The end-of-year giving season represents the most critical fundraising period for nonprofits, with nearly 30% of annual donations occurring in December alone. The combination of GivingTuesday, fall harvests, and winter holidays creates an atmosphere of generosity and kindness and charitable contributions and volunteerism trend upward.
The Bloomerang Giving Platform combines powerful CRM capabilities with advanced fundraising tools to help you maximize both GivingTuesday and year-end campaign success. We've provided suggestions for things you can do before giving season to help your organization be at your most effective and efficient during the busiest time of year.
Donations
Set Up a Campaign
We recommend creating a dedicated donation form in Bloomerang Fundraising specifically for GivingTuesday. If you need help setting up a new Bloomerang Fundraising donation form, check out the Donation Forms Quick-Start Guide.
You can make your GivingTuesday form as complex as you like, but you can really get started just by adding compelling images and impact statements.
Images let you show your organization’s impact. Head to the GivingTuesday website to find official GivingTuesday logos and graphics you can use in your dedicated campaign. We recommend including your own high-quality images as well.
For more tips on showing visual impact on your form, check out How to Show Visual Impact on Your Online Donation Forms. Including quality images on your donation amounts is a great way to show donors exactly who their support benefits.
Note: If you’re not currently using Bloomerang Fundraising, you can set up a donation form in Bloomerang CRM
Promote Your Campaign
For your campaign to be successful, you need to get the word out. Set up your GivingTuesday form early so you have plenty of time to promote it before the big day! And then share your form using these Email, Text, and Social examples:
GivingTuesday promotion examples - Promoting your campaign is key to rallying support. These examples can help you make strong appeals, whatever your mode of communication:
Save-the-date Email example - GivingTuesday got its start on social media, but not all donors are actively following the nonprofits they support. Sending a save-the-date message via email is a great solution to get donors ready for GivingTuesday.
Social Media Image Size Cheat Sheet - To maximize your social media effectiveness, your images need to be the right size. Check out this cheat sheet for tips, and if you need to resize some images, we’ve got you covered!
Need more help organizing your GivingTuesday campaign? Check out the GivingTuesday Ultimate Guide, which includes helpful statistics, a promotion schedule, and tips for retaining GivingTuesday donors.
Be Prepared To Enter Donations
Donations received through Bloomerang CRM donation forms are automatically tracked for you.
Donations received through Bloomerang Fundraising donation forms can be tracked with the Bloomerang Fundraising to Bloomerang CRM integration.
For other one-time donations, in-kind gifts, or pledges that you receive outside of donation forms, we recommend that you review how to enter and update those contributions ahead of giving season's flurry of activity, especially if you are newer to Bloomerang CRM or if you have not performed those tasks recently.
Review and bookmark:
Tip: It can be helpful to walk through the steps on your own, before giving season fully ramps up, so you know exactly where to go and what to do, when needed.
We suggest you also review or bookmark these additional articles:
Be Prepared To Help Donors
Make sure you and other members of your organization are familiar with your supporters' experience donating online so you are prepared to assist quickly if they need help.
Review How Do Supporters Donate Online? for a refresher and walk through your organization's donation experience as a donor so you and your whole team are ready to help if donors have questions.
Enable Online Payment Confirmation Receipts
Save time by sending online payment confirmation receipts to your donors. When you enable online payment confirmation receipts, Bloomerang CRM automatically emails receipts for:
One-time payments, pledge payments, recurring donation payments, and membership payments that are automatically processed in the Bloomerang CRM web application.
One-time payments, pledge payments, or recurring donation payments that you add in the Bloomerang mobile app (v24.7.1 or higher).
View Enable and View Online Payment Confirmation Receipts for instructions and full information.
In Bloomerang Fundraising, donation confirmation receipts are enabled by default. View Global Receipts for more information on customizing Bloomerang Fundraising receipts.
Prepare Your Campaign
Building creative and engaging email campaigns often gets more attention than email deliverability and configuration, but they are equally important to success during giving season and year-round.
Configure Email Settings
Make sure your emails have the best chance of staying out of the spam folder and reaching your supporters' inboxes. Perform these configuration tasks prior to giving season to help improve your email sender reputation.
Contact Information
Provide your organization's real contact information, which appears at the end of your emails:
From the main menu, click Settings.
Click Organization.
In the Edit Details section, verify the information is current and accurate and make any edits, as appropriate.
Click Save to save changes.
Authentication Settings
If you use a sender address from your own domain, configure SPF and DKIM to certify Bloomerang CRM to send email on behalf of your organization. This is a technical task and you might need a little help from your IT support provider.
Tip: Consider the timing of any upcoming campaigns when planning to configure SPF and DKIM. Leave enough buffer between configuration and sending a major email campaign to make sure you have time to work with your IT or domain provider and test configuration before your big campaign.
Keep Spam Complaint Rate Low
When supporters mark emails as spam, it hurts your email sender reputation and makes it more likely future emails are delivered to supporters' spam folders.
Follow recommendations in Monitor Your Spam Complaint Rate and incorporate into your processes and templates to keep spam rates low throughout giving season and year-round.
Build the Right Targeting
Once you've identified the audience for your emails, build the recipient list in the email message. Use filters to specify who and by which criteria you'd like to include and exclude from the email send.
Detailed information about filters is in Filter Emails.
Tip: The email type determines which filters are available, so if the field you're looking for isn't available, you may need to change the email type.
Tip: You can build your email targeting based upon an existing report. In your include filters, select Is in an [Type] Report, where [Type] matches the email type you've selected. Both the email type and the report type must match.
Create Email Content
Here are a few tips to help you build your email content:
Use email templates to save time and effort when sending emails to your supporters.
Use a past, well-performing email as a starting point:
Use the AI content assistant to help draft or revise copy.
Note: Once an email is sent, it is locked to preserve a record of the message, settings, and recipients and cannot be edited further. Copy an existing email or create a new email from a template to begin editing.
More information to help you build your emails:
Edit Email Content — Information about adding supported content types to your email, including anchor links, images, gifs, buttons, dividers, and more!
Track and Report on Emails
After you send a mass email, make sure to Track and Report on Emails to watch email performance and metrics.
Maintain a good email-sending reputation by removing email addresses that drop or bounce. Bounced and dropped emails affect your sending reputation and might result in more of your emails being marked automatically as spam. Make sure you monitor these stats and take appropriate action.
Automate Communication
Scale your fundraising and donor retention efforts by using Journey Automation to create automated, personalized, and timely donor journeys. Utilizing Journey Automation as part of your year-end campaign and communication strategy helps you manage your resources efficiently and save time. You can acknowledge all year-end donations and inspire deeper engagement without additional staff or resources.
Here are a few ways to use Journey Automation as part of your year-end strategy to:
Track Results
Set up reports in advance so you are ready to monitor progress right away. We recommend these three reports for most organizations during giving season:
Key initiatives
One-time vs recurring donations
Payment processing
Before you start building your report in Bloomerang CRM, think about the question you want your report to answer or the action your report will drive to help you determine the best report type, filters, and columns. The suggestions in this article are a starting point. Customize your reports further to tune for your organization.
Follow the instructions at Create Reports to build your reports. Choose:
Start from a template to begin from suggested filters and columns that you can customize to your specific needs.
Build a report from scratch if you know which filters and columns you need.
Note: The report type you choose determines which filters and columns you can use. Custom fields your organization has created are also available as columns or filters.
Resources:
Create Reports — Instructions for how to create a report
Report Columns and Filters — Complete list of available columns and filters
Basic Reporting & Filtering in Bloomerang CRM — Bloomerang Learning course
Tip: If there isn't a specific report template for the exact report you need, consider starting from a template that most closely matches and then add or edit filters and columns, as appropriate.
Tip: You can build your target email list for an email send based on a filter for whether a person is included in a report, so consider building your reports before you build your emails to simplify your email setup.
Key Initiatives
Set up reports for the funds, campaigns, or appeals that are key to your organization during giving season, on GivingTuesday, or the end of the calendar year.
For example, you may have a campaign or appeal set up for GivingTuesday or your holiday gala and want to see how your fundraising is doing against your goals as the event happens. If something is performing below expectations, you want to know so you can adjust. You may also want to communicate progress to your supporters, board members, attendees, or your social media platforms.
Audience: Your organization's leadership
Goal: Gather data on how your initiative is performing so you can:
Report progress to your organization's leadership
Communicate progress to your donors, supporters, or the general public
Template: Build a report from scratch
Type: Transactions
Suggested include filters:
The specific Campaign, Fund, or Appeal of interest
Date is the date or date range for the transactions of interest
Suggested exclude filters: Use exclude filters to narrow your report further, based on the question you want your report to answer.
Suggested columns:
Name
Date
Amount
Method
Fund, Campaign, and/or Appeal, as relevant to initiative you're tracking
Tip: If you are focused on overall totals for a fund, campaign, or appeal, and not individual transactions or donors, you can group by the fund, campaign, or appeal column to show the grand total for that initiative.
Example: GivingTuesday
Following the Key Initiatives guidance, you can use this example to monitor GivingTuesday performance. Use include filters for Date and an existing Campaign created for GivingTuesday:
Date is 12/2/2025
Campaign is ‘Giving Tuesday 2025’
Example: Year-End Giving
Following the Key Initiatives guidance, you can use this example to monitor your year-end giving performance. Use include filters for Date and an existing Campaign created for year-end giving:
Set a date range for year-end:
To report for all of December (including GivingTuesday 2025), use Date is Between 12/1/2025 and 12/31/2025
To start your report after GivingTuesday 2025 through end of December, use Date is Between 12/3/2025 and 12/31/2025
Campaign is ‘Year-End Giving 2025’
Note: You must create a campaign before you can use the campaign to filter your report. More information on how to set up a campaign is in Create and Manage Funds, Campaigns, and Appeals.
One-Time vs Recurring Donors
To report on one-time donors vs recurring donors, build two reports with the same columns but different filters.
Audience: Marketing or communications team
Primary goal: Segment donors differently for follow-up communications based on whether they gave a one-time donation or a recurring donation
Secondary goal: Project revenue
Template: Start from scratch
Type: Constituents
Suggested columns:
Name
Lifetime Revenue
Latest Transaction Date
Latest Transaction Amount
First Transaction Date
First Transaction Amount
Year-To-Date Revenue
Report 1: One-Time Donors
Suggested include filters: Has any Specific Transactions > Type is 'Donation'
Report 2: Recurring Donors
Suggested include filters:
Has any Specific Transactions > Recurring Donation Schedules and Payments > Schedule Status is Active or Overdue
Use AND… between filters
Suggested exclude filters: None
Tip: Create the One-Time Donors report first, make a copy, then adjust filters for the Recurring Donors report.
Payment Processing
Audience: Accounting, finance, or bookkeeping
Goal: Balance books and verify accounting accuracy
Template: Build a report from scratch
Type: Transaction
Suggested include filters:
Date is the date or date range of interest for relevant transactions
Suggested columns:
Amount
Date
Type
Fee Amount (for transactions through Bloomerang Payments only)
Method
Campaign, Fund, and/or Appeal, as relevant
Is Refunded
Processor
Processor Type
Suggested include filters: Transactions within a certain date range. Common date ranges:
Within a time period around GivingTuesday
Q4
December
Suggested exclude filters: None.
Note: Which columns you display depends upon your organization's accounting tool and needs. For example, there are additional fields you can display if you use the Bloomerang QuickBooks Online integration. View the full list of available transaction filters.
Build Your Donor Follow-Up Plan
Build a follow-up plan for donors before giving season begins. Consider segmenting your donors to better personalize communication. Your follow-up plan helps you determine what emails to build, how to target them, and what reports to build.
For example, you could segment your donors by new donors and repeat donors and follow up with them differently depending on whether their donation was above or below your average donation amount.
Above average donation amount:
New donors: Consider calling them. This could start to build a new relationship. Or email and tell your story and explain what they can expect from your organization.
Repeat donors: Do something special. For example, consider sending a video thank you. Recognize that they have gone above and beyond.
Below average donation amount:
New donors: Acknowledge their first gift and explain how it will be used. Tell a story and set the stage for what comes next. Maybe some of them are willing to volunteer and give their time.
Repeat donors: Consider contacting them for feedback. It might be helpful to find out what has changed.
Tip: You can use Journey Automation to create and assign follow-up tasks automatically.
And when giving season ends, strengthen relationships with your constituents by sending year-end giving statements that list all of their support from the previous calendar year.
Expand Your Reach
With more Bloomerang tools in your fundraising toolkit, you can increase your impact even more. In addition to dedicated donation forms and CRM automations, we’ve seen many orgs have year-end fundraising success with text fundraising and peer-to-peer campaigns.
If you’re interested in learning more about those packages and how they might help your fundraising, let us know!