Utilizing Arts People for a Successful GivingTuesday

The next GivingTuesday takes place on December 1, 2020, and we're here to share ways to utilize your existing Arts People system to promote this annual day of giving. Last year, on GivingTuesday Arts People clients raised over $175,000 online. With many clients still impacted by COVID-19, we believe that starting your GivingTuesday planning early will boost visibility and fundraising efforts. Below are some ways you can take advantage of your Arts People account to get started on your GivingTuesday campaign.

Donations on or leading up to GivingTuesday

While your Arts People account is designed to be able to accept donations via the donation public page without doing any additional setup of the donation system, we encourage you to customize the public page and your internal donation setup for GivingTuesday. 

Donation Setup — Campaigns, Funds, Appeals, and Donation Types

Navigate to Setup > Donation Setup to access your internal setup for Campaigns, Funds, Appeals, and Donation Types. For GivingTuesday, we recommend setting up an appeal (called GivingTuesday, for example) and in the appeal setup, you can select to which fund you'd like your appeal directed. You can then use the appeal to create a dropdown menu asking donors where they'd like their contributions directed, or you can use it to require that donations be directed to your GivingTuesday appeal for a specific period of time.

Appeals are the sources of the incoming donation such as how they heard about you, or what led them to donate, so are perfect for GivingTuesday. Appeals will point to a fund, to automatically direct the donation to that fund. Appeals can be activated on the donation public page to allow your patrons to specify the appeal they are responding to thereby automating the tracking to fund.

To setup an appeal:

• Input the appeal name in the Appeal setup column. NOTE: appeals may appear to patrons if you wish so be sure the name of the appeal is clear to them. Names might include "2008/09 Season Brochure", "Heard about it from a friend", "Website", "Article in newspaper", "Membership renewal letter", etc.
• Input description for your internal reference in the Description (internal only) column if you wish.
• Specify the Fund to which this appeal should point. We recommend all appeals point to a specific fund so all donations will be reported to funds.
• Input Active date - the date the appeal is first seen by the public
• Input Expire date - the date the appeal should no longer be available for selection. Some appeals might be perpetual such as "Website", "Heard about it from a friend", etc. Others, such as GivingTuesday, will expire since responses to them will come in a limited amount of time. Expiring these is important to keep your selection list limited.
• Note the Admin only? checkbox will make that appeal only available for you to use internally. The public will not see this appeal to select it. You'll likely want to make sure to leave this unchecked for GivingTuesday.
• Make sure you Save your appeal. You can then add additional appeals if you'd like.
• Once you've finished adding your appeal(s), navigate to Setup > System Messages. Click donation related under SYSTEM MESSAGE GROUPS. Scroll down to the donation_select_appeal_label field and add text (ex: Please select an appeal from the dropdown menu) then click Save.
• Once you've finished adding your appeal, you'll want to navigate to Setup > Global Settings and scroll down to the DONATIONS section. You may want to check the Require selection of appeal on donation public page when appeals are present? checkbox which, when checked, requires donors to select an appeal.

Now that you have your appeal set up, you can navigate to Public Pages > Donations to do some customization on your Donations public page. Once you open your Donations public page, click the Modify system messages: ON link in the upper left corner. You'll see some small modifier text appear. Click any of those links to edit that section of the page. Make sure to click the Save button once you're done editing, then click the Return to online pages link. You can read more about modifying system messages here.

Donations Public Page Customization

If you plan to use your Arts People public donations page to accept online GivingTuesday donations, you may want to do a bit of customization of the page for the day of or days leading up to GivingTuesday. To make adjustments to this page, follow these steps:

• Navigate to Public Pages > Donations (and click your Donations public page link)
• On your Donations public page, click the Modify system messages: ON link in the upper left of the screen
• You'll see several tiny modifiers appear; click the (modify donation_intro) modifier that appears below your header text/ above the "Please accept my gift of" text
• Click the HTML Editor button on the right, above the text edit box
• Select all of the contents in the text edit box and copy and paste that into an external text editor (ex: Word document, Google doc, body of an email, etc.) - it is important that you save this so that you will be able to replace it once GivingTuesday is over
• Make any changes you'd like in this text edit box either using the HTML Editor or the Visual Editor, whichever you're more comfortable using - you may want to include a GivingTuesday logo or other text specifically geared toward your GivingTuesday appeal. Here are some free GivingTuesday logos and images you can use on this page. 
• Click the Save button when you're finished editing
• Click the Return to online pages link (found just below the box where the Save button is located)
• Click the Modify system messages: OFF link in the upper left of your donations public page, so that you can see your modifications without the modifiers cluttering up the screen
• You can repeat this process to make further edits to the page as needed.
• Once GivingTuesday is over, follow the steps above and replace GivingTuesday edits with the HTML text you copy/pasted before you made your GivingTuesday modifications. You'll want to do that by clicking the HTML Editor button again, then selecting all of the contents of the text edit box and deleting them, and pasting the original contents back in that box, then clicking the Save button.

Membership Incentives

If you utilize the Arts People membership module, you may know that you can offer membership incentives tied to ticketing such as $5 off each ticket for members at certain levels or discount codes that apply only for active members. Because GivingTuesday is a special day dedicated to giving, you may want to use your membership program as a way to give back to new or returning members. One way to do this is to offer special membership pricing, providing special reduced pricing on GivingTuesday. You could also set up your donations so that all donations received on GivingTuesday qualify for a membership.

Discounted Membership

To offer reduced membership pricing for GivingTuesday, follow these steps:

1. Navigate to Setup > Membership setup
2. Scroll down to the MEMBERSHIP LEVELS section
3. Click the pencil icon to the right of the level you'd like to edit
4. Change the dollar amount in the Minimum donation field
5. Click the Save button
6. Repeat steps 3-5 for all other levels
7. Repeat the process when you're ready to change the minimum donation amounts back to their original amounts

NOTE: You'll want to make sure that there aren't any repeating dollar amounts (meaning, if you already have a $25 membership level, that one will need to be made temporarily unavailable or will also need to be reduced if you want to offer a discount that makes another membership level also cost $25 in order to make this work correctly).