Achieve Scale, Sustainability, and Impact in Principal Gifts
Big, bold principal gift proposals that address societal or global issues are critical to attracting donors in an increasingly competitive philanthropic landscape. But identifying big ideas and scaling principal gifts is a struggle for advancement staff who must convince academic leaders with short-term departmental needs to think outside the box. It is critical that academic leaders, faculty members, and university leadership align around a formalized big ideas process.
For a big ideas process to succeed, advancement and academic leaders need to cooperate and collaborate. Follow six critical steps to source the big ideas you need while building working relationships with academic leaders and faculty members.
As more nonprofits compete for principal gifts, colleges and universities find themselves under pressure to articulate why they are best positioned to address the global issues donors care about. It is imperative for advancement staff to help campus stakeholders effectively present information about the transformative potential of their projects and share impact data with donors in a compelling manner.
One way for advancement to communicate impact is by helping forge strong ties between faculty members and donors through faculty discovery visits. But forming relationships is no longer enough. Advancement leaders and their faculty partners must communicate with today’s “donor investors” in ways that resonate with them.
"Donors everywhere are much more strategic and thoughtful about their giving. They want to see data and outcomes. They constantly ask 'Can you show me the numbers?'"
Responsibility for managing relationships with principal gift prospects often falls to the busiest senior leaders on campus—Presidents, Deans, and CAOs among them. With the number of prospects being cultivated for principal gifts rising, this model is reaching its breaking point.
To realign principal gifts staffing to deliver high-touch donor experiences sustainably over the long term, best-practice institutions take two steps:
- Scale the CAO’s reach with strategy support positions
- Flip the talent pyramid by enfranchising new gift officers to cultivate the pipeline.
To ensure that campus leaders, including the CAO, are spending the scarce fundraising time they have interacting directly with principal gift donors, best-practice institutions hire strategy managers to handle internal cultivation pre-work. This includes briefing campus partners, drafting communications, or formalizing stewardship plans.
To fully scale the institution’s principal gift reach, some colleges and universities go beyond senior leaders and ask less-tenured gift officers to lead outreach and cultivation. Early career principal gift discovery officers can devote their time and tenacity to build affinity with these cold principal gift prospects and move them quickly toward high-level giving.
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