Major gift

Grassroots International 2010 annual report
Grassroots Interenational’s staff diligently take photos during field visits and now they have a wide choice of images to use in their annual report. They also use donor profiles to support their message, so GRI donors are interested and highly involved.
How Harvard University got its name - major gift fundraising in the seventeenth century.
The examples in this exhibit are almost 400 years old, yet it would seem that we are still making the same mistakes today when it comes to major gift fundraising.
The Wishing Well Appeal for Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital
It’s difficult to do justice to a capital campaign as wide, and complex. This is a condensed summary of a major capital campaign which, at the time, was the largest appeal ever mounted in the UK.
ANC – emergency pre-election fundraising, from 1992
The ANC campaign that pioneered professional political fundraising in the UK and offered the British public the chance to play an active role in getting rid of apartheid forever.The campaign raised £2 million in six months with no budget and just one paid member of staff.
The Bruce Barton letter: the classic long copy letter from 1925 that pulled a 100 per cent response
He sounds like the racy detective hero from a 1930s crime thriller. But Bruce Barton is something else, for sure – a great copywriter and communicator.
UNHCR’s goodwill ambassador
Goodwill ambassadors have become the accepted public face of many INGOs, particularly those in the UN system. But UNHCR’s selection, recruitment and deployment of their public celebrity is a textbook example of how to do it. UNHCR has managed to engage a major celebrity with very simple means at virtually no cost.
Farm Africa ‘ask for what you need’
How do you ask a maojor donor for $50,000 when she’s at the other end of a telephone line and you’re in a very noisy tapas bar? Do you make ‘the ask’ in the worst possible surroundings? The lesson from this case study is that as long as ‘the ask’ is right, it doesn’t matter where you are.
Nature Conservancy of Canada: legacy mailing
How NCC accessed the pot of gold at the end of the fundraiser’s rainbow with a classically straightforward but very appealing legacy piece. Without doubt, this carefully and sensitively crafted pack will raise funds very effectively for the cause and the organisation that created it.
Children’s Cancer Institute of Australia: bequest conversion pack
This very detailed exhibit shows clearly how to ask donors and potential donors for the biggest gift they’ll ever make – a legacy. The campaign achieved brilliant results and stands out in the charity sector as an example of good bequest (legacy) marketing. It showed that asking someone for a bequest doesn’t have to be daunting and risky, as long as it is done in a sensitive, respectful manner that offers an emotive and compelling case for support.
Great Ormond Street Hospital: legacy marketing 1856
Why is it that the giving and receipt of legacies figured strongly in Victorian literature, yet is largely absent today? The announcement in the annual report of The Hospital for Sick Children (later Great Ormond Street Hospital) appeared just four years after the hospital was founded, but it was already obvious that gifts of legacies would be very important to the health and development of the hospital.




