How to Assemble Your Giving Day Team

A Guide to Assembling the Right Team for Your Giving Day

A project as big as an annual Giving Day demands planning and collaboration to achieve the highest level of success. It’s a time to be hyper-focused on your fundraising with heightened challenges, storytelling, and engagement. But preparing for this sprint starts far before the actual day and continues beyond it in order to keep new and old donors alike invested in your school. 

Building the right team is the first and most important step in your game plan. It’s impossible to successfully complete an undertaking as vast as an annual Giving Day by yourself, and those working with you will help keep you motivated and bring fresh ideas to your initiative. 

The people you bring in for this effort will help to organize your initiative, spread the word, and build your donor base, all while maintaining strong enthusiasm and momentum in a process that has many moving parts. Your team members’ involvement is a substantial investment on their part and yours, so think carefully about who to ask and why you need them.  

Below you’ll learn how to assemble an all-star giving team from identifying the roles you need to assigning the right people to inspiring the team with your Giving Day brand and mission.

Identify the Roles You Need 

There are a few essential positions that every team will need to fill, although who fills these roles may look different depending on your team, project, and school’s resources. You may need to combine several positions into one, or add a role that is not listed here; you may end up with smaller sub-teams under the umbrella of your main team. Personalize the roles and duties to best fit your project and optimize your team’s productivity.   

Consider the following roles as a starting point:

1. Team Leader   

This person is in charge of the direction of the project and the team as a whole. They determine the vision and set the goals for the overall initiative. They are also responsible for leading meetings, delegating tasks, and managing volunteers and team communications.  

2. Marketing Lead

This person takes the vision and goals of your overall initiative from the Team Leader and shares them with the world. They create a marketing strategy that could include social media, email, direct mail, media mentions, event promotion, and SMS marketing.

3. Social Media Lead

This person runs your campaign’s social media accounts. While this position would be easily combinable with the Marketing Lead, it might be helpful to have multiple team members working in this role, especially if they have expertise with specific forms of social media. If you have a small team of social media gurus, elect a point person to ensure consistency across the various platforms or involve a volunteer or brand ambassador.  

Facebook and Instagram are the most influential for promoting your fundraising and are must-haves, but other platforms can be useful if you have content to fit the medium and an audience that you know is active on them.

4. Matches and Challenges Coordinator

This person reaches out to potential large gift donors to organize matching contributions or challenges. Some donors may stipulate how they would like their gift to be used, but if not, it is up to the Matches and Challenges Coordinator to determine how that gift could most effectively motivate increased giving. For challenges, consider engagement, new donors, total donors, and total donations as possible goals to unlock a challenge gift. They are also responsible for promoting challenges and matches leading up to and during your Giving Day. Using a platform like GC Social Fundraising enables the Matches and Challenges Coordinator to create multiple challenges for a Giving Day or create tiered campaigns to target alumni with a particular affiliation with a tailored challenge.

5. Stewardship Ambassador

This person plans and creates the stewardship journey for your donors. They’ll identify the best channels for which to thank your donors and create copy for the thank you messages. Depending on your organization it may be a full time role, a partial role, or an additional responsibility assigned for your Giving Day initiative.

6. Content Collector

This person works with video and photography to provide visual materials for your initiative. It is important to have this person for any events that will fall in the days or weeks leading up to your Giving Day, as those events allow Content Collectors to take pictures or recordings of people actually engaging with your educational institution. Content Collectors may also be able to compile promotional videos or gather quotes from those who interact with your project or projects. This role lends itself to a small team rather than an individual.

Assign the Right People 

When assembling your team of in-house people, don’t assume that each role on your Giving Day team must align with an existing job title. Think of this project as an opportunity to shake things up for people who may have skills that are not otherwise being utilized. If you know that someone in your Advancement department enjoys photography outside of work, or tells incredible stories, or writes touching thank-you notes, ask them to get involved as a Content Collector, or Stewardship Ambassador. Your volunteer base, while not always best suited for leadership roles, can also be invaluable as members of a sub-team working on outreach or awareness. 

While each role requires different skills, all benefit from having people who are organized and enthusiastic.  With all of the moving parts involved in a big initiative, it’s important to keep track of who has been contacted and what still needs to be done. Utilizing a platform like GC Volunteer Management can help you stay on top of your team communications and progress.

Since most of the exciting action will happen on your Giving Day, having people who are enthusiastic about the project can keep your team’s morale and momentum strong, even when most of what’s happening at a given stage is the necessary but less exciting legwork to make the big moment a smashing success.

Inspire Your Team! 

The team you’ve built for your Giving Day campaign should already be composed of people who are enthusiastic about the project, but it never hurts to have a good morale boost. Keep the branding of your campaign focused and present to keep the team’s energy high and the goal top of mind. It should be a rallying force for your team. 

The mission, vision, and brand of your school overall should already unify your Giving Day’s goals, impact, and identity through recognizable images and taglines. Creating a video around your campaign is also a great way to convey the mission of your Giving Day in a fun and creative way. Platforms like GC Video make it easy to shine a spotlight on what matters most to your community with pre-recorded video content that drives meaningful engagement leading up to and during your Giving Day.

Your Giving Day page mission statement should evolve slightly each year as you make progress toward your broader goals or refine your efforts; think of this as a step in this direction. A Giving Day initiative should allow your organization to make tangible strides toward those big goals. What will this success allow you to do?  Devise a more specific mission statement and goals for this Giving Day to help you to focus your direction and branding. Employ a tagline, hashtag, or graphic with this initiative that will allow you to spotlight the benefits and importance of donating now rather than later. 

Engage with your team, volunteers, and students to help you come up with your Giving Day branding and messaging. After all, they know your institution the best and will be more motivated the more involved they are.

Summary 

Planning a Giving Day is a colossal undertaking and can’t be done without collaboration. Establishing the right team is critical to your success. But, beyond just having the right people, you also need to give them the right tools. To learn more about how GiveCampus can help you pull off a successful Giving Day, schedule a product walkthrough with a fundraising expert.