Major gifts are one of the highest-ROI fundraising investments a nonprofit can make, and yet for many organizations, a serious major gifts program stays perpetually on the back burner. Sound familiar?
In our recent webinar, Building Major Gifts Momentum: Clearing the Operational Hurdles That Hold Your Fundraising Back, Humanitru Solutions Consultant Christine Robertson sat down with Ed Hohlbein - nonprofit fundraising veteran, CRM consultant, and former major gift officer with 25+ years of experience - to dig into exactly why that happens, and what fundraising teams can do about it. Here are a few of the highlights.
Challenge #1: Making the case for investing in a major gifts program
Before getting into the "how" of building a thriving, intentional major gifts program, you may need to explain the "why" to your organization's leadership. Major gift fundraising programs typically yield an ROI of 8 to 10 times the cost of the program. When compared to event fundraising, which often struggles to hit a 2:1 return, it is hard to argue with the value of investing in major gifts.
If you've been trying to make the case for investing more time and resources in major gifts, those two numbers are your most powerful talking points. Within a broader fundraising context: individuals represent the majority of all philanthropic giving, and when you factor in bequests and family foundations into that picture, the case becomes even stronger. For organizations of all sizes, major gifts are the foundation of long-term revenue stability, and the data backs that up clearly.
Challenge #2: Finding your best major gifts prospects
One of the most important takeaways for fundraisers excited about growing a major gifts program: you don't need to go find new donors to raise more major gifts. The people with the capacity and passion to give transformationally are, more often than not, already in your database.
The challenge is knowing how to find them. You can start with looking at cumulative cash giving - filter out soft credits and focus on hard dollars to get a real picture of who has been showing up for your organization financially. But then, importantly, look beyond the obvious. A donor who's been giving smaller amounts for 20 years is showing you something important about their commitment and their long-term thinking - they may be exactly the kind of person to approach about a major or planned gift.
One critical data note: if your database is a mess, this process can be a lot harder. Duplicate records are a silent killer of major gift programs. If a single donor exists on two records in your system with giving split between them, they may never surface when you're running your prospect lists. Clean data isn't a nice-to-have, it's the foundation everything else is built on.
For smaller shops feeling overwhelmed by the scale of the task, don't try to analyze your entire database at once. Pull a focused list of 5 to 10 people with strong giving histories and start there. The goal isn't to identify every prospect at once, it's to start moving on the ones in front of you.
Challenge #3: Getting a meeting with your top major donor prospects
Once you've identified your prospects, the next hurdle is often figuring out how to open the door, and this is where a lot of organizations are sitting on more opportunity than they realize. Your major donor prospects don't exist in a silo - you're already interacting with them through your other fundraising programs. They're already attending your events, renewing their memberships, and volunteering their time.
The key shift for fundraisers is learning to see those touchpoints not as independent interactions, but as the early stages of a deeper relationship. Events, in particular, tend to be treated as standalone moments rather than relationship-building opportunities. When the gala ends, the conversation with a high-capacity attendee shouldn't end with it - that's the moment for the major gifts team to step in and keep the relationship warm.
This is also where internal silos can get in the way. When event fundraisers and major gift officers are competing for donor attention or credit, everyone loses. The better frame is to keep the organization's mission at the center of every interaction, and let that shared purpose guide how different teams work together. As one webinar attendee put it: remember that donors don't give to you, they give through you. When fundraisers internalize that perspective, the pressure of "getting the meeting" starts to feel a lot more manageable, because the goal isn't to sell anything, it's to deepen a relationship that already exists.
Challenge #4: Making the ask for a major gift
Fundraisers face a variety of challenges when it comes to major gifts fundraising, from messy prospect data, to stretched time and capacity. But one of the most common issues is a little more surprising: many fundraisers are afraid to ask for money. Those emotions are normal, and we shouldn't shy away from acknowledging them.
Here's a useful reframe for fundraisers dealing with anxiety around asking for large gifts: instead of thinking about "asking for money," think about asking someone if they want to make a difference. It takes you out of the equation and centers the donor's values and motivations.
Challenge #5: Setting realistic goals and expectations
Inaccurate expectations are a surefire recipe for disappointing your leadership team (and burning out your fundraisers). Major gifts programs yield strong ROI, but the process of building a sustainable operation takes time. While you may start seeing early wins in the first year, a strong, long-term major gifts program generally takes around 5 years to fully establish. This is one of the best arguments for starting now - you don't need to wait for your data to be perfectly clean, your team to be perfectly staffed, your processes perfectly identified, or your prospects all 100% identified. Start the journey now, identifying the top prospects in your database and beginning outreach to them. Perfection can easily be the enemy of the good when it comes to major gifts, but it's most important just to get started.
Challenge #6: Defining clear process ownership internally
Major gift fundraising requires more documentation than most other fundraising work - call reports, action items, outreach plans, stage tracking. And one of the most common points of friction is confusion over who's responsible for what. Internal coordination and communication between frontline fundraisers, database managers, and fundraising leadership is crucial to creating the trust and transparency needed for a functioning program.
Clear processes for updating call notes and opportunity stages and documenting next steps create an audit-ready pipeline, giving everyone on the team a real-time, transparent look at where things stand. The good news is that modern technology makes this process much easier than it used to be - with simple tools like your cell phone's text-to-speech function, you can dictate notes right after a meeting, so the information gets captured while it's fresh and to-do items don't stack up for you.
Watch the Full Webinar
There's a lot more where this came from — including a live Q&A where Ed and Christine fielded real questions from attendees about prospect identification, how to handle emotions around the ask, and what to do when you're a one-person development shop trying to do it all.
Watch the on-demand recording →
And if you're thinking about the tools side of this conversation, we'd love to show you how Humanitru's new Opportunity Pipelines feature helps fundraising teams build and manage major gifts programs with the structure and flexibility their work actually requires.
Learn more about Opportunity Pipelines →
