The 12-month major-gift forecast is the single number every foundation board asks about — and the single number most development teams overstate. This builds the pipeline tier-by-tier, applies realistic stage conversion rates, checks staff capacity against industry portfolio norms, and tells you the truth: where your bottleneck is, and what gets closed if nothing changes.
The honest count of identified prospects, segmented by capacity tier. Defaults are typical for a mid-size hospital foundation (~$10M annual major-gift goal).
Distribute your qualified prospects across capacity bands. Most foundations have a top-heavy identified list and a bottom-heavy qualified list — that gap is where forecasts die.
Of your qualified prospects, how many are at each stage of the moves-management cycle? The shape of this distribution is the single best predictor of what closes in the next 12 months.
Industry benchmarks shown beside each input. If your historical close rates are materially different, use yours — the math becomes more honest, not less.
Close rate falls and gift size rises as you move up the tiers. The product of the two — expected $ per prospect — is what builds the pipeline forecast.
A pipeline forecast that exceeds your team's visit capacity is a forecast that's lying. The industry rule: each major-gift officer carries an active portfolio of 100–150 and completes 150–200 face-to-face visits per year.
The Family Office Guide and Estate Planning Decoded together cover the full donor-side stack: how high-net-worth families decide to give, the vehicles they use (DAFs, CRTs, CGAs, private foundations), the estate-plan triggers that surface planned gifts, and the development-office operating disciplines that turn pipeline into closed revenue. Three honest places to start:
Educational and informational purposes only. This calculator and any output it produces are intended solely for general educational and decision-support purposes. They do not constitute investment, tax, legal, accounting, fundraising-counsel, or any other professional advice, and they do not create a fiduciary, attorney-client, accountant-client, or advisor-client relationship of any kind.
Estimates based on your inputs. All pipeline forecasts and capacity checks are estimates derived from the conversion rates, prospect counts, and gift sizes you provide. The Baratelli Institute cannot verify the underlying CRM data, wealth screening, or moves-management discipline that produced your inputs. Industry benchmarks shown are illustrative and vary materially by sector (healthcare, higher ed, arts, social services), geography, and institutional age. Verify against your peer institutions and your prior 24–36 months of actuals before relying on any number.
Consult your own qualified professionals. Before acting on anything calculated here, consult your own fundraising counsel, prospect-research vendor, CPA (for 990 Schedule G reporting implications), and attorney (for solicitation registration and gift-acceptance policy review). The Baratelli Institute is a publisher of practitioner reference material. It is not a registered investment adviser, fundraising counsel, law firm, accounting firm, or prospect-research firm.
Co-branded versions: If a professional advisor's name and contact information appear on this tool, that advisor has elected to make the tool available to clients as a courtesy. Inclusion of an advisor's name does not constitute the advisor's endorsement of any specific result, nor does it transfer professional responsibility for the underlying methodology to that advisor. The disclaimer above applies regardless of co-branding.