Gift Range Chart

A gift range chart is a planning tool to help you determine how many gifts you will need at each level to meet your goal. It also tells you how many prospects you need and can identify gaps that will need to be filled.

The chart is based on the idea that you will meet your goal with gifts of a variety of sizes, including some large gifts. In fact it assumes that you will have a lead gift or two at the top, and that something like 80% of your goal will come from just 20% of your donors.

The gift range chart is sometimes shown as a chart and sometimes as a pyramid.

It is always a good idea to create a gift range chart when you are planning a campaign, and then to count the number of prospects you have at each level. If you don't have enough prospects, you may have to lower your sights. On the other hand, a gift range chart may also show that you could actually raise your goal if you have more than enough prospects at each level.

When determining how many prospects you need at each level, the assumption is that the higher the gift size, the more prospects you will need. Deciding what prospects you have at each level is, of course, partly a guessing game, based on past giving history to your organization, prospect research, and intelligence you have gathered from your volunteers.

The gift range chart for a campaign can be created off-line, perhaps by a consultant, and entered manually into ExceedFurther. If you do not have the expertise to create a chart, ExceedFurther can create it for you, using the following logic, using a set of gift ranges entered in the Gift Size Table for the particular campaign:

  1. 10% of the goal is allocated to the top range as a single gift.
  2. 10% of the goal is allocated to the bottom range, generally with a large number of gifts. The average gift size would normally be assumed to be in the middle of the bottom range. However, you can set this to be anything you want by using the Gift Size field in the Gift Size Table setup.
  3. The remaining 80% is allocated evenly across the other ranges, with the number of gifts calculated as the goal for that range divided by the Gift Size you set for the range. Generally you would set the Gift Size to be the bottom end of the range.
  4. It assumes that you need 5 prospects for every gift in the top ranges, 4 for the middle ranges, and 3 for the bottom.

For example, for a goal of $1,000,000, you would need one gift of $100,000, two gifts of $50,000, four gifts of $25,000 and so forth.