Podcast: Unlocking the Power of Gift Range Charts for Campaign Success

Season 4, Episode 25
In this episode of All About Capital Campaigns, Amy Eisenstein and Andrea Kihlstedt reveal the incredible power of the gift range chart, an indispensable tool for any capital campaign. Often called a gift pyramid or table of gifts, this chart does more than outline donation goals—it serves as a comprehensive roadmap for your campaign’s strategy.
Amy and Andrea explain how this simple yet complex chart can eliminate the chaos of campaign planning by structuring communications, guiding timelines, and aligning staff efforts.
Listen Now:
Andrea Kihlstedt:
Do you wish you had one simple tool that would help you make sense of all of your capital campaign work? I’ll bet you do, and maybe it sounds too good to be true, but in today’s session, we’re going to tell you what that tool is and how it works.
Amy Eisenstein:
Hi, I’m Amy Eisenstein. I’m here with my colleague and co-founder, Andrea Kihlstedt, and today we are going to be talking about the magical gift range chart and how it works and why it’s important for your campaign, and really why it’s the roadmap. It’s your campaign plan, all-in-one.
What is the Gift Range Chart and Why is it Magical
So Andrea, talk about the gift range chart and before we dive into that, I just want to say people may know it as the gift table, table of gifts. What else do people call it? Gift pyramid. What is it?
Andrea Kihlstedt:
Let me tell you what it is. It is that simple chart that everybody who’s doing a capital campaign knows, that shows you how many gifts you need, of what size to get to your campaign goal. One gift of X, two gifts of Y, four gifts of Z, and so forth. Every capital campaign has one.
Most of you have at least seen something like this before, and if you’re working with us, you’ve certainly worked on developing one, but just about no one understands the true power of this simple table. It’s not only good for understanding how many gifts of what sizes you need, it’s the way you can help structure your entire campaign and the thinking that goes into making your campaign a reality.
So Amy, let’s talk about the magic of the gift range chart.
Amy Eisenstein:
Yeah, I love the way you explained that and it’s so important because it really is a quick, simple tool. It’s simple and it’s complicated, which is so interesting, the dynamic of that. But when you plunk it down, once you’ve wrangled with it for a while to make sure that it really reflects your organization and your donor base and gets to your campaign goal, when you plunk it down in front of board members and in front of potential donors, the whole capital campaign falls into place.
’Back-of-Napkin’ Quick Campaign Math
It’s like a back of the napkin kind of math thing, and really demonstrates what you need to achieve your goal. And I think that’s so important because people really don’t understand how powerful a tool it is.
Andrea Kihlstedt:
Amy, I love that expression, back of a napkin kind of thing. I love to do these things on a napkin with a felt tip pen, a little skinny felt tip pen, actually. I can’t tell you how many diners I’ve sat in with a napkin and a felt-tip pen, sort of roughing out a gift range chart for a client. There’s something incredibly satisfying about doing it that way. It gets the right tenor of how these charts actually work, much better than if you go and do an online gift range chart formulator.
Amy Eisenstein:
Calculator. Yes.
Andrea Kihlstedt:
Calculator. Exactly.
Amy Eisenstein:
I was just talking to somebody the other day and they really have no idea if they can raise the kind of money that they’re thinking of. And I ran through the first 10 gifts, just in the air…
“You need one gift of 1,000,000, and two of half a million, and four of a quarter million.” And then I said, “Okay, do you have any prospects for your top three gift categories?” And they said, “No, not at all.”
So okay, then you may not be able to do this campaign because if you lower those gifts, you need more donors than you even have in your community. So understanding campaign math basics, this chart really lays it out for people in a way that they can understand.
The Power of the Gift Range Chart for a Capital Campaign
Andrea Kihlstedt:
Okay now, but let me tell you that in this particular podcast episode, we are not going to explain to you how to create a gift range chart. We want to turn to the side a little and tell you about the other power of this chart. If you want to know how to do a gift range chart, there is lots of material on Capital Campaign Pro and elsewhere about how to put a gift range chart together. So we refer you to that.
Today, we want to talk about what happens when you have your gift range chart and how you can use it. And I’ll tell you how this came about, this particular topic. So one of the things we at Capital Campaign Pro do is that we have a monthly session for the CEOs and board chairs of our client organizations. Sometimes we invite them to come as bitch sessions because sometimes the heads of organizations need a little space just to unload the stuff, all the pressures they have.
Brining Your Capital Campaign into Focus
But with some frequency, the people who come to those calls come with questions. And one of the questions that we hear again and again from CEOs is:
“I am so overwhelmed, having to run the organization, having to run the campaign, having so many things to do that I barely know which way to turn. Help me. Please help.”
We hear this all the time, and in yesterday’s call, we always have two professionals, two of us moderating these calls. Yesterday, I was one of the moderators and it struck me that I could tell them the power of the gift range chart and that that might help. Now, why might it help? The conversation had to do with creating communications plans for their organizations right here. They’re all in capital campaigns and everyone is telling them:
“You are the least known organization. You need to get your word out. You need everyone to know more about who you are.”
And of course, every organization hears that, that not enough people know about them. The reality is, for a capital campaign, we don’t really care if the world knows about your organization. What we care about in a capital campaign is that 50 people, among whom those top 20 gifts are going to come, that they really know your organization so that they’re going to be interested in giving to it.
And that thought process made me think yesterday, oh yes, the gift range chart is the magic of helping these people get clarity about what it is they had to do. And when they get clarity, the rest of their work is going to get simpler. So we started by talking about, well, how can you use the gift range chart in figuring out your communications plan?”
Communicating with Differently-Tiered Donors
And the reality is, if you look at your gift range chart, it breaks into three tiers. Those top gifts, probably 20 gifts, a mid-range set of gifts, maybe 50 gifts in the middle, and then a whole bunch of gifts at the bottom. Top, middle, and bottom. And those of course are organized by giving capacity. Top people have the most giving capacity, middle people have middling giving capacity, bottom people, a lot of people are going to give you relatively small gifts. If you think for example, about your communications plan, you can develop a communications plan with a strategy for the top tier, a strategy for the mid-tier, and a strategy for the bottom tier. And those plans are going to be radically different.
You’re going to want to communicate with your top donors at a very personal level, not with big, broad-based communications. You’re going to want to communicate with your mid-level donors as personally as possible, but there are too many of them to be as personal as the top, so you need a different kind of strategy. And of course, the broad swath at the bottom, that’s when you’re really going to need a broad marketing plan.
Well, all of a sudden, the clouds in people’s minds yesterday lifted because they understood that their work for the capital campaign in terms of communications was all about those top 50 people and how they’re going to communicate with them.
Amy Eisenstein:
Yeah, it’s interesting because the start of the conversation was about marketing and appealing to, honestly the people that are going to give you the last 10% of your campaign goal. And what they really, by focusing on the gift range chart, which is what we’re talking about, you were able to help them refocus and really understand that at least for the quiet phase of the campaign, the significant phase of the campaign where you’re raising 75, 85% of your dollars, they really needed to be communicating super personally with 50 people that were going to have the potential, or were going to give those top 20 gifts.
And some of those will trickle down into your middle category, which is what you’re talking about as well. So the top leadership level gifts, about 20 gifts, and then the major gifts level, which is the middle tier that you were talking about.
A Roadmap for Being Tactical Throughout Your Campaign
And so really getting people to think streamlined, so that there’s less overwhelm and that they don’t have to do a big marketing campaign, which is what I think a lot of people do think.
Andrea Kihlstedt:
Well, and they don’t have to do it all at once. They can be very tactical and strategic in figuring out what it is they need to do now. And if they’re in the beginning, the early part of their campaign, what they need to do is to focus like a laser on those top 50 gifts, and how they’re going to communicate there. But that’s not all the gift range chart will do, and I talked with them about this yesterday. You can also organize the staffing of your campaign according to the gift range chart. So you can assign someone to work with you on those top 50 donors, those top 50 gifts.
That’s category A, that top part of the gift pyramid, requires a different kind work than the middle or the bottom part. So you can assign someone at the top, you can assign a different staff member in the middle, and you can assign yet a third staff person at the bottom, who’s organized the broad base of your campaign.
Well, all of a sudden what feels like a total muddle because everybody’s trying to do everything, begins to get clear. Now, that’s not all. I’m reminded of those funny ads on television, which my husband and I often laugh about, where they market and then at the end they say, “But wait.”
Amy Eisenstein:
“There’s more.”
Andrea Kihlstedt:
“For half the price, you can get twice the…” But wait, that’s not all the gift range chart is going to do. You can also organize your campaign timetable according to the gift range chart because you will want to solicit the largest gifts first. That’s a standard campaign principle, always solicit the largest gifts first.
So guess what? In your campaign calendar, your campaign timeline, you are soliciting that top tier of donors in the first months of your campaign. Then you’re moving down to the mid-level. And finally in the public phase, you’re going to the last part. Again, tying it all back in. You can. But wait —
Amy Eisenstein:
There’s more.
Andrea Kihlstedt:
You can organize your whole donor recognition program, of course, according to your gift range chart because you will recognize the people at the top of the gift pyramid differently from those in the middle and those at the bottom. So if you look at this gift pyramid, not just as an idle organization of the numbers of gifts you need, but rather as a major organizing principle for pretty much everything in your campaign, you will be able to get rid of these clouds of overwhelm because you’re going to know what it is you need to be doing, when, and what you need to be focusing on now.
Amy Eisenstein:
Yeah, I mentioned, this is your whole campaign plan in one chart, and you just outlined timeline. We could talk about budget, communications plan, donor recognition. It’s all tied back to this one table of gifts, this one gift range chart, and it dictates and informs your entire campaign plan and strategy. And so really going back to it again and again.
Don’t Rob Your Gift Range Chart of its Power
I want to mention one other thing that we talked about yesterday after this meeting you had with our client CEOs, and that is that after a gift comes in, people are tempted to adjust the gift range chart up or down, often down when a gift does or doesn’t come in as they hoped.
And one thing that you said that really struck me, is that you want to hold fast to this plan as much as you can in order to help people make bigger gifts, think bigger, be inspired. So if every time you don’t get a gift, you adjust the gift range chart down, nobody’s going to be inspired to give those big gifts. So say a little bit more about that. I think that’s a really important point you were making.
Andrea Kihlstedt:
Yeah, the gift range chart, as Amy said earlier, is actually, it looks very simple. It’s actually a very complicated chart. And what’s complicated about it is that it blurs the lines between a sort of a mathematical formula based on the Pareto principle where 80% of the gifts come from 20% of the donors, or the 90/10, and the chart is roughly based on that, and yet it has to have some relationship with the organization and the reality of its donor base, and finding the right place between those two is complicated.
So I don’t want to make light of the fact, this is not a simple clear tool, but what Amy says is right, once you have a gift range chart that is right for your organization and also embraces this mathematical side of it, this mathematical formula side, you want to hang onto that like everything —
Amy Eisenstein:
A dog on a bone.
Andrea Kihlstedt:
Like a dog on a bone, because then you will be pointing your donors to that, saying:
“If we are going to raise $5 million, we need three gifts of half a million dollars to make that happen. Will you consider giving one of them?”
And what happens is that that helps donors figure out what they’re going to give. If you see it just as a way of recording what people actually give, you lose the whole power of the chart.
Amy Eisenstein:
Let me say one more thing to your point about it being simple and complex. So what you’re talking about in terms of the complexity and based on an organization’s donor base, so two organizations that both have $10 million gift range charts and campaign goals, they will not probably have the same gift range chart. So for example, a school community, a K-12 independent school has a narrow donor base. And so their gift range chart is going to look much different than a $10 million animal shelter donor base gift range chart.
One is going to be very steep and narrow, so the top gift is going to be higher, and the other one can be a little bit broader and a little bit flatter. And so that is where the complexity comes in, because you have to factor in, how many donors do you have, what level of gifts are they capable or interested in making?
And so that’s one of the reasons that it can be complicated, is because it does get adjusted for your organization, your donor base, your community, your staffing sophistication in terms of soliciting gifts. There’s lots of things to consider when building this gift range chart that is right for your organization.
Getting the Numbers Right is Crucial
Andrea Kihlstedt:
Amy, let me go back to our original picture of sitting in a diner with a napkin and a felt tip pen to create a gift range chart. The reason I like that so much is because you have to play with these numbers until you come up with a chart that’s right for your organization, and to think about doing it on a napkin and then crumpling up and throwing away the napkin and starting again, starting with maybe a higher gift at the top or a lower gift at the top, and then playing with the numbers to see how they fall out, you start to get a sense of what’s going to work, of what’s going to be right, in a way that very few other activities will help you come to grips with.
And I learn more about a campaign and an organization by going through that exercise than by most anything else. And I’ll put together a draft gift range chart, then I’ll add up all the gifts that we need for that, and I’ll multiply it times three.
So that’ll give me the number of prospects we need for those gifts. Well, if it turns out I need 1,000 prospects and this organization has only ever had 350 donors, we’re in the wrong camp.
Amy Eisenstein:
Ballpark. Yeah.
Andrea Kihlstedt:
The wrong ballpark.
Get Experienced Help to Get Your Gift Chart Right
Amy Eisenstein:
Yes, yes. No, that’s such an important point and such a good example because I think people really, who haven’t been through campaigns before have no idea about this. And I was just talking to an organization that said, “We need to raise this much and we have this many donors, and we’re, of course stuck.” And they just did the gift range chart. They had no idea how to think about the math of a campaign.
So I want to reassure listeners and say, listen, if you haven’t been through this exercise multiple times, it is complicated. We started out with, it’s simple, but it’s complicated. The good news is, you don’t have to do it alone. That’s why there are campaign experts. There’s campaign counsel.
So if you’re thinking about a campaign and you’d like assistance with this or you think you might like assistance with this, I hope you will visit the Capital Campaign Pro website and sign up to talk to us about your campaign. We’d love to help you.
Of course, our advisors help our clients with these kinds of things every single day. In addition, we do have tools and templates for you to start playing with in our Online [Campaign] Toolkit.
Andrea Kihlstedt:
And we have groups that come together like the one we had yesterday, to talk about these things. At the end of our meeting yesterday, we always go around in these meetings and say:
“Well, what’s one thing from this meeting that you really, really want to hang onto?”
And everyone said:
“Oh, my. That was such an aha to hear about how many roles the gift range chart can help us with. It’s given me a way to structure my work.”
And I thought, Amy and I really should do a podcast about this. So here we are.
Amy Eisenstein:
That’s the magic of gift range charts. I hope you had an ah-ha moment listening to this podcast today. If so, I hope you will give us five stars and share and like this podcast so that other people can find us, and we’ll see you next time. Thanks so much for joining us.
Leave a Comment