Expert Process Tips to Ensure Year-End Fundraising Success

You are in full fundraising swing! Your team is executing your strategy, and you are confidently pulling the levers that will help you reach supporters and donors during the year-end giving season.  In preparation for this key time of giving, we asked seasoned fundraising professionals, “What’s something you learned from last year that you are taking into this year?”

Here’s what they shared to help you think about processes that will support your fundraising efforts this year and next year.

Create a Master View of Your Fundraising Activities

Timing is everything. Creating a master calendar of donor touches—mail and email communications.

Kimberly Townsend Pierce
Development Manager, Chester County Hospital Foundation

Creating and sharing a master view of your fundraising activities provides important org-wide visibility for campaign roles and responsibilities to reduce unnecessary repetitive actions. Plus, it helps teams stay aligned and connected, fostering collaboration that will strengthen year-end campaigns while ensuring key steps are not missed.

While individual efforts can be effective, working together often leads to richer ideas and solutions.

Anne Malone
Director of Philanthropy, University of Maryland St. Joseph Center Foundation, Inc.

Look for Ways You Can Streamline Your Processes

Fundraising processes provide a repeatable structure to reach new and existing donors. As you grow and your fundraising strategy becomes more sophisticated over time and new fundraising channels are added, processes can become more complicated. When more prongs are added, there opens opportunity for refinement. In fact, we heard repeatedly about the need to find efficiencies and reduce repetitive tasks to increase time spent creating meaningful and effective donor touchpoints.

This past year we have really been trying to streamline our processes to be more efficient so that we can spend less time doing repetitive or unnecessary tasks and more time connecting. I think this upcoming year we are going to do even more of that because it’s been super helpful!

Development Coordinator at a California-based nonprofit

Not all repetition is redundant, however. Anuradha Parihar, donor database coordinator at House of Friendship, reminds us of the “rinse and reuse” policy; repeating the right actions —instead of reinventing every year— will save you time and help you raise more dollars. Additionally, your audiences become accustomed to specific touchpoints, and they often look forward to them. Whether it be an annual event, or specific campaign messaging, good repetition helps create a consistent experience for your donors, which is a key piece to sustaining your relationship with them.

Track and Document What Works

Processes work best when they are documented, however they are sometimes held in the braintrust of a few tenured employees who have been leading those processes for a number of years and could execute the tasks in their sleep. Your organization will greatly benefit if they are instead written down in a place accessible to all relevant stakeholders in your organization so everyone has access to the same information and can step in when needed.

Document, document, document the policies and procedures for all projects to make the next year more efficient! I also recommend writing down questions or sticking points that popped up so that next year, when you review your documents, you can take more time to reflect on the problem and see if there is a new solution/functionality from Blackbaud or perhaps you have more time and bandwidth to think through a new approach. Sometimes inspiration strikes after you’ve stepped away from the project, so reviewing the documentation a couple weeks in advance of starting the process allows for better solution finding.

Carlene Johnson
Independent Consultant, Next Level Services, LLC

Formalized documented processes can be a great unifier to set expectations and share institutional knowledge; it can also provide a great opportunity to regularly review the processes to make sure they still make sense or to look for opportunities for improvement. Don’t have your year-end fundraising processes currently documented? Take the opportunity to write them down this season so you can easily pull them out next year when it’s time.

There’s a wealth of institutional knowledge across the people who have been here a long time and I’m enjoying learning from them.

Lena Lieb
Director of Major Gifts, Children’s Museum of Houston

Set Time on Your Calendars for a Post-mortem

Not all steps are active fundraising steps. Consider implementing a post-mortem meeting into your end-of-year campaign plan. Use this dedicated time to share results, highlight and celebrate successes, and unpack what didn’t work to help you refine your strategy for the next year. Allison Reville, fundraising support officer at Assiniboine Community College reminds us that “you can’t start planning too early.” A post-mortem meeting is a great moment to capture what you want to work on for the next year.

Applying these expert tips will help your organization become better equipped to tackle fundraising challenges, adapt to last minute changes, and seize new opportunities. And don’t worry if you don’t have it all in order this year; you can use this opportunity to capture these processes this year to make next year easier. Here’s to a strong end-of year…this year, and next!