4 Metrics to Measure Major Gift Solicitation Success

While your nonprofit may receive revenue from diverse sources, major gifts are likely one of the most significant ones. Getting a few big donations each year can help your organization raise money more easily, grow faster, and more significantly impact its mission.

However, like most of your nonprofit’s operations, data-driven decision-making is the key to effectively raising major gifts and engaging those generous investors. Your organization must have strategies in place to gather, analyze, and improve the quality of its data to glean valuable insights and make reliable decisions.

Knowing which metrics to track can narrow down your analysis and focus on the numbers that truly reflect your major gift solicitation success. Let’s explore four common major gift metrics that your nonprofit should track.

1. Total dollars raised

CharityEngine explains that major gifts are often part of a nonprofit’s capital campaign or year-end giving goals. Whether your organization solicits them as part of a specific campaign or throughout the year, you’ll likely have a clear fundraising goal in mind. Observing whether or not your organization reached this goal is the first step in measuring your success.

Using basic analytics tools in your CRM, keep an ongoing tally of total dollars raised within a specific period.

This metric can then be examined in different ways:

• How many dollars were raised this year versus last year?
• How many gifts were made this year versus last year?
• Is the average gift size increasing or decreasing?
• Is there a commonality among those investors who gave larger amounts?

Look at this data from different angles to gain a holistic view of your investors. For instance, did the number of major gifts made increase after your nonprofit erected a recognition wall? Perhaps the investors who gave larger amounts have all previously volunteered for your organization. Identifying such patterns can identify potential cause-and-effect relationships between your nonprofit’s activities and investors’ responses.

2. Number of asks and gifts secured

Measure the total number of major gifts pledged and the amounts received to understand the effectiveness of your asks. If your nonprofit made a high number of asks but received a low number of major gifts, you’ll want to examine your approach to identifying major gift prospects. This might include wealth screening, conducting prospect research, and reviewing philanthropic indicators.

On the other hand, a low number of asks and a high number of gifts received may indicate that your nonprofit can solicit large gifts from fewer investors.

Track the number of asks made and gifts secured using nonprofit fundraising software. The right platform will help your nonprofit:

• Track prospects: Use your CRM to track wealth indicators as well as engagement and giving history.
• Analyze investor activities: Keep an eye on how investors engage with your nonprofit’s outreach and communications. 
• Monitor your revenue progress and goals: Measuring and analyzing data shows you, clearly and objectively, how your fundraising efforts are going. It also highlights areas of strength and those that need attention.

Once you have this data, compare it to previous time periods. According to Double the Donation, analyzing the size of past donations can signal an investor’s willingness to give. Plus, this data can provide a year-over-year look at your solicitation improvements and progress.

3. Average gift size

The amount that constitutes a major gift depends on your nonprofit’s size and needs. You may have an expected gift size in mind, or the recent decline in giving could skew your expectations. Tracking the exact amount of gifts will show you trend lines you can attribute to external influences or address at the individual investor level.

Similarly, tracking the average dollar amount of major gifts received can illustrate surges or dips in giving. This data helps you make strategic decisions about outreach and campaigns.

Average gift size can also be tracked in your nonprofit’s fundraising platform. Using technology to automatically track information means you can quickly generate reports and map data to dashboards. As you generate more reports and collect more data, you can track it over time to flag fluctuations in gift size.

4. Cost per dollar raised

Have you ever heard the saying, “It takes money to make money?” This is true of your nonprofit’s fundraising efforts—to solicit major gifts in a difficult economy, your nonprofit must invest in its fundraising strategies and achieve a high return on investment (ROI).

That’s why tracking the cost per dollar raised is beneficial: It provides insight into the efficiency of your fundraising efforts, revealing areas where you may be able to save or spend more.

The cost per dollar raised is the exact cost of resources incurred to secure each dollar of major gifts. If you’re taking prospective investors out to lunch, for example, this counts as part of the cost of securing that major gift.

It’s helpful to make a comprehensive list of costs that may be incurred through your fundraising efforts, including:

• Staff time, such as administrative or marketing teams or major gift officers
• Marketing materials like direct mail pieces or promotional materials 
• Software costs for any tool you use to identify prospects and solicit gifts
• Entertainment, including anything you purchase while meeting your investors in person

What if you find your cost per dollar raised is too high? By detailing the factors that go into this metric, you’ll be developing a list of areas that can be reviewed when trying to reduce costs. If, for example, your coffee dates aren’t leading to investor donations, it might be an activity you can eliminate or reduce.

Major gifts can be a powerhouse for nonprofits, but collecting and regularly analyzing key metrics like this can enhance your ability to find new investors and collect on pledges. As with any type of fundraising, strategic, personalized outreach will pay significant major gift dividends. Keep your eyes on the numbers and trends and watch your major gifts take off!