6 Annual Fund Strategies to Reach (& Exceed!) Your Goals

Bob Happy

In the world of fundraising, large-scale projects like capital campaigns or time-based fundraising pushes like year-end campaigns often get a lot of attention.

But there’s a less flashy campaign that your organization runs in the background of its other operations, and it needs to be prioritized to be successful. It’s your annual fundraising campaign!

Your annual campaign is essential for covering your organization’s operating costs and ensuring you can carry out everything you have planned for the coming year.

In this guide, we’ll explore several strategies you can use to ensure you reach (or even exceed!) your annual fund goal. Let’s begin.

1. Set the right annual fundraising goal.

Setting your overall campaign goal can be daunting, but never fear. You only need to know two numbers to get started:

Last year’s operating costs for your nonprofit. Assess how much money it took to keep your nonprofit operating last year. Consider administrative expenses, fundraising expenses, program costs, lease payments, utilities costs, money spent on office equipment and supplies, and any contracted services you invested in.
Your fundraising total from previous annual fund campaigns. You already know that you were able to raise a certain amount of money for your annual fund in the past, which means you should be able to do so now, too. Consider whether your organization can push itself to raise more than it previously has.

Knowing these two numbers, you can now move forward in your planning process with your team. The following two steps are simple:

With your fundraising team, develop a preliminary goal. This goal should be based on the two numbers mentioned earlier. While this goal isn’t definite, it gives your team a starting point to consider whether or not you have the necessary resources and support to achieve your campaign goal.
Conduct a planning and feasibility study to cement your goal. These studies aren’t only for capital campaigns! With your team and perhaps the added expertise of a fundraising consultant, conduct interviews with your board, key stakeholders, and community to gauge the feasibility of your campaign and make any necessary adjustments.

Setting the right annual fundraising goal is key to the success of your campaign. Set it too high, and you’ll fall short. Too low, and you’ll fail to inspire your supporters with a challenge.

2. Understand the kind of support you need.

Having a definite financial goal to reach for during your annual fund sets your organization up for success. And once you have a key figure, you can break that down further to better understand what givers at what levels you’ll need to solicit to reach it.

According to Averill Fundraising Solutions, here are the three giving levels and what they each mean for your organization’s annual fund campaign:

Lower-Level Gifts

When someone becomes a supporter of your organization for the first time, odds are they opened the door with a lower-level gift. While the bottom 70% of all gifts are lower-level gifts, they only account for 15-25% of your total fundraising goal.

These gifts are easier to steward, but that doesn’t mean they’re not critical to your fundraising campaign!

Mid-Range Gifts

The middle 20% of your gifts come from mid-range givers, and their gifts account for 15-25% of your overall fundraising goal. These gifts are larger than average and usually come from people who have previously engaged with your organization.

Major Gifts

Major gifts come from contributors who are seriously engaged with your organization and mission. These gifts are rarer than the others and should account for 60% or more of your fundraising goal.

When planning your annual fund campaign, consider how many givers you’ll need from each level to reach your goal. You should always plan to solicit more supporters than you’ll need because not every solicitation will be successful.

3. Promote the campaign effectively.

Before you can begin securing gifts for your annual fund, you must ensure that your supporters know about your campaign and understand how important annual fundraising is to your cause. You can do this by devising a careful marketing plan.

Begin by crafting a core campaign message, one that communicates how your annual fund supports your larger cause and why you need your supporters to give to the fund. Here is an example of a core campaign message:

At The Tiger Conservation Corps, we use our annual fund to keep our mission in motion. It helps us cover everything from our office lease to our administrative costs. This allows us to do what we do best—educate people about tiger conservation, restore tiger habitats, and rehabilitate tigers in need. Your gift can make all the difference in how we’re able to help out our feline friends!

Once you have your core campaign message, you can adapt it for the various marketing channels you’ll use to spread the word about the campaign. You’ll want to use several different channels (such as email, social media, print media, and texting) to ensure that you reach the greatest number of supporters possible.

4. Build meaningful relationships with annual fund prospects.

Now that you know how many supporters per giving level you’ll need to solicit for your annual fund campaign and have a plan for promoting it, it’s time to build relationships with those individuals and inspire them to give to your cause.

The first place to look for prospects is within your constituent relationship management (CRM) software. Your CRM should contain data regarding giving levels, frequency, and previous campaigns.

Use this data to find prospects for your annual fund campaign! These people have demonstrated their commitment to your organization and your mission, and you know enough about their giving habits to reach out through their preferred medium and make an ask.

The most promising demographic of supporters is givers who have remained at the same giving level for multiple years. If someone has given the same gift for the past five years, this is the year to ask them to increase their gift!

Next, your fundraising team should conduct prospect research for members of your community who aren’t currently engaged with your nonprofit. You can do this through prospect research.

Prospect research is a fundraising tactic in which fundraising professionals use publicly available data to better target their solicitation efforts toward individuals who are willing and able to give. Prospect research usually involves looking at data points such as:

Real estate holdings
SEC filings
Salary, if public
Previous history of giving to philanthropic or political causes

These pieces of information give your fundraising team a glimpse into a person’s ability to give, as well as what inspires them to give.

For example, if someone with a large house and vacation home has a history of giving to nonprofits with missions similar to yours, they might be a good prospect for a major gift solicitation. This is because they display both capacity and affinity for philanthropy.

5. Emphasize corporate philanthropy in your annual fundraising efforts.

Have you ever thought that you could easily double the impact of your fundraising efforts just by marketing corporate philanthropy to your supporters?

Every year, millions of dollars earmarked for corporate philanthropy sit unclaimed because supporters of nonprofit organizations don’t know that they’re eligible for corporate philanthropy initiatives like matching gift programs.

Through matching gift programs, supporters can double the impact of their own gifts without having to reach back into their own wallets. All they have to do is submit a matching gift request to their employer, who then verifies the gift with the nonprofit and writes a check.

Marketing corporate philanthropy to your low-level and mid-range supporters is a quick and easy way to maximize the impact of your fundraising strategy and free up more time to solicit those all-important major gifts.

So how can you educate your supporters about matching gifts? Here are some tips:

Invest in a matching gift database where your supporters can check their eligibility.
Include information about matching gift programs in your marketing collateral for distribution during your campaign.
Inform givers that they can submit a matching gift request to their employer even after they’ve given.

The primary reason supporters don’t take advantage of matching gift programs is that they don’t know that they exist. When you demonstrate to your supporters how they can help your nonprofit more than they already have with very little effort, they’ll be sure to submit matches and help you reach your annual fund goal.

6. Lay the groundwork for next year’s gifts.

The work of an annual fund is never over: Even when this year’s campaign is done, it’s probably time to start planning for next year!

Your annual fund campaign strategies must be sustainable so your nonprofit can rely on your community’s support year after year.

To build a strong community of supporters and retain their support from year to year, consider including some of the following techniques:

Engage with your supporters, even after they’ve made their gift. Of course, the first step of this is always the thank-you note, but the key to sustainable giving is stewardship. Invite your supporters to see your office and witness how your staff is serving your beneficiaries day by day, and distribute your nonprofit annual report to anyone who gave to your annual fund campaign.
Ask for multi-year commitments. Instead of only asking for one year, ask for two or even three years’ worth of support! This strategy helps build a long-term relationship with the giver, frees up your solicitation team to broaden its portfolio, and stabilizes your annual fund for multiple years.
Use your CRM effectively to build on relationships you create during your solicitation process. Even prospects who said no for this campaign are a valuable resource for the future. They might be more excited about giving to a different campaign, or they could introduce you to friends who might be more inclined to give.

If you’re considering ways to engage supporters in the new year, establish giving societies for your supporter population! Segment your givers by giving level, and then create semi-exclusive clubs that come with tiered membership perks.

This strategy also allows you to more easily steward supporters into upgrading. Reach out to givers who are reaching the upper limit of one club, and ask them to upgrade to the next level. They’ll love the excitement of moving into a new club and receiving the new benefits, in addition to the pride they’ll feel in helping your nonprofit with its mission.

Your annual fundraising campaign is essential to keeping your nonprofit in business. Use the strategies above to create a strong annual fund strategy and reach your goals. For more personalized assistance, consider partnering with an experienced fundraising consultant!