Giving Tuesday 2025 was crowded, competitive, and unpredictable — but some nonprofits found ways to break through the noise:
- A rescue mission raised nearly 20 times their goal with some help from a turkey in a Santa cap.
- A hunger-fighting organization leaned into segmentation to exceed their $100K stretch goal.
- A cancer society used donor signals to achieve a $1.26 million record-breaking day.
Here's how they did it — and what you can learn from their success.
The turkey campaign that raised nearly $139K (and started a week early)
Organization: Souls Harbour Rescue Mission
Souls Harbour Rescue Mission provides emergency shelter, meals, and support services across Nova Scotia, Canada. For their 2025 Giving Tuesday campaign, they partnered with Give Direct Response, Inc., a Canadian direct response fundraising agency, to create a campaign that would stand out in the crowded Giving Tuesday landscape.
Giving Tuesday goal: $7,000 (enough to buy 150 turkeys for Christmas dinners)
Actual results: $138,978 — nearly 20 times their original goal. By the time Giving Tuesday arrived, $32,000 was already in the bank — more than four times the goal before the day even started.
Challenges for 2025
Missions have long known that the hot meal offer works — it's tangible, immediate, and donors understand exactly what their gift provides. The problem is that donors see a lot of messages that sound the same.
Souls Harbour and Give Direct Response wrestled with the question: how do you take something familiar and make it feel new?
What they did
The Give Response team wanted to hit a nerve. The answer was a micro-capital campaign wrapped in a relatable, seasonal package. The messaging was simple but specific: "Help us buy 150 turkeys for our community meals this Christmas."
“Donors could picture it — a traditional turkey dinner with all the trimmings, the kind of meal that smells like home and tastes like belonging,” Give Response explained in a recent case study.
Then they gave the campaign a name that made people smile: Giving Turkey Tuesday, complete with an illustrated turkey wearing a Santa cap.
The real strategic move was timing. Rather than fighting for attention on Giving Tuesday itself, Give Direct Response launched the campaign a full week early. The campaign included three emails, a homepage carousel, and a Meta campaign that began scaling early to gather behavioral data before the real competition arrived.
Throughout the campaign, Souls Harbour used Fundraise Up's matching gift functionality to promote a $3,500 match. As momentum built, other donors even called asking if they could add to the match.
"Everything has to work together," says Philip Tome, CEO of Give Direct Response. "The offer, the creative, the cadence — all of it matters. But I'm convinced more and more that Fundraise Up eliminates the friction that kills conversions. It makes giving effortless, regardless of device. And the AI-informed dollar handles helped push gift amounts higher than we'd see with typical forms.”
Advice to other nonprofits: have a standout message and a fast checkout
Launching a week before Giving Tuesday secured attention and raised more than four times the goal before the day even started — but the message has to be right. "Giving Tuesday doesn't reward the loudest voice," the case study notes. "It rewards the most interesting one."
A strong start doesn’t mean much without a strong finish. “The best campaign in the world can't outrun a clunky checkout,” Philip says. “The lesson isn't that tech is the answer — it's that tech is what keeps your answer from falling apart at the finish line."
The segmentation strategy that turned past donors into Giving Tuesday champions
Organization: MAZON
For 40 years, MAZON has been mobilizing the Jewish community to end hunger as a collective expression of Jewish values, justice, and communal responsibility. "MAZON is not just a Jewish response to hunger, it is the Jewish response to hunger — the collective action of an age-old people who know how to change the world," says Nicole Tafoya, Deputy Director of Annual Giving.
Giving Tuesday goal: stretch goal of $100,000
Actual results: $105,000
Challenges for 2025
Nicole's team faced serious challenges going into Giving Tuesday.
Their donors had already shown incredible generosity earlier in the year with a High Holy Day campaign that Nicole says "massively surpassed past results." Then came the SNAP crisis — when benefits hung in the balance just weeks before Giving Tuesday, donors stepped up again as MAZON advocated for protection of the program. With donors already giving generously and economic uncertainty looming, the team wasn't sure if they could motivate another round of giving.
Then there was the timing challenge. Their Hanukkah direct mail appeal had already landed two weeks before Giving Tuesday — creating a delicate balancing act between two important campaigns. The challenge was to shift people's focus from Hanukkah messaging to Giving Tuesday without breaking the flow or making donors feel over-solicited.
What they did
Rather than treating Giving Tuesday as a make-or-break moment, Nicole's team positioned it as "the first spark of the season."
Their messaging reflected this. "One candle could not have sustained the menorah by itself for eight nights — it was all of the candles together," Nicole explains. "One person making a gift will not end hunger. It is every single person doing what they can all together that is going to make a difference."
In the two weeks leading up to Giving Tuesday, each email appeal focused on one statistic about hunger, "shining a light on the facts" that needed to be lifted out of the darkness.
The foundation of MAZON's success was identifying every previous Giving Tuesday donor. Nicole manually pulled reports from previous years and built new fields in Salesforce to assign campaign codes to past participants. This wasn't readily available data — it required dedicated effort to create a system that didn't exist.
This groundwork enabled her to customize messaging, include or exclude donors from specific emails, and acknowledge their previous participation. The result was true donor segmentation: reaching the right person with the right message at the right time.
Advice to other nonprofits: know who your previous Giving Tuesday donors are
"Just knowing who the Giving Tuesday donors were gave me the right person, right message, right time," Nicole says. "That is the core of what makes a strong annual giving shop."
Nicole also credits working with her Fundraise Up Customer Success team as instrumental in developing her year-end strategy, providing strategic guidance on segmentation approaches, technical implementation support, and campaign planning assistance.
From 'spray and pray' to precision fundraising
Organization: Canadian Cancer Society (CCS)
The Canadian Cancer Society funds world-class cancer research and provides support services for patients, caregivers, and families across Canada. With two in five Canadians expected to receive a cancer diagnosis in their lifetime, CCS offers critical services including transportation to treatment centers, lodging assistance, and financial support.
Giving Tuesday goal: significant improvement over prior year online totals
Actual results: $1.26 million online — a 32% increase over 2024's $950,000 and the largest single-day revenue in many years
Challenges for 2025
Economic uncertainty loomed large for all nonprofits in 2025. "Everything being day-to-day, any one thing could influence people's giving in a big way, whether positive or negative," says Shital Patel, VP of Digital Marketing and Solutions. Beyond market conditions, CCS faced the challenge of standing out on Giving Tuesday when "everyone is out in the market trying to get attention for that donor dollar."
The bigger challenge was internal: moving beyond their traditional "spray and pray" approach of mass communications. "The challenge we posed for ourselves was how we can become more meaningful — how we can reach out to an individual rather than just a big group."
Their donors were already providing signals through designation preferences, tribute gifts, and campaign responses. "The challenge is not that we don't have data," Shital notes. "The challenge is how do we use the data so that we can become meaningful for the users?"
What they did
2025 marked CCS's first full year on Fundraise Up, and they used the platform strategically to improve cross-team collaboration between marketing, mission, and technology teams.
The platform's flexibility made a significant difference. "We were able to include donation asks in places where in the past it would have been difficult without extensive coding and programming," Shital explains. "We became more efficient; we became more nimble."
They also implemented match funding for the first time and created a frictionless donation experience. "Fundraise Up has helped to complete the transactions and improve the conversion so that we can have more people come in the doors — versus coming in but leaving because they cannot use maybe a specific credit card or they're on mobile."
Advice to other nonprofits: investigate the signals your donors are already sending
CCS's biggest opportunity wasn't collecting more data — it was using what they already had. "Our users or donors have been giving us a lot of information. When they make a donation, they designate it, they make a tribute, they come from a certain campaign. There are a lot of data points, those signals, and we needed to find a meaningful way to utilize those signals."
For 2026, Shital's focus is on automation and scale. "We want to bring efficiencies to the work we do so that we can utilize more donor dollars towards the research and services we offer to Canadians."