While the annual year-end giving season is still a few months away, savvy nonprofits are thinking about what they can do now to prepare for an epic end of the year. The summer months are an opportune time to solidify your goals, reflect on your most effective methods of engagement, and think about crafting an effective year-end appeal.
Clients are often asking us for tips. Sometimes they want to know how to leverage our software for different avenues of contact, but most often, they just want some recommendations on what we’ve seen work over the past 14 years of working closely with nonprofits.
This article promises to walk you through the steps to crafting an irresistible year-end appeal. After reading our tried-and-true tips, you’ll be ready to put pen to paper (or keyboard to monitor, or voice memo to your iPhone) and start formulating your best year-end appeal ever.
It’s been widely reported that half of all nonprofit organizations receive the largest percentage of their donations in the last three months of the year. Why? There are a few reasons, some of them just plain practical.
Remember that getting donations is the primary focus of most year-end appeals, but stewardship is a secondary benefit. A donor might not be able to give this year, but the way you communicate and the messages you send (now and throughout the year) should strengthen your bond with your constituents and engendering feelings of loyalty.
The bottom line: Most nonprofits rely heavily on year-end campaigns to meet their fundraising goals and keep their donors engaged.
Thinking about the psychology of giving, you want your nonprofit’s cause to be top-of-mind when someone gets ready to write a check. You might be waiting for an end-of-year bonus, a holiday check from in-laws, or just for the mood to strike.
The point is simply that you can start your communication early—say, after Labor Day—and nurture your donors so that you’re at the top of the list when the time is right. It’s important to note that a year-end appeal is not one email or one postcard. It’s a multichannel nurture campaign that will allow you to engage with the largest number of supporters.
The year-end giving season traditionally kicks off with Giving Tuesday right after Thanksgiving, but you can be priming your donors for a few months before that.
The bottom line: start thinking of slowly launching a campaign in late September or October, then slowly ramp it up with a big push after Giving Tuesday.
This is when we counsel clients to think of a multi-channel campaign, taking advantage of many different fundraising tools. Your CRM features likely include our dozen favorite fundraising tools, but even nonprofits not relying on technology can implement many of our ideas on the list.
While we love our list, we urge clients to take a deep dive into your unique record books. How do your donors like to be contacted? Which methods—direct mail letters or postcards, automated emails, phone calls, videos, social media, text campaigns—resonate the most and give you the best results? You don’t need 12 different methods of communication, but a multichannel campaign should include at least three channels.
Looking at last year’s campaign, important metrics to track include:
The bottom line: look at what works with your donors, and don’t be afraid to try new methods of outreach.
Well, everyone. And their mother.
But segmenting your list isn’t a bad idea. Your CRM will be able to break an enormous database (or a smaller database) into chunks. If, for example, you segmented your list by age, you could choose different channels for each age group or even change the order in which you send communications. Your millennials might respond first to a text with a link to give, and a different generation might like a postcard or even a phone call.
Or segments might include:
The bottom line: Determine the metrics that influence giving behavior, then use your CRM to segment your audiences and personalize your communications.
You can also segment by age, as we discussed, or you can segment by average gift size. We love the idea of an RFM calculator that calculates your donors' recency, frequency, and monetary value. You can segment by where people live, their political party, or any metric you collect when you add people to your database.
And we recommend a broad reach when it comes to year-end campaigns, which means broadcasting your campaign to no one in particular. This can look like social media, television or radio ads, partnerships with local shops, or events that invite the general public’s participation.
Will you have different content for each campaign? Start with one central message that can be used in any channel, and as your end-of-year campaigns get more sophisticated (and your database grows), you can see if it makes sense to use different messages for different groups.
The bottom line: Match your donors and the messages that will resonate with each group.
So if you’re following along, you know when you want to start your year-end giving campaign and how you will reach your donors and prospects. You also have an idea of who you’re going to target. So now it’s time to talk about crafting your message.
Follow these easy steps to draft your appeal. We will start with the workhorse of channels and talk about how to write an appeal letter for direct mail, and then we will discuss how to apply that work to other campaigns. (Depending on your age, the TL;DR or the Cliff Notes: you need a graphic, a headline, a story, and a CTA leading to a mobile-optimized donation form. But read it anyway to get the details.)
You now have a headline, graphics (or photographs, infographics, illustrations), a story to tell, and an ask that leads to a donation form. While these work for direct mail, you can combine pieces of them for any other campaign.
Just remember the basics of a year-end appeal:
The bottom line: Craft the important elements (a headline, graphics, a story, and an ask) and use them across channels for consistency.
Create an email using these elements and send it to a small group of donors. If it’s not as successful as you hoped, tweak your donation amounts. Or conduct an A/B test, in which you send the same email to two groups with one small change: a different graphic, headline, subject line, or call-to-action.
Emails are the perfect channel on which to test your content because it’s free, responses tend to be immediate, and you can be nimble in making changes.
Once you’ve hit on the perfect appeal, let ‘er rip. And start planning the next segment of your campaign using the effective elements you’ve assembled.
The bottom line: Don’t sleep on even informal A/B testing. It’s the most objective, valuable feedback you can get.
Ring in the end of your campaign and the start of a new year with champagne and confetti or Netflix and your comforter, but then think about how you can leverage the past few months to help you in the coming year.
The bottom line: Measure, record, and plan strategically while this end-of-year push is fresh in your mind.
Finally, pat yourself on the back. We love working with nonprofits (and if you’re looking for a partner, we’d love to work with you) because your mission makes the world a better place, and we tip our hats to nonprofits everywhere.