The Sacramento Region Community Foundation survived an epic giving-day disaster two years ago — and learned from it.
In 2016, the giving platform Kimbia crashed during Give Local America day, resulting in chaos and lost donations for about 13,000 participating nonprofits that were using it. One of them was the Sacramento community fund, which used the crisis as a spur to make some changes. It streamlined its database, doubled down on training local charities to participate in its giving day, and saw gifts increase in 2018.
On May 3, using a new platform, the foundation raised $7.4 million on its sixth annual Big Day of Giving, which benefited 587 charities. That total edged out 2017’s take of $7.2 million.
“Our goals for the day revolve around new donors,” says Jeannie Howell, who left her role as the foundation’s director of nonprofit ventures and strategic impact this month to become a consultant. Usually, she says, participating charities report that about 30 percent of their Big Day of Giving donors are new to their organizations; for some groups, that share is much higher.
Seeking to simplify its online fundraising after the Kimbia debacle, the Sacramento organization combined two different databases it had been using; the streamlining helps donors, who can now can go to one website to both contribute to the giving day and read detailed profiles of participating charities year-round. The new system makes it easier to produce the nonprofit profiles, too. “We do kind of like a GuideStar profile for each organization,” Howell says. “It takes a lot of time and effort.”
Getting Creative
Giving days have been one of the fastest-growing fundraising trends of the past decade, and one of the best ways to acquire new donors. Participants tend to be more diverse in terms of age, race, and ethnicity than are donors during the rest of the year, according to Susan Swan Smith, chief giving-day officer of the Communities Foundation of Texas.
“We like to talk about ‘Anyone can be a philanthropist on North Texas Giving Day,’ ” Smith says, referring to the organization’s signature fundraising event.
To keep donor interest high and take advantage of continuing advances in online-fundraising technology, organizations that run giving days are expanding on the things that work and improving things that need tweaking.
For example, in their most recent giving days, both the Sacramento Region Community Foundation and the Communities Foundation of Texas allowed “scheduled giving,” so donors can make a gift ahead of time and schedule it to be processed on the giving day itself.
For the most recent North Texas Giving Day, in September, the Communities Foundation of Texas allowed scheduled giving for a full 10 days before the event in celebration of the giving day’s 10th anniversary.
Scheduled giving helps busy donors give when they’re ready, yet also allows them to partake in the big day. Smith says a donor survey done after 2017’s event revealed that giving-day supporters were motivated by a desire to “be part of something bigger than themselves.”
The tactic helped 2018’s North Texas Giving Day raise $48 million, up from $39 million the previous year. Donations came in from all 50 states and 27 countries.
This year, the Sacramento group began letting charities enter offline giving-day gifts into its online tallies. It also discovered a way to cover administrative costs involved in organizing its Big Day of Giving. The fund introduced a “tip jar” this year on the event’s website. “It’s similar to an ‘add a dollar’ request at the checkout counter,” Howell says. The “tip jar” raised just over $20,000.
Attracting Millennials
Being responsive to community needs and the ways in which locals want to give has also helped giving days flourish.
The organizers of North Texas Giving Day moved quickly last year in the wake of Hurricane Harvey, which struck Texas three weeks before the annual event. Online giving forms were altered to allow donors to give for hurricane relief. The result: $2 million more raised than in 2016. Forty-seven percent of donors last year were new to the event.
For this year’s edition, the Communities Foundation of Texas redesigned its online form to prompt donors to support more than one charity at a time. It will also make it easier for donors to declare their interest in volunteering. “It came from our desire to reach a broader and younger audience,” Smith says. “Millennials often feel like they don’t have the money to give, but they often have the time to give.”
This year when donors made a gift online, they were be asked if they were interested in volunteering for the charities they support. More than 11,000 people pledged to volunteer upwards of 430,000 hours.
Social-Media Guides
Wellesley College raised almost $600,000 during its six-day “Marathon Monday Challenge” this past April, a giving sprint that culminated on the day of the Boston Marathon, whose route passes the campus. (Runners traditionally must brave the “Wellesley tunnel,” a gauntlet of screaming students, as they navigate that part of the route.)
The all-female institution boasts the highest donation rate among former students of all U.S. colleges or universities; 49 percent of alumnae give, according to the Council for Aid to Education.
But even with that built-in advantage, Wellesley fundraisers keep engaging with alumnae through email (former students get emails every day of the challenge until they give), phone, text (a new twist in 2018), and a mix of “organic and paid social media,” according to Jane Chang, the college’s marketing-communications director.
Alumnae and student “ambassadors” for the Marathon Monday drive are given a guide to help them create effective social-media posts for the giving event, including how to create personal video pleas to donors, Chang says. Their efforts are tracked, and they can win prizes, such as Wellesley-branded shoelaces, cellphone cases, or sweatshirts.
In Training
Both the Sacramento and North Texas community foundations provide training to participating charities ahead of their giving days. The Communities Foundation of Texas has offered social-media training, including basic, advanced, and quick-start tracks.
Sacramento’s fund has gradually grown a “boot camp” program to help charities prepare for its Big Day of Giving. It offers six sessions in February, three months ahead of the event, tackling such topics as board development, storytelling, and digital marketing.
Charities that take part in the training usually raise more than those that don’t, according to Howell.
A mentorship program, piloted in 2018 with 116 charities receiving targeted attention from a fundraising mentor, also generated promising results: Groups that participated got an average of 20 percent more gifts than they did during the 2017 Sacramento giving day.
The volunteer mentors are charity leaders who have long participated successfully in the Big Day of Giving. This year, one such CEO is joining the board of a charity she mentored.
The Sacramento foundation is now working on additional training to help charities focus on steps they should take after a giving day. “We look at new donors as these gems,” Howell says. Charities “can turn these new donors into lifetime supporters from these events.”
