Three Pillars Every Anniversary Campaign Needs
Three Pillars Every Anniversary Campaign Needs
Is your nonprofit approaching a significant anniversary?
As fundraisers, we know anniversaries are a great time to launch a special campaign and raise additional dollars. Milestone years also bring so many other opportunities to celebrate your work and engage stakeholders - both current and past.
At Evolve Giving Group, we’ve worked on dozens of anniversary campaigns and we know it can be hard to get it right. Many nonprofits set overly ambitious goals without clearly defined need or share ad-hoc anniversary messaging that doesn’t tie to a larger strategy.
To truly capitalize on a milestone year takes foresight and planning. You’ll want to identify your goals, hone your audiences and messaging, understand how the anniversary weaves into your annual campaign and outline the year in advance so that you can maximize the opportunities to engage your stakeholders.
With so much opportunity and so many ideas for your anniversary, it can be hard to know where to focus or how to set yourself up for success. If you’re looking to maximize your anniversary - and I know you are! - here are three pillars you’ll want to include:
1. Celebrate (good times, come on!)
Milestones are worth celebrating. First and foremost, your anniversary is a time to celebrate how far your organization has come and the tremendous impact you have had.
Celebrations can happen in many different ways - through signature events, smaller events, highlighting or honoring key individuals, messaging around major accomplishments and sharing a vision for the future - and they are a great opportunity to re-engage people from your past.
Speaking of engaging people from your past, an anniversary year is a great time to celebrate those who helped you get to where you are today - staff, volunteers, board members, donors, alumni, community members and other stakeholders. Consider forming an anniversary committee of stakeholders who are eager and willing to build momentum in your community. Having ambassadors from different groups and different times in the organization’s history helps broaden your reach to engage a larger audience.
2. Build awareness
Use your anniversary as a time to remind the community of your existence, impact and goals for the future. You want to build excitement and re-engage or newly engage stakeholders.
One way to do this is to showcase folks who have been instrumental in your organization’s history. If it’s your 20th anniversary, consider highlighting 20 people who have made the last 20 years possible or share testimonials from 20 alumni about what the program meant to them.
Re-engaging these present and past contributors will support your fundraising efforts in the long-term. Rather than focusing just on short-term dollars, you’re building and further solidifying relationships that could pay off in years to come.
Another way to build awareness is to share your impact. Keeping with our 20th anniversary example, perhaps you want to share 20 stories about participants you’ve helped. Consider following up with past participants to see where they are today and how your organization has impacted their lives.
3. Fundraise!
Of course, anniversaries are also a huge opportunity to fundraise. And with all fundraising, you want to be intentional and set realistic goals. You also want to make sure that you aren’t cannibalizing your annual campaign and the funds you rely on to run the day-to-day of your organization.
Many organizations use a major anniversary as a time to kick off a significant campaign such as a capital campaign to build a new building or an endowment campaign to secure funds for the future sustainability of the organization.
(For more specific ideas around fundraising during an anniversary year, check out today’s freebie: 4 ways to maximize fundraising during a milestone year.)
There’s so much we can do during an anniversary year and when we organize our activities into three pillars: celebration, awareness building and fundraising, we make it easier on ourselves to plan AND set ourselves up to maximize our anniversary. Happy planning - I can’t wait to see the creative ideas you will come up with!
Meet Lisa
Vice President, Evolve Giving Group. Learn more.