How to Answer: “Will We Meet Our Fundraising Goal?”
- Sarah Staiger
- Jul 22
- 5 min read
As we get closer to the end of the calendar year, leaders start asking:
“Are we going to make our fundraising goal?”
Fair question.
For a long time, we answered it with a feeling.
“We’ve got some really generous donors.”
“We usually have a strong December.”
“I think a couple of big gifts are coming.”
Maybe.
But we’d rather answer this question with a something a bit more than a feeling.
(Cue the music 🎶 “More than a feeeeelin’...” 🎶 Boston is playing that for you right now!)
The truth is, none of us knows exactly what every donor will do. A donor might surprise you with a larger gift. Someone else may need to wait until next year. Life happens.
So instead of asking whether you feel like you’ll make your goal, we encourage fundraising leaders to ask a different question:
Do we have enough asks and enough fundraising strategies planned to reasonably expect we’ll reach our goal?
Instead of hoping, you start projecting.
Instead of wondering, you start confidently executing a plan.
Instead of crossing your fingers for December, you can identify gaps while there’s still time to do something about them.
Here’s a simple exercise to try with your team.
Step 1: List every planned one-to-one ask between now and year end.
For each donor, including grant funders, write down:
Who is responsible for the relationship.
When you expect to make the ask.
How much you plan to ask for.
How much you reasonably expect they might give.
That last point is important.
The ask amount and the expected gift are not necessarily the same thing.
You may plan to ask for $25,000 because that's the amount that would meaningfully move the work forward. Based on everything you know today, though, you may reasonably expect the donor to give $15,000.
That's not being pessimistic.
That's making a projection based on the information you have today.
If those fields are hard to fill in, you've already learned something important. Your next step isn't guessing—it’s creating a clearer fundraising plan.
One of the things we love about Values-Based Major Giving is that this part becomes much easier. Because you've already had values-based conversations with donors, your ask amount and your expected gift aren't based on wishful thinking. They're grounded in what you've learned together.
Step 2: Add up your planned asks.
At the end of step 2 you have two lists: your asks and your “expects”. We want you to add up your planned ask values.
As a rule of thumb, we like to see organizations carrying at least two times their fundraising goal in planned asks—and often closer to three times their goal, depending on how qualified their prospects are and how much uncertainty exists.
Why?
Because not every donor will say yes.
Some donors will give less than you ask.
Some conversations will move into next year.
Some asks simply won’t happen.
If your annual goal is $500,000 and you only have $500,000 worth of asks planned, there’s a good chance your pipeline isn’t deep enough. You need $1M- $1.5M to confidently say you’ll hit goal with your asks. If you’re not there yet, don’t stress, keep moving through the steps for now.
Step 3: Add up your expected one-to-one gifts.
Now go back through your donor list and ask:
"Based on what we know today, what do we realistically expect?"
Add those expected gifts together.
This gives you a realistic projection of what your current one-to-one fundraising work is likely to produce and it’s as accurate as you can get down to the person.
Step 4: Value your one-to-many fundraising strategies.
Now do the same exercise for your remaining fundraising strategies but rather than valuing them by person, value them by strategy.
Think about things like:
Direct mail
Email appeals
Giving days
Events
Peer-to-peer fundraising
Give each strategy an estimated value—and write down why.
If you've run the strategy before, use last year's results as your starting point.
For example:
Last year we raised $10,000 from our fall direct mail campaign. We've added 100 new prospective donors to the mailing list this year, so we think that number might increase by 1–2% in line with industry standards. The projected value of this strategy is approximately $10,150.
If the strategy is new, make an educated estimate using the information you have.
For example:
Will these estimates be perfect?
No.
That's not the point.
The point is that you're replacing a feeling with a thoughtful projection.
Step 5: Add it all together.
Now total:
Your expected one-to-one gifts.
The projected value of your one-to-many strategies.
Compare that total to your fundraising goal.
If there's a gap, don't panic.
Celebrate. Ok maybe not celebrate but at least take a deep breath of gratitude. Seriously!
Because you found it while there’s still time to do something about it!
Now your team can ask much more useful questions.
Do we need to qualify more prospects?
Do we need to schedule more asks?
Do we need to strengthen one of our appeals?
Do we need to move more donors into one-to-one fundraising?
Do we need to adjust our expectations?
Those are leadership conversations.
And they're much more productive than hoping December somehow saves the year.
Replace uncertainty with clarity.
One of the things we love most about Values-Based Major Giving is that it gives fundraising teams a way to replace uncertainty with clarity. And that goes a long way to having more ease and joy in fundraising. You deserve it.
You don't have to know exactly what every donor will do.
But you can know whether you've created enough opportunities to reasonably expect success.
That's a much better answer than, "We have a good feeling about it."
If someone asked you today, "Will you meet your fundraising goal?" what would your answer be?
Would it be just a feeling? Or would it be a projection backed by a clear work plan? We want you to have both.
That's exactly what our VBMG Revenue Meeting process is designed to create.
It's a simple meeting framework we use with our clients to:
Project year-end fundraising using real data instead of guesswork.
Identify gaps while there's still time to act.
Prioritize the asks and strategies that will have the biggest impact.
Leave the meeting with clear next steps instead of more anxiety.
If you'd like to see how it works, we'd love to share it with you.
Reply to this post or schedule a free 15-minute conversation with us, and we'll give you a mini-training on our VBMG Revenue Meeting process. We want you to have the ability to work from realistic projections, focus your energy where it matters most, and head into year-end with more clarity—and a little more ease and joy.
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