Major-Gift Fundraising: How Your Technology Can Help

Major gifts are the largest gifts your nonprofit receives, and they’re essential for meeting your funding goals and laying the groundwork for a sustainable future for your organization.

There are often several team members and months of work involved in building relationships with major donors and securing a gift, and the process gets trickier to handle as your major-gift program grows with your organization over time.

However, with a carefully constructed technology stack, you can successfully solicit and secure large gifts from individuals, grantmaking organizations, and even major corporations. In this guide, we’ll explore how various tools—from popular CRM platforms to matching gift tools—can help you approach these three major-gift sources.

Individual Major Gifts

When you’re conducting major-gift fundraising efforts targeted toward individual philanthropists, focus on the relationship that individual (or family) has with your organization. You’ll build this relationship over a series of months or years through a process called moves management.

Moves management involves strategically building relationships with prospective major donors and tracking each interaction or “move” along the way. Your nonprofit will likely follow a set cadence of moves that you’ve seen success with when cultivating major gifts in the past. This may include having a phone call with the prospect, inviting them to tour your headquarters, and scheduling a one-on-one lunch meeting between the prospect and a board member.

As a baseline, your nonprofit’s technology—specifically, your constituent relationship management system (CRM)—factors into this process by giving you information about each prospect. However, your CRM should also empower you to track the moves you make with a prospect by allowing you to:

• log all interactions with a prospective major donor;
• set notifications to remind major-gift officers of upcoming “moves” to make with prospects; and,
• quickly see the status of all major-gift conversations for an overview of your efforts.

If your CRM doesn’t include tools to track your nonprofit’s moves-management efforts, it may be time to look for a new database. You may find it helpful to invest in nonprofit CRM consulting so you can work with an expert to ensure you pick the right tool that addresses your major-gift program’s needs.

Grants

The process for applying for and securing major grant funding often involves a series of intricate steps both before receiving the funding and after it is dispersed.

First, your nonprofit has to research foundations and government organizations to discover where opportunities are available. Then, you need to write a grant application or proposal, often including specific data and details that the funder requests. These details can differ from funder to funder.

After being awarded a grant, you need to carefully track and report on its usage—often, grants require you to use them for specific, predetermined projects and report on them at set benchmarks.

Because it’s a detail-intensive process, dedicated grant management software is valuable to make sure you meet all requirements successfully. These solutions empower nonprofits with features such as:

• a portal to save in-progress grant applications and submit completed ones;
• status reports that are helpful for both grantmakers and grantees; and,
• multi-grant management to track the details of multiple opportunities.

Abiding by the guidelines and deadlines outlined by grant funders is crucial for maintaining positive relationships with funding organizations. Grant management software gives nonprofits the tools to track the minute details of grants at every step in the process and report back accordingly.

Corporate Major Gifts

Companies have started emphasizing sustainability and social good in their community-facing initiatives, with many encouraging volunteerism and philanthropic giving from employees.

While you can reach out “cold call” style to discuss corporate major gifts, those conversations will be more effective if you can make the case by demonstrating an existing relationship between your nonprofit and the corporation. For example, you may have a significant number of donors and supporters who happen to all work for the same corporation. You could suggest that it would be a great idea for that corporation to make a gift to your organization because it would show their employees that their employer cares about the causes they’re passionate about.

Matching-gift software makes it straightforward to discover these connections. This software prompts donors to search for their gift match eligibility when donating to your nonprofit to initiate the gift match process. On the backend, however, your nonprofit can see which employers have the highest representation in your support base and use that information to begin major-gift conversations with corporations.