Giving Tuesday Is 48 Days Out: 5 Best Practices to Lock In This Week
Oct 14, 2026Giving Tuesday is Tuesday, December 1, and today is October 14. That leaves 48 days.
I have 5 best practices for you to put in place this week. All 5 are decisions and documents. None of them needs a design tool or a new platform, and each one saves hours in November.
Giving Tuesday Best Practices: 5 Things to Lock In This Week
- Set the goal in gifts and in dollars.
- Choose one big ask.
- Put every task on a calendar with a name and a date.
- Write the core message once.
- Test your donation page on a phone.
1. Set the Goal in Gifts and in Dollars
A $20,000 goal tells your team nothing about the work. Divide it by your average gift and you get a number of people. If the average gift is $100, you need 200 gifts. Now every email and every announcement has a job: find 200 people who will say yes.
2. Choose One Big Ask
Pick a single action, an amount or range, and an outcome. Use the same wording in the subject line, the social posts, the donation page headline, and the announcement from the front of the room. Repetition makes the ask familiar, and a familiar ask is easy to answer.
3. Put Every Task on a Calendar With an Owner
Work backward from December 1. Thanksgiving is November 26, so the week before it is your last full week of build time. Write each task, one person, and one deadline. A task that belongs to a team belongs to nobody.
4. Write the Core Message Once
4 sentences cover it: who is struggling, what you do about it, what a gift makes possible, and what to do today. Write them first. Then every channel gets a shorter or longer version of the same story.
5. Test the Donation Page on a Phone
Open your donation page on your own phone, make a test gift if your platform allows it, and fix whatever slows you down. GivingTuesday's 2025 results count 19.1 million people who gave money in the United States, so plan for a large and varied audience. Do this twice: once in early November and once the week of Thanksgiving.
Why I Am Pushing This Now
Giving Tuesday brought in $4.0 billion in the United States in 2025. There are so many good causes, and funding limitations throttle their impact. I believe more nonprofits' missions should be funded, and Giving Tuesday is an opportunity to give some new life to a cause-driven team's work.
That belief is why we are releasing an entire suite of workshops. The first one is a video course that covers the goal, the one big ask, the calendar, and the core message, in 4 modules and 12 lessons.
Get the Giving Tuesday Campaign Blueprint and finish this list with a guide beside you. Tomorrow I will show you how to use AI to draft the content without losing your voice.
