Giving Tuesday is just around the corner. Are you ready for it? Now is a great time to get prepped and ready to go so you can have an amazing Giving Tuesday for your organization AND enjoy your Thanksgiving holiday.

In this episode you'll learn:

→ Strategy #1 – get your board of directors and staff on board.
→ Strategy #2 – create your promo kit.
→ Strategy #3 – set up Facebook donation pages.
→ Strategy #4 – optimize your donation page.
→ Strategy #5 – reach out to your network to promote.
→ Strategy #6 – automate your emails.

Want to skip ahead?  Here are some key takeaways:

[4:11] Get all the major players on board with the campaign and how much you want to raise. Make it fun or even make it a competition if you can. Involve them in the brainstorming so they feel part of the campaign and more likely to support it.
[5:38] Put together your promo kit so you can distribute it to all the players. This will give you them all the graphics and content they'll need to share. You want to make it easy for people to promote your organization on Giving Tuesday.
[7:47] Make sure that people have time to get the Facebook donation pages set up. Your promo kit will help with that. Remember that there's a lot of social media noise right now with the election and holiday promos so the sooner the better.
[8:21] This is a great time to review your donation page. Make sure it has all the information that it needs to encourage people to make that donation – and to understand where the donation is going. It's also a great time to check the tech and make sure everything is still working like it should. You don't want to have glitches that day!
[9:21] Start reaching out to your audience to share and promote. This also includes media and your PR contacts.
[9:50] Make sure your email automations are ready to go so you can promote while relaxing with your family.  These emails are going to go out to your list over the course of Thanksgiving week and hit hard on Giving Tuesday. You want people to plan for their dollars so they have some set aside just for you.

Resources

Digital Marketing Therapy Sessions
EP 66 | Using Social Media Fundraising Tools
EP 68 | Use your Existing Audience to Promote for You

Full Transcript

[INTRO] Hey everyone Sami here, your host of the Digital Marketing Therapy podcast. And today we were talking about Giving Tuesday. Yes, it is basically, a month away less than a month, December 1 is Giving Tuesday. So just over a month away, and I know it might seem crazy to start planning for that now, but it's great to plan for it now. So that we can get ahead of the game, we can get things going, we can be ready, prep prepared and get everybody in our network prepped and prepared and ready to support us on that day.

So for those of you that maybe you don't know or haven't taken advantage of it yet, Giving Tuesday is the first Tuesday after Thanksgiving. So we have Thanksgiving, we have Black Friday, we have Cyber Monday. And then we have Giving Tuesday.  With a whole lot of things all jam packed into that shopping season. But it's a great way for nonprofits to take advantage of all the noise, all of the buzz, get your name out there and really kind of get the final, maybe final push for the year to get your fundraising in. So that's we're going to talk about today some ways to get prepped to get ready to go and have everything all set up for Giving Tuesday because the other thing is, it's a holiday week, and you want to spend time with your family and your friends over the Thanksgiving holiday and not being a mad dash to make sure that everything goes off without a hitch. I want you to have that time and space for yourself. So really, let's dive into this. Let's get things ready, prepped and on their way so that you can have an amazing Giving Tuesday with way less stress.

But before we get into it, this episode is brought to you by my Digital Marketing Therapy sessions. So if you want me to help you create the strategy help pull all the things together, review what you've got pulled together for Giving Tuesday, these are a great way to do it. These are 30 minute consultations with me over Zoom. And you can sign up at https://www.thefirstclick.net/officehours, we'll sit down we'll go through what you've got pulled together or even if it's not Giving Tuesday, if there's something else you would like to chat about. I am here to help support you and getting you unstuck so that you can keep moving forward reaching your donation goals and having a great end to 2020 it's been a crazy year. But we can do it guys, we can finish 2020 strong. So again, https://www.thefirstclick.net/officehours, Book your time. And let's keep things moving forward. Time to get into the episode.

[CANNED INTRODUCTION] You're listening to the Digital Marketing Therapy Podcast. I'm your host, Sami Bedell-Mulhern. And each week, I bring you tips from myself and other experts, as well as hot seats with small business owners and entrepreneurs to demystify digital marketing and get you on your way to generating more leads and growing your business.

[BODY] Okay, so Giving Tuesday, hopefully, you've participated and the great thing about it is that no organization is too big or too small to have an impact with Giving Tuesday. And this is a great opportunity for you to get out in front of your audience. Get in front of new audiences and really leverage your network to help support this campaign. And as with any campaign, we always recommend having some financial goals attached. So how much do you think you want to raise because that will really help you figure out the effort you need to put behind it? How many people do you need to reach out to and we're going to go through some different strategies here. But what is it that you need to have in place in order to reach the goals for this campaign, and it might look different than what you had expected it to just because with COVID and in all of the things your fundraising goals may be kind of all over the place, or where you're at where you thought you would be with your financial goals might be all over the place. And that's okay. That's why things like this are great to take advantage of you and to get ahead of stuff, we're gonna get head of all the rest of our quote unquote, competition, and we are going to have an amazing campaign all put together so that it goes off without a hitch. And so I'm excited to talk through some of these strategies with you.

Strategy #1 – Now, the first thing that I want you to do is really talk with your board and your staff to you as a development team or as the development director or fundraising chair, whatever have in mind, okay, we know we need to raise 5,000 20,000, whatever from this campaign. Having those in mind really talk to your board and your staff and your volunteers. And really just kind of have like a fun brainstorming strategy session. The more you can engage them in this process and make it fun, the more likely you're going to have success now. It's near the end of the year. It's a holiday people are probably feeling burnt out. But hopefully you can use this as a way to invigorate and kind of reignite some passion and energy into fundraising to get you through the rest of the year. So talk with your board staff, get them on board. Give them some of your ideas. How you want to pull this together and get their ideas because they probably have some great ideas as well.

Now remember, the beauty of Giving Tuesday is that these aren't large, they don't have to be large donations, right, it's really a way to encourage a lot of people to maybe give a little bit of money. And maybe you'll get some big donations through that as well. But, you know, we're going with the goal of like, let's reach out to our entire base, let's try to get everybody involved, let's try to make this a community event where no gift is too small. And we're going to raise money in that way.

Strategy #2 – So once you have that strategy, it's time to kind of put together some graphics and some materials and maybe like a little press kit, promo kit, we talked about this in a previous episode, I will link that up in the show notes about what you need to put in your promo kit. But basically, it's going to have graphics, it's going to have social media graphics, it's going to have copy, it's going to have some guidelines and some ways that makes it really easy for people to participate. And this is a document that you can then easily distribute to your board to your email list, whatever, so that they can start promoting, you know, hey, I believe in this organization, and I'm giving I'm Giving Tuesday Are you so check out that episode, if you want more specifics on what to put in there. It's a great one and just good for campaigns in general that you're running, or brand awareness. But that's kind of the next step. So once you've got your board and your staff, on board ready to go in line, then putting together that promo kit so that everybody is speaking the same language. Everybody knows what the ask is, and everybody's ready to go and start promoting. And that's critical to get done as soon as possible, because we want to have about what maybe a week or two week window here to start promoting this. And there's going to be a lot of noise on social media over the next couple of weeks as we get through to the election. So I wouldn't say it's too soon to start at any point. Because you're going to need to drive that message home several times, so that people remember.

Stragety #3 – And then also give people space and time to set up their donation pages on Facebook. This is a really powerful tool. Again, we talked about this in another episode, I'll link that up in the show notes. But great way for grassroots for your audience to create their Giving Tuesday, donation page to have it set up ready to go with the graphics you provided to them so that it can go off without a hitch as well. Facebook usually comes up with some different features and things around Giving Tuesday. So keep an eye out for that. But setting up your donation page on your Facebook page is also important. So adding some goals there, like maybe you have a goal of $20,000 for your GivingTuesday campaign and you want to raise $5,000 off Facebook. So putting that in there. All of those things that you can get prepped ahead of time, get them prepped.

And the beauty of the Facebook donor pages is really just, again, building that community building conversation, the things that you'll learn about people that are donating to your campaign, the stories that they're sharing for why this is so important for them, all of that is going to just be super helpful for you to get to know your audience better, while you're raising money for your organization, which is such a bonus in such a plus.

Strategy #4 – Now, the other thing that you're going to want to do is really make sure your donation page is ready. Maybe you haven't looked at it in a while. But now is the time to put some effort into making sure it's perfect, it's spotless, it's got all the right information on it, and it is ready to go maybe test it to make sure the tech is working. You know, a lot of times we make updates to our website. And sometimes the connection breaks between your donation software and your credit card company who knows but really test it and make sure it's working. Make sure it's set up, it's prepped and you have an updated with the information you want to collect. You have added information on the donation page about where the funds are going. Maybe you create a special Giving Tuesday graphic that's going to go on that page as well. So having all of that it's just a great time to revisit everything and make sure that you are set up ready to go and there aren't going to be any glitches.

Strategy #5 – And then once we've got all that done, we're reaching out and it might be a couple of weeks or a couple weeks process for you to be reaching out to potential people to promote it. You're also going to want to reach out to media to share with them that you are participating and Giving Tuesday. Hopefully there's a listing in some of the different magazines and publications in your community. You know all of that outreach that you would typically do for any campaign start to do that now.

Strategy #6 – But then the last thing that you kind of want to focus on is really setting up your email automation. So again, like I said, it's over the holidays, and we don't want to be working on Thanksgiving. We want to take a couple days off. You deserve to take a couple days off and spend some time with your friends and family. Maybe do a little bit of shopping of your own. But you'll want to have those email campaigns set up in those reminders. So maybe you send out an initial email on the Tuesday before that says, you know, don't forget giving Tuesday's a week away, you know, please make sure you allocate something for our organization. Maybe there's a happy Thanksgiving email that goes out, that's just, you know, thanking them for everything that they do with a little reminder at the bottom about Giving Tuesday, maybe you're sending an email out on Black Friday, saying, you know, have fun shopping, make sure you save some dollars for us on Giving Tuesday to support our organization, you know, so whatever, however often you're doing it, you know, and I definitely recommend on the Tuesday of Giving Tuesday that there's probably two or three emails that are going to go out to your list. And I know that that seems excessive. But you have to remember that, again, there's going to be so much noise in our inbox over the course of those few days, from all the retailers that we subscribe to all of the companies that we subscribe to. So, you know, sending it a couple times doesn't mean that they're going to get all three of them, right, they might only see one, or they might see all three, but either way, it's giving them that reminder multiple times to participate. And while you're setting up those email automations, you can also pre-schedule some posts on Facebook, I know you can't on Instagram, which is a little bit frustrating unless you're using a software. But really get those things all set up. So even if you can't pre-post or schedule them, having them all written, having the images all attached, having it all set up so that you know exactly what to do will be critical. And really important to relieving your stress and making it kind of a simple process.

[CONCLUSION] So those are just a few things to get you ready to go for Giving Tuesday. Remember to have fun with it. And the more that you prep and the more ahead of it that you get, the better off your campaign is going to be, the more seamless it's going to be, the better you'll be able to enjoy your holidays, and the more money you will raise for your organization.

The last thing that I'll say is, you know, you could potentially run ads to this if you want to on Facebook, if you want to get more eyeballs on your post talking about Giving Tuesday, but just be aware that because it's the holiday season, and a lot of people are purchasing ads for all of their commercial products as well, you might spend more than what you would typically spend. So just keep that in mind as you take a look at your budget, and how you kind of promote. I really hope that GivingTuesday is a huge success for you. I would love to hear and see your campaign so we can share some of them with our listeners as well on our social media accounts.

So, you know, just hit us up @thefirstclickmarketing on Facebook and Instagram. Just dm us and let us know about the GivingTuesday campaigns you're running so we can give you a shout out. And I hope that this was helpful for you and getting ready to plan and raise the money for your organization. Please make sure you subscribe wherever you listen so you don't miss out on a single episode. And thank you so much for listening. I really do appreciate you and I will see you in the next one.