Two things sink most small charity fundraising plans, and neither is the tactics.
The target gets invented rather than derived. A plan that opens with “we’ll raise £100,000” has begun in the wrong place – that number came from ambition, or from last year plus a bit, and nothing in the plan explains why it’s achievable.
And capacity gets assumed rather than counted. Six campaigns, four applications and an events calendar, delivered by one person who also runs the services, answers the phone and does the payroll. That plan didn’t fail because the ideas were wrong. It failed because nobody added up the hours.
Fix those two and the rest is manageable.
If fundraising planning is one part of a bigger question about where your income comes from, that sits in our marketing and fundraising support.
Start with the gap, not the ambition
Your fundraising target is an output, not an input. It comes from three numbers.
What it costs to run the charity next year, taken from your budget rather than your hopes. What income is already committed – multi-year grants in their second or third year, regular givers you can reasonably expect to continue, contracts, rental income. And the difference between the two.
That difference is what you need to raise. Add the cost of raising it, because fundraising is not free and a plan that ignores its own cost is understating the target.
Now look at the number honestly. If the gap is larger than anything your charity has ever raised in a year, you do not have a fundraising planning problem. You have a strategy problem, and the conversation that follows is about what the charity does next year rather than about how many campaigns to run. Those are different conversations, and it helps to know which one you’re in before you start writing.
Size each source honestly
Take your last three years and break income down by source: grants, individual giving, regular gifts, events, corporate, earned income, everything. That is your baseline, and it is the most useful document in this whole process.
Two rules make the projections defensible.
Growth in a source you already use is a projection. Growth in a source you have never used is a guess, and guesses belong in a plan at a fraction of the value you first thought of. A charity that has never run a corporate partnership should not have £15,000 of corporate income in next year’s plan.
And no single source should be assumed to grow faster than you have ever grown it. If individual giving has risen 5% a year for three years, planning for 40% needs an explanation, and “we’ll try harder” is not one.
The related question is concentration. If one funder accounts for most of your income, the plan’s real job is reducing that dependency over several years, not maximising next year – an argument we’ve made at more length in the Local Giving Report piece.
Before adding anything new, check what you’re already owed. Unclaimed Gift Aid is money that requires no campaign, no funder and no permission, and it can be claimed four years back – the mechanics are in how Gift Aid works.
Count the hours before you commit to anything
This is the step that gets skipped, and it takes an afternoon.
List every activity in the draft plan. Beside each one, put a name – an actual person, not a job title and not “the team”. Beside that, an honest estimate of hours, including preparation, delivery, thanking people and the admin afterwards, which is usually where the time actually goes.
Then add up the hours per person and compare them with what that person genuinely has available, after their existing work. Not their contracted hours. What’s left.
Almost every first draft fails this test, often by a factor of two or three. The response is not to work harder. It is to cut the plan until it fits, because a plan with three things that happen beats a plan with nine that don’t, and the nine-item version also demoralises whoever was supposed to deliver it.
Plan looks reasonable on paper but never quite happens?
That is usually capacity rather than commitment, and it shows up the same way every year. A free Charity Consultation will help you work out what the plan is actually asking of your people.
Build the calendar around fixed points
Start with what you can’t move. Grant deadlines, your financial year end, reporting dates for existing funders, and – importantly – the periods when your delivery work is heaviest. A campaign scheduled into your busiest service month is a campaign that won’t run.
Then layer in the seasonal patterns that suit your charity and your supporters. December giving is well established. Ramadan matters enormously for some charities and their donors, and it moves through the calendar year by year, so it needs checking rather than assuming. Corporate giving often follows the giver’s financial year rather than yours.
Two disciplines make a calendar hold. Leave deliberate gaps, because every plan meets something unexpected and a calendar with no slack turns one setback into three. And don’t ask the same people twice in quick succession – segmenting who hears what, and when, matters more at small scale than at large, because your list is smaller and the fatigue shows faster.
Decide what you’re stopping
Annual plans almost always add and almost never subtract, which is how a small charity ends up with eleven fundraising activities and no capacity.
Go through last year’s activities and calculate roughly what each raised against what it cost in money and hours. The results are usually uncomfortable. The summer event that raises £800 and consumes 200 hours of volunteer and staff time is not a fundraising activity – it may be a community activity worth keeping for other reasons, but it should be judged as one.
Name what comes off the list before you approve what goes on it.
How you’ll know, and when to change it
Four measures are enough for a small charity.
Income against target, broken down by source rather than in total, because a plan that hits its number through one unexpected legacy has not worked. Cost per pound raised for each activity. Hours actually spent against hours planned, which is the one nobody tracks and the one that explains everything. And donor retention – what proportion of last year’s givers gave again, since keeping supporters is cheaper than finding them, and regular giving is where that shows up first.
Review quarterly, for an hour, against three questions: what’s ahead of plan, what’s behind, and what are we stopping or moving as a result. A plan you never change is not being used.
What the board should approve
Trustees don’t need to approve the tactics. They need to approve the target and the assumptions underneath it, and they should be able to answer three questions.
Where did this number come from – which budget line, which gap? Who is doing this work, and does the hours calculation stand up? And what happens if the largest single line doesn’t land, because in most small charity plans one line carries a disproportionate share of the total?
That last question is a reserves question as much as a fundraising one, and it belongs in the same conversation.
Fundraising activity also has to meet the standards in the Code of Fundraising Practice, and anything involving personal data brings duties of its own. Build both into the plan rather than discovering them mid-campaign.
If the honest conclusion is that no fundraising plan closes the gap at your current size and shape, that is a charity strategy question, and it’s better answered now than in month nine.
