The Secret Strategy We Used to Double Revenue in Three Years
Everyone wanted to know how we did it.
What secret strategy were we using? What new tool had we discovered? Who was advising us? What were we doing differently that everyone else was missing?
When the numbers started moving, everyone assumed there must be some clever playbook behind it all.
Did we stumble onto a new CRM that actually made fundraising better? Did we finally crack the code on the perfect segmentation model? Did we have a high-dollar consultant directing our strategy?
To all of those questions, and countless others like them, the answer was no.
The year before I arrived, giving was a respectable $2,397,257.
Three years later, that number was $4,987,357.
By my last year, it had climbed to $5,881,975.
We more than doubled giving in three years, and it was still growing in year four.
I’m going to tell you exactly how we did it, but I need to warn you up front that you’re probably going to be disappointed.
Because the strategy was so simple it almost doesn’t feel like a strategy at all.
When I stepped into my first role as a development director, I didn’t have a playbook.
It was my first director role, and honestly, I was figuring things out as I went.
What I inherited was a program that was doing fine. Not bad, not great, just fine in that comfortable way where nobody’s panicking and the revenue line is stable enough that no one asks too many questions.
I also inherited a long list of people who cared about the mission but had never been invited to give. And an even longer list of people who had given but never heard from us again unless we needed more money.
I didn’t come in with a sophisticated plan. What I did have was a hunch and access to a lot of phone numbers and email addresses.
My hunch was embarrassingly simple.
What if we just asked more people for more money more often and took really great care of everyone who said yes?
That’s it. That was the whole plan.
It did not require new technology. We did not launch a capital campaign feasibility study. We actually fired our fundraising consultant, our marketing consultants, and our digital agency. We did not have a complex “moves management” spreadsheet with color-coded cultivation steps and mult-sheet dependencies.
But we did do a lot more asking. And we did spend a lot more time caring.
In practice, that looked like:
Asking more people…
We stopped limiting our asks to the usual suspects. If someone had given before, they were in the conversation. If someone had expressed interest but never been invited, we invited them. If a donor’s spouse had never been engaged directly, we engaged them. Basically, we widened the circle.
for more money…
We stopped underasking. This was uncomfortable at first. We’d been asking faithful supporters for $1,000 when they were ready to consider $5,000. We’d been tiptoeing around major gift conversations because we didn’t want to seem pushy. So we started asking for amounts that actually matched what people could do and what the mission needed. Not everyone said yes at the higher level, but a surprising number did.
…more often.
We asked more than twice a year. We sent more appeals. We made more phone calls. We created more opportunities for people to say yes. We stopped being so afraid of “bothering” people and started trusting that generous people actually want to be invited into things that matter to them.
And then we took extraordinary care of everyone who said yes.
Every gift got a fast, personal thank you. These were real acknowledgments within a few days and not a form letter three weeks later. We called people, we wrote handwritten notes, and shared updates on what their giving made possible. We invited everyone we talked to out to tour our facility.
And we treated every donor like they mattered, because they did.
We didn’t just ask and move on to the next ask.
We closed the loop.
We showed impact.
We expressed genuine gratitude.
We followed up.
We listened.
And all of this showed up in the numbers.
But there’s also a part of this story I never really talk about.
For most of that season, I felt like a complete fraud.
I kept waiting for someone to figure out that I wasn’t doing anything sophisticated.
Other development directors I knew were talking about predictive analytics, wealth screening algorithms, and multi-channel attribution models while our team was making phone calls and writing thank-you notes.
I’d sit in conference sessions at fundraising events and listen to people present these complex, layered strategies, and I’d think, “Am I doing this wrong? Shouldn’t this be harder?”
I actually felt imposter syndrome because things were working. Like I’d somehow stumbled into results I didn’t deserve because my approach wasn’t complicated enough to justify them.
It was the fundraising equivalent of losing weight by burning more calories than you consume. It’s super effective, but makes for a pretty boring story.
It took me a long time to accept the truth that the basics, done really well and super consistently, actually work.
They’re not sexy. They don’t make for great conference presentations, and nobody is going to write a Harvard Business Review article about the development team who doubled revenue by picking up the phone and saying thank you more.
But $2.3 million became $4.9 million became $5.8 million, and the “strategy” never changed.
Ask more people for more money more often. Then take phenomenal care of everyone who says yes.
I wish I could tell you a more exciting story here. It would be way more fun to write about the innovative tactic that changed everything.
But the truth is boring enough that most people won’t believe it, and simple enough that most people won’t try it.
The hard part isn’t knowing what to do.
The hard part is doing it consistently, week after week, month after month, when no one’s watching, and the results haven’t shown up yet.
The reason most organizations won’t do what I’m describing here isn’t that they don’t know about it. Everyone knows about it. It’s in every fundraising book ever written.
Thank your donors quickly, ask more often, build real relationships, and listen deeply is not new information.
The reason most organizations won’t do it is that it doesn’t feel like enough. It doesn’t feel impressive in a board meeting. Saying, “Our strategy this year is to pick up the phone more and write better thank-you notes” doesn’t make for a compelling strategic plan, and it doesn’t get anyone promoted.
People would rather have a complicated strategy that isn’t working than a simple one that demands they show up and do the same unglamorous things day after day with no complexity to hide behind when it gets tedious.
If your strategy is “do the basics really well every single day,” then on any given day, you either did them or you didn’t. There’s no framework to blame and no system to troubleshoot. There’s just you, the phone, the notecard, and the decision about whether you’re going to show up again tomorrow and do it all over again.
But $2,397,257 became $4,987,357 became $5,881,975.
And the approach never changed.
If you’re looking for permission to stop chasing the next shiny thing and just do the obvious stuff really well, consider this your permission slip.
Ask more people. Ask for more. Ask more often. And take phenomenal care of everyone who responds.
It’s not complicated, but it is hard to do every day.
And that, it turns out, is exactly why it works.
