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Fundraising New Year’s Resolutions
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Updated - 01/10/2025
Who doesn’t like starting the new year with a clean slate? You’re in a wonderful position to aim and reach higher. Better yet, it’s a perfect time to dream. For the public at-large, the most popular resolutions are exercising more, eating healthier, losing weight, and saving more money, followed by more time with family and friends, and spending less time on social media.
The same spirit can and should apply to nonprofits in carrying out essential resource development responsibilities that empower them to more robustly fulfill noble missions to touch, improve, and save more lives, especially helping those who are struggling. Not every nonprofit leader has 525,600 minutes to make resolutions come true.
Where should they start? From my experience, here are recommendations on ten fundraising resolutions based on proven principles, strategies, and best practices.
- Revisit mission, vision and values: Everything naturally and powerfully flows from this foundation. Our nation boasts more than 1.5 million nonprofits. Put yourself in the donor’s shoes. You’re not choosing between the good and the bad, but making excruciatingly difficult decisions between the good and the good. How does your nonprofit stand out and contribute to a better world in a way that all the other good costs don’t? Take time to engage all stakeholders — board, management, staff, volunteers, donors and beneficiaries — to conduct rich dialogues to address these deep questions.
- Establish funding priorities: What gifts do you need of time, talent, and treasure to robustly champion your mission? Capital projects and improvements? Endowment? Programs and services? Never underestimate the power of flexible when-and-where needed most funding.
- Set stretch but realistic goals: Now put numbers to the funding priorities. It won’t be easy. Start with recent giving history. Compare your organization to its peers. To really improve the results, show where the additional gift income will come from. And be honest about the bandwidth you bring to meeting the challenge — the fundraising capacity of board, staff and infrastructure. Be sure to emphasize options that empower you to work with donor prospects to maximize amounts with legacy gifts, Donor-Advised Funds, and stocks and other assets.
- Craft a compelling case for support: How do you articulate your cause? I am an advocate of a “less is more” approach. Briefly document how you persuade donor prospects to provide support in a very competitive environment. The underlying rationale, facts, and stories should be repeated over and over in the messaging of all promotional and solicitation initiatives.
- Visit with as many donors as possible: The meeting will have no other purpose than to express gratitude and gather ideas on challenges and opportunities facing the organization in 2025. This will set the stage for not only motivating them to renew gifts, but to also consider increasing the amounts.
- Create a communications calendar: The good news is that there have never been so many communication channels, and the better news is that many of them are affordable even for smaller nonprofits. Get to know the donor prospect’s communications preferences — print, digital, and new media. If possible, you’ll want to combine these channels, recognizing that most people must receive a message on numerous occasions for it to sink in.
- Think big and make plans for your first or next million-dollar gift: More than anything else this desire came up during our live and virtual learning community workshops. They dramatically change the way your organization is viewed both internally and externally. To acquire million-dollar gifts you must have a project that genuinely elicits a Wow! response.
- Collaborate like the whole world depends on it: With so many nonprofits occupying similar mission space, it makes compelling business sense to collaborate. More importantly, funders love to see it. Effective examples include making joint requests, consolidating programs and services, and sharing back-office operations.
- Engage the entire nonprofit village: Abdicating resource development responsibilities solely to development staff is a surefire way to limit gift income results. All professional and volunteer team players can contribute mightily to fundraising results without ever asking for gifts. They can identify probable donors from their professional, personal, and civic networks, introduce them to the mission, and help spread stories and impact at every possible opportunity.
- Invest in training: You had to know I was going to include this item on the list. The stark reality is that too many nonprofit team members are afraid of fundraising because they’ve never truly experienced it for themselves. So, this is a fear of the unknown. Training— both in person and virtual — will help pull back the curtain and demystify the art and science of fundraising so that everyone can contribute.
Sadly, only about 10% of the general public comes through on New Year’s resolutions when December 31st rolls around. Nonprofits can do much better by prudently committing the time and effort at the beginning of the year to analyze, reflect, and think collectively on charting how to make best use of finite resources so they can operate most effectively and efficiently over the next 12 months.
What are your 2025 fundraising resolutions? Let us know in the comments.
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