Short answer: With four weeks to Giving Tuesday, a small organization should spend week one picking one specific thing the money buys, week two building the page and the list, week three warming the list and lining up a match, and week four sending on the day itself. The single biggest predictor of a good result is asking for something concrete rather than for general support.

Giving Tuesday falls on 1 December. If you are reading this in early November you have four usable weeks, which is enough, as long as you spend them on the few things that move the number and ignore the rest.

This plan assumes you do not have a marketing team. It assumes one or two people doing this alongside their actual jobs.

Week one: decide what the money buys

The difference between a campaign that raises something and one that does not is almost always specificity. "Support our mission" raises less than "forty pounds of feed keeps the rescue horses fed for a week", because the second one tells a donor what their money becomes.

Pick one thing. Not three programs and a general fund. One concrete, costable thing that a donor can picture. Then work out what it costs in units, because those units become your giving amounts.

Turn the units into giving tiers

If a week of feed is $40, that is your first tier, and the page should say so. Giving tiers with titles do the explaining for you: a donor seeing $40 labelled "a week of feed" does not have to work out what their gift achieves.

Set three or four tiers and let people enter their own amount as well. More than four and you are asking somebody to make a decision rather than a donation.

Build the campaign once, reuse it next year.

Campaign templates, giving tiers and fund tracking are all in CoreCause at $0 a month. Book a short demo and we will get your page ready.

Book a Demo → See how CoreCause runs campaigns

Week two: build the page and clean the list

The page is the easy half. Build it, give it the tiers you worked out, and point it at the fund the money should land in so you are not reconstructing that in January.

The list is the half that gets skipped and matters more. Export everyone who gave in the last two years. Check the addresses are current. Separate the people who gave last Giving Tuesday from everybody else, because they are your most likely donors this year and they deserve a different message.

Save it as a template while you are there

You will run this again next year. If the platform lets you save the campaign as a reusable template, do it now while the tiers and the wording are fresh, rather than rebuilding it from scratch next November.

Week three: warm the list and find a match

Nobody should first hear from you on the day. Send something in week three that is not an ask: what last year funded, what happened to the horses, a photograph. It earns you the right to ask a week later.

Line up a match if you can

A match is the single highest leverage thing available to a small organization. One board member or local business putting up $2,000 to match the first $2,000 given changes every message you send, because a deadline and a multiplier are the two things that make somebody act today instead of later.

Ask three people. You only need one to say yes, and the ask is easier than you think because the matcher gets a clear, bounded commitment.

Decide how people will give on the day

Whatever you choose, make sure the people around you can take a gift without you. If a supporter wants to hand over a card at an event, or texts asking how to give, somebody needs to be able to handle that in under a minute.

Week four: the day itself

Send in the morning, send again in the afternoon to people who did not open the first one, and send a last call in the evening. That feels like a lot. It is normal for the day, and the evening send is routinely the best performing of the three.

Say where the total stands. A progress number is the most persuasive thing on the page on the day, because it turns a donation into joining something already moving.

The part everyone forgets

Thank people within 24 hours, personally where you can. A Giving Tuesday donor who hears nothing for three weeks is a one time donor. The same person thanked properly is the person you ask in January to give monthly, and monthly donors are worth several times a single gift.

What to skip

Do not build a new website. Do not film a video you do not have time to finish. Do not run a campaign across four channels you do not already use. A small organization wins Giving Tuesday with one clear ask, one good list and a match, and loses it by spreading four weeks across nine tasks.