Thinking Ahead to End of Year: Target Your Best Audiences

Updated August 21, 2025

Jane Shepard, Senior Vice President, MissionWired

If you’re a nonprofit fundraiser wondering what to expect and how to prepare as we head toward end of year – you’re not alone. I know you’ve got a lot on your mind even in these summer months, when Giving Tuesday and Dec. 31 are distant points on the horizon.

Between a challenging giving environment in 2025 for some nonprofits and a near-constant rapid response year for many – plus a Giving Tuesday that falls in December this year – optimizing your year-end fundraising might be trickier than usual. (My colleague Trista Murphy has shared some new and really insightful strategies around continuing program investments in a difficult economic year if you want to dig deeper into this subject.)

The Digital Co-Op provides a unique opportunity to grow your audience and target the best prospective donors in every channel to maximize results in a challenging end of year.

As you’re planning your strongest possible year-end campaigns, I’m excited to share how you can use the Co-Op to maximize the potential of your year-end strategies:

Target Your Best Audience

In challenging giving environments, you’ll want to identify your smartest audience strategy: targeting your best prospects, your best upgrade potential, and giving your audience the best personalized appeals possible. Modeling gives you access to the audience insights that will give you the best chance of success.

The summer months are a critical window to prepare your lists ahead of year-end: How can you grow your audience? What’s the segmentation strategy that maximizes engagement and ensures strong deliverability? With The Digital Co-Op, state-of-the-art predictive models and a vast data lake will identify the very best digital audiences for your mission.

The Digital Co-Op can help you find and target your most valuable audiences, depending on your program’s unique needs:

Email Acquisition:
Grow your list ahead of year-end with cost-effective email acquisition that’s paying back fast. Last year-end, eight organizations that made investments in The Digital Co-Op between August and November saw an average return of 341% by Dec. 31. And for 20 nonprofit members saw their list growth investments between August and November power conversion rates 85% higher than industry average.

Reactivation Modeling:
Like shopping in your own closet, reactivation is an efficient way to grow your active list with existing supporters who’ve already shown an interest in your work. The Digital Co-Op’s reactivation model can score your inactive audience – the folks you’ve stopped emailing to protect your deliverability – to find the most promising (and least risky!) lapsed supporters to bring back into the fold. Last year-end, organizations raised nearly $4M through reactivation.

Mid-Level Co-Op:
EOY is one of the most important moments to engage with mid-level and high-dollar donors: One organization saw 50% of their annual mid-level revenue come in during December 2024. With The Digital Co-Op’s one-of-a-kind sister product, you can maximize this moment by acquiring new high-value donors who have been proven to give at significantly higher levels.

Custom Modeling Solutions:
We’re always excited to help our members model custom solutions unique to their programs’ needs and goals, target their most valuable prospects, and model for advocates or sustainers. The Digital Co-Op’s custom modeling offerings can help you solve the unique challenges your program is facing.

Don’t Miss Your Chance to Raise Big Over SMS

We often talk about how SMS is one of the fastest-growing channels for digital fundraising, but what’s just as important to emphasize is the potential scale of that growth. At MissionWired, we have nonprofit clients whose text programs have reached million-dollar status, some of which we’ve helped build from the ground up, so when we say we’re seeing high rates of growth over SMS, we’re not just talking about the big percentage jumps you see with brand-new programs. This channel is the real deal and an area worthy of investment.

One quick note: With iOS 26 rolling out in September, which includes filtering of unsaved numbers in SMS inboxes, it’s important to try and establish engagement with your shortcode list so that your organization doesn’t get filtered out. You can do this by sending a contact card to your audience or some type of content that prompts a reply. We’ll continue to keep you updated on how best to adjust your texting program amid these changes.

Growing your SMS list over the next few months is an important way to set up your entire year-end campaign for success. What’s one strategy to accomplish this that every nonprofit should be leveraging? Using longcode acquisition texting to drive opt-ins to your shortcode program. Longcode texting, also referred to as peer-to-peer texting, can be a valuable acquisition tool to opt-in new supporters to your shortcode program – and to drive additional revenue in big moments like Giving Tuesday and Dec. 31.

At MissionWired, we’ve built successful SMS programs for our nonprofit partners for years, and we love it when a nonprofit begins to invest more in SMS. And now, with the help of The Digital Co-Op, we’re able to help our partners even more directly with their mobile growth:

Find the supporters most likely to donate over mobile with MissionSMS.
Just like email acquisition models, MissionSMS uses cutting-edge modeling and incredible amounts of data to identify your best audience to engage over mobile. You can use modeled longcode lists from MissionSMS to drive immediate revenue, and every supporter you convert will be opted into your shortcode list.

MissionSMS helped one member return over 100% immediate ROI and added 894 new donors to their list in a single text campaign between Dec. 30 and 31.

If you want to read more strategies to prepare for year-end, check out my full insights blog, Thinking Ahead to End of Year: Five Strategies to Start Now. As always, we’ll have plenty more to say about the top strategies our nonprofit partners are leveraging to prepare for year-end over the months to come – in the meantime, learn how one nonprofit member of The Digital Co-Op leveraged consistent acquisition investments throughout the year to achieve incredible revenue for their program in 531% Return at End of Year. You can also look back at the results and takeaways from our 2024 End of Year Takeaways and 2025 strategies!