If you’re still counting calls, visits, and solicitations to measure fundraising success, it’s time to rethink your strategy. Those traditional metrics don’t just miss the mark—they actively harm your chances of securing meaningful, transformational gifts.

That’s because they’re focused on activity, not outcomes. It’s like trying to measure a chef’s performance by how many times they chop an onion, instead of how delicious the meal turns out.

Let’s explore how a risk-adjusted pipeline—a concept borrowed from the private sector and adapted into the Engagement Fundraising Operating System—can transform the way your nonprofit secures high-dollar gifts. I’ll also show you why businesses have been doing this for years, and why it’s time for nonprofits to catch up.

Traditional Fundraiser Metrics: The Trap of Activity for Activity’s Sake

You’ve seen this play out before. Leaders push their fundraisers to hit activity targets:

• “You need to make 20 calls this week.”
• “How many visits did you complete?”
• “How many asks did you make?”

It all sounds logical. After all, more activity should lead to more results, right?

Wrong!

Here’s what really happens:

• Fundraisers are overworked and pressured to “ask, ask, ask,” even when the donor isn’t ready. I call these drive-by solicitations. They feel rushed, forced, and transactional. And guess what? They backfire.
• Best case? You get a gift far smaller than what the donor could have given if the relationship had been nurtured properly. But you probably won’t get another. That one was a ‘go-away’ gift.
• Worst case? You don’t get a gift because the donor feels ambushed. Trust is eviscerated, the relationship is damaged beyond repair, and you never get another chance again.

Businesses call this burning leads. It’s wasteful, short-sighted, and completely avoidable.

Plus, it drives high levels of turnover among your staff—costing your organization uncountable sums of money and lost institutional knowledge.

Enter the Risk-Adjusted Pipeline: A Better Way to Manage Staff & Donor Relationships

Here’s the good news: You don’t have to rely on outdated, activity-driven metrics anymore.

A risk-adjusted pipeline allows you to manage relationships more strategically, focusing on relational elements including donor readiness, engagement, and advancement rather than arbitrary, transactional activity counts that mostly serve to make leaders feel good about their authority over their staff.

It’s about quality over quantity, and it works wonders for high-dollar giving. That’s why the private sector uses risk-adjusted pipelines for relational, high-dollar sales—and you should too!

Let’s break it down.

What Is a Risk-Adjusted Pipeline?

A risk-adjusted pipeline is a tool that helps you assess the likelihood of securing major gifts based on where donors are in their consideration continuum.

This approach accepts the fact that each donor progresses through stages—Why, What, How—at their own pace. The early stage of their decision-making requires that they reflect on their life story connection to your cause, how your cause aligns with their values, and how it satisfies their desire for community (including giving back or finding belonging among like-minded tribe members).

Once a supporter’s Why (their core motivations) has been discovered and brought to the fore so both the supporter and the fundraiser understand them, the next stage is What. Here is where the fundraiser and supporter explore What can and should be funded together and whether the What aligns with the supporter’s Why.

After the Why has been established and recognized by both parties, and the What has been connected to the Why, finally you can seriously start working on How. That involves helping the supporter determine How they can make the investment happen wisely—using assets in tax-advantaged ways.

This approach makes value delivery essential. In order to help a supporter advance (move themselves forward in their consideration continuum), the fundraiser must strategically provide value to each supporter in a way that aligns with where they are in the process.

With that understood, now you can begin to list every supporter that has accepted a roadmap for their own cultivation so they can gain deeper understanding about the problem and how they can be a part of the solution (through funding with assets). Plus, you can define their stage (Why, What or How).

You can also plot a ‘close date’ based on what the supporter and gift officer agreed would be the right time for a decision to be made in the cultivation plan. And, lastly, you can calculate the likelihood of that happening (based on the stage: Why, What or How) and the gift amount you either already discussed with the supporter, or you can use a placeholder until you get more information from them about the amount.

With all of that plotted in your risk-adjusted pipeline you should be able to report:

1. Pipeline Size: How many supporters are actively engaged in the process? If your pipeline is small, your future results will be poor—it’s that simple. If it’s big and growing, you’re on the right track.
2. Risk Adjustment: How likely is it that a potential gift will truly close based on the donor’s stage? Multiply that percentage by the projected gift amount to forecast future revenue. And make sure you plot the amount according to when the gift is expected to close.
3. Pipeline Velocity: How quickly donors are moving through the process? Are they stuck? Moving backward? That’s a signal to dig deeper and adjust your approach. In the example above you’ll notice that the first few rows of supporters in the Why stage are expected to finalize their gifts either this month or next month. That’s a red flag for both the fundraiser and their leadership since it’s unlikely that a gift will close when a supporter is still understanding their motivations, and have not yet begun to determine What and How. So, the close date should probably be pushed back to ensure that the pipeline is fine-tuned for accuracy.

The Role of Complete Qualification

By now you might be wondering, “Where did this cultivation plan concept come from, and how does a fundraiser inspire a supporter to agree to it?” Here’s help:

Before a donor even enters your caseload (thereby adding themselves to a risk-adjusted pipeline), they need to be fully qualified. And that should be a collaborative and extremely transparent process. In the Engagement Fundraising Operating System, this process ensures that donors opt in to work with you on the development of their philanthropic journey.

Here’s how it works:

1. Make Outreach: First you must reach out to supporters who are preliminarily qualified.
2. Conduct Donor Discovery: Next, a fundraiser must learn about their motivations, values, and life stories. This isn’t just about asking questions—it’s about listening deeply and helping the donor connect their Why to your What while recognizing there’s an opportunity for everyone to win a victory, together.
3. Offer an Invitation: Most importantly, the fundraiser must transparently offer an invitation to the supporter to co-create a cultivation plan. This sets the stage for collaboration.
4. Gain Acceptance: When the supporter accepts the plan, they’ve self-selected into your caseload. No surprises. No hidden agendas. Just clarity and mutual agreement on an advancement plan for developing a gift that delivers value to both the donor and the organization (and the community at large).

This process transforms the relationship. To the donor, it feels like they’re taking control of their giving journey (and they are). To the fundraiser, it ensures that every interaction is intentional and aligned with the donor’s readiness. This is Complete Qualification.

Why Businesses Rely on Risk-Adjusted Pipelines

The private sector figured this out long ago. High-dollar sales—think luxury cars, enterprise software, or real estate—don’t rely on brute force. They rely on precision.

Here’s what businesses do differently:

1. They qualify leads early. Only prospects with a high likelihood of closing move into the pipeline.
2. They adjust for risk. Sales teams know not every deal will close. By assigning probabilities, they forecast revenue with incredible accuracy so their investors can see their returns on the horizon.
3. They focus on relationships. Trust is the currency of high-dollar sales. It’s also the currency of major gift fundraising.

It works for businesses selling million-dollar products, and it works for nonprofits raising million-dollar gifts. It’s just that most nonprofits use transactional, low-dollar fundraising metrics to manage major gift performance and that is what needs to end.

The Benefits of This Modern Approach

When you adopt a risk-adjusted pipeline, everything changes. Here’s what you can expect:

1. Fewer But Better Relationships

Fundraisers will stop chasing every lead and focus on a manageable caseload of highly qualified supporters. Less is more when it comes to delivering outsized value to high-capacity donors.

2. Increased Donor Trust

Transparency and collaboration build trust. Donors know what to expect, and they appreciate the care and intentionality you bring to the process.

3. Larger, More Meaningful Gifts

By allowing donors to move at their own pace and aligning with their motivations, you unlock their full giving potential. Together, you work intentionally toward a common goal.

4. Improved Forecasting

With risk-adjusted metrics, you can predict revenue more accurately and plan your fundraising strategy with confidence.

5. Clarity

Finally, everyone can be on the same page including supporters, fundraisers, managers, leaders of organizations and their boards. In fact, with this level of clarity, everyone can work together to add more value in ways that drive advancement further, faster.

Isn’t it Time to Evolve?

I think the days of measuring fundraising success by calls, visits, and asks are over. They should be. Those metrics are relics of a transactional era that no longer serves your donors—or your mission.

By embracing a risk-adjusted pipeline within the Engagement Fundraising Operating System, you can align with the way donors actually think, feel, and act. You’ll build stronger relationships, secure larger gifts, and create a sustainable future for your nonprofit.

The question isn’t whether you should adopt this approach. The question is: What are you waiting for?

Related Posts:

• • • Fundraising is Not About “The Ask.”
    • New and Improved Fundraising Metrics
    • Why Traditional Major Donor Assignment Processes No Longer Work As Well As They Once Did — And What You Can Do Instead
    • Donor Levels – Why and How to Treat Your 3 Tiers of Donors Differently

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