Cultivating Giving Part 3: Planning ahead
By: Sarah Obenauer
Tags: Giving Back, Nonprofit Fundraising, Giving, Philanthropy, Fundraising

Your mission can be powerful, your impact can be clear, your design and copy can be ideal, but without planning, will anyone see it? Today we’re going to talk about planning ahead.

Choose a fundraising platform

You can collect donations on your website and this works wonderfully for raising funds all year, but so much of the excitement surrounding Giving Tuesday is visibly setting and reaching a goal with your community. You could work with a designer and a developer to craft a special campaign landing page, but this can take awhile. If you’re able to plan ahead, this is a wonderful approach, especially for a capital campaign.

However, for Giving Tuesday, we would encourage you to choose a fundraising tool that allows you to easily implement and customize for your organization. Plan some time to hop on a call with the team of the tool that you select to learn best practices and start implementing early.

Some of our favorite tools include GoFundMe Charity, Classy, Fundly, and Give Lively.

Audience engagement rings

Let’s revisit audience for just a few minutes. When we talk about audience engagement rings, we’re not suggesting that you buy bling for all your supporters, but we do want to talk about their interest and investment in your organization.

We like to look at our audience as three concentric rings with a fiery hot core, a warm second ring, and a slightly cooler third ring.

The fiery core are our biggest supporters and advocates. They might be staff, board members, volunteers, major donors, and recurring donors. They are invested in the organization, support as often as possible, and will sing the organization’s praise to those in the second and third rings.

The second ring isn’t quite as hot as the core. They also believe in the organization, but perhaps don’t engage as often or with as much vigor as the core. These might be past beneficiaries or participates, local organizations, companies with a similar mission, foundations, infrequent donors, etc.

The third ring is far cooler. They may or may not remember that your organization exists, and while they might be likely to support, they are not in the know about what you do as much as the second ring and the core. These might be followers on your social media accounts or signed up for your newsletter.

You could add more rings, but for our purposes today, three rings is plenty. Take some time and figure out who belongs in each ring for your organization.

The hot core

Starting with the hot core, these people are supporters of your organization. They are beyond supporters, they are fans. They are bought into what you do and will sing your praise. They might be staff, board members, volunteers, major donors, and recurring donors.

People want to support a fundraiser that already has momentum. If someone goes to your fundraising page and they see $0 donated, they are not likely to donate. However, if they hit a page where $1,000 has already been raised, they can easily donate with confidence. Why is that? Perhaps it is that people want to see social proof that your organization does, in fact, do quality work and people want to support it. Perhaps it is because people like to align with something successful. Regardless, momentum matters.

This is where your core comes in. Connect with them on the phone, face-to-face, or via email to let them know that you will be planning a fundraiser and that if they were going to give before year’s end that they can via the online fundraising platform you chose. Explain to them the reasoning and how their donation will help amplify giving. Give them plenty of time before you plan to officially launch to your second and third rings, and to the general public.

The second ring

Moving on to your second ring. These are the people who have heard of your organization, and likely interacted with it in some capacity. Maybe they attended an event or a class, perhaps you chat with the folks in this ring often or even meet for coffee, but they aren’t as invested as your core.

These people will feed off of the momentum of your campaign and the excitement from your core. However, they may need a bit more convincing to donate.

People in your second ring might hear about your campaign from those in the core, from your organization directly through personal interactions or events, or even from social media and email marketing.

Consider what you want their first interaction to be with your campaign and ask yourself, “Why would people in this ring see value in donating?” This is where carefully crafted copy, design, and video content come in handy. We’ll talk more about developing a theme and designing for success next week.

The third ring

Your third ring includes people that may or may not remember your organization. They are the ones on social media and your newsletter list who don’t really interact with the organization, but they were interested enough to follow you or subscribe for updates.

These people will likely hear about your campaign through a friend of a friend, on social media or through email marketing. Like with your second ring, copy, design, and video content are very important to draw these people into your cause. Think about a striking theme that sets your organization apart.

Again, consider what you want their first interaction to be with your campaign and ask yourself, “Why would people in this ring see value in donating?”

Other platforms to consider

Word-of-mouth, social media, and email marketing are the most commonly used platforms for Giving Tuesday campaigns. These options are far-reaching and affordable. However, we have a few suggestions of other methods and platforms that you should consider to amplify your campaign.

To consider:

Campaign headquarters: Create a space, either virtually or in-person, to gather any staff and volunteers who will be volunteering their to time to support your efforts for Giving Tuesday. With everyone synced up and in one space, you’re able to have multiple different people manning your various platforms, reacting with new posts and videos throughout the day based on how you are performing, and so on. Instead of simply planning and then hoping all goes according to plan, you will have a fully equipped team ready to be flexible and react on the actual campaign day.

Direct mail: You may want to introduce a direct mail component into your campaign. Like we discussed last week, direct mail captures attention in a way that other methods do not.

Blog: If you already have a blog, it might be worth the time and effort to prepare a post for your campaign. Don’t have a blogging platform? See if someone in your area with a well-visited blog might consider letting you guest blog and share your story, just make sure it is a business, organization, or person that you align with.

Press: Speaking of collaboration, consider whether or not you want to appeal to press for your campaign. When approaching them, focus on what makes your organization unique in the community.

Event: While an in-person event may be a little bit difficult right now, holding a virtual kick off or other event on a streaming platform could increase excitement for your fundraising efforts.

Get creative!

Content calendar

Finally, the most critical piece for developing a communication strategy and keeping it on track is to develop a content calendar. With this content calendar, you will identify date, time, audience, channel, topic, content, image, and link.

Content calendars give you a fuller picture of your strategy. They allow you to visualize your communication plan and fill in any gaps that might be missing whether that pertains to a certain audience, content, or platform. Content calendars are also easy to share, making the information accessible to all who will be involved.

We would suggest developing two different content calendars, one that identifies your communication strategy over the weeks leading up to the campaign and one that focuses on Giving Tuesday itself.

You can use our editable templates to get started on your content calendar. These calendars include Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, email marketing, and blog, but you can edit and add your own.

In action

Take some time to identify your audience engagement rings and starting filling out your content calendars in the coming weeks.

Next, we will cover developing a theme and designing for success. Let me know if you have any particular questions or prompts for this topic.

Need some extra help preparing your campaign? Give our Cultivating Giving Package a look. We’ll walk you through some of the exercises in the course, provide our guidance and strategy, and even create some deliverables like social media templates.