February 2026: What to Prioritize as a Team of 1
Do you remember receiving the first email in my automated welcome journey—with the caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland GIF—when I encouraged you to send me a digital marketing or fundraising challenge?
I’ve received a lot of great responses to that email, most of which circle around the same theme:
“I’m a development director, and a fundraising Team of One. I’m totally overwhelmed by all the digital marketing and fundraising things I should be doing. What do I prioritize?”
Shout out to you, John Miller, Margot Weiner, Mat Mundell, and everyone who has asked some version of this question!
I’ve been in your shoes. I was in my early 20s as a marketing + communications Team of One at a statewide nonprofit, and it was stressful to say the least.
I was sprinting in a hamster wheel, reacting to small request after small request after small request. It felt inefficient and a little crazy. It was totally unclear where I was trying to get to.
Here’s the answer I wish I’d had back then:
Step 1: Conduct a donor journey audit
You’ve got two options for this:
Hire an expert like me to conduct a donor journey audit and present you with a prioritized action plan that fits your budget and bandwidth.
-or-
DIY the audit, which is less effective than bringing in a neutral third party, but it’s free. Start with my free audit guide, then complete my donor journey scorecard to go deeper and uncover ripe opportunities for improvement at each stage of a donor’s experience.
Whether you audit solo or with professional guidance, you should complete this process in 1-2 months, and the output should be a prioritized list of tasks to increase donor acquisition and donor retention.
Step 2: Conduct direct audience research
Your audit will likely unearth a lot of questions about your current and prospective donors. Write these questions down! You might be left wondering…
How are our most dedicated donors first discovering us?
Which events and/or digital content have deepened their interest?
How long are most donors aware of us before their first gift?
Who are our monthly donors, and what do they have in common?
What messaging is most motivational to our top/most loyal donors?
What’s our donor retention rate, and who’s sticking around?
Who’s donating once and never again? Why?
You should be able to answer some of these questions by looking at your analytics and donor database. (Removing donor names, you can leverage AI to scrub your data and infer some answers.)
But to answer some of these questions, you’ll need to go right to the source. And direct audience research is also a fantastic stewardship activity.
You might send a survey specifically to your “top” donors—the ones you most want to replicate.
Or you might do a little segmentation and send different versions of a survey to different donor/supporter types. You can also create branching logic to ask different people different questions within the same survey.
Conducting 5-10 donor interviews in addition to a survey provides a deeper, richer understanding of your donors’ beliefs, attitudes, the language they use to talk about your work, and what kind of relationship they want to have with your organization. Combining interviews and a survey often paints the clearest picture.
Again, two options here. Hire someone like me to write, set up, conduct, and analyze the research.
-or-
DIY.
Conducting your own research is dangerous because you already know too much about your organization. And there are also some critical best practices for unbiased research. If you choose to DIY, please have an outsider (ideally with research experience) test your survey and provide feedback.
You should use your research results to adjust that action plan from your donor journey audit. Prioritize improvements that will retain your top donors/true believers before shifting your focus to acquisition.
Step 3: Chip away at the list
Take it from the top! Every quarter, knock a couple of items off your donor journey improvement list.
Share your research findings and the resulting to-do list with your larger team so people are aware of your priorities and the reasoning behind them.
When people ask you to do things that oppose or simply distract from your list, refer back to the research to strengthen your position.
“Sorry, not right now” is a phrase I used a lot when I was in a Team of One. I didn’t realize back then that I was training for my current role: mother of a two-year-old. 🤪
Like a toddler, your coworker will probably ask, “Why?” Your audit and survey research can back up your answer. As a wise former boss of mine often said, “Research kills opinions.” (Shout out, Mighty Citizen!)
What to prioritize as a tiny team isn’t as cut and dry as “send these 3 emails” or “create this webpage.” It has to be a research-informed process to create a roadmap that matches your top donors (and helps you attract more like them).
If you’ve already done a lot of audience research, maybe you can skip ahead to the implementation stage! But almost every small nonprofit I encounter has skipped Steps 1 and 2, and they’re throwing spaghetti/ziti/rigatoni/penne/macaroni at the wall, changing their approach every time they watch a new webinar or attend another conference.
The learning and idea gathering are awesome. When you have a research-informed action plan, you can add those new tactics where they make sense, always prioritizing a healthy retention rate before turning your focus to acquisition.
Tiny team? I’ve freed up time to help you!
I did some of my own research last year and asked all of you what you most urgently need help with. I got requests for:
Conducting digital audits
Writing and analyzing donor surveys
Writing and scheduling automated email journeys
Developing monthly donor acquisition plans
Running Meta, Google/YouTube, and LinkedIn ads
After five years of turning small organizations away because my schedule was full with retainers and larger projects, I decided to free up one slot per month this year for something called Get It Done Months.
We can spend 1-2 months together tackling high-impact, high-priority projects on your to-do list to get them done right. These projects start at just $1,000. (Pricing provided on the page linked above).
Here’s a great request to make of a committed major donor: “Fund one or two of these Get It Done projects to help us improve donor retention and acquisition for years to come!”
If the advice in this edition raises follow-up questions, don’t be a stranger! Feel free to reply. I will do my best to help you navigate your donor journey improvement process.
And, please don’t forget to do something sweet for yourself during this month of love. Especially if you're a Team of One. 🍫 ❤️
-Caroline
