I have four kids, and I'll tell you the thing I don't miss: the school fundraisers. There was always another fundraiser coming. I've been the human on the receiving end of a lot of asks, and that's the seat I want you to plan from this year.
Here's the short answer. Giving Tuesday 2026 is Tuesday, December 1. The Giving Tuesday ideas that hold up treat the day as the launch of your year-end giving campaign, not a one-day event: a match lined up in advance, progress updates through the day, a monthly giving ask, a fast thank-you, and a plan for every donor through December 31 and into January. If you already pay for HubSpot, you can run nearly all of it from one portal, and the build is below.
Is Giving Tuesday Still Worth It?
Fundraisers argue about this. In one r/nonprofit thread, some call the day a source of donor fatigue and oversaturation, while others answer that some donors need the ask and that it's a chance to reach donors before the year-end appeal.
The national numbers keep climbing. GivingTuesday reports $4.0 billion donated in the US in 2025, up 13%, from 38.1 million participants, up 6%.
The picture for a single organization is thinner. M+R Benchmarks 2026 found Giving Tuesday revenue up only 2% for its participants in 2025, and email revenue on the day down 8%. Both things are true: the day grows nationally, and email alone isn't carrying it.
Woodrow Rosenbaum, GivingTuesday's chief data officer, put the real risk this way in The NonProfit Times (November 25, 2024): "Giving fatigue is a myth. It does not exist. People are not tired of giving. That doesn't mean people don't get tired of the same old message over and over again from a nonprofit."
And Giving Tuesday is only the front of the season. M+R found that nonprofits received 37% of 2025 online revenue in December, 10% in the last week of the year and 4% on December 31 alone. Across all channels, the Blackbaud Institute (research from Blackbaud, a fundraising software company) reports that more than 36% of 2025 charitable revenue came in Q4, with December alone roughly 18%.
My take: Giving Tuesday is the front door of your year-end campaign. Plan the day and the weeks after it as one campaign, one story and one set of donor segments.
Giving Tuesday Ideas That Carry You to December 31
- Launch your year-end appeal right after Thanksgiving. Practitioners on r/nonprofit describe timing the holiday appeal just after Thanksgiving so it can be promoted with a Giving Tuesday push. Thanksgiving falls on November 26 this year.
- Line up a match before the day. One nonprofit sharing its annual appeal plan raises a board match to encourage more giving on Giving Tuesday itself.
- Post progress all day. Older r/nonprofit advice: post three or four times on Facebook, more if it's working, and share goal updates as the day goes on.
- Ask for a monthly gift, not only a one-time gift. Monthly giving was 27% of online revenue in 2025, per M+R. Neon One, a fundraising software company, reports from its own customer data that 80.33% of donors who started a recurring gift on Giving Tuesday gave again before year end.
- Say thank you fast and short. Bloomerang, a donor database company, advises thanking donors within 24 to 48 hours. One practitioner's thank-you habit is an annual video from the team: "Short and sweet."
- Don't go quiet on Wednesday. Neon One's data shows 47.71% of its Giving Tuesday 2024 donors gave again before December 31. Bloomerang's year-end guide recommends communicating at least every two weeks until mid-December, more often in the last two weeks, and daily digital communication in the last four days of the year.
- Change the message, not just the send date. Soraya Alexander, in the same NonProfit Times piece, worried that after a big Giving Tuesday push supporters will feel "I just gave this month." Give your Giving Tuesday donors their own segment, so the next email they get from you is impact and thanks, not the same ask again.
- Use more than email. With Giving Tuesday email revenue down 8% in M+R's data, mail, social and text matter. Bloomerang's year-end guide calls direct mail "the most popular year-end giving marketing method."
- Write January into the plan now. The Fundraising Effectiveness Project found that 18.9% of 2024 first-time donors gave again in 2025. Every new donor Giving Tuesday brings you starts there.
- Call your top donors yourself. Blackbaud reports that giving to small nonprofits fell about 6.4% in 2025 while large ones grew about 11.7%, and that small organizations' lower-level giving "tapered off at year end" (Blackbaud). For a small shop, that argues for personal asks to your top donors alongside the mass appeal.
Your End-of-Year Appeal Letter: Three Rules
Bloomerang's appeal tips come down to three moves: one call to action, asked for at least three times; an informal salutation; and one signer (Bloomerang).
How to Run Giving Tuesday and Your Year-End Giving Campaign in HubSpot
Here's what I believe about the tools. I still believe in one platform. But HubSpot isn't a donor database. While it can take one-time and recurring gifts, it doesn't do giving statements, fund designations or in-person giving. You can do a good amount around those gaps, though: every gift lands on the giver's contact record, cash and checks go in as manual payment records or a bulk import on all plans (no batch entry or envelope numbers), and a QR code to a payment link, or a tablet open to the link, covers in-person giving. Year-end statements aren't a feature, so exporting your gifts and running a mail merge is an idea to test, not a promise. It still isn't a giving platform, and your donor database does statements, funds and in-person giving well. The donor database records the gift, and HubSpot builds the relationship. Two tools, each doing the job it was built for, connected so nobody types anything twice. So HubSpot runs the campaign, the pages and the messages.
The six-step build order below is our recommendation, not a HubSpot standard.
1. Build your segments first. The data is your foundation, and a campaign built on bad data sends the wrong ask to the wrong human. HubSpot's active segments update automatically, and static segments freeze membership "at the point when the segment is saved." That's on all products and plans. Erica Waasdorp, writing in NonProfit PRO, recommends giving monthly donors their own segment and a separate year-end ask, so start there, then last year's year-end donors and a static snapshot of your Giving Tuesday donors on December 2.
2. Put every asset in one campaign. The campaigns tool lets you associate emails, pages and social posts for reporting. It needs Marketing Hub Professional or Enterprise.
3. Build the giving page. Landing pages are on every plan. Free tools publish on a HubSpot-branded domain, and removing the branding takes Content Hub Starter or higher (Starter includes up to 30 landing pages). Payment links can collect "one-time and recurring donations of any amount," with a charge that must be more than $0.50, on all products and plans. You can let donors set their own amount on a one-time gift. HubSpot doesn't say whether that works on a recurring gift, so test the checkout yourself before you announce it. There's no fund designation, so if you're raising for more than one fund, make one payment link per fund and report by link name.
4. Apply for payments this week, not the week of Giving Tuesday. You don't need Revenue Hub to take gifts; Revenue Hub Professional or Enterprise mainly adds a self-serve billing portal where donors manage their payment method and, if you allow it, cancel. HubSpot payments is for organizations in the US, UK and Canada on a paid plan: Starter, Professional or Enterprise of Marketing, Sales, Service, Data Hub or Content Hub, or Revenue Hub Professional or Enterprise. It names donations among the non-physical goods it's designed for, runs on Stripe, and reviews eligibility "on a case-by-case basis." Stripe's restricted businesses list names organizations fundraising for a charitable purpose and notes they're supported in the US, UK, Canada and Australia, so plan on a review, not an automatic yes. The other route is your organization's own Stripe account, which connects on any HubSpot plan, free included. Either way, HubSpot's automatic receipt carries your name, logo and color but can't carry tax-deductible wording, and HubSpot doesn't produce year-end giving statements, so those stay in your donor database unless the export and mail merge idea above tests out for you.
5. Schedule the emails and automate around the dates. Every plan can schedule a marketing email for a set date and time, though that scheduling doesn't apply to automated workflow emails. Subject line A/B tests need Marketing Hub Professional or Enterprise. For the sequence, date-centered workflows let you build around December 1 and December 31, on Professional or Enterprise of Marketing, Sales, Service, Data Hub, Smart CRM or Revenue Hub. If December gets heavy, Marketing Hub Enterprise has an email frequency safeguard that caps how many marketing emails a contact gets.
6. Only plan on texting if you can register in time. Marketing SMS needs an SMS add-on plus Marketing Hub Professional or Enterprise, and registration takes "six to eight business days for 10DLC numbers and 8 to 12 weeks for Short Code." For a December 1 text, submit 10DLC registration by about November 19. A short code started now won't be ready for Giving Tuesday. HubSpot doesn't do text-to-give, but you can text a donor a payment link.
A Note for Churches
Church giving may run on a different calendar. Two church giving platforms, both vendors, see December as the biggest month: Tithely puts it at 11.8% of digital giving and Nucleus at 13.81% of online giving. For a church, the main ask may be Christmas plus year-end, with Giving Tuesday as a softer outreach or missions moment.
Giving Tuesday FAQ
When is Giving Tuesday 2026? Tuesday, December 1, 2026, per GivingTuesday.
How many emails should we send between Giving Tuesday and December 31? Bloomerang's guide says at least every two weeks until mid-December, more in the last two weeks and daily in the last four days. For context, M+R participants sent 50 emails per subscriber across all of 2025, 31 of them fundraising.
Do we need Marketing Hub Professional? Not for sending and scheduling email, segments, landing pages or payment links (HubSpot payments needs a paid Starter or higher seat on any hub, or connect your own Stripe account on any plan). You do need it for the campaigns tool, A/B tests and SMS, and workflows need a Professional or Enterprise hub. What each tier costs after HubSpot's nonprofit discount is in our HubSpot nonprofit pricing breakdown.
Your Next Step
Inspiration without application is noise, so here's the application. Grab the Communication Plan + Newsletter Template Pack, which includes a Giving Tuesday email sequence, and build your campaign from it this week. Sidekick Strategies gives churches and nonprofits 25% off our services.
