What’s A Major Gift To Your Organization And How Did You Get There Anyway?

In my blog, I breakdown the hidden major gift fundraising potential for an imaginary organization called Arts Now.  In my example, the organization is raising $500,000 from what they consider are major donors – those individuals making gifts of $5,000 or more annually.  Their definition is based on a subjectively chosen amount of what constitutes a major gift for them.  I also show how through a data-driven analysis, raising a major gift to those at $25,000 or higher annually could result in mission funds of $5,000,000 in a single year!  That's a ten-fold increase just by recognizing that the definition of a major gift was set too low.  Check out my post to see how this was derived.
 

The new benchmarking information is enlightening!  It’s like the old song with the lyrics “you say toe-may-toe; I say toe-mah-toe..”  The study clearly shows that we’re not speaking the same language when it comes to major gifts. 
 

If the well-accepted fundraising formula is true - that 80% of funds come from the top 20% of your donors - then we’ve got to better understand major gift fundraising, support the development officers in this role with an adequate budget for staffing and resources to succeed.  Yet, in my 20 years of experience as a front-line fundraising I’ve seen more than 75% of the fundraising budget and staff attention devoted to lower-end donation efforts such as direct mail and special events.  While these, too, are important ways to raise funds, are they given higher priority because we can benchmark them more easily than major gifts?

I believe that the 2017 Major Gifts Fundraising Benchmark Study points out the dilemma and unintended consequences that exist when we don’t understand “What’s a major gift?”  Read my npEngage post and hyperlink to the study I referenced from there.