It’s not equal to a donor’s lifetime total giving to your institution.
It’s not equal to how much a donor has been giving more recently.
It’s not equal to how much you may decide to invite a donor to give next.
It’s not equal to how much a donor tells you they will give.
It’s not even equal to a score produce by a wealth screen.
Instead, a donor’s charitable giving capacity equals how much they could give if;
- supporting your mission was their highest charitable priority; and,
- they were really enthusiastic about the purpose of their gift.
A donor’s charitable giving capacity is never a single data point. It’s a mixture of variables that we influence.
When we keep this understanding in mind, a donor’s giving history, a wealth screen score, what they have told us in the past, or our assumptions begin to have less influence over our future plans with them.
Instead, we begin to ask ourselves how we can positively impact their perception of our mission and how can we increase their prioritization of our mission as a giving preference.
When we start engaging a donor based on our creative responses to those questions, we tend to realize that the donor’s charitable giving capacity was far more than we imagined.
