Building a High-Quality Major Donor Pipeline

Okay, so to get us started, I want to zoom out and set the stage before we get a little bit too tactical.

A lot of organizations talk about building a major donor pipeline, but not everyone means the same thing when they say it.

Sometimes they're talking about prospecting.

Sometimes they're talking about qualifications.

Sometimes they're really talking about stewardship and relationship building over time.

So Lee, when you think about a high quality major donor pipeline, what does that actually look like in practice? And what do organizations most often misunderstand about where strong major donors prospects really come

from? It's one that we actually spend a good amount of time with our clients at JGA, at Johnson Gross Nickel & Associates, so many of our clients' schools and hospitals.

colleges, et cetera, ultimately are looking for who are our best prospects and how do we use our staff and resources, right? To really align to a campaign goal or just overarching growth and advancement.

So a few thoughts to your question, Kathleen.

First, you know, I'm a big believer that a high quality major donor pipeline is not just a wealth list or a listing of those that have capacity, right? A good pipeline should really be a relationship development system.

What that means is that there are going to be individuals on that list with different stages of readiness in the relationship with your organization, whether it's they're just getting to know you, they've made a gift and you're stewarding them or somewhere in between.

But I think most importantly, each individual, each prospect in that portfolio has a defined next step.

clarity on how someone in your institution or a volunteer is going to help drive that forward.

When I think about a good kind of major donor pipeline, sometimes the tendency that we will see is for organization staff to immediately, quote, look outside of the organization.

You know, we need new names, right? How many times have we heard that phrase? We need new names.

We need new faces.

What we find in a lot of the predictive analytic work that we do in helping to define messaging, excuse me, helping to define gifting and capacity is that so many of those prospects are quote, under the nose, right? Somewhere within the database.

For us, here's where we often see them.

It's those loyal, what we call loyal annual donors.

A lot of times that amount that they're giving isn't at a high, high level, but their behavior is annually supporting the organization.

So those loyal donors, it's your volunteers, right? It's your board members, former board members, people that are coming to events or participating.

Who are the people that are putting their hand up and saying we're interested? Often are some of the prospects that can be overlooked.

And so I think that's an important thing to keep in mind.

when thinking about a robust major gift donor pipeline.

Yeah, I think that's a really, really helpful framing, especially when, because I think so many teams assume that they need to start from scratch, or as you've mentioned, finding new names, finding new faces, when the opportunity, again, is like much closer than they think.