Every summer, fundraisers face the same frustration: calls go unreturned, lunches get postponed and the cultivation calendar stalls. Donors are staying at their lake houses, visiting their children at camp visiting days and navigating their European itineraries. The temptation is to coast, let the season pass and pick up where you left off in September.
That temptation is a trap.
The summer pause in donor activity is not a gap in your work. It is an invitation to do the work that the busy season never allows. When you’re not in meeting rooms and at parlor events, you can finally step back and ask two questions that usually get crowded out:
- Are we investing our relational energy in the right people?
- Is our campaign strategy actually built to grow — or just to repeat?
A clear summer fundraising strategy starts with answering both.
1. Reevaluate Your Donor Portfolio
Moves management, the practice of deliberately advancing donors through defined stages of engagement toward a major gift, works beautifully in theory and erodes quietly in practice. The erosion happens not because fundraisers stop caring, but because the urgent crowds out the important. You stay in motion with the donors who respond, and you let the quiet ones slip into a holding pattern that has no defined exit.
Summer is when you audit that pattern. Pull your full major donor and prospect list and for each person, ask: What is this relationship actually worth, and what are we doing to reflect that? Not every donor who gave a major gift last year is a cultivation priority this year. Not every prospect on the list deserves the same depth of attention. A portfolio with 30 relationships where only eight are genuinely being moved forward isn’t a cultivation strategy. It’s a waiting list.
The goal of the summer review is to build honest, individualized cultivation plans before the fall calendar fills up.
- What is the next meaningful touch point for each person?
- Who in your organization has the warmest relationship with them?
- What does the donor care about most
- Does your current engagement actually reflect that?
These questions sound obvious, but most organizations cannot answer them in writing for more than a handful of donors. Summer is when you put those answers on paper — before the season demands your attention elsewhere.
2. Rethink Your Campaign Strategy
This one is harder because it requires a kind of institutional honesty that is easier to defer than to confront. Most established fundraising campaigns — annual funds, galas, year-end appeals and capital campaigns — develop a gravity of their own. They grow incrementally, or they plateau, and the plateau gets rationalized as the ceiling:
- “Our donors are maxed out.”
- “We’ve already reached everyone we know.”
- “This is just where we are.”
Summer is when you stress-test those assumptions. For each anchored campaign, ask what it would take to grow it by 30% — not whether it’s possible, but what would have to be true for it to happen. That question tends to surface the real answer, which is usually not that the ceiling is fixed, but that the strategy hasn’t changed. The same appeal letter, the same event format, the same peer-to-peer approach — refined, but not reimagined.
Meaningful campaign growth typically comes from one of two sources: deepening existing donor relationships to move people up the giving ladder or opening new pipelines to donors who don’t yet know you. Both require deliberate effort, and neither happens by accident during a busy program year. Use the summer to identify which approach each campaign actually needs, then build the mechanism to pursue it before you’re back in the thick of execution.
New donor pipelines tend to be neglected not because organizations don’t want them, but because finding new donors requires a different kind of work than stewarding existing ones. It means identifying communities, networks and affinity groups whose values align with your mission and building an intentional on-ramp for them. It means asking current donors to make introductions. It means sometimes retiring tactics that feel familiar but have stopped producing and replacing them with something that hasn’t been tried yet.
None of that planning happens in October when the campaign is already live.
The Strategic Case for Using the Quiet Season
There is a version of summer where fundraisers stay busy doing low-stakes work — cleaning up databases, attending webinars, drafting newsletters — and arriving in September largely where they left off in June. And there is a version where they use the downtime to build the scaffolding for a genuinely stronger year.
The difference between those two versions isn’t effort. It’s intention. The fundraisers who treat the summer as a strategy season come back in the fall knowing exactly which donors they’re going to move and how, and with campaigns that have been rebuilt rather than simply reset. That is a competitive advantage that compounds, not just in the year ahead, but in every year that follows.
The donors will be back in September. The question is whether you’ll be ready to meet them with something better than you had in June.
The preceding content was provided by a contributor unaffiliated with NonProfit PRO. The views expressed within may not directly reflect the thoughts or opinions of the staff of NonProfit PRO.
