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 unusual end-of-year in 2024 – 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.

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

1. Consider Your Post-Election Messaging

Looming large this year is uncertainty around what election outcomes might bring, especially as it relates to year-end timing. The last few weeks’ headlines alone have absorbed an unprecedented amount of attention and energy from the same audiences who might be engaging with your nonprofit’s campaigns. With tight races, close election results, and even the possibility of runoff elections in some states comes the potential for noise and uncertainty that could carry on well into the year-end season. While we can’t predict how Election Day (or the days following it) will go, it will be helpful to go into November knowing that we might not have that clear air space from Giving Tuesday through Dec. 31 that we’re used to having dedicated to the giving season.

Your organization’s work may be impacted by the outcome in November – and you certainly don’t need to be a political organization for your mission to be relevant to the issues at play in this year’s election. If your nonprofit has something to say related to potential outcomes, it can be helpful to workshop and pre-plan that messaging now.

My colleague Trista Murphy has shared some new and really insightful strategies around election-year fundraising for nonprofits in a year of uncertainties – if you want to dig deeper on 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 October 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
• The 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 may see this end of 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 an 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. Consider custom models specific to your goals. Target your most valuable prospects, and model for mid-level donors or sustainers – The Digital Co-Op’s custom modeling offerings can help you solve the unique challenges your program is facing.

4. 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.

For all our conversations around the challenges the 2024 election year may bring to end of year, it’s also worth highlighting the opportunities: Look to the political fundraising industry for inspiration! SMS fundraising has its roots in the political space, and their high-volume cadence also means incredible rates of testing, optimizing, and innovation. Keep an eye on what’s working in the texts of leading political campaigns for insights into nonprofit SMS strategy. And yes – we know that candidates will be sending lots of texts ahead of the election, but remember: This also means donors are getting more familiar with using SMS as a means of giving.

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

Use 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 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 2024 planning!