The Importance of Planning for Success

For this post, I want to focus on arguably the most critical aspect of every fundraising campaign: one that is often glossed-over or worse, ignored completely, namely, the importance of planning and setting goals, which at the very minimum means defining the success parameters of your campaign.  As Casey Stengel famously said, “If you don’t know where you’re going, how will you know when you get there?”

I’ve noticed that sometimes those running fundraising programs (“Group Administrators” in FundScrip parlance or “Fundraising Coordinators”) don’t do much planning and are often not even working towards a defined target.  This is a big oversight because to be successful in fundraising, as with any endeavour, you need to develop goals & targets and the strategies to achieve them. You need to track your progress so you can make adjustments along the way; and then communicate your progress and adjustments to all those affected by your campaign, aka Stakeholders. Of course, you also need to learn from your mistakes so that you won’t repeat them. But often completion of these fundamental activities is not easy for many reasons:

• Many who take on the challenge of Group Administrator or Fundraising Coordinator don’t really know why or how to plan and set goals. They’re new at fundraising and have never gone through the process of planning, launching, monitoring and closing out a fundraising campaign. The good news is that Fundraisers are created, not born. Like any worthwhile pursuit, becoming a great Fundraiser requires dedicated, applied learning. At FundScrip, we have Coaches and many great tools and resources to help you with this stuff.
• Another challenge is lack of time, since many Group Administrators are volunteers who have other jobs. Depending on the fundraising solution(s) you choose, it can take quite a bit of time to implement and administer a fundraising campaign. You need to automate, template & delegate.
• And then there is the fear of failure: it’s a lot easier to tell everyone that you’re raising an unspecified amount money than to set a hard target and miss it, because you may be judged a failure – at least that’s the fear. Of course, failure is only failure if you don’t learn from your experiences.

There are, no doubt, other nefarious roadblocks to planning for success; but in this blog I will focus primarily on those listed above, which should also help you overcome any other hurdles you may encounter.

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When you think about it, running a fundraising campaign is no different than running a business: you want to maximize revenues (earnings), while keeping costs to a minimum. To many, this is a very daunting task. Not everyone believes they can find their inner-CEO. However, it is not as difficult as it may appear. There are a lot of tools & resources to help you. And, like eating an elephant (BTW, who eats elephants?), you just need to proceed one bite at a time.

So let’s get started!

The first thing you need to do is develop answers to the following fundamental questions. They don’t need to be long answers, just faithful, honest answers:

1. WHY are you raising money? (the Problem)
2. WHAT will the money raised be spent on? (the Solution or Goal)
3. HOW MUCH needs to be raised to pay for your Solution? (the Target)
4. HOW LONG will the campaign run? (the Duration – Start & End Dates)
5. HOW will you do it? (the Strategy)

(If you are already a FundScrip Group Administrator, try to answer these questions; and then ask yourself if your supporters could answer them. If you don’t think so, you’ll need to communicate this to them.)

By answering these questions, you will have created the basis of a plan for success. You’ll also have the basis of your Plea for Support, which you will use to solicit support from potential supporters. I’ll discuss each question individually and the Plea for Support in more detail in upcoming posts.