Power Year-End Giving Campaigns: 10 Fresh Ideas!

Year-end giving season is right around the corner, and savvy nonprofits are planning campaigns to capitalize on the goodwill and generosity that explode as the year winds down.  

But it’s easy to get stuck in a fundraising rut. If you’re looking for some fun new ways to breathe life into your year-end campaigns, you’ve come to the right place! 

Ten Year-End Giving Campaign Ideas 

Here are ten creative ideas you can consider for your year-end giving campaign: 

1. Giving Tuesday Blitz 

The official start to nonprofit year-end giving is often considered Giving Tuesday, which occurs the week after Thanksgiving. It’s easy to generate excitement by creating a 24-hour all-out campaign! Hop on social media every hour and give fundraising updates. Share stories demonstrating your impact. Spotlight donors on your website and issue mini-challenges, such as a Power Hour in which you try to get 100 $10 donations in 60 minutes. 

2. Matching Gift Challenge 

Find a local company with a matching gift program and ask them to support a “Twice as Nice” campaign. You offer them visibility and free publicity, and they pledge to match gifts up to a certain amount. You set that as your goal and choose a period of time, then announce that all gifts within that period will be matched. A shorter time period will add a sense of urgency and competition! Perhaps the company will offer to give a branded item, such as a t-shirt, to all donors. This helps the company with brand reach and incentivizes donors to participate. 

3. Donate Your Age 

This is a great challenge to promote on social media! Encourage your supporters to donate an amount equal to their age or to all the ages in their house. They can donate in honor of someone else and guess their age! Your thank-you email can have fun with the challenge (imagine a subject line that says, “But you don’t look 52!” or however much they donated). Have a short period of time (such as a weekend) and hype up the challenge in emails, on your website, and on social media to create a buzz. 

4. Text-to-Give Countdown Clock 

Create a countdown to year-end, with a goal of receiving donations via text. If you can segment your donors, this is a campaign that might resonate more with some groups than others and can be run concurrently with other campaigns. Perhaps you plan a direct mail campaign targeting a different donor segment and run them simultaneously. This campaign works because it creates urgency for last-minute gifts. Our clients often report that this type of campaign picks up speed as the end approaches. 

5. Social Media Takeover 

Do you have a donor, board member, or team member with a larger-than-life personality? Give them control of your nonprofit’s social media accounts for a day! Ask them to appeal for gifts and urge them to be creative. Livestreaming, interviews, and case studies work to generate buzz. The zanier, the better! 

6. Galas, Events, and Telethons 

One of our clients, Rescue Village, hosted “Woofstock” with the ambitious goal of raising $145,000. They launched a peer-to-peer campaign to support the event and successfully raised nearly $200,000! Another client, a Christian radio station, used a five-day radiothon campaign with the goal of acquiring 75 new donors. The event rallied 160 new donors and exceeded all fundraising expectations! People love events, in person and online, and using them as part of a year-end campaign is guaranteed to boost your fundraising revenue. 

7. A 12-Day Year-in-Review 

Each day for 12 days, highlight an impact story from each month of the year. You can use multichannel fundraising to get the message out, announcing it on your website and in social media as well as texting and even sending a direct-mail postcard that arrives each day. Regardless of the channel, have a clear call to donate, and ensure the stories are impactful enough to compel supporters to donate. 

8. Last Chance for the Deduction! 

Plan a short push after Christmas reminding people of the tax benefits of charitable gifts. You could ask a tax expert to do a live Q&A streaming on social media. Make it easy to give. Text-to-give will help you reach a broad audience quickly and inexpensively! Tupelo Children’s Museum used text outreach to smash fundraising goals. Combine effective outreach with the time-sensitive nature of tax deductions to get a year-end bump in revenue. 

9. Midnight Countdown Challenge 

This melds many successful fundraising strategies: an event, a time-sensitive push, and competition to reach a goal. Host a live-streamed event on New Year’s Eve with the goal of hitting a fundraising number before midnight. You can have hourly drawings for prizes, which can be anything from branded items from your nonprofit to experiences like tickets to an event or even amazing volunteer opportunities not open to the public. The more you can keep the excitement building, the faster the donations will roll in. You can combine elements of other ideas, such as talking about tax deductions and sharing impactful stories. 

10. A Give and Get Raffle 

Designate a week for this campaign in which every donation over a certain amount gets the donor entered into a raffle for a prize. Local businesses can donate the prizes; most are willing to help as it will drive traffic back to them. Ask your board members if they have any prizes to donate. The more alluring the prizes, the more you’ll be guaranteed enthusiastic participation from your supporters! 

Innovative Year-End Giving Campaigns Boost Donations! 

Whether any of these ideas interest you or spark your own creative ideas, we urge you to start a year-end giving plan now. It’s an important season for all nonprofits, so there will be competition for donor dollars. The more you can share your mission and the impact of donations, create a fun giving environment, and make it supremely easy to give (here are some ideas for optimizing your donation forms), the easier it will be to generate some buzz and reach your goals. 

CharityEngine has helped hundreds of nonprofits blast through ambitious fundraising goals at year-end. If you’d like a quick look at our software, book a demo and see what’s behind our promise that our software pays for itself!