That’s A Wrap: Digital Year-End Fundraising Trends

Now that year end is behind us and we’ve debriefed on digital fundraising through the end of 2024, we’re excited to share that revenue is up year-over-year nearly across the board.

For many organizations, the increase in revenue is due to revenue from online gifts of $1000 or more. In addition to that trend, many organizations have also experienced an increase in the average gift amount for donors giving under $1000. And for some clients, the improvement was due to an increase in the number of gifts—a very different trend than we’d been expecting!

Leading into year end season, many MWD clients tested into a higher ask string and pervasive use of personalized ask strings based on gift history going into year end, capitalizing on the trend toward more significant gifts from current donors.

Unsurprisingly, year end 2024 confirmed that we still need to promote match offers to fundraise successfully during this timeframe. In addition to that fundraising technique, “flash match,” one-day-only goals, and increased match multipliers helped our clients raise money outside the crucial 12/31 and Giving Tuesday moments.

Email

Sending more emails continues to mean raising more money. The number of email messages launched, the size of the email audience, and the deliverability of email messages were each crucial components of success. Achieving success in email also corresponds to fundraising on the website, in the mail, and other digital channels.  

MWD clients concentrated on much of their lead gen spending in the fall. When onboarded with a close eye to file hygiene and deliverability, organizations enjoyed great conversion rates among nondonor prospects during year end. Many of those leads were also brought on file with a mobile number and received texts as well.

Texting

Peer-to-peer text brought in significant direct revenue for clients this year end and had a high direct response rate, typically over 0.2%. Texting is also getting cheaper, so ROI continues to skyrocket. Our matchback reports again prove that launching texts increases giving in other channels.

We tested various designs and techniques for MMS and video this year end. Personalization and smart audience segmentation continue to contribute to texting’s impact on donor value and retention. We were concerned about text performance after heavy use of the channel during election season, but performance had bounced back by Giving Tuesday to pre-election season levels and higher.

Digital advertising

Digital ads drove lots of direct and view-through gifts, and almost every MWD client is up in ads revenue year-over-year. Performance Max in Google is a fresh option that worked well for our clients, as well as Dynamic Search, which drove a bunch of web traffic. Many of our clients invested in advertising channels like CTV and programmatic display that do not result in direct donations. Still, our matchback results show that these investments paid off in new donor conversions this year end.

Lo-fi design treatments continue to do well, even beating photos of adorable children! Featuring a premium in ad creative also overperforms.

MWD also promoted other giving methods in our digital messaging throughout year end. Many clients sent emails promoting different ways to give, especially in early-to-mid December, to promote gifts of stock, QCDs, and DAFs. DAFPay is now an option on many of our clients’ donation forms, making it fast and easy to make a gift from a donor advised fund on the donation form. This year end, we created ads promoting other ways to give like QCDs and DAF gifts, with huge cross-channel impact.

Going into year end fundraising season, we had been concerned about extensive political fundraising through the fall, over-messaging in email and text channels due to the election, and the negative news cycle. We were able to strategize how each client could make the best of the fundraising environment to succeed during this year end.

Here’s what’s next for our analysis: direct mail returns are still coming in, so a top-level analysis of giving trends will start once we can truly close the books on Year End. We’re running cross-channel matchback reports to identify the positive impact of adding additional communications channels into the messaging mix. We’ll run paid digital acquisition ROI reports to analyze the performance of lead gen cohorts we’ve onboarded across the past few years comparatively. And of course, we’re hard at work encouraging year end donors to become sustainers!

Congratulations to all our MWD clients for the fantastic difference they are making in the world, and for a successful wrap to the year end fundraising season.