Sign in Subscribe
Newsletter

Five observations on year end fundraising

And a whole bunch of new Future Community Jobs to start the year.

Five observations on year end fundraising

👋 Hello and welcome to Future Community. Big shout out to a few new folks including Chell, Patrick, Anna, and shamari.

Want to chat? Have a question? Need a hand? Reply here or schedule a chat.

JOBS! There are a surprising number of new open roles down below. If that's you're thing.

Year-end Fundraising Review

We talk about fundraising here because change takes resources. And fundraising is a powerful way to build relationships that sustain change over time.

Here are a few things I've seen in looking at year end results from some projects. This is a small data set. One built using (mostly) online fundraising. It's not authoritative by any means. Would love to hear what you're seeing. Happy to chat more if you want to get in touch (see above).

📈 Growth.

But not much. We're seeing successful campaigns for the most part. Which mostly means more $ and donors than last year. A lot of devil in the details.

➕ More donors and more small donors.

This is good. The sector has seen falling donor numbers and falling small gifts since 2021-22 or so. Flipside of this may be fewer large donors. Though these gifts may be coming at other times of the year. Or through other channels.

👿 People aren't happy.

And there are real villains doing bad bad things. Engagement rates are good. People are willing to join the fight. And fund the fight. But stories with clear threats and tangible plans and real people beat shouting from the rooftops. And this is a potential superpower for smaller groups with meaningful community connections.

📨 Email shoulders the big weight. But it has more helpers.

One issue groups are facing is that people are using multiple channels. Maybe they're not seeing your emails but they are hearing from you on Instagram or SMS - where it's easy to consume content without engaging.

➕➕➕ Send more. Get more.

That's a generalization, of course. But it's true you don't get donations or actions or responses if you don't ask for them. In general.

Every list is different but nobody ever clicked through an email they didn't see because they were busy that day. In most cases, send another email (or resend the one that worked before) and stop worrying so much.

That said, I know one group that sent a truly mind boggling amount of email (not my client) and I'm dying to know how it went.

Well, what to do with that?

2026 is shaping up to complete and total sh*tshow for so many of the communities and groups I follow, support, and work with every day. There's serious pressure on these groups, the economy, and the people out there on our lists and walking the streets and trying to feed their kids and pay their damn health insurance and utility bills (which are rising faster and with far fewer interruptions than a SpaceX rocket).

The US ran a coup in Venezuela. It bombed Nigeria. It may attack Iran or even Greenland. Yes, Greenland. And don't forget, the US is disappearing and murdering its citizens like its the early days of the Pinochet regime. These are not predictable and stable times for your organization and its supporters (and probably not for you or me, tbh).

Sooo...who knows if any of our observations are actually useful in your case.

But people are giving money and time. People will give if you ask, if you have a powerful story, if you can make sense of the world, provide comfort, care, and hope, and have real talk about real people.

Bright Ideas

Independent journalism is a form of resistance in The Guardian. Writer Mallory Carra explores how freelance and small shops are breaking some of the most important stories in US news these days.

Some of you may be a good fit for the Belonging Innovation Lab's Narrative Fellowship. It's a small group 12 week program of workshops on narrative interventions, audience identification, messaging frameworks, case studies, and more. Details at the link. February 8 deadline.

A great influencer marketing case study from Harper Yi: Cooking with Electric.

Events and Trainings 🧑‍🎓

Join New Media Mentors for The New Digital Best Practices: What every nonprofit or labor staffer needs to know about digital strategy today. Three sessions beginning February 5.

🦉
Get Future Community from a brilliant friend? Subscribe at Bright+3.

Future Community Jobs

These are the latest links. Check out the full job list here.

Hiring? Consider shipping a featured job out into this amazing community. Learn more here or just reach out on email.

Audience, content, journalism and news roles

Communications

🤔
Interested in featuring your open role on Future Community? This is how you do it.

Nonprofit organizations

Fundraising and Development

Foundations and Philanthropy

Agencies, politics, products, projects & more

Future Community is a product of Ted Fickes and Bright+3. Reply or visit Bright+3 to get in touch and learn more about our work. It's fabulous.

Read next