Major Gifts

Fundraising is about people, not money. Not that well-meaning organizations don’t continue to make it about money—all the time. Because they do. This truth was on stellar display recently when The Wall Street Journal reported that Duke University had filed a lien on the estate of oil magnate and Duke alumnus, Aubrey McClendon, for the balance of unfulfilled pledges amounting to about $10 million....

Being a major gift fundraiser is one of the toughest careers you could choose. Being a successful one is even harder work. One barrier to being extraordinary in your job is a reluctant CEO or executive director. Conversely, Richard and I have seen amazing CEOs and executive directors who are just waiting on the development team to lead and manage them through the major gift waters, yet the director of development or the vice president of major gifts is not using them properly...

I’ve just reviewed results from three middle/major donor integrated direct response fundraising campaigns that my teams managed for various social service organizations over the last year. The numbers are astonishing! We’ll get to those in a second. First, I want to share some of the negative myths we’ve dealt with around these campaigns, and why…

This keeps getting more interesting. I’m talking about what happens when two idealistic and ambitious Millennials decide to devote tens of billions of dollars to making the world a better place. It almost sounds like a fantasy project—more akin to the augmented reality that Facebook is working on than traditional philanthropy. What would you do…

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his pediatrician wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan, are launching an ambitious effort to spend $3 billion over the next decade to cure disease. The goal is to "work together to cure, prevent or manage all disease within our children's lifetime," Chan said during an event in San Francisco for the Chan…

In 2014, Mike and Marian Ilitch made a $7 million gift to the Wayne State University medical school. But the gift, which is to be paid in five yearly installments of  $1.4 million, came with a condition: If Dr. Donald Weaver, the chairman of the department of surgery, left the university for any reason before…

Apparently, LinkedIn's co-founder wants to add "Trump instigator" to his resume. Reid Hoffman, the co-founder and executive chairman of LinkedIn, pledged on Monday to donate up to $5 million to veterans organizations if Donald Trump releases his tax returns before the final presidential debate. The pledge follows a crowdfunding campaign launched late last week by…

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

Aubrey McClendon graduated from Duke University in 1981 and was the co-founder of Chesapeake Energy Corp. He became wealthy as a Colorado wildcatter in the oil industry, and he and his wife (also a Duke alum) provided significant financial support to Duke over the years. Unfortunately, McClendon died suddenly in a car crash in March…

A librarian who quietly saved a $4 million fortune passed away and left his entire estate to the university where he worked for nearly 50 years. Robert Morin, who graduated from the University of New Hampshire in 1963 and worked as a cataloger in Dimond Library, was known to live simply and loved books, according…