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As a nonprofit organization professional, you understand the prominent role major gifts play in your organization’s ability to further its purpose. Major gifts are the largest single donations an organization receives, alongside planned gifts. A vital resource for nonprofits of all sizes and in all verticals, major gifts help fund the projects and programs that impact your community.
In this guide, we'll walk through the basics and benefits of major gifts as well as the best strategies for soliciting them. Let’s get started.
From a donor's perspective, major giving is the act of making a significant donation to a nonprofit. However, on the nonprofit side, it’s a bit more complicated than just depositing a sizable check. Major gift fundraising encompasses the stewardship, solicitation, and cultivation processes of donating.
Aside from bequests and other planned gifts, major gifts sit at the top of the traditional donor pyramid and tend to be relatively scarce. Excluding these planned gifts, major gifts are the largest donations your organization receives in any given year.
In action, major gifts are incredibly varied and can take a wide range of forms. There are five main types of major gifts:
Major donors often have varied financial situations and preferences, so it’s important to accept all of these types of gifts. Giving donors options makes it more likely for them to find a suitable option and ultimately make a major gift.
From one organization to the next, the definition of a major gift is almost always unique. For example, a nonprofit that is just starting out might count anything over $1,000 as a major gift, whereas a larger, well-established organization might only consider donations of more than $10,000.
For your own nonprofit, you’ll have to review your gift history and donor database to determine what constitutes a major gift. To determine your organization’s range, follow these steps:
Once you move your estimate from the theoretical to the concrete, you can adjust as needed. For instance, if you notice that your fundraisers are converting nearly all of your prospects into donors, your major gifts minimum amount should likely be higher. To make the most of your major gift efforts on an ongoing basis, track metrics like the conversion rate and amount raised, and adjust your minimum as needed.
While your major gifts program is essential to your nonprofit’s fundraising success, it should be one part of your fundraising strategy. For many nonprofits, major giving can often be paired with other types of giving on the donor pyramid, including annual giving, capital campaigns, and planned giving:
How your nonprofit integrates these types of giving will depend on your nonprofit's current situation. In any case, your nonprofit should leverage some combination of major donor fundraising, capital campaigns, planned gift cultivation, and establishing an annual giving program to create a sustainable fundraising strategy.
Before you can go through the major donor acquisition and retention processes, you have to find your prospects. For every four or five qualified prospects, your organization will typically be able to secure one major gift. To build a qualified prospect list and secure these donations, you will have to know what to look for.
The best major giving prospects have:
To assess whether someone could be a good major giving prospect, some indicators of their capacity and willingness to give include:
Your major gift prospects are going to be incredibly valuable no matter how much you expect them to give, and your cultivation, solicitation, and stewardship of them should reflect that idea.
A major gifts officer is the leader of a nonprofit organization's major giving efforts. Smaller nonprofits may have just one major gifts officer who handles most of the research and cultivation duties, while large organizations often have multiple staff members on their major giving team.
Major gifts officers should be experienced fundraisers who have backgrounds in major and planned gift fundraising. They’re persistent, goal-oriented, and driven by donor needs. When you find someone who balances that combination of skill set, qualifications, and personality characteristics, you’ve found your major gifts officer.
It’s estimated that the top 80% of nonprofits’ individual donation revenue comes from the top 20% of donors. While the exact percentages fluctuate, the principle remains constant. In general, when you implement a major gifts strategy and begin to secure major gifts, your fundraising numbers will quickly climb.
Here are some of the specific benefits of major gifts:
When someone has the means to give a major gift to your organization and a strong enough philanthropic connection to your particular cause to follow through with the process, that person should go on your prospect list. To start your search, you'll begin with your existing donor base. As long as you keep track of donor data in your CRM, you'll be able to sort out the major giving prospects from your list of donors.
Before you can successfully ask for a major gift, you have to cultivate a relationship with the donor. Donor cultivation is the process leading up to the ask, while solicitation is the process of making the ask itself.
To cultivate major donors, follow these steps:
All of these activities will help your organization start building a relationship with your donor prospects. Building relationships creates the necessary motivation for supporters to give major gifts to your organization.
After you’ve done the hard work of cultivating a relationship with a major donor prospect, it’s time to transition to the solicitation phase. While asking for a large amount of money might seem intimidating at first, following the five steps below will make your major gift solicitation easier and more effective.
When it comes to an ask of this magnitude, major donors (like anyone!) appreciate the little things that prove that you've been listening and paying attention to them. You can ensure that your team shows major giving prospects just how well they know them by:
During cultivation, your fundraisers spend a good amount of time conversing with and meeting with the major gift prospect. Track all interactions in your CRM to ensure that the ask itself is coming from the most well-informed angle possible.
In most cases, you’ll solicit major gifts during an in-person or virtual meeting. Occasionally you can get a donor to commit through a written major gift proposal, but having a conversation allows the prospect to ask questions and helps you work together to find a solution that benefits your organization and the donor.
Even for a meeting, writing out your solicitation in proposal format can help you get your thoughts on paper and make the ask go more smoothly, plus it can serve as a leave-behind for the donor’s reference. If you don’t write a full letter, at least jot down some talking points or a brief outline of the conversation to prepare.
Physically stating the ask is a bridge easier crossed when you have a specific dollar amount in mind. Using calculations and formulas, combined with the knowledge you gained during the cultivation process, your team should be able to determine a specific ask amount.
Most major donors want to know exactly how their contributions will be used if they choose to give. Give the donor agency by suggesting a few areas of your organization they could donate to, but try to encourage them to give to the program or project that needs the funding most.
It’s easy to slip into default pitch mode during your solicitation meeting, but you’ll need to be able to adapt your presentation based on their reaction. Part of this is engaging the prospect in a true dialogue—your solicitation will have a much bigger impact if you make the meeting a conversation.
Talk to your prospect about their:
Let their responses frame your conversation. Successful solicitations should be donor-centric, because, at the end of the day, this process is all about the donors.
Much of the discussion surrounding major gifts solicitation is about how to handle that ask, but there's also the transition stage from ask to stewardship. How you go about that process can affect the way your brand-new donor sees your organization and considers making future gifts.
Donor stewardship is the relationship-building process with donors after they've made a gift. While it should always involve thanking donors for their gift, it can (and should) also include a range of additional activities, such as phone calls, personalized letters, event invitations, and volunteer opportunities.
In each of these activities, focus on regularly acknowledging the impact your major donors can have on your organization and purpose. However you choose to steward your donors, you should put your major donor solicitation strategies and goals into a clear plan for future reference.
Ultimately, major gifts can make a significant difference in your organization’s ability to further its purpose. However, because of these donations’ size, it's important that you take the time, invest in the tools, and dedicate the resources to implement a detailed strategy for identifying, cultivating, and stewarding major donors.
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