As we’ve discussed, major donors are not born.  They are neither spontaneously generated nor conceived, immaculately or otherwise.

Rather, they come from your existing donor file and supporter rolls.  And they exist at the intersection of high commitment to your cause, high ability to give, and high desire to give with a large gift.

Neither are planned givers born.  Vanishingly few donors give their first gift after their passing.  They are far more likely to be that 70-year-old who gives $10 routinely sitting humbly on your file.  You may even debate whether to mail her at all.  (As ASPCA found, cutting off this group means cutting off your best planned giving prospects.)  The planned giver lives at the intersection of high commitment to your cause, assets to give after their passing, and high desire to leave a legacy.

There seems not to be much in common between the grateful disease survivor who provides the $50,000 gift you use as an online match and the retired schoolteacher who clips coupons to make sure she can leave a legacy that reflects her values.  Add in the monthly giver who skews younger and smaller in gifts and you have a hodgepodge of people whose social circles may only exist when it comes to your organization.

We reflect this when we have different people soliciting these gifts and different ways of soliciting these gifts.  But there are two commonalities between them.  The first is that first circle of the Venn diagram: mid, major, monthly, and planned giving donors are all high commitment donors.  Sure, there may be the occasional low commitment donors sneaking in, but these are the exception to the rule and, in the case of recurring giving, will often soon be gone.  Consider:

• High commitment donors give, on average, 131% more in lifetime value, according to DonorVoice’s first National Commitment Study. (This also shows RFM to be far more predictive than RFM analysis of who will give and give more.)
• Of F2F-acquired monthly givers, 54% of high-commitment donors will make it to month six versus 31% of low-commitment donors.
• High commitment donors are more likely to become mid, monthly, major, and planned giving donors.

So let’s put away the demographic dissimilarities and the major v monthly v planned giving silos for the moment.  If you want to get any of these types of donors, the key is first to have highly committed donors.  That starts at the moment of acquisition when you attract the donor identities most likely to be committed to your cause.  (You can try a volume strategy.  But while you can’t sew a million seeds and not get a flower, the strategies you would use for volume are often antithetical to getting quality.)

It continues when you work harder to “sell” low commitment donors early in the process (and separate them from your high-commitment donors, whom you do not wish to oversell).  And, of course, you then want to optimize your interactions to focus on those that are adding to commitment, fixing those that should be but are not, and ending those that are doing nothing for you.

In this way, the best thing you can do to get major donors or monthly givers may have nothing to do with your major gift officer or the name of your monthly giving society.

So high commitment is the first common thread among these donors groups.  What’s the second?

These are the donor groups and donations that are growing.  They are the non-mirage oasis in the desert.  The only group among which giving was up last year (according to the Fundraising Effectiveness Project) was $1000 plus donors.  In online giving, as one-time giving waned, monthly giving increased 17% last year (according to M+R Benchmarks).  And I’m legally required to use the phrase “largest intergenerational transfer of wealth” to describe what’s going on with planned giving right now.

These are your most valuable – and growing – donors.  And the tools are in your hands as a fundraiser.  The question is are you adding to the bank of highly committed donors or subtracting?

Nick