All work and no planning makes Jack a dull boy.

Or, less pithily, all short-term work and no long-term planning makes Jack an ineffective fundraiser.

Yes, if you focus only on what’s currently on your plate (or will be served up in the next three months), you’ll survive as a fundraiser . . . but you won’t thrive. Draw the equivalency to your personal life. What would happen if you never made dentist’s appointments in advance, or only bought plane tickets for summer vacation two days ahead of time, or waited until a month out to plan your wedding?

It would be a disaster (unless you never wanted to see a dentist, really wanted to skip that vacation, or had major trepidation about hitching yourself to your fiancé).

So, planning shouldn’t be eschewed, but the way the government uses large-scale planning is disastrous . . . so learn from their mistakes. Mistakes that include:

• Policies designed to bolster home ownership (via tax incentives and other programming) that unintentionally make home ownership unattainable for most Americans.
• Tax credits that reward virtuous “green energy” drivers (i.e., rich Tesla-owning elites).
• Hedge funds that kowtow to financial risk models that explode in highly leveraged Long-Term Capital Management form (I can’t recommend this Roger Lowenstein account of that fiasco enough).
• Public hatred of overreaching paternalistic policies (e.g., Michael Bloomberg’s soda tax).

Don’t follow the government’s example. Politicians may be terrible at long-term planning, but that doesn’t mean you have to be.

Politicians have the luxury of being loosey-goosey with their planning, but nonprofit leaders do not. Donors don’t give based only on what your nonprofit has done in the past, they want to know what they’re enabling you to do in the future. What wells will you build in South Sudan? What support will you offer to struggling pregnant mothers in the South? How many unhoused people will you protect from devastating heat waves in Phoenix?

You need to be able to answer questions like these in ways that appeal to your donors.

1. Do You Really Know as Much as Your Staff?

Managers all too often assume they know better than their employees . . . and it’s a surefire way to sabotage the planning process. Who knows the on-the-ground running of your organization, how your constituents feel, what’s working, what’s driving everyone crazy? Almost certainly not you, if you’re not making the effort to hear from your employees. Make that effort!

2. Are You Relying on the Past?

Warren Buffett would tell you, as will I: past results are not predictive of future performance. So don’t rely entirely on past data, think about how gifts and donors might differ in the future. What will you say if a major donor tries to adjust her gift amount? Or wants to negate it entirely? Preparing for possibilities is a crucial part of fundraising.

3. What’s Your (Non-Balletic) Black Swan?

Perhaps the most consequential moment of my life happened out of nowhere: thirteen years ago, yesterday, I almost died. I spent a bunch of months in the hospital and a bunch of months in rehab, but I returned to my initial plan of graduating college and finding a job. You should ask yourself the questions you need to ensure you’re equally resilient: How will your organization face the current downtick in donations? How would you respond to an onslaught from the rage givers?

4. Are There Downsides?

You look at all the upsides of your organization’s mission, but are there hidden downsides? You might tell your donors just how much good they can do by funding new wells for South Sudanese refugees . . . but are you considering the fact that just as many wells might be falling into disuse because no one’s paying for maintenance?

This is where you have to be very, very careful. You might be able to up your organization’s revenue by pretending you are the first and only org to dig a well in South Sudan, but that push for novelty will almost certainly drag you into projects that deviate from your organization’s mission.

5. Are You Wearing Rose-Colored Planning Glasses?

When it’s planning season—right about now—we all turn into optimists. We’ll certainly meet this deadline! Without question we’ll hit this target! This project will go off without a hitch!

Let’s be real: execution is a whole lot harder than planning. If we’re not realistic about timelines, targets, and capacity, we’re going to rack up a whole lot more in time and cost than if we’d planned realistically in the first place.

Organizational planning really boils down to one tenet: be realistic. Yeah, yeah, it’s all ultimately guesswork—the future is unknown and unknowable. But if you view the future realistically, not aspirationally, your nonprofit stands a far better chance of succeeding.