Podcast: Unlocking Major Gifts: The Art of Soliciting Top Donors

Season 3, Episode 42

In this episode, hosts Andrea Kihlstedt and Amy Eisenstein dive deep into the world of soliciting major gifts, particularly focusing on the top 10 to 20 donors.

Discover the strategic complexity behind soliciting these substantial gifts and why they can make or break your campaign’s success. The hosts emphasize the importance of meticulous planning and thorough research in the solicitation process.

You’ll gain insights into crafting a compelling plan, understanding your donor’s motivations, and assembling the right cultivation team. Learn how to initiate exploratory conversations that lead to mutual understanding and trust-building with your potential donors.

Listen Now:

Andrea Kihlstedt:
When is a solicitation not just a solicitation? Today, Amy and I are going to tell you.

Amy Eisenstein:
Hi, I am Amy Eisenstein. I’m here with my colleague and co-founder Andrea Kihlstedt. We are excited to be talking about the significance of each gift, certainly the lead gifts as really the key to success in terms of campaign fundraising.

Soliciting Major Gifts for Capital Campaigns

Andrea, we want to talk about, really, the complexity and the thought and the strategy that goes into soliciting the top 10 to 20 gifts for your campaign and how much of a huge difference it can make if you do them well or if you don’t.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Yeah. I mean, it’s one thing to be asking someone for a gift of $100, or 250, or $500. Then, you go and ask them for money. They say yes or no.

Amy Eisenstein:
Right. Or you send them a letter.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Yes. Or you send them a letter. That’s right. It’s quite a different thing to ask someone for $1 million, or $2 million, or $5 million. That’s something that you don’t just send them a letter and hope to get a check back from. It takes a different mindset.

Amy Eisenstein:
Or send them a proposal if it’s a foundation. It takes some thought, some strategy, and some real research.

Planning to Solicit Your Top 20 Campaign Gifts

Andrea Kihlstedt:
We spend a lot of time, Amy, talking about how campaigns are made or broken in about 20 gifts, that you will raise over 60 or 70% of the money of your goal with just 20 gifts. That’s true of pretty much every campaign. Those 20 gifts are big. They’re really important.

Today, we want to talk to you about the importance of planning each one of those solicitations thoroughly, and carefully, and well.

Amy Eisenstein:
Yeah. I think it’s such an important topic because many people who don’t have a lot of campaign experience don’t really understand what the quiet phase is, or why it takes so long, or what they’re supposed to be doing. I think that focusing on the first 20 gifts… So whether that’s 30 donors or how many ever prospects it is, qualified prospects that you’re working to get to know, it’s important to focus on them and really understand that it’s a process.

That’s why the quiet phase can take 12 months, 18 months, 24 months, depending on how well you know these prospects beforehand. But to me, one of the keys that we’re going to talk about today is that it’s not quick. You’re not going to schedule a meeting and sit down with someone and ask for $1 dollars. What has to happen before the ask?

Learn As Much As Possible About Your Donor

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Yeah. Imagine what a plan might look like. To begin, a good plan is going to have a lot of information about the donor. If it’s a foundation, if it’s an individual, if it’s a corporation, doesn’t much matter. You want to know as much as you possibly can about that organization or that person:

1. Why they give
2. What they’re giving
3. Habits and patterns are to you
4. Why they care about your organization
5. What it is they particularly care about
6. Whether they have ever given gifts of the amount that you’re going to be asking them for

Who in your organization has the closest relationships to that person? What is it that brought them to you originally? I mean, really dive back through your files and then in wherever else you can look to find out as much as you can about your top donor.

Let’s just focus on one donor. Let’s just think about… “Okay, who is that? Who is that person, and what do we know about them?” Just looking at that is going to start you thinking about what the solicitation process should be.

All right. Once you’ve done that, then you’re going to want to think about who should be in touch with them. Maybe it’s more than one person.

Amy Eisenstein:
Let me just point out that some of that information that you were talking about in terms of what their interests are and how they give and what they support and those types of things… Some of that, you’re going to be able to find doing some research and looking in records and looking online. This is an opportunity perhaps to engage a prospect researcher to really do a professional dive. But some of that information, which I think is what you’re pointing to in a minute, is only possible to get with a conversation or asking them.

Schedule a Meeting with Your Top Donor

One of the first things to do, as you were about to say, and I didn’t mean to cut you off, is to schedule a meeting. It’s not an ask meeting. It’s an exploratory conversation.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Yeah. I’ll give you a good example of that. I mean, a project that we worked on some time ago, one of their lead donors… The family had been a donor to this organization since their founding really. It was a family foundation run by a husband and wife. They had gotten older. Recently, the husband and wife were no longer involved. The son and the attorney had taken over the foundation.

Now, there wasn’t a strong relationship there yet between the organization and the son because they were just starting to take over. The question was:

“All right, we know about the history of giving that this organization has done. We know about the family. But we don’t know about the son. We know who he is. But we don’t know much more.”

They decided that they were going to schedule an appointment between the executive director, who had the bulk of the relationship, and the son and the attorney to talk about the foundation and how they were functioning and how they felt about continuing their relationship with the organization and what they were thinking about, their giving patterns and the direction of the foundation.

But really, it was a conversation that was to be more about the foundation than it was to be about the organization. That’s what they did. They learned a ton. They really did learn a ton. What they learned is that the son was very new to the business of philanthropy. The son was very forthright about that, saying, “I don’t know what I’m doing yet. The attorney and I… We’re just figuring it out. We’re going to have to ask you, the organization, to help us ’cause you have more experience than we have.”

That’s essentially what came out of that conversation.

Amy Eisenstein:
I think that that’s the case in lots of donors who are either new to money, whether they’ve earned it or whether they’ve inherited it. I think a lot of perceived philanthropists may or may not be experienced philanthropists and may need education on both sides.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
One of the things that came out of that conversation, that early conversation, is that the son and the attorney had this idea that they would like to give in a way that motivated other people in the community to give, that they didn’t want their foundation to be the primary source of philanthropic revenue in the community. They wanted to use their giving in that way. Well, that was a real clue to the organization as they thought about how to put a proposal together for this organization.

After this initial meeting, which was the first thing they had done, to go back to this idea of creating a plan, was that they had gone through all of their records. They knew how this organization had made gifts to them in the past. They knew that the parents had both stepped aside and that the son and attorney had taken over. They had done their research about the son and the attorney to the extent anything was available.

Then, they had decided to go and meet with the son and the attorney. That meeting had yielded the understanding that the son and the attorney wanted help figuring it out. They wanted to use their gifts in a way that would generate revenue and income from other sources. They would never-

Amy Eisenstein:
It’s a lot of learning. They would’ve never known that if they hadn’t had that conversation.

This Critical Process of Understanding Your Donors Takes Time

That’s what’s critical about this process: is that it does take time. It is a back-and-forth. Those are the best relationships and lead to the biggest gifts usually because there’s a mutual understanding.

Let’s go back to this idea of a plan for a minute because I think it is important to think about a plan:

• Who is the best team of people to meet with this prospect or donor?
• Who’s the best, not just solicitation team, but cultivation team?
• Is it the executive director and a board member?
• Is it the development director and a board member?

Usually, for the top 20 gifts… Let’s assume it’s the executive director and potentially a board member.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Maybe for those 20 gifts, it’s quite different, actually. I mean, you don’t want–

Amy Eisenstein:
Each gift.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
…to say that it’s… Each gift is going to be different. If you’re one of the top 20 donors and you have a close friend who’s on the board, but you don’t know the development director from Adam, then it’s going to look one way. But if you know the executive director and you don’t know a board member, it’s going to look a different way. You have to look at each of those prospects as a different question. Who is the best team for this particular prospect?

Sometimes, that takes some serious conversation to figure that out.

Amy Eisenstein:
Right. Right. It may not be obvious at the beginning. It may not be who you think it is right off the bat.

What Do You Already Know About Your Donors?

The other thing to list in your plan, without sounding redundant or obvious, is really listing what you know. What are the facts in terms of the giving patterns, the giving history, what they give, what’s available publicly?

Then, figuring out what you don’t know or what you need to find out before soliciting a gift and trying to check all of those things with not making assumptions. Just because they’ve done something in the past doesn’t mean that that’s what they’re going to do in the future.

Make sure that you’re checking things and not assuming publicly available information is always correct because sometimes it’s not. I think that there’s really an opportunity to have a conversation and an exploratory conversation about what the donors’ wishes, and feelings, and thoughts are about their philanthropy.

Having Conversations with Donors is Respectful, Not Prying

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Amy, I think some people are hesitant to do that ’cause they’re afraid the donor won’t want to have that conversation. We find that it’s quite to the contrary that donors appreciate it when you try to understand their giving before you ask them for a gift. It’s respectful. It’s not prying. It’s respectful.

You’re not going in to say, “Well, tell me everything about your assets.” That’s not what you’re doing. You’re going and saying, “Tell me about your philanthropy and your relationship to this organization. Do you like giving significant gifts to special projects? Do you like giving challenge grants? What’s your history? What kinds of giving has really made you happy?”

People like it when you’re willing to have those kinds of conversations with them. Don’t assume that they’re not going to want to have that conversation. Your curiosity about them will go a long way towards making them feel happy about you.

Amy Eisenstein:
Remember, the number one thing that people like to talk about is themselves. You know that.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
All of us.

Amy Eisenstein:
All of us. Everybody. Everybody.

When you are genuinely curious and looking to do what’s in the best interest of both the organization and the donor, if you’re truly looking for a win-win scenario, that’s when everybody wins.

How Big of a Gift Should You Ask For?

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Let me go back to my example, Amy, as a way of moving on to the next part of a plan because once you have done the homework, and you know what the organization’s giving is, and you’ve looked up everything you can look up, and then you’ve gone to talk to the donor to understand better about their philanthropy and where they are and how they make decisions and all of the other things you want to find out, then you go back and say:

“Well, all right. Let’s think about what we’re going to ask them for and how we’re going to ask them for the gift.”

My organization, the organization we did this campaign for, did just that. They went back, and they said:

“All right. Now, we know what they’re interested in doing. We know that they’re looking to us to make a proposal because they’re trying to figure out how they want to do this. They want to help.”

They took their gift range chart. They picked the highest gift on the gift range chart, which I think was a $3 million level. They decided they were going to ask for a $3-million gift. They were going to make it a challenge gift. I can’t remember what the terms of the challenge were. But it was something like this organization would give a million and a half dollars upfront to get the campaign going and then give a million and a half dollars as it was matched with contributions from others at certain levels.

Amy Eisenstein:
Maybe gifts of 100,000 or more.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Or something. I don’t remember what the terms were. But they set it out. They set out their idea in a proposal. They sent it back. They sent it to this organization. They waited a couple of days, and then they called them. They said, “Did you get our proposal, and can we schedule a meeting to talk about it?” They said, “Yes, happy to do that.”

They go in, and they have a second in-person conversation. The son and the attorney come back to them and say, “Well, thank you. The amount is fine. We can do the amount. But we don’t want to do the challenge this way. We want you to challenge new donors.”

Now that was a problem for the organization because we know how difficult it is to get new donors to give at big levels. To them, to the organization, it was like they knew the son and the attorney didn’t know philanthropy well, or they wouldn’t have asked for this. They didn’t want to get into a challenge that they weren’t going to be able to succeed with.

Amy Eisenstein:
Of course.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
They had a problem. It’s like, “All right, what do they do about that?” They’re not going to be able to raise $3 million in new money. Or they were afraid they couldn’t raise $3 million.

Amy Eisenstein:
Certainly not in big gifts.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Not in big gifts. They then went back home. They rewrote the proposal. They rewrote the proposal in a way that toned that down, that asked for some percentage of it in new gifts. But the bulk of it… They added a section of it that would be increased gifts. They could match increased gifts rather than new gifts, which was interesting.

Well, to make a long story short, this went back and forth several times until they finally, over a period of many weeks, actually, even months… They finally came to a place where everybody was happy with the proposal. But it took several going back and forth. Nobody felt rejected.

Make Sure the Gift Works for the Donor

Really, what I want people to understand is that this was all a constructive conversation, that it wasn’t like we’re asking over $3 million and you were saying yes or no. That wasn’t the issue. They were asking them for $3 million. They were trying to come up with a way that was going to work both for the organization/be possible to fulfill and serve the desires of the foundation. They finally found it. But it took some serious conversation back and forth.

Amy Eisenstein:
I think one of the key takeaways for listeners is that they weren’t afraid to go back to the donor and ask for what they needed. There was some risk involved in that that the donors would say no. It was in their power and their right to do that. But they used their listening skills/their negotiating skills. They weren’t in a massive rush. If they had been in a massive rush, it might’ve fallen apart. But they were patient. They were willing to take the time to go back and forth and ask for what they need.

Both parties came out ultimately with something that was workable and something that satisfied the need of both sides, which is, of course, the ideal situation. Sometimes, gifts do fall apart. But for them to have accepted those terms that weren’t workable for them wouldn’t have been good for anybody because it would’ve fallen apart anyways.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
That’s right. The added benefit to this process was that, in having these conversations back and forth, they developed a sense of trust with one another, that they all knew they were after the same result, namely making it work for both sides. Then, throughout the whole campaign and project, the organization periodically would go back to them and say:

“Hey, here’s what’s happening now. We just thought you’d like to know. Do you have any suggestions about how we might handle this, that, or the other thing?”

Actually, in one instance, that foundation came back with another gift to make something else happen. That was based on the fact that they just had built such a good relationship.

Final Thoughts

For this podcast, I think the super important point is that you shouldn’t be thinking of these as one-stop shops. You should be thinking of these top donors as people with whom you are going to build a relationship to get to an understanding of what the donor wants to do and what it is you want the donor to do at a high level for your campaign.

Those conversations are sometimes quick. But many times, they’re not. In the backing and forthing, you have an opportunity to really listen and build relationships and build trust that’s good for everybody.

Amy Eisenstein:
Yeah. Excellent. Starting out with research and a plan and the assumption that the first time you meet, or the second time, or the third time may not be the time that you ask for or get the gift.

All right, everybody. Thanks so much for listening. We’ll see you next time.