This year, GivingTuesday is on December 2.
The most generous day of the year serves as a kickoff to giving season, but it's not just a great time to raise funds. On GivingTuesday, you can also strengthen your community ties, recruit volunteers, and build relationships.
Our friends behind the global movement have put together a free, detailed 12-week series for you to follow to execute your campaign. Content is updated each week, so be sure to bookmark the page and follow along.
Here are a few other things to think about in the lead-up to the big day.
Understand the Current Giving Landscape
The giving landscape is constantly changing, so before you start planning your campaign, it's a good idea to try and understand the current environment. After all, you want to meet your audience where they are, not have them come to you. So try to get a sense of the sentiments of your potential donors so you can refine your messaging appropriately.
A good place to start for a recent temperature check is the GivingPulse report from GivingTuesday. This report looks at high-level trends across the United States and gives you a general idea of the national mood.
Data from the most recent GivingPulse Report, which covers the first part of 2025, indicates some key trends: Trust, community engagement, and willingness to help others remain remarkably stable across geography and political worldview. However, the report also points to some early divergence along political lines in monetary giving to nonprofits. The report also details the connection between giving and a sense of belonging, among other things.
Also, lean in to your own data and what you're hearing from members of your own community. What are their concerns? Their hopes? Their worries? Are they open to generous giving? Or are they more apprehensive in the current political and economic climate? Understanding these sorts of factors could mean the difference between a successful campaign and one that lands with a thud.
Identify Your Core Message and Audiences
Once you have a sense of donor sentiment, it's time to sort out your messaging. What do you want to say? Who do you want to reach? How do you want to convey your core message? Do you want to present a different message to different groups (for example, corporate donors versus individuals)? These are all things you'll need to define before you begin producing campaign assets, fundraising appeals, and so on.
One approach you can take is to literally chart out what you want to say, and who you want to say it to. Create a spreadsheet with your various audiences across the top — corporate philanthropy, small donors, foundations, large donors, and so on — then list out bullet points of the message you want to convey to each group.
It could also be a good idea to connect your messaging directly to the GivingTuesday movement. GivingTuesday has some guidance on how you can do just that (PDF).
Map Out the Entire Giving Process
Fundraising doesn't start and end with the mere act of giving. With that in mind, you'll want to consider the experience along the entire giving journey. One way to accomplish that is to create a "full-funnel" fundraising strategy.
Sierra Halstenberg from our partners at Tapp Network outlines how you can do that in this blog post. It's all about building awareness, growing interest, providing a smooth giving experience, and finding ways to create a lasting connection with your donors.
Define a Clear Strategy and Schedule for All Your Marketing Channels
In addition to mapping out your donor journey, you'll also want to think through how and when to use your outreach channels to reach your supporters.
Don't rely solely on one marketing channel; instead, use them all in concert with one another. Think of how each channel — email, good ol' snail mail, online ads, social media, video, and so on — can reinforce one another. This is known as omnichannel marketing.
For instance, you can use online ads to raise your organization's profile. If someone clicks on an ad and visits your site, you can ask them if they'd like to opt in to emails. If they do, you can send them a series of emails that highlight your work in more detail.
And think of timing. You'll want to plan your marketing activities over several weeks, not just over a few days. It takes time and repeated exposure to your organization to build awareness, so plan your fundraising outreach accordingly.
Looking for more guidance? Check out this episode of the We Are for Good Podcast that details strategies for a successful GivingTuesday campaign.
Show, Don't Tell
It's one thing to tell the world what you do. It's another thing entirely to show your work. So where you can, try to show your impact to the world.
As we've discussed here before, demonstrating your impact to potential donors makes your impact more tangible. So focus on how your work actually changes lives, not just numbers. Use storytelling. Share photos or videos (with the proper consent, of course!) of your programming in action. Get testimonials from those you serve.
But be careful — it's all too easy to slip into exploitative tendencies. Don't focus on the suffering and misery of your clients or patrons. If it seems melodramatic, it's probably inappropriate for your campaign. Instead, focus on impact and outcomes. Let your patrons or clients tell their own stories whenever possible.
Engage Your Community
We all want to feel like we're a part of something bigger. So throughout any fundraising campaign — whether it's for GivingTuesday or any other time of the year — think of ways to involve your community.
And think of ways to lower the barrier of entry, as we've previously pointed out. Allow people to become engaged at any level of commitment. Have an open house. Hold drop-in volunteer hours. Have a coat drive or food drive. As we mentioned our prior blog post on 10 ways to prepare for year–end giving, you can also encourage your existing supporters to act as ambassadors of sorts for your work.
Looking for more ideas? GivingTuesday's Generosity Toolbox has all sorts of examples that you can use as inspiration.
Make It Good!
Modern audiences are savvy. They can see when you've gone the extra mile and when you’ve phoned it in. So give your outreach materials that extra bit of effort and polish so you can put your best foot forward.
Not a designer? No problem. Free or low-cost tools like Adobe Express or Canva come with templates that make it easy to produce good-looking outreach materials. Additionally, GivingTuesday and Canva have design resources that you can incorporate into your marketing collateral, such as event assets, social media templates, and more.
If you're looking for inspiration for marketing email, the website Really Good Emails has thousands of marketing emails for you to browse from across all industries. They even have a section devoted to nonprofit and charity outreach that might be worth a look.
It's up to you to determine whether using AI for content creation is appropriate given your audience and your staffing. If you do, it's important to be careful about the data you enter into AI tools. Never enter sensitive personal data into an AI chatbot. And remember that, in many cases, companies will use the information you enter into these sorts of tools to train their AI models.
More from GivingTuesday
GivingTuesday's collection of resources includes 12 weeks of guidance, tools, strategies, and tactics you can use to make the most of this critical time for fundraising and community engagement. It also includes resources for community foundations so you can better coordinate with other grassroots organizations.
Here's to a successful campaign!
More from TechSoup
- Learn about these 10 ways to prepare for year-end giving.
- Go from awareness to retention with a "full-funnel" fundraising strategy.
- Find out how you can use data analysis to better understand your donors.
- Learn how you can activate first-time donors through micro-donations.
