How to Craft Compelling Messaging for Your Giving Tuesday Campaign

Giving Tuesday is an annual, worldwide day of generosity on the first Tuesday after Thanksgiving. Nonprofit organizations leverage this movement to meet year-end fundraising goals, acquire new donors, and nurture existing donor relationships. However, to make the most of the giving day, nonprofits must craft compelling messages that resonate with their communities and drive donations.

Below, we’ll explore essential strategies and techniques to help your nonprofit’s Giving Tuesday messaging stand out. By understanding your audience and delivering powerful narratives, you can inspire action and drive impact on Giving Tuesday and beyond.

Plan Ahead to Drive More Impact This Giving Tuesday

As you plan your Giving Tuesday strategy, create timelines for when you want to send different outreach messages. You’ll want to engage potential donors in advance to prepare them for the upcoming campaign, as well as throughout the actual day and afterward, to summarize the impact that Giving Tuesday donations had.

Once you determine when to promote your Giving Tuesday campaign, identify fundraising tools that can help distribute your messaging in compelling ways. A Giving Tuesday toolkit can assist with imagery, color palettes, graphic design, writing, data analysis, and more. However, don’t forget to check out Giving Tuesday email examples, storytelling best practices, and samples of effective calls to action from nonprofits’ past efforts for inspiration as you gather tools to support your work.

Your 3-Month Giving Tuesday Checklist

7 Strategies to Craft Captivating Giving Tuesday Messages That Resonate

A successful Giving Tuesday campaign relies on messaging that highlights how your cause intimately serves individuals, animals, or environments and motivates your audience to act as a result of a new or deepening connection to those places or beneficiaries. Your Giving Tuesday text and visual storytelling elements should inspire action through urgency, impact, and empathy.

Here are seven ways to create Giving Tuesday messaging that converts.

1. Leverage the Power of Words

Choose the wording for your Giving Tuesday 2023 campaign thoughtfully. Select words and phrases that help donors quickly identify or empathize with an individual, place, or animal your campaign funds and establish a connection to it. Then, aim to be concise and consistent while still sharing enough to demonstrate how this beneficiary has been deeply affected by the problem you work to solve.

In addition, consider creating a short tagline for your campaign to feature on donation forms, email headers, Giving Tuesday social media posts, and your main donation website to remind donors of the “why” behind your efforts. You can use quotes or stories from board members and staff that encourage donors to give.

Check out this list of six words that can help increase donations to get started.

2. Tap Into Your Audience’s Emotions and Values

Use your Giving Tuesday messaging to reflect on what you’ve accomplished over the last year, thanks to your donors—because, after all, the holiday season can be a sentimental time for many and encourages a spirit of generosity. Note to donors how this campaign helps your community continue putting its values into action while supporting your larger mission.

Then, consider doing a soft launch of your Giving Tuesday campaign by sending a thank you email to last year’s donors and asking them to help ensure another successful effort. You can also tap into your audience’s generous spirit by asking them to consider peer-to-peer fundraising for Giving Tuesday. By doing so, they can communicate their values and support of your nonprofit to their wider network.

3. Create a Sense of Urgency and Encourage Immediate Action

Build momentum by sending campaign reminders to your supporters as you near Giving Tuesday. You may even ask them to be an early donor by making a gift on Black Friday or Cyber Monday before your big launch.

On the day of, use your Giving Tuesday email subject lines as a countdown. Let supporters know how much time they have left in the campaign and how far you have to go to reach your goal. You can also employ a fundraising thermometer to show that they can be the one to help you cross the finish line. Then, send a follow-up email to donors after they make a gift that shows how it directly impacted your progress.

4. Consider the Power of Storytelling

Include a collection of individual stories that ladder up to your larger mission in your Giving Tuesday messaging, from your email strategy to social media posts. You can use visuals to tell your stories, such as personal photos of people your work has supported or volunteers helping your cause. In addition, you can incorporate short videos and testimonials into your emails that show your work in action, like setting up an adoption event for your animal charity.

Consider incorporating a virtual fundraising event into your Giving Tuesday campaign as well. For example, you could host a live webinar where your staff, volunteers, and beneficiaries share how your nonprofit organization has made a life-changing impact on them—in a way your supporters can relate. This puts faces to your mission for your supporters.

5. Communicate the Impact and Importance of Your Cause

Use messaging to help supporters understand the impact of each dollar you raise and why your fundraising efforts are crucial on Giving Tuesday. One way to do this is through impact blocks. You can have separate blocks for different donation amounts and share specifically what each value will help you achieve.

For example, a food bank might say that $50 will feed 10 families for a week, $100 will fund school lunches for 50 kids for the month, and $500 will buy new storage shelving for its pantry.

6. Tailor Your Messaging to Different Platforms and Channels to Reach a Wider Audience

Create Giving Tuesday social media templates for each platform to simplify the content creation process, taking note of each social media platform’s specific messaging guidelines and best practices. On Threads, for example, posts can be up to 500 characters, while on Instagram, visuals are critical to drive engagement.

It’s also crucial to know which features, such as a campaign-specific hashtag, to use across channels. Consider which methods allow for more in-depth messaging, such as email marketing, and those where you’ll need to keep your outreach brief, such as text messages. By tailoring your Giving Tuesday messaging to align with timely trends on each channel, you’re more likely to pique a user’s attention and inspire action.

7. Measure the Effectiveness of Your Giving Tuesday Messaging

Review data in your CRM from last year’s Giving Tuesday campaign as a starting point for understanding what worked and where you can improve. A great place to begin is checking whether any software integrations helped distribute, track, or optimize your Giving Tuesday messaging more effectively.

Throughout your campaign, you can also review the open and click-through rates for different emails to identify which ones resulted in the most online donations. This analysis can help shape your subject lines, send times, visuals, and other messaging techniques to fuel stronger engagement.

Use Innovative Approaches to Stand Out and Make Your Giving Tuesday Messages Memorable

The holiday giving season is a busy time for your supporters, in addition to being inundated with requests for donations and increased advertising messages. To make your Giving Tuesday messaging stand out from the crowd and encourage action, employ meaningful wording, emotional imagery, and memorable personal storytelling.

Check out Classy’s Giving Tuesday Resource Center for more tools and support to ensure your Giving Tuesday messaging makes an impact this year.

Copy Editor: Ayanna Julien