A strong foundation is key to successful fundraising, and advanced planning is one of the most important fundamentals for nonprofits.
Developing a year-round fundraising calendar provides a strategic timeline of activities, campaigns, and events to help your organization stay organized and achieve its mission.
From planning seasonal events to coordinating matching gift drives, a well-crafted calendar ensures your efforts are intentional and impactful. Here are four essential steps to creating a year-round fundraising calendar for your organization.
1. Assess Your Current Operations
The best place to start building a fundraising calendar is to take stock of your current fundraising operations to help you determine your yearly goals.
Towards the end of your fiscal year, ask and answer the following questions:
- Where do we stand in terms of our current goals?
- How much work remains, and how long will it take to complete it all?
- What resources do we have for the upcoming year?
- Are we planning on expanding our team?
- Are our systems and software tools serving our needs well?
- Which fundraisers or fundraising events had success?
- Do we need point solutions, such as an event management platform, to satisfy specific needs?
If you have recurring events or fundraising campaigns, you might already have some ideas about improving them in the coming year to boost revenue. For instance, if you typically hold a charity golf event and want to streamline it and add more fundraising opportunities in the coming year, GolfStatus suggests adding a golf tournament-specific management platform to your tech stack.
2. Set General Yearly Goals and Objectives
Long-term goals should be the foundation for your fundraising plans.
Specific details can be determined to fill in the gaps down the road, but you should nail down the essentials first. Dig into the data you have from past events and campaigns to identify trends and priorities. For instance, you might analyze reports from your donor database, find that donor retention experienced a significant dip, and set a goal to reverse that trend.
Once you’ve reviewed the data and found the areas you want to prioritize, break those down into more specific goals and objectives. Continuing with the charity golf tournament example, let’s say your overarching goal is to raise an additional $10,000 from this year’s event. An objective to achieve this goal could be to switch from manual registration to online registration that includes donations on a golf tournament website.
It’s important to build flexibility into your year-long goals. It’s hard to predict outside factors that may impact your fundraising, so build in room for contingency plans on your calendar. You might even flesh out backup plans in advance to save yourself from scrambling later.
3. Determine Details and Specifics
Once you have your long-term goals and objectives in place, you can bring all the details together. Your fundraising calendar should have layers that include the following activities that are part of your overarching goals:
- Marketing timelines
- Donor communications and touchpoints
- Volunteer coordination
- Fundraising event management
It can feel overwhelming once you start getting into the details and specifics, but the good news is that you don’t have to plan each fundraising initiative immediately. Instead, create a timeline for each item to keep you and your team on track, and you can easily coordinate strategy, tasks, and to-dos.
4. Review, Adjust, and Optimize
Your calendar will evolve over the year as you adjust to changes or unforeseen circumstances.
Ensure that your development team prioritizes an ongoing review of your fundraising calendar. This is crucial to keeping your goals on track and allowing you to adjust and optimize as needed.
Here are a few tips for gauging your success throughout the fiscal year:
- Don’t strive for perfection right away. This is especially true for new events or campaigns. Instead, work with the data and information you have and consistently build up your calendar based on what you discover over time.
- Revisit your calendar regularly. Schedule monthly and/or quarterly strategic planning meetings where you analyze outcomes from completed items, review progress on upcoming campaigns, and make any adjustments.
- Use data. Be sure you have data collection mechanisms built into your campaigns and those data points are entered into your systems regularly. Use that data to gauge success based on key performance indicators (KPIs).
Final Thoughts
All nonprofit organizations have different needs, resources, and experience levels, so yearly planning might not be ideal or even feasible.
If your organization would rather start small, you can lay out individual fundraising idea timelines and eventually build a yearly calendar around them. No matter how you approach a fundraising calendar, advanced planning will help you allocate resources and anticipate needs to help you achieve your fundraising goals.
