Deepen your curiosity when planning your Giving Tuesday campaign this year.

By Kyle Schnurbusch, OrgStory Strategy Director

Giving Tuesday is November 29th this year (yes, less than a month away). It’s the start of the end-of-year giving season, and it’s a great opportunity for your organization to incite giving among donors, especially low and mid-level ones.

As you’ve probably experienced in your past campaigns, Giving Tuesday can be quite burdensome and frustrating if you don’t plan ahead. I hope you’ve begun your planning process for this year, but regardless of your plan’s status, I encourage you to deepen your curiosity within your planning process to inspire a campaign that truly stands out to your donors amid the magnitude of asks.

Here are three ways you can push your curiosity within your campaign planning to have a more successful Giving Tuesday:

1. Gain insights from your donors to inspire your campaign message.

Insights from your key donors are crucial when planning any campaign. For Giving Tuesday, I recommend focusing on obtaining insights from donors that engage online frequently (email or social media) and have volunteered or given at least once within the last eighteen months (maybe the last Giving Tuesday). If your organization is using Giving Tuesday to raise money for a specific program or need, identify donors that have given toward that initiative.

Once you’ve generated a report on these donors, take time to analyze it to identify commonalities among these donors (occupation, family make-up, interests, etc.). It’s best to establish two to four donor types based on the data.

Next, you’ll want to get to know those donor types beyond the data. You can do this by asking these questions for each audience type:

  • What interests them about your mission?
  • What makes them most proud to be associated with your mission?
  • How does your organization’s work make them feel?
  • What are their expectations of your organization?
  • What communication channels do they prefer?

After you’ve completed your insight gathering, combine the data and responses to create donor personas. Then, develop specific messages that align with the interests and motivations of each. Your curiosity in shaping each persona and crafting unique messages will help your campaign’s success.

2. Determine how to best communicate your organization’s outcomes against broader data points.

In your Giving Tuesday campaign, I recommend using outcome data to complement the messages and stories you share. However, your data should be shared within the context of a greater point to make it more impactful. Research relevant data to share alongside your outcomes that clearly define your success. For example: how many children in your area face the same challenges your clients do? How do your outcomes compare to regional or national outcomes?

Additionally, It’s important to share how your organization’s results directly impact your donors as well. For example: if you continue to evaluate outcomes, will your community operate differently in five years? Will a breakthrough happen if outcomes are sustained?

As mentioned above, data should complement your message and stories for your Giving Tuesday campaign. By combining great results with your stories and the benefits donors receive from your work, campaign success will follow.

3. Leverage donor data to determine how to best spend your time marketing your campaign.

Asking your donors about their communication preferences is important when developing your campaign’s strategy and marketing plan. However, sometimes what people say is not what they do. That’s why I recommend pushing your curiosity about your donor’s communication preferences by analyzing analytics associated with your website, social platforms and email campaigns.

  • Where do donors engage most often?
  • When do donors tend to engage with your content?
  • Do donors tend to give through social media? Email? Website?

Analytics also can uncover the types of content that lead to higher engagement and/or giving behaviors:

  • What pages on your website are visited before the donation page is visited?
  • What stories have received the highest engagement? Where does a user go after they engage with the story?

Gathering analytics shouldn’t be an alternative to talking to your donors, as suggested in #1. Each step is important when informing your campaign’s strategy, messaging and distribution methods.

Good luck on Giving Tuesday! If you use these ideas, I know you’ll create a campaign that will excite and deliver results.

Reach out: Feel free to email Kyle Schnurbusch to share ways your organization is planning for Giving Tuesday.