Annual Campaigns

Wednesday is World AIDS Day, and many celebrities will stop communicating via Twitter and Facebook. They will not be resuscitated, they say, until their fans donate $1 million.

It’s all part of the latest gambit by the singer-songwriter Alicia Keys to raise money for her charity, Keep a Child Alive, which finances medical care and support services for children and families affected by H.I.V. and AIDS in Africa and India.

More than 3,000 Minnesota charities, churches, schools and nonprofits are bracing for one of their biggest fundraising days of the year Tuesday -- "Give to the Max Day."

The 24-hour online giving blitz, which raked in an astounding $14 million last year, has generated a blizzard of creative ideas to call attention to the big day.

Donors are upbeat about end-of-year giving. Here are some helpful links to check out regarding your end-of-year fundraising campaigns.

Year-end online fundraising doesn't just happen in December. Here are nine practical steps fundraisers can take now to raise more money online in December.

In a struggling economy, many other charities will also be conducting year-end campaigns that mix e-mail, social media, traditional mailings, and advertising. What’s more, many of them will be making pitches for gifts right up until New Year’s instead of wrapping up earlier as they did in the past.

Charities have little choice, says Ms. Dyer. “This is a busy time of year for donors, and it is cluttered in terms of competing messages. It is all the more important for us to make a bigger impact.”

C-level executives Angel Aloma, Danny McGregor and Atul Tandon, along with moderator Tom Harrison, discussed the biggest issues concerning fundraisers at the DMA Nonprofit Federation New York Nonprofit Conference.

In their presentation held on July 28 at the 2010 Bridge Conference in National Harbor, Md., "Marketing and Fundraising for Campaigns, Special Initiatives and Anniversary Celebrations," Jeanne G. Jacob, executive director of Goodwin House Foundation, and Barbara Ciconte, senior vice president of Donor Strategies, offered some great tips for successful fundraising. Here are some highlights.

Put simply, modeling means finding like characteristics about people that, when combined, enable you to predict future behavior. There are several inexpensive ways to model your data yourself (and some more expensive ways to use external data sources to help you) that can yield more revenue at lower cost from your direct-response program.

In a Network for Good webinar last month, "Campaigns in Nine Steps: How to Succeed With 'Just Enough' Planning," presenter Kristen Grimm, founder and president of communications solutions firm Spitfire Strategies, discussed some of the key steps outlined in "The Just Enough Planning Guide," created by her firm and the Communication Leadership Institute.

Too often, annual-giving campaigns mean making the same request for the same amount to the same donors in the same way at the same time of year, year after year after year. But in her session, "Annual Giving — How to Do It Well … Over and Over and Over Again," at the 46th annual AFP International Conference on Fundraising held in New Orleans two weeks ago, Jill Pranger encouraged attendees to think about annual-giving campaigns as a series of small, focused campaigns that run throughout the year.