JUST Capital 2020 Giving Tuesday Campaign

PROJECT OVERVIEW: 

JUST Capital is a non-profit that had typically been reliant on funding grants from organizations like the Ford Foundation to sustain itself, alongside donations from its board and percentages from investment offerings. However, in 2020, due to the incredible strain foundations and our board were under, we wanted to try our hand at receiving general donations on Giving Tuesday. 

This brought along several problems, not the least of which was the fact that we had never done a traditional donor campaign before. The nature of our non-profit (working with companies to improve worker conditions) is not something people traditionally donate to, and in a year where everyone was stretched for cash, it seemed like a massive prospect to jump into the same competition pool as millions of other more well-established charities. 

But we did, setting a modest goal of raising 30k during Giving Tuesday to help us out with additional projects we were working on. And given the fact that digital was everything in 2020, I was one of the leads to lead the project.

Step 1: Planning, Coordinating, and Promoting Our Two Live Events

Our Giving Tuesday plan had a lot of moving parts, with two live events occurring during the day. The first was a LinkedIn live conversation between our CEO and two of our most recognizable founders (Arianna Huffington and Deepak Chopra), and the second was a live Facebook/Instagram benefit concert at night featuring pop-country artist Caroline Jones. 

Both of these events required not only a full suite of promotional materials for ourselves and the guests, but also required a lot of tech implementation to go off without a hitch. 

LINKEDIN LIVE FOUNDER CONVERSATION

This proved to be the bigger beast for me. Due to technical issues with one of the founders, we had to create a completely different zoom/restream integration to run the conversation on LinkedIn, and I didn’t have the ability to test functionality with either of them before the actual event. I spent a lot of time setting up the behind the scenes tech, doing tests with staff members, and ensuring to the best of my ability that the conversation would go off without a technical hitch. 

I then worked with their teams/handlers to create questions and a structure for the conversation, as well as creating the event sign-up page, social promotional assets for all of our teams ( like the one on the right), and additional odds and ends to make sure we had a big turnout for the live event.

Despite the fact that we had this event at an awkward time (3:30pm) and on a packed day, we had 4k live viewers for the conversation, with viewership continuing to grow afterwards as more and more people watched the replay.

FACEBOOK AND INSTAGRAM LIVE CONCERT 

Next up was the concert, which had a few different issues. Given the nature of our non-profit, most of our social presence was based around Twitter and LinkedIn, with additional work in growing several high-profile members’ individual profiles. We still had a Facebook page, but it was nowhere near as essential as now. 

Because the concert was going to be live on Instagram and Facebook, both platforms required an overhaul. I increased the posting cadence on both, and applied for donation tools on Facebook and set them up in time for the event for that the stream itself could raise money directly, along with anyone else who wanted to raise money alongside it. 

Then I worked with our designer to create visual assets to promote the concert for both parties, alongside a suite of social to promote the start time. 

Caroline Jones went live at 6pm, with us having no idea how the concert would do when it came to actually raising money.

From this concert alone, we cleared our 30k goal for the day. 

STEP 2: Creating all of our Non-Event Marketing Assets

Besides assets for events, we also had other promotional materials to create, including touts, as well as general pushes to give to the org.

Touts were visuals that highlighted some of our best wins of the year – like having a  company redraw their policies to ensure that their contractors were also making a living wage, same as their own workforce – and using them to encourage more donations around our wins. We also created quote cards out of several of our highest profile board members and CEO’s who supported our mission to add more clout to what we were doing.

I worked with our designer to create easily editable templates for all of the visual assets, and then I spent lots of time creating tweets, posts, and more copy to help everyone promote it to their own allies to make it as turnkey as possible for anyone participating. In addition, I created all of the emails and well as the sending cadence and audience segmentation to avoid oversaturating too many of our subscribers. It took a little, but I eventually found a compromise with our team between making sure we hit them up enough times without pushing us into an “unsubscribe” pile.

RESULTS: 

With all of our prep done, the day went off without a hitch, and most importantly, we wound up raising 100k in 24 hours, blowing past the 30k we’d set out for the day. 

In fact by the time the concert ( screenshot to the right) went off, we’d already raised 70k, and this additional 30k was just more gravy on a shockingly great day.

We’re planning on using the success of this giving tuesday to better build our a suite of donor companies throughout 2021.