The giving season is one of the most important times of the year for nonprofit organizations. December typically brings in more funds than any other month! That’s why it’s important to plan - and plan early. This article walks you through an effective three-step roadmap to help you prepare for and execute your best year-end fundraising campaign yet.
![Getting You Ready for Giving Season [With a 3-Step Roadmap]](https://donorbox.org/nonprofit-blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Giving-Season-Roadmap.png)
The giving season, the season of giving, year-end – whatever you call them, the last few months of the year are critical to your fundraising efforts. In fact, approximately 30% of annual giving happens in December for nonprofit organizations, and 10% happens in the last three days of the year alone (source)!
And it’s never too early to start preparing for this year’s giving season.
In this article, we’ll share tips to help you work through the key phases of running a giving season fundraising campaign – planning, executing, and wrapping up. Use this three-step roadmap as a guide as you work through each phase, from setting your campaign objectives all the way to thanking your donors and measuring your impact.
The first key to creating a successful year-end fundraising campaign for the giving season is planning ahead. And, the earlier you get started, the more time you’ll have to formulate a top-tier fundraising strategy. It’s not just about producing the best campaign possible, but also tackling other in-the-moment tasks as the final months of the year draw to a close.
The good news? There are several things you can get started on as early as you have the capacity.
Here’s a 15 minute podcast with a breakdown of all your year-end communication and campaign must-dos into manageable steps, equipping you to tackle your year-end fundraising with confidence.
▶️ Subscribe to our YouTube channel to master fundraising with pro tips and actionable advice from nonprofit and fundraising experts.
There are several opportunities to learn and build the confidence to run excellent fundraising campaigns, whether you are new to year-end fundraising or want a refresher. Many websites offer free resources for nonprofits to help them get better at fundraising, managing donors and volunteers, and more.
For example, Donorbox Academy is a repository of nonprofit knowledge put together by our fundraising experts here at Donorbox, offering both paid and free courses. Sign up for the email list for early course announcements!
Our free Donorbox Webinars also offer lessons, tools, and more. You can visit our webinars page to sign up for upcoming webinars, or find recordings from past sessions on our YouTube channel.
And, in the Donorbox Library, you can find a plethora of free downloadable resources you can use to build your nonprofit skills, guide you through various strategies, and more.
Next up, determine which staff members, board members, or volunteers will make up your giving season campaign team.
Consider asking a well-rounded group of individuals to join – you’ll need fundraising expertise, marketing knowledge, design skills, and more! Be sure to assign specific tasks to each person and host regular meetings to check in on everyone’s progress.
Before you really start planning your year-end campaign, it’s important to know what your goals are for this year.
First, take a look at last year’s end-of-year campaign. How much did you raise? Which donors gave during the giving season? How many people did you engage?
Use these data points – and others you find important – to set benchmarks and key performance indicators (KPIs) for this year. You can read all about the best KPIs for nonprofits, and how to find them, here.
We also recommend selecting one to two primary goals for the campaign. This will help you determine your target audience, select your outreach tactics, and more. Many nonprofit organizations choose a dollar-raised goal, but you could also aim for others, like new donors, members, or website visitors.
What if you’re a new organization, or you haven’t done year-end fundraising before? Take a look at campaigns you admire as well as what your competitors are doing, or review KPIs from other campaigns you have run in the past. Here’s an example of a successful year-end campaign from last year, created by Sentient Media using Donorbox.
Start a Year-End Fundraising Campaign
Next up, determine your target audience – those who you want to ask for gifts. You should determine everything from gender to age to location.
Pro tip: Take a look at your previous supporters. Determine whether you want to target the same donors, those with similar demographics, or a new audience that would fill in some gaps.
To be able to do that, the first thing you should do is segment your current donor base. Add filters such as giving frequency, giving amounts, location, time frame, campaign preference, and more. Donorbox’s donor management tools can help you with this step!
Once you know who you are targeting, outline the key message for your fundraising campaign as well as a theme. Having a theme helps maintain consistency in look and feel across your platforms. It can take up to 12 touchpoints before someone decides to give, and you have a better chance if they are receiving the same message from multiple angles.
While you can use the season of giving as a basis for your theme, you’ll want to choose something more specific to your mission. And your messaging will help this theme shine through in all of your outreach, as will your brand. Be sure to select campaign colors, fonts, images, and even beneficiary stories that reflect your theme and message.
For example, a food pantry’s theme for their giving season campaign may be “Thankfull”, with messaging that focuses on making sure area families have access to delicious and filling holiday meals.
Next, it’s important to determine the type of year-end campaign you want to run and the tools you’d like to use to reach your goals. Also make sure each of your tools are up-to-date, branded, and ready to go!
In addition to a fabulous online donation form, you may consider using several other methods and tools as part of your fundraising strategy this giving season.
Fundraising events, for one, are popular during the holidays. From concerts to themed happy hours – and beyond – holiday-themed fundraisers can surely help you raise a lot of money.
Donorbox Events lets you create an event page online and add a ticketing form to it. You can add unlimited ticket levels to the form. The form is embeddable in your website. You can also use the event page created on Donorbox. Donorbox also lets you accept donations with the ticketing form.
Peer-to-peer campaigns can also make a big impact. Ask your top supporters to become advocates by creating their own fundraising pages to share with their networks, broadening your reach and bringing in new donors.
Check out Donorbox Peer-to-Peer, which makes it easy to create a primary campaign and then invite your supporters to build their own customizable fundraising pages. All donations from these peer campaigns flow directly into your primary campaign and Donorbox account!
Last but not the least, text-to-give is a great option, especially if you host an in-person event or worship service. With a simple text, donors receive a link to your giving page sent straight to their phone.
With Donorbox Text-to-Give, donors can even quickly repeat their donations with a single text. You can also choose from a standard or shortcode plan – with a shortcode plan, you receive a shorter texting number and a custom keyword that are easier to remember and type in a phone.
Here’s what giving via text with Donorbox’s shortcode looks like –
Crowdfunding is another great choice for giving season and holiday campaigns because it creates a higher sense of urgency as well as provides plenty of social proof and sharing opportunities.
Donorbox Crowdfunding makes creating a customized crowdfunding page quick and simple, and also provides several tools and features you can add to take your crowdfunding campaign to the next level. These include an Updates tab for campaign news, a virtual donor wall to showcase donor messages, a subscribe button for potential donors and visitors (and the ability to email these subscribers), social media sharing buttons, goal thermometers, and more.
Here’s an example of a year-end crowdfunding campaign created by United Sound. As you can see, they far surpassed their fundraising goal in 2022!
Learn More About Donorbox Crowdfunding
It’s important that you select your marketing channels and plan out a campaign schedule in advance. This will help you prioritize the creation of your appeals and marketing collateral, as well as save you time when you launch your campaign.
There are several marketing channels you can use to get the word out about your campaign – we’ll cover them in detail later.
Writing an effective fundraising appeal can take time, so start early. We recommend beginning with your direct mail letter. After perfecting it, you can rework bits and pieces to fit into your other channels (known as syndicating your content), saving time while ensuring your messaging is consistent across your campaign.
Just make sure your appeals are:
Pro tip: Don’t be afraid to write…and re-write…and re-write your appeals. Ask fellow staff members as well as your friends and family to read your letter and provide feedback.
Do you have your theme, messaging, brand, and appeal content set? Next up is designing and building all of your marketing collateral!
This includes everything that will be shared with the public through your selected marketing channels, including your direct mail letter, email appeals, social media posts, paid advertisements, and more. Also be sure to promote your campaign on your website through a homepage banner, blog post, and giving page updates!
By creating all of this in advance, you’ll save time and headaches during the campaign itself.
Pro tip: Whenever possible, schedule your outreach ahead of time. Many email marketing platforms allow you to build and schedule your emails in advance, and there are also several social media scheduling tools available.
You’ve prepared as much as possible in advance, now it’s time for Phase 2 – Execute!
First up in your schedule should be your direct mail letter. It’s best to send this in mid-November as a kick-off to your giving season campaign, and you’ll want to make sure to have it finalized and to the printer at least three weeks before you’d like it to hit mailboxes.
Have the budget and capacity for another direct mail piece? Sending a reminder postcard or letter in December to those who have not yet responded can be very effective.
Email is a great way to supplement direct mail appeals. You can use them to expand upon a beneficiary’s story with powerful images and videos, as well as create a sense of urgency that doesn’t always translate through snail mail. Plan to send at least three emails throughout the season of giving – one to kick it off and announce your goal, one reminder about halfway through, and one in the final three days of the year.
Social media is also a great way to express urgency as well as tell your story through visuals. Aim to post about your giving season campaign at least once a week, beginning in November. Start off with an announcement about your campaign and when it will launch, share a series of posts showcasing a beneficiary story or two, and be sure to participate in Giving Tuesday.
If you have the budget and the capacity, paid advertising is ideal for expanding your reach beyond your current audience. You can run paid ads on social media and Google, as well as through your local print, radio, and television media.
Also, consider using public relations strategies to place earned stories with these outlets.
Even if you are able to schedule most of your outreach in advance, you shouldn’t go on auto-pilot once the giving season begins. You’ll need to stay engaged with your audience as much as possible – respond or react to comments and post shares on social media, reach out to key supporters via phone, and keep your donors informed by sharing updates about the progress towards your goal. And say thank you throughout!
Pro tip: The last three days of the year should be when your biggest push happens. Post reminders on social media, send out a ‘last chance to give this year’ email and call those top donors who haven’t donated yet this giving season.
The third and final phase of your giving season roadmap – Wrap Up – may not seem as important as the others, but it is a crucial step to your continuing growth as an organization!
Showing an attitude of gratitude is one of the most important things you can do following your giving season campaign.
While sending year-end tax receipts is also critical at this time, these communications are transactional. In addition to these tax receipts, you should be sending relational communications that thank the donor for their gift and show the impact they made.
These may include emails as well as personal thank-you letters, or even phone calls. You can also post a powerful thank you video on social media. There are so many ways to show your gratitude to your donors!
You should also use this time to check in on your metrics from the giving season – did you meet or exceed your goals and KPIs? What other ways did your campaign make an impact? Record all of these numbers now so that they are ready for your review whenever you need them.
While everything is still fresh in your mind, write down all of the things that worked this year, as well as anything you’d like to improve. This may include metrics, but also notes about your planning and execution process, the beneficiary stories you used, or your target audience.
Trust us – you’ll thank yourself next August when it’s time to start thinking about the giving season all over again!
Planning and producing an effective giving season campaign can seem daunting. The number one piece of advice we have is to start planning now!
Donorbox Academy offers several courses and resources, compiled and led by fundraising experts, to help you write your best appeals, create peer-to-peer campaigns, and more.
And if you’re in need of innovative fundraising tools that won’t drain your budget this season of giving – and beyond – take a look at Donorbox and its simple-to-use features. The platform fee starts at 1.75% for the Standard Plan (with no monthly fee), but you can upgrade to our Pro Plan for $139/month to unlock a flat 1.5% for all tools. Remember – as always – your donors can opt to cover these fees as well as the processing fees. And if you’re looking to take your nonprofit organization to the next level, you can access a 1.5% fee plus dedicated support, fundraising coaching, exclusive features, and more with a custom Premium Plan. Learn more about our pricing here.
Explore other insightful guides, tips, and tactics on year-end fundraising and more on the Donorbox Nonprofit Blog. Subscribe to our newsletter to receive a curated list of our best resources in your inbox every month.
Kara has several years of experience in communications and marketing for nonprofit organizations, with knowledge in social media, email, public relations, event promotion, appeal writing, and more. She specializes in writing and enjoys sharing her expertise and advice with others.
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Kara Schmid