major gift schedule

Jason Geslois

Hi, I have a question for anyone from an organization that currently has a major gift officer or utilizes major gifts through moves management as part of their main fund development. We are in the beginning stages of doing that program at our organization and I wanted to see if there is an example schedule of what an officer would work? For example, what would a week long schedule from Monday through Friday from 8a-5pm look like and with an example goals being met for when the gift would be secured? Thanks for any help anyone is able to give. 

Rachel Slager 2

Our main donor pool is university alumni who are scattered across the country and the globe.  In major gifts, face to face is still an important tool in finalizing gifts, so I'm not sure there's a typical work week as the hope is the solicitors are out meeting with donors, travelling locally and nationally as needed, and if all their time is 9 to 5, they might not be very effective.  But no doubt other organizations are different.



That said, each solicitor manages a portfolio of about 125 prospects.  What we measure weekly is the number of move actions they complete, without over-emphasizing what kind of moves they are.  Their major activities are to qualify new prospective major donors, stewarding major donors with recent gifts, and cultivating relations with existing majors in working toward the next big ask.  So Qualify, Cultivate, Solicit and Steward moves are measured by month rather than week, as travel to new areas might mean a week primarily focused on Qualifying, or disqualifying and searching for new prospects.



My cautionary tale:  Our solicitors are currently doing a lot of their own prospect discovery research right now which is unfortunately not a good use of time and really hurts their action numbers month by month.  I'm hoping to build profiles, better reporting, better discovery methods because in my opinion what slows them down is a lack of reporting useful to them and way to much reporting focused on what they are or aren't doing, which means the ball is in my court.  So holding a solicitor accountable and giving them goals is great in theory, but solicitors without the right tools, without the right support staff, are being setup to fail.

Jason Geslois

Thank you Rachel. Those answers help me a lot. I have talked to other places as well and like you said they each are slightly different. That is good to know about the prospect discovery especially in helping understand them utilizing their time. I appreciate your time to respond to my question. Thank you again.