How to Build a Fundraising Strategy That Compounds

Most institutions raise money in spurts. The roof leaks; the gala is announced. Enrollment dips; a parent committee is convened. A capital project stalls; the head of school writes a personal letter to three donors who saved the last one. The money usually arrives. The institution usually survives. And nothing in the experience produces a system that makes the next crisis less acute or the next ask less awkward.

Compounding fundraising is the opposite of that pattern. It is a calendar, a team, and a discipline that runs whether or not the budget needs it this quarter. It generates pipeline in years where the institution is solvent so that the years where it isn't are not the years it learns how to ask. It treats every gift as the opening of a relationship rather than the closing of a transaction. And — most importantly — it produces ratios that improve year over year, because every cycle teaches the team something the next cycle uses.

This article describes that operating model. Donor segmentation. The cultivation-to-stewardship cycle. The calendar that respects donor rhythms rather than institutional panic. The team that runs it, even at small scale. The transparency that earns the next gift. The failure modes that kill otherwise-promising programs. Two adjacent follow-up pieces will go deeper on the upstream work — donor matching and due diligence — and on the catalog of mechanisms through which money actually moves — the catalog of fundraising mechanisms. This piece is the spine that connects them.

1. From ad-hoc asks to institutional discipline

An ad-hoc fundraising program is identifiable by three symptoms. It activates only when the budget hurts. It depends on the heroic effort of one or two individuals — usually the head of school, occasionally a board chair — whose personal relationships carry the entire pipeline. And it produces no institutional memory: the next year's effort starts from a blank document, repeats the same conversations with the same donors, and learns nothing it can hand to a successor.

The compounding version inverts each of these. It runs on a calendar, not on a crisis. It distributes the work across a team in defined roles, so that no single departure breaks the pipeline. And it produces records — every prospect, every interaction, every gift, every report sent — that turn five years of effort into infrastructure the next leader inherits rather than rebuilds.

The shift is less about money than it is about treating fundraising as a permanent institutional function. Admissions is permanent. Academics are permanent. Operations are permanent. Fundraising, at most institutions, is treated as episodic — staffed thinly, planned reactively, and measured only when the deficit forces measurement. The institutions that compound made a different decision: they treated advancement as infrastructure, staffed it accordingly (even modestly), and let the discipline accrue.

2. The five-stage cycle (and why most institutions skip three of them)

Every fundraising textbook describes some version of the cultivation-to-stewardship cycle. Most institutional practice ignores three of its five stages and wonders why the results don't compound. The full cycle:

• Identification. Finding the prospect. Who has the capacity, the affinity, and the connection to consider supporting this institution? For most schools and universities, the identification work is shallow — a few alumni names, a list of current parents, the board's personal address book — and the pipeline is correspondingly thin.
• Qualification. Does this prospect actually fit our mission and our capacity to steward? Not every wealthy individual is a fit. Not every foundation aligns. Qualification is the unglamorous discipline of saying "this one is worth our time and this one is not" before the cultivation calendar gets built around the wrong names.
• Cultivation. Building the relationship before any ask. Site visits, conversations, shared meals, introductions to faculty, invitations to events that have nothing to do with money. Most major gifts take eighteen to thirty-six months from first qualified contact to commitment. Institutions that try to cultivate and solicit in the same conversation usually do neither well.
• Solicitation. The ask itself. A specific request for a specific amount for a specific purpose, made by the right person at the right moment. This is the stage that gets the most attention and is usually the easiest of the five if the prior three were done properly.
• Stewardship. The relationship after the gift. Most institutions stop here, and that is where they lose. A donor who is thanked once and never heard from again is a donor who gave once and will give once. A donor who is stewarded — reported to, shown the impact, invited back, asked nothing for six months — is a donor whose second gift is larger than the first.

The three stages institutions skip, with depressing consistency, are qualification, cultivation, and stewardship. They run identification (sometimes), they run solicitation (always), and they treat the middle three as overhead. The compounding institutions treat the middle three as the work.

Identification and qualification — who belongs in the pipeline, and on what evidence — are deep enough topics to deserve their own treatment. We cover them in the follow-up on donor matching and due diligence: how to research prospects, how to assess capacity and affinity, how to vet for mission alignment and reputational risk, and how to decide which qualified prospects deserve a multi-year cultivation plan. For this article, treat identification and qualification as named stages that exist; the deep work lives there.

3. Donor segmentation: the seven sources

A compounding fundraising strategy distributes its pipeline across multiple sources rather than depending on one. Seven categories cover almost every gift an educational institution will receive, and each behaves differently enough that conflating them is a strategic mistake.

• Alumni. The most underused source for most non-elite institutions. Schools and universities outside the top tier often have weak alumni records, no recurring alumni programming, and no infrastructure for graduates to give. The typical gift is modest individually but enormous collectively when even a fraction of alumni participate. Cultivation pattern: long horizon, multi-touch, relational. Pitfall: assuming alumni don't give because they don't care, when usually they don't give because no one ever asked them properly.
• Parents (current and past). Direct stake in institutional quality, present or recent. Current parents fund what their children experience now; past parents fund what their children received. Typical gifts range from annual-fund scale to major capital depending on capacity. Cultivation pattern: relationship-rich while the child is enrolled, often dormant after — which is the missed opportunity. Pitfall: treating tuition as the relationship and ignoring the giving relationship entirely.
• Businesses. Both via parent networks (the company a parent owns or leads) and as institutional partners (companies whose workforce pipeline depends on local educational quality). Gifts often take the form of sponsorships, in-kind contributions, or program-specific funding. Cultivation pattern: account-management style, with a clear value-exchange framing. Pitfall: drifting into pure sponsorship logic and never elevating the relationship to philanthropic partnership.
• Foundations. Programmatic giving with their own missions to align with. Foundations rarely give to "the institution"; they give to programs that advance the foundation's stated purpose. Cultivation pattern: research-heavy, proposal-driven, multi-year. Pitfall: chasing foundations whose stated priorities don't align with what the institution actually wants to do, and contorting programs to fit the funder rather than the mission.
• Major individual donors. The named-building tier. Few in number, transformative in size, and demanding in the relationship they require. Cultivation pattern: deeply personal, often involving the head of school directly, with multi-year arcs. Pitfall: donor capture — letting one large donor's preferences distort institutional priorities.
• Small recurring donors. The annual fund population. Community supporters, faculty and staff, friends of the institution, alumni at modest income levels. Cultivation pattern: high-volume, low-touch, campaign-driven, with strong stewardship producing the recurrence. Pitfall: treating them as second-class because the individual gifts are small, when in fact they are the base on which everything else rests.
• Bequests and planned giving. The long-horizon source most schools never cultivate. A graduate who names the institution in their will may produce a gift larger than every annual gift they made combined. Cultivation pattern: patient, relational, often initiated by the donor rather than the institution. Pitfall: never asking, never mentioning the option, and discovering only at the reading of a will that a donor wanted to give and no one ever made it easy.

The point of the segmentation is not to chase all seven at once. Most institutions cannot. The point is to choose three or four that the institution will work seriously over the next five years and to accept that the others will run on minimal infrastructure until the program has the muscle to add them. A small school with no alumni database does not start with alumni; it starts with current parents and small recurring donors, and builds the alumni infrastructure as a multi-year project. The segmentation is a map of where the institution will eventually fish. The annual plan chooses the waters for this year.

4. The annual fundraising calendar

Time-based discipline is what separates a strategy from an intention. The compounding institutions run a fundraising calendar with the same seriousness as their academic calendar — published, owned, reviewed quarterly, adjusted annually.

The calendar operates at several layers simultaneously:

• The fiscal-year planning cycle. Goals set before the year begins. Targets sized to pipeline and capacity (more on this in the next section). Team roles assigned. Major events scheduled. The plan is in writing before July, not assembled in October.
• The annual fund cadence. Quarterly appeals, with a year-end push timed to giving-season tax considerations and a spring follow-up for donors who missed the year-end window. Each appeal is themed, designed, and shipped on a known calendar — not improvised when someone notices the receipts are light.
• Major gift cultivation. Operates on a multi-year clock. Most major gifts take eighteen to thirty-six months from first qualified contact to commitment. Three or four major-gift prospects should be in active cultivation at any time, each at a different stage in the cycle. The calendar tracks the next planned touch for each — not the next ask, the next touch.
• The event calendar. Galas, plaque unveilings, family events, donor recognition evenings, ground-breakings. Events are the visible surface of a fundraising program and the part most people associate with the work; they are also the part most easily over-invested in. The catalog of mechanisms — which events, at what scale, with what realistic return — is treated in depth in the follow-up on fundraising mechanisms. For the calendar's purposes: events are scheduled with intention, not added because last year had three of them.
• Stewardship rhythms. Impact reports (annual at minimum, gift-specific where appropriate). Anniversaries of major gifts, marked with a note. Milestones in funded projects communicated to the donors who funded them. Stewardship is the part of the calendar institutions most often leave to chance; it is also the part that determines whether the next year's pipeline exists.

The disciplined calendar reveals quickly which months the institution has under-resourced. If September has no scheduled donor touches, that is a fact about the strategy, not a feature of September. The calendar is the document where strategy becomes operational.

5. The timing reality: fundraising is not selling, and it isn't fast

Two misunderstandings kill more first-year fundraising programs than any other: treating the work like sales, and assuming results compress into a single quarter. Both are misreadings of what fundraising actually is.

Fundraising is not selling. A sale moves a product from a seller to a buyer in exchange for an immediate equivalent. Fundraising moves capital from a donor to an institution in exchange for impact the donor will see across years — and trust the donor extends because of cultivation that happened before the ask. The vocabulary of sales (close, pipeline, conversion) borrows usefully, but the underlying transaction is different in kind. A sale ends at the receipt. A gift begins at the receipt — because what follows the receipt determines whether the institution will receive its renewal.

Fundraising is not a series of isolated actions. An institution that fundraises by running a gala in March, a year-end appeal in December, and a board ask when a crisis surfaces is running tactics without a strategy. Every conversation with a donor, every event they attend, every report they receive, every milestone they witness is a contribution to a relationship that will, eventually, produce a gift. The gift itself is the visible moment in a long invisible cultivation. Institutions that count only the visible moments will always conclude they have under-resourced the visible moments. The actual under-resourcing is in the invisible work.

Fundraising takes months, often years. The major-gift cycle of eighteen to thirty-six months noted above is the norm, not the exception. A first-time donor relationship typically requires several touches across two to three years before a significant gift becomes plausible. Bequest commitments are made years before the bequest is realized. Foundation grants are typically multi-cycle relationships — the first grant is small; the meaningful one comes in cycles three or four. Institutions that judge their fundraising on year-one results are judging a discipline that pays its dividends in years three through ten.

The implication: a fundraising strategy is a multi-year strategy. The annual calendar from the previous section operates inside a longer horizon — typically a three-year strategic plan refreshed annually, anchored to specific multi-year initiatives (a capital campaign, an endowment build, a sustained scholarship program). The annual cycle is the execution layer; the multi-year strategy is the architecture.

Donor calendars are not the institution's calendar

The institution operates on its own academic and fiscal calendar. Donors — especially corporate and high-net-worth donors — operate on theirs, which are different in ways that materially affect when a gift is plausible.

• Year-end (October–December). Concentrates giving for tax reasons in most jurisdictions. December alone often accounts for 25–35% of annual individual giving at institutions that have done the cultivation work earlier in the year. An institution that has not earned its way into the donor's December decision-making is mostly absent from that window.
• Corporate fiscal calendars vary. A company with a June fiscal year-end may consider sponsorships in April and May (budget allocation for the new year), not in November. A company with a December fiscal year-end may have philanthropic budget that must be spent before year-end or lost. Ask each major corporate prospect when its fiscal year ends, and align the conversation accordingly.
• Tax-planning windows shape major individual gifts. The appreciated-stock transfer that produces a six-figure gift is often timed against a specific tax decision the donor is making in December — or before a known liquidity event. Major-donor cultivation calendars should include known liquidity events (IPO, business sale, retirement) when those are discoverable through public record or relationship.
• Donor business performance directly affects capacity year-to-year. A corporate prospect whose firm had a difficult year cannot be asked at the level appropriate to a good year. The institution that asks at the wrong level damages the relationship; the institution that asks at the right level — adjusted for the donor's current reality — preserves it for the next year. The information costs of monitoring donor business performance are low; the relational costs of ignoring it are high.
• Macroeconomic context affects every layer of the pipeline. In recession years, the major-gift pipeline lengthens and the average gift compresses; in growth years, the inverse. Strategy should bend to the cycle, not pretend the cycle does not exist. A campaign launch announced into a recession is a different campaign than one launched into a growth year, even if every other variable is identical.

The discipline these observations point at is the same in each case: the institution does not control the donor's calendar, the donor's business performance, or the macroeconomic cycle. It controls only its readiness — its case for support, its prospect pipeline, its cultivation cadence — to be present when each donor's right moment arrives. The institution that runs its calendar against its own academic year alone will always be slightly out of phase with the people whose generosity it depends on. The institution that maps its prospects against their calendars asks at moments that are already half-prepared by circumstance.

6. Setting realistic targets

An annual fundraising goal arrived at by intuition is a number that will either embarrass the team or demoralize it. The compounding institutions size their goals through triangulation between two methods.

Bottom-up: pipeline math. Count the qualified prospects in each segment. Apply realistic conversion rates and realistic average gift sizes. Sum the expected value. For an annual fund: (number of solicitable households) × (expected response rate) × (average gift), segmented by donor tier. For major gifts: a named pipeline of specific prospects, each with an estimated capacity range and a probability of closing within the year. The sum is the bottom-up estimate.

Top-down: institutional need × plausible capacity. What does the institution need fundraising to cover this year — scholarship support, capital projects, program funding, operating gaps? What is the most the institution can plausibly raise given its size, brand, and history? The top-down number is anchored to need, constrained by reality.

The discipline is to triangulate. If the bottom-up math says $400,000 and the top-down need says $1.2 million, the institution has a strategy problem the goal will not solve. Setting the goal at $1.2 million produces panic asks and demoralization. Setting it at $400,000 forecloses the conversation about whether the strategy itself needs to change — more segments worked, more prospects in pipeline, a campaign rather than an annual cycle. The right target is "stretch but not absurd": twenty to thirty percent above what the bottom-up math conservatively projects, with a stated plan for how the gap closes.

Inflated targets are not aspirational; they are corrosive. A team that misses its goal by half loses confidence in the strategy. A team that hits its goal because the goal was a stretch — and an honest one — gains the institutional permission to ask for a bigger one next year. Compounding requires the credibility that only realistic targets build.

7. Building the fundraising team

"We don't have an advancement office" is the most common reason small institutions give for not running a real fundraising program. It is also, usually, a misdescription of the problem. The roles below exist at every institution that fundraises seriously; the question is how many people they are distributed across and how clearly they are owned.

• The advancement leader. Owns the strategy. Reports to the head of school or the president. Sets the calendar, manages the pipeline, presents to the board. At small institutions, this is often the head of school directly; at mid-sized, a dedicated advancement director; at large, a vice president of advancement with staff underneath.
• The development officer(s). Run the cultivation. Manage portfolios of major-gift prospects. Conduct visits, write proposals, draft personal asks. At small scale, one person carries the whole portfolio; at scale, multiple officers split by segment or geography.
• The events lead. Plans and runs the public-facing pieces — galas, donor recognition events, family events with fundraising components. At small institutions, this is often a parent-association lead or a part-time hire. At scale, a full events team.
• The data and CRM owner. Maintains the donor database. Logs interactions. Pulls segmentation reports. Without this role, the institution cannot compound, because no one remembers what happened last year. At small scale, this can be one disciplined person with a spreadsheet; at scale, a database administrator with a proper CRM.
• The communications and case-for-support owner. Drafts the impact reports, the appeal letters, the proposals, the website's giving section, the donor newsletters. Owns the voice of the program. This work overlaps significantly with the case-for-support document covered in part three.
• The board liaison. Inside the board, the trustee who champions fundraising — the person who recruits other trustees to give, who opens doors, who makes the board's fundraising responsibilities feel real rather than ceremonial. A board that does not fundraise is a board that approves fundraising, and the two are not the same.

For modest institutions: one person wears three or four of these hats, with a clear board champion and — where the budget allows — an external consultant or part-time hire for the high-leverage moments (the campaign launch, the major-gift solicitation, the case-for-support drafting). The work does not require a large team. It requires that the roles be named, owned, and accountable.

8. The fundraising CRM and the discipline of donor records

Every prospect. Every interaction. Every gift. Every promise. Every report sent. Every anniversary noted. Every preference recorded. Without this discipline, an institution cannot compound, because every cycle starts without the memory of the last one.

The technology matters less than the discipline. A well-maintained spreadsheet beats a poorly maintained Salesforce instance. A simple donor database used religiously beats an enterprise CRM that nobody updates. The point is that the records exist, are current, and travel with the institution rather than with the individuals who happened to manage them.

The CRM is the spine of the strategy. The case for support is the soul. The two together — disciplined memory plus articulated meaning — are what allow a fundraising program to survive leadership transitions, learn from cycle to cycle, and produce ratios that improve over time.

9. Transparency and accountability as system design

Donors fund what they see being stewarded. That sentence is the single most underweighted insight in institutional fundraising. The institutions that compound are the ones that treat transparency as a system, not as a virtue.

Concretely, what this looks like:

• Impact reports, annual and gift-specific. An annual report that names what was funded and what changed because of it. For major gifts, a specific report to the donor showing the trajectory of their gift's effect: the student supported, the program launched, the building used. The report is the document that makes the next ask credible.
• Financial transparency where appropriate. Audited financials available to major donors and, in many cases, published. Not full radical openness for every donor — that is performative — but real openness for the donors whose gift size warrants it and whose due diligence will reasonably demand it.
• Stewardship as documentation. Thank-yous are necessary but not sufficient. A thank-you is the floor of stewardship. The ceiling is a documented arc: the gift received, the work it funded, the outcome the work produced, the next stage of the project — all communicated to the donor on a known cadence.
• Naming, recognition, and the ethics of acknowledgment. Public recognition of donors is part of the work. So is the discipline of recognizing donors at every tier, not only the named-building ones. So is the harder discipline of declining recognition that would compromise the institution — a gift whose donor's reputation is incompatible with the institution's values is a gift the institution should be willing to decline.
• The discipline of reporting on gifts already received. The most counterintuitive piece: donors fund what they see being stewarded, which means the way to make the next gift more likely is to over-report on the last one. Institutions that under-communicate on past gifts find their pipeline mysteriously thin. The connection is not mysterious. It is the cycle telling the institution something.

Across the institutions I've watched build this muscle — in Latin America, at Stanford, around NUS — the pattern repeats. The transparent ones get the next gift. The opaque ones, even with strong programs, plateau.

10. Targets and mechanisms: where to point this strategy

A strategy is the orchestration of targets and mechanisms. Targets are the specific purposes the institution raises for: scholarship endowment, the new science building, faculty research fellowships, the annual fund's operating support, the planned-giving corpus. Mechanisms are the instruments through which money moves: annual appeals, capital campaigns, planned-giving programs, naming gifts, sponsored events, recurring-giving plans, restricted versus unrestricted funds.

The matching of targets to mechanisms is consequential. A scholarship endowment is built through planned giving and major individual donors, not through a one-time gala. An annual operating gap is closed through recurring small donors and current parents, not through a multi-year capital campaign. A capital project demands a campaign with a named goal and a public timeline, not the annual fund stretched thin.

The catalogs themselves — what targets typical institutions choose to fund, and what mechanisms reliably produce results at what scale — are deep enough to warrant their own treatment. They live in the follow-up on mechanisms and the companion catalog of targets. For this article, hold the principle: the strategy points specific mechanisms at specific targets, with explicit reasoning for each pairing. Strategy without that pairing is generic and produces generic results.

11. Best practices that travel

A short, dense list of practices that compound regardless of institution type, geography, or scale. These are the field-tested rules that hold up across the institutions that build serious programs.

• Personalize every ask. A mass email is not an ask; it is an awareness campaign. Real asks are personal, specific, and tailored to what the donor cares about.
• Match the ask to the donor, not the institution. The donor's interests, capacities, and history come first. The institution then aligns one of its needs to those interests. Reversing the order produces refusals.
• Cultivate before the ask, not in the same conversation. The first meeting is rarely the ask. If it is, the relationship was too thin to support a yes.
• Steward longer than you cultivate. The cycle does not end at the gift. It deepens.
• Document everything. If it isn't in the CRM, it didn't happen.
• Make small donors feel as important as large ones. Today's recurring $50 donor is tomorrow's bequest. Treat them accordingly.
• Tell stories of impact, not just numbers. Numbers earn trust. Stories earn the gift.
• Never end a donor relationship; only pause it. The "no" is information about timing, not a closed door.
• Build a board that fundraises, not one that approves fundraising. A board that gives, opens doors, and asks personally is the highest-leverage asset a program has.
• The first refusal is information, not a rejection. It tells you about timing, about the amount, about the fit. The second conversation is informed by the first.

12. Common failure modes

The recurring patterns that kill otherwise-promising fundraising programs. Each is avoidable. Each appears in nearly every institution that plateaus.

• The "we only ask in crisis" trap. The program activates when the budget hurts and dormants when it doesn't. The result is a pipeline that never deepens because cultivation never happens during the years cultivation is possible.
• The vanity event. A gala that costs as much as it raises, justified by "visibility." Visibility without conversion is not a fundraising outcome.
• The over-engineered gala (small-school edition). A school of three hundred students attempting an event scaled for an institution of three thousand. The labor cost crushes the team and the net is negligible.
• The donor-capture risk. One large donor whose preferences begin to distort institutional priorities. The fix is not to refuse the gift but to refuse the dependency — diversify the pipeline so that no single donor is the institution's center of gravity.
• The stewardship gap. Large gifts received, donor never heard from again. The donor concludes that the gift did not matter to the institution. The next gift does not arrive.
• The pipeline-without-conversion problem. Many qualified prospects, no asks made. Cultivation becomes its own end. The fix is calendar discipline: every prospect in the pipeline has a planned ask date, even if the date moves.
• The transparency vacuum. Donors don't see what their gifts produced. Pipeline mysteriously thins. Connection is not mysterious.
• The "we don't have an advancement office so we can't do this" excuse. The roles exist at every scale. The question is whether they are owned, not whether the headcount is large.

13. The strategy is the leverage. The compounding is the proof.

Three commitments make the difference between a fundraising strategy that lives in a binder and one that compounds:

• Cultivate weekly. At least one substantive donor touch — a visit, a call, a hand-written note, a meaningful update — every week, by someone. The institutions that compound never have a quiet week.
• Review quarterly. Pipeline, conversion rates, gifts received, stewardship completed, calendar adherence. The numbers on a single page. The bottleneck identified. The plan adjusted, not redesigned.
• Re-strategize annually. Once a year, the segmentation, the targets, the team, the calendar, and the case for support get re-read end-to-end. Some sections get a stamp of "still true." Others get rewritten. The strategy is a living document, not a heirloom.

Institutions that run this cadence for five years out-fundraise institutions that don't, by ratios that nothing else in their environment explains. Not market. Not luck. Not the head's charisma. The discipline of the cycle is the difference. The strategy is the leverage. The patience is the cost. The compounding is the proof.

The four perspectives

Dr. Saya Nakamura-EllisThe Classicist

Without measurement, 'fundraising strategy' is hope. Pipeline metrics — qualified prospects, conversion rates by stage, average gift by segment, lifetime donor value — are what separate a program that compounds from one that performs. The discipline of recording every interaction is the discipline of being able to learn from a cycle rather than repeating it. Numbers do not replace relationships; they make the relationships legible enough to steward at scale.

Prof. Marcus Okonkwo-BrandtThe Experientialist

Look at who gets qualified into the pipeline and who is quietly excluded. Donor cultivation programs systematically over-cultivate certain demographics — wealthier, whiter, more locally connected — and call the result a pipeline. The seven-segment model is an equity instrument only if the institution actually works the segments it tends to underweight: alumni from non-elite years, parents of scholarship students, community supporters whose individual gifts are small. The pipeline is a moral document. Read it that way.

Zara Chen-RodriguezThe Futurist

Velocity over perfection. The institutions that ship their first annual fund letter this quarter outperform the ones planning the perfect campaign for two years. Pick three segments, write a real calendar for one of them, run it for a year, measure what happened, and iterate. The fundraising program that exists at eighty percent quality beats the one that is still being designed at a hundred. Compounding starts on the day you start, not on the day the strategy is perfect.

Carlos Miranda LevyThe Curator

Five-year discipline compounds in ways that one-off galas cannot. I've watched institutions across Latin America, at Stanford, around NUS, build programs that look unremarkable in any single year and look transformative across a decade. The work is unromantic — the calendar, the records, the quarterly review, the thank-you note written by hand on a Friday afternoon. The strategy is the leverage. The patience is the cost. The compounding is the proof, and it only arrives for the institutions that were willing to be patient with it.