Major Gift Fundraising: How Your Technology Can Help

| GS INSIGHTS

How can technology help your nonprofit with the many types of major gift fundraising you employ? Explore this guide to technology in major gift fundraising.


Major gift fundraising is one of the most intricate efforts that a nonprofit will undertake. There are often multiple team members and months of work involved in securing a single major gift. However, certain nonprofit technologies, partnered with effective fundraising habits, can help the process run smoothly.

While the general best practices for major gift fundraising are the same regardless of who you’re soliciting the gift from, there are small nuances that exist depending on whether you’re soliciting a gift from an individual philanthropist, a grantmaking organization, or even a major corporate entity.

This guide will explore how various technology solutions can assist your team with major gift fundraising, breaking the topic down into three main categories of funding sources:

  • Individual Major Gifts Fundraising
  • Grants Fundraising
  • Corporate Major Gifts Fundraising

Let’s get started.

Individual Major Gifts Fundraising

When you’re conducting major gift fundraising efforts targeted toward individual philanthropists, the most important aspect is the relationship that that individual (or family) has with your organization. This relationship is built over a series of months or years in a process called moves management.

Moves management is the process of strategically building relationships with prospective major donors, tracking each interaction or “move” along the way. Your nonprofit will likely follow a set cadence of moves that you’ve seen success with when cultivating major gifts in the past. This may include having a phone call with the prospect, inviting them to tour your headquarters, and scheduling a one-on-one lunch meeting between the prospect and a board member.

As a baseline, your nonprofit’s technology— specifically, your constituent relationship management system—factors into this process by giving you information about each prospect. However, your CRM is also essential in that it should empower you to track the moves you take with a prospect.

This includes the ability to:

  • log all interactions with a prospective major donor;
  • set notifications to remind major gift officers of upcoming “moves” to take with prospects; and,
  • quickly see the status of all major gift conversations for an overview of your efforts.

If your CRM doesn’t include tools to track your nonprofit’s moves management efforts, it may be time to invest in a new database or seek out major gift-specific software.

Grants Fundraising

The process for applying for and being awarded major grants funding often involves a series of intricate steps both before receiving the funding and well after it’s dispersed.

First, your nonprofit has to research foundations and government organizations to discover where opportunities are available. Then, you need to write a grant application or proposal, often including specific data and details that the funder requests. These details can differ from funder to funder. After being awarded a grant, you need to carefully track and report on its usage—often, grants need to be used for specific, predetermined projects and reported on at set benchmarks.

Because it’s a detail-intensive process, dedicated grant management software is valuable to make sure all requirements are met successfully. DNL OmniMedia’s guide to grant management discusses a few solutions, including Salesforce’s foundationConnect and Blackbaud’s Financial Edge NXT. These solutions empower nonprofits with features such as:

  • a portal to save in-progress grant applications and submit completed ones;
  • status reports that are helpful for both grantmakers and grantees; and,
  • multi-grant management to track the details of multiple opportunities.

Abiding by the guidelines and deadlines outlined by grant funders is crucial for maintaining positive relationships with funding organizations. Grant management software gives nonprofits the tools to track the minute details of grants at every step in the process and report back accordingly.

Corporate Major Gifts Fundraising

While there was some decline in CSR initiatives after the recession, we’ve seen corporate philanthropy bounce back in recent years. Companies have started emphasizing sustainability and social good in their initiatives, with many encouraging volunteerism and philanthropic giving from employees.

While you can reach out “cold call” style to begin corporate major gift conversations, those conversations will be more effective if you can make the case by demonstrating an existing relationship between your nonprofit and the corporation. For example, you may have a significant number of donors and supporters who happen to all work for the same corporation. It would be a great idea for that corporation to make a gift to your organization as well.

Matching gift software makes it straightforward to discover these connections. This software prompts donors to search for their gift match eligibility when donating to your nonprofit, to later initiate the gift match process. On the backend, however, your nonprofit can see which employers have the highest representation in your support base and use that information to begin major gift conversations with corporations.

Action steps you can take today
  • Review your nonprofit's technology solutions. Do you have solutions corresponding to the specific types of major gift fundraising that your organization relies on?
  • Consider partnering with a nonprofit consultant. A nonprofit technology consultant can evaluate your fundraising strategies and current technology solutions to discover if the latter is supporting the former effectively.