Planning Your Year-Round Fundraising

The Big Picture

Let's start broadly by looking at the big picture goals and strategies before diving into the details.

Goal Setting - What are your year-round fundraising goals?

Goals for year-round fundraising can be more than financial. Manage your expectations for setting your overall philanthropic goals. Some areas to focus on might include: acquiring new donors, increasing your organization's visibility, implementing a new marketing campaign, or boosting your organization's social media presence.

Considerations:

• What is your financial goal for the fiscal year?
• How many new donors are you looking to attain?
• What percentage of current donors are you looking to retain?
• What will be your goal for board involvement? (Check out the example board engagement opportunities)
• What other goals do you have?

Goal Strategizing:

• What tools do you need to make each of these goals achievable?
• Outline how you plan on achieving these goals - break larger action items into smaller, manageable ones

Donor Engagement Strategy - How will you engage donors?

Stewarding your donors throughout the year keeps them aligned with your organization for continued engagement and support. Let's strategize how to most effectively get this accomplished.

Considerations:

• How will you reach new donors?
• How will you retain your current donor base?
• How often will communications go out to update donors on the impact their contributions have made?
• Who will be responsible for sending these communications?
• How do you plan to share your success with your donors and volunteers?

Need help engaging and stewarding your donors? Check out blogs about donor engagement here!

       The Details

Now that you’ve answered some key questions, let’s put it all together!

Plan

• Meet with your board and set this year’s goals (Check out these board resources).
• Create a board task list and assign to members (Click here for example board engagement opportunities).
• Outline how many fundraising campaigns, events, or Giving Days you will be participating in this year.
• Create individual goals for each board member for fundraising campaigns, events, or Giving Days your organization is participating in, while keeping in mind your annual goals (Need help setting goals for your next campaign? Click here for tips!).

Prepare

• Create a staffing plan to support your fundraising.
• Customize your profile on {{dog-link}}.
• Reach out to local businesses to form business partnerships and support.

Steward

• Establish communications with your current donors (such as newsletters or social media outreach).
• Customize email/newsletter templates from toolkit and schedule e-blasts to go out.
• Create social media content and schedule it.
• Set a schedule to stay up to date with your donor report and thank your donors (consider scheduling a bi-weekly meeting with designated staff to review your donor report and stewardship plans).
• Click here for sample thank you templates you can use throughout the year.

As the year goes on, don't forget to:

• Continue to implement your communications plan (emails, social media posts, etc.).
• Remind board members of their roles (outreach, sending emails, etc.).
• Thank your donors in a timely manner and include them in future communications.
• Get out into the community! Spread the word about your organization -- the amazing work you do and how your community can get involved (e.g., radio interviews or advertisements, Instagram takeovers, tabling at local events).