Every charity I work with asks this. What counts as a major gift? The question is put as though the answer sits somewhere outside the room, in a sector standard or in the figure the charity down the road has chosen.
There is no such figure.
A major gift is a gift large enough to justify dealing with one person at a time. That is the definition. The number attached to it belongs to your charity and to nobody else's.
What Amount Qualifies as a Major Gift?
The number is an output, not a starting point. You calculate it, and the calculation has almost nothing to do with how impressive the figure sounds.
Two charities can set thresholds ten times apart and both be right, because a threshold is a promise about attention. Above the line, a donor gets: research before the first approach, a conversation about what they care about, a proposal written for them, a thank you that is not a template, and a report that tells them what their money did. Below the line, a donor gets the same good care as everybody else on the database, which is care delivered at scale.
Set the line in the wrong place and you have made a promise you cannot keep.
Start With the Time You Have
We would expect a full-time major donor fundraiser, with no line management or other responsibilities to manage a portfolio of 80 to 100 names.
But you aren’t that fundraiser, so let’s work backwards from your capacity.
Take the time you can genuinely give to major donor fundraising in a year. Not the hours in the job description, the hours that survive external projects, line management, other fundraising responsibilities.
Let’s say you can commit 2 full days each week, or 40% of a full-time role then you can manage 40% of a full-time portfolio, or 32 to 40 names.
Now look at your database and find the point at which roughly forty names sit above the line. Whatever amount that is, that is your major gift threshold. It is defensible because you can show the working, and because it is built on what you can deliver rather than what anyone would like to be true.
What a Wrongly Set Threshold Costs You
A threshold set too low is the more common error and the more expensive one. Your caseload fills with people who were always going to give a steady amount, and who would have gone on giving it through a direct debit and a good newsletter. You spend the scarcest resource you have, senior time, on income you already had. The donors who could have given ten times more sit further down the list waiting for attention that never arrives.
A threshold set too high fails differently. The list is short enough to feel manageable, and plenty of personal time is poured into a small number of personal relationships and more is poured into cold prospecting due to the belief that the CRM doesn’t hold any more potential. Meanwhile the people who would respond to a personal approach are being thanked by automated email, and so their potential is lost.
In both cases the programme will not grow at a healthy rate.
The Threshold Moves
A threshold set in a year when you had two fundraisers is wrong in a year when you have one. When a post falls vacant, your capacity falls with it, and the honest response is to raise the threshold and shorten the caseload rather than carry a list you cannot service.
The reverse is also true. Recruit, and the line comes down.
Review it annually, alongside the budget, and write down the reasoning at the time. The reasoning is the part people forget, and it is the part you need when somebody asks why the figure is what it is.
Once You Have a Threshold, You Can Rank Against It
A threshold tells you who belongs in the programme. It does not tell you who to approach first, and those are different questions.
At Money Tree Fundraising we score every name against three things. Capacity, which asks whether someone could give at your threshold, judged on wealth signals and on evidence that they already give money away. Commitment, which asks whether they care about your cause, shown by family experience of it, by giving to charities like yours, by a geographical tie to your work or by volunteering. Connection, which asks how easily you can reach them, whether they reply to your emails, come to your events, or sit one introduction away from somebody on your board.
Score those three and you crate a priority list based on each person’s overall score. Two names can share a capacity rating and belong in completely different places in your plan, and the reason is usually connection.
That is the next piece of work after the threshold, and it is the difference between a list of names and a pipeline.
Where to Start
Take an hour this week. Work out your capacity, and then find that position on your database. You now have a threshold with a reason behind it.
If you would like to talk it through, book a discovery call.