Tip of the Week: Gift charts provide a reality check
Last night I taught a class on capital campaigns in the BCIT Fundraising Management program. We talked about many things including “gift charts.” What is a gift chart? Basically, a planning tool to tell you how many gifts and prospects you will need to raise a specific amount of money. By creating a chart, you can see if you have enough prospects at each donation level to meet your goal.
Charts are not built on this math: to raise $100,000 we need to ask 100 people for $1,000. Instead they are built like a pyramid — we need one top gift, several major gifts, and many smaller gifts.
Here are a few guidelines for building a gift chart:
- The lead gift is at least 10% and maybe up to 25% or more of the goal.
- Build the chart downwards by cutting the gift size in half and doubling or tripling the number of donors at each level.
- Roughly 80% of your goal will come from 20% of your donors.
- For each gift you need 3 or 4 qualified prospects (not everyone will say yes to the amount you are seeking). Qualified means that you have some reason to believe the person would consider a gift at that level.
- As you go down the list, you need fewer prospects because people who said no at higher levels may give at lower levels
- Round numbers up or down to avoid bizarre gift amounts.
Sample Gift Chart for a $1,000,000 Goal
This chart does have some bizarre gift levels, so you would want to round those up or down. But I think you get the point — the chart allows you to see that you need a certain number of prospects at each level to meet the goal. If you have an established donor base, your chart may be heavier at the top. If you are just building your donor base your chart would probably be heavier at the bottom, with fewer major gifts. My next step would be to start putting prospect names at each level.
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