11 Dos and Don’ts to Plan a Successful Giving Tuesday Campaign

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Plan a successful Giving Tuesday campaign to be proud of this year to attract and engage new donors with 11 Giving Tuesday dos and don’ts.

Grab Our Giving Tuesday Checklist to Get Ahead

Giving Tuesday is a fundraising professional’s opportunity to capture the interest of donors who are seeking out meaningful ways to make an impact. Lockdown your campaign strategy early to make it a day to remember. We’re known at Classy for our arsenal of Giving Tuesday best practices, but it’s important to know that there’s an equally long list of things to avoid to be successful. We’re here to help you distinguish between the two to make sure nothing slows your momentum.

Below, you’ll get a fully compiled list of Giving Tuesday dos and don’ts for creating, promoting, and wrapping up a stellar campaign. Put these tips to the test to stay on top of every detail.

11 Giving Tuesday Dos and Don’ts

Ready to Get Started? Let’s Start With What to Do

1. Do: Build a Memorable Brand

You never know which touchpoint will convince a supporter to donate or, more importantly, donate on a recurring basis. Maintain a consistent brand across all of the Giving Tuesday collateral you share out this year by strategizing a memorable, donor-friendly design.

Think about your supporters’ experience. Create a seamless look and feel across your Giving Tuesday emails and social media posts to continue the narrative that you established on your campaign page. In a sea of nonprofits, consistency will help your organization stand apart.

2. Do: Prepare a Design Kit

Once you’ve nailed down your branding, make it easier on those who need to pull consistent imagery and visuals for your various fundraising initiatives. Create an easy-to-use design kit that saves valuable time by placing all of your high-resolution images in one folder that key players can access.

When it’s time to assemble everything onto your campaign pages, head to a dedicated folder titled something along the lines of “Giving Tuesday Assets,” where all of your most up-to-date files are easily accessible.

Try It on Classy: Build your campaign with our intuitive design tools and easily upload files from your media kit. From there, it only takes a few clicks to plug in impact block photos, logos, and a customized hero image.

Use this opportunity to bring your unique branding to life in each section of your campaign page. Pull in specific fonts, colors, and visuals that continue the experience you offer in your campaign promotions.

3. Do: Communicate Your Value With Impact Blocks

Show supporters the real-world impact of their contributions with impact blocks. Impact blocks are optional (but highly encouraged) content sections within your donation page. They combine a short and compelling title, meaningful imagery, and a brief description leading to a relevant call to action.

Why does it matter? Well, consider the number of first-time donors you’ll attract with your Giving Tuesday campaign. Educate these new supporters on your organization’s positive contributions to its beneficiaries by creating impact blocks that quickly tell your story and demonstrate your excellent work.

Leave donors feeling confident in the value every dollar brings to your cause, down to the specific impact each gift amount will make. Remove the guesswork on your campaign page to move the needle on your year-end goals and your mission at large.

Do: Communicate Your Value With Impact Blocks

4. Do: Suggest Strategic Gift Amounts

Your average gift size can tell you a lot about your donor base. Use that data to create suggested gift amounts that motivate larger gifts and help you raise more.

Layout exactly which donation amounts will benefit your Giving Tuesday campaign goals to help donors envision their individual impact and motivate them to take action.

Check Out Gift Size Benchmarks From 4,800+ Nonprofits

Try It on Classy: To add suggested gift amounts, navigate to “Pages” in the back-end of Classy, select “Donation Page,” and then edit the “Donation Settings.”

5. Do: Include a Recurring Gift Option

Giving Tuesday is a great time to tap into the generosity of donors who want to see their impact last longer and reach further.

Your campaign might focus solely on promoting your recurring giving program this year. It may also focus on a variety of other priorities like peer-to-peer fundraising or event registrations. Either way, position your nonprofit to tap into the power of recurring gifts.

Make your recurring giving experience hard to pass up with these best practices:

Offer the opportunity to give a recurring gift on every donation page
Include multiple frequencies outside of just a monthly donation
Offer a strategic suggested recurring donation amount

6. Do: Test Your Donation Experience

You’ll never know if your Giving Tuesday donation experience is ready to rock if you don’t give it a test run.

Even the most passionate donors are likely to stop the donation process if it’s too complicated. Attract more donations across all generations by investing in your user experience.

Before sharing your campaign with the public, go through the process yourself to make test donations from multiple devices and browsers. Open your test emails, click through to your campaign page, explore your language from the lens of a donor, and move through the checkout flow. Make sure anyone from any device can contribute.

Be sure to run through your payment experience with a keen eye. Was it quick and easy for you to finalize your gift? Suppose you’re not offering payment options like Venmo, PayPal, or digital wallets. In that case, you may miss out on the last vital step to conversion.

Learn more about ClassyPay to explore those options for your campaign.

Now, Let’s Cover Those Don’ts

7. Don’t: Clutter Your Donation Page

Simplicity is critical in any web experience. Think about how platforms like TikTok took off and fueled the entrance of social sharing like Instagram Reels and Pinterest Idea Pins.

Nonprofits can use these short-form, information-sharing trends on their donation pages to keep the message and call to action simple. A clean layout allows supporters to navigate your page quickly and successfully move through the flow without becoming overwhelmed or frustrated. For some donors, a cluttered page may push them to abandon the donation process entirely.

A good rule of thumb is to consider your most valuable information and place it right at the top under your header image. The easier it is to get to a donation button, the more likely you’ll be to convert each page visitor.

8. Don’t: Underestimate a Communications Plan

Your beautiful donation page will need some traffic for any of the above tips to show value, so let’s talk about communications. Create a communications plan that clearly outlines every touchpoint you want to have with a supporter leading up to Giving Tuesday.

Your plan should map out the channels you’ll use to reach new donors, including social media, email, direct mail, and any events that fall ahead of November. From there, set your cadence and goals per channel.

This year, you’ll see many nonprofits leaning into social media to build awareness through the #GivingTuesday hashtag with new and creative ways to be found by donors. We’ve created an entire nonprofit social media content planner that you can use to strategize your Giving Tuesday plans.

Get a Free Social Media Content Planner

9. Don’t: Make Your Ask Too Broad

When you reach out to your supporters, you can easily overwhelm them with too much information. For example, you likely don’t need to include your founding story in your Giving Tuesday outreach.

Instead, provide a tight one to two-sentence description of your campaign and its goal. Then, transition into a very specific and targeted ask. Think about how you can lean into the power of a video. Explain a bit about your campaign in an easy-to-understand (and easy-to-remember) video with our video best practices for nonprofits.

10. Don’t: Forget to Thank Donors

Nurture long-term relationships with your supporters well after they donate. Take the opportunity to thank them quickly and continue to educate them about new opportunities to give back.

Write out your emails before your campaign launches and automate them to send to supporters the minute they donate. Include thoughtful language that will stand out in an inbox flooded with robotic emails and generic subject lines. We covered some great Giving Tuesday email subject line tips here if you’re looking for inspiration.

Try It on Classy: We provide a few tools to easily thank donors, like a customized “thank you” page for campaigns and personalized “donation receipts.”

11. Don’t: Be Afraid to Tap on Classy for Support

Classy is here for you through every step of your Giving Tuesday journey.

If you’re not currently using the Classy platform for fundraising, we have plenty of free resources available for you in our Giving Tuesday Resource Center and on-demand Classy Academy courses.

Free Giving Tuesday Resources

For those within our Classy community of nonprofits, you can turn to the Support Center. It has step-by-step articles that walk you through various features and subtleties of the Classy platform. Spend some time reading before Giving Tuesday and bookmark any helpful articles for quick reference.