While we're enjoying beach days, barbeques and other Summer fun activities, the team at Blue North can't help but notice that year-end will be coming up on us faster than we realize!
From Giving Tuesday to the tax receipt deadline, the last 8 weeks of the calendar year are a critical fundraising period for nonprofits and a strong digital campaign is a must have for year-end fundraising success.
We're committed to helping nonprofit organizations grow their fundraising results and do more good in the world. That’s why we've put together this checklist to prepare for your digital year-end campaign.
Setting clear goals for your year-end campaign helps with planning the best digital strategy to deliver on those targets. Your campaign goals should include a total revenue goal and goals for difference channels and audiences if there are specific targets you want to reach.
These goals help Blue North put together the best campaign strategy that is tailored for your organization and help us set your expectations so there are no surprises at the end of the campaign. Then we can all celebrate your nonprofit's end of year fundraising success!
The results from your year-end campaign last year really come in handy for planning this year's campaign. So, dust off that report and refresh your memory on last year's strategy and results!
This report may include recommendations you can action this year. Look at these recommendations and determine if there is anything that needs to be implemented ahead of time or if there are out of date recommendations that don't make sense for where your nonprofit is now and can be ignored.
Email sanitation is important all year, but year-end is a great time to clean up your email list. During your campaign email is a key channel for communicating with your current supporters and targeting supporters through paid digital channels like Facebook.
Email sanitation increases the value of your list and improves the engagement of your audience by removing bad and inactive email addresses. You can use a service like AtData to clean up your email file and there is a whole suite of tools you can use to improve the quality of your list.
Verifying that your nonprofit's website is properly tagged with tracking pixels and Google Analytics ahead of time ensures there won't be a last-minute rush to fix tracking just when your digital campaign starts. It also allows builds your remarketing audience to build before you launch, so you’ll have a healthy audience to re-engage.
You can use tools like the Facebook Pixel Helper extension on Google Chrome to test if your pixels are firing and tracking conversions correctly.
Most nonprofits use a third party donation processor like Luminate Online or Rallybound, to name a couple of examples, which means tracking will need to work across these different platforms and even across different domains.
Cross domain tracking ensures you will be able to track conversions to your digital year-end campaign when sending traffic across domains to complete a donation. If you don’t have this tracking in place you won’t be able to track donations to your campaign, leaving you in the dark about its performance!
When it comes to year-end fundraising you can never be too prepared and it's best to start early! Save yourself time and last-minute stress by starting on this checklist now.
Need some help with your year-end fundraising? Contact us to learn more about how Blue North can support your fundraising team!
Topics: Digital Fundraising