It’s early August, which means most nonprofits and brands already have their Giving Tuesday marketing initiatives planned (or they’re 80% of the way there). Giving Tuesday is, after all, a huge fundraising event for nonprofits around the world – last year, nonprofits raised over $274 million over the 24-hour period that follows Cyber Monday.

With such an incredible sum of donations at stake, nonprofits need to use every marketing tool at their disposal to rise above the noise and get their messages heard by their target audiences. A tool that takes the strategy and work already being produced in support of Giving Tuesday and elevates it to reach a wider audience without needing to boost and promote posts. A tool that goes by the hallowed name of Advocacy Marketing.

Advocacy Marketing and Fundraising: The Perfect Match

With an advocacy marketing program, your nonprofit’s biggest fans become your most vocal advocates. Here’s how an advocacy marketing program works in a nutshell.

1. Someone who loves your cause signs up to join your advocacy marketing program (say through the SocialToaster platform).
2. They link their Facebook/Instagram/Pinterest/other social media account to SocialToaster.
3. When your nonprofit has new content or messaging to share, they send that content to their advocates through SocialToaster.
4. The advocates, in turn, click “Share” and that content is published to their personal social media profiles where it’s seen by your advocate’s social network of friends and family.

This additional exposure can have a huge impact on a nonprofit’s social presence on Giving Tuesday. At SocialToaster, we found that even a program as small as 1,000 advocates can help your content get seen by 600,000+.

Advocacy is also an important tool for new-donor discovery. The Georgetown Digital Persuasion Study reports that 65% of individuals learn about a cause or nonprofit through their friends and family. What’s more awesome, 68% of those people were prompted to donate after engaging with a cause on social media.

What does this mean for nonprofits? Advocacy marketing can:

1. Spread your Giving Tuesday marketing messages across social media
2. Introduce your cause or nonprofit to a new audience
3. Drive donations and movement from new donors at a time when giving is top of mind

What Makes Advocacy Marketing So Effective for Nonprofits?

According to Nielson, people are more likely to trust and associate with brands and causes recommended by people they trust. 92% of individuals surveyed around the world say they trust earned media (word-of-mouth, a.k.a. advocacy marketing) over all other forms of marketing.

It is this inherent trust in their peers’ recommendations that makes advocacy marketing so powerful. When someone learns about a nonprofit or cause from a third-party source it:

• Instantly legitimizes the nonprofit (If my friend is talking about this nonprofit, they must be worth looking at.)
• Can compel someone to seek out more information on the nonprofit (What is it about this nonprofit that has earned my friend’s support?)
• Drives social-influenced donations (My friend donated $5 to this cause, so will I!)

How Advocacy Marketing Can Support Your Giving Tuesday Marketing Initiatives

Whatever your core Giving Tuesday marketing tactics, advocacy marketing can help take those efforts to the next level.

Distributing Your Giving Tuesday Video

Many nonprofits and causes create video content solely for Giving Tuesday. Typically, these videos help to highlight the great work being done by the nonprofit or cause. They also include a strong call-to-action to donate on Giving Tuesday and instructions on how to do just that.

The thing is, once the video is made, it’s on the nonprofit to then ensure that video gets seen. Here’s where your advocates can come in. Instead of paying to promote your video on YouTube, Facebook, or Instagram in a Cost per View campaign, have your advocates do the heavy lifting and distribute the video to their social networks.

This will help ensure your video gets the attention it needs to be effective, while also helping to save some of your marketing budget for other initiatives.

Solicit, Moderate, and Publish User-Generated Content

User-generated content (UGC) is one of the most powerful forms of content we marketers have at our disposal. UGC posts shared to social channels see a 28% higher engagement rate than standard brand posts. With UGC, it’s your social media fan and advocates who are creating content on your behalf. This could include:

• Submitting pictures alongside a #whyIgive tag that shares what they love most about your nonprofit
• Sharing their personal stories of how the nonprofit or cause has positively impacted their life
• Snapping a selfie with a beaming smile to show how donating to your cause or nonprofit makes them feel

Regardless of the form, an advocacy marketing platform like SocialToaster can help you manage your UGC content. Our dashboard and UGC moderation platform allow you to see all the submitted pieces at a glance. Your nonprofit can then share your favorite pictures through your advocates to increase visibility on that post.

Your nonprofit can even use SocialToaster to moderate a contest or sweepstakes to further entice your fans to participate and create content on your behalf.

Driving Donation and Donation Page Visits

Sometimes the most effective messaging is the simplest. Many causes and nonprofits will send messaging out on Giving Tuesday that simply requests for a donation to be given to support their efforts. That request usually comes with a link that sends someone to a donation page. As with all things, the greater the exposure, the greater the potential impact.

Advocacy marketing can help drive website visits and donation page views by leveraging the sharing power of your advocates. When your advocates share your donation page, that message gets published to their personal news feed where their friends and family can be exposed to it. Awareness drives action which drives donations.

Support Multi-Day Communication Efforts

As many nonprofits already know, marketing Giving Tuesday to potential supporters starts way before that Tuesday morning. Typically, messages are sent out weeks or even months in advance to prime the donation pump and build excitement about the big day.

Get your advocates involved in these multi-post efforts. If you’re only using them on Giving Tuesday, you’re leaving a significant amount of reach and impact on the table. Make your advocates a part of your long-term, multi-post efforts. Get them excited about the upcoming day, so they, in turn, can get their friends and family excited as well.

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If you’re ready to unleash the full might of advocacy marketing on your Giving Tuesday campaign efforts, now is the time to get your program moving. Your nonprofit and cause will need a bit of time to recruit your fans into your advocacy marketing program. The greater your recruitment runway, the more advocates you have in your program come Giving Tuesday, the greater the potential reach and donations your advocacy efforts can help you earn.

Get started today! Our team of expert advocacy marketing strategist stands ready to answer any questions and show you what makes SocialToaster the most effective and efficient advocacy marketing platform on the market.