Giving Day Game Plan: A Petrus Development Show Episode on Giving Day Strategies

In this episode, Andrew and Rhen return with a short discussion on the pros and cons of giving days.  (Let it be known, however, that we at Petrus think the pros definitely outweigh the cons!) This episode is great for anyone who is curious about giving days and their potential for fundraising success.

Show Notes:  

Giving days have tremendous fundraising power.  Giving Tuesday is the best known national giving day, and in 2023, Giving Tuesday generated over $3 billion from 34 million donors for nonprofits around the country.  Does your organization want to join in Giving Tuesday this year?  Or, even host its own giving day at a different point in the year?  If so, we hope this episode will help!

In this episode, Andrew and Rhen answer the following questions:

• What is a giving day?  Why should fundraisers consider focusing efforts on a giving day?
  
  
• What are some examples of large national and regional giving days?
  
  
• What are the pros and cons of joining a national giving day?  What are the pros and cons of hosting your own stand alone giving day?
  
  
• What goes into a successful giving day?

When done well, giving days provide nonprofits with focused opportunities to connect with donors.  That said, giving days require thorough preparation in order to produce results.  Would it help for you to have additional step-by-step instructions on how to host a fruitful giving day?  If so, check out our Petrus course called, "Raising Money with a Giving Day!"  Click HERE for course details and registration options.

INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT

[00:55.93]
Aggierobison: Okay. Well, howdy, everybody. Welcome back to the Petrus Development Show. I am Rhen Hoehn from Petrus. Joining me today is Mr. Andrew Robison, owner and president of Petrus Development.

[01:08.72]
Aggierobison: How's it going, Andrew?

[01:09.98]
AROB: It's going great, Rhen. How about yourself?

[01:12.16]
Aggierobison: I am living the dream. It feels like fall. It's almost Halloween. I see you're wearing what looks like a costume. If you're watching the video of this, you've got a special friend there with you.

[01:20.43]
AROB: Yeah, this is not just me on the show today. This is my daughter's pet. I'll give a closer look for the video.

[01:31.78]
AROB: Oh my gosh, look at that.

[01:32.77]
Aggierobison: Oh my!

[01:33.81]
AROB: This is Rona. Rona is a bearded dragon and he's my daughter's pet. You can probably gather from the name Rona that he is a quarantine pet.

[01:45.54]
AROB: We got him in April of 2020, and he's been a great member of the family. I have become a big advocate for bearded dragons as pets because they are so easy.

[01:57.73]
Aggierobison: Oh my. Yeah, I would, having spent some time at your house, I've been very tempted to replace the dog and the cats and everything else with a bearded dragon.

[02:07.88]
Aggierobison: Because I've sat there for, I think, two hours with Rona on my shoulder before and didn't move a muscle.

[02:13.31]
Aggierobison: Just sat there and thought, "This is perfect."

[02:15.74]
AROB: No, he's great. Here's a quick story about when we got him. My daughter had been talking—this is Nora, who's nine now, so I guess she was five-ish at the time—and she really wanted a snake. And my wife was like, "No, that's not happening." So I said, "All right, well, what about another lizard?" And she said, "I don't know."

[02:37.36]
AROB: So I went to the pet store and looked around, and I said, "I think a bearded dragon." I had researched it, and she goes, "Bearded dragons are the best." She showed me Rona. He was only about this big—couple inches. And I said, "Hey, it looks cool." Put him on my shoulders, just sat there. And then she said, "Why don't you check out this crested gecko?" And I said, "Okay, fine." So we put the bearded dragon back and got the gecko out.

[02:57.08]
AROB: The gecko just started jumping all over. And I was like, "Nope, nope, not in our house." We have enough living beings that I don't need a creature that's going to be a flight risk and getting lost and all that. So we got Rona. He's been awesome. He was a little bit more active when he was maybe a year old, but he's mellowed out significantly.

[03:22.56]
Aggierobison: I feel like you have a built-in Halloween costume here. You could just do a Crocodile Hunter, wear the khaki, and have the dragon on your shoulder and be good to go.

[03:30.15]
AROB: Yeah, I could. That's right. We have dressed up Rona. Rona has a dragon costume himself. He's got a little Valentine's costume. And a couple of years ago, my daughter and I made a float out of her skateboard and decorated it with red, white, and blue stuff. We put Rona on it—she took him—we dragged them along as a float in the Fourth of July parade in our neighborhood. It was pretty awesome.

[04:04.45]
Aggierobison: We don't have a whole lot of time today, so let's dive into our topic.

[04:09.15]
Aggierobison: Very timely topics here. We want to talk a little bit about giving days. I know a lot of people are starting to think about Giving Tuesday. It's the big one, and it's coming up fast, just over a month away.

[04:34.49]
Aggierobison: So let's dive into our topic right off the bat here. Giving days is a very timely topic. We all know that Giving Tuesday is coming fast. Thanksgiving in the US is only a month away. Giving Tuesday is the following week. So time is getting short. Some organizations have taken part in giving days before, others kind of see it as, "Is that worth my time? Is it worth my effort?" So let's dig into that a little bit and think about if you're considering doing a giving day for Giving Tuesday, what that's going to entail and what you need to start doing now to be ready for it. Do you want to start us off with just what is a giving day? Why would you focus your efforts into a single day of giving?

[05:16.26]
AROB: There are two things that any donor needs to answer in their mind if they're going to make a gift. Those two questions are: Why should I make a gift to your organization? And why should I make a gift to your organization now? As fundraisers, as nonprofits, our job—in order to partner with our donors in giving—is to answer those two questions. We need to show the impact of what our organization is doing, how we're changing lives, how we're making a difference in the world, and why their gift now will allow our organizations to have a greater or better impact.

Those are the two things just outside of giving days—how do we secure funds? How do we secure gifts from individuals? Giving days give us the opportunity to address both of those situations in a very compact way.

A giving day, just on its surface, is a mini-campaign. It's a compact amount of time, in some cases a day—24 hours. A giving day can also be an extension of that, maybe a 36-hour giving day, 48 hours, even longer, although the longer you go doesn't mean that you get more gifts. It just means more work. So tighter is better. It allows you to tell the story of your organization, show the impact of what you're doing, and then invite people to give by a deadline. They should give now in order to meet the deadline, which maybe it's a match, maybe it's a focused effort campaign, a target, whatever that is. That's essentially what a giving day is.

[07:07.52]
Aggierobison: Great, and there are kind of two different approaches to giving days, right? There's the big national, regional ones that you could jump into, or you could host your own standalone giving day. What are some examples of some of the bigger ones? We mentioned Giving Tuesday, but maybe it's worth spending some time on that.

[07:23.14]
AROB: Sure. So Giving Tuesday is obviously the largest. There are no geographic restrictions or limitations on types of organizations. Giving Tuesday is just a phenomenon that started about 20 years ago. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 to 25 years ago, the idea was to shift people's minds from just buying gifts on Black Friday to showing generosity and giving in that same spirit and season on Giving Tuesday, the Tuesday after Thanksgiving. That has grown into a cultural icon. People know Giving Tuesday.

Hundreds of thousands of organizations participate in Giving Tuesday. It's kind of expected that if you're a nonprofit, you're going to at least put up your website, fly your flag, and ask for support on Giving Tuesday, because people are conditioned to give on Giving Tuesday. That's probably the largest.

Looking at some of the numbers from 2023: over $3 billion were given to nonprofits on Giving Tuesday, with 34 million donors participating. So like I said, it's a cultural event now. It's large enough that people know Giving Tuesday. It's for any organization, any cause.

Then you can start dialing into regional events. North Texas does a giving day for organizations in the Dallas area. The state of Minnesota does a giving day for the state. So you can start focusing on region or cause or types of organizations.

A great movement is "I Give Catholic." It started in the Archdiocese of New Orleans a few years ago with the idea of focusing Catholic donors on Giving Tuesday to give to Catholic organizations, parishes, schools, and nonprofits of any sort. Corey Howard, a friend of mine, worked with the diocese and the bishop to launch this. It had great success there, and now "I Give Catholic" is nationwide. Catholic organizations and dioceses all over the country can participate. It's the same concept—this collective message of being generous, giving on this day, increasing your impact—but it's specific to Catholic organizations.

[10:16.50]
Aggierobison: What I like about that is they make a central location for Catholics to go look for organizations to support. With Giving Tuesday itself, you kind of put out your sign, like you said, asking people to give. With iGiveCatholic, people are going on the iGiveCatholic site and they're searching for your organization or Catholic organizations in general to make a gift. There are leaderboards—you can gamify it a little bit.

When I was at the campus mission at Michigan Tech, we always liked to play it up with our rival university, Northern Michigan. We're all friends—I was roommates in college with the priest who's there now. It was all in fun, and you can make it a game and challenge to see who's ahead on the leaderboard.

[11:03.49]
AROB: Yeah, it's again like this collective mission where all our organizations are making an impact. We all want to have a greater impact, and your gifts, your generosity on this day can help us all have a greater impact in the cause you believe in.

[11:23.41]
Aggierobison: What are some of the pros and cons of participating in one of those larger giving days versus holding your own standalone giving day?

[11:34.38]
AROB: We've talked about some of the pros already. People are conditioned to give on that day to that cause. There's collectivism, common messaging, and as you mentioned, there's the opportunity for camaraderie and competition to make it fun and gamify it.

The benefit is really wrapped up in the collective fundraising effort happening at that time for that cause. That's one of the greatest pros. The tree of pros would all stem from that—we're all doing this together. The con, on the other hand, would be... we're all doing this together.

Your donors who often support multiple organizations within the same sector aren't going to make equal gifts to every organization just because you're participating. They're going to select a few and give to those on that Giving Day, "I Give Catholic" Day, or Minnesota "Give to the Max" Day, or they're going to split their gift and spread it out. So while the competition is fun, it affects real dollars—how much your organization will receive and how many people will hear your message.

[14:02.80]
AROB: Let me give you an example of a standalone giving day. When I worked at St. Mary's at Texas A&M—that was my first job out of college—we started doing matching collection weekends, which then morphed into "St. Mary's Gives." St. Mary's promotes giving to their organization on a specific day. They pick a day that's not connected to any other occasion like Giving Tuesday or "I Give Catholic." They tell their story about how they can have greater impact, and generally speaking, there's a match or some sort of incentive to give on that giving day.

[15:31.69]
Aggierobison: Perfect. I know another organization that stands out when you think of standalone giving days is Purdue University.

[15:37.92]
AROB: Oh my gosh. Yes. Absolutely. Please tell us about Purdue.

[15:41.12]
Aggierobison: Yeah, they have a massive giving day. Do you want to guess what they raised in 2024 for their giving day? It's called "Purdue Day of Giving."

[15:47.45]
AROB: The first time I heard about Purdue's giving day was probably six or seven years ago, pre-COVID. They were doing about $10 million on their day of giving at that time, which I thought was just unreal.

[16:06.23]
Aggierobison: Well, for their 2024 Giving Day, which was in April, they raised $76 million.

[16:16.04]
Aggierobison: Just mind-boggling—32,000 total gifts, $76 million.

[16:21.69]
Aggierobison: So clearly they're not just putting out some social posts and emails on that day and raising $76 million. There's more to it, right? A day of giving isn't just as simple as putting out our flag and seeing who shows up. There is some strategy behind it to make something, especially on that scale, happen.

[16:40.27]
Aggierobison: What are some of the things that go into making a giving day successful—maybe not that successful, that's a pretty extreme example—but successful so you're not just raising $200 from three different people total?

[16:53.15]
AROB: You're absolutely right that there is a strategy. I would venture to say that the Day of Giving for Purdue has become the cornerstone of their entire university's fundraising development program, which is the most extreme example I can think of in this world of giving days.

Don't get hung up on Purdue, but think of how important giving days can become to your organization if you invest in developing strategies that will produce results. Some of the strategies that I'm sure they use—that St. Mary's Gives and other organizations we've worked with employ—to make their giving day successful include:
- Pre-soliciting matches, so if you give on this day, there is a match that will double your gift
- Pre-soliciting lead gifts by securing donors who will give large gifts on that day
- Letting your donors know it's coming by creating a roadmap
- Setting out your communication plan in advance, not writing emails on the day of
- Getting your phone call lists ready
- Looking for ways to incorporate events or live conversations, whether digital or in-person
- Making phone calls
- After your giving day, making sure that everybody who gave is recognized, thanked, and already excited about your next giving day

[18:49.64]
Aggierobison: Clearly there's a lot of detail that goes into this, and we're not going to cover all of it on this podcast. Fortunately, we just put some time into creating a course that walks step by step through each of the items you need to take care of to prepare for a giving day like this. It's called "Raising Money with a Giving Day."

If you, dear listener, are interested in learning more about the steps you need to take to prepare for a day of giving like Giving Tuesday—which you probably need to start right now, don't wait until the week before Thanksgiving—I'd go to petrusdevelopment.com/academy. You'll find it there. The course is about an hour of video lessons with 18 lessons. Each one has supplemental resources, and once you buy the course, you own it—it doesn't expire. You can go through it at your own pace.

[20:15.96]
AROB: Absolutely. That short list of things I talked about for being successful with a giving day is important, but here's the thing: if you're the fundraiser or if you're one person on staff, you can't do a giving day at that level that's going to be successful all by yourself. It takes a team, whether that's other people on your staff or volunteers.

Having access to this course allows you to share it with anybody on your team. You can get your volunteers to watch it, share it with your boss, go through it with the team to develop your strategy collectively. It's a great way to get everybody on mission about how you're going to make your giving day successful. Then they start bringing ideas, saying "I can help with this," and it doesn't become a one-person operation, because that's setting yourself up for disappointment. The course is helpful in many ways—lots of details, lots of tactics, but also bringing together everybody who needs to participate to make it successful.

[21:54.53]
Aggierobison: Again, petrusdevelopment.com/academy. You're going to find that course and some other courses we've recently released available to you.

[22:04.85]
Aggierobison: Well, short episode today. I know it's a busy week. We have a lot going on. So we'll catch back up in a couple of weeks.

[22:12.19]
AROB: Thanks, Rhen.

[22:12.85]
Aggierobison: All right. Thanks for being here, Andrew.