Leadership of Giving Tuesday (GT) have begun the process of spinning the international fundraising and engagement phenomena out as its own entity from the safety of its current home at the 92Y in New York City. Launched in 2012, the intention has been to infuse generosity and interrupt the holiday consumerism of Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
It right now is a single member limited liability corporation of 92Y, with paperwork filed for it to become a 501(c)(3) probably within the next six months. Asha Curran, one of the two founders of Giving Tuesday, will be the chief executive officer. There is a “core team” of 10 people, including Curran, she said.
The entity has an eight-person board chaired by Robert Reich, Ph.D., director of the Center for Ethics in Society and faculty co-director of the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society at Stanford University.
Lead funders for Giving Tuesday are the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and Fidelity Charitable, with in-kind support from the Rockefeller Foundation. Individuals, such as Laurence and Carolyn Belfer, are also funding the initiative. Giving Tuesday has been housed at The Belfer Center for Innovation & Social Impact at the 92Y. Other individual funders, such as Jonathan Soros, chief executive officer of JS Capital Management, and international coordinators will also have board seats.
Henry Timms, Curran’s co-founder, left the 92Y in May to become president and chief executive officer at Lincoln Center in Manhattan. He is listed in the funder case study as a co-founder.
“I’ll serve as co-founder of the new organization that houses GT, but Asha is CEO and will run it day-to-day, as she has been for a long time, and manage the board,” said Timms. “I plan to stay very involved in talking through new ideas, acting as an advisor and partner, helping with fundraising, and, of course, being GT’s biggest fan and ambassador,” he said.
Giving Tuesday’s core team will handle strategy, data, funding, operations communications and various elements of building the community. New York City will be its technical home, but the actual “where” remains up in the air with the probability that it will mostly be a virtual organization.
Curran calls it a “distributed model” that allows for adaption based on location, ideas and what sparks engagement at a particular organization or region. It’s about peer learning and co-ownership of the day. The idea is to find the best solutions to local challenges with use of secure data, she explained.
“Henry Timms: Giving Tuesday has accomplished an incredible amount in eight years, but there’s still so much to be done.
“There will be a lot of life on a plane … to see it for myself and offer whatever help we can. It’s a distributed team,” said Curran, with associates around the world working with the organization but not for it.
Reich said the model is appropriate since the effort behind Giving Tuesday is largely digital and decentralized. “There’s always been lots and lots of people working on its behalf,” Reich said. Curran explained that with associates in many countries, meetings have been by video and in airports.
Timms said it is time for Giving Tuesday to be independent. “Giving Tuesday has accomplished an incredible amount in eight years, but there’s still so much to be done,” he said. It is “a movement that needs the full-time focus of its leadership, the guidance of a dedicated board, and to send a strong signal that we intend to double down on our GT ambitions. 92Y was the perfect home for GT’s first years, and nothing could be more a mark of success than when something is so successfully incubated that it grows its own legs,” Timms said.
Giving Tuesday, which used a hashtag for the day before hashtags were cool, at this point is about more than just money. The majority of people who know of Giving Tuesday do something on the day, whether it is giving, volunteering or working on initiatives in a community, according to data from the organization. But, there was a time it was all about the money.
More than $1 billion has been raised online in the United States since 2012. There is also plenty of data about the donors from the more than 60 giving platforms reporting data.
Organizers have stopped trying to count how many organizations worldwide are involved in the day. Nonprofits from 160 countries use the day as a rallying cry. They talk of engagement but the revenue is vital, as is the donor data. That includes:
- 75 percent of participants are repeat donors;
- $105 is the average online gift size on #GivingTuesday in the U.S.;
- Awareness of #GivingTuesday in the United States is 58 percent and 67 percent of those people participate in some way; and,
- 82 percent of organizations used #GivingTuesday to experiment with something new, one of which was the “unselfie.”
“Asha Curran: There will be a lot of life on a plane … to see it for myself and offer whatever help we can. It’s a distributed team.
Critics of the movement have said that having a giving day right after Thanksgiving would push donors to simply make gifts earlier in the holiday cycle. DataKind’s analysis of transactional data determined that #GivingTuesday generated a net positive impact on donation results, said Curran. “In the Time Series analysis performed for #GivingTuesday, statistically significant breakpoints were found around #GivingTuesday for 2013, 2014 and 2015, showing that the campaign had a notable impact on donations during these years,” according to the GivingTuesday Insights Report 2017 by DataKind.
One of the early supporters of Giving Tuesday is Victoria Vrana, deputy director of Policy, Systems and Giving by All on the Philanthropic Partnership team at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The foundation has provided $3.8 million in funding since 2014, according to Vrana. Spinning the organization out has “been a strategic question over time, what organizational form it would take,” said Vrana.
“We’ve (the Gates Foundation) been big partners in two ways. We always supported the day itself. Bill Gates himself sent a Tweet on the first Giving Tuesday,” she said. It started with spreading the word on throughout the foundation’s social media. “Now spreading the word around the world,” she said. There are now multiple digital platforms in India involved in the day, for example.
Some organizations, over time, get better at engaging donors. “The longer they stay involved the more they learn. It’s a tremendous opportunity that is totally agnostic as a cause,” Vrana said. Curran said Giving Tuesday is intended to become a day of generosity, no matter how people define the word. “In an era of global crisis and disconnection, we need new rituals to connect us.” The goals include a deeper establishment of a global day of giving, increased generosity in everyday life, a generous and just world and a vibrant and trusted social sector, according to the authors of the funding case study.
There has been a constant questioning within the organization to develop opportunities. There were seven points decided upon regarding the organization:
- That it be inclusive of all types of partners – everyone has a place;
- We believe in experimentation, creativity and collaboration;
- Working toward a strengthened global social sector;
- Value all forms of giving, time, skills, voice and money;
- It’s about giving together and celebrating that giving;
- We want giving to be seen as a core component of good citizenry and community spirit; and,
- Local impact with a global movement.
Evolving the organization has been a deliberative process, unlike the launch of Giving Tuesday. Curran recalls Timms arriving at her office, them talking about the idea and launching it in just 60 days. “Henry came into the office Black Friday with this idea. We dropped everything and all started working on this. It was very experimental,” said Curran.
It was quite the flurry, Timms recalled. “Our board and leadership at the time was very supportive, partly because we were able to pull off that year with a lot of pro bono support and collaborative effort,” he said, pointing to founding partners at the United Nations Foundation who ran all Giving Tuesday communications for the first three years and Mashable, which helped build the first website.
“I was running a center within the Y and Asha was (at first) employed in a totally different center . We began working together on a series of experimental initiatives, playing with the idea of a distributed model and the possibilities of using digital tools to achieve good things at scale,” said Timms. Two projects — the Social Good Summit and 92Y American Conversation — came before GivingTuesday.
“From the very beginning GT has been powered by the genuine passion people have for it. We have more human and capital resource to support the movement than in those early days, but that’s no less true now.”
