Land the Gifts That Move the Numbers

Welcome back to NPQ’s fundraising advice column, Ask Rhea. Rhea Wong is a fundraising expert and professional coach, exuberant author of Get That Money, Honey!, host of the Nonprofit Lowdown podcast, and an unfailingly encouraging voice in a sometimes-bleak landscape. Rhea wants you to succeed, and she’s here to answer your questions.

In today’s issue, Rhea covers how to keep above water in the priorities pool when you find yourself slipping underwater.

Have a fundraising question? Send it to this submission form and choose “Fundraising” from the drop-down menu.

Dear Rhea,

I’m the development director at a $4.5M human services organization. For Q4, we start an early giving window that opens November first and runs into December until a week before GivingTuesday. We run a year-end appeal, mail and email. DAF (donor-advised funds) Day. And a peer-to-peer campaign our board chair saw somewhere and is excited about.

Every one of these has a deadline, a platform, and at least one person waiting on me for something. I am already behind and its only September.

Last year I worked myself into the ground through December, we came in slightly under the year before. In January, our board asked me what happened and I didn’t have a good answer.

What do I cut? What do I do first? Is there a version of this where I don’t hate my life by New Year’s?

Sincerely,

Drowning in Colorado

Dear Drowning in Colorado,

I was you. Different budget, same December. By the end of it I was cooked, my team was cooked, and I could not have told you which of the hundred things we did actually brought in money.

You asked what to cut. Wrong question, and I’ll tell you why in a minute. First, the question you should be asking: what is the one thing?

Greg McKeown points out in Essentialism that “priority” entered English in the 1400s as a singular word. It meant the first thing. It stayed singular for five hundred years, and we only started saying “priorities” in the 1900s, as though pluralizing it would let us have several first things at once.

You listed five campaigns. That’s not a strategy. That’s a list, and a list will lose to whatever item is loudest in the second week of October. Because here’s the thing about your five: they’re all urgent and they’re all legitimate. Real deadlines, real people waiting on you. Urgent and important are not the same category, and when you’re underwater you lose the ability to tell them apart.

So, here’s your one thing: land the gifts that move the revenue number.

Look at Your Own Math First

Pull last year’s revenue and sort it by source. At $4.5M, I’d bet money the shape is 90/10—10 percent of your donors holding up 90 percent of your budget. It might be fifteen people. You could fit your entire revenue model in a minivan.

Now pull last year’s Q4 calendar and count the hours. Sort them by what they served.

“You spent your best eight weeks on the wrong 10 percent of the revenue.”

The lists won’t match. They rarely do. The giving day, GivingTuesday, DAF Day, the peer-to-peer thing—together they eat your season and return a rounding error, while the 15 people who actually fund your organization get a mail merge and an auto-receipt that says, “Dear Friend.”

That’s your answer about January. Nothing went wrong last year. You spent your best eight weeks on the wrong 10 percent of the revenue.

Now, About Prioritizing…

I’m not going to tell you to kill the campaigns, and not because I’m squeamish. You have a board chair emotionally invested in peer-to-peer and a comms person who’s already built the GivingTuesday assets. That fight costs you political capital you need somewhere else.

Instead, stop treating them as things you do, and start treating them as things that run. Set them up, hand what you can to your comms lead and your half-person and let them be B-minus. A B-minus giving day plus a booked calendar of major gift conversations beats an A-plus giving day and an empty one. It isn’t close.

The campaigns come with dates attached, and things with dates attached win by default. Your fifteen people have no dates. Nothing on your calendar is ever going to remind you to call the woman who gave you $50,000 last March.

So, remind yourself. Write down the names. Tape the list somewhere you’ll be looking in November.

Three Hours in September

If you only had three hours in September to make the rest of the year easier, here is how you should spend it.

Sort the portfolio (two hours). One sitting, top 50 donors, on your calendar before September 30. Three buckets: ask this year, cultivate for next year, park. The cultivate bucket is where hope goes to hide—if everybody’s being cultivated, nobody’s being asked.

“A B-minus giving day plus a booked calendar of major gift conversations beats an A-plus giving day and an empty one. It isn’t close.”

While you’re in there, pull your DAF donors out. December 31 means nothing to them; they took the deduction when they funded the account, possibly years ago. Look at when their grants actually land. The ones who grant in Q4 stay in the December sequence. Everybody else moves to January and February, and that’s an upgrade, not a demotion. Your calendar is open, their inbox is quiet, and the money is already sitting in an account whose only job in this world is to be given away.

Read the signals (one hour). This is the step everyone skips, and it’s why the calls go nowhere. A big past gift tells you someone could give again. It tells you nothing about whether they want to talk to you right now. Sort by capacity alone and you’ll call 20 people and sit in the silence. Crickets.

The signals are already in your database, unloved. Someone who gave three times this year instead of once. Someone who showed up to an event after four years of declining. Someone who opens every email you send, including the ones you were embarrassed by. Someone whose gift arrived unprompted and off cycle in April. Behavior over amounts. That’s the whole hour.

Then count one number.

Solicitation conversations should be on your calendar by November 1, with donors who’ve given you a signal. Not touches. Not coffees. A date, confirmed by the donor, where you intend to ask for a specific amount.

November 1 is already circled on your calendar—it’s when early giving opens. Use the date twice. That morning, before you look at a single platform dashboard, count your booked conversations. That number tells you what kind of December you’re about to have, and you’ll still have five weeks to do something about it.

Target: double your number of conversations from last year. If you booked four, book eight. Not 15, not 25, not a number off a conference slide about best-in-class shops. Eight is achievable by a person with your actual calendar and your actual one-and-a-half staff.

You make those asks. That’s the job and it doesn’t delegate. What your board can do—including your peer-to-peer enthusiast, who now has something better to be excited about—is open doors. The introduction, the “you should meet her,” the call that warms a cold name. Get them working it in September so that when you call in October, you’re not the first person who’s mentioned you.

Anyone can count this number, including your board chair. Nobody can fudge it. The meeting is booked or it isn’t. If it’s not on the scorecard, it didn’t happen.

What January Could Look Like

Next January, when they ask you what happened, you want to hand them a list of names with amounts asked and amounts received. That’s a fundraising season. An open-rate report with a total is a marketing season, and only one of those compounds.

Q4 is the Super Bowl of fundraising. Everybody says so, and everybody means it as a compliment. But nobody ever got good at football in February. The Super Bowl settles a season that was already decided in the months nobody was watching. You show up in February to find out what you built.

You’re not behind, Drowning. You’re in September with three hours to spend and 15 names that matter.

Water the flowers. Not the weeds.

Keep afloat,

Rhea

You can find more insights and resources from Rhea at rheawong.com.