Major Gifts

As a profession, fundraisers constantly spend a great deal of money on training, education and consultants to learn various techniques to improve performance and results. One can never sit on their laurels.

I believe there is a crisis amongst major gift officers all over the world. It’s a confidence crisis that is causing good people, like you, to struggle and lose faith in their skills as well as cause donors to question the mission of organizations they either support or want to support.

Relationships take time. You know that. Your boss knows it. But we ignore time because that is how we have set up things. There is a budget to manage. A forecast to make. So, we go for the fake relationship. One where we pretend to care, but only if we get the money.

There is a major nonprofit that — I know if you heard its name, you would, by all accounts, say, “Wow, what a great organization that is doing such amazing work.” But, internally, the nonprofit has a leadership mess and toxic environment.

Managers and authority figures do not understand that spending the money to give their MGO admin support is the best investment they can make. The fact is that the cost of providing admin support to an MGO actually increases the return on investment (ROI) of the major gift effort.

Almost every good business book over the past two decades has at least one chapter devoted to company culture and making sure you have staff buy-in to the overall vision of the company. But, it's been difficult for nonprofits. Here is how you get there.

Donors want to know that their giving made a difference. That one question alone captures a huge problem in fundraising — a problem you can address in your major gift program.

Your donors probably each has at least five other organizations trying to capture their attention and another 10 to 15 organizations wanting to start relationships with them. So, what are you doing to stand out in your donors' minds, capture their heart and have them always take your call?

If you are in this situation with a caseload filled with non-responding, uninterested donors, then you are wasting your precious time. That is a fact.

If you’ve never done this gut-check exercise, I urge you to do this immediately. Even if you have 150 donors in your portfolio right now — the maximum number of donors in a qualified portfolio — my guess is that over half of them would not pass the gut-check test.