Importance of Major Donors in Fundraising
Have you heard you need more major donors? What does that mean and how can you get more?
Perhaps you've heard that you need to have a major gift campaign and that you need to solicit more major donors for your organization.
First of all, what does that mean and second of all why is that important?
A major donor in general is anyone who's making a gift to your organization but they need to think about it or plan for it. For some organizations and some donors that might be a hundred dollar gift, it might be a $500 gift, or it might be a $5,000 gift if you're a larger organization.
Such a way to identify major donors or major gifts is those gifts that you need to solicit face to face. That's really the key distinction.
How much are your organization's donors submitting through your mail or email campaigns?
They're sending you $100 in the mail, then you want to start thinking about major gifts at the $500 or $1,000 level.
Why are those important rules of thumb for fundraising? It’s that 90% of your gifts should come from 10% of your donors.
Those 10% of your donors who are giving 90 percent of the funding are your major donors. They're not going to give that through the mail. They're gonna give it face to face. Think about if you had to raise $100,000 and you were gonna do that $100 at a time that's a thousand people who need to be giving to your organization. The chances you're gonna find that many donors are very slim.
However if you could get ninety percent of that or ninety thousand dollars from 10 percent of your donors and you've got people giving you $1,000 $5,000 $10,000, that's a lot fewer donors and you're gonna get to that hundred thousand dollar level much more quickly.
The key to major gift fundraising is to sit down, get to know your donors, build a relationship, invite them to your space to meet your clients that you serve. Build that relationship and ask them to invest in the clients that you're serving.
