New year, same old us

Planning for 2026

This week…

We’re gently rolling back into work life after a relaxing couple of weeks off. Caroline is writing this first thing on Monday morning (5 January).

There will be typos. Please bear with.

Highlights from our holly jolly Christmas included:

• The most delicious festive meal cooked by Tony - venison wellington and the most garlicky, cheesy dauphinoise you can imagine. We under-purchased sprouts but suspect that no-one cared.

• Completing our Year Compass worksheets over a beer and a BOGOF burger at Brewdog.

• A chilly dog walk with our kids (who weren’t initially impressed) until we treated them to an epic ‘Sunday Roast in a box’ each from The Larder in Yelverton.

• Starting to properly plan our wedding.

• An entire re-watch of all six seasons of Virgin River (Caroline).

• A trip to minor injuries with our neighbour whose face had a fight with the pavement on the final stretch of his morning run (Tony - what a hero).

Here’s a mini collage of moments from our holidays - from top left, clockwise: Scout on a walk around Burrator reservoir, Caroline with her littlest Godchildren, a new planner (obvs), the crib scene in church on Christmas Day.

Are you a planner?

We love to make plans for the year ahead (as previously mentioned, Year Compass is our go to template for this).

Tony likes to go lighter on the planning than Caroline, leaving space for magic which could not have been predicted. Caroline’s more of a task-oriented quarter by quarter planner.

Our dreams for 2026 include:

• completing the Plymouth half marathon

• hosting a beautiful wedding celebration

• more time in nature

• Fridays off (Caroline)

As far as this newsletter is concerned, the goal is to maintain our subscriber levels and to deepen our connections with those of you that are already here (rather than chasing growth).

Of course, if new people wish to join our paying subscriber community, we will welcome them with open arms (popping a button just below to make it super easy for those of you that are especially keen to upgrade!).

But this year is primarily about being of service to those of you who have followed / subscribed / supported / contributed for a long time now, by delivering high quality fundraising education in the form of easily digestible, engaging weekly articles and mini research projects.

So continuing along this theme…

…we’d love to hear from you!

As we plan the content for the Nest Egg in 2026, we’d love to know more about:

• the topics that interest you

• areas of expertise you’d like to personally develop

• challenges you need support with

Please fill in our annual reader survey.

It’s only 8 questions long.

If you’re in a tearing hurry, you can probably whip through it in 5 minutes.

Of course, if you were able to spare closer to ten minutes to share your reflections and your feelings in more granular detail, we’d be incredibly grateful.

It’s these deeper reflections which help us to shape our content for the coming year.

More importantly, we’re also able to gain real insight into the thoughts and feelings of fundraisers at this present moment. Last year, 100 of you contributed to our annual reader survey and your wisdom enabled us to truly understand where we’re at as a collective.

Nest Egg readers are (on the whole) intelligent, curious, skilled, fun, concerned about the people around them and hungry for a better, more just world.

It would be amazing to take stock and to be able to report back on how we’re all doing right now.

Dropping the survey link here again:

Big thanks to you all in advance.

Can’t wait to share your responses!

Caroline and Tony

p.s. the survey will only work for subscribers (not those of you who follow The Nest Egg in the Substack app).