Tag Archives: moves management

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Upskill your Development Team with Research – Without Breaking the Budget!

Research in Fundraising, Uncategorized, , , , , , , , , , ,

When people hear “prospect research” they often assume that prospect research is a software or using Google to find things like company bios or, sometimes, that it is an employee that creates prospect profiles. Usually, the definition relates to the kind and scale of development operations they have been exposed to. And, really, everyone is as correct as they are wrong!

When we consider the growth of an organization from start-up to raising billions of donor dollars, the core of prospect research is the act of better understanding your donors through data and information.

Even if you have the luxury of a full-time, prospect research professional, everyone on the development team needs to be good at some basic prospect research skills. And if you don’t have the luxury of having a prospect research professional on staff, there are great ways to upskill existing staff to provide additional research support.

Finding contact and occupation

When it comes to personally asking a donor for a gift – most often in a mid-level or major gift program – the first thing you need is contact information: address, phone, email, or social media.

Hand-in-hand with contact information is the donor’s occupation. Occupation is useful for a few reasons:

  • Finding business contact information is easier and usually more accurate.
  • Psychologically, at work we probably expect to be contacted by people we don’t know more than at home.
  • Especially in higher education, development officers can connect with donor prospects on LinkedIn, if appropriate.
  • Occupation is a quick and easy indicator of likely wealth.

Everyone on the development team needs to be good at finding basic information about donors and this is why Aspire and the Prospect Research Institute created the booklet, Search Tips for Fundraising Research.

Search Tips book cover

This 15-page booklet introduces the five fundamental building blocks for fundraising research and gives you tips, tricks, and resources to find what you need. Purchase your copy today!

Information is great – when it’s accurate!

Once everyone is upskilled on basic search —  from the president’s assistant to major gift officers to the database administrator and beyond – it’s time to address whether the information everyone is finding is correct.

The proliferation of misleading and outright erroneous information can be overwhelming. As anyone who has clicked through a scam email knows (and c’mon, we’ve all fallen for one at least once!), when you’re busy, stressed, or preoccupied, it’s difficult to maintain a critical, watchful eye for discrepancies or take the time to double-check information.

At Aspire, we were once asked to perform due diligence research on a donor prospect with whom the organization was in negotiations for a major gift. Beyond reputational risk, the question was whether he actually had the wealth he claimed to have.

It was super challenging! Why? Because the information we sourced seemed to be in a perpetually unconfirmable loop. For example, what appeared to be a published interview was really his own blog article. Live media interviews only seemed to cite information that he had seeded in his biographies and multitude of websites.

And the worst? He claimed to have bought out dozens of bankrupt companies – all incorporated in Delaware with no owner information published!

After hours of creative searching, we finally found the fatal flaw and it was in plain sight. If you tried to purchase any of the products or services on offer through the various companies there was either no option to purchase on the website or no physical address to visit.

Finding accurate information is so important, the Prospect Research Institute created a FREE course to educate your development team (and anyone really) – Solid Intel.

Solid Intel Course

Solid Intel is a multi-module course teaching you how to evaluate sources critically and feel confident in the accuracy of the information you present. Fun quizzes test your comprehension. Share with your team and Enroll Today.

Wealth and philanthropy indicators

If your organization needs deeper research to support major gifts and hasn’t had this support previously, you may want to upskill an existing staff member, such as a development coordinator or database administrator.

You probably have a few specialty tasks you’d like this person to accomplish, such as the following:

  • Identify major gift prospects from the database
  • Provide prospect profiles prior to solicitation
  • Help coordinate moves management for the team

Leveraging your existing staff member or hiring someone at entry level can be economical and helps build internal capacity for upgrading donors and moving toward major gifts. In the past, training a staff member on prospect research support for the growing nonprofit was challenging.

Prospect research industry conferences are expensive and dominated by sophisticated healthcare and higher education environments. Webinars and local conferences offer tidbits, but usually don’t give your researcher key skills with step-by-step instruction on how to apply the skills to their work.

Recognizing the need, Aspire developed a course at the Prospect Research Institute specifically for the nonprofit researcher that needs to do all the research things – and at an economical price.

The Essentials for Successful Fundraising Research course is at least 7 to 8 weeks of on-demand content with a downloadable textbook, homework feedback, ability to earn a digital badge demonstrating competency, and 12 months of monthly group coaching. Give your organization the research edge. Enroll Today!

Growing your Fundraising with Research

When your development team has the information it needs, big things – and gifts – can happen!

  • Routine stewardship can happen with better contact information
  • Stewardship calls can turn into major gift prospect qualification
  • Donors can be moved more methodically toward larger gifts
  • Deeper information can give development officers greater confidence to ask for larger gifts

Upskilling your development team doesn’t have to break the bank. Aspire, through the Prospect Research Institute, has created a variety of training options to meet your needs at affordable prices.

What are you waiting for?
Visit the Institute now!

 

launch your prospect portfolio; rocket

Add Speed to Major Gift Portfolios with RPM

Prospect Management, , , , , , , , , ,

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

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

Major Gift Teams, , , , , , ,

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.

5 Tips to Make Your CRM Successful at Change

4Fundraisers, , , , , , , , , , ,

ColorArrowsI dare you to try this search! Go to the search engine of your choice and type in…

CRM “change agent”

Are you surprised how many relevant results you get? There are many similar if not the same names for the process of putting the customer, or in our case the donor, first. Here’s a few:

  • Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
  • Donor Relationship Management
  • Relationship Management System
  • Moves Management System
  • Prospect Management System

So what’s this about being a change agent? How could anyone reasonably expect CRM software to be a change agent?!

Obviously CRM software is not a magic wand capable of implementing change. But creating or changing your relationship management system is a powerful opportunity to raise the bar in your fundraising efforts. Unfortunately, all too often this opportunity is missed because its role as a change agent is not recognized.

No matter what size your organization and no matter how many people in your fundraising office, any change to your relationship management system is going to affect a number of different players on your team – most potently when it changes performance assessments and incentives.

Following are five tips to help make your relationship management system a successful change agent:

1 – Listen to the key players first.

You are listening for a few critical items: (a) Are you using the same language as the key players? (b) Do your proposed changes match their values? (c) Might any of the proposed changes create undesired consequences? This is Internal Relationship Building 101. Yes, we must do it internally, not just externally with our donors.

2 – Create an internal campaign to sell the changes.

Have fun with this. Go all out. Create simple explanations you can recite in your sleep. Give it a brand and tagline. Use color. No person’s role is too small not to be an advocate of your change. If staff don’t want it or even know what it is, how successful do you think you’ll be?

3- Research suggested performance measures.

Whether you network with your colleagues, read vendor and association research studies, scan for blogs and articles online, or all of the above, do your homework so you can make as few mistakes as possible. Don’t get stuck on research, but don’t be skimpy. If you are recommending a smaller portfolio size, you’d better know the philosophy behind that approach or you may risk raising fewer dollars while you figure it out.

4 – Make sure you have a thoughtful implementation plan.

Why not find a way to test-run some or all of your changes before a full rollout? I’m not talking just the technology – a person should walk through the whole process too. Consider all the phases of your rollout and don’t forget to include training and re-training.

5 – Evaluation means it’s never over.

Your relationship management system will always face two persistent threats: (1) Change in the external fundraising environment such as donor behavior and the economy, and (2) Change in the internal organizational environment, such as changes in leadership and finances. Hopefully you won’t need to make big changes frequently, but if you regularly audit the performance of the system you will be better placed to react.

No matter how big or how small your fundraising office is, your relationship management system is a tool to help you get focused on your donors and prospects. One of the biggest obstacles to achieving success with any technology or system is getting everyone trained and willing to use it.

Other Articles You Might Like

Mastering Moves Management: 3 Key Pieces

4Fundraisers, Focused Fundraising, Major Gift Teams, , , , , ,

Moves management is the process of moving a donor prospect from identification to major gift. Also known as prospect management, when you throw those terms into a search engine most of the results are for software companies, especially donor database companies. But I argue that moves management is not primarily a software solution but sincerely a *people* solution!

A database is a tool. Its importance increases as the number of an organization’s donors and friends increases. We need our donor database to keep track of gifts and all of the other information and tasks surrounding our donors and friends.

The more gift officers and the more major gift prospects you have, the more important it is to use your database in your moves management system. But beware! Anytime you spend more time typing into your database than you do talking with your prospects, you will struggle to raise enough money.

Moving a prospect usually requires a pretty intense relationship over a year or two. You need to discover her interests and motivations for giving and connect her in a very personal way to your organization. What if you have 100 prospects being moved? How about 300? And what if you have 3 gift officers moving prospects? Or 5, or 10, or more?

Now you seriously need a system!

Pretend you are an astronaut looking down on earth. Now pretend you are consultant looking at an organization from a distance. This organization has a moves management system humming along. You notice there are three gears in motion producing consistent relationships with prospects capable of making a major gift. These gears are:

Ratings – Each prospect is rated so you can stay focused on those who can help you reach your dollar goal.

Moves – Actions with prospects are deliberate and planned (and tracked in the database).

Reports – Regular printed reports are reviewed and regular meetings are held to build internal skills and keep all the moving parts in balance

Can you do moves management without a database? Of course you can! You could keep track of your gifts in Excel too, but it is rarely the best solution.

Mastering moves management requires learning the balance for your organization between the three moving gears:

  • How many ratings do you need to stay on path with the most capable prospects?
  • How will you plan for moves, make your moves, and record your moves?
  • What measurements should you report on to keep you accountable?
  • How often should you meet and who should meet to keep your major gifts program growing?

Everything in our world is in constant flux. Moves management requires re-balancing as your major gifts program grows and changes. If you keep the emphasis on the moves – on the in-person interactions with your donor prospects – everything else will find its place.

Have you mastered your moves?

3 Actions That Demonstrate Your High Prospect Research IQ

Focused Fundraising, , , , , ,

As a fundraiser, you may not need to know how every tool works, but you need to know enough to choose the tool with the right fit. How high is your prospect research IQ? Do you demonstrate the following three actions?

1) Knowing that an electronic wealth screening is not the same thing as having a prospect researcher profile your donor prospect.

When discussing best practices around prospect screenings and wealth screenings, the conversation always seems to start with “it depends”, and rightly so. But I state with conviction that an electronic screening is not and should never be confused with the work of a live, well-trained human being.

I don’t care how awesome their match method is or how many sources and formulas are used, an electronic screening is meant to prioritize a large group of records. A human being, a prospect researcher, is meant to qualify individual names and add a dose of reality to the data. A prospect researcher knows that Bugs Bunny, a seasoned executive with grown children, is not the same Bugs Bunny who graduated from Stanford in 2009.

Are you prioritizing a large list? Electronic screening. Are you working on a solicitation strategy? Donor prospect profile.

2) Recognizing that an investment in prospect research is well worth it – when you act upon the information.

I don’t want to tell you how many times I have provided profiles, rated a database, or otherwise identified and researched donor prospects only to learn that the information then sat dormant for months, even years. Why does this happen? I work mostly with small and medium organizations. Among them, the two most common reasons are (1) no performance goal tied to implementing the results, and (2) development staff underestimated the time they would need to spend acting – actually cultivating and soliciting donors.

We are as human as our donors.

If our donors give best under a sense of urgency, we also do our best cultivating and soliciting under a sense of urgency. Whether it is a campaign goal deadline or a target ask date, creating some kind of urgency will help you achieve more. Major gifts can provide a high rate of return on the prospect research investment, but it requires a serious dedication of time and resources.

Urgency will cause stress without success if there are not enough hours in the day to complete your tasks. If you are a busy fundraising professional already working a full day, you may need to consider either eliminating or deferring some of your current tasks, assigning them to another staff member, or hiring additional staff. Be practical about planning the time in your day before spending money on prospect research.

3) Raising major gifts by following through on prospect/moves management.

A prospect management system is like an exercise plan. If you keep neglecting your workouts, every time you exercise it will be difficult and you will feel tired. But if you follow the program, you will feel good and have more energy.

If you prioritize your prospects, take the actions necessary to deeply engage your prospect, and track and report your progress, you will be working the plan and will raise more and higher gifts. The level of excitement and interest you can generate in your donors (and yourself) through a disciplined prospect management system is amazing!

Other Blog Posts that Might Interest You

3 Steps to Major Gift Mojo!

5 Ways You Know You Need A Research Consultant

The Dangers of (Not) Managing Prospect Research

Defining an Action in Moves Management

How to Take Charge of Your Moves Management System

Focused Fundraising, Major Gift Teams, , , , ,
Managing Moves is a Workout!

So you want to implement a moves management system to ensure you are focusing on your best major gift prospects. Or you have a system, but you want to make it better. Good for you!

Moves Management is a Workout!
First, recognize that a moves management system is not a magical system where elves enter all your data and print reports whilst you sleep. Using a moves management system to track donor prospects is like getting physically fit – you have to workout! It requires you to:

  1. Enter information on each donor prospect record – at least:
    • Capacity rating, target ask, prospect stage, affinity/propensity
  2. Record your visits – you want to be sure:
    • Outcomes met the purpose
    • Advanced the prospect relationship
    • Something new was learned or
    • Contact resulted in a next step
  3. Periodically review your progress and start over at #1
    • Regular, internal prospect review meetings (at least monthly)

Assess Your Needs and Resources
Sometimes when you first start exercising, you find that you are so, so tired and wonder if getting fit will ever give you more energy and finely-toned muscles. It will! But you have to slog through the first bit of work. That said, you can’t swim across the English Channel tomorrow if today you are struggling to swim across the pool. Assess your needs and resources:

  • Are you starting from scratch or have you already been tracking prospects somewhere?
    • Tweaking a system is often easier than starting new
  • Will gift officers be tasked with entering tracking info plus their prospect actions, or is there another staff member available?
    • Assigning some data entry to other staff, especially on newly identified prospects, keeps down the grumbling and frees up your gift officers to go and get those major gifts – no excuses!
  • Do you have many solicitors, or just a few?
    • When the office is small, it’s best to keep things as simple as possible
  • Is this for ongoing major gifts or a campaign?
    • While similar, a campaign may warrant a higher degree of tracking

You Will be Tweaking
As you choose a combination of database fields and database reports (or maybe Excel lists and calendars if you are very small) together with your regular prospect reviews, you *should* find yourself tweaking the moves management system. For example, you might realize you are re-visiting disqualified prospects and decide to change your prospect stage like this:

First Method Second Method
Identified

Cultivation

Solicitation

Stewardship

 Identified

Qualified

Cultivation

Solicitation

Stewardship

Disqualified

This is a natural progression in your use of your system. Or maybe you find that it takes forever to enter the information in various fields around your donor database record and decide to limit your tracking to a few key pieces all in one easy-to-enter place in the database. Or maybe you find that monthly meetings are not enough and weekly meetings would keep everyone where they need to be with their prospect list.

Ask any fitness freak – taking the time to understand the best times and types of exercise for yourself makes all the difference in achieving your goals. Taking the time to get your system customized to your fundraising culture and constituents will make all the difference in whether you achieve your major gift goals. Not everyone has washboard abs and not every nonprofit has an efficient, high-performing major gifts program!

Give Yourself a Generous Year
Give yourself at least a year from your first effort to get the system really working smoothly. If it’s not working after a year, take a hard look at whether you (a) really need a system or (2) have put the right kind of effort into it. If you are a one-person shop cultivating ten people across the year, you can keep a lot of that in your head and your calendar. If you have multiple solicitors and/or need to boost your total prospect numbers (those under identification, cultivation and stewardship), you won’t be effective without a system.

Consider Getting a Coach
Olympic athletes wouldn’t dream of training and competing without a coach. Even the most dedicated athletes find themselves tired and frustrated, unable to “see” what is holding them back. A coach can keep your spirits up, redirect your efforts to keep you performing, and, step-by-step, help you reach ever higher goals.

If you are determined to reach your major gift goals, but find yourself unable to wrap your hands around moves management or even identifying good prospects to track, contact Aspire Research Group. We specializing in helping fundraisers reach their goals, guiding you comfortably every step of the way. Call (727) 231-0516 or email jen at aspireresearchgroup.com.

For more blog posts on moves management, click here: Moves Management

3 Shortcuts for Leveraging Prospect Research in Record Time!

4Fundraisers, Focused Fundraising, , , , ,

The majority of nonprofit organizations in the country do not have dedicated prospect research staff. So how can you still leverage prospect research to raise more money?

The biggest hurdle is recognizing that prospect research can be accomplished by everyone in your organization. Here are three shortcuts any fundraiser can implement to begin using prospect research techniques to boost giving:

(1)    Identify people with linkage, ability and inclination

Everyone in your organization can identify people who are connected in some way to you, appear to have some money to give away and, if not outright passionate about your mission, are likely to be philanthropic. Have a team meeting and educate everyone in your organization about what a good prospect looks and sounds like. Arm them with the kinds of easy conversational questions that will help qualify a good donor prospect. Then listen when they tell you about people and share the outcome with them.

(2)    Get to know the people closest to your organization

From the gift entry clerk who starts her call to a donor with “thank you” before asking her question, to the janitor who gives people directions on the campus, to the president who meets with local companies – everyone in your organization has a chance to treat your constituents as the friends and family they are. As the fundraiser, you need to ask staff about people frequently and listen and record what they say.

(3)    Decide on a tracking system and stick to it!

Working with the people in your office who understand your database best (which could also be the vendor), decide what you want to keep track of and the best way to do it. Then make sure everyone entering data does it the same way so you can pull accurate reports. For more ideas, read Three Simple Steps to a Prospect Management System.

At first it may seem like a lot of work to involve other staff members in identifying and cultivating your constituents, but once you learn to balance all of the chance meetings you have with staff with a few added formal encounters, you might find that you will gather more face-to-face intelligence with donor prospects than you ever could have accomplished on your own.

It takes time to implement anything new, but with all this information being gathered you will soon be in the enviable position of prioritizing well-informed prospect lists!

Still need help identifying prospects? Are you lost in your database full of donor records? Need deep research before a solicitation? Call Aspire Research Group at (727) 231-0516. We can help.

3 Steps to Major Gift Mojo!

Focused Fundraising, Fundraising Analytics, Major Gift Teams, , , , ,

Not infrequently fundraisers want to talk to me about finding major gift prospects who are outside of the donor database. Often they have been asking the same group of donors and need to expand their reach.

Too frequently I find out that they have not screened or mined their own donor database for good prospects! Screenings come with a price tag that can be hefty for some and getting management to invest often requires some educated persuasion.

Consider the following plan for jump-starting your fundraising confidence and creating results you can demonstrate to management.

Phase One

  • Pull a list of your top lifetime donors and start calling and visiting to thank them
    • They will be mucho flattered because many will not be wealthy and the lifetime giving will be a significant number. They all make great planned giving prospects
  • Pull a list of your one or two-year lapsed donors by lifetime giving and largest gift
    • Schedule visits with any excuse: wanted to recognize your lifetime contributions with a chatke; wanted you to meet our new CEO; wanted to thank you and tell you about new initiatives you made possible.
  • Consider asking your gift entry/database administrator to make some thank you calls to top-end annual fund donors
    • Pick a list of people similar to your employee to make it easy to relate
    • Already too busy? Make one phone call a day
    • Success in a new task is invigorating! Expect your employee grow

Phase Two

Do not just pull lists…

Pick a concrete time-period – say three months – and blitz call and visit. Every. Single. Day. Especially if you haven’t done much visiting in the past! You will have friendly, feel-good visits that will build your confidence and reward your donors with the stewardship they so deserve. Any excuse for calling will do, but sincerely thanking, recognizing and telling them what their gifts have accomplished is numero uno.

Phase Three

After the designated time period, stop and evaluate. This is important. You will be amazed what your donors tell you and you will be better able to strategize your future efforts. This is where you begin rating which prospects are likely to make major gifts and you will now know how to better recognize them in your database. Check out the Aspire Research Group paper on creating a moves management system.

Looking for customized help with your donor lists? Contact Aspire Research Group today!

Work smarter, not harder. Because you’ll have your major gift mojo of course!

An easy-to-use, kickbutt cultivation strategy tool

4Fundraisers, Focused Fundraising, , , , ,

I usually attract two types of clients: those that want to identify major gift prospects and those that want research on identified prospects. No matter which service I provide, sometimes my clients get stalled on the next steps. You might have the donor prospect right there in front of you, but over time the path to a gift gets as lost as Hansel and Gretel’s bread crumbs in the forest of development activities.

Prospect research consultants (including me) often talk about moves management or relationship management systems. These are powerful tools capable of catapulting your major giving to a new level. But there is another tool you can easily customize that gives you a laser-like focus on one donor prospect at a time. Just like the one you have in front of you right now. 

Creating a Cultivation Strategy document is easier than you might think. This document should highlight key considerations such as capacity to make a gift, when you expect to ask for a gift (average is 18 months out), primary giving motivations and other vital pieces of information. But the true beauty of a Cultivation Strategy document is the action steps section.

Using everything you know about the donor prospect you have to sketch out the actions and completion dates that take you to the day you solicit the gift (just like a roadmap). If you have just identified a prospect these actions might be vague and the dates might just have the month. In the worksheet I created  each action requires you to list the objectives. Those objectives are the lasers!

When you sketch out your actions for the first time you will immediately recognize just how short the time really is between your start date and your solicitation date. Yikes! Knowing the objective, the outcome you desire from each action, ensures you stay on track. No meandering. None of the “let’s just pick another prospect” because you dropped the ball on the first one.

At Aspire Research Group we want you to close more major gifts. Gifts reward your donors, the people you serve and you. Call or email us today to find out how we can help you close more major gifts.