The Major Gifts Handbook

No matter how big or small your staff is, you can run a major gifts program. Your biggest resource and limitation is time; this handbook will help you manage it efficiently and effectively. Your program will not be perfect. Ours certainly isn’t - this is a handbook of best practices, not what we do 100% of the time. But when we get busy and all our time is spent playing whack-a-mole, we can fall back on this system to keep us organized.

This document is based on the actual “handbook” for our major giving program at Lowcountry Land Trust. It was first created in a two-day desperate attempt to document procedures and standardize terms and further enhanced through collaboration over time. This is not a comprehensive textbook and is not the beginning and ending of major giving. But it is our playbook, and we hereby give it to you to make your own.

So please, for the sake of our shared mission of protecting land and water forever, take our iideas, steal our moves, do everything we do and more, make it better, and make it yours. Let us know what you find helpful, and share this with others fighting the good fight for our planet. We hope it helps you, and if it doesn’t, let us know. We’re in this together, and we want to see you succeed.