Major Donor Readiness - Marlin Communications

Ready to accelerate your
Major Donor Program?

Karl Tischler - Founding Director and Idealist at Marlin Communications

Meet Karl

I have around fifteen years of experience working in the mid-value (MV), major-donor (MD) and high-value donor (HV) space.

Over this time, I’ve seen so many charities facing challenges with engaging and communicating with this audience.

This challenge can be distilled to four main questions: Why this issue? Why this charity? Why this donor? And, why now?

The special thing that distinguishes the MV/MD/HV audience is that while they share the same concerns as standard value donors, they have the means to do something extraordinary.

Engaging these donors involves creating an awareness of their capacity—and when you can connect that with their deeper concerns to care and feel inspired by your proposition, that’s when great things can happen.

I’m offering 10 major donor fundraisers a free session to help answer these questions, and find out whether they have the basic ingredients to a successful and inspiring major donor program.

– Karl Tischler, Founder & Managing Director of Marlin

Learn more about our work with Rainforest Rescue

Building Daintree's largest nursery

We worked with Rainforest Rescue to create a simple, compelling campaign that inspired donors with a truly transformative project.
This bespoke pack:

Raised 42% more than target from 104 major donors
Secured funding, property & other partnerships
Increased tree production to 150,000 trees per year

"Working with Karl from Marlin was great—his enthusiasm and assistance throughout the development and implementation of this helped us to see that with the right approach, the right messaging in the right format, we would be able to get our case for support into our donor’s hands… and get them to act accordingly. It has been a terrific success. I can’t thank Marlin enough for the support they’ve given and their belief in this project, and its importance."

Branden Barber, CEO of Rainforest Rescue

Breaking down barriers to ask & give

We ran a workshop with Camp Quality to discover potential barriers to securing major gifts. With this information, we developed a new value proposition and materials that gave any fundraiser confidence to ask.

This pack included:

Bespoke illustrations to help procure sponsorships
A pop-up diorama kit tin
Compelling materials & communications to justify a major gift

Learn more about our work with Camp Quality

Learn more about our work with Trocaire

Building a new hospital

With 11 million Somali people needing access to healthcare, Trócaire, the longest standing organisation to work in Somalia, needed an urgent solution to raise an ambitious funding goal of €1m over 3 years.

We created a Major Donor direct ask pack that focused on the critical and urgent nature of their support which secured €680,000 towards their €1m goal in Year 1.