PROSPECT MANAGEMENT: SMALL, BIG, AND EVERYTHING IN BETWEEN

By: Shelly Steenhorst-Baker, Director Prospect Research & Pipeline Development, and Kat Carson, Co-Editor, The Scoop, APRA Canada | Manager, Pipeline Development

Over the last ten years, we’ve worked for non-profits whose Development shops ranged from a two-person team to an institution with over 100 fundraisers and support staff; who had a handful of people doing everything to a team whose members play very specific roles with very specific functions; whose annual fundraising goals varied from a hundred thousand to over a hundred million.

Small shops and big shops, and everything in between, the mission of the fundraising team is the same: forge and foster relationships, and raise money to support the organization’s mandate.

Prospect Management (PM) plays a part in these activities. PM’s involvement differs depending on the size of the organization and available resources. The question becomes: how can PM be a key player at any organization?

What is Prospect Management?

“Prospect management” is the formal system of deciding who can engage a particular prospect, when and for what ask. It also encompasses the necessary data collection and coding to ensure there is institutional memory for the relationships we build with prospects.

You’ll also hear people talk about the pipeline and the prospect pool. These are sometimes used interchangeably. Essentially, it is the list of who your organization is asking or planning to ask for money (your “prospects”).

Why do you need it?

PM enhances community ties and increases the philanthropic support your organization will receive. Prospect management assists in the success of efforts to fundraise for the university by coordinating approaches to major gift prospects. It ensures that we work with our donors in a coordinated fashion, which maximizes their engagement with our organizations.

Who benefits and how?

• Fundraisers
  • Work becomes systematic and efficient
  • Management of prospects throughout the entire development cycle (also called Moves Management) ensures prospects move through the cycle appropriately
  • Creates accountability
  • For higher levels:
    • Advice on strategy from managers, peers and the PM team allows for a broad awareness of institutional opportunities, and to engage the broader community
    • Delegation of responsibility allows Fundraisers to focus on contact with individuals and organizations in the community
• Executive Directors (Supervisors)
  • Provided with benchmarks for performance
  • Ability to more accurately predict future giving through forecasts with up to date information
• Organization: mission is strengthened by maximizing donor potential
• Donors and Supporters
  • Donor whose relationship is positive and rewarding
  • Creation of a historical record of donor and prospect relationships
  • Fundraising activities and donor engagement are coordinated across the organization, creating a holistic awareness of interest and engagement

What exactly is involved?

Prospect Management will vary from shop to shop, and, as discussed below, vary a lot from how it works in small shops vs. big shops. All shops have a PM System, even if it is “don’t ask, don’t tell”. If you track who your donors are, you have a PM system. It just won’t be a significant contributor to fundraising success until you “level up.”

Below is a breakdown of what I’ve seen PM look like as it becomes more sophisticated. Your shop will usually fit roughly into one of the levels below.  If you have a lot of turnover in the fundraising team, it makes it hard to work at the highest levels without substantial resources as you are constantly in clean up mode.

Level 1: Only the Must-Haves

This is usually what you get in a small shop (see below). It involves tracking (in a form you can report out from) the following key information:

• Who is your donor?
  • Donor biographical data and contact information
  • Donor giving history
• When are we asking them for money?
  • How much will we ask for?
  • When are we making the ask?

With this basic data, you can create the most important report PM can provide: forecasting or progress-to-goal. This report will show how much money is expected when, and should be targeted to how your organization reports out on dollars.

Level 2: Manageable Magic

You’ll need some form of dedicated resources to make this one effective, though some shops make do with fundraisers managing this data on their own. 

• Who is your donor?
• When are we asking them for money?
• Who is the person responsible for them?
  • This is where you get into assigning donors and prospects to specific individuals in your organization, who will be held responsible for making the ask and, usually, who complete the meetings.

Level 3: Prospect Management System

This is when you start to talk about having a true prospect management system because you are actively managing your prospects.

• Who is your donor?
• When are we asking them for money?
• Who is the person responsible for them?
  • In addition to the above, you will capture who else is engaged with the prospect.
  • Usually, a Primary Relationship Manager is assigned (the person who has the responsibility)
• What prospect meetings are happening?
  • Contact reports are entered.
• What stage is the prospect at?
  • You begin tracking how the relationship with the prospect is progressing against the donor cycle. At this level, you will usually only have 2-3 stages (Cultivation, Solicitation, Stewardship)
• Who makes decisions on who gets to engage, how to engage and for which ask?
  • Do the fundraisers decide for themselves? Is there a team meeting to discuss (monthly, quarterly)? Does management dictate from above? – No matter which method, you need to start thinking about how to resolve conflicts and how to add new prospects fairly.

Level 4: Mature Prospect Management System

At this point, you will have robust rules, policies or guidelines and a significant set of reports you are running. You will be actively managing what is happening, as opposed to observing and reflecting those observations through data.

• Who is your donor?
• When are we asking them for money?
  • In addition to looking at how much you’ll ask for when, you’ll track likelihood of the gift, expected amount for after the ask is made.
• Who is the person responsible for them?
• What prospect meetings are happening?
  • Contact reports are reviewed by PM (or others) for completeness and to extract key pipeline updates.
  • Targets are set for moves management: i.e. fundraisers need to add a certain number of prospects to their prospect pool or make a certain number of asks.
• What stage is the prospect at?
  • You track how the relationship with the prospect is progressing more rigorously, with an increased sophistication of stages (Qualification, Cultivation (sometimes broken down further), Solicitation (sometimes broken down further, Stewardship (sometimes broken down further)). This stage is where you start to see a lot of variation between organizations about what they call the stages and how they track movement.
  • You have rules of thumb around how long it should take in each stage and run reports on prospects to see if people are in a stage too long to flag for action.
• Who makes decisions on who gets to engage, how to engage and for which ask?
  • You will have guiding principles or other set rules about how to assign prospects. You will also have guidelines on how to resolve conflicts and how to add new prospects fairly.
• The System gets defined
  • At this point, you will usually have written policy, guidelines or expectations with regards to how fundraisers can engage prospects. You will give them training on this.
• How will you report?
  • You will have regular reports to the fundraisers that show them their pool of prospects, in addition to forecasting specific to their portfolio.
  • You will have a way to show managers of fundraisers the fundraisers progress and performance (through meetings or reports – often both)

Level 5: Ultimate PM

At this point, you would usually have more than one prospect management person, and will start to see things like assigned PM helpers for each fundraiser. This is also where every shop wishes they were to some extent, as it is where you have built a true strategic partnership with the fundraisers. Your job becomes less about data clean up and more about strategic advice.

• Who is your donor?
• When are we asking them for money?
• Who is the person responsible for them?
• What prospect meetings are happening?
  • You start to enforce strict rules about contact report timeliness to ensure your data is up-to-date.
• What stage is the prospect at?
• Who makes decisions on who gets to engage, how to engage and for which ask?
  • You have rules around communicating with prospects and will often enforce “clearance” expectations.
  • You’ll know whether you are an “open cultivation” shop or not.
• The System gets defined
  • Policies and guidelines are enforced institution-wide beyond fundraising, and will incorporate other areas such as volunteers, alumni (for schools) or activity by partners.
  • You will find the addition
• How will you report?
  • If you have a campaign, you will be a valued partner in analyzing the pool for the Feasibility Study and progress reports.
  • You conduct regular analysis of key areas of concern (How many new prospects are we adding? How long does it take from identification to gift? What is our close rate on asks? What is our percentage funded on asks?)
• Guiding the strategy.
  • Instead of just reporting on status, you will make recommendations that are strategic and are followed by the fundraisers.
  • You will have set goals for your system such as increasing collaboration or growing the prospect pool by a certain percentage.
  • You will have a seat at the senior management table to report on both individual fundraiser performance and on overall performance.

Prospect Management in a Small Shop

Strange as it seems to me now, the first non-profit I worked for – a performing arts organization – did not have a formal Prospect Management System. Neither did the second non-profit, which was an organization focused on providing energy-related education.

Looking back, even a level one PM system would have been useful, informing management of donors, making fundraiser performance measurable, and revealing progress to goal.

How can PM play a role in a small shop? Before jumping into the deep end, you need to determine the priorities in your shop.

• What does your shop need: Data entry? Move management? Reporting?
• Know that you can’t do everything – and that is okay. Better to focus on one or two aspects of PM and do them well.
• If you have nothing, what resources would it take to implement level one: can you engage the fundraisers to assist with this?  Can you get management buy-in to increase resources?

Here are some basic elements to consider in a small shop for your PM system:

Prospect Tracking – Simply knowing who your donors are and being able to track demographic and giving information is useful for future prospecting. At both organizations I worked for early in my career, the database was little more than constituent records which recorded donations and enabled us to generating tax receipts. Still, we knew who our donors were and were able to keep track of them and steward their contributions, as well as cycle them back for additional asks.

Data Entry – Tracking prospect asks is the foundation for report generation. Determine what metrics are essential for your organization – Do you want to know how much is in the pipeline at any given time? If so, focus on tracking solicitation amounts. Do you want to be able to forecast? Add a datapoint relating to when you expect to receive the gift. A datapoint for gift likelihood enables discounting, making forecasts more reliable. Develop requirements and, if possible, tailor your database to prompt you for these requirements. At UofC, we have a number of required fields that must be filled out in order for the record to be saved and closed. Color-coding required fields will train users on which datapoints are critical

Moves management – Ensuring prospect pipelines are healthy, and prospects within the pipeline are moving (not stagnating), is key to fundraising success. The UofC has set up timelines relating to our fundraising phases, enabling us to report on prospects who aren’t moving through the pipeline. This allows us to make recommendations around strategy, as well as workload

Reporting – Reporting requires data entry and, to some degree, moves management in order to monitor, for example, portfolio load and proportions, generate revenue forecasting/projections, and report on progress to goal. Reporting needs are unique to the organization – find out what the end reporting goals are and work backwards to ensure your database infrastructure and PM system are set up to support reports.

Determining your priorities will help you to establish a PM system that is relevant to the size of your shop.

Bottom line: If you only do one thing, the best bang for your buck is targets: that is, tracking how much you will be asking for and when. If you track these two pieces of information for every ask, you will be able to set up progress-to-goal reports and forecasts. Your fundraisers and senior executive(s) will love being able to project out how much they’re expecting to raise this year.

Prospect Management in a Big Shop

Systemic Prospect Management in a big shop is a must have. The advantage to being in a big shop is usually resources. When you can start to have dedicated staff working on PM, you can move beyond data tracking.

How can PM get involved? Again, it will be a question of resources and the scope of the prospect pool and number of fundraisers you’ll be supporting compared to those resources.

• Do you have dedicated PM staff?
• What is the volume they need to deal with on the data side?
• Can they offer both strategic and technical support?
• How many fundraisers do you have?
• Are your fundraisers willing and able to take on their own PM?
• How flexible is your database?
• How big is your prospect pool?
• Do your fundraisers work together or separately, and if the latter, what are the potential overlaps?

Now, you decide on how PM can be involved:

Dedicated PM staff are key to building and maintaining a robust PM system. Researching industry standards and best practices, the PM team can create a cutting-edge PM shop by delving into what other organizations are doing. This takes time – in In August 2011, the University of Calgary’s Prospect Research and Pipeline Management Team contacted 20 identified not-for-profit organizations in Canada and the United States to learn more about their research and pipeline management processes, with the aim of identifying best practices in the field. This in turn helped to inform the massive transformation of PM at the UofC – beginning in late 2012. In just over a year, PM went from a one-person shop at around level three with a focus on moves management to a four-person team at level four (and working towards level five) offering a wide range of services to our fundraisers: activity/call report review, pipeline maintenance, analysis of phase timelines, and assisting with prospect advancement strategy.

A dedicated PM team can also be your data champions, pushing for tracking more and better data, and creating meaningful reports and providing invaluable strategic analysis. This is especially useful for organizations who have a large prospect base and/or many fundraisers. With a large prospect base, PM can focus on relationship assignments and moves management, managed with thorough data entry. Think of the strategic questions and reports above and you can begin to imagine the number of data points needed for each ask of each donor. Always think ahead: will the data be maintainable with your current staffing levels.

Additionally, in a shop with many fundraisers – and especially one with a decentralized structure – PM can get involved beyond reporting on assignments. PM can assist in coordinating collaborative asks, especially if the potential overlap between fundraisers is large, as the team has a high-level view of prospect interest, and can see natural synergies between different fundraising units. By ensuring activity reports or call reports are shared with relevant parties, PM can put fundraisers in touch with each other, informing them of opportunities for collaboration.

PM can be a point of contact for satellite fundraisers and Development staff across the organization, building relationships across the team. PM can assist in technical training, augmenting foundational database training with specific instruction relating to prospect management. At the UofC, once Development staff has completed Raiser’s Edge Essentials (online training offered by our database group), I work with each staff member and train them on specific PM infrastructure – where to find information relating to relationship managers, specific asks, activities; how to complete an activity report and enter actions into the database; what tools are available, such as Dashboards and reports. If your fundraisers do not take on their own PM, the PM team has the opportunity to provide behind-the-scenes support, allowing fundraisers to do what they do best: cultivate relationships and raise money.

Bottom line: At a big shop, you can be your fundraiser’s superstars – at the UofC, the PM team takes on the data administration and data entry, enabling our fundraisers to spend more time in the community, forging relationships and bringing in gifts.