Building Your 2025 Creative Toolkit: Top-Performing Giving Tuesday and EOY Strategies

We’re one month into 2025, and already nonprofits have faced significant challenges and have been responding to serious issues nationwide – from executive orders signed by the president just a few weeks into his second term that directly impact nonprofits and their missions to the Los Angeles wildfires that triggered robust and immediate rapid-response efforts just days into the new year. In a time when the nonprofit sector needs to respond to major news more regularly than ever, a new imperative emerges: to break through the noise and be direct when communicating with supporters in these moments.

At Giving Tuesday and end of year, strong creative drives results by being direct; by grabbing attention in the face of increased competition. Countdown clocks and thermometers abound; ask arrays and button designs are rigorously tested to find the combination most likely to increase clicks and donations. The insights we take away from top-performing graphics and creative style during the biggest campaigns of the year are the very same tactics that will help drive urgency and communicate need in moments of rapid response or when breaking news directly impacts your mission.

Our annual roundup of top-performing creative strategies from Giving Tuesday and year-end is a great way to track the trends driving results and the latest creative innovations – and it can also serve as a resource for building your toolkit of creative strategies for 2025. So let’s dive into the top creative takeaways from 2024:

Your stories of mission and impact are powerful. Make sure they’re front and center.

When nonprofits tell compelling stories about their work and mission and make the impact of a donor’s gift crystal clear, we see time and again that these are the emails, ads, and texts that drive the highest response. This year’s top-performing campaigns across our nonprofit partners shared their program’s history, told stories of impact, and used dynamic creative content to move and motivate their audiences.

When planning your campaigns for key moments in 2025, consider where you have opportunity to tell a story that resonates with your program’s core mission, share back the work your organization is doing to drive positive change, and reflect the community impacted by that crucial work – these are the stories that remind your audiences why they follow and support you.

Urgency tactics or personal narratives? Yes, both.

One trend we highlighted in our End of Year Digital Report was that top-performing creative was often adept at striking a balance between urgency and storytelling. We saw deadline-driven emails warmed up by personal stories and compelling graphics and longform narrative emails accented with eye-catching matches. By balancing a clear call to action with personalized content, these campaigns helped to deepen supporters’ connections to the mission while still driving response.

These top performers are a helpful reminder that nonprofit fundraisers don’t need to feel boxed into the structure of a strict fundraising appeal or a long-form engagement message. By striking a balance, creative can be direct and compelling and play a role in building community or telling stories of impact.

If your campaign is powered by a match, shout it from the rooftops. It moves the needle.

This year, creative that included match language everywhere – and we mean everywhere – was more effective at driving response. From subject lines to email copy to topper graphics, repetition and a focused attention on the chance to increase the impact of a donation drove top-performing content.

Over the years, we’ve worked with our partners to test every kind of matching gift tactic we could think of, from the impact of match multipliers to the placement of match language and match math multipliers and beyond. While it’s always important to run your own tests with your unique audience, years of our own testing has given us the confidence to say: If you’ve secured a matching gift for an important campaign, don’t shy away from leaning into repetition and emphasis to maximize its impact.

Deadlines drive response. Emphasize them in your late-in-day sends.

On Giving Tuesday 2024, we saw a number of nonprofits drive significant revenue increases from end-of-day sends and extension messaging. Creative tactics played a role in the success of these later sends, with urgency-driving tactics like countdown clocks, thermometers, and messaging around midnight deadlines.

Based on the increased response rates to deadline-driven messaging, consider opportunities to make your own moment outside of the traditional campaign calendar – how can you increase urgency with a flash match or one-day revenue goal?

As GIF usage grows, give your graphics a personal touch.

As more and more programs incorporate movement into their fundraising creative, we’re seeing organizations find innovative and creative ways to make their graphics stand out. Hand-drawn elements and annotations is one trend we at MissionWired have been excited about for a while, so we’re thrilled to see this creative approach crop up in top-performing campaigns. And when a leader within your organization has strong name recognition, it can be powerful to utilize their voice to speak directly to donors.

Creative touches aren’t just powerful for balancing urgency and storytelling – they’re also an opportunity to put your nonprofit’s personal signature on a fundraising graphic that connects them to who you are as an organization. So consider opportunities to develop a creative flair that’s uniquely yours.

If there’s one thing we’re taking from this year’s roundup of top-performing creative strategies, it’s the impact that standout creative can have – both immediately and in the long term. Because when you take the time to find the kinds of messages that connect your supporters with your core mission, inspire them to take action, and engage them with your world-changing work for the long term, the impact is tremendous. We see this every year – but it’s especially acute in years like this one, when fundraisers are facing a variety of significant challenges all at once. Inclusive, compelling storytelling is so much more than a strategy to build a top-performing message in a single campaign; it’s a touchpoint in each and every one of your donors’ lifelong journeys with your organization and its work.

We can’t wait to see what stories and innovative creative our partners share in the year to come. In the meantime, dig into more trends from 2024 in our End of Year Digital Report or Meet Our Writing Team, the content strategists and copywriters that are essential to our work supporting our nonprofit partners. And mark your calendars for our February webinar, “What Should Nonprofits Do About Email?” To secure your spot, RSVP here: