Five steps toward an annual fundraising plan that will help you achieve structural growth (and surpass your own plans)

The first weeks of the new year are always exciting. Last year’s plans are no longer assumptions, but clear results. As a board member or head of fundraising, you can see at a glance what you had planned and what you ultimately achieved.

For you, it is about more than reflection: this is the perfect time to chart a course for the new year, using data as your compass.

These five steps will help you draw up a clearer, more realistic and more ambitious annual plan.

1. Start at the beginning: strategy and net result

Your first step should not be to zoom in on campaigns, but rather zoom out to see the big picture.

• What was your strategic goal for the year? Growing your donor base, increasing your net income, shifting your efforts online, becoming less dependent on a single channel?
• What was your financial planning and what did you actually bring in?

Ideally, you should consider your net income (or your gross income if you have not yet entered all your costs into your CRM) and then ask yourself a few simple yet important questions:

• • Looking at our financial targets, is our fundraising on course?
  • Do we have occasional strokes of good fortune/bad luck or can we identify a structural pattern in the last five years?

The answers to these questions are concrete data. Do these data confirm your gut feeling or paint a different picture?

2. Consider the three levers that determine your result

Now it is time to dive in a bit deeper, yet without getting bogged down in detail. You focus on the three levers that together determine virtually the entire result of your fundraising efforts.

1. Recruitment (acquisition)

• Are you bringing in enough new donors to compensate for outflow and to grow your donor base?
• What channels are structurally profitable? (Think of DM, online, face-to-face and telemarketing.)
• What are your costs per donor per channel, compared to your own benchmark?

2. Retention

• • What are your biggest outflow moments? Take a look at your channels and outflow moments.
  • What programmes, campaigns or contact moments actually boost retention?

3. Reactivation

• How active are you when it comes to bringing donors back into the fold?
• What message, propositions or channels are most effective for this?
• Are you structurally missing out on donations or potential?

The key question you should ask yourself is this:
In what areas have we achieved our goals and where should we do more to capitalise on unrealised potential?

“Everything you do is important, but not everything you do is important to your donor.”

3. The trick: incorporating these results into your annual plan

The biggest mistake you can make is to stop after steps 1 and 2. You have conducted a thorough analysis and drawn up an insightful evaluation document, but this doesn’t do you any good if it ends up in a drawer somewhere. Incorporate your analysis into your current annual plan. Instead of being used to justify your efforts after the fact, it can serve as a steering instrument throughout the rest of the year.

In the first weeks of the new year, you can therefore do three things (always in line with your strategy, of course):

1. Underperformers: scale them back or drop them entirely

If there are any campaigns or channels that structurally underperform, you scale them back or shut them down. This keeps you from wasting part of your budget for another year, just because ‘it was in the planning’.

2. Winners: do more of that

Geef meer ruimte aan activiteiten die goed presteren. Zoek actief naar manieren om die te herhalen, te vergroten of te verbreden naar andere doelgroepen of kanalen.

3. Record knowledge and experience

You amend your annual plan, your budget allocation and, where necessary, even your strategy. You should also critically assess your CRM and data: are the insights you need actually available?

4. Your role as management: asking the right questions

There is no need for you to study every dashboard yourself down to the campaign level. Your added value lies in asking your team the right questions.  For example:

• • How does the net income compare to the planning?
  • What has been done with regard to recruitment, retention and reactivation?
  • What channel or programme surprised us in a positive way this year by bringing in more donors or more income – and how can we do more of that?
  • What activities should we dare to terminate based on the data?
  • In concrete terms, what does all this mean for our annual plan and budget for this year?

By asking these questions every January — and actually using the answers to alter your course — you will gradually build a data-driven and agile organisation.

5. Ambition for this year: structurally surpassing your own planning

Take last year’s data seriously and repeat these steps every year:

strategy → results → analysis (recruitment/retention/reactivation) → amend your annual plan (right away during the first weeks of the new year)

This will create a pattern:

• Your annual plans will become clearer, more realistic and more ambitious.
• Your budgets will demonstrably be used more effectively.

That reveals the true ambition of your fundraising efforts: not merely achieving your planning, but structurally surpassing it.

Instead of making your annual plan a static document, use it to actively adjust your course and drive structural growth.

For the Fun in Fundraising,

Warm regards,

Jeanette

P.S. If you do not have access to your data or analyses in the first week of the new year, you’ve got your first task cut out for you.

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