I value the wisdom of my fellow Great Strides fundraisers, and want your thoughts about changing the goal of your team after you've started. We conservatively estimated that we could raise $4500 this year due to my deployment and the economic situation in the states. Even though this is an increase over our total last year, we kept it low for the sake of not killing ourselves. But we've got a great team, and recently Alicia and I decided to raise it first to $5000, and then to $5500 when we passed the 2nd Goal quickly.
Our reasons for raising the goal was because we were "on a roll" so to speak with our fundraising, with people on my ship raising a lot of money in addition to some large donations already received. We didn't want someone to think we wouldn't have valued their contribution because we had already met our goal. The simple way to fix this was raise the it!
So how to you handle this? Since we didn't have any idea that we'd pass our original goal, we have found ourselves without a real idea of how to realistically set our goal for next year. What have you experienced in the past with your own goal-setting? Have you ever raised it? If so, how did you decide to do it and why? Love to have your thoughts!
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4 years ago
3 comments:
I think it's fine to change your goal after you initially already established it for the current year. When I started great strides, I started out with low goals, because I wasn't an expert at fundraising. Each year I raised my goal by a couple of thousand dollars. However, the last two years, I came within $1,000 of reaching my team goal of $10,000. But I kept the goal the same the next year. This year I did the same. However, because of the economy, a few weeks ago, I had to decrease my goal from 10,000 to 6,000...which hurts deeply. But it kind of gives a false goal to our CF Foundation if you don't think you can raise that much!
When you increase your goal, I don't think anyone gets offended in the sense that you don't value their donation. It's hard to estimate sometimes. And each year you have your consistent donors, you'll have some that don't donate again, and you'll have those that havent's donated before to donate.
You need to look at your total raised at the end of this Great Strides season. And base your goal on that. Since you have had a great year, if it was me, I would increase my goal a little...but not a lot for next year. It's better to go over your original goal, then not meet a goal (from a behind the scenes of a CF employee standpoint). We have to do goal-gut sheets within the foundation, so we like to have as close to a realistic amount as possible.
Katey,
You rock! Thank you for sharing this, especially in terms of how the foundation looks at things. One thing that has been unfortunate lately is that we have some people who set outrageous goals, which raises our team goal, but of course they can't meet it. I have a great team for the most part, and we met our set team goal, but I understand more now about how important it is to be realistic.
Your thoughts about our next year are very helpful. Thank you so much!
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