Maybe it’s just me, but whenever I hear the words “giving” and “Tuesday” together the soundtrack to “Jaws” plays in my head. The relentless music reminds me that no matter what size boat I am are in, this one day of giving is approaching and there is nothing I can do about it but watch that fin get closer and closer. While some organizations have been able to leverage Giving Tuesday for great outcomes, for the vast majority it represents an elusive promise of contributed revenue that drains resources from other, potentially more successful, activities.
Only nine years old, Giving Tuesday started as an idea by Henry Timms in 2012 who was working at 92nd Street Y, a community and cultural center in New York City. It was championed as a day to promote generosity and encourage people and companies to give back. Recorded contributions have risen from around $28 million in 2013 to over $2.47 billion in 2020.
In 2018, Facebook decided to get in on the action by promising to match 100% up to $250,000 given to charities using its giving platform on a first-come, first-serve basis. This incentivized nonprofits to register as a charity and use Facebook Donate as well as allowed for the collection of individual donor data by the social media company.
Big-name companies like Google, Microsoft, and Sykpe have jumped on board in support of Giving Tuesday and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has contributed matching resources in past years. Additionally, Giving Tuesday, the nonprofit, has been collecting data to better understand philanthropy in the digital age.
So this all sounds great, but from a boots-on-the-ground perspective does participating in Giving Tuesday to drive individual gifts to your nonprofit make sense? Does it fit within your larger fundraising annual plan? Furthermore, does it just create more competition between nonprofits for donations?
Conceptually, creating greater awareness about the work of nonprofits and encouraging donations seems like a huge benefit for the sector. Giving Tuesday is lauded as this panacea event that will fix all fundraising shortfalls, connect with the hip digital audience and streamline operations. However, for many small and short-staffed organizations often focusing time and attention on this one day of giving leads to additional stress and frustration including problems dealing with technology to a misunderstanding of relationship building with stakeholders.
The hoopla about online giving definitely reached a crescendo last year during the pandemic when so much of our society was forced into digital interactions for both professional and personal pursuits. One report states that online giving was up about 21% in 2020 over 2019. However, it is worth noting that size mattered.
“While the report found that charitable giving in the United States increased 2 percent in 2020, large organizations saw their fundraising revenues increase 5.3 percent, while midsize organizations saw a 1.2 percent in fundraising revenue and revenue for small nonprofits fell 7.2 percent.”
Without the infrastructure or staff to manage online giving, many nonprofits will continue to struggle to add it into their ongoing strategy.
Success on Giving Tuesday has been found by nonprofits through leveraging major gifts as a match opportunity, incentivizing giving (aka your local public radio station’s tote bag), or running a peer-to-peer or text-to-donate campaign. All these require dedicated staff time and financial and/or technical resources to run smoothly, and often these are in short supply for small nonprofits.
If you have a big enough boat to catch the shark, give all you’ve got to Giving Tuesday. Certainly, its growing brand awareness and connection to “a global movement” has an appeal. But for the vast majority of us who are captaining canoes or paddling makeshift rafts, maybe it’s a better idea to get out of the water for a bit, dry off and re-assess.
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