Our mission at GiveSignup | RunSignup is to build great technology that helps our nonprofit and endurance customers engage and activate supporters to raise money and grow communities. In addition to helping your organization with fundraising events, GiveSignup also helps nonprofits grow and streamline year-round giving with a suite of donation and standalone fundraising features.
Giving Tuesday is November 30, 2021 and our team is focused on delivering features that will help our customers raise more on Giving Tuesday and beyond. Over the next several weeks, you will see many new features roll out as well as the beginning of our Giving Tuesday promotion on September 15.
This blog walks through our Giving Tuesday products and our new feature roadmap for Giving Tuesday. While we are targeting Giving Tuesday to ship these new features, many of them will benefit all of our customers regardless of which products they use – including a next-generation Email Marketing platform that will soon be available to everyone.
Product Overview
New and Free Email Marketing
Single Sign On
Embed Donation Forms on WordPress or Any Website
Website Builder
Fundraising Milestones and Badges
E-cards
Product Overview
GiveSignup | RunSignup has free and flexible ways that nonprofits can raise money this Giving Tuesday. All options let you feature your nonprofit’s brand and mission and never GiveSignup’s brand, making this the perfect (and free) upgrade for nonprofits currently using PayPal branded donations. Choose one or multiple ways to engage your supporters.
Donation Forms: Donation forms are the most popular option for Giving Tuesday with a modern and simple design that’s easy to get up and running in less than 10 minutes. When promoting your Giving Tuesday campaign via email and social media, directing donors to a simple form that is solely focused on the donation (without additional content, menu items, pop-ups, etc.) keeps the focus on the Call to Action – donating to your nonprofit.
Donation Websites: If your nonprofit wants to feature more content – like video, data, and text – for your Giving Tuesday campaign, you can create a donation website. GiveSignup’s free donation websites look professional yet are simple to manage and update. Bring your own domain or subdomain for free!
Campaigns: If you are looking to empower supporters to create Giving Tuesday fundraisers, you can create a Giving Tuesday fundraising campaign for free with GiveSignup. Use our new and free email marketing to encourage supporters to create a fundraiser for Giving Tuesday. You’ll get all of your fundraisers’ data while allowing them to seamlessly create a connected Facebook Fundraiser to raise money across both platforms – all for free!
Fundraising Events: Some nonprofits may want to elevate their Giving Tuesday donation ask with an event. For example, we’ve seen nonprofits sell tickets to successful zoom fundraisers where they showcase their nonprofit, beneficiaries, and plans for the coming year with an ask to donate at the end. Or host a virtual 5k, exercise challenge, in-person event – with GiveSignup’s free in-person, hybrid, and virtual event technology your nonprofit has options for creative Giving Tuesday fundraising events that complement your ask for donations and highlight your brand and mission.
New and Free Email Marketing
One of the most exciting projects we’ve been working on is a next-generation email marketing platform – and yes, it will be everywhere soon! You will first see our new email marketing platform in Donation Forms, Donation Websites, and Ticket Events. We will then add to Races. A longer blog post with more details about our new Email Marketing platform lays out a detailed plan with the phases of this project.
Nonprofits will be able to leverage GiveSignup’s free Email Marketing to promote their Giving Tuesday campaigns for free and ensure that their donation appeals reach as many contacts as possible. Here is a list of basic functionality that we plan to release on or around September 15 for Donation Forms and Websites.
- Schedule and send emails
- Upload custom contact lists with custom placeholders to send dynamic emails
- Customize templates
- View aggregate reporting
Email Marketing will evolve quickly to offer even more features and capabilities to our customers. After the initial release, we will be adding template libraries with beautifully and professionally designed email templates that nonprofits can choose from (i.e. Giving Tuesday, Thank You Wednesday). We will also add some default text to these templates so that our customers can leverage best practices and save time. After selecting a template, nonprofits can customize by editing, adding, and deleting components. This is an early mockup of what this may look like – you will notice it shares a lot of similarities to the new website builder!
After releasing Templates, we plan to add next-generation Email Marketing to registration. From there we have many planned projects to make GiveSignup | RunSignup’s Email Marketing a better (and free) alternative to customers still paying for Mailchimp and Constant Contact. Our development roadmap for Email Marketing has some exciting plans:
- Email contacts from any report in GiveSignup | RunSignup
- Analytics on a per recipient basis
- Automated Emails
- Drip campaigns that allow you to create custom journey based on actions (i.e. clicked a link, made a donation, etc.)
- Improve and automate the Race Website Email pop-up
- Integration with Supporter Contacts so that you can email across all of your contacts on GiveSignup | RunSignup and create dynamic targeted lists
- Add to Partner Dashboard
- User Sending (i.e. next-generation Fundraiser Email hub, Team Captains, etc.)
Email Marketing is one of the most powerful tools to engage your supporters and promote your fundraising events and campaigns (lke Giving Tuesday!). It also exposes the power of an all-in-one supporter platform that enables your organization to intelligently and effectively engage across all activation points and supporters.
Single Sign On
A barrier to onboarding existing RunSignup customers to GiveSignup is the need to login to GiveSignup using your RunSignup login credentials.
We’ve solved this problem by implementing Single Sign On (SSO). This will allow a customer on RunSignup to stay logged in when going to a GiveSignup URL. On September 15, we plan to launch a pop-up on Race Dashboards to promote Giving Tuesday options with a Get Started Free option that will take you to a new page to create your Donation Form, Website, or Campaign. When you choose an option, you will automatically be logged into GiveSignup without having to re enter your user name or password. (Note that this only applies to those who log into either platform after the release of SSO).
Embed Donation Forms on WordPress or Any Website
We posted back in 2019 and 2020 that modern browsers like Safari and Chrome no longer supported session tracking. As a result, we deprecated our widgets that customers previously used to embed registration and other components into their own websites. We simultaneously made significant investments in free websites – including cover pages and free domain/subdomain hosting. More recently, we’ve released a first version of our new Website Builder, making it simple to add and manage content to your website (more about that below).
We also recognize that some nonprofits that have invested in their own website may not be ready to make the switch to GiveSignup | RunSignup’s free websites. Our new embeddable donation form code is a safe and secure way to host a GiveSignup donation form on your website because it is sessionless (i.e. it does not store cookies). Your nonprofit can use all of the great GiveSignup donation form features like flexible recurring giving options, E-cards, attribution, custom donation levels, branded receipts, and more!
In addition to adding a short HTML code that you can copy and paste into any website, we’ve added a specific shortcode for WordPress, and GiveSignup will be accessible as a widget from WordPress.
Website Builder
Design and build your own high-quality donation websites in minutes. Include images, video, playlists, call-to-action buttons and formatted text on your Donation Website — no coding skills needed. Our initial release makes it simple and easy to host additional Giving Tuesday content. You can learn more about the current functionality here.
The next phase that will be released in the coming weeks is pages and menus. We’ll also have a new component that lets you feature a photo slideshow.
We will continue to invest in making more improvements and feature additions to our free websites – stay tuned for more exciting announcements!
Fundraising Milestones and Badges
We are adding milestones and badges to GiveSignup’s standalone Fundraising Campaigns so that nonprofits can gamify their Giving Tuesday campaigns. The new milestones and badges use the new interface from Virtual Challenges.
Our next major project is to update milestones and badges in registration fundraising. We will also add additional milestone types in addition to Amount Raised, like Number of Donors, Facebook Fundraiser connected, Team Captain, etc.
E-cards
We’ve had E-cards for a while, and have continued to add more features. E-cards are an easy and great way to enhance the donor experience. Donors often make tribute donations on behalf of or in memory of friends and family. Donors can now choose a card from your nonprofit’s custom designs, add a personalized message, and schedule when the card is sent to their friend or family member. Making a donation as a gift is easy with E-cards, and can encourage your supporters to donate on Giving Tuesday as a way to give a meaningful gift to their friends and family.
GiveSignup | RunSignup has free and flexible Giving Tuesday campaign options to help your nonprofit raise money this year. From donation forms to Giving Tuesday websites to fundraising campaigns integrated with Facebook Fundraising, we are ready to help your nonprofit raise more, save time, and save money this Giving Tuesday.
