The holiday season is quickly approaching, which also is a perfect time to try something new with our Give & Grow app.
Believe it or not, the holiday season is quickly approaching, which makes it a perfect time to celebrate the giving season by supporting nonprofits with our Give & Grow app!
Why is giving during the holiday season important?
- 81% of consumers believe companies should give back during the holidays (BigCommerce)
- Online and other non-store sales grew nearly 24% last holiday season to reach $209 billion (NRF)
- 82.5% of consumers plan on shopping online as much or more during the 2021 holiday season compared to last year (Qubit)
What all this means is you can expect a ton of new traffic over the next 4-6 weeks, the majority of which think it’s important for businesses to give back, presenting the perfect opportunity to make a great first impression and ensuring they’ll be loyal customers from here on out.
Ways to Fundraise with Give & Grow
With Give & Grow, the possibilities to give back are endless. Check out are a few of your fellow Give & Grow merchants favorite features are about the app:
- Customer donations: Round-up for charity and/or add $1 at checkout. Allow your customers to round-up their purchases to the nearest dollar or add $1 to their order (or more!) to support charitable causes.
- Merchant donations: Give % or fixed amount per product or transaction. Integrate giving directly into your product sales. Highlight specific products by associating them with causes or nonprofits.
- Choice and Flexibility of Nonprofits: By being able to select up to 12 nonprofits, you offer customers a choice on where their donations go, or can distribute donations equally to your chosen causes.
- Display your impact in real-time: Display total dollars donated or the equivalent of those donations - we’re the only donation app that demonstrates real-time impact.
- Zero Hassle: Give & Grow instantly generates a detailed report of each donation, and easily downloadable tax receipts. We handle all the back-end donation processing.
Make Your Donations Go Further
Promoting how you’ll be using the Give & Grow app is a necessary step to making the most out of your holiday season giving campaign. Without that, there’s a chance that many of your core audience members won’t even know you offer it until they finally reach the checkout button.
Below are a few ways to best reach them to get some ideas going →
Social Media
- Consider this an instant megaphone to tell your impact story!
- Can connect to your holiday campaign or as one-off posts
- Share not only how to give back, but why you give back, what impact these donations will have on your community, who it will go to, and where it goes!
- Keep your audience updated - If you have a goal, share how close you are to reaching it and motivate them to do more!
- Give them an action within each post caption, whether to share with a friend, make a donation, or something else.
Not sure where to get started? Here’s a template with a few post ideas like we discussed above. Feel free to update the colors, text, etcetera.
- Similar to social, this is a great way to keep a highly dedicated audience in the know.
- Add to your existing email content or send a dedicated email to share the story of your impact strategy
- Again, similarly to social - share why you give back, what impact it’ll have, who it will go and where it goes. The more context you can add, the better!
- Don’t forget to create an action at the end of the email or section:
- Shop Now → Encourage others to purchase an item if you as the retailer are donating
- Donate Now → Allow donations at checkout
- Buy [Item] → If you are offering a donation from a particular item
- Learn More → Take them to a dedicated online page that shares more about the organization you are giving back to
Website Promotion
- Sharing information about your fundraising on your website helps an already qualified audience move further towards an action
- Update frequently as you move through your campaign or towards your goal
- Promote across your site → Top of page banners, homepage section, pop-up messages, checkout page
Sweepstakes
- The perfect way to engage your audience that may not be as familiar with your fundraising work or want them to engage on a higher level
- Provide the ability for someone to win a prize (an item or selection of items from your storefront) if they do a certain thing (purchase X item, donate at checkout, purchase anything from your store) within a specific timeframe (from Giving Tuesday to Christmas Day, the end of the month, December 31, 2021, etc.)
- Use our detailed Give & Grow tracking to measure and select a winner within minutes!
Double the Impact → Match Customer Donations
- A great method to encourage donations is by matching all donations, for either a specific time frame (“until December 24, 2021”) or monetary amount (“Up to $5,000”)
- Sends the message to your audience that it is a “team effort” and extends your impact that much further
Case Study: NeuroGum
- NeuroGum partnered with St. Jude in a month-long holiday campaign for the Lunar New Year where they donated 5% of product cost and offered customers to round-up at checkout.
- After raising approximately $500 in the first few weeks, they extended the donation-offering and were able to raise over $20,000 for St. Jude within six months.
- Given the success of this campaign, NeuroGum has gone on to create new charity campaigns during their checkout experience.
Other Ways to Fundraise
- Evite - If you are hosting a smaller event, this is a great way to connect donations to the event, regardless of whether they are the same as those you fundraise for through your Shopify page. Simply create an event and add the ability to fundraise in lieu of gifts during setup.
- PledgeCam - Turn any live stream into a fundraiser instantly, with your video overlay showing how to fundraise, a live donor feed, and total donations so far.
- “Donations by Pledge” Zoom App - Similar to PledgeCam, our new app for Zoom allows you to fundraise directly through the app, from creation to your final donation. Both PledgeCam and our Zoom App provide the perfect opportunity to share with your audience more about the organization on a deeper, more engaged level.
- Text-to-Donate - Perfect for those that are on the go, this mobile friendly solution allows your audience to donate through a customized keyword to an easy to remember number (707070). It also allows you to donate via Apple Pay, Google Pay or credit card making the donation process that much simpler.
Thank you to all for your commitment to a better world and your #PledgeToDoGood! We wish you a wonderful and successful holiday season and one filled with moments of impact.
Have questions? Head to our Support page for more information and to reach out to our support team for additional hands on help.
If you’re new to Give & Grow, head here to install the app to your Shopify page and get started making a change today!