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Held on the Tuesday after Black Friday and Cyber Monday, GivingTuesday is one of the biggest days of the fundraising calendar. To maximize success during the most important time of the year for nonprofit fundraising, you must make sure that you prepare in advance, and give yourself plenty of time to test and optimize your efforts.
Here are some best practices to help you make the most of your fundraising efforts on GivingTuesday 2021:
Prepare your data
The quality of your data will decide how successful your end-of-year fundraising will be. Better donor and transaction data will allow you to create a segmented, personalized donor journey. This donor journey will be the basis of your fundraising efforts in both the short and long term.
In the short term, you can implement personalized asks on a larger scale, leading to a higher return on investment. In the long term, you can implement a donor stewardship strategy with multiple personalized checkpoints, leading to an increase in major gifts.
Invest in personalization
Well-organized and relevant data will help you develop a deep knowledge of your supporters’ interests and the channels they engage with the most. But to reach your supporters effectively, you need to invest the time and resources in personalizing your content.
Tailoring your communications based on your supporters’ interests and preferences will let you offer more relevant and meaningful content and will produce better results for your GivingTuesday efforts. This will also ensure you make the best use of your limited resources by producing highly relevant content.
Plan your campaigns ahead of time
Planning ahead can help you incorporate GivingTuesday into your end-of-year fundraising efforts instead of having separate campaigns.
Your GivingTuesday and broader end-of-year fundraising can use some common content, and you can even utilize GivingTuesday as part of a larger narrative in your fundraising messaging
Create meaningful content
Create relevant, engaging, and diverse content to take your donors along the donor journey. Your content should be informative, impactful, and engaging, all while being part of an overarching narrative.
Use different types of content, such as videos, blog posts, case studies, and infographics. You should also repurpose existing content. For example, repurpose blog posts into infographics or videos.
Experiment with new fundraising events
New or unusual fundraising events can be successful because they effectively engage your audience.
An emerging type of fundraising is livestream fundraising. Livestreaming on platforms like Twitch can help your nonprofit reach a wider audience and build a base of supporters on a fundraising-friendly platform. You can harness the power of fundraising by word-of-mouth by helping your supporters set up peer-to-peer fundraising campaigns.
Your base of supporters are the most effective at spreading the word about your GivingTuesday campaign to their networks. Your supporters can make personal fundraising pages and appeal to their networks to get donations for your cause.
Thank donors appropriately
Make sure to thank your GivingTuesday donors immediately and appropriately for their support. Continue to keep in contact with them after the day ends, and reference their GivingTuesday donation in future communication.
Reference their past donations and showcase their impact. Happy and engaged donors are repeat donors and volunteers!
About the author
iATS Payments
iATS offers the highest caliber integrations to leading nonprofit technology providers plus nonprofit and payment expertise that comes with over 20 years of working exclusively in this space. We make it easier and faster for nonprofits of any size to manage their donations.
