Are You a Fundraising Maverick or Working to a Plan?

By setting objectives that are based on a reasonable improvement from past performance, you at least know that they can be achieved. And by measuring what worked in the past, you can also stop doing the stuff that didn’t work, or at least change it.

This is called management by objectives, or MBO. It might remove some of the mystique from the art of fundraising, but it also takes out some of the stress and the guesswork. You can still add in that leap-of-faith ingredient, but at least you’ll know how big that leap has to be.