There are roughly 19 weeks between today and December 31.
If you sent a cohort of new staff into ministry partner development this summer, that is the entire runway you have left to get them funded before the calendar resets and their families start a new year underwater. Most organizations will find out how that went in January. The ones that find out in August will still have time to do something about it.
Here is the math worth running this week.
The number most organizations do not have
Ask an MPD director how their fall cohort is doing and you will usually get an average. Sixty-two percent funded. Maybe a range. The average is close to useless, because a cohort at 62% could be twelve people at 60% each, which is a coaching problem, or it could be six people at 95% and six people at 30%, which is a triage problem. Those two situations call for opposite responses and the average hides both.
What you want instead is the distribution and the slope.
Distribution: how many staff sit in each funding band right now. Under 40%, 40 to 69%, 70 to 89%, 90 to 99%, fully funded. Write the count in each band on a whiteboard.
Slope: how many percentage points each person has added in the last 30 days. Not since they started. In the last 30 days.
The second number is the one that predicts December. A person at 45% who is adding eight points a month gets there. A person at 78% who has added two points in the last two months does not, and they are the one nobody worries about because 78% sounds fine.
The stall is the signal, not the level
Every support raising organization we talk to can name the person who has been at "almost there" for five months. Somebody at 85% is not a success story in slow motion. They are usually a person who has run out of names, run out of nerve, or quietly decided that 85% is survivable and gone back to doing the ministry they actually came to do.
Slope catches this. Level does not.
Run the slope calculation across your whole roster and you will typically find three groups: people moving, people who have stopped, and people who never started properly. Each needs something different. Movers need to be left alone. Stalled staff need a list intervention, which we will cover in a later post. People who never started need their supervisor, not their coach.
Working backward from December 31
Take each person's remaining gap in monthly dollars. Divide by their average monthly commitment size. That is roughly how many new partners they need.
A staff member $1,400 per month short, with an average partner giving $85 per month, needs about 17 new monthly partners. Not 17 conversations. Seventeen commitments.
Now apply a realistic conversion rate. If your organization tracks ask-to-commitment rate and it sits somewhere around one in three, that is 51 asks. At a sustainable pace of eight to ten in-person or video appointments per week during focused MPD time, that is roughly six weeks of concentrated work, assuming their contact list can support 51 qualified asks.
Can it? That is the real question, and it is usually the answer nobody wants. If they have 60 names left and need 51 asks at a one in three close rate, they do not have a scheduling problem. They have a list problem, and no amount of encouragement in a coaching call will fix it. They need to go back to referrals, and referral asks take a different script and a different amount of courage than a first ask does.
You cannot make that diagnosis in November. You can make it today.
The organizational cost of finding out late
When a staff member arrives at December 31 at 70%, the organization pays for it three times.
The first payment is direct: whatever bridge funding, delayed deployment, or reduced salary the person absorbs. The second is retention. Under-funded staff leave at higher rates than funded staff, and every departure means the recruiting, training, and onboarding investment walks out the door alongside them. The third payment is the quietest and the largest. It is the partner relationships that person built and then abandoned, because those donors rarely transfer to another staff member. They just stop giving.
None of those three costs show up on a line item labeled "MPD." They show up as recruiting spend, as attrition, and as a slowly shrinking donor file.
What to do this week
- Pull every active support raiser into one view with current funding percentage and 30 day change.
- Sort by slope, not by level.
- Flag anyone with less than three points of movement in 30 days, regardless of how funded they are.
- For each flagged person, ask one question: is this a list problem, a courage problem, or a time problem? The intervention is different for each and you cannot skip the diagnosis.
- Put a calendar hold on October 15 to run the same report again. Two data points make a trend. One makes an opinion.
Nineteen weeks is enough time. Twelve is not.
How Karani helps: Most sending organizations run this analysis by exporting spreadsheets from individual staff members and stitching them together, which is why most sending organizations run it once a year. Karani gives your MPD director a live roster view across every support raiser, so funding percentage and 30 day movement are a page load rather than a project.