Major Gifts Success Requires More Than Good Intentions

    If you want to raise major gifts, you need to get out from behind your desk. You know this already, but so often you are waylaid by other priorities. Suddenly another week has gone by and you haven’t seen a donor or prospect in person. You’ve hardly even made any donor or prospect phone calls. And how could you? You’ve been planning an event, writing a grant proposal, doing prospect research, putting together budgets, attending meetings, attending more meetings, etc.

    In a best practices development shop, you should be aided in achieving your priorities by that wonderful, but daunting thing: accountability. You keep the prospect pipeline moving by tracking activities (prospect and donor interactions) as diligently as you track dollars raised.

    If you don’t do it already, start setting weekly goals for the number of cultivation calls and visits you need to make, how many stewardship interactions, and, of course, how many solicitations you need to make in order to reach goal. Set activity goals for your staff, your Executive Director and even your board members. Make sure these goals are realistic – you want everyone to feel good about meeting them.

    The process of tracking activities is not meant to be punitive. It should be aspirational and motivating. It should build a sense of teamwork. Most importantly, it should keep you focused on donor relationships. It will result in more dollars raised and, heck, you may as well reward yourself and your team if those activity goals are met with a nice lunch or maybe just some M&Ms.

    . Reiterate to Laura the purpose of this document and our agenda for the day.
    2. Determine from Laura: Are there errors, misconceptions in the document?
    3. A discussion of the big themes/strategic issues:

    ECCo
    The challenges will be to (and how do we help her):
    Get a real vision for growth, not just ideas that are”being thrown out there.”
    Set an appropriate fundraising goal.
    Position Laura to be able to successfully execute an ECCo fundraising effort (adequate staffing, managing up)
    Avoid the appearance that we’re prioritizing ECCo over C&R fundraising priorities.

    Internal Capacity
    The staff is limited in numbers and experience.
    Need to be smart about how we allocate (there’ll be quick fixes and longer term strategies)

    What have we learned about how to fundraise at the Field for the next five years while they manage current financial situation?

    What are the key things they can focus on for next steps?


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