Now that Giving Thursday is behind us, here comes Giving Tuesday, the cyber-based donation platform for making to contributions to all kinds of nonprofits on a grand scale.
Giving Tuesday, also known as #GivingTuesday, is an international contribution platform founded in 2012 by New York’s 92nd Street Y together with the United Nations Foundation. In the Pioneer Valley, it is being promoted by the Community Foundation of Western Mass.’s Valley Gives effort, which was also first launched and ran its final Valley Gives Day on May 1.
With 5 percent of #GivingTuesday donations going to the Mightycause Foundation platform, the charitable effort provides a way for organizations to ramp up fundraising as the generous thinking of Thanksgiving is being digested — with publicity launched just before Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
“It’s a very important fundraising day for us,” said Jack Golden of the Franklin County Community Meals Program, one of more than 50 Franklin County-based organizations that reach out to prospective donors on the Giving Tuesday. “We really count on community support on Giving Tuesday. That’s how we feed people.”
Community Meals provides more than 100 tons of food a year through its Orange and Greenfield food pantries and serves more than 18,000 meals a year through its Greenfield, Turners Falls and Orange meal sites.
Some of the organizations, which also include well-known nonprofits like Connecticut River Conservancy, LifePath and Stone Soup Cafe, as well as lesser-known organizations like Prison Mindfulness Institute, Full Frame Initiative and Nolumbeka Project, get creative in finding ways to reach out.
Big Brothers Big Sisters of Franklin County, for example, will match its Giving Tuesday contributions, dollar for dollar, with $5,000 from an anonymous donor, and is also reaching out through The People’s Pint to anyone who goes out for drinks or dinner that evening as part of an eight-day Dine to Donate Week at area restaurants where a share of their proceeds go to the organization.
“It’s incredibly important for an organization like us,” says Ericka Almeida, development director for the 51-year-old organization, which brought in $10,000 last year from Giving Tuesday to help serve its 165 participating young clients. “For a small agency like ours, that’s important.”
With a theme of “Giving Back,” Musica Franklin is promoting the notion of people making music videos to share with one another through the organization’s Facebook page — where six of its music instructors have made a video playing, “You Are My Sunshine.”
“For us, it’s a chance for people to hear our faculty,” said Vicki Citron, founding executive director of the organization, which provides free musical instruction to children. “And we’re encouraging people to donate, but also to make videos of themselves making music. We’re hoping people of all ages and abilities will make music of different kinds, because music is for everyone. And it’s fun to be making it with friends.”
Giving Tuesday, which also helps raise funding for a host of other organizations that serve area residents, does more than simply raise money, says Samantha Wood, new executive director of Artspace.
“It’s really about how to amplify community support,” she says, whether through the Facebook and PayPal matches for contributions made through those platforms, or simply by making more people aware of the kinds of offerings provided by the organization in art music instruction to people children who could otherwise not afford it.
Donations can be made through websites and social media of the various organizations, which are also listed on the www.givingtuesday.org web page.