Major Gifts Fundraising Lab.
Tuedays: Feb 11, 25, & March 4 2025
1-4pm EST
When you look up major donor fundraising, you often get two options for strategies. The first is to focus on the donor exclusively, walk on eggshells, and wait up to two years to make an ask. The second is to totally reject strategies that work and make a bold ask now without a strong relationship to guide you.
There’s a middle path that balances our values with our current lived reality: wealth is the accumulation of thousands of years of oppression and some people have all the money.
The Major Gifts Fundraising Lab is a course designed to overhaul how you do major gifts fundraising so you can move as much money into the movement as possible.
From prospecting a major donor to moves management training to finding your donor style, you’ll learn everything you need to be successful with major gifts and still stick to your values.
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This course has 9 live-taught modules. This class is highly interactive. Participants should come ready to actively participate all day.
1) Finding your major donor style
2) Balancing relationship fundraising and movement values
3) Old school major donor techniques 101—you need to know the rules to break them
4) Major donor meeting workshop
5) Major donor stewardship 101
6) Prospecting for major donors seminar—without expensive tools
7) Figuring out the right ask (who, what, when, why, how)
8) Major donor prospecting tools: are they right for you?
9) Practice ask seminar
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This course has three clear outcomes:
1) Participants understand their major donor style and are able to adapt their deltas when needed.
2) Participants feel confident asking for major gifts—and knowing how much to ask for.
3) Participants feel like they understand the nuts and bolts of major donor fundraising from securing a first gift to getting multi-year funding.
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1) Organizations looking to start a major donor program for the first time.
2) Large organizations feeling stuck in their current major giving programs.
3) Fundraisers who are looking to move from grassroots or mid level gifts to major donor fundraising.
4) Executive Directors who have had no formal fundraising training but need to be in front of donors.
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We are offering two scholarships for this course. For more information on our scholarships, visit out scholarship page.
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Kirstie was trained in old-school major gifts fundraising, but it never sat right with her. Known as a good closer and a bold asker, she was burnt out on the idea that everything had to revolve around the donor, instead of the larger movement. She was tired of how volunteers were often asked more clearly, quickly, and directly for their time than donors were for money due to taboos around wealth and consultant-led pitches not to treat donors like, well, donors.
She took the old rules and broke them to create a fundraising style that works for the movement. She coaches major donor officers all the way from Executive Directors of $10M+ organizations to teams that distribute their entire portfolio of $500+ donors across their entire staff. She’s known for helping people make bold asks and helping donor officers secure their first five or six-figure gift.
In addition to her coaching, Kirstie’s specialty at Build Power Strategies is scaling campaigns for sub $1M organizations where she helps organizations double their budgets. These are often led by multi-year seed gifts from major donors.
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We ask about access in all of our sign-up forms. We can accommodate most needs (needing slides ahead of time, needing slides a certain size, needing alt text, etc). We also can accommodate closed captioning.
Other access needs like needing your camera off, needing breaks, not going into break out rooms, being told activities ahead of time, we can accommodate as well. If you’re not sure, reach out to info@thefundraisingschool.com. We do our best to accommodate every access need we can.