Give to the Max Day 2018
For its 10th annual Give to the Max Day, GiveMN teamed up with the Mightycause platform to host its most successful event yet! With brand new tools for organizations, and exciting prizes every 10 minutes, Minnesota’s giving day broke its own record in raising $21 million for thousands of amazing causes on November 15th! With matching grants and prize incentives driving creative nonprofit campaigns, and generous donors making over 100,000 donations, the results speak for themselves.
“Give to the Max Day has become a Minnesota institution in the past ten years. GiveMN is honored to continue to provide this service to our state, and we take our responsibility very seriously to be stewards of this outpouring of generosity which is the biggest fundraising day each year for many nonprofits and schools. Mightycause is a trusted partner in our work together. From their incredible fundraising platform to the expertise they provide GiveMN and our partners, we are thrilled to be working with them on Minnesota’s giving holiday and year-round.“
-Jake Blumberg, Executive Director, GiveMN
About the Giving Day
GiveMN was created in 2009 with a key goal to increase generosity across the state of Minnesota. To kick off the launch of this new organization, GiveMN decided to host its first annual Give to the Max Day, a 24-hour giving day designed to engage the Minnesota community to support and give back to local organizations. In its first year, Give to the Max Day raised $14 million and sparked an important annual tradition. Each year the event has grown in exciting ways, engaging new organizations to raise funds, bringing new donors into the fold, and securing corporate and foundation partners to provide rewarding incentives to keep the giving going. During the first nine years of hosting Give to the Max Day, donors collectively gave nearly $150 million to more than 10,000 nonprofits and schools!
One of the most exciting ways that GiveMN grows giving during this event is through creative and rewarding prize incentives. In 2018, with the help of generous partners, GiveMN offered $130,000 in prizes to participating nonprofits to drive donor activity and engagement. Every single day of early giving and every 10 minutes during the giving day, participating causes had a chance to win extra prize funds through golden tickets. These golden tickets are added as a bonus to a random donation made within the time window, so every organization that received a donation, whether large or small, had a chance to win this prize. One cause selected at random even had the chance to win $10,000 for receiving a donation during Give to the Max Day! The entire 24 hours was filled with lots of giving, but the two most generous hours were 10 – 11 am and 10 – 11 pm. Not surprisingly, these hours corresponded with $10,000 in prizes up for grabs in Power Hours for the organizations that raised the most funds.
Mightycause and GiveMN Partnership
The partnership between the GiveMN and Mightycause teams was well-suited to highlight and lean on the expertise and skills that belong to each team. The GiveMN team are the fundraising experts, with local relationships to donors and nonprofits that are making an impact across Minnesota, so their focus is on engaging nonprofit partners through trainings and prize incentives and promoting the event with donors, media and partners. The Mightycause team focused on its areas of specialization, building and hosting the scalable giving day platform with user-friendly fundraising tools and providing best-in-class customer support for all users. As Blumberg puts it: “Mightycause truly manages the technology component of Give to the Max Day, from serving as a partner in meeting our goals through their tools, to working with Minnesota nonprofits, schools and donors about how to use their platform most effectively. With the Mightycause team as our trusted partner with technology, the GiveMN team was able to effectively manage Give to the Max Day marketing, donor outreach, and training of organizations across the state.”
GiveMN Role:
The GiveMN team holds a series of trainings two months before the giving day focused on the key parts of planning and delivering a fundraising campaign. While the upcoming Give to the Max Day event provides a nice catalyst to host these workshops, GiveMN uses the time to drive home that best practices for campaigns can be used year-round. Aside from these in person trainings that takes place around the state, the GiveMN team works hard to stay in constant communication with organizations, from encouraging them to sign up for the event, to onboarding them through setting up the most important aspects of their page. These GiveMN communications also focus on key ways that organizations can be most successful with Give to the Max Day campaign, showcasing prize opportunities and strategies for success like matching grants and peer-to-peer fundraising.
In addition to supporting organizations, GiveMN is focused on creating and encouraging a seamless and fun giving experience for donors. Over the years, GiveMN.org and Give to the Max Day have become outlets for donors looking to find ways to give back in their community. When asking donors why they made a Give to the Max Day gift each year, they resoundingly say they want to be a part of Minnesota’s biggest day of giving. The GiveMN team takes their job seriously as stewards of this generosity, and want to make Give to the Max a fun, exciting day focused on the value nonprofits and schools bring to their communities.
Mightycause Role:
In support of the Give to the Max Day event, the Mightycause team focused on two key areas: providing a user-friendly, scalable fundraising platform and offering direct support to nonprofits, fundraisers and donors. The Mightycause Giving Day platform is built with redundancy and scalability as core components. Built with the latest in scalable and redundant technologies from Amazon Web Services, the platform is designed to dynamically support high volume events like Give to the Max Day. During the day, the Mightycause platform seamlessly sustained peaks of more than 2,200 concurrent users and spikes of over $100,000 raised in 10 minutes while providing nonprofits, fundraisers and donors with best-in-class speed and features. Beyond platform speed and stability, this new partnership also expanded the tools available to participating organizations such as real time team fundraising and advanced matching grant management. With more dynamic organization profiles including flexible tools for promoting matching grants, and peer-to-peer and competitive team fundraising, organizations had more powerful tools at their disposal to run successful Giving Day campaigns.
Providing best-in-class customer support is one of the most important roles for Mightycause. This begins with designing user-friendly tools, and self-service administrative processes to allow more organizations to succeed without needing to ask for extra help. For those users that did need assistance, the Mightycause Help team provided fast and friendly customer support on all things related to using the platform successfully. Throughout the early giving window and the full 24 hours on Give to the Max Day, the Mightycause team responded within 4 hours (average first reply time), and completed the event without a single help ticket unanswered.