[MUSIC] Welcome, we will now focus on the important topic of prospect management. At the end of this lesson, you will be able to define prospect management. Discuss the benefits of a prospect management protocol. Identify features and functions of a prospect management protocol within an organization and explain the elements of effective prospect management policies. Let's take a deeper look at the fundamentals of prospect management. Prospect management is the planning, recording and reporting of significant moments which lead toward a gift in the relationship between prospective donors and non-profit organization. Although the principles of prospect management can be applied to gift expectancies of any size. A system like this is usually created to help coordinate the major gift effort through the following items. If an organization has a large number of new major gift prospects they have identified through a screening, they need to make certain that they receive the attention they deserve. If staff are having difficult times making accurate forecasts for gift income. If it's unclear which development officer is working with which prospects, or if prospects are confused about who they should contact. The objectives of a successful prospect management program are to help define the people with whom you or your leadership should meet. And it reinforces a thoughtful, disciplined approach to fundraising. It's no longer by the seat of the pants anymore. There are a number of benefits of a prospect management protocol that will be seen by your organization. They include coordinating activity, simplifying reporting, increasing efficiency of your development operations. Reinforcing the sequential process of cultivation, solicitation and stewardship. And finally, it will raise the level of professionalism in your organization. There's at least one other benefit of a prospect management system to the development office. That being a higher level of accountability. We see increasing demands by non-profit boards, the government and the public at large for greater accountability with the use of donated funds. The reports and documentation of actions recorded in the prospect management system, help the development office demonstrate good stewardship of the organization's resources. That is not to imply that the development officer is now doomed to a drudgery of reporting without any personal benefits. Rather, every fundraiser has goals. These reports give crucial feedback to the development officer and their leadership on their progress towards those goals. There are multiple features and functions of prospect management protocol within an organization. The first is to assist in maintaining an active prospect list. It assists in the development of solicitation strategies and schedules. It assists you in producing activity reports, project solicitation schedules. It can help generate moves management reports. And finally encourage and track productivity within your staff. That leads us finally to prospect management policies and procedures. Your prospect management system is not just a collection of programming and reports. It should be the central part of development officer's routine. An effective policy states what kind of prospects are managed in your system. How development officers are assigned to particular prospects, how gift expectancies are set, what time limits are expected for bringing in a gift after assignment and what exceptions can be made. If a policy is not already in place, it must be agreed upon by the development staff before any work begins. Finally, both policies and procedures should be documented in a training or a reference manual. Moves management is the planning, recording and reporting of significant moments and the relationship between prospective donors in the non-profit organization, which lead to a gift. All of the gathering of prospect intelligence and reports associated with a prospect management system are focused on bringing efficiency, predictability and accountability to the fundraising effort. Wouldn't it be great if major gifts would just come in without any cultivational effort and you could just let the donors do all the work? We all know that unfortunately, bringing in major gifts isn't that easy. A donor generally doesn't make a major gift, unless the organization takes specific action to ensure that the contribution they're making will significantly impact the donor's specific area of interest within the non-profit's mission. Often it requires more than just selling the project. Donors today want and need to be personally involved in some way before making a significant gift. That's why having a prospect management system in place is so critical. It can help ensure that appropriate actions and engagements Are thoughtfully planned and executed in a timely manner, so you can secure those major gifts. There are a few critical elements that a successful moves management program must be committed to. First, it must be donor-centered. It must focus on developing donors rather than simply securing donations. It must recognize and document a relationship between an organization and its supporters. It should focus on strategic organizational thinking to further those relationships and the support they generate. It should remain flexible, constantly changing in response to an organization and supporters' needs. And it should support the process with people, practices and business systems. There is an obvious list as well of what a successful moves management program is not. It is not a strategy for the masses. It is not cookie cutter, or obvious to the prospect. It definitely is not simply in someone's head, or on a bunch of sticky notes. And it is not hit and run, it is built for a long term relationship. Before going any further, we must acknowledge one fundamental fact about any prospect management system. Having one requires additional work from the entire fundraising staff. Allowing a prospect to drift aimlessly toward a gift may not be every efficient, but at least it doesn't require a lot of data recording. Intentional prospect management, however, cannot happen without reports that show progress towards a goal. And those reports will be meaningless unless the development staff takes the time to record their actions. Now most development officers didn't get into fundraising so they could do a lot of data entry. So there may be some reluctance to spend the necessary time inputting data into the database. Furthermore, unless they are provided meaningful data on prospects and gifts, many development officers did not see a need to be involved in data collection. Nevertheless, these efforts are absolutely essential to the success of a prospect management system. The chief development officer must be fully committed to seeing that this work is accomplished. The director of development must insist that the staff put in the necessary time, that reports are meaningful and ultimately that the organization reaps the benefits of a systematic and measurable fundraising program. To make prospect management reports work, specific information must be systematically collected and recorded. This is not information collection for information sake. You need to think about what information your program needs for its essential reports and then record only that. Here are some data points that would be common to most organizations. Gift expectancies. This is a fundamental unit with which a prospect management system is concerned. Many fundraising databases refer to this as a proposal. Important attributes of a gift expectancy or proposal, include anticipated gift amount, gift purpose, anticipated gift date and progress or absence thereof toward solicitation or stage of that particular gift. Immediately after the prospect has been identified, it may not be possible to specify the amount or purpose of the gift you hope to receive. Nevertheless, you should establish a placeholder gift expectancy at this early stage. During the cultivation period, as the donor is cultivated and consulted under interest and the level of potential impact, you can modify the gift expectancy. For a prospect whose capacity has not been sufficiently qualified, you may want to default the gift amount to your entry-level major gift amount. The prospect manager. This is the development officer who is the prospect's primary contact with your organization. The prospect manager is your ambassador to the prospect. As such, he or she is responsible for securing gifts from the assigned prospect. Beyond that, the prospect manager may properly become the human face of all aspects of your non-profit to the donor. Other development officers who have an interest interest in engaging with a managed donor can join a team, but all contact is coordinated by the prospect manager. Without this person in place, multiple contacts from within organization can confuse or frustrate your prospect. Your solicitation plan. A solicitation plan should state the anticipated purpose and gift amount, plus the next 2-3 steps that must be taken to secure the gift. No solicitation plan is written in stone. It should be re-evaluated after every move with the prospect. It may well be that the ultimate purpose and ask amount will not be the same as when the plan was first written. But the goal is to assist the prospect in maximizing his or her potential impact on the organization's mission. So the solicitation plan must be flexible and accommodate new information learned from the prospect or other sources during the cultivation period. Contact reports. All moves are recorded in a contact report. Additionally, any substantive contact with a prospect should put in a contact report, whether it qualifies as a move or not. These may include correspondence, phone calls, personal interactions that yield usual information or educate prospect, or actions that engaged the prospect. Some fundraising databases allow you to schedule contacts in the future, creating a tickler of sorts for the assigned prospect manager. You may find it useful to record additional information in your prospect management system, but keep in mind that every item you decide to record, adds a little bit more overhead to the workload of the development officers who must provide the information. Only record what is essential and what you plan to include in your reports. As important as getting the information into the system is, it is merely busywork if you can't get it out again in form of reports. Many fundraising databases have prospect manager reports built into them. One report that is very valuable to a manager of development staff, is a stage aging report. It shows all of the prospects assigned to a particular development officer and how long their gift expectancies have been in the current stage. It looks something like this. The above report listing the prospects assigned to fundraiser David Lamb, shows at a glance that Eric Evans gift expectancy has been in the cultivation stage for 753 days. This raises red flag because the expected time for cultivation is 2 years. Seeing this in the report would cause the fundraiser to re-evaluate the chances of actually getting $100,000 gift from Eric Evans. Which may warrant a new solicitation plan or gift expectancy for Mr.Evans. Also highlighted in this report is the fact that Gale Graham has been in the intent to solicit stage for more than six months. If your prospect management procedures expect that a gift expectancy should normally be in this stage for six months or less, the report gives an opportunity to make an adjustment or re-evaluation of the readiness of Mrs. Graham to receive a solicitation. Or perhaps it is simply time to solicit the gift. It may be possible to program this report so that expectancies would be highlighted or appear in bold face, if they have been at the stage for longer than the established benchmarks.
