Success Guide: Make your year-end appeal count
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(6 min read)
The end-of-year fundraising period can make a huge difference to the success of your organization and whether you can meet your fundraising goals.
To help you make the best use of our tools during this hectic period, we’ve gathered some best practices you can use to make your tried-and-true fundraising efforts even easier to manage and to inspire you with new approaches you can use to raise more money.
In this 30-minute feature workshop, we cover getting ready for year-end efforts, messaging do’s and dont’s, how to make giving easier for donors, better audience segmenting, more ways to encourage upgrades, and more tried and true tips for success.
Preparing the way
Begin laying the groundwork for a successful year-end in early fall by making sure everything is in order to help your campaigns go smoothly in November and December.
Re-engage lapsed donors
Lapsed donors can be a good source of year-end donations since they’ve already shown an interest in your work in the past.
But, if someone hasn’t responded to any of your efforts in the past year or two, you may need to create a special outreach effort to cultivate them for your next ask by thanking them for all they’ve given in the past and reminding them of how their money was used to support your efforts. You want to give them a reason to re-engage with your organization and begin supporting you again.
Improve your email deliverability
This is the time to clean up your email lists and make sure you are communicating with supporters who want to hear from you. Begin early to fix any deliverability issues you have so that you’ll be ready to send during the final end-of-year effort.
Read our Success Guide for Email Deliverability
Read our best practices for end-of-year emailing
Optimize your forms for more conversions
Review your Custom contribution forms to ensure they are optimized to make giving easy for your supporters. Think about your revenue goals for #GivingTuesday and make sure your forms are aligned with these goals.
Read more best practices for improving your contribution forms for more conversions
Review all your autoresponders and opt-ins
Don’t miss out on adding as many supporters as possible to your email and SMS texting channels during the busiest time of the year.
You should review all your Online Actions forms to make sure you are offering your supporters a way to opt-in to their preferred communications channel. This means making sure to enable options like Email Signup for emails and SMS Signup on all your forms.
You should also review your form autoresponders to make sure you include effective follow-ups. Spruce up your messages with seasonal content or link to video thank-yous that acknowledge their year-end gift.
Read more about Confirmed Opt-In for email
Setting goals for the end-of-year campaign
Measuring success for your end-of-year fundraising depends on setting and tracking the right goals, including:
Track your progress toward revenue goals
See how close you are to hitting your end-of-year budget goals using Revenue Streams. This feature makes it easy to see which of your fundraising streams are hitting your goals and which need more resources or a different approach to meet their goals before the year’s end.
Read more about Revenue Streams
Grow your sustainer file
Year-end is an EXCELLENT time to ask folks to give a monthly gift rather than a one-time gift.
Monthly donors give 42% more every year than one-time donors. While you might initially see lower numbers in Q4 by focusing on getting more donors to become sustainers (since their first gift may be lower than their usual one-time gift), the long-term benefits of better retention and higher lifetime value of a donor will outweigh the short-term impact in revenue.
Read tips on improving your sustainer giving
Make the best use of each channel
Donors are hearing from a lot of organizations at the end of the year and you want to be thoughtful about your messaging and how you’ll stand out. Don’t indiscriminately message everyone in every channel. Be strategic with more expensive channels, especially when reaching out to lapsed and deep lapsed donors. Review best practices for each channel during this time and set appropriate fundraising goals for each stream.
Read more best practices for year-end multi-channel fundraising
Consider using analytics tools like DonorTrends to help you identify who is likely to make a gift. Save your outreach on more expensive channels to those most likely to give and then use less expensive channels to reach lapsed donors and new prospects.
Paving the way to success in the upcoming year
As you wrap up your year and look forward to Q1 of the next year, make sure that you are setting yourself up for ongoing success.
Thank your donors - OFTEN!
Thank donors early and often. You can never thank them enough. Your end-of-year giving season should begin AND end by thanking your donors. The speed at which you thank your donors directly influences the time it takes for them to make their next gift.
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Follow up on your gifts with a postal mail thank you by generating acknowledgment letters right from Bonterra Development using our Mail Merge Templates.
Read more on using mail merge templates
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A personal phone call may be the best way to thank your high-dollar donors. Many organizations are seeing success with having their most dedicated members volunteer to thank new donors using the Virtual Phone Bank.
Read our Virtual Phone Bank Success Guide
- Don’t forget the power of SMS broadcast messaging. Try thanking donors who’ve opted-in to your Mobile Messaging with a soft ask.
Welcome your new donors
Don’t leave the new supporters you’ve made during this period hanging until next November. Make sure you engage them immediately with a Welcome Series that will help them learn more about you and have confidence that their donation is making an impact. These are the donors who are most likely to open your next email, so make sure you start the cultivation process as soon as possible.
Use our Automation tool to create a series that includes soft asks and, depending on the donor’s previous response, encourages them to become a sustainer or to make an additional gift.
Read more about using Automation
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