The number at the top of your fundraising plan came from somewhere. Most of the time, nobody can say where.

Third item on the agenda, twenty past seven. The finance report ran long and two people already have their coats over their knees.

The chair looks up. "So — what's the fundraising plan this year?"

The ED has a number ready. Six hundred and eighty thousand. She says it, the board nods, somebody says that feels about right, and it carries.

Nobody asks where the number came from. Which is a small mercy, because the honest answer is last year's total with a bit added — and the bit got chosen because a bigger one would have sounded reckless and a smaller one would have sounded like giving up.

I've sat in that meeting on both sides of the table. What comes out of it is a target with nothing underneath it, and by February it belongs to one exhausted person who didn't set it.

The goal has to come from somewhere

Two questions come before the number, and both of them are arithmetic.

What did we raise last year? And what are we projected to need this year — to run the programs, pay the people, cover the rent increase the landlord already put in writing?

Then the question that changes the room: where did that second number come from? Out of the budget, with line items you can point to? Or is it a best guess?

A best guess is allowed. Small shops make them constantly and they aren't wrong to. Write down which one it is, and say it out loud when you present. A goal that came out of the budget can carry weight — you can staff it and defend it, and walk back into a board meeting in July to say we're eighty thousand short and here's the program that's exposed. A goal that came out of hope carries none of that. When it doesn't hold, it lands on whoever sits closest to the fundraising, usually alone.

So the goal sentence in a real plan reads like this: this year we will raise $X by [date] to pay for [the thing the money funds]. That last clause does more work than the number does.

Not every dollar pays the same bill

This is the section most plans skip, and it's why organizations hit goal and still can't make payroll.

Before a single ask gets planned, split the goal by the kind of money it has to be. Unrestricted — spend it on anything, including salaries and rent. Restricted — tied to a program or a project. Recurring — monthly, predictable, arrives without anyone having to write a cheque. Capital — the building, the vehicle, the one-time big thing.

An arts organization in Western Canada raised just over five hundred thousand dollars in a year they had budgeted four-eighty. Record year. The board was delighted. Four hundred thousand of it could only be spent on program delivery, and by March they were moving money around to cover a payroll run. Nobody could say it out loud without sounding ungrateful for the four hundred.

Restricted money is real money. It comes with a promise you have to honour, and a promise doesn't pay a salary. Work out how much of the goal has to be unrestricted before anything else, then let that decide where the asking energy goes.

Different money costs different amounts of time

Now match the kinds of money to the ways you actually raise them. They don't cost the same — not in hours, not in patience.

Annual gifts. Small gifts, usually under $1,000, mostly unrestricted, which makes them the money that pays for the roof and the people under it. Roughly 80 percent of that work is asking, 20 percent is relationship-building. The retention numbers here belong in every ED's head: only about one in five first-time donors gives again the following year, while donors who have given before renew at close to 70 percent. AFP's Fundraising Effectiveness Project puts sector-wide retention near 43 percent. Half your donors walk every year and you buy them back at full price.

Monthly giving. About 80 percent of monthly donors renew each year. It's the closest thing to predictable revenue a small shop can build, and it usually arrives unrestricted.

Major gifts. Twelve to eighteen months to secure, and about four qualified prospects for every gift you're counting on. Seventy percent of that time is relationship-building. Usually restricted. And the ED or a board member is the one carrying it, which makes major gifts a capacity question long before it becomes a fundraising one.

Grants. Almost always restricted, rarely pays core salaries, heavily competed for, and criteria fit decides most outcomes before anyone reads your prose. The money also arrives late. Plan the cash flow around that.

Corporate sponsorship. A contract, not a donation — sponsors are buying visibility, and it isn't receiptable. Renewal rides on one relationship and on whether you delivered what you promised last time.

Planned gifts. Ninety percent cultivation, ten percent asking. Often transformational, entirely on the donor's timeline, and revocable — someone can write you out of the will and never mention it. The program can be a page on your website and a line in every mailout, or a full pipeline with names in it. Both work. Choose which one on purpose.

Events. At many events, once staff hours get counted honestly, it costs 50 cents or more to raise a dollar. Good for visibility and for new names. Expensive as a revenue strategy.

If the plan needs $100,000 of new unrestricted money and the three approaches are grants, grants and a gala, the plan has already told you it won't work. The only question is whether anyone says so before June.

Three approaches. Not seven.

Beyond what you already run, choose three new approaches. Three that your team can genuinely execute with the people and the hours you have this year.

The three targets should add up to the gap between last year's total and this year's goal. If they don't, some line in the plan is carrying weight it hasn't earned.

Choose them with two questions. Where is the biggest gap between what a source gives now and what it could give? And which money is most likely to actually land inside this fiscal year? Most organizations arrive at some version of the same answer: thank the donors properly, go back to the ten people who already love you, and stop running the event that loses money.

The calendar, and whose name is on it

"Spring appeal" is not a date.

Every ask gets its own line, its own month, its own target, and a person's name beside it. Put the thank-yous on the calendar too, because follow-through that isn't scheduled doesn't happen.

When an organization digs into a flat year, the gap usually isn't in the asking — it's that nobody owns the thank-you. A phone call inside 48 hours on a first gift over $100. A note in the mail at the second gift. By the third, a board member picking up the phone with nothing to sell. That's the cheapest work in the entire plan, and it's the work that moves retention.

The two numbers, then three more

Retention is the first vital sign. Of the donors who gave last year, how many gave again?

The share of revenue that's unrestricted is the second. If it shrinks while the total grows, the plan is winning the wrong money.

Then pick three more that match the approaches you chose — asks made, new monthly donors, days from gift to thank-you, whatever those three approaches actually run on. Three. Not fifteen. A number nobody reviews at a staff meeting is decoration.

Back to the board table

The version of that meeting worth having takes longer and feels worse. The ED brings one page. The number, where it came from, what it has to pay for, the split between restricted and unrestricted, three approaches with hours attached, and a calendar with real dates on it.

Somebody will say the goal is too low. Somebody else will want to know why the gala is coming off the list. Both of those are the plan doing its job.

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, and a campaign math page for the year you set a big goal. It's a fillable PDF and it comes by email. If the harder question is whether the program underneath the plan is sound — retention, restricted share, who's carrying what — the free organizational diagnostic works that layer, and it usually surfaces the scarcity mindset sitting under the numbers. When the plan has to hold real weight, or the board wants an outside read on what's working, that's the fundraising plans and audits work.

Put last year's total and this year's budget side by side tonight, and answer the two questions before anyone asks you for a goal. Everything else in the plan comes out of those two lines.