Happy Holiday (Giving) Season to You!

Fundraising pros share tips on how to make the end-of-the-year push fruitful for both your organization and your donors.

Yes, we know it's only September (well, technically August at the time of this writing). But if you aren't well into the planning of your year-end appeals, well, you're running a little behind schedule.

FundRaising Success recently did a quick, informal poll of a number of fundraising professionals from across the sector, and here are some of their "off-the-top-of-my-head" tips for ending the year with an uptick in giving. Some chose to focus on ideas specifically for end-of-year efforts, but many took the opportunity to reinforce that good fundraising practices are good fundraising practices are good fundraising practices — no matter what time of year it is.

Nothing formal here, folks … just some musings from seasoned pros. But you're sure to find something that resonates with you and your efforts.

Oh, and … happy holidays!

Sandy Rees, fundraising coach

Here are three ideas that I used with a client a couple of years ago. They needed a big finish to the year, so here's what we did.

1. Encourage year-end giving. Staff created a simple postcard that was sent right after Christmas to everyone on the mailing list reminding them that year-end gifts must be received by Dec. 31 in order to count for the year.

2. Encourage online giving. Since the organization has a website with a "Donate Now" button, we conducted a viral e-mail campaign the last couple of days of the year. On Dec. 29, we sent out an e-mail to all board members, volunteers, staff and donors who we had e-mail addresses for to thank them for their support of the organization and give them the link to the website. We reminded them how important the organization is in changing lives of people in the community and asked them to forward the e-mail on to any friends they think would also support our work. (This is what made it viral.)

3. Pitch stories after Christmas. The week between Christmas and New Year's is usually a slow news week. It's not too hard to get a story on TV or in the paper. We chose a great story and pitched it to the local media.

The combination of these activities resulted in a small flurry of donations during the last week of the year. We saw several first-time donors through our online efforts, one of whom gave a $1,000 gift. We were quite pleased with the outcome, and it met the organization's need for a big finish for the year.