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!

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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!

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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 Giving Tuesday campaign ideas.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 Giving Tuesday email examples to get your creative wheels turning!

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.