As survivors straggle back from the holiday blue gap, we're proud to initiate a new feature here on the blog, Tuesday Tips. Every week, we'll share some analysis on trends in the sector and how to muscle up your online actions.

To lead off, an oft-asked question: when should I put out that donation appeal? We'll do this in stages taking a look at the very macro level of seasonal averages, and the very micro level of time of day. But we begin in the creamy middle, with days of the week.

You've got that thing all queued up. Do you cut it loose now, or might you do better by waiting a day or two?

Disclaimers first: of course, this is one of those "no easy answer" questions because whatever the aggregate says, data points are all ultimately organization-specific. Sometimes news breaks and the iron grows hot on an odd day. Sometimes, things change over time (as we'll see). And sometimes, your results just plain vary. Use at your own risk and as always, test, test, test.

Enough from the law-talkin' guy. You want numbers. Here's what DemocracyInAction processed last year, as compared to 2005.(1)

(Click to enlarge.)

Well, what have we got? Monday is the weakest, clearly. Thursday's the king on both charts, though 2006 shows a shift from the Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday bloc to Wednesday-Thursday-Friday as the prime donation window. And somewhat shockingly, the historically weak weekends take a big step up -- Sunday even registering as a better day than Monday.

Really?

Hmmm.

Alert readers may remember that we recently took in an avalanche of end-of-year donations -- and that the end of 2006 just happened to fall over a weekend, with a Friday the last business day before the end of the year. Surely that's the sort of thing to skew some numbers.

Let's re-run those figures. I've removed the first 30 and the last 40 days of the year to get completely clear of the pre-holiday binge/post-holiday doldrums for both years for a more representative sample of the underlying behavior.

(Click to enlarge.)

That's more like it.

Tuesday's drop is real enough, it looks like -- and Monday's as well, a noticeable reversal for the beginning of the week -- but Friday's gain is less substantial. Wednesday and (with more than 1 in 5 of the non-holiday contributions) Thursday are the clear breadwinners. The week as a whole has shifted from a three-day plateau from Tuesday to Thursday with lesser days on either end of the week to a higher Wednesday-Thursday peak fringed by two decent but distinctly secondary days, and Monday practically relegated to weekend status.

(1) Statistics index only counts (not donation amounts) of original instances of online donations -- paid event registrations, storefront purchases, instances of recurring gifts beyond the original payment, and offline donations loaded into the system are all excluded.