The Secret to Year-End Fundraising Success
As we quickly approach the giving season, it’s time to consider how you’ll connect with current donors and reach new donors.
A consistently successful year-end tactic is the Annual Appeal or an Annual Appeal Campaign. This is an effort that will take place during a crucial time of the year for your nonprofit. Typically, this is the last couple months of the calendar year (including Giving Tuesday).
An Annual Appeal is an opportunity for the majority of your community to donate to your nonprofit. It is a mass outreach that will provide an update of the organization and ask for a donation. It will be sent to those community members who have not yet donated and to those who have donated small amounts. This means any donors who fit the major gift criteria (at Cogeo, that’s anyone who offers a donation equaling or exceeding .1% of your annual budget) will not receive an Annual Appeal, but instead will be approached in a more personal way.
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Your Annual Appeal will reach these community members in an exciting, creative, data-driven way that showcases the work that your organization has done over the past 12 months. It will have a strong call-to-action to bring in a large number of donations and give your team a chance to gather additional information about your donors and community.
Below are some helpful tips on how to successfully launch your own Annual Appeal, as well as examples and templates for inspiration.
Have the Right Tools in Place
To launch an Annual Appeal, there are certain systems and platforms that will play a major role in the process and will help determine the success of your campaign:
1. Digital or Direct Outreach Platform
In order to successfully deliver your Annual Appeal, you’ll greatly benefit from a delivery platform. Most nonprofits choose to deliver their Appeals digitally to cut down on costs and increase their reach. Some choose to do a mixture of digital and direct, and few nonprofits with a particular target audience choose to do
However you choose, there are systems available that will help deliver your message smoothly and successfully. For digital, systems such as Constant Contact are example platforms that offer discounts to nonprofits. These systems will help you deliver nicely designed emails and collect crucial data points for your nonprofit.
2. Donation Platform
Having control over your own donor platform, rather than using Facebook’s for example, will give you control over your own funds and data. This is also a good tool to have in place year-round to put on your website and attach to other touch points with your annual giving community. Cogeo highly recommends PayPal’s nonprofit donor platform.
3. Customer Relationship Manager
Most importantly, you’ll want to make sure you have a proper customer relationship manager (CRM) in place. If your organization does not already have a donor database, we highly recommend that you implement one. Having a clean, organized CRM will allow you to track donors and donations, set tasks, and provide strong analytics about donor trends.
The Annual Appeal is an opportunity to collect data about new or semi-regular donors in hopes of turning them into consistent donors and even major gifts donors. Without the correct data, you may fall short of this goal. Make sure that you have an organized system in place to collect and manage your donor data. Salesforce Nonprofit is a high-end CRM offered to nonprofits for free!
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Get Creative about Content & Delivery
This is your chance to add brand voice and style to the message and delivery of your Annual Appeal.
1. Messaging
After implementing the right tools, turn your focus to the content of the Annual Appeal. What kind of message do you want to send? Here are some tips:
Keep your message simple by focusing on a certain project or program that has had a significant impact over the last 12 months.
Make sure there is data to backup your message. Including metrics around how impactful the program or project has been will make your message clear and direct.
Tell a story. Keep your message creative and engaging by putting it into story-telling form. Package your 12-month success summary and metrics into a message that conveys sentiment and relates to your audience on a personal level. As an example, the Rose City Rollers put their Annual Appeal into a series where each week a member from their team would speak to how the organization impacted their life.
2. Pick Your Platforms
Consider how to best reach your audience. You can keep it simple with a series of mass emails. Or, you can add layers to your outreach and launch an Annual Appeal campaign.
If you choose to post on social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.), you create additional opportunities to engage with your community -- and potentially increase the number of donations. If you create a web presence or landing page for your Annual Appeal, you make it easy for community members to read your story, absorb your data, and donate to your organization. There are many ways in which you can bring awareness to an Annual Appeal, so get creative!
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Execute, Collect, & Determine
Capitalize! Launch your Annual Appeal or Annual Appeal campaign and make sure you’re collecting data along the way.
1. Send, Deliver, Post, Publish
Once you have your tools and systems in place, your platforms established, and your messaging finalized, it’s time to execute. Know your audience and pay attention to the timing that your message is delivered. If you choose to launch an Annual Appeal campaign, take note of the opens, clicks, likes, views, and donations that you receive after each execution. Adjust as you go to increase your success.
Then, watch the donations roll in!
2. Collect & Analyze Data
Using your donor platform, track your new donor information. Import this donor data into your database or CRM. Organize and analyze this data to determine which donors may be likely to or have the capacity to become a major gift donor and create tasks to follow up and steward them personally. With all other new donors, place them on a regularly scheduled update to keep them informed about where their money is going and when they’ll have the opportunity to donate again. This is a key tip to fundraising smarter, not harder.
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Examples
Your Annual Appeal will reach these community members in an exciting, creative, data-driven way that showcases the work that your organization has done over the past 12 months. It will have a strong call-to-action to bring in a large number of donations and give your team a chance to gather additional information about your donors and community.
Below are some helpful tips on how to successfully launch your own Annual Appeal, as well as examples and templates for inspiration.
ANNUAL APPEAL CAMPAIGN STRATEGY
ANNUAL APPEAL EMAIL
