Welcome back to the Major Gifts Challenge! If you’re unfamiliar with the Challenge, check out the introductory video here.
A first step to achieve success in raising major gifts is identifying who you will ask.
The last video discussed defining a major gift. Once defined, it’s clear you don’t need lots of major gift donors — you can be successful with just a handful. When it comes to major gifts, it’s not about quantity, it’s about quality.
A Shorter List of Major Gift Prospects is Better
It’s actually better to focus on a handful of well qualified donors, the best potential donors, than a longer list of “maybe’s.”
The goal is to narrow your donor list to a number you can manage. These lists are often called a portfolio, or pipeline, indicating the need to manage what passes through.
It makes no sense to have a list of 50 or 100 names, which may feel so overwhelming that it just sits on your desk.
If you’re at a busy development office, where you’re responsible for writing grants, planning events, marketing, and more, I recommend a portfolio of just twenty potential major gift donors.
There are several ways to identify the people who will go on your list.
How to Identify Prospective Major Gift Donors
The best way to identify prospects is to look at your database of existing donors.
If you don’t have existing donors, keep following the Major Gifts Challenge. In an upcoming video, I’ll talk about identifying new donors and raising friends for your organization.
Assuming you have a database with at least a few years of donor history, you’re going to start there.
When checking your database to determine your best potential major gift donors, you’re looking for two things…
1. Your Largest Donors
Run a report to identify those who gave the most, cumulatively, over the last 12 months (or in the last fiscal or calendar year). It’s important to use cumulative giving. If you simply look for anyone who has given over $1,000 as a one-time gift, you may miss donors who come to every event and donate smaller amounts throughout the year.
If you want to be extra thorough, run another list for the year before as well to catch anyone who should be on the list but didn’t give last year for some reason.
2. Your Most Loyal Donors
Run a report to identify anyone who has given at least four times during the last five years. This group is significantly different from your largest donors group, because there’s no minimum gift amount required to make it onto this list.
This list will identify donors who give $10 per year, but do so consistently, year-after-year. Loyal donors are important because they are devoted to your organization! Loyalty is rare these days in fundraising. It is more important to have a low-level committed donor, than one who gives once and never gives again.
The donors on both lists (the largest and your most loyal) are going to be your best major gift prospects, because they already have an affinity for your organization and are showing it by donating money.
Challenge Yourself Action Item
Step 1: Run lists of your largest and most loyal donors.
I explained how to do this earlier, so feel free to go back and re-watch or reread if you need a reminder of how this is done.
Step 2: Narrow down your lists.
Take a red pen and cross off corporations and foundations. Once you’ve eliminated corporations and foundations, if you have more than 200 names on your lists, then narrow the criteria and run the reports again looking for even larger donors and loyal donors at larger amounts and over longer periods of time.
Going Further with Major Gifts
Once you have your most loyal and largest donors identified, it’s time to narrow your list even more to a number of people you can work with — and ask for a gift this year.
In Mastering Major Gifts, I provide a system and worksheet for narrowing your list based on each person (or couple’s) giving potential and inclination toward your organization. In fact, Mastering Major Gifts is the perfect online program for anyone who’s truly ready to identify the best potential major gift donors for their organization.
Act, Comment and Participate
Now it’s your turn. Does the idea of generating lists of loyal and large donors have your stomach in a knot? What database are you using? Does it have pre-set reports or do you have to develop queries on your own?
Let us know in the comments and provide feedback for your fellow fundraisers.
Next week, we’ll discuss how to further narrow the lists so you can focus, focus, focus on your best major gift prospects.
Thanks Amy , I found it so helpful. Generating list of large and loyal Donors helps you to eliminate some of the donors that contribute less to your organisation. It enables fundraisers to focus more loyal Donors more effectively. On preferences I use the loyal Donors database.
One question I’ve been pondering a bit: many of the folks on this list are our board members, some of whom may not have capacity to go much further than they already are. It also seems tricky to ask one set of folks to go beyond the minimums set by board giving expectations, without asking the rest to as well.
Any advice on navigating this? Should I start with the non-board members? For reference, our major gift level was calculated at $20K, and our board giving expectation is $2500.
Thanks!
Absolutely not tricky at all. You expect board members to give a significant and meaningful gift for their own personal budget. What you set are board MINIMUMS, not maximums.
A little bit more – there are 29 households that meet the criteria, and only 11 not already on the board.
I have used E-tapestry(Blackbaud) for four years and I am just learning Salesforce. I have pulled a report for the list of major donors, but I am not sure how to take out the Corporations & Foundations.
You can probably code corporations and foundations as such in your database. Until that time, you may want to use a red pen.
I don’t really have this information available as the organization as been pushing along on an “as need” basis, this worked (sort of) when starting out but now that we’re a few years old I’m looking to have this be more formalized and future thinking.
Thank you though for pointing out the data to collect and how best to classify it.
We have Raiser’s Edge and the reports are run with queries. I am very new to this world and we have a database manager who we give the parameters to and she runs the reports. We are a mid-size community hospital and I am hoping to find a few “diamonds in the rough” and earn my stripes in the organization… any suggestions are appreciated
I love working with data and I was able to generate these separate lists relatively quickly. I am using ParishSoft/ConnectNow Family Suite. I had to develop and run separate quires on my own. It was very quick and easy to find the largest donors in the last 12 months and the year prior. It took a while to figure out my most loyal donors but now that it is done it is pretty easy. Now I need to narrow down the lists as I have a lot of very loyal donors. I have 72 donors who gave more than 4 times in the last 5 years. I am unsure or how to narrow that list down to my top 20 most loyal donors. I also ran a report for the most loyal donors from the last 10 years and that list had 162 people who donated more than 4 times in the last 10 years. I am unsure as to how to narrow this list down but I am guessing I should cross reference the 2 lists of my most loyal donors and then perhaps narrow it by total giving in the last 10 years. Not sure but I can play with the data. Thanks again! Great advice!
Hi Ann – Great job! More posts to come on next steps. In the meantime, gather key board and staff members to determine who they know on the lists and who might qualify as a major gift prospective donor based on their interests, involvement, and capacity to give a larger gift. You’re on the right track!
Good morning! I have reviewed our list of donors from fiscal year 2017. We have approximately 55 donors who gave at our major gift donor level ( $1,000 cumulative) in fy2017. All of these donors were sent our End of the Year appeal asking for a gift . Thirteen of the 55 gave an End of the Year donation. Therefore, 32 of our major gift donors of 2017 have become candidates for my ASK list of 2018.
Yet my challenge is this…these donors live across the country. Therefore my primary way of connecting with them is over the phone. But my other challenges are… lack the phone numbers f many of these 32 constituents and no one in the organization (board members or staff) have a personal connection with these donors.
Over my past 5 months here at the organization I have sent newsletters, thank-you cards, and one appeal (End of the Year).
Do you have any suggestions of how to approach narrowing down my field of prospects and then Asking them for a major gift?
I am not an expert but I have run into this problem myself. My suggestion is to come up with a project list of what you need (with larger dollar value) then contact the donors individually (email or phone) and ask if they are interested in helping fund any of the items that you have on your list.
Don’t make the list long – three or four is a good number. Even better if you know ahead of time that your donor is particularly interested in one of your projects. You do have to ask, but you’ll be surprised at how many of your donors will step up and help out.
Our software program provides reports for us, but we also create queries to be more specific in what type of donor we are looking for.
Hoping that you are still reading these posts and answering questions. I’ve pulled data and it looks like our major gift is about $20,000, and the Mode (most frequent gift amount) is $5,000. The issue I’m having is that most of the MAJOR gifts are coming from individuals who are already board members. They are basically already funding the entire operating budget. They are donating major gifts AND a great majority of their time, so I don’t feel like its appropriate to ask for more. Should I exclude the board members and run the data again without them (it will result in a much different picture)?
Wonderful! Your most active volunteers are almost always your biggest donors. You’re right where you should be. Why would you assume they don’t want to do more. You won’t know unless you ask them. At the same time, work on widening the circle of donors, but never neglect your biggest and best. Keep them on the list and in the mix!
I’ve been working with my current prospect list for about a year now that is drawn from your recommendations of defining who are potential MG donors,, and adding in folks as the year progresses and they become known to me. However, in reviewing your info, I went back and took a more critical look at their loyalty and giving history. Now that I have that year in attempted and realized contacts with the donors, I have a better understanding of who may be the stronger individuals to focus in on, loyalty-wise (especially since I have just finished the next challenge, as well). Good info!
Amy, Thank you for this resource! I found my level $5000. Now to narrow the list to what I can handle.
Hi Amy,
Why do you remove corporations & foundations from the list?
We are fortunate enough to have a database of donors that makes running lists easy!
As a nonprofit that’s only three months old, I find this series extremely helpful. Looking forward to your future lesson on finidng new donors so I can actually create a data base of donors.
I have a question- When looking loyal donors, those who give more than 4 gifts in 5 years, how do I use our large number of monthly donors? Should I exclude those people when running the lust for quantity of gifts?
If you want to separate them out, that’s fine, but for sure include your monthly donors in whatever loyalty efforts you are making. They are extremely loyal too!
This exercise was great for leveraging another reporting type in DonorPerfect (Gift Frequency Analysis). I was able to pull an initial list of over 200 donors with 4+ gifts over a five year period. Now onto refinement!
We use Network for Good. They have many pre-set filter options, but the ability to add about 30 other filters to it. For instance in the last challenge, I simply looked at all of our contacts, there’s a sort button with 5 different choices including highest lifetime giving, so I sorted by that, and then as I clicked on the top 10 donors, each donor has a dashboard that says when their last gift was, whether they were active, lapsed, new, or recurring, how much their lifetime giving amount was, and how much their average gift was. Makes analyzing data super easy!