5 Tips to Prepare Your Nonprofit Cause for Giving Tuesday

For any nonprofit, the last few months of the year are incredibly impactful. The holiday season is filled with events specifically created to help potential donors focus on the causes they care about. 

One of the biggest charitable events of the season is GivingTuesday -- a global day of giving with the mission to unleash the power of people and organizations to transform their communities and the world. This year, Giving Tuesday will be on December 1st, 2020. If you would like to market your cause to receive GivingTuesday donations, it’s vital to begin planning your strategy now for maximum impact. 

If all you’re planning to do for Giving Tuesday is send out a few random reminders or create a banner, you’re missing out on a huge pool of potential donors. Using software tailored to your needs – like ours at CauseDRIVEN Marketing – you can make sure no stone goes unturned in your efforts. Here are our five tips to best prepare you for Giving Tuesday this year. 

1. Design a Giving Page

One of the top ways to lose potential donors is having a confusing website (or no website at all), which inadvertently leads people away from your site and from the donate button. No one wants to visit a website with a specific goal in mind only to find a cluttered page that’s difficult to navigate. Ultimately these potential donors leave your page and decide on another charitable cause that’s provided an easier to use solution.

To create a page that looks great and functions for your donors, you should utilize a service that makes it easy for you. At CauseDRIVEN Marketing, we’ve created Website Builder which helps you build pages that make sense not only for your donors but also for you. Platforms like Page Builder Pro allow you to evolve quickly, creating and editing pages as needed without waiting for updates. 

From now until GivingTuesday, our partner Paperless Transactions will build your cause a free, custom Giving Widget to draw in donors and maximize your impact! Contact us today to learn more. 

Obviously, other software can help you build a straightforward page that has information on it but accomplishes little else. With CauseDRIVEN Marketing, you get coaching to help you build a page that works for you to gather potential donors and target the right people for you. You can even create two different campaigns for A/B Testing to figure out what works best for nonprofit campaigns. These are digital marketing practices that all kinds of brands are taking advantage of, and now your nonprofit can, too.

2. Maximize Your Visibility

Whether it’s for something as big as GivingTuesday or an event in the early spring, your goal should be to have the most effective campaign as possible. To do this, you must maximize your visibility. In the digital era, this can be a challenge, but it also has tremendous benefits. 

With software like Page Builder Pro - Donor Analytics built to utilize Google Analytics metrics, not only can you design versatile pages for your website, you’ll also be able to analyze donor data, which can help your nonprofit become more visible to search engines as well as provide real insights into how your donors behave on your page. This ultimately gives you full visibility into what’s working for you or what’s working against you. Increasing your visibility also means utilizing other mediums, such as email campaigns. With an efficient donor page, it’s easier than ever to gather contact information and create these types of campaigns, and CauseDRIVEN Marketing can help. 

During GivingTuesday and the end of the year, donors are looking for causes and nonprofits to give their money to right now, not in the future. Harnessing all your digital capabilities to make your nonprofit as visible as possible allows you to catch these donors at the right time. 

Not only that, but CauseDRIVEN Marketing has the capability to manage all aspects of your campaign, from your website to targeted emails to SMS messages. An all-in-one service allows every bit of your campaign to work together without having to try to manage it from different systems.

3. Meet Donors Where They Are

These days, getting donors from your website while they’re sitting down at their computer is important, but it’s only one piece of the larger picture. Meeting your donors where they are is crucial to getting as many donations as possible, and where are they? Their inbox.

With CauseDRIVEN Marketing, we can create campaigns that fit your exact needs, tailored for your church or nonprofit. This means email marketing campaigns, which involve sending strategic emails to your donors that can include actual links for them to donate or allow communication directly with someone in your organization via chat.

Basically, engagement is key, and an app enables total engagement with your content and nonprofit. 

These emails are also vital for donors who might wish to give a large donation but aren’t sure how that works. If these types of donors are unable to find answers, they may be encouraged to go elsewhere. With the ability to ask questions from their inboxes, you enable them to get the answers they need reliably and efficiently.

4. Create and Track Your Goals

All of the functions we’ve mentioned so far are excellent ways to tap into a larger market on GivingTuesday, but to really take your efforts to the next level, you should develop campaigns that not only get you donations on December 1st but that also helps you build and meet long-term goals. 

Every campaign should have a set of goals, whether that’s a specific dollar amount reached or a number of new contacts gained. With CauseDRIVEN Marketing, you can easily track your campaign goals in every facet, whether that’s email, texting, or online donations. 

With Page Builder Pro, you can even connect your website to Google Analytics and get precise, in-depth data that can help you not only track your goals but create new ones that make sense for your donor base. 

5. Build Relationships 

An underrated part of GivingTuesday is that receiving a donation can also mean receiving contact information from donors who support and care about your cause. Using a service like CauseDRIVEN Marketing allows you to gather this data and use it to forge relationships that benefit both you and your past, present, and future supporters. 

Contact information of donors who you already know support your cause allows you to send email campaigns and text messages to them and even provide the convenience of a mobile app, building a relationship that continues their support and partnership with your nonprofit. 

Outside of donors, look to build relationships with peers and other causes to magnify your impact. Our CauseDRIVEN Power Group Call provides an opportunity for nonprofits to join a weekly call to empower their marketing efforts. 

Get Prepared in Advance

You might be thinking that this all sounds great but there’s just no way to get it done before Giving Tuesday, but the CauseDRIVEN Marketing team is here to help you within a week or even a few days. Contact us today to discuss how we can work together to maximize your donations this year and download our Marketing Toolkit to get started.