It’s ideal for nonprofits to have a strong mix of revenue streams. Relying on one activity to attract donors and generate revenue is risky — as many organisations learned when events disappeared overnight in 2020.
A healthy fundraising portfolio might include a mix of:
- Regular (monthly) giving
- Annual appeals
- Events (in-person, virtual, or hybrid)
- Peer-to-peer fundraising
- Corporate partnerships and workplace giving
- Online one-off donations
- Offline one-off donations
- Crowdfunding campaigns
- Bequests and planned giving
- Income from products or services
- Grants and philanthropic trusts
A useful exercise: write down all your revenue streams and estimate each as a percentage of total income. Then ask: if any one of these disappeared tomorrow, how would we cope? If the answer is “badly,” that’s where your diversification effort should focus.
The biggest shift since 2018: online giving and monthly giving have grown substantially as a share of most portfolios, while event-based revenue has become less predictable. If your organisation hasn’t actively built its digital giving infrastructure, that’s a priority.
