Your nonprofit’s fundraising budget gives your team an outline for what you can realistically accomplish in a year. However, shifting economic conditions, new major gift donors, and successful campaigns can all affect your forecasted financial outcomes. Strategic planning based on past giving data and a diverse set of revenue streams can help your organization secure and grow your fundraising baseline, increasing your overall stability. 

When developing a long-term financial plan, consider key factors such as upcoming marketing campaigns, community engagement metrics, and past fundraising performance. This guide identifies key areas to consider when strategically planning your upcoming fundraising initiatives and explores ways to increase your financial returns. Let’s dive in!

1. Set realistic goals

The most important thing to remember when creating a fundraising plan is to be realistic in your goal-setting. Orr Group recommends conducting a landscape assessment to determine the true standing of your organization before making your plan, as it’s easy to inflate your expected fundraising returns when you’re excited about new initiatives and programs.

Here are some data points you need to gather to create a realistic fundraising goal:  

• Collect previous fundraising data: Replace your intuition with hard numbers. How many donors actually contribute to your organization in a year? Which campaign types are most successful? Past giving patterns help your team accurately predict how much funding you’ll receive. 
• Determine a baseline: While multiple years of fundraising data give your team an understanding of how your donors behave over time, your previous fiscal years’ data provide a reachable goal for your future strategies. Base your fundraising goal on your last year’s fundraising numbers to increase your capacity while operating within a realistic fundraising expectation. 
• Track your expected funds: While one-time donations contribute to your overall operational success, they’re difficult to track. When surveying your financial landscape, base your expected financial return on the total of your planned, major, and recurring gifts. These steady revenue streams give your team a concrete financial foundation that supports future programming. 
• Assess hidden costs: When reporting fundraising metrics, teams often overlook their marketing cost per dollar raised. When setting future financial goals, make sure to account for the cost of running advertising campaigns, programs, and events for a full understanding of your fundraising success.

After you’ve gained a comprehensive understanding of your financial landscape, use that data to plan future campaigns, events, and initiatives. For example, if a certain financial campaign, such as Giving Tuesday, brings in twice as many donations as other initiatives, or if you consistently receive major gifts from new donors at the end of the year, pivot your outreach strategy to emphasize those campaigns. Use clean data to identify and play to your past financial strengths in your fundraising strategy, increasing your chance of meeting and exceeding your financial goals. 

2. Assess scale and marketability

It’s important to determine whether your new initiatives are actually sustainable for your organization year after year. While you may have set a realistic fundraising goal, small marketing teams may not be able to support the scale of your planned campaigns, or your volunteer base may not be available to run events at a certain time of year.

When developing a fundraising strategy, assess your team’s capacity and resources, and scale your marketing and fundraising initiatives to fit within that capacity. Consider whether you can use automated or AI fundraising support for certain routine communications or segment your donors to increase your marketing capacity without hiring new staff. You may even consider creating a peer-to-peer fundraising event if you have a small internal staff but an extensive community or volunteer network. Creative problem-solving can help you scale your initiatives to raise funds effectively without overextending your team or marketing budget. 

3. Look for internal growth opportunities 

Many financial initiatives prioritize acquiring new donors. However, upgrading existing members and encouraging long-term gifts is more financially achievable. When assessing your plans to increase long-term giving, look for indicators that existing donors may be willing to contribute more. 

These donor metrics could indicate supporters who are interested in increasing their contributions: 

• • An increase in engagement: Donors who increase their involvement with your organization, whether through event attendance, volunteering, responses to your outreach campaigns, or gift size, may be willing to make a significant contribution. Set up a flag in your CMS to alert your team when donors suddenly increase their contributions to your organization. 
  • Multiple gifts over a period of time: Say you have a donor that makes a sizeable donation once every year or two years. These donors clearly care about your organization, but they don’t have a set donation cadence. Multiple gifts over time provide an opportunity for your team to discuss more regular, recurring donations that add up to or exceed their usual annual gift. 
  • An increase in wealth or financial capacity: Supporters who have historically supported your organization and who have experienced an increase in their financial capacity might be willing to increase their contributions. 

When developing a strategy to increase your long-term fundraising, first look to your mid-level donors, as their gifts help you establish a strong financial baseline. Of your existing donor base, they also have the strongest likelihood of becoming major gift donors during their donor lifespan. As you develop your long-term fundraising strategy, include a dedicated outreach and stewardship plan for your recurring mid-level donors. 

4. Market the benefits of long-term contributions 

While major gifts and legacy donations can help fund major projects and improve your overall financial baseline, the key to long-term financial stability is recurring gifts. However, donors may not know that, which is why it’s important to increase awareness around regular giving.

To successfully communicate the importance of recurring gifts in your marketing initiatives, clearly articulate the tangible benefit of predictable, long-term funding on your organization’s ability to make a positive impact. Show how a monthly donation of just $10.00 can help you provide a book to a classroom, or provide meals to a family in need. If you ground your marketing tactics in the real-life impact, prospective supporters will understand how many small gifts add up to a broad cumulative outcome.

A clear view of your existing financial strategies and expected revenue, as well as your team’s ability to sustain new marketing initiatives and onboard new donors, can help your nonprofit successfully design and execute fundraising strategies that fit your organization’s capacity. Automate your fundraising data logging workflows to increase your data’s accuracy and expand your team’s capacity to create long-term strategic plans.