The Geometry of Fundraising Models
📌 Fundraising campaigns and strategies can be encapsulated using three basic geometric shapes: the triangle, the circle, and the rectangle.
📐 The triangle illustrates the Pareto principle in fundraising: 20% of donors typically contribute 80% of the total money raised (including individuals, corporations, and foundations).
🎯 Focusing efforts solely on mass efforts like direct mail or online giving often targets the smaller portion of revenue (the 20% of donors) rather than securing the critical 80% from major supporters.

Donor Concentration and Online Giving
📊 The relationship where 20% of donors yield 80% of funds holds true for both small ($50,000) and large ($50 million) nonprofits.
📱 While exciting, online/social media giving campaigns, despite popular belief (like the 2008 Obama campaign success), primarily result in either small, repeated gifts or larger contributions; the Obama campaign, for instance, reportedly received 80% more money from large donors ($1,000+) than from small donors.
👤 Identifying and nurturing relationships with the top 20% of donors is crucial for meeting annual budget or campaign goals.

Network Mapping and Individual Giving
🌐 The circle represents the donor network, requiring identification of concentric levels, starting with the nucleus (staff, board, closest friends).
🤝 Successful fundraising relies on effectively using inner network contacts to reach individuals further out on the periphery.
💵 In the U.S., approximately 75% of charitable giving comes from individual donors, making maximizing individual donations critical, even when pursuing foundation or corporate funding.

Gift Tables and Strategic Planning
📊 The rectangle represents the gift table, an elegant tool for structuring fundraising metrics.
📈 Gift tables clarify the number of prospects needed at various dollar levels to achieve a specific monetary goal (e.g., for a $500,000 or $5 million campaign).
⏳ This tool helps strategize by revealing whether necessary top-tier prospects (the required 25 people for the 80% bracket) are already within the current network or require dedicated cultivation time.

Key Points & Insights
➡️ Prioritize relationships with the top 20% of donors ($D_{20\%}$) as they generate 80% of the revenue ($R_{80\%}$).
➡️ Map your network (the circle) to systematically move from your core group outward to identify pathways to major potential donors.
➡️ Utilize gift tables (the rectangle) to inject specificity into your campaign goals, determining the exact number and level of prospects needed to meet the 80% dollar goal.
➡️ Recognize that individual giving remains the largest source of philanthropic capital, accounting for roughly 75% of total U.S. donations.

📸 Video summarized with SummaryTube.com on Nov 15, 2025, 22:12 UTC