(This is Part 2 of a 2 part post.) If your organization wants to raise major gifts from individuals, you need to do this at the outset:

Hold each other accountable for devoting the time needed for building a set of donor prospects who can give major gifts.
Commit to undergo training in the various phases of major gifts fund raising (identification, engagement, cultivation, solicitation, and stewardship) – Board and Staff.
Commit to acquire the infrastructure needed for major gifts fund raising – for example, donor relationship management software and business arrangements with outside financial and legal vendors to support your gift acceptance practices.

Let’s backtrack for a moment to answer an important question: What IS a “major gift” from an individual, couple or family? Essentially, it’s a gift of significant size compared to gifts from other donors to your organization.* It’s not about how much the donor is able to give or how much they give to other groups, but how much they actually give to your group. A gift to your organization may make one of your supporters a major donor to you, while the same gift to their alma mater puts them in the lowest level gift club.

There’s not one dollar amount that defines a major gift, even for one organization. Here is a rule of thumb for organizations with budgets $1.5M and smaller, just beginning to build a major gifts initiative:

Gifts for general operations, given regularly: $1000 and up (per year)
Gifts for special purposes, given every few years: $5,000 and up
Gifts for a campaign, perhaps with a multi-year pledge: $25,000 and up (total)

Over time, as your organization attracts more major gifts, you can gradually raise your recognition levels to honor donors who are giving more.

OK, let’s assume that your organization has committed to the time, training, and infrastructure expenses needed to start raising major gifts. What’s next?

1) Understand your people assets – volunteers and paid staff. You really do need a team (or even teams) to raise major gifts, and they need to meet regularly, communicate and work together between meetings, and report regularly on their results. Every team should have at least one paid staffer involved, but don’t fall into the trap of expecting the staff person to do most of the work, or even most of the administrative work. Not being a large organization, you will be stretched to establish a major gifts fund raising program – it has to be “staffed” by volunteer leaders, alongside the ED and one additional staffer.

2) Be brutally honest about the state of your organized information – your Donor Relationship Management software. First decide what you want to know about your prospects and donors, and what you want to know about your own activity and results in regards to raising gifts from these donors. If you have an off-the-shelf database that you purchased several years ago and haven’t updated regularly, chances are you need to start over with a new, “in the cloud” service for donor relationship management and tracking. Consider hiring a skilled contractor to help you purchase, install, and migrate your data to the new database. Then provide two or three levels of access – and training – to staff and key volunteers.

3) Spend some quality time with your Gift Acceptance Policy. Most organizations have one of these, but most are out of date or inadequate to serving major donors. Your gift acceptance policy not only sets parameters and requirements, but it can also invite donors to consider the gift of assets they might not have considered otherwise. Updating a gift acceptance policy can be greatly assisted by benchmarking in your peer group of nonprofits – ask some similarly sized organizations to share theirs. You can also use the opportunity to consider expanding the ways your donors and prospects can give to you – for example, you might consider accepting real estate or mutual fund assets or establishing a charitable gift annuity program – each attractive to some major donor prospects, many of whom have sophisticated financial arrangements. You might approach your local community foundation personnel to explore ways to partner in accepting these assets, or talk with a bank trust department, investment broker, or real estate broker, depending on the asset.

If I haven’t scared you away from starting a major gifts program (!), stay tuned for my next post, when I will discuss the amount of time this effort takes, and the quality of preparation for calls on individuals that is needed. As a Board member or a Staff member involved in fund raising, you are part of the most critical resource required for starting and implementing a major gifts program.

My goal is to help you feel relatively comfortable about the decision to start a major gifts program. With a high level of commitment, you and your team can probably do this, at least on some level that attracts more support for your organization, but it’s not a casual or inexpensive enterprise.

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*You may wonder why planned gifts are not included as “major gifts”. It’s a valid question, since many gifts made through donors’ estates are bigger than the levels stated above. One difference is the timeline – “major gifts” are cultivated to be made at specific times during the donor’s lifetime. Major gifts are usually available sooner for your organization than planned gifts. Also, major gifts are transferred to your group irrevocably, which is not the case for all planned gifts, especially bequests, the largest category of planned gifts.