Why $10M+ Fundraising Now Requires a Different Playbook
PHILANTHROPY IS CHANGING. IS YOUR ORGANIZATION READY?
By Amanda Weingarten
Tomorrow, your Chief Development Officer receives a call from a philanthropic advisor. A client is considering a $10 million gift to your organization, and the advisor would like to begin due diligence next week.
Are you ready? Could your CDO clearly explain your theory of change, evidence of effectiveness, approach to equity, and growth plans? Would your CEO, CFO, and program leaders give consistent answers? Could your organization show exactly what the additional capital would accomplish and how it would manage that capital responsibly?
If answering those questions requires a series of calls, an emergency leadership meeting, or the hurried creation of materials that don't yet exist, your organization isn’t ready and you could lose the gift.
At this level, a strong donor relationship may initiate a mega-gift opportunity, but the organization’s ability to withstand due diligence now determines whether the opportunity advances. Increasingly, mega-gifts (gifts of $10 million or more)* are moving through intermediaries such as family offices, philanthropic advisors, and wealth managers. These advisors help donors identify funding opportunities, develop giving strategies, and evaluate nonprofits with the analytical rigor previously associated primarily with institutional foundations.
*In this article, “mega-gifts” refers primarily to gifts of $10 million or more, although similar diligence can also shape gifts beginning around $1 million.
Philanthropists still make gifts to hospitals that cared for their loved ones and universities that gave them a leg up in life. The motivations for giving haven’t changed, but the size of gifts is now influenced by criteria such as the importance of the issue you address, the tractability of the problem, and evidence of your organization’s effectiveness.
Philanthropic decision-making around large gifts is shifting, and your organizational strategy has to follow suit.
Money moving differently
The infrastructure surrounding philanthropy is expanding rapidly. Ultra-high-net-worth individuals’ use of intermediaries like philanthropic advisors, consultants, and community foundations to manage their charitable giving has grown dramatically. Between 2020 and 2025, the percentage of family foundations using external consultants or outsourcing support to manage their philanthropic giving nearly doubled from 12% to 23%. While family foundation staffing is also expanding: 67% of family foundations had full-time staff in 2024, rising to 69% in 2025, and to 71% in 2026.
Coefficient Giving, a philanthropic advisory that sponsors donor-advised funds (DAFs) and also keeps a bank of vetted funding opportunities for its clients, has directed $7 billion in philanthropic capital since 2014, and $1 billion in just 2025. A similar advisory, Founders Pledge, has directed $1.9 billion since its founding in 2015. Lever for Change, which connects large-scale donors with vetted organizations and designs and manages grant competitions ranging from $10 million to $250 million, has influenced $2.7 billion in funding since 2019, including $200 million in 2025. Bridgespan, which advises prominent multibillion-dollar donors and foundations on big bets, including the Gates Foundation and MacKenzie Scott, doesn’t disclose how much money it influences, but it is estimated to be in the billions.
Contributions to and grants from DAFs have grown substantially over the past decade, reshaping the landscape of American philanthropy. Contributions to DAFs hit $90.5 billion in 2024, while grants from DAFs totaled $64.6 billion. National Philanthropic Trust, the largest independent sponsor of DAFs and also a philanthropic advisor, directed, influenced, or advised on $6.6 billion in charitable giving in 2025, a 20% increase from the prior year.
In January 2024, Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings and his wife Patty Quillin gave $1.1 billion in Netflix stock to their DAF at the Silicon Valley Community Foundation (SVCF). SVCF is the largest community foundation in the world, a DAF sponsor, philanthropic administrator, and philanthropic advisor. Its assets under management have grown from $8 billion in 2015 to $16 billion in 2026. In 2025, it distributed $2.1 billion in charitable gifts and grants, a 155% increase (or 88% when adjusted for inflation) in the last ten years.
Major gift fundraising and mega gift fundraising aren’t the same
Organizations like Founders Pledge and Coefficient Giving use effective altruism (EA)-aligned criteria to evaluate funding opportunities. Effective altruism is a movement that uses data and reason to identify which charitable causes produce the greatest measurable impact per dollar invested, prioritizing interventions based on issue importance, scale (how many people are affected), tractability (how solvable the problem is), and neglectedness (how much funding it already receives relative to need).
These criteria are not universal. Many ultra-high-net-worth donors do not use EA criteria, and some advisors place greater weight on community leadership, trust-based philanthropy, lived experience, and institutional reputation.
Blue Meridian, a big-bet funder, pools philanthropic capital from UHNW donors and makes grants of $10 million to $200 million over five- to 12-year periods to individual organizations that meet its rigorous selection criteria: compelling vision, strong leadership, track record of performance, evidence of effectiveness, pathway to scale, and sustainable economic model.
Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors directs approximately $400 million to $500 million annually on behalf of clients and helps clients assess philanthropic opportunities and organizations using flexible, context-dependent methods: evaluation at the program level, return on investment analysis, and systems thinking (examining how interventions affect broader ecosystems).
Though the methodologies differ, they illustrate an important shift beyond the traditional major-gift conversation. These intermediaries and advisors are not evaluating your organization on its donor relationships or mission alone; they're asking you to demonstrate a credible connection between your work and the results you seek. That shift has huge implications for your organizational strategy.
Traditional major-gift fundraising is relationship-driven. Your executive director cultivates the donor. Your board opens doors. Your development team builds trust, tells the organization's story, and makes the case for support. The donor gets to know the mission and the people doing the work. Over time, that relationship leads to a major gift.
That model still works at a certain level.
But when a donor brings an advisor into the process, your relationship with the donor and your case for support may no longer be enough.
This is a leadership issue first, and a fundraising issue second.
Different donors and advisors have different priorities, but to stand up to this new level of scrutiny, your leadership team and board should come together and ask:
1. Can every member of our leadership team and board explain our theory of change in two minutes?
Remember: A mission statement explains your core purpose. A theory of change explains how your work produces results.
Explaining what you aim to achieve is not enough. If your organization can't explain what impact it has and how it accomplishes that impact, it becomes much harder for a donor or an advisor to understand what additional capital would accomplish.
A helpful exercise is to solve for X and Y: If you do X, what happens next? Why does that lead to Y? And how does Y contribute to the outcome you're trying to achieve?
2. What evidence do we have of our effectiveness? Are we willing to learn and adapt to improve our impact?
Anecdotes without data don't constitute evidence, but assessments can help donors understand whether an intervention is working and why.
The appropriate level and method of assessment depend on the program and its circumstances. The right evidence also depends on what you do and where your organization is in its development. It might include evaluation data, longitudinal results, external research, third-party validation, RCTs, or a strong body of experience demonstrating that your approach works.
3. Can we demonstrate that we have the systems, leadership, and governance to responsibly manage substantially more capital?
Discuss what would change if your budget doubled. What would break? What would you need to build?
4. Is equity embedded in how we make decisions? Can we explain how the voice of the community we serve shapes our strategic decisions? Is the expertise of the people we serve informing our program design?
It isn't enough to say that your board members come from the community you serve or that equity is one of your values. You have to explain how proximity to the problem you’re solving informs your decisions.
5. Can we make a case for additionality? Can we explain exactly what an additional $1 million, $30 million, or $100 million would allow us to accomplish?
This is a tough question for many organizations and requires big thinking. Include the answer in an ambitious strategic plan visible to all. Keep your full plan intact, define your timeline based on current or near-future resources, and prioritize what you can accomplish with available funding versus what you'd achieve with transformational gifts. Organizations that maintain a compelling vision—rather than moderate their ambitions to match today's budget—are positioned to seize transformational gifts when the opportunity arises.
6. Is the problem we aim to solve tractable? Can our organization make a meaningful and lasting difference on this problem?
Some social problems are highly tractable. Others are extraordinarily difficult. If you are addressing a massive systemic problem, a sophisticated philanthropic investor will want to know which part of it your organization can meaningfully influence. What would success look like? What constraints stand in the way? With which organizations and social movements can your organization partner to effect change?
7. What is our position on scalability? Do we want to grow? What would meaningful growth accomplish and what would it require? If we don't want to grow, why is staying focused the better strategy?
Scale might mean reaching more people, deepening impact in one community, influencing policy, replicating a model, or helping other organizations adopt an approach that works. Some funders prioritize scale. Others value depth, local leadership, systems change, or a deliberately bounded model.
These answers need to be clear before an opportunity appears.
In some cases, organizations may not even know they are being evaluated. Donors such as MacKenzie Scott make gifts of $1 million or more based on their advisors’ research, sometimes without telling an organization that it is under consideration.
What’s required is organization-wide readiness. Your leadership needs to have done this work before an advisor begins due diligence. Then your organization needs to communicate its answers clearly.
Your fundraisers need to be able to talk confidently about your theory of change, evidence of impact, organizational capacity, governance, equity, and growth strategy.
But the development team cannot own all of this. A colleague of mine once said, “Your website is your shop window.” It is often the first place an intermediary looks when deciding whether to investigate an organization further. Your answers should be visible there and consistently reflected in leadership speeches, podcast interviews, articles, proposals, brochures, and talking points.
Organizations that understand this shift and build the strategy and, ideally, the talent to navigate it will be better positioned to compete for mega-gift funding.
Some are already adapting. The International Rescue Committee (IRC) recently posted a role for VP, Breakthrough Partnerships and Foundations, responsible for managing relationships with donors at the $100 million level. The job description speaks directly to this shift:
"The gap will not be closed by doing more of the same. It requires a step change in the scale and nature of IRC's philanthropic relationships: with founders and philanthropists who have made their wealth in the AI era, with family offices and foundations that are still defining their giving strategies, with donors informed by effective altruism, and with funders making evidence-based philanthropic investments and allocations who are looking for organizations that can deploy capital at scale and prove it works."
Readiness precedes opportunity
IRC operates at an exceptional scale. This underlying discipline applies much more broadly. Any nonprofit seeking transformational capital should be able to show what additional funding would make possible, why its approach can succeed, and how it would manage growth responsibly.
Donor relationships remain essential. They create trust, access, and conviction. At the highest levels of giving, those relationships must be supported by clear and consistent answers about impact, capacity, governance, equity, and growth at minimum.
By the time a philanthropic advisor calls, those answers should already be shared across leadership, programs, finance, and development. The opportunity may arrive unexpectedly or without your knowing; readiness is built long before it does.
That's the new mega-gift playbook.
