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Attention nonprofit leaders. On December 10th at 12:00pm Eastern, RIA is hosting a live training on how to secure 4 to 10 major gifts before December 31st. One time only. No replays. Seats are limited so save your spot. Now using the link in the show notes.

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Welcome to Nonprofit Lowdown. I your host, Rhea Wong. Hey hey Nonprofit fam Ria coming to you from the day after Giving Tuesday. If you're anything like me, you got a full inbox yesterday full of compelling stories, lots of emails, some good, some not so good. I know we're in the season, but to be honest, I'm feeling a little bit overwhelmed. But I'm doing this special podcast episode because somebody reached out to me and said, ria, our Giving Tuesday campaign flopped. I don't know what to do about it help. So I thought I would do this post mortem on Giving Tuesday because here's the thing, if you've done this the right way, Giving Tuesday is not the end. It is the kickoff to your end of year campaign, which should end December 31st. So the good news here is that we have time to course correct. We have 28 days to get this right. So what I'm going to do in this podcast is I'm going to walk you through a diagnosis of where your Giving Tuesday might have broken down in order for you to fix it in time for year end. And by the way, I'm also including a fun freebie for you all. So if you click the link below, I have created a checklist because I know y' all love checklists. A checklist for what to do between now and the end of year in order to make sure your end of year campaign is right and tight. So let's get into it now. I want us all to take a breath. First of all, it has been a crazy year. It is still a crazy year. People's inboxes are full. You are competing with the media cycle, the news cycle, the doom scrolling TikTok. I mean, it's a very busy and noisy atmosphere out here, so I want you to give yourself a little bit of grace. Now real talk, your Giving Tuesday didn't fail because donors don't care. And it did not fail because the mission isn't compelling. And it did not fail because you didn't work hard. It failed because fundraising is a system and somewhere along the way some parts of the system broke down at the same time. But it is okay because we still have time to recover. So I think even though you might be feeling a little bit glum about this is a learning opportunity. And actually I think it's good news because this is not the end of year. This was giving Tuesday. So you still have time to recover. So let's get into it. Here are the 12 real reasons that your campaign may have flopped. And I'm going to group these into four different pillars. The audience, the offer, the execution and the follow up. So Those are the four big groups and the 12 reasons why. So let's get into it. Let's talk about audience failures. So number one, and this is super basic, but you had a dirty list. And you know we don't like dirty lists out here. Dirty lists mean bad results. So what do I mean by a dirty list? Things like you had old email addresses, you had inactive donors, you had duplicates, you had search spam, you didn't have good phone numbers for people, you don't have good engagement. So the other thing that you should be thinking about before you send out a campaign is what are my open rates? What are my click through rates? Are there people on my list that really have not been engaged in the last six months? Before you launch a campaign, this would have been an opportunity to clean your list out. To send a two sequence email to folks who haven't opened your emails in a while to say, hey, do you still want to be on this list? Because frankly, if they're not engaged or active on your list, they are likely not going to be a donor for you. Do you have cold subscribers? In other words, are these people who, I don't know, somehow they ended up on your list but they're not really engaged, they're not even. Or maybe they're going into spam. You want to make sure that your list is clean, that you're not getting bounces, that you're actually sending it to people who want the information. That would be the first thing I would look at. Because when you have low deliverability and low opens and low awareness, you have low giving. Number two, no segmentation. So for those of you there who don't know what segmentation is, essentially you are separating out your list into the different segments, hence the word segmentation of the category in which they belong. Why is that important? That is critically important. Because you want to communicate with the people based on their engagement and history with the organization. Now I know that there are some of you out here who don't really know everybody on your list, but I would do the best that you can. The other thing is, I know we can make ourselves crazy with segmentation. So here are a Couple of key segments that I want you to think about. One, major donors who were not stewarded, mid level donors who weren't nudged monthly donors who weren't invited to give above their subscription, lapsed donors, first time donors, corporate matchers, board members and volunteers and ambassadors. If you are able to pull these different lists together and then create a specific communication sequence to speak to their specific, specific issue. Specific always beats general in terms of solicitation. Now if you had an email that went out that was quite generic and it went out to say someone who was a lapsed donor and also someone who's never given before, of course that seemed nonspecific and a generic ask equals generic results which equals low conversion. So again, I don't want to you to make yourselves crazy with segmentation, but I think the second area I would look at is how well did you segment your list? Let's keep going. Number three, under the umbrella of audience, you, there was no use of last year's data. So I am a big proponent of facts over feelings. If you launched your campaign and you didn't look at things like who gave last year at giving Tuesday, who gave during end of year, which messages worked, when was the timing of the peak giving either both in terms of day and time of day, channel performance, where did most of the donations come through? Was it email? Was it snail mail? Was it personal solicitations? Was it social media? I don't think it was social media. But hey, look, there's always an LS ice bucket challenge out there, right? But you need to analyze where did the money come through? How do your donors behave? Do they tend to wait until the very last minute? Are they responsive to a particular type of campaign or a particular story? Who has lapsed? Who has, what is your average gift size? How quickly do donors move from first hearing about the campaign to taking action? Now, I understand that some of you may not have all of that data, but I do think you need to use the data that you do have. And for those of you, and this is the case with someone who reached out to me, they've never done a givingtuesday campaign before. They didn't actually have data to rely on. If you've never done a givingtuesday campaign or an end of year campaign, consider this to be your learning year. You need a baseline. And so sometimes I think we put so much pressure on ourselves to like deliver out of the gate. But the truth is fundraising, like marketing, like sales is a learning game. It's an iterative process so, like, you don't necessarily know what your audience is going to respond to if you've never done it before. However, as you start to do it, as you start to gather data, as you start to learn, you have to collect the data and use it. Like they say, with great power comes great responsibility. Use it for, for next year to inform your campaign when you aren't using your data, you're guessing instead of targeting and you're repeating the same mistakes and you're ignoring the patterns that data already showed you. So by not using the data, it's like roulette. You're just spinning the wheel. All right, last piece. Around your audience, and this is a mistake I see a lot is there was no preheat or warmup phase, which means that you went into Giving Tuesday cold. So there was no Runway, there was no priming, there was no storytelling, there was no momentum, there was no behind the scenes content. There was no emotional warmup. There was no anticipation. They didn't know that Giving Tuesday was coming. You just sort of showed up in their inbox. And so think of the warmup phase like the opener to a concert, right? You want to warm your audience up before the main event so that they are ready to receive what you are putting down. So cold donors don't give, warm donors do. So if you're listening to this and you're thinking, maybe I one of these things applies to me. It's all good, there's no shame. But now you can fix it. Also, check out the checklist that I'm putting in the show notes so you can walk through it with your team. Okay, let's talk about the offer failures. So this is the second pillar of where you might have failed. One, you had a weak or generic offer. So campaigns don't win on please give. Right? Everyone is out here with Giving Tuesday and they're asking to give. But the campaigns that really differentiate themselves are the ones that have that give their donors clarity, anchoring urgency, specificity, and outcomes. So what I mean by that is half of the battle is getting them to pay attention to you. The other half of the battle is to give them a compelling offer that feels too good to pass up. For example, if your offer did not give them a compelling reason to give today, so what could that look like? It looks like maybe we have a 3x match today, or every dollar given today is matched one to one. Something that gives me a reason to give today a match that felt urgent. Why now? Why this thing? Why is this important in this moment? In time, the specificity of the impact, what does it buy? So If I donate $50, what does that quote unquote buy in terms of your actual programming or the outcome that I'm looking for? What are the emotional stakes for me? What is the transformational narrative like? What's the thing that that helps me to feel that I am a character in the story, that with an action I can change the ending and what's the deadline? People really respond to deadlines. So if any of those things were missing in your offer, that probably meant that you had low giving rates. Because when people don't feel urgency and they don't have clarity, they are unlikely to give. And then finally, let's talk about execution failures. I know that Giving Tuesday feels like a lot. I also know that many of you are trying to do the most that you can with very small teams. So understand that I hear all that and do what you can do. But here is what I'm going to say. 1. Lack of omnichannel presence. This often happens when we over rely on one channel. It's usually email. And I'm going to use Wicked as an example. So I've never seen this movie Wicked. Obviously it's very popular. It's out there in the universe. What I think is so brilliant about Wicked from a marketing perspective is they are everywhere all the time. I can't not see this thing like there are billboards and there are movie previews and there are tie ins and there's merchandising and they're on TikTok and I mean I cannot go anywhere without saying something about Wicked. Now obviously many of you don't have the kind of budget that Wicked does. But what I do appreciate about Wicked is I see it everywhere. And there's a psychological term which is exposure breeds affinity. And so the more I see something, the more I like it. So if you found that your Giving Tuesday was a little bit lackluster, it's likely that you weren't everywhere. So that could look like maybe there weren't enough emails or not enough SMS sent, or not enough social or not enough personal outreach, or not enough board amplification, or you weren't retargeting people who opened your emails but didn't take action. This wasn't obvious on your website that this campaign was happening. There was no peer to peer activation and so low visibility and low frequency equals low action. So if donors see you once, they don't act. But if they see you 7 to 14 times, they convert. But remember we are battling the wickets of the world, right? We are getting so used to just turning things off that it really takes a lot for it to break through into our consciousness. So there was lack of omnipresence, I. E. Using different platforms to make it seem like you were everywhere all at once. But then there's also the problem and this is too low volume and low frequency. In all likelihood people didn't see you enough. And so in this case you would need more emails, more reminders, more urgency, more posts, more calls, more reinforcement and more countdowns. And so you likely may have sent too few messages to break through the noise. So if you don't talk enough, donors don't hear you. 3. Weak or inconsistent messaging we talk about all the time that storytelling is the engine behind fundraising. And if you did not have a strong story arc that is clear and consistent, this could also be where things broke down. So for example, we need to understand basic storytelling principles. We need a protagonist who this girl is an inciting incident. What the barrier was. Then we need a call to adventure. What is the opportunity? We need to talk about why the moment mattered. Then we need to talk about the donor. What is it that their gift unlocks? What does the match do? What does the countdown mean? Why now? Why this? Why me? Why you? Without the emotional engagement, the giving is low. Because assuming that we can break through the noise, assuming that they look at our emails, if they finally read the email, if they don't get the emotional payoff of feeling like they need to move now, they likely will not. And then finally, under this rubric of execution 4 timing misses, you may have started too late in the planning. You may have sent your email at the wrong time. You may not have used morning and evening send windows. There are lots of resources online about what the best time of day to send emails. You relied on a single day versus a multi day push. Now I know that Giving Tuesday is that one day. However, I think that there's opportunity before Giving Tuesday to warm up the audience and then there's opportunity after Giving Tuesday to do follow up. I'm going to talk about that in a second. But the idea here is with timing is for whatever reason you didn't catch donors when they're most active and paying attention. And again, this is where you have to look at the data. So if for example, you send out a weekly newsletter or a monthly newsletter, I would look at your stats to see when people are opening your emails. Okay, let's talk about the fourth pillar, follow up failures. This is a Big one y'. All. One Lack of follow up. You stopped when the day ended. So if you stopped when the day ended that means you didn't have a 24 hour post giving Tuesday push. You didn't have a 48 hour miss the match reminder. And by the way I should say this matches are magic. And so in any campaign I strongly strongly strongly recommend that you have a match. Now is the opportunity to send a next day impact from yesterday content to everybody who may have received information but did not respond. Are you doing personal outreach the day after? Is your board doing personal outreach? Are you targeting follow ups to your warm leads and are you calling your mid level donors? Interestingly, most givingtuesday revenue actually comes the day after than the day itself. So if you are not following up like a beast right now, and unfortunately this isn't going to go live until the Monday after but for next year and actually for your end of year campaign, this is an opportunity to remember you must follow up. So let's say for example that your end of year campaign closes December 31st and January 1st. Everyone's going to be out, that's fine, but maybe December 2nd you do some follow ups like hey, did you miss the opportunity? There's still time. Under this pillar of follow up failures, there were no personal touches. Now we have all heard the mantra people give to people. So you needed to do calls, texts, personal emails, not just the mass emails, board members doing outreach, staff sharing content, personally, video messages and one to one asks. The more you can be personal, the more you can be intimate, the more likely I am to give three no real time optimization. So during the campaign period you should have been monitoring your open rates and monitoring your click rates and resending to non openers and changing the subject lines for things that perhaps weren't really performing as well or posted more when engagement dipped or adapted the messaging based on the responses that you were getting. If none of that happened, you were not adjusting the airplane while it was flying. And so use this as a wake up call that if, if and when you launch your year end campaign you should be building in some monitoring to make sure that things are hitting the way that you want. Also, this is an opportunity to test AB messages. And so I talked last week about the importance of your subject line. So this is a great opportunity to break out your list and maybe test a couple of messages before you go live with the messages. All right, that was a lot. And maybe you fell into one of those categories. A couple of categories. Maybe all the categories. But all is not lost. Here's what we can do now. The fix okay one. Fix your audience. You want to clean the list. I'm going to also give this to you as a checklist. So do not worry. Don't go crazy trying to take notes right now. But you want to clean your list. You want to remove coburners, verify emails, verifying phone numbers, merge duplicates, correct spelling, error tag donors, lapsed donors, monthly donors, major donors, et cetera. Create segmentations. I'm going to give you a list of segments that you want to create. Major mid level monthly annual lapsed first time giver and corporate matchers and pull last year's data. This is blueprint. You are going to use last year's data to prioritize calls and personalize outrage to people who have given in the past. 2. Rebuild your offer. So create a year end offer with a compelling match. Remember matches are magic. A clear problem, a specific transformation, a dollar to impact ladder creating emotional stakes, a deadline and a reason to give now. So an example of that might be $140 sends one girl to school for a month. Or our goal is to move from 120 to 140 girls in 2025. Something that demonstrates to me as a donor what the impact of my gift is. 3. I want you to think about building an omnichannel engine so that looks like building in emails, maybe three to four emails per week until the 31st building in SMS, building in social, building in phone calls, building in direct mail, building in your website if you have budget, maybe doing some retargeting ads on Facebook or Google. Thinking about a peer to peer. Now maybe you can't do all of these things. I understand that is a lot. But if you can pick two or three of these things in order to go multichannel in a really strategic way, do that. 4. Follow up like crazy. So after every email you want to send it a text and people respond to text. So after every gift immediately send a thank you video that is personalized. After every campaign moment say here's where we stand. Don't let them forget and don't let the energy die. They by donating they're a part of something and they want to feel like they're on that team. So let's have them feel like they're on a team. I've activate your board. I can already hear y' all out here saying that your board is not engaged in fundraising. But this is the end of the year. This is the final push. Make sure that your board is Making their own year end gift, sending personal emails, posting at least twice a week on their personal social media, making five donor calls and sharing the campaign assets. Your board members are your strongest volunteer force. Use accordingly. 6. This is a great one. Focus on your mid level donors. Now mid level will vary depending on the size of your organization. But let's just call mid level 250 to 2,500 on your mid level donors. This is your fastest revenue path. So you want to send 10 to 20 personalized emails per week. You want to do 10 to 15 calls per week and you want specific offers like fund one girl first semester. Your mid level donors are your sleeping giants. Your major donors should be pulled out. They should not be in your mass mailing. All of your major donors and major donor prospects should be receiving specific reach out. These are your VIPs and they should not be treated like your mass mails. 7. Build a narrative arc. So think about telling your story in chapters. So you want to start with the girl. Then the next one is the barrier, then the next one is the breakthrough, then the match, then the vision, then your role, then the countdown, the final push and the celebration. So think about your campaign like a Netflix show. It should all hang together, building on one by one by one. Because humans are storytelling creatures and we like stories. Stories make sense to us. We remember stories. And so I want you to think carefully about how you're constructing a narrative that goes from think of it like a movie, right? We start with a character in a context that meets a challenge. They take action in the face of that challenge, then they get a victory. Then I want to know what is my role in all of this. So the bottom line here. And again, I will provide the checklist that you can use to take back to the team. Your campaign didn't fail because of one thing. It failed because there were multiple pieces that depend on each other that broke. But the good news is the fixes are here. We have time and your year end giving is absolutely recoverable. So if you execute this omnichannel data driven segmented plan, your year end can still perform and you're not behind. You're just rebuilding the plane. You'll need to fly in 2026. So remember, they don't need perfection. They need clarity, consistency and a reason to care. Give them that and they will show up. Put it in the comments. I'd love to know if these resonate for you. We still have 28 days to go. Hey, fundraisers looking to nail those big fundraising asks. Check out my big ask gift program at riawong.com bag say goodbye to uncertainty and hello to confidence with my program. Get expert strategies and personalized support to secure those game changing donations. Don't let fear hold you back. Join me and take your fundraising to new heights. We're enrolling now@riawong.com bag. That's riawong.com bag. So if you like big asks and you cannot lie, I'll see you in the program.