Post-mortem: our GivingTuesday campaign, numbers and what I would change

Events, Campaigns & Earned Income
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Small org, 4 people. Sharing the numbers because everyone posts the wins and nobody posts the middling result.

Goal ₹3,00,000. Raised ₹1,74,000 from 96 donors. Costs: ₹0 in ads, about 60 staff hours across three weeks.

What worked: we asked 40 people personally before we announced anything, and 31 gave. That was ₹1,10,000 of the total from 31 people. The public campaign brought 65 donors and ₹64,000.

What did not: the WhatsApp forwards did nothing measurable. The Instagram push brought 3 donations. Three.

What I would change: I would spend the entire three weeks on the personal asks and skip the public campaign, which cost most of the effort and produced a third of the money. The public part felt like fundraising. The private part actually was.

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The 31-of-40 conversion on personal asks is the whole lesson and it is in every post-mortem I have ever read, including my own. We keep relearning it because the public campaign feels safer than picking up the phone.

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Three donations from Instagram is not a failure of Instagram, it is a reminder of what Instagram is for. It builds the familiarity that makes the personal ask land six months later. Judging it on same-day conversion will always disappoint you.

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thank you for posting a middling result. this forum would be more useful if more people did

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