Major Gifts

U.S. colleges and universities raised a combined $40.3 billion in fiscal year 2015, with Stanford and Harvard universities each surpassing $1 billion ($1.63 billion and $1.05 billion, respectively)....

Caring for, nurturing and developing relationships with your donors is what major-gift fundraising is all about. If you do that well, the money will follow. Providing your donors with amazing service will set you apart from all the other charities that are clamoring for your donors. Make no mistake; as much as you may not want to think about it, you are competing for the attention of your donors with dozens of other organizations.

Here we go again. Another GOP debate, another Donald Trump demand for a donation to charities in exchange for his presence. We can’t say we were surprised. We had hoped this “strong-arm philanthropy,” as we called it, was done with. But, we knew better. This time was a little different, though. And other candidates played their own roles in the debacle...

In my experience, major donors have a reputation for being untouchable. Communication with this group is often a delicate dance in which few risks are taken due to the high-dollar annual contributions that are at stake. Not surprisingly, there are a few issues with this ultra-sensitive approach to managing your major-donor relationships. The first is…

I was talking to a very talented major gifts officer who had a long track record of success prior to his current assignment. I could tell he was very frustrated. And he felt misunderstood. To put it plainly, he could not get management to understand that without program information he would not be successful....

Do you ever feel stuck in cultivation? Like you’re simply not sure it’s the right time to ask? How can you know when the donor is ready? Figuring out when it’s the right time to ask can be one of the most difficult challenges for fundraisers to overcome. Yesterday, I had the opportunity to coach…

Six years before he died, Himan Brown, the creator of the radio dramas “Dick Tracy” and “Inner Sanctum Mysteries,” signed papers ensuring the bulk of his $100 million estate would go to a charitable trust under the sole control of his longtime lawyer. Now a lawsuit alleges that the lawyer, Richard L. Kay, duped Brown,…

“If you want to milk a cow, sit by its side,” said veteran major gifts fundraiser Jerold Panas in his iconic book, "Asking." Did you know, according to Panas, you’re 85 percent on your way to securing a gift if you can get your prospect to agree to a visit? But how do you get…

Over the last couple weeks, I've listened to major gift officers on why they haven’t done what they said they were going to do with their caseloads. All of their reasons have to do with losing focus on what their primary jobs are: creating and building meaningful relationships with donors...

Three days before Christmas, Boston University was awarded a $16 million grant from the National Institutes of Health for brain-injury research. The funding was supposed to come from a $30 million unrestricted gift from the NFL, but when the study was announced, there was no mention of the league's involvment. Did the NFL back out of the deal? Or was it never involved to begin with? Here's what we know...