Principal Gifts & Campaign Leadership Gifts
Seven-figure conversations: institutional readiness, gift structuring, and the long partnership behind transformational gifts.
Through the Environment lens
A principal gift for a conservation organization or land trust often funds a specific acquisition, the parcel that completes a corridor or protects a watershed, and the timeline can compress if the land is at risk of sale, the one circumstance where this module's usual patience has to bend to real urgency. The decision unit frequently includes a family's own land manager or conservation-minded heirs, and structuring may involve a conservation easement alongside cash, which follows the same referral discipline this module teaches: bring in the right counsel, make no promises before review. Readiness here includes stewardship capacity as much as fundraising capacity, since accepting the land is itself a permanent institutional commitment.
Continuing education
1.25 points
Relationship Building · Securing the Gift
Learning objectives
- Define an institution's principal gift threshold and describe what changes above it: the donor's question, the decision unit, the time horizon, and the CEO's role.
- Recognize the forms a large gift may take, from appreciated securities and DAF grants to real estate and life-income arrangements, and apply the referral reflex for each.
- Draft a two-page principal gift strategy memo with a relationship map, a meaning thesis, a readiness checklist, a sequence, and team assignments.
- Run a quarterly principal review that rolls readiness gaps into an institutional to-do list and names which relationships advanced or stalled.
- Explain how a nine-figure lead gift's anatomy, loyalty noticed first, co-design before invitation, counsel on structure, translates to a smaller organization.
Designed for CFRE continuing education. Not yet accepted; no CFRE points can be claimed.
Lessons
- 25 min
Video lesson
How transformational gifts happen
III Discern · Relationship Building
- 20 min
Field guide· PDF
Gift structuring options explained
V Receive · Securing the Gift
- 18 min
Template· DOCX
The principal gift strategy memo
II See · Relationship Building
- 17 min
Case study· PDF
Case study: a nine-figure campaign's lead gift
IV Invite · Securing the Gift
This is members-only material.
Members get every lesson, template, and worksheet in all eight tracks, plus the support to put them to work in your shop.
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