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Hey, podcast listeners, it's Rhea Wong with you once again with nonprofit Lowdown. Today. I wanted to talk about something that I think a lot of mid sized nonprofits struggle with, that nobody may be talking about, but everybody feels it. And it is this. The fact that your major gift program isn't really a program and everything is working until it doesn't. So let me explain. Maybe you're bringing in some good gifts, but the problem is it doesn't feel predictable. You feel like it's pretty random. You're not quite sure how to bring these gifts in on a regular basis. It's not replicable. Every quarter, every annual, every fiscal year is a little bit like, well, I hope we make it. Or it looks like maybe you have an ED or a development director or a board member who's really good at bringing in gifts and everything is great. They're a rainmaker. And when they leave, they take all those relationships with them and you start back at zero. Or maybe you're out here doing solicitations and you ask for a $50,000 gift and instead you get a $25,000 gift and you're not really sure why. Or maybe it's you have a board member landing homerooms, hitting it out of the park, but that you're getting nowhere on meeting the donors. And so you know that you're in a place of vulnerability should that board member ever decide to leave. So the question here is, are we just bad at fundraising? Are we just bad at major gifts, or is something else broken? And the answer is neither. I'm going to show you why. So the first thing I want to talk about is what I call the invisible revenue gap. The fact of the matter is, most mid sized nonprofit, and by that I define 2 to 10 million in annual revenue, have a hidden problem. It is a problem that nobody talks about, but your executive director and your development director know that this is a problem because this is a problem that haunts them at 4 o' clock in the morning when they wake up in a cold sweat. I know because I've been there. And the thing is, your financials look fine. Everything looks fine on the surface. So you're not doing a lot of digging. You're not raising any red flags. The audit isn't raising any issues, but it's costing you hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. And the thing is, nobody's measuring it because it is invisible. Now, this invisible revenue gap, you can't see it necessarily, but you know what it feels like and you know what the symptoms are. So some of the symptoms are you have major donors, so maybe you have folks who are giving at the 25, 50, even the six figure level, but you're not really able to predict if they'll ever give again. Even when you do the reach outs, even when you follow all of the instructions about good stewardship and you do seven points of gratitude and you're sending personal notes and phone calls and all the rest of it, there's no visibility into the next gift. And so what that means is you're leaning on hope as a strategy, you're hoping that they'll renew. So you're checking your emails, you're throwing things at the wall, you're asking them for coffee, but there's no clear process in your mind for how to elevate their next gift or even what that looks like. Or maybe it looks like a board member who's done a great job for you. They land a big gift and then everything goes quiet. You don't hear anything from the donor, you don't even hear anything from your board member. Or maybe it looks like you got a major donor, but you haven't talked to them in 18 months because it was a little bit out of sight, out of mind. Because in your mind, closing the gift was the end of that cycle and you were on to the next. But in their minds, that gift was just the start of a relationship where all of a sudden they were by themselves. But then all of a sudden, after this period of quiet or maybe very generic communications like the annual report or something that was not very customized to them, suddenly you're back in their inbox because you need to raise money or you have a gap or it's your end of the year and frankly, it feels icky. I talk about this like if you've ever had teenagers in your life, you only really hear from them when they want something from you. And we all know that feeling. Or you're not sure exactly what to ask for. So you're going into a new relationship with a donor and you're like, should I ask for 50? Typically when I hear people asking me, what should I ask for? That is an automatic flag to me that you haven't done enough work to get to know your donors. Then you go in for a solicitation and you're kind of guessing at things. You're like, I don't know. I mean, you go in with a hope. You're like, maybe I'll ask big one of, I have to share this. I was doing a speech once, and it was about major donors. And someone came up to me afterwards and goes, well, Rhea, you didn't mention my favorite tactic. And I said, well, what is that? And he said, well, you know, if you're going in for an ask, you should like go in for a triple amount because then they'll feel so guilty, maybe they'll give you more than you were going to ask for. And I was literally stunned in a silence because I just thought that was such a bad advice. I don't know who taught this man, but it was shocking to me. And I think this was a symbol of all that I think is wrong in the way that we teach fundraisers, because nobody wants to be shocked, nobody wants to feel guilted into a gift. And if this is the way that this man was doing his solicitations, I would not be surprised if no one answers his phone. Okay, the other thing that I want to flag for what it looks like is that your major donor system is broken. Is that your biggest revenue is one or two relationships. This creates some serious vulnerability in your program because if that one or two gifts decide to not renew the next year, you're in the poo poo. Now, I will say this. If you've listened to my podcast from a couple weeks ago, we're talking about trends. And what we do know is that major gifts are probably the single best source of growth at this point. We know federal money is down. We know foundation giving is pulling back. We know corporate is basically flat. But last year, According to Giving USA, 74% of all philanthropic giving were given by individuals. Of that, the significant number, we can get nip requests in a second. But within that individual giving line, there are some interesting trends. Even though that line grew 4%, the overall number of people giving decreased, which means that we're relying on fewer number of very big gifts to keep holding up the tent. The other thing that we know is that DAFs are growing. So over the last three years, DAFs have grown by 75%. What that means is that we know that the wealth exists. The problem is we need to bridge the gap between the people who have earmarked the money for philanthropic purposes and getting them to align with or even know and then align with the work of our nonprofit. Now, when we look at these symptoms, it allows us to define the gap. And the gap is this. It's the difference between the revenue you should be bringing in with your list versus the revenue that you are bringing in with your list. And if there is a gap here it's not because you're bad at fundraising, it's not because you're dumb, it's not because you don't work hard. It is literally because you don't have a system that is designed for today's donors. Now, a lot of us were taught in this old paradigm of the five stages, the identification, qualification, cultivation, solicitation and stewardship phase. And that's not wrong, but it is insufficient for, for today's donors. And I'm going to tell you about why. The system that a lot of us have been taught in, a lot of us have inherited is it's a system that is not based on structure. It is a system based on fragile relationships. So let me give you an example. If, for example, let's take the first step of identifying donors, well, that's purely based on relationships. So maybe it's someone that your board member knows, or maybe your ED bumps into someone at an event, or maybe a past donor's friend is introduced and it's great, it brings people to the table, it's organic, it's relationship, it's relationship driven. It feels really natural. The problem is it's not systematic. It's very much based on happenstance. So if people aren't out there actively meeting new leads, you're not getting anyone into your pipeline. So let's say you've identified people are interested, then what happens is that you typically will invite them to something, you know, a tour, a coffee, some kind of event, regardless of whether they actually want to come on a tour or actually want to be at the event or actually want to have coffee with you. It's sort of a one size fits all. I was brought up with this notion of moves management, which, if you don't know what that is, it's this process of sort of a menu of activities that you can follow in order to cultivate a donor. The problem is we never actually asked the donor if these are the things that they wanted to do. And by the way, in the old model, a lot of us skip over the qualification process altogether if we do qualification at all, and a lot of us don't, but if we do, it looks something like, I've been introduced. I have a way to contact them, either an email or phone number, whatever. Maybe I've done a wealth screen and it shows that they have capacity and maybe I've done some Google searches to see if they are interested in our cause. That's it. Based on that, then they are qualified to be in my pipeline. I'm going to Talk a little bit later about why that is not insufficient qualification process and the reason why you end up chasing a lot of people who don't want to talk to you. Okay, so we've moved into the cultivation process. We invite them to stuff, we build some rapport, we have conversations. This is when things get a little fuzzy because now you're like, okay, well when do I ask for money? Now, what I see typically happens is you as a fundraiser are uncertain when the solicitation is right. Sometimes you wait too long and then it gets into this weird friend territory where it's like, well, I can't ask now because they think we're friends. Right. Or you ask too early and you leave money on the table because they would have been inclined to maybe do something bigger had they built more trust in you. But you have jumped to the solicitation. And by the way, let's talk about the solicitation. It's vague. You don't know what to ask for because you haven't done diligence around what they typically give to, but more importantly what impact they are looking to have in their life. So at some point you ask them for money, maybe you do specific amount, maybe it's vague. Maybe you don't actually ever get to the ask. Right. I've had some fundraiser to say, well, I've never actually asked like, okay, well, so what do you do exactly? So let's say that they do make the gift, which is wonderful, and then once they give, you do the follow up. You're in the stewardship phase. But again, there's no structure to the stewardship phase. So if you're listening to folks out here, and by the way, guilty as charged. I used to teach this as well. Seven points of gratitude, right? So, okay, great, I'm going to send the thank you note, I'm going to do the phone call, I'm going to send the impact report. None of these are wrong per se, but they're insufficient because they're not customized to the person. Just in the way that a lot of us have specific love languages. Your donor has a specific love language. So we are operating under the assumption that like, of course they're going to want the annual report, of course they're going to want to come to this gratitude dinner. Have you asked them? And so when we are actually thoughtful about putting a system in place that is very much about putting the experience of the donor front and center, we can think about a different kind of system. Now, the way that we've been doing things it can really work. I mean, certainly we have evidence. People raise a lot of money, but it works based on the strength of individuals. It works if your ED is phenomenal. It works if you're a board member, is super duper connected. It works if you have really great personal relationships, then it can work. Here's the problem. It doesn't scale. What I mean by that is you cannot build a fundraising program on the magic beans of your executive director. You can't teach a development director to do what an executive director does, or vice versa. And if you can't teach the skill, you. You can't replicate it. The other thing that this way of working doesn't do is it's not predictable. So if you don't have a pipeline, if you don't have a system, you might get a gift, then you get nothing for two years. And so you're perpetually kind of surprised at your revenue, or it feels like you're throwing a lot of spaghetti at the wall. Every quarter just feels like a let's cross our fingers and hope, which is really hard to build a strong foundation of sustainability or even to plan for the future. Because if you're not sure what your revenue looks like, you're probably not going to make that next hire, you're probably not going to expand that program, you're probably not going to make the kind of plans and commitments that you need to actually do the mission that you set out to do in the way that you think it should be done. And frankly, when we have this kind of unpredictable system, it doesn't protect you and the organization, because everything lives in people's heads. The relationships are usually held by one or two people. And again, when the ED leaves, and we've been seeing a lot of folks leaving in the sector, you guess what, you lose the relationship. And with the relationship goes the revenue. Or maybe your board chair leaves. Guess what? You lose the relationship and you lose the revenue. The other thing that this doesn't do is it actually doesn't leverage your board in the right way. So I think one of the mistakes that we make is that we think that all board members have to be engaged in fundraising in exactly the same way. Generally speaking, with our board, we tend to put a lot of pressure on them, and then we have them show up when we need them. But because we don't have a system, because they're not clear what they should be doing or clear about what the strategy is, they feel like they're not being effective, we feel like they're not doing anything. And therefore, there's frustration on both sides. And what happens when the board is not consistently engaged? There's a lot of sporadic behavior, sporadic activity, and there are no sustained partnerships. Ultimately, what this means is that we get decision fatigue. So every interaction we have with a potential prospect is a guest. We're sitting here thinking, do we email this? Do we invite them to events? Do we do it now? Do we do it in six months? There's always the constant guessing because they're always recreating the wheel because you never created the original wheel. So the verdict here is that if you are operating in this sort of situation right now, in this, I hesitate to say system, but if you're operating in a system like this, which feels random, which feels reactive, which feels inconsistent, what happens is it's very much based on relationships. It's based on hope, not strategy. It's not systematic. And while it may work in bursts, it doesn't work consistently over time to bring leads in and convert. Okay, if you're listening to this and you're hearing yourself in this, I want to tell you this is not your fault. You are not unsophisticated. You are not bad at fundraising. You are not bad at your job. You are not lazy. You are not any of those things. The one problem that you have is that you are uninfrastructured. Now, let me talk about the difference between being unsophisticated and uninfrastructured. So if you're unso at a pretty basic level, you don't know how to ask, you don't know how to identify wealth, you don't really know what the steps are, and all of that is fixable. Most of the people listening to my podcast are sophisticated fundraisers. The problem is you're uninfrastructured. So what that means and what that looks like is that you know what to do, you know the right things to do, but you do not have a system to do them consistently, reliably, and repeatedly, and you don't have the right steps in the right order all of the time. What that would look like is that board members, for example, they know how to have great conversations with potential prospects, but they don't know when or what the next conversation is. It looks like your ED may know how to tell a great, compelling story and get people excited about the work, but your ED has no predictable process to move people from being interested to being committed. And so if you are uninfrastructured, you have all of the ingredients. You just need a recipe to make sure you're doing it in the right order with the right amounts. What changes when you have a system is you go from random to deliberate. You go from hope based to designed. You go from crossing our fingers to let us all follow the process because we have transparency. It means that you can teach it, it means you can scale it, it means you can predict it and you can defend it. And by the way, it also means that any one person who leaves the organization doesn't take everything with them. So if the ED leaves, the system stays. If your board member gets busy, someone else can step in. If a donor moves away, you have built a pipeline of people who, you know you can replace the funding. And a lot of us, because we haven't been thinking on the level of systems are constantly running around reactive to whatever's happening. Like, oh, we haven't talked to Bob Smith in a while, we've gotta go talk to Bob Smith. And, and again, no shade. It's not because you don't have the best intentions. Without an actual scalable, repeatable system, you're always going to be reactive. So let's talk about what an actual system looks like. And I want to give credit to my friend Greg Warner. He is the man behind the Engagement Fundraising Operating System. And this is a system that I teach within my program with my students. And I will say that this is a system is very much designed for today's donors. What I mean by that is donor behavior has changed even in the last two years. Donors are different than they were before, right? You're not going to do the coffee because frankly, no one wants to have coffee with you. No one's picking up your phone. No one has time for any of it. People are busier, the world is louder, and people are a lot less trusting at this point. We are in a skeptical society, right? We don't trust our politicians, we don't trust the news, we don't trust anything. And so why would I trust nonprofits knowing that we have to create systems that are trust based and consent based in order to build trust in us. Because the default is that people are going to be mistrustful of your intentions until they believe otherwise. Now, when we implement the six stages of the Engagement Fundraising Operating system, we go from never heard of you to a committed, sustained, major donor. And actually, I'm going to link an interview I just did with Amy Lester, one of the clients that we work with, to talk about the results that she's seen by implementing a system. Okay? So let's Back up. We are talking about a six stage system that we implement with fidelity that is clear, that is templated, that is operationalized so that everybody knows what it is we're talking about. So stage one, it is engagement. You'll notice that engagement has taken the place of identification in our old paradigm. What we want to do first is we want to look at the group of people who already love us, who are already in our community, who are already in our universe. A lot of us get very distracted with this idea that there's some donor out there in the universe who will rain money upon us. I call it the Mackenzie Scott myth. Like, one day Mackenzie Scott will find out about us and write me a million dollar check. And look, I hope that is absolutely true for you. In the meantime, I think you need to pay attention to all the people who are already in your database, who are already in your world, who are not Mackenzie Scott but could but have plenty of capacity. Maybe not Mackenzie Scott capacity that have plenty of capacity that you are not paying attention to. So the first thing that I want you to be thinking about is how do we ascertain engagement? Who is actually already in our world? Subscribing to our emails, opening our emails, clicking our emails, showing up to volunteer events, showing up to events that we do, taking our phone calls, replying to emails. These are people who are responding with their behavior. The first thing that we want to think about is how do we actually understand who this group of people are? These are our fans. We want to, you know, it's called reading the room. What are the signs that show that someone is even interested? Now here's where the board comes in, and this is really the primary role that they have in fundraising. They are door openers. They're leading engagement. They're bringing people in as relationship door openers. They're vouching for you. How many of us have given to something just because someone we love vouched? I certainly have. By them saying, I care about this nonprofit. I think you should know them. That is known as the warm handshake. Now, in our old world, the board was scattered. There were different people doing different things. Like, you didn't know if you were asking your board members to do solicitation or cultivation or steward. In this new world, you have a very clear role for your board, which is the top of our funnel, which is, can you bring new leads to us? Now, let's just do a little bit of math. Let's say you have 12 board members who are committed to bringing one new prospect to an engagement event every quarter. Well, the math maths pretty quickly. If you have 12 board members, four events, one person, you would have 48 new prospects per year in your pipeline. Now I know a lot of you are out here screaming like, my board members already don't invite people to events. And I will tell you this, the reason why, a big reason why they are not inviting people to your events or making introductions to you is that they are freaked out that you are going to treat their people badly. Not because you intend to, you're a very nice person, but because you don't have a process. They don't know what you're going to do with their network. And frankly the last thing that they want is to be embarrassed, as I'm sure that's the last thing that you would want. And so when we have a system and a process, we can be very clear with our board members about how we are going to treat their contacts. And by the way, because it's consent based, all the people that they bring into our pipeline always have the option of opting out. No pressure. And so that does a lot to lower the temperature and the anxiety about bringing people to the table. So once we have identified our raving fans, people who are come to our things, talk to us, want to engage with us, visit our website, follow us on social media, whatever it is, then we move into stage two. And this is where I, this is the hill I'm going to die on. The more work you do on qualifying people, the less work you do chasing them down the road. Now I'll be frank with you, when I was fundraising, I did not have a solid qualification process. So what that meant was one of two things happened. Either one, I ended up chasing people all over the place because my qualification process was I have an email address and I did a well screen and I google searched and saw that they gave to a similar organization. So now I'm going to email them and see if I can get on their radar and see if it was a lot of wasted time. So, or the other thing happened, I would go down the road with someone, I would meet them, I would warm them up and then I get to the point where it was solicitation and only to realize that like they weren't actually going to be a major giver. So I have spent multiple hours and a lot of time for a gift that was fairly modest and frankly not worth the amount of effort I had put in. But if I'd actually had a solid qualification conversation on the Front end. I would not have ended up here. So let's talk about this. We have a pre qualification stage and this is where the rubber hits the road. We can have this pre qualification conversation or we can pre qualify in one of two ways. One, we can either have a conversation if we are already in relationship, or two, we can do a survey. Now, there are some of you who will listen to this podcast and run off and go and do a survey. Please do not do this. The survey strategy has to work in concert with the rest of the system and there's a very specific way to that. We design a survey in order to be a value add to our donors, not an information extraction for us. So please resist the urge from your marketing department to survey your audience. That's not what this is. The survey itself is an engagement tool. Now, in the survey, we're looking at five different components. Component one, capacity. We're looking for things like, do they have a deaf? Do they have a family foundation? Are they interested in donating stock? Do they have a qualified charitable distribution? Are they interested in planned giving? Gifts of assets are major gift territory, not gifts of income. And by the way, there's a way we design it. You can't front and center. Ask someone like, so what kind of assets do you have? Like, how much are you going to give us? Obviously we can't do that. Two, Engagement. How have they been engaged with us? Do they get our newsletter? Have they volunteered? Have they been to an event? Someone that they know involved with our organization? We need to know that. Three, and this is a really important one. What is their reason? Look, the fact of the matter is there are 1.8 million nonprofits in this country. I could be a giver to any one of them. What's the difference between giving to organizations I really love versus giving to potentially the 1.8 other million nonprofits? The reason is always personal. The top gifts I give are for organizations I've either worked for or directly benefited from, like my school. There's always a connection with the personal story. Four, and this is the really important one. Timing. All the other things can be right, but if the timing is not right, if maybe I'm going through something, I'm not thinking about making a gift in the next six months. Maybe I'm like having a life crisis. There's no there there, right? Because timing is everything. And then fifth, do I have permission to reach out to you? The fifth, the consent, the permission changes everything. Because all of a sudden, if I give you permission, I am agreeing to be in some kind of relationship. Ah, but we are not done. So the pre qualification is the first step in the qualification. The second step is what we call the complete qualification conversation. In that complete qualification conversation, we're doing a couple things. We're reaffirming their why. We're reaffirming the timing. We are positioning ourselves as a philanthropic advisor to them that they must accept. And then we're issuing an invitation. And the invitation is something like, hey, Luke Skywalker, I am hearing the mission that you're trying to be on and I'm wondering. At my nonprofit, we have a process where we develop out a plan for us to really get to know each other, for you to get to know us, for us to get to know you. And so that we can make sure that we're meeting your needs, your goals, your desires for impact. Now, in this plan, if and when it makes sense, we will propose there will be an opportunity for us to co create a proposal for funding, but not before you're ready. And by the way, you have full control. You can opt out at any point. But at this point, would you allow me to create a plan for you to view that is their second yes. If they say, yeah, sure, I'd love to see a plan, then you have permission to proceed. But we're not done yet. Once you present the plan and by the plan, the plan is a very simple calendarized schedule of the various touch points with rationale like, here's why I think you might enjoy this particular thing. We then present the plan to them. At this point, it's iterative. They can say, oh, I don't think I want to go to this event where I'm going to be out of town. Then right till we alter the plan. Once they accept the plan, only after they accept the plan do they end up in our portfolio. Because they've said yes at multiple stages. By the time they get to being in your portfolio, the likelihood of a gift is pretty high because they've agreed they know what is happening, they know what the deal is. So one example is that Amy Lester, who I interviewed on my podcast a couple weeks ago, went from a 40ish percent conversion rate to 85% because simply because she'd implemented the system, which meant that the time that she was spending was spent with people who actually wanted to hear from her, who actually said that. Yes. Okay, so now let's go into. So because we have a calendarized roadmap, we go from the old way, which were like coffee meetings, but they were not systematic to a new way, which is we have a systematic way that we are engaging people based on their interest, their timing, their why. So finally we get to, at some point in the process, we say, hey, Luke Skywalker, would now be the time for us to discuss co creating a proposal for funding? And I just want to underscore the word co creation, right? You're not pitching, you're not telling them you're co creating. This is a partnership. And frankly, because they've been engaged in designing the proposal, they understand the alignment, they understand why you might have put certain things and you're confirming what you're designing together. So it's not a cold ask that they're not expecting and it's not coming out of left field, right? It's the equivalent of going shopping for the engagement ring. Like, everyone knows that your ED or your development director is sitting down with confidence and asking, you know, based on what we've talked about, based on the impact that you had, based on the programs that you've seen, what would a proposal look like? What's important to you? What's the ballpark of what you're thinking? What kind of impact would you like to see? And you hear all of this and you create a specific proposal. What we teach in my program is specific and you're checking along the way. So when you present the plan, you ask questions like, does this proposal align with what you told us you care about? Are we moving forward together? Right? So by the time they actually get the final, maybe you've talked about it, maybe they've seen some drafts, so there's no surprises, they've prepped, they've done all the conversations they need to do. You know, a deal killer is when you do the ask in the old way and you get that, well, I have to think about it, which basically is like, it may never happen because you have no idea it's going to go off in the ether. But because this is so clearly defined, you give them the opportunity to do the work ahead of time. So in the old way, we asked when we were desperate or we had some random coffee or like the vibes that maybe now was the time to ask in the new way. In this new system, we know what the pipeline is, we know who's ready, and it's permission based. We have an ask for prospect that is tied to their own personal roadmap. So what this looks like is we also have a pipeline with transparency because we can track who's actually received roadmaps and sort of the general timing of what to expect in the next month, 30 days, 90 days. So finally, let's say you get the gift. Happy days. Everyone is happy. So now we move into the hard work of stewardship. Remember, the gift is not the end of. Remember, you didn't close a gift, you opened a relationship. One thing I'm thinking about too is that every touch point is an opportunity to indoctrinate people into the cause. And if we are doing our job of stewarding them correctly, we are prolonging the afterglow of giving. We are affirming the identity that they are told us that they wanted. We are celebrating the victory that they achieved by supporting the work that they wanted to support. And ultimately the experience of satisfaction and value that they have to get from giving has to be commensurate or greater than the monetary gift, because that is how we add value. So what this looks like is that we design a post gift giving experience that mirrors our pre giving experience. We have a conversation, we map things out, we explain exactly what we are going to do to help them to affirm the victory that they got, the impact that they were able to achieve with this work. Part of it is saying thank you, but the bigger part of it is giving them the gift of meaning, purpose and community. I think the opportunity right now is that so many of us are feeling disconnected from community, that if we in our nonprofit can truly create a community among our donors and truly create an identity for them that is aligned with our nonprofit and the work that we do, it becomes, it goes, it transitions from oh, I do this thing to I am this thing. Let me give you a quick example. I had a board member of mine whose mother was very involved with the Girl Scouts because of the formative experience of being a Girl Scout. She was a Girl Scout, she continued to give as an adult. Her children were Girl Scouts, they continued to give. And so as an identity in the family, we're a Girl Scout family. And that is how you get givers for life. And by the way, if you do your stewardship, not only are you setting the stage for the next gift, but you are also providing the impetus for them to bring other people into the fold. I'm going to give Amy Lester again as another example. By going through this process with her donors, she literally now has donors calling her to ask her, well, that was so great, can we do it again? Because she was able to provide value and give them an experience that fulfilled them so much that they wanted to do it again. It's like Going to Disneyland. If you have a great time in Disneyland, you probably want to go back now. The other thing I will add here is that people quit, they quiet quit when they did not get an experience commensurate with the amount that they spent. In other words, if you do a crappy job at this stewardship experience, it's like going to a bad restaurant. You're like, well, not going to do that again. People also quit when you don't give them a bigger vision to be a part of. And I think one of the things that we need to understand is that bold people who write these kind of checks like bold ideas. And so as we continue to give them something bigger to be a part of and bold, bigger to strive for, the longer they're going to stay with us. But if it's like, okay, thank you for the check and can you just keep doing the same thing year after year, I'm going to guess that they're not going to stick around with very long. So I want to mention one client. So this is a $6 million organization. They'd never really had a major gift system before, but once they implemented, they had a couple of major gifts, but nothing consistent, nothing systematic. And what they did have, they weren't really soliciting or it was the ED who was randomly asking. So the board was well meaning, but they were fairly disorganized. Once we started to implement this system in their organization, we had some pretty staggering results. Their prospect pipeline went from 15 major donors a year to 47 major donors in one year. And their major giving threshold is $10,000. The qualification accuracy went up. They knew who had real capacity and passion. Their close rate went from 40 to above 80%, which meant that they were spending their time with people who actually wanted to be engaged. And they almost doubled the amount of money that they were bringing in from their major donors. So what we can discern here is that this system does work. And it works not because people are superheroes and not because the ED has suddenly become a genius and not because they found wealthier donors, but because they went from being uninfra infrastructured. It's not rocket science, it's not a silver bullet. But if you commit to systematizing and operationalizing a consent based major gift system, you will see dividends. Primarily because most nonprofits out here aren't doing a great job with major donors. And so the fact that you are offering something a little bit different will be a huge differentiator. So right now, if you're listening to this and this is resonating with you and you want to do major gifts differently, you realize that you don't currently have a system. And again, that's not an insult, it's an observation. And I want to tell you, if you're a mid sized nonprofit, and by that I mean anywhere from 2 to $10 billion, and you're thinking, well, surely Harvard has a system. Surely large hospitals have a system. I assure you, friends, they don't have a system. I have checked. Or they might have a system, but it's not nothing that I would call operationalized. The fact is, right now at the 2 to $10 million mark, you have an opportunity to build a system before you really scale up big. And, and it will behoove you to do it now, before you need it. Because it's much easier to start something the right way than it is to go back and repair it. So if you're listening to this and you want to understand how this system could work in your organization, I invite you to book a donor growth evaluation call. It is a free call. I'm going to put this in the show notes, but it is an opportunity to talk to our team. It's not a high pressure sales call. It is genuinely an opportunity for us to help you to reflect on what is working in your organization, what isn't working, and how it could look to implement the system that we teach today. So in closing, I just want to say I see you, I see you working really hard. Isn't it time that we work smarter, not harder? You're not unsophisticated. You're not bad at your job. You are simply unhappy infrastructure. And that's good news because infrastructure is something that you can change. So thanks so much. I will see you next Monday at 7:00am and please, if this is interesting to you and you want to see how this looks in your organization, go ahead and book a call. The link is in the show notes. I'll see you next week.