2 Great Ways to Qualify Major Gift Prospects and Narrow Your List

If you’re planning to raise major gifts this year or are considering a capital campaign, it’s critical to focus on the right donors. You’ll be far more strategic (and successful) when you qualify your donors.

Qualifying Major Gift Donors is Important!

If you’re not sure who your biggest and likeliest prospective donors are, you’re likely to spin your wheels and waste time. Qualifying donors will help you focus on the right ones and streamline your efforts.

Pareto’s Principle

You’re probably familiar with Pareto’s principle, otherwise known as the 80-20 rule. It means that 20 percent of your donors will give 80 percent of the dollars you raise.

With that in mind, it makes good sense that you should spend the majority of your time focused on the small group of donors who have the capacity and the inclination to support your organization in big ways.

2 Great Ways to Narrow Your List of Prospective Donors

There are a number of ways to qualify donors as major gift prospects. In this post, we’ll examine the two strongest measures. Both are based on acronyms — RFM and ABC.

1. Evaluate Your List According to RFM

Start by evaluating your list based on RFM — Recency, Frequency, and Money.

R – Recency:

How recently have donors given to your organization?

The more recent, the better. For example, a donor who has given in the last 12 months is more likely to give again than someone who hasn’t given in over a year.

F – Frequency:

How frequently do donors give to your organization?

Someone who gives every few years, for example, is not as good of a prospect as someone who gives consistently (annually or monthly). Likewise, someone who gives sporadically, multiple times per year (like responding to multiple outreaches), is also a great prospect.

M – Money:

How much do donors give?

It goes without saying that those who give larger amounts are better prospects than those who give smaller gifts.

In Summation:

The challenge (and opportunity) is to search for donors in your database who score points in all three categories. Run lists / reports of the following donors:

• Recent donors – everyone who has given in the last 12 months.
• Frequent donors – everyone who has given more than once in the last 2 years.
• Money donors – everyone who has given more than $10,000 in the last 12 months.

Look for names that appear on at least TWO of the three reports. These will be your strongest prospects.

2. Evaluate Your List According to ABC

After you have done an initial review of RFM, you can apply a second filter using ABC — Access, Belief, and Capacity.

A – Access

Do you have access to the person?

This question will (should) immediately disqualify people like MacKenzie Scott and Oprah Winfrey. The good news is that people like that won’t appear from your initial RFM screen. It’s likely you’ll start with a solid list of people you have access to because they are your best annual fund donors.

A litmus test as to whether you have access to a potential major gift donor is to ask yourself:

• Do you have their email address and phone number?
• Are they likely to respond to outreach from you or someone at your organization?

That doesn’t mean they need to respond immediately, or every time you email them. However, you need to have enough access that they are likely to schedule a meeting if you are persistent (it often takes more than one or two touches to get a response).

B – Belief

Does this major gift prospect believe in your mission and case for support?

By starting with RFM prospects, you already know they support you in significant and meaningful ways and — therefore — believe in your cause.

C – Capacity

Does this prospective donor have the financial capacity to make the size gift you need?

The question of capacity is the most challenging question to answer. You’ll need to do some basic research. Start with a basic Google search of their name, along with their home and company addresses. Then poke around on social media, including their LinkedIn and Facebook profiles.

If you’re asking for a gift of $100K or more, it’s probably wise to engage a prospect researcher to give you as much information as possible. However, there’s no better research you can do than sitting down and speaking with the person to help determine the right ask amount.

Cultivating Your Donors and Preparing to Ask

Once you have your list of the best prospective donors for your organization, it’s time to start cultivating and preparing to ask.

I find that most busy development directors can manage a list (or portfolio) of about 20 prospects at a time. You might be tempted (or handed) a list of a hundred or more prospects, but that will quickly become overwhelming and cause analysis paralysis.

You can divide a large number of prospects into an A list, a B list, and a C list of prospects. But work to get your “A” list down to 20 names and concentrate on those first.

Get Ongoing Support to Raise the Biggest Gifts

If you’re struggling to learn and adopt the process of raising major gifts at your nonprofit, I created a specialized small-group program called Mastering Major Gifts. The program offers you regular access to me, plus an entire community of fundraisers who are raising major gifts each and every day. You can learn more about our community here:

Click Here to Learn about Mastering Major Gifts »

Gain the support of experts and colleagues from across the country. You won’t find a better group of fundraisers to learn from and celebrate with.

Best of all, your first 30 days are FREE!  This gives you a chance to test-drive the program and make sure it’s a good fit for you.