The year-end campaign is one of the most important initiatives a nonprofit will tackle in any given year. It requires planning, hard work, and commitment. It also requires a lean and agile approach to work, learning fast, and listening to supporters and donors. It needs innovation, courage, and creativity. Hopefully, this 5 step outline and the 2021 Donor Engagement Guide provide you the roadmap and playbook required to reach your supporters in new and meaningful ways this fundraising season.
Step 1 Review Your Previous End of Year Giving Campaign
Data can be a powerful guide. Looking at what you did the previous year, the channels used, audience segments, messaging, what worked and what didn’t work. Challenges of the prior year can help steer the direction of your current year (2021) Giving Campaign.
Step 2 Reflect & Set
To succeed and progress, nonprofit organizations must set specific, incremental goals, stay resilient, and keep themselves accountable. Evaluate the overall state of your nonprofit and how close you are to achieving all of your 2021 goals. Get creative; end-of-year giving helps increase more than just fiscal goals. Boost your public profile, help you acquire new donors, grow your mobile list, and establish yourself as the leader in your impact area.
Step 3 Audience
To execute the most effective and successful year-end campaign possible, you’ll need to think about your audience first. Create donor segments and craft your message accordingly. And remember, before your campaign officially launches, you’ll want to have your ‘thank you’ materials ready to go for later.
Step 4. Create a Timeline
It’s recommended that end-of-year giving campaigns should last no longer than 6 weeks. #GivingTuesday indeed extended the year-end giving period by a bit, so you can use it as a benchmark of when to start with the year-end campaign appeals.
Step 5. Make the Ask
Now that you have a goal, audience, messaging, theme, and timeline, use channels to deliver an ask that will reach and resonate with your audience. A combination of channels can be a great way to build a rapport with your audience. Leverage multiple channels to amplify your message while keeping it authentic. Use email, social, text, website, events (live and virtual), and video messaging to tell a story, humanizing the ask.
Year-end giving and Giving Tuesday are great opportunities to meet your fundraising goals.
Between deciding which channels to use, which donor segments to focus on, and creating all the fundraising materials and tools – crafting and executing a good year-end fundraising campaign can be complex. As the leading peer-to-peer conversational text and video platform, each year, we release an annual Donor Engagement Guide, a playbook to reaching your supporters in new and meaningful ways via text and video messaging.
Download the latest 2021 Donor Engagement Guide
About Hustle
Since 2014, Hustle has helped hundreds of relationship-driven clients initiate more than 1 billion personal texting conversations within their communities. We are a market leader in peer-to-peer communication, transforming how organizations and their members talk. The first-of-its-kind and best-in-its-class, Hustle enables organizations to convert simple text messages into a powerful and dynamic tool to meaningfully engage with people and drive them to take action. Turn your text into action!
