Long Term Planning

Fundraising decisions made today can affect income for many years. Donors recruited now may still be giving five years from now. Retention compounds over time. Investments made today may take several years to pay back.

Forward helps you bring those long-term effects together in one five-year fundraising plan.

Start with where you are heading

Long-Term Planning starts with your current fundraising programme.

Forward uses assumptions about acquisition, gift value, retention, donor development, investment and other key drivers to build a baseline for the next five years.

The purpose is not to predict the future perfectly. It is to understand the direction your current choices are taking you.

Where will donor numbers, income, investment and profitability be if you continue roughly as you are?

Compare your trajectory with your ambition

Once you understand your current course, you can compare it with where you want your fundraising programme to be in five years.

That may mean growing income, building a larger or stronger donor base, improving profitability, diversifying your fundraising portfolio or creating more sustainable net income for the mission.

Forward makes the distance between your current trajectory and your ambition visible.

And that gap gives you something concrete to plan for.

Test different ways to get there

There is rarely one route to growth.

You may want to acquire more donors, improve the quality of acquisition, strengthen retention, increase gift value or invest more in donor development. You may want to diversify channels, propositions or income sources. Some activities may need to grow, while others need to improve, change or stop.

Forward allows you to model different scenarios and see how those choices interact over time.

You can compare their impact on donor numbers, gross income, investment, net income, ROI and LTV. This helps you understand not only whether a scenario creates growth, but also what it requires and whether the economics make sense.

Make better investment decisions

Fundraising growth often requires investment before the return becomes visible.

Forward helps make that relationship explicit. You can see how additional investment affects acquisition, donor value, income and profitability across several years.

That creates a stronger basis for deciding where to invest, how much to invest and what level of return can reasonably be expected.

It also makes it easier to have better conversations with Finance, Management Teams, Directors and Boards about the investment fundraising needs to deliver future income.

Make your assumptions visible

Every long-term plan is built on assumptions.

How many donors can you recruit? At what cost? What will they give? How long will they stay? How much can retention improve? What happens when investment increases?

Forward brings these assumptions together in one model, so they can be discussed, challenged and updated.

That is an important part of Long-Term Planning. The value is not only in the numbers that come out of the model, but also in understanding what needs to be true for the plan to work.

Build the fundraising programme you want to have five years from now

Long-Term Planning gives you a clearer view of where you are going, what needs to change and what investment your ambition requires.

Forward gives you the model to explore those choices before you make them.