Giving Tuesday Matching Donations: Doubling Your Year-End Impact

This blog was written in collaboration with Adam Weinger, President of Double the Donation. Double the Donation helps nonprofits increase annual revenue through corporate matching gifts and volunteer grant programs. 

Classy’s The State of Modern Philanthropy report reveals that Giving Tuesday is a powerhouse for donor acquisition, with organizations gaining over 10x more donors than on any other day. Additionally, conversion rates on Giving Tuesday are 2x as high as the daily average.

Corporate matching gifts can supplement this year-end intensity to create a compelling strategy with unparalleled outcomes. Below are some of the most effective ways to jump-start your matching gift campaign this Giving Tuesday and lead you into the holiday giving season:

• Understand the corporate matching gift opportunity
• Set giving and matching gift fundraising goals
• Research donor information to identify lucrative opportunities
• Communicate with donors to encourage matching gifts
• Automate matching gift fundraising

Ready to get started? Let’s jump in.

Understand the corporate matching gift opportunity

Corporate matching gifts are financial donations made by companies to support the nonprofit causes their employees already support. Before you can successfully promote these programs alongside your Giving Tuesday and year-end fundraising efforts, it’s crucial to have a solid understanding of the programs⁠—and what currently hinders their success.

According to research from Double the Donation, an average of $4 to $7 billion in matching funds is left unclaimed each year. Why? Although companies with matching gift programs employ more than 26 million individuals, most are uninformed of their eligibility. This means that the biggest obstacle to maximizing match campaign funding is often a lack of awareness.

How do matching gifts work?

Every company that offers a matching gift program chooses program guidelines. These include donation minimums and maximums, match ratios, and, of course, the match request submission deadline. With year-end fundraising, the submission deadline is one of the most important considerations.

Since many companies allow donation match requests throughout the calendar year that the employee made the gift, the holiday season is a great opportunity to follow up with match-eligible donors who previously gave that year. This allows you to collect additional revenue as the year draws close without asking existing donors to reach back into their wallets.

Set giving and matching gift fundraising goals

As you prepare your fundraising and overall communication strategies for Giving Tuesday, setting goals and expectations surrounding your giving program is essential. These objectives should be specific, measurable, and realistic to help motivate donor participation and team member momentum.

A few examples of Giving Tuesday matching gift metrics might include:

• Response rate to matching gift messaging
• Percentage of donors’ match eligibility statuses
• Total amount raised from matching gifts
• Number of matching gifts received
• Percentage of available matching gift revenue secured
• Number of new donors who submitted matching gift requests
• Number of recurring donors who submitted matching gift requests

To simplify the reporting process, some tools will automatically track valuable fundraising data to ensure accurate and up-to-date matching gift information. For example, 360MatchPro and Classy can track and report on prescribed data-driven goals to ensure your organization has access to the most effective matching gift strategies and platform functionality.

Research donor information to identify lucrative opportunities

As with any fundraising campaign, start with research. A few main donor data insights⁠—particularly regarding their employment status⁠—will help you get started. Specifically, this should include:

• Companies that offer generous matching gift programs
• Companies your donors work for
• Companies that overlap between the two

This information can show you where to focus your efforts and how to ensure the most efficient use of your time by targeting mid-level and major donors with the most generous matching gift programs.

Fortunately, many resources are available to assist you in gathering the data. For example, this compilation of top matching gift companies shares a list of well-known businesses that match gifts and a summary of each program offered. 

You can even use corporate databases like 360MatchPro by Double the Donation to get detailed information about matching gift guidelines for thousands of companies. (Hint: This particular software integrates directly into your Classy platform to easily access matching gift information.)

Once you have this information, examine where your donors work and apply your insights from leading matching gift programs to uncover specific matching opportunities. For example, you might look at your most recent high-value donors to see if they qualify for matching gifts as you prepare your Giving Tuesday donation strategy.

Communicate with donors to encourage matching gifts

You’ll likely send many fundraising appeals and other donor-facing messages around Giving Tuesday. After all, you want to urge supporters to get involved in your global Giving Day campaign. For the best results, we strongly urge you to incorporate matching gifts throughout your communications at a few key points.

Leading up to Giving Tuesday

As Giving Tuesday approaches, you’ll likely initiate supporter outreach to prepare for your upcoming fundraiser. While this can look different from one organization to the next, you may expect to communicate with donors across multiple channels⁠, including your campaign landing page, newsletters, blog posts, email marketing, text messaging, direct mail, social media, and more. 

However, don’t forget to incorporate all necessary information within your match campaign messaging to drive the most significant results. According to the previously cited Double the Donation matching gift research:

• Over 84% of survey participants say they’re more likely to donate if offered a matching gift
• 1 in 3 donors states they’d give a larger initial donation if their gift received a match
• A 71% increase in response rate and a 51% increase in donation amount occurred when mentioning matching gifts in fundraising appeals

These metrics show that donors respond positively to matching gift appeals in marketing. This means that not only will effective promotional tactics help you secure matches for gifts you’ve already received, but they can also encourage additional donations that you might not have collected otherwise.

Within the donation process

Promoting matching gift opportunities at the height of donor engagement is essential, and directly within the giving experience—on Giving Tuesday, specifically⁠—is one of the best times to do it. Luckily, it’s easy to incorporate matching gifts within the donation process, especially with online donations on Classy’s fundraising platform.

That said, your Giving Tuesday donation page can be a fantastic chance to request employment data, especially for those donors whose employment status you don’t have on record. 

But, be sure to mention matching gifts where you collect this information, as donors tend to be more willing to enter employment data when they know how you’ll use it.

Continuously promoting matching gifts throughout the donor experience will also allow you to increase awareness of these opportunities while donors are actively involved in supporting your organization.

After Giving Tuesday ends

We recommend following up with donors in the hours or days after Giving Tuesday to remind them about match opportunities and encourage them to complete their submissions. Consider these tips as you do so:

• Remember that timing is everything: Double the Donation reports that sending matching gift reminder emails within 24 hours of a donation results in a 53% open rate. That’s 2-3x higher than the average nonprofit email open rate.
• Provide as much targeted information as possible: Donors don’t want to conduct research to submit a match request. Simplify the process by sharing company-specific program details with individuals whose employment data you have on file. This should include the company’s minimum and maximum match amounts, qualified employees and nonprofits, match ratios, submission deadlines, and links to submission forms.
• Encourage donors to keep you updated regarding the request process: We recommend incorporating an easy link in your matching gift emails that informs your team when donors complete their end of the matching gift request to aid in tracking matches to completion. Then, be sure to thank them for their time and effort.

Fortunately, the integration between Classy and Double the Donation makes it easy to implement timely, targeted follow-ups (complete with a trackable “I submitted my match!” link). To learn more about how you can do so, we’ll cover automation in more detail below.

Year-round

So far, this guide has primarily focused on matching gifts for your upcoming Giving Tuesday fundraising campaign. This is an excellent opportunity you don’t want to miss, particularly when you craft your Giving Tuesday plan to lead into a strategic rest-of-the-year-end giving season strategy.

But your matching gift efforts shouldn’t end there. Marketing matching gifts to your supporters can also be an effective year-round initiative.

And it should start⁠ with⁠—and center on⁠—your nonprofit website. After all, this is arguably your most valuable marketing asset, so it makes sense to incorporate matching gift information where relevant. Establish a dedicated matching gift webpage, add a section on matching gifts to your “ways to give” screen, and incorporate matching gifts on your navigation menu to aid current and prospective supporters.

The bottom line is that if you’ve yet to explore the power and possibilities involved with corporate gift matching, hosting a Giving Tuesday matching gift campaign can be an excellent way to jump-start your efforts. However, you’ll want to keep growing your matching gift fundraising initiatives well into the future so that available matches eventually get claimed.

Automate matching gift fundraising

As our final practice, automating the matching gift process is one of the best ways to streamline your efforts and boost efficiency across your organization. Doing so allows you to save more of your team’s time and effort, which they can reallocate to your highest-value matching gift prospects. That’s especially critical, considering everything your team will do to boost year-end giving.

Automating matching gifts effectively requires investment in a powerful platform. To drive the best results, this tool should integrate with your online fundraising software, like Classy, and help manage the process from start to finish⁠. 

For example, Double the Donation’s 360MatchPro is a complete automation tool designed to aid nonprofits and schools in identifying, marketing, and reporting on matching gifts every step of the way.

Double your year-end fundraising with a Giving Tuesday matching gift campaign today

Keep these matching gift strategies in mind as you complete the final stretch of Giving Day planning. Goal setting, research, and communication are vital yet simple ways to implement a successful matching method in time for one of the most philanthropic days of the year.

As we’ve seen, matching gifts are beneficial year-round, but their impact is multiplied during the end-of-year fundraising season. By providing your team with a solid foundation for matching gift basics, you can maximize your efforts to drive your cause forward more effectively.

Imagine what your organization can do with double the revenue. 

Copy Editor: Ayanna Julien