Projecting fundraising revenue is a crucial step in every charity’s planning process – ensuring your operating budget is based on data, not hope and wishful thinking. This is particularly true of smaller charities, who might be relying on a smaller number of funding sources.

So how can you reliably forecast fundraising income? Although this is often presented as an impossible task, it’s actually very easy to do this accurately, providing you have been keeping a good record of past applications.

All you need is a spreadsheet for all your prospects for the year, with columns for:

• funders name
• amount of funding sought
• success rating (more on this below)
• amount adjusted to the success rating percentage

Risk Rating Funders

Forecasting grant income is all about managing risk. Every charity will have their own way of doing this, but I would recommend keeping it simple and splitting your prospects in 3 categories:

• funders who have never given to you before (cold prospects)
• funders who have given to you before, but have not made an ongoing commitment (warm prospects)
• funders who give to you regularly (regular donors)

Success Rates

To each of these categories, you will need to assign a success rate, working it out as an average over the past 3 years

For example:

If you applied to 50 funders over the past 3 years who had never given to you before, and 10 gave you a grant, your success rate for cold prospects will be 20%

Forecasting Income

Once you’ve done this, all you need to do is multiply amounts sought by the relevant success rating and add up.

So for example:

2024/25 Pipeline

Cold Prospects:
Trust A: £10,000 x 20% = £2,000
Trust B £30,000 x 20% = £6,000

Warm Prospects:
Trust C: £20,000 x 60% = £12,000
Trust D: £30,000 x 60% = £18,000

Regular Donors:
Trust E: £20,000 x 100% = £20,000

Forecast Grants Income for 2024/25 = £58,000