What Worked Last Year Won't Work This December — Here's What We're Doing Differently for Every Client
What every nonprofit leader needs to know before year-end giving season closes in.
Your nonprofit is losing up to 16% of its email list every single year.
Unsubscribes. Bounces. People who signed up once, drifted away, and never came back.
And if you are not actively replacing them — right now, before Giving Tuesday — your nonprofit year-end fundraising campaign is already starting from a smaller audience than last year's.
That is not a 2027 problem.
That is a right now problem.
Here is what makes 2026 different from every year before it: the strategies that reliably worked twelve months ago are producing weaker results today. The inbox is noisier. Attention is scarcer. Donors are more discerning about what they open, what they read, and what moves them to give.
Which means the nonprofits that adapt their email marketing strategy now — before the campaign season sprint begins — are the ones that will hit their goals in December.
The ones that do not adapt will wonder why the same playbook produced half the results.
I have been running nonprofit fundraising email campaigns for over a decade. And this is the first time I have felt genuinely compelled to say: what I told you last year needs an update.
Here are the three most important changes we are making for every single client this year-end giving season — and why.
First: Here Is What I Would Have Told You Twelve Months Ago
Because I think you deserve to know when I have changed my mind — and why.
A year ago, here is what I would have confidently recommended for a nonprofit year-end fundraising campaign:
✅ More emails equal more donations
✅ Emails plus one hard copy appeal
✅ A clean, scrubbed email list
✅ Storytelling subject lines
✅ No match donor, no problem
✅ Four to six warm-up emails and that is enough
✅ One post-donation gratitude email
Today, in 2026, my opinions have shifted on nearly every single one of these.
Here are the three changes that matter most.
Change 1: How to Grow Your Nonprofit Email List Before Giving Tuesday — Starting Now
This is the change that keeps me up at night when I think about what is coming in November.
Here is the nonprofit email list growth timeline as I have watched it unfold:
2020–2021: Email lists grew with very little effort. Subscribers came in easily and stayed.
2022–2024: Lists started shrinking quietly. First-time donors began disappearing. The decline was real but slow enough that most nonprofit teams did not feel alarmed enough to act.
2025: Lists shrunk again — more noticeably. Teams that had not focused on nonprofit email list growth really had to crawl their way to the finish line in December.
2026: According to 2026 M+R Benchmarks Report, nonprofits are now losing between 12% and 16% of their email subscribers every single year to unsubscribes and bounces.
Every. Single. Year.
Which means if your nonprofit is not actively rebuilding its list by at least 12–16% annually, the audience your year-end fundraising campaign depends on is getting smaller — quietly, consistently, and with compounding consequences that show up most painfully in your December numbers.
There are roughly five months until Giving Tuesday.
Five months to build the audience your campaign will live or die on.
That window is open right now. And it will not feel urgent until it is already too late to do anything about it — which is exactly how nonprofits end up scrambling in November wondering why the campaign is not converting.
Start building your nonprofit email list now.
Here are two resources to help:
➡️ 14 Ways to Find Your Next 100 Email Subscribers — If your list has been stagnant for months or you are starting from scratch, this is exactly where to begin. Fourteen specific, immediately actionable strategies you can start using this week.
➡️ Four Ways Nonprofits Are Growing Their Audience — Real examples from real organizations doing nonprofit email list growth right now, so you can see what it actually looks like in practice.
Change 2: Why More Emails Could Actually Hurt Your Nonprofit Fundraising Campaign in 2026 — And What to Do Instead
I know. This one is counterintuitive coming from me.
For years I have been the person telling nonprofit leaders to send more emails — because more emails, sent consistently to a warm audience, genuinely does produce more donations.
That is still true.
But here is what has changed in the current email marketing for nonprofits landscape: with the explosion of AI-generated content flooding inboxes everywhere, sending more emails has never been easier. Which means inboxes have never been more crowded. Which means the bar for what gets opened, read, and acted on has never been higher.
Emails that feel generic get deleted.
Emails that feel like they came from a real human being with something genuinely worth saying get opened — and they get replied to, forwarded, and donated to.
So the question for your nonprofit fundraising email strategy is no longer just how many emails. It is which emails, when, and in what sequence.
This year-end giving season we are experimenting with something we are calling the inverted bell curve approach — and here is what it looks like in practice:
The week of Giving Tuesday: 4–5 emails — high frequency during the highest-urgency window when donor intent is strongest
The weeks of December 7, 14, and 21: 1 email per week — giving donors breathing room and making each email feel like an event rather than noise
The week of December 28: 4–5 emails — a final urgency push to close the nonprofit year-end fundraising campaign strong before December 31
The total email volume across the thirty-day campaign period is roughly the same as what we have always sent. What changes is the distribution.
Here is why this matters psychologically for nonprofit donor cultivation: when donors receive four or five emails in the first week of a campaign, they engage or they do not — and then they expect that pace to continue. When the frequency drops in the middle weeks, each email that arrives carries more weight. It does not feel like another blast in a blizzard. It feels like something worth opening.
Then when the final push arrives in the last week of December, the urgency is real — and the donors who have been warming throughout the campaign are primed to act.
High quality over high volume. Intentional sequencing over relentless sending. Every email in your nonprofit year-end fundraising campaign earning its place in the inbox rather than taking it for granted.
That is the shift.
Change 3: Match Donors Are No Longer Optional in Your Year-End Giving Campaign — They Are Required
For years I have strongly recommended that our clients secure a match donor before launching their nonprofit year-end fundraising campaign.
Because they work. Dramatically, consistently, and for a reason rooted deeply in donor psychology — a matched gift makes the donor feel like her contribution is worth twice as much, which makes the decision to give twice as easy.
This year we are no longer recommending match donors for nonprofit fundraising campaigns.
We are requiring them.
Here is what that looks like in practice:
Ideally, before your year-end giving campaign ever goes public, you have already raised 25% of your fundraising goal privately — through a match donor, a major donor, or a combination of both.
Which means if your nonprofit fundraising goal is $100,000, you walk into the campaign with $25,000 already secured before a single email goes out.
That money does two things simultaneously. It gives the campaign immediate credibility — donors can see that serious supporters are already behind this. And it creates urgency — because a matched gift has a deadline, and deadlines move people to act in a way that open-ended campaigns simply do not.
It can be a Giving Tuesday match donor.
It can be a year-end match donor.
It can be a match that supports both campaigns.
But it needs to exist before your nonprofit year-end fundraising campaign launches — which means the conversation with your potential match donor needs to happen now. Not in October. Not after Giving Tuesday. Now.
If you are not sure how to approach that conversation, I have written a free fill-in-the-blank email template that makes the ask feel natural rather than awkward.
The Bottom Line on Nonprofit Year-End Fundraising Campaigns in 2026
The nonprofits that will hit their fundraising goals this December are not the ones working the hardest in November.
They are the ones who started growing their nonprofit email list in July.
They are the ones who locked in their match donor in August.
They are the ones who had a warm, engaged, growing audience ready to receive the year-end giving campaign before it ever launched — so that when the emails went out, they landed on donors who already knew the stories, already trusted the mission, and were already looking for an invitation to give.
That window is open right now.
Five months is enough time to build something that changes what December looks like for your nonprofit.
But only if you start now.
Want a team to run your nonprofit year-end fundraising campaign completely on your behalf?
The email list growth strategy. The match donor outreach. The Giving Tuesday email strategy. The warm-up sequence. The campaign emails. The gratitude follow-up. All of it — done completely for you by a team that has run these campaigns for nonprofits year after year and knows exactly what produces results in the current landscape.
That is exactly what we do at Out in the Boons.
Let's talk about your year-end campaign →
And if you are not ready for that conversation yet — start with the free resources above. Build the list. Find the match donor. Sharpen the email strategy.
December will feel different if you do.