GivingTuesday is a cultural success. It is not a fundraising strategy
I have never hidden my disdain for GivingTuesday, and I am not going to start now. Let’s be frank: I loathe it. Plenty of people in this sector agree, but most of them either can’t say so or won’t, because criticizing a day of giving this big, with this much cachet and this much money behind it, sounds like criticizing giving itself. It isn’t. People giving is not the problem. The problem is what the sector has done with the day. It took one day on the calendar and turned it into a fundraising strategy. It isn’t. A real strategy says who you will build relationships with, who will do the work, and how you will know whether it worked. Defenders will say the day has all three: a goal, a toolkit for a plan, and a total for a scoreboard. But all three end at midnight. None of them says who builds a relationship with the person who gave, who does the work afterward, or how anyone will find out whether that first gift led to a second one. A date on the calendar cannot answer those questions, and yet I have watched one organization after another build its entire fall around it, hoping a busy day turns into loyal donors. Hope is not a fundraising strategy.
The day did not come from nowhere. The 92nd Street Y and the United Nations Foundation started GivingTuesday in 2012, and founder Henry Timms framed it as a reversal of the shopping days that come before it. Rather than “these two national celebrations of consumption,” he asked, could you “create something about philanthropy and compassion?” In 2025, it brought in $4 billion in the United States, with 19.1 million people giving money. That number is why the day survives, and why so many organizations feel they have to take part. Board members read the headline as money other nonprofits are collecting, and they ask the staff, “what are we doing for GivingTuesday?” Nobody wants to be the organization that sat it out. For a day about generosity, it runs mostly on the fear of being the only one who didn’t post.
That fear is easy to sell, and the sector has built a whole cottage industry around it. Every fall, nonprofit inboxes fill with webinars, trainings, toolkits, and playbooks on maximizing GivingTuesday, being ready for it, and not being left out. The people selling them are paid whether or not a single donor ever gives again, so they have no stake in what happens on Wednesday. They do have a stake in keeping the day at the center of your fall, because the day is what they sell. Americans gave an estimated $617.2 billion in 2025, and GivingTuesday is about 0.65 percent of it. That is less than one percent of giving, and it gets far more of the sector’s attention and energy than it has earned.
The irony is hard to miss. The day was created in response to Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and it now borrows the retailers’ whole playbook: urgency, scarcity, and volume. Nonprofits run countdown timers and limited-time offers. They send final-hours emails that land beside the retailers’ final-hours emails, and they send them over and over, because everyone else is sending them too. When The NonProfit Times reported the 2024 total, its headline called it a “Philanthropy Doorbuster.” A day founded to counteract consumption has become all about consumption, with organizations scrambling to secure every gift they can.
The urgency is the part I find hardest to forgive. “Only hours left.” “Give now to double your impact.” “Help us cross the finish line before midnight.” Organizations manufacture urgency in nearly the same words, and the messages grow more desperate as the day goes on. I call it “give us money or the dog dies.” It is performance art: the organization stages an emergency, and the donor is the audience. Some deadlines are real, like a funder’s match. Most “only hours left” describes the campaign’s schedule, not the organization’s need. Donors are not fooled. They get the same last chance from a dozen organizations before lunch, and each fake deadline tells them that this organization’s emergencies run on a marketing calendar. Tell donors everything is urgent and they stop believing anything is. The sector teaches them that lesson every year, on purpose, and calls it best practice.
Multiply that by every organization sending on the same day. Weeks of staff time go into countdown graphics, email sequences, and social calendars, the same weeks that could have gone to thank-you calls and visits. Every hour spent chasing a stranger’s gift is an hour not spent on a donor who has already given.
All of that effort, the countdowns and emails and staff hours, is aimed at one thing: winning a gift. So ask whether the sector is short on gifts. They are not. The Fundraising Effectiveness Project found that in 2025 total dollars rose an estimated 5 percent while the number of donors fell 3.6 percent, the fifth straight year of fewer donors. The growth came from major and supersize donors, not from the broad base of everyday givers that GivingTuesday purportedly focuses on. Giving USA tells the same story from the other side: Americans gave an estimated $617.2 billion in 2025, another record year. The money keeps growing while the donors keep leaving.
GivingTuesday’s own chief data officer, Woodrow Rosenbaum, said the sector is “serving fewer donors for the fifth consecutive year” and that “converting first-time givers into long-term supporters remains the sector’s most pressing challenge.” So the sector does not have a gift problem. It has a donor problem. Gifts are the one thing GivingTuesday is built to produce: the countdown, the goal, and the total announced that night all measure gifts. Yet the sector pours its biggest effort into a day that makes up less than 1 percent of that giving. The rest of the year is where donors are kept or lost. GivingTuesday did not cause the decline. But the sector’s biggest day is aimed at the wrong problem.
Think about what this looks like from the donor’s side. Most of the people who give are already donors. A 2025 report from the Blackbaud Institute and GivingTuesday found that 84 percent had given to that organization before. The other 16 percent are new to the organization, and their gifts are small: 53 percent of first-time donors gave between $1 and $50. GivingTuesday likes to talk about broadening giving, yet more than four in five of the day’s donors already knew the organization, so the day mostly asks people it already knows. For the new ones, the gift is a response to a date and a deadline, not to anything the organization has done for them. Whether they ever give a second time depends on what happens on Wednesday.
Usually, nothing happens. Most first-time donors never give a second time, and the loss happens in the weeks after the gift, when the organization either shows the donor what the gift did or goes silent. Too often the thank-you arrives late, if it arrives, and the next message is another appeal. A colleague of mine sent small gifts, $10, to 100 organizations. Only 29 acknowledged the gift. The other 71 never did. The donor concludes that the organization wanted the money, not them. A few donors stay anyway. When they do, it is because someone at the organization did the work afterward: made the call, wrote the note, reported back. The follow-up earned the donor, and the day took the credit. Whether anyone has the time to do that follow-up is up to leadership.
So why do leaders keep choosing the day over that work? Because the day is easy to say yes to. It has a start, an end, and a total everyone can celebrate and nobody has to examine. An executive director who has not built a real individual giving program can say “we’re doing GivingTuesday” and be believed. Keeping donors is harder, and much of it falls on leadership. It means protecting development staff’s time, making sure donors are thanked and told what their gifts did, and asking again at the right time. The day lets leaders look like they are fundraising without doing the work, and they take it. That is not a fundraising problem. That is a leadership decision.
Boards take the same easy way out. On the day, board members are asked to share a link. The Fundraising Effectiveness Project found that donors giving more than $5,000 a year generate most fundraising revenue and drove growth in 2025, and in my experience, gifts at that level follow a conversation, not a post. Board members are often best placed to have that conversation, and the day lets them skip it. Sharing a link looks like participation. It spares the board the part of fundraising that matters. A board that posts a link on Tuesday and makes no calls the rest of the year has not taken part in fundraising. It has taken part in a hashtag.
Defenders have answers to all of this, and each one deserves a straight reply.
Defenders say it raises money. It does, and that headline total is where most of the reporting stops. Nobody reports the time and effort it takes, the platform fees, or the gifts that would have arrived in December anyway. The number that matters is net: what an organization raised because of the day, after subtracting what it would have raised without it and what the day cost. The reports the day’s promoters cite do not offer that comparison. Until someone publishes it, $4 billion is a total, not a result.
They say it builds awareness, but awareness with no relationship behind it is noise. Pressed, they say the day works when done right, and failures are failures of execution. But look at what “right” means: thanking promptly, reporting back, and calling. Those are the things that keep donors with or without the day, so organizations that do them don’t need it. For everyone else, the day is a deadline attached to a process that does not exist. Nor is the advice scarce. If execution were the answer, the years of webinars on retaining GivingTuesday donors would have fixed it.
They say it is how small organizations reach new donors. But as noted above, only 16 percent of the day’s donors were new to the organization. A small organization’s real strength is closeness. It can know its donors by name, pick up the phone, and tell a donor exactly what their last gift did, which a large organization cannot do at scale. The day pushes small organizations the other way, into a contest of email volume, where larger organizations have the bigger lists and the bigger budgets. A small organization cannot win that contest.
And they say everyone else is doing it. This is the most honest reason, and the weakest. Leaders want cover, because no one is questioned for doing what the whole sector does. But cover is not a strategy. An organization that lacks the donor base, the voice, or the follow-through to use the day well gains little by showing up, and it pays for it in staff time.
Look at the best evidence the defenders have: the same Blackbaud Institute and GivingTuesday report cited above. It found that 65 percent of people who gave on GivingTuesday 2024 gave again in 2025, compared with 52 percent of donors overall. That sounds like proof. It isn’t. Of those GivingTuesday donors, 84 percent had already given to the organization, and repeat donors are more likely to give again than first-time donors, whether or not there is a GivingTuesday. You would expect a higher repeat rate even if the day did nothing. And the report gives no repeat rate for the 16 percent who were new, the only donors the day can claim to have brought in. The Fundraising Effectiveness Project measures retention differently but shows the same pattern.
This matters because retention shows whether the day builds donors, and it is the metric promoters reach for. If the day were as impactful as they say, independent, rigorous research would have proven it by now. The proof is simple: compare organizations that run the day with similar organizations that do not, and follow their donors for several years. After more than a decade, and $4 billion in a single year, the reports its promoters publish still compare the day’s donors with donors overall, not with a matched group of organizations that skipped the day. The sector is being asked to rearrange its fall on faith.
None of this means turning away a gift on December 1. It means treating that gift as where the work starts, not where it ends.
If your board insists on taking part, plan for Wednesday first. Skip the countdown and don’t invent a deadline. Build the day around impact and gratitude instead: share stories, shout out volunteers, thank partners, and credit the supporters who fuel the mission. Include a link for anyone who wants to give, and encourage people to share. Before the day, decide who will thank every new donor within a few days and what that person will say the gift accomplished. A year later, pull the list of everyone who gave that day and count how many gave again, and whether anyone talked to them in between. That number is the only one that tells you whether the day built anything. Better still, ask the board a few harder questions before it says yes. Does one person own the relationship with each donor who gave last year? Do board members ask people in conversation, and not only in posts? If either answer is no, the day won’t fix that. Spend the time building a real development process, one that involves everyone in the organization and shows donors where they fit and what their giving does. If both are yes, you already have a strategy, and the day is just a date.
That process is the real work, and the sector keeps getting it backward. It calls fundraising a relationship business, then organizes its biggest day around a transaction and wonders why the relationships aren’t there afterward. Relationships get built the way they always have: a person at the organization who knows the donor, a leadership team that protects that person’s time, and a board that does its part of the asking. None of that shows up on the day’s calendar. That’s how an organization can have a record GivingTuesday and still lose donors. The day measures gifts. Only Wednesday measures donors.
Anyone can show up on a Tuesday. The strategy is what you do on Wednesday.