Develop Your Major Gift Pipeline
Fundraisers’ recent successes at the top of the giving pyramid have had an unexpected consequence: the ranks of pipeline donors have grown thin. As advancement leaders have focused on the biggest gifts, they’ve underinvested in pipeline donors. This inattention to the middle has imperiled the future of major gift efforts and created a sustainability crisis in higher ed fundraising.
Enfranchise gift officers to prioritize discovery
Pipeline development must begin at the beginning: with a robust, active discovery operation. Yet the need for high prospect assignment rates and the tendency for MGOs to “claim” prospects mean that large groups of prospects sit in portfolios unattended.
To take advantage of their untapped potential, forward-thinking advancement leaders are focusing on the barriers preventing MGOs from doing discovery: MGOs’ distrust of newly assigned prospects’ potential, their discouragingly low outreach hit rate, and the distractions created by the “tyranny of the immediate.”
Deploy three strategies for supporting wider coverage of assigned prospects:
- New lead generation practices such as student discovery callers and alumni relations prospect referrals turn gift officers onto “hot” leads and help them better allocate their scarce discovery time.
- Data analytics techniques such as discovery visit likelihood scoring and social media discovery targeting elevate hit rates on discovery outreach, improving efficiency—as well as trust in the worthwhileness of cold outreach.
- Digital pipeline nudges based in behavioral economics principles prevent the tyranny of short-term performance goals from crowding out pipeline development activities.
Increase major gift throughput
At most institutions, development officers manage portfolios that are bursting at the seams. The over-assignment of prospects spreads MGOs thin and slows down cultivation cycles for all of their prospects. With so much on their plate, they get overwhelmed, and their portfolios become a log-jam of prospects moving imperceptibly—or not at all—toward a proposal.
To overcome portfolio inertia and increase major gift throughput, best practice institutions focus on speeding up the rate at which prospects enter—and leave—portfolios.
- Reframe portfolio disqualifications as conducive to major gift success with reasonable contact attempt criteria and automatic prospect sunsetting systems.
- Hardwire post-discovery next steps by setting up pipeline cultivation metrics or providing resources like a plug-and-play cultivation guide.
- Compress proposal timelines with time-boxing cultivation stages and prospect fast-track gap analyses.
"We got our gift officers to start seeing more of their portfolios, but there was so little follow through it was almost like it didn’t matter. They’d find people to take visits, and they’d hit their visit goals, but the wheels were spinning and we weren’t going anywhere.
"Associate Vice President for Development, Private Master’s University
Scale cultivation touches for unassigned prospects
Tomorrow’s major gift prospects may lack the capacity to contribute much today, but cultivating these mid-career rising stars—without direct intervention from MGOs—is crucial to a fundraising enterprise’s pipeline health.
To make inroads into your unassigned prospect pool, we recommend warming the unengaged through coordinated communications touches, collaborating with alumni engagement to deliver programming to high-priority prospects, and mimicking the major gift experience for mid-level annual fund donors and prospects.
Scaling personalized cultivation requires all areas of the advancement enterprise to collaborate. These three strategies represent an “all advancement” approach to cultivating unassigned prospects at scale:
- Warm the unengaged with high-touch prospect communications or a prospect warming campaigns.
- Leverage alumni relations resources to prioritize prospects for engagement with pipeline focused alumni relations programming or alumni engagement portfolios.
- Mimic the major gift experience for mid-level annual fund donors with major gift lite proposals, social media solicitation testing, or digital gift officers.
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