Donor Briefing Template, With a Filled Example

A donor briefing is the single page someone reads before meeting a donor: who they are, what they have given, what was said last time, what they care about, and what this meeting is for. It takes about thirty minutes to assemble from your CRM by hand, it is the difference between a meeting that moves a relationship forward and one that repeats the last, and it is the document nobody writes until the morning of the visit. This page gives you the template, section by section, with a filled example and a free Word version.

Briefing, profile and contact report: three different documents

They are often confused, and each does a different job.

A donor profile is the standing record of what you know about a significant donor, kept current over years. Our donor profile template covers it. A briefing is assembled from the profile and the latest activity for one specific meeting, read once, and is out of date the week after. A contact report is written after the meeting, recording what happened, and it feeds the next briefing. A briefing with no profile behind it is thin; a profile that never becomes a briefing is never used.

The template, section by section

Nine sections, one page. If it runs onto a second page, cut; the reader is going to look at it in a car park.

Two sections do most of the work. Recent contact stops two colleagues repeating the same conversation, or one of them promising what the other already declined. Purpose and ask forces the decision that most meetings never make: what are we trying to achieve with this person today. A briefing without it describes a donor; a briefing with it prepares a meeting.

A filled example

Here is the template completed for a fictional donor, at the length a real one should be.

Notice what is not in it. No estimate of her wealth, no guess at her age or health, nothing from a search of her personal social media. A useful rule for everything in a donor file is that you should be comfortable if the donor read it, and a briefing is the document most likely to be left on a desk or forwarded.

Building one by hand in thirty minutes

Every field above comes from somewhere you already have. The order that works:

1. Run the gift history from your CRM for this donor: first, last, largest, lifetime, and what each gift was for. Five minutes in Little Green Light, Bloomerang or Salesforce.
2. Read the last three contact reports and the last few emails. If there are no contact reports, that is the first problem to fix, and the reason the next section of this page matters.
3. Ask one colleague who knows them. A two minute conversation often adds the most important line in the briefing.
4. Write the purpose and ask last, once you have seen everything, and agree it with whoever is going to the meeting.

The thirty minutes is the realistic figure for a donor with good records. For one whose history lives in a former colleague’s inbox, it can take an afternoon and still be incomplete, which is the real cost of knowledge that never reached the database. That cost is the subject of what fundraiser turnover costs, and the fix for a departing colleague is a donor handover document.

Having a tool draft it

The briefing is assembly work, which makes it a natural job for software that can read the CRM, the email and the documents together. Two routes exist today, and a general purpose AI assistant is a third.

Your CRM’s own assistant. Bloomerang lists an assistant called Penny, in beta, among its AI features, alongside predictive donor insights. If you are on Bloomerang, look there first.

A layer that reads your CRM. Gratefully connects to Salesforce for Nonprofits, Bloomerang and Little Green Light, plus email engagement from Mailchimp, Constant Contact and HubSpot, and uploaded documents, and drafts briefings and handover dossiers from all of it, with each statement citing the record it came from. That citation is the thing to test: a briefing that says where each fact came from can be checked in the car park, and one that does not cannot. It states that donor personal information is replaced with tokens before any prompt reaches a language model and that no customer data trains any model, set out on its security page. It is free for one person, and $79 a month billed annually for unlimited answers on the Essential plan. It is wrong for organizations whose records are thin, because it can only draft from what is there, and for Raiser’s Edge NXT users, who connect by file import rather than live sync.

A general purpose assistant. ChatGPT or Claude can format a briefing from notes you paste in, but it cannot see your CRM, and pasting donor records into a consumer AI account raises questions your privacy policy may already answer. What to check before connecting any AI to donor data sets them out.

Whichever route, the human part does not change: someone who will be in the room reads the draft, corrects it, and decides the purpose and the ask.

Briefing someone who is not a fundraiser

Board members and executive directors meet donors more often than development staff, and they are the people most likely to go in without a briefing. Theirs needs three extra lines.

What not to promise. A board chair who offers naming rights, a seat on a committee or a programme the organization has not agreed to run creates a problem the development lead then has to unwind. Write down what is and is not on the table.

Whether to ask. State it plainly: “Do not ask for a gift at this meeting” or “Ask for $10,000 towards the reading room, and be comfortable with silence after you do.” Volunteers asked to be vague will either not ask or ask for the wrong amount.

Who follows up. The board member’s job is the conversation; the follow up and the contact report belong to staff. Say who, so that a warm meeting does not go cold for want of a letter.

A short form for events

At a gala or a site visit, staff and board may meet thirty donors in two hours, and nobody reads thirty one page briefings. Use a short form instead: three lines per donor on a single sheet. Their name and how they like to be addressed; one fact about their history with you, such as “seven years, funds literacy”; and one thing to do, such as “thank her for the September question about class sizes” or “introduce to the coordinator”. Sort the sheet by who is most important to see, and give each attendee the five names they are responsible for. A short form that gets read beats a full briefing that does not.

After the meeting

Write the contact report within two working days, while it is fresh: what was discussed, anything promised on either side, the donor’s own words on anything important, and the agreed next step with a date. Then update the profile. The next briefing for the same donor should take ten minutes, because the work was done here.

For organizations running a portfolio of major donors, each briefing and contact report is a step in a cycle, which is what moves management formalises.

This is reference information, not legal or tax advice. Rules vary by state and change over time. For a decision that carries real consequences, check the current text at irs.gov or your state registry, and talk to a nonprofit attorney or CPA.