Your fundraising campaign’s success is not only about funds raised, but also about the ongoing accomplishments that keep your team feeling positive and motivated. Celebrating small wins in fundraising is important for building momentum, instilling confidence, and establishing a successful path forward to reaching your big goals.
Achieving this kind of incremental success cannot be overlooked. Especially now, when so many organisations are facing adversity, there are things you can do right away to ensure your campaign keeps moving forward.
Three Ways to Achieve Small Wins
- Rallying your internal support
Building a sense of ownership, trust, and empowerment among organisational leaders is an important accomplishment to celebrate at the outset of and throughout a campaign. Knowing that your people support fundraising efforts inspires greater confidence among campaign leaders and volunteers who are driving activity forward.
Instilling confidence amongst your key insiders can be accomplished in the following ways.
- Be transparent and communicate often. Host monthly update meetings with staff, send newsletters or other forms of consistent communication about campaign progress and success, and create opportunities to discuss challenges and frustrations so lines of communication are always open. This will establish trust and confidence and open the door to internal advocates for your campaign that will build greater momentum for the campaign.
- Look inward and create structure on your team. Creating and clearly communicating roles for each person will create a sense of collective ownership, which becomes a much larger win for the organisation as whole.
- Highlight accomplishments at the next staff meeting. Publicly acknowledging the good work of staff, volunteers and leaders to advance fundraising efforts. Celebrating small successes is key to creating a winning culture and can help create an energised and excited team even during the hardest times.
- Updating your prospect pipeline
Campaigns are also about building and maintaining relationships with donors. While organisations often focus on a specific targeted list of prospects, a campaign is also an opportunity to identify new individuals who share a commitment to an organisation’s mission.
By reviewing and updating your prospect pipeline, you give your team confidence in knowing that they are spending time on the right donors. During challenging times, any update to the pipeline is a great way to get the ball rolling again and each new prospect is a new opportunity to increase donations, set both staff and donor sights higher, and engage a broader community that may include future leaders.
Once a prospect is in the pipeline, celebrate every move throughout the donor engagement process as a small win toward greater success.
- Setting yourself up for a big win
Organisations often celebrate a completed request visit because it means they are one step closer to a gift. While this is an exciting moment, the hard work that goes into the preparation for these visits often goes unacknowledged.
As you plan for a transformational request, acknowledge each task as a small win and share your progress with your team. Over time, you will notice your leaders become more prepared for and confident when conducting requests, which often yields higher returns on requests. This is an example of how incremental success can lead to overall success.
Getting Started Today
Ask yourself: What do I have to look forward to tomorrow? What will we accomplish next week? How can we build on next week’s win?
When answering these questions, keep in mind that small wins illuminate progress and demonstrates success. This helps to motivate everyone involved and sets your people up to produce results.
