Major Donors: Finding Big Gifts in Your Database and Online (Hardcover)

Philanthropy is in a renewed golden age. People want to help, to make a difference, to ensure that the things they value will flourish. In order to capitalize on potential prospects, many nonprofit professionals focus solely on the research of, or communication with, prospects. Although research is an important investment of time and resources, and direct contact with each prospect is essential, neither guarantees successful solicitation of a gift.

Major Donors: Finding Big Gifts in Your Database and Online shows you the Internet and database–mining strategies and techniques that are now making it possible for charities both large and small to target their efforts on those with identified resources and demonstrated interest. It is more of a why not? book than a how–to guide in which the prevailing message is "Yes!" Wherever you are, whether professional or volunteer, in Asia, Europe, Latin America, or the United States, you can do it. You can raise huge, transformational gifts. Why not?

This powerful new book equips you to do it, by perfecting the complex process that requires a reliable combination of skills and intuition, experience and curiosity, discipline and spontaneity, and research and conversation. It presents the tips and guidance necessary to aid in researching potential donors more effectively and helps all types of charitable organizations analyze and select the best practices for developing multiple Internet strategies alongside their traditional marketing, communications, and fundraising methods.

Every part of the nonprofit sector, whether an arts group, a college or university, a health charity, a hospital, or a social change/advocacy organization, will benefit from this book and its fully integrated approaches to:

• Prospecting for major gifts
• Identifying prospects
• Gaining insight into their funding interests
• Finding more accurate and updated information on donors and prospects
• Understanding knowledge management, database mining, and prospect research
• Nurturing hot prospects
• Prospecting research policy, privacy, and ethics
• Becoming acquainted with U.S., Canadian, and international strategies
• Considering what your Web site says to major donors
• Moving from prospect identification to making friends for life

Written seamlessly by respected names in the field for nonprofit managers, fundraisers and leadership of fundraising organizations, knowledge managers, prospect researchers, and Web builders/designers, this book is a powerful tool to help nonprofit organizations understand the great treasures they can discover when they use the barely tapped resources of "e–research" as the first step in a highly personal program to attract big gifts.