Guide: Top 10 / Next 20 Donor Strategy + Cultivate-to-Ask Planner

Most fundraisers don’t have a donor problem. They have a focus problem. 

Your portfolio may be full of good people, promising names, loyal donors, and possible major gift prospects.

But you cannot give everyone the same attention.

And when everything feels important, it becomes very easy to spend your time on whoever emailed last — instead of the relationships with the greatest potential.

The Top 10 / Next 20 Donor Strategy + Cultivate-to-Ask Planner helps you change that.

You’ll identify:

Your Top 10 — the donors most ready to move forward now.

Your Next 20 — the relationships you’re actively building so they can become future Top 10 opportunities.

Your Top 10 aren’t simply your wealthiest or biggest donors. You’ll look for connection to the mission, recent engagement, meaningful giving capacity, and a clear or emerging opportunity.

Your Next 20 are the donors who aren’t quite ready yet — but have enough interest, connection, or potential that they deserve intentional cultivation.

What’s Inside

You’ll get:

• A practical process for choosing your Top 10
• A separate Next 20 pipeline to keep future opportunities moving
• Prompts to help you identify what you know about each donor and what they may be ready for
• A Cultivate-to-Ask Planner to choose one priority donor, identify the opportunity, and decide what to say next
• Starter language for reaching out
• A way to regularly move donors from Next 20 → Top 10 as relationships strengthen

You do not need to work your whole portfolio every week. You need to know who matters now, who you’re building toward, and what you’re going to do next.

That’s how you create momentum instead of overwhelm.