Major Gifts

Billionaire sister and brother Alice and Jim Walton have explained last week’s $250 million grant from the Walton Family Foundation to aid in building charter school facilities as a salute to their parents’ emphasis on education. “My parents spent a lot of time with us growing up just enforcing the fact that education is what…

Good news for fundraisers everywhere. Giving is up! According to Giving USA’s 2016 report, which was recently released, giving is up across the board. Americans gave more than $373 billion dollars in 2015, breaking the record set in 2014. This might be hard to hear, but if your organization didn’t meet its goal, it might…

The Miami Dolphins donated more than $5 million to the Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center on Wednesday, the largest single amount ever given by an NFL team to a charity. The funds were raised through the Dolphins Cancer Challenge (DCC), which includes fundraising bike rides of varying lengths that end at the Dolphins' stadium. "I'm looking…

It isn’t necessarily your organization’s mission that matters most to ultra-wealthy donors. Some data sets are worth going over twice and making a video about them so that they sink in. This week’s Fast Facts video is one of those data sets. After all, what organization couldn’t benefit from better understanding what factors inform and…

We often are asked our opinions on the ideal relationship between the leader of the development department and the major gift officer (MGO). Here is what we think, organized by category of work on the left and the two roles to the right...

As a nonprofit professional, you’ve likely seen and heard your fair share of nonprofit gossip and fundraising myths. It can be difficult to tell myth from reality, especially when so many nonprofit best practices are just bad pieces of advice that get spun into the truth. But have no fear! We’re about to shatter some…

Almost daily, Richard and I receive letters and emails from readers of our Passionate Giving Blog. They talk about the fact that they are either "the lone voice in the wilderness" or "on their own with no support." Some of the communication is quite hard to read because we can understand the loneliness of some development professionals and the utter lack of support they feel from their managers and leaders...

"What do you mean you lost the check?" the manager almost yelled. "How could you do it? It was $75,000, for goodness sake! $75,000 of someone’s life!" It was not a pretty situation. I wasn’t there, but I heard about it in great detail just a week after it happened. Someone had lost a donor check for $75,000! It was gone. Vanished. Vaporized...

Starting a successful charitable organization relies on the success of one simple action: raising money to support that cause. Whether your charity only needs startup funding or your group will rely on contributions in the long-run, raising money toward a cause is a top priority. Thanks to the prominence of corporations in the media, it…

A defensive Donald J. Trump angrily listed more than two dozen veterans groups that he said had received $5.6 million thanks to his fundraising and personal largess during a contentious news conference Tuesday in which he repeatedly railed against reporters who questioned him. Criticizing the news media at length, Trump demanded that journalists credit him…