• The Fundraising goals
  You should have goals for the amount of money you need to raise and what the money will be used for. Is it for overhead costs, to fund a new program, to build a new facility or for a future rainy day?
  You should have a number of different goals and you will want to develop a fundraising plan for each. Your goals should be developed with your board of directors and have their sign off.

• The Fundraising Plan
  You should write down your fundraising plan. Your fundraising plan should state how much you need to raise, from what sources and how you will do it. This plan is a work in progress and should be updated through the year.
  You should start with your current programs and current funding. Ask yourself, is that amount of money covered or is there a gap? Do you want to do more but lack funds? This preliminary accounting will help you determine what your fundraising monetary goals are.

• The Costs
  You will need to estimate how much your fundraising program will cost. Include all costs such as postage, administration, staff, overhead, agency fees, website maintenance and running special events.
  You should try to be as realistic as possible when estimating these costs. Most experts recommend that your fundraising and overall administration costs do not exceed 24 per cent of your overall operating budget. Meeting with your board of directories, regularly will help you keep on track of your budget.

• The Timeline
  You will want to work on either a calendar year or your organization’s fiscal year. Be specific with all of your fundraising activities and identify who is the lead of each project. Develop timelines for each fundraising activity such as direct mail, online or special events. Timelines will change throughout the year but having a baseline will ensure that you get something accomplished.

• The Sources
  Identify your current funding sources and review them to see if they can be leveraged to produce more income. Ask yourself; are there audiences that you are not targeting? What about government or foundation grants, product sales, civic groups or mobile giving?
  Ask staff in the offices as well as your family and friends, how they made their last donation to a charity. If any of their answers are a source that your organization doesn’t do, look into and see if it fits with fundraising plan.

• The Evaluation
  Evaluate your fundraising plan throughout the year. This will help improve your results and let you know what works and what doesn’t. Aim to evaluate your fundraising program every few months. Use criteria such as amount raised, number of new donors and number of solicitations. What were the biggest challengers? What accounted for the biggest successes?

Once your organization is comfortable with having a fundraising plan, you will want to move on to multi-year plans, higher goals, more sophisticated strategies and newer techniques.

Learn More about our Fundraising Services
To get started, please call Patrick Durbano at 1-800-263-0669 ext 178 or by email patrick@ims.ca .

You may be using one database internal to process and track your donations but what about other donations such as online, telemarketing and face-to-face. Are these donations processed and kept different databases?

First you have to determine how many databases you have. Then ask yourself, are my online, telemarketing and face-to-face donations in my direct mail database? If your answer is yes, you are ahead of the game. If your answer is no, please keep reading. Having all of your donations even the ones that you may not have processed or deposited the funds, need to be in one database. The key benefits include donor relations and stewardship, reporting and financial reconciliation.

Your may have received phone calls or emails from your donors saying that they’ve changed their address months ago but are still getting mail to their old address. The new address may only be in one database and the one where the data is being pulled from for direct mail, may be in another. Having to remember to update donor information such as address in multiple databases is a long and tedious process which can be avoided by having one centralized database.

How do you get one centralized database? Now that you have reviewed your fundraising sources and know where that data is stored, you need to get it imported in your main database. If you outsource your donation processing and database management, your vendor will be able to help you with uploading the data. If you maintain your database management and processing internally, work with your staff on getting the files uploaded. If you get stuck, seek advice and help from experts and contacts. A great place to start is AFP.

Once all of your files are in one centralized location, your donor relations staff will only have to use one database to update addresses and other stewardship functions. Your donors will be communicated to more promptly; your staff will be able to refocus saved time on fundraising and save money but not having to pay to have updates be done in multiple databases.

For more information on the benefits of database management please click here.