8 Ideas to Engage Employees in Your Giving Tuesday Campaign with Bright Funds

Employees may choose to give back this Giving Tuesday, but how are you amplifying their efforts to make an even greater impact? Here are 8 ways Bright Funds makes employee giving and volunteering easier and more impactful on Giving Tuesday – and help you build a company culture of connected employees!

1. Build a Customizable Giving Tuesday Campaign

Communication is key for engaging your employees in your campaign. A customized campaign is way to encourage participation across your organization.  Use the platform’s campaign feature to establish goals, incentivize giving with special employer matching limits, and keep track of all participation opportunities in one convenient online portal.

If you don't know where to start, here are 11 tips to build an engaging Giving Tuesday campaign from the ground up.

2. Make it Easy for Employees to Donate with Multiple Donation Methods

There is no-one-size fits all when it comes to employee donations. Bright Funds offers a variety of ways to donate, such as:

• Payroll deductions
• Credit cards
• Bank drafts
• PayPal, etc.,

Making it easier for your employees to give back to charities and organizations they care about can increase the frequency of giving.

You can also make it part of the benefits package in combination with the next strategy.

3. Match Employee Donations

Matching gifts are a great way for organizations to amplify employee contributions. More than 8 in 10 employees say they are more likely to donate if a match is offered and 1 in 3 say they would give more if matching is applied.

Not only does it encourage employees to participate, but by offering to match gifts, you send a message that the company cares about what employees care about.

Use your Giving Tuesday campaign as an opportunity to remind employees that you have a matching gift program, explain how it works and where to go to get started.

To further boost participation, provide a special matching incentive for employees for Giving Tuesday. If you already match, offer a higher match such as double or triple the regular match. If you don’t have matching, provide it for a limited time during your Giving Tuesday campaign.

However, if you're only matching during the holidays, make sure to add a 2x or 3x rate to the matching. This will ensure that your contributions are perceived as meaningful and genuine.

Giving Tuesday Toolkit

Interested in a comprehensive guide to Giving Tuesday? Our toolkit includes ideas, resources, and templates to help you engage your employees in your campaign.

Download the toolkit ➔

4. Create Flexible Volunteering Opportunities

Employee volunteering is an important part of your philanthropy program, and many people would rather volunteer than contribute financially. Providing employees with robust volunteering options gives them the flexibility to give back in the way they want for Giving Tuesday.

To increase participation, give employees paid time off (or volunteer time off) for service activities and be flexible on what counts as volunteering.

Creating a volunteer event or collection of volunteer events on Bright Funds for your employees is easy! For example, if you are doing a service week across all office locations, create a “Week of Service” collection to group volunteer events offered during this week. You can also create “company- sponsored” events featuring service opportunities with your nonprofit partners.

Additional volunteering tools are available to help organize events, encourage hour tracking and empower employees to organize their own volunteering events. If you are working with charity partners, encourage them to post Giving Tuesday opportunities and events as well.

Remote employees may prefer to participate in virtual volunteering opportunities or, in some cases, local opportunities that are socially distant. Make sure they know how to find virtual volunteering opportunities by checking the box “can be done remotely” when searching. Check out our Virtual Volunteering Toolkit for a Hybrid Workforce for more ideas and resources to engage your remote workforce.

5. Give Credit Grants to Employees

Credit grants are donation funds granted to employees that can be directed to the nonprofit(s) of their choice. They’re a great way to grow program participation and impact! Credit grants can be used as part of automated programs or as one-time gifts. Here are some ideas on how to use them, and any of these can be tied to your Giving Tuesday campaign:

• Give credit grants to all new hires at the time of onboarding.
• Send credit grants to all employees who have reached a work anniversary.
• Run a competition and provide credit grants as prizes.
• Plan a charitable goods drive (food, toys, books, etc.) and award participants.
• Enter all employees who have participated in the program this year into a raffle and issue credit grants to the winners! You could also limit the raffle to specific participation rates such as employees who have donated at least $100 or volunteered for 10 hours.
• Issue credit grants to employees who have not participated in the program this year – this is a good way to get them onto the platform.
• Issue special Giving Tuesday credit grants to all employees. This will help get the word out and boost engagement at the same time!
• Give a credit grant to employees who log their volunteer hours by the end of the year.
• Celebrate employees who are program champions with a credit grant award.
• Create physical Bright Funds gift cards for credit grants that can be sent to employees.

6. Reward Volunteer Hours

Volunteer hour matching, or “Dollars for Doers,” is a great way to encourage employees to volunteer for Giving Tuesday and thank them for investing their time. It provides financial donations to nonprofits based on the number of volunteer hours performed by employees.

For example, if an employee volunteers for 10 hours at the local animal shelter and the Dollars for Doers rate is $10/hour, the employee would receive $100 to donate to a nonprofit of his/her choice.

Use your Giving Tuesday campaign as an opportunity to remind employees that you have a Dollars for Doers program, explain how it works and where to go to get started. Consider offering a higher match for Giving Tuesday, or, if you don’t yet have a program, you could use the opportunity to launch your program permanently or just for the holiday.

7. Feature a Fund

Create a Fund to highlight your nonprofit partners or use the Bright Funds Giving Tuesday Fund in your campaign. A Fund is like a mutual fund for charitable giving, and it’s a simple way to highlight your nonprofit partners and the causes that matter most.

It can contain one or several nonprofits, and any donations to a Fund are split evenly among the nonprofits. You can use Funds to support specific fundraising initiatives tied to Giving Tuesday or for causes that you want to support on an ongoing basis.

To make it more personal for your employees, run a survey to find the charities they are more invested in and make them part of your fund. Knowing their workplace is helping a cause they care about will create a connection to the company's mission.

8. Encourage Employees to Send Bright Gifts to Each Other

Bright Gifts is a feature that allows employees to give each other credits that can be redeemed with the nonprofit of their choice. If you have the feature enabled, encourage employees to send Bright Gifts to their colleagues during your Giving Tuesday campaign to express thanks and appreciation.

Remember, participating in Giving Tuesday is just one step. To build a connected workforce that attracts and retains top talent, you must create a year-round social impact plan.

For more ideas and resources to engage your employees in the radical generosity movement, download our Giving Tuesday Toolkit.

Happy giving!