Thank Your Donors Before GivingTuesday, Not With the Appeal

Your donors hear from you when you need something. That is the nature of the work, and nobody holds it against you. But it means the one piece of mail from you all year that does not ask for anything gets remembered differently from everything else.

The question is when to send it. The answer is: before the asking starts.

How much rides on December

The 2026 M+R Benchmarks Study, covering 2025, found that nonprofits received 37% of all their online revenue in December. The last week of the year brought in 10% of the year's online revenue, and December 31 alone brought in 4%.

M+R's figures are online giving only. Blackbaud Institute's 2025 Trends in Giving, drawn from more than 7,500 organizations, puts the fourth quarter at 36.1% of annual revenue and December at about 18% of all giving.

Either way, the last six weeks of the year are when your donors are deciding. GivingTuesday is Tuesday, December 1 this year, and year-end appeals tend to cluster around it.

How many donors come back

The Fundraising Effectiveness Project, run by the AFP Foundation and GivingTuesday, published its full-year 2025 report in April. Overall donor retention was 43.3%. For first-time donors it was 18.9%. For repeat donors, 59.3%.

Dollars were up 5.0% while the number of donors fell 3.6%. Fewer people are giving more. That makes every donor you keep worth more than they used to be, and it makes the second gift, the one that turns a new donor into a repeat donor, the most valuable thing in your file.

Numbers I am not going to give you

This is the part where most articles on donor thank-yous tell you that 93% of donors would give again if they were thanked properly. That figure is attributed to Penelope Burk's donor research, and I could not find it on her own firm's site. It appears to come from her book, Donor-Centered Fundraising, which first came out more than twenty years ago. Her firm does report survey figures on donor-centered thanks, but they are what donors say they intend to do, not what they did.

The "30% of giving happens in December" figure is the same story. I could only trace it to blogs repeating older numbers, and the current data does not support it. The current figures are the 37% and 18% above.

And one finding that cuts the other way, which you should know about. In 2023, Anya Samek and Chuck Longfield published a randomized trial in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics. About 500,000 new donors were randomly assigned to get a thank-you phone call or not. The calls made no difference to whether they gave again.

That study tested phone calls, not cards, and new donors, not your whole list. But I am not going to tell you a card will raise your retention rate. I could not find a controlled test of thank-you cards, and the closest test I could find says gratitude alone does not do it. What a card can do is be the one contact that does not ask, so the contact that does ask lands on a donor who has already heard from you as a person.

The timing that works

Send it before GivingTuesday, not with the appeal. A thank-you card stuffed in with a reply envelope is an appeal with a thank-you card in it, and donors can tell the difference. Mailed by November 18, it lands the week of Thanksgiving, with a few quiet days before the asking begins.

Thanksgiving is the cleanest occasion for it. It is about gratitude by definition, it sidesteps the religious-or-secular question entirely, and it arrives before the December stack. Our Thanksgiving cards work for exactly this. If Christmas fits your list better, a congregation will welcome a religious card, and a mixed donor or corporate-partner list is safer with something secular.

Say one concrete thing. "Because of you, 400 families ate this year" beats "Thank you for your support." One real number from your own program does more than a paragraph of warmth.

Ask for nothing. Not even a soft ask. No reply card, no "there is still time to give." The card's whole value is that it is not asking.

For a card to land the week of Thanksgiving, the order needs to be in during the first week of November. The dates are in The Thanksgiving Card Deadline, and they apply this week.

The short version

December is when your donors decide, and fewer than half of them come back each year. Thank them before you ask them, with a card that has no ask in it. The designs we pick for nonprofits and faith organizations are on our page for nonprofits.