Ah – the air is getting crisper, the smell of hot cocoa is wafting, and a cheerful mood is growing in your community. That can only mean one thing: the holiday season is upon us!
Along with a general upswing in camaraderie, the season of giving is also an excellent opportunity for theatres of all kinds to meet their annual fundraising goals. After reviewing the numbers, perhaps you’re much further away from that goal than you expected – not to worry! By crafting and executing a strong end-of-year giving campaign, you can hit the benchmarks you want. After all, approximately 30% of all annual giving occurs in December – and around 10% occurs in the last three days of the month.
What does this mean? Well – it’s certainly not too late in the year to hit trajectories and get the funding you need to create stronger theatre programming for 2025. On The Stage offers a comprehensive guide to crafting impactful end-of-year donation campaigns.
The Donation Planning Process
Set Your Donation Goals
The first – and some would say the most important – part of the fundraising planning process is to set clear goals. With these goals in mind, enacting the SMART method is always your best bet.
In short, to succeed and progress as a theatre, you must set specific, incremental goals, stay resilient, and hold your team accountable. To delve more into this philosophy, let’s review what SMART stands for:
- Specific: Your end-of-year donation goals should have clear targets or hit upon specific KPIs (key performance indicators).
- Measurable: There has to be a way to measure the success of your fundraising campaign.
- Attainable: Don’t make your donations goals entirely out of reach, but don’t make them too easy either. The aim? Achievable but challenging.
- Relevant: What is your theatre’s overall mission? Make sure your donation campaign is helping you live out that mission.
- Time-bound: Since this campaign already has a set end date, this one should be easy. But make sure to clarify with your fundraising team their exact hard deadlines for gathering donations.
Alongside creating SMART goals for your fundraising plan, you must decide what kind of fundraisers and donation requests you’ll make. A few ideas to get you started include:
- Create a sleek, easy-to-use online donation platforms
- Enact giving tools that can be utilized over text
- Decide if you want to deploy a matching gifts program – either within your own theatre or with business sponsors, community partners, or other relevant individuals
- Consider the option of crowdfunding
- Encourage peer-to-peer fundraising
Once goals have been nailed down and you’ve established the proper channels for reaching them, you may think it’s time to deploy. Not so fast! Next, we take a look back at last year.
Review Last Year’s Donations and Strategies
While you may be itching to start your donation procurement efforts, it’s crucial to first review your numbers and strategies from last year. After all, data can be a powerful guide so you don’t repeat the same mistakes you made last year and can capitalize upon the successful components, too.
If you aren’t sure where to start when it comes to reviewing last year’s end-of-year donation campaigns, ask yourself and your fundraising team these questions:
- Generally, how did last year’s campaign go?
- How much money did we raise?
- Which demographics contributed the most to end-of-year campaigns?
- Did we hit the KPIs and financial benchmarks we should have?
- What elements of our campaign excelled, and which failed?
- Which marketing strategies did our demographics respond well to? Which got little traction?
By answering these and other relevant questions before starting your next campaign, you’re essentially arming yourself with a roadmap of how to proceed.
Pro Tip: If you have consistent donors, stakeholders, community partnerships, business sponsors, or other relevant theatre-loving contacts, see if they can participate in this review. You don’t want to place yourself in a bubble or echo chamber where real, constructive conversations aren’t happening.
Review This Year’s Donations and Strategies
Now that you’ve reviewed last year’s ups and downs as it relates to year-end donation campaigns, it’s time to get down to brass tacks about your theatre’s current situation. A few things you need to review include:
- Your General Fiscal Situation: How much of your marketing budget has already been spent for the year? How has your financial situation changed – for the worse or the better – since last year’s campaign? How close are you to your financial goals at the start of 2024? Not only will this help you set realistic goals, but it will also give you relevant marketing material when making your donation appeals.
- Your Theatre’s State of Operations: Taking a bird’s eye look at your theatre will also help you craft year-end donation appeals. What other goals outside financials have you yet to meet this year? Which non-financial goals have already been met? Which programming offering did well in 2024 – summer stock productions or acting workshops?
- What Opportunities Do You Have in Your Back Pocket: Do you have any incoming grant money? Do you have a business sponsor who has promised to deliver a hefty year-end donation? Have you been working hard all year to secure a major donor close to committing? Do you have a board that may offer connections to secure large donations? The more options you have, the less effort you’ll need to enact this year-end donation cycle.
After getting realistic about the state of affairs at your theatre, you can craft strong strategies to help you reach your goals. This reality check will also help you determine:
- Your budget for the campaign
- The time constraints you’re under
- How many people you’ll need to deploy to hit your goals
- Whether or not you need to rally volunteers to help
In short, getting a better idea of what’s happening internally at your theatre and what resources you have at your disposal will allow you to craft a more informed, successful plan.
Determine Your Audience
In order to execute the most effective and successful end-of-year donation campaigns possible, you’ll need to think about your audience. After all, you can’t craft a strong appeal if you have no idea who you’re appealing to.
The best way to save time on creating tailoring marketing efforts is through audience segmentation, which is a marketing tactic that divides your target audience into groups – based on specific characteristics, preferences, and behaviors. The end goal here is to deliver those groups more personalized messaging, leading to stronger connections, improved engagement, and an uptick in donations. There are a variety of ways to segment your audience, including:
- Personal Traits: like age. Why? Different generations, like millennials, baby boomers, and Gen Z, respond differently to specific marketing efforts and appeals.
- Purchasing Behavior: You should use different tactics to appeal to longtime, loyal patrons versus one-time ticket buyers.
- Geography: If applicable, you also need to consider appealing to different people depending on their physical locations across the country.
You may think: “I do not have the time or the resources to create more than one distinct donation appeal.” Alone, maybe not, but there is donor management software that can help.
With the right one, it can be fast and easy to reach targeted audiences based on their past purchase and attendance behaviors. Even better, these segments can be automatically created in seconds using only a few clicks, and they update dynamically over time as a patron’s behavior changes – meaning you never need to worry about a segment being out of date. (More on that later.)
Determine Your Messaging
Last but certainly not least, you need to determine how you want to run this year-end campaign related to messaging. Creating campaign themes – typically aimed at holiday giving – is a great place to start. But other ideas for messaging include:
- Emphasizing Impact: Your marketing copy should not be all about you, you, you. Your messaging, instead, should focus on how donors will be making an impact – and how much their donations truly matter. Don’t be afraid to get creative in your storytelling to get that messaging across, utilizing strong emotion, sharing personal stories, or focusing on a specific project that a donation can help.
- Personalizing as Much as Possible: We know we already went over audience segmentation, but the personalization of donation appeals will increase your ROI, guaranteed. Even starting an appeal with the person’s name will make them more likely to open the message. And don’t forget about after-the-fact thank-you notes!
Review Your Execution and Performance
After you’ve executed your year-end campaign, you’ve earned a break … but there’s just one more thing to do before you relax: review your execution and general performance. A few ways to do so include:
- Run through your KPIs and track your results.
- Review your specific donor segments to see which demographics were delivered and which need more attention.
- Review what marketing strategies worked well, and which didn’t. Why?
- Ensure the donor management system is up-to-date with all the new folks you nabbed this cycle.
- Study your calls to action and specific marketing language to see what worked best and what didn’t resonate.
Lastly, debrief as a team. Celebrate the wins, analyze the losses, and prepare for another successful year!
Best Practices to Keep in Mind
Now that you’re armed with all the tools you need to succeed, review some of these best practices and start your campaign:
- Always remember your why. Why am I raising these funds? What is my theatre’s mission? How can I exact that mission through this effort?
- Ask yourself, “Who am I trying to reach? Why?”
- Ask yourself, “What does a successful year-end campaign look like? How will I track it?”
- Have clear roles for every person involved in this donation campaign.
- Incorporate data-driven planning before embarking on the mission.
- Craft impactful stories to incorporate into your marketing messaging.
- Maximize your digital fundraising channels.
- Maintain consistent and cohesive brand messaging throughout the campaign.
- Always use a multi-channel marketing approach .
How On The Stage Can Help with Your Donation Strategies
Whether you’re just a few thousand shy of your end-of-year goals or need to enact an all-out fundraising blitz, On The Stage can help. With our comprehensive fundraising suite, you can take control of your theatre’s financial destiny. The suite will help you:
- Launch personalized fundraising campaigns
- Increase funding for your organization through a fundraising site with ready-to-use templates that incorporate best practices
- Track one-time and recurring donations with donor management, goal tracking, and real-time reporting
- Manage and grow your donor base
- Foster a sense of community and partnership by giving your cast and crew, patrons, and sponsors additional ways to engage with your program
- Set goals and track progress with easily accessible dashboards and reports
With a fundraising suite that does it all, the only limit is your imagination. If you’re ready to get started, book a personalized demo today.
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