What you say and when you say it is part of how you raise money. Without a plan, whatever idea is loudest that week wins. The Pattern. On most teams, posts go out when someone remembers to send them. The calendar is full of good ideas that never ship. The leader is supposed to be…
When people cannot trust a report, it does not take long before they stop trusting each other. A report the board believes is one that gets pulled the same way every single time. The Pattern. Finance says one total for the year and development says another. The amount a donor gets credit for, the amount…
When a process lives in one person’s head, you are one resignation away from losing it. Once it is written down, the next person can pick it up on their first day. The Pattern. Most teams have tried to write a procedures manual at least once and stalled halfway. What exists is out of date,…
A simple year-end mailing list took me far longer than it should have, and I know where the buttons are. October is not scary because of the letter. It is scary because of everything underneath the letter, and that is where AI can actually help.
Every donor engagement model I have been handed looks the same. A circle. Identify, cultivate, solicit, steward, back to the top. I think it looks more like a ski mountain.
Fall is when this gets decided. Everyone comes back, the calendar fills, and the report you bring to that first meeting sets the temperature for the giving season.
Reporting that works does the opposite. It defines the metrics that matter by function, ahead of time, with a clear owner and a cadence that gets followed whether or not a board meeting is coming up. The vanity numbers that nobody ever really acted on get retired, on purpose, before the dashboard gets built, not after. What remains is a small number of reports that actually drive a decision when they change, and nothing that runs simply because it has always run.
The fix is not a better calendar template. It is an honest look at whether content is currently running as infrastructure or as a task list, and building the one that is missing.
Every July, development teams do the same thing. They close out the fiscal year, pull the final numbers, and start building the annual fund plan for the cycle ahead. Goals get set. Timelines get mapped. Someone makes a calendar. The plan looks right because nothing is running yet, and when nothing is running, nothing is visibly broken.
