3 Things to Focus on This Giving Season

Giving season is upon us. It’s an exciting time, with 26% percent of all online revenue coming in December. It can be easy to feel overwhelmed but focusing on a few key areas can help you work more efficiently and improve your end-of-year fundraising results –while avoiding burnout. Here’s what our experts recommend:

1. Focus on Segmentation

Just because people are more likely to donate during giving season doesn’t mean they will support your org. They’re receiving asks right and left during this time. Your solicitations need to stand out and convince donors that your organization is the place for their gift.

So, use what you know about your constituents in your customer relationship management (CRM) or donor management system to create audience segments and send targeted and personalized communications.

For example, segment donors by last donation date. You might want to suppress people who have recently donated or acknowledge their recent gift in your solicitations. For people who last gave during giving season, you might thank them for giving last year and share the impact of their gift before making this year’s ask.

TIP: Segmentation and marketing automation won’t be effective if you have inaccurate or incomplete data. If you lack confidence in your organization’s data quality, then establish a regular process for deduplicating data and checking/correcting data inconsistencies. You’ll appreciate the clean data next giving season and throughout the year.

2. Obsess Over the Donor Journey

An ideal way to optimize your fundraising this giving season is to put yourself in your donors’ shoes. Take time to analyze your donor journey to inform your campaigns, optimize their experience, and extend the donor relationship well past the giving season.

A few quick tips:

• Review your website and donor form. Make sure it’s easy for potential donors to navigate your website and find your online donation form. Also, consider if you can streamline your donation form by reducing the number of questions and fields to help ensure donors complete the process.
• Think about how you will communicate with donors after giving season. Thank your donors quickly. Welcome first-time donors to your organization and give them some background about your mission. Follow up with a note about how their donation will help. Then, thank them again down the road and provide an update about the impact of their donation.
• Leverage the engagement tools you have. Marketing automation tools make it possible to develop sophisticated lists and messages that you can set up and schedule in advance, and then simply run. This approach allows you to focus on the donor journey while saving valuable time.

TIP: If you don’t already have a marketing automation tool in place, consider investing in one to make next year’s fundraising even more effective.

3. You’re Only Human: How to Avoid Burnout

As we enter the giving season, the pressure on fundraisers grows more intense. It’s important to balance effective fundraising with self-care for your fundraising team – essentially, it’s time to put the joy back into fundraising.  Here are a few ideas:

• Celebrate milestones. Set interim milestones during the giving season and take time to celebrate them with your team. The celebration can be anything from a congratulation email to a pizza party. No matter how you mark the milestone, be sure to acknowledge the work that got your team to the milestone and remind everyone of what reaching your fundraising goals will do for the organization.
• Work smarter, not harder. Use your process automation tools to save staff time and automate any manual processes, such as routine email communications. If you don’t have time to put process automation tools to work now, then take note of inefficient processes as you move through this giving season and plan to streamline and automate them next year.
• Try new things. It can be easy to just “rinse and repeat” last year’s campaigns. However, trying new approaches with your end-of-year fundraising campaigns can make this potentially stressful time more fun and more productive.This can be as simple as pulling a few reports to look at last year’s data. See if you can spot any trends that point to tweaks you can make to improve this year’s campaigns, such as timing for emails, audience segments, content effectiveness, and number of email messages.

Take the Next Step with Your Fundraising Campaigns

Our team here at Heller Consulting is ready to help you use the right technology strategies and solutions to reach your fundraising goals. Contact us today to learn more and get started.