A Modern Look at Raising Major Gifts: From Cycle to Timeline

For many years, I wrote and spoke about the fundraising cycle. You know, identify donors, cultivate, solicit, and steward them. Start again, and round and round you go.

But that’s not how real relationships work. Relationships evolve over time. So to be honest, a cycle doesn’t exactly make sense.

Consider Donor Relationships on a Timeline

I’d like to propose thinking about donor relationships instead, on a timeline. The question to ask yourself is, how does the relationship with donors’ progress over time?

A donor’s first gift to an organization is rarely their biggest (although it might be if they only give once).

So in order to increase giving, ask yourself the following question:

What needs to happen to increase the chance of a second gift? (Which is likely to be the same or larger than their first gift.)

The answer of course, is cultivation (relationship building) and stewardship (gratitude and evidence of impact).

Donor Relationships Evolve Over Time

But as a relationship grows, you don’t need to do the same cultivation or stewardship year after year. It needs to grow and evolve. And that’s where many nonprofits seem to be stuck.

In other words, you should not be treating someone who has been giving to your organization for two years, the same as someone who has been giving for ten or twenty years.

The good news is that there’s now technology and AI to help track and manage your donors and the process and more and more is arriving each day (see my post about Momentum).

Let’s assume you want donors giving over their lifetime. How would you treat them knowing that it’s likely that they wouldn’t make a major gift for five or even ten years? And also note that a planned gift wouldn’t be considered until they had been giving for ten years or more.

Donors Always Start Small

There’s often a trigger that starts giving.

• Someone gets cancer and starts donating to their local cancer organization.
• Someone graduates, which sets off giving to an Alma mater.
• You move to a new community and join Rotary or the library board or the PTA.

Initial gifts are small, but they have the potential to grow and evolve as donors get more involved and engaged with your organization.

So instead of a cycle, think of it as a timeline. And in that context, what will you do this year, next year, and ten years from now? How will your cultivation, solicitation, and stewardship change as the relationship grows and evolves?

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this paradigm shift. Let me know what you think in the comments.