Happy December.

Snuck right up on you, didn't it?

That cold sweat breaking out might the realization -- knowing full well that December is the development sweet spot, and especially the last week of the year -- that you've got to get that holiday ask out right quick, and you haven't had a chance to give it a speck of thought up to now.

Best Practices for a 3x5 Notecard

There are 18 business days from Wednesday, Dec. 4 through the end of the year, assuming you're actually working all of them and none fall victim to office parties, inclement weather, holiday sniffles, or miscellaneous NGO emergencies.

For those also scratching out grant reporting, board cozying, postal mail soliciting, major donor massaging, admin drudging and -- oh yeah -- that part of the day that's actually about the mission all this is supposed to uphold -- finding as much as half a working day over that span to devote to online giving might very well be an achievement. And even that might be a questionable return-on-investment proposition if the idea is to, say, bump up your donation harvest by +50% ... from an expected 20 donations.

I question how well those of us with the chutzpah to speak from Olympus on the subject treat with that reality for the small and the strapped.

Take The Procratinators' Guide to Year-End Fundraising (.pdf), a new joint publication of Care2 and Sea Change Strategies. These are smart cookies, and there's some very good stuff here for building an online fundraising presence.

But four chapters of 10 are about what you should have been doing for the other 11 months, which is rather the opposite of what the title promises. And many of the other suggestions (videotape test donors interacting with your pages?!) could only be implemented quickly by an online department so well-resourced that it wouldn't have been procrastinating its year-end fundraising to begin with.

Other organizations may have a more basic and pressing question:

How do you get the most return for four hours' work on your online ask?