gokubi.com

The clients that I have worked with to date have one thing in common: they all use their donor management systems as a purely historical record of transactions. When it comes to prospecting for new donors and gifts, they work out of their email and an excel spreadsheet or two. They have no good view into their current donor cultivation activities.

Part of my work with customers has been educating them the process for dealing with potential gifts. It all starts by entering possible gifts into your donor management system. They are entered with a best-guess amount and a probable date that a decision will be made by the donor. Then, a probability is added to the gift–how likely is the gift to come in? If it’s a prior giver, the probablity may be 50%. If it’s a new donor, or you’re trying to really stretch an existing donor, the probability will likely be lower.

As you get more information about the gift (through conversations with the potential donor, doing research on their past giving, etc.) you can modify your best-guess on the amount. Turns out your $100 prospect is a Microsoft millionaire? You may want to round up to the nearest thousand…

And as you become more confident the gift is coming in, you up the probability. If a donor verbally pledges they are going to give a certain amount, it may rise to 80% likely that the gift will come in. You only get to 100% when the check is in your hands–you never know what may happen to derail a likely gift.

Now that you have your potential gifts in the system, you can use them as a cross reference to interesting information. If you have an email conversation with a donor you are prospecting, add it to the system and relate it to the donor and to the potential gift. If you set up a briefing meeting for the prospect, relate it to the gift. The potential gift becomes a hook to hang relevant information. Then, when you bring in a board member to seal the deal, you can easily hand her the list of communications related to the potential gift, and she’s up to speed on the ask very quickly.

Now for adavanced users: when you enter your best guesses on amount, date, and probablity for potential gifts, you’ve got some great data. You can look at when revenue is expected to come in the door. Here’s a sample graph of all potential revenue grouped by the expected “close date”.

So you can quickly see that there’s $150K+ in potential donations and most of them are expected to come in at the end of the year–great to know if you’re expecting to hit a cashflow crunch in the fall.

And because you’re constantly updating these potential gifts as you get more information, this graph is alwsays the best guess. You’re providing the best visibility you can into your expected revenue, all just by using your donor management system to getting your prospecting work done