6 steps for a successful year-end campaign
You know what they say about doing the same thing (over and over again) and expecting different results.
Year-end campaigns happen every single year. Still, we’re caught off-guard when it comes around again.
You save writing the appeal for the last minute
You push printing past Thanksgiving
You promise yourself “next year will be different.”
Let’s make this year the one that’s different. Shall we? Here are six things you can do in September to set yourself up for a smoother year-end campaign.
How to set up your year-end campaign for success
1 ➜ organize and create assets
Save yourself the headache of playing around in Canva for two hours. Or searching through dozens of folders to find that ONE picture you want for your appeal letter. Get organized.
A study by Street Smart found that workers lose over 2.7 hours a week to poor workflows and poor asset management. That means you’d lose over 135 hours a year to searching for files or recreating previously established assets.
Let’s not do that. Year-end is busy enough, you don’t need to waste almost 3 hours a week on recreating your social media templates, creating a new email banner, or digging for your latest thank you letters.
Here are two ways to get started:
Organize your photos and graphics. If you’re like me and forget where you save things, put everything in one place. That means ONE Google Drive. Under one folder (and of course subfolders).
Still struggle to find what you need? Open a Google doc and create a handful of tables with your go-to graphics. One for banners and logos. Another for social media templates. You get the idea! Link to each of the assets so they’re easy to find.
Consolidate your thank you letters. If it takes you five minutes to find your “loyal donor letter” vs “first-time thank you letter,” it’s probably time to consolidate your letters.
If you have seven variations of “repeat donor v1” or “new donor updated 2021,” you definitely need to take stock of what you have and remove the irrelevant letters from your donor management system.
2 ➜ clean up your database
To avoid bumps in the road later on, make sure your database is in order.
Have a bunch of names with the wrong capitalization? Update those. (Here’s an Excel hack to do that quickly).
Another thing you want to do is make sure your donors are appropriately tagged. We all have that one donor who panics if they receive a fundraising message AFTER they’ve already given. They unsubscribe or leave a mean voicemail (Usually they’re of the 90-years-old plus variety…but I digress…).
Maybe it’s easy enough for you to remove Sally Snyder from your mailings manually every time, but that’s really not sustainable. The whole point of having the database is making sure information is accessible to you and your staff. So if there are folks who shouldn’t receive appeal letters or fundraising emails, tag them appropriately. And communicate those tags to your staff!
3 ➜ warm up your audience
Please, for the love of mint chocolate ice cream, don’t ghost for 2+ months then beg for support, like your doors are closing tomorrow.
Send AT LEAST ONE non-fundraising email in September and October. You want to invite supporters in, instead of demanding they join you.
Some ideas to nurture your donors:
Educate them on a relevant topic. Share a recent podcast that relates to your work. Or an article you saw about a policy that impacts what you do.
Entertain or serve them with useful information. And have fun with it! If you’re all about child literacy, and your audience is mostly parents, share a roundup of children’s books from a popular blogger.
Stop making donor communications about you. Think about ways you can serve your audience with educational, inspiring, and helpful information.
4 ➜ tell stories
Stories are the way to your supporters’ hearts. People connect with stories on a deeper level than stats and facts. So start sharing!
Share impact stories. Whether it’s a story about…
… the five year old girl with sparkling eyes at her first trip to the museum
…the three year old pit bull who finally found a home
…the family eating their first meal together at their very own dining room table.
Share stories about how much of a difference a dollar makes.
Other story ideas would be to share program stories and thank yous from participants. You could also start interviewing your Board, staff, and volunteers for stories and quotes (think about it - how many people donate to a cause because someone they love is a part of that organization?.
Stories go a long way in nurturing and building relationships with your donors.
5 ➜ know your numbers
Numbers make a lot of us nervous. I don’t know about you, but sometimes I just can’t bring myself to open up my accounts and assess where we are. What if it’s worse than I thought? What if I have to close my doors?
But, once I take the time to open everything up, I remember how empowering it is to know where we are.
Living in uncertainty isn’t a way to ease your anxieties about money. The more you know, the more control you have. So here’s what I want you to pull this month —well before your appeal letters go to print. Find out:
Where you are. What do you have in your main account, your reserves. What’s the story?
Where you’ve been. Compared to this time last year how much have you raised? Are you up or down? About the same?
Pledges coming in. If you’ve been keeping track throughout the season, your donor management system should have an easy way to pull where you are. If you’ve been keeping track in your hea—or across various notebooks and emails—it’s time to get that information recorded.
Sorry but…clean data makes for a smooth year-end. Besides, don’t you want the peace of mind that Johnny Smith promised another $10K? And don’t you want to be able to follow up with those outstanding pledges?
So know your numbers. It’s scary but worth it! You won’t regret it.
6 ➜ pick your year-end offer
Think of an “offer” as something your donors get to be a part of. You’re offering donors the opportunity to be movers and shakers. It’s not about you or your organization, it’s about what THEY have the power to do.
So how do you figure out what your offer will be?
Start with the basics. What was your offer last year? Did it get a lot of traction? Write your one liner offer down.
Now ask yourself: is there a way to make this more specific?
➡️ Let’s say your nonprofit works on ocean conservation efforts. And last year’s offer was “Save the ocean.” Ok. That’s a bit too general, right?
Does “saving the ocean” mean my money goes towards protecting the turtles?
Restoring coral reefs?
Removing plastic pollution?
Again: you want to give your donors the opportunity to be a part of something they really care about. And yes, you can care about protecting the ocean “in general.” But what takes someone from caring to action? Knowing what exactly their dollar will do, and how far their dollar will go.
To take someone from caring to running to grab their wallet, you need a clear and human-sized offer.
Instead of “save the ocean” you might say…
$50 removes 75 pounds of plastic from Santa Monica Bay
$50 protects turtle nests in Key West
I could go on. In a couple of weeks, we’ll have a whole podcast episode on developing your fundraising offer. For now, look at what you’ve used in the past and challenge yourself to get more specific.
Make your life a little easier
Yes, fall is coo-coo bananas. Yes, holidays are chaotic. But what you do NOW will make your life easier later.
I promise.
Here’s the list one more time:
1 ➡️ create and organize your assets
2 ➡️ clean up your database
3 ➡️ Warm up your audience
4 ➡️ Tell stories
5 ➡️ know your numbers
6 ➡️ pick your year-end offer
You’ll have enough to stress about come November and December. It’s totally worth the upfront planning and work. You got this, my friend!