Free Fundraising Calendar Template and Tips

Fundraising Calendar

Fundraising is one of the most important, and stressful, parts of nonprofit leadership. Organizations must constantly balance programs, administrative work, and fundraising. That’s why it is essential to simplify the fundraising process with a bit of planning – and a fundraising calendar can give you a headstart. 

I think of fundraising as mostly consisting of three P’s: the Pitch (what you say do donors), the Platform (how you deliver that pitch) and the People (who is doing the fundraising). These three Ps come together in a fourth P: the Fundraising Plan. These four elements form the backbone of your strategy to achieve your fundraising goals.

While written plans are amazing, many people find it helpful to visualize their fundraising plan through a calendar. This post will help you think about the basics of creating a fundraising calendar and I will give you a template to get you started.

What Is a Fundraising Calendar?

A fundraising calendar is a simple tool that lays out who does what by when, broken out by month across a calendar year or fiscal year. The goal of a fundraising calendar is to get a clear and quick at-a-glance view of the work ahead. This helps you prioritize and systematize your fundraising, making it easier and more strategic. 

A fundraising calendar is simple to create and use and there are many examples on the internet, including my free fundraising calendar template, but my goal is to always keep it simple and adaptable. You can adapt this template to be further customized to your organization over time. 

Ideally, your fundraising calendar will be easy to edit and change regularly. That means you don’t need to have it graphically designed or created in fancy software. Many people use spreadsheet software like Excel or a simple table created in a “Word” document. A fundraising calendar is about function over beauty.

What Are the Elements of a Fundraising Calendar?

Your fundraising calendar is a visual representation of your written fundraising plan. You’ll start with the left-hand column, where you list the months and weeks in the period covered by the calendar. I recommend breaking your calendar out by weeks, if possible, especially if you’re juggling multiple revenue streams and fundraising priorities. Then you’ll start populating the activities that need to be performed in a given week in order to accomplish your fundraising goals.

From there, you can add more information that you want to have at a glance like goals you have for each month or task and then how you actually performed. Some organizations link this to their budget and track the costs and revenue too. You may also want to make sure critical windows of time are noted like vacations, holidays, giving days, etc.

Finally, I always include a column to add initials or names for every task so there is a clear “owner.” This reduces confusion and helps people plan for the year ahead and look back at what they have accomplished.

Fundraising Tasks You May Want To Include In Your Calendar

Your biggest challenge may be populating your fundraising tasks. This requires breaking down your fundraising goals and strategies into bite-size activities. If you need inspiration, I’ve prepared a comprehensive list of fundraising tasks for you. I recommend starting with major activities and deadlines. 

Some common fundraising tasks and areas to include:

• Monthly Sustainers: How many monthly donors do you hope to invite, renew or add?

• Major Gifts: How many major donors will you approach? Are there donor benefits you need to deliver in a certain month?

• Events: Which events will you host or benefit from? Galas? Monthly mixers?

• Digital: How many fundraising emails will you send? What updates will you make to your website and social platforms? Will you run a Facebook fundraiser campaign for #GivingTuesday?

• Grants: How many grants will you research, write, submit, or renew?

• Board Engagement: Are there fundraising activities board members have committed to? A powerful tool for this is my Board Fundraising Worksheet.

• Mail or Marketing: Will you do a piece of mail for an annual appeal or renewal request? Is there an annual report you need to create and then send out?

Once you have listed the major activities that must happen in a given month or week, you should then plan backward and fill in the smaller tasks that must happen sooner. 

For example, if you plan to submit a grant to the XYZ Foundation in July you may want to put in June that you are doing the research, writing and document gathering for that grant. Do this for every big activity. Events are probably the most planning intensive, followed by grants and donor stewardship. For some, marketing materials and digital efforts have many people involved too.

Balancing Your Calendar

The whole point of having a fundraising calendar is to be more thoughtful, strategic, and realistic. After adding your fundraising tasks to the correct weeks and months on your calendar, it makes sense to step back and ask yourself a few questions.

• Is it lopsided? Are there too many tasks happening at one point in the year? Will this unnecessarily cause stress or problems if a team member or vendor or “act of God” messes up your calendar?

• What about your organization’s dynamics? Does your team tend to save their vacation time for December? Is there a huge push for Back to School or spring appeals? Is your team using a 4-day workweek, which truncates weekly timelines? Do you use “no meeting Mondays?” Are there religious or political dates to consider like elections or seasonal population shifts in your community?

• Does your calendar make sense given other campaigns you have going on with your communications strategy or board recruitment strategy or key programs? Might there be opportunities to align the calendar of fundraising activities with other organizational goals or the activities of your board or coalition partners? 

• Are there themes, anniversaries, or awareness months/days you need to consider?

Division of Labor

Once you have the calendar laid out with each task assigned to an “owner” with their initials, you’ll want to also consider each person’s responsibilities. Ask yourself the following questions: 

• Is the work unfairly distributed? 

• Are women, people of color, interns, or others disproportionally given harder tasks, more administrative tasks, or more tasks?

• Is anyone going to need more coaching, support, money, or tools to handle the workload?

• Can you prevent staff from using vacation time during particularly intense windows of time on the calendar?

• What might others say about the workload if they saw this calendar?

I am a big believer in doing a few things well instead of 20 things poorly. If you think you or members of your team are doing too much work once you review your calendar, consider amending it, even if it means raising less. It’s OK to be smaller! 

Conclusion: A Fundraising Calendar Can Make Your Work Easier

Creating and using a fundraising calendar can be very simple and you should not overthink it. Templates are great for examples, but you should modify and customize them to your situation. Fundraising calendars take the big stressful and complicated work of annual fundraising and break it into a more visual and bite-size view.

Think about your strategy and try to make sure your calendar aligns well with other plans across the organization. Make sure the division of labor makes sense and is equitable and practical. Finally, a lot of other fundraising calendars out there are overly complex and need tons of instructions. Get started by using something simple.

Don’t forget to grab my free fundraising calendar template here.