This toolkit brings together everything you need to build a fundraising plan that fits your organization — your strengths, your relationships, and what your team can realistically sustain. Whether you’re building your first real plan or rebuilding after a tough year, these tools will help you get from “we should probably do something about fundraising” to a clear plan with owners, timelines, and campaigns you’re actually excited about.
From the Helia Library — based on the article Fundraise From Your Strengths, featuring Jess Skylar, Andrea Chen, and Natalie Bergstrasser.
What’s Inside
Start with the Planning Guide — it’s the foundation. The Campaign Inspiration Guide is how you design what goes inside it. The example shows you what it looks like when it’s done.
01 — Helia’s Fundraising Planning Guide
A step-by-step process for building a plan that actually fits. Works through six questions — your vision and strengths, your infrastructure, your relationships and pipeline, what to focus on, your timeline, and how to make it stick. Start here before you design any campaigns or set any goals.
02 — Campaign Inspiration Guide
Real campaign models, a mix-and-match menu of components, and right-sized examples for different team sizes and budgets. Reach for this once you’ve worked through The Why, The What, and The Who — you’ll know what you’re building toward, and this will help you figure out how.
03 — EXAMPLE 2025 Fundraising Plan
A real fundraising plan, built with a real organization, with names and identifying details removed. This is what the output of the planning process looks like — named campaigns, clear owners, a 90-day focus, and an ownership structure the whole team can work from. Read it before you start building your own, or use it as a reference as you go.
Want to move faster? We put together a set of AI prompts that pair with each section of the Planning Guide — so you can use Claude or ChatGPT to help you draft, organize, and refine as you go. We originally built this for a client (in Spring 2025 – so it may or may not have aged well!) who generously gave us permission to share it with the broader Helia community. → Grab the AI Prompt Guide
When Resources and Templates Aren’t Enough
These tools will get you a long way. If you have a clear sense of your strengths, a relationship map you trust, and a pipeline you’re actually updating — you can build something really solid on your own.
What they can’t do is tell you whether your goals are realistic given your current relationships, help you get into rooms you’re not already in, or hold the thread on execution when everything else is competing for your attention.
If you want help
At Helia, we’ve raised hundreds of millions of dollars — for organizations we’ve led and organizations we’ve supported. Jess Skylar, Andrea Chen, and Natalie Bergstrasser work together on most fundraising engagements, bringing strategy, execution, and hands-on support across the full pipeline. We don’t hand you a plan and leave. We get in there with you and get it done.
We’re a good fit if:
- You need someone actually doing the work alongside you — drafting outreach, running the weekly meeting, building the pipeline — not handing you a framework and leaving
- You’re navigating a fundraising pivot, a campaign, or a growth moment and want someone who’s been there
- You want to expand your network and need help getting into rooms you’re not already in
- You want to build the plan AND have someone hold the thread while you execute it
Connect with Helia!
Take what’s helpful, leave what’s not, and make it your own.
