Author: Kris Cole

Part 2 of a six-part series on planning a successful year-end giving campaign.

Last month, we mapped out the full year-end giving roadmap and provided you a planning toolkit to get started. If you downloaded it and haven’t opened it yet, no judgement, but this is the month to change that. September and October are about the unglamorous foundation work: setting goals you can actually measure yourself against, and getting your donor list organized so your messaging lands with the right person. This post covers the first half of that—goals, data, and segmentation. Next month, we’ll finish the job with website testing and corporate matching gifts.

None of this is the fun part of a year-end campaign. There’s no impact story here, no countdown clock. But it’s the part that determines whether November and December run smoothly or chaotically—and it’s worth doing well.

Start With the Data, Not a Gut Feeling

It’s tempting to set this year’s goal by taking last year’s number and adding 10%. Resist that. Pull your actual campaign report from last year—not just the total raised, but the breakdown: how many donors gave, what the average gift size was, how many were first-time donors versus repeat, and where the money came from by channel (email, social, direct mail, in-person).

This matters more than it might seem, because of how steep the drop-off is between a donor’s first and second gift. Across the sector, only about 25.8% of first-time donors make a second gift, meaning roughly three in four new donors who give once never give again. Top-performing organizations do meaningfully better (37.9%), which tells you this is a controllable outcome, not just bad luck. If last year’s campaign brought in a wave of new donors and this year’s goal assumes they’ll all come back on their own, that assumption is worth testing against the data before you build a plan around it.1¹

Overall donor retention across the sector sits around 54.7%, with top-quartile organizations holding onto closer to 7 out of 10 donors. That gap between average and top-quartile performance is almost entirely a function of how deliberately an organization treats its existing donors, which is exactly what segmentation (below) is for.

Set Two Kinds of Goals: Financial and Impact

A revenue target alone doesn’t give your team—or your donors—much to rally around. Pair it with an impact goal that translates dollars into something concrete: “Fund 500 meals,” “cover tuition for 12 students,” “keep the shelter open through February.” Impact goals do double duty—they’re easier to feature in campaign messaging, and they give your team a second way to measure success even in a year where the revenue number falls short.

Use the toolkit’s goal-setting worksheet to record last year’s actuals side by side with this year’s targets: total raised, donor count, average gift size, new-donor count, and a Giving Tuesday-specific number if you track it separately. Write down your top one or two impact stories now, while you have time to gather good photos and quotes, rather than scrambling for them in November.

Segment Your List Like You Mean It

Here’s the number that should change how you think about this step: targeted, segmented email appeals can lift nonprofit revenue by up to 760% compared to generic, one-size-fits-all messing.² That’s not a typo, and it’s not really about cleverer copywriting. It’s about sending the right message to the right person instead of the same appeal to everyone on the list. The research is also clear that engagement quality—not message volume—is what correlates with stronger giving; sending more emails to the same donor doesn’t move the needle the way relevant, well-targeted ones do.

At minimum, plan to split your list into these segments before your mid-November soft launch:

Major Donors — your highest-capacity givers, who should never receive the same mass appeal as everyone else. This group typically gets a personal note or call, not just an email.

Recurring/Sustaining Donors — already giving monthly or automatically; the ask here is usually gratitude and a look at cumulative impact, not a hard pitch.

Lapsed Donors — gave in the past but not in the last 12–18 months. This group often responds well to a “we miss you” or “here’s what’s changed” reframe rather than a standard appeal.

First-Time and Prospective Donors — the group with the steepest drop-off, per the retention data above. Consider what a strong second-gift experience looks like for this group specifically, since that single conversion has an outsized effect on long-term retention.

Internal Advocates — board and staff, who can be your most effective peer-to-peer messengers if you equip them early.

Once your segments are defined, draft messaging notes for each—even a few bullet points on tone and ask size per segment is enough to keep your team from defaulting back to one blanket appeal in the crunch of November. Here’s a handy-dandy worksheet to help get you started on segmented messaging.

A Quick Example

Picture the same year-end appeal going out to two different people on your list: a $10,000-a-year board member and a donor who gave $35 for the first time last Giving Tuesday and hasn’t given since. If both of them get an identical email — “Help us reach our year-end goal!” — you’ve missed an opportunity with both. The board member likely wants a personal update on impact and a chance to be asked directly, maybe even by phone. The lapsed first-time donor probably needs a warmer, lower-pressure reminder of why they gave in the first place, with an easy, specific way to give again. Neither message is hard to write once the segment is defined. The work is in doing the defining, which is exactly why this step belongs in September, before the November time crunch makes shortcuts tempting.

What Success Looks Like by the End of October

By the time we pick this up again next month, you should have: a documented revenue and donor-count goal grounded in last year’s real numbers, one or two impact stories in progress, and a donor list cleanly split into the segments above with at least rough messaging notes for each. That’s the foundation everything else in this series builds on—the soft launch, the Giving Tuesday push, and the final December sprint all depend on knowing who you’re talking to and what you’re asking for.

Next up in this series: October and November — Prep and Testing, where we cover getting your website and donation tools ready for peak traffic, and securing corporate matching gifts before the season gets busy.

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1. What is a Good Donor Retention Rate for 2026? — Virtuous, April 2026 ↩︎
2. 28 Fundraising Statistics for Every Nonprofit (2026 Data) — Neon One, June 2026 ↩︎