How to Maintain Momentum With Year-Round Fundraising Efforts

Imagine that your nonprofit has just launched an ongoing fundraising campaign. Whether you’ve decided to open a gift card store, partner with an online shopping fundraiser platform, take advantage of corporate matching gifts, or branch into text donations, you’re excited to have a new digital channel to fund your mission all year long.

Starting this campaign generated a lot of excitement among your supporters, leading to an influx of contributions. But as time passes, you start to wonder, “How can we keep our community interested in our ongoing fundraisers and encourage them to participate year-round?”

If your organization is in this situation, you’ve come to the right place! In this guide, we’ll share four tips for helping maintaining momentum with year-round fundraisers, including how to:

• Leverage multiple marketing channels
• Increase promotions on a seasonal basis
• Track fundraising campaign data
• Regularly thank year-round fundraiser participants

By implementing these strategies, your nonprofit can help generate more stable support for its cause through its ongoing fundraising efforts, providing the consistent revenue it needs to grow and thrive. Let’s get started!

1. Leverage Multiple Marketing Channels

Like with any of your nonprofit’s initiatives, multi-channel marketing increases your ongoing fundraisers’ visibility across different segments of your audience. The difference with year-round campaigns is that after your initial marketing push, it’s important to keep promoting them on a recurring basis through your various channels.

ShopRaise’s passive fundraising guide recommends using the following methods to promote your ongoing campaigns:

• Your organization’s website, which should have a dedicated page explaining the key details of each fundraiser.
• Popular social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.
• Email blasts and sections in your monthly newsletter.
• Search ads, which your nonprofit can access at no cost through the Google Ad Grants program.
• Flyers posted at your organization’s facility and in public spaces in your community.

In all of your marketing materials, include a link or QR code that supporters can use to contribute to your fundraiser right away. If your campaign requires partnering with a third-party fundraising platform, see if their team provides marketing support to make it easier for your organization to create high-quality, branded content throughout the fundraiser’s duration.

2. Increase Promotions on a Seasonal Basis

It’s no secret that nonprofit giving fluctuates with the seasons—approximately 30% of all charitable contributions occur in December, and donations tend to die down in the summer. Contributions to your year-round campaigns will also vary seasonally, but these fluctuations will be unique to the type of fundraiser you host. 

Monitor these changes and use them to your advantage by increasing promotions for your campaigns when your supporters are most likely to participate in them. Here are some ideas for when to promote different year-round fundraisers:

• Gift card fundraising: Promote heavily in November when supporters may be thinking about buying holiday gifts for their friends and family, and again in April to prepare for Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, school graduations, and peak wedding season. 
• Online shopping fundraisers: Use a similar timeline for promotions as you would with gift card fundraising. However, if your supporter base includes many families with school-aged children, you could also boost this fundraiser in August when they’re likely buying clothes and supplies for the new school year.
• Text-to-give: Since text donations can be a standalone fundraiser and a supplement to other initiatives, create and share special keywords that supporters can use to make mobile contributions during your year-end giving campaign or your annual silent auction.
• Matching gifts: Contact the top matching gift companies you work with to see if they might offer a higher match rate for GivingTuesday or Employee Appreciation Day in March, then communicate this to supporters who work for those businesses.

While these seasonal promotions don’t take away from the importance of recurring marketing, they’re a great way to periodically regenerate excitement around your organization’s year-round fundraising efforts and help them continue to succeed.

3. Track Fundraising Campaign Data

As with many of your nonprofit’s activities, data can provide concrete insights to optimize your year-round campaigns. Use your fundraising platforms and donor database to track metrics like:

• Number of participants in your fundraisers per year and per month
• Average contribution amount per supporter
• Donor acquisition rate (i.e., how many supporters first interacted your organization through a year-round campaign)
• Donor retention rate (i.e., how many supporters contributed to your campaigns multiple times or across multiple years)
• Conversion rates for each of your marketing channels

Analyze this information and use it to optimize your campaign strategies. For example, if you notice that social media has the highest conversion rate of any marketing channel, you might post more frequently about your ongoing fundraisers and experiment with different content formats to see which ones get the most interactions. Or, if your retention rate is low, you could create an email series specifically for first-time year-round campaign supporters to keep your organization top of mind after they participate and encourage them to contribute again.

4. Regularly Thank Year-Round Fundraiser Participants

If supporters participate in your year-round fundraisers on a recurring basis, they deserve to be thanked on a recurring basis as well. However, since ongoing campaigns typically bring in a large number of relatively small individual donations, it can be overwhelming to consider thanking participants for every contribution they make.

To relieve this stress and make your thank-yous more meaningful, try these strategies:

• Send appreciation messages once a month. This timeline will keep your campaign and organization on supporters’ minds without flooding their inboxes or mailboxes. It’s also a good cadence for reviewing data, so you can first see who contributed what amount to your campaign this month and then send thank-you notes to those active participants.
• Share the concrete impact of your campaign. Incorporate statistics and storytelling into your follow-ups so supporters understand how their participation actively furthers your mission. For example, an animal shelter could let participants know that their gift card purchases allowed them to provide food and veterinary care for 15 rescue cats that month. Or, they could tell the story of one cat who found its forever home through the shelter and emphasize how their gift card fundraiser participants made that possible.
• Personalize all thank-you notes. Include the donor’s preferred name in the greeting and mention their monthly contribution amount to show that you’re grateful for their support in particular. These tailored elements are critical for getting supporters to continue participating in your campaigns since they make recipients feel like an integral part of your nonprofit’s work. 

As eCardWidget’s donor recognition guide explains. nonprofit supporters are more likely to give to an organization multiple times if they received personalized communications about how their contributions made a difference. Effective appreciation can not only help boost retention rates for your year-round campaigns but also encourage supporters to get involved with your nonprofit in other ways, increasing their impact on your mission.

Year-round fundraisers require ongoing promotion, data analysis, and supporter recognition to succeed. If you develop a solid strategy by adapting the tips above to your nonprofit’s needs and campaign structure, you’ll set your organization up for consistent revenue growth and effective long-term supporter engagement.