Podcast: The Power of the Gift Range Chart for Your Campaign

Season 3, Episode 11

The Gift Range Chart is the roadmap to your campaign. Join Amy Eisenstein and Andrea Kihlstedt to learn why this tool is so powerful in ways you probably haven’t considered. Learn how all aspects of your campaign are connected to this simple tool.

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Amy Eisenstein:
The roadmap for your capital campaign is right under your nose.

Hi, I’m Amy Eisenstein. I’m here, of course, with my partner, Andrea Kihlstedt, and we are super excited to be talking today about gift range charts, which is really the roadmap for your capital campaign. Andrea, talk to us about sort of, I don’t want to say the history of gift range charts, but why they’re so important, where they came from, all of that good stuff.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Yeah, well, so let’s start by saying that what is the roadmap that’s right under your nose? The roadmap is the gift range chart. You can use the gift range chart to guide and figure out pretty much everything about your campaign. And it took me a long time as a young consultant to understand that fully.

What is a Gift Range Chart and Why Does it Matter?

Now, what is a gift range chart? I’m sure you probably know, but let’s be sure we’re talking about the same thing. It’s that little chart that shows how many gifts at what levels you need for your campaign to get to your goal.

It looks super-simple and most people don’t pay it a whole lot of attention, but it is actually based on the Pareto Principle, this idea that a relatively few people give the significant portion of the gifts. And that’s true in a whole bunch of things in life, but it is certainly true in capital campaign fundraising. We’re looking for 10 or 20 people to give 60, 70% of the campaign goal. And the gift range chart maps that out. It shows you how many gifts you need at each level to make that happen.

Now, capital campaign fundraising is very top-heavy. It’s the top-heaviest kind of fundraising there is. And putting that top-heavy image or picture in a gift range chart makes everyone much clearer about what the task of the campaign really, really is. And you have to get one gift. Let’s say you have a $10 million campaign, you need one gift of at least 2 or $2.5 million. You need two gifts of at least a million dollars each, probably more. You need four gifts of a half a million dollars each, and so on.

So these, we really call out in a gift range chart how many gifts you need, particularly at these top levels. And once you see that, once you see that and you can show it to your board members and to your largest donors, everybody gets clear about what it’s going to take to make this campaign happen. What’s that expression? The scales fall away. Is that the, what is that expression?

Amy Eisenstein:
I don’t know.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
For greater vision. I don’t know.

Amy Eisenstein:
Yes, it becomes clear. So let’s get back to this idea of this gift range chart, or gift table you may call it at your organization, or gift pyramid you may have heard it called.

The idea, though, is that it really is the roadmap to your campaign because you can see gift by gift if you’re on track or not. And if you’re not getting some of the big gifts, you will redo the chart and it will become clear quickly that you either cannot get to your goal or you’re seriously off track, or both. They may be one and the same.

And so that’s why it is the primary tool for capital campaigns and literally the roadmap because you can check off as they come in gift by gift to see if you’re on track or not. And if you’re not, and when you’re not, you go back to the brainstorming room and you say:

“All right, we need some of these bigger gifts. So what’s the strategy?” Or if they don’t come in, “What’s the strategy?”

And we need to really be on track and follow the map, follow the plan.

The Many Ways a Gift Range Chart is Your Campaign Roadmap

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Now, there are other ways in which it’s a roadmap also, and this is really what tickled me, that if you have a gift range chart that you are willing to use as the roadmap for your campaign, you can also track on that chart things like donor recognition.

You will recognize the people in the top third, for example, of your gift range chart in one way, perhaps through naming opportunities or some other special way. You will recognize and steward the people in the middle of your chart in another way. And you will steward the people at the bottom of your chart in yet another, perhaps less personal way. So it becomes your roadmap for stewardship and donor recognition.

It can become your roadmap for staffing. Maybe you have a staff person who is responsible for that top tier, those top third of your gift range chart, and that’s their job for the campaign. Their job are the people who are in that principle gift category or lead gift category. And then maybe someone else on your staff is responsible for the middle donors, and maybe someone else is responsible for raising the gifts from lower level.

So again, that gift range chart, the picture of it gives you a way to make decisions for your campaign that fall into the pattern of the gift range chart.

The same is true of communications. What kinds of things are you going to use to communicate with people? And can you imagine developing your communications plan based on the gift range chart and communicating differently for people at the top, in the middle, and at the bottom? Those are just some of the things that you can hook onto that chart. And when you do it, it’s amazing.

How to Solicit Donors with Respect to Your Gift Range Chart

Let’s talk about the most important really, and that is how are you going to solicit people?

Amy Eisenstein:
Yes.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
How are you going to solicit people? Well, guess what? You’re going to solicit the people at the top of your gift range chart differently from the way you’re going to solicit people at the bottom of your gift range chart. So you can actually create a solicitation plan for the top third, the middle group, and the bottom group. And the way you solicit gifts for each of those is going to be quite different.

So the gift range chart really is the roadmap for your campaign in more than just knowing how many gifts of what size you’re going to need to bring in. It’s much more significant than that.

Amy Eisenstein:
It’s much more sophisticated as well. I mean really, many people who don’t understand capital campaign strategy don’t really connect the dots until it’s right in front of them that stewardship is connected to the gift range chart, that naming opportunities are connected to the gifts that you’ve identified that you need at the top levels of the gift range chart.

I’m so glad you got to solicitation. I thought maybe you didn’t say it because it was too obvious.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
No, I should’ve started there.

Amy Eisenstein:
You should have started there. It’s fine. It’s fine. I was going to bring it up. But that’s exactly right.

I mean, the bottom third of your gift range chart or the bottom quarter is the public phase. And those people are solicited in very different ways than the people at the top of the chart. And there’s probably some sort of middle way for the middle people or a different committee or, as you point out, a different staff person.

So really it does this one very simple chart that probably 50 or 100 years ago was written out on a napkin. I mean, somebody thought of it. And it is as simple as a back of the napkin drawing. I mean, ultimately when you fill in all the gifts, it gets a little more complicated. But when you start with category A at the top, category B at the middle and category C at the bottom, and you know that category A needs to get you to 50% or more of your goal from those top 10 to 20 gifts, it becomes easy to figure out.

So one thing just to get people started if they’ve never done a gift range chart before to help you flush it out, the first gift should be in the ballpark of 25%. It might be as low as 20%. It might be as high as 30% depending on your donor base. But whatever your goal is, the first gift needs to be about 25%. And then create gifts in descending order knowing that the first 10 gifts need to get you to 50% of your goal.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
There have been so many times, Amy, over the years that I’ve worked on a campaign and at the end of the campaign, you go back and look at the gift range chart that was the roadmap for that campaign. And you look and see where gifts came in. You actually check off, “All right, we actually got one gift at this level and two gifts at this level,” and we start checking off. And you’ve been checking them off through the campaign actually. But you go back at the end of the campaign and you really look at it. And it always has felt like magic to me because with remarkable frequency, the overlay of what actually happened and the gift range chart while not perfect is remarkably close.

And I often wondered, okay, why is that the case? It clearly is not magic, right? I mean, much as I love the idea of magic, this is not magic. And here is really why it is the case, that when you have the right gift range chart for your organization, and we should talk about that a little, Amy.

When you have a gift range chart, the shape of which is right for your organization, and you settle on it as the guide, as the roadmap for your campaign, then you will keep coming back to it again and again. You will use it to show to donors. You will ask donors for the giving levels in that roadmap on that chart. You will start to treat donors and solicit donors in a way that is appropriate at the levels that you’ve mapped out in your gift range chart. And in doing that, of course, you create the reality of your campaign, which matches your gift range chart because that’s what you’ve decided to do, right?

Amy Eisenstein:
Yes.

A Gift Range Chart as a Manifestation of Your Campaign Intentions

Andrea Kihlstedt:
To me, it’s so interesting to realize how we start with this sort of abstract pattern.

Amy Eisenstein:
I know this isn’t the right phrase, but I’m trying to think. Intention becomes reality, right?

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Yes, you made it intentional. Exactly.

Amy Eisenstein:
Yes. Yes. Putting down your goals in writing helps you make them a reality because then you go after them. Once they’re written down, everybody knows that’s what they’re supposed to do.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
And that’s what you stick with and that’s what your solicitors stick with.

Now, there are a couple of things that go awry with gift range charts with beginners who don’t know this tool very well.

Amy Eisenstein:
Yes.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
And one of them, and I just want to call it out so people don’t make this mistake, one of them is that they create a gift range chart that they feel okay about, and then they go and ask someone for one of the gifts on that chart, one of the top gifts. But that donor gives something else. Instead of giving a million dollars, that donor gives $600,000, let’s say.

Now, people who don’t understand the chart will then go back and want to redo the chart in keeping with the gift that actually came in. And that’s not the way this chart works. Once you’ve settled on a gift range chart for your campaign, you stick with it.

And your goal is then to make the campaign, to force the campaign into the mold of the chart, not to change the chart into the mold of what you’re seeing on the ground. And that’s super important that people understand that.

Amy Eisenstein:
Yeah. So now people are scratching their heads. So the $600,000 gift would count against your $500,000 category, right?

Andrea Kihlstedt:
That’s right. And that happens, right?

Amy Eisenstein:
Yeah, of course.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
This is not an exact overlap. So you’ve asked someone for a million dollars, they gave you $600,000, and you check off the $500 category. That’s exactly right.

Rookie Mistakes When Using a Gift Range Chart

Amy Eisenstein:
Yeah. So that’s interesting. Where I thought you were going actually was number of prospects needed for the gifts. So let’s talk about that also. I think this is also sort of a rookie mistake. Right?

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Yeah.

Amy Eisenstein:
I think there’s many rookie mistakes we could talk about here, but one of them is not making sure that you have enough prospects for each gift that you need. And they need to be real prospects, not out somewhere.

And I’ve seen gift range charts where people do put two, three, or four prospective donors per gift, but at the bottom they have more gifts needed, or more prospects needed, I should say, than they have donors in their database.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Right. Right.

Amy Eisenstein:
And of course, that never works. And that’s because they think they don’t have any big gifts at the top, so the bottom is too heavy and they need a zillion small gifts to possibly get to their goal. And I say:

“Well, there is fundraising math, and the math is telling you that you don’t even have as many donors in your database as you need to complete this campaign given this current version of your gift range charts. So you know it’s wrong. The numbers literally don’t add up.”

So as you’re going through, you will want to assign two, three, or four realistic prospective donors. And as you get towards the bottom of the donor database, you may, or, I’m sorry, the donor pyramid, the gift range chart, you may not know exactly who each donor is, but you darn well better have a multiplier effect of potential donors in your database if you’re going to be expecting those gifts to come in.

So that’s another sort of rookie mistake or thing to look out for.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Right. I mean, it always makes me chortle when somebody presents a gift range chart and you see that they need a thousand gifts at the bottom, and you add up all the gifts they need for the whole chart, and maybe it’s 1,200 gifts, 1,200 gifts, and you say, “Well, how many active donors do you have?” And they say, “400.”

Amy Eisenstein:
Right. That’s exactly right. You’re not going to make that mistake now. Okay, good.

Gift Range Chart = Gift Pyramid

So let’s talk about this idea of, we call it a gift range chart. Certainly, it’s in the shape of a pyramid because there’s a few gifts at the top. And while some pyramids are more narrow and some are steeper and some are broader, depending on the donor base, they shouldn’t be sort of not follow that pyramid shape. So if you need…

Andrea Kihlstedt:
They shouldn’t be a rectangle.

Amy Eisenstein:
Right. It shouldn’t be a rectangle. It shouldn’t be a hourglass, right? We’ve seen that before where people know that they can get a few gifts, the biggest gifts at the top, and then they don’t have any idea where the middle gifts are coming from, so they don’t plan for any. So it’s that hourglass shape, and then lots of gifts sort of at the bottom.

So we really want to see one gift at this level, two gifts at that level, four gifts, and then eight, and then 12. It doesn’t have to be exact or completely even, but it needs to be somewhat even.

An Exception to the Rule of Gift Range Charts

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Now, there is one exception to that rule, and that is that let’s say you’re thinking about getting a board giving goal. You’re going to your board and you’re hoping your board will collectively give $100,000 to your campaign. Now, that’s just a simple, easy number. And if you wanted to do a little gift range chart for your board for that $100,000, let’s say it’s a million dollars, that’s probably closer, that’s a better number. Let’s say you’re hoping your board is collectively going to give a million dollars to the campaign. And you decide, well, a way to approach the board is by doing a gift range chart for that million dollars that can sort of be on the same, might be on the same principles.

Well, it turns out that when you have a closed set, which is what you have on the board, you have a closed set of people. Maybe you owe 20 people, let’s say. You don’t have masses of people beyond that. You’ve got 20 people. Turns out that a gift range chart for a closed set looks like a diamond, a triangle.

Because you have a few people at the top who are going to give large gifts. You have a few people at the bottom who have no capacity to give much of anything at all, but who will give. And the bulk of the people that are going to fall into the middle.

Amy Eisenstein:
Yes.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
So you have a diamond shape instead of a triangle shape. And that always interested me.

Amy Eisenstein:
Yes. That’s fun.

Alright, great. I think we have given people a lot to think about in terms of the roadmap to their campaign. If you haven’t played with your gift range chart yet, it is going to be one of the first things that you do once you identify some campaign objectives and a goal.

If you need any help developing your gift range chart, of course, we have templates and samples over here at Capital Campaign Pro. So do visit our website, capitalcampaignpro.com. We would be delighted to speak with you about your campaign planning, strategy and, of course, your gift range chart.

Thank you so much for joining us, and we’ll see you next time.