Quick Answers: Major Donor Data, Explained
What does it mean when donor relationships live in the founder’s head?
It’s when one person on your team knows things, like who to call before a big ask, who likes a phone call instead of an email, and who’s been undercover giving for years. However, none of it is written down anywhere. It works great until that person is out sick, gets busy, or leaves.
Why should we care about this now?
Because it doesn’t scale. If you want to hire a fundraiser, bring on new staff, or take a vacation without everything falling apart, that knowledge needs to live somewhere everyone can access it instead of in one person’s memory.
Our top donor numbers look flat or down this year. Does that mean we’re losing donors?
Not necessarily, and this is one of the most common things we see. A lot of decline turns out to be donors who are still giving, just through a different channel, like a donor-advised fund, a family member’s name, or their business. The money didn’t disappear, but it did become harder to see.
What’s a donor-advised fund (DAF), and why does it throw off our numbers?
Think of it like a giving account: a donor puts money in through a provider (like Fidelity Charitable or the National Christian Foundation), and the provider sends grants to nonprofits from there. The catch is that on your end, the gift can show up under the provider’s name instead of the donor’s name. So if you’ve got a bunch of gifts from “Donor Advised Fund Provider X,” there’s a good chance several different donors are hiding behind that one line. Most of the time there is at least a name attached to the gift, or a portal with the DAF provider that you can access to de-anonymize some of these gifts. The miss we’ve seen more than once is when organizations put every gift from the same DAF into one giving account in the CRM.
Okay, so where do we start?
Start small: pull a list of your top donors, and for each one, ask, “Do we know what’s going on with this relationship?” From there, you can fill in the gaps, reconnect gifts to the right person, and start tracking things like how often you reach out and how often you hear back. The idea is to create a system that doesn’t depend on one person remembering it all.
We recently worked with a founder-led nonprofit that hit a familiar milestone: the budget was growing, their Executive Director was a rainmaker who could close a major gift over coffee, and the board had just approved hiring a dedicated fundraising staff person.
On paper, it was exactly where any nonprofit wants to be.
But there was a catch. That Executive Director was also the only one who really knew the top donors. He could tell you who preferred a call over an email, who was related to whom, and which person was a golfer or a pickleball fanatic. All of it lived in his head instead of a database.
That’s not a knock on him. It’s just what happens when an organization grows around one person’s relationships instead of a system. It works okay until that person is stretched too thin, a new hire has nowhere to start, or he eventually moves on.
If this sounds familiar, we get it. It’s one of the most common patterns we see in mid-sized and founder-led organizations. So before this client hired anyone, they asked us to help them figure out what was happening with their top donor relationships, and what we found surprised even them.
The Number That Wasn’t What It Looked Like
We started by pulling every contact whose largest previous gift was $500 or more. That gave us 205 records, aka a solid, workable definition of this client’s top donor tier.
Over the past 5 years, those 205 relationships had given a combined $5.05M. A great number on its face.
However, one line item stood out immediately: $3.75M of that total came from a single Donor Advised Fund provider.
That’s not one donor giving $3.75M. Given how many separate gifts made up that total, it’s almost certainly dozens of different families, all giving through the same DAF provider, and all landing in the database under one name instead of their own.
Before we could say anything meaningful about this client’s top donors, we had to set that DAF total aside and look at what was left: the other 204 records, and $1.3M in giving that was traceable to real people.
That’s where things got interesting.
Why It Looked Like Donors Were Giving Less
Once we set the DAF total aside, we looked at what the remaining 204 top donor records gave last year: $88,444.
Compare that to their 5-year total of $1.3M. Spread that evenly across 5 years, and you’d expect closer to $261,050 a year. Instead, last year came in 66% below that average.
At first glance, that looks like a major donor exodus. But before jumping to that conclusion, there are a couple of different things that could be going on:
- They’ve stopped giving. Some relationships might have lapsed, and that’s worth knowing.
- They’ve shifted to a Donor Advised Fund. Just like the $3.75M we set aside earlier, some of these 204 donors might now be giving through a DAF too, just one that hasn’t been flagged yet.
- It’s a mix of both. Realistically, this is the most likely answer. Some donors have drifted away, and others are still giving, just not in a way the database picks up.
Fortunately, this isn’t a small donor list. 92 of the 204 records have an average gift value of $1,000 or more. That’s a bench of major donors, which means the “decline” is really a sign the tracking hasn’t caught up with how people are giving.
That distinction matters, because it changes what the organization should do next.
What We Recommended Next
Once we knew what the data was telling us, the path forward showed itself. We gave this client a short list of priorities to work through with their new hire:
Figure out what’s really going on with each relationship.
For the 204 top donors, the first job is discovery: has this person stopped giving, shifted to a DAF, or found another way to support the organization, like giving through their business, a gift in kind, or a spouse’s name on the check? You can’t cultivate a relationship you don’t understand.
Close the gaps in the data.
For as many of these 204 as possible, fill in missing contact details and start tracking preferences: how they like to be communicated with, how often, what kind of reporting they expect, and what a proposal should look like for them. This is the kind of context that used to live only in the Executive Director’s head.
Create separate records for organizations and the people behind them.
Several dozen of the 204 records are listed under an organization’s name rather than an individual’s. Some of those are likely people who give personally and through their business. Creating linked records ties a gift back to the relationship.
Dig into that DAF account.
That $3.75M sitting under one Donor Advised Fund provider isn’t going to sort itself. As comprehensively as possible, this client is working to match those transactions back to known donors, so cultivation and reactivation efforts target the right people instead of a generic provider name.
You don’t need new software or a bigger budget for any of this. What you do need is to treat relationship knowledge as something your organization owns rather than something one person carries solo.
Metrics That Keep the System Honest
A system is only as good as the way you know it’s working. So alongside the recommendations above, we asked this client to start tracking a handful of metrics with this group, split into two types: leading indicators that show whether the work is happening, and lagging indicators that show whether it’s paying off.
Leading indicators (the effort going in):
- Number of outbound communications. Are the 204 top relationships being reached out to, or are they only hearing from the organization once a year at the ask?
- Number of two-way conversations. A newsletter open isn’t a relationship. This tracks real back-and-forth, like replies, calls, meetings, and anything that shows the donor is engaged.
Lagging indicators (the results coming out):
- Year-over-year revenue change, in aggregate. Now that the DAF gifts are being reconnected to people, this number will reflect what’s happening with the relationships.
- Referrals and new donors entering the $500+ tier. A healthy top-donor program grows. New names showing up in this tier is a sign the relationships in it are working in the organization’s favor.
The leading indicators matter just as much as the lagging ones. If revenue dips in a given year, this client can look at outreach and conversation numbers and know whether that’s a fundraising problem or a timing issue, instead of guessing.
Just as important: these numbers now don’t live in anyone’s head. Anyone on the team, current staff or a future hire, can look at this dashboard and know exactly where things stand.
What This Means for Founder-Led Organizations
This client’s story is too often the norm.
Most mid-sized and founder-led nonprofits grow the same way: a founder or Executive Director builds solid relationships with people who believe in the mission, and for a long time, that’s enough. It should be, as relationships are the whole point.
But eventually, most organizations hit the same wall this client did. They want to grow, hire, or hand off pieces of development work, and they realize the relationship knowledge they’re counting on only exists in one person’s memory. It’s not a failure but a sign the organization has outgrown the system it started with.
Fixing it doesn’t mean starting over, and it doesn’t mean the founder steps back from donor relationships. It means tracking that knowledge somewhere outside of one person’s head, so the organization can keep growing without being constrained by memory.
If you’re a founder or Executive Director reading this and thinking, “that’s basically our database too…,” know that it’s a good problem to have. It usually means the relationships are strong, but the data just hasn’t caught up yet.
What’s Hiding in Your Donor List?
You probably don’t need to run a full data audit to know if this applies to you. Ask yourself a few simple questions:
- Do you know, off the top of your head, why your top donor revenue is up or down this year?
- Could someone other than your founder or ED explain the history behind your biggest gifts?
- Do you know how many of your top donors might be giving through a DAF, spouse, or business, without it being tracked back to them?
If any of those gave you pause, that’s a good place to start.
You don’t need to fix everything at once. You just need a system that doesn’t depend on one person remembering it all.
Ready to see what’s hiding in your own donor data? Let’s talk.
