Missed Giving Tuesday? Overwhelmed by the push for year-end giving? Try these alternate social fundraising ideas.
Giving Tuesday — the official start to the year-end giving season — is awesome, but the truth is, many great causes get drowned out in the deafening noise created by the number of giving opportunities in November and December. Your story deserves to be seen, and heard, not just skimmed over. Don’t forget about the fundraising opportunities hiding in the rest of the year!
We assisted two nonprofits with social fundraising campaigns that used an “alternate” holiday or no holiday at all. Check out these two campaigns and our key takeaways to inspire your creativity in developing your own unique social giving campaign.
4:13 Strong’s Father’s Day Giving Campaign
4:13 Strong is a nonprofit in Nashville, TN that helps at-risk men through a 6-month residential program that teaches job skills, personal finance, leadership and so much more.
When you look at the DNA of 4:13 Strong, you’ll find that their mission revolves around building stronger men and families in Nashville. It was a natural fit to build a social giving campaign around Father’s Day.
4:13 Strong is still early in the process of building their social following, so the goals of the campaigns were both raising general awareness in the community and getting new donors.
The campaign ran June 10 – 18, 7 days before and 1 day after Father’s Day. We started the campaign a few days before to introduce the idea of giving to their social followers, gain momentum, and give them ample opportunities to give across multiple platforms.
With the Father’s Day tie-in, the campaign focused on a few individual fathers in the program, and how critical fathers are in building strong families and communities.
We had a smaller budget so we needed to repurpose resources. We leveraged a video that we had created for 4:13 Strong’s spring fundraiser dinner, featuring Devin, one of the fathers in the program.
We went through 4:13 Strong’s photo archives and found a few photos that became the staple images for this Father’s Day Campaign.
This is one of the first posts in the campaign that we pinned to the top of 4:13 Strong’s Facebook profile during the campaign. It briefly summarizes the campaign and provides ideas for how to get involved. The photo isn’t overly polished — in fact, it’s a photo 4:13 Strong already had in their archives.
We also coordinated with 4:13 Strong’s Program Director to record short videos with his phone, which we could use on social media, in the emails, and on the landing page. Using video can provide a huge boost in engagement!
Throughout the campaign, the posts talked about how fathers teach us valuable life lessons and help build strong families and communities, and the risks when fathers are not involved. They focused on the guys in the program, and how they are striving to better fathers. We continuously shared different ways people could get involved: visiting the landing page to learn more, making a donation, sharing the post, or starting their own fundraiser.
Asking questions on your posts, like we did in this one, creates a two-way conversation between you and your followers.
This post highlighted a quote from one of 4:13 Strong’s fathers, Zack, where he shares his dreams for his kids.
Suggesting a small donation amount gives first-time givers a place to start when giving, and reminds people that every donation matters.
The guys is the program have a unique life situation that isn’t familiar to most of 4:13 Strong’s supporters. By focusing on fathers and family — something everyone can relate too — we helped connect the donors to the mission of 4:13 Strong.
The landing page served as a “hub” for all of the stories that were told during this 8-day period. It used information and statistics to build the case for having strong male leadership at home and in the community, and used Devin’s video and other real-life stories to make the need personal. The page also served as an additional giving portal for followers who only read the emails or felt more comfortable giving through the 4:13 Strong website.
By focusing on real stories from the guys in the program, and tying it to something familiar to everyone, we were able to show the positive influence 4:13 Strong has on families in Nashville and engage with new supporters.
Matching Campaign
We worked with a local nonprofit whose goal was to become a household name in the local community. As a first step toward this goal, they wanted to grow their social following to organically reach more people.
The nonprofit had an anonymous donor that was willing to match donations during a limited time period. What a gift! We wanted to come up with an unexpected way to take advantage of this opportunity.
Rather than doing the traditional donation matching campaign, we designed a campaign where $1 would be donated for every new “like” that the page got on Facebook or Instagram. This set a very low barrier to entry: people didn’t have to do anything other than like the page for a donation to be made. The donation coincided with the organization’s 10-year anniversary, so we planned to run the campaign for 10 days leading up to the anniversary celebration event.
The messaging focused on educating families about how this nonprofit provided skills and education to men, women and children around the world, ending the cycle of poverty.
In each post, we encouraged followers to like the page so that $1 would be donated to the nonprofit, and share it on their own timelines to multiply the impact.
We chose images from the organization’s archive, like this one, that focused on people, and used a limited amount of text to keep the post looking as organic as possible.
We provided simple instructions on each post with a reminder to share with their social communities.
During the course of the campaign, we boosted several posts to improve the reach. The $1 donation incentive aided in the viral appeal of the offer, as organic reach kept pace with paid reach throughout the majority of the campaign. As a result we saw a 127% increase in page likes during this matching campaign.
Key Takeaways
- Center your giving campaign around a day or time of year that has something to do with your cause or complements your other fundraising efforts.
- Make it simple and easy for people to give directly on each post by preparing your Facebook page to receive donations .
- Make sure you use all your channels to increase potential giving and create a landing page that can serve as a central hub of information and an open door for visitors to learn more about your nonprofit.
