Year-Over-Year Growth For Your Annual Campaign: Takeaways From Hunger Action Month

Alyssa Ackerman (she/her), Vice President, MissionWired
Heather O’Connell (she/her), Senior Digital Strategist, MissionWired

For Feeding America and its nationwide network of affiliate food banks, September marks an important tentpole campaign: Hunger Action Month. Inspiring people across the country to come together and take action in the fight against hunger in America, this month-long campaign is a powerful opportunity for affiliated hunger organizations to drive revenue to support their communities. At MissionWired, we’re honored to partner with food banks and hunger organizations fighting this important fight.

Each year, our partners at Feeding Westchester and San Francisco-Marin Food Bank have strengthened their dedicated campaigns for Hunger Action Month by looking back at the successes of the campaign and asking, “How can we improve year over year?”

We’re excited to share how we leveraged our deep expertise in the vertical to support our partners in reaching this goal. Working closely at their sides, we helped them personalize their Hunger Action Month campaigns to connect with their unique audiences. And by applying tested best practices alongside the very real urgency and increased need facing food banks in 2025, we helped them build campaigns that drove impressive year-over-year results:

Following a strong 2024 Hunger Action Month, SF-Marin Food Bank saw even stronger results in 2025, driving a 9% increase in total revenue.

Feeding Westchester saw their efforts to optimize Hunger Action Month 2025 drive an exciting 51% increase in revenue over 2024.

To celebrate the powerful year-over-year growth both organizations drove in a challenging fundraising year for their critical work in their communities, we’re excited to highlight their inspiring campaigns and the strategies that made a difference this year.

Read on for strategies that these hunger organizations leveraged to improve year-over-year campaign performance – and how you can apply those to your annual or year-end campaigns:

Speak to the current moment – while leveraging proven tactics for response.

This year, the news cycle has brought food banks and hunger organizations into the spotlight in the face of significant funding challenges and increased demand due to SNAP cuts. With their missions all the more crucial to supporting the health and well-being of their communities, SF-Marin Food Bank and Feeding Westchester connected their messaging this Hunger Action Month to the moment to drive urgency on the impact of giving and to communicate why now.

By combining this powerful, timely messaging with tested tactics proven to drive response and increase urgency – like supporter records, progress bars and animation – these organizations were able to optimize their campaigns to maximize relevance and increase engagement.

Scale up messaging in surround sound.

With any major campaign, the readiness to be nimble and scale up in major moments is a powerful tool for driving growth year over year. When this approach is executed across channels for a surround-sound, high-powered campaign, the impact can be even greater.

For SF-Marin Food Bank, this meant increasing their email cadence at the end of the month to bring their results up to pace with the rest of their campaign. By refreshing their most successful emails and finding places to add these extra sends into their email cadence, they were able to extend the success of their campaign without the heavy lift of new content creation.

Feeding Westchester found that scaling up over SMS in partnership with email and increasing direct-to-camera ads featuring their staff members throughout Hunger Action Month was a highly impactful way to build a surround-sound campaign that drove stronger response rates.

Create a sense of urgency.

Falling in September, Hunger Action Month is a major campaign sandwiched in the midst of a busy fundraising season. With the back-to-school season only just passed, and with Giving Tuesday and end-of-year just around the corner, it is important to find ways to draw attention to the moment and build excitement.

To create urgency around Hunger Action Month, we helped our partners update their match strategies to meet the moment by:

Create flash matches. While SF-Marin Food Bank is often able to offer a matching gift campaign to donors, for Hunger Action Month, they leveled up their matched giving with a flash match that lasted for a week within the month.

Flash match creative example from SF-Marin Food Bank

Upgrade matches mid-campaign. For Feeding Westchester, upgrading their month-long 3X match for the final week of their campaign to a 5X “last chance” match drove an increase in response.

Mid-campaign match upgrade creative example from Feeding Westchester

Create mini moments. When a match for a dedicated giving campaign becomes expected by your audiences, consider ways to build excitement around small moments within a month-long campaign. A mini campaign around Hunger Action Day was also an opportunity to change up the messaging.

How can you apply these takeaways to your annual or EOY campaigns?

Dedicated giving days provide a powerful opportunity to engage with your community of supporters, build awareness, communicate impact and drive critical support to your mission. With Hunger Action Month in September, this campaign also offered the opportunity for our partners to look back at their results and get an early read on audience response, re-validating their approaches going into the year-end giving season.

Here are 3 strategies we can apply to EOY campaigns based on this year-over-year success:

  1. If recent news or the current moment impacts your campaign, don’t be afraid to make that direct connection. By drawing a straight line from the challenges that are in the news to their impacts in your community, you can communicate real stakes and urgency to your audience and let them know how they can help.
  2. Stay nimble at year-end – and don’t be afraid to scale up! While it can be tempting to lock in a content calendar to execute throughout end-of-year, we’ve seen our partners power game-changing growth when they were willing to add a last-minute re-send or refresh a top-performing campaign.
  3. Build mini moments within a longer campaign to boost response. Can you identify opportunities throughout your year-end campaigns to incorporate some variety and surprise? Consider testing match upgrades, extensions and flash matches.

Interested in learning more about how food banks and hunger organizations are growing support in a challenging giving environment? Check out Four Things for Hunger Organizations To Prioritize In This Moment. For more tactics and actions to prepare for end-of-year, read our 2025 EOY Checklist – or connect with our team about a custom creative audit.