Getting into The Zone for GivingTuesday (plus a special request)

Welcome to my weekly LinkedIn newsletter! Connected Fundraising Weekly will be?my way ?of providing easy-to-engage insights around donor behavior, fundraiser support, and technology. I hope you enjoy the content, and please share if you think someone would benefit from what I'm writing!

There are 75 days till GivingTuesday this year.

Now, before we get into yet another debate about whether that should matter to your nonprofit or not I want to state very clearly that I am a proponent of utilizing the Generosity Moment that is GivingTuesday as part of your overall strategic planning calendar. If you hate GivingTuesday and will never invest any energy into it, then this week's newsletter isn't for you. Skip to the end and apply for our Changemaker Awards and you're good to go.

For those of you who are proponents of participation in GivingTuesday or are curious as to why to get involved, then I'm going to focus on a new resource that we just put out to help sync up your strategies.

Getting into The Zone

There is a concept called flow, where someone is hyperfocused and tuned in to what they are doing where time itself seems to slow done and decision-making is crystal clear. Many times this is seen with athletes, but as this video from the Flow Research Collective shows it can apply to any sector or industry:

When you are "in the zone," you can massively amplify:

• Pattern recognition
• Future prediction
• Information processing

I remember distinctly experiencing this when working on large data sets for clean-up in my nonprofit CRM. I'd sit down, put on some music, and just crank away at killing off duplicates, merging records, applying appeal codes, writing fundraising copy, and planning out the steps needed for stewardship that other team members would execute.

I said I felt like I was Neo in The Matrix where I can see the code that makes up everything:

How does flow pertain to GivingTuesday?

The focused nature of the day itself lends itself greatly toward tapping into flow. There are set time constraints to work within, there are going to be goals that need to be hit, and there will be a series of things to execute that can help enhance the experiences that donors have on the day itself.

That is why planning things out will be a critical step in maximizing your own ability to be successful on the day itself and beyond. Tapping into the larger zeitgeist moment that is GivingTuesday helps drive success for overall end-of-the-year giving .

To be clear - your plan for the day should be focused on unlocking untapped generosity in your community. That does not mean extracting money from donors who feel guilty or rushed to hit some arbitrary timeline.

It does mean designing experiences that sync into the deeper psychological desires humans have to feel that they made an important decision on their own but one that connects them to a bigger purpose.

Executing with confidence on GivingTuesday

We've been hard at work putting together a resource to help nonprofits get into the zone for GivingTuesday and experience their own flow. A big part of that has been holding numerous conversations with leaders at nonprofits as well as sector thought leaders on how to best think about GivingTuesday. As John Houseman, Director of Institutional Advancement at the Palma School told me in an interview we'll debut at Generosity Xchange:

There was concern that if people donated to GivingTuesday, then they wouldn’t also give their normal annual gift. That absolutely was not the case, it was rather the opposite. We ended up, when including all the matching gifts, close to our $70,000 goal for our first fully planned out GivingTuesday campaign.

The consensus is clear that good planning will lead to success and a big part of GivingTuesday's success comes from activating your passionate supporters (e.g. volunteers, board members, etc.).

Our team has designed several supporting toolkits to streamline a nonprofit's ability to find this same type of success that Palma School saw last year. We've created:

• Planning Worksheets
• Email Templates
• Social Media Templates

We've also inserted the email and donation form optimizations into all Neon CRM and Neon Fundraise systems for nonprofits to tailor to their own communities. This will greatly streamline their ability to get into the fundraising zone. Check out what we've put together below and let us know your own plans and ideas on how to get into the zone.

Special Request - Submit a Changemaker Award Application

We are a few weeks away from Generosity Xchange, our big virtual conference that we hold each year. A major part of that is the Changemaker Awards. This is where we celebrate the amazing work of small shop nonprofits making a big impact in their communities.

Besides public recognition of their work, winning organizations also receive a micro-grant donation from our company. The application process is super short and focused on hearing your story so I'd highly encourage anyone (don't have to use our stuff!) to submit before the deadline of September 23.