Photo credit: Flickr user Communities Foundation of Texas.

When you’re running a 24-hour online giving campaign, that big day is sure to feel like stepping on a treadmill where an invisible hand keeps increasing your pace until you are in a full-out sprint.

Frenetic is a good word for it, but there are lots of ways to prepare so you can handle what comes your way.

Knight Foundation recently published The Giving Day Playbook, a soup-to-nuts guide for running these campaigns. Written for the many community foundations that have begun to organize Giving Days for their communities, the insights apply to the nonprofits participating in them or in #GivingTuesday on Dec. 3.

The “Day of Logistics” section is full of checklists, templates and resources for keeping donors coming and handling any other surprises. In fact, its “Day of Checklist” is a great place to start thinking about how to prepare.

Here are some tips – both from the Playbook and from veteran Giving Day organizers – on how to ensure you’re ready. RELATED LINKs

Giving Day Playbook

Recorded webinar: “Getting the Most from #GivingTuesday: Ideas and Tools for Nonprofits to Drive Giving” via the Stanford Social Innovation Review

Personalize your outreach: In the 10 days leading up to Minnesota’s statewide Give to the Max day, Dana Nelson of GiveMN dedicates time to high-touch marketing.  She prints out her list of contacts and stays up late into the night sending emails, Facebook messages and texts and making calls. She makes sure to have three or four easy asks on hand and gives one or two to different folks. Here are a few ideas:

• “I know that your partner works at (name of business); would he/she be willing to pass out information at the office on Give to the Max Day?”
• “Please share information about Give to the Max Day with three of your friends who don’t know about the Giving Day.”
• “Join us at one of our events throughout the day” (provide schedule).

As Nelson says: “You may never know the impact of personalized outreach, but I guarantee that is more effective than a massive email blast out to your contact list.”

It must work: Give to the Max Day has raised $75 million over the past four years.

Prepare for tech blips:  Any number of issues can creep up – whether it’s your site crashing because of high traffic, payment-processing problems, delays in refreshing the leaderboard, or even registration bugs for sites that require a sign-in.

The key is to be timely and courteous in responding. Make sure a representative from your platform is on standby to handle issues or – if possible – is in the room with you. And if your site crashes? Here’s advice from the Playbook: Send a pre-drafted email to participating nonprofits alerting them the site is down and saying that it will be fixed quickly. You should also update your social media accounts to inform the broader community. When your site is back up, use email and social media to announce that people can start donating again.

Disable your other “donate now” button: This very practical tip comes from the Miami Foundation, which launched its first Giving Day in 2012, galvanizing the community to give more than $1 million for local nonprofits. Many foundations have an online giving option on their homepage for year-round giving – which is separate from their Giving Day campaign site. Be sure to disable that button during the 24-hour Giving Day, so donors don’t get confused. 

Assign staff roles: Every member of your staff needs to be clear on their role for the Giving Day. It’s a 24-hour event, so some people will be assigned to stay overnight. Others will be designated for shifts during the peak hours of 8 a.m. to 6 p.m.  Each, though, should be assigned to a role that might include donor support, nonprofit support, communications, tech help and community outreach.

Make sure phone duty is covered. All incoming calls should be routed to one central line, so individual phone lines aren’t ringing off the hook. Staff members should change their voicemails too to direct callers to that line, and the FAQ on the website.

Thank your donors: We all know we need to thank those who gave to our campaigns. But just in case you don’t know what to say, the Playbook has lots of templates, including samples of personalized emails, phone scripts, tweets and Facebook posts, and more.

And here’s the final tip from the Giving Day’s Day of Checklist: Work hard and have fun!

Marika Lynch, communications consultant for Knight Foundation