Your best prospects may be lapsed donors or current donors with signs of high capacity or interest in your organization, but giving history can be parsed by a number of factors including date, size, and frequency of giving. Other viable prospects might be constituents in specific zip codes or a group of constituents with relationships to members of your Board, but correlating demographics and relationships to giving potential can be tricky.

There are so many ways to slice your data.

Where should you start?

It is tempting to dive right into your database and start digging, but we recommend focusing your search before you get started. An analytics project like this can be a bit of a rabbit hole without some initial definitions to guide you.

Here are some ideas to get started.

Significant first gift

Donors that make a first-time gift of a significant amount likely have a higher level of interest, trust, and giving capacity. These characteristics make them high-priority candidates for qualification and stewardship in a major gift program.

If you’re a small organization and you define a major gift as a contribution of $2,500 or more, a donor that makes a first-time contribution of $500 may be a good candidate for your major gift prospect list. However, if you consider a $20,000 contribution to be a major gift, you may want to raise the first-gift qualifier to $5,000 or more.

While the definition of a significant gift is relative to your organization, the eTapestry reporting tool will be able to support your custom definitions.

Prior one-time major gifts

Donors that made large gifts in the past may consider another large gift in the future. You’ll want to add these donors to your prospect list if you can determine they are interested, willing, and able to make another gift at or above previous levels.

Define what you consider to be a major gift so that you can prioritize any lapsed donors (i.e. donors that gave before this year) with a gift equal to or greater to the prior amount.

Consistent year-over-year, annual giving

Donors that consistently make mid-size gifts generally have high levels of interest and commitment to your organization. Someone who’s given the same amount or more for five years in a row may be willing and able to make a larger one-time gift to a special campaign or initiative. Even though they haven’t demonstrated high giving capacity, they are good candidates for your major gift prospect list.

Define what you consider to be a mid-size gift that, if given consistently year over year, indicates high interest and, potentially, higher giving capacity.

The best way to search for major gift prospects is to export detailed giving history information on your existing donors to Excel for review.

Every eTapestry database comes with a query that finds all donors, but in order to review giving history, you’ll need to build a custom report.

Build a custom eTapestry report (see instructions below) and run the report with the standard LYBUNT & SYBUNT query “Gave Some Year.” Export your results to Excel for analysis (we will cover tips for your review in Step 3).

Include the following columns in your custom report:

• Account Name
• Sort Name
• Account Type
• Last Received Date
• Last Received Amount
• First Received Date
• First Received Amount
• Lifetime Received Amount
• Largest Received Date
• Largest Received Amount
• Year to Date Received Amount
• One Year Ago Received Amount
• Two Year Ago Received Amount
• Three Year Ago Received Amount
• Four Year Ago Received Amount
• Five Year Ago Received Amount

If you’d like to use this report to contact prospects, include columns for contact information (Address Lines, Voice, Email, etc.) and salutations (Short, Long, and Envelope).

Open your exported report in Excel. Use the sort and filter features in Excel to isolate constituents that meet your major gift indicators.

If your indicators include…

• First gift of $500+ (significant first gift)
• One time gift of $2,500+ (prior one-time major gift)
• Recurring gifts of $200+ for 5 years (consistent year-over-year, annual giving)

…then your Excel analysis would follow these steps.

#1 – Find donors that made significant first-time gifts

• Sort by First Received Amount
• Flag all constituents with an amount over $500 (highlight the row with a color)

#2 – Find donors that made large one-time gifts in the past

• Sort by Largest Received Amount
• Flag all constituents with an amount over $2,500

#3 – Find donors with consecutive giving in the last 5 years

• Filter all donors with Five Year Ago Received Amount greater than $200 (or another value of your choosing)
• Then, filter all donors with Four Year Ago Received Amount greater than $200
• Repeat with Three Year Ago Received Amount, Two Year Ago Received Amount, and One Year Ago Received Amount
• Flag all constituents that remain

Remove all filters from your Excel sheet and use sort or filter functionality to limit the data you see to only those you flagged (or highlighted) in your review.

Once you’ve identified potential prospects, conduct a more thorough assessment of these donors and their viability for making a major gift before adding them to your prospect list.