The total income number is a comfort blanket
If you want to understand why so many fundraising teams feel surprised by their own results, even when they have great dashboards and smart people, start here: we manage the wrong number.
‘Total income’ is a lovely number. It feels like certainty. It’s the number you put in board slide decks. It’s the number that decides whether people relax or panic. It’s also a terrible number to manage growth with.
Because total income is not one thing. Total income is the end result of multiple parts of your program moving in different directions at the same time. The overall line might go up while a healthy part of the program is quietly deteriorating. Or the overall line might be flat while one segment is doing something brilliant that deserves investment. Two organizations can end the year on the same total income and have completely different futures.
One grew by pushing acquisition volume while retention weakened. That looks fine now and hurts later. Another grew modestly but strengthened multi-year retention and improved gift value. That looks boring now and becomes powerful later. Same total number. Completely different engine.
This is why total income becomes a comfort blanket. It keeps the conversation warm and safe. It lets you avoid the messy reality underneath: base decline, acquisition quality, payment behaviour, retention curves, different cost structures, and the uncomfortable fact that growth often looks like “investing more now for value later.”
If you only manage the total, you will always be late. You will always be reacting. And you will always be surprised by the “unexpected” shortfall. Because the surprise is rarely unexpected. It was already happening inside the segments months ago. You just didn’t look there.
And yes, segmentation sounds like work. It is work. But it’s the right work. It’s the work that stops you from having vague conversations like “digital isn’t working” and forces you into useful ones like: which part of digital is leaking, and which driver is responsible? Volume? Gift value? Retention? Cost?
Once you see fundraising through that lens, the program becomes more legible. You stop arguing about channels as if they’re ideologies and start discussing mechanics as if you’re running a growth engine… because you are.
The best part is that this is not about being “more analytical” for the sake of it. It’s about making better decisions with the same budget, and not discovering in December that you’ve been under-fuelling the engine all year.
So the conclusion is simple: if we want predictable growth, we need to model it beneath the total. Not as an annual spreadsheet exercise, but as a shared view of how volume, gift value, retention and investment interact over time, per segment. And when you’re serious about making that a habit, planning, scenario thinking, forecasting, you need a tool that makes those mechanics visible and discussable. That is exactly why we use Forward to model growth: because the total number is a result, not a steering wheel.
