute on your strategies. Whether developing personas, building workflows and journeys, or creating engaging content tailored to your unique donor base, the Engaging Networks Academy is an essential resource to help each of our clients meet or exceed their goals this GivingTuesday.