Major donors often provide the bulk of funding for capital campaigns. This means that ahead of your next capital campaign, identifying prospective major donors is essential.
In fact, for many nonprofits, capital campaign preparations focus almost entirely on ensuring the organization has enough major giving candidates and the organizational capacity to pursue them. To help your nonprofit get ready for its next capital campaign, this guide will explore core strategies for identifying promising potential major donors.
The first step in identifying major donor prospects is understanding how much you need to raise, how much you expect each major donor to give, and how many major donors you need. You can accomplish this by creating a gift range chart.
A gift range chart is a capital campaign planning tool that helps nonprofits organize their major donors into giving levels and visualize how many donors are needed at each level. Capital Campaign Pro provides an example of one of these charts:
To create your gift range chart, first determine your total fundraising goal. Your highest gift amount, also known as your lead gift, should be about 20% of your total goal. As you move down the subsequent levels, the gift amount should decrease while the number of gifts needed increases.
While the exact number of gifts and the gift amounts you receive will diverge from your chart, this planning tool can help you understand roughly how many donors you need in total and what their approximate giving capacity should be. It can also help you realize how many prospects you’ll spend your time nurturing.
Almost all major donors start out as normal donors. This means there are likely many major giving candidates already in your donor database (as opposed to wealthy strangers in your community). Your nonprofit just needs to analyze its data to identify them.
When assessing whether a supporter has the potential to be a major donor, look for two key indicators: capacity and affinity.
Giving capacity is the amount a donor is financially able to give. Nonprofit wealth screening can help you estimate donors' giving capacity by identifying these key data points:
Just because a supporter has the ability to be a major donor doesn’t mean they have any interest in doing so. To ensure your nonprofit focuses its attention on donors who both have the ability and inclination to give, assess supporters for their major giving affinity.
Affinity measures a donor's likelihood of making a major gift. A few key indicators for affinity are:
For net new donors, some nonprofits will assess a prospective donor’s propensity, which is their likelihood to give to their nonprofit specifically. Propensity can be measured by analyzing a supporter’s fundraising event attendance, board memberships, and past gifts, though these data points will likely come up in your affinity assessment as well. But keep in mind: most new donors will be acquired during the public phase, not the quiet phase.
Capital campaigns require raising far more money than your nonprofit does over the course of a normal year. For many nonprofits, this means identifying new fundraising sources and expanding their major giving prospects.
One of the ways to find new giving candidates is to leverage your nonprofit’s networks. Individuals who already have some sort of relationship with your nonprofit are more likely to be open to the idea of major giving and are potentially easier to steward than brand-new major donor prospects.
Expand your major giving program by looking into the following network connections:
Many of your board members are likely already major donors themselves or notable members of your community. As such, they potentially have connections to other individuals who might also be interested in supporting your nonprofit.
Ask your board members to explore their networks for potential major donors. Depending on their donation stewardship and solicitation skills, some board members might become an active part of the cultivation process, whereas others may arrange introductions for your major gift officers and hand over relationship-building responsibilities to them.
Local businesses might be willing to sponsor your nonprofit, or, independent of their business, individual business owners may agree to become donors.
Along with leveraging existing relationships, 360MatchPro’s guide to corporate sponsorship recommends researching businesses’ values to find organizations with philanthropic goals that align with yours. Many businesses will openly display their philanthropic values on their website, but also look into past charitable contributions and other affinity markers.
When approaching businesses and other community organizations, ensure you emphasize the benefits of supporting your capital campaign. For example, you might agree to feature the logos of top sponsors on decorations at your capital campaign public launch event or give the business a shout-out on a new program’s website or social, thanking them for their support.
Individuals who have the capacity and interest to make major contributions to nonprofits are often friends with other strong candidates for major giving. Additionally, when a major donor gives to your capital campaign, they are making an investment in your nonprofit and have a personal stake in ensuring that investment succeeds. As a result, some major donors may be willing to introduce your nonprofit to other prospective donors. This can, for example, occur during a feasibility study. When interviewing a major donor, a common feasibility study interview question is “Can you think of anyone who might be interested in this project?”
Maintain strong relationships with major donors, both to secure future gifts and to keep the door open for giving candidate introductions. Whether a meeting with a major giving candidate they introduced you to goes well or poorly, be sure to follow up by thanking both the prospect for meeting with you and the major donor who set it up.
When it comes to identifying major donors, you might default to looking for new giving candidates. However, always remember that your current major donors are your most valuable base of support. When it’s time for your next capital campaign, donors you have strong relationships with may even be willing to increase their support from previous levels.
Continually reaffirm your relationship with major donors at every stage of your capital campaign. For instance, much of a nonprofit’s capital campaign feasibility study involves reaching out to past major donors to assess their current relationship with the organization and whether they would be willing to support a new campaign.
Major donors provide the funding your capital campaign needs to succeed. Before launching your next campaign, it’s essential to check in with your major donors and ensure you have the infrastructure to steward new prospects. Start by analyzing the donors you have, both to secure these existing relationships and identify new opportunities.