Giving Days for Charities and Nonprofits

Updated: Jun 4

Part 7 of The Ultimate Guide to Digital Fundraising for Nonprofits

An illustration of an alarm clock and other icons representing charity giving days

What is a giving day?

A giving day is a 24 hour fundraising event where a charity focuses on raising a target dollar amount from the community. While the charity will usually raise most funds during those 24 hours, donors will often be able to donate on the giving day landing page before and a little after the event.

Tight communications planning and execution are crucial for an effective giving day campaign. You should plan your giving day campaign in Phases as follows:

Phase 1: 2 months to 2 weeks before

Tell your community that your giving day is coming up, get them to save the date in their calendars
Develop your messaging, creatively brainstorm approaches content angles
Develop web, email and social content for the giving day, build your web pages and infrastructure
Locking in matches, a crucial element to optimising income (more on this below)
Prepare your internal teams, key stakeholders, ambassadors and influencers
Allow people to donate early if they want to.

Phase 2: 2 weeks to 1 day before

Step up to more frequent communications from you directly and from your ambassadors
Emphasis the importance of the day and the impact of donating to your community
Respond to supporter engagement with the giving day on social media
Increase your engagement communication to internal stakeholders.

Phase 3: The giving day

A huge and sustained communications push, firing on all fronts:

Varied social and email communications directly from the organisation throughout the day
Responding to all community social engagement around the day
Live social casts with programs people on the ground, CEO etc
Ambassador posts
Partner and corporate posts
Insistent follow-up with internal stakeholders, board, management to ensure maximum participation.

Phase 4: The day after

“It’s not too late to donate” messaging
Wind-down of communications, thank yous.

Important considerations for your giving day

Momentum communications are crucial for a giving day campaign. By this I mean social posts and emails that cultivate the feeling of a special “moment” where a lot of people are coming together to do something special and achieve collective impact.

Your momentum communications should include frequent updates on donations and progress towards the goal, interesting quotes or video snippets from supporters or staff, “just in” news on “surprise” mini-stories and events, inspiring video thanks from beneficiaries and so on. These should increase in the week before to crescendo on the giving day, giving supporters many touchpoints with the campaign all working from different creative angles to inspire a donation.

A clear target is a must for a giving day campaign. It gives the community a clear goal to rally around and gives you something to measure and report progress against. You can create a real sense of momentum as you near the target and encourage supporters to donate to help you cover the final distance.

Donation matches are proven to be an important factor for giving days, increasing donor response and donation amounts with the promise that all gifts and their impact will be multiplied by another donor. But matches take effort to find.

You may have a major donor or a number of mid-level donors ready to make a gift and willing to contribute to a match pool for your giving day. Or with a bit more coordination, you may build a match group through a special question in a supporter survey and reach out to them for this campaign.

You’ll want to start those conversations early, like a couple of months out from your giving day, to make sure you’ve secured the match and can talk about it in pre-giving day communications.

Challenges are like mini-goals that can be drip-fed throughout your giving day to provide extra incentive for donors and participants. Challenges often use matches or “donation unlocks” tied to a specific goal, for example:

Help us reach 50 donations and the first hour and a $1,000 donation from a generous donor will be unlocked and added to the total
When we reach 100 donations, we’ll live cast our CEO getting dunked in a bucket of icy water.

You can gamify your giving day with teams and a peer-to-peer fundraising, encouraging fun competition and increasing your reach to fundraiser networks. You should think about the creative approach to the peer-to-peer angle and what incentive you can provide fundraisers. Leaderboards a good idea. You also want to make sure you get the right balance of creative, making the team and peer-to-peer elements visible on the page without distracting from the main call to action to donate.

Of course a nonprofit’s biggest asset is its people and community, and you must leverage yours. Making sure your board, management, staff and ambassadors understand the importance of their participation to the event’s fundraising success. Get them on board early with commitments to participate, get their networks on board (especially if there are high net worth individuals in those networks), and make it clear what you need them to do as the giving day approaches, and on the actual day.

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