Major Gifts

Do you keep track of each thing you do with major donors? If you’re like many major-gift officers, you probably don’t record much of what you do with each of your major donors. Well, sit back and watch this week’s video featuring Jeff Schreifels from the Veritus Group. He makes a good case as to why we need to be actively recording all of our moves with donors. And then he gives three tips on how we can make sure we record our major donor interactions.

More and more we are seeing donor files that have a great number of lower-dollar donors and quite a few midlevel donors (depending on the size of your organization, between $250-$9,999), but very few major-gift donors. It’s almost like once donors get in that middle range, they can’t move up. We’re seeing plenty of them moving down or going away entirely, but the funnel up to major gifts is clogged. Something is not happening, and they can’t get up and out.

If Mark Twain was your major-gifts officer (MGO), he might amble into your office, lean his surprisingly slight frame against the doorway (he was just 5 feet 8 inches), brush a fleck of cigar ash from the collar of his rumpled white suit and drawl: "A round man cannot be expected to fit into a square hole right away. He must have time to modify his shape."

The only way to achieve a successful major-gifts program is to work on it consistently, every week, 52 weeks a year (minus your vacation time, of course!). In other words, you have to stay the course in order to boost your nonprofit's bottom line with major gifts.

But don't despair! You don't have to hire extra staff or add 20 hours to your already-overworked week to make major gifts happen. In fact, you — yes, you — can raise major gifts in only five hours a week.

How do you work a caseload of donors when you can’t immediately hire a full-time major-gift officer? There are a few options. None of them is great, but these ideas will help you in the short term until leadership understands that your organization needs to invest in a full-time position or until the caseload is producing enough revenue where you can justify it. Here are three options: the development director works a caseload, the executive director or CEO works a caseload, and board members or other staff work a caseload.

What constitutes a major gift varies by nonprofit and depends on its size and depth of its donor base. A major gift could be as little as $100 for a small, grassroots organization and as large as $1 million or more for a large, established organization.

The first step in your major-donor campaign is to determine how much you think you can raise from major donors. To do that you need to define a major-gift level, analyze your major-gift activity and determine what investments in fundraising infrastructure you're going to make.

Every fundraiser would love to land a transformational major gift. But before you can nail down a major gift, you have to make a proper ask. In the August 2008 issue of FundRaising Success, F. Duke Haddad, executive director of development at the Salvation Army, Indiana Division, and senior principal consultant at G. J. Mongon & Co., broke down "The Anatomy of a Major-Gifts Ask."

A friend of mine recently told me that he wondered why each TED Talk presentation was so good. So he researched the subject and discovered that TED talk organizers actually have specific guidelines for each of their speakers. He sent me the list, and as I looked at it I realized that this list is exactly how a major-gift officer should approach a presentation to a major donor.

Here are 12 things TED speakers are asked to do.

Marketers use stories to draw the attention of a wider audience and to generate interest in your organization. In fundraising, including major-gift fundraising, stories motivate donors to provide financial support. Here are three tips for using stories to boost your organization’s bottom line through major gifts: 1. Facts are important, but emotions motivate. 2. Our stories aren't just for an audience of donors and prospects. 3. Ask your prospects and donors to tell you their stories.

One of the keys to a successful major-gifts program is having passion in your nonprofit organization, which in turn translates to passion in major donors. This past August, Veritus Group's Richard Perry and Jeff Schreifels provided 10 steps to getting passion back into your organization in their feature, "Getting to the Heart of Major-Gifts Giving."