Fundraising Plan: Top Steps For Maximum Effectiveness

Would you start a drive without knowing directions? Or find a treasure map without reading clues? Trying to “wing it” can make you crash on the ground before you even take off. Whether you’re a big-scale nonprofit or a small startup, the right fundraising tools and a well-rounded fundraising plan can be crucial things that make or break your campaign.

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This 11-step strategic fundraising plan will not only help increase donation rates but also inspire new givers to align with your cause.

Article Roadmap

• What Is a Fundraising Plan?
• Why Do You Need a Fundraising Plan?
• How To Create a Strategic Fundraising Plan
• Best Practices
• Final Thoughts

What Is a Fundraising Plan?

A fundraising plan is a document that presents all your goals and activities within a period of time (often a fiscal year). It involves donor acquisition and retention plans, campaign dates and deadlines, and a donor communication schedule. It also includes budget, logistics and marketing plans so you have a comprehensive fundraiser strategy ready to execute.

The plan should be concrete enough to help you stay on track but flexible to accommodate changes when necessary so you don’t miss out on great opportunities. In short, make it adequate, accurate and adaptable. The framework must, above all, be strategic and help you use resources in the most effective and efficient manner possible.

Why Do You Need a Fundraising Plan?

Many nonprofits, especially new and small-scale ones, don’t spell out what exactly needs to go into an event. They don’t operate on a fundraising plan and just put together a volunteer group or hosting committee and call it a day. This leaves room for error and some nasty surprises along the way, turning into a stressful experience for everyone involved.

It’s in your best interest to map out a plan of action to avoid such headaches and, ultimately, financial loss. No matter how small your charity is, you need a well-written strategic fundraising plan to keep everyone on course and not lose sight of what’s important.

A killer fundraising plan is what makes the difference between nonprofits that thrive versus those that just survive. It will:

• Keep everyone focused and make sure they’re on the same page.
• Promote accountability and adherence to deadlines.
• Reduce impulsive change of plans due to new shiny ideas.
• Engage board members.
• Increase rates of donor acquisition and retention.
• Balance activities and keep them at a sustainable pace (so you can avoid situations where there’s no activity for weeks, and then you squeeze in too much to make up for lost time).

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How To Create a Strategic Fundraising Plan

First things first — you should decide on who drafts and creates your fundraising plan. A development director or staff should take the lead and write the plan in consultation with your nonprofit’s CEO or executive director.

If your organization doesn’t have a development team, the executive director can start the project and collaborate with the board of directors. You can also get a qualified development consultant on board or for the project’s duration, as they specialize in creating fundraising plans and strategies.

Here are some essential things to keep in mind to help you with the planning process:

1. Reflect on Past Spending

Before getting started with the fundraising plan, take a moment to pause and reflect on your past finances and fundraising plans, if any. If you have fundraising software or a CRM, you can access and analyze this data quickly. You can also take a look at your existing database, analyze stats of similar nonprofits, check donor feedback surveys or meet your staff for suggestions.

Ask yourself the following questions:

• How much did you raise last year? Think about your initial fundraising goals and how effectively you met them. Look at your donor acquisition and retention rates pre- and post-campaign.
• Which fundraising initiatives were most successful? Reflect on which fundraising efforts won over donors and why. What lessons did you learn and want to carry forward this year?
• Which challenges did you face? Were you able to solve them, and how? Should you allocate funds to one initiative over another that wasn’t successful? What didn’t go as planned in terms of budget, resources and campaign execution?

2. Define Your Campaign’s Vision

Identify your campaign’s and overall organization’s vision. It’s a crucial step that helps you and your donors gain clarity on where your nonprofit is headed.

You only have so many hours in a day. Without a proper vision statement, you risk getting sidetracked and wasting valuable time. Simply put, a mission statement helps do one specific thing perfectly so you don’t try hundred-odd things without success.

3. Take a Look at New Fundraising Trends

The pandemic has completely changed how we interact with each other. We now have new and innovative methods to create, engage and distribute media content. Nonprofits are not an exception to this, and many charities use the trends to their advantage. It’s helpful to take note of the latest trends and stay ahead of the curve to effectively engage your donors.

Social Media

According to a HubSpot report, donors between the ages of 18 and 29 increased the amount they donated during the pandemic. Of these donors, every one in four wants social media communication from nonprofits.

People spend most of their time on social media channels like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok and others. So it makes sense to strategically grab eyeballs on these platforms. It further helps you connect with potential donors worldwide, maximizing your outreach.

You can organize virtual challenges like the ALS ice bucket challenge. Hike for Haiti is one such virtual challenge that encouraged students and families to climb 200 flights of stairs. This distance represents how much the students of Marre à Coiffe need to travel to access clean water and other necessities. People all over the world posted photos of them doing this challenge and managed to raise over $344,000 in the process.

Flexible Payment Options

Many donors are moving towards digital donations. Therefore, it’s a nonprofit’s job to give donors options that work best for them and ensure flexible and secure payments compliant with authentication regulations.

Allow donors to opt for multiple payment processing options like credit and debit cards, Google Pay, Apple Pay, PayPal, ACH, Venmo, QR codes, text giving and more. Some platforms also let you collect donations via eChecks and bitcoins.

Hybrid and Live Stream Events

One of the ravaging effects of the COVID-19 pandemic was a significant shift to a virtual world. With social distancing and work-from-home being the new norm, NGOs could no longer hold in-person events, leading to the rise of mobile bidding events like online and live auctions.

Apart from having a wider reach, hybrid and live stream events are also more accessible with minimal operational costs when compared to traditional fundraising. They can create a real-time experience for donors and make them feel like they’re celebrating together, making it more enjoyable.

Post-pandemic, people have varying comfort levels when it comes to large in-person events. By providing options and accommodating different comfort levels, you can build stronger donor relationships that are beneficial in the long run.

Video Content

Video content is bigger than ever, especially with the rise of Tiktok and Instagram reels. Videos, short-form or long-form, help build an emotional connection with donors and supporters. Harnessing viral trends can give your nonprofit traction and encourage people to donate.

Influencer Marketing

Love them or hate them, influencers are here to stay for the foreseeable future. You can attribute influencer marketing’s success to many factors. People may find them relatable over conventional celebrities and hence trust their judgment and preferences.

Influencers can be public figures or subject matter experts who have a big following. There are two categories — Macro-influencers (100k+ followers) and micro-influencers (10k-100k followers). Finding influencers that can help market your niche can be time-consuming. You need to have a good understanding of their audience — where they’re from, why they follow the influencer and what kind of content they’re receptive to.

You need to set aside some budget, especially for a macro influencer, but it’s all worthwhile as the right influencer can be a great way to reach your target audience and boost your credibility.

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4. Define Your Existing Resources

You can’t play with the cards you’re dealt if you’re unsure what your cards are. Strategize goals in terms of the availability and limitations of your resources. Consider your:

Budget: Draw up a budget plan, prioritize spending according to tasks and leave room for any last-minute expenses that may come up. Are there any limitations you need to think about before going ahead? You also need to have a rough estimate of how long certain activities will take — after all, time is money too!

Staff: How many staff members do you have on board to execute what you have in mind? Are there enough people to help with certain specialized tasks? Consider recruiting volunteers — a great way to include the community and get extra hands on deck.

Technology: What current system are you using to handle data, donors, finances and tasks? A fundraising CRM or a dedicated database can help save a ton of time and free up your staff to focus on more important campaign-related activities.

Inventory: Get a clear idea of your assets and constraints. If you’re hosting special theme-based fundraisers, consider what items you would need and where you can source them from.

A thorough analysis of your resources can help you leverage them and optimize your budget spending to the maximum.

5. Set Your Fundraising Goal

After you have a good idea of your budget and the resources you can allocate, set a fundraising goal and plan away. We know it’s easier said than done. Where do you even start, and what exactly to do?

Think about fundraising goals you want to achieve in the next year. Even better, consider how you want the nonprofit to progress in the next five years. Be as specific and detailed as possible. Now pick one of the goals as a starting point and base your fundraising plan around it.

Your goals should fall into one of three categories:

• Donor Acquisition: Expand your donor base with new givers. To attract potential donors, you can — try different marketing strategies, expand your presence to new channels (especially digital ones), hold peer-to-peer fundraisers, and partner with other brands and organizations.
• Donor Retention: It’s cost-effective to retain current donors over spending a huge budget on new ones. To encourage donors to continue aligning with your organization, you need to make them feel heard and appreciated. Personalize donor communications, collect and act on their feedback, and make giving easier through recurring donations.
• Upgrading current donors: Along with gaining new donors, efforts to increase donations from your current donors can prove to be effective. You can work on improving their donor experience, create memberships and set up planned giving programs. Nonprofits can encourage increased donations by being transparent and letting givers know exactly where they spent their money and what difference it made.

Break It Down Further Into Smaller Strategies

If one of your broader fundraising goals is donor acquisition, you can decide on something specific such as increasing your total number of donors by 3% by next year. You can further narrow it down into multiple steps like:

• Strategy 1: Plan a major fundraising campaign every two quarters and a small-scale fundraising effort every two months.
• Strategy 2: Conduct a peer-to-peer or crowdfunding event once every quarter to gain donors online.
• Strategy 3: Invest in fundraising software to save time on data analysis and event management
• Strategy 4: Create a budget for new marketing strategies like influencer marketing to encourage online giving and build a digital presence.

It can be overwhelming to get started, but remember that it doesn’t need to be perfect right away. Start somewhere (anywhere) and build from there.

6. Decide on Which Fundraising Method To Take

After deciding what your fundraising goal is, it’s time to decide how you will reach it.

You can employ any of the numerous fundraising techniques:

• Peer-to-peer fundraising
• Crowdfunding
• Phone calls
• Email marketing Campaigns
• Influencer marketing
• Social media campaigns
• Offline, virtual or hybrid events
• Corporate partnerships
• Recurring donation campaigns

When it comes to fundraising methods, there’s no shortage of them. You can pick one or a mix of the techniques.

Consider the Big Picture

Having a mix of long and short-term plans is one of the best practices in the nonprofit world. You can start by creating a 1-year, 3-year and 5-year plan. The 1-year plan needs to be as detailed as possible, while the 3- and 5-year plans can be broader. Decide some key activities for each of them, and if your long-term plans need additional resources, then include techniques to achieve those as well.

Ensure Your Goals Align With Your Vision

Donors need a compelling reason to give to your nonprofit. A well-crafted, clear and passionate mission statement can make the difference between prospects aligning with you over other similar organizations. You can’t expect donors to give if you don’t know what exactly you’re doing.

Ask yourself the following questions:

• Why did we establish this nonprofit?
• Why are we raising funds?
• How is our nonprofit making a difference in the world?

Once you get clear on the whys of your goals, you can proceed with the whats and create a case for support. It should have:

• A clear mission statement
• A brief history and what your nonprofit plans to accomplish
• Your fundraising goals
• Your gift range chart
• An appeal to give and how donations will make a difference in the community

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7. Plan Away on the Fundraising Calendar

A lot of fundraising organizations plan goals with a solid budget plan, a great mission statement and a dedicated volunteer base, but one place where they stumble is making a calendar. Few basic timelines, a vague idea of project dates and trying to “wing it” won’t do you any good. Especially with fundraising organizations, planning way ahead surely pays off in the long run.

A calendar, first and foremost, will help you stay on track. It serves as a visual reminder of how busy your schedule will be at a given time and encourages you to follow through on tasks. Use the calendar at every development meeting to help keep on top of goals.

Get started with anything — a notebook, spreadsheet, downloadable template, or just simply put it on Google Calendar and provide access to your entire charity. Start with your existing commitments — sponsors, board meetings, events, long-term donor acquisition campaigns — and enter them in your calendar. You can divide them into different timelines like planning, kickoff and follow-up phases. Try to be as detailed as possible.

For example, you need to create a strategic plan and deadlines for holidays (one of the busiest times of year for nonprofits). Just placing the target in your calendar isn’t helpful. Now is the time to let your type-A side shine through and be as organized as you can be! Spell out everything — when volunteer training will take place, deciding a venue, sending personalized messages pre- and post-event, preparing a speech to deliver at the venue and more.

It’s also important to remember that things may always change or get delayed in the process because life happens. So, be flexible with calendar plans when necessary. A good balance between staying on track and changing up when needed is ideal.

Set Realistic Deadlines

A good way to map out timelines is to take a particular event and backtrack from there. Calculate backward how much time each of the smaller goals would take. Pay special attention to elements that need to be taken care of beforehand. There may also be timelines that are dependent on each other. For example, you can’t book catering unless you pick a venue, and you can’t pick a venue unless you know how many donors are likely to attend.

Logistics

Thoroughly laying out your logistics ensures your team doesn’t run into surprises or crises during the planning process. Draft and organize:

• Event’s date, time, location and attendance
• Materials and technology needed pre, during and post-campaign
• Cost of each event and the overall project (marketing budget, cost of catering and venue)
• Any other event-specific goals

Preparing a logistical plan of action can help organize the budget so all your business decisions go hand in hand. This will also enable you to properly delegate tasks, assign expenses and tackle possible roadblocks along the way.

8. Delegate Tasks to Your Team

Get All Hands on Deck

Your development team may be in charge of creating the team, but it will need your entire organization to implement it and produce results.

First, be sure to get your board of directors involved before your plan “goes live.” If you’re a small-sized nonprofit, you may have only a few people to execute projects, which is why consulting leadership helps find an actionable solution. If you’re a large organization, consult board members, marketing, communications and development team before distributing work. You can also talk to a professional nonprofit consultant to help map out the operation.

Assign Projects and Deadlines

This part can feel overwhelming as there are many tasks to accomplish, but there’s only so much time. Collaborate with other department heads and decide who will do what and when. Once you’ve made a rough plan, distribute the activities list to your nonprofit so everyone is on the same page.

Chances are your teams are already occupied with other organizational work and cannot fully commit to new projects. So don’t schedule everything too close together and give your employees and volunteers realistic deadlines and room to work with. You should continuously refer to and change things in the calendar during this stage.

If your staff member has a lot of due dates to meet in a short amount of time, consider spreading them out. Are there any tasks you can work on ahead of schedule? Can you push one campaign’s deadlines so they don’t overlap with another event?

Many times fundraising campaigns can be time-sensitive and initiated as a response to something that happened. But being overly ambitious and giving impossible deadlines sets you and your employees up for disappointment. Try to maintain a sustainable pace to achieve maximum productivity levels.

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9. Do a SWOT Analysis

SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analysis is an evaluation tool that gives great insight into your charity’s overall health. It makes you understand where your plan succeeds and where it falls short. The SWOT method takes into account internal factors (strengths and weaknesses) and external concerns (opportunities and threats) and helps you identify areas for growth.

You can use the following template to get started:

Strengths:

• Which fundraising techniques have shown us consistent success?
• Which areas have seen growth in the past year?
• What are my strongest funding sources?
• What gives us an edge over other nonprofits?
• What unique talents do our staff and volunteers have?

Weaknesses:

• Which area continues to be a concern for us?
• Are we setting goals that are too low?
• Were there ever communication gaps between leadership and staff? How effectively did we resolve them?
• Do we need specialized technology or resources to see improvement in certain areas?

Opportunities:

• Do we accept multiple payment options?
• What new fundraising techniques can we try?
• What are some marketing strategies we can use for growth?
• Are we using the latest fundraising data when planning goals?
• Should we get fundraising plan templates for a quicker and more efficient planning process?
• Are our campaigns optimized for various audiences and channels like mobile and social media?

Threats:

• What are some possible events or factors that can delay the goal?
• Are there similar organizations competing for the same funding sources?
• How will the economy and recession predictions affect our nonprofit?
• Are there any policy changes that can hinder the donor communication process?

10. Segment and Prioritize Donors

Segmenting your donors is as necessary as separating your laundry into colors and whites. Try and target everything at once, and it becomes a big ol’ mess! Separating your donor base into different categories makes it easier to personalize their communications and prioritize their needs. The most common method is to segment based on gift amount.

You can divide your donors into three major categories:

Major donors

These donors give a huge chunk of the funds you raised so far. How you segment donors totally depends on you and your average donor capacity. For large organizations, major donors can be anyone who donates around $10k, but for small nonprofits, it can be someone who gives $1k. Regardless of how you classify them, targeting major donors is a must to succeed in a particular year.

Mid-level donors

This range of donors gives anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars every year. However, what you categorize as a mid-range donor is individual to your organization.

Minor donors

Minor or small-dollar donors are just as essential as mid-range and major givers. As such, your messaging needs to be attuned to their preferences. If you ask someone who donates $50 a month to give a gift amount of $500, it may turn them off and make it less likely to align with your charity. You want to encourage donors after all, not nag or push them.

Minor donors are invaluable funding sources that need equal effort on your part. Small monthly recurring payments can add up to a lot more than a major one-time gift in the long term. Imagine Sarah, a small dollar donor who gives $30 a month on a regular basis. Over the course of one year, she donates $360. Paul, on the other hand, is a one-time major donor who gave $500. Sarah’s two-year donations add up to $720, and even though it’s over a long period, it amounts to more than Paul’s one-time giving.

While categorizing on a gift amount basis and asking for small recurring donations is the best way to go, you can also classify givers on — level of involvement, interests, location, age and more. Once you segment donors, make it a point to reach out to more people than you need. For example, if you need two major donations, contact four possible donors.

11. Revisit as Needed

Executing a fundraising plan is a whole other ball game than drafting one. To bring your vision to reality:

• Regularly check in with your teams: Are they stuck in a project stage and need your help? How is the pace of their progress? Meeting with your staff helps get a better picture of where the campaign is headed and keeps everyone on the same page.
• Create an accountability system: To ensure everyone follows through with their assigned tasks on time, you must review your teams’ performance. You can pair a few people to check on each other’s task progress or use a project management tool that automatically registers campaign timeline data.
• Set aside time for high-priority tasks: Some tasks need your undivided attention, and you must execute them to a T. For example, major donors require follow-ups and customized communication as it can make or break your project.

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Best Practices

Below we’ve listed some best practices you should follow to create an efficient fundraising plan.

Create a Detailed Plan

It’s better to calculate what and how many ingredients go into making a dish rather than desperately trying to fix the food later on. It’s the same with fundraising. An excellent way to make your plans more specific and viable is to create SMART fundraising goals.

Prioritize Collaboration and Communication

Fundraising is not a one-man show, it’s a team effort. You need to prioritize collaboration and communication to make a successful campaign. While you cannot understate how critical proper task delegation is, make sure you’re working with your team. Ask them for their feedback, consider their suggestions for improvement and set deadlines that work for both of you.

Set Flexible and Realistic Goals

Fundraising plans are a guide to help you implement donor acquisition and retention strategies. They shouldn’t be set in stone but rather like a paper you can write and rewrite on. (Is this why paper beats rock?) Be willing to change when necessary, as campaigns can sometimes grow in ways you cannot predict.

Consider Using Dedicated Software

A specialized fundraising solution with project management and CRM capabilities can help you more effectively than messy spreadsheets and neon sticky notes can. You can track donor information, outreach on multiple channels, save time with automation tools and utilize trend forecasting.

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Final Thoughts

Given how useful fundraising plans can be, it’s hard to understand why many nonprofits don’t have one. Maybe they don’t have a development team. Some may not have enough data. Or they’re searching for the perfect template to create the perfect plan. A lot of doubts may come up during this process but always remember — it’s better done than perfect. A plan that is 50% as effective as you want it to be is better than no plan, which is 0% as helpful.

Do you know any other strategies that can help nonprofits in organizing campaigns? Any neat tricks we missed out on? Let us know below!