The annual planning season. An exciting time with kick-offs, brainstorming sessions, and break-out sessions. The big question that needs to be answered is: what are we going to do? That question can be answered in various ways. My advice: outline your program, both in text and numbers. Do you want to fundraise in a data-driven way? This is your chance!

First, take a step back

If all goes well, every fundraising program has a vision that answers the question of where we want to go and why. This aligns everyone's efforts in the same direction. Understanding where we want to go and why we want to go there makes the journey much more efficient. Next, we create our strategy, which answers the question of how we will reach our destination. How do we go from the current situation to the desired situation as quickly and efficiently as possible? The final step is translating this into what we will actually do. These are the things that will go into the annual plan.

So, it's an accumulation. From vision to strategy. And from strategy to plans.

Working on annual plans without a vision and/or strategy creates a lot of noise. The limited resources at our disposal will not be optimally utilized. As a result, the desired outcome may not materialize or will take much longer.

Everything we want to do is written down and hung on the strategy hook. This ensures that we don't waste our energy on things outside our strategy.

Translating to data

Once we have qualitatively outlined our activities, the goal is to quantitatively develop them. We want to verify whether the steps we take lead to the intended goal. As fundraisers, we're fortunate: almost everything can be calculated! Both beforehand and afterward.

These days, we see more and more organizations calculating everything afterward. Great! But data-driven fundraising actually starts at the beginning. The plans we make need to be translated into numbers so that we can predict the profitability of our investments. Based on such a prediction, we decide whether to step on the gas pedal.

You hear it often: we need to optimize this and that. However, optimization remains an empty term if you don't translate it into numbers.

Your entire program must face it: translate it into numbers. This is not rocket-science. These are the basics of fundraising. It's about the investment dynamics behind fundraising. What do you put in, and what do you get out? That is fundraising.

There are quite a few benefits to working in this way:

• Every business case hidden in your program becomes transparent. Investment choices are no longer made based on feelings but on data.

• You teach your team and organization data-driven fundraising in practice. Everyone contributing to this is confronted with the facts of what fundraising is about. Input and output.

• You create more engagement and knowledge within your management and board. They decide on the available budgets. A convincing story about what the investment will yield in the long term is crucial for what you ultimately get to invest.

The annual plan is a wonderful opportunity to give data-driven fundraising the attention it deserves. Outlining your long-term plans is one of the most important steps you can take to be successful in fundraising, e.g. via the planning tool Forward.

Data-driven fundraising starts with planning.

Do you want some help with your annual and long-term planning?

Ask for a demo of Forward!