Fundraising plan template format

Include numbers — lay out your fundraising targets for this year and for the coming couple of years. How much do you need to raise? Are there amounts that need to be raised each month just to keep the doors open?

Are there contingency goals where you will be able to do additional work if additional money comes in? Also include your fundraising related objectives in this section.

For example,… do you want to find 3 new members for your development committee? Whatever your goals and objectives for the coming year, spell them out in this section with as much specificity as possible. Use the sample fundraising plan at the end of this article to see some examples of the types of goals and objectives that you can include in your own plan. This section lists the assumptions you are making in formulating the plan. Every non-profit makes assumptions as it plans out its fundraising for the coming year.

List them here, so that everyone is on the same page. Some examples of possible assumptions include:. The second half of the plan is where things really start to get fun. This is where you list out what you are actually going to do this year to meet your goals. This is where you start to build out your fundraising strategy. It all starts with your fundraising infrastructure.

As you prepare this section, you want to ask your team: what infrastructure do we currently have in place for fundraising, and what infrastructure do we anticipate needing over the coming year or years? Infrastructure includes things like additional staff, your donor database, your marketing materials, your case for support, your website, etc.

What will need to be upgraded or replaced this year? What do you want to add to make your team more effective fundraisers? List it all, with deadlines and responsibilities for implementation, as well as the cost for each item.

The sample fundraising plan below will give you some ideas on the types of infrastructure items you can include in this section. Prospects are the fundamental starting point for the fundraising funnel. Without prospects, you have no one to cultivate, and without people to cultivate, you have no one to ask for a gift.

Simply put, new prospects are the lifeblood of your fundraising effort. Actionable - You should be able to concretely act on the goals that you set.

Realistic - Your goals should be ambitious but achievable. For capital campaigns, feasibility studies are essential for exploring what that might mean for your organization more on this below. For other types of campaigns, your past fundraising and performance data will be your best bet for determining goals that are impactful but realistic. Time-bound - A specific deadline will be essential.

These insights will help you understand whether you can feasibly reach those goals right now or if your time would be better spent focusing on other ways to build your fundraising capacity. Since capital campaigns are major multi-year investments of time and resources, understanding their feasibility as early as possible is a smart move to take during this first stage of planning a campaign.

Next, determine specific start and end dates for your fundraising campaign. Without a concrete timeframe to work within, it becomes much easier for your strategy to lose focus or direction over time. It should be fairly easy to set a start date for the first stage of your campaign, but setting a deadline might be more difficult. Remember that time-bound goals are essential.

Capital campaigns and other major development campaigns consist of these core stages:. For a complete breakdown of these stages, check out our guide to capital campaigns. Following a clear structure of planning, soliciting major donors and stakeholders, publicly kicking off your campaign, and then broadening your marketing to a wider audience of supporters is a reliable way to keep any campaign focused and your tasks prioritized.

Break down your campaign by these phases and set timeframes for each based on your start and end dates:. For each phase, go ahead and outline the key tasks, events, and anticipated expenses that you can already take into account. Plan ahead to conduct ongoing prospect research and use prospecting tools during the quiet phase.

Try to be as thorough as possible at this step. Knowing what needs to be accomplished and accounted for in each phase will be extremely helpful as you complete the rest of your fundraising plan template.

Whenever possible, anchor your budget with insights from previous campaigns and events. If you have past campaigns or events to study, break down their performance like this:. This exercise should give you a detailed view of how past campaigns or events performed in order to guide the budgeting process for your new campaign. If you know how much labor time went into each entry in your list, or any additional relevant notes, record them too.

Next, regardless of whether you had previous campaigns to study, outline your current committed sources that will contribute to your new campaign:. This step will look different for every campaign, but the main idea is to record and fully account for any relevant committed sources early in the process. For instance, previous pledges from major donors, government grants, and grants from private foundations are all common committed sources for capital campaigns.

This will give you the total needed that you should plan to raise across the duration of your campaign. Next, combine these budgeting insights and the notes you made while creating a rough timeline in Step 2. Your general campaign budget might look like this:. This fundraising campaign budget template includes all of the essentials - estimated revenue, expenses, and labor time - for each phase of the campaign.

Use insights from a number of sources to fill in each estimate in your own budget. These sources can include:. Past expenses and revenue data from similar campaigns, ideally broken down into specific tasks or elements.

Then refer back to the total amount needed that you determined earlier your topline goal minus your total committed sources. In a perfect world, the difference between these numbers will be zero, meaning your estimates are spot-on. As your budget and strategy continue coming into focus, adjust your plans with your budget and goals in mind. Just be sure to account for any new expenses that result from these changes.

Similarly, if a donor recognition wall will play a part in your post-campaign stewardship strategy , account for its cost now so that you can plan to raise enough to cover it. Based on your goals, timeline, and budget estimates, fill out a thorough calendar for your fundraising campaign. For each goal, identify any obstacles that may stand in the way of achieving it.

These might be time constraints, budget, the nature of your organization, or any number of additional potential roadblocks. When you identify the potential obstacles, you can incorporate a strategy for tackling them into your overall fundraising plan.

If you are conducting a major campaign, this is the right time to undertake a feasibility study. It is recommended that you use a third-party consultant like Aly Sterling Philanthropy to conduct the study. These experts help determine if your organization is ready to take on a large campaign, how to prepare, and how much you can expect to raise. The feasibility study will survey your stakeholders to answer these questions:. A feasibility study prepares you for your campaign by helping you develop realistic goals and proactively address obstacles.

This helps your organization build a stronger case for support and generate excitement and support for the campaign among the people closest to it, such as donors, board members, and volunteers. These goals should be achievable and should have an eye towards growth. Do not just focus on fundraising benchmarks: set goals to help you grow your community, improve donor retention, increase the number of major gifts your acquire, etc.

The more varied, the better. With every goal you should also identify what obstacles may stand in the way of achieving it. These might be due to time constraints, budget, the nature of your organization, or any number of potential roadblocks. Learn more about building your fundraising strategy! An integral part of crafting your fundraising plan is settling on a budget.

For example, review the success of your last capital campaign or other major fundraising push to determine whether you allocated enough resources in your budget to achieve your goals. Account for the sources of your income before allocating it to your various expenses. One way to clearly identify where funding will come from is by crafting a budget chart.

This chart should reflect:. With this information in hand, your team can better decide whether or not an expense is reasonable for your budget and craft your fundraising plan to account for trends from past budgets.

Make sure your budget also has the flexibility to account for any unexpected circumstances that arise throughout the initiative. Your budget should be as detailed as possible to keep your team on track and ensure nothing is left to interpretation.

Finally, craft your budget to be forward-thinking and use past results to predict future outcomes. This helps you keep an eye on expansion and maintain a positive outlook on the future. Not only will this budget empower your organization to achieve your fundraising goals, but it will also be shaped by how effective your past budgets have been. Account for the source of your income before allocating it to your various expenses. Learn more about assessing your fundraising strategy!

Create a fundraising plan calendar. Mark the dates of the start and end of your fundraising push, budget meetings, board meetings and more in this fundraising calendar. Share this calendar across the different departments of your organization to keep everyone on the same page as you work through the tasks in your fundraising plan. Having a detailed plan laid out in a calendar is especially important for large undertakings such as capital campaigns since these fundraising initiatives are split up into a series of phases, including:.

Each phase has a different timeline, so by noting each stage in your shared calendar, you can make sure your entire team is aware of where you are in the process. Remain flexible when necessary, but use the calendar as a way to track the progress of your fundraising efforts. Mark the dates of campaign beginning and endpoints, budget meetings, board meetings and more in this fundraising calendar.

Even further, your nonprofit should share this calendar across the different departments of your organization to help keep everyone on the same page when accomplishing the tasks in your fundraising plan. Remain flexible when necessary, but try to use the calendar as a way to track the progress of your fundraising efforts. Learn more about creating a fundraising calendar! Create a gift range chart for your fundraising plan. When developing your fundraising plan, your nonprofit should create a gift range chart to identify the donations needed to achieve your fundraising goals.

Gift range charts help nonprofits plan out efforts by breaking down fundraising goals into smaller, more manageable benchmarks. So, how do you make a gift range chart? Armed with this information, your team can be strategic when choosing which prospects to engage with during your fundraising effort.

When developing your fundraising plan, your nonprofit should create a gift range chart to identify what is necessary to achieve your fundraising goals. Gift range charts help nonprofits plan out campaigns by breaking down fundraising goals into smaller, more manageable benchmarks. Armed with this information, your team is better able to identify prospects for giving, which provides you useful information to use when crafting your constituent engagement strategy.

Learn more about creating a gift range chart! Build your case for support. Prospects need to have a compelling reason to give to your organization.

There is no better way to grab their attention than by creating a dynamic case for support. This should be one of the first tasks your team works on so you can prepare all your marketing materials and donor information packages before the fundraising initiative kickoff. You can create a branded case brochure that delivers prospective donors everything they need to know about the initiative in a professional, detailed package.

Prospects need to have a compelling reason to give to your organization and there is no better way to grab their attention than by creating a dynamic case for support.