Giving Tuesday
Am I late?
I didn’t want to be a Giving Tuesday party pooper so I waited to post this until after giving season. I hope all my non-profit friends got lots of donations this year! But I did write this on actual Giving Tuesday. Am I a spoilsport? Maybe.
Because I run a non-profit, I feel like I ought to make a pitch for us every year around this time. It feels like an exercise in futility but a lot of things feel that way, so maybe I should do it anyway? I didn’t do it this year but maybe I should have?
My dominant experience of Giving Tuesday is deleting large swaths of emails, from every organization I have ever come near, asking for money. I don’t have any money, so I don’t even look at them, never open them – just select, batch, delete. I suspect this is what most people do, even those with money to spend or donate.
I remember when Giving Tuesday kicked off however many years ago. It was a response to Black Friday and Cyber Monday. It was pitched as a sober act of charity after such intoxicated conspicuous consumption from Thanksgiving and the shopping after it. In those first years, most emails about it had to explain what it was. “It’s Giving Tuesday!” they’d announce and then explain how people could redeem themselves of their greed by donating to non-profits.
I also remember how every non-profit and arts organization instantly seized on this as a useful tool. Oh, hurrah, an official day we can and should ask for donations! It was a very useful container for a thing we all had to do anyway. Having an official day gave non-profits a kind of permission that’s generally a real hassle. But all in all, Giving Tuesday to me, seems more like Asking Tuesday. We Hope You Give Tuesday. We’re Hoping to Receive Tuesday.
The focus is not on those who give but on the many many non-profits who hope to receive.
And I don’t know, maybe there are corners of the giving constellation where givers are sitting at their computers just hoping someone will ask them for some of their money. Maybe some philanthropist hits GIVE on every email they receive and goes on an incredible donating spree. But even if such people exist, they are very rare. My company got a donation on Giving Tuesday once. That was very nice – but I feel fairly confident that the date had very little to do with it.
For the most part, it feels like a structure that Boards are really into. Like, it’s an easy agenda item: “What are we doing for Giving Tuesday?” And aside from those places that set up a matching scheme, pretty much what everyone’s doing is sending emails. Works great. Good system we have here for funding the arts and charities that take care of essential services and vulnerable populations. Definitely let’s keep this haphazard email flood going!
Anyway – I do wonder if there were an actually useful way to have the givers be the center of some holiday like this. Like, they get an extra tax break if they donate to X number of non-profits on Giving Tuesday? It’s not going to happen with this current government, that I can be sure of. But maybe in a more hopeful future? What would actually encourage people to spread their wealth around? Because I’m pretty sure drowning them in emails is not it.
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