Here’s another reason to keep a fundraising campaign going even if you reach your goal: not all of your pledges will be fulfilled.
If you’re counting pledges towards your goal, you’re operating on faith that they will all be fulfilled – which doesn’t always happen.
One of Better Fundraising’s clients recently encountered this exact situation:
“One of our pledged donors who was planning to send $50k for the shortfall changed their mind and decided to consider a year-end gift instead. That $50k was part of our pledged internal total.
We continued fundraising since we hadn’t received it yet. I am so glad we followed your advice, if not we would still be short fundraising.”
I think we can all agree that it would have been terrible to stop a successful campaign but then discover that the organization was $50,000 short of the goal.
In capital campaigns, organizations are often told to expect a 90% pledge fulfillment rate for planning purposes. This means that if you’re trying to raise $1,000,000 and you’re receiving pledges, instead aim for $1,100,000 to cover yourself in case some pledges aren’t fulfilled.
The next time you’re running a campaign, don’t count all of your pledges towards your goal – remember that ‘life happens’ and keep going a little farther than you think you need to.
Steven Screen is Co-Founder of The Better Fundraising Company and lead author of its blog. With over 30 years' fundraising experience, he gets energized by helping organizations understand how they can raise more money. He’s a second-generation fundraiser, a past winner of the Direct Mail Package of the Year, and data-driven.
- Steven Screen
- Steven Screen
- Steven Screen
- Steven Screen
