The Next 100 Days: An Episode about Checking In On Your Goals

In this episode of the Petrus Development Show, Rhen sits down with Andrew for a practical and motivating conversation about how to finish your fiscal year strong — or, if your year is just beginning, how to start it with real intention.

Show Notes:

As summer approaches, it's the perfect time to pause and take stock: Are you hitting your professional goals? How are your lead measures tracking? This episode is your nudge to check in before you fall behind.

Andrew shares why short-term goals — ones you can realistically complete within a month or two — are so powerful, and why every fundraiser should keep a close eye on their lead measure activity. Successful fundraising comes down to consistent donor calls and visits, and building in a quarterly 100-day review gives you the chance to course-correct while there's still time to make a difference.

INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT

10:07.71 Host All right. Well, howdy, everybody. Welcome back to the Petrus Development Show. I'm Rhen Hoehn with Petrus. Joining me today is Andrew Robison. How's it going, Andrew?

10:17.87 AROB It's going great, Rhen. How about yourself?

10:19.83 Host Living the dream. Yeah, we're here in March.

10:22.63 AROB Right.

10:25.00 Host We're coming up on the end of the first quarter of the year. Any goals you're tracking as we go through the year? How's your progress going?

10:33.46 AROB Oh, well, yeah, good question. So I started working out with a little bit more — intention, I guess — around the end of quarter four of last year, so that's been continuing on pretty good. I think people that have been listening to this podcast for a while know that I've gotten into MMA and boxing, so I put boxing on hold a little bit, mostly because my early morning boxing coach — I wasn't always showing up for class.

11:11.94 AROB So it kind of made it a little more difficult.

11:13.18 Host Ah.

11:14.09 AROB So I took it into my own hands. Now I still do that early morning workout, but I go to the gym most days. So it's been going good. Last year I read 65 books. I don't know that I'm on track to hit that, but when I looked at last year, I started off slow and then it ended pretty strong. So I've read a couple of really good books recently.

11:33.95 Host Oh.

11:33.98 AROB And then one of our company goals was to create, develop, and release an AI co-pilot for Catholic fundraisers. So we are working through the steps on that. We've got some prototypes that we're testing out. We're coming up with our codes of conduct and code of ethics and all that kind of stuff. So still on track for that to be available this year. I would say that right now, where we are at in Q1, nothing's really checked off the list necessarily, but we have been making progress towards everything.

12:13.30 Host Excellent.

12:14.13 AROB How about you? Are you in a similar boat?

12:16.70 Host One of my big goals this year is to walk 5 million steps. I think we talked about this in a previous episode.

12:22.49 AROB There you go.

12:23.81 Host And I'm still on pace, although I banked some days early in the year. I was kind of five days ahead of pace, and then I got sick for a while. There were like three or four days where I basically got 2,000 steps a day. I need to average like 14,000 steps a day.

12:39.54 Host And now I'm down to like half a day banked. So I've got to keep it up — which is why I banked some in the first place. I figured that would probably happen, and it's been flu season.

12:46.04 AROB That's exactly what you've got to do.

12:48.76 Host So once the weather warms up and I can get out walking outside a little bit more, it'll be easy to get it cranking a little bit more.

12:58.27 AROB Does snowshoe steps count as double?

13:00.84 Host They probably should, because they don't rack up very fast.

13:04.95 AROB A little more effort, yeah.

13:05.32 Host You've got to take kind of big steps and it's a lot more effort. Cross-country ski steps work pretty nice, but when you go downhill, you don't get any steps. That's what I've been doing a lot of with my kids, but that's okay.

13:14.50 AROB Oh, yeah, that's right.

13:17.77 AROB That's cool.

13:18.91 Host It's all good. So, it's fun to get up and move a little bit. I bring that up because we're going to talk today about checking in on your goals. We're just over 100 days from the middle of the year, right? Middle of March here, roughly just over 100 days out from the end of June.

13:39.14 Host For a lot of organizations that we work with, that's kind of the end of their fiscal year. Maybe it's halfway through — it's halfway through the calendar year. So depending on your organization, it may or may not be a milestone, but it's a good time to check in. Motivation to get going on goals in January tends to fade in February, right? People kind of lose track or give up on their goals.

13:57.56 Host We want to check in, get reinvigorated, and go strong through the spring — whether you're heading toward the end of the fiscal year at the end of June or just looking to keep momentum going through the year. How does that sound?

14:10.14 AROB Love it. Sounds great.

14:11.48 Host Excellent. So if we're going into the last quarter of the fiscal year — April, May, June — what should you be doing to make the most of that time? What metrics do we need to be checking in on? Are there warning signs that say, hey, we're not on track to finish strong? What types of things do we need to be considering this time of year? First, let's talk about if you are coming up on the last quarter of your fiscal year.

14:42.30 AROB Yeah. In the past — and I'm sure we've talked about it on here — when I was a development director, I always had an incentive plan. Maybe some organizations have an evaluation plan or a set of annual goals that isn't tied to an incentive, but mine was generally always tied to one. What we would do at the beginning, since we usually operated on a fiscal year target, was that about this time we would start looking at goals for next year. We'd ratify a plan for the next fiscal year, and then I'd be working through it around this time. And I think — I know — the most effective way to have a good and effective plan, whether it's tied to incentive or just a performance plan, is to incorporate your lag measures. So what are your big goals that you want to check off the list? But even more so, much more heavily weighted on your lead measures. What are the activities that you're doing? That could be number of visits per month or per year, number of solicitations per year, number of new monthly donors — all of those types of activities that ultimately lead to your lag measures, which would be dollars raised, new donors, new names in the database, things like that.

16:11.22 AROB The nice thing about a performance plan like that is that right about now is when we'd be looking at: if our goal is to hit all of these — or to maximize these — by the end of June, where are we on all of them? Are we at 100%, 70%, or 50%?

16:33.05 AROB Speaking from experience, at my first job at St. Mary's at Texas A&M, the assistant director and my director managed the incentive plan. We shared a plan — same metrics, we both had to hit the same level.

16:51.16 AROB Depending on where we ended up, we both got the same tier bonus incentive. He was always very motivated because that was his annual bonus for the year. So we would tag team different activities on there. I remember the trickiest one, generally speaking, was new monthly donors, because we would set it as a stretch goal. When I first started, we were trying to get 30 because we were averaging around 20. So we'd say, all right, let's push it a little bit. Then we'd get 30, and then he — or the finance council or the boss — would say, all right, let's do 50 next year.

17:37.78 AROB As we approached the end of quarter two, that's when we would really be looking at: where are we on that? Are we at 20? Are we at 40? And my boss, if he knew we were close — if we were at 42, for example — the number one priority was calling for monthly donors. Calling for monthly donors, seeing people about monthly donors, signing anybody up I could. Because hitting those goals was, number one, good for the organization, but number two —

18:07.22 AROB — it built momentum going into the next year, which is always, always helpful.

18:13.72 Host Did you track those just on a yearly basis, or was that something you were checking in on every month or every quarter? How did that work?

18:21.56 AROB Yeah, great question. So I've done this myself, right? In the scenario I was talking about, every month we would do a finance council meeting.

18:27.83 Host Yeah.

18:31.36 AROB That's the way the parish and the campus ministry operated. Every month — I don't know that we presented the status report on that plan to the finance council — but my boss wanted to see it every month because we were getting updated numbers from finance and updated donor numbers. So every month I was completing that report, showing where we were, as we prepared for our finance council. I will tell you that the development directors or development officers I've seen with incentive plans who ultimately end up calling them ineffective are the ones waiting — they forget about them for about nine and a half or eleven and a half months, and then remember in May: oh shoot, where are we on our goals? And at that point, it's just luck of the draw whether you're close or not. It's just not top of mind.

19:20.66 AROB Eventually they don't hit it, and then they say, well, I guess I'm not doing that anymore, and they throw it out. So regularly updating those goals is definitely going to put you in a better position.

19:34.52 Host Yeah. When I was on an incentive plan for fundraising, one of the factors of my plan was whether I turned in a monthly tracker of all of my goals.

19:46.38 AROB There you go.

19:48.18 Host So that was motivation to make that happen. But it definitely does keep you in check of where you are compared to where you need to be, and what adjustments you need to make.

19:58.72 AROB Yeah.

19:58.74 Host Do you think monthly is a good rate for checking in? When you're setting goals, did you break it down monthly? What have you seen work well? Are there other timeframes you might approach?

20:10.68 AROB I wouldn't go less than monthly. Weekly, there's just not a lot of movement, and it can become a chore that you start skipping and then fall behind on. I also wouldn't go beyond quarterly — and even quarterly is a lot of time to not really be thinking about it or staying mindful of it. So for my money, monthly is the best timeframe, because you can set manageable goals, you can see progress, and it's not so tedious or time-consuming that you can't do it once a month.

20:51.58 Host Great. So here we are in March. If you're looking at June as the end of your fiscal year, what are maybe some warning signs that your organization or your fundraising program is falling behind that you might still be able to correct in these last few months of the fiscal year?

21:12.63 AROB Yeah, so if you're looking at dollars and you're approaching the end of the fiscal year, and you don't have some pending solicitations or some donors considering gifts — and you're just thinking, okay, I'm going to go out and make a bunch of asks in the last quarter and then we're going to hit our goals — that's a recipe for disaster. Again, we talk about this all the time, right?

21:36.02 AROB Two things you've got to convince your donors of to be successful: why should I support your organization, and why should I support it now? You have to create that urgency in your donor's mind so they take action.

21:47.54 AROB End of calendar year is just a natural time for people to make their annual decisions about next year. If they want to hit that tax deduction, they're getting it in.

21:58.10 AROB June means nothing to your donors, right? There's no way they're thinking, oh, I want to get this in before June 30th — unless you're specifically asking them.

22:00.73 Host Right.

22:09.47 AROB And that's tricky because a lot of people are distracted with summer plans, kids, vacations, travel — things like that. So if you're at this point and you're looking like you're going to be short on your dollars, and you don't have a pipeline for where those dollars are going to come in, I would say the next two to four weeks are critical for you to make those asks. Your donors are going to need some time to consider and respond, and that gives you a couple of opportunities for follow-up before the end of the fiscal year — opportunities that don't naturally occur because of the calendar year.

22:53.95 Host Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So now let's look at the other most common scenario: if your fiscal year ends with the calendar year, we're only coming up on the end of the first quarter, so you've got a long ways to go. What would you be looking at right now? Anything different in terms of monitoring your metrics or approaching your program?

23:17.46 AROB That's a good question. If you don't have goals divided up by quarter, then in theory what you're saying is, hey, I've got nine more months to hit our goals.

23:29.78 Host Yeah.

23:29.84 AROB Why do I need to approach this next 100 days with any sort of intentionality? Well, from a practical standpoint, for a lot of nonprofits — same as in business — cash is king. Cash flow can really disrupt an organization and a ministry. And summer is just a natural time when cash flow is going to slow down. If you're a parish, people are traveling. If you're a school, nobody's there; it's not front of mind. Other organizations — hospitals and nonprofits — may not have that summer lag, but families get busy and they travel.

24:12.22 AROB I would say that if nothing else, trying to boost your cash flow going into the summer can be a really smart way to shore up any gaps you're going to experience over those slower summer months. Beyond that, a lot of the fundraising rhythm follows an academic year — even if you're not an academic organization. Back to school is when a lot of people start thinking, all right, I'm planning for the next year.

24:45.40 AROB The summer is when you're looking at staffing changes, maybe strategic changes. So going into the summer with a little bit of momentum on your fundraising can put you in a better state for visioning what's possible on the ministry side.

25:08.38 Host So there are things you're always doing throughout the year, but maybe you're putting different focus on specific things at different time periods.

25:15.99 AROB Yeah.

25:16.82 Host Maybe you're kind of playing that out right now. Earlier, before we recorded this, you and I were talking a little bit about some different methodologies for that type of planning. You want to talk about that a little bit?

25:31.80 AROB Sure. I'll preface this by saying these are not strategies or philosophies that we necessarily employ all the time. Certainly we have some clients that are working within some of these frameworks, but these are strategies I'd encourage anyone listening to look into. Some of them are part of the Agile framework. Agile basically involves a process called Scrum, where you're setting very short-term, very manageable — oftentimes multidisciplinary or multi-department — goals, and then working towards achieving them through a short-term sprint. That could be one week, four weeks, and would not typically go longer than 100 days. But the benefit of something like that — whether it's Scrum, Sprint, or others out there —

26:34.49 AROB — is that you say, hey, we want to make progress right now in this area because it will set us up for success down the road. You can take a bite of a big project and say, over the next four weeks, we're going to really focus on this. Here's our short-term plan, here's how we're going to approach this sprint. Or it could be: here's something we've been talking about doing for a long time. Summer is a good time to cross big, tedious projects like that off your list. We're going to use the next eight weeks as an organization to really focus on this, with a very concrete deliverable we want to get done at the end of those eight weeks.

27:14.20 AROB And then here's how we're going to structure our plan to get there. The language and terminology — Agile, Scrum, Sprint, and others — the point is: can you set a short-term goal with a very concrete deliverable at the end of it, and then orient the time, energy, and resources of yourself and the team to get it done?

27:36.57 Host Yeah, it gets your whole team focused on one specific thing. Usually a big thing needs to happen, and it kind of gives them permission to deprioritize other small things that would collectively distract everyone from getting that one big thing done, especially in a short period of time.

27:48.82 AROB Exactly. Or it's the opposite — you've got a lot of little things just sort of lingering, taking up time and resources. And so it's like, hey, we're going to spend the next 100 days doing a series of sprints that knock out all of these little tasks that are otherwise just hanging out there in the background.

28:12.82 Host Yeah, great. So maybe one more question. Let's approach this from both scenarios. First, let's say you're going into the very end of the fiscal year and you have a weaker donor pipeline than you'd like — no major donors lined up, not enough to hit your goals. What would be your approach going into this last quarter?

28:42.62 AROB Yeah, so I would spend as much time on discovery and cultivation as you can, because any organization that doesn't have a strong pipeline and people ready to be asked has people who are, at this point, not ready — but they do exist.

28:57.69 AROB Spending this next 100 days focused on that — maybe that's your focus if you're in that position. We've got to do as much discovery and as much cultivation as we can. And if we can identify some people through that process that we can ask for an end-of-fiscal-year gift, great. But if not, we're going to go into our next fiscal year in a stronger position because we've seen an additional 50 people over the last two or three months that we can continue to work with.

29:35.74 Host And that might mean deprioritizing other things, right? We give grants a hard time all the time, and it is grant writing season. But if you're in a place where you might not hit your goals by the end of June, don't spend a week writing a grant.

29:48.63 AROB Right.

29:48.91 Host It's not going to save you. Very unlikely. Get out and meet 10, 12, or 15 people instead that week.

29:55.83 AROB Or planning your annual report — I mean, there are a number of things that feel very important and critical but should not be given priority over seeing donors and developing relationships, especially if you're in a situation where you're trying to hit financial targets and it's questionable whether you're going to get there or not.

29:58.50 Host Hmm.

30:20.70 Host Definitely. And if you're just approaching the end of the first quarter of your fiscal year and you're looking at a weaker pipeline, it's probably kind of the same thing — maybe not quite as urgent and intense as when you only have a few weeks — but it's still about getting out and meeting people.

30:35.58 AROB Absolutely. And to your point, when we started this, you were talking about your 5 million steps goal, and how at the beginning of the year you banked some — meaning you were a little more aggressive early on, going over and above, because you knew there would be times down the road when you'd need that cushion.

30:42.44 Host Yeah.

30:52.65 AROB I would say it's a very similar approach to seeing donors. There are going to be times when you're sick and you can't go see donors, or something happens in the organization and you have to spend a month on something other than calling donors. So if you have available time, use it to go see more people, because that will benefit your organization and you in the long run.

31:23.44 Host Great. Anything else you'd consider for the next 100 days?

31:29.53 AROB As we get ready to go into the summer, we talked a little bit about how summer can be a good time for catching up on administrative tasks — marking things off the to-do list, whether that's a database cleanup, entering records that have been sitting on your desk for a while, sending thank-you notes to all your donors. The summer, because it is a slower time, is a good opportunity to get yourself primed so that when you sit down and have some available brain space, you can work on those things.

32:06.52 AROB Again, every institution is a little bit different and in a different situation year to year and month to month. So nothing is going to trump going out and seeing your donors. But there are some administrative things that assist you in that effort which are sometimes hard to fit in during event season, end-of-year season, or times like that.

32:28.13 Host Great, love it. Excellent. Well, I think we'll leave it there for today — just get out there and make some calls. Go visit your donors.

32:35.93 AROB Yeah, great. I think we should do this check-in every 100 days throughout the course of the year.

32:40.21 Host Maybe we will.

32:41.34 AROB I think it just brings your goals top of mind, and that's the risk a lot of organizations and people fall into — whether it's your exercise goal, your steps goal, your donor visit goal, or your fundraising targets. Setting your goals at the beginning of the year and then not thinking about them until they're about to come due is a danger. Keeping these things front of mind, making your updates monthly, checking in and reevaluating where you are quarterly — I think that's a good practice, and it's going to benefit you personally, professionally, and it's definitely going to benefit the organizations you're working to support.

33:22.56 Host Great, excellent. Well, we'll leave it there and we'll see you back soon. Thank you, Andrew.

33:27.96 AROB Appreciate it, Ren. Thanks.