How nonprofits can run successful end-of-year fundraising campaigns using paid media

End of year campaigns are key for nonprofit fundraising. The average number of donations to charities rises during the end of year giving period, with 5% more people donating then compared to the rest of the year.

According to the CAF UK Giving Report, it might be even more than this: the UK public donated an estimated £13.9 billion to charity in 2023 – up £1.2 billion from 2022 – despite the financial pressures on households.

With that in mind, what digital fundraising activities should you be doing on paid media in the run-up to the end of year? How do you make sure that your campaigns are effective?

Follow Empower’s guide to a successful end-of-year fundraising using paid media and you’ll be in for a successful year end campaign.

1. Start planning in plenty of time

Effective campaign management requires thorough preparation and strategic planning, so it’s crucial to start well in advance, giving yourself ample time to gather and prepare.

By examining past performance data and feedback, you can identify areas for improvement and adapt your approach accordingly. Reviewing previous years’ campaigns can give you valuable insights, as both successes and failures can inform your current year-end strategy.

From there, you can clearly define your objectives from the outset to provide a roadmap for your campaign and help measure its success. By examining past performance data and feedback, you can identify areas for improvement and adapt your approach accordingly.

This comprehensive planning process, combining preparation, goal-setting, technical readiness, and historical analysis, sets a solid foundation for a more effective and successful campaign. But you do need to give yourself enough time to prepare!

2. Align paid media with other marketing activity

Planning the timings of your paid media campaign around other digital marketing and communications activities is crucial to optimising your outreach and impact.

For example, do you have door drops or letters going out to supporters on a certain date? Timing this with your paid media activations means that your supporters will receive the letter asking for donations at the same time as they see an ad asking for support. This leads to a compounding effect and can lead to higher donation rates.

Other wider activity to align on includes any media coverage, print advertising or live events you have planned in the run up to the end of year.

By synchronising your paid media campaign with other digital activities, your audience receives a unified message that increases the likelihood of engagement and conversion.

3. Ensure you have conversion tracking in place

Having conversion tracking in place for a year-end fundraising paid media campaign is critical to measuring and optimising your campaign’s effectiveness.

Conversion tracking provides valuable insights into the campaign’s performance and return on investment (ROI). It allows you to track specific actions taken by donors, such as completing a donation or becoming a recurring donor, so you can get a much better understanding of the impact of your paid media efforts.

And make sure there is time to test tracking before the campaign goes live. We heard from so many clients about issues with their tracking because testing was rushed!

From there, you can adopt a data-driven approach to identify which aspects of your paid media campaign are driving the most results, enabling you to optimise your paid media strategies and allocate budget to where you get the biggest returns.

4. Focus on Meta fundraising ads

Meta Ads, including Facebook and Instagram, have traditionally been the best way to reach donors through paid media – even if you have a small fundraising budget.

During your end of year campaign, your cause should be a series of organic and paid Facebook and instagram ads to help increase visibility around your organisation and encourage more people to give on and off of the platform.

Try posting to your Facebook and Instagram channels organically and launching separate paid ads to drive donations.

Timings matter too: As you get closer to Giving Tuesday, run extra paid ads with donation messaging to take advantage of this key period during the end of year season.

Use your learnings from previous end of year campaigns, or paid ads during the rest of the year, to tailor ads based on engaged audiences.

5. Optimise your donor journey

By knowing what makes your audiences tick and what pushes them to donate, you can create a user journey that nudges potential supporters in that direction.

Look at the entire donation funnel when running ad campaigns to attract donors and at the journey a person has before they donate to your charity.

This is usually broken down into four main stages:

1. Awareness: they’re seeing your charity for the first time
2. Consideration: they need more information to get them thinking about donating
3. Conversion: they need one final push to make a donation
4. Loyalty: they set-up repeat donations

Use the funnel strategy in paid campaigns to place your own donation calls in a targeted manner (Awareness, Consideration, Conversion).

The easiest way to do this is by defining your target person at each stage. Someone in the awareness stage, for example, might not already know about your charity and so will need more of a demonstration of what your charity does and what you impact make in order to gain their support.

Also, make sure that your social media content is accessible, so you’re not excluding any of your audiences.

6. Publish fundraising-related organic content in the run up to launch

Alongside your active fundraiser, try posting organic content to coincide with your campaign, such as your impact stories, the year’s highlights and posts thanking your audience for their support.

Your organic social media channels are also a good place for testing content that you may later build into an ad campaign. So, if an impact story is getting a good response, you can add that creative to your end-of-year campaign.

It’s good practice to keep your organic social media audiences engaged, but aim for quality over quantity.

7. Create lookalike audiences based on previous donors

Meta has been saying for a while now that their algorithm is better at finding the best supporters and donors for your cause than you are. What this means for Facebook Ads is that you need to trust their algorithm.

One way to do this is to use the Lookalike audience on Meta Ads, which works by grouping a list of people who’ve already donated.

The algorithm will find other users with similar traits: If you have a lookalike audience of 1%, broaden that out to 3%, 5% or even 7% and see if that brings you more results.

8. Use social proof to drive donations

Adding a donation ask works best when combined with an emotive story. The end of year is a good time to do this, and you don’t need to be bound to the usual Christmas schedule. This isn’t like a direct mail that you finalise in November; people are online during the end of the year and you can do this close to Christmas.

Social proof is important with Facebook donations: it’s much better to get a decent amount of donations on one post than to have a scattering of tiny amounts on many posts. What kind of message does it send to your audience if they see you asking for money and hardly anyone responding?

To provide social proof, you can include quotes from previous donors, highlight how many people have donated already or which influencers or celebrities are involved in the campaign

Including these forms of social proof and focusing on stories could convince your audience to donate there and then.

9. Run an email campaign to coincide with your paid campaigns

We recommend a multi-channel approach for end-of-year campaigns, so use email marketing alongside your paid media campaigns to engage your supporters.

Ideally, you would automatically integrate your donation forms with your email marketing software so that the email addresses of supporters are automatically opted-in and added to your email journey. Like this, you can hit them with emails while the fundraiser is still live on paid media; supporting and encouraging them to raise more.

You could also test to see if combining your paid media and email marketing efforts leads to an uplift in the number of donations or the amount raised. This might result in compounding returns for your end-of-year campaign!

10. Get professional paid media training

It’s tempting to run your paid media campaigns in-house, but while paid media is effective and can deliver incredible value for nonprofits, many are not using paid media well. For example, they might be boosting posts with small spends, which doesn’t result in any real return.

The paid media ecosystem is complex and the landscape is constantly changing, but there are strategic techniques to make ads perform across each channel and maximise ROI.

If you don’t have a paid specialist, consider training – it’s a worthwhile investment. If your team is confident in running your own in-house acquisition campaigns, you won’t  have to use agencies, which will reduce your costs. It will also help you run paid media campaigns in a cost-effective way that generates positive ROI for your cause.

Speak to Empower about how we can provide paid media training for your team.

Conclusion: End-of-year fundraising campaigns using paid media

As you can see, there are tons of ways your nonprofit can use Meta for fundraising throughout your end-of-year campaigns.

The only thing left to do is to put these techniques into action. You’ll soon notice that the end-of-year is the prime time for donations for your nonprofit.

Need help with your paid media campaigns? We’ve already had our first end-of-year campaign enquiries through, so this is a call to start reaching out about your charity’s end-of-year campaigns and contact Empower now.