Donor Prospects: Managing Donor Prospects

Donor Prospects: Managing Donor Prospects

1. There are several features inside of CRM you can use for tracking and managing donor prospects/prospective donors.
2. The Stage of Development feature is designed specifically for tracking prospective donors through your development pipeline. You configure the various stages/statues a prospective donor can be at and assign prospective donors to each stage. See this tutorial (part 1) and this tutorial (part 2) for more information.
3. You can could create a contact type (e.g. "donor prospect") and assign the contact type to potential donors. However, keep in mind that if you also create a custom data set associated to this contact type, you will never be able to remove the contact type from the record (so that even someone who becomes a donor will also have the donor prospect contact type on their record as well). See this tutorial on using contact types.
4. You can create and assign a tag. See this tutorial on using tags.
5. If you want to capture substantive/qualitative information about your prospective donors, you can create a custom data set. Common fields in such a custom data set would include:
   • date added to prospect list
   • date removed from prospect list and/or a check box to indicate they are a dead lead/should not be solicited any further
   • reason added to prospect list/source (why do you think they are a good prospect/how did you hear about them/who on staff added them to the list)
   • type of ask (are they a potential major donor, a business that should only be solicited for in-kind items, etc.)
   • See this tutorial on creating and managing custom data sets.
6. You can use any combination of the above methods. So, for example, you might want to create a contact type with an associated custom data set. Or you might want to use stage of development with a custom data set. Or perhaps you only want to use a tag. The method you use for tracking your donor prospects will depend on the following:
   • What kinds of data do you want to collect about donor prospects - just that someone is a prospect or do you want to track more details such as when they were added to the prospect list, that they were on the list but later were removed/should no longer be prospected (tracking this keeps you from accidentally re-adding people who have asked to be removed)
   • Do you want to be able to write reports on your donor prospects - e.g. "how many people are at the cold lead stage" or "how may prospects who were at the cold lead stage at the beginning of our annual appeal are now donors"? If you just use a tag or contact type, you will not have any start and/or end dates to use to correlate stage to donation dates or campaign dates.
   • Tags, Types, and Stage of Development can all be updated using the "take action menu"/in bulk. Tags and Types can be imported using the import utility. Custom data set information cannot be updated en mass/in bulk (nor imported), so while custom data sets provide the most flexibility and ability to capture the most data, they are the most time consuming to maintain as records must be updated individually.