When the fundraising year actually peaks, in 19 markets

The thing that surprises people first

There are four different fiscal year-ends driving giving, not one.

A US-shaped monitoring calendar misses roughly half the campaign year in several major markets.

Moments worth knowing about

• Australia — EOFY

  The tax year ends 30 June. June, not December, is the peak.

• United Kingdom

  No 31 December deadline at all. Two peaks instead: Christmas and Remembrance, and a moving Ramadan peak concentrated in the last ten nights.

• Germany — Weihnachtsmailing

  December is roughly a quarter of the German giving year, and it is driven by print. The creative is signed off in early October, weeks before anything lands.

• Japan — furusato nōzei

  The hometown tax scheme accounts for the majority of measured individual giving and behaves like a consumer transaction, complete with catalogues of return gifts.

• South Korea — the Love Temperature Tower

  A national campaign thermometer that rises one degree per percent of goal, published daily through December and January.

• Mexico and Chile — the teletones

  Single-broadcast events that raise sums no email program in those markets approaches.

• Denmark and Sweden

  Televised national collections — Knæk Cancer, Musikhjälpen, Världens Barn — that concentrate an enormous share of annual giving into days.

• Italy — 5 per mille

  A tax-designation season running March to June, worth hundreds of millions nationally, with no equivalent elsewhere.

• Brazil — two seasons

  The last quarter of the year, like most of the world, and then a second one: March to 30 April, when income tax returns are filed and part of the tax owed can be directed to a cause.

• Israel — a calendar that moves

  Giving follows the Hebrew calendar, so the peaks arrive about eleven days earlier each year. A campaign plan copied from last year’s dates is already late.

Payment rails that leave no trace

In several markets the dominant giving rail has no landing page at all, which means it is invisible to anyone monitoring the web.

Swish in Sweden. MobilePay in Denmark — in one national collection it carried the overwhelming majority of donations while the website carried a low single-digit percentage. Bizum in Spain. UPI QR codes in India. Round-up at the till in Mexican convenience stores. Postal transfer and physical collection boxes in Japan.

If your picture of a market comes from its websites, these are the campaigns you cannot see.

The American year, date by date

The United States is the one market where the calendar is crowded rather than unfamiliar. We keep 59 dates that American nonprofits build appeals around: heritage and awareness months, national holidays, days of service, and the run from Thanksgiving to 31 December.

Two of the 59 stand apart: GivingTuesday and the last week of the year. The other 57 are where organizations compete for attention the rest of the time, from Black History Month in February to Hunger Action Month in September.

Every email we read is checked for whether it hangs on a date or a season, and which one. When a date fills our inboxes, it shows up in Giving Radar Daily and on the blog.

Where this comes from

This page is research, not observation. The tax years, national campaigns and payment rails come from published sources, not from our own archive. What we observe ourselves, in the emails, videos and news we collect, is published on the blog with its sample size and date range. When the two disagree, we say so.

The map so far: 19 markets and 59 American dates.