Are You a Fundraising Maverick or Working to a Plan?

So in my experience, that’s the biggest challenge charities face in this area. Not the ability of the technology to produce reports — they have been able to do that for many years now — it is the ability of the charity to connect the dots between its vision and the objectives so the right information can be produced and enable you to effectively monitor the objectives. Or to put it another way, you are not able to get a database report to show how close you are to achieving your vision because the vision itself is not measurable (although you should be able to tell when you’ve achieved it). But you are able to get reports that track your progress against objectives that relate to the vision. And to coin a cliché, those objectives must be SMART — specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-related — otherwise, how can you measure your progress to meeting them?