270. Five Non-Traditional Giving Tuesday Strategies + More Tips to Perfect Your Appeal With Your CRM

Happy Monday, friends, or whatever day you're listening to this. I hope that day is happy too. Before we dive into our regular podcast nannigans, I wanted to let you know that I'm on the lookout for non-profits that sell items that might make great holiday gifts this season. For example, if you run a museum, that sells really cool gift shop items. A resale shop that sells gently used designer clothes that have been donated or an employment training program where your clients sell coffee or handmade soaps or jewelry, whatever. I want to hear all about those items. You can visit non-profitgenny.com/gifts. That gives back to tell me about your gift items. For a chance to have your goods featured on the pod on my website and in my email newsletter and social media, that's non-profitgenny.com/gifts that gives back. And I'll put that link in the show notes or episode description wherever you're listening to the pod right now. Hey, welcome to the non-profitgenny show, where we chat with non-profit leaders about their management, marketing, and development strategies. I'm their host, Jane. Well, we are exactly six weeks away from Giving Tuesday, the global fundraising day we all love to hate. And as you may know, every year I offer a Giving Tuesday planning guide that takes you step-by-step through a six week planning process to help you pull off a great campaign. And that's available on my website at non-profitgenny.com/courses and more. But if you really want to get creative and try something different this year, I've invited my sister, Michelle, on the pod to talk about five non-traditional Giving Tuesday ideas. Before we get to that though, I'm not going to leave you hanging on our little grain insights mini series about how to manage your fundraising appeals in your donor management system, especially because getting to know the ends and outs of your donor management system is extra important during Giving Tuesday and your end fundraising season. So let's get started with Little Green Insights brought to you by my favorite donor management system, Little Green Light. As we move forward with this mini series about making the most of your donor management systems features, I want to give a quick disclaimer. Obviously, because I work so closely with Little Green Light, a lot of my advice here will come through the lens of using their system. But most of the advice I provide and product features I mentioned are also applicable to any other donor management system you may be using. You may just have to search through your system's help pages or chat with a member of their customer service team to figure out what your platform's equivalent is compared to LGL. Okay, disclaimer over. Last week, we talked about how fundraising appeal data reports generated by your donor management system can help make your next appeal, like your Giving Tuesday or your end appeal, even more successful than the last. But now I want to explore the elements your organization needs to run a successful appeal and why each element is so essential. The first thing you need is a way to track donors and prospective donors so you can decide who to include in your appeal. Perspective donors may include volunteers and past event attendees who have shown an interest in your mission, but haven't made a financial contribution yet. Second, you need the ability to target specific groups of constituents in your appeal, such as lapsed donors or major donors. Third, you need the ability to generate appeal letters that pull in personalized information such as authentication and maybe even a specific appeal ask amount. No matter what donor management system you use, you should be able to find a feature that automatically populates this personalized information to personalize appeal letters for every individual in your system. Fourth, you need a system to accept gifts, not only online, but also via check, and that system should include a way to document those gifts and send acknowledgments to each donor. I've said this before on the podcast, but just as a reminder, donor research has found that if you send a thank you acknowledgement within 24 hours of receiving a gift, you are substantially more likely to receive another gift from that donor. I don't mean right away, but I do mean that that donor is significantly less likely to become a lapsed donor. And obviously you're not going to be able to get a physical thank you letter in their hands within 24 hours unless you use like a very expensive career service. But you can get them a phone call or shoot them an email, let them know, hey, your thank you letters on your way, but I did want to let you know I'm so excited about your donation of X dollars and here's the type of impact that could have for our clients. And finally, you need a way to report on your appeal after the campaign has ended. Great. So why are every single one of these elements so essential to a successful appeal? Number one, they help you set realistic appeal goals and target your solicitations. I can't tell you how many nonprofits I've worked with, who their board of directors or fundraising team, they just seem to come up with this random fundraising goal. Instead of using their historic donor data to set a realistic goal that's actually attainable and also bold and encouraging your team to stretch their fundraising muscles a little bit. Setting your total fundraising goal is one thing, you also should use your donor management system to sort donors into groups so you can customize appeal messages for each segment based on information like their past giving behavior, their estimated capacity to give and the specific parts of your mission that each group is especially drawn to. Number two, these practices help document your work. So you have a record to reference as you plan future campaigns. Number three, the combination of these elements enable you to store donors and prospects effectively over time because you're tracking each milestone in your individual relationships with them. So that means you're not accidentally repeating the same conversations over and over again with them. And you're carrying along the relationship at a good study pace. Number four, this data provide you with essential information that you can use to evaluate your appeal and plan any tweaks needed for future appeals. Little great light's biggest reminder as you explore your donor management systems capabilities in these areas is that you will be best served if your data isn't good shape before you start working on your appeal. Little green light recommends blocking off time in your schedule well in advance of the time that you start crafting your appeal. So you can review your data carefully and use their duplicate checker and address verification tools to keep your data clean and your addresses up to date. And just as a quick side note, if you use a different donor management system than little green right, they may use different terms, they end duplicate checker and address verification tools. So be sure to ask your system support team what their equivalent tools are another quick tip from little green light run your data through the national change of address registry, also known as the NCOA to help maintain up to date addresses for your contacts. This will save you from having to manually update addresses and your database. If you plan to use a printer to send out a physical appeal letter, many printers offer this service for nonprofits. Otherwise, you can always update address records manually if you receive returned mail. Remember that clean data requires consistent maintenance. So make a plan to review your data on at least an annual basis, I personally would recommend reviewing that data at least on a quarterly basis so that you can identify any potential hiccups as soon as possible. and resolve those before your next campaign. All be honest, I am a total nerd when it comes to using doder management systems and records to run reports to get to know a non-profits doder base at such a deep level. If you are non-profit user that the peel records for other ways that I didn't just mention, I'd genuinely love it if you would send me an email to let me know so I can share it with the others. Just check out non-profitgenny.com/contact to send me a message and remember Jenny is about J-E-N-N-I. And by the way, did you know Little Green Light created a free fundraising library just for my listeners? You can go to www.littlegreenlight.com/genny and I'll include that link in the show notes or episode description wherever you're listening now so you can see all the fundraising goodies they have to offer. For example, if you use Little Green Light as your doder management system you may appreciate their guide to managing appeals in LGL. If you have another platform for your non-profit, I still think you'll like their resources like their guide to using online forms to simplify your work and their guide to acknowledging gets. Okay y'all, it's time for my favorite person in the world to join me for a chat about giving Tuesday. My little sister Michelle, if you've been giving Tuesday is just about asking all of your donors for money we want to take a little time to step outside that box and discuss five non-traditional giving Tuesday ideas. Hey, Michelle. Hey, Jenny. What's going on? Talking to you. Greg, what were you doing? Greg, before you were talking to me. Going through some of my partner's boxes from his storage unit so that we can clean our house up. That sounds good, but boring. Um, yeah. Or did you find anything neat in the boxes? Um, there was this one like cute little children's book that, well, maybe it's not a children's book, but it's like illustrated like a children's book because it's called like about the year I was born in or something. Yeah. So did you see cute little pictures? Well, I didn't look through it yet, but I'm going to look through it with him later. But it's not like, it's not like a photo album. It's like a, like a series book that has like facts about each year. About him, though, not just like general children. No, like it's like fun facts about the year 1986. Oh, that's cool. Yeah. I like that. Can you text me some of the funest facts? Sure. Actually take notes because next time you're on the pod, I want to know some of them. You want me to take notes about this, this fun momentum? Or start some picks on your phone. Now, could I just have the book? Do you want to look through it now? No, we don't have time for that. You know why? Why? Because we are talking about everyone's favorite and simultaneously least favorite topic giving Tuesday. Oh. Okay. So, Michelle, first of all, do you know what giving Tuesday is? It's the Tuesday. I think after Thanksgiving, which I find weird. Oh, can I tell you why? Because it's after Cyber Monday. Kind of. Okay, sure. Okay. So Thanksgiving is the day you get thanks potentially the day you enjoy time with family. If you have that kind of family, it's football day. It's Macy's parade day if they haven't gone bankrupt yet. Um, so Thanksgiving's been taken over, right? Friday is black Friday, which is very commercial, very like you focus, very like holiday gift focused. And then Saturday through Monday are like Cyber Saturday is Cyber Sunday, Cyber Monday. But then they chose giving Tuesday to be Tuesday because, first of all, that day had not been claimed by commercialism yet. Um, but second, it's, it's like the global day of giving. So you have just spent the last five days focused on yourself, focused on your family, focused on buying things for, I mean, ostensibly people who don't need you to buy things for them. And so the creators of giving Tuesday were thinking like, you know, it would be really great. After all of that to refocus on creating good and giving back to people who may not have had as many resources and as great of a time as we have over the past five days. Sure, I get that. I just think it would make more sense for to come before all the gluttony so that like maybe you still have some money to give away. Totally hear that. Yeah. I getcha. And the entire thing is like, okay, first priority is being really selfish. Second priority is everybody else. Okay, so this is why it's every nonprofit, every nonprofit here is favorite and simultaneously least favorite. Like it's, it's very controversial in the nonprofit space. Um, the argument, I kind of the doubles advocate argument against what you just said is that the holiday season. So people typically get off of work Thursday and Friday that week. And then they've got Saturday and Sunday off maybe Monday, but they at least have those four days off. And that gives nonprofits time. Um, because studies show that Thanksgiving, social media and email marketing campaign open rates, like shoot up because after erdem with the eating or during the football game commercials, you're really spending a lot of time in that digital marketing space. Um, and then obviously like Saturday and Sunday and Friday too. Because a lot of people just do the Friday sales online, so they don't have to do the craziness in person. It really gives nonprofits kind of a captive audience online to educate people about the global days giving that it's coming up, where it adds if the global day coming up were before all of that, people are really trying to, well either they're very disengaged. They're traveling to get wherever they're going for Thanksgiving. Or they're like obsessing over work trying to stuff in as much as they can so that they are overwhelmed when they get back from the break, right? Yeah. Well, I'm not saying what you said is invalid. I'm saying that's the double-side ticket and I fully recognize given Tuesday is the campaign people love to hate. Sure. Yeah. No, that actually did make sense. Thank you for that argument. I think you can, you can go a little bit more cynical with it though and go the reason you have a captive online audience is because people are looking at their phones so they don't have to talk to their family. As long as you're in maturity, okay. Yeah. The other reason I personally really advocate for nonprofits to engage in giving Tuesday, no matter how big or small their campaign is or what their campaign focuses is that giving Tuesday is such a good lead-in to year-ends giving because it gives you a good head start. You start with trying to get your donor base involved and you're giving Tuesday campaign again, however big or small you decide you want. about to be. And then you have the opportunity to say, Hey, did you not get a chance to donate on Giving Tuesday? Well, you're in luck, you still have this much time to make a donation and still have account word tax deductions for 2024. And then that gives you a lot of time to educate your donors in between Giving Tuesday and the last day of the year about all different opportunities to give reminding people of the impact that you've had so far that year and reminding people how how much of an impact you can have if you can meet your year end goal this year. And it also gives you a chance to try at least one more different campaign tactic that you didn't use during Giving Tuesday. So it's kind of like a tover at the year end. That is my pitch for doing some sort of giving Tuesday campaign. Well, yeah, you should definitely do something. Well, I don't really think so. That's why I am doing the subset. Okay, I mean, yeah, you might as well like try to cash in. Um, yeah, and so if if this year, by the way, this year, Giving Tuesday is December 3rd, 2024, which is later than a lot of Giving Tuesdays, like last year was November 28. So the year that it's in December this year. I know. So if you are listening and you are like, okay, but I don't have any plans for Giving Tuesday. Yeah, I don't even kind of really know where to start or like, you know, it would be nice to have a planning guide or holding a stuff by step, planning timeline for Giving Tuesday. You're in luck because I have that all set to go for you. It is updated for 2024. Um, and using this planning guide, you can plan a Giving Tuesday campaign in just six weeks. Um, obviously that early earlier, you start planning for any sort of marketing fundraising campaign is going to be more successful, but I've tried to make this as easy as possible for you. So not only do you get week by week goals and tasks assigned to you to help your planning. Um, I've also included as a free bonus gift this year, some sample emails, some samples, social media messages, and social, uh, some text messages, but you can tweak for your specific nonprofit, um, and have also included helpful links that kind of go along with each weekly set of steps for you're giving Tuesday planning. Well, yeah, so you can check that out online at nonprofitgenny.com/courses and more. And I will, of course, include that link in the episode description or show notes, wherever you'll send to the podcast. Um, but today, I'm not going to go through all of those planning steps, um, because we could get those in the guide online. Today, Michelle, I want to talk about five non-traditional giving Tuesday ideas for nonprofit campaigns, because if you go to giving Tuesday.org, or you look at other nonprofits giving Tuesday campaigns, a lot of them kind of look the same. They're just trying to get as much money as possible, right? Sure. So these non-traditional giving Tuesday ideas are not like that. Okay. So are you ready for the first non-traditional giving Tuesday idea? Yeah, it's here. Okay. So this campaign type is basically focused on what I call upgrading your donors. What is going to be met up? Um, getting your returning donors to give more or giving back to them more or getting them to give more by giving back to them more. What do you mean by getting back to them more? Like making them feel appreciated? Sure. Not like your returning their donations. I was like, what is she talking about? Um, so that's part of it. So there are a few different options for upgrading in my mind. First is upgrading one time gifts. So someone has made their first gift to you this year or like you said, they just give once a year, they kind of give the same amount every year. You want to upgrade them so that they are giving higher dollar amounts than what they have given in the past. And this is something that can sound difficult, right? Because it is like super lazy and also not effective to be like, hey, can you get more than you did last year? Because it's been a year or two. Like they don't know what they gave last year, right? I mean, um, what they might know. What do we mean? If they, if they're like loyal to your nonprofit and they only give to like just one or to a select you, then they might very well know how much they give. Yeah, I guess the thing is like a hundred a year, they might know. Yeah. Okay. Well, anyways, so in order to, um, really make that ask more effective, what I recommend is going to your donor database, which as everyone knows, my favorite one is little green light. Most donor databases make this super easy for you to customize those, um, those those appeal letters for each donor, um, specifically based on their last gift. So you can say, um, last year is so awesome that you donated. And then the donor database, but we'll put in like a smart field that filled in, um, what they gave last year. Like you can have it fill in the last gift. Um, and you can say thanks to donors like you, we were able to do x, y and z. So it's so awesome that you helped make that happen. Um, this year, we're asking you if you can give, um, and then you can use an ice bar field that is by last gift amount times or plus 15%. Right? Because that would really help us raise the stakes in what we can do for the community. Cool. Good idea. Yeah. So that's one way to upgrade a donor. Another way to upgrade a donor is, and I would not recommend doing both of these or asking for both of these at the same time. Another way you can upgrade a donor as you can try to convert one time or once per year donors into recurring monthly donors. And do you know why I'm showing? Because then they're giving you more. Yeah. And also it's like consistent, um, revenue. Yes. So this campaign type is something that you have to kind of as someone who is who really knows your audience and, you know, you interact with your donors pretty frequently. You know what they are into and not into like, for example, if you have like donors to like most of your donors are donating with checks, this is not going to be a good fundraising strategy for you. Because then not only are you trying to talk them into recurring monthly gifts, you're also trying to convince them to give their credit cards so that you can automatically get those monthly payments. Yeah. So, but if you have a donor beast that is already mutually getting with credit cards, this is very easy. So, what you can do is educate them and let them know by, again, we really appreciated last year you gave us and then put that smart field, X and R dollars. That helped us to X, Y and Z. This year we are trying to ask all of our donors to instead of giving us one big gift at the end of the year. We are asking if you would be willing to become a monthly donor and here is why. And have a bullet point list of the benefits. Do not write a paragraph. People don't read paragraphs, right, write a bullet point list with one sentence per bullet point. The bullet points are like you said, Michelle, it helps the nonprofit so say it helps us to be able to plan our budget more accurately because we have an idea of what will get every month. You can say it allows or it empowers you the donor to have a bigger impact because you can afford to give more if you are getting on a monthly basis versus one lump sum every year. Like whatever your reasons are, put those in a bullet point list and ask people to commit to do that. So, when are your donor database tell you the form of payment that people usually use with their donations or do people not keep track of that usually? So if you have a really stellar fundraising team and a really stellar donor database, yes, it should tell you that. But a lot of nonprofits are working with Excel spreadsheets where they may not be tracking that. A lot of nonprofits may, if they are really feeling like they don't have enough staff or their fundraising staff is just feeling overwhelmed, they may not bother tracking check donations because online donations automatically get added whereas check donations you have to physically manually add those donations or sometimes those check donations get added but only like once a month to people of time to do that or they may not tag those donations as having been checked donations so there are a lot of kind of ifs around that. Right, yeah, okay. So I was just thinking you could like customize your strategy based on the donor if you have that information but if that's not like the common thing then nevermind. You definitely can customize your strategy, love a good donor segment and that brings up a good point, do not ask like if you have a donor management system or a really good Excel spreadsheet and you know someone is already a monthly donor, don't send them the message asking them to be a monthly donor. No, but you can ask them to like add $5 to their monthly. Yes. Absolutely. Okay. So that is number one on my five non-traditional giving Tuesday ideas are you ready for number two? Yeah, let's hear it. Okay. So this is something where this idea is really focused on or is best for a nonprofit that is smaller or more stretch per time, you can make this idea as big or as small as you want depending on your capacity, right? So the idea is to create a campaign for giving Tuesday that is specifically focused not on all other donors, but on one or more really tricky donor segments. Okay. So for example, like last donors, people who have not given in two or three years. So for them, you and this is especially good for a nonprofit where like you have a really solid donor base that you can really count on to, you can have asked creating your year and campaign and you know they're going to give. And so you can really focus your giving Tuesday campaign on making a special ask just for lapsed donors and what you can do for them is say like again, user donor management system if you have one to say with these smart fields. Look, we really appreciated in filling the year here when you gave fill in the dollar amount here, you know, that year, this is what we were able to do thanks to donors like you. Incredible since then so far this year, we've kind of even further, we have done this much more and it's because we have been so thankful for being able to find new supporters for having our existing supporters like believe in us so much that they've increased the amount of support they give us every year. We would love to just bring you back into the fold really got you engaged. And while it would be awesome to get another donation from you, we would also love to get you plugged in and any other way that feels really good for you. So if you want to donate here is the donate button and we are suggesting a donation of and then you put the smart field that's like last donation plus a 15% increase. And then here are three other ways to get plugged in. And again, bullet point list, not a paragraph, and you can say like you can volunteer to do this thing. I hate it when I see nonprofits just say volunteer because like I'm not going to click that. I don't know if that means like volunteer doing what I don't know that doesn't, that's not attractive to me. So you can like say volunteer by becoming a classroom reader. Or if you have multiple different like a diverse variety of volunteer opportunities say volunteer by doing something such as X, Y, Z or something else you like, you know. Another kind of option you could give is host a food collection drive or host a children's book drive or generally use clothing drives like people love to host a drive. And then what's it give me another right damn shall I'm drawing a blank like what's the third thing that people can do to get involved? I don't know. Like, like interact on social media, but is that lame? It's not really like if they're, it's not, it's not going to lead to long-term engagement probably. Okay. Attend a fundraiser. Yes. Love that idea, like come to our next event, like buy tickets to our next event. Or get this especially since there are laps to donor, take it to the end of this special 10% discount off of our next event. Here's your 10% off code, you know, or donate non-monitorially. Boom, love that too, like donate food for our food pantry, donate, I mean, if you work directly with clients, there's all kinds of stuff. Yeah. Just whatever your clients need, but also like, like an office. supply wish list type deal. Yes, donate something on our office supply wish list. Love that. Okay, moving on. Oh, I did want to give one other example of a tricky segment that you might want target just for giving to say campaign is a donor who has only ever given through a what's called like social campaign. So that would be a donor who has never directly donated on your website or, you know, a fundraising event or whatever they've only ever donated to like, Michelle say you do a 5k for the American Heart Association and you ask your friends to donate to your 5k campaign. So they have donated but really they've donated to you, they haven't donated to the nonprofit. So what you can do and that campaign message is say, like, hey, it was so cool when you helped us out with this campaign. Just so you know, that campaign raised x dollars, which allowed us to have this special impact. That was so super cool. Next year we're really hoping to do x, y, and z and we really appreciate your support. Just to also introduce ourselves like you really help support this one campaign, but we also do things like x, y, and z. So if you want to really be a part of that, here's how you can get involved. Cool. Okay. Are you ready for my third non-traditional giving Tuesday idea? Right. Okay. So this one I call try a quote fundraising first. Okay. You will confused. I am explained. Okay. So basically what I'm saying is take a dive and take a chance. Like do something new and fresh that you've never tried before in fundraising. And again, this is best for nonprofits that know or are pretty confident that their year-end campaign with their broad donor race is going to be successful. And so they can really use giving Tuesday to be playful and try something new. Right? Okay. So fundraising first might be you run your very first peer-to-peer campaign. Okay. And that's like getting your donors and or employees to personally ask their social network to donate. I do not recommend this with employees. They are already being paid to do work for you. And that is not her third job. But typically like if you are doing a peer-to-peer campaign for the first time, what I would do is tap into your board of directors. If you have really active committees, because I know some nonprofits have committees that are not so active, but if you have active reliable committees, tap into them. Yeah. So try your first peer-to-peer campaign. I actually get hired by a lot of nonprofits to run and train peers to host their first peer-to-peer campaign. And one mistake I see. It's pretty fun. One mistake I see happen a lot is nonprofit leaders, especially those like I said who have never done this before. They're like, "Oh, so we have 50 people who we want to get involved as fundraisers." And it's like, "No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no." For your first peer-to-peer campaign, there are going to be failures. There are going to be a lessons learned. And you don't want 50 people in on that. You want 10 people in on that, right? So I would pick like 10, 15 is stretching it. People who like the 10 to 15 people that are super committed to your organization, they are very outgoing and not shy. And you have a feeling that they have a lot of, either like just a lot of friends in general or especially a lot of friends who have lots of money. Yeah. Another fundraising first could be maybe from the first time you try getting a matching donation. Okay, and love a matching donation. And that could be by asking what if you're major donors to be willing to step up and giving a matching donation. If you have a business you partner with a lot, maybe asking them to give a matching donation and promising to put their logo and company name on all like marketing materials for that fundraising campaign just to give them a little buzz. You could ask your board, this is a good board challenge. Like depending on how many board members you have, like if you have 10 board members, maybe you say if you guys could all contribute to help us get a $5,000 matching donation. And we can give you a shout out. That would be really cool. So there's some different options. And speaking of local businesses, maybe if you don't have one that you have good relationship with yet, this could be your fundraising first where it's the first time you try to partner with one or more local businesses. Okay. How do you go about choosing which business you want to approach? So in this case, I would start with your board of directors. And like most of them are employed, I would assume. So you ask them to some businesses, if they're big corporations, they have a set kind of process. They ask their employees to go through to request involvement with that business. If it's a smaller business, then it's usually easier because there's not all of that bureaucracy. And I would recommend especially if you're going for a local business to come to them with three different kind of option requests. If you don't have connections to your board, maybe like a supergun hoe volunteers, major donors, or just a long time donors, they don't even have to be major donors. And if you really don't have anything like that, going to businesses to, like if your nonprofit has a physical office, go to your business neighbors. Hey, we actually have an office like right down the road, and we'd love to like get to know you, you know? Okay. Is that something that makes people interested in your physical neighbors? Yes, the psychological thing, like people feel a geographic like team spirit. Okay. Which is why like people will really route for their local sports teams, even when they know their sports teams are not good because they have that geographic proximity. Yeah. Okay. Another fundraising first, sorry, this will be the last one that I give you. I know there was so many fundraising first you could try, but last on the list here is this could be our first time trying to partner with one or more influencers to align with your mission or brand. So that could be influencers on social media. It could be local podcasters who kind of talk about subject matter related to your mission or vision or your client population or whatever. It could be maybe you know that there is a local news station that they always, every music session, every evening, they have like a feel good past piece. And so you ask to be that feel good past piece for a given Tuesday, like whatever influencer means to you, it does not have to be a take that influencer. There are lots of people who are influencers by getting that into help promote your organization. And specifically, you're giving Tuesday fundraiser that could be a fundraising for us to try out. All right, that sounds fun. I can't make it if you do it right. Sometimes like identifying potential influencers can be a lot of work, which is another thing nonprofits hire me to do. So number four, on my non-traditional Giving Tuesday ideas, you can, again, this is really good for nonprofits that have a reliable your end gift campaign that they ask everyone to donate. So before I talked about potentially doing a campaign focused on our tricky segment, right? So this time, my fourth idea is actually trying to create a new segment out of your existing donors. Okay. So for example, you may want to try to create a planned Giving segment. - What is that? - Okay, so Plans Giving is, I can be complicated. I would say Google all the different planned Giving options. But typically when we talk about Plans Giving, we're talking about people putting your nonprofit in their will, okay. And so the reason I say segments is because there are types of donors or really types of people who are more likely to be in a stage of life that they are creating a will. It is very unlikely that your nonprofit is going to ask everyone to create a will and everyone is going to immediately find a state attorney and be like, hey, I need to create a will so that I can donate to a nonprofit after I die. Because typically, sorry, go ahead. A lot of people don't, and this is becoming less and less like a lot of people don't have a lot to give away after they die. - What about property? What about their car? - Yeah, sure, I'm just like. - What about their life insurance? - Sure, not saying no one has anything to give away just like not everyone has personal wealth or assets or things like that. - Sure, and then factors into the assignment name for sure. - Yeah, so when you are looking for a good target for asking someone to consider giving a planned gift, typically the demographics of a donor who are, sorry, a person who is creating a will, they are typically someone who is going to go on an international trip for the first time or maybe not even the first time, just maybe the first time they didn't even think about it and now they are thinking about it, right? - Let's bleak. - I'm just telling you, okay. And for that, that is part of why it's so important to have regular communication with your donors because otherwise you're not going to know when they're going on an international trip, right? - Another demographic is people who are like going to have a baby or just had a baby. Another demographic is people reaching middle age. - Really? - That early. - Yeah, because they're having a midlife crisis and they're starting to grapple with the idea of death. - Okay, another is someone who has recently had a major diagnosis or someone in their family who's had a major diagnosis or has recently died. - Now, here's the thing, like you, as you mentioned, that's as bleak, right? - Yeah. - Do not do this unless you have someone who like just believes compassion, just like has a constant aura of compassion. And like if you're going to start a plans giving society for the very first time, I actually don't recommend doing that on Giving Tuesday because that is something where the timing is going to be, like if you're looking at demographics of donor as who are most likely to create a well, that's going to be a very personal, person-by-person timing, right? - So why is this on your list of under-easing firsts for Giving Tuesday then? - Because you can turn a planned giving ask into something that is not bleak. So for example, there was. Do you know the show's succession? - I've heard of it, but I don't really know what it's about. - Okay, so it's like loosely based on the Murdoch family, which is, do you know that whole drama? - Yeah. - Okay, you're talking about it. - Oh, well not, well enough to do that. And I just know that they're like, they own a lot of newspapers and they're really proud to wish. - They're proud. But anyway, so Rupert Murdoch is the family patriarch. He's in his late 90s and he has been known throughout his older years to kind of hit his kids against each other to figure out which is gonna be the strongest and most resilient to take over the empire after he dies. - Okay, don't a lot of really successful CEOs or business owners do that? - The way he doesn't is like way rude. - Okay, anyways, so on the show's accession, the big kind of thing that happens was one of the big wealthy parents on the show decided, instead of giving that his sons inheritance to him, he changed his will to give the inheritance to Greenpeace. And so Greenpeace tweeted about it the next day and shared the link to their plans giving white page and had like hundreds of percentile increases in their traffic to that page because they made the most of that trending episode on this super popular TV show. - That was a little funny. - And I think their tweet was like, do you really wanna piss off your spoiled child? Click here. (laughs) Nice. It was so funny. So obviously that just happened to be really lucky timing. They took really good advantage of that, but if you can come up with something clever that does not make plans giving sound bleak or that does not wait for a major life event to happen in specific people's lives or don't our database, then that can make a really good giving to say campaign. Well, good example. Okay, another segment that you might want to try to carve out for the first time for giving Tuesday, maybe you try to make your very first major donor society. - So what is that involved? Yeah, so a major donor society is where basically in an effort to try to retain major donors at the major donor level long-term on regular basis, you create some sort of special path for them to follow an annual basis that makes them feel super appreciated and keeps them more plugged in than the average donor. So a lot of people, like if you go to a museum, you will see a major donor wall, right? Sure. And so usually those major donor societies, people who give a minimum of $1,000 get the size of a black kid, people who get at least $5,000 get this sort of a black, you know what I mean? If you don't have a place, like a museum, or a place where you have major foot traffic that may not be as attractive as a recognition, but what you can do is like you have an annual report and so you pledge to put their name in the donor section of your annual report. You have a major donor web page on your website that explains how each major donor level has a super significant impact on your organization, probably that web page doesn't get a whole of traffic as any except by the major donors themselves, but it kind of like just a little ego boost, you can offer an annual special like a appreciation campaign where only major donors are invited and so you can really build that up as as like, you know, get to know other people who are just as invested as you and the mission of whatever, you can send them a special physical, nice, glossy paper, quarterly, update, mini magazine, like doesn't even have to have papers and pages inside of it, it can just be like a single sheet that flips open and has some stats, but mostly has like a really heartfelt story about a client that, you know, you can even some major donor campaigns even have like volunteer benefits, which seems counterintuitive because you're like asking for even more, but for example, like Habitat for Humanity, the first people to get a notification that about like signing up for volunteer opportunities are major donors because everyone loves that feeling of building a house in a day, and they get seven days to sign up before the regular population gets it, you know, another type of segments that you could try to create for the first time for Giving Tuesday would be like donors who have employee matching opportunities at their companies, so this is partly dependent on your fundraising teams or maybe your board members, just anyone on your internal team like really being involved in your donor's lives and knowing that they work for a major company because small companies probably, like they likely don't have employee matching campaigns, but the big ones, like Fortune 500 companies, I forget the actual staff, but it's something like 80 to 90% of them offer employee matching. So if, you know, you have some donors who work for major corporations, you can, I would not ask them, hey, that's your company offer employee matching, because if they haven't set that up yet, they don't know, just Google like big corporation name employee matching gifts, and it'll pop up or not, you know, okay, and the other way you can find potential people to add to an employee matching campaign is donors have signed up on your email list or, you know, when they check out, when they make a donation on your website, and they've used their work email address, you can find potentially then that way. And then another way to create a new segment of donors, and this is something where you could actually send this to a free one in your list, is letting people know about the non-cash assets that they can donate, such as stock, cryptocurrency, and any other kind of non-cash assets that they have, and then if they know that that's an option, then that is the new type of segment to tap into. Okay, good idea, okay, and then you want to hear my fifth final non-traditional giving-to-scay idea? Yeah, okay, four non-profits who unfortunately have just had a fundraising campaign, and they definitely want to have a year-end campaign, and giving Tuesday, just you don't want to burn out your donor's, right? So instead of having giving Tuesday, you have giving thanks Tuesday, where you just have staff put down everything they're doing that day, and call all your donors and just give us thanks, and quick tip, start the call by saying, "Hi, this is Jenny, I'm the food pantry manager at whatever, and I'm not calling to ask for money. I today is known as giving Tuesday, and our organization has turned this into giving thanks to Tuesday. And I wanted to let you know that your gift of $X dollars is actually super meaningful for us. We have a goal of raising this much money by the end of the year, so far we're at that dollar amount, and we just so appreciate your help getting us to that dollar amount. And what that does is not only show like how many people make those kind of phone calls these days, like that's really cool, right? But also it tells them how close or far away from your actual goal is. You can tell them what you would do if you reach that goal, and a lot of nonprofits that I know that do giving thanks Tuesday, the people they call end up giving again because they want to help you reach that year-end goal. Sure. And it's also going to raise morale among your employees to get the chance to talk to donors and get some of the warm fuzzies when they're like, "Oh, yeah, you work at whatever. I love the work you do, whatever, you're so amazing, especially, and I think it'll be nicer for the donors too to know that they're for once not just talking to the fundraising manager or whatever, like they're talking to one of the just general employees of the organization. That's cool." Especially, like if you have a big organization and you have the programmatic staff, like numbers to be able to do this, I actually like when you don't have any fundraising team members make those calls and you only have frontline people make those calls because then the donor can ask questions and you can tell personal stories about, like, how you know that these people are really, like, really thankful. You can tell them a special story about a mom who was crying because she had so much gratitude for what you were doing. But you also bring up the good point of, I don't think you were trying to make this point, but this is where my mind went. People like talking to non-funders, but at least for that day, you need to give access to your donor management system for those who are making calls because a lot of times those calls, first of all, you need to track that you made that call and you need to track if you went to voicemail or if you actually talked to that person. But a lot of times those calls, if you actually talked to the person, lead to that donor saying, like, wow, thank you so much for the work you do. Like, this is why this cause is so special to me. And that's why I made that donation. And I just, like, really appreciate the work you do. If a donor tells you why they're donating, make a note of that. Oh, totally. Yeah. Okay. So those are my five non-traditional giving Tuesday ideas. Any final thoughts, Michelle? No, I'm just really excited about that last one. Yeah, that sounds like a lot of fun. It is fun. But again, I would only recommend it for nonprofits that have just recently done a fundraising campaign because otherwise you're missing out on a fundraising opportunity. Okay, just as a reminder, if you are especially since I just gave you, like, five to burn, giving Tuesday ideas, if you're feeling really overwhelmed, we're getting really close to you having to stay. Don't forget, I have a giving Tuesday planning guide at non-profitgenny.com/courses and more. And I'll include that link in the episode description and show notes wherever you're listening to this podcast. Thank you so much, Michelle, for being here. Yeah, thanks, funny. Don't forget, we are six weeks away from giving Tuesday. And I'm here for you. You can visit non-profitgenny.com/courses and more to grab my step-by-step giving Tuesday planning guide. Plus, you can further strengthen your appeal with Little Greenlight's free fundraising resource library at www.littlegreenlight.com/courses. And don't worry, both of those links are in the show notes for episode description wherever you're listening to the pod. Until next week, go forth and do good. Would you like a written summary of this podcast episode? Once per week, I email out a brief summary of the most important advice from my podcast guests. Visit non-profitgenny.com/subscribe to sign up for these updates. Remember, Jenny has spelled J-E-N-N-I. To thank you for signing up for email updates, I'll send you a link to download two free kits. My non-profits social media cheat sheet and my non-profit photo guidelines. If you enjoy the non-profitgenny show, please support us. Here are four ways to support our podcast. Number one, tap the subscribe button in your podcast app. Number two, if you listen on Apple podcasts, please write a one to two sentence review. Just go to your library, tap the non-profitgenny show, and scroll down to tap right A review. 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