Sonny’s got me thinking again

Last Updated on Friday, 3 March 2006 10:53 Written by Steve Friday, 3 March 2006 10:08

Every time I hear from Sonny about Salesforce, I spend the next few hours ruminating about schemas, custom code, and how to model some process in Salesforce. This time it was his comments about prospecting gifts and how he models pledges. After a day of thinking about it, here’s how I understand the process:

1. A pledge is really just a stage in the receipt of a gift. It’s when a person has decided to give but hasn’t given yet. It has a fairly high likelyhood of coming through, but not 100%, that’s for sure.
2. When a gift gets to the pledge stage it can turn into money in the bank in two ways: the donor could write a single check for the whole amount, or the donor could agree to make installment payments that add up to the full amount of the pledge. Either way, the sum of the gifts should equal the original pledge amount (or close to it)>
3. Either way the pledge is fulfilled, it should recurr on an annual basis. The donor should be asked for another pledge/gift a year out from the date of the received pledge

And here’s how I’d model it based on this generic process:

1. Gifts and pledges are both Opportunities
2. The Gift donation process has multiple stages. There is a “pledge” stage that has a probability between 50% and 80%, depending on how optimistic you are.
3. If the pledge turns into one full-sum gift payment, the stage of the pledge is changed to “Closed Won”, and the payment is received. An Opportunity for the same amount (or a little more) is created for one year out with a prospecting probability. This will be a reminder to ask again in a year.
4. If the donor decides to make installment payments, a custom field called “pledged amount” is populted with the Opportunity amount.
5. A payment schedule is drawn up, and new Opportunities are created with close dates that correspond to the scheduled payments. These Opportunites may have a checkbox checked indicating they are pledge payments.
6. At this time, an Opportunity is created a year out for the pledged amount (or a little more) with a prospecting probability. This will be a reminder to ask again in a year.
7. Each payment Opportunity is identified as being tied to the original pledge Opportunity. You can’t create a Salesforce relationship between two Opportunities, but we can fake this through the use of S-Controls for creating the payments. We can effectively relate the pledge payments to the pledge.
8. As a payment comes in, the existing payment Opportunity is updated to stage Closed Won. The amount of the payment is subtracted from the amount of the pledge, so that the received payment and the remaining amount on the pledge add up to the original pledge. The “pledged amount” field is untouched, keeping a historical record of the full pledged amount.
9. This is repeated with each payment, drawing down on the pledge until it is $0, and the payments add up to the original pledged amount. We can’t do this in real time, because we have no access to the “save” event on the payment Opportunity. If we did, we’d just call some code that would deduct the payment from the pledge Opportunity amount. We can do this in batch, on a schedule, though. Every day, or week, all pledges and pledge payments could be reconciled in an S-Control that might take 1 minute to run.

You can see all pledges by filtering all Opportunites with Stage = pledge. You can see all pledge payments by filtering for Opportunities that have the pledge payment checkbox checked.

I think that’s it. I think it holds together. Poke holes in it, and let me know via the comments. I’d love to hear of problems you see, or ideas you have for doing it differently.

Two notches on my belt

Last Updated on Thursday, 2 March 2006 02:24 Written by Steve Thursday, 2 March 2006 02:22

I realized today, much to my horror, that I may be the world’s leading authority on migrating from ebase 1.0 to Salesforce.com. That’s not saying much, as I only have two notches on my ebase belt, but I suspect that might be more than most people you’d meet on the street. The intersection lozenge in the ven diagram of the ebase world and the salesforce.com world is a lonely place.

Now I’m staring down the barrel of two more ebase 1 migrations. Has anyone out there done ebase to salesforce.com migrations? Want some work? Please contact me to claim your title as World Ebase to Salesforce.com Migration Expert. I’ll throw in a set of steak knives…

Prospecting

Last Updated on Wednesday, 1 March 2006 09:05 Written by Steve Wednesday, 1 March 2006 09:03

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