So how do you know if you have enough
prospects at various levels to justify a specific goal?
Professionals use "gift charts" to determine whether enough
A new warehouse for
donated food highlighted this statewide campaign.
prospects have been identified in each
gift category. Campaigns are built around "equal sacrifice"
not "equal gifts". It’s logical that Bill Gates, for
example, should be asked to give more to a campaign than a
board member who owns a small business.
It’s all but impossible to raise any
significant amount of money on the idea of asking everyone
to make the same level of gift. You can’t raise $1,000,000
by getting $1,000 gifts from 1,000 people. Fact remains,
it’s simply easier and more efficient to ask one person who
can afford it to give your organization $500,000 than it is
to ask 500 people to give you $1000. You work as hard for
the $1,000 gift as you will for the $500,000.
Gift charts are guidelines, not
projections. They can be used to raise sights of donors and
prospects and show the type of gifts required to reach a
specific goal.
Generally, the 80/20 rule comes into
play. Eighty percent of the funds you’ll raise will come
from 20% of your donors. If you raise $1,000,000 from 100
gifts, you’ll usually find that $800,000 of the amount
raised will have come from a total of your top 20 donors.
Is there a formula for determining an
appropriate gift chart? Yes, to some degree. It’s not cast
in stone and it depends on the type of organization
(churches, for example, usually have flatter gift charts but
higher participation). Generally, the chart works like this:
The lead gift is at least 10% of
the goal, preferably 20%.
The next ten gifts equal 40-60%
of the goal
Eighty percent of the goal will
come from 20% of your donors.
As gifts get smaller on the
chart, the number of gifts needed will almost always
increase.
In addition to the total number of
gifts needed, its important to know that there is also
something of a formula for determining the number of
prospects needed in order to receive each gift needed. For
example, if you need five $100,000 gifts to succeed, you’ll
probably need 15 $100,000 prospects in order to get five
$100,000 gifts. Keep in mind, however, that prospects may
drop down into lower categories. You may identify 15
prospects who can give $100,000 each and only have five
actually give – but those others may well make lower level
gifts (say, $50,000 or so). So it’s not that you need to
take the total number of gifts needed and multiple by three.
Below are several gift charts for
various campaigns with various goals we’ve directed. It can
give you an idea of how gift charts work.
Gift Chart for
$10,000,000 Dollar Capital Campaign
