In a small nonprofit, the fundraising plan is really a decision about where ten hours a week go.

Tuesday, twenty to ten in the morning. The grant report is due Friday and the outcomes table wants numbers that live in three different spreadsheets, one of which belongs to a program manager who is on vacation.

At eleven she leaves a second voicemail with the golf store about the donated putter for the silent auction. Retail value four hundred dollars. She has now spent about ninety minutes of her life on it.

At 2:15 the phone rings and she lets it go, because she is finally, actually inside the report. It's Marguerite. Eight thousand a year for eleven years, and the only other time Marguerite has phoned out of the blue was 2019, when she called to say she'd sold the farm.

She calls back Thursday morning. Marguerite is lovely about it.

Nothing in that Tuesday was wrong. The report was owed. The putter was promised to a volunteer who'd gone to some trouble. What was missing was anybody, anywhere, having decided which of those three things mattered most before the day started.

The plan feels like something bigger organizations do

I hear a version of this constantly from EDs running budgets between six hundred thousand and two million across Western Canada: we're too small for a real fundraising plan.

Underneath it sits a reasonable belief. Plans belong to organizations with a development director, a database person, somebody whose entire job is the calendar. When the fundraising department is you — also the ED, also the grant writer, also the person who prints the tax receipts and unlocks the door in the morning — a plan reads like homework assigned by someone who has never done your job.

In a shop that size, the plan isn't a performance for the board. It's the thing that tells you what not to do on Tuesday.

Ten hours, and what they rule out

Start with the honest number. Not the week before the appeal — a normal week. How many hours does fundraising actually get, after the board package, the staff issue, the funder site visit, the thing with the landlord?

Most solo shops land somewhere between six and twelve. Call it ten.

Ten hours a week is roughly five hundred hours a year, less vacation, less the stretch in late December when nothing happens except thank-yous. That is your whole fundraising budget. It's denominated in hours rather than dollars, and you can't borrow against it.

Now set the ratios beside it. The realities table in Brazen's Doable Fundraising Plan template — those splits come from our field practice — puts major gifts at roughly 70 percent relationship-building and 30 percent asking, twelve to eighteen months from first coffee to signed pledge, with about four qualified prospects needed for every gift you're counting on. Annual gifts run the other way: near 80 percent asking, 20 percent relationship-building. Events, once staff hours get counted honestly, cost 50 cents or more to raise a dollar at many organizations — a rule of thumb the sector has used for years and mostly declines to apply to its own gala.

Run ten hours through that arithmetic and things start falling off the list without anyone having to be brave about it.

Most events go. So does cold acquisition, because buying strangers is a volume game and you don't have volume. And the habit of chasing every grant deadline that crosses the inbox goes too — criteria fit decides most grant outcomes before a single sentence of yours gets read, so applying to a funder whose priorities don't match yours is a donation of your hours to their filing cabinet.

What the small-shop version keeps

A goal that came out of the budget. The number your programs and your payroll actually require this year, with line items you can point at when somebody asks where it came from. The what goes in a fundraising plan piece works through the whole framework — where the goal comes from, why restricted and unrestricted money aren't interchangeable, how the calendar gets built. A small shop needs the same spine at a quarter of the length.

Two approaches. Not three. The standard advice is three new approaches beyond what you already run. At ten hours a week, three is usually one too many, and the one that quietly dies in March is whichever had no external deadline attached — which is nearly always the relationship work. So choose two. Give each a target in dollars and a name beside it, even when the name is yours both times.

The thank-you calendar. A phone call inside 48 hours on a first gift over $100. A note at the second gift. Somebody checking, on a date that's actually in the calendar, for donors who gave last year and haven't yet this year. In the template this gets its own page, because follow-through that isn't scheduled doesn't happen.

Two numbers, and only two. Retention first: of the donors who gave last year, how many gave again? AFP's Fundraising Effectiveness Project puts sector-wide retention near 43 percent, with only about one in five first-time donors giving a second gift the following year, while donors who have given before renew at close to 70 percent. Then unrestricted share — how much of what you raised is allowed to pay a salary. If the total grows while that share shrinks, the plan is winning the wrong money.

Every hour in a small shop gets taken from something else. A plan that only adds work has already failed the person who has to run it.

Permission to drop things, named out loud

The gala that nets nine thousand dollars on a hundred and eighty staff hours and four months of low-grade dread. Work out the dollars per hour, then set that beside what a well-fitted grant application or five stewardship calls would have produced in the same time. You already suspect the answer. The arithmetic just makes it sayable.

The newsletter nobody replies to. Not the one people read and forward — the one that goes out monthly because it has always gone out monthly, and whose reply-to address hasn't received a human sentence since 2024.

The social channel that produces nothing. You know the one.

Dropping any of it is rarely an analysis problem. It's a board table problem. "We're cancelling the gala" lands like retreat. "We're moving the gala's hundred and eighty hours into monthly giving and into the eleven donors who gave more than $2,500 last year, and I'll bring both numbers back in June" lands differently, because that's a reassignment with a date on it — and boards can vote for a reassignment.

The part nobody puts in a template

The deciding is lonely. In a one-person shop there's no colleague down the hall to say yes, drop the gala, I've watched you run that math three years straight and you were right the first time. So the decision keeps not getting made, the gala keeps happening, and it costs the same four months every year.

Brazen Connections is a free gathering every two weeks. EDs and fundraisers, no pitch, no slide deck, mostly people comparing notes on exactly this kind of call. Bring the gala math. Somebody in that room has already run it on their own version.

Back to Tuesday

Marguerite was phoning because her sister had died in June and she wanted to ask about doing something in her name.

The Thursday call went well. Warm, even. The gift came, and it was bigger than the eight thousand.

But there's a difference between being the person somebody thinks of on Tuesday and being the person who gets back to them on Thursday. Over eleven years that difference compounds, quietly, in a direction nobody puts on a dashboard.

A plan doesn't make that Tuesday disappear. What it does is decide, in advance and in daylight, that the call outranks the putter — so on the worst Tuesday of the quarter, the choice has already been made by someone who wasn't tired yet.

If you want the page itself, the free Doable Fundraising Plan template is the one I use with clients: one page for the annual plan, a follow-through page for the donor year. It's a fillable PDF and it comes by email. If the harder question is what sits underneath the plan — who's carrying what, and what happens to the organization during the two weeks you finally take off — the free organizational diagnostic works that layer.

Open next week's calendar and find the ten hours. Then decide what they're for, before the inbox decides for you.