You’ve landed the job. You are the new major gift officer. Hopefully someone gave you a different title to use externally, because you should not use MGO as your title.
Connections
If you’re hanging with Richard it won’t be long before you’ll be laughing.
He always finds something funny in everything. But when the conversation is about people, their money and giving, you’ll find a deeply caring counselor who helps donors fulfill their passions and interests. Richard believes that successful major-gift fundraising is not fundamentally about securing revenue for good causes. Instead it is about helping donors express who they are through their giving. The Connections blog will provide practical information on how to do this successfully. Richard has more than 30 years of nonprofit leadership and fundraising experience, and is founding partner of the Veritus Group.
If you like baseball, tennis, golf, Gregorian chant, jazz, rock, good wine and deep conversation, then you’ll like to hang out with Jeff.
If you are passionate about fundraising, Jeff will inspire you to be a true “broker of love” for your donors, helping you bring together a donor’s desire to change the world and the world’s greatest needs. Jeff believes that if nonprofits truly want to grow and obtain more net revenue for their mission, it will come through creating, building and successfully managing major-gift programs. The Connections blog will give you inspiration and practical advice to help you succeed. Jeff has more than 25 years of nonprofit fundraising experience and is senior partner of the Veritus Group.
At Veritus, we believe that creating strategic plans for every donor in your portfolio is critical. All 240 major gift officers who we directly work with all have a plan that will guide them toward achieving their revenue goals.
The other fundraising programs are not doing too well. Finance is going nuts, wondering how the bills will be paid. The executive director has a brilliant solution: launch a major gift program, and sit back and watch the money pour in.
I titled this post “Robots and Major Gift Officers” to get your attention and to make the point that it would be ridiculous to even consider that a robot could be a major gift officer. But I also want to make the point that in your daily major gift work, you have to guard that you don’t do robot-like work.
Purpose to examine all of your asks and proposals in the next week or so. And look at the “because” in each of them. Does your “because” have something to do with solving a societal problem? If not, you are on the wrong track.
A gala is not major gift fundraising, nor does it really have anything to do with philanthropy. A gala is a way that nonprofits bring in cash—and in rare cases, enough net revenue to justify having one.
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