Should You Clean Up That Mess? The Evolution of Prospect Management.

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Should You Clean Up That Mess? The Evolution of Prospect Management.
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Many years ago, a small, local organization wanted to identify major and planned gift prospects and put in place a plan to raise more money. It was my first ever prospect management assignment as a consultant and I was so excited. I knew exactly how all the pieces worked together and could craft a plan and create a program manual and everything!

I won’t say the assignment was a failure, but if I did it over today I sure would do it a lot differently!

Although I jumped into the project with very detailed intentions, the end result was not the dotted “i”s and crossed “t”s approach that I had been aiming for. Great new prospects were identified and there was forward movement in building relationships, but it wasn’t as neatly organized as I originally envisioned.

First Mistake: Identification and What is a Major Gift Anyway?

The first error I made was assuming that the organization’s goal was to ask prospects to make pledges that would push the prospect to the edges of his or her gift capacity. Instead, the major gift leaned in to match the major gift opportunity, which in this case was an annual gift of $10,000 or more.

If I had taken the time to explore with them what the gift opportunities were, this would have been obvious!

As a prospect research professional, I had been trained to assume a pledge gift over a number of years, but also to create the gift capacity rating based on that full wealth potential.

What might have happened had I provided them with a target ask amount based on giving history and gift opportunity and omitted the gift capacity entirely?

It feels like I might get struck by prospect research lightning just thinking that, let alone expressing it in public!

But no prudent philanthropist is going to make a gift that would dwarf an organization’s budget, so who cares if that philanthropist is capable of making a HUGE gift? Far better to guide the development officer on what is a reasonable ask amount based on capacity, but tempered by giving history to the organization and available gift opportunities.

It makes me wish I had asked a question along the lines of this:

“If you knew I had given a million dollars to my alma mater last year and a thousand dollars to you last year, and you were meeting with me to ask for a gift, how much would you ask for and for what project or program?”

I would have understood so much more about them and the organization by working through their answer.

Second Mistake: Treating People Like They are Textbooks

The second error I made was trying to create a fully structured prospect management program out of the gate. If I had been writing a textbook on prospect management I might start with a discussion on policy and process, but that is not how human beings start to implement prospect management.

Relationships are messy. They are not carefully organized in neat rows in an Excel spreadsheet.

Instead of trying to start with a full and complete prospect management program I might have offered them some proven major gift start-up tactics:

  • Contact Reports: As Jessica Balsam said in the Research Rocks! Podcast (see link below), a great beginning is to start documenting donor prospect visits and other contacts in the database. How simple and powerful is that? Many organizations have yet to take this first critical step.
  • Database Procedures: And in the case of my first prospect management assignment, entering contact reports and proposals required some database massaging. It was well worth spending more effort on database procedures.
  • Top Prospect List: Another common tactic is to focus on the “Top #, Next #”. In practice that means something along the lines of who are my Top 10 prospects and my Next 20 prospects? Those are manageable prospect numbers a development officer wearing many hats can stay focused on. They are also the prospect names the organization’s leadership can stay focused on.

Third Mistake: Being Too Technical!

As a prospect researcher professional, I lean towards creating a logical system that uses lots of formulas and numbers. But relationships don’t work like that. Especially when you are a development officer trying to run the entire development program, not just a major gifts initiative!

In his book, Flawless Consulting, Peter Block talks about identifying and focusing on a client’s strengths. Looking back all those years I have to wonder if I could have inquired about what was working the best in their fundraising program so far. I might have been able to help them use that success to more easily bridge into their budding major gift efforts.

Making the Most of the Mess

If you are looking to leverage prospect research to help raise more funds through major gifts, I hope you might learn from my early mistakes. Structure and method are wonderful things to bring to fundraising, but only if they are flexible enough to accommodate the messy nature of human relationships.

Ideally, prospect management techniques help development officers stay focused on their best prospects in a way they ordinarily might not, given all of the everyday distractions they face running the office.

If you are someone like me that loves the orderly rows of numbers in an Excel spreadsheet, that’s a great skill to bring to fundraising. Just don’t forget that even when things are quite messy, you can make progress, one prospect management tactic at a time!

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