[VIDEO] #GivingTuesdayNow Social Media Tips, Tricks, and Strategies

In this webinar, Kat Murphy Toms, Giving Tuesday’s Digital Strategy Director, will show you how your organization can leverage #GivingTuesdayNow and set up a campaign in no time.

Full Transcript:

Steven: Okay. Kat, is it okay if I go ahead and get this party started officially?

Kat: Let’s get this party started officially.

Steven: Awesome. Welcome, everybody. Happy Monday. Thanks for being here. Good afternoon, if you’re on the East Coast. Good morning, if you’re out west. Wherever you are, I’m so happy to see you. We’re going to have a good session here. We’re going to get our Monday off to an awesome start. We’re here talking about #GivingTuesdayNow. Yes, a new GivingTuesday. I’m so excited. We’ve got a great guest to tell you all about it, but I’m so happy you’re all here. I hope you all had a good weekend, and you’re staying healthy, you’re staying safe. I’m Steven. I’m over here at Bloomerang. I’ll be moderating as usual.

Just a couple of quick housekeeping items. I want to let everyone know that we are recording this session. So if you have to leave early, maybe get interrupted by a kid or a family member, something like that, don’t worry, we will send you that recording. We’ll send you the slides. We’ll send you anything that is mentioned in the sessions. I promise we’ll get that to you this afternoon by email. So just be on the lookout for that from me.

Most importantly though, as you’re listening today, please feel free to use the chatbox right there on your webinar screen. There’s a Q&A. Type in your questions there. I’ll be looking at questions. We’re going to save time at the end for Q&A. In the chat, tell us who you are, introduce yourself. We’d love for this to be super interactive. So don’t be shy, don’t sit on those hands. You can also tweet us. I’ll keep an eye on the Twitter feed. We should get a couple of tweets throughout the hour. That’s cool. But we’d love to hear from you, your questions, comments, and definitely introduce yourself, because we want to know who we’re talking to also.

And if this is your first Bloomerang webinar, just want to say an extra special welcome to you newbies. If you’ve never been on a Bloomerang webinar, we’re so happy to have you. We do these webinars usually every Thursday, but we’ve been doing webinars all the time. I hope you’re not webinar-ed out. We were just talking with Kat about that. There’s been a lot of webinars that you can register for and attend. I know it. We try to keep the contents super high quality. We record everything, so if you don’t want to catch it live.

But in addition to doing those webinars, what Bloomerang is most known for is our donor management software. That’s what Bloomerang is just for context. If you want to learn more about us, check out our website. You can watch videos, you can take tours of the product if you are interested in seeing what we’re all about. So check that out if you’re interested later.

Don’t do that right now because I’m so excited to have Kat Murphy Toms joining us from beautiful downtown Chicago where the sun is shining, I can tell. How’s it going, Kat? Are you doing okay? Thanks for doing this, by the way.

Kat: How are you? No, thank you.

Steven: This is so awesome. I have so many things that I want to say about Kat and GivingTuesday. For one, I asked them to do this, and they very graciously accepted, because they’re just awesome people over there. They just want to help folks with this new GivingTuesday that’s going to be happening in a couple of weeks. Put this together really quickly for us, and it’s chock-full of awesome information.

If you guys don’t know Kat, she’s over there at the GivingTuesday team. She leads their digital strategy. She’s got all kinds of templates and tips and tricks to share with you today. And I just had a blast the last half hour talking to her. If you all logged in early, you saw some of that chat. But, Kat, I’m so thankful that you’re doing this for us. It’s awesome to finally meet you. And I don’t want to take any time away from you, because you’ve got some good info for us. So I’m going to stop my screen sharing here and let you . . .

Kat: I was going to say, I’ve got a lot. I’m going to talk a lot about what #GivingTuesdayNow is, because I’ve been getting that question a lot. So that’s where we’re going to start. Okay.

Steven: Love it. I’m going to shut this down.

Kat: Why is this not presenting? Can you tell me what to do to make it present?

Steven: It might be under View.

Kat: View, right.

Steven: There you go.

Kat: In front of my face. Right in front of my face.

As you’ve mentioned, I’m Kat Murphy Toms. I do digital strategy for GivingTuesday. I’ve been only on the team for two years, although it feels a lot longer than that. I led previously what we call one of our community campaigns. These are like chapters of GivingTuesday. All around the U.S., we have 213 of them now. They’re usually geography-based. I led my Illinois state campaign, and it was a giving day that we did on GivingTuesday every year. So I’m very familiar with GivingTuesday, long-time veteran, and so they brought me on to the team.

You probably know about GivingTuesday and the history of it, so I’ll do the shortcut version just in case you don’t. It started as a day for anyone anywhere to give, and it’s really grown into the largest social movement of all time. If you think about it, by reach, there’s activity happening in literally every country in the world.

We have 213 of these community campaigns that I mentioned. These are chapters, coalition, organizations that form around GivingTuesday. Most are in geography, but there are issue area campaigns as well. And we have 60 official countries, everywhere from GivingTuesday Taiwan to GivingTuesday Kenya. It’s the heartbeat of this movement, and they’re a pleasure and a joy to work with. Each country does their own thing with GivingTuesday. Some countries are on different places in the universe when it comes to fundraising. So some use it for fundraising. Some don’t use it for fundraising at all. They do something completely different with GivingTuesday.

Some new things with GivingTuesday, we’ve recently spun out into our own organization. We used to be housed at the 92nd Street Y in New York City. That’s where we were born. But we have grown and pulled out into our own organization just this past July.

And our mission is not to create the largest crowdfunding day of all time. That’s not it at all. We feel that our mission is to build a more just and equitable society through uplifting generosity and scaling generosity. So it’s much bigger than that. Sure, this is a day for fundraising. We did $2 billion in the U.S. last year, sure. But what’s more important to us really are the small acts of kindness, and especially now, those are the things that are going to carry us forward and heal.

So a little bit of backdrop on how we came to adding #GivingTuesdayNow to our regular purview of things that we do. And I’m going to say this a couple of times throughout this that GivingTuesday is still happening on December 1st, 2020. We’re not moving GivingTuesday. This is in addition.

Like many of you, as the coronavirus crisis started to, you know, roll out in waves across the world and finally arriving here in the U.S., our team thought really hard about what the best way to respond would be given our global footprint, given our megaphone as the leading voice for the generosity economy, and given our distributed leadership network all around the world. At first, we wanted to be sensitive to the moment, and we still want to be sensitive to the moment, but we thought maybe we would just try empowering our leaders and our community to activate and respond on the ground. But it really quickly became apparent that we needed to do something much bigger.

So, at the urging of our many, many partners, these are everyone from data platform providers to the social media platforms, to big foundations, to small rural communities in Louisiana, everyone’s considered a partner of GivingTuesday, so we tested the water with folks. It eventually became important for us to try to think about what we could do as a more meaningful response to the crisis. And after a lot of consultation with a lot of people in our networks, we decided that the thing to do was going to be to use our GivingTuesday platform to spur people around the world to be generous, to create a spike of generosity but also to benefit nonprofits, but to reinforce that our collective generosity has the power to heal our communities. It has the power to unite communities. It has the power to strengthen civic bonds at a time when we so desperately need to do that.

So we launched this new day, #GivingTuesdayNow. It’s happening in 14 days. Fifteen, 14, who’s counting? It normally takes us 51 weeks to pull off GivingTuesday, but we figured we’d give it a go. “Let’s try it in four weeks and see what happens.” That’s a joke. One of the things that GivingTuesday is best at is rapid deployment and quick mobilization of our group, and we’re going to leverage that and we’re going to do that for #GivingTuesdayNow.

Okay. I was going to say I talked about this already, but we can talk about it again. We have 213 community campaigns in the U.S., 60 countries. Most of the time, these community campaigns rally around a certain geography. So please check to see if a community campaign exists and is already happening in your area, but see if one is happening in your issue area as well. Lately, we’ve had a trend where folks are organizing around like there’s a coalition of zoos. They celebrate GivingTuesday under the banner #GivingZOOday.

We have a couple of new ones crop up just this past GivingTuesday. One is #GivingTuesdayMilitary, which is military spouses all around the world who very quickly connected themselves to each other, and they did acts of kindness on GivingTuesday last year.

#GivingTuesdayKids last year started up. It’s led by a 13-year-old and a pack of her 13- and 14-year-old friends. They do acts of kindness. They participate with nonprofits. They do fundraising campaigns with nonprofits. They feel that social good is in their heart and blood, and so they wanted to celebrate GivingTuesday alongside all of us adults. And so we said, “Yes, you should do that. Please come on in.” So if you have children, please contact me. I would be happy to get you in touch with the #GivingTuesdayKids group.

We’re seeing a lot of professional networks come up and activate around COVID, especially, right. We’ve been . . . folks who are providing remote counseling, coalitions of therapists who are organizing to help. Same thing with lawyers who can assist people with navigating legal issues. These are all acts of generosity and kindness that count and that we felt that we wanted to be mobilizing and celebrating.

Mutual aid networks, of course. These are organic, grassroots networks of folks who are coming together to help out around their blocks or their neighbors. All of those types of activations count, and we’re working actively to mobilize a lot of them.

We’ve been getting this question a lot, you know. Like, is it tone deaf to fundraise or to sort of express need for support in this moment? And so it’s part of the goal of #GivingTuesdayNow is to create an umbrella under which all kinds of organizations can say, “Yes, we too are addressing the critical needs at this moment, and here’s the role that we’re playing.”

Steven and I were talking about this a second ago. Every single nonprofit is essential, right, and there is not a soul on this planet that is not touched by this global pandemic. So I don’t want you to feel that way. You’re all part of the community of responders. You really are. An attendee of one of our webinars last week or the week before — it seems like ages ago, I don’t even remember — said something that I think was worth repeating. She said, “If you don’t think your organization is essential, just imagine what your community would be like if you didn’t exist.” Think about that. Toy with it.

With all of that said, I want to be very clear that this is completely optional. This is not going to be for absolutely everyone, and we’re okay with that. There’s going to be some communities that . . . there are some communities that we’re working with that are telling us that, frankly, this just isn’t the right opportunity for them, and that’s okay. There’s a whole bunch of other ways that you can participate in #GivingTuesdayNow though, and we’ll talk about some of those in a little bit. This does not just have to be a fundraising campaign. I guess I’ll talk about some of those ways right now.

As with GivingTuesday proper, #GivingTuesdayNow, we’re inviting you to take it and do what you like with it. It’s always the best when folks make it authentic to themselves and do creative things with GivingTuesday. We love that. But also, those are the most successful campaigns, right.

There’s never any rules for how to participate in GivingTuesday. There’s never any rules for how to participate in #GivingTuesdayNow. The goal is simply to shine a light on generosity that’s happening in your community. That’s the overarching goal. You don’t have to spin up a separate campaign for this. If this fits, you can use it to amplify whatever you’re already doing. You can share moments of generosity that are happening in your community, whether they’re directly related to your organization or just people in your community who you’d like to celebrate and lift up.

Our key message that we’re really focused on with this event is how we’re coming together in this moment as a global community using all of our own skills, talents, assets, and generosity in whatever ways that we’re able to help our communities and help our communities be strong, be resilient, heal, and move forward. So if you’re in a campaign or you’re about to start one, this effort can certainly be complementary. No need to reinvent any wheels. Think about using it as a way to thank your donors or reach out to them in another way to get them involved later on with your GivingTuesday proper campaign. Use it as a way to strengthen and build relationships with your community and share what you’ve been doing on the ground in response to COVID-19 and just, in general, supporting and healing your communities.

I want to give a couple of examples for some of my favorite nonprofit activities so far, and none of them have anything to do with fundraising, just to start to get your wheels spinning. One of our organizations that serves the Latinx community, and I think they’re in East L.A., since it’s a Tuesday and it’s also Cinco de Mayo, this group is planning to deliver tacos to health care workers at three different hospitals in their area. I’m excited to see how that one pans out.

There’s an organization in Chicago called Twist Out Cancer. They support cancer patients, and what they’re going to do for #GivingTuesdayNow is to virtually connect past cancer patients with current cancer patients to try to help reduce this sense of isolation and fear that they might be experiencing.

There’s a group in St. Louis, they are mobilizing their community to sew a quilt as a symbol for healing and like a peace quilt kind of thing. Nothing at all to do with fundraising, and they were clear about that in their email too, like, “Look, this is not necessarily a fundraising. If you would like to give us, that’s fine. But we have this higher project and motive that we’d like to engage you with.”

The trend that I’ve talked about a lot, even last GivingTuesday, and I’m still seeing it for #GivingTuesdayNow, there’s nonprofits that are fundraising for other nonprofits, and that just warms my soul. It’s one of my favorite GivingTuesday activities. Maybe your org is doing okay. Maybe you just don’t feel right making an ask right now, but maybe you want to lift up another organization in your neighborhood, in your communities, an org that’s complementary to your mission.

A million and one ideas. If you’re not on our email list, I’ve been emailing twice or maybe three times a week with a bunch of these examples. As I’m coming across them, I’m sharing them with our e-newsletter list just to help get folks’ wheels spinning. There’s a whole bunch of other resources that I share in there too. So make sure you’re on our email list.

A couple of things to consider as you’re moving forward. People are still interested in giving. Steven and I were just talking about this a couple of seconds ago. I can’t stress that enough. People are begging for things to do, ways to help. And just like regular GivingTuesday, we think that there’s a place for you to say, “Here are some ways that you can help. And we need help, and here are some ways that you can connect with your community.” The more touchpoints, the better.

We are on an unbelievably shortened timeline. So the first thing you want to do after you get off the phone with me is, if you haven’t already, get that email “save the date” out. Make sure it includes a calendar invitation. I don’t know about you, but for me, if it’s not on my calendar and I’m not getting a notification on my Apple Watch, it’s not happening. So do that. Get a notification about GivingTuesday on May 5th on all of your supporters’ Apple Watches. It’s as simple as sending them a calendar invite, and there’s all sorts of tech to do that. You can ask me about it if you’re interested.

Download the nonprofit toolkit when you get a chance, and I’ll include that in the email. It will be sent to you a little bit later. In there, I have included a shortened timeline, a really shortened timeline. As far as email and what sort of social media you can be putting out right now, just think about what kind of reminders you can be giving to your folks. Prime the pump over the next week and half to remind your supporters that the big day is coming. And if you seed them with enough information and enough touchpoints, all of a sudden you’ve built up equity. On May 5th, all you’ve got to do is pay it off. So you’ll have people out there being your advocate because you’ve primed them to do so. But it starts now.

If you go to our website, now.givingtuesday.org, you will find a number of ways that we’re suggesting that folks participate. We’re launching a new version of the website in a couple hours actually. So come back in a couple hours. I’ll have even more exciting ways for people to participate in GivingTuesday.

And I invite every single one of you who’s on this webinar actually to participate as an individual. We would love that. We’re suggesting folks do everything from the traditional classic #UNselfie. Do you remember that from back in GivingTuesday 1.0 days? It was a print off, the #UNselfie template on a piece of paper, and you hold it up, and you write down what cause matters to you and why. I think that’s something that can be easily adapted for this campaign. And there’s a template in the folder for you to use if you want to share that with your own supporters.

We’re asking people to share their generosity in whatever way that they like and whatever way they feel is best for them. Everything from starting an 8 p.m. cheer, you all have seen this in cities all throughout the U.S. and around the world too. Cities are coming together to do a cheer and celebrate at shift changes near the hospital. It’s so beautiful. One of my favorite acts of kindness.

Buying gift cards for small businesses in your area that you want to be able to support but might not be able to at this immediate moment. Think about buying gift cards.

Combat loneliness, sign up for a volunteer shift with Crisis Text Line. There’s 100 ways to express generosity. We’re going to present a few of them on our website, but one of them, of course, is going to be to support your local nonprofits. But we want to stress with people that there are more than one way to give back and be generous in their lives.

We have a new daily generosity text message campaign. If you text GivingTuesday to 33777 — it’s on our website, and I’ll include it in the recording too — you’ll get a text message from me every day with an idea for something quick and easy and simple that you might do to help give back. It’s a pet project of mine. It’s a lot of fun. It’s really time consuming. I don’t recommend it for absolutely every campaign, but we feel it’s a really good one in this case. So sign up. We’d love to have you.

We have a new map campaign. We’re asking folks to pin their acts of kindness and generosity, not just stuff that they’ve done but stuff that they’ve witnessed too, and I’d invite you all to do the same. Pin it to our global map so that we can show the impact of generosity during this pandemic. We literally want to cover the map with GivingTuesday hearts. It’s getting there. This is from a week ago, this screenshot. But if you go to now.givingtuesday.org, you’ll see the live version. It’s another thing that excites me. If you are ever feeling low or have a moment where you need a pick-me-up, check out the map. There are some really, really great acts of kindness and things, good news that’s worth celebrating. I’d love for you all personally to pin to the map. And if your nonprofit has an activity that they’re planning for #GivingTuesdayNow, make sure that’s on the map too.

As always, in addition to individual tools, we have built a nonprofit toolkit for you, also available at now.givingtuesday.org. Everything is in a Google Drive right now, trying to make things as simple as possible.

In there, you will find sample press releases. You will find sample social media. I did sample emails for you this time around too. I don’t usually do that, but in the interest of time and knowing that you all are strapped for it, I did some sample copy-pasteable email templates that you can use to get the word out to your supporters.

I did a super-condensed communications timeline. It included last week. So I’m telling you, you’re behind now. But it’s there. You can play catch-up. Remember, first thing you do, when you get off the phone, is send that “save the date” email out.

And there’s graphics, loads and loads of graphics. We worked with Canva this time around. So they are available on Canva. You have to access them through the nonprofit toolkit. If you go down to the bottom, you’ll see a collage of . . . it’ll look similar to that. You’ll click the Use the Template button, and that will open a new copy of that template in your own Canva account, where you can edit and change and customize and rebrand at will. Make sure you tag us in whatever graphic creations that you make, because I love to see them. The creativity that people exhibit and show off around GivingTuesday is my favorite.

Other highlights in the nonprofit toolkit, I did a section for light and easy ways that you might engage in digital tactics. You could organize a peer-to-peer campaign. If you have folks from last GivingTuesday who did that for you, I suggest asking if they’d do that for you. You can probably reuse whatever toolkits you created for them last time around for GivingTuesday and change the date. I think you’d be okay.

I’ve been highly recommending that folks go live. With everybody being at home, the platforms are very much in favor of keeping folks on their platforms, so the algorithms are favoring live video. It doesn’t have to be fancy. It can be . . . honestly, some of the most interesting lives that I’ve tuned into the past week have been an executive director on their couch and just telling it like it is. Be authentic. Don’t be afraid to explain what’s going on in your organization. I think it makes the case even more compelling actually.

A tactic that I saw last year that I really liked, a nonprofit was asking their followers, who were heavy Twitter users, to change their display name, and I show you a screenshot of this in the toolkit so you can see what I’m talking about. They asked their supporters to change their display name to instead of Kat Murphy, I’m supporting at what your organization handle for #GivingTuesdayNow. In that way, any time that person tweets anything throughout that day, that message is strategically placed in everything that person says and everything . . . all of their followers will see that too. Think about organizing a Twitter chat. I haven’t seen enough of those lately, and I miss Twitter chats, but I think that’s a good opportunity. An AMA could be good content for live. Actually go live with clients if you can, but even team members, fascinating way to let people know what’s going on with your community.

If you follow our social channels, and if you don’t yet, please do, @GivingTuesday on every social media platform including [inaudible 00:26:22]. You’ll know that I’ve been sharing stories that our community has been reporting to us. I mentioned we have 60 countries, and those country leaders share with . . . they’re on a WhatsApp group, and they’re constantly sharing these beautiful activities, things that everyday people are doing to survive and heal through this crisis. And it’s just amazing. And so my strategy on our social channels has been to share all that, because it inspires others. We know that folks need that. So think about sharing uplifting stories on your own social channels in the weeks leading up to May 5th. It doesn’t have to just be about your organization. It can be anybody in your community. Just share good notes. It’s inspiring and it helps.

Like I said, we just signed up with TikTok. It’s my favorite. GivingTuesday has always been a reason for folks to try something new, and we definitely encourage that. If you are an organization that’s looking to reach young people, this is the place that you need to be. I think it’s sorely under capped too, right. There’s only a handful of nonprofits, myself . . . there’s a handful of us. We call ourselves #nonprofitTikTok. It’s a hashtag we made up. Please join us. The third video that I ever posted has 2.1 million views. I’ve never seen anything like it. The engagement is incredible. People actually talk to each other on that app. It’s refreshing and it’s fun.

I think I’m going to do a webinar. If you’re interested, let me know. Just come at me in Twitter, or if you DM @GivingTuesday on any social platform, it goes to my phone. So that’s probably the easiest way to reach me. Let me know if you’re interested in that. I might do a small group session or a webinar on TikTok for nonprofits, because I think it’s an underutilized channel.

Like I said, we’ve got the new Canva templates for you. Please take whatever it is that you find in that Google Drive folder and adapt it for your own purposes. We love that. GivingTuesday is a free and open-source movement for everybody. It’s shaped by you all. We’re not the experts in this at all, not even close. We find that our role is to share out activities that others are doing and some novel activities and activations that we see, so in an effort to inspire you all to use your creativity and come up with something awesome.

I guess the last thing that I want to say . . . oh, there’s GIFs in there too. And Instagram stickers, don’t forget about those.

Everything seems to be falling apart right now, right, but we have an opportunity. We can get through it together, and we can put it back not just the way it was, but the way we want it to be. That’s what #GivingTuesdayNow is all about. Let’s build the society that we all want to live in. This crisis is deepening. Failings and gaps in our system are becoming more apparent than possibly they ever were before. But we have a chance to emerge from this with a commitment to bridging those gaps and protecting our vulnerable and caring for one another and opting for generosity first in all things.

So that’s what #GivingTuesdayNow is about. I invite you to join us. Please don’t think that you have to fundraise on this particular day. If you want to, you’re more than welcome. We’re just hoping that this can be a day of global unity to celebrate us as humanity and the generosity that we’re using to get through all this.

So thank you. I’m going to open it up for questions, I think. Steven, do you want to do questions?

Steven: That makes sense. I echo that from what we see in the Bloomerang customer cohort at least, which is not the whole sector, but it is tens of thousands of fundraisers. It’s the quantity, you know, the folks that are raising more money, they are asking more often than people who aren’t, so.

Kat: Yeah. Don’t be shy, don’t be scared. You need to tell your story. Essentially, you are all first responders in this.

Steven: Yeah.

Kat: Don’t feel bad about sending four emails in a week. I don’t think that’s bad. I don’t think you should think that’s bad either. You’re going to be targeting and segmenting your audience. You’re going to be changing that content up with a little bit different message each time, and it’s okay.

Steven: I love it. Well, a couple of people are asking about, will there be any sort of matching gifts from Facebook or other entities, like they’re normally are [00:42:23]?

Kat: I haven’t heard anything from Facebook yet. I mean, you all will find out as soon as I . . .

Steven: Yeah, could have.

Kat: But there’s a GoFundMe thing.

Steven: Okay.

Kat: I’ll share the link with you, and you can share that out.

Steven: Okay, sweet.

Kat: I only got it yesterday morning, and I haven’t had a chance to read the details on it yet, but it exists. There’s some kind of GoFundMe match.

Steven: You’re all kind of moving fast over there.

Kat: No. Honestly, that’s just it. I don’t know the answer to the matching question yet. I will find . . .

Steven: Okay.

Kat: You’re going to find out as soon as we find out about it.

Steven: Cool. You’ve got 16 days yet.

Kat: We’re never involved in any of the matches.

Steven: Oh, okay.

Kat: Just like all things GivingTuesday, everyone, companies and brands included are welcome to take it and do what they like with it. We have absolutely nothing to do with the Facebook match. They just knock on our door and . . . well, they send us an email is what they do and tell us what they’re going to do. And we say, “Okay, we’ll help get the word out.”

Steven: Cool.

Kat: We have nothing to do with any of these matches.

Steven: Okay.

Kat: But we’ll let you know as soon as they come up.

Steven: Yeah. And if Bloomerang sees something, we’ll signal boost it as well, of course.

Kat: Yeah.

Steven: Channels, you mentioned channels. A couple of people asking about being on every conceivable channel. Yeah. What’s kind of your take on that? Because I feel similarly.

Kat: No. No. No. You can’t be on every single channel, no.

Steven: Yeah.

Kat: I am, but only because I have various subsets of audiences that are on those channels. So I create different content for those folks on the different channels that I need to use to reach people. Your folks are not everywhere.

Steven: Yeah.

Kat: Pick two. Pick two. Why would you have more than two social channels? Maybe LinkedIn and two more. I think LinkedIn is underutilized as well.

Steven: Yeah.

Kat: I really do. We did a webinar with LinkedIn. I’m going to pull it out. There’s a recording. It exists somewhere. I’ll pull it out and share it with you guys. It had some interesting . . .

Steven: Yeah. TikTok webinar, you’ve got everything.

Kat: I got it. No, I don’t have the TikTok thing yet. Maybe tomorrow, I don’t know. Maybe tomorrow.

Steven: Can you dig into the #UNselfie thing? We had a couple of people that . . .

Kat: Oh, yeah.

Steven: Is that . . . that’s kind of an old school. That was the first thing I did, I remember, maybe 2012 or 2013. Is that making a comeback? Are you seeing . . .

Kat: It’s making a comeback.

Steven: Okay.

Kat: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. It wasn’t a gimmick, but it was a thing that you could do, right. It was a simple and an easy way to share what organizations you’re giving to, and then the premise is that you challenge someone else to do it. So I write on my sign and I promise I have a version of this that has our logo and it says #UNselfie on it. And you print it out. If you don’t have a printer, I’ve come up with a solution for that too. There’s a digital version of it on Instagram stickers. If you’re making a story on Instagram and you type in #UNselfie or if you type in GivingTuesday it’ll come up. There’s a sticker and you enlarge it and you type what, where, who you’re giving to tag them actually, that would be even better, and post it to your Instagram story. Because people don’t have printers these days. But that’s okay.

Steven: So this is donors sort of bragging about who they’re giving to on GivingTuesday.

Kat: And you. And you.

Steven: Yeah, okay.

Kat: Even when I worked for a nonprofit organization, I’ve always write down, “This is the cause that I stand for.”

Steven: Okay.

Kat: And then I post it to my social media channel, and I challenge five other people to do the same thing. And it’s helping you reach that next tier of folks that you might not normally reach. It’s the same premise as peer-to-peer fundraising, right. You’ve got those folks out there being your ambassador and sharing your content on their own personal pages so that it reaches their friends and family members that you don’t necessarily have access to unless they happen to follow the page.

Steven: Right. It seems like there’s almost like a fear of missing out to tap into with this ...

Kat: Totally.

Steven: . . . that’s really powerful.

Kat: Totally.

Steven: Because people want to show off that they’re philanthropic. And it’s almost as if giving them an opportunity to brag is more motivating than asking them for money, right. Do you know what I mean? Like, who are you supporting, right?

Kat: That is exactly why GivingTuesday has reached its . . . that’s why GivingTuesday is the way it is, yeah, for exactly that reason.

Steven: So I’m wondering if maybe folks could, maybe ahead of time, reach out to those loyal donors in their database and almost kind of seed it a little bit.

Kat: Yeah, yeah.

Steven: Because they might be more powerful to raise money for you, going back to what you said about peer-to-peer, than you would be asking people directly. I love it.

Kat: Yeah. It’s a really good idea. It’s a really good idea.

Steven: Okay. We got lots of questions coming in. I think the answer to this is you probably don’t know yet. But any sense that maybe this would repeat next year, that there will always be two GivingTuesdays?

Kat: God, I hope not. Oh, goodness, I hope not.

Steven: Yeah. Because you mean for this to really just be like a pure response.

Kat: We are fully intending . . . this is in direct response to COVID-19.

Steven: Okay.

Kat: I would not anticipate that we would be doing this again. I mean, I hope not.

Steven: Yeah, I hope not either.

Kat: I hope the world doesn’t look like this in a year.

Steven: Yep.

Kat: No, we’re not intending, but who knows.

Steven: Okay.

Kat: I don’t know. I mean, maybe I shouldn’t say unequivocally not. I don’t know. I don’t know.

Steven: We won’t hold you to it even though we’re recording. You mentioned some of those affinity groups, other organizations, a similar cause type. How can people maybe find those? Is there a good way? Should they go to maybe their kind of mothership if they have a national headquarters or association?

Kat: I have them all listed.

Steven: Okay, you’ve got them.

Kat: Go to givingtuesday.org. In the navigation on givingtuesday.org, there’s a page that says GivingTuesday in the U.S.

Steven: Okay.

Kat: There’s a map that pulls up. I’m actually going to migrate these to the new map later this afternoon. So it’ll probably be even easier for you to find. But you find the map page, zoom in on your area, and you will find out if there is a community campaign already happening in your local neighborhood, community, city, town, state.

Steven: Cool.

Kat: There’s also a listing of affinity groups for issue areas. I have them pulled out a little bit separately, because they’re not geographical. There’s a listing of those there.

If you don’t see one that you fit into, we love folks who want to organize community campaigns. All it takes is one person to raise their hand. I did it. I was the second community campaign ever, and my colleague, Jamie, who’s our Chief Strategy Officer, was the first community campaign leader. We take great pride in that, numbers one and two. And all it was was I called 92nd Street Y and said, “Hey, I’d like to do this. I’d like to steal your idea and do it in Chicago.” And Henry and Asha were like, “Yeah, that sounds great.” And I had psyched myself up for this conversation, “I’m going to have to convince them that I want to just steal their stuff and I want to change the logo, and they’re going to tell me no. There’s no way they’re going to tell me that that’s okay.” And quite the opposite. That’s exactly how it works. You come a-calling, send me an email, hit me up on DM, tell me what it is you want to do.

The only thing that we require of our community campaigns is that they’re open to more than one nonprofit. So if you’re intending on doing a geography-based campaign, it has to be open to all nonprofits in your vicinity or within your issue group, whatever, depending on whatever you’d like to do with the coalition. They’re often run by community foundations or United Ways, or they have partnership with your community foundation or United Way.

Steven: Okay.

Kat: I worked at a nonprofit association when I ran my community campaign. If you have one of those, that’s a great resource to tap as well.

Steven: Nice. Cool. Okay. A couple of questions about creating maybe specific landing pages around the campaign. Any guidance there versus just kind of the normal, generic donate page on people’s websites?

Kat: I wouldn’t, to be honest with you. I wouldn’t. Why recreate anything? We’ve only got 14 days to do it. Now, if you have some sort of tech platform or ways to easily do that, by all means. But if it’s going to take you any amount of time to build a landing page, don’t do that. Why do that? Just direct folks right to your donate button.

Steven: Cool.

Kat: It’s great if you can rebrand your donate page temporarily. Folks will do this for GivingTuesday proper. A question I get for GivingTuesday proper is, “Well, how do I fold my GivingTuesday day into my end-of-year campaign?” And we say, “It’s very simple.” On your donate page, on December 1st, it has a GivingTuesday banner on it and some GivingTuesday language, and then, the next day, you just roll that into your end-of-year.

Steven: It’s gone.

Kat: It’s going to take that off and that’s it. That’s often an easier way of handling it than developing a full landing page.

Steven: Right. Which is going to go away anyway, yeah.

Kat: Which is going to go away anyway. It’s often easier for tracking purposes just to direct folks to your donate button. If you’re doing some sort of activation that you think it would be really helpful or if you happen to have a really easy to use website, where it’s not hard for you to create a landing page, it’s good to have, but I don’t think it’s essential.

Steven: Okay. Keep it simple I guess is a good rule of thumb.

Kat: Keep it simple, yeah. Keep it simple. Don’t make people go through loops or hoops to find what it is that they want to do. Especially if your call to action is to donate to me, don’t make it hard for them. Easy as possible. And don’t make it hard on yourself.

Steven: Yeah, that’s probably most important. We were talking about this before we started, but this tends to be a pressure point for people, and we don’t want that.

Kat: No. Low bar. Set yourself at a low bar. We are all going through some stuff right now . . .

Steven: Right.

Kat: . . . personally, professionally, emotionally. Don’t set yourself to a high bar with this. And again, it’s completely optional. We’re not requiring all nonprofits on the planet to do something on GivingTuesday. Now, we would love that, but it’s optional.

Steven: Here’s a question which I think you’re going to say yes to, but I want to read it because I think it’s a good idea that maybe some other folks could maybe emulate. This person had a month-long virtual fundraiser on Facebook, and it’s scheduled to end on April 30th, but they haven’t quite hit . . . they don’t think they’re going to hit the goal that they wanted to. Would you suggest extending that fundraiser through May 5th and sort of, you know, tag-teaming on GivingTuesday? That seems like a pretty good idea.

Kat: Absolutely, that’s brilliant. Yeah, that’s brilliant. Absolutely. Folks will do that often for if they hadn’t met their GivingTuesday proper goals. Folks very often continue that through end-of-year. Having that thermometer, or whatever it is that you’re using, show your progress is that much more compelling and a kick in the pants for donors to keep giving. So use that. Yeah, totally, that’s a brilliant idea.

Steven: So, you know, broadly, GivingTuesday can just be the kickoff. It doesn’t have to end at 11:59 p.m. on May 5th.

Kat: Totally. Totally.

Steven: Very cool. We’re almost out of time. It’s almost 2:00. I want to give you the last word, Kat, but I thought a good last question. A lot of folks in here have never done any GivingTuesday.

Kat: Welcome.

Steven: Yeah. Which is, you know, I’m glad they’re here. Should they do anything differently? It seems like maybe not for this one, but any advice for those first-timers, specifically?

Kat: Honestly, get on our email list, because I’m walking folks through what exactly it is they need to do each day. I’m doing that by just converting what I have in my nonprofit toolkit into email pieces. So if you want to just read it that way, that’s fine too. Get on our email list, get into that Google Drive with all the nonprofit resources, which I will share with you when we get off the phone. We have everything built for you, which you’re welcome to customize and take, change, and do whatever it is that you like, but we have everything built for you.

Steven: Okay. Well, we’re going to get all that information out. We’ll send folks the slides the recording. I know you’ve already said it a couple of times, Kat, but how can people get in touch with you besides just DM-ing the GivingTuesday account? Which, thanks for saying that, that was really nice of you to admit.

Kat: I’m the only one who runs our social channels, so [inaudible 00:55:12].

Steven: Oh, it’s the same way with me and Bloomerang. If you DM Bloomerang, it’s actually me.

Kat: People are astonished by that. I find it amazing and humbling, and I love it. That’s my favorite thing ever, to get off of a webinar and then I usually spend the whole rest of my day responding to people, but it’s my favorite. It’s important to us as a team. We want you to talk to an actual person. You will always talk to an actual person with us.

Steven: Okay.

Kat: As we get closer to the date, my response rate may be a little bit slowed, but I will get back to you eventually. My email address, you can reach me there too. It’s [emailprotected]. I answer questions all the time. No question is too silly. I love questions.

Steven: Well, we appreciate that and the fact that you did this webinar on short notice for us. I said in the beginning, people who didn’t log on early enough, but I sort of berated them to have somebody come on and talk to our audience here. And they answered the call, so they’re awesome people, for sure. It’s good to finally put a couple of faces with the GivingTuesday logo as well.

Kat: I know.

Steven: So thanks for doing this, Kat. This was a lot of fun.

Kat: You’re welcome. No, thank you. Thanks for having me.

Steven: And good luck to you and the team over there, and good luck to all of you who are going to, hopefully . . . if you want to participate in this, like you said, it’s an optional thing, but I think it could be good depending on your situation and what other things you’ve got going on here. So we’re going to send out all the resources. We’ll get that to you today. You may get emails from me, from Kat, from both of us, with different things in them. But you’re definitely going to want to go to their website and download those things. And there’s a new website coming up, I think, later today, right, Kat? There’ll be some new stuff there.

Kat: Now. It exists now. I’m going to flip it to a new design a little bit later. You can go there now. It’s now.givingtuesday.org.

Steven: Okay, cool.

Kat: It’s our campaign page for this activation.

Steven: Awesome. Well, thanks for doing this, Kat. It was real fun to have you.

Kat: Thank you, everyone. No, it’s my pleasure. Thank you.

Steven: Well, we’ve got a couple . . . actually more, we have three more webinars this week. I’m just going to roll through them.

Kat: Really?

Steven: Yeah. Starting tomorrow, we’ve got Karen Hopper. Yeah, I know. I’m excited. I’m going to be . . . I need to get a lot of B vitamin injections.

Kat: Oh, “Legacy Fundraising During a Pandemic.”

Steven: Yeah. We’ve got some really good topics.

Kat: That’s fascinating.

Steven: Yeah. Ligia, she’s a top fundraiser over at Greenpeace. She’s a buddy of mine. She is awesome, one of my go-tos for legacy. We’ve been getting a lot of questions about, you know, “Should we be sending out the quest marketing? Should we talk about plan giving now?” She’s going to break it down. That’s Wednesday. Tomorrow, we got Google Analytics, which I think will have a lot of interesting dovetails into your presentation, Kat, to kind of see where people are coming from. And then, on Thursday, our buddy Jeff Jowdy is going to talk about how board chairs, specifically, should be engaging with the organization they serve on during these tough times. So we got some really . . .

Kat: Make them do something for #GivingTuesdayNow.

Steven: Yeah, absolutely. Oh, yeah.

Kat: Make your board, or if you want a match, ask your board chairs to put up a match. It doesn’t have to be a lot.

Steven: We could have talked for an hour about board members, specifically, for GivingTuesday.

Kat: I know. We really put up . . .

Steven: I think GivingTuesday . . . yeah, go ahead.

Kat: Two asks of them. See if they can pull together a matching fund for you. It does not have to be a lot. It can be 500 bucks. But it allows you to be able to say, “Your donation might be matched up to however much,” right. Board chairs, vendors, sponsors who were going to sponsor your gala and are not anymore, ask them for a match for GivingTuesday. Always better to organize your own match.

Steven: Okay.

Kat: Aside from that, they could run a peer-to-peer fundraiser for you and help you reach their networks that you might not normally have access to. There’s 100 things that board members can do for #GivingTuesdayNow.

Steven: It could be a godsend for just board members donating to you. Like, if you don’t have 100% board giving, this seems like a good reason to ask, “Hey, it’s GivingTuesday.”

Kat: Yeah, it is.

Steven: Wow. Maybe we should . . . we’ll have you back tomorrow. You’re not busy or anything. Come back for an hour.

Kat: I’ll come back, yeah, tomorrow. We’ll talk about TikTok and board management.

Steven: I love it.

Kat: That’s great. I’m so glad you brought this up. I had forgotten to mention it entirely, but it’s a really good strategy.

Steven: Well, see, she’s a wealth of knowledge. So reach out to her, folks. There’s obviously lots of things you can pick her brain about. So thanks for doing this.

Kat: You’re welcome.

Steven: I know I’ve already said thank you a bunch of times, but this is awesome. And thanks to all of you for hanging out for an hour or so. It’s 2:00. We’ll call it a day there, because I know you’re all super busy with stuff. But just look for an email from us. We’ll get you all the recordings and stuff. And hopefully we’ll see you sometime this week. If you want to come to the rest of the free webinars, that would be a lot. But if you only want to come to one or two, that’s okay. Just send me a chat, let me know you were on the one with Kat.

So thank you. We’ll call it a day there. And have a good Monday, have a good week. Stay safe. And we’ll see you on May 5th.

Kat: See you all on May 5th.

Steven: Yeah. Good luck. Bye now.

[VIDEO] #GivingTuesdayNow Social Media Tips, Tricks, and Strategies - Bloomerang (2024)