Beyond the Surge: Practices to Sustain and Upgrade the New Donor Wave
Between successful federal funding campaigns, and an always-fruitful calendar year end, stations are seeing a surge of donors giving generously with gifts of $1,000+.
This is great, and, of course, necessary as the system restructures in the wake of the loss of CPB. But this surge in generosity won’t sustain our services unless we maximize the long-term value of these new supporters—many of whom are giving at this level for the first time.
It is a challenge to strategically integrate large numbers of new donors into our long-term fundraising efforts, particularly when many of us don’t have additional resources to apply to bigger portfolios. But it’s also true that failing to engage these $1,000+ donors in a timely way risks significant churn, which could leave us worse off than before the surge.
In order to sustain revenue beyond a temporary bump, any-size fundraising team can focus on two key processes to make cultivation manageable and encourage retention in 2026 and beyond:
- Portfolio management to make the work doable
- Right-sized engagement processes to encourage retention
The Critical First Step: Donor Qualification
Stations have reported that there are simply more donors on file, in every giving category. For our mid-level and major gift fundraisers the immediate challenge is to identify and prioritize a few key things about these new donors:
- Who are likely major donor prospects? Who has the interest, willingness and financial capacity to make substantially larger gifts? (i.e. 10x+ the amount of annual gifts, and most often asset-based, not cash).
The way you find those things out is the process of qualification, which boils down to “talking” to donors.
Since there are a lot of donors and very few staff assigned to work with mid-level and major gift donors, you don’t have to have an individual phone call or meeting with each donor. Try surveying new donors or have volunteers conduct thank-you phone calls and then record what they learn about the donors’ interest and willingness.
- Which of those donors want and will respond well to high-level, personalized engagement? As qualified donors, their preferences should be noted so that the fundraiser working with them can choose the best engagement activities.
- Which of those donors want a more scaled-down – but still relevant – relationship? These qualified donors do still want to know what the impacts of their gift are and want to celebrate your successes but are less interested in “high touch” cultivation. Again note and respect those preferences.
Portfolio Management: Making the Work Doable
Once you’ve qualified your donors, be mindful that circumstances change.
To-Do in January: Culling and Prioritizing Your Major Gift Portfolio
Major Gift Officers (MGOs) should aim for 125-150 donors in their active portfolio, and every MGO’s portfolio requires active management. There will be donors in the portfolio who just are no longer good major gift prospects. Maybe they stopped responding to your outreach or had a change in their financial situation. When this is the case you should no longer be cultivating this prospect as a qualified donor. Instead, move them out of your portfolio and back into membership. While it can be hard to make those decisions – especially if it’s a donor you knew well at one time – you have to prioritize the time you have available.
Conversely, you may have learned about some donors’ intentions to give more in the coming year and so they need to be boosted up in priority placement in your portfolio so that you can make a concrete plan for the right ask and the right time for them.
When you prune your portfolio regularly (especially in January) it will help you use the time you do have for donor work, instead of for tasks like budget management, event planning, and team leadership. If you know you only have 15 hours a week to dedicate to working your portfolio, it is crucial that your portfolio be highly focused.
Now that you’ve identified which donors are ready for which level of relationship, the next challenge is creating an effective engagement strategy to ensure long-term retention.
Right-Sized Engagement Processes
Mid-Level Engagement
Typically midlevel or gift club programs are designed to be retention focused. These donors tend to stick around year after year because of the benefits they receive or the joy that making a gift gives them (ideally both). In 2024, the retention of donors giving $1,000+/year in public media was very nearly 80%. This is fantastic and we should rightly feel proud of that level of service to and meaning-making for donors.
But with more donors making bigger gifts, through both upgrades and new gifts, there is an operational risk: that staff will not have the time or budget to provide the level of service to all these donors that help keep those numbers high. And there is a relational risk: that the donors who gave out of anger at the federal funding cut are less connected to the continuing fundraising needs and made that gift in a more episodic manner.
You must put together a plan for how you will thank and update this group of donors who have given $1,000+ throughout 2026. Your plan needs to be within your budget, of course, but, even more importantly, it needs to be within what is realistically possible for your staff (and any volunteers who help) to accomplish. With layoffs at stations there may be fewer fundraisers to help with these projects, so plan your frequent outreach strategies to be adaptable.
Scaling Mid-Level Cultivation
Since midlevel fundraisers are cultivating donors in a 1:some context, midlevel portfolios can be larger. Having a portfolio of several hundred is not uncommon. (Outside public media, a mid-level portfolio of 300 – 2,500 donors is common, and I dearly wish that every public media station gets to the point where they’ve got 2,500 mid-level donors and needs to add staff!)
Midlevel donors likely will still expect to get more than just the basics from your station. They want to know that you got their gift, that you appreciate their support, and they want to get updates from you about what their gift is doing. Demonstrating the impact of their gift and getting a heartfelt “thank you” is what research tells us again and again that donors crave from the organizations they support.
And you cannot provide all midlevel donors with 1:1 cultivation. You cannot possibly hand-write individual note cards to hundreds of donors every quarter. Frankly, if you did, it’s unlikely that it would make much of an impact on revenue.
But you can divide large mid-level fundraising portfolios into segments, making it possible to keep track of who needs what and when.
Here are two effective strategies for segmenting your outreach to mid-level donors so that those who prefer automated, scalable engagement receive it, while freeing more of your capacity to meet the wishes of those who want high-touch attention.
Segmenting Monthly (Sustaining) Donors
It’s becoming more common, especially with the federal funding cuts, for midlevel donors to give monthly. As a fundraiser, you can be more assured that the gift will continue, and your segmenting strategy can be to build your engagement tools off of the plans made by membership for current sustaining donors.
Using Surveys for Custom Segmentation
Another effective strategy is to survey mid-level donors to establish which donors want and need more interactions. For the others who might find that displeasing, you can set an alternate plan which gives you more time to execute on the higher-touch individuals.
Major Donor Engagement: The Multi-Year Focus
Major gifts over $10,000 require a different approach. Engagement and relationships are critical to each and every major gift, and there is the ROI in major giving to invest in 1:1 relationships and touch-points with the individuals in your reasonably-sized portfolio.
Since many major gifts are also multi-year gifts, it also changes the notion of donor retention. Your focus should be less on annual renewal and more on working towards asking for more multi-year gift commitments. This will shift your focus toward pledge fulfillment and cultivation for the next major commitment.
If creating a personalized cultivation plan for major donors and prospects is new for you, take a look at the resources available at GP including this template to document your plan.
We Will Rebuild Our Sustainable Future Together
Americans are generous, our audiences care deeply about the work you do, and have absolutely shown up since federal funds were rescinded. I hope you’ve seen this in the form of revenue and in heart-touching comments from donors that offer hope and faith in our work and path forward.
To truly secure our future, we must close a critical knowledge gap: Because public media has historically focused more on membership giving, we currently have less shared data and established benchmarks for major gifts. To better secure our future, we strongly encourage all Greater Public member stations to participate in Benchmarks for Public Radio Fundraising. By sharing your major donor trends and strategies, we can collectively establish the industry benchmarks we need.
As you encounter difficult headwinds in the coming year, reach out for engagement suggestions for your new mid-level and major donors, or to work on rebalancing your portfolio for the new year. This work is challenging but it doesn’t need to be lonely. Stay connected to Greater Public resources and your peers doing this work.
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