You're Spending 90% of Your Time Chasing 10% of Your Revenue
- Erica McWhorter
- Aug 3
- 4 min read
Updated: Aug 3
Grow Sustainable Revenue: Garden, Don't Hunt!
You Should Know This
Your development team is burned out. They are constantly researching new prospects, writing cold proposals, and chasing the "next big grant." Yet your revenue stays completely flat. Why?
Because you are treating fundraising like a hunting expedition rather than like gardening. You are spending all your energy trying to track down new, cold prospects while ignoring the existing partners who are the actual lifeblood of your mission.
What's Going On
For most social impact organizations, the data is incredibly clear: 70% to 80% of your funding comes from your top five to ten funders. These are your true partners. They already believe in your leadership, they understand your community, and they want to support your work. Yet, we routinely spend the vast majority of our organizational time and energy writing long-shot, cold proposals to foundations that have no prior relationship with us.
When we look closely at successful fundraising programs, we find a powerful, repeatable pattern: their most reliable funding isn't just about the funder's wealth, it is about the alignment of a specific funding source with a specific type of project.
For example, a local family foundation might consistently fund your youth environmental education programs, while a regional corporation supports your community cleanup events. This combination of funding source and project focus represents a "historical win"—a proven formula where your operational strengths and their philanthropic goals are in perfect alignment.
When we lack the clarity to see these historical patterns, our prospect lists balloon with generic grant options. We treat fundraising as transactional rather than relational, and we break the chain of success that built our foundation in the first place.
Why This Matters
What if you could clearly assess the lifetime investment value of every funding relationship in your portfolio?
You would immediately see that a partner who gave a modest initial grant has quietly grown into a six-figure anchor over five years, while another has remained a one-time transaction.
Having this clarity forces your leadership to ask three critical questions:
Are we spending 90% of our limited staff capacity on cold, transactional applications that carry a high risk of rejection and a low financial return?
Are we deliberately investing our time in cultivating and stewarding our proven, high-value partners—ensuring they renew, deepen their commitment, and align with our new initiatives?
Have we clearly mapped out which project types consistently attract the most funding from specific sectors so we can repeat those successful matches?
While prospecting is necessary, it is not the foundation of sustainable funding success. This simple shift in perspective and approach—moving from aggressive "prospecting" to intentional "stewardship"—is a super effective way to increase organizational capacity and repeatable revenue.
What's Next
Ask: Take a moment to look at your top five funding partners over the last three years. Do you know the exact combination of projects and funding sources that has yielded your highest success? What about their total lifetime investment in your organization over time?
Test: Healthy stewardship begins long before you secure a grant; it starts with selecting the right partners in the first place. You need a clear process to identify which funders are a natural fit for your specific programs and capacity so you can repeat your past success formulas rather than only chasing cold leads. To help you build this muscle, I am sharing my Funder Prospecting & Alignment Checklist as a free resource. You can download it HERE to confidently evaluate and score your next three prospects before you invest your precious staff time.
Stay Tuned: We’ll be exploring more about relationship-first stewardship and portfolio management on our social channels this month. Join the conversation on LinkedIn and Facebook to share how you are moving away from the hunting mindset.
What Else You Should Know
My mission is to help values-oriented leaders move past organizational noise and focus on strategic clarity.
If you are tired of messy, unorganized spreadsheets that bury your institutional history, the Excelevate Strategic Funding Tracker is designed specifically to solve this. It automatically calculates partner retention, portfolio balance, and the full scope of your funder investments without manual math.
To support your organization's unique capacity and goals, we offer:
· Low-cost, turnkey access to the Tracker and Toolkit to structure your data independently.
High-touch, white-glove setup where we personally audit and import up to 75 of your past funding records, identify your historical success formulas, and deliver 1:1 strategy sessions to co-create a 12-month campaign roadmap.
Ongoing fractional advisory support to help you scale your operational capacity, evaluate revenue-stream efficiency, and present clear strategic updates directly to your board.
Affordable and no cost access to the Tracker and Strategic Advisory Sessions for implementing lessons learned from your Tracker. Limited slots available each quarter for the Access Pass, so apply today.
