How to plan your December fundraising appeal using Lightful’s Story Builder

Did you know that 17% of annual giving takes place in December? It’s the perfect opportunity to tap into the generosity of your supporters by launching an end of the year fundraising campaign. Whether it’s for Giving Tuesday on 3rd December, a Christmas or Winter Appeal, we’ve got you covered with our new Story Builder template! And it’s got a snazzy new design too. We hope you love it!

If you think it’s too late to start planning an end of year appeal, think again. There’s still plenty of time to start planning! Not quite sure how to get started? We’ve got a template with 20 posts to inspire you to craft your end of year campaign. We’ve designed the story builder template to make it as easy as possible for you to create your campaign.

Plan your fundraising appeal with the Story Builder

Our End of Year Fundraising Appeal template aims to help:

• Inspire you to come up with content ideas
• Save you time by scheduling your content in advance
• Organise all your content from Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn in one place
• Structure your story to tell your message in the most effective way
• Decide on which days to promote your campaign in advance
• See a visual preview of your campaign
• Be more strategic

You can start creating your end of year fundraising campaign now, whilst still scheduling your day-to-day content as usual. We’ve made sure that the analytics will be separate so you can easily see how your campaign performed.

Building your own fundraising appeal

Here’s a step-by-step on how to create your own story in the Story Builder

Log in to the Lightful platform and go to Story Builder.

Click on the “End of Year Fundraising Appeal” to use this template

Give your Story a name – we recommend naming it whatever your appeal name is with the year. For example, Give a Child Hope this Christmas 2019. Adding the year is useful if it is an annual campaign so that next year you can measure how 2020 performed against 2019.

We’ve included 20 posts in this template, which may seem like a lot but remember, it’s spread over December. Plus, you don’t have to use them all if you don’t want to.

Once you’ve clicked on the template, it’s time to start creating your first post! You can see that we’ve included tips on what that first post should include.

We have included suggested days and times but you can change them to what works better for your organisation. Once you’ve added your copy and image, it’s time to schedule it.

If you’ve made a mistake or spotted a spelling mistake, you can edit your scheduled post at any time prior to launch. Just click on the ‘edit’ button and make your changes.

Once you’ve added all your posts (and remember, you don’t need to do this all in one go), don’t forget to click on ‘Launch Story’ so that they will be scheduled.

We are so excited to see what end of year fundraising campaigns you launch!