Research Donors on the Homepage

Research Donors is one of the four tabs on your Dataro homepage. It collects three groups of donors worth a closer look and gives you a route straight into researching them, rather than requiring you to build an audience and sort it yourself. The homepage shows the top three donors in each group, and the full list of any group opens on the Donors tab.

Current Major Donors means donors whose giving reached your configured major gift threshold within the past 12 months. Dataro infers the group from giving history rather than reading it from your CRM, so it can differ from your internal major donor tagging. It is a recency test rather than a status test: a donor moves into the group when their giving crosses the threshold inside that window, and moves out of it when their qualifying giving falls outside the window. Nobody has to tag them, and nobody has to remember to untag them when things change.

The group deliberately does not read your CRM's portfolio field, does not reflect who is in a major gift officer's active pipeline, and does not map to a "major donor" tag your organization maintains internally. Your internal tag might mean lifetime giving, capacity, board relationship, or a decision made several years ago. A donor being actively cultivated who has not yet given at major level is not in this group, and may well be in Major Donor Prospects instead.

The major gift threshold, and the mid-level band alongside it, are configurable values in your organization settings. We recommend setting them correctly early if the defaults do not match how your organization defines major giving.

Donors the major gift model rates as likely to give at major level, whether or not they ever have. This is normally the largest of the three groups by a wide margin, and it is the one most organizations work first, because research here is most likely to change what you do next. A current major donor is usually already known to someone on your team, whereas a donor the model ranks highly may not be assigned to anyone yet.

Donors whose first gift arrived in the recent window. We recommend researching this group early, because a new donor with significant capacity needs a different conversation from a new donor who gave once because a friend asked them to, and the two look identical on a gift report.

Which group should I work first?

Major Donor Prospects, in most cases. It is the largest group and the one where research is most likely to change your plan, because these are donors the model rates highly who may not be on anyone's list yet. Current Major Donors are usually already assigned to someone.

A donor I know is a major donor is not in Current Major Donors. Why?

Their giving in the past 12 months does not reach the threshold. That is a normal state for a donor who is being cultivated, or who gives large gifts on a multi-year cycle, or whose last major gift was 18 months ago.

Can Dataro use my CRM's major donor flag instead?

Not for this group. The definition is deliberately consistent across organizations so that the model behind Major Donor Prospects has a stable target to predict. If your internal designation matters for how you work, you can filter on it when building your own audiences in Audience Builder.

Why 12 months rather than 24?

Because the group answers "who is currently a major donor," and 12 months is the window where that is a fair claim. Longer windows are used elsewhere in Dataro where the question is about demonstrated capacity rather than current status.

What happens to a donor who lapses out of the group?

They leave Current Major Donors when their qualifying gift falls outside the 12-month window, and they count as a lapsed major in the prospect calculation. They remain a sensible target for reactivation.