Is Your Charity Ready for this Giving Season?

How charities can excel through a significant fundraising period
 

It's September and malls haven't started putting up their holiday decorations, but charities are already preparing for the all-important holiday giving season. Fundraising efforts during the final six to eight weeks of the year can account for as much as 50 percent of a non-profit's revenue. Plans that have been in the works throughout the summer go into overdrive and activations in the market get initialized.

In recent years non-profit organizations have expanded some of their traditional focus to Giving Tuesday. Just as Black Friday and Cyber Monday celebrate the consumer and mark the beginning of the holiday rush, Giving Tuesday is meant to be the “opening day” of the giving season. Now in its seventh year, the organizers behind Giving Tuesday hope the added attention and promotion will convince individuals, particularly millennials and Generation Y, to rally around their favourite causes.

While Giving Tuesday can be a boon for many charities across the sector, the most prominent and most recognized non-profit organizations are the ones that typically benefit the most from these campaigns.  The number of non-profits jockeying for donations grows each year, which makes for a particularly challenging environment for smaller non-profits to gain attention and attract more donors. Even in this environment, the gap has more to do with how organizations plan to cultivate and continue to engage with these donors after Giving Tuesday has come and gone. Leveraging data and innovative approaches to create focused views of your donors is one of the most effective ways of building long-lasting relationships.

DonorRank is a tool that helps fills that need. While data and analytics can sometimes seem intimidating, DonorRank makes it easy. It provides a view into your pipeline and finds your best prospects by using wealth and psychographic data to rank your existing database. 

DonorRank puts the tools that larger organizations use—tools like third-party privacy-friendly data and analytical services—into the hands of small- to mid-sized organizations. The customizable scoring system offers charities a cost-effective way to mine their existing donors and works with as few as several hundred donors.  

By focusing on those that have given during this critical period, it allows organizations to maximize their Giving Tuesday activity and properly strategize how to unlock these potential new donations.

With the outlook for the Canadian economy projected to tighten over the next year, this is a great time to pause and evolve the decision-making process to ensure short-term goals are met and longer-term priorities don’t get lost. DonorRank is a system that can help Not-For-Profit organizations of all sizes with a variety of different challenges.
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Allen Davidov leads Environics Analytics' Not-For-Profit Practice. He has more than 15 years of experience helping charities of all sizes use #DataForGood to achieve their fundraising goals.