Natasha Marshall, Feedback Labs | April 25, 2024
GivingTuesday is a global movement that champions radical generosity, envisioning a world where shared humanity and generosity are foundational. With a mission to foster generosity across all cultures and contexts, GivingTuesday inspires year-round acts of giving, celebrating every contribution, whether monetary, material, or through volunteering and advocacy. A core component of the organization is the GivingTuesday Data Commons, a research collaboration between 100+ giving platforms and researchers and 50+ global data labs focused on uncovering new trends and insights on giving and generosity. They explore giving behaviors and patterns, movement growth, and altruistic behavior in order to identify and share the best practices that help drive increased generosity at a global scale.
GivingTuesday has been systematically tracking individual philanthropy since 2022 with a new free product, called GivingPulse. They provide quarterly reports and an interactive dashboard that showcases evolving trends, based on a weekly national (US) generosity survey. To ensure the product’s usefulness and relevance, they are seeking feedback, to customize for various audiences. Your insights and curiosity could help them fill in the gaps about the “who” and the “what – Who needs this knowledge? (possible audiences include nonprofit fundraisers, project managers, foundations, donation platforms, CSR professionals, reporters, or the public at large). What trends about individual behavior would be most helpful?
Identifying an Audience
GivingTuesday asked members of the LabStorm discussion for ideas on how to identify the audience(s) for this data product. Many members of the discussion suggested different methods of taking surveys to see who primary audience members may be. Creating psychographic profiles, analyzing the right questions to ask in surveys and looking into smaller spikes of giving and identifying those people were also ideas brought up as possible solutions.
Making Data Understandable & Helping Consumers Hone It
GivingTuesday also asked two more questions during this LabStorm: how can they make the data they gather easier to understand, and how can they help information consumers hone these data and insights? Most discussion members saw threads between these two questions, answering them together. There was a diverse range of solutions suggested for these questions, such as creating user groups for raw data, creating a mailing list to keep people who are interested in touch with the organization, doing webinars & trainings for organization staff and audience members, partnering with organizations that specialize in this kind of communication and creating a dashboard as a landing page for data and information on the organization.
GivingTuesday had two main key takeaways from this LabStorm discussion. These included that it would be beneficial to reach out to partners in order to achieve their goals of identifying their audience and making their data usable and understandable. The other key takeaway was that the organization should try working with other individuals or organizations that already have an idea of how to identify and understand the end user for their data rather than trying to generate this information on their own. Overall, this LabStorm yielded potential solutions for GivingTuesday’s questions that are heavily focused on collaboration and communication.
Learn More About LabStorms
LabStorms are collaborative problem-solving sessions designed to help organizations tackle feedback-related challenges or share what’s working well in their practice.
Presenters leave the experience with honest, actionable feedback and suggestions to improve their feedback processes and tools.
To learn more about participating in a virtual LabStorm, please visit feedbacklabs.org/labstorms.
