Year-end giving is the most critical fundraising period for nonprofits, with Giving Tuesday, December 31st, and even end-of-fiscal-year campaigns driving significant donation volume. Organizations need a strategic, data-informed approach that can be customized by audience type to maximize impact.
If you want to streamline any of your organization’s essential giving campaigns, we suggest leveraging Salesforce, Classy, and Marketing Cloud. Here’s how to set your campaigns up for success.
The Importance of Giving Tuesday & Year-End Fundraising
Giving Tuesday and year-end campaigns are critical fundraising opportunities for many charitable nonprofits. Consider the following:
- The Tuesday after Thanksgiving – Giving Tuesday – has grown in impact. According to GivingTuesday.org, the 2024 event was the largest in history, with over 36 million people making $3.6 billion in donations on that day alone.
- The Giving Tuesday organization estimated that in 2023, the last year for which full data was available, individual giving worldwide totaled more than government and foundation giving combined – a data point that seems particularly crucial given today’s political climate.
- Tax-deductible giving is still essential to some donors’ tax planning, particularly those in higher tax brackets who are more likely to itemize and potentially give with greater impact. To that point, the Fundraising Effectiveness Project (FEP) found that even though individual giving reached an all-time high in 2024, both the total number of donors and donor retention declined by 4.5% and 2.6%, respectively, when compared to 2023.
- Data collected in Classy’s most recent “Why America Gives” report (2022) shows that donors are motivated by international human rights crises, climate change, and women’s rights and reproductive health.
Your organization may have other annual campaigns focused on a single day that affect your bottom line. The tips we share below can aid in planning and executing campaigns that fully leverage your existing technology, no matter when that date might fall on the calendar. Let’s dive in.
Building a Strong Year-End Giving Strategy
You always want to plan for success, communicate confidently, and show gratitude, and your technology can help you do all three. These steps are so necessary when it comes to execution.
Plan. Every campaign should start with a review of previously collected data. Leverage the Classy-Salesforce integration to run reports on earlier campaign performance. Use Google Analytics to uncover more info about donors. Analyze the referral source through Google Analytics. Start to make decisions about how and where to devote your outreach efforts.
Finally, if you can conduct interviews with prior-year donors, please do it. You will learn so much about their intent to give, their motivations for donating, and much more. And these interviews or surveys do not have to be complicated or high-fidelity. A tool like FormAssembly integrated with your Salesforce instance or a simple Google Form both work to gather this information.
Set SMART Goals. The data you’ve just collected? It should absolutely inform the goals you set next, which should all be SMART – Specific, Measurable, Ambitious/Attainable, Relevant, and Time-based.
Start with this Specific sentence: “I want to raise this amount by this date through X, Y, and Z efforts.” Put a dollar figure in place to serve as your Measurable goal. Be optimistic but realistic about what kind of growth you need to attain this year’s goal. Ask yourself if this goal is directly related to your mission, and define that connection for yourself and for outward-facing messages to ensure Relevance. Finally, set your time and date to reach these goals.
Plan Your Campaign Timeline: Now you can create and schedule your content. Classy makes this easy with its landing page builder, where you can design and launch on-brand, mobile-friendly donation pages or embed Classy directly onto your website. You’ll drive traffic to these pages through email, social media, SMS, direct mail, phone campaigns – whatever you use- and real-time analytics allow you to analyze regularly. We suggest checking our analytics at least twice a week. Create different landing pages for different audiences and do some A/B testing to see what works best for each audience.
Quick best practices for landing pages include a strong focus, a call to action, and as little competing content or navigation as possible. You want to drive potential donors right to the call to action without distraction.
Creating an Engaging Donor Experience
Your plan is complete. Now it’s time to think about how best to engage with your donors to reach those SMART goals. We suggest a few simple steps to make it as appealing and easy as possible for those well-defined audiences to donate:
- Optimize your donation pages.
- Design donation pages to be mobile-first, as over 50% of donations come via mobile.
- Deploy impact tiles to show tangible outcomes of donations.
- Ensure your branding is consistent across email, web, and direct mail.
- Use segmentation tools to personalize your outreach.
- Segment your donors by giving history using Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (MCAE, formerly Pardot). You may want a list of all donors from the last giving season in addition to donors above or below a specific dollar figure, perhaps donors by age, donors who are also volunteer board members, and so on. Don’t forget a list of institutions that have matched donations. Scrape the data from last year to ensure you’re also sending messages to those companies and orgs.
- Automate personalized email appeals and follow-ups. You can also do this in MCAE using the same criteria that you use to pull your lists to swap audience-relevant content in and out.
- Don’t forget to leave enough time to build out all the necessary elements as well as for proofreading and testing. Remember, when you’re doing anything dynamic, you really must test it thoroughly to ensure the results are precisely what you want to send to your donors and potential donors.
- Offer the payment options that donors prefer.
- Make sure to take donations via PayPal, Venmo, and other digital wallets so that donors can choose their preferred way to give.
- Match donation opportunities to drive potential donors’ urgency to give.
Final Steps: Post-Campaign Nurturing and Donor Retention
Let’s imagine it is your first day back at your desk in the new year, and you are still elated because your nonprofit achieved its fundraising goal. Now that you’re back, it’s time to review the data collected over giving season and build on the momentum generated over those year-end weeks of communications and engagement.
First, be sure to review your statistics from Classy and MCAE and use them to create Salesforce reports and dashboards that you can share with other staff and board members. Pay attention to the donation amount, the speed to donate, and any individuals who shared their donations on social media, garnering additional donations. Brainstorm ways to prove impact to donors quickly. Be visual, be creative, consider interactive infographics, video, Instagram reels, TikTok videos – share this information where your donors spend their time. And make sure to emphasize how every single donation has made a difference to your nonprofit’s mission.
Second, consider creating follow-up campaigns for your fiscal year’s first and second quarters using the power of MCAE’s Engagement Studio. Use your lists to send personalized thank-you notes to all donors. Identify donors who may potentially become recurring donors. Craft content for them about how easy it is to become a sustaining donor and how that little extra investment will allow your organization to do so much more. Lean on those segmented lists you’ve created, but don’t forget to reevaluate the criteria and adjust as necessary to keep your communications relevant.
Lastly, consider suggesting other ways donors can aid your organization. For instance, if your organization is in Los Angeles, develop a list of prior donors in the LA area. Create a Why I Donate campaign and reach out to donors of a certain level, asking them to fill out a quick online form with a sentence or two about why donating is important to them to use in future engagement efforts. Or use that list to ask for volunteers interested in getting hands-on in the new year.
A successful year-end giving campaign combines strategy, automation, and donor-centric storytelling. By using Salesforce, Classy, and Marketing Cloud, nonprofits can drive donations more effectively, build stronger relationships, and carry momentum into the new year and beyond.