Nonprofit Answers: Nonprofit Fundraising, Marketing, Monthly Giving

You got the meeting. It's Thursday at ten at a coffee shop, and now a new kind of nervousness sets in: what do you actually say? In episode three of Your First 90 Days in Major Donor Fundraising, we walk through the discovery visit, the conversation where you learn why a donor gives and what they hope their giving will do.

In this episode you'll learn how to:

• Focus on the four goals of a discovery visit, and leave the pitch for later.
• Prepare a one-page prep sheet with three things you hope to learn and one short story to share.
• Use a simple visit structure: a warm opening, a specific thank-you, a clear purpose, real discovery, and a natural next step.
• Ask good questions, then listen for what the donor truly cares about.
• Follow up with a note that shows the donor they were heard, and record what you learned.

Marcus, Linda, and the food bank are fictional composites, but if you've stepped into a major gifts role, you'll recognize them. When Marcus asks Linda how she first got connected, he learns about her late husband's Saturdays in the warehouse, and everything changes. The donor is the hero of the story. Your job is to listen for it.

Resources mentioned

• Your First 90 Days in Major Donor Fundraising (free course)

You've done your homework and written down what you want to say, and your finger is hovering over a donor's number. Almost everyone feels that moment. In episode two of Your First 90 Days in Major Donor Fundraising, we make getting the first meeting a lot easier. What you're asking for is time. The money conversation comes later.

In this episode you'll learn how to:

• Decide who to contact first: promises and landmines, then warm donors, ED relationships, and active but cold donors.
• Write a short introduction email that thanks the donor for something specific and makes it easy to say yes.
• Make the first call, handle common responses, and leave a voicemail that gets returned.
• Answer "Wait, what happened to Sarah?" with honesty and grace, and own the gap.
• Set realistic expectations: plan for three to five attempts per donor, block outreach time each week, and track every attempt.

Marcus, Linda, and the food bank are fictional composites, but if you've stepped into a major gifts role, you'll recognize them. Your donors are often glad someone finally called. A sincere reason to meet is all you need.

Resources mentioned

• Your First 90 Days in Major Donor Fundraising (free course)

You got the job. Maybe a stack of donor files landed on your desk on day two, or someone on the board just said, "You'll handle major gifts now." However you got here, you're now responsible for the people who give the largest gifts your organization receives, and you're probably wondering what to do first. This is episode one of a special five-part series, Your First 90 Days in Major Donor Fundraising. In your first 90 days, the scorecard is relationships and information. The dollars come later.

In this episode you'll learn how to:

• Avoid the two early traps: hiding in the database, or calling everyone with no context.
• See the three things you really inherited: a list, a history, and relationships.
• Build a portfolio audit spreadsheet and sort every name into four buckets: active and warm, active but cold, lapsed, and unknown.
• Find the promises, landmines, and open pledges before you pick up the phone.
• Have short internal conversations with your predecessor, your executive director, finance, and your database manager.
• Qualify your portfolio by capacity, affinity, and connection, and move names that don't fit to the right place without dropping them from your organization.
• Write a one-page "what I found" memo that shows your boss your plan and resets expectations.

Marcus, the new gift officer we follow, is a fictional composite, but if you've stepped into a major gifts role, his portfolio will look familiar. Your donors have been waiting for someone to pay attention to them. These first weeks are how you start.

Resources mentioned

• Your First 90 Days in Major Donor Fundraising (free course)

A fundraising plan has to balance on three things: dollars, hours, and dates. In the final episode of A Plan You Can Defend, we put one name on every line, build a budget that knows when the cash actually arrives, close Riverbend's hundred-and-fifty-hour gap with a stop-doing list, pressure-test the plan with AI, and take it to the board for a decision.

In this episode you'll learn:

• Why every line in your plan needs one name, including the board's lines.
• Cash timing: why a goal you reach in December still has to get you through June.
• Why Serving Orphans Worldwide cut its budget to rebuild reserves but protected donor acquisition.
• How to build a stop-doing list from return: stop it, shrink it, or hand it to someone else.
• Three rules for using AI in planning: the AI asks, challenges, and drafts but doesn't do the math; no donor names leave your building; and you make every decision.
• Five AI pressure tests, including the skeptical treasurer, the tired donor, and your most overloaded person, plus where AI gets it wrong.
• How to present your plan to the board in ten minutes and ask for a decision, not feedback.
• How to pace quarterly check-ins against last year's pattern, with a short monthly walk-through in between.
• This episode's action item and homework: put your planning day on the calendar, and start your stop-doing list now.

Riverbend Community Food Pantry, Dana, Joanne, and all of Riverbend's numbers are fictional and illustrative.

Ready to build next year's plan? Your 12-Month Fundraising Plan in One Day walks you through it step by step: nine modules and about three hours of video, built for executive directors and development teams of one to three people. You get the Planning Day Kit (data checklist, request emails, one-day agenda, team exercise guides, and a printable wall calendar), the Planning Workbook spreadsheet in a blank version and as Riverbend's filled-in example, the One-Page Board Plan, and the Co-Strategist Prompt Library for using AI without sharing a single donor's name. Lifetime access to the videos and downloads.

When one part of your plan deserves more attention, go deeper with Finish Strong for your year-end campaign, The Gratitude System for thanking and keeping new donors, and the Monthly Giving Masterclass for your monthly giving push.

Resources mentioned

• Your 12-Month Fundraising Plan in One Day
• Finish Strong: The 90-Day Year-End Fundraising Course
• The Gratitude System
• Monthly Giving Masterclass

Riverbend's first draft plan looked great on paper. Then Dana counted the hours and put every ask on one calendar. The plan needed a hundred and fifty more hours than she had, and their most loyal donors would be asked six times in April. In the second episode of A Plan You Can Defend, we make sure your plan fits the people who have to run it, on both sides of the ask.

In this episode you'll learn:

• Why a plan that ignores capacity is a wish list with a budget attached.
• The Hours Honesty exercise: compare each person's estimate with a two-week time log.
• How to turn real weekly hours into a year, and why you plan at eighty percent.
• How to estimate what each campaign and strategy costs in hours.
• How to choose three or four anchor campaigns with a simple scoring grid, and why a telemarketing campaign the staff didn't like stayed in the plan.
• Why your always-on work goes into the plan first.
• Calendar Collision: put every ask, touch, and thank-you on one wall, one row per donor segment, and find the month that asks too much.
• How to set your own ask limit for each segment from your own evidence.
• This episode's action item and homework: start counting your real hours, set your own ask limit for each segment, and leave your capacity gap open for now.

Riverbend Community Food Pantry, Dana, Joanne, and all of Riverbend's numbers are fictional and illustrative.

Ready to build next year's plan? Your 12-Month Fundraising Plan in One Day walks you through it step by step: nine modules and about three hours of video, built for executive directors and development teams of one to three people. You get the Planning Day Kit (data checklist, request emails, one-day agenda, team exercise guides, and a printable wall calendar), the Planning Workbook spreadsheet in a blank version and as Riverbend's filled-in example, the One-Page Board Plan, and the Co-Strategist Prompt Library for using AI without sharing a single donor's name. Lifetime access to the videos and downloads.

Resources mentioned

• Your 12-Month Fundraising Plan in One Day

Most fundraising plans are last year's calendar plus hope. In the first episode of A Plan You Can Defend, a three-part series on building next year's fundraising plan, we follow Dana and Joanne at Riverbend Community Food Pantry into their planning day. We start with the numbers: what to gather, how to read last year honestly, and how to set a goal you can explain in one sentence.

In this episode you'll learn:

• Why a small team can build a full year's plan in one working day, but only if the numbers are on the table first.
• The four things to request before your planning day (gift-level giving export, finance's revenue report, channel costs, and hours), and why gathering them usually takes one to two weeks.
• Why you reconcile last year's total with finance before you plan anything.
• The guessing exercise that shows the gap between what your team remembers and what actually happened.
• Net per hour: why a gala and an email appeal can look very different once you count costs and staff hours.
• How to read donors by lifecycle and gift level, and what one point of retention is worth to you.
• Why the goal starts with your organization's strategy, and how to build it top-down and bottom-up.
• How to set a floor, a target, and a stretch, and the one-sentence test every goal has to pass.
• This week's action item and homework: send the data request, and do the guessing exercise before you look at the real numbers.

Riverbend Community Food Pantry, Dana, Joanne, and all of Riverbend's numbers are fictional and illustrative.

Ready to build next year's plan? Your 12-Month Fundraising Plan in One Day walks you through it step by step: nine modules and about three hours of video, built for executive directors and development teams of one to three people. You get the Planning Day Kit (data checklist, request emails, one-day agenda, team exercise guides, and a printable wall calendar), the Planning Workbook spreadsheet in a blank version and as Riverbend's filled-in example, the One-Page Board Plan, and the Co-Strategist Prompt Library for using AI without sharing a single donor's name. Lifetime access to the videos and downloads.

Resources mentioned

• Your 12-Month Fundraising Plan in One Day

It's the first Monday in January. The pantry is quiet, and Dana is looking at a printout of about two hundred new donors with two feelings at once: gratitude that they showed up, and a little dread, because she knows how often first-time donors never give again. In this final episode of Finish Strong, we talk about the part of year-end that happens after December 31. Year-end brings new donors in. January decides whether they stay.

In this episode you'll learn how to:

• See why a second gift matters more than a bigger first one, and why keeping a donor costs far less than finding one.
• Thank every donor within 48 hours with a real thank-you, not just a receipt.
• Run a board thank-a-thon in early January, a job every board member can do.
• Build a 90-day welcome series: personal thanks, a story about what their gift did, an invitation to come closer, and then a first ask to become a monthly donor.
• Report back to everyone who gave: the total, the promise kept, and one face.
• Debrief with your team in January and record your real numbers, so next October's plan starts from facts, not guesses.
• Use AI to draft your welcome series while you hand-write notes to your top new donors.

Riverbend Community Food Pantry, and Tanya's story, are fictional, but if you've worked at a small nonprofit, you'll recognize them. Your new donors said yes in December. January is your chance to show them it mattered.

Resources mentioned

• Finish Strong Full Course
• Free 12 Days to Build a Great Year-End Fundraising Plan

It's December 15, a little after four in the afternoon. Dana clicks schedule on the last of her final-week emails and heads out for the holidays. The biggest week of Riverbend's year is about to happen, and the person who planned it won't be in the building. That's exactly the plan. In episode six of Finish Strong, we prepare for the last 72 hours of the year, when a huge share of giving comes in.

In this episode you'll learn how to:

• Understand who gives at the very end: tax-motivated donors, procrastinators, and people who meant to give in November.
• Build a six-email final-week sequence, with four of those emails in the last 72 hours.
• Write and schedule everything by December 15 (December 22 at the latest) so a small team can rest.
• Audit your donation page on a phone: load speed, gift amounts, the monthly option, the receipt, and other ways to give, like donor-advised funds and stock.
• Remember that in the US, a check with a December 31 postmark counts for this tax year.
• Make personal thank-you calls to top donors who haven't given yet.
• Run December 31 well: who's watching, updating the match total, and when to stop sending.
• Use AI as a second set of eyes on your emails and donation page before you schedule.

Riverbend Community Food Pantry is a fictional organization, but if you've worked at a small nonprofit, you'll recognize it. Your donors want to finish their year well, and a clear, easy last week helps them do it.

Resources mentioned

• Finish Strong Full Course
• Free 12 Days to Build a Great Year-End Fundraising Plan

It's the Monday before Thanksgiving, and Dana has eleven emails in her inbox with Giving Tuesday in the subject line. None of them are from donors. In episode five of Finish Strong, we take some pressure off: you don't have to win Giving Tuesday. You have to decide what it's for, and then do that one thing well.

In this episode you'll learn how to:

• See Giving Tuesday honestly. Most of the people who give to you that day already know you.
• Choose one of three ways to play it: go all in with a launch, focus on one narrow goal like new monthly donors, or skip the ask and send gratitude.
• Run a four-touch plan if you're going all in: a preview the week before, a morning launch, an afternoon progress update, and an evening last call.
• Let a few board members carry part of the day with personal texts to friends who trust them.
• Win the day after: thank every donor within 48 hours, report the total honestly, and protect your December 31 giving.
• Use AI to draft board messages that sound like each board member, not like your organization.

Riverbend Community Food Pantry is a fictional organization, but if you've worked at a small nonprofit, you'll recognize it. On a day full of noise, the warmest message your donors get can be yours.

Resources mentioned

• Finish Strong Full Course
• Free 12 Days to Build a Great Year-End Fundraising Plan

Last year, Dana was at her kitchen table at 9:30 on the night of December 18, writing an email that had to go out at eight the next morning. This year she's writing that email in the first week of November, when she's rested and has time to think. In episode four of Finish Strong, we build your email calendar from November 1 through midnight on December 31, so your donors hear from you when they're ready to give.

In this episode you'll learn how to:

• Get past the fear of "too much email." Most organizations email too little, and donors who are ready to give need a reminder.
• Plan four phases: echoing the letter in early November, the Giving Tuesday run-up, December 2 through Christmas, and the final week.
• Write about twenty emails in a few batches instead of one at a time in December.
• Mix five types of email (story, impact update, match countdown, thank-you, and last call) so twenty emails don't feel like twenty asks.
• Stop asking once someone gives, and move them to a thank-you track.
• Write versions for monthly donors and lapsed donors, and keep the real ask for top donors personal.
• Get the mechanics right: send from a real person, keep it plain, use one clear link, and make sure your donation page works on a phone.
• Use AI to draft from your letter and calendar, then edit every line by hand.

Riverbend Community Food Pantry is a fictional organization, but if you've worked at a small nonprofit, you'll recognize it. Every email is a chance to show your donors what their generosity is already doing.

Resources mentioned

• Finish Strong Full Course
• Free 12 Days to Build a Great Year-End Fundraising Plan