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What is a fundraising strategy?
What is a nonprofit fundraising strategy?
Why do you need a strategic fundraising plan?
What makes a successful annual fundraising strategy?
Oct 5, 2023 · A nonprofit fundraising strategy is a detailed plan created to guide you through a chosen campaign. Fundraising strategies vary depending on the size, capacity, and goals of the nonprofit planning them, along with the specifics of the campaign being planned.
A fundraising strategy helps keep you on track by offering deadlines and benchmarks to hit throughout the year. Ultimately, a well-rounded fundraising strategy will help your organization raise more and gain access to long-term support. But what does a fundraising strategy look like in practice?
- Define your goals. The first step to creating an effective fundraising plan is to set your goals. If you don’t have goals, you won’t have a direction to head in or metrics to review to measure your success, which would inform your next steps.
- Determine your audience. Too many nonprofits tend to think about fundraising as simply pulling money out of an ATM, forgetting that there’s another person on the other side of the equation.
- Choose your campaigns. There are thousands of nonprofit fundraising ideas available to your organization. The ones that will work best for your nonprofit are the ones that are chosen with your audience in mind.
- Write a case for support. While many of your campaigns like hosting 5Ks and selling merchandise encourage smaller donations, much of your fundraising revenue will come from major donations and larger campaigns like capital or capacity-building campaigns.
- Define the Funding Channels that the strategy will address. The funding channels are the different categories of income that the organisation is already accessing or might expect to be able to access in future.
- Internal Review. Once you have defined the funding channels, it’s time for the first element of the review phase. For any strategy, it’s important to look internally at what approaches the organisation currently takes, what it has achieved over recent years and what resources are at its disposal.
- External Review. After the internal review, it is helpful to assess the external environment. This includes looking at what other similar charities are doing and how they are performing as well as any benchmarking data from voluntary sector studies and reports.
- Funding Source Review. Having done all the research and analysis across the internal and external review, now is the time to bring it all together. Going back to your funding source categories, you can use your findings to develop a detailed SWOT analysis for each source.
- Evaluate Your Current Strategy and Past Campaigns. The best way to build a targeted fundraising strategy is to evaluate your present one. If you don’t have a formal pan, look at your past campaign performance and spending.
- Do a SWOT Analysis. SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analysis is an evaluation tool that gives great insight into your charity’s strengths and overall health.
- Define Your Existing Resources. You can’t play with the cards you’re dealt if you’re unsure what your cards are. Strategize goals in terms of the availability and limitations of your resources.
- Determine Goals and Create a Gift Range Chart. The next step is to set a fundraising goal. We know it’s easier said than done. Where do you even start, and what exactly do you do?
A fundraising strategy is a dedicated plan to build strong donor relationships and raise revenue to advance your mission. A successful annual fundraising strategy typically involves multiple campaigns, from peer-to-peer initiatives to matching gift challenges, to keep donor engagement levels high and encourage giving at a large scale.
Apr 12, 2024 · Fundraising ties into almost all nonprofit efforts — that’s why we’ve compiled 60 nonprofit fundraising strategies that cover everything from donation forms, email, and events, to websites, and social media.
