For decades, major gifts fundraising has revolved around a process for working with wealthy donors to raise money. It involved phases like identification, qualification, cultivation, and stewardship. But that process is outdated. Donors have become pigeonholed, catalogued, and dragged through de-personalized systems and processes that make them feel like cash machines.
The heart of fundraising has been lost. Too often, it’s no longer about the people. It’s about the organizations.
MarketSmart is championing a new approach, and our clients are using it with great success. Many of them are earning far greater than our 10:1 ROI Guarantee in revenue from major gifts.
The new approach begins with what we call preliminary qualification, and then transitions into complete qualification. From there, prospects get added to caseloads, at which point they begin developing relationships with your gift officers.
What Is Preliminary Qualification?
So what is preliminary qualification? It happens after what used to be thought of as identification. Now, donors self-qualify by choosing to engage with your organization through internet-based systems such as opt-in forms and surveys that get them added into your supporter database.
Once there, you can begin to nurture and develop the relationship at a pace the supporter finds acceptable. You don’t force them to go where they aren’t ready to go. You don’t demand things they aren’t ready to share – such as information about their finances or personal details about their lives.
You bring them along and engage with them in ways that make them feel heard, valued, appreciated, respected, and important.
In other words, if a supporter says they don’t want to be emailed more than once or twice a month, you respect that and honor their request. With MarketSmart’s Engagement Fundraising automated system, you can work with thousands of supporters at once using this approach, communicating with each one of them in a personalized, responsive manner – while using almost no staff resources. We’re like hiring a gift officer who works 24/7 and requires no HR benefits.
And as you do this, you’re looking for the five elements of preliminary qualification.
Once a supporter has supplied enough information that you can confidently affirm they have met these five qualifications, they are pre-qualified, and ready to move forward in the process toward complete qualification. At that point, you need the attention of a person from your organization – either a gift officer, lead outreach associate, volunteer, or comparable role.
Here are the five elements of preliminary qualification for major donor prospects.
Timing Is Right
Just because a supporter joins your email list and even indicates they have capacity or interest in giving a major gift doesn’t mean the timing is right to do so.
For countless reasons, now may not be the best time in their life to work with gift officers or make a transformative gift. They may be interested, but that doesn’t mean they’re ready.
Through the ongoing communication made possible by MarketSmart’s Engagement Fundraising system, supporters will indicate when they are ready to talk about making a major gift. Until that happens, there’s no reason to devote resources to pursuing them for one – even if they have the wealth capacity to give big.
Our system puts the power in the donor’s hands. They tell you when they’re ready. That means you don’t waste time on leads who aren’t ready to give. And donors don’t get annoyed at being pestered for something they’re not ready to do.
Until donors indicate the timing in their life is right, they are not preliminary qualified.
Reason for Giving
Few people will give a major gift if they don’t have a powerful emotional reason for doing so. No one gives big just for tax benefits. That’s a secondary benefit – and a very important one. But it’s almost never the main one or the only reason people give.
Donors give their biggest gifts when they have a strong emotional bond with your mission, its work, and its outcomes. They care deeply about your cause, and they want to invest in your mission. They want to make your work part of their legacy, a moment in their lives that will define their entire existence. You want donors thinking on that kind of level before you move them beyond the preliminary qualification stage.
With our fundraising automation systems, donors get the chance to explore their own reasons for considering a gift through ongoing automated communication. This is critical, because donors often don’t really know why they care.
They might have an idea of why your mission matters to them, but they don’t fully grasp how meaningful it really is. Given time, they get to explore this in a non-pressured environment with no deadlines. And the system decides when they have clear and emotional reasons for wanting to give.
At that point, they can be pre-qualified as long as they also meet the other four requirements.
Engaged with Organization
People give when they are engaged in some way with the organization. There are numerous ways people can be engaged, such as volunteering on site, volunteering off site, helping with events, serving on boards or committees, promoting your work online or in person, networking, engaging in P2P fundraising, and many other ways.
A supporter who is just consuming information and has a fairly abstract, distant, or detached relationship with your organization is also engaged, but not as deeply as a volunteer or board member.
Survey respondents, social media followers, members, subscribers, and event participants all score as people who are engaged, too.
Once an observable level of engagement is determined, the supporter has met this requirement of preliminary qualification.
Wealth Capacity (Thanks to Intent)
Here’s the one everyone talks about who is still using the old outdated fundraising model. And yes, it matters. If you don’t have wealth to give, you can’t give a major gift.
It’s worth pointing out that we’re looking for people who say they have assets AND are willing to consider sharing them. That’s ‘intent’.
This is a key component of MarketSmart’s turnkey survey platform. It helps supporters consider what assets they have and their willingness to share them using a likert scale:
Permission to Reach Out
Technically, if a supporter has met the previous four requirements of preliminary qualification, you can take a chance and reach out. However, in general, it’s far better to have permission to make outreach to a supporter before you pick up the phone.
When they give you permission, that means they want to hear from you and will not hang up on you or ignore your call. They want to engage with someone from your organization, and have explicitly stated this.
This makes them a ‘warm lead,’ and not so much a stranger. It is a far more enjoyable experience for a gift officer to call someone who has said they want to be called. And generally, the outcome is better too.
What’s Next?
With all five of these requirements met, a supporter is said to be preliminary qualified. Our system will help these people identify themselves so you won’t miss it when this happens. This matters because the timing might not be right a year from now. You want to jump on the opportunity when a supporter says now is a good time.
Once a supporter has been pre-qualified, you can prepare to make outreach and begin nurturing them through the complete qualification process. With this approach, your gift officers almost exclusively interact with warm leads. It’s more productive, more efficient, and best of all, more fun!
This approach is far simpler to understand than the old model, which in various forms had as many as six stages. Our approach has only three. Once they’re in the caseload, the donor remains there until they ask to be removed. The caseload management process includes first-time major donors and repeat donors being stewarded toward future gifts, including planned giving.
See a video showing how fundraising automation works
Related Resources:
- 6 Reasons Why Major Donor Prospects Ignore Your Outreach Efforts
- A Good Problem – What to Do If You Have Too Many Pre-qualified Major Donor Prospects
- The 4 Habits You Need to Develop for Productive Major Donor Outreach
- How to Gain Trust of Major Donors and Be Accepted As Their Guiding Sage
