Keep Calm and Write On| The Guide to Creating Fundraising Appeals that Work

All year you’ve (hopefully) been building and nurturing relationships, telling stories about how donor support impacts your mission, and making plans for the biggest season of giving.

End of Year.

As you know, a successful fundraising strategy takes months, sometimes a full year, of preparation. And since over 20% of online giving happens in December alone,  it’s never too early for your organization to start preparing the year-end appeal.

This past January, Steve MacLaughlin analyzed 320 emails sent to him from 55 nonprofit organizations between December 1^st and 31^st of 2013. He found that the best email campaigns of December had a mix of: good offers, clear messaging, targeted segmentation, and mobile friendly messages. 

If your donors’ inboxes are anything like Steve’s, your end of year fundraising appeal is one in a stack of a few hundred.

So, we designed a resource to help your fundraising appeal stand out from the rest this December. In our latest eBook, Danielle Johnson-Vermenton and Mike Snusz have broken down the major components that great fundraising appeals are made of and how you can create your own.

What’s in the eBook?

• How to plan, write, and design fundraising appeals that get results
• Real-world examples of successful fundraising appeals
• A complete workbook and checklist for creating your campaign theme and tracking progress
• Best practices in designing fundraising appeals that work across multiple channels

Click here to download!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Madeline Turner

Madeline Turner is the Online and Social Marketing Manager at Blackbaud. Prior to running Blackbaud’s social media and thought leadership blog npENGAGE, Madeline worked as a Managing Editor for Blackbaud’s Content Marketing program. It is her goal to create content and share ideas that challenge the status quo of the nonprofit industry. When Madeline isn’t tweeting or writing blog posts, you can find her drinking coffee out of her ‘Crazy Cat Lady’ mug, wearing giant headphones and singing off-key.