New Frontiers in Pipeline Development Study

About this brief

This study aims to help advancement leaders build sustainable major gift pipelines by re-orienting their focus on three groups of overlooked prospects: 1) assigned but overlooked prospects, 2) high-potential unassigned prospects, and 3) developing-potential prospects.

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Executive summary

Higher ed fundraising has enjoyed banner years of late. Total dollars raised have increased significantly, inspiring colleges and universities to launch ambitious campaigns.

As overall fundraising returns have climbed, advancement leaders have begun to look to the future and consider their institutions’ long-term revenue sustainability. Unfortunately, the situation as they see it is far from secure.

A small number of mega-gifts from well-established donors have powered higher ed’s recent fundraising growth. Yet few institutions can boast of a well-developed pipeline of on-deck major gift supporters. Without a cohort of donors rising through the gift pyramid, advancement leaders will find themselves unable to continue the current climate of fundraising success in the coming years and decades.

Best practice institutions maximize major gifts from overlooked prospects by adopting a segmented strategy for managing the prospect pyramid. They focus on three imperatives:

1.  Overcoming the barriers preventing MGOs from increasing coverage within their portfolios
2.  Accelerating portfolio churn to free up room for high-potential, unassigned prospects
3.  Scaling personalized cultivation for tomorrow’s prospects by engaging other areas of the advancement enterprise in the work of pipeline development

Section 1: The sustainability crisis in higher ed fundraising

The years since the Great Recession have brought immense growth at the top of America’s wealth pyramid. The number of millionaire households in the United States has reached a new record high every year since 2013. Driven by a burgeoning stock market, high-net-worth individuals have amassed ever-larger large fortunes. These trends have vaulted many into the very top wealth percentiles for the United States.

Economic gains at the top bring increased opportunities and Canada also sees an upswing in millionaire households.

This growth may be accelerating. Indeed, the rate of growth for millionaire households has outpaced the rate of population growth overall in the United States for the past half-decade. Whereas in 2008, 1 in 17 households were millionaire households, by 2016 that number had climbed to 1 in 12.

The increase in private financial wealth has spread north of the US-Canada border as well. Recent years have brought impressive increases in the ranks of Canada’s millionaire households. Incredibly, between 2015 and 2016, the number of millionaire households grew by 26%, launching Canada into the global top five for millionaire households.

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The promise of big data

To capitalize on these opportunities, advancement professionals have embraced big data to identify major-gift prospects. Advancement isn’t alone in embracing big data. The world as a whole has gone through a big data revolution in recent years and will continue to do so for years to come. The unprecedented availability of data today has revolutionized industries. Disruptive innovators across sectors have used data to work smarter and bring in greater gains at lower cost.

In the world of advancement, these innovations have often taken the form of more sophisticated wealth ratings, propensity ratings, and predictive models. These data resources have by now become ubiquitous in the industry. Interestingly, some advancement leaders have begun to worry about declining returns on data. They recognize that all the data in the world will do little for advancement’s performance if fundraisers do not act on newly discovered major-gift opportunities.

An alarming oversight

At many advancement shops, far too many major-gift opportunities go overlooked. Upwards of 80% of high-net-worth, high-inclination prospects go uncultivated, often despite their inclusion in major gift portfolios. Ignoring these prospects comes with a steep opportunity cost. The median institution in an analysis that EAB conducted stood to gain tens of millions of dollars from increasing prospect penetration by just a few percentage points.

Other organizations in the nonprofit sector have not made the same mistake as colleges and universities. They have rushed in recent years to cultivate the major gift prospects that higher education fundraisers overlook.

Data analysis reveals that high-potential individuals often go ignored.

As nonprofits proliferated, more than tripling in number across the past thirty years, they have formalized their major gift programs and launched capital campaigns. Today, high-net-worth individuals have many competing asks for their mindshare and no lack of organizations that can help them achieve their philanthropic aims.

An unstable center of gravity

Contraction at the top of the giving pyramid poses great risks to advancement shops due to higher ed’s overreliance on major gifts. EAB analysis of members’ gift pyramids revealed that the median institution relies on just 36 gifts—0.3% of all gifts—to provide 63% of annual revenues. The giving level below those top gifts, from $25,000 to $99,999, is likewise sparsely populated.

Advancement leaders and industry commentators alike worry about the inherent unsustainability of such a top-heavy fundraising strategy. Many of them wonder aloud how long our present success can last.

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Section 2: Increasing Prospect Coverage

The first section of this study will investigate how best practice institutions increase prospect coverage for assigned but uncultivated prospects.

Missed opportunities hiding in plain sight

The problem of assigned but overlooked prospects afflicts all of higher education advancement. It has two distinct root causes: an institutional need to create the appearance of prospect coverage and major gift officers’ desire to “claim” prospects, even if they themselves don’t have the time to cultivate them.

In many instances, institutional priorities and misaligned incentives contribute to the problem. Advancement leaders want to demonstrate to their presidents and boards that they are paying attention to the institution’s highest potential prospects. To do so, they assign them in great numbers to fundraisers, even when those fundraisers don’t have the time to cultivate them.

Fundraisers’ behaviors also contribute to low prospect coverage. Often, fundraisers hold high-potential prospects in their portfolios so that someday, they hope, they’ll be able to cultivate them. While they have no short-term cultivation strategy for these prospects, the last thing they want is for another MGO to act faster and capitalize on an opportunity they’d prefer to hold for themselves.

Outsized returns from new prospects

Low prospect coverage, while understandable given advancement leaders’ and MGOs’ incentives, undermines the viability of the long-term major gift pipeline. Development offices rely disproportionately on new donors to fill tomorrow’s pipeline.

Certain institutions achieve higher than 50% conversion rates for first-time visits. There’s an 18% chance of eventual major gift from first-time visits leading to $10K+ gift.

New prospects with whom MGOs meet have a nearly one in five chance of someday giving a major gift. For some institutions, that ratio can climb to one in two new prospects. If MGOs concentrate only on donors with whom the institution has already established philanthropic relationships, they miss out on opportunities for an expanded pool of major gifts in the future.

Learn How to Develop the Pipeline

Practice 1: Alumni relations prospect referral form

Alumni relations staff record key intel about their interactions with prospects to send to prospect research for review and assignment. A template form lists key indicators of philanthropic capacity, providing a quickstart guide for discovery. Alumni relations staff learn to consistently identify major gift potential, and MGOs approach referred prospects with a greater sense of confidence in their major gift likelihood.

Alumni relations staff regularly interact with high-potential prospects, yet few formal channels exist through which to share this information, resulting in relatively few leads being passed. Conversely, MGOs regularly overlook their newly assigned prospects due to skepticism about the prospects’ capacity or likelihood to give. Without greater assurance that a newly assigned prospect is in fact a good lead, these prospects languish in portfolios.

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Practice 2: Student caller lead generation

Top-performing student callers contact highly rated, unassigned prospects to gauge their philanthropic interest and pass leads to major gift officers. These “hot” and “warm” leads inspire a sense of urgency among MGOs. The personal interaction that led to the lead being passed overcomes MGO skepticism that prospects are assigned due purely to an overreliance on wealth ratings and other data-based indicators of potential.

Large numbers of highly rated prospects are coded for discovery, yet MGOs often suspect that the data informing those codes are faulty and unreliable. Due to the high time investment necessary for a discovery visit, many MGOs deprioritize the discovery visits that would substantiate these prospects’ potential.

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Practice 3: Discovery visit likelihood scoring

A regression analysis of the common characteristics of prospects who take discovery visits helps MGOs prioritize the warmest uncultivated leads. The higher hit rate on discovery outreach leads MGOs to embrace cold calling as a more fulfilling and high-return activity.

MGOs often deprioritize cold calling due to the low returns it brings. Rather than spend time reaching out unproductively to unresponsive prospects, they focus their efforts on today’s best donors. Yet this inattention to new prospects depletes tomorrow’s major gift pipeline.

• Identify control group: 460 prospects took recent discovery visit
• Find shared qualities: Regression analysis and other statistical techniques spot common characteristics
• Apply to all prospects: Rank prospects from 1-20 based on likeness to model

Bryant University built a discovery visit likelihood score to help their MGOs prioritize discovery prospects who would most likely answer a cold call. The team at Bryant partnered with advancement data experts to analyze what distinguished a small group of prospects who recently took discovery visits from other prospects in the database. They found that by applying differential weights to variables such as whether the institution had the prospect’s personal email on file, whether the prospect had been a varsity athlete, and whether the institution knew the identity of the prospect’s spouse, the data analysts could estimate the prospect’s likelihood of taking a discovery visit.

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Practice 4: Social media discovery targeting

Prospects with high levels of engagement with the university on social media are prioritized for qualification visits. MGOs direct cold calling to these individuals, even if they have not engaged with the university through other, more traditional programming, such as events or volunteering. Digital tools assist with collecting social media data.

MGOs grow frustrated with low conversion rates on cold calls to prospects who appear otherwise engaged with the institution. Despite a high internal affinity score, few prospects prove willing to meet with fundraisers.

While sophisticated predictive models can offer much insight into discovery prospects’ likelihood of taking a visit, a more obvious, immediate, and easy-to-access indicator is going overlooked by most advancement professionals: social media engagement data.

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Practice 5: Dedicated discovery schedulers

Staff members are dedicated to visit outreach and to scheduling meetings with hard-to-reach prospects. These individuals exercise their research skills to identify what an unresponsive prospect might find compelling. They reach out through email and phone with compelling asks and coordinate the scheduling logistics for their MGO colleagues.

With so much on their plate, MGOs can spend only a minimal amount of time on cold calling and new prospect outreach. They never develop expertise in the art of the cold call, and their hit rate for discovery outreach never reaches a high enough level to fill their prospect pipeline adequately.

“Engagement specialists” take the burden of initial outreach off MGOs

Manage scheduling logistics

• Conduct high-volume, multichannel outreach
• Sequence visits to optimize travel efficiency
• Populate MGO calendar invites with key intel

Build relationships with “cold” prospects

• Research affinity and engagement history
• Craft high personal, meaningful messages
• Serve as initial, pre-qualification point of contact

To raise the discovery visit hit rate, some advancement leaders have opted to take the burden of cold calls off of MGOs. Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) did so by hiring two engagement specialists who spend the majority of their time cold calling hard-to-reach prospects and scheduling visits for MGOs.

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Practice 6: Digital pipeline nudges

Tech tools “nudge” gift officers to engage their pipeline prospects. MGOs receive updates and new prospect recommendations through both a mobile and desktop platform. The tools take the best of the tech world (e.g., Amazon recommendations, Facebook newsfeed) and adapt it for major gift fundraising.

Many MGOs intend to actively engage their new prospects but cannot find time in their busy days to do so. Their good intentions are overwhelmed by the tyranny of the immediate, and without tools to structure and guide their workflows, they default to focusing primarily on prospects they already know.

The “nudge”—a behavioral economics strategy of presenting choices in ways that subtly influence the ultimate decision a user or customer makes—has shaped the way commercial organizations build their customer experiences. Especially in the world of technology, most users’ interactions with organizations are mediated by carefully designed nudges leading them to opt for certain products and options, from songs (Spotify) to consumer goods (Amazon) to movies and TV series (Netflix).

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Next step: Fill out the prioritization guide

Based on your institution’s goals and available resources, use the chart below to map out which of the tactics profiled in this section you would like to prioritize. Use this document to assess viability and determine next-steps. Download the Guide.

Section 3: Accelerating portfolio churn

In this section, we’ll focus on high-potential prospects who are not currently assigned to major gift officers.

In many cases, MGOs carry the same prospects in their portfolios for the duration of their employment at the institution. Indeed, in a small sampling of EAB members, the average length of time prospects had been assigned nearly matched the national average for MGO tenure.

Many advancement leaders believe that stagnancy within portfolios stems solely from a lack of portfolio penetration. They think that increasing the rate at which MGOs reach out to their assigned prospects and go on discovery visits will automatically lead to more churn. Yet that does not always prove to be the case. Institutions that increase the rate of cold calling, discovery, and qualification can still fall prey to three risks that threaten to undermine portfolio churn.

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Practice 7: ‘Reasonable attempt’ contact criteria

MGOs make two attempts to contact discovery prospects through two channels for four consecutive quarters. If prospects are still unresponsive at that time, MGOs disqualify them and move on to new, and potentially higher-inclination, prospects.

MGOs keep high-net-worth prospects in their portfolios for years, even if their outreach attempts have never met with success.

Their seemingly endless optimism leads them to believe one more email or voicemail will elicit a response. Yet their persistence and tenacity mean that better prospects never find a spot in their portfolios.

George Washington University (GWU) sought to rein in some of the tendencies that diminished disqualifications by establishing reasonable attempt criteria for outreach. Advancement leaders asked MGOs to make a reasonable attempt every year to contact 100% of their assigned discovery prospects. They further clarified what constituted a reasonable attempt—and they did so in a way that limited MGOs’ endless optimism.

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Practice 8: Automatic prospect sunsetting system

Prospects whom MGOs do not engage successfully at least once every six months are removed from portfolios. Every automatically sunset prospect leads to the MGO’s unit losing an incentive pay point.

MGOs allow assigned prospects to sit in their portfolios without active engagement. In particular, unresponsive prospects with little major gift potential portfolio space that could instead go to a higher-propensity prospect.

At Colorado State University, a prospect sunsetting system incentivizes MGOs to embrace disqualification. MGOs must log a successful contact with all of their assigned prospects every six months. If they reach the three- and five-month marks without a successful contact, an automated email reminds them to reach out.

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Practice 9: Discovery officer referral process

Unresponsive major-gift prospects are handed off to discovery officers for additional follow-up. The discovery officers have greater bandwidth to persistently continue the outreach process and often land visits with hard-to-reach prospects. The institution’s discovery goals are met, while MGO portfolios are freed up for new prospects.

MGOs recognize that keeping unresponsive prospects in their portfolio may not be a great use of their time. Yet they fear that disqualifying these high-net-worth individuals would lead the institution to entirely overlook them in the future. Without ownership or accountability, they will go neglected even if their inclination increases.

Northern Kentucky University (NKU) grappled with MGOs’ reluctance to disqualify prospects by creating a pathway out of a portfolio to more productive active management. They did so by focusing on handoffs rather than disqualifications. In years past, MGOs whose outreach attempts were met with radio silence faced one of two options.

A portrait of the discovery officer
Staff of three discovery fundraisers focuses on the pipeline:

• Large portfolio (200+ prospect)
• High visit goals (20/month)
• High-volume outreach (100 contacts/month)
• Low response rate (20% v. MGOs’ 50%)

They could continue reaching out and potentially waste time that could be spent engaging higher-inclination prospects, or they could give up and possibly miss out on a prospect who was one email or one phone call away from responding positively. Advancement leaders at NKU deconstructed this dichotomy. They hired a small staff of three discovery officers who took unresponsive prospects from MGOs and continued following up with them.

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Practice 10: Stage-change metrics

Advancement leaders evaluate and reward MGOs based on how many prospects they are able to move from one cultivation stage to the next. Movement between stages involves not only a code-switch in the database but also the formulation of a cultivation strategy and initial steps to execute on it.

Visit metrics are ubiquitous across higher ed advancement. At many institutions, they contribute to unproductive behaviors. MGOs will visit prospects every six to twelve months to hit a visit goal, but they will not formulate a cultivation strategy for advancing toward a solicitation. Without a strategy in place, prospects linger in portfolios and keep new prospects from being cultivated.

Ithaca College’s stage-change metrics

• Deemphasize visit count: Downplay one-off visits that do not meaningfully advance cultivation
• Reward moves in to cultivation: Track number of prospects who move from “qualification” to “cultivation” in donor management system

Ithaca College realized recently that much of their prospect activity led nowhere. MGOs would visit with prospects but not follow up for six months or a year. These MGOs consistently hit their visit goals, but they did little to move their prospects toward an ask. To remedy this, the team at Ithaca developed stage-change metrics for their MGOs. While visits continue to play a role in MGO evaluations, it’s a smaller one than previously.

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Practice 11: Pipeline cultivation metrics

Advancement leaders redesign the metrics system they use to evaluate MGO performance. The new system incentivizes MGOs to perform key pipeline development activities, such as assigning wealth ratings to prospects and creating cultivation strategies.

With such an intense focus on the amount of money MGOs raise each year, many institutions find they underemphasize the fundamental pipeline activities necessary to support long-term performance. MGOs focus their efforts on a few high-potential prospects while under-cultivating the rest of their portfolios.

USC likewise overhauled their fundraiser metrics to hardwire cultivation next-steps. To ensure that MGOs were not only visiting their prospects but also developing cultivation strategies for them, USC began tracking and rewarding strategy formation and fundraiser-assigned capacity ratings. MGOs at USC must develop cultivation strategies and assign a potential capacity range to 75% of their assigned prospects.

These metrics complement the other performance indicators for MGOs at USC, including qualifications (and disqualifications), visits, and dollars raised.

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Practice 12: Plug-and-play cultivation guide

A lengthy, comprehensive manual for MGOs lists recurring cultivation opportunities across campus. The document streamlines cultivation planning by connecting prospect interests with existing opportunities and allowing MGOs to avoid having to surface new cultivation opportunities every time they want to formulate a strategy for a prospect.

Cultivation plans are labor-intensive documents to compile. Often, MGOs find themselves having to reinvent the wheel by tracking down cultivation opportunities across campus every time they want to put together a strategy for a new prospect. Consequently, strategy formation occupies a large share of MGOs’ time, limiting the number of prospects for whom MGOs can compile a strategy.

MGOs try to reinvent the wheel with each new strategy which limits reach. They have a lot of pre-cultivation work and less time than ever to do it.

To better hardwire cultivation next-steps, advancement leaders must contend with the biggest barrier fundraisers face to cultivation planning: time. Developing a cultivation strategy for each prospect takes a large amount of time. Fundraisers must survey the landscape of upcoming events and willing on-campus partners to identify potential moves, manage the logistics of donor visits, and market these opportunities to the individuals in their portfolios.

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Practice 13: Cultivation concierge

A dedicated staff member takes the lead on identifying cultivation opportunities and coordinating planning for when prospects are on campus. MGOs shift their focus from cultivation planning to execution.

MGOs spend a minority of their time on frontline fundraising due to how long it takes to coordinate cultivation for each individual prospect in their portfolio. With so much time invested in so few prospects, MGOs find they are unable to effectively cultivate a broader segment of their assigned prospects.

Bryant University is moving in a similar direction as Marquette on cultivation planning. Instead of providing fundraisers with a self-service menu of moves for prospects, advancement leaders are designating a single staff member as an in-house cultivation concierge. The director of donor relations will serve as this cultivation concierge.

This staff member will identify on campus cultivation opportunities, recruit campus partners to participate, and curate and design the menu of cultivation offerings—all tasks that previously fell to frontline fundraisers. When MGOs wish to bring a prospect or donor back to campus, they simply have to touch base with the cultivation concierge about an opportunity, invite their prospect or donor, and attend the event.

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Practice 14: Prospect interaction metrics

In addition to in-person visits, MGOs are rewarded for one-way outreach and significant two-way exchanges with prospects through remote channels (email, phone, text message, videoconference, etc.). These metrics incentivize broad, comprehensive activity across the portfolio, as well as cultivation that aligns more closely with some prospects’ aversion to in-person meetings early in the cultivation cycle.

Prospects are proving more reluctant to take in-person visits with frontline fundraisers prior to establishing a relationship with them. Their time is their most precious commodity, and an ask for time is difficult for them to say “yes” to. MGOs, too, struggle with time. The time it takes to travel for an in-person visit imposes constraints on how many prospects they can meaningfully cultivate in any given year. Consequently, much of their portfolios goes under-cultivated, since MGOs do not have the time to meet individually with everyone assigned to them.

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Practice 15: Time-boxed cultivation stages

Advancement leaders institute a division-wide timeline for cultivation. MGOs must move their prospects through discovery, cultivation, and solicitation within 18 months of assignment. Prospects who do not move quickly can be subject to reassignment.

MGOs worry about moving too quickly toward a major gift proposal. They err on the side of too much, rather than too little, cultivation. Yet in so doing they miss opportunities to solicit prospects who are ready for a proposal. In addition, they create bottlenecks within their portfolios that prevent new prospects from being cultivated.

The University of Chicago has worked to act on the insight that an expedited approach to solicitations leads to top fundraising performance. Advancement leaders at the university now ask all of their fundraisers to move prospects through the cultivation cycle in under two years.

Prospects can spend no more than six months in qualification, twelve months in cultivation, and six months in solicitation. MGO managers work with their fundraisers to ensure that prospects are moving through the cycle at a quick clip. And, while it is rare, prospects who spend too long in any one stage can be reassigned to another fundraiser. This expedited approach, paired with other division-wide changes, has supported an overall increase in major gift proposal activity.

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Practice 16: Fast-track prospect gap analysis

Prospects are selected and prioritized for cultivation based on the likelihood that they will give to capacity quickly. MGOs focus in particular on high-net-worth individuals who currently give but do so below their full capacity, as well as donors who last gave major gifts before the current campaign started.

Even MGOs who work to move prospects quickly toward an ask often focus their efforts on the wrong prospects. Not all high-net-worth individuals will take the same amount of time to arrive at a major gift proposal. Overinvesting time in prospects with extensive capacity but a low likelihood to give in the short term undercuts the institution’s fundraising performance and constrains pipeline development.

Next Step: Fill out the Prioritization Guide

Based on your institution’s goals and available resources, use the chart below to map out which of the tactics profiled in this section you would like to prioritize. Use this document to assess viability and determine next-steps. Download the Guide.

Section 4: Scaling personalized cultivation

This final section will focus on tomorrow’s major gift prospects. These individuals are often rising-capacity mid-career individuals or those who are poised to inherit great wealth in the coming years.

Tomorrow’s prospects beyond our reach

MGOs should not focus on these prospect populations because the returns from doing so are low in the short term. And with relatively few MGOs on staff, advancement leaders must rigorously prioritize the leads their teams pursue. Indeed, the ratio of undiscovered prospects to MGOs is so high that an average team of fundraisers can spend decades just working through today’s potential donors.

Prospects still developing capacity

“We should stay in touch, but we can’t focus our MGOs on low-level prospects.”

Prospects are not warm

“We’ve tried reaching out, and we get nothing. They’re just not willing to take a visit with an MGO.”

Not enough fundraisers

“We operate in an environment of scarcity. Our MGOs can only do so much. But that can mean they ignore the pipeline.”

It takes a village to cultivate a pipeline

Scaling personalized cultivation requires all areas of the advancement enterprise to collaborate. Communications professionals, alumni relations staff, and annual giving teams all have a role to play in engaging tomorrow’s best prospects and warming them to the idea of an investment in the institution.

The first set of strategies involves partnerships with the marketing and communications team to track the digital engagement patterns of tomorrow’s prospects and segment content to increase their feeling of connection to the university.

For most institutions, communications are an untapped opportunity for scalable, personalized cultivation. Currently, the best communications go to individuals who are already convinced of the value of investing in the institution. These donors give society-level gifts and receive impact statements, advance notice of breaking news, and more.

The marketing and communications and donor relations teams treat them as true insiders. Prospects whom the institution hopes to cultivate but who have not yet given are left out of these communications streams. They receive the same communications and content that all other constituents see. Often, these pieces do little to move them meaningfully through the engagement pipeline.

Practice 17: High-touch prospect communications

Advancement communications or marketing/communications staff track and analyze engagement rates on communications to identify meaningful touchpoints for high-potential unassigned prospects. They then segment these prospects for customized messaging in broader communications campaigns.

High-potential prospects who are currently unassigned receive the same one-size-fits-all messaging as all other constituents. Many of them are not yet engaged enough to acquiesce to a visit with an MGO, yet communications staff do little to target them with content that would meaningfully increase their engagement rates.

McGill University is moving toward segmenting out tomorrow’s prospects for specialized communications streams. The marketing and communications team has begun analyzing engagement patterns and behaviors that this group exhibits when the university sends out communications. They will use that data in the future to customize mass communications and address the prospects in a way they will find particularly meaningful.

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Practice 18: Prospect ‘warming’ campaign

Targeted engagement communications nurture leads and warm prospects. Teams of phonathon callers follow up with prospects to schedule visits following the conclusion of the three-month warming period.

Many unassigned prospects have low engagement and affinity levels. They perceive the few communications they receive, consisting mostly of annual fund appeals and general university news, as “noise” to be ignored. When MGOs reach out for a visit, their requests likewise land in the trash folder.

Rutgers University is also aiming to warm unengaged prospects, though they are doing so in the hopes of seeing major gift returns in the short term. The advancement team at Rutgers targeted 5,000 cold, unresponsive prospects with engagement communications for a three-month period. These multichannel communications won mindshare among the prospects and underscored a feeling of connection to the university.

Following the end of the communications campaign, callers began reaching out to the prospect group to schedule visits with MGOs. As this pilot effort concludes, advancement leaders at Rutgers will hope to see the warming campaign positively impact prospects’ receptivity to further engagement with and investment in the institution.

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Practice 19: Pipeline-focused alumni programming

Alumni relations staff develop programming that would appeal particularly to a high-potential prospect audience, especially executives. They target the invitation list toward unassigned prospects whom MGOs do not currently have capacity to cultivate, thereby acting as a “force multiplier” for cultivation efforts.

Engagement programming often aims to serve the entire alumni community. The broadly resonant orientation of this programming often holds little appeal for high-potential prospects. They feel underserved by these offerings, yet MGOs do not have capacity to cultivate them, leading to a complete lack of engagement with the institution.

Cultural change has brought with it shifts in structure. Today, nearly two-thirds of alumni relations shops are integrated with development. Many of these shops enjoy a larger budget to execute on efforts critical to the overall advancement enterprise.

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Practice 20: Alumni engagement portfolios

Alumni relations staff members are assigned portfolios of alumni to engage. These supersized portfolios, often numbering over 1,000 alumni, are segmented by long-term major-gift potential. Engagement officers prioritize the 150 prospects with the greatest long-term major gift potential while ensuring that their remaining assigned alumni receive high-touch, personalized engagement.

No member of the advancement team has accountability for high-potential prospects until the prospects are assigned to MGOs. Mid-career alumni who are still building capacity are relegated to the general alumni population for engagement. Few steps are taken to personalize these general engagement offerings or ensure they are resonating with these priority populations.

Elon University has taken even bolder steps to shift from engagement to cultivation within alumni relations. They did so by reorganizing a segment of their alumni relations staff’s workflow around portfolios. Elon hired three alumni engagement officers to each carry a portfolio of 1,150 engagement prospects, with 150 of those prospects being designated as top priorities. The officers use scalable cultivation mechanisms, such as text messages, mail-merged emails, and phone calls, to actively engage their assigned alumni.

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Practice 21: Major gifts lite proposals

Advancement leaders segment a small group of overlooked prospects who are well positioned to upgrade to a higher giving level. These donors receive high-quality, customized direct-mail solicitations that resemble major gift proposals. The proposals ask for an ambitious upgrade to the next level of the institution’s gift society, which often involves a doubling of the donor’s previous gift.

Prospects receive nearly identical annual fund appeals regardless of their medium- or long-term major gift potential. While the default ask amounts on these appeals may vary by capacity, the content of the solicitation is the same. These appeals do little to communicate to donors that they have the potential to make a high-impact, meaningful investment in the institution that will stand apart from a standard annual fund gift.

The initiative’s reach

• 906 mailings sent in 2013
• 847 mailings sent in 2014
• $4.44 cost per mailing

Oregon State University has done so with a high-quality, four-page mailing that resembles a major gift proposal. The proposal is sent in a large, priority-mail envelope with a handwritten address that stands out from other direct-mail pieces. A personalized reply card asks for a specific upgrade amount. In addition, the appeal is populated with customized content based on donor interests and giving histories. Advancement staff automate the customization process as much as possible by using a mail merge that links content such as impact stories to commonly shared donor characteristics.

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Practice 22: Social media solicitation testing

Social media engagement data points advancement staff to topics and themes that resonate with priority populations, such as rising-capacity prospects or highly rated unassigned prospects. Staff solicit these populations for gifts to funds that align with the content they engage with online.

Personalized cultivation must involve engaging prospects around a cause or topic about which they feel passionately. Yet determining the interest of tomorrow’s prospects in a scalable way often proves difficult.

Advancement staff struggle to identify what resonates with prospects whom MGOs do not have the opportunity to sit down and talk to. Unrestricted asks fall flat, as do open-ended asks for restricted gifts. While staff suspect there’s likely some cause that would move these individuals to make a significant philanthropic investment in the institution, they can rarely figure out what it is.

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Practice 23: Digital gift officers

Gift officers cultivate and solicit prospects for leadership annual gifts through a multichannel, remote strategy (phone, email, social media, videoconferencing, etc.)

Leadership annual gift officers have proved effective, but they come at a fairly high cost to the institution. In addition, the busiest prospects may shy away from in-person meetings, as time is their most precious commodity.

Some institutions have moved toward an even more scalable cultivation strategy: hiring digital gift officers. Digital gift officers engage and solicit large portfolios of leadership annual prospects and highpotential discovery prospects with few to no in-person visits. Davidson College recently hired their first digital gift officer.

A day in the life of a digital gift officer

• Direct solicitation/stewardship (55% of time)
  • Using digital strategies to identify, qualify, cultivate, and steward selected alumni as donors and volunteers
• Digital engagement strategy (20% of time)
  • Develop a comprehensive digital engagement strategy for identified segments of the alumni population
• Data analysis (10% of time)
  • Evaluate the reach for all digital engagement and compare tactics with personalized email outreach, social media, text-messages, etc.
• Special projects (15% of time)
  • Responsible for making solicitation calls and texts in addition to one-off projects related to fundraising

Advancement leaders have tasked this new team member with using digital channels, such as email, text messages, Skype, and social media, to cultivate a portfolio of over 1,000 prospects. Many of these prospects have fallen outside of Davidson’s cultivation efforts in the past due to staffing constraints.

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Next Step: Fill out the Prioritization Guide

Based on your institution’s goals and available resources, use the chart below to map out which of the tactics profiled in this section you would like to prioritize. Use this document to assess viability and determine next-steps. Download the Guide.

Implementation resource center

This toolkit will help you implement the practices outlined in the study, New Frontiers in Pipeline Development, to maximize major gifts from overlooked prospects and revitalize your major gift pipeline.

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