September 2023: 5 Year-End Takeaways from the Nonprofit Marketing Summit
Did you attend the virtual Nonprofit Marketing Summit? I blocked all three afternoons on my calendar so I could fully focus on the content and I’m glad I did. There were some gem sessions, mostly focused on or applicable to year-end campaigns.
Here are my top 5 takeaways from the conference:
1. GivingTuesday works best when it’s not all about fundraising
I already knew this anecdotally and it was great to hear it directly from the GT team. The most successful GivingTuesday campaigns are the ones that try something new, are fun to participate in, and give people more than one way to show support. This could look like hosting a virtual event, asking your most loyal donors to host 24-hour P2P fundraisers, asking people to like and share a video you share on social to maximize the reach on the big day, or running some kind of online competition… just spitballing here! Think about an easy and fulfilling activity you can promote in addition to donating.
2. If you’re a lean team, follow the RAISE framework
The Community Boost crew shared some really nice best practices for a simple year-end campaign that even a comms/marketing/development Team of One can pull off. They suggest following this RAISE framework and timeline:
Reciprocity pre-wire: October 1 - Giving Tuesday
Appeal & ask - Giving Tuesday through December
Intense campaign climax - 12/21 through 12/31
Stewardship - 1/1 through 1/31
Enrollment in recurring giving - 1/31 onwards
I love that early 2024 is included here. January and February are key months for up-leveling one-time givers to monthly donors!
3. Test a variety of different ads at year-end (and always)
Every campaign is an opportunity for testing. It was cool to watch Megan Toscano with charity:water explain their approach to testing social media ads. For your year-end campaign, can you create two versions of a video that are different lengths, or that tell the same story from two different perspectives? Can you prepare a handful of photos, headlines, and captions to test with digital ads and see what lands? Unlike a newspaper or radio ad, you never have to put all your eggs in one basket with digital.
4. An optimized donation page might look different than you think
I’m obsessed with NextAfter and follow everything they do because they are truly at the forefront of nonprofit user experience testing. Their team has run thousands of experiments and found that a donation page needs a few key things—namely, a compelling case for support. Depending on your donor base and how much your donors like to read, this could mean a few sentences of text on your donation page, or a few dense paragraphs! Here are NextAfter’s 19 tips to optimize your donation page, just in time for year-end. I recommend setting up a landing page that’s specific to your year-end campaign with visuals, a story or testimonials, and a time-sensitive reason for giving. If you have the bandwidth to create two versions of your campaign landing page to A/B test with ads or with a small subset of your email list, this could result in thousands of extra $$.
5. Following the old playbook won’t get you far
Were you able to catch Seth Godin’s interview with Jon & Becky from We Are For Good? It was so refreshing and at times even goosebump-inducing. Seth talked about our responsibility as nonprofit marketers and fundraisers to try new things. And he reminded us that you can start by testing an idea with a small group of people. Do you have a campaign idea that’s outside of the box? Run a Zoom focus group and ask a handful of donors what they think! Want to know if personally calling or emailing last year’s donors now to ask for a non-monetary favor will result in more December donations? Try it with 50 of them, then track to see how many of those 50 people donate to your campaign. Whatever your idea is, there’s no harm in testing it. The real harm lies in doing exactly what you did last year.
I hope these tips are helpful as you dive into your year-end planning!
