How to Raise More With Facebook and Classy This Giving Tuesday

To prepare for Giving Tuesday—and the rest of your year-end initiatives— your organization must first decide where to host your fundraising campaigns. And with the day’s inherent social nature and Facebook’s developing fundraising offerings, you might consider focusing your campaign efforts on Facebook alone.

Yet if you operate your Giving Tuesday campaign on a platform without donor acquisition and nurturing tools like those available on Classy, the day’s success threatens to be a blip on your larger fundraising calendar that fails to fuel your efforts into the year-end giving season and the following year.

To help you take advantage of Facebook’s powerful reach and acquire the donor information you need to nurture Giving Tuesday donors, the following steps outline how to use Classy and Facebook together.

Step 1: Adopt the Right Giving Tuesday Mantra and Campaign Goals

To capitalize on all Giving Tuesday has to offer, nonprofits tend to rely on email distribution lists to reach their existing donor pool, and social media platforms to mobilize their community and garner new attention. While it’s important to think about how you can capture the maximum number of donations during the 24-hour window, it’s even more vital to consider how to nurture new donors into long-term supporters.

This is why this year, your Giving Tuesday mantra should not only be “attract,” but “attract and retain.”

According to our platform data analysis,

• Giving Tuesday attracts 3 to 5 times the number of new donors acquired on a typical day—new donors you might reach on Facebook
• Fifteen percent of new donors on Giving Tuesday give again before the next Giving Tuesday
• New donors on Giving Tuesday are 3 to 4 times more likely to become fundraisers than donors acquired on December 31

We also found that Giving Tuesday fundraising efforts do not cannibalize fundraising efforts during the final, high-volume five days of the year. As such, it’s a great day to kick off your year-end campaign because you can use the new donor information you collect to re-engage them during the end of the year.

Which is why it’s important to create your campaign goals with the mantra, “attract and retain” in mind. Some goals you might consider are:

• Acquire X new donors across Classy and Facebook combined
• Obtain donor information for X percent of new donors for follow-up

On Classy, 100 percent of donations made to your organization come with an associated name and email address. If you were to fundraise on Facebook alone, you might see that fewer than 10 percent of donors provide an email address, like Operation Broken Silence.

Step 2: Build Your Giving Tuesday Campaign on Classy

Once you decide the appropriate goals for your campaign, you can select the campaign type you want to run.

On Classy, crowdfunding and donation pages are the most common campaign types used to fundraise for Giving Tuesday. Some organizations run standalone campaigns and focus their efforts solely on the 24-hour time period. Others use Giving Tuesday to kick off their year-end fundraising campaigns and swap out campaign visual assets shortly after the day to continue fundraising through the new year with the same page.

Depending on your goals, you might also consider running a recurring giving or peer-to-peer fundraising campaign. Through our platform analysis, we found that while a low percentage of total gifts made on Giving Tuesday are recurring, Giving Tuesday donors are more likely to become recurring givers than donors who give during the final five days of the year. We believe this to be due in part to the fact that high net worth donors tend to give for tax benefits near the end of the year, and that Giving Tuesday donors are more similar to “typical day” donors.

Once you decide what campaign type to run and gather your design assets, you can create a campaign on Classy in a matter of minutes.

To get started, gather these things first:

• Campaign name
• Fundraising goal
• Campaign start and end dates
• Featured media
• Donate button text

Read Next: How to Launch a Crowdfunding Campaign in 10 Minutes

Step 3: Complete the Facebook Nonprofit Verification Process

When your campaign page is up and running, you’ll be in a position to start appealing to donors and calling for support. But before the conversations begin and Giving Tuesday draws near, you’ll want to be sure your nonprofit is verified on Facebook.

Even if you don’t run a focused fundraising campaign on Facebook, supporters might seek you out hoping to make a contribution to your cause through the platform. If you’re not set up, you’re missing the opportunity to meet that person where they want to interact with you, and it becomes less likely they’ll go the extra mile to give their support.

Mark Hackett, executive director of Operation Broken Silence, recognizes the power of one-time supporters and explains,

“We still use Facebook fundraising tools because we recognize there are a lot of people who like to give and fundraise for a lot of different causes. I think that audience is where Facebook fundraising tools are especially useful because it allows them to be engaged in a ‘one-and-done’ kind of way. While our priority as an organization is cultivating our supporters and building them into a movement over the long-term, there is still value in having an individual give or fundraise one time and then move on to something else.”

To get set up and ensure you’re not turning away supporters who chose to engage with you on Facebook, complete the following steps:

1. Make sure you qualify to use Facebook’s fundraising tools
2. Create a nonprofit Facebook Page

Step 4: Promote Your Classy Campaign on Facebook

After you’ve created your campaign to actively push on Giving Tuesday and verified your nonprofit on Facebook to receive passive support, you’re in a position to get sharing.

To take advantage of Facebook’s wide reach, you should craft messaging about your Giving Tuesday fundraising campaign to share before, during, and after the day. By linking your posts to your Classy fundraising page, you combine the power of social media with the ability to acquire crucial donor information.

Your Classy campaign will also maintain the look and feel of your brand, reminding would-be supporters that they are about to give their personal information in a safe and secure way. Conversely, given recent events and news stories, if you were to promote strictly a Facebook fundraising page, many may question the security of their information and hesitate to proceed.

In our Giving Tuesday Resource Center, you can download a copy of 28 Giving Tuesday Social Media Templates for free, as well as countless other assets. This guide includes 14 Facebook templates you can use to engage your audience and encourage social sharing.

Interested in learning more about how to use Classy and Facebook in tandem to meet your Giving Tuesday fundraising goals? Get the guide on the subject.