Giving Compass' Take:

· Ben Paynter at Fast Company explains how Giving Tuesday gained traction and became a worldwide phenomenon spurring hundreds of millions of dollars in donations.

· How has Giving Tuesday encouraged generosity and increased charitable giving? 

· Here's how to give back on #GivingTuesday.

The first Giving Tuesday started in 2012 to fight against Thanksgiving’s commercial corruption: The fourth Thursday of November was becoming less about feeling grateful and more about strategizing for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, those nationally recognized days for shopping deals.

“The very basic premise of it was, could we turn people’s attention from two days of consuming to a day of giving,” says Asha Curran, chief innovation officer at the Belfer Center for Innovation & Social Impact at 92Y,  the New York-based community nonprofit that first dreamed up the idea. “Could there be a sort of counterpoint to Black Friday and Cyber Monday that brought us back to what is really a very, very long American tradition of giving and generosity, but for this age of social media and shifting behaviors?”

More than 2,500 nonprofits participated the first year, which brought in roughly $10 million in online fundraising. Tens of thousands of groups have since joined in, with donations increasing 3,000% since then: People gave at least $300 million in 2017, according to transaction data from online giving platforms and payment processors like PayPal, Blackbaud, and Facebook.

Read the full article about Giving Tuesday by Ben Paynter at Fast Company.