Overly Ambitious
I’m just back from a car trip. It would have been fun, but we tried to cram a three or four week trip into two. At first, we drove too long each day and stopped too infrequently. Then we realized that even if we construed our road trip as ONLY being on the road, we couldn’t get to all the places we intended. I’d say poor planning, but in truth there was no planning. Just a “let’s go,” and off we went.
After a big fight at 2 am one morning, we agreed to cancel half our trip—but not our time—and actually stop and smell some proverbial roses.
In the end, it was fine, but not the trip either of us hoped for.
Along with not getting to places we wanted to go, our lack of planning resulted in missed opportunities and too many times where long gone from somewhere looking at each other and saying, “We should have….”
Usually, we like car trips because there is a freedom from being on someone else’s timeline—the airlines, the hotel reservations, the train, the boat. With a car trip, you go when you want, have the freedom to head up a road you hadn’t counted on. Only this time, we went to extremes. We did no planning and to paraphrase my hero, Yogi Berra, because we didn’t know where we were going, we didn’t get there.
It’s interesting to note that I would never condone embarking on fundraising without a clear and detailed plan. Too often I’ve seen nonprofits use the fit and start method of raising funds. Or trying to, for that is never successful.
As with a trip, you should start by defining the destination. And as with a trip, while that can be aspirational, it also has to be realistic. If your organization has been raising less than $40,000 a year, what would make you think that THIS year you could raise $1,000,000? As you decide on your fundraising goal consider what you’ve been raising in the past, the depth of your prospect pool, and how many and how sophisticated your fundraising staff and volunteers are. And, while your mission or a specific program may seem to be compelling, if you only have one person who is willing to make an ask, under 100 potential donors, or a fantasy that social media will do the trick, you may find yourself on the equivalent of my car trip.
As you develop your goal, think about who will provide those gifts (and perhaps, grants). Gift charts can be helpful in thinking this through. If your plan is totally to raise the needed funds via only major gifts, then a traditional gift chart works. But if you are going to reach your goal using a variety of fundraising techniques you must tweak that gift chart. If, for example, you think that you can raise 20% of your goal via direct mail (e or post) appeals, plug that in. Then consider how you will raise the other 80%. Will 50% come from grants? Great—identify who those grantors are, the amount you reasonably expect to get, and put that in. So now there is 30% to figure out. If, say 250,000 is going to be raised from individuals who will give you somewhere between $2,500-$75,000, do a separate gift chart for them, then integrate that into you main chart.
What happens if you find that you are $25,000 short? This is where planning ahead helps big time.
You can, of course, scale back your goal. Doing this before you tell your board and the world what your goal is helps to prevent embarrassment and a sense of failure. And if, after you lower everyone’s expectations, you reach that previous number, well better to be over goal than under water.
With your gift chart in hand, get granular about how you will raise these funds. An appeal, fine. But what are the specific elements of that appeal? And what are the steps you will have to take to reach your number? Major gifts? Who will you ask? Who will open the door to that prospect? What are the moves you need to make so you will get that prospect to make the gift you want?
I get it. Planning is time consuming and, honestly, it can be painful. Remember Yogi’s advice—and make sure you plan your trip so you get where you intended to go.