Why I Stopped Giving Nonprofits Templates

A consultant friend asked me recently if I had any templates that might help someone working in fundraising. I told him no, and that I think building it custom is actually the better answer.

That probably sounds like a weird thing for someone in my line of work to say. Templates are everywhere in this space. Every consultant has a welcome series template, a year-end appeal template, a stewardship cadence template. The pitch is always the same: here's a proven framework, drop your details in, you're done.

I used to give them out too. I don't anymore. Here's why.

The Real Problem With Templates

A template is someone else's idea of how the work should be done.

When I hand you a welcome series template, I'm telling you: a donation comes in, an email goes out at day one, day three, day seven, here's a task assigned to a staff member on day fourteen. That outline is technically correct. It is also generic. It assumes you work the way the person who built it works.

You don't.

Look at how you actually run your day. The tools you reach for first. How you handle the donor who replies to a thank-you email with a question your CRM doesn't have a field for. How you keep track of the prospect you met at an event last month who said "follow up in the spring." That stuff is not in a template. It is in you, and in the specific way you have figured out how to do this job inside the constraints of your organization.

When a template skips over all of that, two things happen. The system that gets built does not match the human running it, so it gets quietly abandoned within a few months. And the staff member never gets to develop a real understanding of their own process, which means they cannot improve it.

That is the dependency I am worried about. Not dependency on me as a consultant. Dependency on a generic process that does not reflect how you actually work.

What I Used to Do

When I started, I would do what most consultants do. Show up, ask a few questions, recommend the tools I happened to know best, hand over a workflow that looked clean on a slide.

Sometimes I would push for a tool change because the platform the organization was on did not do what my template assumed. That is the move I am most embarrassed about looking back. The technology was almost never the actual issue. The issue was that nobody had ever sat down with the staff member doing the work and watched them do it.

I have no interest in telling you to switch from your current email tool to one I happen to have a referral relationship with (which I don't have any to be honest). The tools you have are usually fine. The way you are using them is what needs the work.

What I Do Instead

The first thing I do now is record the actual work.

I will sit on a Zoom or Loom call with the person doing fundraising and ask them to walk me through what they did the last time a donation came in. Not the version they think they should describe. The actual version, including the part where they remember halfway through that they were supposed to update a different system, or the part where they trail off because they are not sure if anyone is doing the next step.

That recording, and the transcript that comes out of it, is where the real work starts. Now I can see the gaps. I can see the steps that take fifteen minutes that should take two. I can see the handoffs that quietly fail. I can see the decisions that are happening in someone's head that should be happening in a system.

From there, I help the person redesign their own process. Same tools they already pay for. Different way of using them. Then we layer in AI to take over the parts of the workflow that do not need a human, so the human can spend more time on the parts that do.

This sounds more involved than handing over a template. It is. But the result is a system the staff member actually built and actually understands, which means they keep using it after I am gone.

When a Template Is Fine

I want to be honest about this. If you are a one-person shop sending your first ever donor thank-you email and you just need a starting point, grab a template. You are not the reader I am writing this for.

The reader I am writing this for is the executive director or program lead who is doing fundraising on top of everything else, who has tried three different "proven systems" in the last two years, and who is wondering why none of them have stuck.

If that is you, the answer is probably not a fourth template.

Who This Matters For

You are running a small nonprofit. You are doing fundraising, but it is not your only job, or even your main one. You have a CRM you mostly use, an email tool you mostly understand, a donor list that has gaps you know about and gaps you do not. You keep meaning to set up better follow-up. You keep meaning to send the second appeal. You keep meaning to call the lapsed donor from last year.

Someone hands you a template and you feel a brief surge of relief, because finally there is a system. Then a month later the system has not been used, because the system was not built for the way you actually work.

If that is the loop you are stuck in, more templates will not help. Watching how you actually work and building something around that, will.

What Working With Me Looks Like

That observation work is the foundation of every Mission Simplify engagement. Before I touch a tool or design an automation, I am watching how the work currently happens. Then I help build a system that fits the person doing it, using the tools they already pay for, with AI doing the parts that do not need a human.

If you are tired of templates that do not stick, that is the conversation to have.