Focus Your Efforts on a Campaign – Rather than spending time on many small and scattered fundraising efforts, a campaign helps rally more people behind a meaningful cause and creates a deadline to inspire action. Multi-year projects will always yield bigger results through the ability to ask for larger gifts, thus securing more and larger multi-year pledge commitments.

Look at the calendar and map out a timeline for your year-end activities remembering that most electronic messages can be scheduled in advance. Don’t plan so much that you can’t execute it well if you’re just starting now, but pick 4 activities, integrate them into one theme and do them well! Do something that will result in revenue coming in the door every week during the month of December.

For many non-profits, the fundraising role is lumped in with multiple other job duties, equating to less than one full time equivalent staff member dedicated to this important role. It isn’t enough to say that fundraising is a priority, in order to find success in this realm, you’ve got to dedicate time and resources to move the needle.

If you’re like most fundraisers, you quickly realize that events are a LOT of time and work. When you look at time spent and event expenses, a majority of events don’t yield enough revenue to make much of an impact at all.

I want to let you in on a little secret – minimizing the number of fundraiser events you host will not only free up precious time for you to do other tasks, but it will actually enable you to build a robust fundraising program that yields the financial results needed to make a much bigger impact.

Set a fundraising goal – Be specific with what you are trying to accomplish. Focus on the dollars needed and set specific, measurable goals so that you can inspire action and track financial growth and results.

Do you have the bandwidth to figure out all of the who, what, when, where, why and how you need for a successful campaign? Or, would it be better to have someone with experience help you with the roadmap for success…

So, what does this mean for our donor recognition efforts? Some basic principals of human psychology are at play here.

Where should we focus our time and efforts regarding philanthropy? We must focus on building and expanding authentic and meaningful relationships.