Whether you and your staff are starting your organization’s first major giving and planned giving program, or you’re seeking counsel as you stretch for an ambitious goal, our team can help you craft the right fundraising policies and plans for your organization, identify and evaluate potential donors, develop cultivation and solicitation strategies that get gifts—and the stewardship plans that keep donors engaged. 

In contrast with the traditional comprehensive or universal capital or endowment campaigns, major gift programs focus on a narrow set of sophisticated and experienced major donor prospects. Requiring fewer volunteers, highly skilled solicitors, and a more controlled pace, major gift programs involve a disciplined and intentional focus on those one to two hundred major gift prospects that have the capacity to influence the future course of an organization. Often, a major gift program is a more manageable model for the care, cultivation, and solicitation of an organization’s most capable major donor prospects.

Major gift fundraising is an essential component of a successful campaign. It is rooted in solid relationship practices that include working with leadership, volunteers, and staff. As part of our campaign services for nonprofit organizations, we will help you plan for, build, and cultivate a successful major gifts program. Your major gifts program will promote direct giving to your organization for ongoing operational support, capital needs, and endowment growth.

At the heart of transformative giving is the concept of donative intent—moving the donor to consider a life-changing or institution-changing major gift. Major gift program counseling is ultimately about fostering donative intent and helping to align the donor’s desires and interests with the objectives of the major gift program.

Major gift program counseling services focus on structuring the program for the maximum impact on major donors. Skilled institutional strategists, our senior team members shift the focus to the prospective donors and the development of the necessary donor-specific strategies. While narrower in scope, our work is to direct this program as if it were a collection of small but critically important individual campaigns.