ANALYTICS
Some Serious Thoughts About Giving Tuesday
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BY JENNIFER ROBINS
’m sitting here at my home office in midAugust writing this article, soaking up every last drop of the summer weather, family BBQs and visits to the beach. Even as we enjoy the last few days of this wonderful season, if my inbox is any indication, I know fundraisers everywhere are putting the final touches on their all-important holiday season campaigns. From Thanksgiving to Diwali to Hannukah to Christmas — the last quarter of the year is a time for giving. In recent years, Giving Tuesday, occurring after the mad rush of Black Friday, has become a prominent and important date in the fundraising calendar. Hashtags of #givingtuesday flood social media channels and more and more donors are participating in this movement — what should organizations be doing to prepare for this now annual event? Recognizing this new tradition, and being the data geek that I am, I wanted to take a deeper look at giving trends on Giving Tuesday and what types of donors are showing up on this very important day. I’m curious to find out if Giving Tuesday donors are the young digitally savvy Millennials and Gen Zers that are anecdotally expected, or if the results are more nuanced than that.
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Who are these donors? While it is very interesting to look at web traffic data, especially for other organizations that you aren’t typically privy to, the fundamental question really is — who are these web visitors and how can charities attract them to their own causes on Giving Tuesday? Leveraging Environics Analytics’ PRIZM lifestyle segmentation system, I was able to look under the hood so to speak and paint a holistic picture of who these online visitors are. Most interestingly, there is a big difference between web visitors in August versus those in December. August 2020 In August 2020 there are three types of web visitors that are showing up in high proportions, they share some but not all characteristics. The largest group of web visitors is what we’ve called Mid-City Mellow and they are a group of urban retirees
TABLE 1
September/October 2021
COURTESY ENVIRONICS ANALYTICS
Web Traffic Leveraging Environics Analytics’ new ClickScapes data, I looked at a week-over-week visitor-perwebsite view of a few different large charitable organizations (see Table 1). What is most fascinating to me is that not all the organizations saw a spike the week of Giving Tuesday. Recognizing that this is primarily a digital movement, it is not surprising to see Canada Helps had a big jump in their web-traffic over that period — an additional 200K visitors came to their website the week of Giving Tuesday (December 6th, 2020) versus in August and September. But what is surprising is that other organizations, such as
SickKids Foundation or the Ontario SPCA, did not see a spike in their web traffic data. Looking at these trends, my question for all charitable organizations is — do you know your donors well and have a strategy to help you leverage the momentum from the Giving Tuesday movement?
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