It’s that time, friends! Time to get your year-end campaign planning in motion. If you struggle to get started, I recently published an article called "The First 5 steps: How to Start Planning Your Year-End Campaign."

Step 4 on that list is to create a unique year-end donation page. Yes, this is different from your regular donation page. If you only take one morsel of advice from this article, let it be this:

Please don’t send people to your year-round donation page this December. 

With the right fundraising platform and a little bit of creativity, it’s easy to create a custom page that reflects your campaign visuals, messaging, and a specific ask. 

You can duplicate your usual page as a starting point, but your year-end donation page should be distinct. 

This will allow you to:

• Customize your ask and messaging. A strong fundraising campaign has a clear, time-bound Case for Support. This paragraph (or two) should live right on your donation page. 

• Customize visual design. The look and feel of your campaign donation page should match your emails, social media posts, and ads, so no matter where someone clicks from, they know they’re in the right place. 

• Include a goal meter or progress bar. If you choose to share your fundraising goal publicly, adding a goal meter to your donation page is motivating! 

• Suggest higher gift amounts. If your donors tend to make bigger gifts at year end, your suggested gift amounts should reflect this! Pro tip: Anchor your donors by listing the highest suggested amount first. 

• Track gifts more easily. With a separate year-end donation page and form, you know how much money is coming directly to your campaign, and you can look at the analytics to determine which channels are driving the most gifts. 

If you use a platform like iDonate, it’s a snap to set up a new donation page with a campaign-specific URL, Case for Support, photo or video, button color and text, and all the rest. 

What should be included on my year-end donation page?

Here’s a comprehensive checklist: 

✅ Your year-end campaign name and visuals 

✅ Your call for support: a paragraph (or two) that speaks to the donor’s values and the future they want to see

✅ A simple donation form that’s visible above the fold (without scrolling) on both mobile and desktop 

✅ Just a few required fields (likely name and email) with optional fields (phone, address) only if you plan to use them in the future

✅ One-time and monthly giving options, with one-time preselected unless your campaign is specifically recruiting monthly donors

✅ A smooth user experience: mobile-friendly, fast loading (under two seconds), accessible (good contrast, alt text, large button), with one clear call to action

✅ BONUS: Add one or two pieces of social proof below your donation form and call for support, such as testimonials, a before-and-after story, awards, earned media, or any other trust-boosters.

What should be included on the backend? 

Every fundraising platform is different, so make sure you have the following technical components in place before launching your campaign:

• Source tracking: Create UTM links for your ads, email CTAs, fundraising text messages, and any other channels you’re using to promote your campaign page. This will show you exactly where gifts are coming from.
• Analytics integration: Make sure there’s an integration in place between your fundraising platform and your analytics tool of choice (for example, Google Analytics), so you can track revenue and donor behavior.  

Should I use a pop-up or a full-width donation page? 

I wrote an article all about pop-up forms a couple of months back. The TL;DR is, they serve different purposes. 

At the beginning of your year-end campaign, I recommend using a full-width donation page with all of the persuasive messaging and design elements in the checklist above. In the first couple of weeks, you’re familiarizing everyone with the campaign. 

As December rolls along, though, you can introduce a pop-up version of your year-end donation page in situations where people are already familiar with the campaign, such as:

• Emails and texts to existing donors
• Social media posts promoting a limited-time match or progress update
• Retargeting ads for people who have already visited your full-width page 

If possible, it’s even better to A/B test your full-width page and the pop-up version to see which performs better. You can do this by…

• Splitting an email or text list in half and sending one version to each group
• Using an ad platform’s built-in A/B testing functionality or setting up two identical ads linking to the different page formats 

This is just one of many things you can A/B test before or during your campaign to maximize results. 

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The Final Word: If you need a little accountability, let me be the one to say, it’s not too early to develop your year-end donation experience. Start by setting up your year-end donation page and the thank-you messages that will follow each gift, so these boxes are checked by October and you can move on to writing and designing promotional content. 

Here’s to being done by December with all the prep work, so you can spend the last month of the year engaging with your supporters (and planning for next year)!