GIVING TUESDAY EVE
Every fall, organizations ask whether they should participate in Giving Tuesday. Whether they should run a fall appeal series. Whether to add a peer-to-peer push, a matching gift challenge, a special-purpose campaign. The answer changes year over year, the questions do not.
The piece almost no one runs is the debrief afterward. The campaign closes, the team is exhausted, the dollars are reported up, and within forty-eight hours everyone has moved to the next thing. Whatever was learned in the run-up and the execution stays in heads instead of getting documented anywhere the next person can find it.
A post-campaign debrief takes about an hour. It does not need a deck. It needs five questions answered honestly, by the people who actually ran the work.
One. What did you actually do, and when. Not the plan. The plan is in a folder. The actual sequence of emails, social posts, direct outreach, and follow-up that went out. Each one rated one to five against the response you expected. A three-out-of-five gala email tells you something different than a five-out-of-five segmented appeal.
Two. What did it cost in staff time. Estimate hours per person. Apply a fully loaded hourly rate. The number you arrive at is what the campaign actually cost the organization, regardless of what the budget line said.
Three. How does this year compare with the last five. Number of gifts. Total dollars. Average gift size. New donors acquired. Same calendar period each year so you are comparing like to like. The trend line tells you something the single-year number cannot.
Four. Would your top twenty donors have given on a different day. This is the question most teams skip because the answer is uncomfortable. If a major donor moved a gift they would have made anyway, the campaign moved cash flow, not new revenue. The distinction matters for next year’s planning.
Five. What is your retention plan for the new donors. Acquisition is the easy part. A new donor who gave once on Giving Tuesday and never heard from you again is not actually a new donor. They are a one-time gift. The retention plan needs to be written into the debrief, not figured out in January.
Document the answers. Share the document with the team and the board. Add recommendations for next year written in the same week, when the memory is still warm. This is the discipline that turns a one-time campaign into a repeatable engine. It is also what separates organizations whose Giving Tuesday performance improves year over year from organizations whose performance is whatever the team had energy for that fall.
The debrief is not the celebration. It is the work that makes next year’s celebration land.
Originally published November 26, 2018 as “#GivingTuesday Eve.” Adapted for Vivia Studios. By Erin Peshoff, Chief Curator, Vivia Studios
Erin Peshoff is the Chief Curator of Vivia Studios. She has spent thirty years inside nonprofit operations, helped raise over $100 million for institutional missions, and built Vivia around the operating discipline most strategic engagements skip.
