GivingTuesday: Reflections on 2020

Reflections on an unprecedented year WE’RE A GLOBAL MOVEMENT IN ITS EIGHTH YEAR AND A NEWLY INDEPENDENT STARTUP In 2012, when GivingTuesday was launched, we had a big goal: to make giving more central in daily life. Our commitment to a core set of values, an open, distributed leadership model, and a belief in transformational partnerships set us on a course to build the first global generosity movement, and the first global day of celebration open to anyone and everyone.

Today, GivingTuesday is an inclusive and pluralistic community of millions of givers, with activity in every country on every continent. We celebrate and uplift grassroots generosity, and generosity as a universally held value. Around the world, across diverse giving cultures, our network of local leaders in over 70 countries and hundreds of communities innovate, collaborate, and inspire collective generosity as a way to build the world they want to live in.

Reflections on an Unprecedented Year

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INDEPENDENCE FUELED BY INGENUITY Since our launch in 2012, GivingTuesday has scaled exponentially, leveraging a highly interconnected community of leaders across the globe, each of whom sits in proximity to their own ecosystems of nonprofits, platforms, religious institutions, families, schools, and private sector partners.

Working alongside them, we have together built a powerful global grassroots movement building and have driven change at scale.

of generosity is at the heart of the society we build together, unlocking dignity, opportunity and equity around the globe.

In June 2019, GivingTuesday left its home as a program of the 92nd Street Y to spin out into a standalone entity, where we had the independence to fully realize our ambitions. We secured initial grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation, Fidelity Charitable Trustees Initiative, and PayPal (largely multi-year, largely general operating) to ensure that we were in a sound financial position and had runway to drive toward our vision for a more generous world, one in which the catalytic power

We believe that everyone has something to give, and everyone has needs. We support and amplify small urban and rural grassroots organizations with the same vigor and commitment as the world’s largest NGOs. We recognize the wisdom of leaders on the ground to be the best problem solvers in their communities. And we share our experiences and learning with other movement leaders seeking to drive change at scale. Our framework allows us to rapidly build, learn, adopt and adapt.

GIVINGTUESDAY 2019 WAS ANOTHER RECORD YEAR

$511M online donations

$ $1.46B offline donations

A record $511 million was donated, just online, in the United States.

Reflections on an Unprecedented Year

Offline giving in the United States alone totaled more than $1.46 billion.

20.1B

global social media impressions GivingTuesday social media impressions totaled 20.1 billion and gained an earned media value of $318M.

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2020: PANDEMIC, PIVOTS, PURPOSE The ground shifted under us and our global community in 2020.

As the novel coronavirus and resulting quarantine spread, the recession took hold, and protests around racial justice and human rights erupted in the US and around the world, we paused to reflect on our role as a movement and our responsibility as leaders.

We quickly realized that the upheavals of 2020 only magnified GivingTuesday’s mission, as generosity became the language of response, of action, of healing. Around the world, people were turning to generosity as a response to the traumas we were collectively experiencing.

As our CEO, Asha Curran, noted in a reflection on radical generosity, “Generosity is a powerful countervailing force to isolation and loneliness, which already are prevalent in our society and bound to worsen now. Our ability to give help and hope gives us agency, dispelling feelings of powerlessness.”

Ingenuity and experimentation are core values for us, and we have always pushed ourselves, and leaders and participants in the movement, to use GivingTuesday as a platform for innovation. In this unprecedented year, we felt the urgency of new thinking to meet the moment. Since March, we’ve galvanized millions of people around the world to participate in #GivingTuesdayNow on May 5th, established the groundbreaking Starling Collective to support grassroots changemakers, hosted a Global Virtual Summit, launched an Exponential Networks strategy, onboarded 50 new data platforms into the GivingTuesday Data Commons, and so much more.

More detail on these initiatives follows.

Reflections on an Unprecedented Year

#GIVINGTUESDAYNOW: A RAPID RESPONSE TO COVID-19 Our first major response was the announcement of #GivingTuesdayNow on May 5th. We deliberated as a team about what response was both appropriate and impactful, and sought feedback from our partners regarding a range of possibilities.

Ultimately, we determined that our ability to harness the emerging surge of generosity and mobilize the world around a day to do good would be our most important immediate contribution. Thanks to our global network of leaders and partners, we executed #GivingTuesdayNow in less than five weeks, spurring countless acts of kindness and generosity around the world.

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#GivingTuesdayNow provided a spike in optimism, hope, and connection for people around the world, and an infusion of support for the social sector at a pivotal moment. It channeled the alreadyincreased energy of millions of people around the globe into a collective surge of generosity and action on behalf of nonprofits and neighbors. It gave organizations that were not directly connected to COVID-19 response a platform to tell their stories and seek support. It generated creative collaborations, mobilized seniors and celebrities, and sparked joy and community in the face of quarantine and isolation.

One local leader shared what the day meant to so many local organizations and their staff: “On behalf of all local nonprofits, thanks for helping us get our fire back. It was about more than money today. today was about confidence. It was a chance to be bold in the face of so much uncertainty.

Thank you.�

#GIVINGTUESDAYNOW WAS ALSO A SUCCESS BY THE NUMBERS

$503M

online donations in the US

Spurred social media conversation in 145+ countries

A surge in social media activity including

3B+ impressions on Twitter

Activated nearly

At least $503 million was given online in the US on #GivingTuesdayNow, nearly equaling the $511 million that was given on GivingTuesday 2019.

16 million American adults

Generated an estimated earned media value of

more than $72M (excluding social media)

The #GivingTuesdayNow Impact Report provides a more detailed look at the day.

Reflections on an Unprecedented Year

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STARLING COLLECTIVE The second innovation we launched this year — the Starling Collective — is a direct outgrowth of #GivingTuesdayNow and the racial reckoning we are confronting as a country. The first iteration was the Starling Fund, a pool of money reallocated from our cancelled Summits to support GivingTuesday leaders who pursued innovative strategies for GTNow. The Starling Fund provided support to 46 projects, ranging from $1,000 to $7,000. In addition to many grants that were leveraged to drive giving to nonprofits, many focused on citizen action, including a massive all-day feeding program that distributed more than 1,000 meals in Columbus, OH; a nationwide generosity news SMS campaign in Nigeria; a collaboration between Liberian nonprofits to distribute masks produced by local seamstresses;

We are still raising funds due to the commercials we were able to run from the Starling Fund grant. Our original goal was to raise $35,000 and assist 100 families with rent/mortgages.

To date, we have raised $58,500 and are on track to serve 125 to 150 families. The extra dollars are also allowing us to help rehouse families who will no longer be able to afford their current housing due to multiple circumstances.

The grant made a major impact on our campaign.”

- LAURA KING

Conway Gives, Starling Fund grantee

Reflections on an Unprecedented Year

The Starling Collective

and a community project in Jackson, TN, to build and assemble “little free pantries” with food and essentials in areas with a high concentration of individuals experiencing food insecurity.

Just after #GivingTuesdayNow, George Floyd was murdered, and the country erupted. Around the world, grassroots action surged against the threats of human rights abuses, economic disaster, social isolation, and threats to public health. We saw the potential for Starling to be so much more than just support for GivingTuesday leaders; we saw it as a new way to both rapidly deploy funds, and to build a learning community to strengthen the movementbuilding skills and the support networks of grassroots leaders. Often, these are leaders with little traditional power or capital, left on the sidelines without access to big philanthropy, or to the support and coaching that could accelerate their work.

So we launched the Starling Collective, designed to identify creative, passionate leaders with particularly innovative approaches to catalyzing generosity, empathy, equity and justice. The program offers skill-building, coaching, and peer-learning, as well as an initial pool of $250,000, which we intend to double by year end, for microgrants to accelerate on-the-ground work.

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The importance of ground-level movements is more critical than ever and leaders and organizers around the world are working with great urgency, under even greater constraints, with little to no resource.

But it is the kind of innovation and leadership they bring to the table that will prove crucial for transforming the current systems and structures of society, so many of which are clearly not serving us.

We’re committed to systems-level change, and believe that the giant leaps of progress we seek can be fueled through investment in these leaders. During #GivingTuesdayNow, we saw up close the impact of a very small investment. We are building on that initial experiment with the Starling Collective’s expanded model. With microgrants to cover essential resources, a learning curriculum and community to bolster knowledge, and a network of supporters to amplify successes, we are working to support dozens of leaders in their work.

We welcome innovators of all backgrounds and aim to eliminate barriers that often leave diverse voices and nontraditional movement builders on the sidelines. Nearly 2,000 applications were submitted from 93 countries, and the submissions were evaluated on how their proposals addressed generosity, leadership, vision, ingenuity, scalability, and diversity and belonging. In October, 50 grassroots leaders representing 29 countries were selected to participate in the program.

VIRTUAL SUMMIT On August 4-6, we held our first Virtual Global Summit for our country and community leaders.

Over 300 leaders from around the world participated in three days of programming that ranged from discussions of tactical campaign planning and fundraising to meta-level discussions of New Power, movement building, and race and equity.

EXPONENTIAL NETWORKS Beyond our existing network leaders, we think this is an important moment to inspire new networks to action and impact, by sharing our expertise

Reflections on an Unprecedented Year

about driving change at scale. We have developed an exponential networks strategy focused on identifying and seeding new networks in a range of industries and sectors. Each network will be led by a superconductor, an individual we identify as a leader in a given field who has already stepped up as a powerful online connector with the potential to turn a concept into a movement.

We are particularly interested in the potential impact we can have providing knowledge, interconnection, and backbone infrastructure to the many Mutual Aid Networks (MAN’s) that have emerged across the US and around the world during the COVID-19 crisis. One of the partners we are working with, Mutual Aid Hub, has 880 local mutual aid networks connecting residents, agencies, nonprofits (in some cases) and small businesses to tackle urgent local needs. It’s a powerful new form of local movement and we are engaging with them in a range of ways.

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MORE UNCERTAINTY; MORE OPPORTUNITY As we approach GivingTuesday 2020 on December 1st, we recognize the uncertainty of the times. The continuing strain of the pandemic, the US elections, economic dislocation and calls for racial justice will be a backdrop for the day unlike any year since our founding.

There is a very real possibility that the toll of these overlapping crises are a distraction from the day.

There is also the very real chance that we experience a surge of action — giving, advocating, volunteering — that surpasses prior years. Either way, we will honor and celebrate the choices individuals make about the right ways for them to respond in 2020.

We are immensely proud of our country and community leaders, our team, and our board; they are passionate, steady, and determined. And we trust our community of participants to make decisions that are appropriate for them in the context of an unprecedented year.

In 2022, GivingTuesday will be ten years old. Looking forward to that milestone, and reflecting on the unexpected events of 2020, we know that we can’t fully anticipate what lies ahead. But GivingTuesday

brings the expertise, ingenuity and values that will propel continued growth in giving to nonprofits, broad mobilization of people across the world to help and heal, and real societal change through support of emerging leaders. We have made tremendous progress this year, but there is much more opportunity to leverage our movement — its leaders and participants — to go even further, faster together.

Together we can catalyze support for critical causes around the globe. Together we can change how people view generosity around the world, not just as an action to take on birthdays, holidays or on GivingTuesday, but as a value, and even a ritual, where every Tuesday is the day for giving back around the world...a day to ask, “What good will I do today?”

Together, we can build a society that values collective good, equity, empathy and the strength of humankind.

WE INVITE YOU TO JOIN US.

Reflections on an Unprecedented Year

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