Memorial Day marks the unofficial beginning of summer for most Americans. For nonprofits, it’s an opportunity to showcase their values and their patriotism. 

In 2023, 75% of consumers said they were planning to celebrate Memorial Day. 92% of them also planned to purchase something to mark this occasion. 

As a nonprofit, this is your chance to guide people to a meaningful purchase and encourage them to think beyond trinkets to make a real impact on their fellow Americans.

Memorial Day Has a Bigger Impact than You Might Think

Memorial Day isn’t just for the nonprofits that support veterans and their families. There are currently 18 million veterans living in the US, or 6% of the entire population.

This means that you’ll be hard-pressed to find someone who doesn’t know a veteran. 

Moreover, the veteran population is becoming more diverse, with people of various races, genders, and sexual orientations joining the army. This diversity means that most socially oriented nonprofits will have some stakeholders among veterans.

Thus, Memorial Day is a huge holiday for everyone.

Let’s see how you can remind your donors and leads about its importance and increase your donations.

How to Set Up Your Automations for Memorial Day

Preparations for Memorial Day should start at least a couple of weeks in advance. Your goal is to remind people of the coming holiday and about your mission. 

The Gary Sinise Foundation, a long-term SyncApps client, uses the Salesforce NPSP integration to segment its donors based on donation habits and other criteria. Granted, The Gary Sinise Foundation empowers veterans and helps them navigate their integration back home, as well as their physical and mental health issues.

Memorial Day is the most important day of the year for them. However, they are not the only nonprofit that leverages this holiday to increase donations. 

The following tactics are inspired by the USA Basketball Foundation, Nexell, QSource, and hundreds of other nonprofits that use SyncApps to automate their marketing and drive more donations.

1. Design Your Memorial Day Campaigns with Patriotism in Mind

Your emails should clearly display the flag and mention Memorial Day and its importance for veterans. But it’s more than that.

Here’s how to use your NPSP integrations to reach patriots:

• Check out your Salesforce account — do you have any data that might indicate which of your leads or former donors identify as patriots? If so, create a dedicated segment for them.
• Using the SyncApps integration for NPSP and Mailchimp, Constant Contact, Klaviyo, or ActiveCampaign, send that segment straight to your email marketing platform.
• Now you have a clear segment to target.

2. Automate for Timeliness

Your Salesforce account holds a lot of important data and now is its time to shine. For instance, an important segment is people who typically:

• Donate around this time of the year — people are creatures of habit.
• Donate around major holidays
• Haven’t donated in a while — a celebration that matters to most Americans is a good occasion for them to pick up that habit again.

Similarly, you can automatically send that segment to your email marketing platform and target it with relevant messaging. 

Pro tip: don’t send a single email. Send sequences of 2-5 emails dedicated to Memorial Day to remind people of its importance. 

3. Drive More Organizational Donations

Donations from companies are the lifeblood of most nonprofits because organizations typically donate more than individuals.

Sometimes, donations overlap: some people donate both as individuals and as part of a company. While these overlaps are welcome, it can be hard to keep track of who donates on behalf of whom.

With the SyncApps NPSP integrations, things get much easier. For instance, if you see that a Mailchimp record donated to your nonprofit personally, the knee-jerk reflex would be to add their company name in Salesforce.

But that will get confusing very fast.

Instead, you can create an Affiliation (Household account) for that record.

By default, if the Company from, for example, Constant Contact is not blank, SyncApps will create it as an Account in Salesforce, and it will be the Account Name for the Contact. If the feature is enabled, SyncApps will still create the Company as an Account, but only as an Affiliation. SyncApps will also create a Household Account as the Contact’s Account Name.

Using the NPSP integrations, you can drive more organizational donations by:

• Inviting individual donors with a company affiliation to consider getting their company to donate as well.
• Inviting organizational donors to organize a donation event within their company to gather individual donations.

Read more about smart automation with NPSP here.

Beyond Automation: Memorial Day Campaign Ideas to Help Your Nonprofit Stand Out From The Crowd

Automation can save you dozens of hours of manual labor every month and help you properly segment your audience for optimal results.

However, there is one thing that automation (no, not even AI) can’t do for you: write relevant emails. Around Memorial Day, consider these ideas to increase your impact:

• Since Memorial Day is the unofficial beginning of summer, use this opportunity to send people your event agenda for the season. Invite them to save the dates as early on as possible! People are now looking for summer events, so you’ll be just in time!
• Explain how your nonprofit supports veterans, even if that is not your main mission. Given the number of veterans currently living in the US, you probably have quite a few veterans among your stakeholders.

Final Thoughts

Memorial Day is a time to come together and honor those who have served their country. Beyond donations, use this opportunity to bring your stakeholders (both donors and supporters) closer to your mission.

In your emails, don’t forget to honor the veterans and to invite your audience to do the same. Shared values unite people and organizations!

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