The infrastructure layer beneath fundraising. Cash flow visibility, board accountability, role clarity, scaffolding.
Cheap is the most expensive way to run a nonprofit.
She thought sharing hotel rooms would save the budget. Six months later she was rebuilding a team. Scarcity math: the receipt always comes due.
The number at the top of your fundraising plan came from somewhere. Most of the time, nobody can say where.
What goes in a fundraising plan when the goal starts with your operating budget instead of last year's total — the gift types your team can actually run, a calendar with real dates, and where the hours go, because different money costs different amounts of time.
You've run the same fundraising calendar for six years. A fundraising audit asks what each piece actually returns.
What a fundraising audit examines — where the revenue really comes from, who came back, how much of it you're allowed to spend, and what each approach costs in staff hours. When it's worth doing, and the three things you can check yourself this month from a spreadsheet export.
In a small nonprofit, the fundraising plan is really a decision about where ten hours a week go.
A fundraising plan sized for a small shop — the budget-derived goal, two approaches, the thank-you calendar, two numbers. What to keep, what to drop, and where the ten hours go.
Diversifying your revenue is how a small team ends up running five things badly.
Depending on one funder is a real risk — you are one decision away from a layoff. But every stream a small team adds comes out of the hours running the streams it already has, which is why the fix is usually deepening two or three sources instead of finding a fourth.