Shopping Influence & Giving Tuesday

It’s been interesting to watch retailers (and the media) wake up to the nation’s purchasing habits – and “name” them, “institutionalize” them, and further promote these habits.  I’m speaking, of course of “Black Friday” and “Cyber Monday.”  It wasn’t long ago that the day or weekend after Thanksgiving marked the beginning of the holiday buying season... yet the “official” nature of these spending days has now been set in stone, so to speak, through the phrases and the sales.

What’s more intriguing today is to see how others are trying to bend the rules a bit – not picking up on consumer habits and “naming” them but rather using the technique to try to create behavior itself.  To “influence” how consumers spend their money… and the best example so far has been “Giving Tuesday” – the day after Cyber Monday.  Nonprofits now are doing their best to continue the tradition of “year-end giving” by naming a day – and hopefully creating the behavior.  

It’s not that far-fetched an idea, in this case.  As a general rule, people do tend to give more to nonprofits during the holidays – perhaps because of the concept of “giving” to those in need during the holiday season, perhaps because of the year-end tax deductions.  Who knows?  However, nonprofits have had a longstanding tradition of pushing donations in the 4^th Quarter and some generate the majority of their revenue stream at this time.

So how to influence giving?  GivingTuesday.org is the brainchild of the 92^nd Street Y – and they’ve created the website as well as the Twitter hashtag #GivingTuesday.  And the idea seems to have taken off… thanks (perhaps?) to the 92^nd Street Y’s partnership with organizations such as Microsoft, the United Way, JPMorgan Chase, and the Huffington Post, among others. 

According to Crains New York, approximately 1,500 organizations across the U.S. are promoting the idea. And the media have picked it up, with stories from Atlanta to Oregon (picked up from the AP Newswire) to NPR. 

It’s nice to see that a new effort from nonprofits to generate donations has gained some traction among a number of factions – from donors to the media.  Now let’s see if this “influence” idea works – and if consumers will “follow the name.”