Geared Up For The New Year
New Year, New You. Go ahead and roll your eyes at me, but let's take a look at a few ways this infamous saying can guide you in your 2017 planning. Some of you may not be in the throes of planning right now because you plan based on a different fiscal year, but stay with me and take the opportunity to do a check in of where you are to date and if there are any changes that you want to make between now and the end of your fiscal year. For more details specific to your fundraising planning, check out the Fundraising Resolutions For The New Year blog.
Let's start off easy with some goals. Think beyond just an overall dollar amount and consider what percentage of donors to you want to keep this year. What is your goal for new donors? Set individual goals for each event, appeal, and campaign that you have. Even for free events, consider setting goals for registration and attendance. Spreading your mission through events will increase your ROI, so they deserve goals as well. Once you have your calendar and goals set, start entering your calendar items with the goals into Raiser's Edge.
Next let's take a retrospective look at 2016. Take your 2016 list of planned campaigns, appeals and events. First review the list and cross off any that do not align with your 2017 goals. With the remaining items, identify all you actually did and put a star next to those that were successful. Your starred items are the foundation of your 2017 plan! If there are items that weren't completed, consider why you weren't able to complete them and if you can overcome the challenges this year. For the items you did but weren't successful, evaluate to see if investing time to make changes would be worthwhile or if you could be better served by moving on to something new and reallocating those resources to your starred items to make them even more impactful.
You now have a great jumping off point to outline your 2017 calendar. Have a quarterly newsletter? Great, start outlining rough bullets of topics you want to include. Think about any events, industry news, or campaign progress that you may want to share. Look at your list from above, do you want to keep the same calendar for your events and appeals? Could shifting the timing of these result in a better turnout? Now is the fun brainstorming time for new 2017 ideas. Is there anything specific to 2017 that you want to highlight such as membership milestones, completion of a new building, or a programmatic success?
Next let's review the technology systems you use and determine who should have access and what that entails. Raiser's Edge NXT provides you with unlimited user licenses, so you can be very liberal in who gets access to the system without worrying about your contract price increasing. The important part is to put your users in the correct security group so they only have access to the particular parts of the database they need. You may give all your volunteers access to the web view but they may have varying projects. Only give access to the information they need to complete the task at hand. Adding all of your new users now can save you time and get you off on the right foot for 2017. What other technology systems are you using? Is there anything that you can replace with RE NXT so that there is less hopping back and forth between systems? If you are not using Online Express or another Blackbaud product for your online donations and email marketing, give it a try, it is included in your subscription. If you like it, you may be able to save yourself time and money!
In the same vein as reviewing technology packages and access for your organization, flip back to your policies and procedures guide to make sure that everything is up to date for your current solutions and that all technology users have access to the guide to make sure your data integrity is of the highest caliber.
Share your planning successes and lessons learned in the comments.
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