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Rachel Burris Rodriguez on Oct 8, 2026, 8:15:01 AM
Two hundred issues. More than 26,000 of you reading every week. That still surprises us in the best way. ❤️
We've covered donor psychology, GivingTuesday timelines, AI prompts, peer-to-peer campaigns, event ads, lapsed donor re-engagement, and a digital advertising campaign that brought in $694K for a single conference.
Through it all, the same principles keep showing up in the campaigns that perform, and with GivingTuesday eight weeks away, this week felt like the right time to bring them together.
The take-home template
With GivingTuesday less than two months out, year-end ad creative is one of those things that's easy to keep pushing until it's urgent. Our free library of 200+ ad templates gives you a starting point for every campaign type — GivingTuesday, year-end appeals, events, peer-to-peer — with design best practices and step-by-step Canva instructions built in. Download a few now so they're ready before the November push.
Snackable snippets
You're doing more than your metrics show 📖
A donation is the last step in a long chain, and if it's the only thing being tracked, a huge amount of real work never shows up in any report. Event registrations, volunteer sign-ups, email sign-ups, and new CRM contacts are all real indicators of engagement. Tracking them shows which channels move people toward giving and gives your team something concrete to point to when making the case for budget.
Re-engage lapsed donors with email mapping 📖
Your unsubscribe list isn't a dead end. Email mapping lets you reach people who have opted out of your emails with display ads as they browse the web, using the email address you already have without sending another email they didn't ask for. It's one of the more underused tools heading into year-end, and it's particularly useful for lapsed donors who still care about the mission but stopped engaging with your inbox.
How to grow your events with digital advertising 📖
Most nonprofit event marketing reaches the people already in your orbit. Digital advertising opens it up to people who haven't heard of you yet. Geofencing reaches attendees of similar nearby events, retargeting follows up with anyone who visited your event page but didn't register, and affinity targeting finds new audiences by interest. The American Association of Endodontists used this combination, along with print and email, to bring in $694K to their annual conference.
For your inspiration folder
Christian Relief Fund connects sponsors directly to individual children in need through a one-to-one model that ran mostly on print, direct mail, and face-to-face outreach for years.
When they added retargeting to the mix, something shifted. Visitors who landed on the sponsorship page and left without completing a form started seeing ads that followed them across the web, keeping the mission visible through the decision window.
Two hundred and sixty-seven conversions and $107,306 in donations later, their director of marketing reflected: "Unlike our more traditional campaigns, we were able to follow the sponsor all the way to the donation, knowing exactly how long they stayed on the page, with all the data that came with it.”