What You Should Be Doing in September (Before Year-End Gets Here)

October arrives the same way every year — suddenly.

One week you're thinking about fall campaigns in the abstract. The next, someone's asking about the year-end appeal timeline and you realize you're already behind.

The copy needs to be written, the segments need to be pulled, the board needs to approve the goal, and somehow none of that has started yet.

I've watched this happen at organizations of every size. It's not a planning failure. It's a sequencing failure. Most nonprofits start year-end in October because that's when it feels urgent — but by October, the window to do the work that actually moves the needle has already closed.

The organizations with the most predictable year-end results don't start earlier in October. They start in September, and they don't start with copy. They start with their data.

Year-end fundraising is largely a retention event. The donors most likely to give in November and December are the ones who've given before — and the quality of your results depends heavily on how well you understand that pool going in.

That means September is for looking at your donor file before anyone writes a word of copy. Not to build segments — that comes later — but to understand what you're actually working with.

Three questions worth answering right now:

Donors who gave in 2025 but haven't given yet in 2026 are your highest-priority reactivation target. They're warm. They know you. They made a decision to give once, and something — a missed touchpoint, a communication that didn't land, a life event, or simple inertia — got in the way of a second gift.

The research on lapsed donors consistently shows that recency matters less than most organizations assume. Donors who lapsed one to four years ago often reactivate at higher rates than donors who lapsed six months ago, because the ones who left recently may have left for a reason, while the ones who drifted away years ago often just need to be reminded you exist.

The sector average for reactivation is around 5%. Organizations with a deliberate lapsed donor strategy routinely see 10-15%. The difference is almost entirely in the timing and the message — and both require knowing who you're talking to before you start writing.

Mid-level donors — typically defined as donors giving between $1,000 and $10,000 annually — are the most underleveraged segment in most nonprofit files. They're giving at a level that signals real commitment, but most organizations treat them identically to donors giving $100.

What's worth looking at in September is not just who your mid-level donors are, but whether their giving has changed. A donor who gave $2,500 last year and $1,500 this year is sending a signal. A donor who gave $1,000 consistently for three years and skipped this year is sending a different one. Both are worth a personal touch before a mass year-end appeal goes out.

The organizations that catch these signals in September can respond individually. The ones that catch them in November respond with a form letter.

Last year's year-end campaign almost certainly brought in a cohort of new donors. Statistically, most of them haven't given again. The sector average for first-year retention sits between 19 and 23 percent — which means if you acquired 200 donors in last year's year-end campaign, roughly 155 of them have lapsed without ever making a second gift.

Some of those donors are genuinely gone. But some of them are still reachable — and they're more reachable in September, with a warm touchpoint that isn't an ask, than they will be in November when they're receiving year-end appeals from every organization they've ever supported.

None of this requires a sophisticated CRM or a data team. It requires someone to pull three reports:

1. Donors who gave in 2025 but not yet in 2026.

2. Donors giving between $1,000 and $10,000 whose giving has changed.

3.First-time donors acquired in October-December 2025 who haven't given since.

Those three lists tell you most of what you need to know about how your year-end is likely to go — and more importantly, they tell you where to focus personal attention before the mass campaign goes out.

The organizations I've worked with that do this well don't necessarily have bigger budgets or better copy. They have a clearer picture of their file going in, and they use that picture to make decisions about where personal outreach is worth the time.

A mid-level donor who gets a personal call in September, before the appeal, is significantly more likely to respond to the appeal in November. A lapsed donor who gets a genuine reconnection touchpoint in September is more likely to reactivate than one who gets a year-end appeal cold. A first-time donor who gets an impact update in September, before anyone asks them to give again, is more likely to become a second-time donor.

This is the work that moves year-end numbers. It happens in September, not October.

The first step is understanding what your donor file actually looks like right now — not in the abstract, but in terms of specific numbers. What's your current lapsed donor count? What's your mid-level retention rate? How many first-time donors from last year's campaign are still active?

If you don't have those numbers in front of you, that's exactly what the Donor Revenue Health Check is designed to surface. In twenty minutes, we pull the numbers that tell you where your year-end revenue is most vulnerable and where the highest-leverage opportunities are.

You bring your numbers, or I'll help you pull them. No pitch. No prep required. Within a week, you'll receive a Revenue Stability Snapshot — a short written summary of what we found and the one or two places to focus first.

Book one here.

Ellena Fortner Newsom is a fractional digital fundraising consultant and founder of Nonprofit Bestie.