There is a lot of discussion in fundraising about “the ask.” And while asking your donors is an important part of fundraising, we know it’s far from the only one! There are a lot of steps involved in cultivating new donors, and stewarding them once you have them. It can be hard to keep track of it all, especially when you have multiple team members. That’s why a fundraising calendar is so useful.
Fundraising calendars are designed to outline donor correspondence, campaign timelines, special events, benchmark dates, and other noteworthy occurrences that your fundraising team will be engaged in over the course of the year.
Want to incorporate a calendar into your fundraising efforts but not sure where to start? We’ve compiled everything you need to know to get your calendar started:
Table of Contents
- Developing Your Fundraising Calendar
- Including Communications on Your Fundraising Calendar
- Maintaining Your Fundraising Calendar
Developing Your Fundraising Calendar
When you first develop your fundraising calendar, you need to think ahead about your whole year to come.
- Does your fiscal year run from July 1st to June 30th? Or January 1st to December 31st?
- What are your hard deadlines? This can include: Campaign start and end dates; Campaigns on certain dates, like Giving Tuesday; Special events like donor appreciation lunches; Board meetings and budget meeting dates
- How many fundraising campaigns will you have this year?
- What are your action deadlines?
When you sit down with your team and start plotting your dates on a calendar, your fundraising ideas start to take shape and become more detailed. For example, planning your action deadlines gives you an opportunity to move from the broad-scope dates and deadlines that will inform your overall fundraising campaigns to more specific and task-oriented details. And in order to plot those on the calendar, you need to actually plan out those specific details!
It’s important to do this work within your team so that you can come up with action deadlines you can all agree on together. If deadlines are created from a boss and given to team members, it is more likely that they will be unrealistic and unattainable, and therefore doomed to fail.
When plotting out a fundraising campaign, your action deadlines should include:
- Each scheduled donor ask
- Reaching out to major donors
- A ‘Thank You’ and donor recognition schedule
- Basic donor communication schedule (both online and offline): email; direct mail; face to face interactions; social media; phone
In addition to the deadline for each of these steps, you should include the person or people responsible for completing each one. That way, you can maintain accountability amongst your team.
You should also look at each of your events and think of deadlines that may not come to mind at first. For example when will invites go out? When will volunteers be trained?
The level of detail with which you approach these and other deadlines will depend on the size and composition of your team. Just make sure that everyone is involved with creating your fundraising calendar so that they can stay on top of the work that is assigned to them.
Including Communications on Your Calendar
Fundraising campaigns require a lot of communication. Just like the Director of Development shouldn’t decide on deadlines without talking to the whole team, your development team shouldn’t bring deadlines to your marketing and communications team without discussion. Without the input of the marketing and communications team on your calendar, you may set unrealistic timelines, or forget key points of communication.
Some things you will be thinking through with your communications team that needs to be on your calendar:
- When do you want to announce your event or campaign?
- Do you need direct mail materials or will this be an email invitation?
- Will this be advertised on social media, or is it an event with a select invite list?
- How much social media promotion will this need? What channels? Video? Graphics? When will those need to be finished?
These are just a few examples of the types of communication that you will need to include.
In an ideal world, your fundraising calendar and communications calendar would be one and the same. This would allow you to coordinate all fundraising and communications efforts from one central hub. However, this may not work for your team as the finished product may have too many action items and details to keep straight. At the very least, your communications team should have access to your fundraising calendar and your fundraising team should have access to your communications calendar.
Maintaining Your Fundraising Calendar
Sometimes, we can have a new idea or tool that we’re very excited about, spend a lot of time on the onset at building it out, and then abandon it over time. Your fundraising calendar won’t work for you if you set it up at the start of the year and then aren’t continuing to refer to it, and updating it as needed. You need to maintain your fundraising calendar! Here are some tips to help you do that:
Have a Monthly Focus
A fundraising calendar is not just good for keeping track of dates and communications. It is also a great tool to help you remember to stay in contact with those most important to your organization- your donors!
Donor cultivation is a year-round effort. You should be putting in significant effort to engage your donors every month. If you were a donor, wouldn’t you be bored if the cultivation took the same form every month? So mix it up with different events and engagement strategies each month and plan these efforts ahead of time on your fundraising calendar.
Consider devoting each month (or every other month) to a different donor retention strategy. Try:
- A ‘Thank You’ phone blitz
- A special event for long-time donors or donors at a certain giving level
- Videos targeting different donor segments
Donors are the lifeblood of your operation, and focusing on retention on a regular basis keeps this in the forefront of a fundraiser’s mind.
Tweak Your Calendar Each Year
Ideally, you’ll build a calendar that can serve as a great foundation each year. Maintaining a relatively similar schedule every year makes planning easier for your team and for your donors.
However, throughout the year you’re likely to find something on your calendar that isn’t working for your organization. It’s a good idea to research best practices of other similar nonprofits to figure out a possible solution. This is where the true value of a fundraising calendar comes in. It allows you to view your year of fundraising with a bird’s eye view. When you go to revise your fundraising calendar before the beginning of your next fiscal year, you’ll be able to see everything that you accomplished in the previous year.
Ask yourself what worked and what didn’t and if something didn’t work, ask yourself why. Did you have enough time to plan? Was there cohesion with your marketing and communications team, or did things fall through the cracks? These are all things to note for the following year’s fundraising calendar, and things you can change for a more successful year.
Update As Needed
Your fundraising calendar is a living document, and should be treated as such. These are deadlines for your success, but you are not bound by what you decided at the start of your fiscal year. Is something in the landscape changing, that means you have to adjust a campaign? Then adjust! Did you get unexpected restricted funds for a specific program, so you need to change the focus or timing of a campaign? Then change it!
Your fundraising calendar should change as the organization and the fundraising climate changes. You need to stay flexible in order to meet the demands of the current trends in fundraising. So make that flexibility a standard part of your fundraising calendar.
Fundraising requires a lot of work, and a lot of forethought. If you are trying things randomly, you are unlikely to succeed in meeting your goals and achieving your mission. The more planning you can do to set up your team for success, the better. So if you’re not already using a fundraising calendar, sit down with your team and get one ready! This will definitely improve your fundraising efforts moving forward.
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