Society of St. Andrew (SoSA) started their #GivingTuesday efforts 2 years ago, and those efforts have paid off big. The first year they brought in $65,000. Last year, their second year, they brought in $87,000. “This year we are hoping for $100,000,” says Steven Waldman, Executive Director of the Society of St. Andrew. Many of the donations they receive from #GivingTuesday come in from their website. The online giving will be handled by the FundRaiser Donor Portal this year.
Steven believes that SoSA’s success with their #GivingTuesday campaign is due primarily to “keeping things simple. We make a clear connection to the GivingTuesday message and we make it easy for donors to give to us.”
“Donors can give any way they want, but most of our GivingTuesday donations come in online. Last December, through the entire month of December, we had 71,000 credit card donations come in. Most of that money came in on GivingTuesday. We’re expecting some tens of thousands of dollars coming in, and coming in online this year. Since we are using the Donor Portal, this year the process for entering all those online gifts will be a lot easier and take a lot less staff time. Instead of entering them manually into our FundRaiser database, most of that work will be done with the Donor Portal. All we'll need to do is confirm the correct record to match with the gift and it is done. Even for new donors the process for creating their record and entering the gift will be much easier via the Donor Portal.”
To get ready for #GivingTuesday, SoSA has created website pages that specifically reflect the #GivingTuesday focus. They have also been working with FundRaiser Technical Support to modify the landing page that donors see after they give, so that it reflects the #GivingTuesday theme.
SoSA’s mission “is all about food. We work at the farm level and pick up donations of good crops that aren’t perfect enough for the grocery store. Every year we handle 30 – 40 million pounds of fresh produce. It is good food, and anyone would be happy to eat it. We have 40,000 volunteers who go out to pick things up,” says Steven.
“Mostly the financial donations go toward paying for packaging and freight to distribute the produce from the pick-up points. We collect the food then transport it to all the 48 contiguous states. We like to say that each year we move 30 – 40 million pounds of produce and we don’t own a truck or warehouse.”
When asked what advice he might give to other nonprofits who want to include #GivingTuesday as part of their fundraising strategy, Steven had this to say: “Our advice to other nonprofits going for GivingTuesday is to get in the theme around Thanksgiving: people have gorged themselves and spent money on gifts and it is time to give back. For most people giving back will be financial. The simpler you keep things, the more likely they are to give, so that is why having easy online giving is positive.”
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