Roadmapping: Fundraising Planning for Nonprofits, Part 1
If your nonprofit is like most, fundraising planning occurs once a year near budget development time to forecast contributed revenue and departmental expenses. It also happens periodically around major initiatives, like capital campaigns. But too few organizations take the time to prepare and then regularly consult a written fundraising plan as a guide to annual development activities. That’s an oversight because having a written plan can deliver big benefits!
Thoughtful planning in fundraising can engage and focus your team, clarify responsibilities, and integrate efforts. It can articulate organizational priorities for fundraising and ensure agreement on “stretch goals” that are slightly more ambitious than budget. It can confirm the fundraising calendar, and strategically distribute activities and resources throughout the year. Importantly, it can inculcate a practice of designing the future tailored to current and changing circumstances instead of repeating the same thing year after year. A good plan also provides the grounding and flexibility to pivot when you encounter something unanticipated (a retrenchment in government funding, for example). And it affords opportunity for input from the board development committee to endorse and help implement the plan.
Think of this as strategic planning for fundraising that creates a shared, practical roadmap and accountability tool for raised revenue—the GPS that drives your organization forward and puts strategy into action.
A fundraising plan can be anywhere from a few pages to more than a dozen, with bulleted entries or brief narratives accompanied by prospect lists, a master calendar, and budget. It answers the following questions:
What are this year’s fundraising priorities?
What is the overall fundraising goal, how is that apportioned by donor source and purpose, and how does this compare to last year’s results?
What strategies will be used to realize goals?
Who will be asked for support and what activities will undergird asks?
Who owns each activity?
How much will it cost to fundraise (personnel and direct expenses)?
How will you measure progress towards goals?
This is a shared exercise for the full development team, whose members can each be asked for their insights according to areas of expertise. The first time you and your colleagues craft such a plan may take a bit of effort, but that document then becomes the guide for subsequent years. The more concrete and operational the plan, the easier it is to execute and determine if goals are being met.
Earlier in my career, I stepped in to lead a college development team fatigued by the demands of a recently concluded capital campaign. Without campaign priorities to direct fundraising, we needed to shift focus to the fundamentals. I dispatched development officers to speak with division heads across campus and learn about student, faculty, and academic opportunities suitable for fundraising. These formed the basis of our development roadmap for the coming year. Preparing the plan also served as a team building exercise and moved the advancement staff from inertia and indecision to clarity and inspiration. We consulted it regularly to track towards agreed-upon goals. And at the close of a year expected to be challenging, we raised over five times our departmental budget, securing nearly $1 million in new scholarships, increasing annual fund giving by 12 percent, and realizing seven new institutional grants totaling $2.5 million. That’s the power of a collaboratively driven, forward-focused, realistic plan.
Over the next three blog posts, I’m going to walk you through a sample annual fundraising roadmap and offer tips on how to prepare one for your organization. So buckle up and here we go!
—A big shout out to Jackie Franey of JWF Consulting, LLC for her insights on this series.
Image Credit: Untitled, detail, by Diego Jimenez, n.d. Courtesy of Unsplash.