Reflections on the Giving Challenge

 

24 Hours: $16,760,297 donated by 50,683 donors to 751 organizations

I’ve served as a nonprofit board member for giving challenges before, including Give Big Pittsburgh. Coordinated campaigns inspired by the National Day of Giving movement, aka Giving Tuesday, can generate real excitement and energy that rally donors to show up for the organizations and causes that they care about.

The Giving Challenge here in the Florida Suncoast has that same visible energy, but in a much more public way, with the coordinated communication and creative energy and support of so many partners. It’s the kind of effort and impact that wouldn’t be possible without the Community Foundation of Sarasota County (CFSC), local media outlets, and The Patterson Foundation (TPF).

On the surface, it looks like a high-energy fundraising event in a single day. However, when you look closely at what makes those 24 hours possible, what you find is a very thoughtful strategy.

A Closer Look at the Strategy
The excitement, outcomes, and impact are all real. But it’s not accidental.
The structure of the Giving Challenge is built to foster wide participation. The message is clear: everyone can be a philanthropist. That’s not just aspirational language. It’s made possible through the design of the entire experience, from planning and organizational training to the back-office support and technology to the strategic communications before, during, and after the event.

The open match commitment by TPF is perhaps the most visible example of strategy in the design. It’s an informed risk by TPF’s Governing Board that enables some key strategic objectives for a fundraising initiative that needs to serve a wide variety of nonprofits across the four-county region, such as:

• Shift the organizational value proposition from competition with each other to focusing on engaging with current, previous, and potential donors.
• Affirm the possibility and awareness that everyone can be a philanthropist by offering a dollar-for-dollar match on gifts of $25-$100.
• Amplify the total amount of unrestricted funds from mission-critical household donors. This boosts the value of the Giving Challenge for nonprofits. For every unrestricted $25 an organization raises, it’ll get $50.
• Provide consolidated and coordinated infrastructure (technology, software, accounting, training, and consultant resources) so that the Giving Challenge increases the possibility of success and reduces the costs of participation and donor acquisition and retention by removing barriers to participation for even the smallest of our regional nonprofit organizations.
• And, last but not least, commitment from CFSC and TPF brings valuable social proof and awareness raising to a collective giving effort that no one organization could do alone.

These strategic choices lead to important impacts. It lowers barriers to broad participation. It helps build trust and connectivity at all levels in our community. And, to the aspiration that “everyone can be a philanthropist,” the proof is in the numbers: $16,760,297 raised from 50,683 donors to 751 organizations in Charlotte, DeSoto, Manatee, and Sarasota counties.

Why $25-$100 Gifts?
This is what first stood out to me about the strategy. I worked for many years as a Director of Annual Giving for several different organizations. It was my job to acquire, steward, and retain donors who made annual donations from $1 to $5,000 (or more).

Donors in the $25–$100 range are both mission-critical and expensive to acquire, particularly if they’re not already in relationship with your organization like being an alumnus of an educational institution. They require time, attention, and infrastructure to engage well and can be expensive to get [1]. Donors to an annual fund, particularly in the $25-$100 range, are the backbone of a nonprofit’s unrestricted support - dollars that can be used for mission-critical work.

The Giving Challenge changes the donor acquisition math in favor of the nonprofit organizations. First, there’s a shared technology and back-office platform, along with a variety of other campaign-planning support. The open-ended matching funds and coordinated infrastructure remove barriers and large costs for nonprofit organizations, fostering wide participation and amplifying the impact of the dollars raised by removing some of the costs of fundraising. Further, organizations are able to participate in a highly visible and publicized event that makes the mission-critical household giving more visible and celebrated.

Celebrating the Impact
The real impact of The Giving Challenge isn’t just about the money raised. It’s about connecting and strengthening how philanthropy happens at the community and household level to support organizations that we care about. And those organizations work every day to deliver on missions that address shared quality-of-life aspirations here in the Suncoast region.

[1] It can cost an organization between $1.20 and $1.50 to acquire for every dollar a first-time donor initially gives. It takes a second gift for the acquisition to pay off. In comparison retaining a donor costs about 20 cents and reengaging a lapsed donor costs about 50 cents.