How to Double Your Net-New Major Gift Pipeline in a Month

Most development teams treat their fundraising pipeline growth like compound interest: slow, steady, and something you’ll reap the benefits of in the future. You add a few new names from an event here, a new mailing list there, and your numbers gradually go up year over year.

But there’s a faster way. 

If you treat prospecting like a sprint (a focused four-week push with a clear goal), you can make more progress in a month than you would in a year of just passively growing your pipeline.

This approach won’t work for everyone. If you’re part of a newer or smaller organization that hasn’t built major gift pipelines or started to really execute moves management, you should focus on the fundamentals first. If you’re part of a large fundraising team at a major institution, you may actually only see marginal benefits from prospecting for new donors.

But, if you’re part of a development team that’s raising seven figures annually and you feel like you’re starting to plateau, making the same asks over and over again, a dedicated prospecting sprint could be exactly the burst of energy your team needs. 

Here’s how to do it in four weeks.

Before You Start, Agree on What “Net-New” Actually Means

Before you can grow your pipeline, you need a baseline: What counts as a net-new prospect for your organization?

For some teams, it’s brand new people who have never appeared in your CRM at all. For some, it’s donors who have given once or twice, but never made a major gift. For others, it’s existing names who have some affiliation with your organization outside of giving, but have never been flagged for solicitation.

A clear baseline keeps the sprint honest and gives you something worth reporting when it’s over.

Week 1: Find the Names You Don’t Know Yet

Casting a wide net is the key to successfully starting a sprint. Your goal in the first week should be to build as big a list as possible of major gift prospects; qualifying and narrowing down that list will come later.

Major donors rarely appear out of nowhere. Depending on your definition of “net new,” they may even be sitting in your database, ready to be identified by a wealth screen. But the major gift prospects not already in your CRM leave traces, too. These include, but are far from limited to:

• IRS 990s of local or family foundations who make grants to organizations like yours; their board members are all but guaranteed to be individuals who care deeply about causes like yours, and have demonstrated philanthropic intentions
• Annual reports from peer institutions that show who else is giving at a major gift level in your space or region
• Sponsorship lists, gala rosters, even event photo captions from other relevant charity events
• Many major gifts, especially around capital campaigns, are often accompanied by a press release; looking through previously published news articles is a good start (setting up simple Google alerts for keywords and/or peer institutions can keep these names coming after the sprint, too)
• Local or industry business journals will contain news on mergers and acquisitions, business financing, and other recent instances of wealth creation; the names here might not be guaranteed to be philanthropic, but are good to have on your list as you go into qualification (see Week 2)

Your goal should be to end Week 1 with as large a list of new names as possible. You don’t need to focus on collecting any other information yet, but at least keep track of the source where you found a name for future reference.

Week 2: Find the People You’ve Been Missing

Now that you have a list of names, here’s your next task: Identify who actually belongs in your pipeline. For each name, you’re trying to quickly answer two questions: 

1. Does this person have the capacity to make a major gift? 
2. Is there any reason to think they might care about your mission? 

You don’t need a full research profile to answer those questions. A few minutes of well-directed research per name is usually enough to make a judgment call. Giving history, board affiliations, professional status and background, and any public statements about causes they care about will get you most of the way there. You can speed this work up even further with the right tools: OutVote, a nonpartisan civic engagement nonprofit, cut their prospect research time by 87% by using AI-powered research tools to move through qualification faster.

This stage is where most teams leave value on the table by not cutting aggressively enough. Disqualification is just as important as qualification. The goal for the end of Week 2 isn’t a longer list; it’s a more certain one. Aspire Research Group, a prospect research consulting firm, builds much of their methodology around this idea. For one client on a tight timeline, they moved from 550 names down to 400 high-quality, fully vetted prospects in a week by cutting hard on fit and capacity early. The time they saved on low-fit prospects went directly into deeper research and engagement later on for the prospects who mattered.

Your goal should be to end Week 2 with a smaller list of people with clear capacity, plausible mission alignment, and enough information to confidently move forward.

Week 3: Map Your Path In

Even a qualified prospect is nothing more than a name if you have no credible way to engage with them. The work of Week 3 is figuring out who in your existing network can open which doors.

Your instinct with a promising prospect might be to start asking around: “Does anyone know this person?” Sometimes you get lucky. More often you don’t. 

The better approach is to start from the other direction: Begin with the people in your network (board members, trustees, current donors, volunteers) and systematically map their potential relationships. A relationship can come from a variety of sources, including educational overlap; a shared employer; mutual board seats, past or present; and much more. 

Relationship mapping can be extraordinarily time-consuming. The Inland Empire Community Foundation, which has awarded more than $250 million in grants over two decades, used to spend weeks of staff time piecing together connections manually: cross-referencing sources, building maps by hand, and relying on institutional memory. Once they had better technology in place to surface these connections, the foundation team found the same work could be done in just hours. Their Chief Development Officer described the shift as moving from “searching for data” (what AI is great at) to “thinking strategically about data” (what fundraisers are great at).

By the end of Week 3, your goal is to have each of your strongest prospects tagged with a connection: a specific person already in your network who could plausibly make an introduction.

Week 4: Prioritize for Action

Now that you have vetted, qualified prospects with mapped relationships, the last step is making hard choices about who to prioritize. By the end of Week 3, you’ll have more good prospects than you can realistically work at once. Prioritization turns your sprint from a research project into a fundraising plan.

Take your strongest prospects (the ones with clear capacity, plausible mission alignment, and a warm path in) and build a simple brief for each. Your CRM might have a built-in AI tool for this, or you could prompt an external AI tool to draft the brief. It doesn’t need to be long: the signal that caught your attention, a link to the source, a note on the relationship connection, and a suggested first step (this could be an intro email, an event invitation, or anything else that’s relevant). The goal is to give your gift officers, board members, or Executive Director something they can act on immediately with confidence.

Rodman for Kids, a Boston-area nonprofit serving more than 100,000 children by raising $2 million annually, ran a push like this with a team of eight and surfaced more than 3,000 strong connections they hadn’t previously mapped. The team had been relying on tools that couldn’t develop relationship pathways at all. Once they could see their network clearly, they were able to pick the right few dozen prospects to pursue. Outreach became faster, more targeted, and more personal.

Your goal should be to end Week 4 with a named next step and a named owner for a few dozen high-quality prospects.

After the Sprint

Prospects sitting in a spreadsheet tend to stay there. During and especially after the sprint, make sure all this prospecting work feeds back into your CRM.

Let the meetings and outreach happen, and after a few weeks, come back to close the loop on the sprint itself. You’ll be able to review the essentials: 

• Which sources produced the best names? 
• Which introductions opened doors? 
• Which prospects looked promising on paper but weren’t? 

That feedback makes the next sprint faster and sharper than the last.

A sprint won’t fully replace a steady, year-round prospecting practice. But if you’ve been making the same asks to the same donors and feel the plateau setting in, four focused weeks can move the needle in a way that slow and steady rarely does.

The right fundraising software can help you build a healthier pipeline and keep it moving long after your sprint ends. Learn how Blackbaud fundraising solutions can support your next stage of growth.