Hopefully the words “Giving Tuesday” hold some sort of significance to you as someone who is involved in social media for non profits. If not, you definitely need to start doing your research! Giving Tuesday is one of the most important days of the year for a non profit looking for funding and it’s absolutely crucial that you are involved.
What is Giving Tuesday?
#GivingTuesday, which takes place this year on December 3rd, is a day that aims to kick off the holiday giving season. Strategically placed after Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the day invites people to make a donation (of either personal time or money) to support things like big issues (think global poverty) or more local issues (think homelessness). Families and individuals are encouraged to be generous in whatever ways matter to them, whether that means volunteering at a local charity or donating to a favourite cause. It’s basically an national campaign to encourage charitable activities that support non profits. Hopefully you’re starting to understand how important it is that your non profit is involved.
How do we get involved?
To be an official partner, you must be a registered non-profit [a 501(c)3 in the United States] with a specific #GivingTuesday initiative, or a for-profit business, school, religious or community group who commit to spearhead a project that will benefit at least one registered charity or non-profit. This is super important. If you don’t have a specific initiative, either take steps to create one or sit this year out. Here’s a great HubSpot article on how to amplify your Giving Tuesday campaign. Oh! Also, Giving Tuesday actually provides a bunch of suggestions on how non-profits can become involved on Giving Tuesday.
Anyways, if you don’t have a specific initiative I would suggest that you don’t get involved. United Planet, the non-profit that I work for, won’t be registering as an official partner but we will be promoting Giving Tuesday on our blog and social media in general. It’s really about the bigger picture. The non profit community as a whole is coming together to promote a day of giving. The fact that this takes place on social media means that it’s going to be easy for your non profit to take part, and in doing so you’ll probably draw some traffic to your website and/or help spread awareness of your cause. You’ll also get to interact with other members of the non profit world, which is always a plus.
Give me some numbers.
If you’re still not convinced that being involved in Giving Tuesday is an absolute must then let me convince you with some numbers. I’m not sure why, but crazy awesome statistics are always super convincing. So here you go:
- In 2012, more than 2,500 partners from all 50 states of the US took part in Giving Tuesday.
- Blackbaud, the accounting software that Giving Tuesday uses, processed over $10 million in online donations on the 27th.
- Paypal mobile donations soared 487% higher than the previous year’s number. The total value of those donations increased 228%.
- More than 50 million people worldwide spread the word about Giving Tuesday – you better believe that it was a trending topic world wide too!
- According to this infographic, the 28 clients that promoted Giving Tuesday performed 170% better on the actual day.
- The movement was named the “Social Innovation of the Year” by Bloomberg.com; “One of Five Philanthropy High Points in 2012” by the Chronicle of Philanthropy; received a 2013 Cannes Lions Award; and is a finalist for the Peter F. Drucker Award for Nonprofit Innovation. (Stats from this article)
At this point, I’m going to assume that you’re completely convinced that your non profit needs to take part in Giving Tuesday. Just in case you don’t fully understand what it’s about or how your non profit can take part I’ve added some articles for you to read at the end of this post.
So – will you be taking part in Giving Tuesday? What role will your non profit play? Can’t wait to see you all actively using the #GivingTuesday hashtag next month!
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Some extra reading for you
Obviously the media is buzzing about Giving Tuesday. In fact, Huffington Post has an entire section of their website dedicated to it. Salsa Labs designed an on-demand webinar about how to raise more money with a Giving Tuesday plan. For Momentum, who specialise in cause marketing, wrote an article on How to Maximise Your 2013 Giving Tuesday Results. Also, like I mentioned above, the GivingTuesday website has a whole bunch of resources for you to use. They’ve actually put together Tweets + Facebook posts that your non profit can use working up to the event and on the day of. You can also follow them on Twitter to keep up to date with partnerships, news, and more.
Tweet the Change 