Strategic Planning and Fundraising in a New Era: The focus of this blog is to explain how fundraising has changed in the past few years as the pandemic impacted us all and shifted how various generations of donors now choose to make their gifts.  I will start with describing how development has become an integral part of strategic planning and integrating new initiatives with both strategic planning and development.  In future blogs, I will explore with you the new ways that donors are using to make gifts, particularly through Donor Advised Funds and crowdfunding with friends and like-minded donors.

At one time, nonprofit organizations used consultants to help them devise strategic plans for their organization, usually in a three to five year framework.  Initiatives came later when finding champions to lead these initiatives or donors to participate in funding these projects created a disconnected process. 

Current thinking advocates implementing strategic planning in connection with a multistep process of envisioning new initiatives and stimulating Board members to champion various initiatives.  The final step is to create a fundraising development plan (annually) that ties these initiatives to specific financial goals and action steps with responsibilities for participating Board members, development committee members and involved alumni/major donors. 

Benefits of This New Planning Process:  With this type of multistep strategic planning and fundraising development planning process, nonprofits were able to weather the challenges of running their organizations during a pandemic and reaching out to donors in new ways, particularly through social media and zoom events.  Who would ever have thought that grandparents participating in a Grandparents Day via zoom would reach out afterwards and beg the nonprofit to continue an online/zoom component of that event in future years so that far away relatives could continue to participate!  And it was amazing to see that these participants would later initiative conversations about donor advised funds and their giving plans with the goal of helping the school grow strong despite the challenges of the pandemic!

For more information, please look at my website, https://focusedfundraisingctllc.com and view additional short-term workshops and training options. 

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