Last Minute Giving Tuesday Tips

If you’re like most of us, the struggle to get everything squared away before an extended holiday break can make a short work week stressful. To make matters more hectic, professionals in the non-profit sector will all be returning to one of the biggest fundraising days of the year. So here are some must-dos before you leave to make like Adele and go easy on yourself this Giving Tuesday.

Schedule what you can in advance. Not only will your future self thank you later when your social media posts are out before you’re even out of bed, but this is a great way to save the rest of your time to focus on engagement. You can use a scheduling tool like Hootsuite or Sprout Social to set up posts to go out in the morning. Then watch what happens over the next few hours and tweak your later day-of posts if they’re not performing well, or spark conversations with those who’ve donated and ask them to help spread the word. Other tools like Hubspot or Mailchimp let you schedule emails in advance, too.

Use pop-ups. Take a few minutes to check out which pages of your website are the most often visited, or the ones that visitors spend the most amount of time on.These pages, in addition to your homepage, are the best places to add a Giving Tuesday pop-up. If you have a resources page, consider putting on it, too. That way you’ll reach folks who come to your website organically or for a specific purpose, who obviously find your work useful and are more likely to support your mission. These are a great “set it and forget it” tool. Just don’t forget to take them down or update them once your campaign is over!

Make any necessary updates to your CRM. This will help you with data collection once the campaign is over. You want to make sure you have the capabilities set up to save your new and returning donor information so that you can re-engage them long after the fundraising holiday. CRM’s can even be useful if you’re sending snail mail in addition to doing an online fundraising campaign, by automating things like personalizing donor letters and mailing labels before you print them. And this technology is great for post-campaign reporting as well. Salsa Labs has some more great tips for using CRMs to help with your fundraising.

Re-use these tips. Don’t let the End Of Year fundraising game sneak up on you like Giving Tuesday did. Remember that this should be your kick-off to holiday giving engagement, not the end game. So use these same tips to automate what you can now and save your brain to think of other creative ways to leverage your holiday engagement for more donations. Like sending holiday cards or gifts, hosting a virtual EOY celebration, or organizing a volunteer action. And if you do nothing else, find yourself an agency like us that specializes in non-profit marketing to make your 2022 goals a reality.

Get even more tips from previous posts in our Giving Season series:

• Giving Tuesday Strategies From Orgs Like Yours
• Peer-To-Peer Fundraising For Giving Campaigns Realness
• Giving Tuesday Should Be Your Kick-Off, Not Your End Goal

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