Name: Get Ready for Giving Tuesday with Blackbaud Altru®
Uploaded: 2025-09-24T19:31:37.004Z
Duration: 33 min 52 s
Description: Get Ready for Giving Tuesday with Blackbaud Altru®

Transcript for "Get Ready for Giving Tuesday with Blackbaud Altru®": Alright. Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us today for the next installment in our arts and cultural webinar series. Get ready for giving Tuesday with Blackbaud Ultra. Please introduce yourselves in the chat, and we will go ahead and get started in just a few moments. Alright. And it looks like our numbers are growing there. Can everybody hear me alright? Sometimes these headphones are a little glitchy. Can you just drop a yes? I can hear you in the chat if you're good. Awesome. I see Evan there. Alright. Well, we will get rolling here. So my name is Lexi Trent, and I'm a senior customer success manager here at Blackbaud. And I've been at Blackbaud for going on four years now, which is a little hard to believe. Prior to coming on board, I worked in development and marketing at a children's museum. And after that, I was at a historical foundation, which had a couple of house museums. At both organizations, I used Blackbaud Altru, and I even got to do a RE seven to Altru conversion. So been through one of those. I live in Columbus, Ohio with my husband, our two kids, a dog, and two cats. And I'm gonna apologize. I'm at the tail end of a cold. So if I'm a little nasally today, that's why. I am joined today by my colleague Evan Coffey who will be helping out as the chat monitor. So a little housekeeping before we get started. The webinar audio will be broadcast through your computer speakers. If you encounter any audio or technical issues like slides freezing, usually a quick refresh of your browser is the best way to get it working again. Worst case scenario, leave and log in again. Chat and q and a are located on the right hand side of the screen. You can see that Evan has dropped a couple of fun gifts in there. So drop your questions, comments, etcetera. And if we don't get to your question during the session, we can follow-up via email afterwards. So next to chat, you should see a documents tab. If you click on that, you'll see a couple of helpful lists, links and resources in there that are relevant to our discussion today. You might wanna click through those during the presentation, and you can also save them for future reference. You can adjust any settings by using the cogwheel at the bottom of the event space. Sometimes our slides are gonna look a little bit squished in Goldcast. If that happens, you can hover over the right hand corner of the display and click the box to expand your slides. Alright. As we are getting started, I want to hear from you guys. Does your organization participate in Giving Tuesday? And do you have a specific Giving Tuesday campaign for defined need, like an exhibit or something like that? Or is your Giving Tuesday initiative intended to encourage general donations? So drop that in the chat and let everybody, know what you guys have done in the past. Giving Tuesday is a global generosity movement that empowers communities and organizations to create positive change. Giving Tuesday started in 2012 and was created by the ninety second Street y in New York in partnership with United Nations Foundation. It was launched as a counterbalance to the consumerism of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, encouraging people to give back to their communities. Over the years, Giving Tuesday has grown into a worldwide celebration of philanthropy, inspiring millions to donate, volunteer, and support the causes that they care about. Today, Giving Tuesday is observed in over 80 countries and continues to evolve through grassroots efforts and digital campaigns. Giving Tuesday is an opportunity for arts nonprofits to connect with their supporters and raise essential funds. To make the most out of your Giving Tuesday, have a plan, encourage connection, and maximize your impact. Strategic planning and technology use can help your organization maximize the fundraising impact of Giving Tuesday. Alright. So when preparing for a GivingTuesday campaign, you need to ask yourself the big identifying questions. Who are you trying to engage? What are you asking them to do? And why do you want them to do that? Define what success looks like for your organization and how a GivingTuesday campaign fits within the rest of your year end fundraising efforts. At a surface level, these questions might seem a little bit obvious. The who is your donors, the what is give a gift, and the why is to raise funds for your organization. But dig a little deeper and ask yourself, which supporters in particular are you trying to engage with the Giving Tuesday campaign? Are you trying to acquire new donors, young philanthropists who might not be ready to give yet but are active on social media? Do you want them to give a one time gift to your general annual fund, or are you asking them to become recurring donors? Is this Giving Tuesday campaign part of your annual fund, or is it a specific targeted campaign for a particular cause like an exhibit or staff development? Giving Tuesday could even be used as a volunteer drive or friend friend raising event to build awareness and grow your future donor pipeline. By asking yourself these detailed questions ahead of time, you can better identify who you want to target, how you can reach them most effectively, and what you are asking them to do. Let's take a deeper dive on each of these topics. First, ask yourself and your team what you envision for a Giving Tuesday campaign. Consider what your organizational giving strategy has looked like so far this year. How many formal asks have you sent out? What does your event schedule and engagement look like? Did you launch your annual appeal yet? For many organizations, your annual appeal will have gone out well in advance of Giving Tuesday. Will your Giving Tuesday initiative supplement your appeal, or is Giving Tuesday going to be a stand alone campaign with a with a distinct look, feel, and execution? Giving Tuesday offers an opportunity to drive engagement for the annual appeal or to encourage donations for an entirely different fundraising effort. Giving Tuesday is also a great opportunity to try something new and out of the ordinary. Fundraising efforts on Giving Tuesday are typically dynamic, strategic, and community driven. Fundraisers can and should leverage email, social media, websites, and even telethons to reach supporters on all different media channels. Best practices include using branded visuals, storytelling, and real time updates to keep momentum high. By nature of the event being a quick one day focus on giving, social media is the perfect avenue to drive engagement. Perhaps your organization has always stuck to the tried and true hard copy, year end mailer. There is nothing wrong with that, and it works great for many organizations. However, donors change and evolve. Maybe your donor base is becoming more reliant on technology and wants more online content and engagement. Try a quick it one day campaign on social media to see if you can capture some of those potential donors. Remember, every penny counts. A social media campaign is low risk with low overhead and offers a way to engage those low hanging donors, those who have a propensity to give but may not have been activated yet. Regardless, define what success looks like to your organization. Establish clear goals, align with your stakeholders, like your team, board, leadership, etcetera, and develop messages tailored to specific audiences. Next, let's talk about the who. Once you have an idea of what your campaign looks like and what you're trying to do, let's talk about who your donors are. Which groups are you targeting with this GivingTuesday campaign? A GivingTuesday campaign has many different forms. You could conduct it entirely on social media to your entire follower base on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etcetera. These folks may not be in your Altru system, or you can target only those constituents who are already engaged and already in your Altru. A more targeted campaign could use an email with a link or QR code directing donors to your giving web forms. If you are looking to target donors who are already in your Altru database, you should be using query in Altru to extract the specific donors you're looking for. If someone has already engaged with your organization as a donor, they should be at the top of your outreach list. They have already demonstrated an interest in your organization and a propensity to give. If you have not received a gift from a donor yet this year, you can consider them a Libund or a Cybund. Libund and Cybund are acronyms for groups of donors that have given before but not within the current calendar or fiscal year. Libunt means donors who have given last year, but, unfortunately, not this. This refers specifically to donors who gave in the immediate preceding last calendar or fiscal year, but not in the current calendar or fiscal year. Seibunt means donors who have given some year, but, unfortunately, not this. This refers to donors who gave in any preceding year, but not the current year. Altru has two standard smart queries to help you pull this information. You can use the lapsed donor knowledge base article I've linked in the documentation of resources tab for step by step directions. And you can also see a screenshot of the LiveBot Sibon query on this on this screen right here. Also, look at your event attendees. You can craft a campaign entirely focused on attendees at one specific event, or you can even look at all event attendees throughout the year. Members should also be top of mind for outreach as they are your biggest fans and likely see the most direct benefit from engagement at your organization. Linking events and memberships with campaigns can enhance your donor's experience and drive additional participation. For both events and membership, Query will be the most effective tool for extracting and organizing those constituents. It's also easy to manipulate your query results external to the Altru system in something like Excel. For an email campaign, you should also be using segmentation to remove donors who should not receive your Giving Tuesday solicitation if you're sending it out by email. Next, let's talk about stakeholders. Especially with a social media based campaign, make sure you are activating all of your key stakeholders to drive engagement and broaden the reach of your Giving Tuesday efforts. If you are able to, find a matched donor to drive excitement and motivate additional giving. For example, Sally Smith on our board has offered to match every dollar raised up to $5,000. Double your donation today by giving a gift, which will be matched. You can ask yourself who needs to be involved along the Giving Tuesday journey. It's probably your marketing team. It's definitely your gift processing team. If you're involving mail, it's a mail house, and you'll also want to keep your leadership informed every step of the way. Ensure all stakeholders know the why of the campaign and the goals. You should also be sharing their roles ahead of time and your timeline. For your board and volunteers, give them shareable social media graphics and short why I give scripts to post. For staff beyond the development team, remind team members, educators, admin staff, etcetera that they can also share stories with their friends and family networks. For peer to peer, encourage supporters to run small Facebook or Instagram fundraisers that are tied to your Giving Tuesday initiative or year end campaign. And above all, make it easy. Provide ready to use language, templates, and impact numbers for people to share for you. Smaller organizations can't afford complicated asks. Next part is the why. GivingTuesday offers a platform to tell your organization's story and strengthen your community connections. One of the most important aspects of any campaign is aligning with your mission. Your storytelling should show how donations support programming, education, preservation, etcetera. A successful campaign will drive emotional engagement for your supporters. Make sure that you are crafting a narrative that resonates with your supporters to inspire generosity and build lasting donor relationships. Real life examples of your impact are a great way to accomplish this, and Altru is a perfect source for that information. You can use the information within Altru to pull facts and figures about various initiatives and projects that you're working on. Use real stories. Even if the stories are not always successful or happy, donors wanna hear about the real initiatives happening and where their money is going. For example, the children's museum has welcomed over a thousand students from title one schools free of charge for a field trip. You can even give details like every $25 raise provides admission for a full class of students to visit the museum. You should also highlight your uniqueness. Share what sets your organization apart from the others, and start brainstorming why the need is so pressing at the end of the year. For example, unlike other wildlife hospitals, Happy Paws never turns animals away. We're open twenty four seven for drop off, and we don't receive any state or federal funding. That's powerful. You can also frame your donors as heroes. Not all donors want recognition publicly or to be singled out, but donors do like feeling a part of something bigger than themselves. Get creative with how you can play with words to make your feel make your donors feel even more special. For example, thanks to your generosity, we raised over a $100,000, and Happy at Home was able to help 25 seniors stay in their homes longer with at home nursing services. Visuals and emotion are key. Photos, short videos, and staff or volunteer voices add authenticity. Now before we dive into the actual timeline, I wanna take a quick peek at chat and q and a and see if there's any questions. Oh, it looks like we don't have chat enabled, but q and a is enabled. Okay. So, chat's not working. If you have any questions, drop them in q and a, and we'll get to them there. But it doesn't look like we've got any at the moment. Alrighty. So moving on. For your to dos before giving Tuesday, you're going to want to prepare your campaign messaging in advance. Finalize clear and compelling messaging to engage donors effectively well before Giving Tuesday. If you're creating content for your stakeholders, like board members or staff to share, make sure that it's ready and in their hands several days to a week before the event. Make sure that your donation forms are built, ready, and functioning well before the day of the campaign. And this one is easy. Open up your website and look for the donate button. Is it easy to see? Do the colors stand out? Test all the links on your web page, social media profiles, and emails, etcetera well ahead of time. That's also a best practice just generally is make sure check out your website, see if the links are working, and make sure that your users are having the experience you want them to when they're going to your website. If you're not already using the new online giving or optimized donation forms, and here's a screenshot of one of those forms right here, try them out. Giving Tuesday is also the perfect opportunity to try out the credit card fee coverage options included with these new donation forms to see how your donors respond. And as a reminder, if you're not familiar with the new forms or the credit card fee coverage, it is optional. Your donors do not have to participate. There's a little toggle on the screen that they can click and say whether or not they want to give those additional funds to cover the credit card transaction fees. The optimized donation forms are easy to set up, offer greater customization, and a beautiful, more modern look and feel. And you can also see on this form here that we've set up as a sample for one of our customers, San Antonio Zoo. There's a little, ticker thermometer at the bottom of that form that says how much has been raised so far and what the goal is to encourage participation and activation. And as a reminder, these forms are included with your Altru subscription at no additional charge. I've included a couple different resources for setting up your new online giving forms in the documentation tab. Excuse me. To ease day of lift for your Giving Tuesday campaign, make sure that you are scheduling social media posts ahead of time. Right? Organize and schedule your post in advance to maintain consistent outreach and maximize visibility. By creating your post ahead of time, you will also be able to ensure that your outreach is effectively conveying the message you're hoping to get across to your donors. If you have your core engagement outlined ahead of time and scheduled and auto posting, you can still update your donors with live off the cuff post throughout the day with the success of your campaign and funds raised so far. You will also want to confirm donor outreach list for any emails or anything like that ahead of time for those campaigns. You should be verifying and updating donor contact list regularly to ensure targeted and efficient communication. Lastly, this is an important one that is probably not top of mind. Create a query in advance of Giving Tuesday to identify all gifts made to your Giving Tuesday appeal. This makes it much easier to skip to share your success with donors the day of the event, especially if you will be doing updates live throughout the day. And here, we have a screenshot of one of our standard donation forms. If you're still using the standard donation forms primarily, make sure that you are adding appeals to your forms to make day of reporting easier or just in general make reporting easier so that you can share your success with donors on Giving Tuesday. If a donor gives you the form and does not pick a specific designation, the default appeal designation is automatically selected. You can also display the appeal designation as a field on the donation form and make it required so that donors must choose a designation before submitting their gift. That's not necessarily, like, you have to do that. You typically wanna make giving as easy as possible. But if you really need to know which appeal this is going for, you can make that required. Additionally, you can create custom URLs for your donation form that include a specific appeal designation. When donors use that URL to give, the designated appeal will automatically be added to their donation. And, again, this is for the standard donation forms, not the optimized donation forms. So day of giving Tuesday. Ideally, the majority of your outreach, and that's either by social media, post, email, etcetera, should have been scheduled well well in advance of Giving Tuesday. As the day presses on, you can analyze live results and share progress with your donors to encourage more participation, more enthusiasm, more sharing, etcetera. And by adding that appeal to your online gift, like we talked about in the standard donation forms, that's gonna make tracking a lot easier. So if you did set up that appeal query in advance, all you need to do is refresh it periodically to see how things are going. And this is when tying into something like a Power BI dashboard or an Excel workbook that you've set up with an o data link will make things even easier. If you have those set up well in advance, all you're gonna have to do is refresh to get a live look at your results and see how many funds you're raising. After the event. So cleanup and follow-up. These are so, so important. Your first follow-up to donors can be an automated email recognizing their gift, highlighting your mission, and a community impact statement. You should always include meaningful images, hopefully, of your supporters, like, in your spaces enjoying the the the different exhibits you have on offer. The day of at the end of the close of Giving Tuesday, you can announce your numbers via email and social media. Share the amount raised, the number of gifts that were given, numbers of new new or retained donors, etcetera. Or maybe you're asking for volunteers to sign up. Share those numbers as well. Your formal written acknowledgment letters should address the donor by name, reference Giving Tuesday, and explain what their gift is funding. Also, include a sign off with the name and contact information of a staff member, and do not include another appeal. You can use the appeal process in Altru to run these acknowledgments and make sure you're marking the donor's record to confirm that they have been formally thanked. For acknowledgments, acknowledgments are one of the most critical pieces of the gift giving process. It's essential to let your donors know that you've received their gift and are grateful for their support. For Giving Tuesday, you can thank your donors quickly in the three different ways that we mentioned before. First, end your Giving Tuesday with a thank you to supporters posted on social media channels, everywhere that you've been asking for solicitation, emails, newsletter, etcetera. You can also configure that automated thank you email immediately after the gift. And then the last is the formal written acknowledgment letters for those who have shared their addresses with you. And I add that caveat about sharing addresses with you because the new forms don't require you to have an address, like a mailing address included. It can just be an email. You can prepare your acknowledgment letters in Altru or use the acknowledgment process to generate a list for export and complete the mail mail merge process externally. Altru will also allow you to set up multiple acknowledgment letters and send them depending on which category the donation belongs to. This is especially important if you're pinging donors in multiple different brackets. So, like, you have your biggest fans, the high level donors, you probably don't want them to receive a generic thank you email, same for your board members, essential volunteers, etcetera. So you can set up different categories for people in acknowledgments and say, if they're a board member, kick them out and put them in a different category with a different letter and filter on down by that. This is similar to the appeal process and allows you to segment donors for acknowledgment based on their donation using selections created via query. To set up and run the acknowledgment process, go to marketing and communications, click acknowledgments, and then add. This will open up the letter editor letter editor where you can select which letter constituent selection and delivery method you'd like to use for those acknowledgments. For a step by step video on how to set up and run the acknowledgments process, please see the how to run acknowledgments article we've linked in resources. And, lastly, this is very, very important to help you out later on. Make sure you create a selection of any donors thanked for GivingTuesday using the acknowledgment process in Altru so that you can query them easily at a later date. Alright. Just checking chat real quick. Alright. So you've gotten the gifts. You've done your acknowledgments. Next up is checking your data. This is one of my favorite points. Hopefully, GivingTuesday has brought in a bunch of new donors for your organization. This is the perfect opportunity to take a look at your data and confirm that it's been entered correctly. This is especially important for anything that's web form heavy that has the potential to generate duplicates or, you know, any any room for error in terms of data entry. You should be looking for duplicates or any information that's not come in according to your organization's best practices, policies, and procedures. If you do not have a policies and procedures guide for your organization yet, I highly recommend taking a look at my colleague, Jessica Pierce's webinar from just a couple of months ago. She's got a great, really thorough examination of policies and procedures and why they are important. Having strong policies for entering constituent information can help you avoid messy list pulls or embarrassing errors in the future. We all know those you've gotten those acknowledgments before when you've accidentally acknowledged somebody who is no longer with us, and you get the response from the donor that that lets you know that. And that's that's uncomfortable for everybody. So document how names, addresses, and titles should be collected and entered. Once you've established these policies, make sure they're reflected in your name format in Altru. For example, if your organization has decided not collect titles, make sure you are not using formal name formats as the default. Additional policies that you wanna draft include your organization's policy for collecting genders or not, and you will also want to document how relationships and households should be determined and built and when a constituent should be marked as deceased in your database. You can also consider if you wanna add supporting documentation. Next, I wanna touch on memberships a little bit. So this is not necessarily Giving Tuesday, but it comes right along in that, in that suite of post Thanksgiving holidays. So keep Black Friday and Cyber Monday in mind, and keep that momentum going by considering launching a campaign for memberships on on both or either of those days. We all know that many people give memberships as a holiday gift, and Black Friday or Cyber Monday are the perfect opportunity to encourage those purchases early. I've also heard from a lot of organizations recently who are trying to incentivize people to begin, enrolling in auto renewal for their memberships. You can add an auto renewal or early renewal incentive, like, 5 to $10 off if people elect to participate in either of those to drive adoption. And last note I have for everybody, join the Giving Tuesday movement. So if you haven't already, go to givingtuesday.org. That's the formal organization who heads up, you know, Giving Tuesday, worldwide. They have a bunch of tools on their on their website including, the above week the the week by week planner that I've got a screenshot of here. And they also have resources and tips that can that they've seen as, like, a constant throughout very successful campaigns. You can also formally register your campaign as participating in the Giving Tuesday movement. I believe they highlight several throughout the throughout the season. So just take a look at that and, you know, get to know your peers that are also doing that. Excuse me. At other organizations. Alright. Any questions? I don't see any questions at the chat. I'm so oh, wait. Here we go. Carly. So Giving Tuesday is annual fund and Black Friday, Cyber Monday are membership focused. So, I'd say generally yeah. I mean, Giving Tuesday doesn't have to be annual fund. That can be completely up to you guys. And that's what I meant by, do you want Giving Tuesday to be driven by a specific appeal or campaign? So, like, it could be focused on a new exhibit you guys are hoping to launch or sending staff to a special training seminar or something like that. But Black Friday and Cyber Monday would be membership focused because that's where you have the opportunity to kinda capitalize on that end of year holiday shopping frenzy and say, hey. You're doing your Christmas shopping? Consider giving a membership as a gift. I see another question here. I think that okay. I think Evan answered that one. And then Evan answered the question about membership and donation forms. So the new forms are only for donations at this time. The hope would be that as additional forms are developed, those will those will be rolled out to all Blackbaud products, but currently only donations. I highly recommend taking a look because they are, included with your subscription. They're great. They offer a lot of customization, and they offer that fee coverage option. So definitely take a look at that and see if that's something that'll work for your organization. Any other questions? I don't I think that's about all we've got. Let me just scroll down here. Alright. So it looks like we don't have any. I'll give a second for any more of those to come in. And then I do wanna do a plug for our next webinar. It's going to be on October 22, and we focused on group sales and streamlining the guest experience. So please stick around or please register for that one, and we hope to see you at that event. And then lastly, I wanna talk a little bit about resources. So the the new giving forms is a perfect example of this. Say you wanna get started with those forms. You haven't dipped your toe into that yet. We have a lot of different training resources to, help you get up to speed on all of the different different options for using your systems. So Blackbaud University offers courses. You can always reach out to help, to support for help with, troubleshooting, but knowledgey, those kinds of things. Then we have the knowledge base where you can look up articles. And you also have the Blackbaud community, where you can ask peers at similar organizations what they're doing in specific scenarios. And if you don't know your customer success manager, highly recommend reaching out to support to get connected with them. They are a great resource to help make sure that you're getting the most out of the systems that you already have. And that is all I have for you today. So thank you all so much for coming. I hope you all have a really great and successful giving Tuesday. Thank you.