Giving Tuesday checklist: A veteran fundraiser’s guide to flawless execution

Email and SMS strategy and execution

Preparation decides everything with your email and SMS strategy. Make sure you have all your emails written, designed, and ready to fire as soon as possible.

Here are the main ones to have ready, per campaign:

• Campaign announcement. Optional, but I’ve seen this do very well. It preps your donors to hold a spot in their wallet for you.
• “Campaign launched” email and SMS blast. This goes to everyone to notify them of the campaign, what it is, how to donate, etc.
• Mid-day campaign blasts to those who engage. You can decide if you want to send this to everyone, just openers or just clickers. And, whether you want to send an SMS as well (this can get costly). Be sure to exclude any donors and subscribers.
• Campaign ending soon or 24-hour notice email. This can be the same as the above email, but just add a big sticker saying “24 hours left”.
• Last call campaign email. Same as the above, but swap messaging for “Last call — 1 hour!” or something similar.
• Technical difficulties email template. This is a plain-text email to have handy, just in case something goes wrong.
• Shipping delays email template. Same as the above. If you’re shipping swag of any kind, this is a plain-text email to have handy.
• Post Giving Tuesday “thank you” email. Optional, but just a simple email thanking your donors for participating in a campaign and making it a success for everyone. Talk about how the campaign supported your programmatic efforts.

Don’t forget to:

• Update dynamic banners in flows to include campaign messaging, wherever applicable.
• Update your new donor welcome series. Ensure you really educate donors who come in new to the file over Cyber Week. Typically donors who come through Giving Tuesday have a lower LTV, so educating them early is important, especially before you begin sending donation asks to them at the end of December.

Campaigns/promos

• Promo ideas should be easy to understand, not complex. They must pass the “Can my Grandma understand this?” test.
• Site-wide match. Automatically applied; clear language what “match” means in the context of the donation.
• Donation with purchase. Once someone donates over a certain threshold, or even without a threshold, they receive a thank-you gift in their order.
• Bundle sale. Got product? For UNICEF Market I built bundles including best sellers and applied a discount higher than anything I’d run during the year.
• Multiple bundles. Very similar to the above, but you have a few bundles that you merchandise specifically. This is great when you have a hefty number of new donors to bring in who you can offer a five-dollar donation to at checkout.

Note for next year

Rather than getting caught in the milieu of Black Friday sales, kick off your Cyber Week with Small Business Saturday and run through the Wednesday after Giving Tuesday. It could offer you a nice corporate partnership play too - you’ve 6 weeks to get this locked in.

Website updates

Dedicated campaign pages

If you don't have a dedicated landing page for your Giving Tuesday campaign, you're missing conversions. I've seen firsthand how a well-designed Campaign Page can turn casual browsers into committed donors.

Here's what your Campaign Page needs:

• Compelling storytelling. Use unlimited space for text, images, and video to show donors exactly what their gift will accomplish. Don't just ask for money — show the impact.
• Real-time social proof. Display a live feed of recent donations. When people see others giving, they're more likely to join in. It's powerful during high-volume giving days.
• Goal meter. Make progress visible. An auto-updating goal meter creates urgency and shows donors they're part of something bigger.
• Mobile optimization. Over half of your Giving Tuesday traffic will come from mobile devices. Your page needs to load fast and look flawless on every screen size.
• Multiple payment methods. Apple Pay, PayPal, Venmo, direct debit — give donors the payment option they already use. Friction at checkout kills conversions.
• Match messaging front and center. If you have a matching gift sponsor, highlight it prominently. Donors need to see immediately that their gift will be doubled.
• A single, dedicated URL for your Campaign Page makes everything cleaner and more trackable.

Site banners

• Homepage. Your homepage hero banner should reflect the EOY campaign and any match messaging.
• Announcement bar. Your site wide announcement bar should reiterate the campaign message and definitely the match.
• Make sure it doesn’t get too thick on mobile.
• Email capture design. Mentioning any match or promotion in the email pop-up yields a higher opt-in rate. Test it and see if you get the same result.

Promotions

• If you’re in PST, start your campaign promotion 3 hours before it starts, to account for EST. For example, if your campaign starts on 9/30, you should enable it to go live at 9:00pm PST on 9/29 (midnight EST).
• Make sure all campaigns are active. Double/triple check everything is live when it should be, and is spelled correctly.
• When applicable, like with a site-wide Match, apply Matches automatically for the donor vs requiring a Match code.
• Don’t forget to account for all time zones. (I’ve made this error in the past, hence repeating it three times here!)
• If you're in EST, end all your campaigns three hours into the next day. For example, if your campaign ends Sept. 30 at 11:59 p.m. EST, you should keep it enabled until 2:59 a.m. Oct. 1 (11:59 p.m. PST).

Code freeze

• Set a pens-down date. Don’t push updates on your website or with any apps in your tech stack.
• If you absolutely need to push an update, test it thoroughly in a staging environment and then go live with those changes.
• Remind everyone that no last-minute creative tweak is worth breaking the donation flow.

On-site pixels

• Ensure your pixels are all properly firing.
• Don’t forget to check that your heatmap is properly capturing web user data for you to analyze later.
• Post-donation survey. Be sure you have one active and updated with any creators/influencers/EOY partners you want to try to understand performance from.

Paid media and ad creative

• Determine how creative should differ for each ad campaign.
• Some creative should be exclusive to any match promotion. For example, loud, bold, chunky text highlighting the % or dollar match with an image from paid media with proven conversion
• Merge your best-performing donor prospecting ads with campaign messaging.
• Test, including any match promo code, in your headline on Meta and Google
• Submit your ads ASAP. Don’t get stuck in “pending approval” or “disapproved”-land, you can make the necessary changes with time to spare now.

Data and reporting

• Predefine success metrics (donations, conversion rate, AOV, cost per new donor).
• Build and monitor real-time dashboards so you’re not flying blind on the day.
• Tag all links with UTMs for campaign and channel attribution.
• Prepare a simple post-campaign report template now, otherwise you’ll never retroactively clean the data.

Organic social media

• Post the campaign across organic social media — stories, links in bio, pinned posts, highlights.
• Update any product or brand swag catalogues with any holiday prices so they reflect “promo prices” inside Meta and TikTok shops.
• Preload your social calendar and have your designer queue templates for reactive posts (e.g., milestones hit, match met, last-hour push).

Affiliate/creators/influencers

• All EOY partners, creators and influencers have URLs that auto-apply match codes where applicable.
  • Their match or campaign promo codes should be easy to remember if someone saw it on a billboard and had to remember it six hours later.
  • If possible, use branded links for each affiliate/creator/influencer, for example: unicef.org/ferrari versus unbranded links that are hard to remember.
• Confirm each influencer’s link actually tracks — do a live test donation before launch.
• Talking points are updated, understanding of the campaign/mission/promotion is clear, all questions are answered.
• Comment moderation is on lock from the creator pages or a plan on how you plan to respond to post comments.
• I’d also email your campaign and all its details to publishers who have an affiliate arm (BuzzFeed, Teen Vogue, Insider Picks, etc.) too. You never know. A little bump in organic publicity is often more within reach than you think.

Cross-team coordination

• Lock your internal comms plan: detail who owns what on campaign day (email, social, data, tech).
• Create a single Slack/Teams channel dedicated to “Giving Tuesday Ops.”
• Schedule a 30-minute post-mortem the following week while data and insights are fresh.
• Share outcomes with partners, agencies, and execs. This is what gets you next year’s budget.

About the author: Tobes Kelly is SVP of Marketing at Fundraise Up, where he helps nonprofits optimize their fundraising technology and donor experience. Previously, he served as VP of Marketing and Fundraising at UNICEF.