(How Tony grew Major Donor annual income from scratch to nearly £2m in five years)
Working with High Net Worth individuals to raise funds for your charity can be hugely valuable. It can also be a challenging domain to navigate successfully.
Because the way forward is rarely straight forward, one effective way to hone your judgement is to study strategies and insights gleaned by those who are already succeeding. In studying fundraising success for two decades, I’ve found that consistent success in working with major donors, as with any area of fundraising, usually leaves valuable clues.
One of my all-time favourite episodes of the Fundraising Bright Spots podcast was with Tony Gaston, who took part in the Major Gifts Mastery Programme back in 2013. New to fundraising, and from a standing start, that year he went on to raise £250,000 for the organisation he worked for, which is a fairly small international development charity.
The following year he steadily grew these results to £300,000. The results continued to grow every year for the next four years. In 2017 the charity received major donor and trust income worth almost £1m, rising in 2018 to nearly £2m, which included a seven figure pledge to a capital project.
If you search for it, there is no shortage of good advice in this space. But I find the insights Tony shares in the interview are especially helpful because these results and insights were achieved in the context of growing major donor income for an organisation with limited brand and resources.
In this blog I will share three powerful ideas that contributed to this fabulous growth.
1. Regularly pause to just think!
Even when extremely busy with the day to day actions needed in his fundraising role, Tony tried to make time to pause, take stock and actually think. He asked himself and sought answers to valuable questions.
He recounts an especially busy time, where his lengthy to-do list included various preparations for a Christmas appeal…and he had a nagging feeling that even if he got all these things done, it still wasn’t going to raise enough money to meet the fundraising target to pay for his charity’s important services.
He recalls forcing himself to step back from that busy-ness and going for a bike ride. He consciously made time to focus his attention on what was most important. More specifically, while riding along beside the canal in Glasgow, he asked himself, ‘where is this money most likely to come from?’ He told me the next bit was not difficult, in fact, the answer that came to him seemed so obvious. There was a wealthy individual who had shown a keen interest in the work of the charity, and who Tony had been talking to for a while.
Then, sitting on a park bench, Tony texted this person, inviting him to fly out to visit the work of the charity in Malawi. He got an enthusiastic text back within five minutes along the lines of ‘when can we book our flights?’ One month later, they made the trip, seeing the difference the project was making. Two weeks after that the donor donated £100,000!
Nine years later, the skill and habit of thinking carefully about relationships with your most important potential / existing major donors is still a valuable concept we help fundraisers on the Major Gifts Mastery Programme to improve.
The reason it’s so important to consciously develop this skill is that making time to think about what is important, (but not particularly urgent) rarely comes automatically. The urgent, less important things usually grab our attention for most of our day, unless we consciously decide to seek answers to valuable questions.
2. Practice the 80/20 Principle.
‘It was fast! And if we hadn’t got there fast we would have absolutely missed it.’
Tony recalls a time his colleague came back from an event and mentioned that she’d had a conversation with a trustee from a charitable trust. Apparently the trust were looking for some advice on a particular matter.
Though Tony was extremely busy at the time, he sensed that this was a rare and valuable opportunity. He didn’t add it to his future to do list.
That day he contacted the trustee, who introduced him to the chair of the foundation. One week later he had changed his schedule in order to go and meet the chair in person, which involved travelling hundreds of miles by train – an eight hour round trip from Glasgow to Shrewsbury.
After a positive meeting, Tony and his colleagues worked to put together a brand new proposal for funding within a month.
The ultimate result from being so proactive to follow up on this opportunity, was a donation of half a million pounds to fund the project.
When you sense there is a really good opportunity, move quickly and take massive action.
As Richard Koch explains in his excellent book, The 80/20 Principle, we must always remember that not all opportunities are equal.
In fact, they are not nearly as evenly distributed as we tend to expect and act.
Not all donors / supporters / partners are equal. Some are able and likely to give far more than others. But we need to play our part and work out where being proactive in deepening relationships will prove most effective.
While you should not neglect any of your supporters (they all need to receive some level of stewardship), the insight is to always be on the look-out for and ready to move quickly when you sense there is an opportunity. Interestingly, these opportunities or more valuable relationships may not be obvious to other people.
As Malcolm Gladwell explores in Blink, your valuable hunches can be subtle and hard to articulate. They may even seem downright illogical to others who don’t have expertise in this area.
And as with this example, following through on the implications of your idea may be at the very least inconvenient and sometimes mean you have to change your plans (or much harder, to persuade colleagues to do this.)
I’ve found that the more you study the patterns of fundraising success, the easier it becomes to listen to your instincts and find your own confidence to take massive action when you need to.
3. Talk less, nurture your curiosity.
When in conversation with supporters, Tony shared that the most important thing of all is to overcome the temptation to do more of the talking, the pressure to explain lots of detail about your charity early in the conversation with the donor. Instead, be genuinely interested in the other person and create the safe space for them to articulate their background / views / how they feel about the issues your charity addresses.
In my book, The Fundraiser Who Wanted More, I put it this way:
‘If you really want to influence someone, first seek to understand and appreciate their world.’
I know this seems obvious, but if you’re not careful, it’s all too easy to enthusiastically launch into an explanation of all the wonderful things you know about your important charity.
In the interview Tony shares an example where he managed to avoid this temptation. In the first half of the conversation he stayed curious and helped the potential supporter feel comfortable enough to share some of his ideas and experiences.
Tony told me he discovered lots of things he just would not have known had he done most of the talking early on.
Later in the conversation this enabled him to realise there was a project that was an ideal match to something the supporter really cared about solving. So that was what he shared. He reflected that if he’d started the meeting with a preconceived plan for what the charity wanted, and a script for ‘selling’ that, this ‘match’ and the generous gift that the donor chose to make, would probably never have happened.
Want to go deeper?
You can listen to Tony share the full story in my podcast (episode 125).
Tony credits the skills and support he developed through the Major Gifts Mastery Programme as making a big difference to this fundraising journey. If you’d like to find out more about how it works, follow this link.
Find this helpful? If so, please share it on, so we can help as many good causes as possible.
