The 80/20 rule is now 90/10!

There is no doubt that a high correlation between a major lead gift and campaign exists It holds true here, where this decline is directly connected to the major gift activity of the marketplace. In “Upward Bound,” an article in the March 2012 Case Currents magazine, author Harriet Meyers references the CASE Campaign Report 2012, which notes that of the campaigns ongoing or ended in 2010, the top 10 percent of the donors contributed 93 percent of total money raised, up from 84 percent a decade ago (2012). It used to be that 80 percent of the total amount raised came from the top 20 percent of the total number of donors. A decade ago, that increased to 84 percent of the total amount raised from the top 10 percent of donors (Mutz, 2010). This tracked with the U.S. trend of an increasing level of wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer people (Reich, 2010). So it stands that this trend with major gift activity would have a detrimental effect on overall fundraising results. Eugene Tempel, in his book Achieving Excellence in Fundraising, also supports this finding. Tempel contends that the primary reason organizations are failing to achieve successful capital campaigns is their inability to secure major gifts. Without major gifts as the campaign foundation, there is no campaign (Tempel, 2009). Tempel is yet another voice from those who evaluate and research nonprofit fundraising performance. So, clearly, one could easily conclude that failures in securing major gifts is due, in part, to be attributable to a lack of thorough and complete donor profiling (Rosen, 2010). Rosen proposes that working smart and from a quantitative lens can help institutions identify donors. He also suggests that missing or incomplete qualitative data accounts for the reasons donors are not responding (2010). As a result, major gift officers are searching for new, improved, and rigorous qualitative interview techniques to provide insights into what motivates high-net-worth individuals (2010). Remember the high correlation between a major lead gift and campaign success? It holds true here, where this decline is directly connected to the major gift activity of the marketplace. In “Upward Bound,” an article in the March 2012 Case Currents magazine, author Harriet Meyers references the CASE Campaign Report 2012, which notes that of the campaigns ongoing or ended in 2010, the top 10 percent of the donors contributed 93 percent of total money raised, up from 84 percent a decade ago (2012). It used to be that 80 percent of the total amount raised came from the top 20 percent of the total number of donors. A decade ago, that increased to 84 percent of the total amount raised from the top 10 percent of donors (Mutz, 2010). This tracked with the U.S. trend of an increasing level of wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer people (Reich, 2010). So it stands that this trend with major gift activity would have a detrimental effect on overall fundraising results. Eugene Tempel, in his book Achieving Excellence in Fundraising, also supports this finding. Tempel contends that the primary reason organizations are failing to achieve successful capital campaigns is their inability to secure major gifts. Without major gifts as the campaign foundation, there is no campaign (Tempel, 2009). Tempel is yet another voice from those who evaluate and research nonprofit fundraising performance. So, clearly, one could easily conclude that failures in securing major gifts is due, in part, to be attributable to a lack of thorough and complete donor profiling (Rosen, 2010). Rosen proposes that working smart and from a quantitative lens can help institutions identify donors. He also suggests that missing or incomplete qualitative data accounts for the reasons donors are not responding (2010). As a result, major gift officers are searching for new, improved, and rigorous qualitative interview techniques to provide insights into what motivates high-net-worth individuals (2010).