3 Steps to Year-End Fundraising Success

My advice? Any time there is free media support encouraging people to donate to charity, take advantage of it. At a minimum, have an email in your constituents' inboxes that morning. If you have the bandwidth to do more, fine — but at least get that email written and queued up to send.

2. Beef up your knowledge
There are so many free resources available that it can be overwhelming, so choose to invest your learning time in the busy final months of the year on what you believe will have the biggest return in terms of raising money. There are two free guides (that I know of) on Giving Tuesday: one from Campbell and Co. and one from Network for Good. nfpSynergy also offers free reports on a variety of topics for charities in the U.K. and Scotland. There's a free report on using Twitter from Salsa Labs. And those are just the ones I've heard about in the last few days.

You probably won't get all of these read and be able to put the learnings into action in time for this year-end giving season. But choose one of these or another resource that covers something that isn't your core competency. Download the free book or report, glean from it what is useful to you, and then implement that. It there's nothing in it that you can implement, quickly put it aside and move on (the joy of free information).

As you learn how to use a new tool and see the impact it has on fundraising, you will feel re-energized. Fundraising is never boring unless you let it become boring.

3. Act on information
The mailing you send on Dec. 23 will not provide results that you can use by 2014. But every email you send can help you know the next steps to take. Every donor visit or call you make can shape your messaging on the next call. Every email, call or note from a donor can help you sharpen your final efforts for 2014.