What follows is a guest blog from our friend and colleague Daniel Pietrzak, Vice President of Resource Development and Marketing at Boys & Girls Clubs who offers a front line perspective on the value as well as the challenges faced by a local nonprofit in regards to the #GivingTuesday movement.  We appreciate the great mission being carried out a Boys & Girls Clubs and are delighted to have Daniel share his thoughts with our followers.

Daniel can be reached at dpietrzak@wakebgc.org.  

The community has been great to Boys & Girls Clubs in Wake County. Our Clubs have been filled with volunteers, our financial goals have been met and our partners endured the dozens of communications we sent over a two week period.

In fact, #GivingTuesday has become so successful, our organization is going to rethink how we participate.  To some degree #GivingTuesday has fallen victim of its own success which means as an organization, it is time to evolve our strategy.

Wait…didn’t he just say they made goal?

The generosity on #GivingTuesday has grown by leaps and bounds but so too have the number of organizations participating.

I am going to coin this as the Pie Effect. Everyone likes pumpkin pie, right? Let’s imagine an 8 inch pumpkin pie cut into 6 slices. Everyone gets a nicely sized proportion.  That same pie can also be cut into 8, 12 and 16 slices. Soon, everyone receives more of a sliver, rather than a slice! As you can figure out, the slices are the donors and we are on the ones eating delicious pumpkin pie.  Instead, perhaps we should be the ones focused on giving away the slices of pie.

Over the last two years, our organization has participated in #GivingTuesday and the community has been very good to us and many other organizations.

Our 2014 planning for #GivingTuesday began 4 months in advance.  We spent a great deal of time recruiting and educating over 20 community partners.  We proudly felt we had gotten the jump on everyone!

Fast forward a year later, when we approached the same list of partners 4 months in advance, many had already committed to another organization.   Fundraising vendors were also sure to capitalize on #GivingTuesday advertising products and services as early as the summer.

So what ended up happening? Members of the community reported anywhere between 25 and 50 unique emails and seeing dozens of posts streaming on social media. With the increase in giving, surely this worked but as an organization, how do we stand out from the rest? How does someone pick who they wish to support on a single day?

We must be strategic on how we choose to spend our time and we must maintain integrity while we seek to raise money.  So what does this mean moving forward?  A change in how we look at #GivingTuesday!  Perhaps we should just focus on being thankful. Thankful for our volunteers, thankful for our patrons, and thankful for those who believe in our cause.

Can you imagine thousands of charities communicating gratefulness for 24 hours?

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