r/funanddev

Hi everyone, I wanted to share about my new project, which I'm sure will be interesting to some of you! I´ve been writing grants more or less successfully for the last 15 years, mainly for large foundations, governments, and international organizations (especially consulting, research, and social projects. I really like the process of designing a new project for a specific call, but the process of actually writing it for 5, 6, 10 days is really taxing.

Then in the last couple of years, I started experimenting with AI but found the outputs to be either too superficial and generic, or hallucinations or stolen pieces. With the current models that's changing, as you might have noticed, and I´ve gotten better at it as well, developing little by little a multi-step method, so now the final outputs are actually pretty decent (for a first draft at least).
With the method in place I now spend 2 or 3 hours writing the whole thing with AI, and I've made sure it includes good guardrails so that the outputs are both ethical, effective, and the evidence behind it actually EXISTS... With it, I´ve been able to secure a couple 6 and 7 figure grants with it...

Anyway, eventually my colleagues started to ask me to walk them through the method, so I developed some briefs walking people through my method for internal use so that I didn't have to explain it over and over...

Long story short, I've now turned that into a small public course, and I'm really proud of it. I know self-promotion is generally frowned upon on Reddit, but this is just me sharing a personal project I'm really passionate about and which I think could help people in this trade...
So if anyone is interested and would like to check out what I did please drop a comment below. I'd love your feedback on it and I just want as many people as possible to have access to it
Thank you!

Paulius

I've talked to enough fundraisers this year to notice a pattern that I felt needed to be said louder.

Org sets a goal at last year's number plus 5-10% > Fundraiser hits it, then next year's goal becomes the new number plus another 5-10%...Crush it and you've just locked in a higher floor for next year. So the smart move becomes hitting the goal exactly.

This incentive structure punishes overperformance.

So here are four alternatives I'd push for if you're a development director feel the above:

1. Tie growth to capacity. If your major gifts portfolio added 40 prospects this year, the goal should reflect what those prospects are worth in cultivation stage 2 or 3, not a flat percentage bump.

2. Separate net new revenue from retention. Mixing them creates a moving target where success in one masks failure in the other. A team that loses 20 percent of last year's recurring donors but lands one big new gift looks fine in aggregate. They are not fine.

3. Build in a discovery quarter. Most orgs ask fundraisers to start cultivating in January and close by June. That timeline assumes prospects who are already warm. If they are not, you've set the team up to chase cold contacts and then call it strategy.

4. Stop counting the same dollar twice. If a gift came in through a foundation but a major gifts officer cultivated it, decide once whose goal it counts toward. Otherwise everyone is fighting over the same dollar internally while the donor wonders why three people from your org keep calling.

What I hear from orgs that are doing this well:
Leadership treats the annual goal as a hypothesis that they revisit quarterly. They adjust when the data tells them to. They don't double down on a number that was wrong from the start just because admitting it was wrong is uncomfortable.

The orgs that get it wrong run through fundraisers every 18 months and wonder why they cannot keep talent.

I'm curious, what does your org do? Are you ratcheting, or is there a smarter system in place?

I’m wondering how other fundraisers keep their giving calendars. My current method: on the first of every month I pull a report of all the donors that made gifts in that month the previous year. So on May 1st, I pulled a list of every donor that gave in May of 2025. And I make an ask to them to renew their gift. Of course we’re cultivating them throughout the year.

How do others do it?

I've been in fundraising for 20 years and, after a couple of webinars, could qualify to take the CFRE in the next round of testing (July 15 application deadline). I recently discovered the Chartered Advisor in Philanthropy Program and feel like it might be a better fit for the position I'm in (exec level jack-of-all-trades fundraising for a rapidly growing nonprofit), but the CFRE is so much more recognizable. I would be more likely to seek a pay increase in my current position than to use a new credential in a job search. For those of who have considered both, what did you choose and why? Or are there other options for advanced fundraising credentials I might be missing out on? Thanks in advance!