Major Giving Playbook

How can you use Dataro's Major Donor Ranks to find more potential major donors?

Major donors are essential for almost every nonprofit. They are individuals who give substantial amounts of money, ranging from the thousands to the millions. 

Building relationships with potential major givers with a strong connection to your cause is the primary responsibility of major gift officers. The return on investment from major gifts is typically very high and nonprofits usually see strong retention as these donors are generally deeply connected to the causes they support.

What is Dataro's Major Donor Propensity?

• Objective: Prioritize donors in order of likelihood to give more than major giving threshold in the next 12 months by One-Off donations. Threshold can be: ($/£) 5,000 or 10,000
• Output: Major Rank (1 = most likely)

Note: Major giving is the result of one-to-one relationships. Dataro’s model is not built to replace this function or to tell you a major donor’s giving capacity. You can use our ProspectAI tool for that. Instead, the major donor model is designed to tell your their major giving propensity and to find potential major donors you might have missed.

Basic Major Giving Use Cases with Dataro

• Review your major giving portfolios
  • Identify any highly ranked donors who are not in a portfolio 
  • Identify any low-ranked donors who are currently in portfolios and need additional qualification
• Identify more major donor prospects, and get alerts as new prospects qualify
• Build ‘Major Donor Prospect’ segments in direct mail and digital appeals for any highly ranked donors who are not included in your portfolios 

Building or Expanding your Major Giving Program with Dataro

Step 1. Identify your existing major donors

By uploading a list of major donors:

1. Go to Donors & Audiences > Saved Audiences > Upload

1. 1. Ensure you include their Constituent ID
   2. Name the audience something that you'll be easily able to find laterUpload a CSV of your current major donors

By segmenting a major donor list in Dataro:

1. Go to Donors & Audiences > Audience Builder
2. Segment a list of active major donors
   1. Depending on how your CRM data is structured, use the Major Status (active) filter or the Gifts (above a certain amount) filter.

Step 2. Review your current portfolios

To find prospects in your database that you may have missed, use the Dataro Major Donor Rank to select the donors with a rank equal or lower than the number of donors in your existing pipeline. Then compare your pipeline and Dataro’s selections to understand the overlap. By doing so you will identify:

• The prospects Dataro found that you already knew about - these prospects can now be considered as having “confirmed” propensity to be a major donor. So it is a good idea to keep building these relationships.
• Additional or new Major Donor prospects that Dataro found in your database - these highly ranked prospects should be researched further with ProspectAI to confirm their capacity and connection. If they weren’t on your radar already, you can start planning and executing a tailored stewardship journey.

Here's how to do it, step-by-step:

1. Select your audience using a process outlined in Step 1
2. In list view, select ‘Columns’ and check the box for Major Donor Rank, as well as any other relevant information (e.g. Future Giving, Total Giving, etc.)
3. Sort your list by Major Donor Rank to see if you’re missing any of the top-ranked donors

Step 3. Find your best major donor prospects

One of the biggest concerns we hear from nonprofits is where to find major donors. The most obvious place to start is with the people who already give to your cause. Dataro's Major Donor ranks can help you hone in on your best prospects.

Here's how to do it, step-by-step:

1. Go to Donors & Audiences > Audience Builder
2. Click "Filter" in the top right corner
3. Add a filter for "Major Donor Rank” lower than or equal to [insert your planned campaign size]."
   1. TIP: How many donors should I select? Easy - take a look at how many prospects are in your portfolios right now. Use this number as your starting point, then simply scale up or down as required. 
4. Add any other filters you require (e.g. last gift amount, contactability, etc).
   1. For example: exclude “Active Major” donors if you only want a list of Major Donor prospects, not existing major donors. 
5. Click "Save filters." Now you have a list of the best qualified donors.
6. Update the columns to include Major Donor Rank, along with any other helpful attributes, like last gift date, total giving, future giving, etc.
   1. Use the total giving column to get an idea of past behaviour
   2. Use the Future Giving column to get an idea of their likely 5 year giving forecast
7. Click "Save audience" and name it something recognizable. If you’re planning to run a 6-12 months journey to the same set of donors, save the audience as a static audience. If you want to see whenever a new donor meets your filter criteria, save the audience as a dynamic audience. 
   1. 1. For dynamic audiences, select ‘Manage Notifications’ from the Audience Summary page to subscribe to the audience. This way you will get an email whenever a new prospect qualifies for the group. 
8. [Optional] Use ProspectAI to quickly research the prospects you've identified and expand your donor profiles. 

Step 4. Understand what motivates your donors to give

Understanding why your donors give to your cause is key to planning your acquisition and stewardship activities. You can ask your major donors for feedback via a personal phone call or by sending them a survey. Asking your donors for their input will help build rapport and a genuine connection but also demonstrates you value their support and feedback. The donor responses you receive will help inform your major donor content strategy which you can use to acquire and steward your donors. 

Some questions to ask could be:

• Why do you give to our cause over another cause you may care about?
• What do you tell others about why you support our cause?
• Was there a specific reason or campaign that made you want to support our cause?
• Was there something in particular that made you want to give a larger gift?
• What is important for you to know about the causes you support financially?

Step 5. Plan your acquisition and stewardship activities

Understanding what motivates your major donors to support your cause is key to developing an effective major donor acquisition strategy and tactics. Through discussions with many successful philanthropy teams we’ve summarised a few simple yet effective tactics you can use to create an effective major donor acquisition and stewardship plan:

• Tailor and personalise appeal mail packs (with special ad-ons or information)
• Develop personalised email journeys with exclusive opportunities or more information
• Create special events and opportunities including:
  • Major donor gala nights or fundraising events
  • Boardroom lunches and coffee chats with your CEO/key personnel
  • Exclusive ‘behind the curtain’ tours / field trips your operational facilities
  • Sponsorship opportunities to provide matched giving for fundraising activities
  • Annual report briefings
• Personal thank you calls for every gift over a certain threshold (say $500)
• Thank you calls from the CEO for gifts over a certain threshold ($5k or more)
• Impact reports to demonstrate the ROI of a major donors’ gift
• A key contact / major gift officer to manage the relationship

Be sure to listen to your major donors and customize a plan that meets their needs and interests. This will give you the best chance of building a strong relationship and bringing your donors closer to your cause.

Step 6. Qualify and cultivate your prospects

The major donor model identifies donors who are likely to give more than the major giving threshold amount (either (£/$) 5000 or 10,000) within the next 12 months. The model is not designed to tell you their total giving capacity. Ultimately, the amount you ask for from a major donor will be the result of your work with them, including using tools like Dataro’s ProspectAI to assess their capacity alongside their connection to your cause. 

But waiting for a donor to just give over your threshold is a very slow way to build a major donor pipeline. A much faster and more pro-active approach is to use Dataro’s major donor ranks and qualify them with higher value asks, to see if you want to start a one-to-one relationship.

• Use your prospect audience as a segment in your next appeal and ask them for a higher amount.
• Design a conversion journey for your prospect audience.
  • An easy tactic is to simply send these ‘prospects’ the same journey you were planning for your mid-level donors. 
  • Omnichannel campaigns work best. Plan a journey that includes email, mail, calls, SMS, impact reporting or even event invitations.
  • Additionally, small gifts, like a coffee voucher or branded swag, can be given to further enhance the donor's experience. 
• Test your outreach methods and cadence
  • Try to maintain a consistent message across the entire journey. A great tactic is to educate prospects about a product before asking them to join!
  • Don’t leap straight to the big ask! This is a multi-step journey - you want to focus on education and relationship-building first and then make your ask.
  • The best teams might randomize their list of prospects and test two different upgrade strategies, such as: 
    • Strategy A: no change to messaging, only increase ask amount
    • Strategy B: ask prospects to fund a special product/program
  • Our clients have seen success with the following tactics:
    • Asking prospects to give to a restricted fund
    • Simply increasing their base ask amounts
    • Adding thank you post-cards, calls and event invites to journeys
    • Asking mid-level prospects to contribute to a Matched Giving Fund. 

Step 5. Repeat

Repeat this process as often as you like, but we recommend at least quarterly. This way you will constantly be identifying new prospects to top up your major donor pipeline and means you won’t be missing potential high value donors.

Tracking your Major Gifts program 

Dataro's Major donor program summary

To find more information about your major donors and your prospects, do the following: 

• Go to Reports
• Select the ‘Reports’ drop down
• Scroll down to Major Donor Program Summary

The Major donor program summary uses your definition of a major donor. The report showcases the health of your current program and identifies your top prospects.