Where Can I Find Some Major Donors!!!???

Fundraisers can spend a lot of time asking “ Where Can I Find Some Major Donors?”  Clever fundraisers start by looking at home.

As Veritus Group in the USA highlight in their recent blog ‘Stop Prospecting’, the most likely place you’ll find major donors is in your existing donor file.

Yes, it is more fun and exciting to seek new major donors from the rich and famous, the top end of town.  And for Universities, Arts and capital campaigns that may not be a bad place to look.

But drilling down into the data, I can see much more money for most charities coming from what I will call mid-value donors.

You have more chance of finding these ‘mid value’ donors in your current database of donors, and these are the usual source of bigger (or major!) donors.

What kind of donors?

The best source is usually direct mail donors. 

I know, I know – so many are saying ‘Direct Mail is Dead!’ 

Well it isn’t. Not only is it not dead - for many charities it is the single biggest source of donors who are going to give more than $1,000 in the future.

The chart below shows the huge proportion of money that comes in from the ‘small’ numbers of donors in the bequest and $1000+ categories in the Pareto Benchmarking study in Australia. 

Charities that succeed in raising money from donations over $1,000 tend to start with people already on their database.  It works, and is not that hard.

How to do it?  Stay tuned for my next article and please take a look at my series of webinars about mid-value donors.

Sean