Major Gifts: Measure Your Donors’ ‘Gravity’ It isn’t a donor pyramid.
It’s a done funnel. According to Andrea Wasserman, president of Washington, D.C., development firm Social Profit Ventures, the trick is moving your base of annual donors down the funnel and convince them to make major and planned gifts. Wasserman and former colleague Sarah Schonberg, director of development for BBYO in Washington, D.C., shared some strategies on how to advance annual donors during the Bridge to Integrated Marketing and Fundraising Conference in Oxon Hill, Md. “If you have a large group of supporters for your annual campaign, you should be able to drop some down to bigger gifts,” said Wasserman. “Gravity is on your side.” The goal of a healthy program is to build a donor funnel that can support all fundraising efforts. When BBYO, a Jewish youth organization, took a hard look at its philanthropy program, it saw a problem: Almost three-quarters of the funding was from 11 major donors.
Its solution was to re-categorize gifts based on size. Jeff Jowdy-Major-Gifts undraising: It's a Numbers Game. We are in a numbers game.
To meet a fundraising goal, you need to have the right numbers — gifts that add up to and, you hope, even exceed your goal. While the numbers are a bit different for a capital, comprehensive or other larger campaign (even more top-heavy) and for an annual-giving program, you can determine the typical range of gifts needed to reach your goal. Major gifts anchor any campaign. These are relationship-based and typically built over time. While direct-response fundraising can play a vital role — rounding out a campaign and especially with bringing tomorrow's major and planned-giving donors into the fold — the gifts that anchor a campaign are still built face to face. To be successful, you need enough qualified prospects to be likely candidates for their larger giving levels. As you are benchmarking your campaign or planning for next year's program, how are your numbers looking? Asking Donors for Ideas Can Prompt Them to Give, Book Says - Big Gifts. By Holly Hall Jeffrey Walker, a private-equity investor-turned-philanthropist, says he hates “boring thousand-person fundraising galas.”
So when he chaired the board of the foundation that runs Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s elegant Virginia estate, Mr. Walker decided to use the founding father’s genius in marshalling people and ideas to revolutionize the organization’s fundraising and make it more democratic. Instead of leading big fundraising events for Monticello, Mr. Walker began mimicking Mr. He also borrowed Mr. “I was looking for ways to connect,” he says. Since his first Jeffersonian Dinners, Mr. Ms. Building support for a charity, they write, is like forming a jazz band in which each member has an inimitable sound. “To begin practicing this new style of fundraising, move money away from the center of the conversation,” the authors write. Ms. Why Direct Mail — the More Personal the Better — Will Not Die.
I like e-mail.
I like sending text messages. And I use both extensively. Yet neither of them grabs my attention like seeing someone’s handwriting on an envelope or note card that I receive. This is one reason I don’t believe direct mail will ever die, because it’s how we send each other handwritten notes, cards and letters. And in the nonprofit world, I also believe sending a handwritten note is one of the most effective forms of cultivation available. ... More Suggested Content: On a Personal Note October 13, 2011 From Inside Direct Mail Weekly I know the articles you normally read here are about mass-produced mailings — letters "personalized" using variable data printing and mailed in the hundreds of thousands.
Where Do Profits Come From? The Mindset You NEED for Fundraising Success. Have you ever been so focused on the details of something that you wound up missing the broader message?
We recently co-hosted a webinar with Hubspot on how to market a peer-to-peer fundraising campaign where this exact thing happened. We were so focused on the individual best practices that we were assembling that we didn’t immediately identify the broader theme. Once everything was put together and we took a step back, however, the main message emerged clearly. So what was the distilled essence of all the fundraising best practices we’d put together? To get the most out of your online fundraising campaigns, you need to believe that YOU are ultimately responsible for your own success. Don’t Get Trapped in a Losing Mindset The “responsibility statement” above might seem pretty unremarkable on the face of things, but it actually gets to the heart of a problem that many online fundraisers share. Becoming an Empowered Fundraiser The best online fundraisers take the exact opposite approach. Looking Back: How Does Your (Fundraising Garden) Grow? : Page 1 of 1.
Fundraisers Need to Better Integrate Direct Mail and Online Marketing : Page 1 of 1.