Tag Archives: major gift teams

launch your prospect portfolio; rocket

Add Speed to Major Gift Portfolios with RPM

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When a current client created a job posting for a Research and Prospect Management position a light bulb went off!

Research and                                  Revolutions
Prospect                                            Per
Management                                   Minute

More frequently you’ll see this type of combined role posted as Prospect Management and Research (PMR). But if you reverse that to Research and Prospect Management (RPM) …can you get more speed into your major gift portfolios?

Which comes first – research or prospect management?

Unlike a similar question about chickens and eggs, there is a pretty definitive answer to this question. Research usually comes first in the form of prospect identification.

Most organizations grow into major gifts. A common nonprofit story begins with institutional funding, such as foundations and corporations, who want to support early and continued nonprofit growth. Along the way, nonprofits attract small dollar individual gifts and refine their individual giving program to the point where larger gifts receive more personalized attention and individuals are personally asked for larger gifts.

Usually with the first capital or other campaign, there comes a need to more methodically or reliably identify donor prospects who can give lead campaign gifts. Enter prospect research with major gift prospect identification!

When there are just too many donors requiring personal attention to keep track of in one person’s head, the CRM database comes to the rescue with prospect management. Prospect management provides a systematic way of tracking prospect’s progress from identification to a gift and stewardship.

But what happens to research when prospect management becomes a separate specialty in-house?

Sometimes research and prospect management get out of sync, prompting major gift portfolios to get as stubbornly stuck as a zipper out of alignment!

When research is disconnected from the management of major gift portfolios, various things begin to break down. Sometimes the criteria that research is using to identify prospects does not fit with the funding priorities or the development officer’s views on what makes a great prospect. Research might not be aware of specific regions or development officer portfolios that need more or different prospects than others.

When prospect management is disconnected from research, important information learned from development officers is not passed along. For example, a development officer might learn critical information about a wealth event for which research could provide capacity insight. Also, the prospect manager might not be aware of the criteria used to source new prospects and then they cannot explain it to the development officers.

Adding research in at the “front” of prospect management – the RPM perspective – recognizes that the smooth coordination of prospect identification with portfolio management is where major gift speed is generated.

When the zipper is not aligned, movement is difficult and slow. When there is alignment, the zipper zips easily and quickly.

Similarly, when research and prospect management are aligned, development officers zip through qualifying and disqualifying!

(This all assumes, of course, that development officers are trained in qualification techniques and have a disciplined work process. But that is a different subject!)

Major gift fundraising: Can’t have one without the other

Whether you like to call the work PMR or RPM, the bottom line is that you can’t have one without the other. Without research, pipelines eventually run dry. Without prospect management, development officers lack support to move prospects effectively and efficiently toward a larger, major or transformative gift.

Additional Resources

workshop ad, people around a table

How connected is your major gifts team to its donors – really?

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Do you really know how well your major gifts teams is performing? Maybe they are raising millions of dollars every year and hitting the targets set for them — but are those the right targets? Evaluating donor engagement could help you answer those questions.

If you are one of those organizations that fundraises your budget every year and has grown to command a major gifts team, you have my deepest admiration! Scaling a nonprofit organization is not an easy task. Neither is growing and scaling a major gifts team.

At Aspire, we work with fundraising leaders who are tasked with taking their major gifts team up to the next level of performance. It can be surprisingly difficult for even an experienced major gifts officer, trained at a larger institution, to make headway with a legacy major gifts team.

Donor Engagement as a Framework

Having major gift officers assign their prospects a donor engagement level is one way to find out what’s happening on your team and in their portfolios.

It has been a common practice to focus on portfolios through the lens of the gift cycle — identification, qualification, cultivation, solicitation, and stewardship. And this works very well for gift proposals, but human relationships don’t fit very well into those process-oriented terms. Donor engagement is different.

Many major gift officers intuitively view their portfolio through the lens of donor engagement – discovery, early cultivation, and deep cultivation.

It also fits the rule of three, which means when major gift officers show up to work, they only have to remember three categories of donors in their portfolios. This can help them manage their time and prioritize the right people.

Honest Discussion Leads to Real Change

When you ask each major gift officer to assign a donor engagement level to every person in their portfolio, surprising conversations may arise and lead you to what’s really happening.

For example, you might learn that someone on your team is struggling to find contact information, leaving them with only snail mail letters to communicate. You may also discover that some team members don’t know how to build a deep relationship with a major donor, which is why they have stagnant, lower gift sizes.

To create fertile ground for these kinds of discussions, it’s important to clearly define the donor engagement levels. It’s also important for each major gift solicitation to be recorded and tracked as a proposal or gift opportunity on the donor record.

Major gift officers also need routine portfolio reviews. This is time-consuming, but it’s where all the stories start pouring out. And when you combine portfolio reviews with monthly team meetings, now you have a platform for coaching and developing process and policies.

Which Comes First – The Process or the Outcomes?

If you are like most fundraising leadership, you need more dollars raised and now. Using donor engagement as a framework isn’t for every organization, but it can help you assess the reality of your team’s performance while you are working to identify and assign new prospects.

And there is an added bonus with this framework. It is within the full and complete control of each major gift officer to categorize their relationships with the donors in their portfolios – as it should be. When major gift officers have ratings of all sorts assigned to their donors it can feel like their relationships and the information they have gathered are ignored.

With a donor engagement framework, it’s about the relationship first, ratings second.