Season 1 - Episode 2: Giving Tuesday
===
[00:00:00] What's good? What's good? It's the Jeremy Haselwood show. What's good? What's good? Let's get ready to go. Welcome to the Jeremy Haselwood show. Plug in, turn it up. Let's go. Hey, hey. Welcome to the Jeremy Haselwood show. Push play, let it roll. Let's go. What's good? Welcome to my show. In three, two, one. Let's go.
Welcome to this episode of the Jeremy Haselwood show. This is our second episode today. We're going to talk all about Giving Tuesday. I'm going to share 17 tips, but before I do that, I'm also going to talk a little bit about Giving Tuesday, what it is, why it's important. And if you don't know what Giving Tuesday is, this is a day where billions of dollars are generated across the world.
Really. For the sake of doing good in the world. Before I start though, I do want to [00:01:00] give pause. I'm a little sad today. My little 16 year old Yorkie passed away this past weekend. She's been here with me through everything she's actually featured. If you're watching this on YouTube or on video, like the dog that you see in the intro. That's her so kind of mourning a little bit today, but this is a part of life and we have to continue moving on.
I appreciate friends, family, people on social who have reached out shared kind words. I should have done a trigger warning before I said that, but here we are just raw and unfiltered, but just want to say I'm dedicating this one in honor of my little Yorkie Cali. This episode is going out for her, and I hope that through this episode, you learn. A lot, take plenty of notes and use this as you plan your Giving Tuesday program.
Also, if you're interested in really going deeper and putting together a Giving Tuesday program, you can go to my online course, Giving Tuesday course.com and you can register there. I tried to make that course pretty affordable. It's a name, your own [00:02:00] price course. It's valued at I believe it's a hundred dollars, but I do have a minimum maybe of 9 99 or something I don't remember, but it's there for you.
So use that resource. Of course, it goes more in depth on the topics that I'm talking about today and also get into a few more topics and organization around your Giving Tuesday. Okay. So let's jump into Giving Tuesday. One of the things that I want to talk about. Are really three different phases of Giving Tuesday.
There's the planning phase. There's the execution phase. And then there's the after. Days of Giving Tuesday. And 85% of your time is going to be built around that planning phase. That's where most of your work is going to go into, and this is like the planning and the creation of assets and things like that. About 10% of your time is actually going to be the execution of your Giving Tuesday program.
And then maybe 5% of your time was going to go into post Giving Tuesday where you're reaching back. You're thinking donors, you're evaluating your successes and your learnings [00:03:00] from the campaign. So those are the three distinct phases in. As you're planning your Giving Tuesday, think about it from that perspective.
I think a lot of times when you're planning any kind of campaign, you really just focus on how are we going to execute. And sometimes you don't really put a plan together. So this podcast should help you with the planning and at least provide you with some tips. So you can have a more successful Giving Tuesday. In the before phase. What some of my tips that I'd recommend is one to look at what you did last year.
And what I mean by that is how much money did you raise last year? What was your goal last year? How many donations did you get? What was your average donation that you received that way? You kind of know how to set goals going into this coming, Giving Tuesday and based on whatever you set last year. Naturally, I can't tell you increase it by 10% or 25%.
These are arbitrary numbers, but I think you need to set some kind of a goal that you feel is obtainable for this Giving Tuesday based on last year's results. And then you want to identify what [00:04:00] marketing channels you will use. And we're going to get into those here in a moment. There are several that you can choose from. And we'll touch on that in a sec.
And then also you want to plan your communication and your messaging. And then create your assets. So these are like the four main things that you do before Giving Tuesday, looking at your goals, setting your goals. Identifying what marketing channels you'll use plan your communication and messaging, and then creating all the assets that will go to execute this communication and messaging. Now 10 marketing channels that you would want to consider would be a website banner for your homepage, a donation page. Emails and we'll get more into email here shortly.
Social media posts. Social media banners. Facebook live, or you can go Instagram, live any kind of live, but I would recommend Facebook live if you are going live because the audience is bigger. Facebook ads, search engine marketing ads, like a Google grant or Google search ads. SMS [00:05:00] messaging. So a text message campaign. And if you have time, a direct mail postcard and maybe too late, by the time you hear this, but maybe it's something you can work into the mix next year would be really like a, save the date postcard for direct mail.
I think that is an area that is significantly underused by nonprofits when it comes to Giving Tuesday. So here's an example of what your planning communication might look like. And I would use this as a way to really lock in the dates and the marketing channels for your Giving Tuesday. One month before you're Giving Tuesday. You're having an in-home date for the save the date for your direct mail postcard. One week before Giving Tuesday. You have like you're Giving Tuesday announcement, like social media posts, social media banners.
You send out a Giving Tuesday email and a website banner. And I say one week before, but you can start like really four weeks before, but really the Giving Tuesday message, isn't going to resonate that [00:06:00] heavily a month before, because it's so dependent on that date. And you have, Thanksgiving messaging and things like that coming up.
So I'd say at the latest you want to do one week before when your. You're putting up that Giving Tuesday announcement, and this is through digital channels. Like your social media posts, social media banners, Giving Tuesday email and a website banner. The Friday before Giving Tuesday. This is when you're really ramping up your marketing and promotion of Giving Tuesday.
And you're putting your Facebook ads out there. You have your search engine marketing ads, and you might even put another email out a deployed another email that Friday before and keep in mind in the U S this is like that day after Thanksgiving. And most people will be off here in the United States.
So this is something you would want to schedule in advance. Then you have the day before Giving Tuesday. So it's that Monday. And with this, you would have social media posts, SMS messages, and an email. And everything is like tomorrow. The messaging is, tomorrow's the big day tomorrow is Giving Tuesday, whatever the case may be. And [00:07:00] then the day of course, Giving Tuesdays here it's that Tuesday.
And this is when you're really in full marketing blitz mode. You're going to have multiple social media posts. You're going to have an email that you deploy in the am, an email that you deploy in the PM. And some people even deploy a third email, maybe at 11:00 PM. Like we only an hour left to meet our goal. And that's really just dependent on your philosophies and your resources and things like that. I'm also on Giving Tuesday, you can go Facebook live, you can send out SMS, text messages.
So these are the different marketing. Channels that I would use on Giving Tuesday. The most overlooked piece of Giving Tuesday is after Giving Tuesday. So the day after. Or if not the day, at least within 48 hours, you want to put out another email, social media posts and maybe even do a Facebook live.
And thank your donors. If you have updates on how much revenue you generated or how much impact was able to be made, then definitely put that out there. If you're short on your [00:08:00] goal, then this is also a good time to say, Hey, thank you for a great Giving Tuesday. We're still X amount of dollars short. Can you help us reach our goal.
And that is a way that you can still raise money after Giving Tuesday is over with. Now let's talk about couple of tips on the day of Giving Tuesday. This is a day where it can be super stressful. But what I challenge you to do is make it fun. And you're listening to me right now. I don't know if you're a fundraising department of one, or if you're a fundraising department of 20, I just don't know if it's a fundraising department of one. I make it as fun and easy as possible.
Do something different. Celebrate the day. If you're a group, if you have an actual organization where there's multiple people have a breakfast brought in, do something fun to make it engaging and don't make it try to take as much stress out of the day as possible. Make it as fun as you can. And then Tuesday morning that Giving Tuesday morning, make it fun.
You want to [00:09:00] review the day? Like, all right. Here's what, here's the game plan. You go over roles, responsibilities, who's doing what who's monitoring social media, who's deploying emails. Who's answering calls, all of that. You want to have all that just game plan ready in the morning, and then you launch it.
You're ready to go. And you're Giving Tuesday is off to the races. Now before Giving Tuesday rewinding a little bit, there's a few questions that you need to ask yourself that need to be answered so you can. You know, really have a solid Giving Tuesday plan one is why are you participating in Giving Tuesday?
And that doesn't mean you shouldn't, but I think when you understand why you have a little more clarity on what you're looking to accomplish with Giving Tuesday, are we looking to raise a certain amount of money to help fund a certain need? You know, what, why are we participating? Are we participating?
Because this is a day of worldwide generosity and we just want to, Be in the game too, while our donors, while it's are open, that could be a reason as well. Think about what will your donations help to accomplish [00:10:00] or to fund. And this could be something big. It could be a capital project.
It could be. It could be whatever fits your donation. Maybe there's a research study that you're looking to get funded. Maybe it's beds for a shelter. So think about these things that your donations or that the donations will help accomplish. And then think about why your organization is unique. You know, because everybody will not everybody, because you might listen to this and say, I'm not doing Giving Tuesday, but there's going to be. A ton of non-profits doing Giving Tuesdays.
So that being said it's a competitive day. So why would someone donate to your organization? Think about what is unique. And then think about what a quantifiable gift or impact can be. For example X amount of dollars will help accomplish X. If it's $50 will help us shelter X amount of animals or. $25 will feed a family of five for three meals.
So think about what that dollar equivalency would be and what is [00:11:00] accomplished with that dollar amount. And then you want to answer the question of what will our creative need to communicate and by creative, your images, your copy of your emails and social media posts, your ads, your calls to action.
What do we need to communicate to our audiences? And then very important. When will you deploy your assets? So what days and times will you be posting? Will you be sending emails? Will you be putting up that pop-up banner on your website? And then think about also if a donor were to call your nonprofit. On Giving Tuesday. Is someone there?
Are you ready? Will someone be there to answer the phone and help? Take that donation over the phone. This is something that needs to be considered Azure planning, a comprehensive Giving Tuesday program. The last thing that you want to do. And this is really a game changer for Giving Tuesday is can you get a match?
Is there. A board member, a donor, a company in your community that is willing to make a matching gift. [00:12:00] I've seen matching gifts, totally transform the amount of giving that occurs within organizations on Giving Tuesday. So if you can secure a matching gift, this can help your emails. And now, instead of just having, $50 does this, your $50 is now a hundred dollars, so you can double your impact. So find out.
Is there someone or some organization that, that can assist with the match? Okay, we're going to get into 17 tips for Giving Tuesday right after this message.
And we're back on the Jeremy Haselwood show. Now we're going to go over 17 tips for Giving Tuesday. And some of these relate to the marketing channels that I went over in the first part of this podcast. The first tip that I'm going to give is, and this is low-hanging fruit. Please do this. Make sure that you have a website header image.
These are often called hero images. It's the homepage of your website. Make sure that this has the same Giving Tuesday messaging and creative as other touch points of your Giving [00:13:00] Tuesday campaigns. That's what tip number one. Tip number two, you want to create that offer? I mentioned it a few minutes ago. But don't go into Giving Tuesday without an offer.
If you're going into Giving Tuesday with just generic donate now message. Make a gift message. You're Giving Tuesday is minimizing its impact. So you want to have that offer $15 equals what $50 equals, what $200 equals what? So have a breakdown of equivalencies. And if you have different levels of equivalencies, that's even better, better as opposed to just one level of equivalencies.
Don't overdo it with five. I would say three would be the max, people take information in threes very well. So do X amount of dollars equals this X amount of dollars equals that. And then so on for one more offer. The next thing that I would challenge you is on your social media accounts, especially your Facebook account, create a Giving Tuesday cover [00:14:00] image.
And this is that hero area of your Facebook account. And this should be. If not the same, pretty close to the same message or image that you'll have as the hero image on your website. Basically it's like anywhere a donor or prospective donor interacts with your brand on Giving Tuesday. They need to see uniformity and continuity within your marketing and branding assets.
So create an asset for your Facebook cover image. Tip number four is. Emails, you're sending before, during and after Giving Tuesday. And I covered this a little bit. When we talked about the calendar, I'd send at the latest one email. A week before. And it's, the messaging is very simple. It's like next week, a week from today and you're talking about Giving Tuesday, what the need is.
Now, if you start earlier in the month, that's fine. Have a reason to do it. Bring quality and value to that email. You want to send one? You can send one on that Friday. Definitely send an email the [00:15:00] day before Giving Tuesday. And on the day of Giving Tuesday, I would send I'd recommend two emails.
If you don't have the time or resources, at least. One email in the morning on Giving Tuesday. And then of course, the day after, or two days after you want to send an email thanking donors. For their gift and their participation. That is tip number four, tip number five. Remove within your email, any social media icons.
This is something that I've seen way too much of on fundraising emails across the board. So I'm, we're talking about Giving Tuesday here, but any fundraising email that you're sending, you want that email to be hyper focused on one call to action, which is to donate. You want to take away any distractions, any links, anything that's going to take your donor away from your donation page.
And I still see a lot of fundraising emails. That have the social media icons at the top or at the bottom in the footer of the email, remove all of those for your giving. [00:16:00] Tuesday fundraising messages. Tip number six. Guess what? No social media icons on your donation page. Yes. We don't want them on your email, but we also don't want them on your donation page because if they come to your donation page, You have a person who's already more inclined not to give because a donation page has an abandonment rate of about 80%, which means only 20% of people that hit your donation page will likely donate anyways.
So don't give them a single reason to leave your page, remove your social media icons from your donation page. Tip number seven. Email subject lines. I'm always a proponent of testing and Giving Tuesday, you have one, one. Time to test it. I typically don't recommend a whole lot of testing during big fundraising seasons.
Like your aunt or something like that. However, I do think you need to learn for the next year. [00:17:00] So one simple test that you can do with your email is within the subject line. Test using the word Giving Tuesday versus a subject line that does not have Giving Tuesday. Everything else will be the same.
Your messaging, your creative and everything will be the same within your email, but the subject line find out what works for you, because the theory is on Giving Tuesday, there's going to be so many people who say Giving Tuesday or mentioned the word within their head, their subject line, that it may drown out, your brand and your nonprofit from actually being seen or open. And that is why you want to test whether that's effective or not. On the flip side, maybe someone seeing that Giving Tuesdays oh, I need to open that email because I know that's today.
So I would test that if you haven't already, if you've already tested this and have significantly. Or statistically significant results. Then you may not need to test it again, but that's something I'd recommend. Tip number eight. On your Facebook ads. Whenever you create a Facebook ad, [00:18:00] you have the option to select donate.
Now as your call to action button, what you should do to make sure you have donate. Now that way people know if they click on it, they're donating. But one piece that I believe a lot of nonprofits miss is within the copy of your Facebook ad. Include a link there as well because people there, they visually may not, their eyes may not go underneath that picture and see the donate now button.
So as people are reading the copy that you have within your Facebook ad, they're scanning down top to bottom. So at the very bottom. Put a call to action there. Make your donation here and put the link for your donation page. Now, if you have a very long link, what I would recommend is using a link shortener like Bitly and put your link there.
And whenever it's posted on within your Facebook ad, it will say, please make a gift here. And it will have a much shorter link that won't look very well. It won't look spammy because it's not going to be like 200 characters long. All right. So consider [00:19:00] adding that into your Facebook ad mix. Tip number nine. Oh, man, this is. This is a biggie you want to approve and schedule your Facebook ads early.
If you're scrambling to get your Facebook ads done the day before or the day of Facebook, then you've probably missed the boat. And I'm saying this because I've seen. Tragic. Tragedy occur in that. Organizations have just got this done. They've just built their Facebook ad campaigns, but they did it the day before.
And either Facebook rejected them or there were errors and they weren't able to get the issues resolved by Giving Tuesday and therefore nonprofits missed out on using this effective marketing channel to help amplify their fundraising campaign. So do this early, I'd recommend having all your Facebook ads scheduled one to two weeks before Facebook do this.
You'll be so thankful and that's a big piece and you'll have that out of the way. That big piece of your Giving Tuesday campaign will be [00:20:00] done. Tip number 10. I would recommend that you only run Facebook ads. On the newsfeed and I'd even recommend that you don't run ads on Instagram. And the reason for this is your donor population. Number one more of them are on Facebook than Instagram and yes, you can target people by age on Instagram.
However, based on what I've seen in my experience, the conversion rates of a Facebook ad are significantly higher than an Instagram ad. Now, if you want to set aside maybe a portion of your budget and test Instagram, then do that. And set that up as a separate campaign, don't mix your Facebook and your Instagrams within the same campaign of Facebook ads.
But I also recommend only running. Only running newsfeed ads because if you're running story ads or The right sidebar or video, like those ads are not as effective. And this is based on the work that I do and [00:21:00] what I've seen. I've never seen a story ad outperform. A newsfeed ad. And if your budget is limited, which it is, you want to make sure that you're maximizing the return on every single dollar that you spend on your Facebook ads.
So I would say. Don't fall into the trap also of Facebook doing what their recommendations are. Let's be smarter than what their recommendations are and select manual placements for your Facebook ads and only select newsfeed. Okay. Tip number 11, which correlates very strongly with tip number 10.
And that is don't use Facebook's default ad settings, their default ad settings go to all locations, all ages. All everything. I would target people first and foremost, within the location that you serve. And an age group that is 50 years and older. And I would recommend that because again, budgets are limited.
The average age of the digital donor is around 65 years old. So why would I want to target [00:22:00] my ads to a 25 or 30 year old? Yes, they'll donate. There are people within that age group that will donate. However, there's a higher propensity of people within the age group of 50 years and older that will donate.
And if I'm looking to get a stronger return on investment for. What I'm investing in Facebook ads and donations coming in. I want to target 50 plus, and it could even be 55 or 60 plus, 50 plus might even be a little too generous. Tip number 12. On your Facebook page. You can actually, there's a button there and if it's not already set to donate. Then make sure that the button on your Facebook page is set to donate and you do have to have Facebook's nonprofit tools set up for this.
So make sure you set that up and for that donate link, have that link point to your Giving Tuesday page, if possible, that way people, that the continuity of the experience. Is there they are seeing you're Giving Tuesday messages in your Facebook. The cover image, they click on donate. It goes to your Facebook.
Excuse me to your [00:23:00] Giving Tuesday donation page. Tip number 13. On your donation page for Giving Tuesday. Remove all of your top menus. So no top menus on your donation page. This means if I'm on your donation page, and I look at the top, I shouldn't see about us, our services contact. I shouldn't see any of that.
There should be no top menus and again, no social media icons. We want the whole focus of the person on this page to be on your offer. And you're in the making that gift. This will help to reduce abandonment rates on your donation, page, and help to increase your donations. Tip number 14. On your donation page. You want to make sure that your creative reinforces your Giving Tuesday messaging.
If I respond to a Facebook ad or an email or a Facebook post or an SMS text message, and we're talking about Giving Tuesday and I go to your donation page and it's a [00:24:00] generic page. And it doesn't reinforce the messaging than as a potential donor. I'm confused. I don't know. Am I giving to Giving Tuesday?
Yes. I know I'm giving to your organization, but you told me that my $50 could do this, but I go to your page and I don't see that anywhere. So I'm think I'm going to hesitate giving because this isn't really what I thought it was going to be. You want to make sure that the creative, everything is in sync with the assets and the messaging that brought that donor to your donation page. Tip number 15. Make a plan to go live.
And there's so many ways that you can go live in so many reasons that you can go live. It's very specific to your organization. It could be the executive director. Encouraging people to give on Giving Tuesday, sharing the goal. What's your going to do. If we reached the goal, how the gifts will be used, it could be a tour of your facilities.
It could be talking about research studies that you're doing. It could be interviews of people that you [00:25:00] serve. There's so many things that you can do with going live and. Taking that time to express why the work that you do is important. And then reminding people is Giving Tuesday and you can go ahead and make a gift by going here. Okay.
Tip number six. At a website. Light box pop up. And these are the things like when you go to a website you're greeted with a pop-up message. That you have to actually click the X to close. And some people say I don't want to do that because I don't like pop-ups. Just remember this. It's not about you.
This is about raising money. Pop-ups are extremely effective. And one of the reasons they're extremely effective is because the person that sees it has one of two choices. They either click donate and they go to your donation page or they close the box. That's it. They're not intrusive. There they're there.
As soon as the person hits the page, it's like a welcome box. The fallacy is, if you do not have this, [00:26:00] if someone goes to your website, now they have no exaggeration, probably 20 different calls to action. Click on the donate button. Contact us about us. Sign up for the blog. Read the latest story. Need help.
There's so many different choices that you're giving a donor if they just hit your webpage. So make it simple. We want to shorten the decision making cycle, shorten the friction and just get people to click that donate button or close the window. And I've seen these generate tens of thousands of dollars.
I'm not saying that would be the case for you, but I've seen these be extremely successful. And I recommend that. Now tip number seven. Is a little more involved, but I've also seen this to be an extreme game changer for organizations that do it. And this is bringing other people in to help. And what I mean by that, it's like a peer to peer, but not necessarily set up as a peer to peer. This is tapping into your board, your volunteers, maybe your friends or your [00:27:00] staff, and putting together a coordinated, like personal Giving Tuesday plan where your border volunteers or friends like. You're providing them with assets.
So picture this, you seek these people. People agree to say yes, I will help you for Giving Tuesday. You have a zoom meeting where you're bringing everybody together. You're talking about the importance of Giving Tuesday, what you're looking to do, and now their call to action, because. They said they would help you. You're going to provide them with phone scripts, to call or text their friends.
You're going to provide them with email copy and all they have to do is just templatize it. And. And send it to their friends. You're going to provide them with social media posts and images. You almost have a kit that you're going to arm your, what we're going to call these advocates. You're going to arm these advocates for Giving Tuesday. And they're going to tap into their networks.
So on Giving Tuesday, it's not just you, that soliciting donations for your organization. Now, your board is your volunteers, your employees, and [00:28:00] you've armed them with everything that they need for you to be successful. Also, you can provide them with a calendar of, okay, we're going to drop our first email here.
So if you can send this email on this date, Please do that. And sure. There's going to be people that say they'll do it and they won't do it. But other people who are really big advocates for your cause and supporters, like they're going to roll their sleeves up and they're going to get in the trenches with you to help out on Giving Tuesday. Do not forget to provide this group of helpers with the donation page URL, because you provide them all this information on what to say, but don't just. Provide them with what to say, and it ends with donate.
Now, make sure you provide the link to them that way, whenever they're sharing these assets, they have everything that they need. Okay. So those are the 17 tips. That's an overview of Giving Tuesday. I hope you learned a lot with this. Also there is my course. You can go to Giving Tuesday course.com and we go a little bit deeper on each of these.
this is today [00:29:00] I hope you enjoyed it. Hope you took a lot of notes. I want to thank you for tuning in to the Jeremy Haselwood show. And if you enjoy today's episode, don't forget to follow or subscribe so that you're always up to date when the latest episode drops until next time, keep following your dreams to find your purpose.
