If you want to expand your base of major donors but aren’t sure where to start, the good news is that the answer is closer than you might think. The donors with the capacity and inclination to make a transformational gift to your organization are, more often than not, already in your database. They’ve been attending your events, opening your emails, and making modest gifts for years, signaling their affinity for your mission, but they haven’t yet been asked to step up as a major donor. The challenge for fundraisers is knowing what to look for – being able to read the signals in your data that help differentiate between a casual supporter and a potential major donor prospect.
If expanding your major gifts pipeline is one of your priorities this year, here are a few tips for getting started with the data you already have in front of you.
Look at engagement before giving history
A common instinct when searching for major donor prospects is to sort your donor list by largest cumulative giving and work down from the top. This approach isn’t wrong, but it may miss some of your best opportunities. The two most important factors in identifying a major gifts prospect are giving capacity and affinity for your work, and your database is rich with affinity signals that go well beyond giving history.
Before you add a single gift amount filter to your list, ask yourself: who in your database is deeply engaged with your organization? Look for supporters who:
- Attend events regularly, not just your big annual gala, but smaller events, lectures, or volunteer opportunities
- Have a long relationship history – donors who have been giving regularly for 10+ years, even if their gifts have been modest
- Open and click your emails consistently, engage with your social media profiles, or otherwise engage with your organization online on a regular basis
- Have taken on multiple types of engagement (a supporter who volunteers, donates, and attends programming events has demonstrated significant dedication to your mission)
Consolidated supporter data is crucial to uncovering these signals – you’ll need to be able to see online and offline giving, volunteer history, email interactions, event attendance, membership history, and program participation all in one place. With your supporter engagement tools integrated with Humanitru, you can easily pull this picture together in the Constituents Reporting interface by combining filters for the different types of Actions that you’d like to consider, including volunteer hours, membership, ticket purchases, email clicks, and more.
With your “high affinity” list in hand, you can begin additional capacity research.
Pro tip: Let Donor Insights do the data work for you
With Humanitru’s Donor Insights tool, your first stop for prospecting should be the Prospects tab. This feature does a lot of the initial filtering work for you by surfacing engaged constituents who haven’t yet made a donation (or haven’t given in a long time), exactly the population most likely to be overlooked in a traditional giving-history-first approach.
Similarly, the Weekly Nudges tool will proactively surface high-priority outreach opportunities each week, flagging things like a lapsed major donor who just registered for an event, or a highly engaged constituent whose membership is about to expire. Think of it as an automated prospect radar running quietly in the background, making sure the most time-sensitive opportunities don’t fall through the cracks.
Review giving history for upgrade signals
Once you’ve identified a list of highly engaged constituents who show strong mission alignment, it’s time to add a layer of giving data to prioritize your outreach. In the constituents reporting interface, filter for donors who meet criteria like:
- Consistent annual givers: Donors who have made a gift every year for five or more consecutive years. Loyalty is an indication of both affinity and commitment, and long-term consistent donors are often dramatically underasked relative to their capacity.
- Donors with a recent significant increase in gift size: A donor who gave $250 for five years and then gave $1,000 last year is telling you something. Run a report filtered by year-over-year gift growth to find these constituents.
- Recurring donors who have upgraded their monthly amount: A donor who has voluntarily increased their recurring gift is explicitly signaling that they want to give more. These donors deserve a personal conversation.
- Donors who give to multiple campaigns: A constituent who gives to your annual fund, sponsors a table at the gala, and makes a year-end gift is showing deep investment in your organization
Verify capacity with wealth screening
Each of the donors identified in the previous steps are likely worth a personal conversation, but to further narrow or prioritize your donor outreach list, it can be helpful to add a layer of external research.
Humanitru integrates directly with both DonorSearch and Windfall, two of the leading wealth screening platforms in the nonprofit sector, allowing wealth screening data to flow directly to your constituent profiles. These tools offer additional insight into net worth and philanthropic giving history, enhancing your understanding of each prospect’s total giving capacity. Both tools work best when used to validate and prioritize a list you’ve already developed through engagement and giving analysis, combining capacity and affinity information to identify your best prospects.
While wealth screening tools provide an easy option for this type of research, you can certainly find capacity clues on your own as well. To manually research donor wealth, start with a simple Google (or AI chat tool) search. You might look for:
- Financial news related to the prospect: such as the sale of a business, or a noteworthy investment or real estate transaction.
- Philanthropic gifts to other organizations: Look for their name listed in annual reports and donor acknowledgement website pages, where you may find clues as to both their giving capacity and to the types of work they prefer to support.
- Significant career moves: check LinkedIn to understand their career trajectory, industry, and professional networks. A recent C-suite promotion or successful exit from a company are worth noting.
- Valuable assets: Look up their address on Zillow or your county assessor’s website. Real estate can be a helpful indicator of wealth, although it doesn’t necessarily correlate with liquid resources.
Build a pipeline, not just a list
The goal of this work doesn’t stop at creating a list of donor prospects. People and relationships aren’t static – your database is a living ecosystem, and the major donor pipeline you’re building needs to be treated the same way.
New prospects will emerge at unexpected times, while the prospects you’ve already identified are moving through a cultivation journey, getting to know your organization more deeply, building trust with your team, and gradually becoming ready for a major gift conversation. Some of them will convert into major donors, and those relationships will need to be stewarded and grown just as carefully as they were cultivated.
This requires more than a spreadsheet or a saved report. You’ll need a managed pipeline to track where each person stands in their relationship with your organization, what the next step is, and who is responsible for taking it. This moves management infrastructure separates organizations that occasionally receive surprise major gifts from those that consistently cultivate them.
Coming Soon: Opportunity Pipelines
Opportunity Pipelines in Humanitru enable you to easily manage fundraising efforts that rely on high-touch, multi-stage processes. They are most commonly used to track major gift portfolios, but are also often used to manage grants, relationships with institutional funders, and specific fundraising initiatives like capital campaigns. Stay tuned to hear more as we prepare to release this feature!
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