One of my favorite fundraising cliches is, “If you ask for money you get advice. If you ask for advice you get money.”
Sage advice, yet fundraising professionals insist on ignoring it.
One of the valuable tools available to most major gift fundraisers is prospect research, including gift capacity ratings, to help determine the most promising possible donors to engage with. The basis of using such research, specifically gift capacity ratings, is sound, but too many fundraisers focus on the wrong time to use this important information.
The traditional way of pursuing a major gift is to look at the suspected donor’s rated gift capacity and, when building the relationship, search for some emotional connection between the suspected donor and your nonprofit. So far so good.
The fundraiser cultivates the relationship, then, once the prospect confirms interest in a gift, asks for the rated capacity amount, without giving much thought to whether the prospect might be able to afford that amount or where it might come from. Gift motivation is addressed in detail, but what to ask for is based on a practice not much more detailed than blind faith – hoping the researchers got it right.
The right time to look at gift capacity ratings is when identifying who to call for appointments.
The wrong time to refer to rated gift capacity is when asking for the gift. Two bad things can happen. The rating might be too high, in which case the prospect will say NO. Worse, the rating might be too low, leaving a lot of gift potential on the table and giving the new donor the impression that you are more salesperson than donor-centered fundraiser.
Rated gift capacity is valuable at the start, when identifying which 100 names to pull from the big list of 10,000. It can get in the way when you depend on it at the ask instead of on inviting the prospective donor to have a conversation with you about what he is interested in supporting and how the gift plan might best be structured. There are darn few exceptions.
I started this article with a cliché, an oft-repeated truth, and I’ll close with my favorite — “Don’t ask for contributions; ask for conversations.”