2025 Year-End-Fundraiser in Nevidimi Zhivotni (Anima International)

2025 Year-End-Fundraiser

in Nevidimi Zhivotni

(Anima International)

By Teodora Mishineva

Introduction (and progress through the years)

2025 marked our 4th year running this format of fundraiser. We started out with very little knowledge — just an eagerness to learn and to keep improving with each attempt. The chart on the right shows how many monthly donors we acquired during each End-of-Year Fundraiser, year by year.

With every year that passed, we implemented more and more tactics to improve our campaign, building on what we'd learned the year before. Here are some examples for improvements:

👉 2022 was the first year we tried to do EOYF.

👉 2023 was the first year we focused on monthly donors.

👉 2024 was the first year we removed the option to switch to a one-time donation and left only the monthly option. This was also the year we started Meta ads.

👉 2025 was the first year we focused on creating a variety of Meta ads alongside the newsletters.

👉 And 2026 will be the first year to have a matching grant.

Overview

✅ Result: 248 regular donors (€2 278 per month)

🎯 Our goal: 300 regular donors

📆 Campaign duration: 23 days (December 09th - December 31st)

🐮 Landing page: http://nevidimi.bg/dari

We did not track single donations, since the campaign was focused on regular donations and the single ones were rare exceptions.

Donation page tips and tricks:

🐮 Have a simple ask on the top with big bold letters.

🐮 Have a progress bar with the ever-extending goal - when the goal is reached the new one should be no less than 70% filled.

🐮 Have a countdown until the end of the fundraiser.

🐮 Have recommended, highlighted donation amount to guide supporters (that is higher than the average amount from last year).

🐮 Have testimonials at the end of the page to build credibility and inspire potential supporters.

🐮 Send lnks in the newsletter that autofill your info if we already have it.

🐮 Have a sticky button "I will donate" that will follow you when you scroll down.

🎥 You can see screen recording here.

Sources of all regular donations 2025:

📩 Emails: 84 (55K active contacts)

📰 Ads: 84 (€2929 spent)

📝 Funnel after signing petition: 47

📛 Other: 33

Tele-fundraising: 1 (we did not manage to have a full call-a-thone)
Organic from social media: 12
No source (Other): 16
nevidimi.bg (front page of our site): 4

Comparison to last year 2024:

📩 Emails: 102 (51K active contacts)

📰 Ads: 29 (€840 spent)

📝 Telefundrasing: 52 (we have 1 telefundraiser and had 2 call-a-thones with 3 people participating)

📛 Other: 31

Organic from social media: 10 (we had 5 posts)
No source (Other): 9
nevidimi.bg (front page of our site): 12 (We have 14K followers)

❓Why the proportions shifted:

We spend more on ads this year and actually the price of a donor got a little bit up, which is expected when you put more money:

In 2024 one donor was 29€

In 2025 it was 35€

A big portion of the people in our mailing list were the same as last year - they had already seen a similar year-end campaign and there were fewer low-hanging fruits.
This year we tested a lot of options with the AI tools of Meta algorithm and even though one donor is more expensive, the ads were better optimised, because of the big variety of visuals the algorithm could choose.

Old vs New:

Out of 248 donors, 68 are NEW, which means they were not even leads in our mailing list.

The remaining 180 were already on our mailing list before the campaign .

Paid vs Organic:

I've separated all the donors, who were not NEW into 2 categories. Paid refers to people who became a lead from an ad. And all of the others are organic signers of one of our petitions or have no tag (they became part of our mailing list from another action or signed up for the newsletter via our site)

Paid Old:

Amount: 44

Average donation: 11,44€

Open Rate: 43,83%

Click Rate: 6,35%

Organic Old:

Amount: 136

Average donation: 8,90€

Open Rate: 27,86%

Click Rate: 3,98%

Baseline for active subscribers is:

Open Rate: 20,96%

Click Rate: 0,82%

Average Amount Per Source:

Overall average is €9.09

New donors average is €7.95

Day to Day Measurements:

Here we can see the typical spike towards the end, but we can also see that some days have performed better than others as well because of a good newsletters.

Our Strategy and tools we used

✅ Had only regular donations as an option on the site - there was no way to give a single donation except by asking us in an email or through the petitions.

✅ Optimised and supporter focused landing page - The ask was on the top and only if you scroll down you can see more info about the problem, but a sticky button to donate is following you all the time.

✅ Did a pre-launch to the warmest supporters first - those with an open rate above 25%.

✅ Kept the main goal to ourselves but shared smaller goals (usually increasing by 20 to 50 donors, so when increased the goal would never go below 70% of completion.

✅ Had a progress bar on the site and on most of the newsletters.

✅ Had a countdown on the site and on the last URGENT newsletters.

✅ Focused on communicating that the campaign was successful up to now - more than 150 000 signatures for the calf campaign were collected and now the next phase is ongoing - public pressure and organising events.

✅ Tracked the sources of all donations, allowing us to see in real-time what was working and what wasn't.

✅ Spent money on ads.

✅ In all channels we focused on empowering the supporter rather than educating them or talking about our organisation

✅ We had a supporters box at the top of emails

✅ We celebrated milestones and progress throughout the campaign in our Slack channel

And because we are still growing and learning there were some thing we decided that we don't have capacity for yet, and that is ok.

What we didn’t do:

❌ Had a call-a-thone.

❌ Asked current regular donors to upgrade their donations.

❌ Tried to secure a donation from a major donor to create a matching donation opportunity.

❌Extended the final deadline.

❌ Used phases.

❌ Contacted supporters who visited the website or attempted to donate but didn't complete the process.

Struggles and Failures

Currency change

Bulgaria was in the process of transitioning from our national currency Lev (BGN) to euro. The plug-in in the site we use can only support Lev transactions. All the transactions are then processed by Stripe. Even though Stripe support team reassured us that Lev transactions will be available after 1st of January - this was not the case. On 1st January Stripe removed Lev currency from the existing ones and no transactions were possible.

This problem was resolved after a week, but we ended the campaign without an extended deadline (5 more days).

This was the main reason why we did not achieve our goal of 300 donors.

The New Petition Against Fireworks

The topic of fireworks becomes a big deal in Bulgaria before the holidays. This was the reason why we decided to try creating a petition/pledge site to catch the wave of animal-lovers outrage.

It was not a hard task, because it required to re-skin our existing site for the petition against cages for calves. Changing the pictures and the text and we had a new petition.

After a person signs the petition they are redirected to a Donation page that is not the same as EOYF page. On this page your recommended donation was Monthly, but you could still change it to One-time.

All the monthly donors from this petition were counted towards EOYF.

Then the petition was closed and will be open again this year.

The Landing Page

Donation page

Resources and Materials

Newsletters

We’ve sent 17 newsletters.

All of them can be found here.

And on the table here you can see how many donors we got from each newsletter.

The 3 most successful newsletter are:

30.12.25 - [URGENT] Only 32 hours remaining – graphic footage - 17 donors

29.12.25 - Help! There's no room for Mom here - 12 donors

26.12.25 - Open this letter if you can - 10 donors

Aside from the urgency, the next biggest reason for people to donate is storytelling. The second newsletter is this and it portrays the picture from the perspective of a calf.

Ads and SM Posts

We had 4 posts, none of them boosted. Ads running as a dark posts.

Ads were set as flexible with multiple images for the algorithm to choose and 4 different texts.

The audience was set to all Bulgaria over 18 years old, excluding our monthly donors, as well as a Custom Audience based on Meta Pixel, defined as everyone who donated on the Christmas fundraiser webpage. The Goal of the Campaign was set to Conversions, optimizing for Donation Conversions, as tracked by Meta Pixel.

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