When people ask us about prospect research or wealth screening to identify new prospects, the first question we ask is, ‘’What is your fundraising target?’ Without understanding your target, you can’t plan or manage your prospect pipeline properly.
When thinking about your target, consider your three-to-five-year fundraising objective. Often when you look at your target from a one-year perspective, you’ll miss out on opportunities or have too narrow a focus so it’s always beneficial to think about that longer time frame. A long-term approach means you can plan for multi-year gifts and pledges not just one-off donations. It increases the scope of the fundraising you can do and increases the scope of the relationships you can have with your prospects because it allows for stewardship and a multi-gift approach rather than one gift-and-go.
What are you fundraising for?
Bring together all the possible elements of your organisation’s work programme that you may need to include in your fundraising target. This should include the costs of fundraising. Some specific areas to incorporate into your target may include:
- Running costs
- Project costs
- Bursaries
- Capital work
- Endowment needs
What types of gifts are you looking for?
Establish the types of gifts you’re looking for by asking yourself the following questions:
- Do you have a table of gifts?
- What’s the minimum value for a major gift?
- What kind of gifts will be transformational for you?
- Do you have prospects that can give high and mid-value gifts?
Why is the table of gifts so important?
Not everyone is a fan of the table of gifts but it adds so much to your ability to plan, it’s an essential step that we feel shouldn’t be missed. Understanding the size and scale of gifts you need means you can calculate how many prospects you’re going to need. It will also help you:
- Plan your campaign
- Produce a research brief
- Agree on a target
- Set the timetable
- Calculate your budget
- Work out the numbers of staff, researchers and volunteers needed to deliver the fundraising
- Monitor your progress
- Show donors and ask them where they think their gift fits
- Review and revise the plan
- Know how many donations you need and how many prospects it will take to reach that number.
Below is a sample theoretical table of gifts to get you started.
Successful major gifts fundraising depends on a strong prospect pipeline. How many prospects do you need and what do you need to do to find them?
Join Kerry Rock for a free webinar exploring ways of better understanding and managing your prospect pipeline. We will cover:
- Understanding your fundraising target
- How many prospects do you need for your major gift pipeline?
- Hot, warm and cold prospects – how can you tell which is which?
- Generating and managing new prospects