3 Basic Steps for Improving Your Major Gift Upgrade Strategy
There’s an art to it: keeping your focus on the relationship, knowing how to motivate and inspire, creating opportunities to engage, matching the right donor to the right moment. But to get there—to find the right donor, I like to think that science has a role to play. Whether identifying audiences or developing engagement tactics, data and analysis are a fundamental part of planning your approach to major gift upgrades.
So how do you put this science into practice? Let’s break it down into three key steps, starting with identifying the right donors for a major gift upgrade.
Identify
Employing your own donor data in combination with external modeling and capacity screening is a powerful and effective way to identify annual giving donors for upgrade to major giving.
Start with your own donor database. Through identifying likely audiences using key data points and testing those prospect groups, you can begin to uncover the most successful indicators of upgrade among your donors. Some common data points I usually consider include:
Longevity: how long and how frequently has the donor been giving?
Largest: has the donor made a gift that is approaching your major gift threshold?
Latest: has the donor maintained and expressed their ongoing interest by making a gift within the last 12 months?
Participation: has the donor engaged with your organization beyond giving—as a volunteer, by attending an event, by downloading digital program content?
With your own data in hand, then look to data from external sources. External sources could include upgrade likelihood modeling that targets audiences based on past behavior as well as philanthropic capacity screeningwhich identifies and rates donors who have wealth-based capacity and philanthropic inclination.
I like to keep in mind that external data, while a valuable source of information, has its own limitations—it may reveal a donor’s capacity to a certain extent, but your own first-hand knowledge of a donor is likely your most reliable guide. Third-party capacity ratings and scores are like flags planted along the road ahead—an indicator of where to go—but not the end of the journey.
Prioritize
Once you have identified key data points from within your database and from external sources, begin to prioritize and segment your prospects for engagement and outreach. I like to think about prioritizing as looking for intersections. Where do your key data points intersect for each donor?
Your highest priority donors may be those who have been donors the longest, with giving already in the mid-level range, who attend events, who have a history of making large gifts to other organizations, who have a high likelihood score. It is at these intersections of information that we find the donors who are most engaged, willing, and able to upgrade.
Plan
Based on your overall number of identified prospects, your prioritized list may include individuals for immediate personal outreach and groups for longer-term cultivation and engagement. A comprehensive engagement plan includes not only a calendar of outreach that crosses over and includes all audiences, but importantly, at the major gift level it includes detailed, personalized plans for the highest priority individuals:
- Place stewardship at the center of donor engagement to nurture the philanthropic relationship. Speak to the heart and share stories which show how giving impacts your organization’s ability to fulfill its mission.
- Include philanthropic marketing strategies that are designed to cross over fundraising efforts and giving levels with consistent messaging. Whether the effort is One-to-Many (direct response), One-to-Few (hybrid approach for mid-level donors), or One-to-One (major and leadership giving) content should speak the same language and deliver the same message.
- Collaborate on individual donor strategy across campaigns and fundraising functions—bringing the best of each type of effort to bear on moving a donor relationship forward.
- Continue to employ your donor database: A good moves management system should let you know the who what and when of outreach: when did the donor last receive an impact report, who reached out personally to thank the donor, when was the last touch point.
Through this three-step approach—identify, prioritize, plan—data stays at the center of your planning and decision making, and allows the art of donor engagement to shine.
To learn more about how we can help, contact Garth Allen or visit schultzwilliams.com/data-analytics-development-operations/
