It’s New Year’s Eve, and your inbox is chock full of match offers.
Every appeal promises your gift will go further, and they all end at midnight.
A genuine match can be effective. But when everyone reaches for the same two tools, those tools stop setting anyone apart.
A few copy changes can help an appeal stand out, and none of them require a bigger match.
The view from my 2025 inbox
I looked back at the fundraising emails that hit my inbox between Giving Tuesday and New Year’s Eve last year.
I went through them the way a donor would, looking for the most compelling reason to give.
On Giving Tuesday, most match offers I received doubled or tripled gifts. A month later, on New Year’s Eve, I was seeing subject lines like “7X Match Expiring” and “10X MATCH.”
Several of those emails also included a box designed to look like an account notice. One read “YOUR GIFT: PENDING,” and another said, “You haven’t claimed this 3X match yet.”
I’m sure there’s real testing behind these tactics. But after a while, the matches blurred together, and the emails I remembered made a real case for giving.
As messaging expert Frank O’Brien puts it, “technique used as a substitute for a strong message is a road to disaster over time.”
What made me want to give
Showing the gift impact. An email from Feeding America on New Year’s Eve built the outcome into each donation link, with lines like “DONATE $100 X 5 = 5,000 Meals for Neighbors Experiencing Hunger.”
I could clearly see the match AND what it would help fund. That’s what VeraData’s 2026 Fundraising Signals Report recommends: lead with specific impact.
Try it on your suggested gift amounts before you write a single new paragraph.
Telling supporters where you stand. A year-end appeal from Wikimedia opened with “Fewer people are giving this December than last year, and we are still short of our goal.”
In an inbox full of bigger and bigger matches, a plain update on how the campaign was really going gave me actual stakes.
If your emails use a status box, that’s the kind of tangible number that belongs in it.
Planning what comes after the match. Paws With A Cause, which trains assistance dogs, unlocked their full $100,000 Giving Tuesday match before the end of the day.
Their next email thanked supporters and set a new goal: fully funding four assistance dogs, at more than $60,000 each, for clients on a waiting list of 50-plus people.
Before your match goes live, decide what you’ll tell supporters if you hit your matching gift goal before the end of Giving Tuesday or year-end.
The bottom line
A match can get attention, but the copy still has to earn the gift.
Pick at least one of these tweaks, test it ASAP, and build it into your Giving Tuesday sends this month.
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Quick hits
Nonprofits on Meta are now limited to two organic posts or comments with outside links a month unless they pay for a new Meta One subscription, and M+R’s breakdown makes the case for turning those followers into email and text subscribers instead.
Gmail inbox placement fell from 90.97% in the first quarter of 2026 to 81.57% in the third, with more mail landing in spam or getting blocked outright, according to Validity’s latest Email Radar. Its advice is to send smaller, better-targeted campaigns, not more of them.
The National Democratic Redistricting Committee is hiring a Grassroots Fundraising Director to lead its fundraising across email, text, ads, mail, and telemarketing ($135K starting, mostly remote with Washington, D.C., preferred).
‘Til next time!
Sara