Giving Tuesday? 6 Questions Your Nonprofit Needs to Ask First

If you're like most nonprofits, you've probably heard about this Giving Tuesday thing over and over and over again.

There Black Friday, there's Cyber Monday and then there's Giving Tuesday, and this is all about nonprofits making money. And, you've probably attempted Giving Tuesday over and over and over again and, potentially, unsuccessfully. So, before you get started diving into Giving Tuesday this year,

Ask yourself these six questions about whether Giving Tuesday is right for your organization!

#1 - Does your nonprofit organization have a Giving Tuesday plan?

Chances are that you have participated in Giving Tuesday in the past, and if you haven't been successful, you've maybe shown up to a meeting or two that are held by a statewide association, you've set up the platform from the email you've been given, but you have no plan. You're like, "Yeah, when we have time, we'll do that Giving Tuesday thing."

So, before you decide you're going to do the Giving Tuesday thing, ask yourself, do you have a plan? And if you don't, don't do Giving Tuesday, you will not be successful.

#2 - Is your Donor-base a Giving Tuesday donor-base?

Giving Tuesday is not primarily about getting major big gifts in, it's about getting large numbers of gifts from potentially new donors.

For a lot of organizations that have volunteers, that have maybe parents of after school programs, that have people that have small touches with your organization and a lot of those people that maybe haven't been asked to give before, Giving Tuesday is a great way to engage those potentially new donors.But, if you're an organization that has no brand awareness, it's never received any money from people in the community, giving Tuesday might not be the best way to start raising funds. You might want to consider a friendraiser or marketing campaign first!

If you don't have lots of donors, Giving Tuesday, because it's primarily digital and really about crowd funding, you have to have a crowd, they have to show up. So, if you don't have donors, maybe not the best bet for you.

#3 - What's your Giving Tuesday goal?

Yes. Don't just say, "Please raise money to support our organization. We're a very important organization and it's Giving Tuesday, so give us money because we want money because we're an important organization." Don't do that. Okay? Have a very specific goal with a specific ask. So, if you are a food pantry, for example, don't just say, "Please support our food pantry. We're a food pantry. Support us." Instead of doing that, come up with a smart, measurable goal that you can communicate, that's heartwarming.

If you're a food pantry, you might want to say, "We have 30 elderly people that don't know where they're getting their next meal that come in every single day, and this is how much it costs for each box of food they go home with. And what we'd like to do is feed those people, those elderly individuals that come in every day, and it costs $37 per food box that feeds them for a month or supports them for a month with food. So we'd like to ..." $37 times three months and times the 30 people, that's your goal.

So then you can say, "We want to feed these 30 people that come in every day for three months and it costs $37 a person," and then you can really communicate how many people, and $37 is a good number, right? It's easy enough for me to kind of say, "Instead going to Starbucks this week, I'm going to donate $37." And again, Giving Tuesday's not about big major gifts, it's about all those little ones and really engaging and informing all those new donors.

#4 - Do you have a campaign manager?

I always say with fundraising, if you build it, they will come is literally never true.

Fundraising, fundraisers, your organization, you'll need to get people to know and care about you and Giving Tuesday's a great platform to do it, but there needs to be a you to do the work. And chances are, if you're an executive director, you can't be the one scheduling out social media posts.

So do you have someone internally, whether that be director of public relations and development, a key volunteer, an admin person that, for that day and leading up to that day, are doing the work to make sure you have a plan for your campaign, you have a specific goal, you've communicated that goal on multiple platforms and you have someone who is the owner of the campaign? I often see with nonprofits, you'll have one person that's responsible for getting the page up and one person that's responsible for doing posts, but there's a lot of behind the scenes work that needs to happen beforehand for a Giving Tuesday campaign to be successful. So if your answers to the first couple questions were correct and you don't have that person, do and then you'll have a successful

#5 - Can you or do you have people that will pledge money ahead of time?

At Grit HQ, some of the most successful fundraising campaigns we've had, we really had about 50% of the money that we were going to raise that day brought in before the campaign actually started through pledges. And that can be pledges from major donors, that can be pledges from board members, that can be even smaller pledges from staff. But, if you have those pledges ahead of time, especially if you can use them as matching gifts, you're more likely to reach that goal. And when you talk about online fundraising through social media, people want to be a part of success. So you don't want to start from zero and then reach zero. You really want people, and you'll see donors to start to step up if you're communicating your progress well more when you're around the 50th percentile towards your goal. They want to help be towards the success.

So if you can get pledges up to 50% of your goal that actually come in throughout the day on Giving Tuesday, you'll see a lot more momentum in your campaign and hopefully a lot more new donors coming on board.

#6 - Is the Giving Tuesday campaign the best ROI and use of your current resources?

And that can be staff resources, that can be your time, that can also be pledging and money. There's only so much time in a day, especially in the nonprofit world where people are running around like chickens with their head cut off. Yeah, but there's only so much time in the day. So really ask yourself, "Is this the way we want to utilize our resources?" And if it's not, that's okay. I do encourage you, if you're not allocating resources towards Giving Tuesday around the giving season, that you think about writing a solicitation letter and not just sending it out, but doing it the right way. You can check out my blog post about the four mistakes people make when it comes to writing solicitation letters for nonprofits.

Whether or not you decide to do Giving Tuesday, I do wish you all a very successful fundraising and giving season, a very spiritually successful fundraising and giving season. And remember, when things start to get crazy in the nonprofit world, take a breath. It will help you do much better!