Lessons Learned from Giving Tuesday: Maximize Your Success with Omnichannel Marketing Best Practices

Giving Tuesday, held annually on the Tuesday after Thanksgiving, is a critical day where nonprofits, higher education institutions, and organizations across the impact sector appeal to their donors to make a gift in support of their causes and kick off their end-of-the-year giving drives. Started by the GivingTuesday organization in 2012 as a movement to unleash and inspire radical generosity around the world, Giving Tuesday has become one of the largest fundraising days of the year for organizations in the United States. This year’s Giving Tuesday fundraisers raised a total of $3.6 billion in donation revenue, a 16% increase from Giving Tuesday 2023. But with the loud clamor of so many organizations competing for donors and asking donors to donate all on the same day, how can your organization’s appeals stand out and drive a successful Giving Tuesday fundraiser? Although this year’s Giving Tuesday has come and gone, now is the time to prepare for next year’s Giving Tuesday. In this blog, we’ll explore how to create and deliver standout Giving Tuesday marketing campaigns that boost donor engagement and maximize Giving Tuesday fundraiser results.

Navigating the Nonprofit Marketing Landscape

Navigating the nonprofit marketing landscape can be complex when it comes to marketing and promoting fundraisers. This is a landscape that has:

Differentiation in a Crowded Field + Marketing Saturation

A common challenge that nonprofits deal with is how to stand out and differentiate themselves from other organizations. So on a day like Giving Tuesday, where so many organizations are asking your donors to give all on the same day, nonprofits need to identify what sets them apart from other nonprofits to their donors and weave that into their strategy and content.

Donor Fatigue

Donors get solicited for donations across a variety of channels from the various organizations they interact with, and it can tire them. This means that we need to relate to them on a one-on-one level that communicates to them that we know who they are and that we value the personal relationship they have with our nonprofit. This is something your organization should do at scale using preference management and automation to overcome fatigued donors, as there could be millions of donors your organization engages with.

The Ability to Measure Impact

Organizations employ a variety of communication tools and channels to outreach and engage with donors, constituents, and supporters. These tools might have their own built-in features that track and measure the impact those channels are having with your constituents. Impact metrics include open rates, click rates, unsubscribe rates, website visits, social likes, social comments, social reposts, average donation size, number of donations, etc. The issue is that each of these tools measure impact in their own way and often the data only lives inside of each tool. Prioritizing normalizing and bringing that data together allows your team to ask yourself questions like: Which channels or content are having the most impact? How do we replicate the success of one channel to another? Where do we need to invest more (or less) of our time, marketing budgets, and efforts to drive success? What lessons can we learn from last year in strategizing for Giving Tuesday this year?

Adapting to Changing Digital Landscapes

There are lots of digital tools available, and there are many more in development. And the tools that your nonprofit uses on a day-to-day basis to communicate with your constituents, new features or offerings are emerging and evolving too. On top of that, you aren’t the only one communicating with your donors. They are engaged with brands across a variety of industries, including for-profit brands, especially during the holiday season. Those brands are leveraging cutting-edge tools, robust and experienced staff, and big budgets to tailor the experience a person may have to their unique desires. Because of this, your donors also expect your organization to provide them personalized digital experiences. As such, marketing and fundraising teams have to adapt to those changes and trends in the digital landscape to meet donor expectations where possible.

Limited Resources

Nonprofits commonly deal with time, bandwidth, budget, and technology limitations. They are being asked to do more with less by their leadership. So how do we make good use of the limited resources that our nonprofit has, but also explain why we potentially need to invest in a new resource (additional staff, tools, budget) that the organization currently does not have.

Because of these complexities, impact sector organizations must shift from utilizing a one-size-fits-all marketing approach that might resonate with some donors but not all towards an omnichannel marketing approach that maximizes engaging and resonating with as many varieties of donors as possible within a donor base. This approach is more sophisticated, but with the right marketing tools, strategies, and scalability in mind, its potential for cultivating and engaging donors, driving generosity and gifts, and delivering greater fundraising results can be incredibly valuable for nonprofits (and possibly higher education institutions), especially for a major fundraiser like Giving Tuesday.

Omnichannel Marketing Approach Best Practices

What is in an omnichannel marketing approach varies across organizations, but leveraging multiple communication and marketing channels, personalized messaging and engagement, and segmentation are among the best practices of an omnichannel approach that are instrumental to maximizing Giving Tuesday appeals and results.

Maximize Donor Engagement

In order to best engage donors, we have to meet them on the marketing and communication channels they use the most in their day-to-day lives. This can include utilizing email, direct mail, SMS, social media, and more. By leveraging multiple channels, you not only create more than one opportunity to engage with your donors who may not log in to their personal email every day for example, but also expand the reach of your audience and maximize the opportunities to generate gift revenue. This is especially important when running a single-day campaign.

Smart Segmentation

Just as your nonprofit has donors with different communication preferences, your nonprofit also has donors who come from various, diverse backgrounds and demographics, with different motivations and reasons for donating to your nonprofit, different relationships with your organization, the list goes on. This means that putting all of your donors into a single marketing segment just won’t cut it for your Giving Tuesday marketing efforts. This is where segmenting your audience based on a variety of criteria will make a difference when engaging with your donor base. The criteria you can use to segment your audience can include giving range, giving frequency, wealth, demographic, and print vs digital communication preferences. This strategic segmentation requires accessing and viewing your donors’ data—specifically their donation history, as well as demographics and engagement—and using analytics to generate and organize your donors and audience into the segments that they best fit into. Then, once you have your segments, you can create relevant fundraiser appeals tailored to each segment. The messaging for these appeals should be generally consistent across all segments, but tailored so that it can optimize how the recipient will respond or engage with your appeals. When it comes to the best tools for segmentation, nonprofits could find value in leveraging a tool like Data Cloud to bring all of your data together and activate the segments in Marketing Cloud or other channel tools. For organizations that rely on direct mail marketing or other direct response services, but have disparate data across their systems, Data Cloud is an especially valuable tool that, upon unifying siloed or disparate data, can transform donor segmentation for direct response initiatives.

Turning Donors into Advocates with Meaningful Donor Experiences

Each of your nonprofit’s constituents has a unique way of relating to or connecting with your nonprofit and its mission. This means that identifying your nonprofit’s most loyal and supportive constituents, personalizing your engagement efforts and messaging with them, and building strong relationships with them accordingly can make a difference in shaping the experiences they have with your organization. Here are the best practices and tools we recommend to create and deliver meaningful constituent experiences and develop relationships that can unleash and inspire their generosity:

Automating communications with tools like Marketing Cloud’s Journey Builder to allow your organization to communicate with your audience at the right time at scale, allowing team members to focus on marketing efforts that need to be more hands-on.
Unifying data with Data Cloud so that you have a 360-degree view of your donors and constituents and can thoughtfully communicate with them based on that rich information.
Personalizing cross-channel website experiences with Marketing Cloud Personalization to create a consistent experience no matter which channel your constituents are engaged with.
Creating cutting-edge, seamless donation experiences online with Commerce Cloud and give your team access to the same tools an e-commerce company may have like Abandoned Cart or Recommended Funds.
Analyzing and tracking fundraiser performance with data analytics tools like Tableau and Marketing Cloud Intelligence so that everyone is in the loop on how the Giving Tuesday campaign is doing, but also so you can use data to prepare for future campaigns.

Planning Ahead for a Successful Giving Tuesday 2025

With another Giving Tuesday come and gone, it is never too early to think about how your nonprofit can get ready for Giving Tuesday next year and to consider the strategies and best practices for facilitating a successful fundraiser in 2025.

In addition to the marketing best practices identified and discussed above, there are other key items your nonprofit should address ahead of Giving Tuesday 2025:

What are some key metrics we should track to measure the success of our blended marketing campaigns for Giving Tuesday? Where does that data live today? How should we track it in the future? What other data points will help us tell the whole story?
How far in advance should we start planning and implementing our Giving Tuesday marketing campaign? Who needs to be involved? What approvals need to take place?
Which practices and strategies should we prioritize for next year if we don’t have enough bandwidth, buy-in, or budget to do all of them? For tactics that we want to seek more investment for, what details need to be gathered, who do we need to talk to, and when do those conversations need to occur?

As a Salesforce partner with a deep understanding and robust knowledge of what tools, technologies, and best practices enable successful donor engagement and experiences, and fundraisers like Giving Tuesday, Cloud for Good can help your organization address these questions ahead of Giving Tuesday next year. Get in touch with our experts to discuss your 2025 Giving Tuesday goals, and watch the on-demand webinar that this blog is based on, Maximize Your Giving Tuesday Success: Blended Marketing Campaigns that Deliver.