How To Advocate for Growth in a Challenging Year: EOY Strategies From SVP Trista Murphy

Published October 23, 2025

Trista Murphy (she/her), Senior Vice President, MissionWired
Karen Nicoletti (she/her), Director of Marketing Content, MissionWired

We’re heading into another year-end giving season in a calendar year that’s been consistently pitched to a higher frequency. With an unrelenting news cycle and an influx of conflicts and natural disasters, it’s felt like every day has brought a new rapid-response moment.

At MissionWired, our team is well-versed in nonprofit priorities and deeply invested in helping our partners achieve their best possible fundraising outcomes so they can continue to power their world-changing work. In our decades of helping top nonprofits grow their programs, we’ve seen time and again how acquisition investments that are modeled to identify likely donors for your unique mission can pay off first – and better – to maximize results in key fundraising moments.

A leader in strategic vision and growth for nonprofit fundraising, SVP Trista Murphy started her career in-house working in email and external communications before shifting her focus to the bigger, broader picture – how to fundraise effectively across all channels. She went on to lead fundraising programs for several top nonprofits, helping them develop holistic approaches to maximize the impact of their fundraising efforts. In 2023, she joined the nonprofit leadership team at MissionWired to bring her deep expertise and vision to our broad range of mission-driven partners.

With year-end approaching amid a challenging 2025 fundraising environment, we sat down with her to hear what she’s thinking about going into this giving season and the bold advice she has for driving growth in a tough environment.

Karen Nicoletti: What were the biggest challenges you faced in your years leading fundraising strategy in-house with nonprofits? And how did you find strategic solutions?

Trista Murphy: One organization where I led fundraising and growth was facing an email file that was concerningly small. A challenge for them was figuring out how to bring new voices into the fold. We joined The Digital Co-Op with the goal of growing their file – and grew their email list of active audience members by 1,411% over four years. The success that they saw in audience members acquired through The Digital Co-Op is something they are still seeing the impact of today, as those donors continue to give to their mission or re-engage in new emergency moments.

Another nonprofit I worked with faced the challenge of having a very limited budget, with none to spend on donor acquisition – they were only able to invest in net positive sources. We were able to make some careful adjustments to their budget to get them into The Digital Co-Op and grow their list with new, modeled prospects. That year, they achieved a 5% growth in fundraising, after years without seeing any growth. In the face of today’s ongoing economic uncertainty, this takeaway feels very relevant: In critical moments when nonprofits are forced to clamp down on budget, there are still careful adjustments you can make to recalibrate your spending and investments toward long-term growth.

In order to drive meaningful growth, sometimes you have to swerve from the expected path and take those risks – to pivot in moments when others aren’t taking the chance.

KN: For fundraising leaders who want to take those risks but need to get buy-in from leadership to invest, what advice do you have?

TM: Taking a holistic approach to fundraising is essential if you want to drive long-term growth for your program. At its simplest, it’s really about finding the best ways to bring new donors into the fold and how our channels work together to achieve that.

What I’ve found is that this requires a unique balance between donor acquisition and retention – especially in moments like the one we’re in now. No one can outpace the other; you need to be constantly putting energy into both.

Consistency really is key when it comes to balancing that priority between acquisition and retention. For programs that invest in acquisition and then stop, there will be an inevitable dropoff. We learned this lesson in the recession back in 2008 – when organizations made big cuts in acquisition, the challenges that followed were difficult to rebound from. If we want to learn from this, it’s critical to have the hard conversations now to make the case for reinvesting smartly in acquisition during those lightning-in-a-bottle moments that have the potential to drive real growth amid all the general softness.

What do those hard conversations look like? It’s about asking really direct questions of your leadership team: What is your bottom threshold? What’s the tolerance for investment without an additional budget at a really basic level? Is it $0.45 to raise a dollar? Then you can take that tangible amount with you into your planning and lean into:

• Precise segmentation. When you’re keeping your margins as tight as possible, you may want to only message your most responsive group in certain moments. When this is executed effectively, it can free you up to pull from what you gain from those successful sources to invest in new acquisition.
• Solutions-oriented budgeting. Your direct response team generally has an investment line. Ask questions about your budget: Are there guardrails for how we spend the budget, or is there some fungibility? What return metrics do you want to see by EOY? Armed with these details, you may discover you have some space to find the resources you need within what you already have.
• Resource within. Lean on your agencies for support with this. Ask them: Where can we save money so that we can invest in something else?

KN: Today, nonprofits are navigating such a uniquely challenging fundraising landscape. What’s your biggest piece of advice for responding to this moment?

TM: There’s a temptation to be timid in these moments, to stay in your lane and follow the leader – and that can be great to do, generally. But if a moment strikes that feels mission-critical, if you can resist that urge to stay timid and you have the runway to lead, you can drive tremendous success.

Some organizations are doing this with incredible grace and authenticity right now. Kendra Davenport, the CEO of Easterseals, has been vocal about how the current funding cuts will impact their organization. She is taking such a genuine approach and doing things in a unique way, and it’s driving response and getting attention. Countless other programs are also doing this critical work in standing up for themselves: Save the Children, UNICEF, Doctors Without Borders (MSF), Planned Parenthood Federation of America, just to name a few. And what’s incredible about the leadership they’re taking is that they’re also standing up for other nonprofits in their verticals. Smaller organizations can work under their umbrella and look to them as an example of success.

It’s such a powerful strength in the nonprofit industry. Our missions are connected, which means we can lean on each other as a community in this time – we can stick together and speak in a unified tone. And we can reach out to other organizations to ask questions and get genuine answers from folks who are weighing the same questions.

KN: How are you helping nonprofits prepare for year-end right now, with all this in mind?

TM: I’m encouraging our partners to think holistically about the content they’re putting out at end of year – is there a relevant news moment you can lean into in your messaging? We have one partner who is already 300% at goal for the year – and they got there by speaking out, bobbing when everybody weaved, and gaining new supporters who are ready to help. That’s the kind of momentum we’re carrying into this busy, loud year-end.

Stay busy. Stay loud. Stay visible, and find new places to break in.

For some organizations, this might mean launching an SMS program to connect more quickly with audiences in response to all the news impacting their mission. For others, it’s leaning hard on search and display ads to catch folks who are looking for ways to help. It will look a little different for every organization, but if you can find those bright spots that will help you grow in the face of softness in other channels, that’s when you can really achieve success.

We don’t know what the news cycle is going to look like in November and December – so be ready to remain nimble heading into year-end. It’s never too late to swap something in or out to be responsive to what’s relevant and rapidly changing in your work and mission. If you go in with flexibility, ready to meet the moment, you’ll be able to break through and make more meaningful connections with your audiences.

And – one thing I’m advising to all our partners? Lean into acquisition now to maximize your growth at year-end. Fundraising in 2025 has been really interesting to track – we’ve been following the metrics closely with our monthly Nonprofit Trends by MissionWired tool. One thing we’ve noticed there is how investment in acquisition increased starting in August. After budgets tightened, and the reality of soft results in a tough economic moment set in, nonprofits turned to acquisition as a solution to turn results around in the final months of the year.

We’re in a moment right now where investments in acquisition can have the biggest impact on your EOY results. In 2024, 20 nonprofit members of The Digital Co-Op saw their acquisition investments between August and November power conversion rates 85% higher than industry average.

In today’s challenging fundraising environment, and with acquisition costs rising, we want to support nonprofits’ efforts to meet their year-end goals. So we’re offering discounted pricing for a limited time ahead of EOY – just $0.60 per email lead for members and 50% off your first-time investment in The Digital Co-Op.

If you want to talk more about how our discounted pricing can help you reach your goals at EOY, or have any questions at all about acquisition strategy, reach out to me directly at trista.murphy@missionwired.com – or share your info here. For more strategies to drive growth at EOY, check out our EOY Takeaways Blog.