3 Phases of a Successful Year-End Giving Campaign

As a nonprofit marketer, you probably have a love-hate relationship when it comes to your own fundraising. It’s when you can drive a ton of revenue and prove our worth, yet it’s stressful. We want to share the three phases that we think about when it comes to year-end giving. We’ve titled them Mission Planning, Launch, and the Extended Mission. We’ll walk you through this framework and what those three key phases look like.

Phase 1: Mission Planning

We recommend having the mission planning phase fully completed by the end of October at the very latest. In this phase, you definitely want to lock in your overall year-end campaign theme, what the ask is, the general appeal, as well as build a lot of the assets for your year-end fundraising campaign. This includes your landing page, the general banners you’re using across social and in email. Next, you certainly want to dive into your segmentation. What key audiences are you communicating with? How are you communicating with them differently? You’ll want to schedule this out in your calendar through December and even into January. How are you communicating with your supporters, potential supporters and donors throughout this entire campaign? A video can be really advantageous to have ready to go for year end. If this is something you’ll be using, you definitely want to get a head start and get that all dialed in. The last piece is really understanding the channels you’re going to be utilizing. This can range from email to Facebook and Instagram ads, Google ads, Google Ad Grants, and more. Make sure to get those builds completed during the mission planning phase.

Phase 2: Launch

In this phase, you’re launching all the channels you identified as high potential in your planning phase. There are going to be different milestones depending on where you are in your campaign. In November you’ll be super focused on sharing impact and driving engagement. Then you’ll definitely want to have a hard ask around Giving Tuesday and the middle of December. Those last three days of the year you’re really driving home the big bucks. The launch phase is about traction, traffic and really trying to take your campaign to new heights. 

Phase 3: Extended Mission 

There is a big opportunity for organizations after year end and it really centers around stewardship. It’s about expressing gratitude in January and sharing with donors your plans for what these funds are going to drive in the new year. This is an opportunity for you to really analyze how your year end went. What were your intended results, what were your actual results, what were your key learnings and what are you going to now apply to your whole new year fundraising strategy? That’s what the extended mission is about. Often you can roll those into new opportunities. Things like recurring giving and starting the new year off like never before. 

Cameron Ripley