#GivingTuesday may be a special day of philanthropy and volunteering after Thanksgiving, but for many charitable organizations, it's also the start of the holiday giving season!
Did you know: Most charities will receive 30% of their annual online donation volume in December? Often, it's in those last few days of the year.
FrontStream Payments processes donations for thousands of charities and nonprofits in North America and around the world. This year, we dove into our aggregated data from online activity on December 3rd to pull out the most interesting mobile and social trends we saw on #GivingTuesday.
Now, more than ever, your donors are mobile
A significant group of donors are responding to charity solicitations on smartphones or tablets. When considering how many people are reading emails, browsing Facebook, or posting tweets on mobile devices, the numbers make sense!
In the United States, 33.1% of visitors browsed donation pages on mobile devices. While in Canada, 25.7% of visitors browsed donation pages on mobile devices.
Which smartphones and tablets were most popular with donors? Apple products were most popular overall, but we saw traffic from many different kinds of mobile devices and operating systems. We also noticed significant differences by country!
Holiday tip: Your supporters are already using smartphones and tablets to visit your website. Ensure your end-of-year donors can give securely by using mobile-optimized or responsively-designed donation forms.
#GivingTuesday was a social experience
Facebook continued to be a top referring site for Canadian and American donors on #GivingTuesday. An incredible 29.4% of American visitors and 18.7% of Canadian visitors to donation forms were originally referred by posts, links and comments inside Facebook!
A big surprise came from Twitter in Canada, where tweets drove 700% more people to donation pages on December 3rd than on an average day. This number likely reflects the unprecedented amount of activity around the #GivingTuesdayCA & #GivingTuesday hashtags that launched the event for the first time in that country.
Here's another great insight: Mobile Facebook traffic to donation pages in both countries increased by an incredible 130% over 2012! The reason? Half of Facebook's daily users now access the site from a mobile device.
Holiday tip: Peer recommendations are influential! Encourage supporters of your cause to share your content on popular social networks like Facebook and Twitter.
