Giving Tuesday posts on your social media should follow a dynamic routine that leverages different strengths of social media at different stages of the drive. Take advantage of what’s trending to gather awareness, then schedule countdown posts to draw in suspenseful engagement. Finally, cause a scene with bold and simple donation posts on the day.
It’s pretty straightforward once you know how, and if you’re reading this, you’re about to learn!
We’ve got a bunch of Giving Tuesday social media post ideas for you coming up, but if this all sounds a little new to you, let’s first go over what Giving Tuesday is and how social media works to drive successful Giving Tuesday Campaigns.
What are Giving Tuesday Social Media Posts?
Since its creation in 2012, the Tuesday after Thanksgiving has been known as Giving Tuesday, it’s a time when people all over the world are implored to offer their generosity toward a good cause. This generosity can come in many forms, whether volunteer work, donating to a nonprofit organization, or even a random act of kindness in the street.
Since its inception in New York, it’s grown to a multinational, recognized event, and charities the world over have been able to leverage it to drive up their donations. And this is a trend that looks set to continue. In 2020, despite COVID-19, Giving Tuesday reported donations of $2.5 billion from American donors alone.
Giving Tuesday social media drives involve a series of posts that follow the same format as any upcoming donation drive. First, they’re designed to spread the word and gather attention. Then, they’re tailored to stimulate anticipation and excitement and keep the enthusiasm alive. Finally, they shift to a powerful and urgent CTA to capitalize on the energy that’s been worked up over the course of the campaign.
Organizations can work alongside Giving Tuesday to brand their content with the Giving Tuesday logo and boost awareness not only of their cause but also of the day of giving. Designing your own campaign around this is a fun exercise in fundraising, and we’ve got plenty of Giving Tuesday social media post ideas for posts you can use coming up.
With the right series of Giving Tuesday social media posts, your campaign will capture and hold the attention of your supporters all the way up to donation time and beyond. With just a handful of strategies, starting your own campaign and taking advantage of a global phenomenon is easy.
So, how do you do it? We’ve got ten tips for you in the next section, covering all the stages of a successful, repeatable Giving Tuesday fundraiser.
How to Design the Campaign for Giving Tuesday Posts in Six Stages
By the time it comes to posting on social media, your Giving Tuesday Campaign is already begun. This means there’s an entire back-end to think about in order for you to be ready to go on the day and to make the biggest impact with your Giving Tuesday social media posts. However, while this is an important component of running the show, it doesn’t involve much social media, so we’ll just summarize it briefly here.
The campaign itself can be split into six distinct stages:
1. Setup
This is where you’ll gather your internal teams and get everyone on board. Align expectations by holding meetings and identifying who will be your high-profile champions if you have them. Design the fundraising thermometer, set your fundraising goal, and design and settle on a donation form template. You’ll also want to agree on your schedule for posting and the format of the posts as they change over the course of the drive.
2. Promote
Next, you should be ready to begin your social media Giving Tuesday posts. This stage should start around two months before your donation day, and you’ll want to split your resources between promotion and recruitment. Here is where you’ll send out your ambassador recruitment forms, spread the dates of the giving day, and start trying to increase awareness of the concept and your specific drive.
More than this, you’ll start posting content that generates awareness. This could be more in-depth, educational content that ties into the campaign or simple, sharable promotions.
TIP 1 – Use Hashtags
Remember, at this stage, your campaign is about generating interest and spreading awareness. Hashtags are great for this, and Gilda’s Club weaved the Giving Tuesday hashtag into their post for this reason. The clever use of a hashtag on a Twitter post will lead to around 60% more engagement than the same post without it. Instagram will also be a great place for using hashtags, and it will even put the hashtags users follow into their feeds.
The point of the promotion stage is to reach as many eyes as possible. You’re not ready to up the pressure yet, so just focus on spreading the word.
TIP 2 - Use Stories
While you’re in the promotional stages of your campaign, you will want to have a linear course to your content. This isn’t always possible when Facebook and Instagram don’t display posts in order. This is where stories come in handy. This tip is also suitable for any stage of the campaign where you want to be able to share your social media posts in a way that tells a story.
Stories will promote awareness and engagement and allow you to add your hashtags and donations buttons too. They can make use of the inbuilt “stories” function on your social media (“reels” in Snapchat), or they can be actual video stories containing the narrative of your project, as in this Mercy Home campaign.
These will allow you to cover more linear themes, perhaps of previous campaigns and how they ran from conception to success. These stories are great for generating interest in your organization and the concept of Giving Tuesday.
3. Remind
Here’s where you can push a little harder. For those who have signed up, you can start sending reminder text messages and publishing more social media content. You’ll be tailoring your content more to people who are already aware now, which means adjusting your approach slightly.
The role of your social media here should be to build anticipation and promote deeper engagement with those who are more aware. Repetition is the key to engagement, and focusing on the time is the key to building suspense.
TIP 3 – Use Countdowns
There’s nothing more suspenseful than a countdown, and in the days running up to the giving event, this is the perfect time to use them. This DuPage campaign doubled the countdown with repetition, so the branding and the reminders came through consistently throughout the countdown, inspiring engagement, and suspense. Consider using these for at least the seven days leading up to Giving Tuesday.
Keep the branding consistent and the message clear. You’ll want to have everyone’s attention for the next stage.
4. Inspire
This is the day! It’s time to pull out all the stops and inspire your followers to get involved. At this stage, you should have all hands on deck, reaching out to all your contacts across all channels and offering an engaging and urgent reminder of what’s at stake. There are several ways to achieve this.
Tip 4 – Use Fundraising Thermometers
A fundraising thermometer is a live image of the current state of the campaign. It gives a visual representation of the funds you’ve got so far and how close you are to the target. As the example from The Camphill School shows, it’s possible to put one of these front and center to show donors the direct impact of their contribution to your goal.
Fundraising thermometers are such a handy tool for engagement. The faster they refresh, the better. If donations are large enough to register, it should be possible for a donor to watch their money go straight into the pot.
TIP 5 – Be Bold
It’s important to make your CTA very clear and present on the day of the donation drive. Hire Heroes used a bold and high-contrast graphic social media post that’s immediately eye-catching and has a handy donation update instantly visible. The donate button is right up the top, next to their own fundraising thermometer, and they managed to make the Giving Tuesday branding their own, too, cleverly blending it into the message and their logo.
They also provide an inspiring message and a slogan that inspires a community spirit and an image of the face of the people donors will be helping. This boosts brand recognition and reminds people why they were considering donating in the first place. The large smile shows the effect of each donor’s contribution on the individual.
5. Gratitude
After the event day has passed, you can still do a lot to promote the next one and keep the donors and prospects engaged for the project you’re supporting. Whether you are responding to first-time donors or recurring givers, it’s important to acknowledge their contributions with gratitude. An authentic thank you will work wonders for your donor pool and maximize your chances of receiving recurring donations next year.
TIP 6 – Say Thanks!
Thank-you posts are critical to the repeat donation process, so don’t skip them! Recurring donors are already rare enough, you should be taking any chance you can get to make your first-time donors feel as valuable as they are, and hopefully, they’ll be happy to come back next time, too.
USsoccer.com president Cindy Cone makes a personal show of gratitude in her thank-you social media post. The thanks are more heartfelt when they come from the top, but don’t forget to reach out to individuals in private too, and thank them personally with texts and emails.
TIP 7 – Show your accomplishments
What better way of demonstrating effect than by listing what the drive accomplished? In the days following your fundraiser, put out posts like this one from Hunger Free America, in which you reward donors with a look at what they helped you achieve.
There are many ways to do this, but try to focus on the direct impacts of the money you receive. Consider the perspective of the donor, and pick the highest-profile examples. Listing the number of admin staff you paid for during the campaign isn’t as attractive as showing the number of lives you saved or wells you dug.
6. Engage
The engagement should never stop! Using the momentum from a successful campaign, you can ride the wave of engagement and begin promoting your next campaign or spreading awareness about your organization through ongoing social media posts. The idea here is to keep people so enthusiastic that it’s a breeze to gather donors for the next round.
Remind people that there is always an opportunity to donate, and keep your media informative and engaging to start gathering the attention of the next generation of donors.
TIP 8 – Educate
Your media from this point on can be informative, engaging, and easy to digest, like this post from Save Our Oceans. There’s no direct call-to-action (although there could be). Instead, the post focuses on taking an essay’s worth of content and condensing it into a very simple infographic with information on how people can help and why they should care. This is a great example of a post in which there is no real push. It’s simply driving awareness.
The only thing missing from this example is the donation button. While it’s not necessary, it’s easy enough to include it in almost every post, whether you’re directly calling for donations or not.
TIP 9 – How to get involved
There are more things to contribute to charities than money. Catalog for Philanthropy’s post about Giving Tuesday could be used at almost any stage of the campaign, but it stands out as a good summary of how to list ways in which people can contribute. Many of the people watching your social media may not be able to afford donations but may still want to help. It’s important to remind them that they can, in fact, volunteer or promote your cause one way or another.
At the end of a successful campaign, this is a powerful message not to give up and offers ways in which philanthropists can contribute without spending their own money.
TIP 10 – A wall of fame
One great way to publicly thank your top donors is to have a donor wall post. As long as they’ve made it clear, they don’t want to be anonymous, putting up your top donors, or even all of your donors, ranked from highest to lowest is a great way to accomplish public gratitude, engage future donors, and inspire a little bit of healthy competition for the next rounds of funding!
This leaderboard from Qgiv shows how you can make it fun to display your donors publicly and even presents them with virtual awards for the top three rankings. These little displays of gratitude go a long way to encouraging recurring donations and engaging new prospects.
Giving Tuesday Social Media Post Ideas: A Summary
When designing your own series of Giving Tuesday social media posts, remember to adjust the content to the stage of the drive you’re at. The initial stages must be to cast a wide net, spread information, and reach a large audience. Use hashtags and educational material here.
Then, become more specific as the day draws near, counting down the days and reminding people why it’s important. On Giving Tuesday, make sure you don’t let up the pressure and provide a bold expression with a fundraising thermometer and a donate button.
Remember that repetition is important to engagement and that the marketing rule of 7’s says that your prospects may need seven iterations of the same message to motivate them to part with their money. Make your message loud and clear, and let your donors see their progress live.
Finally, don’t neglect the follow-up stages, as your audience and donors will want to know how it went and where their contributions went. Demonstrate your successes, and be sure to publicly thank those who want it.
The key to a good campaign is to know your audience and follow the formula to leverage the power of your social media in precise ways that match the stage of the drive you’re at.
Conclusion
With these Giving Tuesday social media post ideas, you should be able to find inspiration for your own campaign and leverage these tips to succeed in your drive. The formula isn’t different from any other social media-based funding drive, but there are some added quirks, like the custom branding and the global network of support available.
Check out these ideas, and let them help you create your own. Social media isn’t the only way to make a splash. Rally Corp offers a host of mobile messaging tools that you can use to engage your followers and supplement your public social media posts with a personal message to each individual. Short links and QR codes make it easy to get donor attention and grow your prospects list quickly.
Thanks for reading. And good luck with your Giving Tuesday campaign!
