GIVING IS GETTING: CELEBRATING GIVING TUESDAY

GivingTuesday.org describes the holiday it oversees, #GivingTuesday, as “a global generosity movement unleashing the power of people and organizations to transform their communities and the world.”

Giving Tuesday began as “Cyber Giving Monday” in 2011, the same year that “Black Friday” opened at midnight for the first time. Carlo Lorenzo Garcia, a theatre director in Chicago, wrote an article in The Huffington Post urging shoppers to donate to charity after they had finished their Cyber Monday shopping, birthing the concept of ending the run of crass commercial Thanksgiving holidays (Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, etc) with a celebration of giving.

The next year, New York’s 92nd Street Y formed a partnership with the United Nations Foundation announcing today’s formulation of a separate holiday on the Tuesday after Cyber Monday on Mashable, and a new snowball began rolling, extending the run of Thanksgiving celebration to a full week, beginning with 1800Flowers.com’s"White Wednesday.” , Skype, Cisco, Microsoft, Sony, and many other large corporations immediately came on board. 

Their announced purpose was to get people and companies to donate money directly to charities, but has since extended to include any kind of giving of time, gifts, or other generosities.

It’s notable that of the seven days of this run, only two - Thanksgiving and Giving Tuesday - are about gratitude and giving, with the rest focussed on coaxing people to buy buy buy based on huge one-day only discounts, which makes #GivingTuesday all the more notable for how it shifts the conversation the holiday week.

#GivingTuesday has grown year on year, now celebrated officially in sixteen countries and raising nearly $2 billion dollars for charity last year. Facebook has become a core sponsor and ran a matching campaign for the first $7 million of that in 2019. Still, the holiday is not that well known. A survey a couple years by the Greater Good Science Center of the John Templeton Foundation showed that whereas 93% of respondents were familiar with Black Friday, only 18% knew of Giving Tuesday.

Why does Giving matter? That same Greater Good Science Center has found that increases in generosity are directly associated with greater happiness, health and well-being, and quality of life. This is physical science, with brain links actually connecting generosity with positive emotions. In their book The Paradox of Generosity, Christian Smith and Hilary Davidson found that happy people volunteered nearly 6 hours of their time per month, while less happy people averaged only half an hour per month. And it’s a self-growing spiral: the more generous a person is, the more that generosity is reinforced with positive emotions, leading to greater generosity, gratitude, and even more happiness. Generosity leads to better relationships, and within a business, more generous businesses are more successful. And because creativity is directly related to positive emotion and experience, more generous teams are more creative teams.

All of which might make a person wonder, why should GIVING be relegated to a celebration on just one day per year? Well, this year, there was a second Giving Tuesday in May in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. And it has become a near mantra on social networks like LinkedIn that giving is more important than getting for anyone looking to do business successfully these days. 

And it really doesn’t have to be money. In fact, the gift of your time and energy may be far greater. As Kahlil Gibran wrote, “You give but little when you give of your possessions. It is when you give of yourself that you truly give.”

Perhaps we should start by making every Tuesday a #GivingTuesday and spread it out from there. But at least, let’s begin the run by doing something today, on the day that has become the appointed moment for giving. What can you give today that will make life better for others? Don’t hesitate - do it, right now.

Join the Innotivity Institute for our GIVING TUESDAY celebration “HOW TO DANCE WITH UNCERTAINTY” at 6 PM SAST (11 AM EST) today. Register at https://www.dhirubhai.net/events/howtodancewithuncertainty-aninn6736429862254338048/