I'm Dan Kimball I'm a product specialist here at Aplos and I have a unique
background and that I have actually 20 years of fundraising experience working
in nonprofits as a fundraiser I've also had the opportunity to serve
on some boards and actually help some small nonprofits here in my community
and it's it's an area that I love with a lot of passion and really have a lot of
fun in the fundraising field so a common question that I get all the time and I
think in a really important tool for nonprofits is what is a fundraising plan
and it's something that again I get lots of questions on and I'm just gonna spend
a couple of minutes to tell you a little bit about that fundraising plan
the fundraising plan is is really a critical component of a fundraising
operation I really feel like that a lot of people kind of missed the boat when
they don't have a fundraising plan because I look at it as as it's like
having a roadmap I mean you're not or a Google map if you want to be current but
with the fundraising plan is really gonna do is gonna help you take your
goal whatever goal that is if you can raise ten thousand dollars in your year
or a hundred thousand dollars or a million dollars you're gonna take that
goal and you're gonna really divide out what are the strategies that you're
gonna raise that money so it's the most simple form it's gonna be you know a
column it says what the task is so let's say maybe it should it's a dinner
banquet and in that dinner banquet we want to raise $5,000 and of that we want
to have a goal of 200 people coming to that event and then there's going to be
a column that says well how are we gonna go about doing that ticket sales an
auction and we're gonna pass out envelopes at that at that event so so
it's not the detail within that it's just those three kind of main things and
then really if you keep going with that then what you would do is you put
creating a fundraising plan for just that dinner banquet so it's a plan or a
whole second sheet event if you're going along and your six
months of the year and and you realize that maybe you have a couple of your
tasks on your fundraising plan that didn't go as well well you maybe you
want to add something I I definitely think that a fundraising plan should be
flexible in the sense that you you should be able to change it Midway I
think is okay I don't see anything wrong with that the thing that I probably most
cautious of is when people get too little too excited about the next great
thing without thinking it through you know maybe something like you know the
ice bucket challenge was a big deal everyone got really excited about that
suddenly everyone's like well we want to do that same thing well these things
take time to plan out and to really execute so I would just be careful of
that but certainly I think midway through a year it's good to look
together make sure that it's not just one person driving it but get feedback
from your staff how's this going do our do our dates need to be extended out
those kinds of things we have a great example of a fundraising plan in the
description below so if you link on if you click that link we'll have that for
you a couple things with the fundraising plan that I think are really great one
is it kind of helps keep your staff and the people who are involved involved
also an accountable the other thing that's really nice is that if you work
with a board and your board likes to give a lot of ideas and maybe they're
not always sensitive to the number of hours in a week what you can do with the
fundraising plan to say hey look folks we're gonna refer to the fundraising
plan to see where we are so it's actually a really nice tool to bring to
every board meeting to actually on an agenda and say hey how are we doing this
month of this quarter on our fundraising plan so I like it from that aspect too
you