There has never been more fundraising potential than today. 

Here’s why: We are currently in the midst of the Great Wealth Transfer. Which means, over the next 20-25 years 45 million households will cumulatively pass on $73 trillion from one generation to the next! Cerulli Associates estimates that $10-$12 trillion of that will go to charity. 

To help you get your head around this mammoth number, these estate gifts alone will provide an average of $476 billion to nonprofits each year — a number equivalent to the total of all charitable giving in 2021.

While this is an exciting time to be a fundraiser, potential of this magnitude may also leave you feeling:

• pressured to meet goals and deadlines that are unrealistic 
• confused about where to start — you don’t know what you don’t know about large gifts
• like you lack the basic resources to do your job well 
• unfocused and unproductive
• alone and unsupported

These feelings are common among fundraisers and lead to discouragement and overwhelm — the feelings that keep fundraisers moving from job to job or leaving the profession altogether.

This leads us to an important question: How can fundraisers make the most of this potential even if they have limited budget, staff, and time? 

Raise the right gifts. 

In order to raise the right gifts you will need the right team, targets, tactics, tools, and time. 

Two Kinds of Gifts Fundraisers Should Prioritize

When you invest your fundraising energy in the right places amazing things can happen. 

According to research, the best place for fundraisers to focus their fundraising efforts are major and legacy gifts. Here are three reasons why:

• Legacy gifts are becoming a preferred form of charitable giving. In 2022, Americans gave almost $500 billion to charity — 9% of all giving in 2022 was given through bequests. 
• 20% of donors contribute 80% of gifts in a healthy nonprofit. These gifts are often being made with noncash assets like stock and retirement funds.
• Inviting and securing legacy gifts means a significant portion of these gifts will come to you later, but your annual giving will increase at the same time. According to Dr. Russell James, “Nonprofits accepting non-cash assets saw 66% revenue growth over a five-year period compared to those accepting only cash.”  

Fundraisers who want to maximize the incredible gift potential of the Great Wealth Transfer need to invite major and legacy gifts. Throughout the rest of this article, you will learn the five things you need to prioritize major and legacy gift work with limited budget, staff, and time.

Team

You’ve probably heard it said, “teamwork makes the dream work.” It’s true…the dreams and visions you have for the impact of your organization depend on a great fundraising team.

There are four different types of people you need on the team you build for major gift and legacy gift fundraising. 

Staff

In every nonprofit, the chief executive officer is the chief fundraiser. 

Often when an executive director or lead pastor steps into their role they don’t realize it comes with the responsibility of fundraising. If that’s you, remember two things about fundraising work: first, this is relational work — if you’re good at cultivating relationships you can be good at this work; and second, the nuanced parts of fundraising can be learned. 

If you have any development staff — whether they have the right experience or not — they can play a key role on your major and legacy gifts team. Their ability to identify, interest, inform and involve your donors is critical preparation for the gift invitation. 

Board Members 

Governing Boards have primary fiduciary duty for the nonprofits they lead and serve, and that includes fundraising. Every Board member can be instrumental in connecting with and cultivating relationships with potential major and legacy donors.

There are four commitments every board member should be asked to make when they join  your board:

Learn more about these four commitments, board members’ fiduciary duty, and how to get your board on board with fundraising HERE. 

Advisors

Trusted advisors who are just a phone call away are essential members of your fundraising team. There are a lot of things to know about financial planning, charitable estate planning, taxes and accounting when it comes to major and legacy gifts. 

But there’s good news! You don’t need to know all this. You just need to know trusted professional advisors you can reach out to as you, your board and your donors need their knowledge and expertise.

Your “dream team” of professional advisors — assuming they are advocates for charitable giving — should include: an estate planning attorney, a tax accountant, a gift planner with a local community foundation, and a certified financial planner or wealth manager.

Contractors

You should never contract away your relationships with major and legacy gift donors. But in order to direct your own time toward this important work, you can more easily and inexpensively contract out work like appeal writing, grant writing, and prospect research along with some of your marketing and communications work.

Targets

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?” Alice asked softly. 

“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” the Cheshire Cat responded. 

Looking around Alice said, “I don't much care where.” 

“Then it doesn't much matter which way you go,” said the Cheshire Cat.  

Most of us have heard this children’s book excerpt more than once, but I think it applies to fundraising very well. If you don’t have specific targets, any plan may get you there. But in fundraising, the most essential targets you establish are related to financial goals, timelines, and donor prospects. 

Target #1: Goals

Good goal setting begins with a carefully calculated total dollar target for the year. 

This number should be based on both your donors’ capacity and your organization’s priorities. It should be realistic enough to achieve but risky enough to challenge and stretch both you and your donors.

But that big number can look and feel like an elephant unless you break it down into bite-sized pieces of quarterly and monthly goals. We recommend aligning your goals with the 80/20 rule by planning to raise 80% of your gift income for the year from your major gift strategies.

Target #2: Timelines

Since time is also precious and limited, target specific weeks throughout the year to focus on specific strategies.

For example, some of the work might be driven by timelines related to your events — the major sponsors you enlist pre-event and the major donors you visit post-event. Your timeline for your year-end appeal could begin in October with visits you make to those donors who typically give their five-figure gift during November or December. You may choose to focus on your legacy giving work during Make-A-Will Month in August or any month that makes sense for you and your organization.

Target #3: Prospects

Now you need to identify who you’re going to meet with to reach your annual, quarterly, and monthly goals. 

As you identify the right prospects for the right funding priorities consider these two things:

• A major gift prospect is more likely to have a higher capacity for making a gift now
• A legacy giving prospect is more likely to be a loyal contributor who would consider including your organization in their will

Want some help identifying your best prospects? Download The Legacy Giving Identification Checklist HERE. 

One of the best ways to make sure you set the right fundraising targets and hit them on time is to have a proven fundraising plan. The Fundraising Plan Package is a consultant-guided workshop for your leadership team to walk through and implement our proven five-step fundraising plan framework. 

You will strategize the best fundraising goals and solutions for your organization alongside our consultant. At the end of our time together you will have an effective fundraising plan and implementation strategy. Is it a good fit for your organization? Find out by scheduling a call HERE.

Tactics

With only a limited amount of budget, staff and time, a major and legacy gift strategy requires your focus on 3 tactics that are fundamental to your success: scheduling appointments, conducting visits, and stewarding gifts.

Tactic #1: Appointments

“Getting the appointment is 85% of getting the gift.”  Jerry Panas

If you’re not scheduling appointments, you won’t be receiving your best gifts.

When I was a full-time gift planner, I blocked the first minutes of my day, every day, to send emails or make calls to schedule appointments. Over time, I learned my “call rate” and knew that if I initiated 3 contacts with donors every morning, it would result in 1 appointment, and I would end up with about five appointments every week. Why?…

The key to getting appointments is setting aside time to schedule them. Block sacred, uninterruptible time for this task. Whether that’s 15 minutes a day, or one day a week for two hours — block that time!

Tactic #2: Visits

Ask most any seasoned major or planned giving professional why they love doing this work, and they’ll tell you “I love the donors!”  Donor visits are without a doubt the most satisfying part of fundraising. It’s in this relational, one-to-one part of the work where “the holy stuff  happens.”

Contrary to what you might think, the most important thing about a donor visit is not what YOU say…it’s about the questions you ask and what the donor says in response.

“This single mindset shift totally transformed my desire to be out seeing our donors”. It was almost embarrassing, but most definitely gratifying, to hear my coaching client speak to this during the Q&A of a recent presentation. “When I realized that the visit wasn’t about my pitch, but it was about my ability to ask thoughtful questions and to listen, I thought “That’s me! I can do that!” 

Tactic #3: Stewarding Gifts

When a donor is ready to make a major gift or a legacy gift, you most definitely need to be ready to receive it!  Every nonprofit needs to have some basic procedures in place that make gift-giving easy and trustworthy.  

As a starting point, ask yourself these questions to see if you’re ready to receive and steward the most common types of major and legacy gifts:

• Do we use all of our various communication channels to help our donors know that we can receive gifts from stock, retirement funds, Donor Advised Funds, etc?
• Can we receive gifts of stock either through our own brokerage account or with the help of a pass-through entity? Do we provide simple instructions for our donors?
• Do we publish simple bequest language that our donors can take to their attorney for our inclusion in their will? 
• Do we publish simple instructions for Qualified Charitable Distributions and Donor Advised Fund Distributions that our donors can share with their financial advisors?
• Do we have a personalized and timely process for thanking donors and telling them about the impact they are making in the lives of the people they are serving?

Tools

In a fast-paced environment of innovation, digital tools for fundraising are popping up everywhere. We look to large and sophisticated development shops and assume our success is dependent on wealth screening subscriptions, planned giving software and customized marketing products.  

But here’s the good and far less expensive news. There are just a few basic things you must have in your toolkit for effective major and legacy gift work, and only one of them requires a monetary investment.

Tool #1: CRM

Keeping track of donors, their gifts, and your contacts with a spreadsheet can complicate your major and legacy gift work. That’s what makes a Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) such an important fundraising tool. 

A good-fit CRM for this work is:

1. Affordable. Our clients’ current favorites are Little Green Light and Bloomerang.
2. Intuitive. You can use it without weeks of training.
3. Useful on the go. You can use most of its functions while out doing donor work. 

Tool #2: Case for Support

A well-written case for support is crucial to effective fundraising and positions your organization as the best option to solve a specific problem. This case for support provides the succinct, compelling content you’ll replicate over and over again in your brochures, appeals, website, and social media.

Reading a case for support should feel like someone saying, “I want to tell you about something very special happening at our organization. Here’s how you can help.”

Tool #3: Donor Stories

Donor stories are important tools. 

“People see themselves through the eyes of other givers,” said Sarah Gilday, Director of Philanthropy with our client, The Siebert Lutheran Foundation in Milwaukee. One of the things that makes donor stories so powerful is that readers can relate and see themselves in the story making their own gift.

Whether you share the story in a donor visit or tell the story through a publication, a compelling donor story includes three things:

1. A desired outcome or passion. Major and legacy donors are giving to a future they are passionate about providing for others.  
2. A personal connection. Bring the personal elements to the forefront. What prompted the donors to make their gift?
3. Aligned action. What action was taken or gift made?

Learn more about telling stories for effective fundraising HERE. 

Time

One of the biggest barriers to inviting major gifts is limited time. 

Even though we have annual goals and deadlines, what we say yes and no to is mostly up to us. This means it’s up to you to ask, “How can I adapt my week to spend time inviting bigger and better gifts?”

Here are a few tips from my 40 years of prioritizing time for major and legacy gifts work:

Block Your Calendar

Calendar blocking is a way of scheduling appointments with yourself for your priorities. 

Instead of waiting for an open block of time to magically appear, you set that block of time apart and protect it for only that priority. Your work colleagues know about your protected time, understand it, and respect it. Be sure to block these hours, days, and out-of-town donor trips on your calendar months ahead of time. 

Manage Others

If you’re going to successfully engage others in this work with you, you have to take the lead in managing them as well. 

If your Executive Director or your Board members are going to be making visits with you, it’s up to you to develop and manage reliable systems for working with their calendars and preparing them for the visit.  If volunteers are going to host small group gatherings of donors in their homes, it’s up to you to provide them with the checklist and agenda that will help them give you their best.

Habits and Hacks

As a full-time fundraising professional, I was good at getting visits and conducting visits. But I could be kind of a slacker on the follow-up.  I had to create some habits and hacks to be sure I would bring the visit to its proper completion. These 3 were game-changers for me:

1. The Zip-Lock Baggie of Notecards — Following every visit, I’d drive away, pull over, and write a personal thank you note for the visit. Within days of getting into this habit, I could whip out a highly personalized thank you note in 3 minutes. Envelopes were pre-addressed and stamped, and I’d drop them in the mailbox on my way home.
2. Windshield Time — Between visits or on my way home, I’d “phone in” my report from my visits while they were fresh in my head. This process looked different over the years as technology improved. But the point is, I got my notes out of my head and into the CRM. 
3. Scheduling Next Steps — Great visits end with a plan for the next step. But if I didn’t get that next step scheduled into a reminder system, they didn’t always happen. Today’s CRMs make it easy for you to schedule your next move and automate a reminder. 

Start Maximizing Your Fundraising Potential Today

You didn’t get into fundraising to burn out, change jobs every 18 months, or leave a meaningful career cultivating relationships with good and generous people.

If you’re getting to the end of your rope, here’s some wisdom from author and entrepreneur Jim Rohn, “Your life doesn’t get better by chance. It gets better by change.”

It’s the same with fundraising. Something has to change for you to… 

…reach bigger goals than last year. 

…create a sustainable and thriving financial future for your nonprofit.

…maximize the fundraising potential of the Great Wealth Transfer with a limited budget, staff, and timeline.  

The good news is, you can pick the change! It doesn’t have to be a big change, it just needs to be an intentionally and consistently implemented change. 

So of all the strategies you read about in this article, which three could you implement into your work this month?

If you want help choosing and implementing the best steps to maximize your fundraising with a limited budget, staff, and timeline schedule a call with us HERE.