[A Plan You Can Defend] Episode 1: Start With What Actually Happened
Most fundraising plans are last year's calendar plus hope. In the first episode of A Plan You Can Defend, a three-part series on building next year's fundraising plan, we follow Dana and Joanne at Riverbend Community Food Pantry into their planning day. We start with the numbers: what to gather, how to read last year honestly, and how to set a goal you can explain in one sentence.
In this episode you'll learn:
- Why a small team can build a full year's plan in one working day, but only if the numbers are on the table first.
- The four things to request before your planning day (gift-level giving export, finance's revenue report, channel costs, and hours), and why gathering them usually takes one to two weeks.
- Why you reconcile last year's total with finance before you plan anything.
- The guessing exercise that shows the gap between what your team remembers and what actually happened.
- Net per hour: why a gala and an email appeal can look very different once you count costs and staff hours.
- How to read donors by lifecycle and gift level, and what one point of retention is worth to you.
- Why the goal starts with your organization's strategy, and how to build it top-down and bottom-up.
- How to set a floor, a target, and a stretch, and the one-sentence test every goal has to pass.
- This week's action item and homework: send the data request, and do the guessing exercise before you look at the real numbers.
Riverbend Community Food Pantry, Dana, Joanne, and all of Riverbend's numbers are fictional and illustrative.
Ready to build next year's plan? Your 12-Month Fundraising Plan in One Day walks you through it step by step: nine modules and about three hours of video, built for executive directors and development teams of one to three people. You get the Planning Day Kit (data checklist, request emails, one-day agenda, team exercise guides, and a printable wall calendar), the Planning Workbook spreadsheet in a blank version and as Riverbend's filled-in example, the One-Page Board Plan, and the Co-Strategist Prompt Library for using AI without sharing a single donor's name. Lifetime access to the videos and downloads.
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