Don't Plant Seeds in a Drought: A Nonprofit Fundraising Reset
I recently caught myself saying something I now regret. On more than one client call, when we were talking through funding uncertainty and the creeping anxiety of watching a budget that's always been mostly grants start to feel a lot less stable, I told people they were planting seeds. That the work would pay off. That they just needed to be patient.
I meant it. But I was being a little glib.
Planting seeds is good advice — when conditions are right. When there's water. When the season isn't about to turn hostile. The nonprofit funding landscape right now is not that season. A third of nonprofits reported government funding disruptions in early 2025. Federal cuts have cascaded into state and local shortfalls. Organizations that built their entire budget on grants — government contracts, foundation grants, the whole stack — are realizing that the floor they thought was permanent is actually a lease, and the landlord is making changes.
This isn't a post about staying calm or thinking positive. It's a post about what to do when the funding dries up and you're staring at a budget that no longer works.
The garden will come back. But right now, we're mulching. And that looks like…
Reforecasting your budget before a crisis forces you to. Run three scenarios, not one.
Stop pursuing every grant opportunity; get ruthlessly strategic about where your team's energy actually goes.
Recognizing that your warmest donor prospects are already in your database — audit before you prospect outward.
Trusting that monthly giving builds stable revenue faster than a major gifts program
Remembering that the right support network (not just the right board) makes the difference between survival and sustainable pivoting
Face the Reality Before You Make a Plan
The most dangerous thing a nonprofit leader can do right now is keep running the budget they built in January as though the world hasn't shifted.
If you're grant-heavy — meaning grants make up 50% or more of your revenue — and any of those grants are government-funded, you need to reforecast. Not in a panic, not with catastrophizing, but honestly, on paper, in front of your finance committee, before a crisis makes the decision for you.
Reforecasting means running three versions of your budget: one where the funding holds, one where you lose 20%, and one where you lose 40%. It means looking at your operating reserves and asking how many months of runway you have. It means identifying which programs could pause, which staff positions are mission-critical, and what your actual break-even number is. Honestly, what is aquisition funding anyway, at this point?
This is also the moment to have the hard staffing and program conversations that leaders often put off until they're in full crisis mode. Not every organization will need to reduce staff. But some will. And if that's the reality, getting ahead of it — with intention and care — is almost always better than reacting to it when the money is already gone. A furlough managed with transparency and a clear timeline is a different thing than a layoff nobody saw coming.
None of this is comfortable. But you can't build a sustainable garden on a foundation you haven't examined. Don't plant seeds in a drought — fix the irrigation first.
Set a North Star and Stop Chasing Every Dollar
Here's something worth sitting with: individual giving programs take three to five years to build in a meaningful way. Year one, you might raise $20,000 from individuals. Year three, if you've done the work consistently, you might raise $150,000. That's real growth — but it does not replace a $500,000 federal grant in the short term.
Knowing that timeline matters for two reasons. First, your expectations need to match reality. Second, it means you get to be strategic about what you pursue right now rather than reactive.
The worst version of a funding pivot looks like this: your team is simultaneously managing the existing grant portfolio, writing applications for every open RFP in the state, launching an individual giving campaign, planning a gala because the board thinks it's a good idea, and cold-calling donors from a spreadsheet someone found from 2018. Nobody does any of it well. Everyone burns out. The yield is low and the cost — in staff time and organizational energy — is enormous.
📖 Read More: Why Good Grant Writers Won't Work for Commission — important context if you're thinking about adding grant capacity during a pivot.
The better version: you pick a north star. Maybe it's a focused monthly giving program. Maybe it's one or two highly strategic grant relationships worth the investment. Maybe it's a major gifts push targeting five to ten people you already have warm relationships with. And then you build toward that with intention, saying no to almost everything else.
The hardest part of this for most leaders is the saying-no piece. Boards will have ideas. Staff will surface opportunities. There will be an RFP that seems like a perfect fit that you know will take three weeks to write for a 15% shot at $10,000. Being ruthlessly pragmatic doesn't mean being closed-off. It means asking honestly: is the return on this worth what it costs us?
📖 Read More: 7 Reasons You Aren't Getting Grant Funding — the answer is often that the fit isn't really there.
Know What You're Already Working With
Before you start building an individual giving program from scratch, spend two weeks auditing what you already have.
Most organizations have more warm relationships in their database than they realize. They just haven't been cultivated. Look at your CRM and ask: who has given to us before, even once, and never heard from us again? Who has attended an event, volunteered, or signed up for the newsletter but never made a financial gift? What connections do your board members have that haven't been mapped to actual donor prospects?
These aren't cold calls. These are people who have already raised their hand for your mission. They're lapsed donors who maybe got busy, or volunteers who would give if someone asked them personally, or board connections who've never been introduced to the organization's fundraising work at all.
Starting with warm relationships is almost always faster and more effective than prospecting outward. And if you're going to build toward major gifts eventually, these are where your first major donors are most likely to come from.
📖 Read More: 7 Ways to Build Your Donor Base and Jumpstart Your Nonprofit Fundraising — a practical place to start if you're building individual giving from the ground up.
Monthly Giving Is Your Fastest Path to Stable Ground
Major gifts fundraising is a long game. Cultivating a $10,000 donor typically takes 18 months of relationship-building before the ask. That's the right work to be doing — but it can't be the only thing you're doing if you need revenue in the next 12 months.
Monthly giving is different. You can ask for it now, from people who already give to you. Converting a one-time donor of $100 into a monthly donor of $15 is a meaningful increase in annual giving from that person — and it's unrestricted, predictable, and it compounds. If you convert 50 donors to $25 a month, that's $15,000 in stable annual revenue that shows up whether or not your grant renewal comes through.
Monthly donors also have significantly higher retention rates than one-time donors, which means you're not starting over every year trying to re-acquire people who already said yes.
The ask doesn't need to be complicated. A personal email to your existing donors explaining what you're building and why monthly giving matters right now — not a blast, an actual personal email — converts more often than you'd expect. This is mulching work. It's not glamorous. It absolutely compounds.
📖 Read More: Ready…Set…Slow: An End-of-Year Giving Manifesto — on building sustainable giving relationships rather than transactional ones.
Build the Right Support Around You
The last thing worth saying is about who you're doing this with.
Boards will have ideas in a crisis. Some of those ideas will be good. Some will be the nonprofit equivalent of "have you tried posting more on Instagram?" — well-intentioned, not particularly useful, and capable of consuming a lot of staff energy if you don't manage the conversation deliberately. Your job as a leader is to channel board energy toward what's actually helpful: opening doors, making introductions, participating in a board giving campaign, and staying focused on governance while you manage the operational reality.
Beyond your board, this is the moment to lean into your peer network. Other executive directors and development directors are navigating the same landscape right now. The organizations doing this well are talking to each other — sharing what's working, being honest about what isn't, co-hosting events to share costs, applying for coalition grants they couldn't access individually. Sector cohorts and coalitions aren't just feel-good community-building. In a drought, they're infrastructure.
There is also a real case for outside support when you're in the middle of a significant strategic pivot. Not because your team isn't capable, but because having a thought partner who has seen this before — who can help you think through the sequencing, the messaging, the board conversations, the donor strategy — can mean the difference between a well-managed pivot and a year of exhausting improvisation. Reach out to peers, assemble cohorts, and be deliberate with where you spend your time and energy. It is okay to say no 90% of the time. It is necessary, actually.
You can't control the drought. You can control how you prepare, what you build, and who you're standing next to when the season finally turns.
The Mulching Season Is Still a Season
The honest version of "fundraising is like planting seeds" is this: sometimes the conditions are bad. Sometimes the right move is to stop planting, do the foundation work, get ruthless about where your energy goes, and build for a season you can't quite see yet.
That's not giving up on the vision. That's being a good steward of your organization and the people it serves.
If you're in the middle of this right now — reforecasting, pivoting, trying to figure out how to build individual giving while keeping programs running — you don't have to figure it out alone. And whether or not you ever work with us, we're rooting for you.
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