When charities first consider major gift fundraising, the instinct can be to look outwards for wealthy donors. Fundraisers start scouring rich lists and the wealthy individuals who have made headlines supporting other organisations. However, the best place to find major gift prospects is often in your network and among their connections.
Instead of asking, who else could support us? Ask, how well do you know the community you already have? The best way to find prospects for a major gifts programme is to explore your existing supporters, alumni and volunteers and understand their connections.
Your existing supporters likely have more potential than you realise
Someone who’s already attending your events, volunteering or is an occasional supporter is easy to overlook if they haven’t donated at a higher level. But these are signals that they are engaged with your organisation, and with further research you can better understand their capacity to give.
This is where wealth screening comes in. When we talk about wealth screening, we’re talking about comparing the information in our Wealth Intelligence Database (which contains information on 270,000 high-net-worth and well-connected individuals in the UK) with the information in your supporter database.
Essentially, we’re looking for matches. A match is a high-net-worth (HNW) individual who appears on both our database and yours.
Don’t overlook the value of networks
Some of the most valuable people in your community may never become major donors, but they could connect you with one.
As well as helping you understand your existing supporters on a deeper level, wealth screening can help you discover the HNWIs, corporates and grant-making trusts they’re connected to. This means your potential major-gift community is a lot bigger than the people in your current CRM.
Warmth matters more than wealth
Those connectors can turn a cold prospect into a warm one if they’re willing to introduce and vouch for you. A billionaire with no connection to your cause might sound good, but without the affinity or connection to your cause, they won’t magically give you a major gift. But someone with lower capacity, strong affinity, and an existing relationship with someone who will go to bat for you is a much stronger prospect.
Affinity is the overriding factor when ranking your prospects. While it’s good to balance connected and wealthy prospects in your pipeline, a mid-level donor who’s really connected may surprise you with a top-level gift.
Researching your community
Your database is always the best place to start when building your prospect pipeline. Spend some time understanding what insights you can get from it, and what useful parameters you can search on.
Once you’ve mined your database, you can move on to wealth screening, prospect research and network mapping to better understand your community. In addition to uncovering potential wealthy individuals in your database, this reveals the combinations of capacity, affinity and attachment that aren’t always immediately visible.
Cold prospecting has its place
If your major gifts programme is particularly ambitious or you’re working with a small network, you may need cold prospecting to expand your prospect list.
This identifies people not currently connected to your organisation but (research suggests) have both the capacity to give and an affinity to support you. Like all good research, the more targeted cold prospecting is, the more successful you can expect it to be, so the first step is always understanding what your existing community can provide.
Want to learn more about developing and managing your major gift pipeline?
In our last webinar, we looked at prospect pipelines in particular
- 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
If you missed it, you can always watch the recording, which is available on our website, along with webinars on a range of other topics.