The Work Rarely Happens as Neatly as the Calendar Suggests
One of the things I have come to appreciate about annual giving is that the work rarely happens as neatly as it appears on a campaign calendar. On paper, there may be an appeal scheduled for one month, a digital campaign planned for another, a giving day approaching, and a year-end campaign waiting a few months away. In practice, there are donor lists to review, stories to gather, creative decisions to make, emails to build, approvals to secure, data to analyze, and several people who may need to contribute before anything reaches a donor.
It is easy for annual giving to become a cycle of moving from one deadline to the next. I have experienced that pressure in my own work. When you are responsible for getting campaigns out the door, completing the next deliverable can understandably become the priority. There is always something that needs to be written, reviewed, approved, designed, segmented, scheduled, or measured. Over time, however, I began to question whether completing all of those activities necessarily meant we were building stronger annual giving programs.
The Campaign Calendar Is Not the Strategy
A campaign calendar is incredibly useful, but I do not believe a calendar alone constitutes an annual giving strategy. Knowing when an appeal will mail or when an email will deploy tells us what we are doing and when we are doing it. It does not necessarily tell us why we are doing it, whom we are trying to engage, or how one interaction contributes to the next.
This distinction became increasingly important to me because annual giving involves so many moving pieces. It is possible to have a beautifully written appeal, a well-designed email, an active social media campaign, and a thoughtful stewardship plan without those components ever truly functioning together. I became more interested in the connections between those pieces. Does the message make sense for the audience receiving it? Does the email add something to the direct mail experience, or does it simply repeat it? Do we know what we want to learn from the campaign before it begins? Does what we learn actually influence what we do next?
I Stopped Asking Only, “What Are We Sending?”
One of the most important shifts in my own thinking was moving away from beginning campaign conversations with the deliverable. Instead of starting with “What are we sending?” I became more interested in asking, “What are we trying to accomplish?” That sounds like a small distinction, but it changes the conversation.
If the starting point is an email, the conversation naturally becomes about subject lines, copy, design, send dates, and audiences. Those decisions matter. However, if the starting point is the purpose of the campaign, the conversation can become much broader. We can think about what the organization needs donors to understand, which relationships we are trying to strengthen, what role different communications should play, and what success should look like beyond simply getting the campaign launched. The tactic becomes part of the strategy rather than the strategy itself.
Doing More Is Not Always the Answer
Fundraising professionals are surrounded by ideas about what we should be doing. We should send another email, create more content, test another platform, add another campaign, improve stewardship, acquire more donors, retain more donors, grow recurring giving, personalize communications, and measure more data. Many of those recommendations are valuable. The difficulty is that nonprofit teams operate with real limitations. Time, staffing, budgets, technology, competing priorities, and organizational capacity all affect what can realistically be accomplished.
For that reason, I have become less interested in asking how annual giving teams can simply do more and more interested in asking how we can make what we are already doing work better together. Sometimes the opportunity is not another tactic. It is greater clarity. Sometimes it is better coordination. Sometimes it is understanding an audience differently. Sometimes it is recognizing that a campaign has been repeated because “we always do it” without revisiting what the organization actually wants it to accomplish. And sometimes it is simply creating enough space after a campaign to ask what we learned before rushing into the next one.
The Thinking Behind Annual Giving by Design™
These experiences and questions ultimately shaped the philosophy behind Annual Giving by Design™ and the development of the 5M Architecture™. I wanted a practical way to think about annual giving that acknowledged the realities of the work while helping fundraising professionals see the relationships between the decisions they make.
The framework gives me a way to slow down that thinking and ask better questions before immediately moving into execution. The detailed methodology belongs in the deeper work of the playbook and workshops, but the principle I return to most often is straightforward: strong annual giving is not about doing everything; it is about becoming more intentional about how the right things work together.
A Question Worth Asking
If your annual giving calendar disappeared tomorrow and you had to rebuild it from the beginning, what would you put back simply because it has always been there? More importantly, what would you design differently?
I think those questions are worth asking periodically, even when a program appears to be performing well. Annual giving programs evolve. Donors change. Organizations change. Communication habits change. Internal capacity changes. A strategy that made sense several years ago may not be the strategy an organization needs today. The goal is not to abandon the tactics that work. It is to understand why they work, how they connect, where gaps exist, and how the entire experience can become more intentional over time. For me, that is where better annual giving begins.
Take the Next Step
If these questions are prompting you to look at your program differently, the Annual Giving Assessment™ offers a starting point for examining how your current practices work together.
Download the Annual Giving Assessment™ →
Related: The 5M Architecture™ · The Playbook · Workshops