Thinking Ahead to End of Year: Target Your Best Audiences With The Digital Co-Op

Jane Shepard, Senior Vice President, MissionWired

If you’re a nonprofit fundraiser wondering what to expect and how to prepare as we head toward this unusual end of year in 2024 – 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 an election news cycle that’s already been taking up a significant amount of space and attention and a Giving Tuesday that falls in December this year, optimizing your November fundraising will be a more important piece of your year-end strategy this year. (My colleague Trista Murphy has shared some new and really insightful strategies around election-year fundraising for nonprofits in a year of uncertainties – if you want to dig deeper on 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 – like what we may see this end of year – 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 your 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. With The Digital Co-Op’s recent model upgrade, nonprofits are seeing their top-performing acquisition source achieve 25% higher returns than they’d already achieved – so right now is an exciting time to invest in list growth.

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. One organization even achieved a 317% return in one month at year-end.

Custom Modeling Solutions:
We’re always excited to help our members model custom solutions unique to their programs’ needs and goals. Target your 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.

Growing your SMS list over the next few months is an important way to set your entire year-end campaign up for success. One strategy to accomplish this that every nonprofit should be leveraging? Use 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.

For one nonprofit organization, bolstering their existing SMS list with acquisition and modeling through MissionSMS led to a 275% increase in SMS donors and a 110% increase in SMS revenue year over year. What’s more, donors identified by MissionSMS are donating not just on their first text but again and again.

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 2023 End-of-Year Giving to find insights and inspiration for your 2024 planning!