Jesse Lane founder of goodmakerU, has a message to walk you through your report to let you know whats here, and how to use it.
Scott, what you've built with Scott's Tots in a short time — running a full organization essentially on your own — is genuinely impressive. You named it clearly: you need new methods of fundraising, and that's exactly what this report is going to dig into. But the fundraising ceiling you're hitting isn't just a tactics problem. It's connected to a few structural patterns that, once you see them, are very fixable. Here's what the data is telling us.
When you said 'honestly everything would struggle' if you stepped back, that's not a sign of failure — it's a sign of how much you've personally built. But it's also the most important thing to address before anything else, because every other growth lever you want to pull — new revenue streams, grant funding, board engagement — runs through you right now. You're the fundraiser, the operator, the relationship manager, and the brand. That's not sustainable at any budget size, and at under $250K with no full-time staff, it means the organization's capacity ceiling is essentially your personal bandwidth. The path forward starts with deliberately externalizing some of what only you currently hold — whether that's documented systems, trained volunteers, or a board member who actually owns a fundraising relationship.
A donor retention rate in the 11–20% range is a signal worth taking seriously. At this stage of Scott's Tots, every donor you bring in is hard-won — and right now, roughly 8 or 9 out of every 10 of them don't come back. That's not a donor acquisition problem; that's a stewardship and follow-through problem. New donors need to feel connected to the mission after their first gift, and without staff or systems to manage that touchpoint, it's almost certainly falling through the cracks. Given that you're also the sole operator, this ties directly back to your founder dependency — there's simply no capacity to run a proper re-engagement cycle. A lightweight CRM and a simple 90-day donor journey could meaningfully change this number without requiring a hire.
Here's the encouraging part: your brand is working. People immediately understand who Scott's Tots is and what you do, and you're generating earned revenue from programs — that's a real foundation. You're not starting from zero; you're at a plateau. Your Q13 priorities — launching new programs, increasing grant funding, diversifying revenue — are exactly the right instincts for an organization ready to scale. But scaling without addressing the founder dependency first tends to just create more chaos for one person to manage. The sequencing matters: stabilize the internal structure, then expand the revenue mix. You're closer than you might feel right now.
These three patterns form a tight loop that's worth understanding, because fixing one in isolation won't hold. The founder dependency means all donor relationships, program delivery, and fundraising live with you — which makes consistent stewardship nearly impossible, which drives the low donor retention. And the low retention means you're constantly replacing lost donors instead of compounding on existing ones, which exhausts the one person running everything. Meanwhile, your board is present but passive, which means you're not getting the external fundraising relationships or the strategic air cover that could relieve the pressure. The good news is this loop has a clear entry point: build even minimal systems around donor follow-up and board accountability, and the whole picture starts to shift.
Get your team and your board in on this conversation. Reports like this one work best when the whole organization can tackle issues together.
