Brazen Solutions · Org Resilience

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.

August 2026 · 3 min read

A two-person development shop that adds a stream doesn't acquire two more people — the hours come out of whatever is already running, and what's already running is almost always the annual fund and the donor follow-through, because those are the only things nobody will notice you dropped for eight months.

If one funder is sixty percent of your revenue, you are one decision away from a layoff.

Concentration is a real risk.

Why "diversify" turns into nothing

Grants are almost always restricted, rarely pay core salaries, and get decided mostly on criteria fit before anyone reads your prose. The money also arrives late.

Events cost fifty cents or more to raise a dollar at many organizations, once staff hours are counted honestly.

Major gifts take twelve to eighteen months to secure and about four qualified prospects for every gift you're counting on, with roughly seventy percent of the work in relationship-building.

Monthly giving renews at about eighty percent a year and usually arrives unrestricted, which makes it the closest thing to predictable revenue a small shop can build.

AFP's Fundraising Effectiveness Project puts sector-wide donor retention near 43 percent, which means half your donors leave in an ordinary year — and replacing them is the most expensive work on your calendar.

What it looks like when the team is four people

Fewer sources, chosen deliberately, along two axes: when the money arrives, and what it's allowed to pay for.

The shape I'd argue for in a shop under about $1.5M:

One predictable unrestricted engine. Monthly giving sitting on top of a properly run annual fund.

One relationship-driven growth line. Major gifts, most often. Start it the year before you need it, which means now.

The honesty to retire what leaks. The tournament that nets nine thousand dollars on two hundred and forty staff hours has to come off, and saying so costs somebody politically — usually the ED, usually in front of the board member who founded it. Deciding what a team can genuinely run is most of what goes in a fundraising plan.

Go back to the concentrated funder. Ask about multi-year. Ask what it would take to get a portion unrestricted, and who sits in the room when the renewal decision gets made. Sixty-two percent with a signed three-year agreement and an ED who has the program officer's mobile number is a different animal from sixty-two percent renewed annually by a committee you've never met.

Three numbers, and you can have them by Thursday

Pull last year's revenue by source. Work out what share came from your single largest funder, and what share came from your top three together.

Then the number nobody has: what share of this year's projected revenue renews without a new decision from anyone. Monthly donors, multi-year agreements, an endowment draw, the one corporate sponsor who has renewed nine years running without being chased. That figure is usually far smaller than the room expects, and it's the one that predicts whether next year hurts.

When the answer to concentration becomes apply to everything, say yes to every stream, that's usually a scarcity mindset writing the strategy, and it burns the same two people every time.

If you want the page that forces that decision, that's the free Doable Fundraising Plan template — it makes you split the goal into restricted and unrestricted before you pick a single approach, and it caps you at three.

Open last year's financials tonight and calculate the top-funder percentage. Then go find out when they decide.

Free template

Need a fundraising plan the board can read in one sitting?

The Doable Fundraising Plan Template: one page you fill in over an afternoon. The goal and where it came from, the kind of money you need, three approaches, every ask on a date, and a follow-through page. Free.

Or see what's inside →

Wondering whether your organization could carry a capital campaign? The free readiness assessment scores you across the eight areas that decide it.

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