Donating Christmas card money to charity? Everybody does that. Instead, try out these creative end-of-year campaigns.

The end of the year is the golden age for gift, card and giving campaigns.

Forgoing paper cards for the end-of-year holidays and sending an email campaign about the charity the money was directed to instead… A good idea, but feels like everyone’s done it already.

What else could businesses, projects and professionals do to give back, celebrate another year drawing to a close and create a positive buzz around their vision and work?

Pick your favourite of these five year-end campaign ideas that tie communication and mission together. 

Creative Giving Idea #1: Free Training Series

Ask your in-house experts to host a valuable webinar series to share knowledge and strategies for free. If you’re an independent expert, pool resources with your peers to provide value to your shared networks through a series of training.

To make the gift genuinely worthwhile and separate it from typical marketing-driven webinars, focus on topics that matter to your audience and are tightly linked to your mission and vision. Consider involving your community in the decision-making process when choosing the topics!

Sprinkle on some Christmas spice

Add a Christmas-y feel to the series, and in addition to sharing knowledge, ask the experts to share a piece of gratitude to a client, project, loved one or a lesson learned that year. Use the gratitude pieces as a stand-alone social media campaign – and why not invite your followers to post their gratitude videos, too!

Creative Giving Idea #2: Client Spotlight Campaign

Use the gift budget to create a content series that showcases your clients’ success stories from the year. The campaign gives them the gift of visibility and shines a positive light on your company’s and team’s work as well.

To make the campaign content valuable for everyone in the audience, ask the companies to share their tips and lessons learned from the collaboration. Strive for authentic stories instead of glossed-over “success-only” anecdotes.

Sprinkle on some Christmas spice

Look further into the past and choose some older clients for a series of “Then and Now” interviews. They can share about their business’ successes since their collaboration with you and reflect on how your support, products or services helped them get to where they are now. 

Creative Giving Idea #3: Join a Cause for a Day

Donating money to charity is of course a great way to give back, but what if you did something tangible with your team and donated your time instead of allocating a budget to Christmas cards and gifts?

Sign your team up for short-term volunteering options that also provide a sense of community within the company. Cleaning seashores, packing meals or driving food donations are examples of activities that can be easily spread between team members. This keeps the individual time donation manageable while still making a difference.

Sprinkle on some Christmas spice

Even small teams and one-person brands can volunteer to make a difference! Join an organisation doing gift-wrapping towards donations for a cause close to your company’s mission or provide online tutoring to kids who need support with their school work.  

Creative Giving Idea #4: Host a Skill-Share Day

Another concrete way to give back to your community is to host a skill-share day where your employees volunteer their time to share their professional skills with local communities or nonprofits.

Teams can offer workshops for jobseekers, training sessions for local small business owners or one-to-one mentorships to young graduates – just to mention three examples. Look into areas where your team naturally shines!

Sprinkle on some Christmas spice

Choose the cause to support based on your company’s mission and vision. In case of doubt or difficulty in choosing, pick an end beneficiary group that tends to suffer especially during the holiday season, such as families threatened with poverty or people suffering from loneliness.

Creative Giving Idea #5: Donate Unused Time

Many consultants can relate to this scenario: a client books a service and then leaves it unused. Maybe their goals change in the middle of a coaching programme, or they don’t have time to finish the collaboration that started promisingly. Whatever the reason, it’s always a pity to leave that resource unused. 

My idea for the year-end giving is this: I’ll reach out to all the clients who’ve got unused strategy or training sessions in their bank and ask if they intend to use them. If not, they have an opportunity to give their unused sessions away. Then, I’ll collate all the unused and donated sessions to offer support to nonprofit organisations.

Sprinkle on some Christmas spice

Did this idea inspire you? Set up your own campaign or get in touch and we can pool our resources to make an even bigger difference!