End of Year Fundraising

For many nonprofit fundraisers, the holiday season is incredibly busy. End-of-year fundraising activities range from toy drives to concerts to holiday galas, plus end-of-year campaigns and solicitations.

The logistics for fundraising events and mailings may need most of your attention, but may also still need to meet your monthly or quarterly goals in other areas, such as grant proposal submissions.

If you have plans to submit grant proposals during the month of December, you probably just want to get them out the door as quickly as possible.

But wait.

Some grantmakers have specific deadlines near the end of the year and their boards meet in December or January to discuss submissions. You’ll definitely want to make time to submit those proposals!

In other cases, when you’re planning to submit a proposal to a grantmaker with an open grant cycle or rolling deadline, you may want to reconsider submitting in December.

Take the time to reach out to the grantmaker and find out whether they will have funds left to award in December or if they have already disbursed all their funding for 2022. You should also inquire about whether their board will even meet to look at the proposal until January.

There are several reasons that you may want to hold onto your proposal until early next year, all relating to more effective fundraising. The added bonus to being selective about the proposals you submit in December is that you may be able to reduce the amount of stress that you have to deal with around the holidays as well.