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Free DonorPerfect Giving Tuesday Templates

TechSoup donor partner DonorPerfect has come out with a great free resource hub that has the strategies and communication templates you need to execute a successful Giving Tuesday campaign quickly and easily. The DonorPerfect resource hub has eight planning worksheets and templates that you can fill out online and print out or save as PDF documents. Find below our summary of them.

The templates are designed to help you set your Giving Tuesday campaign goals, get the word out, recruit digital volunteers, and retain new donors beyond Giving Tuesday. This is a brilliant new addition to the growing roster of Giving Tuesday resources. Even if you're not planning to do a Giving Tuesday campaign, the free DonorPerfect Giving Tuesday templates can serve just as well in your end-of-year fundraising.

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Campaign Planning

This set of resources helps you organize a brainstorming meeting with staff, board members, and even some enthusiastic donors or supporters who can serve as valuable contributors to your Giving Tuesday campaign. It includes ideas and questions to help guide your discussion as you work to build your campaign from a donor's perspective. Complete the statement at the end of each section as the basis for all that you'll plan for December 3.

  • Why will donors connect with your campaign?
  • How will donors discover your Giving Tuesday campaign?
  • What's it like to make a donation to your organization?
  • What happens beyond a donor's Giving Tuesday experience?

Online Fundraising

You've got to love the Blackbaud Giving Institute annual reports on charitable giving. They provide some good insight into the trends of online fundraising. There is a steep increase year over year of people donating on their mobile phones as well as online giving overall. Online giving on Giving Tuesday has increased 518 percent since 2012. Still, a significant number of charities and libraries don't yet use a CRM application for tracking and managing donors. These tools are key to online fundraising. Fortunately TechSoup has a number of donated and discounted options including ones from DonorPerfect and Blackbaud. See DonorPerfect's online fundraising section.

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Email Strategy

Email marketing is still king in the online fundraising world. You can use an email marketing tool that integrates with your nonprofit's CRM to track donors' engagement, an email marketing service, or simply use an email application like Microsoft Outlook. As much as you can, start out by analyzing which subject lines have given your organization high open rates so you can replicate similar language in this year's campaign. Next, determine your click-to-open rate on each of your Giving Tuesday emails. For those that performed well, note what kinds of messaging and calls to action resulted in above-average engagement. Also do a bit of research to discover any previous campaign elements that helped you best connect with donors in the past and incorporate them in your emails for this year.

DonorPerfect recommends in their email templates an early November email to donors, one around the 20th of the month, and as many as three on Giving Tuesday itself.

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Monthly Gift Strategy

A monthly giving program is the most effective and effortless way to retain Giving Tuesday donor support beyond the 24-hour social media buzz. DonorPerfect recommends three ways to promote monthly giving on Giving Tuesday:

  • Define monthly gift amounts in terms people can relate to.
  • Set a goal of monthly donors on Giving Tuesday.
  • Spell out how each monthly gift amount makes a difference.

Social Media

Social media is the best channel to create instant buzz on the actual day of Giving Tuesday. That makes Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram essential components of your Giving Tuesday outreach initiatives. DonorPerfect has lots of tips and tools for you in this area. Perhaps most important are their five social media post templates your nonprofit or library can copy and adapt, including an unselfie image, a progress toward goal image, and an hours remaining to give image.

Crowdfunding

Crowdfunding tools like the new free GoFundMe Charity and also DonorPerfect Crowdfunding are powerful fundraising tools that probably most charities and libraries have not tried yet. DonorPerfect provides some Giving Tuesday ambassador email invitation templates for your core donors, inviting them to help publicize a crowdfunding project.

Online Activism

This is a clever and also an edgy set of resources. Mobilizing your fundraising efforts in response to events in the news can be highly effective. Leveraging current events, from natural disasters and national tragedies to policy changes and social movements can be excellent attention getters. The aptly named "rage donation" gives us a way to respond to news events. DonorPerfect suggests three ways to mobilize your mission-driven advocates on Giving Tuesday:

  • Turn slacktivists into supporters with timely requests on social media.
  • Encourage donors to create crowdfunding pages on your behalf.
  • Create a "take action" web page sharing other ways donors can help.

Donor Retention

This is maybe the most important and often neglected part of a fundraising campaign. DonorPerfect provides some simple steps and email templates to set up a donor retention system designed to bring new Giving Tuesday supporters into your community of donors who back your cause all year long. Email templates include

  • A thank-you template
  • A "welcome new donors to our community" template
  • A Giving Tuesday impact template to tell people what their donation will be used for

A Last Thought

Campaign Monitor's new Data-Backed Guide to Nonprofit Marketing has some interesting findings that serve as a reality check to using the DonorPerfect templates. It's actually pretty hard to resonate with donors. Campaign Monitor's survey results support the fact that email is still the most effective medium to communicate. Pitches must be specific and convey a compelling need via pictures and stories. Most importantly, donors need to feel that they're hearing from real people, about real people, and about the results a donation is creating.

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