A Tide Pool Program

End of Year Giving Crash Course

Six Tuesdays. One cohort of nonprofit leaders who are done winging it every November. We’ll build your Giving Tuesday through New Year’s Eve campaign together — strategy, story, actual emails — so by Thanksgiving, it’s done.

Six Tuesdays, Oct 6–Nov 10 · 11:00am CT

Choose Your Price & Sign Up Here

You know the shape of this season before it even starts.

Back-to-school hits, and somewhere underneath the school supply lists is this quiet awareness: giving season is coming. You know you should be building the campaign now, while there’s still room to think. But the day-to-day doesn’t leave room for should. Grant deadlines. Board meetings. The event that ballooned into three events. And then it’s November, and you haven’t drafted a single email, and the low-grade dread sets in — the kind where you’re trying to plan a campaign and answer the phone and write thank-you notes and none of it is getting done well.

We’ve been there. Not in the abstract “we understand your struggle” way — we’ve sat where you’re sitting, the week before Giving Tuesday, staring at a blank subject line.

Most of what makes this season hard isn’t fundraising strategy. It’s the specific, unglamorous stuff nobody really teaches you. How do you tell your org’s story honestly, without flattening someone’s dignity or underselling the actual need? How do you get your board to actually help instead of just asking for updates? How do you write four weeks of campaign content when you don’t have four weeks, or a comms team, or even great photos to work with?

That’s what this cohort is for. Not just a plan (though you’ll leave with one) — six weeks with other nonprofit leaders working through the same real problems, at the same time, out loud, so none of you are doing this alone in a Google Doc at 11pm.

Nonprofits raise 37% of their annual giving in the last three months of the year — and 12% of all giving happens in the final three days of December alone.1

That doesn’t mean you need to be drafting emails on Thanksgiving, or scrambling to hit send on New Year’s Eve. It means you need a plan built before any of that starts.

Here’s what six weeks with this cohort actually gets you:

  • A campaign blueprint built for your org — not a generic template, the actual strategy for your list, your budget, and your story
  • Every email, letter, and social post drafted and workshopped before Giving Tuesday, not scrambled together after
  • A room of other nonprofit leaders doing this alongside you, six Tuesdays in a row
  • A plan you can reuse next year, so this doesn’t have to be a scramble again

1. Qgiv, “Key End-of-Year Giving Trends: Giving Tuesday vs. December 31.”

Find Your Tide Zone

Tuition for the Crash Course is $345. That’s High Tide Zone — the number that covers what this actually costs to run: six live sessions, office hours, the worksheets, and paying the people who built it. Below that, Mid Tide Zone is $225, and Low Tide Zone is $145.

Quick fact: intertidal zones aren’t ranked by how good the living is. They’re named for how often the tide covers them, full stop. The high tide zone is actually the harshest place on a shoreline to survive — driest, most exposed, least forgiving. The low tide zone is underwater almost all the time, which makes it the most resource-rich, most biodiverse real estate on the beach. Nobody looks at a tide pool and calls the low zone “the poor zone.” It’s just where the water happens to sit.

So: pick honestly. High, Mid, or Low Tide Zone tells us where you’re standing this October, not what your org is worth or how hard you’re working. If $345 is the number that works, that’s the number that keeps this program funded for next year. If it’s not, $225 or $145 is yours to take — no email explaining your budget, no application, nobody in the cohort finding out which zone you picked. You already know where you are.