A Great Old-Fashioned Major Gift Tool
I love the digital age and all it offers fundraisers today — and what it will increasingly offer in the future.
I’m also aware that too many folks avoid undertaking basic fundraising tasks in hopes that some ‘magic app’ will appear that can deliver instant results inexpensively with the click of a mouse. Not gonna happen.
I served my fundraising apprenticeship in the late ‘50s and early ’60s in what was basically a computerless, faxless, and smartphone-free world. Back then ‘digital’ was the act of using your fingers to dial the telephone or type a letter and stick a stamp on the envelope.
In the absence of digital technology and readily accessible data we used methods that I fear have gone out of style, and maybe by and large forgotten. Nonetheless these ‘old’ approaches are just as valid and powerful today as they were back then.
I’m thinking especially of the task of identifying potential major gift prospects within an organization’s base of donors.
Of course, organizations today have many options for identifying major gift prospects including wealth screening services and predictive analytics. But, as valuable as those services may be, there’s one wonderful tool that any organization regardless of size and budget can and should use: The Screening Session.
In simplest terms a ‘screening session’ occurs when you put a list of potential major gift donors in front of folks knowledgeable about people of wealth in a particular community. You confidentially share a list of prospects with these folks and seek input on the prospect’s capacity to give and her/his affinity for your cause.
You go down your list of names and funders, and you ‘screen’ the names as you discuss them one by one. And you can do it one-on-one or in small groups. Most important: the information you receive is often far more powerful — and useful — than anything produced by a wealth screener or a predictive algorithm.
Take a look at Gail Perry’s post Screening Sessions: A Terrific Tool for Major Gift Prospect Research and you’ll quickly see why screening sessions are so valuable, and steps you can take to make the most of them.
Gail’s post quickly and clearly covers the basics of organizing and running a screening session. And, especially helpful, it tells you what to avoid. Here are the topics she covers:
- Who can participate in a screening session
- What type of information you might discover
- How to invite someone to participate in a screening session
- Two kinds of screening sessions
Here’s the type of valuable information you’ll get from a good old-fashioned screening session that you’re highly unlikely to get from digital data and analytics.
- How to open the door with the prospect.
- How best to develop the prospect’s interest in your organization
- When’s the best time to approach your prospect
- Who is the decision maker in the family
- Who might be able to influence your prospect’s decision to give.
This is good, fundamental major gift building-block stuff. So do yourself a favor and mouse click your way to an important, time-honored and proven method for major gift fundraising.
If you already use screening sessions please share your experience with us.
Roger
P.S. While I’m on the subject of basic building blocks for major gifts, you’ll also benefit from Gail’s 7 Golden Prospecting Strategies for Major Gifts. Again, great advice here for small shops, mid-sized shops and even the giants.
5 responses to “A Great Old-Fashioned Major Gift Tool”
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I love screening sessions as they also fire up board and volunteers to become involved in helping you get your foot in the door. One of the reasons I like group sessions is that people will play off of each other and offer up information they might not have thought of (or recalled) on their own. And if person A says they’ll help, person B may just get competitive and say they’ll help too! That being said, group sessions are not for everyone. So choose who’ll be invited with some care.
I was just thinking about screening meetings when I read the recent news of UK charities being fined for using wealth screening tools.
I’ve been a fan of analog screening meetings since I worked my first one for Tufts University circa 1986.
Since then we’ve done large group silent screenings of 2,000-3,000 undifferentiated names as well as small committee discussions of Top 25 major prospect lists.
Screening meetings provide substanitve, meaningful engagement for hosts and participants alike. And one-on-one screening sessions are also a great option when you’re looking for the next strategy step with donor prospects.
Typically, the meetings generate useful information that no wealth screening service is capable of providing. It is also a useful second level of research to real world test your wealth screening results.
It amazes me how many orgs still ask their board members to take a blank piece of paper and jot down ten names of potential donors. This used to be the “Rolodex” approach – also analog but generally a huge waste of time.
An interesting phenomenon of screenings is that the process gets participants’ brains working in such a way that they generate additional names of qualified prospects that they never would have come up with via the blank page approach.
Thanks to The Agitator and Gail Perry for calling attention to this incredibly valuable tool.
Roger, thanks so much for sharing these tools. Getting the right information about a major donor prospect can be a delicate act of reconnaissance.
I LOVE the informal data that acquaintances are often willing to pass along.
And Dan, we need to start a movement to ditch this awful practice of asking board members to share 10 names. I can’t imagine anything more awkward!
After 21 Fundraising years in smaller shops (less than 2 million budget), I truly can’t think of anything I dislike more than screening sessions! It seems like one giant major excuse (they call reasons) why none of our donors are right for a large gift Ask, from divorces, building new homes, kids off to college, they just gave a million to the hospital, on and on! I suspect they let the pressure off the board and put it squarely on Development. Just saying!
Joy, seems like you have some negative folks around. So sorry about your experience.
I have had terrific success with screening sessions — and particularly enjoy brainstorming with a big donor re how we can engage some new donors. These kinds of convos are fun and productive – at least to me.
Board members are not necessarily good people to do screening, I totally agree that they are mostly looking for an escape route!