Is your organization asking the same donors to support every campaign? Is your major gift pipeline drying up with fewer proposals each year? Do you visit the same donors every time you plan a trip?
It’s time to get back to some fundraising fundamentals!
It doesn’t matter if you are an extrovert or an introvert, establishing a relationship with another human being from scratch can feel daunting. Major gift officers are frequently handed a list of new names to call and expected to connect and engage with those individuals. It sounds so simple. They can just start writing, calling, emailing, and texting, right?
Just writing that sentence has me imagining walking into a crowded room of more than 50 people who are all talking and doing different things. Who do I approach first? What if there’s a group talking – how do I join the discussion? Should I sit at the table with the people wearing suits or the table of casually dressed younger people?
Oh wait! That exact situation has happened to me so many times! I’ve learned to walk in with strategies at the ready to identify the people I most want to connect with. But it has taken a lot of practice and it is still not my favorite situation.
Identifying Prospects that Want to Engage
There are people who want to engage and give big to your organization if you connect with them. We just don’t know which ones. Or could we?
Sure, we can get tech to give us fancy scores that tell us who to call, and that’s better, but a score is only as good as the data input and we humans really are mysterious.
What if we went old school and nurtured donors? Then some of those nurtured donors might call in asking to talk with someone about giving more and many others might engage more quickly.
Did you know that this actually happens at organizations that are great at communicating with their donors and their community? Maybe it even happens at your organization!
And it can keep major gift teams busy “catching” the gifts as they come in. That is, until the fundraising goal is raised and passively catching gifts suddenly isn’t enough.
What is the Solution?
It’s not surprising to me that major gift officers struggle with engaging and qualifying the major gift prospects we researchers identify for them, but are there solutions?
When social media first began gaining momentum, I thought it might be the solution to personalized donor communications. Suddenly you could touch and connect intimately with thousands upon thousands of people – through digital platforms.
You wouldn’t need to hire an army. You would just need to hire a few people to interact online with lots of people.
Good things have come out of social media and digital engagement, but the effort and the data being generated is rarely connected or available to major gifts.
Now there’s a new tech solution that is entering the squishy area between annual and major giving – virtual engagement officers.
Say Hello to Virtual Engagement Officers
Norfolk State University is testing out virtual engagement officers. These are 100% A.I. and they are proving to be very trainable assets to the fundraising team.
Meet Lyman and Brooks and discover an early version of the fundraising future.
These engagement officers are consistent in their messaging and their outreach and no-one has to hunt them down to enter their call reports, which are all entered instantly!
When a prospective donor indicates that they want to invest more deeply in the university, Brooks and Lyman introduce them to a human development officer. Now that is the kind of warm lead everyone wants in their portfolio!
How Will You Improve Your Major Gift Success?
Initiatives like Norfolk State University’s virtual engagement officers are a natural extension of the rapid development of A.I. tools in the fundraising space. But like most early technology, it is expensive.
Following are some ideas you might implement to work on your prospecting fitness:
- Block your time strategically. Outreach to new prospects is a different fundraising “muscle” than deepening a relationship with someone who already wants to engage in major gifts. Consider blocking your time so that you can focus on one fundraising “muscle” at a time.
- Be methodical with your outreach. Methodical outreach attempts over a four to six-week period using different communication channels works. Ask Lyman and Brooks!
- Track your efforts and know when to say goodbye. Make your last communication a friendly goodbye. Something along the lines of: “You haven’t responded to my outreach so I’m going to assume you are not interested. Thank you for continued support.”
- Leverage your research team. Work with your research and prospect management professionals to make using your database easier for working through lists of prospects. And when you have a prospect worth going the extra mile, ask research for help strategizing your messaging.
The reality is that prospect engagement is hard, tedious work. But it’s also essential work. Whether you’re exploring cutting-edge A.I. solutions or getting back to the fundamentals of consistent, methodical outreach, the key is finding a system that works for your team and actually implementing it.
Because somewhere in that database of names is someone who wants to make a transformational gift to your organization. You just need to connect with them.
Additional Resources
- Warning! Check your Fuel Gauge BEFORE Campaign Launch | Aspire Blog | 2024
- How $83 Trillion Could Disrupt Traditional Fundraising – And What you Can Do About It | Aspire Blog | 2025
- How connected is your major gifts team to its donors – really? | Jennifer Filla | 2024