Year End Focus On Major Gifts

By Laurence A. Pagnoni, MPA

Fundraisers often refer to the 80/20 rule: that 80 percent of your funding typically comes from about 20 percent of your donors. This rule especially comes into play as part of your year-end drive because it is the optimum time of year to discuss major gifts during your personal donor meetings. These donors are the people whose donations will spearhead your year-end campaign, and they require a much higher degree of personalized attention when appealed to. By Labor Day, you should have finished segmenting your donors and then begin preparing, sometime between mid-October and mid-December, to set up meetings with your largest donors: the top 20 percent of your givers.

Typically I’ll write to or call my top 20 percent and say, “I’d like to meet and update you about the organization and to talk about your year-end gift.” Some donors are so accustomed to it after all these years that they’ll occasionally reply, “We don’t need to meet this year.” However, if that’s the case, I don’t recommend just abandoning the conversation right there. It still behooves you to ask, “What would work for you this year?”  If you feel a year-end gift is just not in the cards from a particular donor, you can still suggest a no-obligation meeting to update them about the organization.

It typically takes more time to secure larger gifts, in part because your donor needs to plan a large gift more meticulously due to its correlation with their year-end tax planning. By the end of the year, if you’ve taken time to work with your donors, they should be ready to make those really big year-end contributions. Given the potential for their year-end largesse, your devoting extra time and planning on your end can prove highly lucrative. Know who your loyal donors are. Communicate with them differently from those who have supported you only once or twice, or whose support is more sporadic. If you treat your loyal donors carefully, you can build an enduring relationship with them that can lead to larger gifts over time.

We welcome your comments about this post on the LAPA blog.

Subscribe
Notify of
guest

0 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments

Related Posts

The CEO as Chief Fundraiser: A Role That Should Never Be Delegated

Our recent posts have lasered in on fundraising perennials–retention of fundraising staff, annual funds, and why donors give.  Another perennial stacks up as equally worthy of thoughtful commentary, and that’s the role of the chief executive officer in fundraising.  

A short definition of a CEO is he or she who makes decisions.  Nowadays, we recognize the value of consensus decision-making, and that’s fine.  But the kinds of decisions I’m referring to are the big ones, decisions such as those made by the captain of a ship.

Read More »
Fundraiser Retention

How To Improve Fundraiser Retention

That disturbingly high turnover rates and low morale plague fundraising professionals is nothing new. Research going back almost two decades shows this to be true.

One study in particular found that the “average fundraiser stays on a job only 16 months.”

In fact, just last year, author Rob Webb called on us to act on fundraising turnover right here in NonProfit Pro.

The past research on turnover was best summarized by our colleague Penelope Burke as follows:

Read More »

The Secret to Why Donors Give

There are many reasons we in the fundraising industry tell one another about why donors give.  They are moved by your mission, they know a board or staff member, they’ve given for years, to name a few.  I doubt that all of them are true, and I especially doubt that they are all true at the same point in the giving calculus for each donor.

Read More »