Projections & Budgeting Workshop.

$350.00

Tuesdays, April 22-29, 2025

1-4pm EST

Many organizations budget backwards, starting with their program side and then building their fundraising budget based on aspirations, not data. Other organizations budget based on what came in last year, not what they think will come in this year, leaving them scrambling in December with multiple large gift loses.

The Projections & Budgeting Workshop teaches you how to make budgeting decisions based on what you know you can raise, so you can be sure you can meet the outcomes you set in your budget.

  • This course has four live-taught modules. This course involves statistics and math, but we do our best to break it out for you in lay person’s terms!

    1) Budgeting 101 for fundraisers

    2) Data-based projections for individual donors and campaigns

    3) Key performance indicators

    4) Understanding “green light” budgets

    5) Budget creation demonstration

    Please note: this course is not a finance course and is not financial advice. It is simply to help organizations create the fundraising part of their budget and understand how this interacts with other parts of their budget.

  • This course has two clear outcomes:

    1) Participants leave able to project on the individual level for campaigns and donors.

    2) Participants are able to create fundraising budgets based on real-world data.

  • 1) Anyone who has to create the fundraising budget.

    2) Anyone who needs to understand the fundraising budget and why it needs to be based in real-world data.

    3) Development Directors, Executive Directors, Organizing Directors, and Board Chairs are all good candidates for this course.

    4) Teams. This course is one of our courses that has the opportunity for teamwork built into the course. The workshop portion of this course includes time to work and reflect. If you come with multiple members of your team, we’ll put you in a breakout room together to do this as a team.

    If you’re a Development Director coming to this course in order to use it in your budget this year, we recommend bringing your Executive Director with you so they can understand why your funding projections are lower than years before.

  • Kirstie is only conservative in one area of her life: her budgets. She helps organizations create “green light” budgets that are rooted in fundraising data as opposed to aspirations, so that you can be sure you’re going into next year with a budget you can raise for sure.

    About half of Kirstie’s clients come to her with rapid downward trajectories and a desire to grow. The first thing she does is project with the skills she teaches in this class to help them avoid layoffs and get them back on track.

    Clients who budget with her have, on average, 5 month in reserves and a strong safety net to shelter against the loss of any large donors in their portfolios.

  • We are offering two scholarships for this course. For more information on our scholarships, go to our scholarship page.

  • We ask about access in all of our sign-up forms. We can accommodate most needs (needing slides ahead of time, needing slides a certain size, needing alt text, etc). We also can accommodate closed captioning.

    Other access needs like needing your camera off, needing breaks, needing recordings, not going into break out rooms, being told activities ahead of time, we can accommodate as well. If you’re not sure, reach out to info@thefundraisingschool.com. We do our best to accommodate every access need we can.

A class designed to change the way you think about your budget.

$350.00