Did You Experience #GivingTuesday Fatigue?

Thanks to the generosity of the Gates Foundation matching funds for donations made through Facebook, participation in #GivingTuesday is expected to reach all-time highs. From my own perspective, within the first hour of logging into my Facebook account, I had more than 100 notifications inviting me to fundraiser pages.

By 12:00 noon CT, I stopped keeping track and simply turned off notifications entirely. Email campaigns messages started a hair slower but increased a faster clip throughout the day compared to FB notifications.

Within the first two hours of the work, all of it become overwhelming.

In response, I posted the following note on my Facebook wall:

The responses were fascinating, I highly recommend you take the time to give them a read.

One arts administrator located in the west coast wondered if the Gates matching funds were distributed evenly across organizations in each time zone or if the onslaught of messages meant groups located in the Eastern Time Zone had an advantage. If anyone has some certified information on that point, I’d love to know about it.

Even though the majority of responses echoed the off-putting nature of message fatigue, there were those who gravitated toward the condensed messaging approach.

Another arts administrator took a different approach when determining her organization’s approach.

I’m curious to know what you think.

From the perspective of an individual donor on the receiving end of messages, did you find this year’s event to be overwhelming or did it perhaps inspire you to participate even more?

If you’re an arts administrator, did your group participate? If so, what sort of feedback did you receive. If you decided against participating, what influenced that decision?