About 31% of total annual giving occurs in December, which makes it essential for your nonprofit organization to optimize its fundraising efforts during this critical time. 

In this guide, we’ll cover some of the key ways that you can maximize your year-end fundraising activities to increase revenue. Here are our tips to ensure you wrap up this year successfully: 

1. Clean up your website.
2. Update your supporter segments.
3. Create an outreach timeline.
4. Remind supporters of potential tax deductions.
5. Promote matching gifts.
6. Aim to retain supporters in the new year.

Incorporate these ideas into your strategic plan for the year’s end. This plan should be detailed, spelling out all of the campaigns you’ll launch, who at your organization will be responsible for which tasks, and a timeline with deadlines for your goals. 

Let’s get started with our tips to build out this successful strategy. 

1. Clean up your website.

When people visit your website, the last thing you want is for them to get bogged down with outdated content. This makes it more challenging to navigate the site and find opportunities to get involved. Often, supporters will abandon the site if they can’t quickly find what they’re looking for.

Make it easy for your website visitors to find what they’re looking for by eliminating any outdated information before your year-end fundraising push. 

Review your website before year-end fundraising efforts kick off, which will likely be between Halloween and Giving Tuesday. 

As you do so, be sure to:

• Eliminate old information. You should delete any information from expired campaigns, past events, and other historic activities from your site. 
• Check your contact information. Update your contact information with your current phone number, address, and email to help supporters get in touch. Test your forms and links to make sure people are able to reach out to your team through your website. 
• Make your donate buttons prominent. The most crucial thing you need to do is ensure it’s easy for supporters to make a donation on your website. Place your donate buttons in prominent locations, like the header of your home page or in the navigation bar so they’ll know right away where to go to make a gift. 
• Test your donation buttons, forms and pages. In the case of supporters who want to make a gift online, you don’t want to run into a situation where a form or page is broken, not optimized, or otherwise creating friction for the donor. That’s why testing is so important.

Checking your site for outdated information and ensuring other elements work properly on a regular basis is essential for nonprofit security, stability, relevance, and reliability. Take your website upkeep to another level by conducting maintenance throughout the year, such as on a monthly basis. 

2. Update your supporter segments.

Segmentation is one of the most important and impactful communication strategies that your nonprofit can implement. Effective segmentation allows your organization to efficiently reach out to different supporter groups with messages that personally appeal to each group.

For example, you wouldn’t send a long-time major donor a welcome letter and information packet about your mission. However, that welcome letter and information packet would be the perfect message to send a brand new donor who just gave their first contribution or signed up to volunteer for the first time. They would appreciate the personal touch and the additional information about your mission. 

While setting a strategy for year-end fundraising success, be sure to clean up your donor segments, ensuring they’re updated and useful for your campaign. We recommend creating donor segments based on the following data: 

• The recency of the donor’s contributions 
• The frequency of the donor’s gifts 
• The type of gifts
• The amount the donor contributed to your organization 
• The reason the donor contributed 
• The donor’s interests 

What does this look like in practice? Bloomerang’s donor segmentation guide provides several examples of potential segments your organization may create, including: 

• LYBUNTs. This stands for last year but unfortunately not this, describing donors who contributed the previous year but have not yet donated this year. Reach out to these supporters reminding them about your mission and encouraging them to get their donations in before the end of the year. 
• First-time donors. In order to retain these donors, you’ll want to make a strong first impression. Add these donors to a welcome email series and give them a little more TLC. 
• Monthly donors. Although they give throughout the year, you can still reach out to monthly donors to thank them for their continued support and ask for an additional contribution to help reach your year-end fundraising goal. 
• Volunteers. Your volunteers are a great recruiting ground for new donors. If your volunteers haven’t contributed yet, the end of the year is the perfect time to reach back out and encourage them to make a gift. 

After you’ve cleaned up your data segments, consider how you can appeal to each segment for your year-end fundraising campaign. Create unique outreach materials for each one, encouraging them to get involved and contribute.

3. Create an outreach timeline.

Creating a timeline can help keep you organized and prevent some last-minute scrambling.

Keep in mind the important holidays and celebrations that occur during the end of the year, then build out your marketing strategy and opportunities accordingly. For example, you can build your year-end fundraising celebrations around: 

• Halloween. Host a costume party or another Halloween celebration to encourage community members to get involved. For example, an animal shelter may host a dog costume contest where supporters make a donation to vote for their favorite pup. 
• Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is the perfect time to recruit volunteers who are looking to  give back. For example, a food bank can recruit volunteers to serve food on this day and during other busy times. 
• Giving Tuesday. The Tuesday after Thanksgiving has quickly become one of the most impactful giving days of the year. Make the most of this day by hosting your own Giving Tuesday campaign. 
• Winter holidays. Celebrate the winter holidays with your supporters. For example, you might host a gala for your major supporters during this celebratory season. Be sure to keep in mind the varying comfort levels of your supporters and incorporate hybrid event opportunities where applicable. 

As you’re crafting your timeline, determine when your events will occur and when you’ll launch different campaigns. Then, start creating the different letters, emails, and other marketing collateral you’ll use during and leading up to these activities. This will help you kickstart your various opportunities and save some time during the campaigns themselves. 

4. Remind supporters of potential tax deductions.

One of the reasons the year-end fundraising season is so lucrative is because your supporters are trying to get in their contributions so it counts toward their tax deductions for the year. 

Use the urgency naturally created by the year-end timeline in your marketing strategies when reaching out to supporters. Tell them about the necessity of getting their donations in for their tax deduction to apply for the year. 

This year, this communication is even more important. While charitable contributions are generally only deducted by supporters who itemize their taxes, the CARES Act allowed those who take the standard deduction to also itemize their charitable contributions for an above-the-line deduction of up to $300 for singles and $600 for couples who file jointly. This applied in 2020 and was extended to 2021. 

5. Promote matching gifts.

Many companies require eligible supporters to request their donation match by the end of the calendar year in which they made the donation. 

Compile a list of supporters whose donations could be matched by their employers. Then, reach out to the supporters who have not submitted their request for a match yet. Send them emails and letters informing them of the opportunity and encouraging them to make an even bigger difference by seeing their donation matched. 

6. Aim to retain supporters in the new year.

Don’t forget about your donors after they make their donation. After you have their initial support, you have to work hard to retain them. The first step for this stewardship strategy? Showing appreciation for donors’ contributions during your year-end campaign. 

Some of the appreciation ideas you can incorporate into your stewardship strategy include: 

• Email supporters to say thank you. This should be done immediately after their contribution. Be sure to also include your official gift acknowledgement in this email.
• Host an appreciation event. There’s a lot of power in not asking for money. Host an event that simply has the purpose of thanking your supporters for how they’ve helped you carry out your mission.
• Gather feedback. Ask your supporters about their opinions on your year-end campaigns. Not only do surveys like this show your supporters that you care about their opinions, but they can also help you improve your future fundraising efforts. 
• Add them to a recognition wall. Create a recognition wall to highlight major donors in a public place. This could be a physical wall in your office with their names engraved, a virtual wall on your website, or both. 

Plan out the various steps you’ll take as a part of your appreciation strategy before the end of the year. This makes it easy to show your appreciation and ensure you’re stewarding your donors well. 

The end of the year presents an incredibly lucrative opportunity for nonprofits like yours. Start your planning early and get as much preparation work done as possible. This will help you reach your supporters more effectively, raise more money, and take some of the stress off of your fundraising team. Happy fundraising! 

About the Author

Jay Love

Co-Founder and current Chief Relationship Officer at Bloomerang, Jay Love, has served this sector for 33 years and is considered the most well-known senior statesman whose advice is sought constantly.

Prior to Bloomerang, he was the CEO and Co-Founder of eTapestry for 11 years, which at the time was the leading SaaS technology company serving the charity sector. Jay and his team grew the company to more than 10,000 nonprofit clients, charting a decade of record growth.

He is a graduate of Butler University with a B.S. in Business Administration. Over the years, he has given more than 2,500 speeches around the world for the charity sector and is often the voice of new technology for fundraisers.