Confidently Create your fundraising plan

Congratulations! You’ve made the decision to invest in yourself and your organization. Now what? This module is all about setting you up for success. If you start from a place of defeat and overwhelm, the process may still feel daunting – and believe me, we don’t want that. Instead, we’ll get you started on the right footing so that you can breeze through creating your plan and begin to put it into action.

Highlights: 

• Learn answers to some of your most pressing questions so that you can move forward with confidence and ease.
• Complete a brain dump to clear your head by getting your thoughts and ideas down on paper. This will help you to get started on the right foot by making sure you have the brain space for what comes next.

If we want to craft a thoughtful grounded plan, we first need to understand what’s worked, what hasn’t worked and where we can make improvements. After all, we want our plan to be based in fact and we want to have data to support our decisions.

Here, you’ll review your fundraising efforts to better understand how they met your organizational goals. The understanding you gain in this module will become the backbone of your goal setting and decision making for years to come. It will give you a deep understanding of your fundraising efforts and help you better tell that story to your key stakeholders.

Even if you’ve never looked at your fundraising data or key metrics, this module will break them down into simple, easy-to-execute steps that will finally make you feel confident in pulling and compiling this information.

Highlights:

• Understand the revenue, expenses, profit and other benefits associated with each fundraising activity and begin to identify trends. Remember when I said I’m going to challenge you to think about quality over quantity? This is the first step in doing that.
• Uncover the breakdown of your donor pyramid giving you the knowledge to firm up your donor base, start building a major gifts program, begin exploring sponsorship levels, create moves management plans and more.
• Identify your organization’s top donors and the most pertinent information about each donor so that you can create personalized stewardship and solicitation plans to deepen relationships, build loyalty and grow giving.
• Calculate your retention rates and donor universe to understand your current donor loyalty levels and your current potential reach. Many organizations believe the answer is to find new donors. But you know the key to working smarter and not harder is retention.
• Use my tried and true worksheets to quickly and easily compile your information in one easy-to-use place that you can build on in upcoming modules.

Now that you’ve pulled your data, it’s time to take a step back and see what the data is telling you. Where are your pain points and are they worth your time and energy? Which activities leave your staff feeling burnt out? Do they provide a significant enough return to be worth the investment?

Here you’ll identify what’s working and worth your time to continue and what you want to finally kiss goodbye. You’ll think through ways to enhance already fruitful activities and ways to change activities that aren’t meeting their goals. We’ll walk step-by-step through examples to show you exactly how it’s done.

For many of my clients this section is their “ah-ha” moment. It’s where everything crystalizes and where they can finally begin to see a future filled with more intentionality, more simplicity and more freedom.

Highlights:

• Implement the 7-question fundraising activity framework that I’ve developed and that has helped dozens of development professionals efficiently analyze their fundraising activities to make sound decisions about how to move forward in the most profitable way.
• What’s considered a major gift? We’ll talk through how to decide where to start your major gift program.
• Uncover when and how your major gifts come into your organization so that you can plan for your programs, services and cash-flow.
• Identify which of your major gifts are likely renewable so that you can more accurately predict fundraising revenue holding you accountable to a goal you can realistically achieve.

Your analysis is complete and you’ve had your “ah-ha” moment. You are now ready to put yourself in driver’s seat and set fundraising goals you feel confident you can achieve (and even exceed).

It’s here that you’ll also create the plan to reach each of your goals. This is where the rubber meets the road and it’s what you’ll reference on a regular basis to know where you should be spending your time. This is the roadmap you’ve been seeking – the bible that will give you the freedom to work on the items that will have the biggest impact while saying no to those that drain you and your team.

Highlights:

• Officially decide what to include in your fundraising program for the coming year and drill down on those – and only those – activities to create a laser focused guide.
• Learn the 4 key areas critical for the success of each activity that answer the most important questions generating expert-level results right out of the gate.
• Craft individualized plans for each of your top donors that will lead to deeper connections, easier asks and a lifetime of increased gifts.
• Understand the difference between budgeted and working goals to set both your organization and fundraising team up for success while not promising more than you can deliver on.
• Draft a top-notch cultivation, stewardship and recognition plan that will show your donors how much you love them without adding a heaping pile of work to your plate. 

As a fundraiser, you know that fundraising is only piece of the puzzle. So it’s time to talk about the other pieces of the puzzle – your internal systems, printed materials, and volunteers.

Love them or loathe them, these pieces can either make your hard work harder or they can be a welcome addition by giving you partners in your work, automating systems and adding ease. Here we will both analyze our infrastructure and set goals to make improvements that will drastically reduce your workflow and stress while providing critical added support.

Highlights:

• Identify your current systems-related pain points and learn two strategies to choose goals that will have the biggest impact without becoming all encompassing.
• Learn the four key questions to ask when assessing fundraising materials so that you can create language and materials that will go farther.
• Draft a compelling case for support that will become the boiler plate language you use time and time again. Say goodbye to continually trying to come up with new ways to talk about your core needs.
• Understand who at your organization is responsible for fundraising and how to talk with those stakeholders about their critical role in a way that mobilizes action and creates true partners in your fundraising efforts.
• Learn how to set realistic goals when you might not be personally responsible for achieving them – and how you can help motivate and keep others accountable to what they agreed to do. After all, it can’t all fall on you!

You’ve made it to the end and the good news is that you’ve already done the heavy lifting and written your plan. Now all that’s left is to compile everything into one place (and if you’ve used the worksheets I provided, you’ve already done this too!) and follow your roadmap toward fundraising success and personal freedom.

My goal for you is to create a plan that will deliver the funds your organization needs without the tiresome days and sleepless nights. In compiling the plan, you have an amazing opportunity to review everything you want to achieve and make sure it’s realistic before you share it more broadly with your Executive Director or Board of Directors. If you were too ambitious in creating your plan, this is the time to scale back and I’ll take you step-by-step through how to do just that.

I’ll also share my top tips and tricks for making your plan actionable. And finally, we’ll discuss how to easily update this amazing new asset so that you can use it for years to come.

Highlights:

• Choose a template that aligns with your personality so that your plan will be easy for you to read, use and update.
• Determine if your plan is realistic for the team you have in place and make any adjustments needed so that you can feel rock solid in what you’re committing to achieve.
• Learn the golden rules for developing buy-in with your colleagues and volunteers to create a culture of collaboration and shared responsibility.
• Uncover exactly how to share your plan in a way that positions you as an expert, leader and strategic thinker.
• Set the steps you want to take to hold yourself and your team accountable to keep you on track to hit and exceed your goals.
• Understand the simple steps you can take during the year that will make it so that you can update the plan next year in a few short hours.

Of course, your organization has unique challenges, every organization does. And while your plan will be perfectly tailored to address those challenges, the steps that you take to create that plan don’t have to be. Don’t get me wrong. I work one-on-one with organizations to create their fundraising plans. And while I LOVE that work, I’m here to tell you that you don’t need to spend all of that money to have a plan that is tailored to your organization. You can have a fully customized plan for a lot less by following the step-by-step process I lay out in Plans That Produce.

Plans That Produce is a self-paced implementation program. When you register, you’ll get LIFETIME ACCESS to all the lessons, slide decks, worksheets and materials right away so that you can work through them at your own pace.

If you’re committed to completing your plan in 4 weeks (which is what I recommend), you’ll likely put in 3-5 total hours of work a week which includes time to watch the lessons and to put them into action.

But here’s the thing…

You’ll quickly see that Plans That Produce is designed for rapid implementation and that the lessons build on each other. And when you realize that building a fundraising plan isn’t a chore when you know exactly what you need to be doing and when you know you aren’t spinning your wheels or wasting your time, you’ll WANT to keep going.

You’ve come to the right place! Plans That Produce is specifically designed for development professionals and Executive Directors who are newer to creating fundraising plans. Maybe this is your first time creating a fundraising plan. Or maybe you’ve thrown something together with varying degrees of success and you want to learn how to take that to the next level.

I’ve got you covered. I’ll show you exactly how to move from a blank canvas to a well thought-out actionable plan. I’ll share tips for those of you in one-person development departments and for those of you with small teams.

Unless you’re at a large development shop (think university, hospital, major philanthropic organization) or you’ve been creating fundraising plans for years, Plans That Produce will be an essential tool in your personal and professional growth.

I hear this all the time. You have a laundry list of things to do and it’s hard to know where to start. How can you possibly add something else to your list? Trust me, I get it. I’ve been there too.

The thing is, if that’s how you feel, how can you afford NOT TO take action? After all, if you don’t create a plan, you’ll be in the exact same place one, two or five years from now. And just imagine how burnt out you’ll feel at that point.

I want to let you in on a little secret about overwhelm…

Overwhelm happens when you don’t have an actionable, easy to follow, proven path. And overwhelm happens when you try to do everything at once.

Eliminating overwhelm is just one of the many reasons I’ve created Plans That Produce. Inside the program, you’ll follow my super detailed step-by-step implementation process to enhance your knowledge, sharpen your skillset, and create a forward thinking plan that you can use to lead your organization to success.

Making the choice to invest in yourself and your organization is not always an easy one, and yet, as you know, it is oh so necessary. The way I see it, you have two options:

1. Talk with your Executive Director or board chair and explain that you want to take this course and the benefits it will have for your organization. I find that when you’re able to make a compelling case, your organization will do its best to find the resources to support you. After all, investing in fundraising is one of the only investments that is guaranteed to bring in more money for your organization.

2. Choose to invest in yourself, your skillset and your future marketability. After all, learning how to create a fundraising plan is a skill that you will use day in and day out for the rest of your fundraising career and one that will make you more marketable when you go to look for your next job.

Yes! I know that if you watch the lessons and do the work, you’ll see the results.

I know that if you’re committed to making sure that next year goes different – less putting out fires, more intentionality in your execution, bigger results – you will create a plan that will succeed.

If you can show me that you’ve gone through the steps, that you’ve done the work and if you still don’t feel that you have a solid plan in place, reach out to me within 30 days of purchasing the course and I’ll issue you a full refund.

For more information, please refer to my return policy here. 

When you sign up today, you’re getting:

The complete Plans That Produce program with 6 training modules, 18 lessons, videos, slide decks, guides and templates. You’re also getting 3 amazing bonuses!

Bonus #1: Private, members only Facebook group with lifetime access for community and accountability.
Are you tired of feeling alone and not having a cohort to learn from? The Facebook community will give you a group of your peers where you can share ideas, best practices and get all of your questions answered. You’ll have an all-star community and a group of people to hold you accountable to your goals.

Bonus #2: Weekly live Q&A sessions with me for troubleshooting and clarity.
Have questions? Unsure of how to think about something or how to tackle something? We’ll answer your questions during the weekly live Q&A sessions.

Bonus #3: Two 30-minute one-on-one coaching calls with me
This is an extra special bonus that will only be around for this launch, two 30-minute one-on-one coaching calls with me. You can use the coaching calls to discuss any specific questions or concerns you may have, to brainstorm together, or for anything else that is on your mind!