Tips & Tricks | Estimated Read time – 5:58
The world’s biggest day of generosity, known as GivingTuesday, is just around the corner! Many individuals were inspired by this global movement last year and we are predicting that this generosity will continue on. Now is a great time to get ahead and ensure your event is ready for November 30th, 2021!
What is GivingTuesday?
GivingTuesday, as referenced by givingtuesday.org, is a “global generosity movement unleashing the power of people and organizations to transform their communities and the world. GivingTuesday was created in 2012 as a simple idea: a day that encourages people to do good. Over the past seven years, it has grown into a global movement that inspires hundreds of millions of people to give, collaborate, and celebrate generosity.”
If your event is set up on Race Roster, your fundraising organization is connected and ready-to-go, your event is LIVE and fundraising is enabled – you are ready to accept donations! However, technology is only part of the preparation. Your fundraisers may not know all the best tips and tricks for powering up their individual or team fundraising strategies!
We’re here to help and ready to assist you and your participants with some great ways to get set up for success and make significant progress towards your fundraising goals this GivingTuesday.
1 – Set & encourage fundraising goals
You likely have a number in mind that you are aiming to raise for your fundraising partners this year. We recommend inserting that goal into your dashboard to publicly display the progress towards completing it. Seeing how close an organization is to meeting a goal can be a great driver for donations!
Goals can be especially motivating for individuals or fundraising teams! You can encourage your fundraisers to set a personal fundraising goal for themselves, as well as a goal for their team to work towards.
2 – Encourage fundraisers to tell their story
Many people have causes that are near and dear to their hearts. Hearing the why behind an individual or group’s passion can be extremely impactful and form a connection between fundraisers and donors. Once you know the story behind the importance of a cause and understand how your donation is going to make a difference, it’s hard not to contribute! We also analyzed fundraising data and behaviours on our platform and determined that fundraisers who shared their own personal journey and image on their fundraising page received higher engagement! A fundraiser’s story might even drive someone else to advocate for the cause and encourage others to donate as well.
3 – Customize your fundraising pages
There are a variety of ways a fundraising page can be customized!
- Custom banners – A custom banner image can be displayed at the top of your fundraising organization page, as well as team and individual fundraising pages. This is a great space to bring in branding elements of your fundraising organization or something aligned with your event!
- Custom text – There are many customizable text options available for fundraising pages. You can utilize these customizations to change default content, customize button text, set default story text, images, goals for fundraisers, thank you messages, and more.
- Donation messaging on general organization pages – Every fundraising organization page can be styled from fundraising organization settings. You can add text, images, videos, and HTML to appear in the details section of your page. Some great information to include here could be an outline of how each donation amount contributes to helping the organization.
For example, “If you donate $50, you will be providing individuals and families in need with 200 meals“.
4 – Set up how-to email campaigns
We put together a ready-to-go email template you can use to encourage your fundraisers to customize their pages! Simply navigate to the Race Roster email campaign tool, create a new campaign and select ‘personalize your fundraising page’ from the pre-made campaign options.
When you arrive on the customization page, you can either leave as is to keep this process quick and easy, or tweak the design to your liking. This campaign will link fundraisers straight to their fundraising page and includes step-by-step instructions on how to add a photo and story to their page.
5 – Encourage others to spread the word
Spreading the word about a fundraising organization and asking for donations is absolutely key. No one will donate if they don’t know about it! Anyone who visits a fundraiser’s page is presented with the option to share on Facebook, Twitter, or they can copy the share link to promote on alternative platforms or share via email! This is another great place for fundraisers to explain why this cause is so important to them and how their contribution truly makes a difference.
6 – Create fundraising badges
An effective way to motivate your fundraisers to drive more donations is to create digital fundraising badges. These achievements can be based on a fixed monetary amount (e.g. raise $100.00), or as a percentage of a goal (e.g. raise 50% of a specified goal amount). Achievements can be set up to be awarded to an individual fundraiser or to a fundraising team!
It can also be impactful to include how their amount raised has helped the organization. Seeing that the $100 you raised has contributed to providing 400 meals can be a great motivator to keep going and try to raise more! You could set up an email campaign to automatically send when a fundraiser has earned an achievement. This campaign could congratulate them on their amount raised, provide some tips on how they might be able to raise more, highlight how much their efforts are appreciated and how it is making a difference.
7 – Additional ideas to increase fundraising engagement
After analyzing fundraising stats and behaviours, we determined that the following methods are also great ways to increase fundraising engagement:
- Include a link to individual or team fundraising pages in Instagram bio
- Ask for donations as a gift (e.g., birthday or holiday present)
- Create fundraising organization awareness campaigns (you can use the Race Roster email campaign tool to further educate your participants on event causes and how to)
We hope you find success this GivingTuesday and wish you the best! Using our research, we have a prepared an easy to reference summary of takeaways we hope you will find useful:
Top fundraising tactics
- Sharing with friends on Facebook, Twitter and email.
- Sharing fundraiser page in Instagram Bio.
- Sharing their own personal journey and image on their fundraising page.
- Setting goals on fundraising page to incentive fundraisers to raise more.
- Having fundraising badges and sending out email campaigns once a fundraiser has raised a certain amount.
- Utilizing all three layers of fundraising pages to maximize fundraising efforts organization, team and individual.
- Sharing a personal story of those affected by the organization’s work. Letting donors know where their money will be going and who they will be helping.
Key donor behaviour
- More engagement and donating to fundraising pages that have more imagery and a personal story.
- Making donations because of awareness through emails or social media.
- Donating as a gift to a friend of a loved one.
- Donating to an organization because they are passionate about the cause.
- Having short/personal stories to share and letting donors know where their money is going
Knowledge base links
To share with your participants:
- How do I set up my personal pledge page?
- How do I share my pledge page?
- How do I share my team pledge page?
- How to add a goal for your fundraising organization
What’s new at Race Roster?
See all of our releases or visit our what’s new page for the most noteworthy Race Roster updates!
