If you read last week's post, you know that the most important thing to do for 2021 is simply to ask for a gift. The second most important thing to do for 2021? Ensure that you are not just flailing around without a plan. You must develop a plan if you hope to work successfully in fundraising or any other field.
Vow to develop a plan that you can use to create a step by step approach for ensuring that you or you and your team are asking the right prospects at the right time for the right reasons--and in the right way.
Create a Cohesive Fundraising Plan
Think about your goals. What is the minimum that you have to raise? Then think about your own stretch objectives...all of us want to reach our goals and many of us want to exceed them...using those parameters, decide seriously what you need to do.
Define the priorities and write a short case statement to summarize them for yourself and also to use as a basis for proposals or solicitation letters. Are your priorities compelling? Urgent? Decide how much you have to raise and quantify how much you can raise with current prospects.
Do you need to expand your prospect base? How? Will you look into new groups altogether? For example, are there groups of certain professions that might be interested in your mission? Certain types of corporations who you have not yet approached? Great, write down as many possibilities as you can.
Think seriously about a time line for how you are going to reach those goals. Over what time period and what can you accomplish each month? How will you do it? Each week? Each day?
Think about what is realistic for you to plan and accomplish. Can you get it done?
How will you go about it--what are the strategies that you will use? Be specific.
How will you engage your prospects? Cultivate them? Follow-up with them?
Think about your project goals. Is there any way you might look at the goals just a little differently? Fundraise for those projects by taking a different approach? Perhaps you realize that if you interpreted the goals slightly differently now, how else you could be asking for support? With which groups would that be particularly effective?
Look over all of these items and go back as many times as it takes so that you can ultimately create a doable and strategic fundraising plan.
Take Inventory Of Resources That Can Support You
No one is an island in fundraising. There are many others who can catalyze your efforts. Who can help you now?
Are there Board Members who are engaged or could be engaged to help?
If there an Advisory Council? Does it make sense to engage them? Or if there is none, does it make sense to develop one?
What role can the CEO play?
What about other senior leaders?
Program staff?
Community volunteers?
What about others within the organization? Does the Prospect and Research Team have the resources to support your efforts? What about the Grantsmanship Team? The Annual Gift Team? Planned Giving Team? What other groups create an infrastructure of support? What systems are in place and how can you rely on them?
What about your budget? Is it adequate? Fixed or flexible?
If you have a staff, do you have the right people? Take the steps to ensure that you do.
Revisit And Revise Your Plan To Ensure That It Will Be Successful
You now have figured out the plan as well as the resources available to you. You have a great deal of information available. How can you use this information to create an action plan that is understandable to your leaders as well as your team and colleagues? Ensure now that the plan is achievable with the resources that you have in place. Ensure that it is adequate enough to reach your goals.
Write the Work Plan Down--List Your Tasks
Take the time to commit to the plan and, using all of the new information that you have compiled, write it down. Two or three pages, not a book. Again, looking at the next months and weeks. How long are various elements of the plan going to take? What results are you anticipating from each element of the plan? And when? Be specific as you develop next week's work plan--what do you need to accomplish?
Does your plan zing with creativity and realism? Does it get the job done? Why not get some external feedback--ask a trusted resource who can evaluate what you have done. Then be sure to share with your leadership and team.
Tick off the items from your to-do list every day...carry the list around with you to remind yourself where you are in relationship to your goals and timeline.
If you are moving forward and have not yet reached the goals that you laid out, get creative--pivot to a new or additional idea.
Check on yourself. Stay in front of the wave. Are you reaching the goals that you planned to reach? If not, why not? What seems to be blocking your movement forward? Diagnose the problems and address them one by one. Keep doing this throughout the next weeks and months. Self analysis. If you think you have stretched too far, back up just a bit. If you have not reached far enough--perhaps not asking for gifts of the right amount or not having enough prospects--adjust that.
Don't worry if you have to work double time (or triple time) to get to where you want to be. Simply embrace the fact that you have to work harder. At the end of that time, you are more likely to be where you want to be. And if time goes on and it is not happening, again, pivot to another play...come up with something to address the issue before it is too late--all great leaders can pivot or should learn to...no matter what, focus on the positive. Don't let yourself get overwhelmed, don't panic and don't get paralyzed. Concentrate on forward movement for your organization, yourself, and your team. Emphasize the positive.
Write it down and cross it off.
Throughout my educational experiences and my work career I used to make an abundance of notes, lists of what I needed to do, and I would cross them off as they were completed. Crossing them off was reinforcing to my need for productivity. One day, when I was cleaning my 7-year old daughter's room, I came across a very small piece of paper with a child's writing on her dresser next to her bed. I was curious and quickly realized she had created her own to-do list:
Read my book
Hug my doll
Choose clothes for school
Play Pretty Pretty Princess with my mom
Call Mallory
Eat dinner
This is a great example of how you don't even realize what you are modeling for your children--but in this case it was a valuable habit!
Time goes on and the days become weeks and the weeks become months. Go back and adjust your plan if you have to...keep doing it until you have reached your goals or the end of the year. Rarely do things come together easily in fundraising, that's why you have to work hard, early in the year. Be joyous. Keep in mind that you are in an amazing field, that you can make an impact for many people supporting or benefitting from your mission--and that 2021 is a year filled with exciting possibilities.