Our five-step major gifts fundraising framework gives you a place to start, but the real work rarely moves in a straight line. Here’s why Foundation stays fixed while everything else adapts to your capacity.
Getting started with major gifts fundraising can feel overwhelming. We’ve heard it on sales calls, and we’ve seen it in our audit questionnaire answers. It’s the main reason why we created a five-step framework for integrating major gifts fundraising into your fundraising approach. Foundation, Architecture, Conversation, Cultivation, and Reach make up those five steps and we typically explain them in a sequential way because its easiest to understand without needing a lot of context.
But there’s a difference between walking someone through the five steps on a sales call or blog post, and actually walking through those steps with a client. Because if you took a look behind the curtain with a client, you’d notice that the real life version doesn’t quite match the linear one.
Most often, deliverables from later steps show up early. Some Architecture work is still being refined months after a client has technically moved into Conversation. The order holds, generally, but the lines between steps blur.
We don’t get asked about order of our deliverables and activities very often. Most people see the framework steps, understand the logic, and move forward. But it’s worth explaining anyway, because it says something about how we approach major gifts fundraising, whether you’re considering working with us or working through the steps on your own.
Table of Contents
The deliverables are a fluid map, not a fixed schedule
We present the framework in five sequential steps with clear deliverables for each because that’s what makes it easy to understand. We have yet to meet anyone who walks into a major gifts fundraising conversation with us and isn’t overwhelmed at the prospect of getting started, or who knows exactly where to get started. Because of that, we break the work into stages with clear deliverables and activities to give you something tangible to hold onto; a place to start, a sense of what comes next, and a way to see the whole arc before you’re in the middle of it.
Yes and, we’ve also yet to work with an organization who actually moves through the real work in a perfectly linear fashion. Staff capacity shifts. Board turnover changes who’s available for outreach. A conversation with a donor surfaces something your team hadn’t considered. None of that means you’re behind, or that you’re doing it wrong. It means you’re a real organization, and real organizations don’t run on a fixed schedule.
Want to learn more about those five steps? Click here to read A Major Gifts Strategy for Nonprofits: Our Five-Step Framework.
Why we build in deliverable flexibility on purpose
One of the most common questions we receive from organizations who learn about our approach is, “Okay, but what if we have to change [the timeline, the deliverables, the order, etc.]”
Yes, we have a steps with deliverables and activities that we walk every organization through. But it’s not a checklist, where each item needs to be marked off before the next one can begin.
We check in regularly (bi-weekly meetings always begin with general updates), and we adjust based on what you can actually hold at any given point, regardless of what stage we’re working on or working towards. We do this because we believe that if our approach isn’t able to meet you where you are, it can’t and won’t be sustainable. Handing off a completed deliverable just to mark it at ‘done’ isn’t helpful and won’t hold up in practice if you don’t have the ability to carry it forward. So instead of pushing every client through every deliverable at the same pace, we pay attention to capacity and adjust the work accordingly.
Two examples from recent client work show what this looks like in practice.
One client walked away from our work together with a donor recognition plan that likely won’t see the light of day for at least another 6- to 9-months. She was upfront that she didn’t have the internal capacity to integrate most of it right away, and we worked together on creating something that she could integrate when the time is right. That’s the point of building it aligned to your capacity, rather than a specific template or mandate. The plan is there when her organization has the capacity to use it.
Another client isn’t leaving our engagement with a print-ready case statement. Through the work, we surfaced real gaps in how the organization talks about its finances; gaps that need deeper internal conversation before the language can be finalized. They know exactly what conversations need to happen next, and they have everything they need to drop the language in once that internal work is done.
Neither of these organizations failed to complete a step. They encountered their own reality, and the framework adjusted to meet it.
The exception to this flexibility: Foundation
While deliverables and activities within Architecture, Conversation, Cultivation, and Reach can flex, adjust, and reorder based on your capacity, Foundation is the one exception. It has to happen first, and it has to be solid before anything else can hold weight.
That’s because Foundation isn’t just the first stage. It’s where we build the material that every later step will draw from:
- The audit tells us where the real gaps are in your existing brand and fundraising activities, so we know exactly what to focus on for the rest of the project, across all five steps.
- The brand strategy guidebook becomes what we pull from when we help shape a brand-aligned donor engagement in Architecture, when we write your case statement in Conversation, when we create a donor retention plan in Cultivation, and when we build communications in Reach.
- The theory of change is central to how we write your case statement, because it’s what makes your impact legible to the people you’re asking to invest in it.
- The contact list and relationship tracker help map who’s already in your network and what kind of relationship exists today. That becomes the reference point in Architecture, when we’re identifying potential committee members, and in Conversation, when we’re choosing who to reach out to for validation. It also feeds directly into the donor engagement and retention plan we build in Cultivation.
- The gift table and giving level ranges define what you’re asking for and at what levels. Those numbers show up again in your case statement and other major gifts collateral, and they help you see who from your contact list might be a fit for which giving level, connecting straight back to the relationship tracker.
- And the workshops for brand strategy, theory of change, and fundraising clarity aren’t just working sessions. They’re dedicated time to think about your organization with detailed, pointed questions most leaders haven’t had space to sit with before. That clarity doesn’t stay contained to Foundation. It’s what later conversations with donors, committee members, and your own team, continue to draw from.
If you skip ahead, or rush through Foundation to get to the “real” work or major gifts fundraising, the later steps will not have anything solid to stand on.
What a framework is actually for
The biggest barrier to getting started with major gifts fundraising usually isn’t the fundraising itself. It’s not knowing where to start. That’s true whether you’re beginning from nothing, or you already have a few pieces in motion, but no clear sense of what to prioritize or how it all fits together.
That’s exactly what a framework is meant to solve. Ours gives you a place to begin, and a way to see the whole approach before you’re in the middle of it. Whether you’re building a major gifts strategy from scratch or making sense of work that’s already underway.
But a framework is a starting point, not a finish line to check off exactly as written. The organizations that get the most out of this approach are the ones willing to stay responsive to their own capacity, their team’s bandwidth, and whatever their organization actually needs in the moment, rather than forcing every deliverable to match the order it was taught in. That’s not a departure from the framework; it’s a supportive approach to what your organization needs to maintain a sustainable major gifts fundraising strategy.
Kelly is a passionate brand strategist and designer who loves supporting nonprofits on their mission to do more good work in this world. She’s seen firsthand the power of creating a consistent and cohesive brand – from building better connections with your audience to streamlining marketing and fundraising efforts.
