What To Do Right Now: Strategies to Maximize Your Year-End Fundraising

So good afternoon, and welcome to what to do right now, strategies to maximize your year end fundraising. Our presenter today is Michael Goodrum. Michael is a seasoned nonprofit Digital Marketer and a foundational leader at Community boost with a background in Read More

So good afternoon, and welcome to what to do right now, strategies to maximize your year end fundraising. Our presenter today is Michael Goodrum. Michael is a seasoned nonprofit Digital Marketer and a foundational leader at Community boost with a background in finance coaching and human psychology. He leads the client services team in driving strategies that help nonprofits achieve growth and impact during critical fundraising seasons. Michael is dedicated to assisting organizations to maximize their year end success. So welcome Michael, and the floor is yours. Thank you so much. And thanks to everyone who is taking the time out of a Thursday to be here in the middle of year end, where I’m sure that things are already crazy and Thor, I really appreciate that introduction, and also appreciate us starting on time, on the dot, because I’m gonna, I’m gonna forewarn everybody This presentation is packed. That’s kind of my, my style when I, when I build decks, as I tend to be very like, you know, try to pack as much value as I can into them, but that sometimes does mean I have to move really quickly. Lori, really quick. Just a question, are we going to be sending this deck out afterwards?

Yes, it will be sent afterwards there. Well, the recording will be sent. You sent the PDF of the deck that I can attach into the chat, if that’s helpful, perfect. Yeah, I should have just clarified, because there’s, there’s a few things in here that are, like templates and things like that that people can use. So anyways, without further ado everyone, let’s go ahead and dive right on in. As Laura mentioned, I am with community boost. We are a digital marketing agency that works exclusively with nonprofits, and we exist to empower nonprofits and causes through high impact digital marketing so that they can change the world. I’ve been at Community boost for almost nine years now, so had quite a you know, spent some serious time running nonprofit fundraising campaigns on behalf of a lot of different types of clients. And then overall community boost, we’ve supported over 500 this is actually just in the last year. So just in the last calendar year, 500 nonprofits directly helped raise over 50 million in donation revenue. We have a nonprofit marketing summit as well that has over 50,000 leaders attend. And then we have about 75 Rockstar team members at Community Boost, which is great. Laurie already intro me. I’m the director of our Client Services team, so I don’t need to say anything else about that. And, yeah, so I want to just, you know, set the land really quick with what are we going to be talking about today? Again, we are in the thick of things at your end. So full transparency. I originally created this presentation and sort of this, yeah, like this. This talk track for a couple months in front of year end. But we are going to, of course, look at it through the lens of year end, in the middle of it, right now, today, and then also, you know, it’s very prudent to for those of you who are thinking about next year and as well, it’s going to be useful for kind of both of those things. So today, we’re going to talk about, like, a check in quickly and then making sure we’re really clear on year end trends. We’re going to walk through a an appeal of your donation, excuse me, an audit of your donation appeal for your organization. We’re going to take a look at game planning your organization’s creative and making sure that it is set up for success for the end of the year and for that like major last push that you can make. We’re going to talk about what’s something new that you can test while we just have a few weeks left here. And then also want to leave some time for Q A today.

So before we get any further, I’d love to have do a quick poll and a quick check in. I know we already have Giving Tuesday happen. I know we’re almost now two weeks into December, which is crazy. Curious what your organization expects for year end results compared to last year? Are you expecting to see a large increase in revenue, so 15% or higher, and this is sorry, this is specifically for year end

15% or higher, just an increase in revenue, so four to 14% same, basically year over year. So just adjusting for inflation, about three to 0% increase a decrease in revenue, or a large decrease in revenue.

See if I can see these poll results here.

Not sure where I can see them.

Shoot, okay, well,

I’m sure the polls, the poll answers, are coming in, which is great.

Sorry, guys, let me just there is no poll coming. Okay. Well, why don’t we do this? Would everyone just, if you’re if you’re here, would you mind just typing in the chat really quick? Oh, there’s the poll, okay.

Okay, so.

Hmm, okay. Well, that’s a The chat is disabled for attendees. Okay, hey, Lori, just, just a note. It sounds like chats disabled, so maybe that’s a setting we can kind of work on in the background. But for now, I’m going to just, I’m gonna keep going, but yeah, just kind of have in mind too, you know, just it can be helpful to set the stage, just to understand kind of the room and where we’re at in terms of our projected results. But it’s not that big of a deal, so I’m just gonna go ahead and move forward. So every year, community boost runs what’s called an acceleration report, where we pull over 20,000 different nonprofits to get a sense of like, what are they like? What are the trends that there are that is that are happening in the space, and what are some of the things that we can learn from so that we are not so that we’re staying ahead of the curve, right? Like, I think that very frequently we learn things as they become obsolete, right? And the point of the acceleration report is that we’re learning things in real time, so that we are sticking with and we don’t necessarily want to do things just because, you know, other organizations are doing them, but they really help to keep a pulse on what are the trends that are happening in the space right now. And so just taking a look at this acceleration report, 45% of nonprofits expect to see a moderate increase in revenue, so four to 14%

this year end right now, as opposed to last year, we’re only about 38% responded the same. And then those organizations who are reporting high revenue growth expectations, so 15% or higher, they have a direct correlation with investment towards digital advertising, which basically means, right, like organizations who are expecting to see a large growth, 15% or higher, are way more likely to be investing in one or more different digital advertising channels. So just something to keep in mind, it’s, of course, foreshadowing going to kind of implicate some of the tests we’re going to recommend later.

As we all know, giving was down last year. I’m not going to spend much time on framing this conversation. We all know that giving was rough in 2023 but it’s really like our time to shine now, for the end of, you know, for the last few weeks of the year, to do as much as we can to counteract, you know, even just like a poor year last year. And yeah, so knowing this and knowing what the stakes are, what does this mean for us?

We need to understand year end trends, right? Like we are already halfway through, but there are still, there’s still a very major trend worth understanding that we’re going to talk about here that can be taken advantage of. We also still have time to bolster our year end fundraising appeal. We have, still have time if you’re not feeling like you’re not feeling like you’re the best creative assets in the history of your organization, to do some damage there as well, engage audiences in a new channel. And then guys like, seriously, if you’re here today, I hope that all of you are actually willing to roll up your sleeves, or have someone on your team in the wings who’s willing to roll up their sleeves, because now is literally the the latest time to start to, like, implement anything or make any changes for this year end.

So with this, I do want to just do a quick check in on, like, the cadence and the timeline of year end, right? Like looking at it from the bigger perspective. Year end, of course, is your organization’s Super Bowl. I’m assuming that’s why you’re here today. Maybe some of you have a different fundraising season that is larger than year end, but for the vast majority of fundraising focused nonprofits out there, December is the time that it happens.

We see about 33% of all donations happen in December in the space in general. And we really recommend, just like any if it was like a sports game, right? You you need to play hardest. At the close, about 12% on average, of all gifts happened in the last three days of December. So there is still that is the it is the largest three day period of giving that it happens every single year. And I think a lot of today’s energy, you know, knowing that it might take time to, like, get things created, or whatever should really be spent thinking about those last three days and how we want to maximize those

but yeah, December 31 of course, is the biggest giving day of the year, and then Giving Tuesday is kind of the second largest Day of Giving. Typically, we really want to leverage the cadence of that right, like, there’s this natural there’s this natural cadence, an ebb and flow that’s already happening. And we want to map our campaigns, our strategy, and we want to map our budgets to match that cadence as well.

This is a super quick screenshot from inside one of our what’s called a master Client Center. So it’s a combination of a of in this case, I think it’s like over 500 different accounts. And this is from within Google ads that shows the last three days of the year. And these are, these are two different accounts that we have of this, this gigantic three day spike right of conversion value, which is basically donation revenue here, and then the same exact thing from from a different.

Count too. So it’s just, it’s not just like a theory that that is out there. It’s like we see it aggregated from the data that we also manage to which is so cool. See that correlation so we know it’s real. And I think really drives home what we want to be talking about today.

Generally speaking, the pattern of like a general year end donation campaign is going to look something like this, where we had the period of initial excitement for a lot of us on this call that was giving Tuesday, where we’re doing a lot of pre wiring, right? We’re letting our audiences know ahead of time. Hey, Giving Tuesday is coming up. Get ready to support us. Here’s the campaign that we’re going to have. And then we already talked about this kind of natural, big finish right on the right hand side, where there is this natural sort of tendency to give you, we still have to take the right steps to make sure we’re taking advantage of that. But like, generally speaking, donation campaigns are going to have these strong starts and strong finishes. But right now on, when is it December 12, right? Yeah, we’re in. Many of us on this call might be kind of in this trough period. And we call that the inevitable trough where the initial buzz and excitement of the campaign falls off. And we’re not quite at that part where it’s like, this is your last chance to donate. And so we’re really capturing all the remarketing people. We’re sort of in this, like middle gray area. How do we, you know, make more of that in this time period. What we want to do, of course, is like, fill in that trough as much as we can. And we want to accelerate through that quote, unquote, Big Finish and excuse appreciate everyone’s patience with my graph designing skills here that I built in like, like Excel.

And you know how we how we do that, how we want to make sure that we are filling in this trough and accelerating through the big finish really does come down to how our appeals and how our creatives are landing with our audiences. And so I do want to talk about your organization’s donation appeal and just do a quick check in of if we were if, like we were working together, how would we actually do a deep dive and an audit of your donation appeal?

And

as I think everyone here knows, nailing your appeal is extremely imperative.

We kind of sped through the beginning of the presentation around giving trends. But one of the trends that has been occurring, that occurred last year, and has continued to occur this year, is that we’re seeing fewer overall gifts given, but we are seeing, on average, larger donation amounts per gift. So we’re seeing that trend happen, but that means that making sure we’re doing everything to capture every gift, because every gift that’s not given, oftentimes now is a larger amount that’s not being captured by us. It’s really more critical than ever to nail our appeal.

Your organization should ideally be auditing and seeking to improve its core donation appeal on at least an annual basis, and filtering it through the lens of the different segments of donors that you’re interacting with, and looking to attract.

You know,

it may be, it may be like it’s, it’s definitely not too late in the game to at least do some of the exercise we’re going to talk about in just a bit here. But highly recommend that you also put this in terms of your like, annual calendar, a period of time every year to do a check in on your appeal and just realistically saying, like, does this appeal? Touch move and inspire our team? Does it touch move and inspire me? If it doesn’t, that’s kind of a problem, right? Like, it’s worth taking the time to edit or recraft your organization’s core appeal before aligning on anything else that you really would want to do from now to the end of year, end was as it relates to creative, as it relates to messaging or otherwise. And I’ve been saying this this year like I think your appeal should feel so moving that it gives you goosebumps from how powerful it is.

And you know, of course, I think this is extremely relevant right now, because, like, the reasons that people give, because that trough period, oftentimes, is happening from our organization speaking in one tone or one voice, right like there are, there are so many different kinds of appeals that you can make, which we will talk about in a little bit like I’ll give some real examples from clients that we’ve worked with. But one of these, one of the number one ways to have a breakthrough through that trough is to test different types of giving appeals based on the reasons why people give. So if your organization is like, purely focused in on an emotional only appeal, so you’re really trying to tug on people’s heartstrings, I would highly recommend pivoting at least some of the messaging you’re putting out, whether that’s on social email, if you’re running ad campaigns, to a more statistic and logical based appeal, right? If you’re not seeing the trough happen, keep doing what you’re doing. Phenomenal.

But if you are seeing a lull in giving, and it’s any kind of cause for concern, switching up the kind of like perspective of your creative and of your messaging is you kind of have nothing to lose, right? And there have been many campaigns that I have run where I’ve seen that pivot result in a new influx of gifts that wouldn’t have happened otherwise, getting us to that big finish, much farther ahead than we would have been. So I’m not going to read through all this, just because I think most of us here do have a pretty strong sense of like, all these different areas, not all of these reasons that people give are going to be applicable to every organization out there, right? Like there are some out there where people have a faith based connection with and if you’re an animal organization, it’s unlikely that the faith based connection appeal type of thing is going to work for you. But there are, there are multiple different kinds that work for every organization out there.

So again, we’ll send this out so that you can kind of look through this as you’re doing a bit of an audit of what are the different kinds of appeals you have out there,

and I just mentioned this, like the main psychological kind of avenues that people think through, and the pieces of motivation that give them the desire to give, are going to be unique to your organization, but regardless of which are most applicable to the different segmented donor personas that you have, which there might be some appeals that are more effective for different segments that you have, we always do need to focus on making the donor the hero of the story, right? I think that in year end, I would really recommend you also take a look at your creative that’s running now.

Is it very focused on your nonprofit and what you need, or is it? Is it more framed around why the donor is the hero of the story and saving the day, right?

And you don’t necessarily need to call out specifically like you’re the hero, or have it be speaking directly to them in that light. But what’s the energy of the creative and the messaging that you have? Is it like we need this? Give this to us, or you will be inspiring X in the world and creating X in the world with this. And so

I just mentioned donor, the hero. I don’t know if we have anyone here who is familiar or a fan of story brand. I’m a huge fan of story brand and their frameworks. We actually borrowed, borrowed, borrowed, and then, like, kind of reconstructed the story, brand, brand script framework that they have. And with that comes, like, to get to that brand script, comes some key questions that you’ll basically want to ideally sit down with your team on and discuss and put your heads together. Like, what feels right for answering all of this again with the time that we have today, I don’t think I can. Actually, every time I’ve done this presentation, I haven’t read through all of these but basically, like some of these overarching questions, like, what is your organization’s aspirational goal? Right? Like, not just we, you know, like, not just the mechanics of what you do. So if we’re talking about a, like, an animal rescue organization, like, oh, well, we rescue animals, it’s like, What is the vision that you have that all animals in this town

are, like, all animals of certain type in this town to have a home, right? Like, something that is that’s bigger, that gives people hope and a vision of something larger than themselves you really want to have and be bold with. And then getting into some of the problem questions we always need to talk about, why people should trust us, like, why should we be the guide, slash authority on this subject, versus some other nonprofit that’s out there, and then also helping paint what success and or failure looks like if your mission and your aspirational goal is not achieved.

And after that questionnaire, after that interview, which I seriously do think you know, I know that many of us are probably getting ready to head out on break. I’m I’m not because we’re we have a lot of clients who are in the middle of year end, and so we’re rocking and rolling until January. But

if you, if, yeah, if you are planning on heading out doing this questionnaire and then taking a stab at the brand script within the next couple days to see how you could modify some of your creative will rate, will generally genuinely raise you more money, period. So with this brand script, the here’s the template for it, right? It basically, like, fills in from the questions that you just answered here, and you just use those. I mean, you sometimes you can’t directly copy paste them. You have to, like, use it in the context of the sentences here, right? But you’re all smart people, you can figure that out. And you really want to use this as a keystone for helping guide your year end creative. And then, of course, like you can take this into next year with you as well. So I also wanted to give you a core example of this. We did this brand script recently with this organization called work for they’re the national campaign for.

A four day work week. So hoping that they hoping that we can help them drive success there, because it would be great if we could realize a four day work week.

But yeah, again, in the sake and for the sake of time, not going to read through all of this, but this will get sent out afterwards. And yeah, you’ll have an example of a brand script here. It’s long, right? There’s a lot of stuff that needs to be shared. If, I mean, personally, right? Like the idea of a of a four day work week coming to life is a very aspirational goal, right? And so for me, if I was contemplating a donation, there’s kind of, like, a lot of different angles and lenses of things I would need to understand or think through and different kinds of appeals that might work on me. So this is why this brand script ended up being a little bit longer yours might not be, but yeah, an example here for you to check out later.

Just take a quick peek at the chat here. See there’s a lot going on here.

Okay,

cool.

Yeah, I see someone said, Is this a live presentation? This is definitely a live presentation, for sure. And we’re gonna have time for Q and A at the end as well. So please do make sure that you’re putting any questions that you have, they might get lost in the chat. But there’s a Q amp, a panel under this kind of the settings in zoom, and I will make sure to save some time to diamond and Q and A too. So we talked about the trough, right? And we also are thinking about the last three days of the year as we approach them. And we also talked about the first thing you should do, which is your messaging right, your core appeal. What is that? How do we want it to feel? Why? What are the different reasons that people would give and support you now, let’s talk about the actual like, boots on the ground. You’re creative, so

we want to think proactively about like, where we might need new creative, which could include messaging, could include copy, imagery and video. I mean, right now, it’s probably a little bit late for video, although I will say I don’t have a slide on this, so I guess I’ll say this now,

there is, there is something actually really impactful and oftentimes very successful about a video shot by someone like your executive director or someone like your director of philanthropy. Whatever it is,

there can be something very raw and from a pure, like marketing and ROI perspective, very, very effective about someone shooting a video in that manner. So, you know, it probably is too late, from a creative perspective to get a like, very robust, well designed, you know, professional level video, unless your organization has the kind of budget and connections for that, but a raw, authentic video from someone on your team prepared for like, those last few days of the year is absolutely something you can and potentially should be thinking about doing.

And yeah, I mean, of course, our creative assets are going to be the things that really make us or break us our landing pages, our donation pages, our advertising and then our email campaigns as well.

And so want to do this with you, like kind of break down the different types of assets that your organization may have in the mix right now, and then also take a look at the strategy timeline of when those kinds of different assets come into play. So the different asset types you know you may already have probably do direct mail campaigns going out,

hopefully, there’s some kind of social advertising going on, right? There’s so much attention on those social platforms, especially during the holidays, right? Like people are off work. Oftentimes they’re taking time off. They’re around their family the first 24 hours or so. And

I’m partially Speaking for myself, but I also do believe this to be true, the first 24 hours or so of family time really engaged, right? But then you’re there for a week, and these people are on their phones, on social media, even more than normal. And so yeah, social advertising, extremely effective for year end fundraising. Search advertising, absolutely programmatic. Video Advertising, if you have content there to use, and then digital audio advertising as well, running ads while people are home, listening to Spotify, listening to Pandora, listening to these other music streaming services,

and then landing pages that are designed to introduce your campaign and your nonprofit, and then also donation pages or modals that, ideally, if possible, are segmented based on your don’t the donor persona that you’re targeting. So I’m just going to cover this quickly for those of you who are who you know would take this information into next year as well. But we always do a what’s called a pre wire and a gratitude period from October 1, roughly through giving Tuesday. So the gratitude is killer. Gratitude is where we acknowledge, we thank and we inspire existing supporters and audiences. We literally just spend half.

Dollars running a campaign, reaching out to people from list, you know, list of donors, those who follow and engage with us on social and just to thank them for being who they are. What’s kind of wild is from these gratitude campaigns, we actually oftentimes see donation revenue come in, because people almost never see ads that don’t ask them to do anything? Right? Like every time we see an ad, it’s take this action, sign in for this, buy this thing, versus just like acknowledging and appreciating us for who we are. And I know that there are people at your organization, maybe it’s you on this call so focused on stewardship, who spend a lot of time calling people. And you can further supplement that with a small investment into a gratitude campaign. So highly recommend doing that. And then I also will say to run a gratitude campaign after year end. So year end finishes, whether you know it again, doesn’t cost that much to do on a platform like meta, which is, I think, our favorite platform to do it on, you can send out a thank you. Just, like, really, like, your end wouldn’t have gone as well without you, or, like, without people like you, thanks so much for being part of our community. And again, language like, Thanks for being part of our community means you can send it to people who maybe did or didn’t even donate, but they just, you know, engaged or liked one of your posts, or, you know, some other form of support during the holiday season.

Anyways, a pre wire campaign is all about getting new people into your marketing funnel before giving Tuesday happens. So, you know, a little bit late to be discussing that now, so I’ll just kind of move on. Here are some examples of gratitude ads. So this is, these are from different clients that we’ve worked with, and, yeah, it literally just, that’s all it does is just thank people. I remember both the social souls and the Cancer Research Institute campaigns brought in, I want to say, somewhere between like 15 and $20,000 each from this gratitude campaign, which, again, is not the point. So don’t judge the success of a gratitude campaign based on whether you raise money or not. But if you see it happen, it’s not uncommon, uncommon for that.

And then we’re in the thick of it right now, right like this is we’ve already kicked off what we’ve been building up all year two. We’re really seeking to inspire donations from our existing audience members as much as possible. We’re continuing our outreach to people who are currently So highly recommend right now you do a little bit more, like, look at the kind of calendar here, maybe until the middle of next week, if you are doing any ad campaigns, continuing to spend budget on audiences who are currently outside your Like existing pools of Oh,

my screen sharing got paused, sorry about that. Um, let me restart that. Gotta

close my slack here.

Thanks for bearing with us. Everybody we got technology is our best friend. Okay,

all right. Um,

yeah, so recommend continuing to reach out to people who are currently outside your existing audience

before we get into the final phase. But like the final phase here that we’re about to talk about, and then here are also an example, too, of what we were talking about earlier, the different types of appeals you can make. So this is Cancer Research Institute, one of my favorite nonprofits out there, focused on using immunology to solve all to cure all types of cancer in our lifetime. So hopefully, I mean, that’s, it’s really bold, aspirational mission. And then these are different types of appeals. This is a very emotional focused appeal. This is a very like guide authority focused appeal, right where it’s focusing in on the scientists as the main piece of the creative. And then this is more like a logical graphic based type of appeal. We were running all of these at the same time, and then measuring which one worked, and making decisions based off of

that, and looking at our final phase of the timeline here. So this is our urgency and remarketing. This is why you came to this webinar. Is to crush this you guys,

if there’s one thing I think, with the timing that we’re at at year end, that you can still do and do very well, is nail this last whether it’s the 21st or the 24th you launch this campaign. It doesn’t really matter that much. 21st is just a placeholder. You nail that urgency in the remarketing period of time during your end. So here you drop any cold audience outreach, right? You no longer market to audiences that have not at least shown some form of positive interaction. So that could be liking a post, watching a video, opening an email, etc, right? It’s like they’ve done something. This is where we want to also change our creative to drive gifts from those who have been contemplating but have not actually given yet, and we already know, right? This is where we’re matching up what we talked about at the beginning, the cadence of how giving already happened.

Us with how the messaging that our campaigns have and the budget that we’re putting behind those campaigns, we want to match that energy.

Here are some examples of urgency and remarketing ads from those same three clients from before where we are this. You know, the pediatric Brain Tumor Foundation had a specific goal. We’re calling out December 31 we’re also, then again, giving, kind of like an appeal, based on our coordination appeal here,

souls, for souls.

Yeah, I mean, we just got, we didn’t have any creative that was, like, as direct to the point like there’s something simple, immediate and meaningful we can do right now, right like it’s just so I actually really love this copy.

And this launched during that urgency period. And then Cancer Research Institute, similarly, had this kind of like match challenge going on. We’re calling out donate before December 31 and then we’re also using kind of a same core donation appeal from that brand script.

And as much as possible, as we think towards, I mean, this is true for every phase, but especially as we think towards that urgency and remarketing phase,

do everything you can to segment your donors and your audiences and iterate your messaging. So if you know that there are, there are, I’m not even going to try to try to think of an example. But just like there are certain types of people in your core audiences who would respond better to each type of messaging in that urgency and remarketing period, take the extra hour or however long it takes to like, draft that extra thing, to speak more to them. This is the last opportunity for a home run that you have all year.

But yeah, I mean, I think most often we think about segmenting based on email lists, right? And like writing email copy differently. You can also do this inside of advertising platforms, and you should be doing this inside advertising platforms too,

if possible. It’s definitely late in the game. Now, if you have to, like, be iterating your landing pages, but just know for next year too, you can definitely do that. You can have one landing page that is like, you know, for a specific segment, that speaks to the same kind of ethos that your ads and your email copy had, so that it’s like a really continuous journey for that segment. But that’s kind of like a more of a nice to have and absolutely need, need to have here.

And

wouldn’t just talk about landing pages without you sharing a blueprint of what your organization could use to create highly converting, donation focused landing pages.

If you don’t have one or you’re not extremely passionate about the one that you do currently have, it could be worth making a few tweaks based on what we’re about to talk about, to your current landing page from now through the end of the year to really boost as many gifts through as possible.

So a donation campaign landing page, again, not a donation page. So you’ll notice that all of these, the like screenshots I’m going to walk through, do not have an actual donation like form on them. When it comes to a landing page, we want people to land there and be able to learn about the campaign, learn about your organization. We’ll get through all the you know, different facets of what that means. And then either, in this case, if you click this, any of these donation buttons, it opened up a modal where you can give. But we want people to not the like when they’re their first click to your organization’s website, to be more inspirational and focused on them and your mission and all of that. Then like them seeing a checkout form, right? So just something to think about.

But here we want the first section ideally to be a hero image that is left or right justified, so it’s on the left or the right side of the page, so that the headline and the sub header are really easy to read and they’re legible. Of course, this matters way more on a desktop device, but you’re I’m not. This isn’t even part of this presentation, because if, hopefully I don’t need to talk about mobile formatting, like it’s so critical that your your pages look phenomenal on mobile and on desktop.

But yeah, we want the campaign name or a strong, brief headline and then one to two sentences that really encapsulate the campaign below it with a donation. Call to Action, chat, GBT can be your best friend in the world. If you’re thinking like, Oh man, I want to implement any of these areas, you can even feed it this framework, and then go to town and it’ll, you know, do a lot of some of the thinking for you. And then you can just do some adjusting from there, after that, we want to frame the problem. So from that psychological perspective, we shouldn’t be talking about how we can solve something without talking about what the thing is that needs to be solved. So you want to keep this quick. You want to keep it simple. And we want to also consider having potentially a moving image here that pulls on the heartstrings really helps.

Besides that, the issue that we’re dealing with is serious. If you have a video, feel free to use it souls for souls had a video. So we had a video there,

and then we now get to frame the solution. And we get to talk about, like, Why, or excuse me, now that they know why they should care, we get to talk about, like, how our organization is solving it, and talk about what their donation will create in the world. And

we want to address specifically as much as possible how this campaign or this program is going to help cause a shift in the problem, which you’ll see that correlates as well to sort of this donation brand script questions. So your team is already getting clear on that and then helping using those to help kind of build this page, the credibility piece is really huge too, right? It’s like, why you so they care about the problem they care about, or they’re they believe your solution. But there’s oftentimes multiple organizations out there who have a similar approach to solving the same problem, and so from a credibility perspective, like, why should they trust you? You don’t necessarily need to, like, debunk anyone else here, but it’s just as much anything you can lend to the credence or credibility of your organization is good and pointing to things your nonprofit has done that are somewhat related to the existing issue we’re facing, even if the campaign is like a brand new one, that’s, you know, you’re starting a new program, or you’re taking a step out that your donors aren’t familiar with in the past,

we do want to add another call to action. So oftentimes I’ll see these donation landing pages that have so much good in them, but then we’re not actually asking the user to give again. So just do make sure that you have another call to action to actually donate,

and then if you can have impact amounts.

The it’s fantastic. Not every nonprofit is able to have donation impact amounts. So $20 equals this, right, like equals one meal for a family.

So we talked about Cancer Research Institute. It’s really difficult for research focused organizations. Just as an example to to quantify a donation does this so it may not be possible for your nonprofit, but I would say for like, 85% of nonprofits out there, it is, if you don’t already have this, this is another thing you should talk with your team on immediately so that you can leverage this for that remarketing and urgency period at the end of the year. One other thing to keep in mind about impact amounts is people tend to give what we ask them to give, which maybe doesn’t. It’s maybe sounds crazy or like I can’t see any of you, so I don’t know any of your reactions to that statement. But for souls, for souls, the nonprofit that’s we’ve been using this landing page as an example for about two year ends ago, we were seeing gifts of a certain amount come in for them. And we had this, like, really small. It was a really cool donation impact amount that it was really small. It’s like, a small gift creates this impact. And it was like, a pretty measurable thing, but we were seeing gifts of that size actually come in. We were, I think it was like something like $5 and we’re like, Okay, well, why don’t we just try changing it to 20, and we’ll multiply the outcome by four, and then we’re right. When we made that change across all of our campaigns, we literally saw $20 donations start to come in instead of $5 donations. So I know, I’m sure there’s a limit, and I’ve seen this. I’ve also seen this, I’ve also seen that happen for a lot of different nonprofits that we’ve run campaigns for. But just know that if you are you have impact amounts out there, there’s a strong chance you’re going to see a correlation with the amounts that people actually give to them.

And then here’s, it’s a long page, right? So here’s just all the kind of sections it would scroll typically, but just so you can see it all together.

And then now it’s also time to make sure your content is packaged.

Thinking about it being the end of the year, you know, we’re kind of like in the thick of it right now. The campaigns, as many campaigns that you can have, that are using fresh creative to target your existing supporters are going to perform better, typically than campaigns that recycle previously used content to target those same audiences. So think through your campaigns that are running right now, if you have any that are going to your current audiences, so people that have donated before, or like lapsed donor lists or whatever is it. Is it content that they saw last year? Because that would be a really good place to start between now and the end of the year, is testing something in lieu of a previous piece of content that someone’s already seen and potentially donated. Because of

we really see this dramatically expressed in the advertising platforms, via return on ad spend. So like the really core metric of seeing like success of, you know, what ad, what audience made the most sense. We’ve run campaigns where we had ads from the previous year in and then new ads, and both of them had, you know, similar flavor, and it’s just a dramatic difference that the new content typically outperforms. Um.

But then also all the good work that your team did to create great creative and create great content is not for waste, right? You do not always need to introduce new, fresh things into the mix when it comes to audiences who have not seen or maybe seen like once or twice, like very rarely, your previous best creative your quote, unquote closers,

then, yeah, absolutely reuse those. It’s just for those of you who are, you know we’re getting into kind of that urgency remarketing period, and thinking about that that way, we want to segment, if we’re segmenting our list, or, excuse me, our audiences into previous donors who we know have donated the year before, potentially the year before that really, ideally, they’re getting fresh creative, but then we’re also doing remarketing, right? So we’re, we’re targeting audiences who know us, who have done some interaction with us, but they may not, they haven’t given in prior years. And in the platforms, there’s a there’s very simple way to say, target people who meet this criteria but do not meet this criteria. So they have not, they’re not part of our donor list from last year, for example,

those people can see previously existing creative. So again, don’t need to go back to the drawing board for everyone, but it’s worth taking the time if you want to hit a home run between now and the end of the year to think about fresh creative for your current audiences.

And of course, as a digital agency, we are going to recommend testing something new.

Back to the acceleration report that we ran, the importance we saw the importance that nonprofits place on multi channel digital marketing increased so much between 2023 and 2024

Nonprofit Professionals overall have ranked multiple digital marketing channels of higher importance to their year end, year end fundraising efforts in 2024 showing an increased investment into digital marketing overall.

It really like omni channel, activation of your audiences, meaning campaigns running ideally everywhere but on as many platforms or places as possible, truly does work for activating your audience and pushing the gifts from those who are considering over the line

Community boost. So looking back at our year in 2023, cumulative results, one of the one of the supervisors here led this incredible charge internally to compile all of our client data so that we could get a sense of like performance. Overall, we had an average return on ad spend for our clients of 400% last year, which is great. Happy on that. But I have to say, the nonprofits who are making the investment in consistent cultivation across multiple channels and platforms tremendously supported this advantage. Like we’re talking some organizations who are doing the work, you know, like year round work across multiple different channels to do more of that. Omni channel approach were like, 16 100% right? So they, there were some organizations we work with at 150 200% return on ad spend. And those who, those who are, like, really doing this omni channel activation helped raise that average tremendously.

And so yeah, if you are, if this is something you’re able to do, even between now and the end of the year, and have someone who is considering a gift to you see you in a great way on a new platform that they’re not used to, why would you not do that?

And so some ideas for testing the omni channel, and really get this going as soon as possible, if you’re going to pick one, if your goal is to fundraise more on social platforms, launch an engagement campaign designed to engage audiences for retargeting. We’re kind of at the last possible mark you can do for that. Honestly, I would say, you know, if you have, if you have the time within the next few business days to do a quick engagement campaign before the urgency and remarketing phase, super worth it, if not, focus your energy on your remarketing and urgency campaign on those social platforms.

You know you could do also a lead generation campaign running right now for the last few years. Excuse me, for the last few days of the year, where I know most of us here are going to have very targeted, impactful emails going out, asking for gifts on those last few days.

And then, if you’re kind of feeling like we pulled out a lot of the stops already, and you know, it might be difficult to get anything else in play right now. Then strengthen your donor retention. Create ads and emails and social posts now that are going to thank donors after year end is over, and strengthen those relationships tremendously by doing so, if you’re, you know, you may not have the space right now to launch.

Something to generate more donation revenue. And then you know this, it’s also if your organization is not leveraging the Google Ad grant, which is $10,000 in free advertising every single month. That’s crazy. It’s definitely a little late in the game now to launch the Google Ad grant, but yeah, it can help tremendously with building website remarketing audiences for every single advertising platform out there. And community boost has multiple different things. If your organization is wanting to learn more about that, we can, we can talk about that

after, and if you do have any interest in getting in touch with our team to do any kind of an audit, to talk about 2025 together, and what fundraising could look like on the calendar year, and really also too, like this is actually the greatest time to to think on the whole year, like we were talking about those organizations that are doing the omnichannel marketing correctly, that are pulling the average up of all of our clients. They’re the ones who are planning, starting in like, January, February, for how we want to tackle the entire year, not just trying to turn the heat up, you know, in December. So we would love to have a conversation with you and our team’s commitment to is just every conversation we have, whether we end up, you know, partnership makes sense or not, we leave each other with value, which I think is really great.

And so I do want to take some time for some Q and A

and let’s see if we got any here. Okay,

wonderful. All right, so I’m gonna go. I’ll just go in order of what we see here, I’ll do answer live.

So how are the pivots and final pushes being affected by donor fatigue?

Yeah. I mean, I think that, you know, donor fatigue is a big piece of the trough in general,

and

I want to make sure I’m answering this question correctly. We don’t for this year, Gina, we don’t currently, I’m not able to say how the final pushes this year are being affected by donor fatigue. I will say that we

by testing a different variety, like a variety of different creative appeals, like we’ve talked about a lot today, we tend to overcome a fair amount of that donor fatigue. Now, if we’re thinking about a donor who’s already given three times or so in a year, yeah, that donor is likely going to be fatigued. But this is also why we have been doing ideally, audience building outside of those that give frequently to us to then include in that last round of people. We’re making that really hard push for.

But I would say that,

you know, of course, by the end of the year, there’s some fatigue, but the fatigue is magnified tremendously by us, if we’re in a place where we haven’t changed how we’re speaking to our donor base. So this is the time to to make some changes, to audit your donation appeal, to think through all the different types of appeals that are out there, and like the avenues of why people give, and try to really overcome some of that potential donor fatigue. So

and then, okay, so Myra Riviera Rivero, excuse me. Wrote, can you provide examples of how CBOs focus on community organizing?

Myra, that might be, I’m not sure I know the acronym CBO off the off the cuff,

but I will. I’m

tempted to put my LinkedIn in the chat so we can chat afterwards.

We do have a number of we do have a number of local, focused organizations that we work with who do tremendously strong community focused fundraising campaigns. I’m not sure if that’s exactly what you mean by community organizing. I’m assuming that that that potentially is but

community based organization, okay,

yeah, I so, I guess I can just, I can tell a little bit of a story of Park City Community Foundation,

where they run, in my opinion, like one of the most successful local, community focused campaigns that I’m aware of.

Their their direct, I think, I don’t want to butcher her title, but I think she’s the director of marketing, or the VP of marketing. Christine Coleman

has done just extensive, tremendous work to build

relationship. Didn’t mean this my screen share

here. No, we didn’t. Okay, great. Oh, we can just, yeah, I see change it to this.

It’s, it’s a lot of relationship building, but then it’s also thinking through ways to create fun and like authentic.

Technically fun, real experiences for people who are showing up to any kind of event, or any kind of, like, community focused thing that you’re creating. So I know that Park City, their event is called Live PC. Give PC Myra, which could be worth looking into,

and and like, how they structure it, how they market it, because it is. It’s like, truly one of a kind. I know that this year they had two different kinds of parties on this main giving day that they had. They had a true, like, legit party for adults in, like, a cool venue with music and all of that stuff happening. Then they also had a party for parents, who were, you know, have had, like, kids, and so it needed to be a little bit of a different atmosphere. But I thought that that catering to all the different kinds of people who would want to show up and, like, engage on a certain day of giving for them was really cool. They, of course, have been doing this for a number of years, so the momentum is a bit more there than if you were going to start something fresh. But I would highly look at, recommend looking up live PC, give PC from the Park City Community Foundation Meyer, for an example of an extremely well run community focused campaign. And

let’s see.

We have a question from George here. I’m a very small nonprofit, George, thanks for doing what you do as a smaller nonprofit plan on three emails before 1231 what dates would I recommend? I would say

three emails before. I mean definitely one on the 31st I would say one on the 29th and then one on either the either the, probably the 27th so give people an extra day after. For those that celebrate Christmas, send one out on the 27th another one on the 29th 29th really calling, like, 27th basically saying, like, hoping the holidays are going well. Reminder, here’s the impact you can create with our organization. 29th really touching on we’re we’re three days out from the end of the year. Now’s the time to make a gift if you haven’t thought, and then 31st is basically like last chance to support us before we get into 2025 your gift would create this kind of impact.

Okay, so we got a question from Camille. It says, how should we approach our paid search strategy for end of year with cost increasing more than revenue?

Um, that’s a great question.

I mean,

you you gotta, you gotta trim all the keywords that aren’t that are costing you money that you know, like whether it’s your team or whatever agency you’re working with, if you’re not earning money during year end you like there are times before December where I believe that investing in paid search to build remarketing audiences is worth it, even if you’re not earning dollar for dollar back. But in December, you should be positive on your return on ad spend for

for paid search, generally speaking. So I would say, yeah, like really getting clear on the keywords that are not converting, and letting those go, or pausing those right, maybe until next year, but trimming the account down so that it is performing for you or

or investing the ad spend somewhere else. Honestly,

if you’ve already tried that and it’s not working,

wonderful. Okay, we have a question

from Kevin, who, I think, asked the exact same question as George. That’s crazy. Am I? Am I seeing this? I’m a small nonprofit planning on three broad email blasts before 1231 what dates would you recommend and why? Kevin, I hope I answered your question when I answered George’s question that’s

wild rose asked, are connections on social media a good choice without a boost, or should mainly concentrate on influencers and past donors? Now

rose, I’m not sure I fully answer understand your question, are connections on social media a good choice without a boost?

I don’t, I honestly don’t. I don’t recommend so boosting ads in general,

or boosting posts, excuse me, is not the same as running an ad campaign.

You’re, yeah, if you do not have the, you know, the ability to do any kind of actually, like going into ads manager and have from, like, Business Manager, in meta, into ads manager and actually doing a campaign there, boosting a post to your engaged audiences is probably the best way to do it. So rose, I’m sorry I’m not or Rosa, I keep mispronouncing your name. Wow, Rosa, I’m not familiar enough with boosting because we do it, quote, unquote, the right way. But I believe in boosting it there should be an audience called engage.

Engaged,

recently engaged, and those are the people who have in a timeframe that meta considers recent, either liked or commented or shared or clicked like they’ve engaged with your organization in some way online.

I would recommend boosting to whatever you feel really strong about about that post, to that audience from that space, I believe that’s an audience. I know that’s an audience we target all the time inside of ads manager, I think you can do the same in boosting.

Camille asked any question or any tips on splitting between being in Google and I’m assuming in terms of paid search,

I mean,

it’s all date. It should really all be on the based on the data, I would say Google’s cost per clicks are higher typically. So initial would would say like 6535

or like 6040 between Google getting 60 and being getting 40. But it really, then is data, right? It’s like you, wherever you’re seeing the the return on adspend be stronger, or it’s, it depends on your main metric, right? It could be. There’s some nonprofits we work with that are more focused on new donor acquisition than like immediate return, which you should be, by the way, because donor lifetime value typically far exceeds, like a one time gift. So if your main metric two is like new donor acquisition, if you’re seeing that happen more on a certain channel, even if the revenue from a different one is slightly higher, invest more into that one that you’re seeing it. But Camila, I would I would say initially, Google more being less, but follow the data and then make a change part way through based on that Data.

Myra, I’ll put the organization in the chat. Um,

yeah,

wonderful. Andrea asked, How often is it? How often is it ideal to post the invitation to donate without being too pushy

to post the invitation to donate?

So

there, there’s this philosophy in in marketing in general, and I think it’s really important for nonprofits, called Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook, where we, which is kind of like a violent way to describe it, but like we ideally do want to be varying our content to a degree. So we’re not just throwing right hooks, right? We’re not just saying, donate, donate. Like, the thing that people expect from us, right? We want to, like, soften them up. Essentially, this is true for for profit, nonprofit, like, it’s kind of a universal principle of marketing. So I would say

right now, you should be posting pretty much every day if you’re able to,

but maybe once every three days, making a very direct donation appeal. The other ones you know, people understand it’s your end, and if they follow you, they’ve seen your donation appeals. So you want to be posting things that are focusing on your impact right now, like stories of impact,

staff, connections with those that you serve,

like reflections from your organization. Those can all be things that you post in between and Andrea highly recommend to chat. GBT, hey, we don’t want to post a donation appeal every single day. We want to do it maybe once every three days. Now, as we get to the last few days of the year, 28th really the last three, but even like 28th 29th 30th, 31st post a donation appeal every day. Like, yeah, it’s pushy. But also this is, it’s like our time to shine, right? It’s like, this is pushy or not, we got to do it. But yeah, chatgpt can be really helpful in thinking of additional things that, like, keep the message of inspiration there without making that direct ask which is something to we want to do,

and we are out of time shoot. Okay,

Gabby, I see your question here. I’m going to put my I mean, you know my name,

it’s on the screen, but if you want to reach out to me on LinkedIn, or anyone else wants to reach out to me on LinkedIn, me on LinkedIn, I’ll put my actual LinkedIn here. Would be more than happy to connect

and talk further. Thank you all so much for being so engaged today. I really appreciate it. And then, or I don’t know if you’re here too, if you want to. Yeah, there you are. I am Yes. Okay,

so Michael, thank you for your time today. The timing of this presentation is spot on. Are these nonprofits, and it was pretty jam packed with some great information. As you saw that I was watching the chat and the Q and A, everything was just filling up and.

So I’m sure the attendees got some, got plenty of takeaways.

But again, I hope you’ll join us again in the future for another webcast. But for now, we are done for today, the recording will be sent out in the next few days, and as Michael said, you can reach out to him on LinkedIn. Yeah, you guys are all awesome. Thank you so much, and thanks for having me. DonorPerfect, me, DonorPerfect. Appreciate it. You’re welcome. You’re welcome. Thank you for being here. Have a great afternoon. Bye.

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