A major gift officer typically manages a portfolio of donors who are already identified as major gift prospects, cultivating and soliciting a relatively small, known list one relationship at a time.
Catapult's Donor Engagement program works one tier below that: it identifies and cultivates mid-level donors, too significant for a form letter but not yet assigned to a major gift portfolio, at a scale a single officer's calendar can't reach on their own.
In practice, the two work together rather than compete: Donor Engagement's 8-stage methodology surfaces and warms the next generation of major gift prospects, so the major gift officer's pipeline stays full instead of shrinking to only the donors already known.