Nonprofit Fundraising: Powering Through the End-of-the-Year Push?

In June this year, I accepted the volunteer Chapter Director position for the Silicon Valley chapter of One Brick, a nonprofit that I've been deeply involved in since 2009. It's more work than I anticipated, but it's rewarding to be making a difference.

As an event manager and member of our social media team, I've always been aware of the annual campaign, take advantage of IBM's automatic payroll deduction plan to donate throughout the year, and donate online when the annual campaign kicks off on Giving Tuesday.

As a chapter director, I found myself immersed in the fundraising process: writing and sending fundraising emails to my chapter members, creating social media tiles and a small video, and taking responsibility for meeting the donation goal for my chapter of the organization.

In the midst of this end-of-year flurry of activity, I noticed that my personal email filled with donation requests which made me curious about end-of-the-year charitable giving. Not surprisingly, I turned to Charity Navigator, the "nation's largest and most-utilized evaluator of charities" to satisfy my curiosity. All of those fundraising letters obviously pay off: 31% of all giving occurred in December and 12% of that in the final three days of the year.

Now that I'd answered that question, I found a few more interesting giving facts from Charity Navigator including:

• 58% of people share information about charities on social networking because they feel it makes an impact.
• 62.6 million Americans volunteered in 2013 for a total of 7.7 billion hours. That service is worth an estimated value of $173 billion.
• Volunteers are almost twice as likely to donate to charity than non-volunteers.
• 69% of Americans donate to charity and 64% of donations are made by women.
• The average annual household charitable donation is $2,974.
• Americans donated $358.4 billion in 2014, 5.4% more than in 2013.

Have you made a donation to your favorite nonprofit yet? Did you know that even small amounts —$10 or $20 — make a difference? Don't delay — you only have a few more days to take advantage of the 2015 tax deduction. Happy Giving.