Giving Tuesday Guide (Part 1)

Part 1 : Using Wealth Screening to Power Results

Giving Tuesday is one of the biggest fundraising days of the year and is a major fundraising opportunity for many nonprofit organizations; nonprofits in the United States alone raised over $3.1 billion from 34 million individuals on Giving Tuesday in 2023.

Running a successful Giving Tuesday requires an “all hands on deck” approach, with contributions from across your organization’s ranks – board members, volunteers, and casual supporters alike can all play a part in a successful Giving Tuesday campaign.

The same “all-in” mentality applies to the technology solutions underpinning your organization’s fundraising efforts on this pivotal day. Windfall’s Wealth Screening and AI-powered Propensity to Give (PTG) Modeling can provide you with a competitive edge, helping optimize outreach and planning for Giving Tuesday.

In the first post of this 3-part blog series, we’ll cover four data-driven best practices to create a winning Giving Tuesday strategy:

Activate Existing Donors
Personalize Messaging to Break Through the Noise
Engage your Most Loyal Supporters in New Ways
Go Beyond Giving Tuesday

1. Activate Existing Donors

Due to the national visibility of the Giving Tuesday movement, it is one of the best days of the year for new donor acquisition, so naturally, many organizations focus the majority of their Giving Tuesday outreach efforts on finding new donors. While donor acquisition is always important, concentrated efforts on engaging existing donors and prospects can lead to significant wins on Giving Tuesday.

It costs nearly five times as much to acquire a new donor as to retain an existing donor. Constituents already in your CRM are likely connected to your organization in some way and are more likely to give a gift to your organization than someone just learning about your mission amidst the buzz of Giving Tuesday. With Windfall’s unlimited Wealth Screening model, you can screen your entire database before Giving Tuesday to ensure your team is equipped with up-to-date wealth and career information to fuel your outreach strategies.

Many organizations may focus their Giving Tuesday outreach to constituents who qualify as current donors, LYBUNTs (Last Year But Unfortunately Not This Year), or SYBUNTs (Some Year But Unfortunately Not This Year) to keep costs down. Unlimited wealth screening of your entire CRM allows your team to expand this scope and potentially target affluent lapsed donors and even non-donors in your campaign. This tactic allows your organization to leverage Giving Tuesday’s recognizable brand to re-engage high-net-worth potential donors and prospects who may have otherwise been overlooked.

2. Personalize Messaging to Break Through the Noise

As one of the biggest fundraising days of the year, Giving Tuesday is also one of the noisiest, with nearly every other nonprofit also sending out solicitations and emails. This makes it crucial to personalize your messaging to break through the general buzz of the day and convince your constituents to take action. The wealth screening and career intelligence data points provided by Windfall give your team many avenues to segment and personalize your outreach on Giving Tuesday. Some data-driven strategies for personalized messaging include:

Utilize affinity information to target constituents based on their known philanthropic interests, shared as the Philanthropic Cause Trigger. Constituent career information like company type and industry can also fuel personalization, especially if your Giving Tuesday campaign supports a specific program or project at your organization.
Identify “Hidden Gems,” or donors with a net worth vastly exceeding their current giving level. Make a plan to personally contact the very top tier of these donors on Giving Tuesday to sow the seeds of an upgrade conversation. If your team cannot personally reach out to all your potential hidden gems, you can utilize their net worth to develop increasing ask strings for them, so they are afforded the opportunity to increase their commitment to your organization in your Giving Tuesday outreach.
Tap into philanthropically savvy donors with messaging specifically geared toward the tax benefits of end-of-year giving. Windfall’s Trust Association and Foundation-focused triggers can help identify potential donors to include in this segment.

3. Engage your Most Loyal Supporters in New Ways

There is a growing concern among nonprofit organizations about over-soliciting throughout the year. Your most loyal supporters and high-net-worth individuals are already likely giving back to your organization in ways that exceed the scope of Giving Tuesday, which is largely a participation-focused day. For your highest-level donors, rather than making another large Giving Tuesday ask that might interrupt the flow of their established giving pattern, consider the following engagement strategies to make your most loyal supporters feel special while increasing your fundraising impact:

Send personalized invitations to a Giving Tuesday impact celebration, or if that feels like too much, hold a simple virtual ‘cheers’ via Zoom toward the end of the fundraising day to celebrate your wins.
Invite loyal supporters to participate in a “thank-a-thon”, calling 5-10 new Giving Tuesday donors to personally thank them for their support.
Ask loyal supporters to solicit donations from five people in their network to expand your donor base or to post a templatized message on their social media channels.

If you’re looking for more volunteer ideas or advanced fundraising strategies, check out the second article in this series, which is coming soon!

4. Go Beyond Giving Tuesday

While Giving Tuesday is a fantastic day for fundraising, it’s also an opportunity to build momentum that you can sustain throughout the months ahead. Acquiring new donors is just the beginning – retaining them can be a challenge; the Fundraising Effectiveness Project found that new donor retention has declined by over 7% in the past year. Leveraging wealth screening can help you better understand the new donors you acquire on Giving Tuesday and how to retain them. Post-Giving Tuesday stewardship strategies include:

Screen every new donor from Giving Tuesday to identify any affluent donors who may warrant cultivation. Establishing a regular wealth screening cadence and taking advantage of Windfall’s unlimited screening model will ensure you have this valuable data at your fingertips for newly-acquired donors within the week or month.
Leverage net worth to prioritize new donor cultivation and stewardship. Customize gift acknowledgment outreach based on net worth and other factors that may make a new donor a promising mid or major donor. For example, donors with a net worth over $10MM may receive follow-ups from a major gift officer, those between $3MM and $10MM may receive personalized phone calls from the annual giving team, and those under $3MM may receive a more mass email ‘thank you” message.
Extend your Giving Tuesday campaign into a year-end fundraising campaign. December is far and away the largest fundraising month of the year, with the most charitable donations coming in the last three days of the month. This long tail is a great time to build on your Giving Tuesday momentum and use your wins and stories to reconnect with new and existing donors.

Partner with Windfall to Make Giving Tuesday Work for You

Giving Tuesday represents a powerful opportunity for every nonprofit organization to galvanize donors and meet their fundraising goals. If you want to supercharge your Giving Tuesday, then partner with Windfall to identify, understand, and engage your valuable constituents.

With Windfall’s wealth screening solution, you receive a precise net worth figure, not a score or a range. Our net worth is based on both deterministic inputs from more than 50 sources and proprietary algorithms to ensure accurate values at the household level.
Our propensity models are completely bespoke to your nonprofit and your goal. They leverage your internal data on top of Windfall’s precise net worth data and more than 30 additional attributes, outperforming RFM, heuristics, and other out-of-the-box models.