Marketing

At the end of the year, donors may be frazzled by holiday planning and leave their charitable giving to the last minute. To help ensure that their end of year gifts count for the current tax year, here’s a primer on how to determine gift date. We’ve also included a digital checklist as an additional resource from our experts at Foundation Source with the most important milestones for private foundations throughout the calendar year—including key dates for year-end giving.

The end we are talking about is the end of calendar year 2016.  Are you ready?  Most charities concentrate on year-end giving in the fourth quarter and for good reason.  A study conducted by the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University focused on high-net worth donors found that 42.7 percent of those surveyed gave more during the holidays than the rest of the year. Nonetheless, in addition to soliciting and encouraging gifts at the end of the calendar year, it is also a time for planned giving departments to prepare and plan. 

Whenever you prepare a carefully crafted email for your donors, do you have a split second of doubt as you click send that anyone will open it?

I still do after almost 20 years of email marketing.

We can’t help it. There are too many times we have racked our brains for the very best content, the best starting sentence, the best subject line, only to find the email stats show opens aren’t as good as hoped. It happens to all of us, but there are ways to improve the odds of a successful open rate.