Giving Tuesday: Seven Steps to Creating a Successful Fundraising Campaign

Research says Giving Tuesday revenue declined by 13% from 2021, and email revenue on Giving Tuesday declined by 18%, but don’t let that be you!

Turn the statistics around by using every channel to engage with your donors. 97% of American professionals keep their phone next to them 24 hours a day. Use texting to your advantage when email response rates are below 1% (M&R Benchmark report).

With Giving Tuesday at the end of November, it’s time to create your plan of action and get started now.

Step 1: Choose Your Texting Platform.

Rally Corp is different. We focus on community and relationships.

We allow you to send more characters in your text campaigns, send personalized ringless voicemails, and have peer-to-peer texting conversations to develop deeper, more meaningful relationships with your donors. It’s important to be able to respond when your supporters ask questions or want to learn more about your cause.

What could be better in the nonprofit world than building long-term supporters that will stay connected with you beyond the next few months?

Step 2: Get Your Phone Number Verified

At Rally Corp, we do the hard work of getting your number fully verified within six weeks so your text messages are received when Giving Tuesday rolls around.

Wait, what?

Yes, your phone number for bulk texting needs to be verified. And it takes time. You need to plan ahead.

You can certainly sign up for any texting platform today and try to send out thousands of messages, but without that verification, your texts may not be sent or received. Many phone carriers will block them as spam.

To get the most out of your time and your money during the busy giving season, a verified toll-free number is the best way to go. And as long as you plan ahead, you’ll be ready for your text messages to be sent and received, without worry, on Giving Tuesday!

Step 3: Begin Building Your Contacts List

With Rally Corp, you have access to keyword workflows and QR codes that allow your donors and community to text in and make the first move when they decide to connect with you. Share these over social media, via email, and on your website to grow your list as you prep your Giving Tuesday campaign. (Need a QR code or some graphics to help you get started? We can help!)

Already have a list of donors and supporters you want to reach out to? Perfect! We can help you import those lists into your contacts, organize them with tags which help you to understand who you should send messages to, and get them added to your upcoming campaigns. We provide documents and import templates for you to use, or if you need a little extra help, our staff can work with you one on one.

Step 4: Start to Engage With Your Community

In the nonprofit world, it’s said it often takes at least seven touches to receive a donation. That may sound like a lot, but when you include texting along with the communications you are already using, you can grow relationships quicker and more efficiently.

Consider sending messages ahead of time that make supporters feel needed and show the impact your nonprofit is making in your community. The best part? When they ask questions and respond, you can reply with Rally Corp to start a conversation and use our AI sentiment analysis to know when replies are good or bad. You can even use multimedia message service (MMS) to include video, GIFs, and images to incorporate humor or drive empathy and put less pressure on your donors.

Step 5: Create Your Giving Tuesday Campaign

You can create your Giving Tuesday campaign either ahead of time or on the day of. The flexibility is great for creating larger, multi-step (and multi-text) giving campaigns just like Giving Tuesday. If you have your messages planned and set up ahead of time, you can schedule them on a specific day and time to go out automatically, or save the campaign message, import the right contacts, and press send later!

When you do create your messages, personalization and being human-centered is key. After all, building relationships with your donors will create long-term success for your nonprofit. If you aren’t sure how to accomplish this, don’t worry, we have over a hundred pre-written text message templates you can choose from, and many of them are written with either Giving Tuesday or fundraising and donations in mind.

Knowing what to say or how to ask for money can be stressful, so we take the guesswork out of it.

Step 6: Send Your Giving Tuesday Messages and Ringless Voicemails

The day is finally here, Giving Tuesday! You have been prepping for this day for a couple months and you are ready to send your day of campaigns and/or ringless voicemails! After completing steps 1-5, Giving Tuesday will be easy for you to just press send and see the impact of your work as donations come in.

Step 7: Watch Your Donations Pour in and Express Gratitude

There are a few different ways you can track interactions and your donations in the Rally platform, either by link tracking or by accessing your CRM integrations.

With our link tracking ability, when sending links out in campaigns or keyword workflows, you have the ability to see who is actively clicking the link to your donation page.

Rally Corp also integrates with a number of different CRMs and giving platforms such as Classy, Mightycause, Fundraise Up, Bloomerang, and more. Set up your account with one of these integrations to create even more value in your Giving Tuesday campaigns.

After you have reached, and even surpassed your goal, make sure to express your gratitude. It’s important to thank your supporters and continue to build those long-term relationships. You can do so by creating a thank you campaign to send to your donors that helped you reach your goal (consider sending a video link to make it that more personal) or by sending a personally recorded ‘thank you ’message via ringless voicemail.

Make Giving Tuesday Work

Yes, using text messaging for Giving Tuesday is incredibly effective, but using it all year round to build relationships is even more effective. You could even expand your Giving Tuesday initiative to a year-end fundraising campaign.

Continue to use the Rally platform to show your community the impact their donations have made through the next year, grow your volunteer base, and increase your event participation! As you build meaningful relationships via human-centered text messaging, your nonprofit will flourish, and your community will be forever changed as the number of lives you change and the impact you make continues to grow!

Ready to get started with Rally and make Giving Tuesday work for you?