With Giving Tuesday coming up tomorrow, let’s reprise an article from a couple of months back, which looked at an essential fact nonprofit fundraisers need to know before they take part.
If your group is thinking about participating in Giving Tuesday, the effort first organized last year to create a national day of philanthropy on the Tuesday after Thanksgiving, you really need to know one thing: are these NEW donations or just early gifts of money your supporters were planning to make anyway? In other words, is Giving Tuesday increasing the overall amount of donations, or is it just cannibalizing your other year-end fundraising?
According to Dave Leichtman when he spoke on a Salsa Community Conference panel this morning, the answer is in. Dave looked at Salsa’s data from many different clients who participated in Giving Tuesday last year, and the extra round of fundraising doesn’t seem to have hurt their December giving at all. The donations that came in through Giving Tuesday turned out to be new/extra fundraising for the organizations that participated, not something that cannibalized their overall year-end campaign.
That answers one of the big questions I had last year, and it’s good news for groups that are building up to a Giving Tuesday push. Go for it: via extra income and list growth, at least so far, it seems to be an overall plus for organizations that take part.
– cpd