Cookbook

Run a fundraising programme, where the best report is about absence

A gift is a completed fact, not a forecast. That single difference breaks every sales-shaped CRM, and it is why the report that matters most to a fundraiser is one about absence.

The modelling decision

There is no pipeline here, and resisting the urge to build one is the whole trick. A gift already happened. It has an amount, a date, a fund it was given to and an appeal that prompted it, and none of those are stages. A donor gives again next year, and the year after, and the relationship is the sum of those events rather than a position in a funnel.

So a gift is a record with no stages at all, pointing at the donor. That is a shorter definition than anything else in this book, and the shortness is the point.

You

Create a gift type: amount, date received, the fund, the appeal, and whether it is recurring. Each one belongs to a donor. No pipeline. I want to total by fund and by appeal, and filter by date.

Where the money came from

You

Total giving by fund, and by appeal.

Agent

by fund capital 20,000 2 gifts scholarship 7,300 3 unrestricted 6,100 8 program 2,550 3by appeal major gift 21,800 3 year end 10,600 4 gala 2,400 3 spring mail 1,100 4 recurring 50 2

Eight unrestricted gifts raising less than two capital gifts is the permanent tension of the job in one report, and it is worth reading the counts as carefully as the totals. Four spring mail gifts for eleven hundred is a campaign that may be costing more than it brings.

The report the whole programme turns on

Every fundraiser has a name for it. Who gave last year and has not given this year. It is the most valuable list in the building because those people already said yes once, and it is a question about something that is not there.

You

Who gave in 2025 and has not given in 2026, and what were they worth?

Agent

gave in 2025 9 donorsgave in 2026 7 donorslapsed 5 donors Sandra Lindqvist 5,000 Rosalind Meyer 1,200 Henry Ashcombe 750 Kwame Boateng 600 Paul Okonjo 500at risk 8,050new this year 3 donors

Eight thousand at risk against three new donors is a real sentence about a programme's health, and it is one nobody produces monthly because it normally means two exports and a spreadsheet.

How that answer is actually produced, and why it matters

The database will not compute this one, and the reason is worth being precise about. Totalling BY donor is a question you can ask directly, and it gives you your largest supporters. This is a different shape: a list of people who are ABSENT from one set and present in another, which no amount of grouping produces.

So the agent asks for two lists, last year's gifts and this year's, and does the comparison itself. That is not a workaround, it is what the report is. Worth understanding because it tells you the shape of every other absence question you will want. Donors who gave to the gala but never unrestricted. Recurring gifts that stopped. All of them are two narrow lists and a comparison, and all of them are one sentence to an agent.

Verify it

Check the lapsed list against a name you know. One person, by hand, the first time. A list like this gets acted on by people phoning donors, and being wrong is expensive in a way a sales report is not.
Add a gift from a lapsed donor and re-run it. They should drop off the list immediately. If they do not, the date window is wrong and everything downstream is off by a year.
Reconcile a fund total with finance. Once per year at minimum. A fundraising number that has never been checked against the ledger is a number that will be checked in public eventually.
Count the recurring gifts. If the count is lower than you believe you have donors giving monthly, gifts are not being recorded as they arrive and the lapsed list will be full of people who never stopped.

Run it again

Fund and appeal totals monthly. The lapsed list monthly too, and act on it the same week, because its whole value is being early. Before the year-end appeal, run it once more and treat it as the call list rather than the report.