Stupid is as Stupid Does: On Using Gift Capacity Ratings

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I was talking with a major gift officer and she told me that a couple of years ago, leadership of the major gifts team wanted to push through to a new fundraising goal. Each officer was assigned a fundraising goal that was based on gift capacity ratings that had been recently added to the database through a wealth screening. Spoiler Alert: They came in way under goal that year.

Every day I am thankful that I get to be a prospect research consultant and not a major gifts team leader. It seems to me that it most resembles catching greased pigs!!

Not only must leadership build, train, and manage the staff, but that major gifts team must then build relationships with individuals who possess their own objectives and personalities. Throw in the reality that information technology has been changing very swiftly and it is easy to understand how someone could get sold on a score or rating and forget that all the fundraising fundamentals still apply:

  1. Just because someone has a lot of money does not mean they will give big to your organization.
  2. Quantifying and rating things like gift capacity and affinity or interest is challenging; not least because the data you need is not always available or collected in your database.
  3. The best data can’t bring your team’s skills up to speed or accelerate their adaptation to change.

Should You Even Use Gift Capacity Ratings?

I admit to still being in awe of capacity ratings. After all these years, they still feel magical. Thousands of individual names being ranked in a few hours. And the matching algorithms have gotten better and better, too. I can’t imagine going without wealth screenings and their accompanying gift capacity ratings.

It’s more about what you use capacity ratings with.

You wouldn’t try to bake a cake with only one or two ingredients, would you? And you wouldn’t try to bake a cake without following a recipe – maybe tweaking that recipe from time to time, such as adding instant coffee to chocolate cake? (Yes, I’m all about the cake baking!)

It’s been my experience that every organization is different and as with cakes, recipes lead the way to success. They give you the key ingredients and measure them in relation to one another.

If you are just building your major gifts program, you may only need to segment your prospect pool by capacity rating and RFM scores (recency, frequency, monetary scoring that is based on giving history) to get a really strong start.

If you are working to bridge your major gifts team to much higher fundraising goals, you need a much more robust, ongoing process that is tweaked based on your unique organization and constituency.

And even that more robust process is probably going to do well with gift capacity ratings as one of the pieces.

Keep the Capacity Ratings in Good Company

Machine learning and tech companies focused on the nonprofit sector are really heating up the research space! They promise to deliver a more inclusive and comprehensive approach to fundraising research. But they haven’t made capacity ratings redundant, yet.

Until they do, make sure you keep your capacity ratings in good company. Pair them with insights from your donors’ giving history, any engagement markers in your database, and other stuff you know is important (gift size increasing over time, high lifetime giving, etc.).

And listen to your team members. Sometimes out of the mouths of major gift officers come the most amazing observations. “As soon as I saw she made gifts to those three organizations, I knew she would want to make X gift for $.”

In other words, capacity ratings might seem “stupid” sometimes, but it’s what “stupid” does that matters most. If you pair capacity ratings with other information, you might just break through your fundraising goals!

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