3 Things Nonprofits Should Do Now to Prepare for End-of-Year Giving
Don’t wait till November to start thinking about Giving Tuesday.
Giving Tuesday kicks off the biggest fundraising time of the calendar year: 30% of charitable contributions are made between Giving Tuesday and December 31. So how do you make the most of this important time?
To get a head start on the end-of-year giving season, focus on the messaging strategy and the time-intensive technical work required for a successful campaign. Here are three foundational things that you can do now that, come November, will help you create content and send emails quickly.
Decide on the theme and the key messages of your campaign.
The first thing to think about when planning your campaign is its theme and key messages. These will guide all of your communications, both verbally and visually. They will make sure that your campaign has consistency and focus.
To decide on a theme and a set of key messages, consider the following questions:
Which of your service areas have the greatest need right now?
Where has your organization made the greatest difference this year?
What new initiatives will you be launching next year?
Identify 3-5 individuals that your organization has served this year. Is there a theme that unifies their stories?
What type of fundraising messaging has worked well for your organization in the past?
Once you have established your theme, identify and write the key messages that will support that theme. Those messages could be talking points about your organization’s work, impact stories, impact statistics, and more. For impact stories, write out the longest version you might end up needing. You can always edit it down later.
Create a single document that outlines the theme and all supporting messages. This document will be your campaign messaging guide: anytime you need to write something related to the campaign, you’ll be able to rely on these key messages.
2. Find (or design) visuals to support your theme and messages.
Photos and data visualizations are powerful ways to communicate your messages, especially on social media. For each of your key messages, select any relevant photos. Make sure that you have photos of all people in your impact stories–if not, use this time to source them. Create visualizations of your impact statistics.
Give each visual a clear file name and drop all of them into a folder so that you can easily find them later.
Now is also the time to design any campaign-related assets you might need. Email templates? Social media frames? Instagram stickers? Get started on those now.
3. Clean up your email lists.
Email is a powerful tool in your end-of-year giving arsenal. Maintaining and cleaning up email databases can be time-consuming, however. Take advantage of having some breathing room to tackle this project now.
First, get the right contacts on your email lists:
Identify which of your lists will receive end-of-year giving emails
Purge those lists of any duplicate contacts, hard-bounce contacts, or spammy email addresses
Correct any obvious typos (eg, gmial.com instead of gmail.com)
Add any recent organization contacts who might not be in the system (and figure out a way to add future new contacts to the list automatically)
Next, segment your email lists by audience. Here’s why: you may want to send audiences different email messages depending on their interests, past donation history, and more. Your CRM may have built-in features that allow you to email target audiences the way you want.
If it doesn’t, here’s what to do:
Think about your audiences and the key messages of your campaign. Are there specific factors that would lead you to tweak those key messages? If yes, make a list of those factors.
Identify how you will tag audiences in your CRM and how those tags will transfer over to your email client, if you use two different systems. Once you have a plan…
Create your list segments!
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These three items will set your campaign up for success. Once they are complete, you will be able to quickly generate all of the content you need for emails, social media posts, and ads. What’s more, you’ll be able to target messages for specific audiences.
Happy planning!
Here are two ways I can help you:
Serve as your non-profit’s Fractional CMO.
Analyze and optimize your marketing strategy.
Interested? Send me a note.