Goal Reached? Keep Going!

Say you’re running a campaign to raise a specific amount of money, and you reach your goal before the end of the campaign.

Should you stop the campaign, or slightly change your messaging and keep going?

My vote: update your messaging and KEEP GOING!

Here’s why:

• Your campaign is working.  Every donor that has given you a gift has loved doing it.  Why would you stop a campaign that’s causing more donors than you expected to give gifts, especially when donors are enjoying it?
• If the money raised beyond your original goal can be used to do more of your mission work, why would you stop?
• For your donors that really care about your cause, which message would you like to send at the end of your campaign: “We blew past our goal and can help even more people” or “We met our goal and stopped the campaign immediately”?

If you need to change your messaging, change your messaging as needed.  For example, say you’re an organization that helps young people who are aging out of the foster care system.  Say your goal is to raise $100,000 before the end of the month to erase a shortfall.  You reach your goal – but you have a week to go in the campaign.

Change your messaging from “please give a gift before the end of the month to erase the shortfall” to “please give a gift before the end of the month to help a child who is aging out of the foster care system.”

Then, after your campaign, report back on the tremendous success of your campaign.

Personally, I suspect the people and organizations that want to stop their campaigns once the goal is met are people who wonder if fundraising is bothersome.  Deep down inside, they fear their fundraising bothers donors, or somehow manipulates them into giving.  And if that’s how you feel, it’s a relief to reach a campaign goal and an obvious choice to end the campaign early.

But if you believe that fundraising is a net positive – that it raises awareness for your cause, that it allows donors to make changes to the world that they can’t make on their own, that donors enjoy giving, that all of us are made better when we give gifts – you keep going.

You increase your goal.  You expand your vision of what’s possible.

If your donors show you that they have more capacity than your current vision, the solution is to expand your vision, not limit your donors’ giving.