Giving Day Season Is Here: Three Tips to Make Your Special Day Shine

There are a whole lot of college and university giving days in the Spring. These special days have expanded over the past 20 years as a key way higher education attracts and excites donors.

Many institutions now book up to half of their total alumni donor count in the week of their giving day. And most have begun to engage current students and parents on giving days.

Why are so many higher education giving days in the Spring?

Well, it’s about timing, and shovels.

First, Spring is generally a low solicitation time. Sandwiched between just-finished holiday season and a common July 1 end of fiscal year appeal season, February through April has emerged as a bit of a “sweet spot” for colleges to hold their giving days.

Spring is also when we have a lot of Founders’ Days at colleges. The formative years of US college expansion were the frontier period, and the history of many institutions is movement West by pioneering educators (many abolitionist and religious), who founded institutions the first day they could put a shovel in the thawing ground. So, we have a lot of Founders’ Days in late February, forward.

And I know a lot of you are putting your shovels in the ground to build great giving days right now. I thought I would offer a few tips for giving day success, from my experience of working with hundreds of college and universities. Here are the top three:

Make giving easy on your giving day to convert the most donors

You’ve publicized your giving day for months. You’re pushing a ton of communications to get donors excited. And then, when they wake up to make their gift, they are confronted with a clunky, high friction and annoying online giving form. It’s a buzz kill.

Remember: for your giving day, you’re mostly converting donors who are warmed up, excited, and have pretty good knowledge of your mission. You don’t need to restate the “why” or ask for a lot from them when they click the “give” button. So, offer an online giving form that collects only what you absolutely need from donors, and makes it very easy to give.

This includes allowing “digital wallet” options like gifts through Apple Pay, Google Pay, Venmo and Paypal. Any good payment processor and CRM can help you get that done. It also means testing your page to ensure that auto-entry of information flows easily. I’ve seen giving experiences that are as fast as 28 seconds – and making a gift in under a minute is a good goal to have. To reach that goal, the colleges strip down their giving pages, removing anything that isn’t crucial, along with carefully testing so that loading and processing times are optimal.

You want to make it very easy to give on giving day. But some donors will want to use options that are a little more complicated. You’ll also want to allow for strategic giving options, like donor-advised funds, IRA QCDs and gifts from family foundations: some of these may take more than a day to arrange, so allow donors to “pledge” a strategic gift on giving day and then complete the process in the coming weeks. Count these pledges in your totals.

In short: Make it very easy to give online, and allow for other, more complicated options for those donors who want to use them.

Engage donors across channels in a symphony of communications on your giving day

You have a lot of permission to send numerous giving messages around your giving day. This is a moment you are least likely to annoy donors, because they know it’s coming and it’s only once a year. However, many institutions lose an opportunity to convert donors by focusing on flat communications, an over-focus on email, and very little personalization.

They best giving day campaigns take a donor’s preferences and interests into mind (and heads up, this is not always their major), send messages that are responsive to what donors do, and communicate across channels. This means things like different messages for previous givers, and even additional special messages to those who give early in the day. (Yes, we see donors give more than once on a giving day). Donors expect these messages to cross channels. In my opinion, texting and voicemail are still greatly under-utilized.

You need to craft a campaign that creates a bit of a “symphony” for your donors, with messages coming in different ways and different voices to tell the giving story.

This is going to take careful coordination, and solid technology. You’re probably going to need some help. Most important: Focus on how your communications tell a story together, and are responsive to donors across channels. In the end, doing it better may be more important than doing just “more.”

If you’re sending the same everything to everyone on your giving day, just blasting and blasting, you’re losing an opportunity to personalize and make donors feel special.

Layer challenges, matches and time-sensitive deadlines across your giving day

The best giving days have multiple (I’ve seen even 100 or more) challenges, matching campaigns, and time-sensitive events throughout the day. These have grown in recent years:

• Challenges based on donor count, not just money: This is where a donor gives based on the number, not the amount of giving during a specific time period. These create a bandwagon effect and send the message that donors of all levels are welcomed on  your giving day. Timing: the whole day, or before a specific time like lunch or end of “work day.”
• Social media “blitz” challenges that unlock a gift: Some giving days have a donor who will make a gift for a number of social shares across the community, and these work great early in a giving day to build momentum. Timing: Early in your day, before 11am.
• Matching challenges for values-driven programs by key leaders: these can be offered by notable alumni, Deans, Provosts, Presidents. The key here is to combine the “match” with a meaningful mission, things like support for first-generation students, inclusive STEM programs, women’s empowerment, and other causes that excite sub-communities in your donor base. Timing: over the course of the full day, usually for 2-3 hour spans.
• Fill the map challenges: All the major giving day platforms now have widgets that can display the number of gifts from each state. And alumni donors just love to see each state checked off. I can’t tell you how many calls I am about to get from friends asking if I know someone in South Dakota. Timing: by the end of the giving day.
• Overall matching challenges that boost institutional confidence: This is the most common challenge. Create an umbrella match, related to your overall donor and/or dollar goal that builds over the course of the day. This sends the message that the mini-challenges which attracted specific meaning for doors combine into a group effort, to do something truly extraordinary. Timing: by the end of the giving day.

And no, not every match or challenge in your giving day needs to succeed. I haven’t seen that some failed challenges hurt giving days in the future. A close challenge might even energize donors for next year. Set some challenges you feel very confident about, but take some risks. Your donors will surprise you.

Giving days require collaboration, tech, and creativity

Your average donor is going to see multiple giving days this Spring, between their alma mater, others schools represented in the family, and other charities. To break through and get attention, you’ll need to be creative and persistent in your communications.

The tech for giving days is also always expanding. One top tip I have for fundraisers is to make gifts this Spring to a few giving days at institutions similar to yours who are on different platforms, and take notes on the experience. You’ll surely pick up some new ideas.