11 Ideas to Supercharge your Online Day of Giving

A few weeks ago Ari reached out to me to talk about their day of giving at Ramah California. Ari is someone I have looked up to for a long time from afar. He is one of the most forward thinking camp marketers I know of, and I love watching and stealing ideas from him. It turns out he had seen some of what we, Stomping Ground, had done for our day of giving and what colleges were doing and ran one at Ramah. It was awesome. First go follow them on FB and Insta.

Ramah ran their first Day of Giving this summer and raised over $50k ($25k on the day of plus a $25k matching gift!) Which is more than double what we raised in our first try ($24k in 2017) . Ari outlines his lessons below. The moral of the story is fundraising online can be fun and isn’t impossible for new or established organizations. GOOD LUCK! - Jack

DAY OF GIVING!

Ari Polsky
Camp Ramah in California

This season each of our camps tried something new. We wanted to try a “Giving Tuesday” during other times of the year: a day of giving, a day of social media, and a day of storytelling. Most importantly, it was a day free of clutter, free of noise, and free of competition for attention. For Stomping Ground, it was during May in the preseason ramp up. For Ramah, it was smack in the middle of the summer.  

Here were some of our key lessons, takeaways, and moments from the day: 

1) Articulate Clear Goals

How much are you trying to raise? What will it fund? Answer these questions before your audience asks them. It will help you both design the day’s logistics, and give you a measurable goal to work towards. 

2) Make it easy to give. 

During the various conversations we had throughout the day, the speaker held up a sign indicating how you could support Camp Ramah while talking, and even repeated the information several times throughout their air time. 

We made the donation URL as simple as possible and made sure the link was easily found on our website, facebook, instagram, and twitter.

Further, we asked for the least amount of information necessary to make the donation process quick. 

3) Audience Attention & Ramp Up Reminders

What is the value proposition of your day of giving? Use this wisely in your marketing. We mailed “sibling photos” to our families taken at camp and in the envelope included a postcard on Day of Giving. 

Every email we sent in the three weeks leading up to the day also included the postcard image to keep the day fresh in everyone's mind. The night before, the day of, and the evening after the day we had standalone emails to remind our community to participate, update them on progress, and thank them. 

4) Have Some Help

I can’t do this on my own. Who can I have schedule posts, manage the insta story, or be the talent in a video? We delegate one person to run Instagram all day, another person for Facebook, and another for emails. Then we have captains that run the thank you note stations, mug packaging (more on this in #10), and thank you calls. This in combination with each of those people being pulled at different times to help with videos and live events. The delegation is key to keeping me sane on the day of. (From Jack)

5) Share your WHY: Talk to different people

Why does your summer camp exist? Hear directly from your counselors, campers, specialists, leadership team, and board members what this place means to them. What they say is often better than anything you could ever script. Give them a one sentence “pitch” on how viewers can support your camp and give them the donation information sign from #2.

If you have key people you want to include who won't be available, pre-record it! And make sure that your key leadership are ready to go on camera as the face of the organization. 

6) Update on your progress

So you have started your day, you have articulated your goal, and now you’re gaining traction online. Do you know how much you have raised? Your audience will want to know. Whether you are using the simple thermometer that your campers or staff fill in and report on, or your event host writes the figure on a whiteboard, find a way to give an update. This creates a social pressure and reminder of what your day is all about. If you are comfortable (and your donors are not anonymous), give shoutouts and thank your donors by name throughout the day.

7) Engage with the social media: listen to what people want to show

Instagram is chock-full of tools (multiple choice, A/B, and fill in the blank polling as examples) that allow you to hear directly from the people that matter most. Either monitor yourself or engage help to monitor your social streams (See #4), and hear from your community what they might want to see or hear about on social media, and show that you are paying attention to them. Your event host or guests can even tell viewers to “drop a comment” with an answer to whatever prompt you give.

8) Give inside sneak peaks

People LOVE peeking behind the veil. Go behind the scenes and help people learn more about you. Camp Ramah has a top notch bakery that bakes its own breads, cookies, muffins, pizzas and more. The bakery tour and interview with our baker was one of the most popular segments- and brought back food memories for so many alumni.  What backstage tour will you offer? 

9) Know your WIFI

Having wifi or cell service is crucial to the day’s success. Do you know where your wifi is strongest? Which parts might not have wifi, but strong cell signal (full bars of LTE)? Test this using Facebook’s page admin tools for going live to test out the facilities and make your plan. 

10) What is your thank you plan?

Our first year running a day of giving way more people donated than we expected. Great problem to have, but we were so focused on day of content that we didn’t think about how to thank the people that gave. Now we write thank you notes to everyone who donates day of, try to call everyone that day, and send a mug to anyone that donates over $100. We don’t tell people any of that before they donate.  (From Jack)

11) Use your seasonal staff and alumni

A huge part of the success of our day of giving is how we take over the feeds of so many of our supporters. This happens because we text all our staff alumni and closest supporters and directly ask them to share, comment, and change their profile pictures. At the moment shares and comments are a huge driver of what shows up in people’s feeds. We are looking to make it appear like everyone you know is already on board and you are missing the boat if you don’t donate or at least get involved in some way. (From Jack)

IN CONCLUSION

The day was a success because of the partnership with our board and lay leaders, support from our year-round leadership team, starring roles of our summer staff and campers, and the hundreds of Ramahniks who engaged with our social media and/or donated. They are all superheroes.

Ari Polsky
Camp Ramah
MARKETING & COMMUNICATIONS ASSOCIATE
ari@ramah.org