Your fundraising plan is a means of guidance as you plow through your fiscal year, figuring out the time slots in which things need to happen while balancing the writing of grants. It’s funny because most organizations claim to do whatever they can to get funding, but something as simple as a fundraising plan seems to make them run the opposite direction.
How simple is it really? If you and your organization can answer the who, what, when, where and why of your fundraising goals, then you’ll already half way done (the other half being research and writing it down!).
WHO
Everyone. No, I’m serious! Everyone in your organization should be part of developing your fundraising plan. Depending on your available resources, your fundraising staff or a fundraising committee would typically be leading the development of the fundraising plan (in terms of gathering research and actually putting the organization’s plans out on paper). Everyone should have input in determining goals and coming up with strategies because it gives them a sense of entitlement when carrying out the plan’s deliverables.
WHY
‘You need a fundraising plan because you need to fundraise’ is not a good enough answer. For most organizations, they need money to operate and to continue running programs that positively impact the community. That is the real ‘why’ of a fundraising plan. The next step is determining a financial goal that will ensure you’re able to keep your programs. A good start would be to look at your organization’s financial statements for the past 3 years as it will likely give you a good overview of how much your programs cost.
WHAT
Okay, now you know who’s responsible and you’ve got a ton of money to raise. How are you going to do it? The strategies you list need to have clear objectives and direct outcomes. For every strategy, you should have a direct fundraising goal attached to it, like $100,000 in grants and $5,000 in fundraising events. Some common strategies for fundraising include:
- Membership drives
- Major donors
- Grant-writing (either from corporations, government or foundations)
- Fundraising events
- Corporate sponsorships
- Capital campaigns (item-specific fundraising like a vehicle or a building)
- Community fundraising (like events held by other groups to benefit yours)
- Employee-driven campaigns (fundraising through something like a contest within an office/team)
There are just about a million ways to generate revenue but select ideas that are relevant to your organization’s focus. For example, if you’re an organization rescuing animals, it may make more sense for you to have a “cuddle a dog for $5” event rather than say, a car show fundraiser.
WHEN
Ahh, the dreaded timeline! This is where most organizations are too ambitious or not time-sensitive enough. You need to give yourself a reasonable amount of time to research, wait for correspondence and to carry out tasks. To say that you’re going to organize a golf tournament in two months is highly unlikely, and could in fact be a financial detriment to your team. On the contrary, giving yourself too much time for certain tasks can waste your valuable time as well. DON'T force yourself to create an event or run any type of fundraiser if that's not possible for you or your organization! Building a calendar of grant deadlines and proposed events can smoothen out the planning process, and allows it to be transparent among staff, directors and volunteers.
WHERE
The location of where these strategies will take place. Will your strategy be local? Provincial? Federal? This is important because the scope of your fundraising target audience can differ greatly depending on where you fundraise. If you’re trying to run a national campaign, that will take a lot more planning time and human resources than needed when asking local businesses to donate.
Finally, evaluation. Take a look at your fundraising plan at the end of your fiscal year. Did your organization meet its goals? What worked? What didn’t? Are there any areas of improvement? Short answer, yes. There are always ways to improve and that could result in raising more money. Evaluating your plan and performance really helps to set the standard for the following fiscal year because you can’t know where you’re going, unless you know where you’ve been.
See? That wasn’t too hard! Have you ever developed a fundraising plan? What are some key elements to your plan? Please share your suggestions on how organizations can invest time into developing a fundraising plan!
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Please feel free to comment on today's blog post. I welcome all opinions, suggestions and feedback--both good and bad--because frankly, fundraisers are desensitized to negativity. Thank you for reading!