End-of-Year Planning: 7 Things to Get Done this October

Along with the start of school and football season, we’ve also kicked off the end-of-year campaign planning season for nonprofits. Previously, I wrote about 6 things to do in September to plan your end-of-year campaign.

And with September nearly finished, it’s a good time for a follow-up post.

Here are 7 things to do this October to be ready for end-of-year fundraising:

1. Finalize your theme – It’s difficult to move forward with creating campaign images or content if you’re still deciding your theme.
2. Homepage creative requests submitted – Whether you’re planning a new banner, lightbox or other homepage presence, get those creative requests into your internal team or agency.
3. Plan your email schedule – Get dates on the calendar for mid November through end of December. You can then back out your content, list and creative deadlines from there.
4. Finalize segmentation – Similarly, it’s difficult to begin creating content if your email segmentation is undecided.
5. Planning online ads – Whether it’s Facebook, Google or elsewhere, deciding where you’ll advertise online and what the schedule will be now should give you enough time to get ads created.
6. Contacting social ambassadors – Ask for their commitment now to help you spread the word later around Thanksgiving, giving Tuesday and the rest of December.
7. Figure out tracking results – Too many times, nonprofits can’t decipher whether gifts came from the homepage, email, social media, or somewhere else. Make this year different. Whether it’s Google Analytics or multiple donation forms, figure it out now. This post on 5 revealing campaign metrics you may be missing can help.

This list will give you a good start. If you have additional items to add to the list, please leave them in the Comments section below.