Giving Tuesday is around the corner, but there's still time to finalize some details in the campaign you've spent months planning.
It's a little late to implement most Giving Tuesday advice out there, so we picked out five resources you can still use to bolster your work in the month that remains.
Official Giving TuesDay Case Studies and Toolkits
The official Giving Tuesday toolkit (PDF) includes ideas you can steal and copy you can use in announcements and press releases. The Giving Tuesday site also has case studies of past college and university campaigns (PDF).
Their 50 day timeline (PDF) might help you nail down the details in the weeks running up to November 28. Their social media toolkit covers the nuts and bolts of posting to your social channels (PDF). And don't forget to download the official Giving Tuesday logo for all your visual needs.
Update on #columbiagivingday from our fund chair. Largely driven by young alumni participation, giving was up by 58%! ^h
— CEYA (@myCEYA) November 8, 2013
The Role of Love, Generosity, and Belonging
Our 2013 blog post on Columbia University's Giving Day explains the importance of the warm and fuzzy side of giving day campaigns.
Even the most ubiquitous awareness campaigns go nowhere without a compelling message. In higher ed, that means appealing to the love that binds our communities together, the belonging our students and alumni feel as part of those communities, and the generosity that those feelings elicit when our community members want to give back.
Columbia's message worked so well that it nearly doubled the number of donors who contributed to its Giving Day campaign year over year.
5 Email Trends to steal
Email tactics and strategy are among the most mundane aspects of any fundraising campaign, but they've never been more important.
As more organizations and companies vie for the attention of our alumni, we have to optimize the smallest details of our email campaigns. In our blog post we explain the email trends you need to keep up in the email arms race—from layout, to messaging, to follow up.
Boost giving with simple human engineering
Babson College increased reunion class giving participation by 70% in one year, and they didn't need dozens of staff or thousands of dollars in ad money to make it happen.
All Babson had to do was encourage members of the class in question share on Facebook that they had given to Babson, and why, on the Day of Giving. This peer-to-peer communications strategy was authentic—alumni generally feel more connected to their peers than to their alma mater as an institution—as well as being easy for the alumni relations and fundraising teams to implement.
6 Higher Ed Giving Day Case Studies
Competitions, hourly challenges, mobile giving, and young alumni outreach are all strategies used by the colleges and universities featured in this list.
These case studies dissect the successful giving day campaigns of Purdue, USCB, Hamilton College, College of the Holy Cross, Columbia, and Miami University. Every institution is different, and with the variety of schools this article offers, you're sure to find some useful piece of advice.
Have your own Giving Tuesday resources to share with other readers? Link to them in the comments below.