There’s still a long road to December 31st, but we’ve passed Giving Tuesday — the first major hurdle of the EOY season — and we’re feeling optimistic.
The vast, vast majority of our clients saw significant year-over-year gains, with one seeing an exceptional 83% increase.
Broadly speaking, average gift size was up a little, but we saw the majority of growth coming from more people pulling out their credit cards and making gifts. In the coming days, we’ll have more insight into who these people were (prospect, active, lapsed) but for now, we wanted to share some hot takes about the big day.
1. We’re living in a match nuclear arms race. The triple match is the new double match. We saw some organizations run 10x match incentives this year. We know that donors love matches, but there’s a risk that our industry is going to create its own tragedy of the commons — undermining organizational and industry credibility with wild matches. We need to be clear and truthful to donors at every point in our relationship with them or we risk destroying a powerful tactic.
2. Revenue raised on Black Friday was stronger than predicted. This may have to do with Thanksgiving falling later in the year this year than last year, but we gained significant traction with a number of clients in the days leading up to Giving Tuesday. Cyber Monday has traditionally performed well, but we’re pleased to report that some clients saw a similar haul in revenue on Black Friday.
3. Deliverability was less of an issue. Hopefully this was in part to more people being better citizens and employing stricter holdouts of poor-performing emails, but in general, we heard less chatter about deliverability this year than last. We very much hope this holds for the upcoming few weeks and we’ve not upset the Deliverability Gods with this proclamation.
4. More organizations are spreading Giving Tuesday into Giving Week. We’ve seen variable results with this tactic, but it’s one that more clients are deploying, in both directions — in advance of the big day and after it. We’ll be looking closely at how these campaigns perform, and they very well may be successful given that we have a shorter-than-normal runway to December 31st.
5. SEM spends are seeming less predictable. We’ve seen some wild variations in the price we needed to pay on SEM throughout Giving Tuesday. We saw a year-over-year cost increase of 200% for one client, and significant drops in the Cost To Raise Dollar for others. We’ll be following this data point closely in the coming weeks.
But what did you see? Drop us a line at [email protected] to share your own takeaways.