When I actually got paid to fundraise, as we swung into the last two months of the year we had to balance two priorities — 1) maximizing year-end fundraising to get the numbers as impressive as possible, and 2) projecting costs and revenue for the coming year to fuel the annual budgeting process.

That was hard enough. So I sympathize with today’s fundraisers, who now must also squeeze in Giving Tuesday (this year on December 1st)! But already I digress.

I was on the ‘executive team’, so I managed to fob off responsibility for the first priority to my fundraising team. They had to sweat out how many appeals to cram in; how to integrate mail, email and phoning; what messages to use; what tactical gimmicks etc. They felt the pressure of ‘would we make the projections or not’. All I had to worry about was what explanation I might give to the executive team if we didn’t make our numbers. Of course I had consultants to help me with that! [Fortunately we were always pretty much where we needed to be.]

By October we had dealt our hand for the current year. Our prospecting, renewal and upgrading programs were either working or they weren’t. There weren’t many options for ’emergency treatment’ anyway … unless some windfall event (cynically speaking) happened that we might jump on.

In the last two months of the year, brilliant execution is the name of the end-game — that’s how priority #1 gets achieved.

Otherwise, as Russian spy Rudolf Abel replied to his James Donovan/Tom Hanks lawyer in the current film, Bridge of Spies, when asked why he didn’t seem worried about his situation: “Would it help?”

So my priority toward year’s end was more the question of how the coming year should be approached — priority #2. Looking at the ‘givens’ — e.g., our file size, its recent performance, the strength of our recent acquisition efforts, our established investment level and risk tolerance — what changes might be made to improve performance and yield?

Answering that question involves integrating everything:

• making ‘mechanical’ projections off the givens;
• assessing weaknesses in the current program (e.g. retention rates, monthly giving participation, net cost of acquisition) and where greatest headroom or ROI opportunities might lie;
• identifying new approaches to test and channels to fix (e.g., crappy line conversion);
• speculating about the durability of current fundraising messages;
• speculating even more about changes (for better or worse) in the external environment that might affect our success; and,
• appraising the tolerance of my CEO and Board to take budgetary risks that might accelerate growth in the fundraising program.

Depending on where you sit in your nonprofit’s fundraising hierarchy, one or the other of these two priorities and their associated questions should be your focus for the next two months.

Oh, and if you have time left over, squeeze in Giving Tuesday.

Tom