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In this week’s SPN:
Can you treat consistency as a creative advantage?
Giving Tuesday checklist: email, web, sms, paid media, social, data and reporting, influencers.
And, plenty ofJobs & Opps.
Let’s jump in!
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Brand Campaign / Loneliness
Watch Heineken’s revival of urban spaces campaign with, LePub Singapore and LePub Milan
Heineken’s Rooftop Revival campaign reframes urban loneliness as an opportunity to reclaim the city rather than escape it.
Regular readers of SPN will know I’ve a lot of respect for how Heineken turn up (despite not being a fan of their beer). This month they transformed Seoul’s unused green rooftops into open-air spaces for shared meals, performances, and workshops.
→ In other words they turned isolation into sociability that the brand could authentically own.
They grounded the campaign in research that showed 57% of 10,500 of Seoul’s residents reported feeling lonely, with nearly half of Gen Z and millennials spending a week without social interaction. Seoul was chosen for what they termed its “proximity paradox”: a dense city where people live close but feel disconnected, and for its abundance of flat, underused rooftops.
The aerial photographer Tom Hegen took overhead imagery, which the campaign published across Seoul’s digital billboards to reinforce messaging.
Each location was pinpointed via Maxar satellite imagery and marked with Heineken’s trademark red star → a handy beacon for connection if there ever was one.
What’s clever is how the brand keeps it constant while flexing the context around it. In Seoul, it marked rooftops; earlier this year, it lit up Trust Bars (self-serve pubs for 4 a.m. Champions League matches, see SPN #161). In both, the red star served as a literal signal guiding people toward social connection.
A lot of Heineken’s recent campaigns have prioritized in-person interactions. I liked this comment from their cmo:
“We believe in balance. Online connections matter and help spark conversations. But we encourage people to remember the importance of connecting in real life, embracing the realities of modern life. This is part of a bigger vision of reclaiming space for human connection long after the events have ended. Wherever the place, we believe that small changes in how we use our cities can create significant opportunities for socialization and togetherness.”
My takeaway? Brands that endure don’t reinvent their messaging every year but they do lean into new media, technologies, and leverage cultural moments.
Heineken’s partnerships with musicians, chefs, and artists extended its social reach. Orgs can build similar relevance by working with creators and trusted community voices.
Heineken’s story and campaign - bringing people together - remains constant while the execution evolves.
As you plan your EOY campaign can you give it more legs? Can you treat consistency as a creative advantage → refresh formats, build on what’s worked, and evolve the message rather than start all over again in January?
Giving Tuesday may have become a bit of a reflex for some Orgs - yes, you participate but do you truly prepare?
There are two things we can control: preparation and coordination. I built this checklist to help cover both, so my team can focus on what matters most → conversion and donor experience.
Email and SMS Strategy & Execution
Preparation decides everything with your email and SMS strategy. Make sure you have all your emails written, designed and ready to fire as soon as possible.
Here are the main ones to have ready, per campaign:
Campaign announcement. Optional, but I’ve seen this do very well. It preps your donors to hold a spot in their wallet for you.
Campaign launched email and SMS blast. This goes to everyone to notify them of the campaign, what it is, how to donate, etc.
Mid-day campaign blasts to those who engage. You can decide if you want to send this to everyone, just openers or just clickers. And, whether you want to send an SMS as well (this can get costly). Be sure to exclude any donors and subscribers.
Campaign ending soon or 24 hour notice email. This can be the same as the above email, but just add a big sticker saying “24 hours left”.
Last call campaign email. Same as the above, but swap messaging for “Last call - 1 hour!” or something similar.
Technical difficulties email template. This is a plain-text email to have handy, just in case something goes wrong.
Shipping delays email template. Same as the above. If you’re shipping a swag of any kind this is a plain-text email to have handy.
Post Giving Tuesday “Thank You” email. Optional, but just a simple email thanking your donors for participating in a campaign and making it a success for everyone. Talk about how the campaign supported your programmatic efforts.
Update dynamic banners in flows to include campaign messaging, wherever applicable.
Update your new donor welcome series. Ensure you really educate donors who come in new to the file over Cyber Week.
Typically donors who come through Giving Tuesday have a lower LTV, so educating them early is important, especially before you begin sending donation asks to them at the end of December.
Campaigns/Promos
Have you locked in what campaigns you plan to run for the Holidays?
Rather than getting caught in the milieu of Black Friday sales, kick off your Cyber Week with Small Business Saturday and run through the Wednesday after Giving Tuesday.
It could offer you a nice corporate partnership play too - you’ve 6 weeks to get this locked in.
Promo ideas - these should be easy to understand, not complex. They must pass the “Can my Grandma understand this?” test.
Site-wide Match. Automatically applied; clear language what “match” means in the context of the donation.
Donation with Purchase. Once someone donates over a certain threshold, or even without a threshold, they receive a gift in their order.
Bundle sale. Got product? For UNICEF Market I built bundles including best sellers and applied a discount higher than anything I’d run during the year.
Multiple Bundles. Very similar to the above, but you have a few bundles that you merchandise specifically. This is great when you have a hefty number of new donors to bring in who you can offer a $5 donation to at checkout.
Website Updates
Site Banners
Homepage. Your homepage hero banner should reflect the EOY campaign and any Match messaging.
Announcement bar. Your site wide announcement bar should reiterate the campaign message and definitely the Match.
Make sure it doesn’t get too thick on mobile.
Email Capture Design. Mentioning any Match or promotion in the email pop-up yields a higher opt-in rate. Test it and see if you get the same result.
Promotions
If you’re in PST start your campaign promotion 3 hours before it starts, to account for EST. For example, if your campaign starts on 9/30, you should enable it to go live at 9:00pm PST on 9/29 (midnight EST).
Make sure all campaigns are active. Double/triple check everything is live when it should be, and is spelled correctly.
When applicable, like with a site-wide Match, apply Matches automatically for the donor vs requiring a Match code.
Don’t forget to account for all time zones. (I’ve made this error in the past hence repeating it 3 times here!)
If you’re in EST, end all your campaigns 3 hours into the next day. For example, if your campaign ends on 9/30 at 11:59pm EST, you should keep it enabled until 2:59am on 10/1 (11:59pm PST).
Code Freeze
Set a Pens Down Date.
On your website and with any apps in your tech stack, don’t push updates.
If you absolutely need to push an update, test it thoroughly in a staging environment and then go live with those changes.
Remind everyone that no last-minute creative tweak is worth breaking the donation flow.
On-Site Pixels
Ensure your pixels are all properly firing.
Don’t forget to check that your heatmap is properly capturing web user data for you to analyze later.
Post Donation Survey. Be sure you have one active and updated with any Creators/Influencers/EOY Partners you want to try to understand performance from.
Paid Media and Ad Creative
Ad creative for different campaigns
Some creative should be exclusive to any Match promotion. For example, loud, bold, chunky text highlighting the % or dollar Match with an image from paid media that you’ve proven converts.
Merge your best performing donor prospecting ads with campaign messaging.
Test including any Match promo code in your headline on Meta and Google (this could be a cool one to run an incrementality test with).
Submit Your Ads ASAP
Especially given that we’re in an election year, you need to upload ads ASAP to ensure they get approved in time.
Don’t get stuck in “pending approval” or “disapproved”-land, you can make the necessary changes with time to spare now.
Data and Reporting
Predefine success metrics (donations, conversion rate, AOV, cost per new donor).
Build real-time dashboards in GA or your CRM so you’re not flying blind on the day.
Tag all links with UTMs for campaign and channel attribution.
Prepare a simple post-campaign report template now, otherwise you’ll never retroactively clean the data.
Organic Social Media
Post the campaign across organic social media - stories, links in bio, pinned posts, highlights.
Update any product or brand swag catalogues with any Holiday prices so they reflect “promo prices” inside Meta and TikTok shops.
Preload your social calendar and have your designer queue templates for reactive posts (e.g. milestones hit, match met, last-hour push).
Affiliate/Creators/Influencers
All EOY Partners, creators and influencers have URLs that auto-apply Match codes where applicable.
Their Match or campaign promo codes should be easy to remember if someone saw it on a billboard and had to remember it 6 hours later.
If possible, use branded links for each affiliate/creator/influencer, for example:unicef.org/ferrari versus unbranded links that are hard to remember.
Confirm each influencer’s link actually tracks - do a live test donation before launch.
Talking points are updated, understanding of the campaign/mission/promotion is clear, all questions are answered.
Comment moderation is on lock from the creator pages or a plan on how you plan to respond to post comments.
I’d also email your campaign and all its details to publishers who have an affiliate arm (BuzzFeed, Teen Vogue, Insider Picks, etc) too. You never know. A little bump in organic publicity is often more within reach than you think.
Cross-Team Coordination
Lock your internal comms plan: who owns what on campaign day (email, social, data, tech).
Create a single Slack/Teams channel dedicated to “Giving Tuesday Ops.”
Schedule a 30-minute post-mortem the following week while data and insights are fresh.
Share outcomes with partners, agencies, and execs. This is what gets you next year’s budget.
That’s all for today.
I hope you’ve found one nugget today that you can put into play next week!
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And huge thanks to this Quarter’s sponsor Fundraise Up for creating a new standard for donor experience that helps Org’s raise more money.
