The giving season is one of the most important times of the year for nonprofits, but it requires proactive planning. Keep reading as I walk you through an effective three-phase roadmap to preparing and executing your best year-end fundraising campaign yet!
Join the fundraising movement! Join the fundraising movement!The last few months of the year – known as the giving season – are critical to your fundraising efforts. In 2025, nonprofits in the M+R Benchmark study received 37% of their annual revenue in December alone.
Feeling overwhelmed? I’m here to help. In this article, I’ll share tips to help you work through the key phases of running a giving season fundraising campaign: planning, executing, and wrapping up.
The first key to creating a successful year-end fundraising campaign for the giving season is planning ahead. It’s not just about producing the best campaign possible, but also tackling other in-the-moment tasks as the final months of the year draw to a close.
Ideally, start planning four to six months before your campaign launches to make sure you’re well positioned for both Giving Tuesday and December’s giving spike. Early donor outreach and strategy-setting help you align your charitable goals with the realities of the season – especially as holiday giving increases across all demographics!
Here’s an expert tip from Erica Waasdorp, fundraising consultant and president of A Direct Solution:
Start early. Begin with a thank-you message before Thanksgiving. Then send a first email on Black Friday, follow up on Cyber Monday and then go for Giving Tuesday messaging if you’re participating.”
For more guidance, check out this podcast providing a four-month roadmap to successful giving season fundraising:
We’ve also got a fully customizable Giving Season calendar you can use to your advantage:
Next up, determine which staff members, board members, or volunteers will make up your giving season campaign team.
Consider asking a well-rounded group of individuals to join – you’ll need fundraising expertise, marketing knowledge, design skills, and more! Assign specific tasks to each person and host regular meetings to check in on everyone’s progress.
Before you start planning your year-end campaign, it’s important to know what your goals are.
First, take a look at last year’s end-of-year campaign and analyze any giving patterns you can see. How much did you raise? Which donors gave during the giving season? How many people did you engage?
Use these data points – and others you find important – to set benchmarks and key performance indicators (KPIs) for this year. Make sure these reflect your financial fundraising goals and your broader charitable impact.
We recommend selecting one to two primary campaign goals. This will help you determine your target audience, select your outreach tactics, and more. Many nonprofit organizations choose a dollar-raised goal, but you could also aim for others, like new donors, members, or website visitors.
See how FLY created their 2025 Giving Season campaign on Donorbox and exceeded their $250,000 fundraising goal by 27%!
Start a Year-End Fundraising Campaign
Next up, determine your target audience – those whom you want to ask for gifts. You should determine everything from gender to age to location.
Pro tip: Take a look at your previous supporters. Determine whether you want to target the same donors, those with similar demographics, or a new audience that would fill in some gaps.
Start by segmenting your current donor base. Add filters such as giving frequency, giving amounts, location, time frame, campaign preference, and more.
Once you know who you are targeting, decide on your campaign’s key messaging and theme. Having a theme helps maintain consistency in look and feel across your platforms. It can take up to 12 touchpoints before someone decides to give, and you have a better chance if they are receiving the same message from multiple angles.
While you can use the season of giving as a basis for your theme, choose something more specific to your mission. Your messaging will help this theme shine through in all of your outreach, as will your brand. Select campaign colors, fonts, images, and even beneficiary stories that reflect your theme and message.
For example, a food pantry’s theme for their giving season campaign may be “Thankfull,” with messaging that focuses on making sure families in their community have access to delicious and filling holiday meals.
Next, it’s important to determine the type of year-end campaign you want to run and the tools you’d like to use to reach your goals. Make sure all your tools are up-to-date, branded, and ready to go!
In addition to a fabulous online donation form, use several other methods and tools as part of your fundraising strategy this giving season.
Fundraising events, for one, are popular during the holidays. From concerts to themed happy hours, holiday-themed fundraisers help you raise a lot of money.
Create an event page online and add a ticketing form to it using a tool like Donorbox Events. Include unlimited ticket levels and embed the form on your website. Or use the customizable, Donorbox-hosted event page.
In addition to purchasing tickets, donors can make one-time and recurring donations to your giving season event, allowing you to raise even more for your cause!
Pro tip: Place a donation kiosk at your Giving Season events so you can accept cashless in-person donations swiftly! Apps like Donorbox Live™ allow you to turn your tablet or iPad into a powerful giving kiosk when paired with a card reader. Or, use the Mobile mode on your smartphone to fundraise on the go with a simple tap – no card reader required.
Peer-to-peer campaigns can also make a big impact. Ask your top supporters to become advocates by creating their own fundraising pages to share with their networks, broadening your reach and bringing in new donor support.
Check out Donorbox Peer-to-Peer, which makes it easy to create a primary campaign and then invite your supporters to build their own customizable fundraising pages. All donations from these peer campaigns flow directly into your primary campaign and Donorbox account!
See how this fundraiser helped the English Skills Learning Center raise funds for their 2024 year-end giving campaign.
Crowdfunding is another great choice for giving season and holiday campaigns because it creates a higher sense of urgency and provides plenty of social proof and sharing opportunities.
Check out this Donorbox-hosted year-end crowdfunding campaign by School of Imagination. As you can see, they far surpassed their fundraising goal in 2024!
How much should a nonprofit spend on a Giving Season campaign? There’s no one-size-fits-all amount or percentage that works for every nonprofit. Your budget should reflect your overall fundraising goal, the channels you plan to use, and what your previous campaign results tell you.
I’ve put together a table to help give you an overview of what you’ll need to account for:
Budget area What to account for
Staff & contractor time Copywriting, design, data management, campaign setup, donor outreach
Fundraising tools Donation software, email marketing tools, and other campaign add-ons
Creative materials Photography, video, graphic design, printing, and campaign signage
Promotion Direct mail, ads, or other paid outreach
In-person events Venue costs, equipment, ticketing, catering, staffing
Donor follow-up Thank-you gifts and materials for direct mail, post-campaign reporting
Not every item on this list will require additional spending (your campaign may be run by existing staff or volunteers rather than paid contractors, for example). But even when there’s no direct cost, it helps to account for time and capacity so you don’t build a campaign your team can’t realistically manage.
It’s important that you select your marketing channels and plan out a campaign schedule in advance.
Mapping out your timeline and channels in advance is a smart way to streamline your campaign planning! This will help you prioritize the creation of your appeals and marketing collateral, as well as save you time when you launch your campaign.
There are several marketing channels you can use to get the word out about your campaign (more on this below!).
Writing an effective fundraising appeal can take time, so start early. We recommend beginning with your direct mail letter. After perfecting it, you can rework bits and pieces to fit into your other channels, saving time while ensuring your messaging is consistent across your campaign.
Just make sure your appeals are:
Pro tip: Don’t be afraid to write…and re-write…and re-write your appeals. Ask fellow staff members, family, and friends to read your letter and provide feedback.
Do you have your theme, messaging, brand, and appeal content set? Next up is designing and building all of your marketing collateral!
This includes everything that will be shared with the public through your selected marketing channels, including your direct mail letter, email appeals, social media posts, paid advertisements, and more. Promote your campaign on your website through a homepage banner, blog post, and giving page updates.
By creating all of this in advance, you’ll save time and headaches during the campaign itself.
Pro tip: Whenever possible, schedule your outreach ahead of time. Many email marketing platforms allow you to build and schedule your emails in advance, and there are also several social media scheduling tools available.
Every email, letter, social post, and ad should lead donors toward a clear next step – ideally, a mobile-optimized, branded donation/campaign page!
Use this checklist to prepare your campaign page or donation form:
See how the Harm Reduction Therapy Center used the Donorbox OmniGive™ Donation Form to collect Giving Tuesday donations in 2025, offering donors 25+ familiar payment methods and a frictionless giving experience:
You’ve prepared as much as possible in advance, now it’s time for Phase 2 – Execute!
First up is your direct mail letter. Send this in mid-November as a kick-off to your giving season campaign. Finalize and get it sent off to the printer at least three weeks before you’d like it to hit mailboxes.
Pro tip: Have the budget and capacity for another direct mail piece? Send a reminder postcard or letter in December to those who have not yet responded!
Email is a great way to supplement direct mail appeals. Use them to expand on a beneficiary’s story with powerful images and videos, and create a sense of urgency that doesn’t always translate through snail mail.
Plan to send at least three emails throughout the season of giving – one to kick it off and announce your goal, one reminder about halfway through, and one in the final three days of the year.
Social media is also a great way to express urgency and tell your story through visuals.
Aim to post about your giving season campaign at least once a week, beginning in November. Start with an announcement about your campaign and when it will launch, share a series of posts showcasing a beneficiary story or two, and be sure to participate in Giving Tuesday.
If you have the budget and the capacity, paid advertising is ideal for expanding your reach beyond your current audience. Run paid ads on social media and Google, as well as through your local print, radio, and television media.
Also, consider using public relations strategies to place earned stories with these outlets.
Even if you schedule most of your outreach in advance, don’t go on autopilot once the giving season begins.
Stay engaged with your audience as much as possible – respond or react to comments and post shares on social media, reach out to key supporters via phone, and keep your donors informed by sharing updates about the progress towards your goal. And say thank you throughout!
Pro tip: The last three days of the year should be when your biggest push happens. Post reminders on social media, send out a “last chance to give this year” email, and call those top donors who haven’t donated yet this giving season.
The third and final phase of your giving season roadmap – the Wrap Up – may not seem as important as the others, but it’s a crucial step to your continuing growth as an organization.
Showing gratitude is one of the most important things you can do following your giving season campaign. While sending year-end tax receipts is also critical at this time, these communications are transactional.
In addition to these tax receipts, send relational communications that thank your donors for their gifts and show the impact they made.
These may include emails, personal thank-you letters, or even phone calls. You can also post a powerful thank-you video on social media. There are so many ways to show your gratitude to your donors!
Use this time to check in on your metrics from the giving season – did you meet or exceed your goals and KPIs? What other ways did your campaign make an impact? Record all of these numbers now so that they are ready for your review whenever you need them.
Tracking these results helps you identify what contributed most to your fundraising success.
While everything is still fresh in your mind, write down all of the things that worked this year, as well as anything you’d like to improve. This may include metrics, but also notes about your planning and execution process, the beneficiary stories you used, or your target audience.
Trust us – you’ll thank yourself next August when it’s time to start thinking about the giving season all over again!
Even a well-planned Giving Season campaign can lose ground when a few common mistakes slip through. Here’s what experienced fundraisers recommend watching for, and how to course-correct.
Giving Tuesday should support your wider year-end strategy rather than stand alone. Plan how you’ll build momentum before the day and keep donors engaged after.
First-time donors, monthly givers, and long-standing supporters should not all be getting the same appeal message. Segment your audience and adjust your message accordingly.
Don’t assume donors are tired of hearing from you. Many plan to give at year-end, so timely reminders can make it easier for them to follow through.
In 2025, the final week of the year guaranteed 10% of nonprofits’ annual online revenue, with 4% arriving on December 31 alone.
So share useful updates through the final days, then follow up with a prompt, genuine, and personalized thank-you in the new year.
Bonus resource: Get more expert tips in our article, “8 Fundraising Experts’ Best Giving Season Advice”.
Planning and producing an effective giving season campaign can seem daunting. With good planning, clear goals, and genuine appreciation for your donors, you can end the year with strong donor involvement and measurable charitable impact.
If you need innovative fundraising tools that won’t drain your budget this season of giving – and beyond – take a look at Donorbox and its simple-to-use features.
Explore other insightful guides, tips, and tactics on year-end fundraising and more on the Nonprofit Blog. Subscribe to our newsletter to receive a curated list of our best resources in your inbox every month.
Kara has several years of experience in communications and marketing for nonprofit organizations. Her love for serving others began while fundraising for and attending mission trips. She then worked with multiple local nonprofits through various marketing agencies and volunteer opportunities before becoming a communications manager at Variety the Children's Charity of St. Louis for more than four years. Kara now specializes in writing and enjoys sharing her experiences and knowledge with others on this platform.
Join the fundraising movement! Join the fundraising movement!
