Make year-end shine: what the data says about giving

Melaina Chromy: What the data says about giving. We’re so excited that you are here and joining us for today’s webinar. As you join, please type in the chat where you’re tuning in from so we can see where all of our attendees are from.

Awesome. Indiana, Pennsylvania. Great. Another fun question I love to ask folks, especially at this time of year: have you had a fall beverage yet? Is it too hot where you are? I’m based in Chattanooga and had my first pumpkin spice latte last week, and it’s currently 82 degrees here, so at this point we’re just manifesting. Illinois, hopefully a little cooler there.

Awesome. Thanks again, everybody, for joining us. We’re going to dive in with a few housekeeping tips as more folks arrive.

First and foremost, I want to reiterate that this session is being recorded, so we will send a replay and slides to everyone who has registered. You don’t need to worry about catching every precise detail live. Just keep an eye on your email inbox. We’ll also be dropping several quick polls throughout the session, so keep an eye out for those. For any questions you have, please type them in the Q&A box at the bottom of the Zoom screen. The chat will be pretty active, so by sending your questions in the Q&A box, you ensure that we’re able to catch them and get to them later on.

If you like what you’ve heard today, you can keep learning alongside the Bloomerang team by visiting our website, which is full of free webinars, ebooks, templates and more that you can access on demand at any time. You can also connect with the Bloomerang team through the chat, and keep an eye out for a poll near the end where you can indicate if you’d like us to follow up with you or send you more resources.

You can also join us for a three-day learning experience, which is like this webinar magnified on a much bigger scale. GiveCon is Bloomerang’s annual conference, and in 2027 we’re heading to Atlanta. With over 70 sessions, you can receive CFRE credits, experience more hands-on learning and connect with other fundraising professionals. If you want to learn more, just scan the QR code on your screen.

Now, with our housekeeping out of the way, I want to introduce the other people you see on the screen with me. I’m joined by Tiara Stephan, our product marketing manager here at Bloomerang; Evan DaSilva, our SVP of payments here at Bloomerang; and Paul Kramer, head of the nonprofit vertical at Stripe. Thank you all for being here.

Since today’s webinar is on year-end giving, I want to open this discussion with a fun question. What is one cause or organization each of you is looking forward to supporting during the year-end giving season? Evan, I’ll start with you.

Evan DaSilva: Thanks, Melaina. I’m excited for the conversation. I’m Evan DaSilva, SVP of payments here at Bloomerang. I’ve been at Bloomerang for a little over five years, and the DaSilvas are big supporters of our local MSPCA. We have an adopted mastiff named Vance and an adopted rabbit named Willis. This year we’re going to keep our contributions monetary and volunteering. I think we have enough mammals in the house for the time being. We’re capped out on the number of mammals we can have, but we are big fans of the MSPCA.

Melaina Chromy: Awesome.

Tiara Stephan: Hi, everybody. I’m Tiara, and like Melaina said, I’m a product marketing manager here at Bloomerang. I specialize in the fundraising side of things, so I’m really passionate about all of those online fundraising tools, like donation forms. My favorite cause is the arts. When I was in college, I worked for an arts nonprofit, so I’m going to be donating to them this year. I love those holiday concerts, so I’m really excited to attend a few of them and hope that some of my monetary support can go toward supporting those musicians as well.

Paul Kramer: Awesome. I guess I’ve got to round us out. It’s hard to follow those two nonprofits. Thanks, Melaina. I’m Paul, and I lead Stripe for nonprofits. I went to Vanderbilt, although I did drop out. I love classical music. It’s part of Nashville, so the Nashville Symphony is closely on my mind. Unfortunately, they’re very close to shutting down. I’m lucky that I’m going to visit my friends in Nashville, and I’m going to try to volunteer with them a couple of times, to give back a little bit for all the amazing evenings they gave me while I was in Nashville. I’m also planning to support World Central Kitchen. They do amazing work and have some awesome opportunities to engage locally here in the Bay Area.

Melaina Chromy: Awesome. Thanks so much, everybody, for sharing what causes you’re going to be supporting this year-end.

Now we want to hear from the audience. I’m going to kick things off with a quick poll. We want to know: where does your organization feel the most pressure to stand out during year-end fundraising? This could be reaching the right donors, or creating a message that feels distinctive. Whichever option on the screen resonates most, please click your preferred choice.

We know that GivingTuesday and year-end fundraising bring tremendous generosity, but they also bring a lot of distractions, like crowded inboxes, competing appeals and limited donor attention. So it’s important for us to talk about ways we can stand out. Something we discovered in our last GivingTuesday webinar is that nearly half of the people who responded said standing out among so many other nonprofit appeals was their biggest concern this year-end. That’s one of the challenges we’re going to work through today.

We’ll explore how you can reach the right supporters, create a clearer message, and build an intentional campaign cadence, making giving easier and hopefully turning that year-end gift into the beginning of a relationship. As we go, we’ll share current data and Bloomerang’s own online giving experiments and what they’re teaching us. Standing out isn’t necessarily about being louder or sending more fundraising appeals. It’s about making each decision more intentional, from who you reach out to, to what happens after the click to donate.

The poll results are really interesting. They show that standing out amongst the noise and picking the right channels is really important to this audience.

Let’s talk a little more about the stakes here. We all know that year-end is a major fundraising period, but the latest sector data shows that charitable dollars are growing while donor numbers continue to decline, with growth driven disproportionately by major donors and bigger-level donors. We also know that GivingTuesday brings new people into the fold. Roughly 16% of GivingTuesday donors are making their first gift to an organization, and those donors can be valuable beyond a single day, which makes the experience surrounding year-end giving and that first gift especially important.

With that context, Evan, I want to ask you a question. If more money is being raised from fewer donors, what does that mean for how nonprofits should approach year-end?

Evan DaSilva: It’s a great question, Melaina. It means that sending more appeals is not a complete strategy. When fewer people are participating, every interaction needs to work harder to earn attention with relevance. Relevance starts with meeting your donors where they’re at. If they’re checking email on their phone in between meetings, or scrolling during a commute, that’s where your story needs to meet them, not just where it’s easiest for your team to send communications from. In today’s world, there’s so much context switching, and it’s easy to get distracted and pulled away. So meeting your donors in their preferred channel, and making it easy to give in that channel, is essential. It’s all about reducing friction in the funnel.

I’d also say that the first gift can’t be the finish line, especially at year-end. You’re going to be engaging with a lot of people who have never supported you before. The way you thank them is by showing the impact of the gift and showing them how they’re connected to the cause. If you can do that and invite them to stay connected, that determines whether the moment becomes a relationship.

If you think about it, if one in six GivingTuesday donors has never given to you before, you’re not just running a fundraising campaign in December. You’re potentially running the biggest new donor acquisition campaign you have. So plan for it, and be intentional about how you connect with your donors.

Melaina Chromy: Awesome. If I’m hearing you correctly, one of the best ways to stand out at year-end is simply not more appeals. It’s being relevant, both in the message you send and where you show up, and then giving donors a reason to remain connected.

Evan DaSilva: That is exactly right.

Melaina Chromy: Perfect. That gives us the big picture. Now I want to dig into something Evan mentioned: relevance starts with being where your donors are. When we think of year-end fundraising, I’m sure most of us think of the traditional direct mail appeal, but giving doesn’t just happen with a mailed check. Tiara, I want to turn it over to you. What does current giving data tell us about how donors are showing up online?

Tiara Stephan: The data shows that online giving is no longer a separate channel. It’s where other channels lead. A recent report from the Giving USA Foundation and Dunham and Company found that nearly half of donors across generations who respond to direct mail visit that nonprofit’s website and give online, while only about one in five will actually mail in a check. So your website and donation form should be treated as part of the direct mail experience, not as something separate from it.

In addition, that online experience increasingly needs to work on a phone. Mobile devices account for more than half of nonprofit website traffic, more than four in 10 donation transactions, and almost a third of online revenue. The takeaway is not necessarily that every donor has moved completely to mobile. It’s that a donor may encounter your appeal in their mailbox, inbox or social media feed, and then try to act online, often on the device that’s already in their hand. So the practical questions are: can someone move from your appeal to your website? Can they understand what your donation ask actually is? And can they complete that gift easily on a phone?

Melaina Chromy: Thank you, Tiara. So even when the appeal begins offline, in a donor’s mailbox for example, the giving experience often ends online, and donors are arriving on their phones with the intent to act. Paul, from a payments perspective, what are donors expecting when they navigate to a nonprofit’s donation form on their cell phone? What key considerations should our attendees make for mobile giving this year-end?

Paul Kramer: Absolutely. I’d start with what the donor needs in that moment. They’ve connected with your mission and clicked through to give. You’ve already done the donor acquisition work, so the next step should feel frictionless and straightforward: a clear amount, a payment method they recognize, and a button that tells them what happens next. They should feel confident about completing the gift, so you need to establish trust with a high-quality checkout form.

On a phone, you also have much less room to work with. So you want to keep the text readable, make the buttons easy to tap, and keep the required fields to a minimum, to what you actually need. Something that looks simple on a laptop can feel surprisingly cumbersome when you’re working through it with your thumb. The thing I’d underline all of this with is that the private sector has trained your donors with checkout forms. Any of the large companies have teams of hundreds of people working on how to optimize that one checkout form so that a person is as likely as possible to check out and buy whatever item they’re selling. In your case, it’s how to make the person most likely to donate. Donors have been trained by the private sector, so make sure that carries over, and that it’s very easy for the person to act on their intention to donate to your organization.

Another thing I’ve seen help a lot is digital wallets. When donors use a payment method that’s already set up on their phone, like Google Pay or Apple Pay, they avoid finding a card and manually typing in the details. Depending on their device and payment method, they might be able to confirm with Face ID or a fingerprint, which lowers the effort involved in giving the gift. And how the page looks is another trust establisher.

Melaina Chromy: Those are great things that make giving easier, things to focus on to improve. I think sometimes it’s easier to know what’s effective by spotting and calling out friction. Where do you think organizations most often lose giving momentum when a donor has made it to their form? Is there any friction that may be easy to overlook?

Paul Kramer: One hundred percent. I talk to nonprofits, and I come in with a new set of eyes, focusing on the donation form. A lot of the time, you can get so used to your own form that you stop noticing where it’s awkward. You know what the fields mean and which button to click. In some cases, you’ve coded a custom interface for yourself, so you naturally work around the things that might confuse the median donor. If I were in a nonprofit’s shoes, I would ask someone who has never used the form to try to make a gift on their phone while you watch. See where they pause, where they struggle, and where there’s a lot of manual work involved. The hard part is staying quiet when you just want to lean over and say, “Oh, just click that.” But it’s incredibly useful. It’s like user research, where your users are the donors. When I’m building a product, it’s the same thing. I like sitting down with a donor and seeing how they actually interact with Stripe, or with a platform built on Stripe, rather than just doing it myself. The executive director or development director is going to know how it works, but the median donor might not. If you’re itching to explain something while you’re watching someone do it, you’ve probably found a place where the form could be clearer.

Melaina Chromy: That’s a really good point, Paul, and something I’d add to the recommendation: get donors or friends, people of different ages, to fill out your form. That’s a good way to see not just where different people experience friction, but whether there’s something that may not be friendly for folks of different generations. Great insight.

I want to pivot now to Bloomerang’s fundraising innovation work. Tiara, can you talk a bit about that and how it helps fundraisers make better giving experience decisions?

Tiara Stephan: Absolutely. Fundraisers are expected to make dozens of decisions about their donation forms. It seems like everything is customizable: the suggested amounts that appear on your donation form, recurring giving options, the option to cover fees, required fields, payment methods, copy and the layout of your form. But a lot of teams don’t have the volume, time, staff or tools to test every single choice on their donation forms themselves. It’s very overwhelming sometimes.

Bloomerang is working on taking more of the guesswork out of those decisions. We’re using real donor behavior and controlled experiments to learn what actually helps donation forms perform better. Then we can turn that evidence into smarter guidance, stronger default settings and more effective giving experiences for donors everywhere. We’ll share a few examples today, but the larger idea is more important than any single number: donation form decisions should be guided by evidence, not assumptions.

Melaina Chromy: Thanks for sharing that. We’ve chatted about the importance of considering online giving, specifically mobile giving, when it comes to the year-end giving experience. But to get donors to your giving form, you first have to find the supporters or potential supporters you want to communicate with. Before we dive into the next section, I want to poll this group again. Which audience is hardest for your organization to engage effectively at year-end? Is it first-time donors or lapsed donors? Do you have your sights set on major gift prospects? If there’s a certain supporter type you’re most concerned about reaching in your year-end appeals, please add it to the poll. We’ll look at the results in a moment. As we wait, I want to pivot back to Tiara. What signals can help fundraisers identify the supporters they most want to reach, and reach them effectively, inspiring the action we all want at year-end, which is of course a donation?

Tiara Stephan: The first shift is that we have to move beyond donor and non-donor. Those categories are too broad to tell you what someone needs. You want to look at giving history alongside things like email engagement, event attendance, volunteer activity and recent interactions. A first-time donor might need a more meaningful welcome instead of another generic ask. A recurring donor deserves to have their commitment to your organization recognized. They want to see that their gifts are being seen and making an impact. A previously active donor might be drifting away and need a little extra touch to bring them back and continue their support. A volunteer or event attendee might be showing signs of deeper engagement and be ready to take their support to the next level. And a loyal donor is probably ready for a more personal conversation.

Let’s take a quick look at those poll results. The audience that is hardest for organizations to engage effectively: we’re seeing a lot of results there. A lot of people are saying first-time donors and lapsed donors. We also have a good group of people saying that they currently use the same approach for everyone, so we can dive into that next.

Melaina Chromy: Really interesting. First-time donors does not surprise me. By the time year-end fundraising rolls around, we’re really looking to bring new people into the fold. But speaking of the same approach for every type of donor, what you shared sounds valuable, Tiara, but I’m thinking, what can a really busy fundraiser do with all of this information? It’s easy to get overwhelmed when we think about dividing our outreach into different segments. Can you give us some advice?

Tiara Stephan: It can be really overwhelming to figure out how to address all of your donors, especially if you try to segment everybody at once. The goal is not to build the perfect list or create a different campaign for every audience you have. Start with two or three groups where you would genuinely change the message, the timing or the next step you’re asking them to take. Personally, I would recommend starting with lapsed donors, people who made their first gift this year, and highly engaged prospective donors, like volunteers and event attendees who haven’t yet taken that next step to give.

A lapsed donor can be reminded of what their previous support helped you accomplish and what their support now would mean to your organization. Someone who gave to your organization for the first time this year should be recognized for that gift, and they could be primed to give a second time while they’re still engaged with you. And an engaged non-donor may just need a link between their existing support and how a year-end donation could help their support go further, to be encouraged to take that step.

I want to recognize that these won’t be the right three groups for every organization, but it’s a good place to start if you’re not sure where to. Using the information you already have, such as giving history, email engagement, event attendance and volunteer activity, you can identify the groups that make the most sense to engage during the year-end giving season. It does not have to be perfect, so let’s get away from that. You’re looking for enough signals to make your next donor outreach more relevant. Technology can help organize that information and keep it current, but it should support your judgment as the fundraiser, not replace it.

Melaina Chromy: That’s a really good point. I know we’re getting quite a few questions in the chat. If there are questions you really want us to save time for at the end of today’s discussion, please don’t forget the Q&A box. It’ll help us find your question more easily.

I want to reiterate what Tiara just said. The practical advice for our attendees is not to build 10 different segmented lists. It’s to choose two or three priority segments and ask: what places someone in this group, what do they need next, and how should outreach differ from a general or generic campaign?

Tiara Stephan: That’s exactly right. The goal is not more lists for the sake of having more lists. You want to identify the few groups where a different message or next step could genuinely improve your donors’ experiences.

Melaina Chromy: Fantastic. Thank you, Tiara. We’ve talked about who to reach and how to start segmenting your audiences for year-end communications. Now let’s turn to the message. Here’s our next poll: what is the hardest part about creating a year-end appeal that stands out? Is it finding a distinctive story, or explaining the impact of a gift? Maybe your biggest hurdle is getting everyone at your organization aligned and in agreement on a message. We’ll give the poll a few seconds, and if there’s a different challenge you’re facing that isn’t captured here, share it in the chat. We would love to hear it.

As we wait for those poll answers, I’m going to turn it over to Evan for my next question. Evan, how can a year-end appeal create a real sense of urgency without feeling generic or manufactured?

Evan DaSilva: I think the answer is specificity. Specificity makes asks feel genuine and authentic, which is a key ingredient in building connections with donors. Name the need, explain why it matters now, and show the donor what they can make possible. “Help us reach our goal” is a little less compelling than a clear picture of a specific outcome. And if you can do it accurately, connect the suggested amounts with a tangible impact. Choose one clear primary action. Consistency matters too. If your email promises one thing, and then you get to a donation page that’s disconnected from it, you create doubt at exactly the wrong moment.

I told everyone earlier, I’m a big dog lover and a supporter of the MSPCA. If you send me an email about rescuing dogs, I’m probably going to donate to you. But if the landing page has a picture of cats, I’m not a cat person. In all honesty, I’m joking. Cats are great too. I’m using that tongue-in-cheek as an analogy because it illustrates the friction that can get created when messaging doesn’t align with the giving process. My connection is genuinely to my dog, and if the message changes, it loses some authenticity, which is what fosters the connection between the donor and the mission. So carry that central message from the appeal to the form, to the confirmation page, to the thank-you.

Melaina Chromy: I want to touch on the poll results that just popped up. The biggest challenge fundraisers are facing is creating urgency without sounding alarmist. Then what do we have? Tailoring our message to different audiences, and then explaining the impact of a gift. As I mentioned earlier, bloomerang.com has a bunch of free resources to learn more about segmentation, so if that feels overwhelming, please don’t worry. We have plenty of resources to help you out. And we’re going to talk a little more about messaging in a moment.

We’ve discussed how to get your message through. Evan, you talked about clarity and the importance of a consistent experience. I now want to talk about how a nonprofit can reach donors more than once without sending the same appeal. I know there’s a lot of pressure on fundraisers to email more than once, send the same appeal, and break through inbox clutter. Tiara, what’s a good strategy here?

Tiara Stephan: Oh, I’m on mute. My bad. You want to think of a coordinated campaign like a playlist with a theme. That central theme should stay recognizable through all of the songs you choose, but each song should add something new. It should be the same with your campaign. Start by giving every touch a job. One message might introduce the need, another might show impact, another can provide progress, create urgency like the poll talked about, or offer a final reminder to give. When every touch serves a different purpose, the campaign feels more like a story unfolding instead of one email being copied five times and showing up in your donors’ inboxes.

Map your campaign from GivingTuesday through your year-end deadline, including the quieter periods between major moments. You can still make an impact during those times. Coordinate all of your channels, from email, social, text and direct mail to personal outreach, around one campaign promise, and adapt how that promise is expressed through each channel. The goal is to repeat the central message without having identical copy in all of your communications.

Melaina Chromy: So what is a practical tool here? Would a simple calendar with date, audience, channel, purpose and call to action work?

Tiara Stephan: Yes. That makes gaps and unnecessary repetition between all of your communications much easier to see. And if your platform supports timely follow-ups when someone begins but doesn’t quite complete that final gift, that can complement the campaign as well. But all in all, it should support the broader cadence and not become your entire year-end strategy.

Melaina Chromy: Awesome. Thank you so much. We’ve covered who to reach, what to say and when to say it. Now I want to ask the audience another question: when did you last complete your own donation experience on a phone? It could be within the past month, within the last six months, or maybe you don’t remember, and that’s totally okay. Please answer the poll question.

I know Paul talked a little about this earlier by mentioning the importance of getting a friend or someone you know to go through your online giving form, but I want to spend some time on this specifically. Paul, what should the payments experience make most effortless for our donors?

Paul Kramer: Absolutely. I’m excited to see the poll results.

Melaina Chromy: I know.

Paul Kramer: The answer is completing the gift they’ve decided to make. It’s a very simple answer that is difficult to implement in the end software. A donation form can quietly become a wish list from the whole organization. Someone wants a phone number for follow-up. Someone wants to know how the donor heard about you. Someone wants their email. Someone wants their home address. Everyone has a reason for needing that information, and those are reasonable things to want. But making them required means the donor has to answer before they can give.

I’d ask which questions you need in order to legally accept and acknowledge the gift, and which information can wait. Could you ask an optional question on the thank-you page, after the donation has been completed? You can keep getting to know someone after they’ve donated, as long as you have one piece of information. So figure out the balance between wanting to turn this person into a recurring donor and a longtime supporter of this work, and making sure enough people actually complete the donation, so your donation form doesn’t have 50 steps to complete before someone can give.

Melaina Chromy: That’s a really good point, and something I’d recommend as well. It’s like that commercial: how many licks does it take to get to the center of a lollipop? How many steps does it take to get to the end of a donation form? The more steps there are, the more drop-off you’ll see. So what should every nonprofit test before their year-end fundraising campaign launches or their appeal gets delivered?

Paul Kramer: One hundred percent. I would deliberately make a mistake. Leave a required field blank or enter something incorrectly and see what happens. Does the form explain what to fix? Does it automatically jump to the part of the page that you need to fix? Does it keep everything you’ve already entered? This is something I pay really close attention to. Recently at Stripe, we ran a test of a bunch of different donation and checkout forms. We looked at where people drop off and why. We saw a very large percentage of people drop off because the forms don’t jump to where they need to add another piece of information or correct the information. Often it’s not a one-page form. It’s something you have to scroll through.

I think that’s very interesting. Now, when was the last time you completed your own donation experience on a phone? More people have done it recently than I would have expected. That’s good. Clearly we have a subset of folks who are deeply interested in donation and checkout forms. That’s exciting.

Melaina Chromy: We have a good audience. We care deeply about this as well.

Paul Kramer: Exactly. At the end of the day, that’s something I’d pay close attention to, because there’s a big difference between correcting a field and having to start the whole form over. That turns a small mistake into another decision about whether to bother completing it. And remember that your donors are the same people ordering dinner and buying things online, so they already have expectations that have been set. It’s very important that your checkout and donation form follow those same expectations. Making it easy to give is a small but meaningful way to show that you appreciate the time that person has taken out of their day to figure out whether this work matters to them. Great. Yes, it does. I would like to give, and I would like to support this organization.

Melaina Chromy: Awesome. Thank you. As I mentioned, Bloomerang has its own data on some of these choices and optimizations folks can make for their donation forms. Tiara, I’d love to turn it over to you. What does Bloomerang’s recent data show us about these form choices and optimizations?

Tiara Stephan: We have several findings that reinforce that broader lesson: seemingly small experience choices can really shape your donors’ behaviors. For example, text to donate has shown a 57.8% gift completion rate for gifts that were initiated by text to your organization. That percentage is also boosted by reminder messages that go out after your donor has initiated a gift but hasn’t quite gotten around to completing it.

We also have Express Donate, which allows donors to give using the digital wallets on their phones, like Apple Pay, Venmo and PayPal. We’ve seen that having Express Donate on your form can produce up to 55% higher conversion rates compared to donation forms that don’t have it enabled. And in our test of Gift Assist, which gives donors the option to add a little extra to their gift to help cover processing fees, we saw that 51% more donors covered those fees when the fee coverage box was preselected for them. We didn’t see a decrease in conversion rates, so people were giving just as frequently even with that box selected. It also didn’t decrease their gift size, which is huge.

Melaina Chromy: Really interesting. For anyone wondering what to do with these findings, we’ve talked quite a bit about the value of testing your own donation form and doing a mobile self-audit. Paul, could you give us a few tips? What would you recommend for an organization that wants to test its own donation form?

Paul Kramer: Absolutely. The easiest thing is to use something I like to call the thumb test. Hold your phone in one hand and try completing your gift with just your thumb. Notice which buttons are hard to tap, which are too small, which fields are awkward to fill in, and where you have to stop and figure out what’s next. Fix the clearest obstacle first, then go through again to make sure the change helps. Get the time it takes to donate down as much as possible, and also make your form incredibly accessible, so that anyone can use it. If I have really big hands and fingers, I need big buttons on the donation form to make sure I can check out. It’s really important that you can do it with one finger, without typing in a lot of information or using multiple fingers to add your address and this and that. Just make the flow as easy as possible. I think that will uncover most of the issues we’ve talked about today.

Melaina Chromy: That’s awesome. And back to what we said earlier, get folks of different ages to fill out your form too. Where are they struggling? You should be able to spot pretty quickly if folks are having to use more than their thumb and actually zoom in. That’s a big accessibility flag.

Once a donation is complete, it can be easy to think, okay, our year-end fundraising campaign is done, we can rest easy and work on receipts and follow-up once we get back to the office that first week of January. But at Bloomerang, we are big believers that stewardship should be planned with as much intentionality as your year-end fundraising ask itself. I’m sure you’re thinking, why does that matter so much, Melaina? Showing the donation’s impact and thanking donors is instrumental in retaining them and getting them to give again next year. According to the Fundraising Effectiveness Project, first-time donor retention hovers around 25% for nonprofits. So if you want more than a quarter of the donors you bring in with your year-end fundraising efforts to give again next year, it’s important to think about your stewardship plan now and make it part of your year-end campaign.

With that said, I’m going to turn it over to one of our experts, Evan. What should happen right after someone makes a year-end donation?

Evan DaSilva: First, confirm the gift clearly, then thank the donor in a way that connects the transaction back to the mission. The receipt confirms that the payment method worked. Stewardship confirms that the donor matters. The two are not the same, and they’re both valuable touchpoints, but the plan should still be built before the campaign launches. Then use a campaign-specific confirmation and thank-you. Tell donors what happens next, and share progress and results so they can see what they helped accomplish.

Melaina Chromy: Awesome. How do we do this without it feeling transactional? I know a lot of folks here may have automated receipts.

Evan DaSilva: I think you want to respect the original gift first. Thank them, show the impact, and then offer a next step that fits the relationship. For some donors, that may be learning more. For others, it may be volunteering, attending an event or considering recurring support.

Melaina Chromy: Awesome. We have a poll on the screen again: when is your year-end donor follow-up plan usually finalized? If you haven’t already, add your answers to the poll so we can discuss. I hope that, based on this, you’ll start thinking about what your follow-up looks like for your year-end donors, if you haven’t already. I’d encourage you that it is worth it and will help you see stronger fundraising results next year.

We’ve talked about the importance of following up with your donors to retain them, but there’s another great way to create a habit of giving with your supporters. Tiara, can you tell us what Bloomerang has learned about recurring giving prompts?

Tiara Stephan: Definitely. For those who don’t know, Bloomerang Fundraising’s recurring giving prompts either gently nudge the donor to upgrade a one-time gift to a recurring gift, or interrupt the giving experience to encourage donors to make that upgrade. We’ve seen that donors who were exposed to the recurring giving prompt started 22% more recurring gifts, and those gifts were 19% larger on average. Huge. The important part is not to turn every thank-you into another ask. It’s to make an appropriate recurring option visible when the donor is already demonstrating their commitment to give.

After your campaign, you want to segment your follow-up so recurring donors and one-time donors are recognized accurately. Relevance in your communications matters after the gift just as much as it did before. You don’t want to ask a recurring donor to give again so quickly, or at all, after they’ve made that recurring gift, whereas with a one-time donor you want to reach out, continue to cultivate the relationship, and encourage them to give a second time.

Melaina Chromy: Awesome. That’s super valuable, and it’s something everyone can check on their own donation form: do you offer a recurring giving option, or better yet, a recurring giving nudge? I think as more Americans feel the effects of inflation and we see subscription culture increasing, recurring giving offers a great avenue to get our donors into the habit of giving in a way that works best for them. For our nonprofits here today, you can easily frame this as breaking a gift down into smaller chunks. And the best part is that recurring giving helps you build a sustainable and predictable avenue of revenue. So what’s not to love? I’m a big recurring giving fan.

Now I want to ask our last poll before we get into what your year-end giving priorities could look like. Please let us know what would be most helpful for you as you get ready for year-end giving. As I mentioned earlier, Bloomerang has dozens of free resources on our website to help with year-end fundraising, and if you’re curious about any of the specific online giving optimizations we discussed today, we can follow up with you to share more.

As you fill out the poll, let’s bring everything together into a practical priority checklist. I’m going to turn it over to my fellow panelists. We’ve covered audience, message, cadence, giving experience and follow-up. If a nonprofit team can only approve or improve a few things, where should they start? Evan, I want to begin with you.

Evan DaSilva: I think they need to choose the audience that needs a distinct approach. There’s a great question in the chat about this: what does a channel mean for each audience? Make sure that your Gen Z donors, you’re engaging through social media or online ads, and for some of your older generations, maybe it’s email or direct mail. Baby boomers love direct mail, so engage them that way. Make sure you’re meeting people where they’re at, and understand the demographics of your donors. Then clarify one specific impact promise, and prepare thank-yous and follow-ups before the gifts begin arriving. Done.

Melaina Chromy: Paul?

Paul Kramer: I like to use the line, “Be your campaign’s first donor.” Send yourself the appeal, open it on your phone, and make the gift all the way through to the receipt in your inbox. Test the full cycle of the campaign yourself. Have your kids do it, have your friends do it. Have a few folks test it out across a couple of different demographics and ages, as Evan was saying. Pay attention to the first moment where you hesitate and where other people hesitate, even if you know how to get past it because you built the campaign. Your donors won’t have that head start. That’s the bit I’d fix before launch.

Melaina Chromy: Perfect. Tiara, any last insights?

Tiara Stephan: I would say review your required fields, the suggested amounts on your donation form, your recurring prompts and your fee coverage settings. Then assign an owner and a deadline to make any of those changes to your forms before your first year-end appeal is delivered. If you can’t execute something confidently before that appeal is sent out, defer it rather than introducing last-minute changes. You want your donation form to be working perfectly before people start giving.

Melaina Chromy: If I’m capturing priorities correctly: choose two or three audiences, clarify your impact statement, map the cadence of your different year-end messages, test the giving flow on a phone with your campaign’s first donor, review the settings, prepare your thank-yous in advance, and give every change you want to make an owner so it feels less overwhelming for you and your team. That feels more manageable than trying to do everything at once.

Before we get to the Q&A, which we’ll start in about two minutes, I want to go back to one central idea. Tiara, if someone remembers one thing from today, what would you recommend?

Tiara Stephan: Stronger year-end fundraising does not come from simply making more noise. Everybody’s making noise during year-end fundraising season, and your donors are getting inundated with emails, calls and appeals left and right. Stronger year-end fundraising comes from making smarter decisions about who you reach, what you say and how easy you make it to give. You shouldn’t have to rely on assumptions. We’re using real donor behavior and controlled experiments to learn what actually helps donation forms perform better, and to turn that evidence into smarter guidance and better giving experiences for every donor. Bloomerang’s goal is to take the guesswork out of donation form optimization so you can focus on raising more for your missions during this critical year-end fundraising season.

Melaina Chromy: Awesome. Thank you, everybody. A shout-out to Lisa in the chat. We’re going to go through our Q&A now. If you have any questions you want us to answer, please add them to the Q&A box.

I can answer this first one. Since data is showing that even credit card donations may not be growing, can Bloomerang please partner with DAFpay and give us better DAF or planned giving tools? Heard you loud and clear. If you’re not signed up for Bloomerang’s emails yet, I’d go ahead and sign up on bloomerang.com and keep an eye on your inbox. Some exciting things may be coming, and that’s as much as I can say.

Now, let’s see. In August, we wrapped up a matching gift campaign, and now we’re preparing for our year-end campaign. Any tips so we don’t burn out our donors? I have some ideas here. Tiara, do you want to chime in?

Tiara Stephan: Do you want to start?

Melaina Chromy: Yes. The biggest thing I would recommend is making sure you have thanked the donors who participated in your matching campaign. There’s a term we have in the sector that we try to avoid, and it’s called the “THASK”, which is a thank-you combined with an ask. You want to avoid that if at all possible. Before you reach out to those matching gift campaign donors again, make sure they’ve received a thank-you from your organization that doesn’t include an ask to donate. It should be purely a stewardship piece. That will help make sure those donors aren’t burnt out by the time they get your year-end appeal.

Tiara Stephan: One hundred percent. I’ve actually seen some people in the chat address that: keep the ask and the thank-you separate. I would also remember what we talked about earlier, having that same central theme throughout without copying the copy. I’d lean into that here, for sure. And talk about the impact of that first gift from the matching gift campaign. Say, “This is what your first gift helped us accomplish, and this is what doubling that gift with our matching gift campaign helped us accomplish.” In your follow-up, make sure they understand what a next gift could help you do as well.

Melaina Chromy: Awesome. Thank you so much. For this next question, Evan and Paul, I’ve got you on deck. Our organization has a large base of older donors, many of whom are not very familiar or comfortable with text to give. What are some effective ways we can introduce and encourage text to give with older audiences, while also making the process simple, accessible and trustworthy? Tiara, feel free to chime in too if you have any ideas.

Evan DaSilva: I’d actually pivot this one. I think this goes back to meeting the donor where they’re at. Older audiences are going to struggle with text to give, so don’t try to fit a square peg in a round hole. Text to give is an incredibly effective tool, and you should use it, but it’s more about finding the right channel for the right donor. Some of the older donors are probably going to be better served through traditional channels like email and direct mail.

Paul Kramer: I definitely echo what Evan is saying. It’s important to cover all of the other means of giving rather than just focusing on forms, because there will be folks who don’t want to give through a form. They want to send you a check, or use their bank account to transfer some money to you. It’s important that you cover all the bases with different means of giving.

The other thing I’ve found very useful with older audiences, back when I was running a nonprofit, is showing, not necessarily explaining. In a newsletter, event program or direct mail piece, literally show: text G-I-V-E to 12345, tap the link, make your gift. Show them the process, if you’re set on having these types of donation flows. It’s very important to meet them where they’re at, but at the same time, use what you’ve got and the technology you want to make accessible to your donors.

Melaina Chromy: That’s good. One more question. We are attempting to update our online donor form to provide more immediate gratification by quantifying what the gift is helping with. The issue we’re running into is that we have many different programs the gift can go to. How do we make sure we’re not overpromising where the gift is helping?

Paul Kramer: What I suggest to nonprofits who want to quantify but have a lot of different programs is to run different campaigns, if you have the capacity to do so. I have different donation forms for different campaigns. If I’m running a campaign for early childhood education, we need books for that, so $10 funds this many books and $25 funds this many books. If you’re able to quantify your programs like that, run a couple of different campaigns for the main programs you want to cover. Then you can also have an encompassing campaign that says this will help educate five children or buy 10 books. There are ways to do that across a couple of different initiatives.

Tiara Stephan: I think that’s really good advice. I agree. Something folks can check into as well, speaking from experience with Bloomerang: a lot of online fundraising tools give you the ability to clone a donation form in a second. If you have lots of different programs, clone the form and make a duplicate. That way you can customize different forms, and your direct mail appeal or your email appeals to different segments of donors can go specifically to that form with more detailed impact information. Just a suggestion.

Melaina Chromy: Let’s see here. One question: how can you explain how to map the cadence of the messaging again? I think, Tiara, this goes to your section. I do want to remind folks, before we chime in, that you’ll get the recording and a copy of the slides afterward so you can dive back in later.

Tiara Stephan: One hundred percent. Mapping out the cadence means that you don’t want to be inundating your donors with constant emails and constant social media posts. Make sure you have a calendar where all of your communications can be tracked. Track across your social media: when is this post going to go live? Track your email as well: when are we going to send this appeal to this group of donors? That way you’re making sure your message is getting heard and rising above the noise, but you’re not one of those nonprofits in the inbox where it’s like, “Oh, another appeal again? Are you kidding me? I just gave to you.” You want to make sure you’re segmenting, and that everything is mapped out so you can make sure you’re not sending too many emails or too many appeals throughout the year-end giving season. That’s what mapping the cadence means: keeping track of all of your communications and making sure they go out at the appropriate times to the appropriate audiences. I hope that answered your question, Stacy. If you have a follow-up, please feel free to reach out. We would be happy to help.

Melaina Chromy: Awesome. Thank you. We have time for maybe one or two more questions. Nancy asked, can you share that last recap list of top things to do now to prep for year-end? I can share that right now. The first thing to do is choose two or three audiences. That’s the segmentation piece we talked about earlier in today’s webinar. Then clarify your impact statement. Do your year-end appeal and the various messages you have going out answer “your donation will help with X”? It should be very clear what the impact is. Then, as Tiara just spoke to, map out the cadence of your different year-end messages. Are your messages sprinkled throughout October through December? Is there any overlap, or are there specific dates to avoid? Adding that to a calendar will really help. Next, test the giving flow on your phone. Paul mentioned the thumb test earlier: how easy or difficult is it for you to give via mobile? And then, if you’re going to be making changes to your donation form, give every change an owner if possible. See if you can divide up some of the work so it’s not too big a burden or challenge for you. I hope that answers the question.

We have one more here that I think we have time for. Lindy asks: one major benefit of the membership program is dynamic grouping when members enter a level of membership. Do giving plans allow for dynamic grouping as well? It sounds like this is a Bloomerang-specific question, so Lindy, we can reach out to you directly after this webinar to make sure you have the information you need.

It’s 2:59. I want to thank everyone for their time today, for jumping on this webinar and staying as we went through the Q&A and answered questions. We all wish you the best of luck with your year-end fundraising campaigns, and know that you’re going to crush it this year. You have a whole team of people ready to support you here at Bloomerang and at Stripe. Thank you, everyone, and have a good rest of your afternoon.

Evan DaSilva: Thank you all. Bye.

Tiara Stephan: Bye, everyone.