7 Simple Ways to Save Money on Your Year-End Fundraising Campaign

Year-end fundraising may be your biggest revenue moment of the year, but it can also be one of your most expensive campaigns. Between payment processing fees, direct mail costs, staff time, donor questions, and follow-up, even a great campaign can cost more than it really needs to.

That makes cost-conscious planning especially important. With the right mix of digital tools, smart segmentation, and AI that supports your team, you can reduce campaign expenses while still giving donors a top-notch giving experience. Let’s start by exploring the seven cost-saving measures below. You can leverage some of these ideas very quickly!

1. Use fee cover options to offset online transaction costs

When a supporter fills out your donation form, they expect a $100 gift to mean $100 for your mission. They don’t always know that processing fees chip away at each gift, especially in November and December when transaction volume peaks.

To offset this cost, offer donors the option to cover your transaction fees so more of their gift goes toward making an impact. For example, Blackbaud offers two fee cover configurations:

• Donor cover presents donors with a suggested percentage to add to their gift. If they opt in, your organization receives the full intended donation. If they don’t, standard fees apply. The choice is up to each donor.
• Complete Cover® is designed to eliminate processing fees on eligible donations under $3,000, whether an individual donor opts in or not, because Blackbaud covers the gap. Donors can add a voluntary tip to support the program. Gifts of $3,000 or more and gifts made through PayPal or Venmo aren’t eligible, so those donors will see the donor cover option instead.

Participation in donor cover has been amazing, especially in our event registration forms. We’ve seen a 90 percent adoption rate, which is much higher than we expected.

Ed Doolittle
Annual Fund and Digital Giving Manager, AID Atlanta

Blackbaud customers saved a combined total of nearly $17.4 million in 2025 through fee cover options. Those savings can go back into important programs, while donors have a clear choice about helping more of their intended gift reach your mission.

2. Optimize your donation form for high-volume year-end giving

Year-end giving can bring high traffic to your donation form, so make sure it’s ready for the moment: mobile-friendly, easy to fill out, and designed for both completion and gift size.

Don’t worry—this doesn’t require a full redesign. A few donation form best practices can yield big results during the busy end-of-year giving season:

• Improve the flow. Start with gift amount and frequency, then contact information, then payment details. Reinforce your mission with on-brand imagery and a short line about what the gift makes possible.
• Remove friction points. Include only the fields you really need and remove unnecessary navigation and links so donors stay focused. Keep trust signals (like secure payment logos and your privacy policy link) easy to spot.
• Consider accessibility. High-contrast colors, keyboard navigation, and screen-reader compatibility help more donors complete the giving process.
• Encourage recurring gifts. Give December donors an easy way to turn a one-time gift into ongoing support. Add a recurring gift option to every form and use mission-focused language to show what ongoing support could mean for your cause.
• Put yourself in the donor’s shoes. Complete a small test gift on your phone and confirm that the form loads cleanly, transactions can be completed with minimal friction, acknowledgments arrive quickly, and gifts appear correctly in your systems.

3. Clean up your direct mail list before you print (and long before you send)

The fastest way to save money on direct mail is to stop mailing people who can’t receive it or are unlikely to respond. It sounds simple, but this step often gets skipped when the print deadline is looming.

Work through these three data health updates before you finalize your mailing file:

• Addresses: Run National Change of Address processing before major mailings and write the updated addresses back to your database. Identify and fix incomplete or incorrectly formatted addresses, and suppress undeliverable records so they can be corrected or removed from your mailing lists.
• Duplicates and deceased records: Run your duplicate check and set clear merge rules. Then run a deceased records check and suppress matches per your organization’s rules. This helps prevent a bereaved family member from receiving a fundraising appeal addressed to someone who has died.
• Segments: Use giving recency, frequency, gift size, channel preference, and prior appeal response to decide who gets what and how often.

4. Use peer-to-peer fundraising to extend reach without increasing paid promotion

By December, most of your paid budget is probably spoken for. When you want to expand your reach before the year closes, more ad spend isn’t always an option.

We’ve seen some great peer-to-peer campaigns—like a holiday-themed “fill the plate” campaign for a hunger-focused organization. It’s a great way for existing supporters to help you reach new donors with a year-end peer-to-peer fundraising push.

Of course, coaching these fundraisers one by one doesn’t scale in your busiest month, so build a coaching kit that you can reuse year after year. Consider including:

• A fundraising page template with a suggested goal. Supporters can launch quickly with an approved page. Give them a starting goal and a sample gift amount so they don’t have to guess what to ask for.
• A story prompt. A few simple questions can help each fundraiser explain in their own words why they’re asking friends and family to support your cause. Help them move beyond default page text by sharing their personal connection to your mission. Consider prompts like:
  • What first brought you to this cause?
  • What’s one experience with our organization that means a lot to you?  
  • What could support from your friends and family make possible this year?
• Ready-to-personalize messages. Create email and social media templates for launch, the midpoint, and the final push so fundraisers have relevant messages for each stage of the campaign. Encourage them to adjust the wording to sound like themselves.
• On-brand graphics. Provide useful options such as a progress tracker, a “why I’m fundraising” card, and an impact statistic. You can also include a few approved photos of your organization’s work. Visuals give supporter’s networks something to picture and save fundraisers from searching for images on their own.
• Pair the kit with a few simple, specific actions for every fundraiser, such as: 
  • Set your personal goal
  • Make a donation on your page to get things started
  • Email or text your fundraising page to 10 people
  • Share it three times before the year ends

When people embrace the tools—the social sharing, email templates, suggested messages—they do really, really well.

Kelly Fleming
National Director, DIY, Breakthrough T1D

A peer-to-peer coaching kit takes some time to build, but you can reuse it year after year and refine it based on what works best for your fundraisers.

5. Focus paid social and text messaging where your audience is already responding

Instead of spreading a small paid social budget across every platform, prioritize the channels where your donors, volunteers, and advocates are most active. 

Then add a few “do not spend” rules.

Before you boost anything, make sure you aren’t paying to reach donors who already gave this season. Move them into your thank-you sequence instead. Then, exclude audiences that stopped engaging months ago. These exclusions focus your budget on the people most likely to give.

Use text messaging for time-sensitive moments like matching gift deadlines and final-hour reminders, but don’t limit it to fundraising asks. Sharing impact updates and thank-you messages before and after GivingTuesday or campaign milestones can help build the relationships that support year-end giving.

Just make sure you have appropriate text consent in place before you send.

6. Save staff time with AI built into your tools

Could you personally thank every year-end donor, coach every fundraiser, and draft every reminder email throughout the end-of-year giving season? That’s more work than most fundraising teams can reasonably take on during the year-end rush. Staff time is one of your most valuable (and limited) resources in a year-end campaign, and AI can help reduce time spent on routine drafting and follow-up.

AI capabilities are probably already embedded in the tools you use every day. Consider putting them to work on specific year-end tasks while your team reviews and guides the output. Here are a few places to start if you use Blackbaud solutions:

• Personalized acknowledgments. If you’re in Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT, AI Acknowledgments can draft a personalized thank-you email for a gift and save a copy to the record. Your team gets a relevant draft to review instead of starting each acknowledgment from scratch. 
• Appeal and reminder drafts. Chat for Blackbaud AI can draft an email from a plain-language prompt, so your team can review and refine a first draft. Ask your admin about enabling this generative AI feature if you don’t see it yet.
• Fundraiser coaching. The Gen AI Content Writer & Tone Enhancer in Blackbaud TeamRaiser drafts coaching messages directly inside the email editor and can refine an existing draft to match your preferred tone. Your team can review and tailor those drafts to provide consistent encouragement throughout the campaign without starting from a blank screen every time.
• Donor follow-up. If you already have the Development Agent, December is truly its time to shine. The surge of first-time donors who give at year-end creates more follow-up than many teams can keep pace with, so assign the agent to a defined segment. Every one of those donors hears from your organization again in the weeks after their gift, while your team focuses on running your busiest fundraising season.

Seeing donors assigned, outreach drafted and sent, and activity tracked within the Development Agent’s work center gives us greater visibility into both the work the agent is doing and how quickly it is being done.

Cortney Moore
Donor Relations Manager, Fort Collins Habitat for Humanity

7. Reuse what already works

Not every cost-saving move has to be big. Some of the easiest savings come from strategies that already work.

• Repurpose campaign assets that performed well before. Turn last year’s strongest email, appeal story, donor quote, or impact graphic into this year’s social posts, reminder emails, postcards, or stewardship follow-up instead of starting every asset from scratch.
• Ask your strongest supporters first. Before the campaign goes public, send the appeal to board members, loyal annual donors, and corporate partners who’ve given before. Their early gifts can help you gauge response before committing the full budget. If your donation page includes a goal meter, those gifts also show public donors the momentum already building and how much remains to raise.
• Partner with an organization that aligns with your mission. Explore whether another nonprofit or community partner can help amplify your GivingTuesday or year-end appeal—reaching new audiences while sharing creative, event, or print costs. The strongest collaborations start with a unified goal and an understanding of what each partner brings to the table.

Save where you can, but invest where it counts

None of these seven tips will save you a fortune on its own, but each one can help reduce the cost of a successful year-end fundraising campaign. Together, those savings can leave more resources for your mission.

So, start with what sounds doable this week. You could turn on fee cover and run a test gift through your donation form to see what the experience is like for your donors. Look for anything you can simplify. Before GivingTuesday, finish your address and duplicate checks and get your coaching kit into fundraisers’ hands. For more resources to help you put your plan into action, explore our Ultimate End-of-Year Fundraising Toolkit. 

Then, in January, sit down with the numbers while they’re fresh and compare what each channel raised with how much it cost.

Whatever this December brings, you’ll close the year knowing you made thoughtful choices about where to spend your campaign budget, and you’ll start next year with clearer insight into where you can save and where it pays to invest.