The Money

Fundraising Calculator: What Could Your Group Actually Earn?

Most fundraising pitches hand you a percentage and leave you to do the arithmetic in your head. Move the four sliders below and see the shape of it with your own numbers instead.

Misty Gaunt Fundraising partner, GoodFundraising.org 615-414-3837

What the four numbers are doing

The calculation is deliberately simple, because a fundraising model you cannot explain to a treasurer in one minute is a fundraising model that never gets approved.

Your group earns 20% of every first order placed through one of your links. That is the one-time piece, and it is the number most fundraisers stop at. Then your group earns 10% of every reorder that customer places afterwards, for as long as they keep ordering. That is the piece that makes the arithmetic behave differently from a candy bar sale.

So the first box multiplies people by customers to get your total customer count. The second applies 20% to their first orders. The third takes the share you decided would keep ordering, and applies 10% to their monthly spend. The twelve-month total is the first orders plus eleven months of reorders, because month one is the first order itself.

Why the smaller number matters more

Watch what happens when you drag the retention slider rather than the participant slider. Adding people raises the one-time figure in a straight line. Raising retention bends the twelve-month figure, and it keeps bending it every year after, because those customers were never asked to do anything again. They just kept buying vitamins they were already buying.

This is the whole reason a supplement catalogue works as a fundraiser and wrapping paper does not. Nobody reorders wrapping paper in March. A household that switched its multivitamin does.

Where groups get the participant number wrong

Committees tend to put their entire roster into the first slider. Do not. Put in the number of people who will realistically share a link once, which is usually somewhere between a third and two thirds of a roster. A fundraiser built on the optimistic number disappoints everyone; one built on the honest number tends to beat expectations.

The same goes for the second slider. Four customers each is a low, believable figure that most participants clear without discomfort. If your estimate only works at fifteen customers each, you are looking at a plan that needs a very specific kind of student.

What this calculator cannot tell you

It cannot tell you whether your particular community will engage. It cannot predict how many people reorder in month seven. It has no idea whether your band parents already buy supplements or whether the idea will be new to them.

It also cannot account for the thing that most changes outcomes, which is whether one or two people in your group take genuine ownership of the campaign. Every fundraiser has a person like that, and their presence or absence moves results more than any assumption on this page.

What it can do is show you the difference in shape between income that stops and income that continues, using numbers you chose rather than numbers a brochure chose for you.

What to do with the number

Take the twelve-month figure to whoever approves your fundraising calendar, and take the monthly figure to whoever plans next year's budget. They are two different conversations. The first one gets you permission to run a campaign. The second one is the argument for why this campaign is worth more than the one you ran last year.

If the figure looks worth pursuing, the setup is genuinely short. There is a walkthrough in how to launch a fundraiser in one week, and the mechanics of the two percentages are covered properly in how 20% plus 10% recurring income works.

Misty Gaunt

Misty helps schools, teams, churches and nonprofits set up recurring fundraisers through LiveGood. She will look at your roster and tell you whether the model fits before you commit to anything. Call or text 615-414-3837.