Letter and reflection( 9hours)

2020 SMART Fundraising Goals - Save The Penguins (EXAMPLE)

Overall fundraising goal: Increase fundraising income by 25% compared to 2019

STRATEGY FOCUS: Growth through donor empowerment and retention

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FOCUS AREAS Comment by Pamela Medina: You are required to include at least 2 focus areas (either donor acquisition, donor engagement, or donor retention). The obstacles should be identified based on the information you have- if you don’t have much information, there are some standard objectives (the numbered rows) that may apply to most organizations, including: competing with other organizations for donors, diversifying the donor pool, measuring donor satisfaction, and measuring the impact of various strategies for donor acquisition, engagement, or retention.

OBSTACLES Comment by Pamela Medina: The obstacles may be based on the information that you have access to about the particular organization, and/or standard obstacles related to the objective. For example, if the objective was to diversify the donor pool, a standard obstacle might be gaining access to or locating new donors.

TARGETS Comment by Pamela Medina: These targets may be estimates that you guess based on the amount of information that you have about the organization. Don’t worry too much about the numbers you use for this assignment. This is just to get you to practice writing targets. They may be hypothetical, since you will have varying access to information about the organization’s capacity.

Donor Acquisition

1

Improve online donation experience for donors

Clunky donation form and page

Increase donor conversion rates by 30%

2

Invest in Facebook ads to promote our ongoing impact stories to like audiences

Historic budget allocations

Acquire 200 new donors in 2020

3

Build out a friends program that invites current donors to leverage their networks to help us reach new donor audiences

Q1 budget limitations and cash flow

Increase social media reach by 200%

4

Hire a community partnerships manager

Lack of board engagement

Develop 3 new community partnerships

Donor Engagement

5

Build out a middle donor program focused on giving upgrades

Small staff; no time to hard

Increase the avg giving per donor by 10%

6

Run a peer-to-peer campaign in the spring and then again for Giving Tuesday on CauseVox

Development team turnover

Recruit 15 donors to do peer-to-peer fundraising

7

Launch 2x donor thank/engagement events

Historically limited focus on donor engagement

Raise > $50,000 through two new donor thank you events

Donor Retention

8

Move from reactive only (i.e. thank you notes) cultivation to proactive donor retention programs (i.e. quarterly outreach with impact reports)

No processes; need to systematize

Upgrade 20 donors to recurring giving using CauseVox recurring donation functionality.

9

Produce a monthly newsletter for donors (focused on impact; not an ask)

Board doesn't see this as top priority

Retain 70% (10% increase) of 2019 donors

10

Launch a quarterly donor survey (Net Promoter Score method)

Competing priorities/new donor acquisition typically gets priority (not a good thing)

Reduce donor follow-up to < 1 week