102 Percent

FY26 closed at 102 percent of goal. I want to sit with that number for a second, because it is the first time on this whole site that I get to write about something going right instead of something breaking.

For context: the day job is planned giving. Gift officer work, in a region that grew mid year to cover extra ground on an interim basis, on top of the territory I already carried. A dollar goal gets set every year, and most years getting close to it is a genuinely good outcome. This year I cleared it. Not by a little. By enough that it stopped feeling like a rounding error and started feeling like a result.

Here is the honest credit split, because I do not want this to read like an AI success story when it is not one. The relationships were mine. The calls were mine. Nobody automates a conversation with a donor about their estate, and nobody should try. A machine cannot sit with someone while they talk about what they want their life to mean after they are gone. That work is entirely human, and it stayed entirely human all year.

What the systems bought back was everything around the conversation. The outreach engine I built earlier this year schedules calls, emails, and letters on a rotation, holds to a daily cap so no day gets overloaded, and carries forward anything I miss instead of letting it quietly vanish. Every morning it hands me a short list: exactly who to reach that day, and by what means, ranked so I know where to start if the list runs long. Before that existed, the actual work of staying on top of hundreds of relationships ate the hours I should have spent having more of the conversations that matter. Now the list is just there, waiting, correct, every single morning.

The same year that gave the day job its best number is the year I also launched six storefronts, shipped three apps, and started this journal. That is not a coincidence and it is not a brag about hours. It is one system doing double duty. The scheduling, the follow up, the invoicing, the drafting: all of it is the same infrastructure, pointed at more than one part of my life at once. I did not trade the day job for the side projects or the side projects for the day job. I built one operating layer and let it carry both.

I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to overstate what software did. A donor does not give more because my calendar is tidier. They give because they trust the person across the table, because the timing is right, because the mission means something to them. The number is a people number, first and always. What changed is that fewer of those people fell through a crack that used to be mine to own. Nobody missed a call because I forgot. Nobody's file went stale because I was heads down on something else that week. The floor got higher. The ceiling was always going to be about the relationships.

There is a version of this post that turns 102 percent into a victory lap, and I want to resist that too. A number like this is really a proxy for a lot of individual yeses, people who decided their estate would do something meaningful with a piece of it, and trusted a stranger from a nonprofit to help make that real. I do not take that lightly, and no scheduling engine gets to take a bow for it either. Credit where it is due: the systems cleared the floor. The people did the rest.

One year, one system built for more than one job, and a number that finally reflects the work instead of hiding it. That is a good place to be, and I plan on beating it.

MG