As another year-end quickly approaches, nonprofits are rushing to make their final fundraising asks before the calendar turns. It’s fitting, then, to quote legendary composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein, who spent his life and career in the nonprofit arts space: “To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan, and not quite enough time.”
Those last-minute donations could be critical to your operational budget and ability to execute your nonprofit’s mission – but you aren’t alone. Nonprofits of every kind are vying for the same donor eyes and dollars. To succeed, you need both a plan and enough time.
52% of nonprofits start their year-end appeals in October – and 7% as early as September. But that’s when the appeals kick off – the planning occurs much earlier. You can gain greater, more meaningful traction with donors by defining, developing and executing an annual giving plan and campaign long before December 31.
What is annual giving?
Annual giving lets you create a reliable, consistent, and, ultimately, sustainable yearly funding pipeline. While many nonprofits focus their efforts on the last quarter of the year, annual giving campaigns and initiatives aren’t isolated to November and December. You can set your cycle to your fiscal calendar, a holiday, season, or any time you find boosts your fundraising efforts.
Why is annual giving matters
The most important aspect of annual giving is that it’s typically a source of unrestricted gifts that aren’t restricted to a single purpose, unless you offer donors the option to specify which aspect of your operations they would like their donation to be applied.
All nonprofits, from hospitals and educational organizations to the arts, face the same fundraising, economic and competitive obstacles – as do the donors on whom they rely for operational support.
An annual giving strategy is critical to facing and overcoming fundraising headwinds
Recurring giving and year-over-year fundraising growth are the result of donor engagement and retention
Annual giving provides an opportunity to regularly and consistently share your story. The better donors know and understand you and your mission, the more likely they are to be personally and financially engaged.
When your annual giving campaign or initiative appears on the calendar, it’s an opportunity to share your success story – in words and numbers – and those of the people and organizations you impacted. When donors see their money was well spent and the difference their generosity made, they are more likely to renew – and maybe increase – their annual giving.
Annual giving can help win the donor competition battle and avoid donor fatigue
In all forms and purposes of marketing and communication, there’s a fine line between too little and too much engagement. When it comes to fundraising, too frequent asks can become white noise that makes donors tune out – and even worse, give the appearance of consistently being in financial need and not properly putting their donations to use.
But you aren’t alone in that sea of fundraising noise. There are competing voices trying to tap the same donor vein, adding to the static and every donor’s frustration and giving disengagement.
- Annual giving lets you focus your fundraising. You can hone your giving message and create a multi-tiered, impactful campaign that resonates with donors and sets you apart from the competition.
- Annual giving lets you focus on donors. Instead of multiple impersonal fundraising “blasts,” an annual campaign gives you an opportunity to tailor and personalize your messages and initiatives in ways that make donors feel personally engaged and appreciated.
- Annual lets you “fight the fatigue.” Making only one operational ask a year lets you spend the rest of the calendar cycle on story and mission messaging that has nothing to do with money and everything to do with increasing donor engagement. When the time comes to execute your annual giving campaign, your brand-building efforts will ensure your request isn’t lost in that white noise and received and perceived as authentic and purpose-driven.
Operational annual giving challenges
Challenges related to donors and competition aren’t your only obstacles to annual giving success. Operational and structural issues can equally impact how you form and deliver on your strategy.
| Challenge | Importance | Impact |
| Uncovering qualified prospects | A “spaghetti at the wall” approach to donor prospecting doesn’t ensure finding donors who are most likely to engage with your nonprofit’s mission and have the wealth to make a meaningful financial commitment. | Nonprofits find themselves re-working existing leads, leading to donor fatigue and disengagement, or relying on generic contact lists. |
| Providing donation transparency and impact | Economic volatility and a more informed, educated donor base mean donors give with an expectation of demonstrable results to prove the value of their current and future commitment. | Donors reduce their giving if they aren’t given tools to view and measure results: dashboards; real-time reports; qualified, quantifiable gift-to-results metrics. |
| Filling data quality and donor insight gaps | Clean and complete operational and donor insight data are critical to your daily functions and long-term planning. | Strategic decisions made on incomplete or out-of-date data can waste limited time and resources, and lead to undesirable results. |
| Improving leadership and board engagement to build warm connection numbers | Top donors rarely respond to cold calls and introductions. They require nurturing and relationship building that shows they are valued as not just one-off “human banks” but as people. | Lack of leadership and board engagement in the donor introduction and development process, or unwillingness to tap into their network or lack thereof, severely limits fruitful donor connections. |
| Finding ways to do more with less | Nonprofits are often understaffed – both generally and departmentally, mission-critical functional areas – but still responsible for achieving the same high-level results. | Understaffing in research, donor relationship management, marketing and others can lead to missed opportunities and deadlines – or, worse, reputational/brand damaging mistakes. |
Major Donor Fundraising in 2025: Top Trends and Strategies for Nonprofit Leaders, Altrata.
Take a strategic approach to tackling your challenges – and your annual giving
Your challenges may be the same, different or nuanced. Identifying them and taking a strategic approach to your annual giving lets you pinpoint where you need to allocate time, people and resources to ensure challenges are just that: not obstacles to fundraising success.
The annual giving equation: specific goals + attainable goals = measurable success
Annual giving success starts with identifying specific, attainable goals. Set numbers, not ideals – x amount of money raised, y number of new, unique donors, etc. – and establish metrics to measure your annual giving campaign, from start to finish. Most of all, ensure your goals are reachable with your available time, systems, staffing and financial resources.
At the end of your annual giving campaign, you want to deliver measurable success and results that strengthen your bottom line, satisfy leadership, and energize your team for future fundraising efforts.
A solid team puts annual giving goals in reach
An annual giving campaign cuts across all functional roles and demands consistent communication and teamwork. Once you’ve established your goals, identify the key individuals who will lead or staff each initiative component – project management, marketing, donor engagement, and others.
And in terms of project management, it’s critical to set and track targets throughout the campaign. This helps you track delivery and deliverables and see where you may need to reallocate staff resources during planning and execution.
Engage your leadership and board as partners in success
In many cases, leadership and board members play a role just as vital as frontline teams in driving annual giving success. With access to a network of potentially affluent, warm introductions, their engagement can lead to a pipeline of verified prospective donors with a human touch and handoff.
One strategy is to provide talking points about your nonprofit and annual giving campaign they can use to start and steer conversations within their network.
Get your annual giving messaging in place
What you say about your nonprofit and campaign makes a difference in donor perception and engagement. Instead, donors respond more positively to messaging rooted in strength and optimism than to messages driven by urgency or desperation.
Use your messaging to highlight achievements and demonstrate how donor support drives continued impact. Share success stories and how those were made possible through donors like them. A strong value proposition that explains how donations are used and who they benefit is essential.
While the donor universe is vast, the focus should remain on attracting supporters whose values align with your mission. Aligning your story with your giving message will act as a homing beacon that resonates with the right donors.
Put donors at the center of your annual giving universe
Nonprofits often point to the economy as a negative influence on donations. Yet in 2024, the full range of donors gave an estimated $592.50 billion to U.S charities – a growth of 6.3%. However, individual giving was elevated by a strong stock market and represents two-thirds of total donations. Individuals and nonprofits can’t bank on sustainable investment success.
Therefore, it is crucial for nonprofits to strengthen donor relationships while supporters are at the height of their giving cycle. Delivering an authentic, high-touch experience based on personalization, engagement, and measurable results drives sustainable donor giving.
Donation start with data
Even with a strong annual giving strategy in place, incomplete or outdated donor data can limit its effectiveness. As a result, nonprofits of all sizes benefit from technology that supports donor identification and cultivation.
Understanding the donor management lifecycle
Moves Management for Nonprofit Fundraising Success, Altrata.
- Identify: Screen your existing contacts and uncover new high-potential prospects aligned with your strategic goals using advanced search and filtering tools.
- Qualify: Quickly qualify prospects by analyzing their wealth, donation history, giving capacity, and philanthropic background to prioritize outreach.
- Cultivate: Engage targets through warm introductions using relationship mapping and foster authentic connections with insights into the interests, passions, and hobbies of your targets.
- Solicit: Make the appropriate ask based on the donor’s readiness and financial profile.
- Acknowledge: Follow best stewardship practices by showing donor gratitude and impact.
- Retain and upgrade: Show them the importance of their ongoing support and start them on the path to increased giving.
Make data-driven donor decision
Monitoring donor interactions throughout your annual giving campaign provides insights that inform every aspect of your nonprofit’s activities. Fundraisers no longer need to rely on intuition alone and can make data-driven decisions that guide donors along their journey.
You can:
- Track interactions like event attendance, email opens, and giving history to identify donor behavior trends.
- Create automated scoring models in your CRM that flag when a donor is ready for the next move.
- Use dashboards to assess team-wide progress, identify prospective donors who have stalled in their journey and decide on a new engagement strategy.
- In turn, combining this data enables robust reporting that tracks performance against goals and signals when adjustments are required.
Donor acquisition and cultivation tools to power your annual giving strategy
As a result, you can build stronger bonds with donors by better understanding their backgrounds, interests, and values. Annual giving is exactly that: You want to cultivate donors who are committed to supporting you every year.
Donor acquisition and cultivation tools let you understand donors on an individual – and most importantly, human – level. As a result, annual giving evolves into an ongoing conversation that strengthens donor relationships.
What intelligence tools should deliver for annual giving success
| Capability | How this helps achieve fundraising goals |
| Verified donor profiles | Helps focus on high-capacity prospects with confidence by providing accurate insights into net worth, giving history, and affiliations. |
| Relationship and board mapping | Reveals trusted pathways to top prospects through shared boards, alumni networks, or executive connections, helping fundraisers secure warm introductions instead of relying on cold outreach. |
| Human-verified data accuracy | Reduces time spent validating information and minimizes errors in outreach. Confidence in data allows officers to spend more time building authentic donor relationships. |
| CRM integration | Embeds donor intelligence directly into fundraising workflows, ensuring insights flow seamlessly into daily use. You’ll boost efficiency, collaboration, and team adoption. |
| Predictive analytics and donor scoring | Helps teams segment donors and prioritize outreach based on wealth, likelihood to give, and affinity. This data-driven approach supports smarter major donor fundraising decisions. |
| Global prospect intelligence | Provides visibility into international donor networks, helping organizations identify and engage cross-border philanthropists and alumni with untapped giving potential. |
| Global coverage | Expands the universe of potential supporters beyond domestic markets, empowering organizations to cultivate relationships across borders and regions. |
| Data enrichment | Enhances existing donor records by filling in missing wealth, career, or philanthropic data, ensuring a complete, actionable picture of every supporter. |
| Real-time alerts and updates | Keeps you informed when key donors experience wealth events, career changes, or media visibility. Timely, personalized engagement becomes easier. |
The Ultimate Guide to Planned Giving for Nonprofits, Altrata.
Better sustainable giving through donor engagement
Annual giving success is measured by the number of first-time donors engaged and long-term supporters created.
Cultivating, nurturing and retaining donors can turn annual givers to planned givers, giving you:
- A more predictable funding pipeline
- Increased donor lifetime value
- More efficient fundraising activities
- Greater chances of identifying and cultivating donors from their network
Improve the donor experience to make your annual giving “sticky.”
Personalization
Impersonal generic messaging runs counter to making donors feel valued beyond their giving. Improve your individual focus through:
- Audience segmentation. Use donor data to separate donors into different communication categories based on interests, affiliations, past involvement and others. This allows you to tailor giving messages that reflect donors’ values or passions and feel uniquely personal.
- Channel segmentation. Additionally, you can segment donors by their preferred communication channels to ensure they receive your giving messages. For example, review past interactions to identify whether a donor engages more through phone calls, email, social media, or direct mail. From there, tailor your outreach accordingly.
Stewardship
Ultimately, both prospective and existing donors benefit from sustained, meaningful engagement across your annual giving strategy.
- Put technology to use. Email marketing tools, direct mail services and automation platforms are effective at maintaining high-touch donor communication. You can program a CRM system to create personal donor reminders: call a loyal donor on the anniversary of their first contribution, offer a birthday greeting by card or email, send out a thank you note 24-48 hours after a gift.
- Make it personal and in person. It bears repeating: personalization drives donor engagement. Your annual giving strategy should include multiple touchpoints between you and your team and donors throughout the execution cycle. Calling a donor directly or meeting with them one-on-one puts a voice and a face to your nonprofit. You can host in-person or webinar events that let donors interact with and hear from you and ask questions in a relaxed environment.
Gratitude
- Show gratitude. Saying “thank you” seems intuitive – but it’s a crucial step that if missed could erase the goodwill you built throughout your giving campaign. Every thank you is an opportunity to remind of their ongoing importance to you and your mission. You aren’t confined to one kind of thank you:
- A personalized, handwritten letter.
- An email with a request to complete a satisfaction survey and information about your nonprofit’s upcoming/future activities.
- Additionally, a phone call encouraging deeper involvement through volunteer opportunities.
- A thank you video featuring people the donor’s giving impacted, showcasing their personal gratitude.
Take the first steps towards sustainable annual giving
By integrating annual giving into your overall fundraising model, you reduce reliance on year-end campaigns and the pressure they create. Nevertheless, economic uncertainty remains unavoidable. Consequently, a solid, data-driven plan enables nimble, informed adjustments that limit its impact.
Ultimately, your strategy begins and ends with donors. Human and technology-driven data provides insights that support donor discovery, cultivation, and capture. With the right tools in place, you can turn prospects and one-time donors into lifelong partners who support your mission.