Is your EOY campaign ready for GivingTuesday 2022?

[00:00:11.530] – Ashley Hansen
So hello and welcome, everybody, to Engaging Networks giving Tuesday webinar. I’m super thrilled to be here with you virtually and hear from our amazing panel of fundraising experts. Before we get started, I wanted to give you a few statistics about Giving Tuesday and Engaging Networks, and then I’ll let the panellists share their tips with you. So giving Tuesday turns ten this year. It was first launched by an organisation in 2012 in response to Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and it’s now a global movement and I think it’s pretty clear to say, or pretty fair to say, that it’s really the launch of end of year fundraising for many of your organisations here in the US, Canada and globally. A few stats from giving Tuesday on Engaging Networks. Last year, we sent, or our clients customers sent 57 million emails and the average one time gift was $120. And it was also really good for donor acquisition. 19% of transactions we saw came from new donors and peak transaction volume was at 09:00, a.m. Eastern time. So just some fun stats that we tracked the day of and then after shared with our customers. So, for those of you not familiar with Engaging Networks, we’re a digital fundraising and engagement platform for nonprofits.

[00:01:37.920] – Ashley Hansen
And Engaging Networks will delight your donors, will be easy for your staff to use, and we’re really a company that’s fun to work with. I also always like to share that we are independently owned and it’s really our people who make us who we are. So if you’re looking to refresh your online giving experience, we definitely love to talk to you, but we’re here to hear from the fundraising experts we’ve invited today. And we have Caroline from Avalon Consulting, brandon from Raise the Roots, grace from Double the Donation, and Liz from Allegiance Group. And we’ve asked each of them to share their top advice for Giving Tuesday. And after they each go, we will then have time for questions and answers. So throughout their presentations, feel free to chat in questions and then we’ll take them all at the end. So right now, I’d like to introduce Caroline from Avalon Consulting.

[00:02:34.370] – Caroline Crow
Hi, everyone. As Ashley said. My name is Caroline Crow. I am a senior digital programme manager with Avalon Consulting and I am thrilled to be here today. Thank you for taking the time to come, listen and share ideas while we go into what is undoubtedly one of the busiest seasons for all of us here. Quick plug for engaging networks. They put out really wonderful statistics on Giving Tuesday and past performance when there’s a couple of steps that are phenomenal for trying to make the sell to your clients, be it sending additional email, day of to when the best time is end. So definitely go cheque those out when you can. But let’s dive into some tips for Giving Tuesday. Giving Tuesday and year end campaigns used to be much smaller, just an email or two a blip basically in the grand scheme of things for your campaigns on an annual basis. But now it’s making up so much more of your clients budget revenue and frankly, taking up even more space in your donors email boxes. So how do we stand out when everyone is inundated with Asks fancy graphics, the latest techniques? It’s a question we’re all asking, especially when we’re worried about programme revenue softening after banner years resulting from the pandemic.

[00:03:55.550] – Caroline Crow
One answer that we’re looking at, Avalon, is taking your personalization techniques to the next level. I’m not just talking about dropping someone’s first name into a subject line or into a donate link to try and draw their attention. These techniques have been pretty universally adopted. They’re a best Practise and they’re just not as exciting or surprising as they used to be. So we’re asking how else can we engage them to convince donors that you’re actually talking to them as an individual, recognising their value to your mission and convincing them that they should really give to your organisation out of all the other ones with their hands out at this time of year, you have to show them that you’re really paying attention and value their relationship. Sorry, everyone. So now is your time to leverage those longstanding relationships with your donors and non donors in addition to their first name. Let your supporters know that you do know them. You know when they gave, how often they gave, how much they gave, what issues or programmes they gave to and if they never gave it all. So as simple as calling out that they gave three times in the last three years, how much they gave in the last three years if they gave to a specific issue.

[00:05:16.290] – Caroline Crow
And that can look like in your Giving Tuesday email saying something like this year we’ve saved an issue that they supported previously, filling that in with an amp script dynamic content. We accomplished a campaign that they gave to we furthered a mission that they have clicked on on our website. John, we couldn’t have done it without your support. This year you’ve donated three times and contributed over $250 to help. But right now we have an opportunity to triple any gift to give them before midnight on Giving Tuesday. And I’m asking you to make another gift to supported previously and all your other essential work. So in that just brief paragraph, you’ve already let the donor know that you keep track of them on a personal level. You know that they’re mission oriented, you’re connecting them back to your mission, especially when right now, so many of the apps are just about upping the urgency. We’ve got so much we need to accomplish, we have so much that we won’t be able to do next year unless you give. But this way you’re connecting them to why they gave you’re recognising them as an individual and tying them back to that mission on why they gave you to begin with.

[00:06:34.680] – Caroline Crow
Now, that’s specifically for donors. If you want to transition this to non donors, you keep it a little bit more vague or you can look at specifically what they opened, what they clicked on, so going less from what they donated and more on those engagement metrics that you can see in your email platform. Now, it does take some set up, I won’t lie. There can be a lot of groundwork that has to be made. There’s going to be tracking and categorising your various campaigns, creating a file source code associated with certain campaigns, adding custom fields, but it’s all so capable of being done and it can make such a massive impact when speaking to your donors. It’s really important to connect with them personally at this time of year and that’s why they chose to support you to begin with your organisation, your mission. It was personal to them. So that is my number one tip for going in a Giving Tuesday, trying to make it as personal as possible. Thanks.

[00:07:35.770] – Ashley Hansen
Awesome. Thanks, Caroline. Next, we have Brandon from Raise the Roots.

[00:07:42.710] – Brandon Fuller
Hi, everybody. Good afternoon to those of you on the East Coast, and still good morning to those of you on the east on the West Coast, and thank you for coming. My name is Brandon, I’m the owner and chief strategist at Raise The Roots. And we’ve had the fortunate opportunity work with dozens of Engaging Networks clients, particularly around Giving Tuesday, and how to maximise the platform for their Giving Tuesday success. And one of the things that I wanted to talk about today is maybe an opportunity to refresh or Giving Tuesday strategy a little bit and bring in social media so that you can blend these different sources of revenue and see if you can engage people at a different level. And I have some examples of ways that organisations have done that. And so if we go to the next slide, this is very busy, so I’m just going to walk you through what’s happening here. Let’s just start at the top right where you see the form there, and you can see that on this donation form we’re asking for which social network a supporter is using, and then the handle on that network.

[00:08:49.440] – Brandon Fuller
So it’s just a suggestion where you could either thank people in real time on social media for their donation, or they could give a shout out to somebody special and make like an immortalim gift or an honour gift when they’re making their Giving Tuesday gift. And so setting up these fields on your engagement network donation pages gives them the opportunity to provide the social media handle information that you need in order to thank them on social. You can then set up in engaging networks a custom notification so that as soon as somebody makes a donation where they’ve entered some kind of a social media handle, an email goes to somebody in your team and they keep a record of those people in the handle that they used and which platform they want to be thanked on. And then down below, you can see it in these three images. These are three examples of ways that people are thanked. So the first two are Instagram stories where the handles were entered on top of graphics that were created in advance and they were thanked for their donation. And then you have a Twitter example there next to those.

[00:09:55.860] – Brandon Fuller
And the idea is that as the day is progressing and you’re trying to reach your Giving Tuesday goal, you have this awesome real time social media feed that’s filling up with thanks. And one of the things that we notice is that people, when they see this, they comment on it, they like it, they share it, and that just increases the overall reach of your donation. Thanks. And so their supporters see that they make a donation. We actually have seen 30% to 40% new donors that have come from social media thanks to these links and thanks to the shares that people have done. Of the thank you that was posted online. On the right, in the lower right hand corner, you can see the email that we sent out in blue. We’ve highlighted the fact that we’ll be thanking people live and posting updates throughout the day. For this particular campaign. We call it a givea thon kind of thing. So, just like in the old fashioned TV telephones, as people are donating you’re updating on social media, thanking people, posting pictures and things, it’s been a huge success. We’ve done this a few times, actually, for different organisations.

[00:11:05.330] – Brandon Fuller
In the top left, you’ll see all of the impressions and level of engagement that was generated by doing this thank you action throughout the day. So if you’re just looking for some way of cutting through the noise in social media on a very busy Giving Tuesday, and a way to refresh your Giving Tuesday strategy, this might be something to consider. It actually is not a huge list. For the most part. It just includes updating your donation page. Creating that notification to somebody in your team that a donor has elected to be thanked. Or to think somebody else on social media. Generating these graphics in advance that can be updated with their handles. That you can tag them in your story or your Facebook post or Twitter post. And then just obviously letting people know and maybe kind of explain to them that you’re going to do this. How it works. What the benefit of it is. And to generate as much excitement as possible that you’re going to be running this really cool interactive social media campaign on Giving Tuesday. So that’s my tip and I think we’ll have to discuss them later. So if you have any questions about how to do this or the benefits of it, hold those and I’m happy to discuss it later.

[00:12:18.320] – Brandon Fuller
Thank you.

[00:12:19.730] – Ashley Hansen
Awesome. Thanks, Brandon. I’m definitely seeing a theme of personalization from social media, really asking your donor, what social media channel are you most active on? Where do you want us to be engaging with you? And then Caroline really talking about knowing your donor and speaking to them and I think that that’s really a trend just in the marketplace and our donors and supporters are really wanting to hear that from us and sometimes we haven’t fully thought about that. Our systems get in the way of implementing that. So now we are going to screen from Double the donation.

[00:12:59.150] – Caroline Crow
Awesome.

[00:12:59.650] – Grace Green
Hi everyone. Like the slide says and like Ashley mentioned, I’m Grace and I’m on the partnerships team at Double Digit. So I’m lucky enough to get to work with the Engaging Networks team to help empower their clients to be able to raise more from corporate matching gifts. And so that’s what my Giving Tuesday tip is also about today, is thinking about ways to incorporate workplace giving asks into your existing end of your strategies. I’m sure we’re all aware in the wake of recent global events that companies and corporations in general have shifted to put an emphasis on corporate philanthropy or corporate social responsibility initiatives. And I know those can be kind of buzzwordy, but they also can be really valuable to nonprofit organisations in general. And so there’s a lot of reasons that corporations will kind of emphasise these programmes and put these programmes into place for the corporation in general. So you’re thinking like tax benefits, employee retention strategies, positive brand association, marketing elements that go along with corporate social responsibility initiatives and so on. And so all of those things are great for the corporation, but the real good news in this story is that all of those things that they’re putting into Practise, the nonprofit is the benefactor or the fundraising institution is the benefactor.

[00:14:21.140] – Grace Green
And so we see in research that we’ve done here at Double the Donation, that about four to $7 billion goes unclaimed annually in just corporate matching gift funds. And so those are dollars that have already kind of been allocated through those programmes. So basically you’re saying that these companies have already decided that this money is going to go to support community or to support a local cause, maybe a global cause, whatever aligns with that company strategy. They’re allocating these funds, but we’re kind of consistently seeing these funds be underutilised. And so my recommendation, my tip, would be to start to think about ways that you can incorporate asks into your Giving Tuesday messaging that can help you better harness these funds that already exist kind of for your organisation to take advantage of in the first place. Workplace giving in general can take many different shapes and sizes, whether it’s payroll deductions or volunteer grants, matching gifts, corporate sponsorships, anything kind of like that. But the idea here is you want to make sure that your organisation is primed to receive these funds, especially ahead of a day as kind of big as Giving Tuesday has become.

[00:15:39.430] – Grace Green
And so specifically for my tip, I really want to focus on matching gifts, mainly because they’re one of the most common and easily accepted forms of workplace giving and they’re also pretty widely available. And so now that we’re getting closer and closer to Giving Tuesday, I’m sure you’re all anxiously checking your calendar as the month seemed to fly by. But as we get closer, I really want to encourage everyone to take a look at matching gifts. And one quick distinction to make is that matching gifts, in just like terms of terminology, there are two kinds of ways that people can think about matching gifts. There’s employer matching gifts and then there’s kind of matching gifts from one major donor where you’re running kind of like a micro campaign. I would encourage you to take advantage of both if you have that opportunity available to you. But in this particular instance, I’m referring to employer matching gifts or the programmes that companies and corporations have set aside to match the charitable contributions of their employees during days like Giving Tuesday and any other days throughout the year where an employee is deciding to give. And so the reason that I think matching gifts are so pertinent when it comes to end of year fundraising is that the majority of matching gift programme deadlines are timed around the end of the year, which means most of these programme deadlines actually end around December 31 or even a couple of weeks into the next year.

[00:17:07.960] – Grace Green
So we see some times around like January 15, maybe even the end of January. And so the idea here is that the majority of gifts that have been made in the entirety of 2022 could still be eligible for a match from their employer. And so when you’re thinking about all these new donations flooding in from Giving Tuesday, as well as all of the historical donations you received this year, what you really want to do is be able to educate and encourage your donors to go about submitting that matching gift request and securing those funds, whether their donation was on Giving Tuesday or in March of 2022. And so as you start to think about your messaging in general, maybe you have donors where you’re not ready to make that additional asset, you’re not ready to have them primed for another solicitation, but it’s a great way to include them in your messaging around Giving Tuesday. It’s a great way to keep them engaged like we’ve been talking about with personalization. That’s just another way that you can know things about your donor. If you’re able to know where they work and connect them to actionable next steps that make the most sense for what they’re looking for.

[00:18:18.270] – Grace Green
That’s going to go a long way in being able to secure those matching gift funds and so essentially my biggest recommendation would be to mention it to your donors in some capacity. Whether that’s on social media like Brandon mentioned. Whether it’s in those personalised connections that Caroline mentioned. Of finding ways to put that touch point out there to your donors. Because it’s an old adage, but if you don’t ask, you won’t get. And so being able to just make that connection and say, hey, thank you so much for your $50 donation earlier this year or today, or wherever the donation came in, we encourage you to look into employer matching gifts at your company, or if you know where they work, we encourage you to cheque. If the Home Depot has a matching gift programme, they do, they have a great one. That’s why it’s the example I always go to. But we encourage you to look into if you can get your gift matched for our organisation and just making sure that you’re able to close that donor awareness gap. This can look like a lot of different things based on your donor base, but really the main thing here, the big takeaway is that you want to educate your donors about this, make sure they’re aware and give them that opportunity.

[00:19:31.090] – Grace Green
We see that donors respond really well to this, which makes a lot of sense. Who wouldn’t? If you know that your donation could go from twenty five dollars to fifty dollars without any more of your own money, that’s going to be a pretty motivating factor. But so that’s my Giving Tuesday tip. Really incorporate workplace giving. So thanks.

[00:19:53.090] – Ashley Hansen
Awesome. Thanks Grace. Yes, workplace giving. And even the way Brandon showed with finding out someone’s social handle, you can always ask them where they work and keep that stored on file and know whether or not their company matches. And as Grace mentioned, there’s also I know a lot of matching techniques used with major donors as well. So just a really good strategy to encourage your donor to know that their dollars that they’re giving you are doubling or increasing. We are now. And I also want to encourage you to put questions in the Q and A. Somebody put a great question in about getting advice from our expert panellists on how to encourage someone to upgrade their one time gift to a monthly on Giving Tuesday. So if there’s any questions, if there’s anything that you’ve been struggling with, with fundraising for Giving Tuesday and maybe even sneaking into end of year, definitely feel free to put something in chat and we will have time to answer those live later. I am now going to turn it over to Liz from Allegiance group.

[00:21:02.450] – Liz Murphy
Hi, thrilled to be here. Thank you so much. I’m so glad that we’re here talking about Giving Tuesday. We only have ten weeks to go, so we really need to get our house in order. So today the theme for me is what do we do now and what do we do during giving Tuesday across all channels to get the best response. So, if you can move to the next slide. Austin, thank you. So I wanted to give you some quick tips across a couple of different areas. Now is a great time to be looking at your donation form. Is it doing everything that you wanted to do? I think some of the low hanging fruit is how do we get a higher average gift from our donors. And one of the things is to do a gift string analysis and by that I mean looking at your gift string on your donation form and looking at the amounts that you have there, including your preselected. Are you also seeing, for instance, a large number of people giving at a higher level? And if so, should you add that higher level or should you bump up your preselect to a higher level?

[00:22:09.670] – Liz Murphy
This is a great time to be doing that. It’s low hanging fruit that you can just get a lot more money from all that wonderful traffic that you are driving to your donation forms. The other tip is, you know, I come from the direct mail world, but I’ve been in digital for almost 25 years and one thing we know is that people who give online give it a higher rate with a higher gift. And I recommend that we are seeing a lot more for our clients, we are seeing a lot more folks responding from mail to vanity URLs or QR codes. And so we are saying don’t use that direct mail that lower as string, but keep it to the online as string and you’ll get a higher average gift. Another I think really easy thing if you don’t have time to do a full sort of donation form optimization like we did with the Human Rights Watch on the right is look at the headline and your sort of copy block on your donation form. Hopefully you have a copy block because I see a lot that don’t. But if you look to the right, you can see it’s a very strong sort of call to action in the headline.

[00:23:28.470] – Liz Murphy
I hate to see when I go to a donation for them and I see thank you for your gift and I haven’t even done anything yet. So just look through the lens of your donors about what that language should be. Make it as emotional, make it as impactful, mention how their gift will help to save lives or defend human rights in this case and, you know, just as impactful as you can. So that’s a really easy kind of optimisation that you can make. There’s lots of other things like taking advantage of engaging networks, has amazing capabilities using best Practises, which is the monthly gift and the one time gift, different the toggles as well as the different gift strings they have to cover my processing fee. They have creating dynamic gift strings, but also dynamic gift strings don’t typically work on your organic forms or your acquisition forms, so just look closely at those. For social ads, we’ve been seeing an interesting trend and it really does depend on the client, but you should be doing a tremendous amount of testing during as well as before giving Tuesday and end of the year. But one of the trends that we’re seeing is that people are sort of not looking at the text above and below on their Facebook ads, they’re looking at the image.

[00:24:55.430] – Liz Murphy
So we’ve started putting text over the image with a really strong call to action. So as you’re creating the different variations of creative for your end of year, just do some testing. In regards to that. The other is just underlining Caroline’s point about the ultra personalization. I feel like this is the time that we really need to target specific cohorts with specific content. So a few ideas for you is those non responders, those people on your list who are engaged but who have not given a gift, maybe you create a very small matching gift that is actually a higher sort of like a five time match or something like that. It’s not usually a large group, you’re not going to get a huge response, but if you can actually incent them to give during giving Tuesday or end of year with a higher match, that would be great. We’ve done some testing also, and Caroline mentioned this, those lie bump folks who gave last year but not this year, what can work in incentiving them to give? Again, we’ve done some tests where we did a soft ask that mentions the specific gift that they have given previously and that outperformed that sort of direct kind of ask significantly by 30%.

[00:26:31.840] – Liz Murphy
So look at everybody’s sort of audience by audience. The other thing is just a reminder. I’m sure you’re all already doing this, but adjust your email suppression queries for Giving Tuesday and end of year. Typically some people suppress for gifts given in the past 30 days, but giving Tuesday and end of year is so close together that you often what we see is that people who gifted Giving Tuesday also gift to end of year. So you would be suppressing a lot of gifts if you did not adjust your suppression for that time period. So we typically lower that suppression and then we open up the queries as well for those folks who may be inactive in the last six months, but they are going to respond to an end of year or Giving Tuesday. So make sure that you think about that and sort of update your rules and your queries for end of year. Those are my tips. I hope they’re helpful. Let me know if you have any questions.

[00:27:36.850] – Ashley Hansen
Awesome. Those are great tips, Liz. I specifically love the social media. One, people aren’t reading anything anymore, so put that text right on the images and test how it works for you for a lift. Great. Well, so now we’re going to do questions and answers. We received one question in here, but this session is really for you all. We have just over 15 minutes left, so please chat in your questions. We also have some questions prepared, so we’ll start touching on those. But first, I’d love to hear from each of our panellists if they’d like recommendation for the question came in. I’d love your recommendations on getting people to upgrade their single Giving Tuesday gift to monthly during the donation process. I have tested a form with monthly and one time options and also an Upsell light box on a one time form. And I’ve had very little success getting monthly donors during our Giving Tuesday campaign. I’m wondering if I should test Nudge language or Upsell Lightbox Design language or something else entirely. So I’m going to say two things moderator privilege here. We can pull up the stats and share the link. But I think last year, Engaging Networks customers only saw 3% of all gifts as monthly coming in on Giving Tuesday.

[00:29:02.250] – Ashley Hansen
So I just wanted to put that stat out there. Maybe you’re not crazy, maybe it’s just a trend, but then also you might already be doing this. But we see a lot of our customers, when they want to be driving monthly gifts, to put someone directly on the monthly page in the monthly option, not the one time option. So that’s my answer. But does someone want to chime in as well?

[00:29:31.190] – Caroline Crow
Yeah, I’ll go ahead and jump in real quick. I’m sure there’s some people have additional advice. I saw Brandon also provided an answer. Great advice. I won’t lie. I’ve also had difficulty running monthly campaigns during Giving Tuesday. I think there’s a theology of giving on Giving Tuesday, and that doesn’t always translate into making the monthly gift. Where I’ve had a lot of success is actually right in that sweet spot after Giving Tuesday and before your end when there’s that lull and transitioning it into making it a season, not just a season of giving, but giving year round. Start getting people into that kind of like seasonal we’re giving gifts warm and fuzzy to your organisations, or making it give a monthly gift as a gift to someone else and that kind of campaign framed that way. I see a lot of success around year end. And I also did look up the stat. Ashley yes, it was less than 3% on Engaging Networks. Something, though, that I have tried is breaking up that one time gift, dividing it by three and say, make it a monthly gift. So if someone says they’re going to donate $15, you can have that pop up that light box, say, divide it by a certain number and break up that gift and say, make it a monthly gift.

[00:30:57.440] – Caroline Crow
And they can go just as far. Sometimes it’s that initial high amount that they kind. Of gut clench on, so sometimes just making the amount a little bit smaller can turn them into a year round donor.

[00:31:14.370] – Liz Murphy
I can weigh in a little bit here, too. I do think it does vary by industry sector. We have several conservation, environmental clients who really went out and literally turned getting Tuesday into a monthly push and they were very successful. So I do think it’s a bit of what sector are you in? What’s the call to action? How comfortable have you made your donors in terms of the Sustainor ask? I do think it works better for some industry sectors than others. I would also. Though. Tell you to look at your Upsell light box and I do agree with Ashley that if you really want to test it. You might want to do a split test and send half of them to a monthly form and half of them to a one time form. Or be very brave and send them to a monthly first form and see how they do. The other is to sort of isolate it and not do it the whole campaign, but do it as one of the asks, which is another idea.

[00:32:27.550] – Brandon Fuller
Yeah. I know some payment gateways allow you to make an annual gift. So you could provide people with the option to say. Like. Lock in next year’s donation by making an annual gift now. So that if you wanted to avoid the problem that Liz had identified. Where you have people who gave last year but they haven’t given this year. They skipped a year end donation period. That increases the odds that they’re going to give again next year. You could provide them with sort of a variety of options, but I think offering the matching gift only if somebody makes a recurring gift on their monthly, maybe their first monthly gift is matched or something, also might be a good enough incentive to get people to push through and make that monthly gift.

[00:33:21.250] – Liz Murphy
I wanted to mention one other thing, which is going back to knowing your audience, right, and really understanding your file is really just making that option available to those who you think who you’ve scored as being much more likely to give a sustaining guest. That’s another way to do it and not do it as a blanket ask.

[00:33:44.930] – Grace Green
Echo the sentiment that Caroline shared of lowering the ask. If you’re going to have like. A light box or something that comes up when a donor initially selects a onetime gift and then lowering that donation and making it more feasible so that they’re not thinking.

[00:33:59.670] – Brandon Fuller
Oh.

[00:33:59.920] – Grace Green
My goodness. This is such a large number to give every single month. But rather something very digestible and then also something that is very tangible. Especially. I think. Around giving Tuesday. There’s a lot of imagery with what your donation could look like or what an organisation will do with a donation. And so if you can do that and really conceptualise what twelve monthly donations will look like between Giving Tuesday this year and Giving Tuesday next year. I think that’s a really great way to make that push as well, because it can be hard to think, I’m just focused on today, I can’t even think about tomorrow, much less a month from now. So to be able to really put that in perspective and say this is what your donation will do now, six months from now, twelve months from now, if you’re getting on a recurring basis, awesome.

[00:34:45.850] – Ashley Hansen
Thanks for adding that, Grace. It’s a really good point. Donors these days really do want to know where their money is going, I think always, but I think it’s elevated. So here’s a question from someone asking about their current monthly donor pool and for the Giving Tuesday appeal, is it a best Practise to reach out to monthly donors with the Giving Tuesday appeal for a one time gift? Or is it best just to reach out with the cultivation? Thank you for being a monthly donor. Feel free to chime in if you want to answer that.

[00:35:20.490] – Brandon Fuller
I think everybody is fair game.

[00:35:25.750] – Ashley Hansen
Yeah, just keep on asking. Liz, did you want to say something?

[00:35:28.960] – Liz Murphy
Yeah, just that it’s very common, huge percentage of what we call the 13th guest or more. And Giving Tuesday is an activation point, as is the last week in December. For sustainers you typically, I would probably say you would not send them the 16 emails that you send through the end of the year or the 20 emails, but you would be very discriminating about which ones you sent.

[00:35:57.470] – Ashley Hansen
Great, thanks for that and please feel free to type in other questions. So, Brandon gave some really good examples on using social. Do you all have any thoughts on how to cut through the noise on social media on Giving Tuesday?

[00:36:14.850] – Grace Green
My initial thought here is that it can be really discouraging because Giving Tuesday is as large and all encompassing as it is. I think it can be really discouraging for especially organisations on the smaller side or that are specifically regional, to feel like their post isn’t going to go anywhere. But I think that is a discredit to your supporters. They’re engaged with your mission for a reason. And so even though it might feel a little bit like your social post is just a drop in the bucket, it really might be the difference maker for someone who is on the fence about giving. And so just remembering that that post might be the deciding factor for someone and not kind of letting yourself get caught up in all of the noise on your own, to be able to say, this is what works for my audience, this is what works for the people who are engaged with my mission and kind of taking that and running with it.

[00:37:16.870] – Brandon Fuller
Yeah, I think all this sort of typical social media best Practises apply if you can record videos and include video, that’s obviously a huge bonus and anything that feels urgent and timely. And so if you can have somebody who maybe does a takeover of your account for Giving Tuesday. Somebody who’s been impacted by your work. Maybe a refugee family who can share their story. Giving Tuesday. Anything that can add a story and some authenticity to your social media feed that day and tie directly back Giving Tuesday to the work that you do and the importance of raising money. I think we could follow the example of corporations and how they use Black Friday and even like Small Business Saturday. I think it is about how they use all these different days. They come up with entire campaigns and storylines that they share and they drive and they have colour schemes and special logos. So following their lead and making your social media feed be really exciting and special for that particular day, but obviously just like any other kind of best Practise storytelling, urgent, timely and connecting the donation to the real impact of your organisation.

[00:38:41.090] – Caroline Crow
Yes, I tag off with Brandon there. I’ve done videos that were prepared prior to Giving Tuesday and those did well, but something that we found that kind of tied right in that is doing live, like you said, takeovers on Facebook. We had a couple of parks and such that actually did live with their team on site and that really engaged their audience. But I think that an important factor for cutting through the noise, is doing a lot of organic content, so working on growing the organic following throughout a year, so staying engaged, building that following because people are going to be paying attention to who’s just as passionate on Giving Tuesday as they are year round and who they’re just seeing ads for. It’s definitely still important to be running those Giving Tuesday ads, but the market is expensive on Giving Tuesday. You run an ad campaign, you know your money doesn’t go as far then. So for a lot of organisations, I like to remind them that organic content on Giving Tuesday, asking your donors, is just as important for making their budget go far and getting those donations in as running a donate campaign on social media.

[00:40:01.250] – Ashley Hansen
I love that. Thank you. So, another question. Have any of you all seen creative ways to do matching gift campaigns on Giving Tuesday? I know an organisation that I’m on the board for does the technique where once the donations have hit a certain point, it unlocks an additional match and you make those numbers appropriate for your organisation and ideally are able to run a thermometer or progress bar so that everybody can see the movement that they are a part of, but would love to hear thoughts.

[00:40:40.410] – Grace Green
I think that running a matching campaign. Especially in tandem with Giving Tuesday. Is a great way for any organisation to kind of spur other donors onward and it can be a really meaningful thing. Like you mentioned. Ashley. To have something where once we reach this threshold. Then we’re going to unlock an even greater amount. Or maybe we were going to do .5 of a match and now once we hit X number. We’re going to turn it into a one to one match or a two to one match. So I think being really transparent and creating. Like you said. Those milestones of saying. This is what we’re hoping to achieve. And by saying. We’re going to have this. Once we get to X amount. It’s going to increase. Or. This is what we’re going for and your donation will be matched. Like Brandon mentioned earlier. With if you change this to a monthly gift. Then you’ll get a match there. So just kind of creating it to be a more incentivizing piece there. And, of course, tracking and showcasing what this looks like, the storytelling and highlighting how much further things can go with a match.

[00:41:49.710] – Grace Green
We’ve seen in research that we’ve done that I think it’s 71% of donors are more likely to respond to a fundraising appeal that mentions matching. And so as you’re thinking about those organic social media posts or those personalised emails that you’re sending out ahead of Giving Tuesday, mention matching and go ahead and muster up excitement and energy around this campaign so that when it comes to the day of, donors are really excited about it and they know what to expect when they make that donation.

[00:42:27.610] – Brandon Fuller
Yeah, I would feel like a matching gift is almost a necessity this time of year during your end. And I’ve seen the difference between organisations who are able to secure a matching gift one year and weren’t the next and raised half as much. Obviously, the old tricks of having an astring in the email where you display for people, if you get 15, your impact will be 30. All of that really gets people excited and I think does edge them up in the amount that they’re willing to give. One of the things that organisations do now is just like if the holidays arrive in Target earlier and earlier every year, I think Giving Tuesday emails arrive in your inbox earlier and earlier every year. And so, magically early access to the matching gift donation thing, it comes in on Friday, it comes in on Thursday before, or a preview of our matching gift as a way that Chris was saying, getting people excited about it. So those are just some of the sort of classic ways, but I do think it’s sort of a necessity.

[00:43:37.570] – Caroline Crow
I’ve also found great success with creating a deadline on that matching gift. So if you send out a notice the day before that, the next 24 hours you’ve got a deadline on a match, you can concentrate those people giving, because now not only is there an urgency marketing Tuesday, but they have to get that in order to take advantage of it. So in general, campaigns with deadlines do really well. One of the reasons your end does so well. So creating an artificial deadline really does something to improve response rates.

[00:44:09.770] – Liz Murphy
I think there’s other types of matching gifts too that are not just for donations that should be worked into that sort of engagement arc of we have a big long five or six weeks between Giving Tuesday and end of year. But also sort of we don’t want to ask them every single email. But we want to engage as well. So that if you’re lucky enough to have corporate sponsors and you can say for every pledge that you take. Or every action that you take. It will be matched by a dollar or $5. That’s just another form of variation of incentive someone to either join your email list or to just become more engaged so that you hopefully will feel very comfortable answering a donation. Ask when you send it.

[00:45:02.930] – Ashley Hansen
Awesome. I love that, Liz. So we’ve come to time, but I have one last question for everyone and we’ll go in the order that you all presented. So what’s your top piece of Giving Tuesday advice that can be accomplished in less than an hour?

[00:45:20.510] – Caroline Crow
For me, it’s going to be a reset of your best friend email on the day off. It’s become common Practise to send two emails and it’s becoming even more common Practise to send three emails on the day off. If you take a look at the engaging network statistics that were shared in the chat, it even talks about emails sending an 08:00 P.m. Doing phenomenal. So it’s never too late to send another email on Giving Tuesday. Resend it with a new subject line, get it in, people’s inboxes. It’s really simple and can boost some more revenue in on day off.

[00:45:54.470] – Ashley Hansen
And be sure to suppress people that are already given.

[00:46:00.690] – Brandon Fuller
My advice would be to get your engagement’s account ready for Giving Tuesday ahead of time. So if you have some settings turned on that people in a marketing automation journey won’t receive irregular emails, you may want to update those settings. If you don’t have any fraud protection, set up on your pages and you look at adding captcha for people who are donating from countries that are known for testing stolen credit cards. I’ve seen, unfortunately, on days like Giving Tuesday, where a payment gateway is shut down an organization’s account because they’re seeing a lot of fraudulent activity, which is a terrible day for that to happen. I would say monitor set up in advance your finance reports so you can monitor failed transactions and see if you’re getting any spikes on those. That would be an indication that you are being attacked fraud, but also that people are struggling to make a donation on one of your pages and that might be something that you don’t want to realise once it’s too late. So running those reports. Being familiar with that I think Liz also said looking at your list and figuring out who’s going to be in your suppressions and who’s not going to be in your suppressions.

[00:47:08.970] – Brandon Fuller
If you want to do a lot of the personalization that Caroline was explaining. You could start tagging your pages with attributes so that you can then use those attributes to build those custom audiences. So anything that you can be doing now to get engaging networks all into the condition that you want it to be in so that it will be as successful as possible. And I think one tip that Ian always shares is that there is a queue for emails that go out on Giving Tuesday and it is first serve. And so sometimes if you want to make sure your email goes out at a busy, popular time, getting that email scheduled as far in advance as well for that time on that Giving Tuesday will ensure that it will most likely go out at that particular time that you really wanted to go out.

[00:48:00.330] – Grace Green
My number one tip I think would be to remember transparency on Giving Tuesday. Everyone kind of knows what Giving Tuesday is, what kind of traction it brings, how important it can be for organisations across the United States, across the globe. And so everyone’s kind of vying for that attention, they’re vying for those donations. And so being transparent and recognising that maybe you’re giving campaign doesn’t go as well as you wanted or maybe it goes way better than you expected, but honouring and recognising the donations that came in either way and just remembering that your donors support you for a reason and so you want to be able to kind of walk with them hand in hand through this process. They are your supporters, but they’re also your teammates. And so just kind of being cognizant of that very hectic, busy, overwhelming, stressful time that there is going to be good that comes out of this.

[00:49:03.190] – Liz Murphy
It’s a hard one, I would say. One of the things that I already said, which was just take a look at your donation form and make sure that there isn’t something stronger that you can do that you’re using best Practises, you could do a quick 1 hour audit and just look at are you using all the features of engaging networks that you can, if not adamant? But most importantly, I think you need time to test. So the QA and testing is critically important. You have to be able to read the results of this because you are going to be using it next year. So make sure you have your analytics and everything just tested and that means going in and testing your own forms with a credit card and it means also testing all your emails and making sure that the data is going where it should.

[00:50:01.870] – Ashley Hansen
Awesome. Thank you all. This has just been such a great 45 minutes of content and tips and tricks and advice for Giving Tuesday. So thanks for your time, for all of the attendees, and thanks to all the panellists for sharing with us so openly and freely. And we in Chat give you a list of resources that we encourage you to look at. And lastly, I just really hope that you have the most successful Giving Tuesday ever. Thanks so much.

[00:50:35.570] – Brandon Fuller
Good luck. Thanks.