Major gift insights from the trenches

What I find myself saying to a lot of chief executive officers is, any donor who is going to give you a significant gift wants to see the whites of your eyeballs. They want to have a relationship with you. They want to hear your vision. They want to know that you are trustworthy. They want to know that you are authentic. They want to know that you’re going to execute. And so the engagement of leadership, just to affirm that we are the right place for them to deploy the good they have in mind, to me is essential…and that extends to our governing board and our foundation board members as well. – Betsy Chapin Taylor

Every single time we’ve been called into a nonprofit organization, higher ed, ministry, advocacy-driven organization, it doesn’t matter. Every time we’re brought it, we’ve heard some version, as have you, Andrew, of, ‘We’ve got to raise more money…But it’s never actually about the lack of availability of money. And one of the things that is always prevalent in organizations that struggle, we found, is culture. Specifically, what is the emotional intelligence quotient, or factor, of folks that are touching the fundraising process? – Scott Koskoski, CFRE

The last obstacle to successful one on one solicitation maybe is the biggest one, even though it’s not the top vote getter, but it’s mindset. And mindset exposes itself when people use uncertain terms to describe the organization’s worthiness of receiving large gifts. – Kent Stroman, CFRE 

High net worth and ultra-high net worth philanthropists are looking for deeper engagement in their philanthropy. The other thing they look for is access, and that means they like to have access to something that maybe is not in the newspapers, maybe is not something that everybody else sits down and gets to talk about. That’s why having experts, we call them accelerators, where we can have an area expert in a certain type of services being delivered, have a direct contact with the mega prospect and get their engagement at a level where they actually talk to the person whose hands are out doing the work. Because, you know, development officers are great people, but they’re not the product, they’re the facilitators. – Bob Carter, CFRE

Donors want more engagement and fewer galas and golf tournaments. We need to think of more creative ways to get donors involved in our missions. More and better donor engagement is important. The advice I’d give to aspiring fundraisers or young fundraisers new in their careers is to be creative, think outside the box, it doesn’t have to be a gala, a walk, or a golf tournament. Get creative with it. Getting people together to do something interesting that they want to do and doing it on behalf of your cause is what’s important. – Lisa Notaro

One of the challenges with fundraising is a lot of nonprofits are doing great work but they have trouble expressing and talking about it in a really compelling way. And when we think about major donors, they are typically self-made, have a lot of wealth, usually from being entrepreneurs or starting their own business or some sort of wealth creation effort. And they get pitched every single day. They get pitched on business deals, on partnerships. All sorts of things. And they’re pitched at a really high level. But as nonprofits, people come in and you might pitch and prepare for talking with this donor by writing out a few bullet points on a note card or thinking through your pitch as you drive to the meeting. But when you compare that to the previous meeting your donor had where she was pitched a multi-million dollar deal or partnership, then you get in there and you’re kind of laying out some points, talking about the good work you’re doing, but not in a really tight, compelling way. If organizations want to be more successful at closing major gifts, they need to have a really tight pitch that’s on the same level as what they’d be doing if they were pitching for venture capital or some really big investment, which is what these donors are used to experiencing. – Trevor Bragdon

We have to come to the table with the donor with open hands and sharing information. Giving them the education that they need because the likelihood is that they are going to give to your organization and this is going to help them in their giving strategy across the board. So I think it’s always important to make sure that we are a source of education. And we know from the Bank of America studies that donors that view themselves as expert donors give more. So when they feel like they’re at the novice level, their giving is somewhere just under $20,000. When they move up that scale to being an expert giver, giving goes up to over $60,000 – $65,000, average giving. And so you can see the tremendous impact of education on a donor’s giving. – Lisa Wolf

This scarcity mindset results in the lack of investment. And I don’t mean investing in, you know, yachts and private jets. I mean just investing in your own capacity so that you can give as much as you can, be the most thoughtful, and you know, very smart, strategic in building on existing needs, understanding community issues, knowing who the right partners are, and understanding the different ways that you can help them…When funders refuse to spend money on overhead or tightly restrict grants, refuse to give core operating support, only dole out grants in one year increments, etc., when they know that the needs obviously require a multi-year strategy this holds back the nonprofit from being successful because they don’t have the resources they truly need to hire the right talent and invest in their own strategy or even increase their fund development capacity. All these things are really important and they’re not nice to have, they’re must have. But there’s the donor thinking that they’re being impactful, but they’re actually hamstringing the nonprofit. And so to me, that’s how a scarcity mindset really is delusional, like you think you’re being prudent or being good stewards of your money by only dolling out bits and pieces. But it’s really ineffective. – Kris Putnam-Walkerly

If I go into a meeting and I’ve talked more than 25% of the time, I’ve talked too much. That’s the thing, the ones that make it in our industry are the ones that are good listeners and good at getting people to share what they’re thinking. It really has to be someone that’s very good at asking questions and very good at letting that donor tell their stories in response. The donor knows the reason you’re there is to help them and the only way they’re really going to believe that is if you take the time to listen versus pitching…If you’re pitching, you’re probably in the wrong business. – Roy C. Jones, CFRE

The good thing is it’s not just revenue growth, but it’s much more profitable revenue because the cost of mining the revenue, if you will, is lower when you’re dealing with fewer individuals and you don’t have a lot of mailing costs and things…I didn’t get it initially. That is, it’s a lot less expensive to retain a donor than it is to acquire a new one. So if you can minimize that negative growth, if you will, that you have to make up for, it’s less costly to do that if you invest in that, and it’ smore profitable because you’re keeping donors you already know, and you’re building a relationship with and growing them, and they’re less likely to leave. – Dan Balena

To me, the biggest issue with campaigns is that people simply aren’t ready. Maybe they’re rushing into the process. It’s somewhat typical, and I don’t know if you’ve ever worked with organizations like this, but when the board and the executive team have conversations and then turn around and say, ‘Hey, fundraising team, now it’s your turn. Go raise the money for what we just agreed to.’ That’s a little backwards…And that doesn’t typically lead to success because you’ve bypassed all of the buy-in, all of the planning, all the relationship development part of getting ready for a campaign. – John Kozyra

As soon as any fundraiser understands that really significant charitable gifts don’t come from income from the checkbook, they come from appreciated assets. And to get the couple sitting across the coffee table from you to stop thinking about how big of a check they can afford to write today, to thinking about things like life events, and milestones, things that happen in people’s lives, that sometimes invite them to allocate assets…And then to turn their attention to the tax implications of those asset allocations, to talk about what’s coming up that’s important to me and the people I love, and to put all of those parts together to help them realize that maybe they can afford that gift. And maybe they don’t have to make that gift today. Maybe the best gift plan for them will be something that happens later, a testamentary gift. We might find a gift that provides somebody an income stream to specifically address a life event. Or, everybody’s favorite, we might find a balanced gift that has a little bit of each. – Dan Shephard

Here’s the one point that a vast majority of organizations miss, and it’s that 93% of major donors will make a gift when they believe that when they give you this gift, that gift is going to make the difference in the life of somebody else. We call that the transformational case…The donor doesn’t really care how much money you need, if they don’t understand: A) why they believe in your organization; and B) when they give you that money, what are you going to do with that money that’s going to transform somebody’s life. – Bob Westfall