5 steps to major gifts for any nonprofit

Dani Cluff: Well, perfect. We’ll give it just a second as people log on today. Good afternoon. Or I guess it’s still morning for you, Brian, where you are. Thank you, everyone, for joining us.

I know this is a busy time of year for a lot of people, so we really appreciate you taking the time out of your schedule to join us. My name is Dani Cluff. I’m on the partner team here at Bloomerang, and I’m super fortunate to be joined by Brian Saber today, who has come to share a wealth of knowledge with us. He’s going to be sharing five steps to major gifts for any nonprofit, so I hope you all know you’re in the right place. This is the webinar you signed up for.

Let me get my slides moved. There we go. Before we get started, a few housekeeping notes. We’ll be using the chat today. That is your place to talk with your peers, share ideas, and talk with Brian and me throughout the webinar. If you want to drop in where you’re logging in from, I always love seeing where people are across the country. We’ll send out the recording of today’s webinar later this afternoon, and we’ll also send out Brian’s slides. At the end of the webinar, we’ll launch a quick poll in case you want to hear more from Brian and his Asking Styles quiz, which he’ll talk about today, or if you want to hear more about Bloomerang.

If you have any questions, Zoom has a Q&A area. Please add your questions there and we’ll keep track of them and answer them at the end of today’s session. If you add them in the chat, I’ll do my best to keep track, but we’ll have a lot of people here today and questions can get lost in the conversation, so the Q&A area is your best bet.

If you’re unfamiliar with Bloomerang or new to our webinars, we are a giving platform built for purpose. We help nonprofits build stronger relationships and grow their impact through the different tools we provide. If you’d like to learn more, that poll will be at the end.

But what you’re really here for today is not to listen to me talk, but to listen to Brian and everything he has to share. Brian, we are so lucky and excited to have you with us. I’ll get out of your way so you can launch into things.

Brian Saber: Well, thank you, Dani, and thank you, everyone, for joining me today. I’m delighted to talk about major gifts, which are so important. I’m delighted to be partnering with Bloomerang, which does such great work. I’ve been doing webinars for them for a long time now. Boards and major gifts always seem to be sources of challenge and need.

I think many of you have typed in where you’re listening in from, which is wonderful. If you could also type in your position and your organization, that would be great, because I always like to know how many directors of development we have, how many executive directors, any board members. Oh, a board treasurer. I’m going to immediately give a special shout-out to board members who have taken time in the middle of the day to learn more about major gifts, because we need you in major gifts. You’ll see that one of the steps relates to boards. I see we’ve got a lot of directors of development here.

I’m going to assume most of you are with small to midsized shops. You might not even have a director of development. As executive director, you might be doing everything. If you’re under a million dollars, which most nonprofits are, you might have one or two development staff. You certainly don’t have a major gift officer, and this whole idea of major gifts can really loom over you.

I’ve been at this for forty-one years now. I got my first job in April of 1985. I never thought I’d be a fundraiser, but I wanted to be in the nonprofit world after college, and it turned out I was good at it. By my third job, I was the executive director of a little dance company in Chicago. If you’re from Chicago and you knew of Joseph Holmes Dance Theater, you can type that in. I was the only professional staff there other than a marketing person, so it was on me to fundraise. It was on me to do what I call major gifts, all those relationships, and to work with the board. I ended up doing all of that for twenty-five years as an executive director or director of development. I’ve been a board chair. I’ve been a board treasurer. And in the last fifteen or sixteen years, I’ve been working on this as a consultant, so I’ve learned it from all different sides. I hope that by the end of today, everyone will feel empowered to go after major gifts, and we’re going to talk about what they really mean.

We have five items on the agenda today. I said to Dani, how about we do a webinar called Five Steps to Major Gifts? I teach this all the time, but I had never said, “If I had to choose five steps, what would they be?” So what you’re seeing today is brand new, in terms of how I decided to distill this down to the basic, important pieces that would make it doable.

Here they are. Set a major gift level. Work our way down, and you’ll hear what I mean by that in a minute. Build a cultivation plan. Track activity. And utilize board members optimally.

I’m simplifying as much as possible. That’s not to say this is simple or easy work. I think fundraising is the hardest work in a nonprofit, and I think building relationships and meeting with donors individually is the hardest work in fundraising. I respect that, having been in thousands of meetings and still finding it daunting today. I do it because it’s so important, and I hope you all will.

Before we get into setting a major gift level, I’d like to position why this work is so important. Staff will know some of this, but board members may not, and some of it is research I came across. In particular, Kent Dove, long ago of the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy at Indiana University, did research on how effective different types of asking are. Take direct mail. We buy a list from our local newspaper or wherever, send out five thousand letters, and see what comes back. It’s very expensive, and only a small percentage of those letters result in a gift. Today, very little of the email and crowdfunding we do results in a gift either.

Kent found that 25 percent of phone solicitations result in a gift. This isn’t cold calling. This is when your alma mater, your place of worship, or an organization you already care about and support reaches out to you. Twenty-five percent of those calls result in a gift. But when we are face to face asking for a gift, 75 percent of those asks result in a gift. Really incredible odds.

There are many reasons for it. The number one reason is that when we’re together, a level of empathy develops that doesn’t develop any other way. If you’re like me, you find the phone a little disconcerting. Now we have video chat, which is great. When we’re with each other, even by video chat, looking in each other’s eyes, we have more empathy for each other. We care more about each other. We listen more closely, and we want to come through and be as good as we can be. It’s how we’re wired.

So we want to get in front of people. Of course, we can’t see everyone, which is why in a minute we’ll talk about setting a level. Ideally, we’d meet with every single donor in person if there were no cost. But there is a cost, so we have to figure that out. The benefits are really great, though, and that’s something we can do with what we call major donors.

That’s a really good question. Does the 75 percent include video meetings? I’ve been looking for research on how video is impacting major gifts and haven’t seen any. I know we’re seeing more major gift meetings, fewer in person, but more contacts with major donors, and I don’t know if the conversion rate is changing. I hope someone will do research on that. I doubt it will be me, but you never know. I do know it’s easier now to get a video meeting. It takes less time, and there are fewer reasons to say no because no one has to travel anywhere. People are comfortable with it today. But I don’t know the difference. Thank you for that question.

The second reason this is so important is where the money comes from. We’ll soon get the 2025 numbers from Giving USA. In 2024, almost $600 billion was given in private gifts in the United States, including foundation, corporation, and individual gifts. I know the professional fundraisers will know more or less where this comes from. Two-thirds of it is individual money. Almost 8 percent is bequests. And half of all foundation money is actually individual or small family foundation money. People put their money in some vehicle for posterity or tax purposes, but it’s still an individual making a decision about their money. Put it together, and 84 to 86 percent of all private money given out in the United States is given by individuals. That’s been consistent forever. Corporations have increased their giving significantly over the last few years, but it’s still a small piece.

The other truth here is that major gifts are very efficient. We spend a lot of time on direct marketing, which is very expensive. Usually you lose money the first year or two until you build a stream of income. Special events, and we’ll come back to them, I guarantee you, are more expensive than you’ve ever calculated. They are very expensive and time intensive. I’m not saying we shouldn’t do them, but they are expensive. As we move to annual giving, then sponsorship and grants, these larger gifts are less expensive to raise, and they depend more on there being a relationship. With direct marketing, someone gets something in the mail, it piques their interest, and they respond, but it’s expensive. As we get to major gifts and planned giving, these become what I call the gifts that keep on giving, especially major gifts.

So I have a question for you. What is the longest number of consecutive years you have made a gift to any institution? I’m now coming up on my forty-second year since graduating college, and that means, unless they miss something, I’ll have given for forty-two straight years. What’s the number for you?

I hope everyone’s getting it. Twelve, fifteen, seventeen, six, five, thirty-two. Twenty-nine, twenty. I’m looking for someone to beat my forty-two. Is anyone going to beat forty-two? What do we have? Forty-five. Okay, is that Stan? It went by fast. I want to know who gave forty-five years, and forty-two as well. Kristen, I need glasses for some of these. If you’re over forty, tell me. Shana Lee, who will be at fifty. Jenna, you may, if you want, tell us who went to Harvard. Go Harvard. Elvira, fifty-two years. I bet it’s a church or a school or something like that. Might be a YMCA. That’s an answer I get a lot.

Wow, it is so great to see this. Why do I ask this question? Because these are the gifts that keep on giving. How much cultivation do you actually get from an organization you’ve given to for forty or fifty years? I don’t get a lot from my school. I have a certain loyalty that has developed over those years. I do have a relationship, whether or not they’re fostering it. My biggest gifts are where I know people, where I know the work they’re doing, and where I’ve been giving for years. So this is really important. It all begs the question, which piece of the pie do we want?

We need to do major gifts if we want to access all the money in that pie chart, and if we want our fundraising to be efficient and low cost. The challenge is that when we say “major gifts,” someone thinks Harvard. Someone thinks a major gift is putting your name on a building or endowing a scholarship. So we need to figure out what it is for us.

That’s the first step. I hope I’ve convinced you that you really have to go for these major gifts. The first step is deciding what you call a major gift. So I’d like you to type in, if you know, what you consider a major gift at your organization, if you’ve ever used that term.

Type that in. A thousand. A thousand. Two thousand, five thousand, twenty, some much higher numbers. Ten. Ten. So a hundred thousand for someone. Wow, a much bigger organization. If it’s at ten, a hundred, you’re already doing a lot of major gifts, I would think.

For me, I define it as a gift worth your time and money. It’s interesting. The people who are saying a hundred thousand, I’m going to assume that even at ten or twenty-five thousand, you are paying attention to people individually and meeting with them individually.

For eight years, I was in charge of giving in the Midwest for my alma mater. When I say giving, it was individual giving almost entirely, and I was working with people who could give at a certain level. I couldn’t get to everyone, and I always thought, why doesn’t my alma mater have two or three people in my region? Even at $2,500 a donor, that person could make money for the university. They could bring in way more in gifts than it would cost in salary, benefits, and office space. So what I’m trying to help organizations figure out is the minimum threshold, in terms of what someone is currently giving or could give, that makes it worthwhile. Then we’ll come at it from a second direction, which is how far down that pyramid you can go.

As I said, a major gift is one worth the time and money. It could be $1,000 for your organization, or $2,500 easily. Hundreds of these went by in the chat, so I don’t know if anyone put in $500. But if you’re that low, I might say try to go to $1,000, because we need to aspire, and it takes a lot of time to get a $500 gift. We’re going to come back to the board at the end, and given the numbers you’ve put up for major gifts, it will be interesting to find out what types of gifts your board is looking at.

Kim Klein of Grassroots Fundraising came up with this ages ago, the ABCs of picking prospects, and I’ve been using it for more than a decade. For someone to be what I would call a major gift prospect, they have to have the ABCs: ability, belief, and contact.

We’ve discussed the first one, ability. They need to give or be able to give at a certain level. They certainly need to believe in what you’re doing, specifically. Most people believe we should have after-school programs, that we should help the elderly with senior programs, that we should do research, that we should clean up the environment. Most people would agree with most of these things, but that doesn’t mean it’s in their sweet spot. When we’re looking at people we want to be major gift donors, or major gift prospects, meaning they haven’t given yet, we need to make sure they believe in what we’re doing. Even the biggest philanthropists can’t give to every organization. As a matter of fact, larger donors are more likely to focus and say, “I’m dealing with education. I’m dealing with the environment. I’m dealing with medical research.”

And then, of course, we have to have contact. Whenever I present, I try to include things that board members like and things that staff like. So here’s a gift for staff, which I’m saying to board members. Coming up with a list of the richest people in your town or city, or even those who support the sector you’re in, is not particularly helpful. I lived in New York for twenty-five years, and everyone said I should solicit Mike Bloomberg. I would say, do you know him? Because I don’t know him. If neither of us knows him, he’s not a prospect. He’s a suspect. And I don’t go after suspects much, because I’m one of five hundred people standing outside his door, euphemistically, and there are a thousand people on the other side of that door trying to keep me out. There needs to be a contact.

So the ABCs are really important in figuring this out. We figure out a threshold at which it’s worth the time and money, and we look at people who already give or have the ability to give, who believe, and who have a contact.

Then we figure out how far down the list we can go. One of the challenges I find in fundraising, and tell me if you’ve had this as a fundraiser, is that there are so many people out there who could be prospects and meet those ABCs. Current [unclear], just tons of people we know about, people who are connected to people. How do we figure out how to do this? In my own mind, I always had to figure out how to get rid of the noise and focus only on what I could do.

How do you figure out what to do if you’re just starting out? By the way, let’s type in: how many development staff altogether do you have at your organization? Let’s see. We’ve got twelve for someone. Wow. So you’ve already got a major gift program going, I would think. Lots of zeros and ones, a whole mix. Another twelve. Twenty-two. Wow, very big. Two point five.

Unless you have six, eight, or ten development staff, you don’t have one person focused on major gifts. It’s often the last piece of the puzzle, which is probably why many of you are on today. We start an organization, and all the people on the board make little gifts and do all the hands-on work, and the budget’s really small. Then we get a little more money and an executive director, and people start doing the programs. The board turns into more of a governance board, and we get some institutional funding. Maybe we get a government grant, and we’re doing special events. Eventually, we come back to major gifts, and then we have to figure out how to fit them in. At a certain point we grow to have a major gift officer, but what do we do in between?

I’ve studied this a long time. I actually do a wonderful paid webinar for Charity How To called Major Gifts in Two Hours a Week. I took a few elements from it for today, but if you want to dig in deep, you might find me there.

I think it takes about twelve hours on average per donor per year when you put together time spent in meetings, personal correspondence, and anything else you might do individually. If you take four weeks of vacation a year, then for every two hours you have in a week, you can have seven active prospects.

So if you’re an executive director truly trying to find time for any of this, and you can carve out two hours a week on average, you should have only seven live prospects on your radar screen. These are people you’re expected to meet with, hopefully twice a year, think about on a regular basis, write to, invite to special things, and so forth. That’s all you can do. And even if that’s all you can do, that is a major gift program.

A major gift program doesn’t mean you have a hundred people and you’re having all these events and there’s a big back office. For me, a major gift program is just that you’re out there seeing people who meet a certain threshold, in whatever time you have. We’re going to go through what it really means to deal with major donors, in as simplified a form as possible, because it doesn’t have to be any more sophisticated or complex than that. What’s important is to realize that even with that time, you can have prospects.

We’re still going to come back to the board and how important it is, especially since so many of your organizations have no staff or one staff. Say I’m an executive director and I have just one development person who maybe has four hours a week for this. But I have a whole bunch of board members, and let’s say each of them could give us even two hours a month. They could each have two or three prospects, and now I can start to see where we might have twenty or thirty altogether if we involve the board, which we’ll come back to.

But I’m sure some of you executive directors are saying, “Fine and good, but my plate is full already. How am I supposed to find two hours for major gifts? Okay, Brian has told me how important they are, I see all the statistics, but I’m up to my eyeballs, especially in the current climate, trying to keep the place going.” At a certain point, and I do come back to special events and other things, something has to leave your plate.

I’ll often ask this question. If you could get rid of one fundraising event your organization does, what would it be? Type that in the chat box. I bet I’m going to hear golf tournament at least once or twice. What would you get rid of if you could?

The gala. Oh, just the word gala makes me cringe, I have to say. Golf tournament, golf, gala, gala, gala, auction, golf. I get pained by all of these. We’re going to talk briefly about the Asking Styles. I bet many of you on today know about them. I’m actually an introvert. The thought of attending a gala makes me cringe.

You absolutely have some event that’s less strategic than the rest, which you could probably get rid of. One on one, when I’m working with an organization, I will make them do some painful calculations about their events. I’ll say, okay, you have the gross amount, and now you take away the direct expenses. Now how about the indirect expenses? How about the portion of your staff time? I worked with an organization in New Jersey that had a very successful gala, but the director of development admitted she spent almost 60 percent of her time on it. She was earning $100,000 a year, so that was $60,000, plus taxes and Social Security and other benefits, that had to be deducted from the net of that event. Then I asked, how much did your board members give? They gave a total of about $80,000. They bought all these tables and such. I said, wouldn’t they have given you that money without the benefit? Aren’t they giving that money for your gala because that’s where you ask them to give it? In most cases, that’s the truth. By the time we got down to what was left, that event was much less strategic. There was much less net income in it.

Then people say, “Yes, but we got visibility and we got this.” And I say, yes, and you could have had that without the sit-down dinner and all the speeches. I’m a big fan of special events that cultivate people, special events that thank people, and special events where people can volunteer or be recognized. None of those are fundraising events. None of those take the same time and effort.

We have a portfolio of revenue. Put earned income aside. On the contributed revenue side, we have government contracts, corporations, foundations, board giving, annual fund giving, and then major giving. We need a piece of each of these, and like your retirement portfolio, you need to balance it so it serves you best. You may have to say, if we’re going to go into major gifts, we have less time for this. You might eventually decide it’s worth the investment to have another half a person or to do something else.

This is also true for boards. It’s one thing to say, “Board, can you help with this major gift effort?” But where are they finding the time? They’re going to say, “We’re already coming to eight board meetings a year.” Do you need all eight? Can they be shorter? Where is your board spending its time, and might we free up some of it?

We have to be honest with ourselves about how we spend our time. This is what businesses do all the time. They’re always squeezing every dollar of profit and every bit of efficiency out of their organizations, to a fault, I might say. But they look at it and say, “Don’t spend your time on that, because this other thing is more profitable.” As fundraisers, we need to do more of that to find the time, given the resources we have today.

That tells us how far down we can go. Remember, the title of this chapter is to find how far down you can go. You may have a hundred people at that major gift threshold, but based on two hours a week and how people are going to be involved, you might only get to thirty. That’s okay. You might have to forget about the others.

One of the frustrations with galas, and tell me if you’ve had this, is that you have hundreds of people in the room and you can’t give them all the same attention. You can’t give some of them any attention that evening or in following up. I don’t think you have to. A lot of people in that room were there for different reasons anyway, not to support your organization full time. I have a 5 percent rule. After your big fundraiser, identify the 5 percent of the people who attended whom you think you can build a stronger relationship with over time, outside the special event cycle. If you had two hundred people, that’s ten. That makes it doable. So that is the second piece.

Third, build a cultivation plan. When I work with organizations, we spend some time on this. I call it building a menu. This is the cultivation cycle I use. There are many versions of it out there that you’ve probably seen. We start with identifying, and then we move to educating. We’ve already identified; that’s what we did in the first sections. It could be that your board helps identify people in their networks who could be major gift prospects, which is very helpful. But here we’re onto educating, then involving, asking, thanking, et cetera.

Let me go back one step. It can be challenging to constantly think about the next thing you should do with a donor. So what I like to do is come up with a menu. Say someone gave a gift, and we thanked them, and now we want to further educate them. I can look at a list of ways to educate them and say, “Kathy and Mike, I think it’s time to invite them to sit in on our Early Head Start program,” or “I think it’s time for them to come to our lab and see what we’re doing,” or “to take a walk in this conservation area,” or whatever it might be.

I’ll often do this exercise with board members, because it helps them understand better ways they can involve their own networks. So we come up with a whole bunch of ways to educate people. At your organization, what is the number one way to educate people about the work you do? Type that in. What works best to get people to understand what you do?

Briefing session, tour, magazine, face to face, one-on-one conversations. Boom. Facebook, newsletter, visit the store, TV. Work for PBS? Go PBS. Open house, tour, social media, lunch and learn, tours. Great. Lectures. This is wonderful. Newsletter and socials.

Whatever those are, you don’t need a ton. Maybe you have three or four ways to educate people. Some of us can have people come to our program. For some, there are distance issues, confidentiality issues, or other logistical issues. So what might it be? If we have this whole list in front of us, it’s easy to just say, “Oh, let’s do that one.”

Second, how are we going to involve them? These are things we do all the time, but are they working? That’s a question too. You need to make sure what you’re doing is working. You’re getting feedback and seeing whether the people who participate that way are getting more involved, giving more, or communicating more with you. It’s a good point that we do need to measure along the way.

So now, involve. What’s the number one way to involve donors in your organization? Can they volunteer? What can they do? Type that in the chat box.

An advisory committee. Excellent. I’m sure many of you will say volunteer, but for some of you it’s difficult to volunteer, again because of the type of organization. Join the board. Absolutely. Advisory committee. Make a meal. Wonderful. Foster group. Volunteer days.

I think I see some questions coming through. Dani, if any of them are relevant, I’ll take them now. Otherwise, we’ll be done in five or seven minutes and then I’ll take questions.

Again, we’re creating a menu, a simple list of all the various things we can do. Wonderful.

Asking. There are lots of things to ask for other than money. They’re easier to ask, certainly of board members and volunteers, and those asks are cultivation. When people give us something, they become closer to us. It’s not like we use up a chip. It’s just the opposite. I remember another consultant saying years ago that it’s amazing how much time we spend trying to get someone to give. We send thank-you notes afterward, and we might be great at that. But after someone gives is when they’re most engaged and connected, because they’ve just made that connection to you. We tend to spend less time after the gift than before it, but we should spend more time after.

One of the things we could do is ask for non-gift items they may be able to provide. “Wonderful, thank you for your gift. Might you now sit on a committee because of your expertise? Might you introduce us to this other person in your field or your community? Can you give us a little more information on someone else? We’re going to be reaching out to them, and it would be helpful to know.” All these different asks are cultivation.

Then, of course, we have all the ways to thank people. Jerry Panas, many of you will remember him if you’re of a certain age. He was the pantheon in our field, and a great mentor to me. He wrote twenty-one or twenty-two books, including the book Asking. He would say you should try to thank people seven times. That might sound like a lot, but once you make a list of all the ways to thank, it becomes easier. Every thank-you doesn’t happen right away. We go back and thank people again, and many people in an organization can thank someone for a gift, depending on the gift and the relationships. And then we recognize. That’s often a staff role only: donor listings, profile pieces, and so on. But make a list of all the ways you can recognize donors at a certain level.

Once you have all that, I recommend doing this brainstorming with staff, board, or both, and making the list. This is all I ever had when I did my major gift work for my alma mater, Brandeis University. Every quarter, I went back to the school and sat down with all the different staff: major gifts, the liaison to the president, the dean, the alumni relations people. We would go through all my major prospects. I had it on a piece of paper, and I still do to this day when I’m doing that type of work. We’d say, “Okay, Mike and Kathy, what’s the next step?” I didn’t have this list at that time, but if I did, it would have made it even easier to just look down the list and say, “In the next three months, I’m going to do A and B.” And just go through the list.

I’ve got a lot of magic numbers. One of them is that seven is six. I think if you have six good, individualized, personalized touches a year with a donor, on average, that keeps them engaged. I hope two of those six are meetings, and the others can be beautifully crafted updates, invitations to tour, invitations to thank-you events, and personalized one-on-ones. Some donors will only meet with you once a year. Sometimes you get to meet more. I plan on two, and I plan on a total of six opportunities. So what do those look like for your organization?

Oops, I don’t know why that happened. Whoops. Boom. So fourth is tracking activity. This will be brief because, in a way, I’ve talked about it. You can have a prospect tracker that looks like this. You might use your CRM for a tracker, and there are all sorts of reports you can generate. This is what’s most important: What’s the next action? Who’s going to take it? And by what date will it be completed? When I left those Brandeis meetings, most of it was on me and some of it was on others. “Brian’s going to do this on this date. Lisa is going to do this on this date.” Everything was set for me. The other columns on the trackers are great, but I loved a one-page spreadsheet to keep it simple, with all the names, what was going to happen, who was going to do it, and when. That is all you need for a major gift program.

Is there any chance you can get the tracker after the call? Yes. I’ll give a PDF of this to Dani, and she can send it with the slides. I’ll do that right when we’re done so Dani can send it out later this afternoon. Absolutely, Emma.

Truly, CRMs can be very complicated and feel overwhelming. I keep it simple. Even when I was in a big university development office, what worked for me was very straightforward.

Now we’re on to the board. I specifically say “utilize board members optimally” because generally we don’t, on the fundraising front. If you’re a million-dollar-a-year organization and your board members are soliciting people for $100 gifts, they are not being used strategically. If we’re saying that what we need to do is focus on major gifts of a certain level, why wouldn’t our board be focused on those gifts? I want our board members to be partners with staff in building a major gift program.

It starts with policies. I believe the best policy is for every board member to give and get to the best of their ability. If we want our board members involved in fundraising, we have to ask all of them to do it. It needs to be part of the job description. What is your board giving and fundraising policy? If you can, type that in. I know they’re going to fly by, and we’ll probably have a range. But the first thing is to know what yours is, and then to see if you can work toward what I believe is best practice, which I see as nonexistent: give and get to the best of your ability, where everyone is giving a personally significant gift and raising as much as they can.

I don’t like “give or get,” because the wealthier people on the board can give and not do the harder work of fundraising. Also, if it’s “give or get” to a certain amount, the wealthier board members can make one ask. They can swap gifts sooner with friends and others and have access to money, and it’s still harder for the board member with less capacity. “Give or get,” as I said, lets people off the hook. The strongest board is one where everyone knows what’s expected of them, which is why you need a policy. I see many of you say nonexistent. The strongest board is also one where everyone is doing the work and everyone knows everyone else is doing the work. I believe it is the job of everyone on a board to fundraise to the best of their ability.

Many board members might say, “I don’t have anyone to ask.” That’s fine, because I think we established earlier in this webinar that your organization has a whole bunch of prospects who aren’t getting much attention anyway. If I’m an executive director or director of development, I would rather have my board member working with me on someone who can give at that $1,000 or $2,500 or $5,000 level than spending their time on a friend who might only give $250 or $500 and with whom they might have to swap a gift. Our board members do way too much quid pro quo gift-swapping, which doesn’t get the organization anywhere in the end. We need to get rid of it to the extent we can, and stop depending on our board members for this quantity of small gifts that doesn’t add up to anything and doesn’t create long-term donors. Instead, focus them on building relationships.

I don’t care whether my board members actually ask for the gift, if that’s really hard for them, as long as they build the relationship all year. That takes the time. For some of them, asking for a gift is too big a lift, though hopefully, with training, which we’re not good about, they will do it. We’ll talk about the training they need in a slide. But being part of this major gift cultivation cycle is really important.

Here’s my third number for the day. I talk about seven prospects for every two hours. I talk about six touches. And four prospects. My goal is for every board member to have four people on their radar screen who can give at the major gift threshold, who they are the primary contact for during the year. They reach out, have coffee, update them, involve them, and ask for all sorts of things, whether they ask for money or not.

They need training, though. Please stop sending your board members out to slaughter, which is what happens when we make everyone fundraise without them understanding the basic tools that we learn over time as staff. We don’t get enough training as staff, either. Actually, I’ve never had one ounce of training in forty-one years. Back then, we had a couple of books. There wasn’t much else, and we learned simply by doing. But board members aren’t doing enough to get up to speed quickly. As executive directors, directors of development, and other fundraising staff, we do this work regularly, and we learn and build our skills. We need to give our board members training right away, to get them up to a certain point on all sorts of pieces, because this is not easy work.

One of the ways to help, and this is a bit of a plug for the work I do, is the Asking Styles. As I said, many of you probably know about it. It’s a personality framework we developed at Asking Matters, similar to Myers-Briggs, DISC, or the Enneagram, but specifically about asking. It’s based on two personality traits: our level of extraversion versus introversion, and how analytic versus intuitive we are. Based on that, we build relationships in different ways. Everything we talked about today is about relationship. Major gifts are all about relationships. People give to people. Our large gifts are where we have relationships. So we want our board members to lean into who they are, and we need to lean into who we are as staff, to build those relationships. There’s the stereotype of the fundraiser, and we want to make sure we’re not trying to be something we’re not. We understand who we are, we play to those strengths, and maybe we ask others to complement us by partnering with us, in giving, and so on.

The one tool I’ll leave you with, besides sending you that chart Emma mentioned, is a thirty-question true-or-false quiz at quiz.askingmatters.com. It takes two to three minutes. We say don’t overthink it, go with your gut, and you’ll get a response on your screen and by email. The system gives you a primary and a secondary style. I’m a Kindred Spirit and a Mission Controller, which means my introversion dominates, but I do have a lot of Mission Controller, which is the more organized, systematic of the four styles. I’m not going to spend more time on it today, but as you move into major gifts, I highly recommend you focus on who you all are. For anyone on the major gifts team, what’s your personality, and how do you embrace that to build relationships and be a major gift officer?

So how do you start today? Where do you start? Think it through. What did you learn today? How do you get the key people on board? If you haven’t done any of it, who’s important? Is this just staff-run, with an executive director and a director of development? Are you going to try to work with the board chair and maybe the head of your development committee? Figure out what’s reasonable to expect. How many are you going to start with? Ten major gift prospects? How many is reasonable, so you can do the work? Forget everyone else for now, and start with the low-hanging fruit. Start with the easiest. Start with the most obvious. Try to cultivate them, meet with them more often, and spend your time there. It’s much easier to renew a gift or increase a gift than it is to get a new gift.

I hope that gives you a sense of what to do. Here are the things to remember. First, these are really important gifts. Think of what your organization wants to be and what it will take to get there. You need these major gifts, and you need people spending their time on the bigger gifts. Second, whatever time you have, you can do this. Don’t think big, fancy program. Keep the system simple. Have your menu and have your tracker. Make it your own. There’s so much money out there for the taking. We didn’t talk about planned gifts, which are really a subset of this, but it’s yours for the taking. And where you build relationships, they will come to you.

So, questions. Dani, what are some questions I could take?

Dani Cluff: Perfect. I’m going to launch that poll real quick and we’ll run it in the background, and then we’ll jump into some of those questions. A few people were asking if you have any advice for organizations that are at a national level, or doing work in areas where it’s tougher to connect and engage people in a hands-on, tangible, in-person way.

Brian Saber: Yes. I have a few thoughts on that. First, I always got on a plane and went to the donor if the donor was at a certain level. If you’re a national organization, at a certain point you need to plan to travel and meet with people where they are. I used to go to a variety of cities twice a year and fill my day with five or six appointments, to give donors face time. Truly, it was always easier to get time with people in other cities, because I’d say, “I’m coming to you. I really want to see you.” Maybe I’d pick a day around the top donor or two. They feel flattered, and it’s an important thing to do.

In terms of involvement, of course it’s harder if you’re national, or the program is in specific places or even abroad and nowhere near the donors. That’s where I think video technology has been really helpful. It’s less about being involved like a volunteer, which can get really hard geographically, and more about being engaged. At a university we called them faculty in the field. I saw that we were talking about education tours. You can do tours of facilities virtually. You can have speakers from your programs, or people with expertise in the area you focus on. All of that can be done virtually and very inexpensively. If you’ve got a subset of donors, you can do it with small groups and then have a little discussion afterward on Zoom, so it feels like a small site visit for a select number of people. Those things have been very effective for organizations, and they’re efficient. Going there is time intensive.

Video chat has helped because, obviously, you’re not there all the time. But I would still make the effort and spend the money to visit donors. I was working on a campaign in New York. We had a wonderful donor, Emily, and we wanted to ask her for another gift as we were closing out the campaign. But she was in Arizona for the winter, and I flew out to see her. It was a gift of a certain level, and that’s what you do. I don’t know if that’s enough of an answer, but I hope it helps.

Dani Cluff: Perfect. You talked a little about board training and how important that is. Are there any books or specific trainings you would recommend for boards?

Brian Saber: The number one thing is learning how to talk about the organization. Staff send tons of information. I hear staff say, “I’ve told the board that. I’ve sent them all that information. They have it already.” But back to another point I made: your board members come to your board meetings and help where they can, but then they go back to their lives. They’re not thinking about you twenty-four hours a day. They’re doing their own work. They have their families and other obligations. They’re not out there constantly talking about the organization like we are as staff, and it can be stale for them.

I do webinars on this, where I say we’ve got to get away from features. As the saying goes, numbers tell, stories sell. It’s okay to say we serve five thousand meals a year, we’ve saved ten thousand acres of wilderness, we have a hundred seniors in our program, we give out eighty scholarships. But what’s the impact that makes? Why are we doing it? What’s our vision? What impact can we make? Working on vision and impact, so board members are more articulate about it, will help them be more comfortable and more effective ambassadors and askers. That’s the number one thing: how to tell your story.

The second is understanding that this is about philanthropy, not money. It’s not about just getting that dollar in the short run. It’s about building relationships. It’s putting it in the perspective I gave you today so board members understand they’re doing strategic, long-term work. They’ll go dun their friends and coworkers if you ask them to, but I think there’s a part in the back of their minds that says, “Okay, I’ll do it, but gee, this doesn’t feel right.” And they’re right, it isn’t right. So I think it’s important to put it in context, and also to make sure they’re strategically part of the decisions that are made.

I wrote a book. Oh, it’s actually here. Engaged Boards Will Fundraise. I wrote it with Michael Davidson, my dear friend and another of my mentors. If you want board members involved in fundraising, they have to be involved in the strategic decisions of your organization, so they’re part of what’s moving it ahead. Dani?

Dani Cluff: Fantastic, thank you. We’re coming close to the hour, so I have one question in the chat that I see a few people looking for a response to. I’m also happy to stay on a few minutes, and people can go if they have to, if you want to answer a few more. It’s up to you.

Brian Saber: Let’s take this one. Okay.

Dani Cluff: Absolutely. A few of our attendees are facing the issue that they’re not sure how to make the ask, because they have a lot of different things they could apply major gifts to, but there’s not one specific main campaign they’re feeding. Do you have any suggestions for how to approach that?

Brian Saber: First of all, the best gift is an unrestricted gift, and unrestricted gifts can be really large. I think it’s helpful to educate donors, just like board members, about the need for unrestricted gifts that go right to the bottom line and can be used wherever they’re needed. There’s a balance here, because it can help with stewardship if a significant donor gives for one particular project, since then you can steward them on that project. But if you’re not sure, it might be that you first need to have a meeting where you learn what the donor is most passionate about, because some donors will give more to what they’re most passionate about, even within your organization. For every donor who wants that, I have a donor who says, “Do with it what you need.”

And can we thank MacKenzie Scott fourteen [unclear] times for leading the way on this in our universe, giving these large gifts and even saying, “Don’t follow up with me. You don’t have to tell me how you spent it. I trust you. I know you’re doing great work at your Boys & Girls Club. Here’s a gift.” So I would try to teach, not preach, but teach. Then there is a strategic discussion to have as to whether, for this particular donor, you really need that specific connection to a program or not. The largest donors to my last campaign gave without restrictions. Most planned gifts come without restrictions. Anyway, one more, or no?

Dani Cluff: Yes, let’s do one more. We did get a question. If you have any advice on language around “here’s our specific campaign and the mission we’re trying to fund,” but we also have operating costs and admin that allow us to keep functioning, do you have any suggestions on how to approach that language?

Brian Saber: I remember that terrible moment when, who was it who came up with that 15 percent overhead? Killer. Maybe it was GuideStar, actually. “Organizations should have 15 percent overhead.” It’s such hogwash. Procter & Gamble would be happy to spend ninety cents on a dollar to get you to buy another bar of soap. So we need to educate our donors that there’s no such thing as overhead. Everything is running the programs. Everything is allocable to a program. At the end of the day, whatever we’re doing, turning the lights on, buying paper for the copier, it’s all because we’re running these programs. So I think we try to get donors away from, can you ask the exact question again?

Dani Cluff: Yes. It was advice on good language for raising general operating funds versus program-specific needs.

Brian Saber: Yes. And this idea of overhead. This is where major gifts come in, because when we build these relationships individually and donors come to trust us more, we can say, “We’d really appreciate it if you gave it generally. It’s a sign of trust, but more importantly, it allows us to put the money where we need it most at any given time.” From year to year, the programs fluctuate in terms of what revenue is specifically generated for each program and what isn’t. We can end up in situations where there’s too much for one program and not enough for another. So, to the extent you’re comfortable with how we use it, it would be so helpful to give it generally.

Even in campaigns where we name things, the money isn’t restricted. It’s just that their name is on a room or a building. Sometimes it is restricted, because we’re endowing a chair at a university or something like that. But with most major gifts, we honor people, and we use the money the way we’ve already decided. That’s much easier to do one on one, even with larger gifts, through educating people. And for some donors, it’s, “No, this is really the one program, and you’re stuck with it.”

Dani Cluff: Well, absolutely, that’s great. We’re a little bit past the hour already, so I’m going to have to wrap things up for today. As a reminder, we’ll be sending out the slides to everybody who registered, so you’ll get those later this afternoon. A huge thank you to everybody who attended, and, Brian, thank you so much for all your work today.

Brian Saber: Thank you. I just want to say one thing as I close. I always say this: I am so lucky to have worked in this field for these forty-one years, in the nonprofit world with the best people in the world. I wouldn’t have lasted long in the corporate world, I know. But I work with people, volunteers and staff, who want to make the world a better place and are doing that, taking their time as volunteers or staff. I’m really lucky, and I appreciate all of you. This is one of the great institutions of the United States, our charitable arm and all the nonprofit work. So thank you for doing that work.

Dani Cluff: Fantastic. Thank you all so much. I hope everyone has a wonderful rest of your week. Bye, everyone.

Brian Saber: Bye-bye.