Digital wallets like Venmo, PayPal, and Apple Pay have eclipsed Visa to become the most popular payment method among donors to educational institutions. At some schools, more donors now give with digital wallets than with Visa, American Express, and Mastercard combined.
Download this report to get the insights you need for choosing payment methods for your fundraising campaign.
Giving Days are a great way to increase the visibility and excitement around philanthropy at your institution. In an increasingly digital world, having a day to encourage your school’s donors to give back and then celebrate that collective impact can be incredibly powerful.
GiveCampus has powered over 1500 Giving Days, and by working closely with our partner community of nearly 1,000 schools, we’ve been lucky enough to learn from a lot of experts—17 of which participated in our first ever Giving Day Boot Camp in January 2021. Here are three of them, speaking to three important dimensions of Giving Day planning.
First: Giving Days should be meaningful, aspirational, and fun — and so much of this starts with a goal. Listen below to Amy Gallo, Director of Advancement Communications at Princeton Day School, as she talks about setting goals and using four key segmentation tracks to make them achievable. She also describes some of the specific messaging angles that encourage participation and build an entire culture around giving.
Your planning and goal-setting leads up to the part where you gather up your alumni and constituent volunteers. You know that your Giving Day is going to give donors an incredible opportunity, but Giving Days take a village. You are going to need to get buy-in from others to take your Giving Day to the next level (and stay sane while doing it). Your key to recruiting and communicating with volunteers is demonstrating impact — tell them why they should get involved with your Giving Day, and arm them with the tools to make doing so easy and fun.
Christene Riendeau, Director of Annual Giving and Volunteer Engagement at College of the Holy Cross, talks about how to best engage and empower your volunteers in the weeks leading up to the big event. Plus, she talks through ways to steward volunteers and creative ways to help them feel that they made a difference.
In addition to your external volunteers, it is also important to get buy-in from your internal stakeholders. Your key stakeholder net should be campus-wide, and can and should include: athletics, deans, faculty, facilities departments, campus dining, beloved staff, and student organizations. Send a recruitment email well in advance of any planned trainings or resources that you share, and make sure your core group feels confident about their roles and responsibilities. Erin Pollard, Director of Annual Giving at the University of Hartford, shares how she gets buy-in from key internal stakeholders and the “team captain” model that has worked so well for them.
The bottom line? A lot goes into planning a Giving Day and you don’t have to do it alone. The GiveCampus partner community comes with a 365-day forum for sharing ideas and best practices (which means ongoing access to experts like Amy, Erin, and Christene on this page), a dedicated Partner Success lead to talk strategy with, and a support team that answers questions in 13 minutes on average.
Want to learn more? Click the button below to schedule an introduction call with our team.
Have you ever wondered if your school should add a yearly Giving Day to your annual giving strategy? Giving Days are proven to help get constituents excited to give back to their institutions and create an urgency to give within a specific timeframe. They are also helpful in encouraging donors to make a second (or third) gift during the fiscal year.
Some might wonder, “Is it too late for my school to add a giving day?” The answer to this question is a resounding NO! Over and over, we’ve seen schools add giving days to their list of strategies with strong results. As we wrap up the Giving Day season for this fiscal year, over the next few weeks we will be highlighting some of our partners who hosted their first ever Giving Days. First up, George Washington University (GW).
As GW was preparing to host their first ever Giving Day, their team leveraged our Partner Success Program for planning support and key insights (the Partner Success team has compiled best practices from working with almost 1,000 schools). The GW team met regularly with their Partner Success Lead for strategy meetings and also leaned on GiveCampus university, a partner-exclusive repository of how-to’s and tips.
Here are the results from their campaign:
Click here to take a look at GW’s campaign page. You’ll see their wonderful branding, video content, and how they utilized GiveCampus’s peer-to-peer tools to raise more dollars.
Are you ready to learn more about our Social Fundraising Platform or another of our world-class solutions? Click here to schedule an intro call with our team!
Fill out the form below to download our report with data from the first 250 schools leveraging our Venmo and PayPal integration for their fundraising.
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Our next webinar is coming right up on June 10th!
Join GiveCampus Partner Success Manager Rosa Conrad for an educational webinar on growing and sustaining your volunteer program, including how the GiveCampus Volunteer Management System can make it easier to reach your goals. Open to all educational fundraisers.
Read More +Every year, we’re focused on supporting schools in this final stretch before the fiscal year ends. We take this role seriously, making sure that our busy partner schools have the resources, support, and inspiration they need to reach their fiscal year goals. Everyone in the educational fundraising community understands the importance
Read More +It is no secret that peer-to-peer outreach is the most effective way to increase constituent engagement and raise more money. However, facilitating a volunteer program can be cumbersome—from exporting data from your database into a spreadsheet, to removing sensitive information and splitting up the list for volunteers. Not to
Read More +Do you ever reach out to support teams and wonder, who is actually answering my questions? Or is support outsourced to a different company or answered by a bot? At GiveCampus, you have no need to wonder or worry, because our expert fundraisers are the ones in the GiveCampus
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