How to Develop a Strategic Fundraising Plan

As a nonprofit or charity organization, it’s important that you approach the job of fundraising intentionally. This means having a well-thought-out plan in order to achieve your fundraising goals - and the best way of doing that is with a strategic fundraising plan.

Below we detail exactly what a strategic fundraising plan is and discuss a number of methods for creating your own.

What is a Strategic Fundraising Plan?

A strategic fundraising plan is a set of plans that precisely lays out the fundraising strategies and goals of your organization.

Why is this important?

Because it gives your organization structure and a blueprint that it can follow in order to achieve its fundraising goals and fulfill its mission.

Making Your Strategic Fundraising Plan a Reality

Now that you have a better idea of what precisely a strategic fundraising plan is, let’s take a look at the steps you should follow in order to realize it.

1. Tie it into Your Mission

An effective strategic fundraising plan should tie into your organization’s mission. This means that every process of the project should be carefully coordinated so as to bring your organization - whether it’s a charity or non-profit - one step closer to achieving its overarching mission.

This could be something as simple as sending out emails to prospective donors. In that case, your mission statement should be included in every email so that your donor base is aware of what you’re trying to achieve and where their money will be going.

The same goes for events and silent auctions. Attendees should be made aware of your mission from the get-go so that it’s clear why you’re raising funds, and what your solution to the problem you’re trying to solve is.

Don’t sleep on this one - organizations without a clearly communicated message risk losing support from donors.

2. Build Your Team

An organization is only as strong as the people working there.

It’s therefore incredibly important that you have hard-working and competent people working towards executing your fundraising plan.

Determine their roles beforehand so that it’s clear who is in charge of what aspects of the strategic fundraising plan. This eliminates the guesswork about who is responsible for what task and that everyone has a clear and unobstructed understanding of what their role in the plan is.

The same is true for volunteers. Make it abundantly clear that volunteers understand what their role in the overarching fundraising strategy is so that they can readily achieve their targets and goals.

3. Develop Milestones

Milestones and objectives are important for every project, and the same is true of a strategic fundraising plan. After all, without milestones, the plan wouldn’t be very strategic.

Creating a list of clear, actionable goals is critical for breaking down the larger problem - raising money for your cause - into smaller, more manageable tasks that can be achieved in a shorter time frame.

But how do you decide on the milestones?

This largely depends on your mission. If your goal is to raise money for children's hospitals through silent auctions, a good starting point would be to determine how much money you need to support them. Once you have that information, you might think about how much money you can raise per silent auction, and how many silent auctions you need to raise that amount. That might require a large amount of research, but once you’ve finished you could turn to the problem of sourcing the items you plan to auction.

We could wax lyrical about this until we’ve written an entire case study, but the point is clear - milestones provide the blueprint that will help you achieve meaningful and tangible progress from inception to success.

4. Determine Your Timeline

Now that you’ve determined your milestones, it’s important to develop a realistic timeline in order to achieve them. Some milestones may require quite lengthy timelines - even years - whereas others are relatively short, but once you have everything laid out in front of you, you’ll have a much better understanding of how long your mission will take.

From direct email appeals to hosting events, there are various methods of fundraising, and each of them will require different amounts of time commitments. Depending on your strategy, you need to determine when you’re going to send out communications, host events, or perform other fundraising initiatives.

5. Research

If you’ve already hosted fundraising initiatives, you’ll have a lot of data to pull from in order to effectively achieve future goals.

For example, if you hosted a silent auction that raised a lot of money, you can study it to learn what worked and what didn’t, and apply that information to any silent auctions you hold going forward.

Likewise, if you hosted an event that had an underwhelming turnout, try to figure out why it didn’t perform so well. Did the demographics of the audience not align with your organization’s mission? Were the items on the auction not desirable to the audience? Was there inadequate planning?

The answer to all of these questions will give you invaluable data which you can then apply to your strategic funding plan.

6. Implement Your Strategic Funding Plan

At this point, you should have a fully fleshed-out strategic funding plan - and now it’s time to put it into action.

Many nonprofits and charitable organizations begin strong only to abandon their strategic fundraising plan halfway through the year. But this solid framework for achieving fundraising success is most effective when you stick to it.

That doesn’t mean that there isn’t wiggle room for adaptation. Quite the opposite - when you need to make changes to your plan, do so carefully and with intention. After all, there are likely to be forces outside of your control that influences the direction of your efforts. The important thing is that rather than abandon the strategic fundraising plan, you adapt it to meet the challenges of external markets.