The $3 Billion Fundraising Lesson: Stop Asking Donors to Fund Your Needs
Last week, Carnegie Mellon University received the largest individual gift in the history of American higher education. $3 billion!
Citadel founder Ken Griffin committed $2 billion to establish an entirely new Carnegie Mellon campus in Miami and another $1 billion to strengthen the university’s Pittsburgh campus.
The number is almost difficult to comprehend. But there is a fundraising lesson buried inside this story that applies just as much to a nonprofit raising $5 million as it does to a university receiving $3 billion.
Transformational donors aren’t looking for a bigger list of needs. They’re looking for a bigger vision.
Carnegie Mellon didn’t approach Griffin with a collection of projects that needed funding. The university presented an opportunity to help create something that didn’t exist.
CMU Miami is planned as a 35-acre campus eventually serving more than 3,500 students, with nearly 300 faculty members and 600 staff. It will bring together education, research, business and government to tackle major issues including health, national security, energy, climate resilience and advanced manufacturing.
That’s not filling a budget gap. That’s a vision. And Griffin apparently saw something else he liked. Excellence.
He said he believes in supporting institutions that achieve excellence because doing so raises the bar for other organizations. That should cause every nonprofit leader to think. We spend an enormous amount of time explaining what we need. We need a new building. We need another staff member. We need $100,000 for this program. We need to increase the endowment.
Those may all be legitimate needs. But need rarely inspires a transformational gift. Vision does.
There are several lessons here for nonprofit leaders and fundraisers.
First, show donors where you are going—not simply what you need. The best case for support isn’t a shopping list. It describes a future that doesn’t exist today and explains why your organization is uniquely positioned to create it.
Second, demonstrate excellence before asking someone to invest in more of it. Griffin reportedly became interested in Carnegie Mellon after seeing the quality of the work already being done there. Major donors want evidence that an organization can execute. Past performance builds confidence in future ambition.
Third, give donors an opportunity proportional to their capacity. This is where many organizations become timid. We identify someone capable of making a transformational gift and then present them with a $100,000 opportunity because that’s the largest gift we’ve ever received.
Don’t decide for the donor what is too much. Present the opportunity. Let the donor decide. And finally, think bigger with your best prospects.
Most organizations will never receive a billion-dollar gift. That’s not the point. For one organization, transformational may mean $10 million. For another, $1 million. For another, $100,000. The principle is identical. If you want donors to make transformational gifts, you have to give them something transformational to accomplish. Big gifts usually follow big ideas.
The job of nonprofit leadership is to develop those ideas. The job of fundraising is to find the people who might believe in them.
