Creating your nonprofit bucket list

What does your nonprofit want to accomplish in the next six months, year, or five years? Have you considered making a bucket list?  

A bucket list provides a palatable way to get your thoughts on paper for what the future could hold. It is a brief outline of what you hope to accomplish in your organization’s lifetime. Of course, some things will be shorter-term and easier to implement, while others will be longer term. No matter the length of your list, it is important to get some longer-term hopes on paper.  

This brief exercise can help reenergize, reframe, and reengage your strategy, staff, volunteers, and donors. And some things on your bucket list should be FUN. Feel free to use the list below as a guide. 
 

Some ideas to get you started:  

• Clean out and organize/label the supply and event closets so we STOP BUYING PENS 
• Figure out a way to get more free food for the staff (RE: ask the board to contribute to quarterly lunch/happy hour fund again) : ) 
• Find (free) baseline fundraising training for junior staff 
• Bring back quarterly “blue sky” brainstorms to get some out of the box thinking going again 
• Ask staff (and follow-through) on what they would like to cross-train on or shadow to round out their professional experience 
• Get a staff stewardship/retention plan going 
• Get the auction committee to look at past high-interest items and look for free, high-impact items to influence what we go after 
• Get our event committees to adapt to new ideas 
• Refresh volunteer incentive program and make it FUN for our youth volunteers 
• Establish and (follow-through with) donor segmentation and stewardship plan 
• Increase recurring gifts to better stabilize our revenue and help our mission THRIVE 
• Finally launch new, annual junior board fundraiser AND… 
• …Find fundraising management software that doesn’t limit/charge more for more than one fundraising campaign 
• Expand into another market with our walk, education programs, and advocacy efforts  
• Find a CURE/end hardship/educate all, then….  
• … look for a new job 🙂