Why Your End-Of-Year Appeal Isn’t Working

Why Your End-Of-Year Appeal Isn’t Working

By Laura Orwig

With 30% of all annual donations occurring in December and more than 12% in the last three days of the year, the end-of-year appeal has long been a significant source of revenue for nonprofits. Often composed of mailers, emails, and/or social media posts, the fundraising tool can be highly successful and, occasionally, yield up to half of the annual budget. 

However, organizations that yield half of their donations through the EOY appeal are definitely an exception to the rule and not the norm. The large majority of organizations actually don’t get the results they want from the EOY appeal.

Here are three reasons why your EOY appeal may not be working:

Segment Your Data

One of the biggest missed opportunities we see is the lack of segmentation within a campaign. To most effectively reach the various audiences within your donor base, you should segment your appeal. This can be done a few ways, whether you categorize donors by number of gifts, dollar amount of gifts, or type of involvement with the organization. 

By segmenting donors, you can send tailored messages to each of the identified categories and even offer suggested giving amounts customized to each donor’s giving history. One caveat to segmenting data is that you must first have clean, useful data to segment. 

Use Multiple Channels 

According to BusinessWire, multi-channel donors give THREE times more than those who have only interacted with a single channel. Despite this, just 3% of nonprofits leverage multi-channel communications. 

Using multiple channels can be as simple as taking advantage of the platforms you already use, like various social media, online newsletters, phone numbers, or mailing lists. The key is for your message to remain consistent across each of these channels and to increase the frequency at which your message is seen. 

With today’s scheduling software, social media and newsletters can be planned out months in advance and left on auto-pilot while mailers and phone calls are attended to in real-time, leaving plenty of capacity for your development team to tackle several channels at once.

Communicate with Your Donors Regularly 

Finally, making the mistake of only asking donors once each year is one of the biggest reasons your end-of-year appeal could be flopping. If donors have not been primed throughout the year to know your organization’s accomplishments and goals and have not been treated as though they are important to the cause, they will be less likely to give. 

Recently, national donor retention rates have dropped from 45% to just under 40%. By communicating with your donors throughout the year and stewarding them toward increased involvement, retention rates can increase, thereby increasing gifts to your end-of-year campaign and throughout the year. 

The end-of-year campaign can be a very effective method of fundraising when done right. Rather than being asked once in December, your donors want to be involved in your organization throughout the year and will contribute in countless ways when they identify as champions for your cause. Furthermore, your greatest success will come when you’re using your data smartly and consistently communicating across all available channels.