Jodie Kluver Says Year-End Giving Season Rewards Nonprofits That Listened All Year

Westerly, Rhode Island Nov 1, 2026 (Issuewire.com) - A Season Built on One Month

Every December, nonprofit mailboxes and inboxes fill with year-end appeals. Boards watch the calendar. Staff count donors against last year's numbers.

Jodie Kluver has spent more than two decades inside that cycle, first as a fundraiser and later as a researcher who studies how public and nonprofit organizations hold up under pressure. She spent eight years as director of development for an arts and culture organization, running the kind of annual fund and gala calendar that most nonprofits know well.

"December gets treated like the whole relationship," Kluver says. "It's really just the moment the relationship gets asked to show up."

The Listening Nonprofits Skip

Kluver's research looks at citizen engagement and what she calls voice, the ways people signal what they think and want inside an organization or a community. She argues that most of that signaling happens quietly, long before any appeal goes out.

A donor who asks a pointed question at an event. A volunteer who stops showing up. A board member who goes quiet in meetings. Kluver says these are forms of voice, and nonprofits that only check in during fundraising season tend to miss them.

"An appeal letter can't make up for a year of not asking anyone what they think," she says. "It can only ask for money. It can't manufacture trust that wasn't there."

What Voice Looks Like in Practice

Kluver teaches public and nonprofit management courses, and she tells students that engagement is not a single event on the calendar. It is something an organization either practices or does not.

She points to small, ordinary moments: a thank-you call that is not tied to an ask, a survey that gets read and acted on, a volunteer who is told what happened because of something they raised. None of these require a big program. They require someone to notice and respond.

"People can tell the difference between an organization that wants to hear from them and one that wants their name on a list," Kluver says. "That difference shows up in December whether anyone planned for it or not."

Why December Pressure Backfires

Kluver says the pressure nonprofits feel at year-end often pushes them toward tactics that work against the relationships they are trying to deepen. Mass appeals, deadline countdowns, and matching-gift urgency can raise money in the short term. She says they rarely build the kind of attachment that keeps a donor giving for five or ten years.

"A donor who gives because of a deadline gives once," she says. "A donor who gives because they feel heard tends to come back."

She also notes that this is not only a fundraising question. Nonprofits that treat engagement as a year-round practice tend to handle hard years better, because they already know what their community thinks before a crisis forces the conversation.

"The organizations that struggle most in December are usually the ones that went quiet in June," Kluver says. "The fix isn't a better letter. It's a longer memory."

Kluver says she does not think nonprofits need to add another program to fix this. Most already have the contact points, the events, the small conversations. What changes, she says, is whether anyone treats those moments as information worth keeping.

"You don't need a new system," she says. "You need to write down what people tell you, and then actually use it."

About Jodie Kluver

Jodie Kluver is a professor in the Department of Political Science at Bridgewater State University, where she has taught public and nonprofit management since 2006. Her research covers citizen engagement, organizational resiliency, and voice within public and nonprofit organizations, and her work has appeared in Public Administration Review and other academic publications. She previously served as director of development for a Westerly, Rhode Island arts and culture organization and as executive director of a children's literacy nonprofit. She is based in Westerly, Rhode Island.

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