You know the money is not coming in the way it should, but you do not yet know why, and the why decides everything.
Trouble with the money you raise from people comes in four shapes that feel identical from the inside and need completely different work: you have no real plan and no path a donor travels, you are losing the donors you already have, your base of givers is too thin, or your handful of deep relationships is unmanaged and underasked. This sorts out which one you have, checks that your problem is really about donors and not grants or a contract, and hands you a plan, so you put your scarce energy on the leak that is actually draining the boat.
This is a sorting instrument, not a fix. It will not raise you a dollar. It tells you which kind of fundraising trouble you have and in what order to work it. It is not a fundraising plan and it is not a pep talk about believing in your mission. It is a short, honest look at your own numbers that ends with a written plan.
Completing it fully takes about three hours, which you can spread across more than one sitting, plus your actual giving numbers from the last two or three years even if they are messy, and the willingness to face a retention number you have probably never calculated. What it does not promise: it does not fix anything by itself. It points.
This works only if you are steady enough to plan. If you cannot make payroll this month, or the doors could close within weeks, that is a different emergency and it comes first. There are fast, real ways to put cash in the bank this week.
Take the two-minute steadiness check first →You cannot diagnose a fundraising problem you have not laid out in numbers. Most leaders carry a feeling about their giving and have never put the actual shape of it on one page. Pull the last two or three years and sort your contributed income by source, noting how many donors, not just how many dollars. Keep grants and government contracts on their own line, because they are not this work.
Open the Giving Engine Snapshot →First, make sure you are in the right place. Look at your snapshot and answer honestly:
Good, you are in the right place. Now answer each of these the way it really is, not the way you wish it were. There is no shame in a low score. That is the whole point of looking.
Two numbers decide more of this than any feeling, and both are commonly misread: how many of last year's donors gave again, and how much of your money rides on a few people. This makes you calculate them rather than guess. Where the number is worse than your gut said, trust the number.
Open the Retention and Concentration Reality Check →Turn the finding into an ordered plan that names your first guide and respects the one rule that saves the most wasted money: fix the leak before you pour in new donors. Where you have more than one finding, the order is always strategy first, then retention, then base, then major relationships. Give the very first guide a real start date.
Open the Prioritized Giving Plan →Two moments here call for someone outside these pages. If a gift raises a real legal or tax question, an unusual asset, a gift with strings that may not be legal to accept, or a question about what you can promise a donor for their taxes, get a nonprofit accountant or attorney before you accept or acknowledge it. And if working through your numbers makes plain that you, the leader, are carrying the entire weight of the fundraising alone and running on empty, notice that, because a development function built entirely on one exhausted person is its own risk, and your health comes before any campaign.
You can say, in one plain sentence, whether your trouble is that you have no plan, that you are losing the donors you have, that your base is too thin, or that your best relationships are unmanaged. You have a written plan that names your first guide and a date. And you calculated your donor retention rate, probably for the first time, and you know your real number instead of your hoped-for one.
Once the acute money is collected and you are on your feet, it is worth stepping back to look at the whole organization, not just the part that was on fire. There is a short whole-organization check-up waiting for you when you are ready, and it will show you what else deserves attention. That is not a sales pitch. It is the next honest thing to look at. The whole-organization check-up →