Major gifts or major donors?

I was recently in discussion with two other fundraisers about major gifts and major gift fundraising programs. It's an area I claim to know something about. After all I have written a book, Artful Major Gift Fundraising. And I run workshops in major gift fundraising and asking for major gifts. However the conversation caused me to think again about what is major gift fundraising.

I was as conscious as ever that however much it has been written about and discussed, as fundraisers we still don't have a common understanding of what is major gift fundraising? Or what is a major gift? Or what is a major donor?

Major donor  is the phrase used in a recent report commissioned by the UK Institute of fundraising which is well worth the read – Major Donor Giving Research Report. It's written by an excellent resource for non-profit managers, the research consultancy nfpSynergy. One of the report's aims is to explain the differences between the donors in the US and the UK.  One of my beliefs is that our donors downunder are much more likely to behave like those in the UK than those in the US. For this reason we must be wary of importing practices from the US unquestioned. However this is not my main point.

Sometimes we are so caught up in our own world that external changes and trends pass us by. There was something I had missed suddenly struck me. It explained our discussion.  We were talking about major gifts and major gift fundraising. It's the familiar trap of seeing, hearing, feeling the world only from our own place in it as fundraisers. The name of this report was Major Donor Giving.

Major gifts versus major donors.   A quick Google on the two search terms 'major gift fundraising' and 'major donor' fundraising returned an unexpected but encouraging result. 25,700,000 for major gift fundraising and 41,900,004 major donor fundraising. The world is changing and somehow I hadn't noticed.

What's the difference? It's all about the donor. Major gift fundraising or major donor fundraising are about understanding your donor. They mean stepping into the shoes, wearing the clothes, talking the language and seeing the world of your donor. And what we practice as major donor fundraisers is nothing other than a simple and effective methodology to enable us to be good at just that. It's why we do the research. Why we spend so much time getting to know and understand our donors. It is why we make a case for support using the language and matching the values of our donors. It is why we share with them our challenges and successes, why we involve them so closely on what we do.  And it is ultimately what enables us to offer donors a very personal and targeted opportunity to give.

So in the future, I am going to abolish the phrase major gift fundraising and adopt the term major donor fundraising. Will you do the same?