How Many Donations Can Your Nonprofit’s Website Support on GivingTuesday?

GivingTuesday is a global phenomenon and the largest donation day of the year. But will your marketing campaigns break your site when people donate? First, let’s start with your donation pages.

How Many Donations Is A Lot on GivingTuesday?

If you’re worried about launching a giving campaign on GivingTuesday, then look to your infrastructure. Is your website up-to-date (WordPress core, plugins, and themes)? Do you have a backup of your site? Are your forms working (test, test, and test again)? Are your donation forms successfully connected to the correct bank account?

Test all the things. Test on mobile. Test while in incognito mode. Ask your mom to donate $1 to make sure it works. Don’t wait until November 15 to test. Make sure it’s working in advance. You’ll likely be coming back from holidays with your family on GivingTuesday, so you won’t have time for big problems.

Hot take: “Studies show that using campaign-specific messaging on a donation page can increase revenue by 420% . Even better, you can set up multiple GivingTuesday donation pages that speak to your specific donor segments.”
NeonOne.com

Credit Cards can process 5,000 transactions a second, so you won’t have to worry about Visa or Mastercard breaking. You’ll need to be worried about your website hosting. This is also why we recommend accepting donations on your own website. When a third-party site like Classy or MobileCause goes down, everyone’s donation forms go down.

Is GivingTuesday Really A Big Fundraising Day?

GivingTuesday has been a successful day for nonprofits for over ten years. In 2022, 3.1 billion dollars was raised in the US alone. Twenty Million Donors participated in that $3.1b raise and for the first time ever, $1b was donated online. Yes, online. Not in person. Not with a check. Through a website form – like the one on your foundation’s site.

Let’s say $1b was donated within a typical workday: 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM. That’s a nine-hour time span. That averages out to $111,111,111 an hour. Per minute, that $1b is $1,851,851.85. Think about that. 1.85 million dollars was donated per minute. Per second, that works out to be $30,864.20 per second.

Okay fine. You say. If we think about the average donation on Giving Tuesday, per person, we can get a better handle on the number of transactions per second.

Earlier, we found out that 20 million people donated 3.1 billion dollars. How many dollars per donor? On average, people donated $155 on GivingTuesday in 2022.

How many transactions per second does it take for $155 donations to add up to $30,864.20? This simple division problem leads us to 199 transactions – per second.

So the question is, can your website handle 200 transactions per second? That’s 12,000 a minute or 720,000 an hour. We bet you’re thinking that there is no way any one website gets 720,000 transactions an hour. Well, maybe Amazon does.

Let’s scale it back. Can your website handle 20 transactions a second? How about 10? If you’re expecting to raise quite a bit of funds at $5 a pop, your site will need to be supported by a robust enterprise environment. Every sale isn’t just one hit to your server. Each transaction is a bundle of requests, handshakes, and a bunch of other technical terms that don’t matter – until they do.

How Do I Make The Most Out of GivingTuesday?

Before we recommend that you fully embrace the largest donation day of the year, we offer a disclaimer. GivingTuesday isn’t a magic potion for solving your poor marketing and communication throughout the year. It’s also not a day to ignore small donors because you have large donations from local corporations either.

Kathleen Murphy Toms is the Director of Digital Strategy for GivingTuesday.org. She recommends that nonprofits invest the time to tell the stories that impact giving. You can’t just make a graphic in Canva, post it on Facebook, and think that will raise funds. It just won’t work. This is an opportunity to bring awareness to your nonprofit’s mission. Once you’ve spent the time using social media (and blog posts) to educate the potential donors (over the course of the year), they will be inspired to donate on GivingTuesday to help you meet your financial goals.

How Many Donation Pages Should I Have for GivingTuesday?

Some people believe that GivingTuesday collects donations on behalf of your nonprofit. Not so. Instead, it’s a Global Movement meant to inspire monetary donations after Thanksgiving of each year. Now, some people volunteer on GivingTuesday as well, but that wasn’t the original purpose.

So, you can have one single donation form (campaign) for GivingTuesday, sure. You’ll want to separate this campaign from your normal donations – even if it goes to the same bank account. Be sure to have a fundraising goal for GivingTuesday in numbers. It’s even better if your donation form shows progress. GiveWP does a very good job with multiple donation forms, campaign progress, and reporting.

At the very minimum, you should have a donation landing page for GivingTuesday for the current year. Refer to previous years if you like to compare, and don’t be afraid to have the year in the slug (eg yournonprofit.com/givingtuesday-2023). There is no need to consolidate or delete previous landing pages for GivingTuesday.

Website Hosting for Enterprise Nonprofits

You’re running your enterprise nonprofit, interfacing with the Board, fundraising, and coordinating volunteers. You don’t have time to worry if a donation campaign like GivingTuesday will break your website. You need a partner you can trust on GivingTuesday and the whole year.

Choose a performant platform that compliments the mission of your foundation, organization, or nonprofit. Summer is the time to get your technical ducks in a row for end-of-year giving.