How to build an end-of-year giving strategy around the final six days of December

Every fall, our team at Fíonta supports countless nonprofit teams as they plan and execute end-of-year giving strategies, and the conversation almost always starts with Giving Tuesday. Fundraise Up’s new Pulse Check: Giving Season Decoded report gave me a reason to rethink that practice. It looks at five years of giving season data from more than 500 US nonprofits, and the picture it paints is a season with several peaks, the biggest of which arrives when most teams are already on vacation.

Here’s what stood out to me, and what I’d do about it with six weeks to go.

The final six days carry the season

December 26 through 31 brings in about 38% of a typical organization’s season revenue. December 31 alone accounts for about 16%, and December 30 adds another 8%. For comparison, Giving Tuesday brings in about 10%.

Giving Tuesday still matters. It’s the kickoff, and it builds momentum. But if your team’s energy peaks on December 1 and your appeals taper off after Christmas, you’re easing off right before the two biggest days of the year.

Your best December donors are already in your database

Over five years, returning donors grew from 46% to well over half of season giving. Donors who gave last season are the single strongest segment, and they’re the most concentrated in that final week: about 41% of their giving lands December 26 through 31.

This is where I see the biggest gap between data and practice. Many teams spend December chasing new donors and treat last year’s donors as a mailing list. I’d flip that for the final week. Segment last season’s donors, write to them as people who already know your work, and time those appeals for the 30th and 31st.

If your organization is on Salesforce, Marketing Cloud Next unifies supporter records into a single profile, and its AI-assisted segmentation can build an audience like “gave $250 or more last December, gave on desktop or by bank transfer, attended an event or volunteered this year, and hasn’t given since” without a data analyst. That’s the group I’d email on December 30, with the bank transfer option easy to find. That kind of capability has typically been out of reach for many nonprofits.

One practical note on the form itself: returning donors skew toward desktop, while first-time donors skew mobile. If your form lets you set suggested amounts by device, show higher amounts on desktop in that final week. And test the form on a real phone anyway, because your new donors will be using one.

ACH: the payment method many nonprofits still skip

The average ACH (bank transfer) gift in the report was about $1,500, roughly five times the average credit card gift. ACH’s share of season revenue has tripled since 2021. Yet about 39% of nonprofits still don’t offer it online.

I’d be careful with that 5x figure. Some of the gap is self-selection: donors planning a large gift are more likely to choose a bank transfer in the first place. Turning on ACH won’t make every donor give five times more. What it does is remove a barrier for the donors who were already planning a big year-end gift, and that’s reason enough.

If you don’t offer ACH today, enable and test it before Giving Tuesday, not on December 29. Then keep it visible on the 30th and 31st, when the largest gifts come in. While you’re in the settings, check Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal, and DAF options too. Each one removes a reason to abandon the form.

Plan for one gift, then steward

Donors give about once per season. Recurring sign-ups are rare in this window, too: only about 2.6% of returning donors and 5% of new donors started a recurring plan.

So I wouldn’t build a December budget that assumes a second ask will land, and I wouldn’t make recurring donations the centerpiece of your end-of-year giving strategy and campaign. Focus on the one-time gift, make it easy, and plant the idea of monthly giving with new donors in your thank-you.

The bigger opportunity is January and February. The first-time donors you bring in mid-December are next year’s returning donors, and the report’s title makes the point well: December is the result of the work you do all year. A welcome sequence for new donors is where that work starts.

What I’d do in the next six weeks

1. Before Giving Tuesday: test your form under load, check your tracking, and turn on ACH and digital wallets. Then check your CRM integration: gifts should sync from Fundraise Up to your CRM with payment method, device, source, and campaign intact. Run a test gift through and confirm it shows up in your daily giving report, your year-over-year comparison, and your last-season donor segment, since those are the reports you’ll lean on in the final week.
2. December 9 to 21: run your widest acquisition push. This is when most first-time donors arrive.
3. December 22 to 29: scale the channels that are working and start reaching out to last season’s donors.
4. December 30 and 31: treat each as its own campaign day, lead with last season’s and lapsed donors, keep ACH visible, and have someone on call. Then celebrate. Your team just ran a six-week sprint through the holidays, so thank them, take a real rest, and come back ready to roll up your sleeves for the next push.
5. January: start your new-donor welcome sequence.

Two caveats before you rebuild your calendar. The report covers US organizations only, and its figures are medians across organizations, so your own pattern may differ. Pull last year’s daily giving from your own data first, and if it matches the report, you have your plan.

You can read the full Pulse Check report from Fundraise Up. If you’d like help putting any of this in place before December, my team at Fíonta is happy to talk it through. Fill out our contact form, and we’ll reach out to you shortly.