Thinking Ahead to End of Year: Five Strategies to Start Now

If you’re a nonprofit fundraiser wondering what to expect and how to prepare as we head toward this end-of-year, you’re not alone. I know you’ve got a lot on your mind even in these summer months, when Giving Tuesday and Dec. 31 are distant points on the horizon.

I’m excited to share some of my thinking around the best strategies to keep in mind right now, as you’re kicking off the planning for your strongest possible year-end campaigns.

1. Identify an Environment-Responsive Plan

2025 has been a deeply challenging fundraising environment for many nonprofits. So many organizations are still trying to fill big funding gaps, whether they’re directly impacted by funding cuts or indirectly impacted through increased need across their communities. All within an onslaught of domestic and international emergencies, economic uncertainty for would-be donors, and a turbulent news cycle. With so much changing for nonprofits in 2025, we’re preparing for the unexpected at EOY.

One thing we have seen clearly in our Nonprofit Trends this year: Organizations are responsive to the news, directly calling out funding cuts and building momentum around it, and inviting their donors outright to show up have driven gains amidst economic uncertainty. As you plan your year-end content, consider leaning into this responsive framing – but don’t wait until year-end to try it. Test early and often.

Organizations keeping their foot on the gas in their messaging, and even in their acquisition investments, have been able to continue to drive immediate and long-term growth and revenue for their programs. My colleague Trista Murphy has shared some new and really insightful strategies around continuing program investments in a difficult economic year, if you want to dig deeper into the subject.

2. Optimize Your Digital Strategies

As always, summer months are a time when you can gain valuable insights through A/B testing on your digital program to find out what messaging will resonate with your unique audience at year-end. If there’s an innovative tactic you’ve been wanting to try, don’t wait until Q4 to run those tests. Test into your best combination of tactics like:

• New acquisition channels
• Email signers/design/length
• Ask strings
• SMS and MMS approaches
• Advertising creative
• Supporter records and other personalization tools
• Headers and images that maximize conversions on donation page

Of course, it’s important to remember that year-end will see a boost in response across the board – so even if you’re not seeing incredible lifts right now, knowing your top-performing tactics early will help you put your most effective strategies into market for Giving Tuesday and Dec. 31.

3. Target Your Best Email Audience

In challenging giving environments – like what we’ve seen this year – you’ll want to identify your smartest audience strategy: targeting your best prospects and your best upgrade potential and giving your audience the best personalized appeals possible. Modeling gives you access to the audience insights that will give you your best chance of success.

The summer months are a critical window to prepare your lists ahead of year-end: How can you grow your audience? What’s the segmentation strategy that maximizes engagement and ensures strong deliverability? With The Digital Co-Op, state-of-the-art predictive models and a vast data lake will identify the very best digital audiences for your mission. Members of the Co-Op are finding their best audiences depending on their unique goals, but a few common priorities can help drive big increases at year-end:

1. Use the summer months to grow your list. Email acquisition through The Digital Co-Op is more cost-effective than other channels – and recently, a new model upgrade is driving even stronger results, so right now is an exciting time to invest in list growth.
2. Focus on reactivation. Like shopping in your own store, reactivation is an efficient way to grow your active list with existing supporters who’ve already shown interest in your work. The Digital Co-Op’s Reactivation model can score your inactive audience – the folks you’ve stopped emailing to protect your deliverability – to find the most promising (and least risky!) lapsed supporters to bring back into the fold. One organization even achieved a 317% return in one month at year-end.
3. Acquire and engage high-value supporters. EOY is one of the most important moments to engage with mid-level and high-dollar donors: One organization saw 50% of its annual mid-level revenue come in during December 2024. With The Mid-Level Co-Op, you can maximize this moment by acquiring new high-value donors who have been proven to give at significantly higher levels.

4. Don’t Miss Your Chance to Raise Big Over SMS

We often talk about how SMS is one of the fastest-growing channels for digital fundraising, but what’s just as important to emphasize is the potential scale of that growth. At MissionWired, we have nonprofit clients whose text programs have reached million-dollar status, some of which we’ve helped build from the ground up. So when we say we’re seeing high rates of growth over SMS, we’re not just talking about the big percentage jumps you see with brand-new programs. This channel is the real deal and an area worthy of investment.

One quick note: With iOS 26 rolling out in September, which includes filtering of unsaved numbers in SMS inboxes, it’s important to try and establish engagement with your shortcode list so your organization doesn’t get filtered out. You can do this by sending a contact card to your audience or some type of content that prompts a reply. We’ll continue to keep you updated on how best to adjust your texting program amid these changes.

Growing your SMS list over the next few months is an important way to set up your entire year-end campaign for success. What is one strategy to accomplish this that every nonprofit should be leveraging?

Using longcode acquisition texting to drive opt-ins to your shortcode program. Longcode texting, also referred to as peer-to-peer texting, can be a valuable acquisition tool to opt-in new supporters to your shortcode program – and to drive additional revenue in big moments like Giving Tuesday and Dec. 31.

Here’s another way that The Digital Co-Op can help: Just like email acquisition models, MissionSMS uses cutting-edge modeling and incredible amounts of data to identify your best audience to engage over mobile. You can use modeled longcode lists from MissionSMS to drive immediate revenue, and every supporter you convert will be opted into your shortcode list.

5. Integrate Your Creative Across Online & Offline Channels

As always, when planning for year-end, your development teams and partners should be in close conversation to maximize the potential for integration across channels and give your constituents an optimal experience that inspires generosity. Digital leaders, remember that your direct mail colleagues are finalizing their plans now – get that meeting on the calendar and coordinate!

While direct mail campaigns often focus more on end of year than Giving Tuesday, which has remained a predominantly digital moment, some of our partners have found success with a Giving Tuesday postcard or drive-to-web mailers, closely aligned with their digital campaigns, to boost impact in November.

Consider integrated strategies you can easily A/B test with measurable results. Try co-targeting, where you serve your direct mail list targeted digital ads to support the campaigns in their mailboxes. By targeting half your list with digital ads, you can measure for a lift in results. Try A/B testing a postcard mailed to website visitors who didn’t convert.

At a time when incremental gifts can really make a difference, these kinds of extra touches across channels help you scrape every win that you possibly can – and can help you build a more robust list of multi-channel donors while you’re at it.

As always, we’ll have plenty more to say about the top strategies our nonprofit partners are leveraging to prepare for year-end over the months to come – in the meantime, looking back at the results and takeaways from our Giving Tuesday and End-of-Year Giving reports can always offer insight and inspiration for your 2025 planning!