Engaging Networks December Recap: Powering Your Year-End Finish
Welcome to our final check-in of 2025!
This has been an exciting first year for me at Engaging Networks. I had the pleasure of attending both our Canadian Engaging Networks Community Conference (ENCC) in Toronto earlier this year and our most recent ENCC in D.C. this fall.
I got to connect with so many of our fantastic partners, clients, and friends of Engaging Networks—and I even took part in the community’s jam-band happy hour, where we played a selection of old and new protest tunes.
Last week, we released our Giving Tuesday report, and the energy has been fantastic. In short, we saw a record-setting day of fundraising on Engaging Networks. But we know that the work continues in these most critical fundraising weeks of the year.
Our entire team is here, dedicated to ensuring your final year-end push is the most successful yet. We’re focusing on the features and resources you can use right now to maximize every donor interaction before the ball drops on December 31st
As we approach the final push, I wanted to share some updates from the past few months and what we’ve been up to at Engaging Networks, along with a preview of what’s planned for early 2026.
Community Updates: Your Year-End Strategy Guide
ENCC 2025 – All Wrapped Up and Ready to Help You Finish Strong
The energy, insights, and excitement at this year’s Engaging Networks Community Conference (ENCC) D.C. 2025 were a real treat to be a part of. ENCC is our annual gathering where digital fundraising and advocacy professionals share case studies about the work they’re doing on Engaging Networks.
It’s a great chance for fundraisers to share tips and tricks, their success stories, and general insights from the nonprofit view.
While the conference was held in October, the strategic sessions apply to the campaigns you’re running today.
Some of the main takeaways:
- Email Deliverability and Fatigue: Get technical and strategic about how to keep your list clean and your critical year-end appeals landing in the inbox, not the spam folder.
- Optimizing Conversion Rates: Sessions covered proven methods to reduce friction in your forms and maximize donations from every visit.
- The Future of Fundraising: Discussions centered on adopting new platform technologies and best practices for advanced advocacy campaigns.
Here’s a preview video!
If you weren’t able to attend any of this year’s ENCC events, you can still take part! The entire library of sessions from ENCC D.C. 2025 is now available on the Engaging Networks Academy.
Access the Full ENCC D.C. 2025 Session Library Here: ENCC D.C. 2025 – Engaging Networks Academy
Unlocking Big Year-End Gifts with DAFpay
Tapping into Donor Advised Funds (DAF) as a source of revenue could be a game-changer for your organization, especially this time of year when DAF giving consistently spikes. Thankfully, our partnership with Chariot makes it easy for you to enable their DAFpay tool on your forms (available in the U.S.)
Did you know that TIME magazine named DAFpay as one of its ‘Best Inventions of 2025’? The average DAF gift is often 8–10 times larger than the typical credit card gift, making this integration a powerful tool for your year-end campaigns. If you are curious to learn more about reducing friction and capturing these larger gifts, check out the recording of our recent webinar: Unlocking the Power of DAFpay.
Product Updates: New Enhancements Supporting Your Fundraising Efforts
Our product team has been focused on delivering updates that give you more flexibility and power, especially during these demanding final weeks. As an integrated platform, our goal is to eliminate manual work and improve data accuracy and your team’s efficiency. Here are some recent updates:
- Smarter CRM Integration: We enhanced our core integration tools to ensure your crucial year-end donor data (like from Salesforce) is cleaner and more accurate, saving your team hours of manual cleanup.
- Flexible Peer-to-Peer Fundraising: We made it simpler for your key volunteer leaders to manage their teams and family members during campaigns, allowing them to focus on raising more money through P2P efforts.
- Actionable Real-Time Reporting: We updated our visual reporting tools so you can track the performance of your appeals in real-time and make quick, data-driven decisions on where to shift resources before the end of the year.
If you’re interested in learning more about how these updates can help your team, you can get in touch with us any time for a walkthrough of our fundraising capabilities.
Academy, Training, and Community Improvements
Over the past few months, the Engaging Networks Academy (our official training resource) has seen major updates and improvements! We’ve added dozens of new training videos and how-to guides so you can find instructions on how to do just about anything on the Engaging Networks platform.
The growth has been incredible: we now support over 3,300 students and have surpassed 28,000 course enrollments! The Academy is a dedicated resource that’s here 24/7 to support your team, especially during the year-end fundraising push.
New Training: Premium Gifts Need a final nudge for your donors? You can access our short 11-minute training in the Academy to learn how to create and manage Premium Donation pages—a powerful way to boost your fundraising efforts by offering donors a thank-you gift or incentive.
You can visit the Engaging Networks Academy at any time to access the full library of resources. It’s a free portal, so it’s a great way to explore what you can do on Engaging Networks if you’re interested in learning more.
Join the Engaging Networks Community
If you haven’t joined our online community, what are you waiting for? It’s a great way to connect with other Engaging Networks users to ask questions and share ideas. The Community also hosts a Technical Exchange space (for sharing code), a Job Postings board, a Member Directory, and a listing of upcoming events. Come check it out, or visit if you haven’t in a while.
Visit the Engaging Networks Community here.
Looking Ahead: Ringing in 2026
Focusing on Efficiency and Global Engagement in the New Year
As 2025 draws to a close, we are full steam ahead on development for next year:
- New Texting Tools Launching in Q1: We are putting the final touches on our highly anticipated new integrated texting capabilities. Get ready to activate this powerful new channel for instant supporter engagement in the new year.
- Looking ahead to 2026 Conferences: We’ll be back again for our three flagship ENCC conferences next year! Official dates will be announced soon, but here’s what you can expect:
- 🍁 April in Toronto (new venue!)
- 🎡 May in London
- 🏛️ October in Washington D.C.
If you’re looking to improve your fundraising campaigns for 2026, you can check out a report our team put together, “The Ultimate Fundraising Strategy Guide for 2026.”
You’ve made it to the end of our December roundup! On behalf of the entire Engaging Networks team, we wish you a successful year-end push and a happy, restful holiday season! We can’t wait to partner with you for an impactful 2026.
