Are You Missing or Misusing this Powerful Tool?
If you don’t have a Development Calendar or its tucked away somewhere in your notes, you are missing out on a powerful fundraising and leadership tool that helps make your God-given vision a reality.
If you don’t have a Development Calendar or its tucked away somewhere in your notes, you are missing out on a powerful fundraising and leadership tool that helps make your God-given vision a reality. Share on XWhat is a Development Calendar?
Your Development Calendar includes the programs, projects, events, and celebrations you will use to help donors and volunteers discover their place in the mission of your ministry. It is what puts feet on the path you create in your Strategic Planning.
Why is a Development Calendar Essential?
Your Calendar is a powerful leadership tool to use across ministry teams, including your Board, Development, and Program staff and volunteers. This creates synergy among your teams, promotes effective communication, clarifies decisions, uses resources more efficiently, promotes accountability, and facilitates smooth staff transitions.
Without a Calendar, you risk missing crucial donor connections, staff and volunteer burnout from over-scheduling, and conflict from overlapping uses of resources. You also leave your ministry vulnerable from loss of knowledge and history if the staff who have all the information stored in their heads leave your organization.
How Do You Make Your Calendar Actionable?
Let’s look at what makes your Development Calendar actionable, so you engage more money, more people, and more impact for your mission success. Make your Calendar…
1. Sharable
Your staff and appropriate volunteers need to have a copy and know who is responsible for making changes to the master version. It can be very visual or just a plain word document.
2. Meaningful
You want to capture the essentials of Who, What, Where, When, Why, How. For example, for any given donor stewardship opportunity answer the following:
- Who is the opportunity intended to engage?
- Who will be the lead person or team?
- Why are you offering the opportunity/what is the goal or intended outcome? How will you know if it is a success?
- Where will it take place?
- What is a description of the opportunity?
- When are you offering it?
3. Adaptable
Your Calendar details the opportunities that puts arms and legs on your Strategic Planning (long-range planning). Just as your 3-5 year planning needs to be adaptable and responsive to changing needs, your Development Calendar needs to be revised as details change.
Learn More in Our April 21 Webinar…
Join us in our April Accelerate! webinar, What Should Happen When. We’ll explore more specifics on making your Development Calendar a powerful leadership and donor stewardship tool, so you engage more money, more people, and more impact for mission success.
