The year-end email planning guide you need

Year-end planning feels enormous when you look at it all at once. 

Two months of emails, multiple segments, creative for your biggest appeals of the year — it’s a lot.

But it breaks down into a handful of straightforward decisions, and right now (or three weeks ago) is the best time to make most of them. 

Here’s where to start:

Start with what last December told you
Before you build this year’s calendar, pull the data from last year’s. 

Look for wins and misses in the data. Which sends actually drove revenue? What creative made the difference in your final week? 

Did the patterns in your file match what we saw across the sector in our year-end breakdown, or did your audience respond differently?

If your testing notes from last year are thin, build a better log into this year’s process. 

Avalon Consulting’s year-end analysis found that top-performing emails consistently clustered on December 30–31, when urgency peaked.

Your own data will tell you whether that held for your file and what to double down on this time around.

Decide what every send is doing before you write any of them
A year-end email calendar is really a sequencing document first. 

Before anyone opens a Google Doc, figure out how your sends work together across November and December — which ones are earning the right to ask and which ones are doing the asking.

Map your anchor dates backward from December 31. With Giving Tuesday on December 1, cultivation emails need to start hitting inboxes by early November. 

Plot your appeal windows from there and make sure every week has a clear purpose before you start filling in copy.

Get honest about your cultivation-to-appeal ratio. CauseMic’s Donor Lifecycle Report studied 204 nonprofits and found that the ones skipping cultivation before year-end were far more likely to miss their goals, often by double digits. 

And those December donors are worth investing in: a Blackbaud Institute and GivingTuesday report found that Giving Tuesday donors gave again at a 65% rate, compared with 52% for donors who gave earlier in the year.

Build your segments now, while the stakes are low
This month is for pulling your engagement data and setting your segmentation rules.

It’s also the right window to run a reengagement campaign for donors and subscribers who’ve gone quiet. 

Decide who gets what message arc. Your active donors and lapsed donors need completely different November lead-ups to your biggest appeals. 

Figure out those arcs now so your team can write to them with intention.

Start your creative pipeline while your brain still works
I say this with love: your strongest year-end creative comes from weeks when your team still has energy and perspective. 

We’ve all written a 4pm-on-December-30th appeal. It shows.

Figure out your anchor story. What’s the strongest impact narrative your organization can tell this year? That story should drive your biggest appeal and inform everything else you send around it.

Check your welcome series, too. If you’re still acquiring new emails this fall, they’ll hit that sequence before they ever see a year-end appeal.

Can you find ways to tie your year-end theme? If yours hasn’t been tested or refreshed recently, right now is the time.

The bottom line
Your December revenue gets decided months before the first appeal goes out. 

Planning year-end in August feels premature right up until you’re scrambling in November and wishing you’d started sooner. 

Don’t wait for it to feel urgent. Trust me.

Check our events list for more or reply to this email to submit one for consideration.

‘Til next time!
Sara