Major Gifts

“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...

Donors have a desire to provide real healing through giving. There is a desire to give another opportunity, to give themselves to others. That is really what is going on. Donors are not giving gifts. They are giving something of far greater value. They are giving relationship. You just need to find those real reasons in every donor relationship. Here's how that applies to you and your donors...

We know multimillion-dollar gifts are never anything to sneeze at. But the sizable shift in major-gift amounts from some of the wealthiest donors and their foundations is worth watching. And, according to The Chronicle of Philanthropy’s annual ranking of the year’s top 10 biggest, publicly announced, single gifts, deep pockets were significantly shallower in 2015. We’ve highlighted some of the list’s biggest takeaways...

Twenty-three Chicago nonprofits answered the phone this week to learn they were lucky recipients of basketball legend Michael Jordan’s winning lawsuit. Jordan wore jersey No. 23 during most of his career with the Chicago Bulls. Jordan’s court case began in 2009 when the now-defunct regional supermarket chain Dominick’s used Jordan’s name in an unauthorized advertisement.…

OK, I’m going to tell you something that will blow your mind: You already have major-gift donors who have given you gifts but are not part of your major-gift program. In every donor file we have reviewed, we found major donors who are not part of the organization’s major-donor caseloads. So, where are these donors?...

Your major donor has given in the last month or so, and you now are turning your attention to the donors on your caseload who have not given so far this calendar year. This is good. But you may be missing an opportunity to ask your major donor for another gift. “What?” you say. “Ask again? I can’t do that! It would not be right.” Well, let me present a different point of view...

What would you do if your organization received a sizable donation from an individual who, months later, was charged with a federal crime? Would you keep the donation or give it back? That’s the question facing Hunter College High School in the wake of Thursday’s arrest of Martin Shkreli, a 32-year-old multimillionaire pharmaceuticals executive who once attended the school...

Several of the biggest and richest names in Silicon Valley have collectively put $1 billion behind a new artificial intelligence research organization called OpenAI. "Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return," reads the introductory…