Five free hours: the nonprofit to-do list that never gets done — and what it's actually costing you

The one with the items that have been on it for six, twelve, eighteen months.

Fix the welcome series. Clean up the lapsed donor segment. Set up a monthly giving onboarding sequence. Write a re-engagement email for people who haven't given in two years.

This month, I'm offering five free hours of consulting to nonprofits who are ready to stop deferring that list.

Applications are open through April 30 — and I want to tell you exactly why I think five hours is enough to make a real dent, because it surprised me too the first time I tested it.

Important work. Work they know would move the needle. Work that keeps getting bumped by grant deadlines, board meetings, and the endless churn of keeping an organization running.

If you recognize that list, you're not alone — and you're not disorganized. You're under-resourced and overextended in the way that nearly every small and mid-size nonprofit operates. But the cost of that list sitting untouched is higher than most organizations realize, and it compounds quietly every month.

The Fundraising Effectiveness Project reports that the average first-year donor retention rate is 19%. That means more than 8 out of 10 first-time donors never give again. A significant portion of those losses happen not because the donor changed their mind, but because nothing meaningful happened after their first gift — no thoughtful follow-up, no impact story, no invitation to deepen their relationship with the cause.

That's not a donor acquisition problem. That's a to-do list problem.

When the welcome series doesn't get fixed, every new donor goes through the broken version. When the lapsed donor segment never gets a re-engagement email, those donors drift further out of reach every month. When the monthly giving onboarding never gets built, monthly donors cancel at higher rates than they should, and nobody knows exactly why.

The delay doesn't just defer the fix. It extends the damage.

There's a well-documented phenomenon in organizational management called the urgency trap — the tendency to prioritize tasks that feel time-sensitive over tasks that are actually high-value.

For most development offices, donor communications infrastructure falls squarely into the second category. It's important, not urgent. Until it's suddenly very urgent, because retention is down and the year-end campaign is two months away.

The organizations that break out of this pattern usually don't do it by finding more time. They do it by temporarily bringing in external capacity — a consultant, a strategist, a second set of eyes — to knock out the high-value work that keeps getting pushed.

Not because they can't do it themselves. Because the structure of their days makes it nearly impossible to prioritize it themselves, and an outside engagement creates the deadline and focus that internal to-do lists never do.

Here's something I've learned from working with small nonprofits: most of the items on that other list don't require a six-month engagement. They require focused attention and a clear framework.

A welcome series audit and rewrite: five hours, maybe less. A lapsed donor re-engagement sequence: four to six hours. A monthly giving onboarding review with specific recommendations: three to five hours.

These aren't small problems. But they're not as large as they feel when they've been sitting on a list long enough to seem overwhelming.

This month I've partnered with five other consultants — including Peak 9860, J Gattis Consulting, Little Dog Consulting, and Apex Compass Solutions — to offer five free hours to up to 30 nonprofits. No pitch at the end. No obligation to continue. Just five hours applied directly to whatever has been sitting on your list the longest.

Not sure what to ask for? That's fine — we can use part of the time to figure that out. Think your project is bigger than five hours? Also fine — we can scope it and give you a clear picture of what's possible within the free time and what a fuller engagement would look like.

Start by writing down the three items on your other list — the important-but-not-urgent work you've been meaning to get to. Then ask honestly: what would it take to get those done in the next 90 days?

Applications are open through April 30. Apply now.

Drop a comment below with what's been sitting on your list the longest — I read every one, and you might find that naming it out loud is the first step to actually crossing it off.

Or send me a DM if you'd rather talk it through directly. Either way, I'd love to help you finally get to it.