Why Traditional Major Donor Assignment Processes No Longer Work As Well As They Once Did — And What You Can Do Instead

Greg Warner

September 18, 2024

It’s amazing how many so-called best practices get fixed and set in place, and then never questioned from that point on. Look up anything about the major gift fundraising lifecycle or perhaps the major donor journey, and you’ll find variations of the same old mantra.

For decades, most people involved in the raising of major gifts agree the steps of the donor lifecycle have been – in this order:

1. Identification
2. Caseload population (assignment)
3. Qualification
4. Cultivation
5. Solicitation
6. Stewardship

That’s what has become the generally accepted progression fundraising operations must manage in order to ‘move’ supporters to make big contributions.

When I first learned about this I wondered, “When does the donor have any say in this? Do they get to opt-in and decide whether they want to be assigned and ‘moved’? And if not, why?”

But later I realized there’s another issue besides the absence of donor permission and participation. A much bigger issue.

What if that traditional approach doesn’t work very well any more?

I first realized this problem in 2009, when I began to make more money than I ever knew possible. The marketing agency I had started one year earlier took some gambles related to how we got paid. We were only paid on results. For one of our clients that meant we’d get paid a percentage of the increase in revenue and profit we helped generate.

It was an unorthodox and risky way to run a marketing agency. But it led to some really big paydays for me, and great results for my clients.

When the big checks came in, I felt an urge to give some of my earnings away to help others. My gifts were major to me but not the kind that would necessarily warrant a call or a visit from the organizations I was donating to.

But soon, I realized that the more I gave, the more my beloved beneficiary organizations sold my name to others (their competitors), and the more all of them solicited me with mass marketing. Sometimes I’d even get 9X12 envelopes with fancy proposals for five figure gifts.

Later I found out that my wealth screening profile recommended fundraisers start me off with an initial ask of $50,000—an insane figure.

I started helping one of my favorite nonprofits alter their approach for free and quickly was referred to others. A couple of years later I stopped providing marketing support to private sector businesses and pivoted MarketSmart to solely support nonprofits. Now, our entire business is devoted to helping nonprofits engage, connect with, and eventually develop meaningful relationships with major donors that result in long-term partnerships that benefit both the donor and the organization.

We obsess over this. It’s all we think about.

And the longer we’ve done it, the more we have found the traditional approach to major donor caseload assignment to be inadequate. And since assignment happens so early in the process, everything that cascades after it costs organizations untold amounts of money.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Fundraising operations can become more efficient and effective. But before we get into that, let me first layout the challenge.

Why the Old Major Donor Assignment Process Falls Short

A full explanation of this would take too long for a short article, so here’s my best attempt at summarizing it:

1. The donor lifecycle outlined above is too organization-centric.
2. It primarily focuses on what staff do (activities), instead of on where supporters are in their consideration continuum related to sharing their wealth — and what value they want to gain at each stage.
3. It ignores the donors’ timing and encourages ‘moving’ them to satisfy the needs and timing desires of the organization.

Consider this over-emphasis on activities, such as:

• How many people did you call this month?
• How many conversations did you have?
• How many visits did you have?
• How many presentations did you make?
• How many proposals did you send?
• How many solicitations?
• Etc.

Alternatively, imagine focusing on your supporter’s needs and acquiescing to their consideration continuum. From that perspective, their needs (including timing) include:

• Why do they care, what’s their motivation for giving, and why might they consider sharing?
• Where are they in their consideration of a gift?
  • Never
  • Not right now but maybe someday
  • I’m considering it
  • I’m seriously considering it
  • I’m definitely going to do it
  • I need your help now
• What funding opportunities might they want to support? And why?
• How might they want to provide support? With assets or cash? And how can we facilitate that?
• What value do they want offered to help move themselves forward at each stage in their consideration continuum and make a decision that’s right for them at a time that makes them feel comfortable?

Organization-centric, activity-oriented fundraising isn’t working as well as it once did. It’s no longer a coin-operated, transactional process. It isn’t just a numbers game. The people in your database are human beings, not targets.

Sure, the old system will drive activity (calls, visits, and asks) and that will bring in some money. But, more and more it seems to be driving donors away, and driving fundraisers out of the industry. If you’ve got low donor retention and high staff turnover, could it be caused by this traditional orthodoxy? I think so.

I’m not alone. Dr. Russell James (the foremost researcher in our field) says it’s driving donors to give to donor-advised funds and family foundations instead of worthy organizations like yours.

The cost of tradition and orthodoxy.

Let’s consider the cost of those six traditional steps and the measurement of performance based on activities.

Identification

To identify potential major donors, you have to scour databases, generate or purchase wealth screening, RFM, or predictive AI reports, analyze the data, and try to find needles in the haystack who might be worth your efforts to contact them — never mind whether they are ready and willing to to engage.

That’s a lot of activity and money spent on human resources staring at screens and not talking to actual supporters.

Caseload Population (Assignment)

Next, you have to decide who ‘might’ be a good prospect for giving at a high level. Without any donor input, that’s not easy.

Qualification

Once assigned to a gift officer’s caseload (you might also call it a portfolio), a gift officer has to determine if they’re qualified. At this stage, they have to make outreach and finally gather the supporter’s input and feedback. That might require several phone calls, emails, and the use of other channels just to make contact. It could even take a year or so!

If you’re lucky enough to get a response quickly, you will finally be involving the donor in the process. But, according to the research they will only be interested in moving forward with a relationship one third (⅓) of the time. That means two thirds (⅔) of your time spent on prospect identification and qualification is mostly a waste of time (and a waste of past donor dollars).

Cultivation

Next, once you’ve qualified someone (and they qualified themselves by explicitly opting into the relationship building and gift consideration process) you have to win their trust and nurture them along until they become ready to share their wealth.

Now your activities include calls, meetings, calls, emails, calls, meetings, emails, and calls. And texts. And often, getting ghosted and ignored. Gift officers LOVE this part. Right?

More time is spent, costing your organization more money. And all the while, your gift officers live in fear because they haven’t asked most of the folks in their caseload to give yet. They worry that they’ll get fired. And in some cases they do. Then a new gift officer has to start the process over again to rebuild trust.

Solicitation

As the famous saying goes: If you don’t ask, they can’t give, or something like that. Depending on your fundraising shop’s culture, gift officers might feel compelled to ask. And if they’re not reaching their activity goals, they might keep on asking. Even after the donors say no. Because eventually, they might say yes, right?

If your leadership is tracking activities they’ll ask, “How many asks did you make this month, [YOUR NAME HERE]?” And you might feel driven to do even more activities, even though it feels, in your gut, like you might be driving potential funders away.

The number one reason why people give isn’t because they were asked—it’s because they were asked for the right gift, by the right person, at the right time, for all the right reasons (ones that resonate with their life story, values and desire for a sense of belonging and meaning).

Stewardship

All this activity does result in some major donors. And for those, you will prove that you did what you promised with their money. That’s hard work that involves yet more activities—usually absent donor feedback.

Now, let’s take a pause here.

Do you feel the stress?

Just reading the costs (time and money) related to those six components is stressful. And yes, our description is a bit of an exaggeration. But the point is that the absence of opportunities to provide feedback and gain involvement on their terms is why so many donors drop out of giving altogether or give to their donor-advised funds (or family foundations). And it is why gift officers keep quitting the industry or looking for a better opportunity at another organization, only to find it’s the same thing wearing different clothes.

Again – there’s a lot more we could say about why the old system doesn’t work as well as it once did, but that’s a good start.

What’s it missing? Why isn’t it working as well as it once did?

Here are the challenges:

Again, the traditional approach is organization-centric, rather than donor-driven and based on where supporters reside in their consideration continuum.

Also, here’s another big concern. It mostly employs quantitative data (past giving and wealth screening) often supplied by speculative and out-of-date ‘big data’ sources, not qualitative data directly from your supporters (which is outlined below).

It’s activity-based, instead of relationship-based.

It satisfies the needs of your organization and its leaders more than the needs of each potential benefactor. And now, after years of study, refinement, experience, and seeing what actually works for the organizations using our software and that we speak to in demonstration calls, we have arrived at a new understanding of the major donor lifecycle.

Here it is.

Introducing A More Effective and Efficient Methodology

This approach doesn’t have six components. It has five. Don’t you feel better already?

And guess what? You only have to actively manage three of them! You can outsource the first two: Engagement and Preliminary Qualification.

1. Engagement

This should never involve asking for money—ever. Rather, it should involve offering something of value. Doing so builds trust. It shows that you care about them, not just their money. I wrote an entire book about this, in fact, titled Engagement Fundraising. You can get it here for free in a variety of formats including audiobook.

2. Preliminary Qualification

In a donor-centered relationship, you don’t qualify a donor for major gifts. You allow the donor to qualify themselves. At their own pace. On their own terms. Why?

Because when you don’t do it this way – as in the traditional framework – the likelihood that potential donors will ghost you and run away increases. They know you’re trying to force them to make decisions they’re not ready to make, and that makes them recoil.

Even simple, low-barrier decisions like taking a phone call will feel to some potential donors like too great a step. They hardly know you. They know you want their money, so unless they see any other reason to have a call, they fear they may feel pressured to do something they’re not ready for.

Instead we recommend allowing donors to self-qualify at their own pace using discovery technology (at scale) to monitor their progress (also known as ‘advancement’) by tracking what we call their ‘digital body language.’

Essentially, you’re looking for four out of five different boxes to be checked off:

A. Timing

Does this person feel like the timing in their life is right to consider a gift? Until they feel the time is right, there is almost zero good reason for you to ask for a gift. They’re not ready. Doesn’t matter how much money they have. They’re just not ready, and there are a thousand reasons why this might be the case – most of which have to do with your nonprofit.

By allowing donors to self-report through surveys, automated email communication and online click engagement when the timing in their life is right to discuss a major gift of assets, you can let them progress at their own pace without involving them with any of your gift officers.

B. Reason for giving

No one gives unless they have a reason to give. When gift officers try to pressure a gift because they have a quota to meet or a boss to please, but the donor doesn’t have a strong, emotional, intrinsic motivation for making a major gift, what happens? At best, the donor gets a guilt-trip icky feeling inside that makes them feel like they have to give. So they offer a relatively small, cash, ‘go-away’ gift. But it leaves a sour taste, and most won’t be back after that.

Donors need a personal, emotionally resonant reason to give. In fact, many times their timing drives that reason.

And with automated communication and surveys, you can allow them to reveal when they have a reason for wanting to engage more deeply in consideration of a major gift of assets, and what that reason is.

C. Engagement level with your organization

Preliminary qualification requires a potential donor to be involved in your organization in some way. It could be through volunteerism. It could be as a monthly recurring donor. It could be helping with live events, or advocacy, or various other things. It might even be with reading your content or engaging at arm’s length with your social media.

Essentially, you want to see evidence of involvement before you consider a person qualified for outreach from a gift officer.

D. Giving you permission

This is the only box you don’t necessarily need checked off before making outreach. If all four of the other components exist your supporter is likely to be receptive to your outreach. But, if they do give you permission to reach out to them then you’ve really got something special happening.

You can certainly make outreach if they are engaged, said they have a reason for giving, and signaled that the timing is right. But if they also grant you permission, then things are likely to move much more smoothly.

Gaining permission can happen if you employ automated donor cultivation. Then, as long as you have the right technology, outreach-ready supporters will raise their hands or arrange a meeting with you or your staff when they are comfortable and interested in connecting more deeply to explore how they can gain value from you as their facilitator and guide.

E. Wealth capacity

For too many nonprofits following the old, traditional methods, this is the only thing they look for when identifying people and assigning them.

“Got money? Let’s talk!”

“No thanks,” says the donor.

While having money is obviously a requirement for making a major gift, it’s just one of five of the preliminary qualification components of our contemporary donor lifecycle.

Introducing the Prioritization Pentagon®—your modern preliminary qualification decision model.

NOTE: This is what you get from MarketSmart if you implement our tech-enabled system.

3. Complete Qualification

Once a donor has signaled all five elements of preliminary qualification (or at least four), they are now ready to be assigned for complete qualification. Here is where actual people from your organization will get involved.

Wait, what do you mean, “actual people”? Who’s doing all the preliminary qualification steps?

Believe it or not, you can automate the entire preliminary qualification process. All of it can be done with AI-guided software using email communication. The system engages each supporter with messages that resonate. It’s personalized based on their responses, so they feel like it’s a real person. Yes – they do not know the difference. It’s that good.

Plus, they appreciate the fact that you are not spending their past gifts on hiring staff to do this time-consuming work for hundreds or thousands of people. Yes, they want it done. But they don’t want to invest in the high cost associated with you or your staff doing it manually.

This is what MarketSmart makes possible — more efficiently — for large and mid-size nonprofits. (And it works so well we have a 10:1 ROI Guarantee. Yes, you read that right. Ten to one).

That means you can conduct preliminary qualification with hundreds or thousands of people – all at the same time. And this is why you don’t need the traditional identification step as much as you once did. Sure, quantitative identification research makes the qualitative data captured by this modern methodology even better in some cases. But, if yours is like most cash strapped nonprofits, the question is about cost and ROI. And by inserting prequalification into your operation you lower cost and increase ROI. Who wouldn’t want that?

After being preliminary qualified, here’s what happens next. And this may involve just a few hundred donors at any given time. But it’s money well spent because its expense is focused squarely on the people who have qualified themselves for outreach, or arranged a meeting with you or your staff on their own.

Outreach

A gift officer or other qualified person at your nonprofit (even a volunteer) will reach out to the preliminary qualified donor. This outreach can happen through a variety of channels, such as:

• Email
• Social media
• Text
• Phone
• Other methods the donor prefers, such as video chat

There is a whole set of skills related to effective outreach, and we’ll soon have a book out on the subject. For now, you can learn more about this often overlooked skill from this webinar recording or free report.

Discovery

Once outreach has succeeded, the gift officer begins to build a human relationship with each potential major donor. Your goal here isn’t to get a gift though. You’re completing the qualification process.

Your goal is to understand them. What’s their story? How does it entwine with your mission? Why is your organization’s mission important to them? What matters to them? What do they care about? What do they want to change in this world that you can help them with?

The discovery process could go on for months and involve multiple meetings. Or, in the case of an eager donor who makes it clear they’re ready to move forward, it can take place all in one meeting.

Invitation

When you sense the supporter is ready, you invite them to the next step.

Which is still not to make a gift!

At this stage, you’re simply inviting them to consider going on a journey that might result in a gift, but a gift that will be most meaningful and impactful for them. You offer to show them a path they can take by promising to develop a Roadmap® that calendarizes their potential engagement and exploration experience. It details how they might lean in to examine your organization’s effectiveness and gain deeper understanding of how they might find meaning through giving, so they sell themselves the numerous ways they can change the lives of people impacted through your organization.

Here you’re inviting them to develop their cultivation plan with you.

After they revise the draft Roadmap® with you and put the agreed-upon engagement experiences on their calendar, you can consider the plan to be ‘accepted’. Then, finally, they can be added to your caseload since they clearly opted in knowing that they’ll be developing (that’s why it’s called ‘development’) a potential major gift of assets with you as their guide for advancement.

After all, this is what fundraising is all about—development and advancement, right?

At last, your modernized Complete Qualification Quadrants®.

4. Caseload Management

Caseload management is where you work through the cultivation plan your donor agreed to undergo with you. That begins with further nailing down their ‘why’, followed by uncovering ‘what’ they would like to support, and wraps up with determining ‘how’ they would like to provide funding.

With this approach, ‘the ask’ will be merely a formality because the donor has already indicated they want to consider giving and has gone through the process to this point. In fact, in most cases, you won’t have to make an ask in the traditional sense.

Usually, using this donor-driven process, when you get to the predetermined decision date they agreed to in the Roadmap®, the donor will have already made up their mind and you’ll know all about their decision including the amount they want to share and all the other details. You won’t need to ambush them with a proposal because you already developed it with them.

This component also makes it so you know what kind of stewardship they want. As a result, you will be able to more easily sustain and continue to deepen the relationship. This way, a donor could remain in your caseload for decades and you won’t always have to be on the prowl, looking for new donors.

Using the traditional system, only a portion of ‘donors’ in a gift officer’s caseload may ever actually accept outreach and even fewer will make a major gift.

But, in the new system, nearly 100% of them will give (and give bigger), because you have altered the terms by which a person gets added to a caseload. The donors decide. Thus, gift officers spend far more time doing what they love to do – building relationships with people who want to give, and helping them through the process of making those gifts.

How refreshing is all that?

Finally, a Caseload Management Triad®.

5. Stewardship

Now that you know how they want to be stewarded, you can more easily right-size your stewardship efforts precisely in line with their wishes. And, as long as you make good on your promises and deliver value in line with their expectations, you’ll be exponentially better positioned to go on another journey with them soon.

Usually the next gift will be bigger, too. Plus, they’ll tell their friends about their value-oriented experience, and encourage them to work with you on developing a gift, too. That drives operational efficiency since referrals usually come along having already pre-checked the five components of the Prioritization Pentagon® .

How to initiate the process

How do potential donors begin that preliminary qualification process?

With MarketSmart, that process – and preliminary qualification – begins with an engagement offer MarketSmart deploys on behalf of your organization, such as a survey which encourages feedback. Believe it or not, there is pent up demand for this among your supporters. By now, most are sick of solicitations and happy to provide feedback, instead.

Through a survey, they can opt in to benefit from cultivation using a variety of methods. A survey can be offered via email, posts on social media (including retargeting ads), using pop-ups on your web pages, through regular mail, as part of your newsletter, at live events, and in many other ways depending on your organization.

But the key is – they opt in to receive communications from you. Then, if you use MarketSmart, our automated system delivers all the cultivation communication that is needed to drive preliminary qualification.

Is this better than your current system?

Yes! It’s, in fact, way better. See what some of our nonprofit clients say about it.

And, you can sign up for a free, no pressure, purely educational demo to see how our system works.

Related Resources:

• • Don’t Just “Find” Donors; Build Relationships for Lasting Impact
  • How Many Major Donors Are You Overlooking Right Under Your Nose?
  • What Is Donor Identification? Major Gift Fundraising Fundamentals Series
  • What Is Donor Qualification? Major Gifts Fundraising Fundamentals
  • Major Donor Retention – What’s Holding It Back?

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