5 Exciting Tactics for Your Giving Day

Giving days are a great way to engage your donors with a time-sensitive giving opportunity. Whether it’s on #GivingTuesday or a special giving day for your organization, these all-in giving events are something almost all of us do annually. We’re constantly coming up with new tech to engage your audience, because we know you’ll want to keep things fresh and interesting each year.

Here are five ways to keep the excitement and engagement high on your giving day.

Use timed matches and challenges throughout your giving day.

You can use timed matches and challenges to increase site traffic throughout your giving day, especially during times of the day where site traffic can be slow, like early morning, mid-day and evening. Timed matches and challenges can also provide engaging content for email and social media solicitations throughout the day.

These matches encourage donors to give during a specific time period, and organizations have even used them as opportunities for donors to “vote” for specific areas like student groups, by giving.

Pictured: Tiffin University’s Power Hours and timed challenges added excitement to their record-setting giving day.

Promote virtual events like a Trivia Challenge on your giving day

Trivia (or similar) events encourage your constituents to engage with you on social media, helping build an audience and making giving a true experience. Offer an incentive like the opportunity to win $100 for a designation of the donor’s choice to encourage participation. Keep an eye on who is engaging with you in social media challenges, because these folks can make great ambassadors in future years. Social media challenges can also help to boost content for your social media aggregator on your giving day site.

Pictured: The University of Louisville conducted a Trivia Challenge on Twitter to keep donors engaged during their giving day.

Promote fun giveaways using giving day updates

Using updates allows you to keep donors informed throughout your giving day. Promoting fun giveaways like “exclusive” stickers encourages donors to make a second or third gift on your giving day.

Pictured: UT Austin offered special stickers to encourage giving day gifts during a two-hour window, building on that incredible Longhorn pride!

Create friendly giving day competition and set goals for your groups using percentage leaderboards

RNL ScaleFunder offers some unique functionality to gamify your giving day. Percentage leaderboards allow you to create individual goals for your campus partners and track their progress to that goal. Create friendly competition between groups (like colleges, departments, or student groups) by allowing them to “compete” against one another. Because each group can set their own goal, you can level the ‘playing field’ for different-sized groups.

Pictured: Rochester Institute of Technology offered athletics groups to compete, and each team set a goal they were hoping to reach.

Host a second targeted giving day, for a specific need or goal

A second targeted giving day creates another opportunity to invite your annual giving day donors to give a second (or more) time. RNL research tells us that donors who make multiple gifts in a fiscal year are often more likely to be retained, and to give larger gifts. A second day allows you to focus on a priority fund or initiative on campus. A great example of this is Oklahoma State University’s Cowboys United Giving Day, focused on support for mental health.

It’s never been easier to make your giving day fun, engaging, and successful

We’re all doing giving days now, and the key question is: How do I keep people engaged, for another year? There are a ton of options, and you can pick and choose new innovations based on your audience and key goals. Most of these tactics use technology specific to RNL ScaleFunder giving days, so if you’d like to hear how they work, contact us and we will set up a demo. We also talk about how you can make your giving day more engaging, more energetic, and primed to set a record.