Tuesday Tips was a little too sick to get this out Tuesday, but as with a fundraising ask, better late than never. After the first two entries in this series took a more ground-level look at donation patterns appropriate for organizations considering exactly when to release an upcoming appeal, this issue zooms back to a bird's eye view of the seasonal rhythm of donations for organizations scheduling the year's principal pitches. To begin with, I've taken a daily count of donations to all organizations in the DIA universe*, divided by the number of supporters belonging to organizations using our donations services for each day during the year. To distill out some fundamentals from the spikes of major fundraising pushes by major organizations (for example), I've explicitly removed a few major donations pushes. And to smooth over the day-to-day oscillations, I've plotted not 365 points but 52 points of weekly medians of the week's seven donations-per-100,000 supporters data points (this also acts to reduce the effects of most fundraising asks throughout the year). Result: You have to click to really get at this thing, but obviously the December effect completely warps the chart. But you already knew to plan some holiday asks, right? Let's look at the same numbers without December: The seasonal effect is weaker than one might assume outside of the holiday season. The summer, not surprisingly, is a trough -- and the depression actually starts in early May and persists into September -- but certainly not so prohibitively so that one should balk at releasing a pertinent ask during a pennant race. Here's that same data even further abstracted, to twelve monthly medians: The post-holiday hangover -- shall we call it a green gap? -- is noticeable enough, and actually even deeper than the summer bowl. And it confirms that apart from the holidays, the somewhat-more-receptive windows are early spring and early fall. But while the correlation is there, it's not overwhelming -- so if you're thinking right now about when to make four or five asks this year, these are the lessons:

1. Absent any other determining factors, target the windows from mid-March through April, from late September through October, and -- of course -- December.
2. Again absent any other guideposts, January, February and the time between Memorial Day and Labor Day are better to avoid.
3. However, there does exist sufficient latent willingness to contribute throughout the year that season should not be invoked to justify balking at opportunities.
4. Finally, and most importantly ... fundraising will not happen by itself. As Habitat for Humanity founder Millard Fuller put it, "I have tried raising money by asking for it, and by not asking for it. I always got more by asking for it."

As always, your mileage may vary, trends evolve and invert, and test, test, test. (Frankly, I'd test summer, or at least hit both early and late in both spring and fall: the peaks and plateaus here suggest a six-month layoff from April to October, and it's a good rule of thumb that any trend map counseling six months without asking for a donation is one not to take too literally.) *As before, these numbers are of counts (not donation amounts) of original instances of online donations -- paid event registrations, storefront purchases, instances of recurring gifts beyond the original payment, and offline donations loaded into the system are all excluded.