9 Steps for a Great Giving Day
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Introduction
Your Giving Day is much more than a 24-hour fundraising sprint; it’s a high-energy celebration of your institution’s mission and the incredible community that makes it possible. But how do you keep your Giving Day campaign fresh and eye-catching year after year? How can you reach and engage new donors in today’s fundraising landscape? And how can your institution do all this while streamlining things as much as possible for advancement staff?
Whether you’re looking to inspire your newest alumni or you need to ensure your back-office systems don’t skip a beat, the right strategy makes all the difference. We’ve put together this comprehensive Giving Day Action Plan to help you navigate the moving parts, eliminate the guesswork, and focus on what really matters: connecting your donors’ passions with the causes they love. Get ready to reboot and re-energize your Giving Day!
Chapter 1Begin by Getting the Necessary Support From Across the Organization
A successful Giving Day isn’t just a fundraising project, it’s an organization-wide event. When leadership and faculty are visible and invested, it signals to donors that the entire institution is aligned and energized. You’ll want to do the following well in advance of your Giving Day:
Giving Day
Campus / Organizational sTakeholders
Advancement Leaders
Volunteers & Ambassadors
Secure Executive Alignment
Meet with campus stakeholders and executives to align the event with the institution’s broader mission. Understand what the priorities are for your campus partners; whether it’s a new lab or a scholarship fund, ensure the Giving Day feels like a shared victory.
Mobilize Buy-In From the Advancement Team
Collaborate with gift officers and advancement leaders to secure the "fuel" for your campaign: match and challenge funds. Donors are 27% more likely to give when presented with a match, so these match and challenge funds are key to encouraging and increasing participation.
Recruit Volunteers
Your institution will need the support of volunteers to help spread the word. It’s absolutely essential to train, educate, and even incentivize your ambassadors. If you offer prizes and have competitions for your ambassadors, that is going to help increase engagement.
Chapter 2Streamline Back-End Processing and Accuracy
While the front-end team celebrates every spike in the dollars-and-donor sticker, behind the scenes your gift processors are the unsung heroes managing the data surge and tracing every single zero during your event to ensure donor intent is met. To keep your momentum accurate and your team sane, it’s important to eliminate manual bottlenecks in processing this data. Here are four steps that have helped hundreds of campuses and organizations lay the foundation for a successful Giving Day:
Choose a Platform Built for the Surge
Your everyday giving form isn’t a Giving Day engine and could get crushed under the surge of donors. Use a platform specifically designed for high-traffic spikes that natively supports real-time leaderboards, countdowns, and automated challenges across multiple department micro-pages.
Enforce Strict Giving Designations
Eliminate ambiguity with forced-choice menus rather than open text fields. Mapping digital funds directly to internal general ledger codes ensures gifts are routed without human intervention.
Centralize Offline Gift Entry
Use a dedicated interface for staff to log checks and phoned-in gifts in real time so they count toward challenges and leaderboards immediately, keeping the momentum and excitement going.
Automate Source Tracking
Use embedded tracking codes (UTMs) to automatically tag gift sources. This removes the detective work of identifying which email or social post drove the donation — great information to have when budgets are tight and every piece of mail/phone call/text/email is not equal.
Run a record-breaking Giving Day With ScaleFunder®
Hundreds of colleges and universities have had record-breaking Giving Days using the ScaleFunder platform. Find out how we have helped institutions raise more than $1.5 billion in Giving Day donations.
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Chapter 3Modernize Your Payment Tech
Donors expect the same “one-click” convenience they get from online retailers. If they must get up to find their wallet, you’ve already lost them. Here are three things that will make giving frictionless for your donors and help boost completed gifts on your Giving Day:
Prioritize a Mobile-First User Experience
Follow the three-click rule: a donor should be able to complete their gift in three clicks or fewer. Use multi-step forms to break up data entry and ensure every button is “thumb-friendly” for smartphone users.
Offering Diverse Payment Methods
Move beyond manual credit card entry to include Apple Pay and Google Pay for biometric checkout, Venmo and PayPal for mobile-first alumni, and DAFpay to capture high-value Donor Advised Fund (DAF) grants instantly.
Automate Matching Gifts
Don’t leave free money on the table. Embed an employer search tool directly on your gift form so donors can check eligibility and initiate match requests in real-time without leaving the page.
Boost Giving Day Results With Modern Payment Options
Find out how the ScaleFunder platform gives you a wealth of payment options for donors, including DAFpay, corporate gift matching, and digital wallets like PayPal and Venmo.
Ask for a Demo
Chapter 4Shift From Funds to Impact Stories
Donor research shows that donors are increasingly likely to give to people and to causes that mean something to them. To put it plainly, consider moving away from generic fund names in your calls-to-action (CTAs) and solicitations.
Instead of a dropdown menu of 20 departments, lead with the specific outcome the gift provides.
THE OLD WAY
“Give to the student emergency fund.”
THE PURPOSE-DRIVEN WAY
“Ensure no student drops out due to an unexpected car repair or medical bill.”
One quick action you can take toward this end is to audit your fund list/email subject lines and rename them to reflect the person those funds help or the problem they could help your organization solve.
Chapter 5Omnichannel Engagement and Messaging
Although we consider Giving Days to be largely digital campaigns, omnichannel engagement is absolutely essential to your success. Below is an outline of a recommended bare-bones outreach plan:
Save-the-date postcard
Pre-event communication email
Day-of communication email
Pre-event and day-of phone outreach
Digital ads
A texting component
Once you have all the messaging channels covered, what about your actual messaging? What is going to entice your donors to give? Here’s a quick list of what we recommend to start developing your Giving Day messaging:
Make It Clear That a Gift of any Size Is Helpful
Make sure your donors understand that you simply want them to participate at the level at which they are comfortable and the gift size does not matter.
Communicate Deadlines and Urgency
Part of what makes Giving Days successful is the sense of urgency to participate now before it’s too late. Your messaging should incorporate a deadline and a sense of urgency.
Play Up the Nostalgia
Pulling on those heartstrings and reminding donors of their time on campus can really motivate them to give.
Convey Your Excitement
A Giving Day really is a day to celebrate your institution and all the things that make it special. It’s an overwhelmingly positive event and celebration, so lean into that excitement and share that celebration with your donors.
Chapter 6Gamify Giving Day
Giving Days are about fun and excitement along with giving. In that vein, there are numerous ways to “gamify” your Giving Day:
Donation Matches
A donation match can help get potential donors off the fence with the knowledge that their gift will be doubled. Sometimes a match can create impact by focusing on a beloved campus project or can be used to boost giving during specific times of the day (e.g., a giving “Happy Hour”).
Challenges
Giving challenges that unlock a big gift or other incentives that align the donor community toward a goal can build powerful community response.
Leaderboards
Leaderboards have become commonplace for Giving Days. They are a fun and visual way to use competition to boost attention and get donors more engaged, especially through volunteering. Creative, custom events can also transform your giving day into a community experience. Encourage friendly competition between on-campus groups or between volunteers to see who can bring in the most gifts through their personalized giving links. You can also encourage campus partners to “beat their best” from past Giving Days or engage alumni networks by granting bonus prizes to the affinity groups that bring in the most gifts.
Chapter 7Get Your Entire Campus Involved
Start With the Top
Ensure your president, deans, and board members aren’t just donors, but vocal advocates. Have them issue matching gift challenges or film short personal videos to lead by example. A powerful “why I give” quote can take you far.
Empower Faculty and Staff Ambassadors
These are the people donors remember most. Provide them with toolkits (pre-written social posts and graphics) so they can easily share the specific impact of their department’s work with their personal networks.
Activate Student Organizations
Since peer-to-peer influence is a major driver for younger alumni, give student clubs leaderboards that reward the groups with the most individual donors.
Host On-Campus Hubs
Create physical energy to match the digital buzz. Set up giving stations in high-traffic areas with music, snacks, or swag to turn the day into a celebration that students and staff can’t miss. Want to take it up a notch? Invite alumni back to campus for the day!
Promote Affinity Giving
Enable peer-to-peer fundraising where students, alumni, faculty/staff, and friends can advocate for the specific organizations that shaped their own experience. After all, 81% of alumni give because they care about the cause, so let them give to what they love. (And don’t count out parents of students and alumni, as they are often unsung affinity groups.)
Chapter 8Leverage Social Media and Influencers To Expand Your Reach
Social media is your Giving Day’s megaphone, reaching untapped audiences beyond your database. To cut through the noise, shift from asking for money to creating a shareable, high-energy event that people want to be a part of by doing the following:
Recruit Social Ambassadors
Don’t just post from the main institutional account. Identify micro-influencers — popular professors, high-profile student leaders, or active alumni — and give them unique referral links to track their impact.
#AllInforWesleyan EXAMPLE:
Prioritize Scroll-Stopping Video
Use short-form video (Reels/TikTok) to show exactly what a gift supports. Seeing a student in a lab or a patient benefiting from new equipment is far more moving than a static graphic.
Gamify the Feed
Create social-only challenges. For example: “If we get 50 shares on this post, a donor will unlock an extra $1,000 for student mental health.” This turns passive followers into active advocates.
Elevate the Interaction and Fun
Use polls, “This or That” stories, and live countdowns. Host a live session where the dean completes a silly challenge (like a dunk tank) once a specific donor milestone is hit.
Be Specific and Tangible
Use your captions to connect dollars to action and impact. Instead of saying, “support our mission,” try “Today, $50 provides a leadership training workshop for a student.” Give them a concrete reason to care and a reason to share.
Chapter 9Prepare for a Stress-Free Giving Day
Even if you’ve got your strategy ready, your staff prepped, your ambassadors trained, your campus energized, a Giving Day can still be a stressful experience for all involved. Here are some tips for boosting your Giving Day results, surviving the stress, and taking care of your team:
Run a Mock Giving Day
Running a mock Giving Day with your fundraising team a few days in advance is a great strategy and helps reduce the stress on your actual day. You’ll pick up things you didn’t think of, people who have had a question they’re wondering about will ask it, and you’ll be able to fine-tune your strategy and work plan so you’re 100% ready on your big day.
Automate Where You Can
Use the friction reduction built into your Giving Day platform to make things easier on your team, such as:
- Tools to auto-complete challenges and matches, complete the accounting, and update the status of your totals in real-time on the Giving Day platform.
- Awesome volunteer ambassador functionality, like uploading training materials, tool kits, and providing updates to ambassadors. This makes it easy for volunteers to create original content and boost their authentic peer outreach.
- Pre- and post-Giving Day splash screen options which automatically pop up before and after your Giving Day. This can allow people to give early and even give a gift if they missed the day (and have a little FOMO after). You set these up in advance, saving your team stress as the day ends.
- Pushing Giving Day updates through the platform by setting up emails that automatically go out to those who gave to help celebrate small wins throughout the day, donor goals, etc.
Take Care of Your People on Giving Day
Encourage intentional screen breaks and have a little fun. Sitting in your Giving Day “war room” with laptops while watching gifts come in and populate on the aggregator is fun, but it will get a little tedious in there after eight hours, even for the most excited fundraisers. It can also create a bit of anxiety. To alleviate this, do something fun and engaging with your team throughout the day, maybe when it’s a lower-stress hour. Play a game, share stories, or go outside if that’s possible. This will reconnect you to the humans you’re working so hard to support and keep you from watching the screen all day. Don’t worry, the tech will keep running, and you can check back in a few short minutes to see your donor total jump, which will be even more fun.
Success on a Giving Day Doesn’t Happen by Accident
A great Giving Day is the result of a thoughtful blend of tech, heart, and high-energy community spirit. Annual giving and engagement professionals like you add so much value with your knowledge, ability to keep cool under pressure, and creative spin you put on the most mundane outreach. By prioritizing the donor experience and supporting the unsung heroes in your gift processing office, you aren’t just hitting a fundraising goal; you’re building a lasting culture of philanthropy that resonates with every generation of your alumni.
Ready for a Record-Breaking Giving Day?
Talk to our Giving Day experts about ScaleFunder, the platform that has helped institutions raise more than $1.5B on their Giving Days. We’ll show you how you can make your Giving Day exciting, engaging, amplified, and a huge success.
