Riverbend’s first draft plan looked great on paper. Then Dana counted the hours and put every ask on one calendar. The plan needed a hundred and fifty more hours than she had, and their most loyal donors would be asked six times in April. In the second episode of A Plan You Can Defend, we make sure your plan fits the people who have to run it, on both sides of the ask.
In this episode you’ll learn:
- Why a plan that ignores capacity is a wish list with a budget attached.
- The Hours Honesty exercise: compare each person’s estimate with a two-week time log.
- How to turn real weekly hours into a year, and why you plan at eighty percent.
- How to estimate what each campaign and strategy costs in hours.
- How to choose three or four anchor campaigns with a simple scoring grid, and why a telemarketing campaign the staff didn’t like stayed in the plan.
- Why your always-on work goes into the plan first.
- Calendar Collision: put every ask, touch, and thank-you on one wall, one row per donor segment, and find the month that asks too much.
- How to set your own ask limit for each segment from your own evidence.
- This episode’s action item and homework: start counting your real hours, set your own ask limit for each segment, and leave your capacity gap open for now.
Riverbend Community Food Pantry, Dana, Joanne, and all of Riverbend’s numbers are fictional and illustrative.
Ready to build next year’s plan? Your 12-Month Fundraising Plan in One Day walks you through it step by step: nine modules and about three hours of video, built for executive directors and development teams of one to three people. You get the Planning Day Kit (data checklist, request emails, one-day agenda, team exercise guides, and a printable wall calendar), the Planning Workbook spreadsheet in a blank version and as Riverbend’s filled-in example, the One-Page Board Plan, and the Co-Strategist Prompt Library for using AI without sharing a single donor’s name. Lifetime access to the videos and downloads.
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