SPN 115 (Some Personal News)

Insights and fire power to crush Cyber Week fundraising - Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Giving Tuesday

Aug 25, 2024

A very warm welcome to all the new subscribers. I’m thrilled to have you as readers and truly appreciate your feedback and support.

Donor Experience Matters.

And implementing a high-performance platform that maximizes uptime and scales instantly is an essential tool to enrich that donor experience. It means increased engagement and more conversions during Cyber Week!

Fundraise Up is that solution.

Game changer? It is for me.

In this week’s SPN:

Consumer/Donor behavior and insights
Approaches to activate during Cyber Week: How and With What
- #1 Flush the funnel, Paid Ads, Email & SMS, YouTube, Revive Monthlies, Influencer Collabs
Jobs that took my fancy this week

Happy Sunday!

Today’s SPN is a one piece deep dive… I’m drafting it on my penultimate transatlantic flight of the Summer, so it feels as good a time as any to gather all my Holiday, BF/CM/GT thinking to share all the insights and fire power to crush Cyber Week.

We’re about 75 days away from peak Holiday season and I expect a ton of Orgs to be running campaigns earlier this year.

Ok, let’s get into gear for the Holidays.

First, setting the stage:

I wanted to do some research into Black Friday/Cyber Monday last year to understand donor behavior outside of our sector.

Here’s what I found:

According to Adobe, it was another record setting 5 day event for commerce worldwide.

Cyber Week (i.e the five days from Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday) saw $38 billion in sales overall, up 7.8% YoY.
There was record spending online during Thanksgiving day ($5.6 billion, up 5.5% YoY)
Black Friday $9.8 billion, up 7.5% YoY
Cyber Monday $12.4 billion on, up 9.6% YoY

From Nov. 1 to Nov. 27, consumers spent $109.3 billion online (up 7.3% YoY).

Also, for the first time ever (and some consumer-donor behavior cross over to be aware of):

Cyber Week Mobile shopping overtook desktop for total spend: Smartphones drove 51.8% of all online sales (up from 49.9% in 2022).
Average Order Values also increased: Consumer carts grew by 2.7% from Nov. 1 to Nov. 27, when compared to the same period in 2022. AOVs grew by about 3.2%. These numbers are the average and Shopify merchants did a little better than this.
Buy Now-Pay Later Surged: BNPL purchases hit an all-time high, up 43% from 2022’s BFCM.

Also, this: eMarketer published US Social Network Forecasts 2024 last week. Audience and Video Ad Spending are both set to surpass Linear TV in 2025.

Look at YouTube and consider how you’re leveraging the channel today.

YouTube is making a better and better case not just for TV ad dollars but ad dollars period.

Let’s get after some tactics, approaches and how to win this Cyber Week.

#1 Flush the funnel

From now until the end of the calendar year, your job as an Org is to flush your funnel. It’s a mental model as much as it is a tactic.

All year, every single media dollar that you spend is building brand awareness, directing traffic to your site, attracting donations, and getting first party data where you collect emails and SMS numbers from the popups on your site.

At this point, it’s time to bring out the big guns with your best matches, best ads, best emails, and best SMS campaigns to convert as many of these potential donors into actual donors as possible. And I’m going to share some of my tactics and ideas on how to do that below.

Start campaigns a lot earlier than you think

There’s a finite amount of donating that donors will do in Q4.

If great stories from other Orgs come out in October, and people donate to them, they may be tapped out early and no longer have the ability to allocate to your Org by the time your BFCMGT campaigns go live.

As much as I don’t love having to start your EOY fundraising effort six weeks before BFCM, other Orgs will be doing it and it’s up to you to launch in line with the market to give your Org the best possible chance to drive fundraising revenue.

FYI Google is telling merchants that Holiday campaigns should start as soon as September 1st!

Next: Paid Ads

For ads, my Q4 philosophy is that you’re simply paying more money to get in front of people who have already interacted with you before. You should be spending the vast majority of your budget at this stage on retargeting traffic i.e anyone who has clicked on an ad or viewed content on your site throughout the year.

You don’t necessarily need or want to spend too much time and money trying to convince cold traffic or net new people to donate for the first time. You want repeat donations from existing donors and to convince people who have meaningfully interacted with you throughout the year but haven’t converted yet, that BFCMGT is the right time to give to you.

Ad Spending Patterns

On-average, it seems that Orgs spend roughly 70% more on Meta and Google during the week of BFCMGT compared to prior weeks. I also read that brands in general (across all sectors) spent 32% more on Pinterest ads in 2023 but the average RoAS on Pinterest actually declined during that time. Snap didn’t see a material increase and I haven’t seen the data on BFCMGT TikTok spend.

It looks like most brands flip on their BFCMGT spend during the first week of September, but then haul it back in October in prep for November. This is reflected across CPM charts pretty consistently.

The last week of October is when ad spend goes crazy. So Orgs looking to avoid the rush would do best to seed their advertising and fundraising before that time.

CPMs are 20%-30% higher this year for Google, Meta and TikTok than they were last year.

Not just during BFCMGT season, but in general. Not a surprise to SPN - and something I’ve shared many times - the Election in the US has certainly played a role here. Political ad spend is going to drive up costs come November. Programmatic is almost 30% of political ad budgets right now.

Whatever you were budgeting last year for BFCMGT, you’ll need to budget more to hit the same performance numbers.

One place CPMs have stayed relatively flat? YouTube. Nobody is using YouTube well enough. It’s also deeply under-utilized by all Orgs. Most don’t know how to crack the code yet.

If you have a product, TikTok shop sales have absolutely crushed it and I think more Orgs should spend aggressively here.

Here’s a bunch of more tactics below:

Don’t turn off your evergreen ads

If your evergreen ads are working, don’t turn them off. Layer your BFCMGT ads on top. Your evergreen ads have built up so much positive social proof, including tons of comments, likes, and shares. If they still get clicks and conversions, keep them on!

Consider changing the URL redirect on your evergreen ads

Instead of turning off evergreen ads, consider changing the URL redirect so it lands on your BFCMGT landing page. That’s one small hack if you want to redirect those clicks somewhere else.

Always have and update your on-site Fundraising Campaign banner

Always have your campaign fundraising banner as a global object on all of your pages. Whatever event/promotion/collab you’re running that day should be visible as a header banner everywhere someone goes on your site.

For Email + SMS

According to Klaviyo, the average brand across all sectors sent 11 emails during BFCMGT weekend in 2023 with an average open rate of 49% and an average CTR of 1%. That’s only 2-3 emails per day. In my opinion, you should send more. Stay with me, I break this thought down a little more below.

I feel very confident that no one will remember that you sent 8, 10, or 15 emails to them 2 weeks after BFCMGT. As an Org, those extra emails or “chances” to convert could equal a meaningful increase in fundraising revenue.

Don’t be afraid to send more emails. 11 is the average. I think 15-20 throughout the Thurs-Tues stretch weekend is more than okay! I’ve only increased it by one more than the average here.

Email your entire list to start

Most Orgs exclude inactive subscribers on regular sends to increase their open rates and click through rates. Don’t do this on BFCMGT. You should ping your entire list. As an Org, your biggest goal with email (or SMS for that matter) is to make email subscribers aware of your Ask to donate (to solve X) in 2 seconds or less.

Put your Ask in the subject line

This brings me to my next point. If your ask is $30, put it in the subject line and put a massive image in the email stating it. People want to know what your Ask is so they can decide how they might want to allocate their limited budgets on BFCMGT between brands and Orgs. Although they might not open your email, they will scan their inbox and read subject lines. Put the Ask upfront and make it loud and clear.

Use exclusions after the first 3 emails

If you plan to send 15-20 emails during BFCMGT, the best way to go about it is to use exclusions and segments after the first few major blasts. If people open and click, exclude them from various future emails that you plan to send. If they’ve converted already, exclude them. Exclusions and segments exist in ESPs for a reason. Use them wisely as you clear more and more of your funnel over the week.

Put a countdown timer in your emails and on LPs

Creating a sense of urgency is crucial when it comes to BFCMGT fundraising. Use countdown timers in your emails and on landing pages to show that “this match only lasts for 5 more hours.” You want web visitors to feel a bit of FOMO and then click and convert right away.

Incentivize the first 50-500 donations with a free branded gift with donation:

To get fundraising rolling, try giving exclusive offers to early birds like “the first 500 donations receive a free gift.” Some form of value exchange is always handy at this stage. Who doesn’t love branded swag. Water bottles and keychains are overdone.

Send postcards that land days before BFCMGT

This isn’t related to email per se but I think sending postcards to a subset of mid-major existing donors that arrive in mailboxes a few days before BFCMGT is a great strategy. To go one step further, customizing them with “Giving Tuesday starts early for you (and then insert their name)” is the best way to go.

Send Handwritten Cards

Want to be memorable? Create and send handwritten cards with a note from you as their Gifts Officer from something like Handwrytten.

It’s the same concept but this is far more memorable since very few Orgs do it. You could also send regular post cards to a donor list and handwritten cards with an exclusive match to your top 100 individual givers if you wanted some differentiation.

Revive churned monthly donors

Giving Tuesday is the best time I’ve seen to revive your churned monthly donors. IMO, you should offer a steep match on the first gift for people to rejoin your monthly program if they commit to at least two quarters. They have tried monthly giving before and it’s likely while they are in shopping mood, that they’d consider subscribing again.

I’ve run the same playbook for churned donors too. If they donated last year but haven’t donated anything this year, try running a segmented win-back campaign with a custom match that literally says, “you delivered X impact last year and we’d love for you to help us deliver Y impact this year, use match code GT24 with your donation today.”

Send your offer to bloggers and affiliates to be featured in top Holiday lists

Every year, nearly all major publishers will run lists on the top 50 BFCMGT deals in tech, beauty, and fashion etc. They cover every category. Get your Org on these lists - it’s easier than you might think.

The strategy is pretty simple. Find a top 50 list from last year. Find the author’s name. Find their Twitter, LinkedIn, or email. Tell them what your campaign/mission is this year and ask if they’d consider including it in their upcoming list. Boom, you just saved them time at their job. I’ve seen this work because I’ve done it. Even if it doesn’t generate a ton of donations, you will get a great backlink from a popular publisher or blog. Be sure to use UTMs so you can track the performance if you do get a few links into blog posts and articles from big publishers this year.

Invest in Influencer Marketing

Similar to the bloggers and journals, everyone is looking for recommendations when it comes to BFCMGT. Now is the time to increase your influencer spend. Having a flurry of posts with people talking about your Orgs mission and impact generates a lot of FOMO and high-level awareness for fundraising. It’s worth allocating 5% of your planned spend here.

Run you own advertorials and gift guide lists

If you can’t get included in the “Best of” Holiday guides, create your own.

Just spin up a blog post with “11 ideas for the perfect gift for … etc” that’s a curated list of products or Org’s you think your donors might like. Add your own Org and products to this list and then run media dollars to it. These lists tend to perform incredibly well.

Bonus: YouTube Shops

This is a sleeper channel for BFCMGT this year.

YouTube is one of the most under-utilized channels. I also think Orgs will see strong performance from YouTube Shops throughout Q3 and Q4 if 1) you have product and 2) can figure out how to make creative that converts on the platform.

As far as the creative formats, it’s still pretty early so I don’t have any conclusive evidence that one style works better than another on YouTube vs TikTok vs Instagram, etc at least for the shopping part.

On TikTok, it’s all about UGC affiliates. On IG, whitelisted creator ads and influencer content still works best. For YouTube, I’m not sure if there’s a specific format that’s crushing it right now. As I test it, I’ll let you know. Overall, it’s still an underpriced marketing channel and should be for a bit longer.

That’s all for today!

I’ve tried to give you everything I’ve got on BFCMGT for this year. I know it’s going to be a fun one, I’m feeling pretty dialed in.

If you enjoyed this edition, please consider sharing with your network. Thank you to those that do.

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And huge thanks to this Quarter’s sponsor Fundraise Up for creating a new standard for online giving.

Now onto the interesting stuff!

Jobs & Opps 🛠️

Central Park Conservancy: Senior Vice President, Comms & Institutional Positioning ($250,000 - $275,000)

Best Friends: Associate Director National Social Media ($90,000 - $100,000)

Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC): Senior Digital Fundraising Campaign Manager ($104,000 - $115,000)

Reform Alliance: VP, Community Engagement ($225,000 - $250,000)

First Responders Children's Foundation: Manager, Media Relations & Comms ($75,000 $85,000)

National Geographic: Director, Corporate Partnerships ($145,300 - $153,000)

New York Botanical Garden: Director, Foundation Relations ($95,000 - $110,000)

AMEX: Manager, Social Impact Communications ($80,000 - $155,000)

CARE: Associate Director Development, Mid-Level ($70,548.26 - $98,414.83)

USA UNHCR: Senior Director, Individual Giving ($181,294 - $201,438)

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