Five years ago, Giving Tuesday was just one of a million nice ideas, says Henry Timms, executive director of the 92nd Street Y and founder of the annual day aimed at spurring philanthropy. “No one thought it was going to work.”
Mr. Timms and other Giving Tuesday organizers hoped the event, which follows Thanksgiving and the consumer-focused Black Friday and Cyber Monday, would make people think more about giving and volunteerism around the holiday season.
Today, Giving Tuesday has become a fixture on many charities’ fourth-quarter calendars. Philanthropy observers say the day — slated this year for November 29 — has become more than a hashtag holiday and brought a much-needed spirit of collaboration, innovation, and digital experimentation to the nonprofit world.
“We really think of it as more of a movement now than an event,” says Asha Curran, chief innovation officer at the 92nd Street Y, which developed the first Giving Tuesday with the help of the United Nations Foundation.
Giving days are isolated events, but Giving Tuesday represents a mind-set shift for both individual charities and nonprofits as a whole, says Ms. Curran. “I think it’s changed the way organizations think about their own capacity.”
A Day for Experimentation
Participation has increased exponentially each year, and online donations continue to grow at a double-digit rate — a trend expected to continue this year. Last year donors gave an estimated $116.7 million online on Giving Tuesday, up from $10 million in 2012.
Media attention surrounding the event each year creates an awareness and momentum that nonprofits of all sizes and causes can benefit from, says Steve MacLaughlin, vice president for data and analytics at Blackbaud.
The day has become a laboratory for fundraisers, marketers, and businesses to test new messages and ideas by email and social media. Marketers can use it as an opportunity to do what Aaron Sherinian, chief communications and marketing officer at the United Nations Foundation, calls “the benevolent brag” and advocate for their causes in new ways. And some businesses are even using the day to promote their ideas about social change, he says. “Giving Tuesday has become an opportunity to try something new,” says Mr. Timms. “That level of experimentation is so critical for our sector.”
Countless free classes, webinars, and other online resources have popped up throughout the year to help charities build skills that are used not just on the date itself but year-round. The 92nd Street Y and its partners provided a lot of that support in the beginning, but now they increasingly see their role as serving as a connector and facilitator of resources for participants around the globe.
From the start, the event organizers avoided a top-down approach: Nobody owns the Giving Tuesday brand, nobody dictates the rules, and participating charities don’t need to sign up through an official channel. The spirit of collaboration that has emerged from the event is atypical of organizations that must compete for support, says Mr. Timms.
And as Mr. MacLaughlin sees it, the movement is still in its infancy. “I don’t know if we’ve seen the full depth and breadth of what Giving Tuesday is able to do for the sector,” he says, adding that it has “huge potential” in the years to come.
Mr. Timms echoes his prediction. “We’re really trying to think big about the next five years,” he says.
Fast-Spreading Movement
While Giving Tuesday has become famous in the charity world, a survey last year found that just 18 percent of Americans were familiar with the event.
Yet each year, more countries have adopted the movement. More than 75 nations now help organize their charities on Giving Tuesday, Mr. Timms said. This year, countries including Russia, Croatia, Slovenia, Switzerland, and Tanzania plan to launch first-time efforts.
“These Giving Tuesday campaigns, all of which have learned from the movement here in the U.S., are coming alive all around the world,” Mr. Timms says. “You have this kind of cascade of information-sharing and data-sharing and goodwill.”
At the same time, it’s becoming even more localized, with many cities and civic communities establishing their own local Giving Tuesday campaigns.
Some charity leaders worry about their causes getting lost in the giving day’s glut of email appeals. Others have questioned whether Giving Tuesday is really increasing overall giving or merely prodding donors to make their usual — and maybe even smaller — year-end gifts earlier in the season.
But an analysis of the first three years of Giving Tuesday data by the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy found that the event tended to draw in new donors who give small gifts. And data from a sampling of organizations that participated in 2012 and 2013 did not demonstrate that donors saved their year-end giving for Giving Tuesday. On the contrary, without the event, Lilly school researchers found, year-end giving to many types of nonprofits would have been much lower.
Many Goals
Data alone can’t tell the whole story about what charities want and expect from Giving Tuesday.
No one thought it was going to work.
“It’s quite challenging to truly capture the impact of Giving Tuesday,” says Una Osili, the school’s director of research. “If you measure Giving Tuesday just by how much is raised, you may miss some of the other indicators like the advocacy and volunteer components or the fact that there is more engagement with the institution following Giving Tuesday.”
Success, she says, depends on the goals of participating organizations, which may include raising matching funds, signing up monthly donors, hosting volunteering opportunities, or introducing a cause to new audiences.
But many are raising significant sums. Large charities have fared best. In 2015, the biggest groups — those with budgets of at least $10 million — brought in 71 percent of all gifts during the event. But smaller organizations have seen their share of total gifts rise steadily each year.
Of the causes that attracted the most money over all in 2015, medical research charities topped the list, followed by religious organizations and human-service groups.
Foundations Dig Into the Data
Giving Tuesday data can be hard to track because the event is decentralized and gifts are processed through many payment systems. But some grant makers are getting more serious about supporting the effort and tracking philanthropy during the event.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, as well as the Gateses personally, have supported Giving Tuesday since its inception, says Victoria Vrana, the foundation’s senior program officer for philanthropic partnerships.
In the beginning, the foundation encouraged participation in the event through matching campaigns. In 2014, it decided to begin making more significant investments to support its operations.
In 2015, it made a two-year $2.65 million grant to the 92nd Street Y to help figure out what Giving Tuesday’s future might look like as well as support the second year of the #MyGivingStory competition, which encourages donors to share short essays about why they gave to a nonprofit. The grant will support a “data dive” effort in March 2017 with the nonprofit DataKind to analyze giving data and social-media activity on Giving Tuesday.
“We believe the continued growth of the campaign has the potential to strengthen the culture of generosity and giving back in the U.S. and around the world,” Ms. Vrana wrote in an email to The Chronicle.
In recent years, the Case Foundation also supported a data-collection effort. The 92nd Street Y has helped foster a cooperative effort with dozens of giving platforms and processors.
Mr. Timms sees much more room for foundation involvement in the years to come.
One of the big questions many foundations are grappling with is how to shift from their roles as grant makers to movement builders that can mobilize communities, he says. Giving Tuesday presents a great moment to try that.
“Even the Gates Foundation, with the resources they have, recognize that the capital alone won’t shift the outcomes they want to shift,” he says. “We’d love to see more foundations use Giving Tuesday to mobilize around the causes they care about.”
‘Incredible Optimism’
With just about three weeks until the big day, Mr. Timms and others say this year’s event could not come at a better time. Following an election season so full of divisive rhetoric and negative campaigning, Giving Tuesday has the potential to shine a light on the “incredible optimism” the nonprofit world contributes, something he describes as “crucial to the greatness and goodness of this country.”
“We’re really focused on having it be a moment of unity for this country and for this world, rather than a focus on dollars,” Ms. Curran says. “I think the opportunity to come back around a common, a positive goal this year is particularly meaningful.”
