Every day is a fundraising day, says new free calendar

The 2026 Fundraising & Supporter Engagement Calendar (linked at the end of this article) has been created by Equitable Philanthropy and Blaze Your Trail, both of which work with charities that need to plan out their messaging and campaigns.

Every month’s page outlines priorities and asks questions. February, for example, is about tuning up your case for support.

“February is all about sharpening the tools that matter most in fundraising: your Case for Support and your pitch materials,” the calendar explains, alongside 10 focus areas to work on before March.

Equitable Philanthropy’s Catherine Brooks said the calendar was aimed at charities of all sizes, from small, volunteer-led outfits to large national charities.

“Sometimes charities, even the big ones, get stuck in their own ways or they forget what to do next,” she told the Community Advocate. “It’s about momentum, momentum, momentum, so that’s why we did the calendar, to make sure there was always momentum happening, and if they get stuck around what they should be doing, there are a gazillion ideas each month to pick up on.”

Co-creator Jessica Macpherson, from Blaze Your Trail, has a history in almost every role in running small, understaffed and underfunded charities, and she brought that “frazzled CEO” muscle memory to the project, identifying all the little things that somebody might forget when overwhelmed by a charity’s fundraising needs.

As an untrained fundraiser, Macpherson said she had made mistakes in processing donations and tax receipts, and she would now love to help others avoid them.

“I benefited from the generosity of so many people in my early days in the sector, so I’m always looking to pay it back and pay it forward. I never see a charity as a competitor; we’re colleagues, against the professional world that can pay better and has all the resources.”

Macpherson’s consultancy, which creates fundraising calendars for individual clients (among its many other services), was a logical partner for Equitable Philanthropy on the project. The two organisations work together a lot – “Equity is strategic, and we are tactical, or they do the goal setting and we get stuff done,” Macpherson said – and they combined their knowledge to create the calendar.

“It’s standard for us to have the whole body of work planned for 12 months,” Macpherson said. “Are our clients talking about the Christmas campaign in September? Have they worked out their tax messaging in March? It’s not just fundraising. There’s also volunteer management, delivery of services or measuring impact.”

Brooks said Macpherson was the perfect partner for that reason. “I just love her because she was a CEO of a charity, so she knows exactly all the things that you have to keep in your mind at once,” Brooks said. “And Jessie was an absolute star at fundraising, donor stewardship, always doing the newsletter, pushing that out, and that’s quite rare. I think, again, it’s that momentum theme, like, how do we keep people really inspired?”

The calendar is brand new but is already being well received by the sector, Brooks said.

“I knew that it would be well received, and we’re really happy with all the positivity. We want to know if people find it useful, so we can keep improving the calendar each year. We’re going to start printing out copies for events that we’ve got coming up because I think some people want hard copies, but we thought: let’s just get it out to as many people as we can to start with.”

Macpherson said she was proud of the calendar and looked forward to it evolving over the years to come.

“This fundraising guide is important to me, because it's so important that, as a charity, you’re organised so that in the first week of July, you can send out annual tax statements to donors. We’re making sure that when people sign up as a recurring giver, they get a beautiful welcome and that the expectations are managed. I’ve seen so many charities where team members have moved, or the fundraising manager has left, there’s been a gap in between hires, blah blah blah, and they forget to send out those tax statements, for example, and then they get complaints.

“Suddenly, you’ve got some poor frazzled CEO going, ‘How could this possibly ever have happened?’

“Hopefully, our fundraising calendar is going to prevent those kinds of basic mistakes being made, and it’s written for that frazzled CEO. It’s written for that board that doesn’t have any professional staff members yet.”

Brooks said the calendar was an extension of Equitable Philanthropy’s job as a consultant. “We’re the momentum givers because otherwise they’re doing their other jobs, like the chair of the board’s doing what they do, the CEO is doing what they do, there might be a head of fundraising that’s doing about 100 things. Our job is to make sure that they’re not missing opportunities.”

More information

The fundraising calendar is here:
2026 EP Fundraising Calendar