The best Giving Tuesday campaigns from May 2020

Nationwide giving

 

One example of a National campaign for #GivingTuesdayNow is Slovakia’s ‘give 5 on 5’ campaign.

 

This initiative encouraged its 5.5m citizens to offer donations and carry out fundraising activities around the theme of five.

 

People were sponsored to do 55 push-ups, practise piano for 5.5 hours, learn 55 words of sign language, and challenge friends to write down 55 things they liked about themselves to encourage good mental health. This same approach—give 5 on May 5—was also adopted by Colombia and Uruguay.

 

Giving Tuesday Australia launched an ’ovation across the nation’ - thanking frontline staff for helping throughout the crisis. They’ve extended their campaign to make sure the generosity conversation continues, rolling out a digital ’Generosity Register’ with details about organisations and causes that Australians can give to.

 

Country-wide initiatives like these now exist in 70 countries, with Spanish-speaking and German-speaking countries even getting together to create assets for their prospective audiences, showing the power of collaborative effort.

Together while apart

 

Despite not being able to work face to face through the pandemic, charities and philanthropy organisations across North America came together to support local causes using innovative digital means, showing that physical distance is no barrier to working together and running creative campaigns.

 

I Live Here I Give Here in Austin, Texas, held a virtual giving event that saw over 140 emerging

philanthropists hear from local influencers and community leaders sharing their personal giving

stories. They launched mentorships and partnered with local businesses to use their shopfronts to celebrate charity causes.

 

Hispanics in Philanthropy used their unique bilingual crowdfunding platform HIPGive to distribute match funds, as well as holding a virtual concert to support frontline farmworkers.

 

There were also lots of examples of video being used imaginatively. Charity cosplaying group Avengers of New York made a collaborative video to thank essential workers and created inspirational social media challenges for young people to take part and show their generosity.

 

Leaders from GivingTuesdaySpark, the children’s branch of the Giving Tuesday partnership, came together to create inspirational videos for TikTok, encouraging people to do the right thing during the pandemic, such as not hoarding toilet paper, and helping young people to feel less isolated through a special dance challenge.

 

It was also the first time that the team from Giving Tuesday hosted a livestream event, as a channel to highlight different campaigns from around the world and in different non-profit sectors such as military and youth charities. The livestream brought onboard celebrities and philanthropic leaders, and showcased video clips from social media and campaign results, complemented by live data analysis of the social conversation trends of the day.

 

 

Rapid response

 

These are just a few of the activities and campaigns that happened and are continuing to happen, for #GivingTuesdayNow.

 

All of it was planned and organised in less the month. The day showed the power of creativity, collaboration and innovation in rapidly mobilising people and accelerating the work of organisations, with a huge boost from the use of digital platforms.

 

If you’re looking for more information on how to kick start your efforts for the 1^st December we recommend our recent article ’How to prepare for GivingTuesday 2020’.