A 7-Day Giving Tuesday Marketing Plan for Nonprofits

December 9, 2019
10 minutes

What goes together like peanut butter and jelly? Fundraising and marketing, of course! Fundraising on its own can work. But when you layer in marketing to your fundraising campaign you can supercharge your efforts by reaching new audiences and priming audiences for the ask. When you strategically schedule your marketing campaigns to roll out before your planned fundraising campaigns, you’re prepping and priming your audience with the right messages and information. Never tried this combo before? With Giving Tuesday coming up, your nonprofit has the perfect opportunity to build a short-term marketing plan to maximize your campaign opportunities.

Today, we’re sharing smart marketing ideas to help your nonprofit have its best Giving Tuesday yet!

But first, if you haven’t downloaded Funraise’s Giving Tuesday Toolkit, do that ASAP. You’ll thank us later. It’s filled with tons of tips and strategies to help your nonprofit thrive on Giving Tuesday. Once you’ve combed through that goodness, we’ll see back here!

T-Minus 7 days to Giving Tuesday

While planning for Giving Tuesday should *theoretically* start months ahead of time, when you’re a week out, it’s time to start ramping up your marketing. It’s also a great time to tease out a bit of information about what you’re raising money for this year. A week before the big day is the time to lay the groundwork for your Giving Tuesday ask. This means priming your audience with information about what’s happening (Giving Tuesday), why they should participate, and how their gift can make a difference.

Some key marketing channels to update at this point include:

  • Email—Send out an update to your email list giving them a heads up about Giving Tuesday.
  • Website—Update your homepage’s graphic to reflect Giving Tuesday messaging
  • Social Media—Change your social media headers to tie into your Giving Tuesday campaign. It’s also good to post an update about your Giving Tuesday campaign on platforms that you use.

Here are a few teaser graphics to inspire you!

An ad with a tonal blue background picture of a house. White words "On November 29, 2016, #GIVINGTUESDAY give a gift they'll never forget" with a green bar below saying "...a place to call home". At the bottom, a sky-blue bar with whie words "Support Greater Cleveland Habitat for Humanity" and their website, not clickable.
An ad with white words "Support your Cahaba River on" above blue, red, and black words "#GIVINGTUESDAY". The words are shown on a background photo of a small river with green, leafy trees on its bank.

T-Minus 6 days to Giving Tuesday

Since you distributed an email update yesterday and gave your website a bit of a refresh, let’s focus on social media content today. You’ve got a diverse, multi-channel audience, so we want to make sure people within each channel hear about your Giving Tuesday campaign. Today’s the day to share eye-catching graphics and impact stories from last year’s campaign.

If you’re not sure what kind of content performs best with your audience, crack open your analytics for insight. See which posts got the most engagement in the last 30 to 90 days, and look for characteristics in those posts that might have made them more successful than others. Roll your insights into what you create for today.

Here are a few social examples to inspire your GT content.

Image of a tweet asking people to donate to Care Everywhere on Giving Tuesday. Paired with an image of a Black child wearing a green shirt in a field.
Image of a tweet telling the twitterverse that Neverthirst is providing families with clean water. Featuring an image of two water glasses—one with clean water and one with cloudy brown water.

T-Minus 5 days to Giving Tuesday

Today’s the Thursday before Giving Tuesday, otherwise known as Thanksgiving! Get ready to serve your donors a heaping helping of gratitude alongside their turkey this year.  As donor stewardship fans, holidays are a delicious low-hanging fruit and an easy touchpoint with donors. For non-donors in your audience, you can use Thanksgiving as an opportunity to thank them for being a part of your nonprofit’s community.

We love this graphic from No Kid Hungry. It’s perfect for a short and sweet email and social updates.

And it goes without saying, but we’ll say it anyway… schedule this stuff yesterday! Don’t stress over posting while you’re trying to spin up from-scratch gravy.

Image of a social media graphic from No Kid Hungry with the words "Happy Thanksgiving", thanking their donors. The words are orange and black on an off-white background with a border of orange and yellow leaves, pumpkins, berries, and corn.

T-Minus 4 days to Giving Tuesday

While you may be anxiously counting down the days to Giving Tuesday, today your supporters are pulling out their wallets to cash in on Black Friday savings.

It might be hard to compete with all the sales today, so think about making today’s Giving Tuesday message relevant to Black Friday. For instance, you can remind your community that all the money saved on purchases today can be used for big ol’ donations, come Giving Tuesday. You can also piggyback on #BlackFriday action by using the hashtag on relevant social posts.

T-Minus 3 days to Giving Tuesday

It’s Saturday of a long holiday weekend and folks in your community are likely still enjoying time off work (and maybe still enjoying time with family.) Use today to kick the excitement up a notch by reminding your community that it’s just 3 (!!) days until Giving Tuesday.

If you’re looking for fresh ideas for social, think about making some countdown graphics.

Social media image. Red background with a mustard-yellow stripe horizontally through the middle. The text is white, blue, and black, and says "6 days until #GIVINGTUESDAY November 28, 2017 Fight Hate Educate"
Giving Tuesday social graphic. On a background with three horizontal color stripes of white, lime green, and light blue, showing words in gray, blue, black, and white "Counting down to #GIVINGTUESDAY 3 Let's end homelessness for 5 families! I'm supporting wellspring family services"

T-Minus 2 days to Giving Tuesday

Keep the countdown going on social media today. Update your graphics and post new Giving Tuesday content to keep the momentum going into next week.

We like this graphic from the School Nutrition Foundation that provides reasons to give on Giving Tuesday.

Social media graphic offering 7 reasons to donate on Giving Tuesday. With a mustard-yellow horizontal bar at the top with black words. The lower three-quarters of the image show a black background with multi-colored circle. Inside the circle is a drawing of a schoolbus facing the viewer. Outside the circle are 7 speech bubbles. Inside each speech bubble is an image—mortarboard hat, report, schoolhouse, lunch tray, milk and apple, dollar sign, and beaker and dropper. Next to each speech bubble is a reason to donate to School Nutrition Foundation in tiny white letters.

T-Minus 1 days to Giving Tuesday

It’s the day before Giving Tuesday. Let’s make it a great one! Schedule an email to remind your audience that tomorrow is Giving Tuesday. Keep it short, sweet, and enthusiastic. You’ll also want to post updates on all your social channels. If your organization likes to use social video, get on Facebook Live or Instagram Stories today to increase engagement with your social media audience.

Here are two examples of emails to get your creative wheels turning!

Screenshot of an email asking recipients to donate to WAVAW on Giving Tuesday. The header is a digital drawing of multi-colored abstract shapes on a white background with words in black "In a world that doesn't believe survivors, you can stand out."
Screenshot of an email from Invisible Children asking recipients to donate on Giving Tuesday. The email has a white background with black text and two images of African children and adults smiling.

We’ve covered a lot of marketing ground in this post—we hope it’s helped you build a roadmap to Giving Tuesday success! The great news is that Funraise’s Giving Tuesday Toolkit has pre-written templates for emails, social posts, and text messages. We’ve made it easy for our nonprofit friends to grab a template, insert your nonprofit’s info, and be 99% ready to market the heck out of Giving Tuesday!

The more you can do to prepare your audience in the week leading up to Giving Tuesday, the better. Lean on your digital channels and engage your audience to get them ready for an awesome giving opportunity this holiday season.

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