Major Donors: A Guide to Securing Major Gifts
Individual donors are an important part of any nonprofit’s funding. Major donors are those whose gifts have a major impact on the nonprofit’s budget. Finding – and sustaining relationships with – major donors can help a nonprofit thrive. So how do you go about finding major donors for a nonprofit?
How do I find major donors for my nonprofit?
- Major donor strategy. Effective nonprofit fundraisers create and are guided by a major donor strategy for their organization. The major donor strategy will guide fundraisers through all the steps of finding, and keeping, major donors: from prospect research through donor cultivation and donor stewardship. Creating and implementing a major donor strategy includes:
- Defining roles within the fundraising department — who is responsible for doing what.
- Outlining a plan for what will be done when.
- Keeping track of everything from prospect research through donor stewardship, using charts, files, and database software (such as a fundraising CRM).
- Prospect research. A nonprofit’s fundraising (or “development”) staff is often tasked with identifying potential major donors — or “prospects.” The best prospects for a major gift are people who have both the capacity to give a significant amount of money and a history of involvement with your organization (or at least the issue it addresses or the community it serves). A fundraiser can conduct prospect research and then make a chart of top prospects who meet both these criteria. Prospect research is ongoing as fundraisers continually seek out and identify new potential donors to sustain the organization. Ways to research prospective donors include:
- Get to know the people who regularly volunteer at the organization or attend the nonprofit’s events; pay attention to clues that they might have the financial capacity to make a big donation.
- Research who on the organization’s mailing list or in the community has the capacity to be a major donor based on indicators of wealth (e.g., real estate ownership) or philanthropic history.
- Learn who gives to peer organizations or other nonprofits in the community by reading donor lists on other nonprofits’ annual reports or the donor wall at a local museum or other institutions.
- Peruse the zip codes on your organization’s mailing list to learn which constituents or supporters live in high-property-value zip codes.
- Take note of who has contributed to the organization — even in small amounts — consistently over time; it’s not unheard-of for the person who has been giving $100 during every annual appeal for a decade to leave a sizable bequest to the organization, or to say “yes” to a bigger ask as soon as a fundraiser from the organization engages them by inviting them to learn more about the nonprofit over lunch or in a one-on-one tour.
- Some nonprofits subscribe to special software that provides insights about the wealth and philanthropic history of people in the organization’s community.
- Donor cultivation. Taking someone from being a prospective major donor to an actual major donor is the process of donor cultivation.
- Cultivation involves getting to know the potential donor and letting them know more about the organization or projects that need funding.
- Cultivation can involve talking to prospects at the organization’s events, inviting them for a tour (often called a “site visit”), or inviting them to coffee to talk about upcoming projects and programs that align with their interests.
- How to ask for a donation. Once you have identified and cultivated a potential major donor, the next step is soliciting a donation. There are many ways to ask for a donation. These tips can help you prepare for and structure your ask:
- For a major donor, it’s ideal to ask in person; invite them for coffee or lunch to discuss opportunities to support the organization.
- Connect the ask to the donor’s interests and funding priorities.
- Make sure your ask is clear: how much are you asking for, and why?
- If applicable, have a menu of naming opportunities or other forms of recognition available.
- Be prepared for a yes or a no:
- For a no, kindly accept the answer. Later, assess whether it wasn’t the right time or the right ask, but you should continue cultivating this potential major donor – or whether to let them go.
- For a yes, be prepared to receive and acknowledge the donation. Say thank you! And follow up soon with a thank-you email, letter, and/or gift agreement
- Donor recognition. Asking for a donation often involves letting a donor know how they will be recognized for their gift. This could include naming opportunities, which are common for capital projects, endowed programs, and the like; special opportunities for involvement with the nonprofit’s work; or invitations to special events.
- Donor stewardship. After you have identified potential major donors, asked them to give, and secured their contributions, the job of a major gifts fundraiser also involves sustaining relationships with major donors. Stewardship of donors — including acknowledging and thanking them, as well as ongoingly learning about their funding interests and finding opportunities for them to give in alignment with their funding priorities (i.e., building toward the next ask) — is a big part of retaining their support year after year.
Who is a major donor?
There is no fixed definition of a major donor. Instead, fundraisers define what constitutes a major donor at each organization. Often, this is simply a top donor, or any individual donor whose giving has a significant impact on the organization’s budget. One nonprofit might consider any donation over $1,000 a major gift, whereas at another, the “major gift” threshold starts at $25,000. Some fundraisers define a major gift as any gift that feels major to the donor — that is, a gift that is above and beyond that person’s ordinary giving and that feels personally significant to them, whether the gift is $100 from someone who usually gives $10, or $100,000 or $1 million.
- A person who makes a donation that has a significant impact on the receiving organization.
- No fixed dollar amount defines a major donor.
- Defining who is (or isn’t) a major donor is up to each nonprofit seeking funding.
- Major donors have outsized influence in individual nonprofits and in philanthropy as a whole.
What is the role of major donors in philanthropy?
Major donors have a significant impact on a nonprofit’s budget. Beyond that, their role varies. Some major donors are hands-off and trust that the nonprofit knows best how to do its work. They are often just as passionate about the mission as the organization is and want to do what they can to support it. Others give to fund specific programs or projects, or are inclined to offer input and advice, which can take up staff time (sometimes helpfully, sometimes not so much) and can also influence which projects the organization prioritizes, as well as how they execute the work. Some major donors also serve as board members, which means they have a concrete role in organizational governance and decision-making.
In some sectors of philanthropy — for instance, the visual arts and dance — individual major donors are top sources of funding. The arts, in particular, have a storied, international past of individual major donors as “patrons.”
At a broader level, major donors can have a major impact on philanthropy as a whole — and by extension, on entire sectors of a society or even, as is increasingly the case in the U.S. today, the entire society.
There are major donors, and then there are mega-donors. The people who give $1,000 or even $10,000 to a nonprofit may have a significant impact on that organization. But they are in a different category of influence from the billionaire philanthropists who today dominate entire sectors of philanthropy, influencing public policy and changing perceptions on issues that affect huge numbers of people.
As wealth is increasingly concentrated among a very small portion of the U.S. population, a small number of mega-donors impact the entire nonprofit sector and society as a whole.
