beyond Blue links: Winning Donor Acquisition When AI Answers First

Upcoming webinar: Beyond Blue Links: Winning Donor Acquisition When AI Answers First, featuring experts from Streetlight Digital and the Crohn's & Colitis Foundation.

Streetlight’s webinar coming up in October is critical for our nonprofit friends. Whether you’re in the Direct Response world or peer-to-peer fundraising, every nonprofit leader should take the time to understand how to get your nonprofit visible when AI Overviews become the first answer to many online queries.

AI Overviews now answer many informational questions before a user ever reaches a website. For nonprofits, this means a visible drop in nonbrand organic clicks and CTR, while donor-ready intent such as donate and brand terms remains stronger. This session shows how to measure the impact, protect visibility, and rebuild top-funnel reach without relying on blue links alone.

Our webinar will share a simple diagnostic scoreboard that any nonprofit can replicate. Participants learn how to track AIO presence rate, the CTR gap when AI Overviews appear versus when they do not, the impressions versus clicks gap that widens over time, and performance on action-intent queries. The goal is to understand the pattern before choosing tactics.

Next, our team will cover how to compete for both discovery and selection. Nonprofits will learn how to earn citations in AI-generated summaries through answer-focused content, expert validation, FAQ schema, and entity clarity on deep pages. We will show you how to turn informational content into info-plus-action pages that offer real utility through tools, downloads, sign-ups, or helpful next steps that an AI box cannot replace.

From there, we apply Search Everywhere Optimization. Attendees learn where AI gathers its answers, what can be influenced, and what cannot be controlled. The session breaks down visibility sources across owned pages, knowledge listings, third-party directories, reviews, and public reference sites. This helps teams spend effort where it actually changes outcomes.

Finally, the session covers the current state of Google Ad Grants and where paid media still creates lift. The presentation closes with three practical ways to recoup lost informational reach using GA4 lookalikes, contextual native, and YouTube so nonprofits can continue growing donor pipelines even as AI reshapes search behavior.

Every nonprofit leader should attend this webinar, it doesn’t have to be so complicated to be found, but you do need to learn the next steps in the AIO world!

The Art and Science of a Great Comms Schedule

Last week's webinar on “The Power of Personalized Engagement” had some of the best chat energy we’ve seen in a while.

One thing that kept coming up: folks kept wanting a real comms schedule they could look at. And for good reason! Building a comms schedule that aligns all your channels is truly both an art and a science. The challenge is that the value isn't in the calendar itself. The value is in the audience analysis, channel strategy, fundraising goals, and performance data that drive the calendar. Every communications plan is built from the ground up around an organization's unique audiences, objectives, timelines, and resources.

Last week's webinar focused on just one channel: mobile. But building out a comprehensive comms schedule really brings all channels together into a coordinated strategy that delivers the right message to the right audience at the right time. We thought it would be helpful to share the four pillars we use when developing communications strategies with our clients:

Timing

When a message lands matters as much as what it says. Registration, fundraising minimums, event day, and post-event thank-yous all have different urgency windows, and your cadence should shift with them, not stay flat all season.

Channels

Email, SMS, and social all play different roles. The mistake we see most often is treating them as interchangeable rather than sequencing them so each channel does the job it's best suited for, at the moment a participant actually needs it.

Streetlight tip: Before sending any message, ask yourself: "Why is this channel the best channel for this audience, right now?" If you can't answer that question, rethink the channel, the timing, or the content.

Audiences

Not every participant is at the same stage. A first-time fundraiser six weeks out needs different support than a veteran team captain three days before the event. Segmenting by behavior and stage, not just by list, is what makes messages feel relevant instead of generic.

Creative

Even perfect timing and targeting fall flat if the message itself doesn't match the moment. Creative needs to flex in tone and urgency alongside the calendar, not stay static from kickoff to event day.

Streelight tip: Review your last five participant messages. If they all sound roughly the same, you're probably missing opportunities to reflect where different supporters are in their journey.

These four pillars work the best when they are built together, not as separate checklists. That alignment is where we spend a lot of time with our clients, and it’s what turns a generic drip into a comms program participants actually respond to.

If you want to learn more about developing a comms schedule tailored to your specific needs, reach out and let us know. We’d love to help.

The Next Great Campaign Idea Might Already Be Within

How DAV turned a decade-old digital campaign into a thriving peer-to-peer program, and what it taught us about looking inward

We'd love for you to take a listen to this episode of the P2P Soapbox, where our valued clients at Disabled American Veterans (DAV) share the story behind the remarkable growth of their peer-to-peer program, Field of Flags. The idea had been ruminating within their organization for some time. Through an opportunity assessment with Streetlight Digital, we were able to help bring it to life. And what a life it's taken on! In just four years, registrations have grown 473% and net revenue has climbed more than 2,000%.

On the season six finale of the P2P Soapbox, host Marcie Maxwell sat down with Laura Rusche, Strategic Fundraising Priorities Manager at DAV, to talk about how Field of Flags began as a digital fundraiser nearly a decade ago and evolved into one of DAV's signature peer-to-peer campaigns. What began as flags flown at DAV's national headquarters became a community-driven, DIY program with fields planted in all 50 states, an outward, public expression of gratitude to veterans.

What we love most about this story is that the vision was DAV's own. They paid close attention to their supporters, recognized organic momentum where it was already building, and had the instinct to imagine something bigger. That direction was theirs.

Where we were proud to help was in bringing it to life. Through an opportunity assessment, Streetlight worked alongside DAV to refine the vision, understand what teams across the organization saw as opportunities, align stakeholders around a shared plan, and map out a phased, achievable path to growth. The result was a clear business case and a step-by-step roadmap. It had the foundation that turned a promising idea into a funded, scalable program.

If you're sitting on a program with untapped potential, or wondering how to make the case for it internally, Laura's story is a great reminder that the best place to start is often by looking inward.

[Listen to the full episode of the P2P Soapbox with Laura Rusche.]

Curious how an opportunity assessment could help bring your next idea to life? [Get in touch with the Streetlight Digital team.]

Trust, Friction, and the Future of Fundraising

Our Biggest Takeaways from Bridge 2026

Our direct response team recently spent three days at The Bridge to Integrated Marketing & Fundraising Conference, and we came home with pages of notes, sore feet from many hallway conversations (and some karaoke, of course!), and one very clear realization: The fundamentals of fundraising are not being replaced, they are being rewritten in real time. People still give to people. Trust is still earned, not assumed. Donors still want to feel something before they give something. What is changing is how quickly that trust has to be built, and across how many more channels it now has to travel. 

Here is the version of Bridge 2026 we would tell a colleague over coffee: the sessions that stuck with us, the stats that made us pause, and the ideas we can’t wait to bring back to our clients. 

Trust Is the Currency 

Keynote speaker Americus Reed II, a professor at the Wharton School, presents a reframe on donor identity.

Opening keynote speaker Americus Reed II, a professor at the Wharton School, set the tone for the entire conference with a simple reframe: nonprofits are not just in the donation business, they are in the identity business. Every donor is asking three questions of the organizations they support. Who am I? What do I believe in? Who will I become? The nonprofits that can answer those questions, Reed argued, are the ones that earn something far more significant than a single gift. 

He described this as an identity ladder, climbing from information and awareness at the base, through engagement and trust, up to identity, advocacy, generosity, and finally legacy. Donations, he reminded the room, are often not the only currency an organization can earn. Attention, self-expression, and belonging matter too. 

The most memorable line of the morning: if you are hiding from being a brand, you are making a mistake. Beautiful brands connect who you are with who your donors are, or want to become. Think of Apple. It gives its users language, creates community, and turns customers into voluntary ambassadors. Reed's challenge to the room was to build a community worth belonging to, one where people naturally invite others in, and to never let anyone else tell your story for you. As competition for attention grows, he argued, the real competitive advantage shifts from budget to trust. 

The Friction Problem, and the Clock That Is Ticking 

We kicked off day one with a challenge we would encourage every nonprofit marketer to try. Pull out your phone right now and attempt to donate to your own organization. How long did it take? How many fields did you have to fill in? How many times did you almost give up? 

If that experience felt frustrating, your donors are almost certainly feeling the same friction. Every extra click, form field, or moment of hesitation is a small tax on conversion, and those small taxes add up. 

That challenge landed next to a trend we've been watching for a while now: charitable donor participation in the U.S. has been declining for years. Nathan Chappell put a hard number to it during his session. We have lost two-thirds of individual donors over the last 20 years. If that trajectory continues, participation hits zero in 24 years. Reversing it starts with rethinking how we engage supporters and removing the barriers standing between intent and action, starting with friction at the moment of giving.

One Size Fits None: Generational Giving Strategies 

A session from Arreva made a case that many organizations already suspect but rarely act on: a single fundraising strategy cannot serve four very different generations of donors. The pressure is real. One in three nonprofits are already experiencing government funding disruptions, and a proposed $163 billion cut to domestic discretionary spending is on the table. Total giving dollars are still climbing, but who is giving, and why, is changing fast. 

The generational snapshot, in brief: 

• Boomers (ages 61 to 79) are legacy givers who trust institutions and hold the majority of current wealth. They respond to personal thank yous, direct mail, and phone calls. 

• Gen X (ages 45 to 60) are results driven givers at the peak of their careers and giving capacity. They want efficiency: automated giving options, smart reporting, and outreach through email, LinkedIn, and Facebook. 

• Millennials (ages 29 to 44) are purpose led givers who fund causes, not just organizations. They expect transparency, real time donation tracking, and engagement through social campaigns, real stories, Instagram, and peer to peer fundraising. 

• Gen Z (ages 13 to 28) are change seekers who may not hold significant wealth today, but represent real lifetime value. They respond to authenticity, interactivity, and fast impact content on TikTok and SMS, often introduced by creators and influencers they already trust. 

A wealth transfer is coming over the next 20 to 30 years, and 70 percent of donor wealth currently sits with Boomers and Gen X. The session's framework for building an ask that works across generations was simple and sticky: hook, heart, hand. Hook them with urgency or curiosity. Move them with a concrete picture of transformation at a specific gift level. Give them a clear, time bound call to action. Bake the stewardship plan in from day one, not as an afterthought. 

When AI Answers First, Trust Has to Travel Further 

Streetlight’s Vijay Malavia (Director, Digital Media) and Lizzie Russell (Director, Direct Response Strategy) presented alongside valuable client Traci Osborne of the Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation.

Our own Streetlight Digital team led a session at Bridge this year, titled “Beyond Blue Links: Winning Donor Acquisition When AI Answers First,” alongside our client, Traci Osborne of the Crohn's & Colitis Foundation. The premise: the traditional search journey is changing. People still have questions. They still need information, support, and connection. But increasingly, those answers arrive directly through Google and AI tools before a supporter ever lands on a nonprofit's website. 

That makes trust more important, not less. The opportunity for nonprofits is not to produce more content. It is to produce content that is clear, accurate, expert-informed, and grounded in real, lived experience, the kind of content that helps a supporter feel confident in an organization before they are ever ready to donate, register, or advocate. Traci and the Crohn's & Colitis Foundation team shared how they are meeting people where they are, from educational resources to practical tools to lived experience content that AI can summarize, but never truly replace. 

The Infrastructure of Trust: Email Deliverability 

Not every session at Bridge was about creativity. One of the most practical hours covered the unglamorous, essential work of email deliverability. Spam filtering keeps getting smarter, security and authentication requirements keep getting stricter, and machine learning is changing what “reaching the inbox” even means. 

The diagnosis checklist organizations should run regularly includes: IP reputation, sending practices, spam traps, technical setup, the reputation of “neighbors” on a shared IP, domain reputation, engagement rates, and even the content itself. Deliverability is not a one-time setup. It is an ongoing relationship with inbox providers, and case studies from organizations like the Statue of Liberty & Ellis Island Foundation and Rails to Trails Conservancy showed how quickly a strong list can become a liability without attention to the fundamentals. 

Built to Last: Lessons from Reading Is Fundamental 

One of the most useful case studies at the conference came from Reading Is Fundamental, the nation's largest children's literacy organization, and Sage Communications Group, on building a major-donor case for support from scratch. Their challenge: no new building, no new program to announce, and a narrative that had moved on from the pandemic-era conversation about learning loss. RIF had also lost its federal funding in 2011, adding urgency to the need for a compelling private-philanthropy case. 

Their first instinct, a storybook concept, did not work. The tone was off, the framing did not align with a major donor audience, and the materials clashed with an audience of corporations, philanthropists, and family foundations, rather than RIF's typical bright, playful, kid-centric brand. They landed instead on a suite of materials: a soft-touch, coffee-table-style casebook, a highly customizable viewbook for major donors and foundations, and a proposal document for more formal asks, unified under a distinct campaign name and identity called READ. 

The lessons that translate to any organization building a major case for support: 

• Know your audience, and be honest when it does not match your everyday brand voice. 

• Give the campaign its own visual identity that still feels connected to your core brand. 

• Invest in photography early. Staged, overused, or thin photo libraries undercut even the best copy. 

• Balance donor centricity with your mission. The people you serve are the hero of the story. Donors are the supporting characters who make the story possible. Do not sugarcoat the need, but do use numbers your donor can actually visualize. 

• Get buy in from key stakeholders early, and approve the copy before scaling into design. 

• Make every deliverable editable, with base versions built for each audience segment from the start. 

Stronger Than the Moment 

We closed the conference the same way it opened, on the idea that trust is the real currency of a strong nonprofit brand. When donors see their own identities, values, and aspirations reflected back to them, they do more than give. They engage, they advocate, and they become part of a community worth belonging to. 

That is the thread running through every session we have recapped here: remove the friction that erodes trust, speak to each generation in the language it actually trusts, show up with content built for a world where AI answers first, give your program a voice people want to text back, protect the quiet infrastructure that gets your message delivered at all, build a case for support that treats your mission's story honestly, and keep listening long after the ask is made. 

We left Bridge 2026 energized, and we are already bringing these ideas back to the nonprofits we serve. If you want to talk through how any of this applies to your program, we would love to hear from you. 

Webinar Alert! The Power of Personalized Engagement: How Breakthrough T1D Increased Fundraising with a Mobile-First Strategy

Is Mobile the Missing Piece in your fundraising strategy?

REGISTER NOW > 

Speakers from Breakthrough T1D, Streetlight Digital, and Nuclavis will discuss how a mobile-first strategy helped increase engagement and fundraising results.

Join us for a candid conversation on August 27th with Streetlight Digital, Nuclavis, and Breakthrough T1D on what it takes to build a more connected supporter experience through SMS that will increase participant engagement and raise funds.

It's a critical time to have this conversation because everyone's talking about mobile. But how's it really going? Who are the ones who are actually seeing gains? What's the strategy behind a successful program? How do you layer it into your plans to get out of it what you really need? 

We're thrilled to break down all the nitty gritty on August 27, at 1pm ET for a behind-the-scenes look at how our client Breakthrough T1D put into action a practical and successful mobile-first strategy that genuinely connected with supporters and achieved critical results.

You'll hear directly from the Breakthrough T1D team about their experience, key learnings, and the role SMS played in their participant journey. We'll also explore how the partnership between Breakthrough T1D, Streetlight Digital, and Nuclavis combined strategy, project leadership, and mobile engagement technology to bring the program to life.

Helping Make-A-Wish America Reimagine Youth Fundraising Through Student WishMakers

There are projects you build, and then there are projects you get to pour your whole heart into.

Our work with Make-A-Wish America on Student WishMakers was one of those: a chance to work shoulder to shoulder with their team to take a big idea from strategic assessment to launch, reimagining youth fundraising under one clear, inspiring peer-to-peer program.

Make-A-Wish already had a strong foundation for youth fundraising, with existing programs that engaged students, schools, campuses, and local communities. But there was an opportunity to bring those efforts together into a more cohesive program that could create a clearer on-ramp for youth activation, peer-to-peer fundraising, and chapter engagement.

Streetlight began with a specialized assessment focused on program positioning, audience needs, naming structure, messaging, storytelling, activation strategy, resource needs, and digital presence. The goal was to help Make-A-Wish establish a stronger foundation for a reimagined youth fundraising program: one with a unified brand identity, a consistent messaging framework, and a flexible structure chapters could use ahead of the new school year.

One of the best parts of this project was the way the work happened. We got to work closely with the Make-A-Wish America team, combining their deep understanding of the mission, chapters, and youth audiences with Streetlight’s strategy, creative, digital, and fundraising expertise. From kickoff through launch, our team also led project management end to end, something many agencies leave to the client. That meant Make-A-Wish could stay focused on the vision while we kept the moving pieces aligned.

The result was Student WishMakers, a refreshed national identity designed to unite youth-led fundraising efforts under one empowering brand. Student WishMakers is now a nationwide youth fundraising movement powered by Make-A-Wish America, giving students of all ages a way to raise funds, rally their communities, and help grant life-changing wishes for children facing critical illnesses.

Once the strategy was in place, Streetlight worked alongside Make-A-Wish to bring the program experience to life across the website, messaging, visuals, and email journey. Our team supported the work across strategy, copywriting, UX, design, development, supporting visual assets, and email communications, including autoresponders, milestone messages, and coaching emails.

The website needed to introduce the new program clearly, make the audience pathways easy to understand, and inspire students, schools, chapters, and supporters to take action. The visual direction helped Student WishMakers feel distinct and youth-friendly while staying connected to the Make-A-Wish brand. The copy brought the program’s voice to life in a way that felt empowering, joyful, and easy for chapters to use.

For Streetlight, this project is a strong example of what happens when strategy, creative, technology, and fundraising expertise work together. Also, when trust and collaboration guide the process. We were grateful not only to help shape the program, but to work alongside a client team so committed to creating something useful, inspiring, and scalable for chapters and students.

We are grateful to have played a role in helping bring Student WishMakers to life. We can’t wait to see how students, schools, chapters, and communities make it their own.

Because when young people are given a clear path to lead, rally, and fundraise, they help make wishes come true.

Giving Season is Won Before the Ask

10 Things You Can Still Do

By Vijay Malavia (Director of Digital Media) and Lizzie Russell (Director, Direct Response Strategy)

Streetlight Digital
July 2026

It is July, and giving season is five months out, which means most of what determines December is still in your hands. The organizations that win the final month are rarely the ones bidding hardest on December 31. They are the ones that spent the runway building awareness, cleaning their data, warming their donors, and testing their pages. Here is what we would prioritize between now and then, drawn from what we see across our client accounts.

Build demand now

1. Fund awareness before the season, not just gift capture at the end

Paid search and lower-funnel social are harvesting tools. They capture people who already know you, searched the category, or were close to giving. The catch is that at any given moment only a few donors in a hundred are ready to give, a pattern the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute calls the 95:5 rule, and much nonprofit spend concentrates on reaching that small in-market group. The awareness that moves everyone else toward giving looks non-existent in a last-click report. Brand media, PR, a Reddit thread, a CTV spot, a mention in AI-Powered search: none produce the final click, and all create the demand it captures.

What to do now: For many organizations, this may mean carving out 10 to 20% of paid media for demand creation, using channels that are good at building familiarity like CTV, online video, and digital audio. Then judge it on assisted paths, brand lift, and branded search response, not last-click donations.

2. Watch branded search as your earliest read on year-end demand

People do not wake up on Giving Tuesday and decide from scratch who deserves their money. By the time someone types "donate to [your org]," the decision is mostly made, which makes branded query volume the cleanest leading indicator you have for year-end demand. It moves before the donation does, downstream of the video someone half-watched in September, the peer who mentioned you, the AI answer that named you when a donor asked who to trust.

What to do now: track your share of branded search against comparable organizations in Google Trends, a free check that tends to move months before giving does, and fund a brand defense campaign so you are not paying a competitor's toll to appear for your own name.

3. Make your site quotable, because AI answers shape trust before the click

A June 2026 SparkToro and Similarweb analysis found that 68% of U.S. Google searches ended without a click in the first four months of the year, up from about 60% in 2024. Being cited also stopped tracking with ranking: Ahrefs found the overlap between top-ten organic results and the domains cited in AI Overviews fell from 76% in mid-2025 to 38% by early 2026, and eMarketer projects more than 45% of U.S. internet users will use generative AI for search by 2030, up from 34% this year. An answer engine can now shape a donor's trust in your work, using sources you have never audited, before that donor reaches a page you control. The sharpest near-term hit lands on Google Grant accounts, whose informational queries ("what is [cause]," "where does my donation go") are exactly what AI Overviews absorb. That is a click-volume problem, not a return-on-spend one.

What to do now: build citation-ready evidence pages that are dated, plainly authored, expert-reviewed where the topic warrants it, and easy to quote, add structured data, and invite loyal visitors to mark you as a Preferred Source. For clients with acceptable category risk, this is also the quarter to qualify ChatGPT's ad inventory as a small pilot.

4. Build a story library

According to M+R's 2026 Benchmarks, new online donors drove 31% of 2025 online revenue but came back at just 24%, against 66% for prior donors, which means roughly three in four first-time donors did not return. A bigger revenue year built on unstewarded new donors is a weaker file wearing a strong quarter's clothing. The donors who stay are the ones who come to feel like part of the work, and that feeling is built through story: the person a gift reached, the outcome it created, the mission a donor is now part of. Story is the asset that does that job, and it is also the asset many teams are scrambling for when the season arrives.

What to do now: gather your donor and impact stories over the summer and assemble them with the end uses mapped out. One authentic story, captured once, can be recut into a long-form stewardship piece, a vertical for social, an awareness video, and a short proof point for retargeting. These stories do their work in the awareness push before the season and the follow-up after a gift. 

Fuel and direction

5. Feed the platforms better conversion data to get better results

Google and Meta have absorbed targeting, bidding, and placement into automation. What remains in your hands is the conversion signal you feed those systems and the creative you give them to serve. Most nonprofit accounts still pass a single generic donation event, then wonder why the algorithm optimizes toward shallow volume. A bidding system can only chase the outcomes you report to it, so the signal has to be three things at once: complete, safe, and fast. Complete means the offline and recurring gifts that never touch the platform still make it back in. Safe means the data respects consent and sensitive-category rules by design, not as a cleanup step. Fast means the platform hears about a conversion quickly, because latency during peak hours leaves bidding optimizing on stale information at the moment volume spikes.

What to do now: pass gift value, not a flat event, separate one-time gifts from monthly gifts from leads and advocacy actions, and feed offline and CRM outcomes back through enhanced conversions or the Conversions API with hashed identifiers. Decide before Q4 what data you will and will not pass, which matters most for medical, veterans, and advocacy organizations, since mission data can imply health status or protected characteristics. Get conversions to the platform directly: routing Google Ads conversions through a GA4 import, for example, adds latency you do not want when December 31 bidding depends on real-time feedback. Give creative the same care, with enough variety to hand the system real choices instead of one execution to optimize into the ground.

6. Set guardrails so automation stops spending on your brand and competitors

When every nonprofit floods the same platforms in December, costs climb, and the accounts that suffer most are the ones on autopilot. Performance Max is built to find the path of least resistance, and brand is almost always that path. Without guardrails, it takes credit for demand you owned to begin with, and we have seen accounts where a high percentage of PMax spend and conversions came from brand terms. The same logic runs outward. Non-brand broad match, AI Max, and PMax will also serve against competitor and peer-organization queries, so in the absence of negatives, exclusions, and brand controls you may conquest by accident, at a higher cost, against a donor who wanted someone else. There is also a change with a date on it: starting August 17, 2026, Google adjusts how Target CPA and Target ROAS behave on budget-limited campaigns, moving delivery toward the target you entered and away from the better number you may have been getting, and it will not reset stale targets for you.

What to do now: apply brand exclusions and account-level negatives to stop cannibalization, then decide your conquesting posture on purpose instead of letting the algorithm decide it. Audit your budget-limited campaign targets before August 17 so the repricing does not catch you heading into peak.

Win the moment

7. Hold budget for the late-night peak

This is one of the last real edges on the calendar, because it is one of the few things you can still affect on the night itself. A trend we’ve seen on December 31, a click at 9 PM converted at 53% against 33% at 9 AM, on volume one click apart. Grouped, the two evening hours converted at 56% versus 31% in the morning on nearly identical traffic. Fundraise Up's platform data shows the same 8 to 9 PM peak across U.S. donors, roughly 50% above their annual average. It is possible to exhaust campaign budgets earlier in the day and miss that high-converting window.

What to do now: pace budgets to stay live through the final evening instead of front-loading, and hold a reserve for the last hours of Giving Tuesday and December 31.

8. Break the sameness with a trusted messenger

By December, nonprofit feeds can look similar: an urgent deadline, a matching gift, an affecting image, a donate button. When a donor sees a dozen versions of that appeal, the sameness itself becomes the cost, and polished institutional creative often struggles to break through. A trusted person speaking to the camera is the clearest pattern interrupt available, and both Meta and Google have made it easier to run paid distribution from a creator's own handle instead of the org's page.

What to do now: trust matters more than production value here, so the question is who your audience already believes, whether that is a clinician, a veteran, a caregiver, or a local advocate, instead of who has the largest following. Give that person room to speak to the real objections a donor has, and put paid distribution behind them. Most of the video you need for this already exists in some form and can be recut rather than reshot.

9. Audit Your Donor Experience Before Q4 Traffic Hits

Before the year-end rush, it's worth checking whether your messages are actually landing: deliverability, list hygiene, sender reputation, segmentation, the works. AI-generated inbox summaries and previews are also changing the game, so subject lines and preheaders need to earn the open more than ever. And once someone clicks through, your donation page needs to close the deal, with fast load times, mobile-friendly design, digital wallets, and smart recurring-gift defaults all mattering when traffic spikes.

What to do now: Run a full donor journey audit, from inbox to text to completed gift. Check how your emails render in AI-assisted inboxes, and fix friction points now before Q4 volume hits.

10. Prepare for a More Competitive Fundraising Environment

The 2026 midterm election cycle is expected to create new challenges for year-end fundraising, from increased competition for donor attention to rising costs across fundraising and marketing channels. Political campaigns can drive up demand for advertising inventory and communications resources while flooding inboxes, social feeds, and other media with competing messages. Research from recent election cycles suggests that donor intent to give to charities can soften during peak campaign periods, as some supporters redirect contributions toward political causes or delay their charitable giving amid uncertainty. In major donor markets such as Texas, California, and New York (where political spending is expected to be especially heavy) nonprofits may find themselves competing not only for attention but also for donor dollars. The challenge will be breaking through the sheer volume of election-related content that supporters encounter every day. As a result, coordinated messaging across email, SMS, paid media, social, and other channels will be essential to maintaining visibility and engagement throughout Q4.

What to do now: Review your Q4 fundraising calendar against key election milestones, identify where donor attention may be most fragmented, and build a coordinated multi-channel communications strategy that can cut through election-season noise and keep your mission top of mind.

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Several of these run deeper than a post allows. Two of them we are taking on live at the Bridge Conference on July 30: the move from blue links to AI answers, in 'Beyond Blue Links: Winning Donor Acquisition When AI Answers First,' and on July 31: how SMS turns everyday supporters into active advocates, in Lizzie Russell's session with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. If you are working through any of this before the season starts, come find us there.

Come Find Streetlight at Bridge Conference 2026!

We're heading to Bridge this year! If you'll be there, shoot us an email and let us know. We would love to connect in person. 
We’re thrilled to have Streetlight team members speaking in two sessions alongside wonderful clients and peers in the field. We are looking forward to being part of the conversation around how fundraising, marketing, and technology come together. It's one of our favorite topics.

And if you know Streetlight, you know we also show up for the fun! You'll find us at the various happy hours and social events throughout Bridge. 

If you will be there, be sure to save these sessions and hear what our team is preparing to share.

A conversation with Streetlight Digital, featuring our client Traci Osborne with the Crohns & Colitis Foundation

A conversation with Streetlight Digital and Chesapeake Bay Foundation