At Pingdex, we want you to get the most out of your fundraising program. We’ve worked with hundreds of candidates and organizations to build high-quality call time operations and have built a long list of best (and worst) practices. As the 2025-2026 campaign season kicks off, we hope to provide you a regular series of Fundraising Tips and Tricks.

Today we’re talking about finance plans. Hopefully, we don’t have to convince you of the importance of a well-made, consistently-updated finance plan. However, we do have some thoughts on how to get the most out of your plan. We’ve even included a template for those of you just getting started.

1. Make the plan your own! You may have different sources of contributions than what is in our template. Make sure to customize this plan to fit your campaign.
   
2. Update the plan frequently. Depending on how often you are receiving contributions, and how large your team is, you may need to update your finance plan at the end of each day, or at a minimum a couple of times per week. 
   
3. Double check your numbers add up. It’s critical that your finance plan matches your other financial tracking methods.

Projections are the hardest part of building and maintaining your finance plan. It’s also the most important. Smart projections make for smart spending decisions. Here’s some tips on getting it right.

Preventing Under-Projecting: It is common to under-project in finance plans so you do not give the candidate false hope or overspend from your budget. However, drastic under-projections lead to poor staffing and paid comms decisions.To prevent under-projecting, make sure to revisit projections often, appropriately weigh higher contribution times of the year vs. lower, and push your vendors to update their own under-projections if you see them happening.  

Preventing Over-Projecting: Similar to under-projecting, it is also common to overproject. This of course leads to campaigns spending too much too soon and running out of money in the final weeks. To prevent this, avoid treating soft pledges as guarantees and do not count them all in your projection. Additionally, be realistic about what event hosts can raise on their own, and realistic about cold outreach projections to make sure they aren’t too high. 

If you want to go further into setting up a successful campaign finance plan, check out our last blog post where we go even deeper into setting up the mechanics.

Creating a Campaign Finance Plan

Learn how to create a finance plan for your campaign fundraising in this post. A finance plan is a critical document that organizes all aspects of fundraising in one place. We provide insight into creating accurate call time, event, PAC, direct mail, online, and pledges projections.

The Pingdex BlogDavid LeBender

Call time is most-often the most important line item in your plan. If you’re looking to up your call time game, sign up here to learn more about Pingdex. We want to help you hit your goals this cycle!