The Green Sheet Online Edition
October 26, 2026 • 26:10:02
Street Smarts
Giving Tuesday is coming: Help your merchants make every donation count
Giving Tuesday is right around the corner, and if you have nonprofits, charitable organizations, schools, foundations or community organizations in your merchant portfolio, now is the time to start a conversation. Why? Because Giving Tuesday has become a pretty big deal. In 2025, 38.1 million Americans participated in Giving Tuesday, and an estimated $4 billion was donated in the United States in just 24 hours—a 13 percent increase over the previous year. Since Giving Tuesday began in 2012, U.S. donations associated with the event have reached an estimated $22.5 billion.
But here's what payments professionals should really pay attention to: Giving Tuesday isn't just about one very busy day of donations. It kicks off one of the most important fundraising periods of the year. According to Blackbaud Institute's 2025 giving data, 36.1 percent of annual charitable revenue came in during the fourth quarter, with December alone accounting for roughly 18 percent of annual giving. Online giving also increased approximately 11 percent year over year.
That makes the next few months a fantastic opportunity for you to help your nonprofit merchants—and potentially build some long-term processing relationships along the way.
Start with the donation page
We talk all the time about reducing friction at checkout for retail and eCommerce merchants. Why should making a donation be any different? Think of a donation page as your nonprofit merchant's checkout page. A donor has already made the decision to give. Your job is to help make sure technology doesn't get in the way. Talk to your merchants about hosted and customizable donation pages that are easy to navigate, mobile-friendly and consistent with the organization's branding. Look for solutions that allow merchants to create individual payment links for different campaigns, events or fundraising initiatives. Those links can then be shared through email, social media, SMS, QR codes, websites and even printed materials.
And keep the form simple. The goal isn't to collect every piece of information about the donor before accepting the donation. The goal is to make it easy for someone who wants to give $25, $100 or $1,000 to complete that gift.
Make mobile giving easy
Your merchants' donors are spending plenty of time on their phones, so donation pages need to work just as well on a smartphone as they do on a desktop. That means responsive payment pages, fewer fields and payment methods that don't require someone to dig through their purse or wallet for a card.
Help your nonprofit merchants consider options beyond traditional credit and debit cards, including ACH and digital wallets such as Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal, and Venmo, depending on the capabilities of your processing platform. Every additional step creates an opportunity for a donor to change their mind.
As payments professionals, we're always talking about creating frictionless commerce. For nonprofits, we should be talking about frictionless giving.
Don't overlook recurring donations
Here's where Giving Tuesday can become especially interesting for ISOs and MLSs. A one-time $50 donation is great. A $25 monthly donation that continues for several years is even better for the nonprofit—and creates ongoing transaction volume for the payments provider. According to M+R's 2026 Benchmarks, monthly giving accounted for 27 percent of all online nonprofit revenue in 2025, while monthly giving revenue increased 12 percent year over year.
Talk to merchants about making recurring giving easy to select from the donation page. Even something as simple as clearly presenting "Give Once" and "Give Monthly" options can introduce donors to the idea of becoming sustaining supporters.
From the payments side, consider the technology supporting those transactions as well. Tokenization, securely stored payment credentials, account updater services, automated retries for failed transactions and recurring billing tools can help nonprofits maintain those relationships.
For an ISO, those same solutions can help create predictable processing volume and a much stickier merchant relationship. That's a win-win.
Connect payments with marketing
Here's another conversation worth having with your merchants: How are people going to find that beautiful new donation page? You don't have to become your merchant's marketing agency, but there are plenty of ways your payment technology can support their fundraising efforts.
Help them create unique payment links or QR codes for email, social media, direct mail, fundraising events, and Giving Tuesday campaigns.
If your platform provides reporting by campaign or payment link, even better. Now your merchant can begin answering an important question: Where are our donations coming from?
Encourage nonprofits to promote their Giving Tuesday campaign early and often. Email to their existing supporters. Post on social media. Add a QR code to signage. Include a donation link in newsletters. Send text reminders where appropriate. And don't forget the follow-up. A thank-you message isn't simply good manners. It is the beginning of the next donor interaction.
Think beyond Giving Tuesday
This may be the biggest opportunity of all. Giving Tuesday can open the door, but nonprofits need payment solutions 365 days a year.
Online fundraising is growing. M+R found that average online nonprofit revenue increased 15% in 2025, while Blackbaud found that average gift size across its data has nearly doubled over the past decade, from $727 in 2016 to $1,346 in 2025. For ISOs and MLSs, that means this shouldn't simply be a Giving Tuesday sales pitch.
Nonprofits need secure online payments, recurring billing, ACH, digital wallets, QR codes, mobile payment capabilities, fraud protection, reporting and integration with the technology they already use. They also need someone who can help them understand how all those pieces work together.
$h2That's where you come in.
Take a look at your existing merchant portfolio. Reach out to your nonprofit customers before Giving Tuesday and ask them a few questions: Is your donation page mobile-friendly? Can donors easily set up recurring gifts? What payment methods are you accepting? Can you track where donations originate? What happens when a recurring payment fails? You may discover opportunities to provide services they didn't even know were available.
With $4 billion donated during Giving Tuesday 2025 alone and more than a third of annual charitable revenue arriving during the fourth quarter, there's a lot of money moving between donors and organizations this time of year.
Make sure your nonprofit merchants are ready to accept it. Because helping a merchant make giving easier isn't just good for their mission. It's good business, too. 
Jaki Kackert is a seasoned marketing professional with experience supporting organizations across the payments and financial services industries. Through expertise in content marketing, digital strategy, public relations, and communications, she helps ISOs and Resellers build marketing strategies that attract, retain, and grow merchant portfolios. For more information please visit www.kackertmarketing.com or reach out to Jaki at jbkackert@gmail.com.
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