GivingTuesday is more than a hashtag: It’s a leading nonprofit organization that enables nonprofit fundraising through campaign planning and resource sharing. By partnering with community leaders around the world, GivingTuesday has become a pivotal resource for data-driven insights into giving trends, thanks to its Data Commons. 

Woodrow Rosenbaum, chief data officer at GivingTuesday, leads a team of 35 data scientists, data engineers, and knowledge management staff who work with a larger network of over 1,000 collaborators around the world. Their pioneering data analysis offers access to market research that was difficult to nail down. What they’ve uncovered has led to greater understanding of the nature of generosity and how to cultivate it. 

We sat down with Woodrow to understand the value of data democratization in the social good sector and what’s in store for GivingTuesday this year.  

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What were early challenges GivingTuesday faced in measuring its impact? 

We encountered data challenges early on. We were trying to answer simple questions about GivingTuesday’s impact. But data was missing, siloed, difficult to access — all of these barriers meant that it was really hard to measure. We’re not a giving platform, so if we wanted to know things like, “What is the growth of online giving on GivingTuesday?” We didn’t control any of that data flow. 

If we were going to answer this question, we needed to partner with companies like Bonterra to share results with us.  

Why was it important for GivingTuesday to access and share nonprofit market trends?  

Well, first, because it serves the GivingTuesday mission. We have a robust infrastructure available for commercial enterprises to understand market trends and the actors within the marketplace. That ecosystem-level evaluation just didn’t exist in the nonprofit sector.  

We’re trying to make change at a global systems level, and to do that, we need good data to inform our own practices, programming, and interventions, as well as the broader ecosystem and network that we support. Learning and being able to make data-driven decisions is necessary in order to advance our mission of increasing generosity and its impact, and also increasing the agency of everyday givers. 

“Learning and being able to make data-driven decisions is necessary in order to advance our mission of increasing generosity and its impact, and also increasing the agency of everyday givers.”

Woodrow Rosenbaum, Chief Data Officer, GivingTuesday

What was your approach to getting data? 

People have tried to solve these problems with data standards. Data standards are a useful tool, but not a useful goal. So we made it our problem and said, “Look, we have a data standard, but you don’t have to comply with our data standard in order to participate,” which meant that the hard work of data cleaning and normalization was ours. One of the outcomes is that we now have a unique expertise in handling and understanding the nuances of data in the sector. There’s actually value in having messy, incompatible data. Because you get a better understanding of what that landscape is and what’s happening in the background.  

Why did you decide to share your reports free of charge? 

The social sector needs digital public goods. Although there’s certainly some opportunity for earned revenue streams on various data initiatives and products, the fact is, most of the return we get from this effort is a social return on investment. The lack of good data infrastructure, measurement, and capacity to use data in the nonprofit sector has a real human cost: People suffer because of that lack. The return is alleviating suffering and improving the community; it’s not financial. If we want this to work, then people have to be able to access it as a public utility. 

We’re also committed to the collaborators we work with and helping them get a direct return on their mission. We find that space where our missions intersect and we’re able to provide value, and then, as a result, we get the data that we need. 

What’s a key insight you learned from your data efforts? 

We have a much better understanding of the nature of generosity and people’s giving. There was, for a long time, an assumption that since participation in nonprofit fundraising is declining, people must be less generous, or there’s more competition for their dollar. That misunderstanding, that myth, is being successfully eroded because we’re able to show that the data does not support that viewpoint. Critically, that means that we as organizations have a lot more capacity, a lot more agency, to change these trends than was previously understood.  

What do you see for the future of GivingTuesday’s data initiatives? 

What we’ve been doing this year is refining and getting a little bit more prescriptive, rather than just descriptive. A good example of that is our partnership with RKD Group to create a quarterly field guide as a companion to our Giving Pulse report. We’ll be looking to do a lot more of that in the coming year with more of our partners. We can generate hypotheses from the data and the reporting, and then we can test those and feed the results back into our network of nonprofits.  

Also, we think recurring donations, broader engagement of grassroots givers, and seasonal giving are untapped opportunities.  If we as an industry take decisive and collective action, we can make transformative change, where the annualized potential is in the tens of billions of dollars. 

Bonterra helps organizations tap into the urgency and community spirit of Giving Days to build their supporter lists, convert that support into donations, and ultimately raise more for their missions on GivingTuesday and beyond. Talk to us to learn more about how Bonterra can help you power your Giving Day.