Giving Tuesday in northwest Ohio had an awkward coincidence. Separate campaigns — one in the Toledo area and another in rural Archbold — both used the hashtag #GivingTuesdayNWO. The duplication created no confusion, however, as the Archbold fundraising drive was very intentionally an offline affair.
That November evening, some 250 of the 4,300 residents of Archbold gathered at the local community college for chicken, pork, and a heaping side of generosity, raising $1.6 million in just a few hours. The event’s title included the ubiquitous social-media tag #GivingTuesday, but only those in the room could make a donation.
The Toledo-Archbold contrast illustrates the metamorphosis of Giving Tuesday since it began in 2010. The fundraising extravaganza has gained fame as an illustration of social-media’s power in charitable giving; this year, more than $125 million of the $380 million raised was donated through Facebook alone, nearly triple the amount in 2017.
But as more nonprofits jump into the game, there’s increasing competitive pressure to stand out from the crowd. As a result, some groups are abandoning Facebook-focused strategies to meet face to face with supporters.
“Everybody’s getting the sense now that Giving Tuesday cannot just be about barraging people with emails,” says Asha Curran, who tracks Giving Tuesday efforts globally at New York City’s 92nd Street Y, which in 2012 created the day devoted to philanthropy. “You just become part of the noise. The creativity driven by the need to rise above that noise is interesting and inspiring to see.”
Online Bird-Watching
This year’s #GivingTuesdayNWO effort in Toledo looked much like others nationwide. It was loosely coordinated through the Toledo Community Foundation, which offered training to help groups plan their pitch. In 2014, when the foundation first stepped into Giving Day, some groups didn’t even have a “Donate” button on their websites. This year, with many organizations now veterans, sessions focused on how to make Giving Tuesday part of an organization’s annual-giving program.
Black Swamp Conservancy was one of the stars of the drive. Soon after it started running Giving Tuesday campaigns, the small land trust realized that social media was overrun with groups vying for attention and dollars. This year, to catch attention early, it launched a post-Halloween online contest to name a statue of a heron that the organization had recently purchased as a pseudo-mascot.
The statue was christened Erie, and at 8 a.m. on Giving Tuesday, the organization began posting photos of her to Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. In each image, she was posed in an area that the group had helped to protect — a meadow, a historic farm, a marsh, and the like.
By day’s end, the photo-every-hour campaign had raised some $12,000 — more than twice the $5,000 the group typically netted.
Rob Krain, the organization’s executive director, credits the success to the name-the-bird gambit. Contests and other engagement hooks “tend to track well on social media,” he says.
At least a few Toledo groups supplemented social-media drives with opportunities for personal interaction. The Arts Commission, which has held Giving Day events since 2012, realized after a few years that “the shark tank was getting pretty full,” says Ryan Bunch, communications outreach coordinator.
To change things a bit this year, the group capped the day with a gathering for supporters at a popular bar. The organization collected donations at the event, “but it was really more about the opportunity to say ‘thank you’ to people and meet face to face,” says Jennifer Jarrett, deputy director of the commission.
The United Way of Greater Toledo focused its entire Giving Tuesday effort on showing gratitude through what it called “Thanking Tuesday.” It dispatched staff members to nearly 50 companies that back the organization. They presented the managers of volunteerism at each business with tokens of thanks: framed watercolors of a red feather, once the symbol of the United Way’s community-chest campaign.
The organization eschewed raising money altogether, in part because research suggests small groups with focused missions do better on Giving Tuesday than big organizations that, like United Ways, have a broad portfolio of work, according to Kate Fineske, vice president of engagement.
One benefit of the gratitude blitz: The staff visited many small companies that United Way generally works with by phone and email. “With some of these businesses, there hasn’t been a lot of face-to-face contact,” Fineske says. “I felt like they developed a more authentic relationship with our staff.”
Nonprofits as the Stars
The 92nd Street Y team that tracks Giving Tuesday efforts says the Archbold #GivingTuesdayNWO drive was one of this year’s most innovative. It was organized by Everence, a Midwest-based financial-services company that’s a ministry of the Mennonite Church.
The previous year, Shari Beck, Everence’s financial adviser in Archbold, had hosted a late-autumn philanthropy event for company clients and others in the area. She had brought in a representative from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to headline a panel of speakers. About 20 or so nonprofit officials attended, and Beck decided that groups like those should be the main attraction.
She had never heard of Giving Tuesday, but hitched her 2018 event to the brand and worked with the 92nd Street Y team. She secured 14 nonprofits — from the local Habitat for Humanity chapter to Sara’s Garden, a small family-founded group to support children with cerebral palsy, autism, and other disorders — to hold an “expo” before the dinner, then participate in panel discussion about their work.
Beck promoted the event to Everence clients and through newspaper ads, as well as videos about the groups created by company’s marketing team. She also secured a $500,000 matching grant from local donors and businesses.
The night of the event, the nonprofit leaders talked about their work before a packed room of more than 250 people. Beck made a point of accepting donations only from those attending. “This was really geared to the community and to show generosity as a community,” she says. “In order to do that, you need the community to be there. If they weren’t there, they wouldn’t have heard those panel discussions by those local organizations that were making a difference in their area.”
Jamie McDonald, part of the 92nd Street Y’s team coordinating Giving Day, says the Archbold effort was a standout for its authenticity as well as the total dollars raised in a small community. “Here’s one woman who gets inspired by highlighting the nonprofits in her community, and she does something completely creative and rises above the din.”
Archbold’s drive, she adds, was about a community coming together to do good and make a difference. “That’s what distinguishes a campaign.”
