The troubling part comes in with the Raising Awareness results. 22% said this was their top goal. (See pie chart for details.)

You might be saying, “What’s wrong with that, Erica? You have to raise awareness in order to raise money, recruit volunteers, attract amazing staff. That’s a legit goal.”

Raising awareness for the sake of it is a waste of time. Don’t get me wrong: I am all for raising awareness…so long as you are very clear on what, specifically, raising awareness is going to do for you. Think of raising awareness as a pre-cursor to other goals, i.e. you raise awareness so that you can achieve other goals.

You raise awareness so that:

• You can increase year-end donations by 175%.
• You can recruit 3 new absolutely awesome board members.
• You can land a 5 year, $500,000 grant.

As you set out to set your goals, remember the Claxon Method:

1. WHAT does success look like?
2. WHO do you need to reach in order to be successful?
3. HOW are you going to reach your ideal supporters?

If you don’t set a SMART goal in response to #1, you can’t identify your target audience (#2), and then it’s a crap shoot on what messaging and mechanisms will work for #3. Crap shoots may be fun, but they aren’t strategic.

Goal-setting may not be glamorous, but it’s suuuuuuuuper important. And that’s why we’re going to talk about how to apply SMART goal-setting to your year-end fundraising on the October 12 webinar. (We’ll also talk about fun stuff like calls-to-action and which stories will be the most powerful and whatnot. Didn’t want you thinking it was going to dull. Never!)

Be sure to sign up for your spot!

 
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Reading Ease: 67.8, Grade Level: 6.7

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