The Data-Driven Guide to Year-End Giving Campaigns

Published by Riley Young

If you aren’t maximizing revenue during the year-end giving season, it could be costing your organization and preventing your mission from moving forward.

This evidence-based guide will give you everything you need to plan a year-end giving campaign that cuts through the clutter, earns more revenue, and sets you up for success in the year ahead.

Why trust NextAfter? We’ve spent the past 15 years helping nonprofits grow online giving revenue. Everything below is supported by thousands of year-end fundraising experiments and over a decade’s worth of fundraising research trusted by nonprofit leaders to help grow their fundraising.

What is year-end giving and why does it matter?

Before planning your year-end giving campaign, it helps to know a little bit more about them and why they’re so important. Once you understand more about year-end giving and the important role it plays in reaching your annual goals, you’ll get a step-by-step framework for running a successful campaign with confidence.

What is year-end giving?

Year-end giving campaigns are fundraising campaigns specifically designed to maximize donations during the time of year when donors are most likely to give.

Year-end campaigns typically run the final 45 days of the year and play a pivotal role in meeting your annual fundraising goals and setting your mission up for success in the year ahead.

Donors are typically more likely to give during this time of year for a variety of factors but it is generally enough just to know that end-of-year has consistently been far and away the busiest giving season year after year.

Why does year-end giving matter

M+R’s 2023 Benchmark suggests that 26% of all annual fundraising revenue is raised during the Year-End Giving Season, while NextAfter’s year-end giving research has found that 37% of annual online fundraising revenue is earned during the final 45 days of the year.

Considering the 45 days that typically comprise the year-end giving season account for just 12% of the full calendar year (but 37% of annual online fundraising revenue), the importance of your year-end giving campaign cannot be overstated.

2024 Year-End Fundraising Benchmark Report

A data-driven look at how 211 nonprofits treat the year-end giving season—with additional insights on how you can improve results this season.

Explore the Benchmarks

Plan a Successful Year-End Giving Campaign In 5 Simple Steps

Sometimes, the hardest part of running your year-end campaign is knowing where to start. And with so much riding on the end of the year, it’s important to make a plan so that you avoid relying on guesswork, mimicry, or “what we’ve always done.”

Year-end giving campaigns are incredibly important, but they needn’t be complicated. This section lays out practical steps to help you plan your campaign early, align your team, and set your goals.

This proven five-step framework can help you plan year-end giving campaigns that cut through the clutter, engage your donors, and earn more revenue.

Gather year-end giving campaign ideas
Identify your year-end giving channels
Make a year-end campaign timeline
Write your year-end emails like this
Build your year-end donation page

1. Gather year-end giving campaign ideas

If you were to ‘eavesdrop’ on a collection of year-end fundraising campaigns, you might be shocked at how similar their tactics and messaging are to one another.

The nonprofit industry has a differentiation problem. It’s as if every organization was handed a set of canned messaging and told to fill in their organization’s name, donation needs, and mission.

Problem is: your ‘mission’ is not your value proposition (the reason someone should donate their hard-earned money to your organization), and your email appeals, ads, direct mail, donation pages, etc. won’t get the results you need if they look like everything else.

Have you seen how many appeals hit your inbox in December?

If you want to cut through the clutter of year-end giving season and beat last year’s results, then ‘what we’ve always done’ won’t cut it anymore — you have to be willing to test new ideas.

But testing into new ideas doesn’t mean guesswork or blind mimicry.

It means paying attention to those few pieces of marketing that do catch your eye and compel you to act — and then reverse engineering them to fit your audience and campaign.

Here are three year-end giving campaign ideas to get you started:

Implement a Sticky Bar on Your Donation Page

In the fundraising experiment shown below, adding a sticky bar to the donation page produced a 50% increase in donation rates and 35.4% increase in average gift size, leading to an incredible 103% lift in donation revenue.

Use Exit-Intent Pop-Ups to Capture Last-Minute Donations

In a recent year-end fundraising experiment, adding an exit-intent popup to a campaign donation page produced a staggering 179% lift in donations. Exit intent popups target users who land on a donation page but then attempt to leave the browser tab without making a gift.

Don't be afraid to try longer year-end fundraising emails

One of the most common questions we get about email fundraising is, “How long should my emails be?” Here’s our answer:

“Your emails should be as long as it takes to thoroughly explain why someone should give to your organization — but no longer.”

Ignore any blanket advice about how “people don’t read.” It’s simply not true. You know who reads long copy? People who are interested in what you have to say!

The hard part is understanding exactly how much information is needed for your donor to trust that investing their money in your organization is the right decision. But sometimes the answer is MORE.

In this fundraising experiment, lengthening the email copy led to a sizable 27% increase in donations.

Remember: these are just ideas to get you started. And it’s extremely important that you take time to consider how to adapt these examples to your audience.

Click here to see 17 year-end fundraising ideas, each with real-world examples, that you can swipe to test in your own year-end giving campaign.

2. Identify your giving channels

Our breakthrough year-end giving benchmark has found that only 36% of organizations studied sent year-end communications via more than one giving channel.

Unsurprisingly, of the 36% that used a multichannel strategy, 76% were considered to be high-retention organizations — this represents a huge area of opportunity!

In one recent multichannel fundraising experiment, we found that following up a direct mail appeal with a fundraising email increased donation rates by a staggering 132%!

But don’t feel restricted to direct mail and email channels — in another fundraising experiment, sending emails alongside text messages produced an 80.1% increase in donations.

In the example above, emails were added onto a text-only campaign — but what would happen if texts were added to an email-only campaign?

Below you’ll see an example illustrating that this multichannel approach works both ways. Accompanying an email campaign with texts produced 27% more donations than emails alone.

Identifying your giving channels will help you determine your campaign budget and the assets you’ll need to reach your goals.

Utilizing a multichannel strategy will give you the best chance to get your appeal in front of your donors and raise more revenue.

3. Make your year-end campaign timeline

A year-end campaign timeline can help you successfully manage your campaign by ensuring you have relevant, timely messages scheduled to hit on the days when your donors are most likely to give.

Which of course means knowing which days those are! Our 2024 Year-End Fundraising Benchmark Report has found that a whopping 50% of year-end revenue is earned during the final week of the year and on Giving Tuesday:

4% of online year-end revenue is earned on Giving Tuesday.
14% of online year-end revenue is earned on December 31st.
32% of online year-end revenue is earned during the last week of the year

So it makes sense to schedule communications during those times…

But digging further into the data reveals an extremely valuable but little-known insight:

More organizations send communications during the week of Giving Tuesday than they do during the last week of the year, despite a significant revenue disparity between the two.

We’ve done the research: learn exactly which emails to send on which days during this year’s giving season with this free year-end campaign timeline — a visual guide to help data-driven fundraisers plan year-end campaigns that earn more revenue.

4. Write your year-end emails like this

Fundraising emails are the cornerstone of a successful year-end giving campaign. Compelling emails can help you unleash a torrent of revenue, building awesome momentum into the year ahead.

But if you treat them like a task to cross off your list or just dupe the emails you sent last year, they’ll pile up unopened at the bottom of the inbox, leaving critical revenue on the table during the year’s most important fundraising season.

Years of fundraising research have shown us that high-converting fundraising emails are, first and foremost, ‘human’ and ‘relational’.

The seven tips below will help you write engaging year-end emails that gain the open, get the click, and earn more revenue.

Send your fundraising email from a human. People give to people. Don’t send from the name of your organization.
Nail your subject line. Before a donor can click a link or make a donation, they have to open your email. Spend time on your subject line and write it first.
Don’t customize your preview text. Custom preview text tells your donor that your email is marketing. Let your preview text naturally pull in the first line of your email.
Say hello and call your donor by name. Your email should be written in a conversational tone – like a message to colleague. Good conversations start with a warm greeting.
Explain the problem at hand. If there’s no problem to solve, there’s no reason to give. Explain the problem and illustrate the symptoms your donor experiences or could experience as a result.
Propose a solution. Help your donor catch the vision for solving the problem at hand
Articulate the donor’s impact. Help your donor connect their donation to meaningful impact. Be clear and articulate — and don’t be afraid to write a few paragraphs of copy.

See 12 real-world examples of year-end giving emails your donors can’t resist — swipe these emails, adapt them to your audience, and plan your most successful year-end campaign yet.

5. Build a year-end donation page that converts

One of the most common mistakes online fundraisers make when planning their year-end campaign is driving traffic to their general donation page.

But having only one donation experience for all of your fundraising campaigns could keep your donors and potential donors from being as generous as they could be.

Building a donation page specific to your year-end campaign creates a personalized experience for donors, building on the momentum created by your campaign communications, and inspiring more donors to give as generously as possible.

These 7 tips will help you create a higher-converting year-end donation page.

Lose the navigation at the top of your page.And please don’t put a “Donate” button that jumps your visitor right to your form. It sounds like a good idea, but it decreases donations.
Don’t over-invest in design. As long as your page is readable, additional design elements rarely make a significant difference.
Clarity trumps persuasion. Clearly state the impact of someone’s gift right in the headline.
Add urgency. Use a progress bar (showing how close you are to a fundraising goal) or a count-down clock to a specific giving deadline. But don’t put them both in the same spot.
If you use an image, make sure it’s directly related to the reason why someone should give.
After your headline, write an introductory paragraph that relates to the specific reason someone clicked through to your page. (Your email call-to-action, for example.)
Don’t use videos. I know most people hate hearing that, so here are 3 times we tested using copy instead of a video and increased donations by 203%, 342%, and 560%.

Running a year-end campaign requires a significant investment of time and resources, so make it count with a campaign donation page tailored to your campaign.

Get all 21 elements of a campaign donation page that earns more revenue in this free template.

Let us plan and execute your fundraising campaigns

When you're ready, we can help you plan and execute fundraising campaigns that get more donations, earn more revenue, and reactivate hidden donors already on your file.

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Summary

Approximately 1/3 of your annual contribution revenue is likely to come during the Year-End Giving Season: the final 45 days of the year. So your year-end giving campaign is critical to setting yourself up for success in the year ahead.