The year-end giving season is your organization's opportunity to engage with supporters, donors, volunteers, and fans, whether your ultimate goal is deepening relationships or fundraising.
By planning ahead, thinking multichannel, and preparing your nonprofit fundraising communications, you'll be ready for the year-end giving season.
Remember:
Identify community celebrities who will be your year-end campaign spokespeople. These can be staff, board members, community heroes, and other inspiring people.
Also, get a matching donation you can use for a fundraising challenge. Nothing inspires people to give quite like a match.
As your messaging and themes start to take shape, begin work on a year-end video. You can promote the final product in emails and on social media and also embed it on your website and your donation page.
Year-end charitable giving appeals succeed when they are multichannel — when you're able to reach out and connect through postal mail, real-world events, email messaging, and social media. Find opportunities in your organization to coordinate messaging during the year-end. For example, if you're using a challenge match, how might you promote it in multiple channels so that it gets more attention?
Your website will get a burst of visitor activity from people who are hearing about you. Freshen up your website with new content that aligns with your year-end messaging and supports year-end online giving. This content might include new blog posts, a new featured article on your home page, a lightbox that pops up, or a fresh, new donation page with an inspiring photo and headline.
Email has become increasingly important at year-end because of the precise way we can schedule delivery and control the visual and click-through experience. This year, email will be read on more mobile devices than ever before, so you should
Donors look to others to decide where and when to give. Social media is the perfect platform to push out year-end messaging that is centered around real-world examples, quotes from real people, and lots of photos. Tell your story at year-end on all your social channels and encourage social sharing whenever possible.
Think of the most creative ways you might use social media to promote year-end giving. Recruit a social media brigade of volunteers to create engaging content. Set up a tracking system so you can measure the impact on your fundraising that originates in the social channel.
Also, make sure that social sharing opportunities are integrated throughout the giving process on both the donation thank-you web page and the email receipt.
Consider all the ways you can promote monthly giving during year-end. While monthly giving will reduce revenue in the short term, monthly donors will stay on your list longer and will have higher lifetime value as donors.
Take the time to refresh your data dashboard at year-end so you can track all your fundraising activity. Pay specific attention to multichannel tracking, which often reveals emerging trends among your donors.