FAQ
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Forward is a long-term fundraising planning, profitability and monitoring tool.
It helps fundraising organisations understand where their current choices are taking them, compare different scenarios and make better long-term investment decisions.
Forward brings donor numbers, income, investment, profitability and the key drivers behind fundraising performance together in one five-year model. During the year, it also helps you monitor actual performance, update your forecast and see where your fundraising is now heading.
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Forward helps you look beyond the annual budget.
It gives you a five-year view of where your current fundraising programme is heading, whether that matches your ambition and what needs to change to get there.
You can test different assumptions and scenarios, understand their impact on donor numbers, income, investment, net income, ROI and LTV, and use that insight to make better decisions about growth and investment.
Forward also creates more transparency around the assumptions behind your fundraising. This helps fundraising teams, Finance, Management Teams and Boards have better conversations about future performance and the investment needed to achieve it.
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Many fundraising organisations build their own planning models in Excel. These can work, but they often become complex, difficult to maintain, prone to errors and dependent on the person who designed them.
Forward provides a structured fundraising model that is built and maintained as a professional software product.
It combines the flexibility needed to model different fundraising programmes with a consistent methodology for long-term planning, profitability, scenario comparison and monitoring.
This means less time maintaining the model itself and more time understanding the results and making decisions.
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The technical setup can be completed quickly. The main work is understanding your fundraising programme, collecting the relevant data and agreeing the assumptions you want to use.
How much time this takes depends mainly on the quality and availability of your data, the complexity of your fundraising programme and your existing experience with long-term planning.
The implementation process is deliberately hands-on. You build your fundraising structure, review the drivers behind performance and make your assumptions explicit.
So implementation is not only about setting up the software. It also helps build a stronger understanding of your fundraising economics and creates the foundation for better planning and monitoring.
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Good fundraising decisions can have financial consequences for many years.
Forward helps you understand those consequences before you commit significant budget and resources. You can compare different scenarios, see what additional investment may produce and understand the expected impact on donors, income, net income, ROI and LTV.
That can improve the quality of decisions about where to grow, what to improve, where additional investment is justified and which assumptions need closer monitoring.
Forward is therefore not simply an investment in planning software. It provides fundraising teams and leadership with a stronger basis for making long-term fundraising investment decisions.
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No. Forward is deliberately standalone and does not require a direct connection with your CRM.
You work with the key data and assumptions from your own fundraising programme and enter the information needed for planning and monitoring.
There are good reasons for this. Historical data can inform a plan, but future fundraising also depends on decisions and assumptions about acquisition, retention, gift value, diversification and investment. These cannot simply be derived from CRM data.
The standalone approach also keeps Forward independent of different CRM and reporting environments and keeps fundraising teams close to the assumptions and economics behind their plans.
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We support you during the initial setup and help you translate your fundraising programme into Forward.
The level of onboarding depends on your Forward plan, but support can include training, Fundraising Program Design and guidance while you build your first plan.
All users also have access to the Forward Support Center and our user community. Depending on your subscription, additional email, phone and priority support is available.
Our aim is to get your team to the point where you can confidently use Forward yourselves.
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Forward uses an annual subscription model with three plans: Essentials, Standard and Premium.
The plans differ in functionality, the number of plans and segments you can work with, reporting options and onboarding levels.
Essentials provides the core Long-Term Planning and Profitability functionality. Standard adds more advanced planning, scenario comparison and Monitoring. Premium adds additional management, reporting and expert functionality.
All plans include unlimited users.
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No.
Forward works best when the most important fundraising data is available and reasonably reliable, but one of the benefits of the process is that it often identifies where data or assumptions are weak.
You can start with the best information available, make assumptions explicit and improve them as your understanding and data quality develop.
The objective is not false precision. It is to create a sufficiently reliable model to support better decisions.
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No.
The value of Forward depends more on the fundraising questions you need to answer than on the size of your organisation.
Forward can be useful whenever an organisation needs to understand the longer-term relationship between acquisition, donor development, investment, income and profitability.
The different subscription plans and levels of functionality allow Forward to be used with fundraising programmes of different sizes and levels of complexity.
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Yes.
Forward allows you to model how changes in fundraising investment could affect donor numbers, income, net income, ROI and LTV over several years.
This can help fundraising teams explain why additional investment is needed, what assumptions the business case depends on and when the expected return should become visible.
It therefore provides useful evidence for discussions with Finance, Management Teams, Directors and Boards.
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Forward is primarily designed for individual giving fundraising.
It can model both regular giving and one-off giving, and distinguishes between donors already in your base and donors acquired through new fundraising activity.
Within those areas, you can model acquisition, retention, gift value, donor development, investment and profitability over time.
Forward is therefore especially useful for organisations that want to understand how different parts of their individual giving programme contribute to future donor numbers, income and net income.
High value programmes like Major Gifts, Foundation , Legacies can also be added to complete your portfolio.
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Yes.
Forward allows you to compare the long-term consequences of different fundraising choices before committing additional budget or resources.
You can model what happens when you increase investment, improve retention, change acquisition assumptions, grow gift value or diversify your fundraising mix.
That gives you a stronger basis for deciding which activities to scale, protect, improve, test, reduce or stop.
Forward does not make those decisions for you, but it makes the financial and fundraising consequences much clearer.
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Your long-term plan should provide a stable strategic direction, but the assumptions behind it should be reviewed in your annual planning cycle as new information becomes available.
Forward’s Monitoring functionality is designed for regular updates throughout the year. Actual performance is combined with the latest forecast to create an updated Latest Estimate.
This allows you to monitor performance monthly without rebuilding the full five-year plan every month.
When performance, investment decisions or key assumptions change significantly, those changes can also be reflected in your longer-term planning.
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Forward is primarily designed for fundraising teams, but its value extends beyond fundraising.
Typical users include:
Heads and Directors of Fundraising;
Fundraising managers and specialists;
Fundraising analysts;
Finance colleagues involved in budgeting and investment decisions;
Fundraisers responsible for a specific programme or segment.
Boards and trustees do not necessarily need to work in Forward themselves, but the outputs can provide a much stronger basis for discussions about ambition, investment, risk and expected returns.
Forward supports unlimited users, so different colleagues can work with the same planning and monitoring framework.
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Yes.
Forward allows you to model different parts of your individual giving programme separately, so that differences in acquisition, gift value, retention, investment and profitability become visible.
For example, you can distinguish between regular and one-off giving, existing donors and newly acquired donors, and different acquisition channels and segments.
This is important because donor groups can behave very differently. Looking only at the total fundraising programme can hide those differences and make it harder to understand what is really driving performance.
Forward brings the individual segments together into an overall view while still allowing you to analyse them separately.
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Yes.
Forward includes reports and visualisations that can be used to communicate plans, scenarios, performance and profitability.
These outputs can support discussions with fundraising teams, Finance, Management Teams, Directors and Boards.
Depending on your Forward plan, different reporting and management views are available, including planning status, scenario comparisons, profitability reports, monitoring reports and management summaries.
The aim is not only to calculate the results, but also to make them clear enough to facilitate the discussion, and support decision-making across the organisation.
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Yes. Forward is designed so that individual donor data is not required or stored in the system.
Forward works with aggregated fundraising data and planning assumptions, rather than personal donor records.
The technology behind Forward is provided by XLReporting, which is ISO 27001 certified and applies professional information-security standards.
This allows fundraising teams to work with the information needed for planning, profitability and monitoring without importing individual donor data into Forward.
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Forward was developed through a collaboration between Reinier Fundraising and XLReporting.
Reinier Fundraising brings more than 25 years of fundraising experience, including strategy, long-term planning, individual giving, investment and performance management.
XLReporting provides the technology behind Forward and extensive expertise in financial modelling, reporting and forecasting software.
Together, this combines fundraising expertise with a robust software platform built specifically around the needs of fundraising organisations.
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Absolutely.
If you want to understand whether Forward fits your fundraising programme, you can contact us or book an online demo.