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Winter is Coming...what to focus on now for year-end appeals.

Maria Davis
Written by :

Maria Davis

Categories: Fundraising

 The first week of August has come and gone, your fall fundraising events are right around the corner and – shortly thereafter – we’ll have #GivingTuesday, holiday appeals and end of the year goals to meet. At this point in the year it seems like time starts to snowball and the next thing you know you’ll be singing Aud Lang Syne and welcoming in 2018.

But FIRST there are some critical things that need to happen. Here are three things you can do now to start preparing for those year-end appeals: (FYI: This post is assuming you'll participate in #GivingTuesday, a holiday appeal and a year-end appeal but is not necessarily recommending that you do all three.)

  • Decide if you are going to run separate campaigns or if you plan to tie them - and their goal - together. If you are planning to treat them separately, assign them their own goals and create social media/strategy/timeline around each. It's totally fine for the plans to be similar, no need to recreate the wheel, but segmenting them will help both you and your donors keep track of when and how much they gave. Make sure the goals are simple and tangible to achieve in that time period. For more ideas of year-end appeals, check out some from Gail Perry's blog here. 
  • Find your champion donors. Talk to your donors now about these campaigns and ask them to prepare to be involved. For example, for #GivingTuesday, begin working to find a donor who might offer a matching gift that day for x amount of funds raised. Having that donor in place now will allow you to set a more feasible budget and will allow you to strategize around messaging.
  • Start to create your content. If you have a staff member who works on graphic design for you, that’s great, but if it’s just you, go ahead and work on creating a bit of content for these campaigns (i.e. Instagram posts, sample tweets, etc.) Our team loves Canva, which is a free and easy-to-use graphic design tool. To make sure you're thoughtfully promoting your campaign, you don't want it to look thrown together. Having these ready in advance will take stress off of you later.