It’s a simple idea. Find a way for your family, your community, your company or your organization to join in acts of giving. Tell everyone you can about what you are doing and why it matters. Join a national celebration of our great tradition of generosity.
And together we’ll create ways to give more, give better, and give smarter.
Last year, Henry Timms, #GivingTuesday’s deputy executive director, began considering how to harness the brand power behind Black Friday to benefit philanthropy.
“Everybody talks about the giving season… We thought it would be great to give the giving season an opening day,” said Timms in an interview with the Washington Post.
According to the creators of #GivingTuesday, New York’s 92nd Street Y, a world-class nonprofit community and cultural center that connects people at every stage of life to the worlds of education, the arts, health and wellness, and Jewish life, has been the catalyst for #GivingTuesday, “bringing the expertise of 139 years of community-management to the project, and providing #GivingTuesday a home” since last year.
As the United Nations Foundation and an influential team of donors, endorsers, and media personnel joined as partners and contributers, the concept of #GivingTuesday continued to improve and grow.
Thanks to the internet and commitment of talented media leaders and tech-savvy endorsers including Patty Huber, Head of Groupon Grassroots, Libby Leffler, Strategic Partner Manager of Facebook, Sharon Feder, COO of Mashable, and Kathy Calvin, CEO of the UN Foundation, what started out as a simple idea to give back to families and communities in need during the holiday season has transformed into a much larger, social, giving phenomenon.
Mission Statement: #GivingTuesday™ is a campaign to create a national day of giving at the start of the annual holiday season. It celebrates and encourages charitable activities that support nonprofit organizations.
On Tuesday, November 27, 2012, more than 2,000 charities, families, businesses, and individuals across the country came together to hold volunteer, social media and cyber-giving drives in honor of what organizers hope will become a “national day of giving” to encourage Americans to donate to their favorite causes during the holidays.
However, much like Black Friday and Cyber Monday, #GivingTuesday is not, unto itself, a formal organization, according to the Washington Post. “Just as it is up to retailers to leverage the Monday and Friday umbrellas,” writes Emi Kolawole. “Leveraging #GivingTuesday would be up to individual organizations.”
Source: givingtuesday.tumblr.com
With a goal to transform the way people think about, talk about, and participate in the giving season, #GivingTuesday was successful in sending around the buzz via social media. By midmorning on the Tuesday after Thanksgiving, #GivingTuesday was a trending topic on Twitter.
“I think it will be interesting to see if this national movement does lead to more giving, more volunteering and more advocacy,” said Una Osili, the director of research at the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University, which puts out the Giving USA report, in an interview with the Washington Post. “I think it’s too early to say.”
Despite great progress with the potential to give millions of dollars to charities across the country and the power to utilize social media for good causes, it is still up in the air whether #GivingTuesday will sustain in years to come. Can #GivingTuesday do for charities what Black Friday does for retailers?
Cyber Monday Magazine 
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