Fundraising Strategies for Fiscal-Year-End Success 

When the calendar year turns, it signals the half-year mark for most fundraising programs. With many fiscal years ending in June, advancement shops return from a holiday break looking at their totals and wondering, “What can we accomplish with donors in the next six months?” That means it’s a crucial time to tune strategy, shift resources, and make course corrections based on where you stand.

Markets are up, inflation is cooling, but fundraising is still challenging

We have some serious challenges. Fundraising results at the end of calendar year 2023 are mixed. While the financial markets saw a great upturn in the final month of the year (in comparison to 2022’s dismal drop), we had a flat #GivingTuesday. Consumer confidence is improving, but inflationary pressures remain high. Sentiment about institutions, including charities and higher education is low. And many charities are down on donors, even if large givers have boosted giving totals.

This is the time to carefully consider your strategy for the remainder of the year and what you’ll do next to build a donor pipeline after the fiscal year ends. We’ve put together a webinar later this month to help with that, outlining some of these key trends and crucial strategies we have seen work with RNL partners. I encourage you to join us or register to get the recording.

But you don’t have to wait. In talking with the RNL experts, here’s a quick overview of some of the key things you can be doing right now to maximize results for the rest of the fiscal year.

Register for our webinar where we will break down key FYE strategies and share examples of success, even in a challenging time for donor engagement.

The donors you are looking for to meet fiscal year end goals are waiting in your data

If your strategy at the end of the fiscal year is to just blast direct mail appeals to everyone on your list, you’re doing it wrong. While getting the giving message out broadly is key, targeting your outreach will have much greater impact. Consider these key strategies:

• Increase personal outreach (leadership gift officer, volunteer, student ambassador phone) to those who have recently lapsed or seem to be lapsing.
• Utilize video messaging at scale to communicate impact and personal connection.
• Text donors with low-friction, social giving options like matches, challenges, and giving day/week campaigns.
• Maintain a “hot list” of key recent donors for follow up on a weekly basis to drive revenue.
• Focus on donors who have multi-year history with more expensive appeals.
• Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that young donors can’t step up to leadership giving or give a second time. Engage across generations on key passions, and you’ll see results.
• Use your channels in concert, not silos, and it will have much higher impact on response.

Image: Millennial donors are rapidly increasing their giving, even during challenging economic times. Use cause-driven engagement to ignite their passion and make it easy to give.

I’ll give you some free insider advice right now: We recently completed a comprehensive cross-channel analysis of phone, video, and text messaging for a dozen RNL partner programs. One key finding: video messages had a massive impact on intermittent SYBUNTs. These are donors who have given two or three of the last five years but have not yet booked a gift this year. They’re charitable but not consistent. A human face, making an appeal in a video message (which can be sent at scale with RNL Engage and other technology), was the personal nudge that seemed to matter. This is an example of smart fundraising, targeting a group and applying a strategic resource with data-driven technology to maximize response.

This strategic outreach will yield immediate results. It will also set you up for future success, even when donors don’t respond by the end of the fiscal year, if your focus is on relationship and impact. Remember, our fiscal-year deadlines are mostly about us. If donors are feeling immediate economic pressure, we need to stay engaged with them if we ever hope to get them back when the pressure passes. That means that your fiscal-year-end fundraising is also about setting up your fall success if you are executing great messaging about the value of giving.

Your messaging and marketing could be awesome. But economic pressures mean some donors may be skipping a year. Continue to communicate their giving impact, even if they lapse. Those who stay connected will be the donors who you can bring back when this economic moment has passed.

Becca Widmer, Senior Consultant

Careful use of fundraising resources is key for fiscal-year-end success

The end of the year is about using your remaining fundraising resources wisely because you’re running out of time. This is the moment to look into your database and carefully consider your outreach strategy across appeals, channels, and campaigns. Key tactics include:

• Look at your data to see recent engagement, including event attendance, volunteering, web page views, and email opens. These prospects are more likely to respond.
• Renew and recapture recent SYBUNTs with higher cost channels like direct mail, phone, and volunteer and gift officer outreach.
• Go “fishing” for new or long-lapsed donors with low unit cost channels like email, texting and social media outreach.
• Consider spins on traditional channels that reduce cost and friction for donors, like shifting a direct mail appeal to a postcard with a QR code, or phone outreach to a call plus a text link to give follow-up strategy.

As you move into the remainder of the fiscal year, your focus on the prospects most likely to respond is crucial. That’s where a deep dive into your data, and smart use of channels in concert can make a big difference. Every year, we work with programs that find untapped wells of responsive donors when they get creative with strategy.

Melissa Adair, Associate Vice President

The time is now to craft smart strategy and meet short- and long-term fundraising goals

You have a few months to make some key decisions that could greatly impact the rest of the fiscal year. And just as importantly, you can have a major impact on your pipeline for the upcoming few years if you engage donors smartly as you push to a fiscal year end close.

Smart fundraising programs are making data-driven decisions that carefully use resources and engage an inclusive donor base for short-term revenue goals and long-term major giving engagement. In today’s complex technology and giving environment that’s a tall order. But remember, you’re not alone.

Three things you can do: register for the webinar, email me to join an upcoming fundraiser round table, and take advantage of upcoming professional conferences. All charities share some common donor engagement challenges. Donors are changing, and we need to work together as a fundraising community to transform the ways we excite their giving passion if we expect to meet their philanthropic goals and our fundraising goals, this fiscal year and beyond.