Giving Tuesday Is December 1. Your 43-Day Campaign Plan Starts Today

Giving Tuesday 2026 falls on Tuesday, December 1, the Tuesday after Thanksgiving. If you are reading this on Monday, October 19, you have 43 days.

That is enough time to run a strong campaign. It is enough time to decide what the campaign is and to build it, as long as the deciding happens first. This week is for decisions. The building starts next week.

What Giving Tuesday 2025 Looked Like

GivingTuesday published its 2025 results for the United States. Giving reached $4.0 billion, up 13%, and participation reached 38.1 million people, up 6%. Of those participants, 19.1 million gave money and 11.1 million volunteered.

Those numbers describe a day when a very large audience is already thinking about generosity. Your campaign can build on interest that already exists. Make it easy to find and easy to say yes to.

Giving Tuesday Campaign Planning: 4 Decisions to Make This Week

1. A goal expressed in dollars and in the number of gifts it takes to reach them.
2. One big ask that every message points to.
3. A calendar that runs from the weeks before December 1 to the weeks after, with an owner on every task.
4. A core message your whole team can repeat in the same words.

Every email, post, text, and announcement you create between now and December 1 depends on these 4 decisions. Teams that make them in October build fast in November.

What Each Decision Protects

The goal tells your team what finished looks like. The one big ask gives your audience a single action to take. The calendar keeps the work from piling up in the final 10 days. The core message keeps your voice consistent across every channel.

None of these decisions require a large budget or a large staff. They require a few focused hours and a person willing to write the answers down.

Why Big Click Syndicate Is Releasing a Suite of Workshops

We are releasing an entire suite of workshops because we believe more nonprofits' missions should be funded. There are so many good causes. Funding limitations throttle their impact. Giving Tuesday is an opportunity to give some new life to a cause-driven team's work.

The first workshop in the suite is a video course built around the 4 decisions above. It has 4 modules and 12 lessons, and you finish with a clear goal, a working calendar, one big ask, and a core message ready to build every asset from.

Your next step: build your Giving Tuesday campaign plan in the Campaign Blueprint course. Over the next 4 days I will walk through each decision here on the blog, so you can start on your own and use the course to finish faster.