Many nonprofit leaders rush to obtain big gifts too quickly, says one veteran fund raiser.
That is because they are concentrating on the institution’s needs rather than individual donors’ comfort level in making larger gifts than they ever have before, says Kent E. Dove, senior vice president of Indiana University, in Bloomington.
For example, Mr. Dove says, university fund raisers in an ambitious capital campaign might learn through meticulous research that a donor whose largest previous gift was $25,000 is capable of giving $5-million or more.
But unless the donors shows he or she is interested in giving that kind of sum, Mr. Dove says that he has learned from decades of experience never to ask a $25,000 donor for a contribution that large. At least not initially.
Instead, with the $25,000 donor, he says that he would plan a solicitation to ask for a campaign contribution that’s four to seven times larger than that person’s previous largest contribution. “
A lot of nonprofits make the mistake of asking that donor for $1-million when they should be thinking of a $100,000 gift,” he says.
Mr. Dove says the most generous donors, even if they are extremely wealthy, often worry about their assets lasting and need to prove to themselves they can afford to make very large gifts. When the $25,000 donor sees that giving $100,000 doesn’t have an adverse effect, he or she might make a bigger gift, he says.
“When we go back and review 20- to 30-year giving histories,” he says, “this is the type of growth pattern we see with our most generous donors who up their giving one step at a time.”
