How to Get the Most Out of Year-End Giving
Can you believe it’s already here? We’ve reached the time when nonprofit organizations are preparing for their year-end fundraising campaigns.
Year-end giving is one of the most profitable times of the year, so it’s crucial to be intentional with preparation in order to maximize your reach and profit for this year’s campaign.
50% of all nonprofits receive most of their donations in the months of October through November with 30% of donations coming in during the month of December.
If these statistics cause stress as you haven’t begun planning for your campaign, don’t fret. Most nonprofits begin planning for their year-end fundraising campaigns in November with only 7.7% starting in September.
You are not behind, but now is the time to kick it into planning mode. We’re here to help you as you begin the planning process to make the most out of your year-end fundraising campaigns with the fundraising tips below!
Planning Ahead for Year-End Giving
Planning ahead helps your team become a more cohesive unit moving into an event as it gives ample time for everyone to understand various roles and responsibilities.
If you are beginning to plan in early November, you still have time to plan well! Being strategic in your plan of action is crucial and makes all of the difference.
Allow yourself time to define a clear strategy that will reach your target audience.
Direct mail is the most popular marketing method for year-end fundraising campaigns. Many nonprofits will send one simple blanket letter to their audience without segmenting their mailing list.
This method is understandable when you wait until the last minute without appropriate planning time, but it is not the most strategic way to reach your audience.
Sending a letter in the mail is a very effective way to reach your audience. Instead of sending a blanket “dear friend” letter to everyone on your list, we suggest segmenting your audience and writing more specifically and directly toward each group.
In a webinar we hosted with Jim Dempsey last month, he mentioned three groups to target in your year-end fundraising campaigns:
The Critical Few
The Mid-Level
The Masses
The Critical Few
Writing letters adds a personal touch. When reaching out to an audience, you want to make it feel like you are addressing the individual even if you are sending the same letter to many.
When addressing your critical few, or your larger donors who give $5,000 or more, you want them to feel appreciated and set apart from the rest.
Take the time to address the individuals you are writing to in your letter. Give specific updates and make it meaningful.
These people are the 20% of donors who bring in 80% of profit for your year-end fundraising campaigns.
This means the critical few are the ones who you want to focus on most. A letter typically garners a 2-3% blanket response rate, but when adding a phone call the response rate jumps to 30%.
When reaching out to your critical few, you will want to add a phone call and maybe even add a lunch meeting with them as the response rate jumps to 50%.
The Mid-Level
When reaching out to your mid-level donors, those who have given large one-time gifts between $1,000 and $4,999, it is still important to personalize letters.
Make them feel appreciated and in the know while also sharing opportunities to donate in the range of previous donations. If they have given $2,500, give opportunities for them to give similarly again.
In the month of December, your donors’ time and attention are at a premium. Because of this, be sure that once you’ve got their attention that you make it incredibly simple for them to take action and give.
A follow-up phone call could prove beneficial for this group and add an extra personal touch that could go a long way.
The Masses
The masses would include those who have given before, a gift of $1 to $999, or those who are involved with your group in other ways.
This would be your typical “dear friend” letter that you could send out to anyone. This letter might not be the most effective which is why there are other ways nonprofits typically try to market themselves outside of writing letters.
Creating at least two opportunities to market your organization to the masses is a great rule of thumb. A letter to this group still serves a vital purpose but isn’t necessarily going to garner large returns without additional steps.
Develop a Social Media Strategy and Plan It Out
With most nonprofit organizations creating at least two strategic opportunities to market their year-end fundraising campaigns, it is smart to include a social media strategy.
Studies show 70% of donors give through both online and offline options. By offering multiple ways to give, you increase the potential of your year-end profit.
By using a variety of marketing platforms for an online giving option you broaden your reach and have the ability to reach different demographics.
Be sure to plan a social media strategy and don’t forget to plan an email campaign to cover all the bases.
The holidays get crazy, so plan how you share your content accordingly. You don’t want to market your fundraiser online poorly because you didn’t plan ahead.
Creating a communications calendar is going to be your best friend when it comes to social media strategy. Developing a schedule not only makes things less stressful, but also helps to keep your strategy organized and specific.
Check out our blog post “5 Tools Every Fundraiser Needs To Know About” to learn more about online planning and scheduling resources.
Set SMART Goals
While creating a strategy for your year-end giving campaigns, be sure to set goals. Goal setting while strategizing helps you be clear about what you hope to accomplish.
Creating overly lofty goals can leave you feeling defeated. Try to create goals that still push you as an organization, while being worthwhile and attainable.
SMART goals are the most popular and, in our opinion, effective ways to set expectations for your year-end fundraising campaigns – and any fundraising campaigns for that matter.
SMART goals should be:
Specific
Measurable
Attainable
Relevant
Time-bound
Specific
A goal should deal with a specific KPI or a specific area of performance.
By making a goal specific, you will be able to plan specifically and strategically to meet that goal. This helps your entire team keep their eye on the prize and be as effective as possible.
Measureable
Instead of creating a subjective goal, it is more helpful to create a measurable one.
By making a goal measurable, you provide a way to evaluate throughout your fundraiser. Year-end fundraising campaigns are most easily trackable over the years if you make a goal measurable, which helps with ongoing planning.
Attainable
As previously mentioned, a goal should set your team up for growth while also being realistic.
What would be possible within the scope of your organization? How can you push your team to reach without it feeling impossible?
Relevant
A goal should connect to your organization’s overall mission, vision, and values.
If you plan a year-end campaign based on a goal that doesn’t connect with your mission and vision, you will more than likely not be as successful. People will be able to see through a thrown together campaign that doesn’t connect with you or your audience.
Time-bound
A goal should have an end date. This is an easy marker for year-end fundraising campaigns as they naturally have a specific end date.
Making sure to communicate your end date with team members and donors helps with urgency. Be sure to always create a time frame for your goals so you have a date to begin evaluating effectiveness.
Consider Developing a Recurring Gift Program
One of the best things you can do for your organization overall is to implement a recurring gift campaign. This refers to a monthly giving program that automatically has donations repeat every month.
The retention rate for monthly givers is 90% while the retention rate for the average donor sits at 43%. However, without a coordinated program to encourage donors to give regularly, the opportunity to give regularly isn’t necessarily going to yield its potential.
What better time to ask donors to be a part of giving routinely than when you have their attention during the Christmas season of giving?
By creating a recurring giving campaign you can create a source of steady revenue so you can budget, make strategic decisions, or offer predictable funding in response to emergencies.
When planning recurring giving for your year-end fundraising campaigns, make an effort to help donors understand the value of a monthly gift.
What many organizations don’t understand is that you can’t build a recurring donation program just by offering a “make it monthly” checkbox on a donation form, or even gauge interest in monthly giving.
If you want a successful program, you’ll need to commit to asking donors for monthly gifts. Communicate with your donors how valuable recurring gifts can be, and don’t be afraid to ask.
Some believe that stressing monthly giving too much will alienate donors who only have capacity or desire to give one-time gifts. Be sure to give multiple opportunities for giving during year-end giving campaigns. This helps retain donors while also offering the opportunity for regular giving.
Make the Ask
Asking your donors who have given large donations in the past for more may seem intimidating.
Many simply need the reminder to give or need to know what the need within your organization may be in order to give again, so don’t shy away from asking.
Writing letters with opportunities to give with a response card, creating and sharing an online giving campaign via email and social media, following up with a phone call or appointment – all of these are great ways to ask your donors to be a part of your year-end fundraising campaigns.
We have talked about who and how to ask, so let’s address the question of what to ask.
What to Ask
Jim Dempsey suggests that your organization determines your greatest cause concept. This would be a project or program that needs specific funding when preparing what to ask for your year-end fundraising campaigns.
Make sure when forming a cause concept your team asks these 3 key questions:
What’s your greatest need?
What would most excite your donor?
What would be embraced by the broadest audience?
Once you have addressed these questions, you can cultivate what to ask for specific to your organization – confidently.
Implement a Year-End Matching Program
There is research from the Double Donation that says on average four to seven billion dollars in matching gift funding is left on the table each year.
Corporate matching gifts are donations made by companies who support the nonprofit causes that their employees are giving towards. Often these companies match at a dollar-for-dollar rate, although some companies might match at lower or higher ratios.
If you would like more information on how to set up a matching program, check out the linked blog post.
Set up your year-end fundraising campaigns for success by setting up a matching program!
Utilize a Fundraising Software
Like we mentioned before, it is the busiest time of the year. When it comes to year-end fundraising campaigns, let nonprofit fundraising software do the monotonous work so you can do the parts you enjoy!
Your online fundraising campaigns can be handled simply with FundEasy’s Crowdfunding software.
Crowdfunding for nonprofits allows anyone, anywhere, at any time to donate to your organization. Your year-end fundraising campaigns should be simple – and what is more simple than being able to give any time, anywhere?
When it comes to year-end fundraising campaigns, don’t take the chance of like-minded potential donors stumbling across your fundraiser. As stated before, you need to promote your campaign well via many social media channels, email campaigns, etc.
With FundEasy’s crowdfunding campaign, start promoting the same day you set it up.
Starting with your donor lists and adding friends, family, and community members is a good plan of action on how to raise money via crowdfunding. FundEasy’s software makes it easy to ask others to share your cause during your year-end giving push, too!
Say Thank You
Never forget to say thank you. You want your donors to feel appreciated instead of used, right?
It says a lot about your organization when you have lots of communication during a season of need, but silence in seasons of plenty. Tell your donors how much their donation has meant and keep them up to date throughout the year to share how their donnatino is being used and the impact it has made.
Strategically, giving out thank you’s increases the chances of donors coming back and donating again, which helps set the foundation for strong and positive relationships with donors. If your donors feel appreciated and connected to your nonprofit, they are more likely to encourage friends and family to support your organization financially too.
No matter the size of the gift, send a personalized thank you as soon as possible that simply expresses your gratitude. It is a great idea to go ahead and write these thank you’s throughout the campaign and before it comes to a close so you can move forward with the new work a new year will bring.
If this is not feasible for your group, consider hosting a thank-a-thon as soon as possible following your year-end fundraising campaigns. Set aside a day or two for the whole team to write letters, cultivate personalized email thank you’s, or make phone calls – we promise it’s that important.
Final Thoughts
Year-end fundraising campaigns are a huge positive for nonprofit organizations. We hope this has helped you brainstorm unique ways to engage donors to maximize your efforts this year.
Although our offerings don’t cover all the bases to help your year-end fundraising campaigns, we do have an exceptional crowdfunding platform that significantly helps to simplify the online fundraising process.
Our platform will walk you through how to raise money via crowdfunding, and FundEasy backs that up with a support team if and when you have questions. When it comes to online fundraising, we’ve got you covered.
If you'd like to learn more about our Peer-to-peer, Attendance, or Crowdfunding products, please reach out! We'd love to chat.
Also, if you haven't joined already, we have an exclusive Facebook Group just for our customers! If you are a current FundEasy Customer and would like to join, go here to learn more and request to be added!
Madison Hull
This article was inspired by our customers and written to encourage your fundraising efforts. Although we work with nonprofits and events daily, our team members are not Event Consultants. We encourage you to consult with your event consultant, executive team, and/or affiliate organization before making any major changes to your events.
