Vander Hook Advancement
Principal and Major Gifts Counsel
Build your donor relationships with the strategy and systems to support lasting growth.
Your organization has experienced success with major gifts and invested years in cultivating donor relationships. You may also have loyal annual supporters whose potential for deeper involvement has yet to be explored.
What would help you build on that foundation?
I work with nonprofit leaders and development teams to identify opportunities within their donor community and build the portfolios, systems, and practices to support their next stage of growth.
Who in your donor community might be ready for a deeper relationship?
A donor assessment can help you understand the potential within your current base of supporters. We’ll combine giving history, engagement, and available capacity information with your team’s knowledge of donor relationships.
Together, we’ll identify people worth getting to know more deeply and develop next steps to understand their interests, readiness, and connection to your mission.
Do your fundraisers have focused, manageable portfolios?
I can help you build or refine donor portfolios informed by data and your team’s experience, and set clear relationship assignments and priorities for each fundraiser.
For your most significant major and principal gift relationships, we can develop individualized strategies, clarify leadership involvement, and connect donor passions and interests with organizational priorities.
Do your systems help you manage relationships and see what’s ahead?
I can review how your database captures donor interactions, interests, relationship assignments, and next steps, then recommend improvements to your setup and shared processes. If you are in need of putting a CRM in place entirely, I have helped with that too.
If needed, we can also establish a major gifts pipeline to track potential asks, anticipated amounts, timing and progress. You’ll have a clearer picture of developing asks/opportunities across the current year and future years, supporting more informed revenue planning and conversations with leadership.
How do you recognize progress before a gift arrives?
Major gifts work takes time. Your team needs ways to recognize meaningful progress throughout the relationship, alongside dollars raised.
Together, we can establish measures that reflect your engagement goals too, including meaningful donor conversations, a clearer understanding of donor interests, agreed next steps, proposals delivered or asks made, and stewardship milestones.
Regular portfolio and pipeline conversations help your team celebrate wins, identify challenges, and adjust its approach while keeping the long-term goal in view. We can establish a practice together, when needed.
Support as you put the work into practice
We’ll shape the work around your organization’s goals and capacity, with tools your team can keep using. This can be a focused engagement or combined with coaching and fundraising planning for support throughout the year.
Let’s talk about where your major gifts program stands today and what would help it grow.