December can deliver nearly a third of your annual revenue—and just as easily drain your team.
Year-end is harder than ever. Inboxes flood, deadlines collide, and donors expect messages that feel personal and arrive at the right moment across email, SMS, social, and mail… all while your staff deals with everything year-end.
But the solution isn’t more hours; it’s leverage. And used well, AI is perfect for that. With the right AI-powered operating system, you can reactivate lapsed donors and personalize at scale without piling 10× the work onto your team.
In this post, you’ll see where AI creates year-end lift and three plays you can launch now—without burning out your team.
Where Artificial Intelligence Can Create Year-End Leverage
AI isn’t here to replace fundraisers. It’s here to take repetitive work off your plate so you can focus on what matters most: setting the strategy, shaping the story, and building donor relationships.
Here’s how AI creates leverage in December:
- Reactivating lapsed donors at scale
Lapsed donors are one of your most reliable year-end opportunities, but manually pulling lists, writing variants, and scheduling follow-ups can eat days of staff time.
AI can surface the right cohorts, segment them by recency and amount, and draft multiple versions of appeals (gratitude, impact, matching gift) in minutes.
This way you get more reactivations with less manual work. For example, we saw one of our clients reactivated 308% more lapsed donors with an Avid AI-Powered Playbook running in the background.
- Producing campaign assets in minutes
Year-end requires more content, emails, ads, and thank-yous than any other season. And small teams can’t keep up.
An AI system can take your brief and generate a coordinated set of emails, social posts, ad copy, thank-yous, and segment-specific variants in your brand voice. All without late-night copy-paste marathons.
You end up with more assets, less rework, and a team that’s freed to execute thoughtfully instead of scrambling.
- Personalizing content for higher conversion
Donors respond to simple, personal messages that feel human. AI makes it simple to draft plain-text, personal appeals that often outperform glossy templates.
Try it on just one donor segment and see how often people choose “personal over polished.” We’ve found out that in the last 72 hours of the year, plain-text appeals frequently outperform.
Don’t give in to “AI paralysis”: 3 AI Plays to Try This Year-End
The best way forward is to start somewhere and learn as you go. Here are three high-impact plays you can launch with AI this December:
Play 1: LYBUNT/SYBUNT Reactivation
When to run it: Early–mid December (before the final rush).
Goal: Reawaken donors who gave last year (LYBUNT = Last Year But Unfortunately Not This) or the year before (SYBUNT = Some Year But Unfortunately Not This).
How to implement with AI:
- Segment automatically. You could patch this together in a Google spreadsheet and surface donors whose last gift was 12–24 months ago, sorted by gift amount.
- Draft the outreach. Use AI to create 2–3 email variants with different angles: gratitude, mission impact, and urgency.
- Build a mini-campaign. Tell AI to schedule a simple 3-part flow:
- Email 1: “We miss you” appeal
- Email 2: Reminder with story/impact
- Email 3: Final 48-hour deadline
- Step in personally. AI flags any replies or questions so you can personally re-engage those donors.
AI can build the reactivation flow for you in minutes instead of you spending hours pulling lists and writing copy. You just review, approve, and respond human-to-human when donors reply.
Play 2: Mid-December Upgrade Nudge
When to run it: Mid-December, before the year-end deadline messaging ramps up.
Goal: Invite recent or first-time donors to increase their gift before Dec 31.
How to implement with AI:
- Identify upgrade-ready donors. Ask AI to pull donors who gave in the past 90–120 days and group them by giving level.
- Draft the note. Train ChatGPT on your brand voice and have it write a short, plain-text message from your executive director or program lead:
“You moved X forward this fall—here’s what an extra $20 could unlock before Dec 31.”
- Personalize the ask. AI can suggest a tailored “stretch” amount (e.g., +$20, +$50, +10%) based on each donor’s last gift.
- Approve + send. Review for tone, make any edits, and push it out through email/SMS.
AI handles the list-building and copy; you make sure it feels warm, personal, and respectful before it hits inboxes.
Play 3: Last-48-Hours Urgency
When to run it: December 30–31—the highest-urgency giving window of the year.
Goal: Capture the natural surge in gifts without overwhelming your donors.
How to implement with AI:
- Pre-build urgency messages. Ask AI to draft three appeal variants in advance:
- “Tax deadline tonight”
- “Double your impact before midnight”
- “One day left to stand with [beneficiaries]”
- Set frequency caps. Tell your system to send no more than 2 emails + 1 SMS per donor. Suppress anyone who’s already given.
- Prioritize engaged donors. AI automatically finds people who opened, clicked, or visited your donation page in the past 30 days and puts them at the top of your urgency send list.
AI ensures the right donors get the right urgent messages while protecting trust by not bombarding everyone on your list.
TIP: Train ChatGPT to Write in Your Brand Voice
Fundraising isn’t just about what you say but how you say it. Donors give because your message feels authentic, aligned with your mission, and written in a voice they trust.
In this OneCause webinar, Nathan Hill shared the story of Riley, a teammate who secretly had ChatGPT draft four weeks of emails in his voice. When he read them, he realized they sounded more like him than if he’d written them himself.
That’s the power of training AI on your brand voice. Instead of generic, “newsletter-y” appeals, you can teach ChatGPT (or Claude, Gemini, etc.) to write like your organization: warm, donor-first, mission-driven.
To make it simple, we’ve created a free Brand Voice Training Guide with a step-by-step prompt template you can use today. With it, you’ll:
- Define your mission, vision, and value proposition for AI.
- Upload words and phrases you always (and never) use.
- Teach AI to draft appeals, thank-yous, and social posts that sound like you.
With the right training, AI can become your most consistent copywriter, one that never forgets your style or your mission.
Download the free ChatGPT Brand Voice Training Guide here.
If the three plays above sound like a lot of manual work and switching between spreadsheets, emails platforms, and prompts, that’s because they are. That’s exactly why we built Avid: the first fundraising operating system that bakes these workflows into proven ready-made AI-powered Playbooks.
Meet Avid: The Only AI-Powered Operating System for Fundraisers
Nearly every fundraiser we talk to says their year-end plan depends on late nights, messy spreadsheets, and last-minute copy-paste jobs,
That’s exactly why we built Avid—to take the heavy lift off your plate. Avid is the first fundraising operating system designed for nonprofits.
- It pulls the right audience segments automatically.
- It drafts copy and creative in your brand voice.
- It deploys campaigns across email, SMS, ads, and more.
- And keeps learning as results come in.
At the core are its AI-powered Playbooks: pre-built, campaign templates designed by fundraisers, for fundraisers. You don’t start from scratch, you start from strategy—and the Playbook builds the rest.
Focus on Donors, Not Spreadsheets This Year-End
Year-end doesn’t have to be a blur of late nights and last-minute copy.
With Avid, you can reactivate lapsed donors, personalize across segments, and spin up a full campaign kit in under 90 minutes. Your strategy in; assets out. Humans in the loop; donors at the center.
See a play build in real time. Book a demo and see how Avid builds your year-end play—so you can spend more time with donors, not spreadsheets.
