Charities fundraising for other nonprofits on GivingTuesday

GivingTuesday, the annual fundraising blitz on the Tuesday after Thanksgiving, turns 10 this year. What began as a social-media hashtag to counter aggressive consumer advertising campaigns with appeals for charitable giving has now grown into a juggernaut. Charities raised an estimated $2.47 billion from U.S. donors on GivingTuesday last year in addition to the $503 million they raised on GivingTuesdayNow, the special May 5 giving day to raise emergency dollars to meet pandemic needs.

This year, however, some fundraisers worry that donors will no longer feel the same urgency to give as they did in 2020.

Even if charities don’t raise as much as they did last year, Niely Shams, president of nonprofit solutions at the marketing company Data Axle, says she still expects the giving day to make a splash. “Every year it just gets bigger and bigger,” she says. Shams credits fundraisers’ growing mastery of strategies to appeal to donors by email, social media, and text message.

Fundraisers now spend months crafting strategies to appeal to donors leading up to and on the giving day, says Asha Curran, who co-founded the event back in 2012. Curran now heads up the nonprofit GivingTuesday, which organizes the campaign.

This year, donors should expect to see more charities with similar missions joining together to appeal for support and raise awareness of their causes, Curran says. The National Center for Family Philanthropy, for example, is organizing family foundations across the country in a social-media campaign to highlight charities making an impact in their local communities. Volunteer efforts such as mutual-aid networks are also taking advantage of the day, joining a campaign that is typically the purview of nonprofits. The grassroots group Pandemic of Love and the mapping resource Mutual Aid Hub will post on social media...