For the illusion of efficiency, it can be tempting to use buzzwords like streamline and aggregate as you work to justify using the same strategies and approaches for all your fundraising, regardless of which donors it is targeting.
The reality is, this will be less efficient because it doesn’t work as well. Efficiency involves both process and outcome. Yes, a uniform process is more efficient. But that’s only half the equation. If the outcome is much worse, the efficiency declines.
The most efficient approach is to target your efforts to each type of donor – low-level, mid-level, and major donors – and approach each category in ways most efficient for them.
This is most true for the category known as major donors. Major gift fundraising is very different from all other forms, and you need to understand these differences if you want to maximize your effectiveness at raising money from this group of donors.
Here are the five biggest major gift fundraising differences.
Relational, not Transactional
To be clear, all forms of fundraising should strive for some level of relationship with the donor. With email marketing, SMS, direct mail, social media, and yes, even phone calls for monthly and mid-level donors, you can do a lot to improve the quality of relationship with all your donors.
But major donors are very different.
Major gifts fundraising is almost entirely relational. With a gift officer, it’s a 1 to 1 relationship, with the gift officer acting as a sort of ambassador from the organization. They are the face of the nonprofit, to the donor. This is the person they talk to, the person they know.
Gift officers, ideally, should not have more than 30-40 people in their active caseloads. The reason is because one person is only capable of sustaining a certain number of thriving human relationships. You can’t do that with 100 or 150 supporters.
In a relationship, not everything is about getting something from the other person.
It’s give and take. You give value. You encourage in-depth conversations. You listen. You seek to understand what this person cares about, what’s important to them, what they worry about.
You wait until you know the timing is right for them to make a gift. And then, you work with them to craft the specifics of the gift so it results in the best possible outcomes for everyone.
The only transaction comes when they actually sign the form and write the check. All the rest is relationship.
Goal Is to Advance Supporter’s Hero Story
Major gift fundraising is, ultimately, not about the organization. This is true even though for most nonprofits, the majority of their revenue comes from major gifts.
But major donors don’t give just because your organization is great. They give because there’s something about your mission and their history or connection to it that captivates, motivates, inspires, and compels them to act.
Giving to your mission matters to them on a primal level. It achieves something profound that they want to see happen in this world.
And that’s why Dr. Russell James and other charitable giving researchers have found that the most important thing you can do in your major gifts fundraising is to focus on helping each donor advance their personal hero story.
Giving is about what they get out of it, because it relates to the kind of person they want to become.
This can be internal or external.
Internally, giving can change how a donor feels about themselves. “This is the kind of person I want to be,” they might think. There might be a relative, friend, coach, or other person in their life who changed the way they think about themselves, about money, about the world, or who pointed them in a direction of life that changed everything, and they want to live that out through giving.
Giving large gifts can arise from all these sorts of experiences. It’s not just money.
Other times, the donor looks for external benefits. This might mean validation from family, coworkers, or customers. It might mean solidarity with others fighting for the same cause. It might relate to changing perceptions of the family name.
But again, the motives here go far beyond just giving money to charity because it’s “a good cause.” People give low dollar gifts for that reason. Few, if any, give major gifts only because of that.
Fundraiser Positioned Properly
As a major gift fundraiser, you are not a salesperson promoting a nonprofit. To your major donors, you want to think of yourself more like a guide, a counselor, or a coach. At MarketSmart, we like the word ‘sage.’ This too comes from Dr. James’ conclusions from his years of research.
If the goal is to help the donor advance in their hero journey, then a sage is the type of person they’ll be looking for to lead them through the perils that lie ahead.
A sage, just like great fictional sage characters such as Morpheus, Obi Wan, and Gandalf, does much more than give advice. They’re not trying to persuade or convince. They’re aware of the deeper emotional and primal drives at work in those they’re leading, and seek to draw those out so the person can realize their full potential and become who they were born to be.
Yes, major giving is like that.
Donors don’t want to be ambushed with constant, desperate requests for money. They want to be supported, guided, and led to places they want to go, but aren’t sure of how or when.
Jim Stoval, a blind Olympic weightlifting champion, went on to write over 50 books. One of them, The Ultimate Gift, includes this gem about philanthropy:
“It is a rare individual indeed who wants to listen enough to understand our philanthropic goals and help us make those goals become a reality.”
In one sentence, that’s what a gift officer is supposed to do. And it’s rare. Your goal is to be rare.
Strategy, not Tactics
These may seem like synonyms, but they’re not.
Strategy is big picture. Tactics is a small picture.
Strategy will look different for each major donor, because each one has a different background, different story, different values and motivations for giving, different levels and types of wealth, and more.
An effective gift officer creates a different strategy for each supporter in their caseload. Then, they implement that strategy using an array of tactics.
Do you see the difference?
Without an effective strategy, the tactics won’t move the needle.
For example, suppose you have a major donor who’s been burned by a previous nonprofit, but cares about your mission and wants to give. But, they’re nervous.
Your strategy must be crafted so it’s clear you respect their past unpleasant giving experience. And, you’ll look for ways to build up their assurance and confidence that your organization will be different. That’s the strategy.
Tactics for implementing this might include in-person visits to your facility, or volunteer opportunities, or getting to meet people on the board or even beneficiaries. It would likely mean delaying asking for a gift.
Those tactics might work beautifully for that donor. But imagine another donor who is in their last year of life and mostly stays at home. They want to leave a legacy gift, and are working out the details for which organizations to give to, why, how, and how much.
Offering that donor in-person visits and volunteer opportunities will be pointless. You need different tactics.
Tactics are driven by strategy.
And the strategy will be different for each major donor and supporter. Do you see how the strategy and then the tactics are going to arise out of the relational nature of your work? You learn what this person cares about and how they live their lives. From there, you’re able to craft a strategy that will engage and deepen their bond with your organization.
Modernize Your Metrics
This is a big one, one of the most overlooked and misguided aspects of major gift fundraising.
So many gift officers have been led to believe – by nonprofit leaders as well as clueless fundraising consultants – that measuring activities is the way to monitor how well your gift officers are performing.
They want you to keep track of things like calls made, emails sent, conversations had, asks, and other vanity activity metrics. Related to these are things like clicks, answers, callbacks, and appointments.
You can track these sorts of things if you want. It’s not going to hurt you. But these are mostly useless metrics, so it’s largely a waste of time.
The more relevant metrics focus on key points in time when a support advances in their journey through what we call the consideration continuum. You could also call it the donor journey, and it has other names.
As an example, calling a donor doesn’t matter if the donor tells you they don’t want you to call them anymore. There’s no future benefit to be found from this donor, so who cares if you get to put a little check under the ‘calls made’ category?
But, if a supporter agrees to have a meeting, or agrees to a second phone call, or requests a special report, these are significant moments because the supporter is now advancing forward. They are taking a step that will result in an increased level of engagement and involvement. They are going deeper into your organization, moving closer to playing a bigger role in your mission.
These are metrics worth measuring, because they tell the gift officer where this person is in their process. With that, you can keep the momentum going and know what to do next.
Which Supporters Are Ready for Major Gifts Outreach?
MarketSmart was created to answer this question.
Normally, it’s pretty hard to know which supporters from among those in your database are capable of giving major gifts. That means much more than just wealth capacity too. They have to want to give. They have to be ready to give. They need to have a reason why they want to give that’s bigger than mere tax benefits.
Figuring all that out takes time, and it’s hard to do for more than a handful at a time.
With MarketSmart, you can determine the answers to those questions for large swaths of contacts in your database, and with all the communication automated.
Your gift officers don’t have to do a thing. Our system automates the process of identifying potential major donors, and qualifying them on a preliminary basis.
With this, you’ll waste less time on bad leads, and have more time to reach out to good leads because the system will show you who is ready for outreach, and why.
With MarketSmart, you can begin focusing on the five core aspects of major gifts fundraising, because you won’t have to devote so much time to the more frustrating tasks of fundraising. And, you’ll only be communicating with high quality leads – people who want to hear from you.
Related Posts:
- How to Deepen Your Major Donor Relationships
- 4 Primal Motives for Major Gifts – the REAL Reasons People Make Transformational Gifts
- Why You Don’t Want Short-Term Results — 4 Reasons (Plus 6 Reasons Why You Want Long-Term Relationships Instead)
- The 7-Step Donor Journey from Stranger to Philanthropic Partner