Mike’s Monday Message Takeover: Exploring Alternatives to Giving Tuesday

The last two months of the year are often the busiest for fundraisers, between campaigns affiliated with Giving Tuesday and end-of-year (EOY) appeals. It will depend on your cause, just how much of your annual revenue comes in during those last few months, but according to Nonprofits Source, 30% of all annual giving occurs in December, with 10% occurring just in the last three days. 

With that much of their budget depending on EOY performance, fundraisers who want to capitalize on both Giving Tuesday and end-of-year appeals are often torn between separate, differentiated appeals or using Giving Tuesday as the kick-off to their year-end campaign. However you choose to position it though, condensing that much solicitation into such a short period of time is naturally going to cause some fatigue, certainly in your fundraising staff, and potentially in your donor base as well. 

That’s why some nonprofits are shying away from the traditional Giving Tuesday, replacing it with alternatives such as “Gratitude Tuesday”, while moving their giving day to a less traditionally busy time of year, like the spring. 

That’s what we are doing this year at the Colorado State University Pueblo Foundation, where I work. 

We noticed that our fall fundraising season was particularly busy with several back-to-back appeals: a Homecoming mailer in September/October, the former Fall Giving Day in October/November, and a year-end mailer in December. In contrast, our spring fundraising efforts were limited to a smaller Memorial Day mailer and our annual gala in May. 

We looked at the data on the success of these appeals and found that while we had seen a steady increase in donor participation in the first six years of our giving day, in the last two years, our contributions had plateaued.

We decided that this year, we would move our giving day to the following spring, with the hope that this change will spread donor engagement more evenly throughout the year, reinvigorate participation, and reduce the concentration of appeals in the fall, which will really help the workload for our small staff.

Internally, this was a pretty easy decision to make; the hardest part was communication with our university partners who host a campaign on our give day. We had to let them know we were moving to the spring after eight years of holding the event in the fall.

We’ve had some initial pushback from stakeholders who were accustomed to a fall giving day. However, after explaining our reasoning, university staff and faculty expressed understanding and are looking forward to participating in the new spring format.

Many universities hold their giving days in the spring, often coinciding with their Founders Day. In higher education fundraising, we see ourselves as partners, not competitors, which allowed me to gather helpful insights from peers as we weighed the pros and cons of the switch. 

If your organization is considering a similar move, I would suggest talking to peers in your space who have made the shift. I would also recommend evaluating more than just fundraising results—take a close look at your team’s capacity and workload. Giving days generate a large influx of donor data, which can create strain, especially on smaller teams. By spreading donations more evenly throughout the year, we’re also hoping to reduce the operational pressures that typically accompany year-end campaigns, including tax-related gift processing.

I’m looking forward to hosting our first Spring Giving Day next year and reporting back on the results! In the meantime, good luck to anyone participating in Giving Tuesday tomorrow, and best of luck to everyone in their year-end fundraising campaigns.