129 – The Ultimate Giving Tuesday Playbook

Episode Transcription

David Pisarek: Worried your Giving Tuesday campaign is not going to stand out? In today’s episode, I’m sharing proven strategies that will help your non-profit cut through the noise, inspire your donors, and raise more, even if you’re really short on time.

Stick around, and let’s turn this Giving Tuesday into your biggest one yet.

Welcome to the Non-profit Digital Success podcast. I’m your host, David, and today I’m going to be talking about Giving Tuesday, how to prep, launch, and optimize your campaign to get better results in less time. Please make sure to follow, subscribe, and share our episode and our podcast. It really does help us out.

Whether you’re a seasoned pro or you’re scrambling to pull a campaign together, I’m going to walk you through actionable strategies to help your non-profit stand out, engage your donors, and ultimately raise more funds, even if you have a limited time and budget.

And before we jump in, I’ve put something special together to help you make the most of this time. A limited-time Giving Tuesday offer, what you’re going to get is four professionally designed Giving Tuesday social media graphics for only $250 plus tax. You can check this out by going to wowdigital.com/gt

Okay, so let’s dive in and talk about how you can crush your Giving Tuesday goals this year.

Let’s talk about how you can define a clear and compelling story that connects your donors emotionally to your mission this Giving Tuesday. I’ve talked about this on a few episodes recently. Some of them haven’t yet come out. Those are coming in the next few weeks or so. But you ultimately need to start with the foundation. Bad pun, I know. I’m a dad, dad joke there. You need to start with the basics.

What is it that your organization does? Why did your organization come into being? What’s the origin story? There’s always behind a non-profit, whoever set it up, started it, the founder; why did they do this? It came from a place of them wanting to help them, wanting to solve a problem? Let’s talk about that. What is the problem that you actually solve?

Now, people don’t typically want to hear, ‘Oh, we help feed 80,000 people, blah, blah, blah.’ No. If you can talk about a specific case, follow somebody through the day in the life of, talk about, ‘We helped this child, this parent, this animal,’ and try to engage as an individual person that you’ve helped instead of a huge group of people.

You can then go meta on it and go bigger and talk about how this is just one example of how we help. That would work totally fine. But you want to try to engage on an individual basis. It’s easier for people to understand and connect emotionally if there’s a single story behind there.

The next thing we need to discuss is figuring out how to effectively communicate this message to people. In terms of segmenting your email list or your donor list, you need to be able to tailor the messages based on the audience. You’re going to have, for example, different donors. You’re going to have donors who come and volunteer, give their time. Great. You’re going to have donors that probably give you, maybe, $5 a year, or $5 a month. You’re going to have larger donors, maybe $1,000. You potentially have major gifts. So, people who are giving, I would say, over $100,000 to your organization. You have corporate sponsors that are maybe giving product or their service time instead of money.

Each one of those requires different messaging for them because they are thinking about different things.

For example, major gift donors, they want to really understand the business plan, where all the money is going to. A lot of times, people that are donating maybe, $5 or $10, $50, $100, it’s important to them that they understand where the money is being spent. But when you’re spending significant amounts of money, with wherever that’s going to your organization, they want to really understand how it’s being spent. Think of it more as a bit of a business case. That type of messaging is very different than, ‘We’ve helped do this, we’ve raised this much money, this is the impact it’s had. Here’s how we’ve helped the climate.’ It doesn’t fit for everybody, and you need to be thinking in that way when you’re going out and you’re talking about the work that you do.

You’ve segmented your audience. You’ve figured out messaging for each of them. When you send out the messages, not every message should have an ask for money.

We need to educate, we need to empower, we need to share stories.

Yes, every email at the end, you can make a difference, click here to donate or something like that. But you still need to empower them with information. I really personally get a ton of email. I get a ton of actual letters in the mail from organizations that are just, maybe I made a $20 donation five years ago, and I still get mail from them. It’s important to stay top of mind, but these letters that I’m getting, they don’t talk about the impact. It’s really just a donation form and a return envelope. What is with that? If that’s you, you really need to second-guess what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.

Okay, so we’ve sent out messages, we’re connecting with people, we’re resonating with them because we have the right message for the right people. But what do we need them to do? Ultimately, yes, we need them to go to our website or go to a donation page or respond by text if you’re doing an SMS campaign, things like that.

How do we actually convert? And that’s where the donation pages are really important. We need to make sure, number one, that they’re optimized for mobile. Over the last five years, there’s been a huge shift. Prior to COVID, people were using their cell phones a little bit more every year, but there was a big jump during COVID. And now I would bet about half of your website traffic is from mobile devices. Open up your analytics, take a look. We’ve seen a big shift in the last year alone.

We want to ensure that your landing pages and donation pages are mobile-optimized, so they look good when someone is scrolling on their phone. We want to make sure that it’s easy for them to make a donation.

Do you really need their mailing address, and a shipping address, and a phone number and this, this, this, this on that donation page? Probably not. You probably need a name. If you can, ideally, integrate a, I don’t know, let’s say, Google Pay or Apple Pay or PayPal for faster checkout, you can get their information from their profiles from that process. Do you really need to be asking for all those fields? What can we do to optimize that to make it as stress-free and as painless for people to be able to make that donation for you?

Then, what happens after that? I go to your website, and I make a donation. Awesome. You get the money, whatever it is, $50, whatever it happens to be, what do I get? I should be put into your email marketing list into a customer journey. There should be a series of seven to eight emails that are sent out to me over a period of time, maybe over, I don’t let’s say a month or so, a month and a half, and then I get put into the regular email sequence that you have.

You want to empower, you want to educate, you want to talk about the importance, you want to thank them, and you want to have those conversations by email, hopefully getting them to re-engage, reply to the email, click through, share, any of those things. But really, it’s about empowering.

And that’s the other part of what I’m going to talk about, which is that you need to have clear call to actions. You need to make it really easy for people to know what you want them to actually do next. Unfortunately, over the last few years, there has been a significant shift in how people browse websites. So think about that for a second. Years ago, people would have giant paragraphs of copy and all kinds of information. That has really shifted. People are not reading anymore. They’re scanning. They’re looking for bullet points, something really quick, small snippets. If you’re thinking about a news release, block quotes, pull quotes, titles, headings, those things, and they’re skimming. They’re not actually reading everything.

We need to make sure that we’re optimizing the pages so that they’re legible, clear, and easy for people to skim. At the same time, we need to have a clear call to action so that they know the next step that we want them to take.

The call to action should not be, ‘Click here, or learn more, or Read more, or Donate.’ You need to make it much clearer to them what it is and be more specific. ‘Learn more about whatever, not just learn more.’ Let’s do that. That is also going to help with some accessibility issues with your website. Let’s make sure that we’ve got clear call to actions there.

Alright, so we’ve sent out emails, we’ve segmented, and we’ve got landing pages or donation pages, whatever those happen to be. You’re really clear with the call to action. You’ve got really great skimmable content on there.

We need to really trigger people’s emotions, not making them break down and weep and cry, but we need to engage emotionally with them, with their subconscious and their consciousness, to get them to want to make a donation to you.

And that is part of some of the things that we need to play with in terms of urgency, FOMO, significance, and the importance of it. There are certain ways that you can do that. You can put dates on things. You could say, ‘By this date, we need to raise this because X, Y, and Z.’ You could potentially get somebody who’s a donor matcher. Maybe there’s a business, a corporation, a really big philanthropist, somebody who’s willing to donate, let’s say, up to $50,000 to match donations that are made. But those donations have to be made by this date, and that’s the cutoff date for that.

There are different ways that, as an organization, you can think about how to address the urgent need.

Sometimes there are catastrophic events like flooding, monsoons, earthquakes, war, all that stuff, and that can definitely help drive urgency as well.

Giving Tuesday is coming up in a few weeks. You’ve got great messaging, you’ve got the page, you’ve got all of that going. You need to make sure that afterwards, you are sending thank yous to the people in your list. If you have a really great email platform, you can actually have that all pre-programmed out and ready to go, so that come December 4th, December 3rd, even if you wanted to on December 2nd at like, midnight or just after midnight. I guess it’ll be December 3rd. Send out a thank you. Like, ‘Here’s how much money we raise. Thank you so much. Here’s where we’re going to be spending money, how we’re going to be spending it, what you’ve supported.’ And you really want to thank them.

Donor retention is where long-term success is going to pay off for you.

I hope that everything that I’ve talked about really helps you out. I talked about how you can plan, launch, and optimize Giving Tuesday campaigns to deliver better results for your organization. I hope that you picked up some valuable ideas that you can apply right away. And my challenge to you, and I do this to all of the guests on the show.

All right, my challenge to you in the next 24 hours after listening to this. So by the end of, hopefully this week, if you’re subscribed to the podcast, then you’re hearing this on launch day. But by the end of this week, that you have reviewed your emails that are going to be sent out after Giving Tuesday. I want you to also review your social media graphics and how you’re going to be thanking the donors and the community and the public for their support during Giving Tuesday. Take one thing from today, go and implement it.

Every small step is going to turn into bigger wins for you.

And just a reminder, If you want a quick way to boost your Giving Tuesday campaign, we’ve got the special offer. Head over to wowdigital.com/GT, that’s for Giving Tuesday. To get 4 professionally designed Giving Tuesday social media graphics for only $250. Use them to grab attention, inspire action, and to save your team time.

If you’re looking for more personalized support, you could also book a free strategy call with me at wowdigital.com/consult. Let’s make this your best Giving Tuesday yet.

To everybody listening, if you want any of the insight that I talked about, just head over to our podcast page at nonprofitdigitalsuccess.com and click on this episode for all the details.

And until next time, keep on being successful!