Prospecting
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
March 1st, 2006 at 3:37 pm
Although you don’t mention it…I assume all of this is in the context of SFDC Opportunties. If an org is using Opps to track donations, do you not run into some “messiness” in trying to track both historical donation informaiton and prospective donation info?
~S
March 1st, 2006 at 5:11 pm
I was talking in a general context, but with Salesforce.com as my index case for a system that lets you prospect well. I don’t know what you mean by “messiness”. There is a clear distinction between historical donations and potential ones–in this case it’s a field called IsClosed. Anything that IsClosed is historical, so you can easily filter on Closedness to view revenue information. Let me know if I didn’t address the messiness you’re talking about.
March 2nd, 2006 at 7:34 pm
It has been my experience that fundraisers like their donation tracking and prospect tracking systems related, but separate. In this case, I would use salesforce opportunities to track the prospect development cycle. A closed opportunity would reflect a Pledge, not a donation (cash in hand). Then using a custom object, track the revenue (pledge payments) generated by this won opportunity.
Does the business process distinction make sense. It just seems cleaner to me.
~S
March 2nd, 2006 at 9:30 pm
I understand what you are doing. I see how separating the pledges from payments makes sense. A pledge in the way I do things is an Opportunity of stage “Pledge”. A pledge has a probability of 75%–we expect 3 out of 4 of them to come in. I can generate payments from the pledge opportunity with a link that calls custom code. I haven’t built in draw down yet–the ability to keep track of how much is left on a pledge, but I have some ideas on how to do it. A customer hasn’t wanted it yet.
I’ve found that Salesforce.com is so flexible there are many ways to skin the cat and there isn’t a “right” way. All ways have trade offs, so it comes down to weighing the pros and cons in a specific situation. Since I’m doing consulting, I’m trying to come up with the most generic way to do things because I have to get it to work in many scenarios. It’s fun to solve these puzzles, but I never feel super confident that I’ve chosen the right path. But, things are working out so far, so I’m pretty excited.
March 27th, 2006 at 9:42 pm
Yes, I agree with you Steve, there are lots of ways to implement a solution…and a lot of how you choose to proceed comes from listening to the client and what their process is. One thing I’ve discovered about Sonny’s approach is that his org thinks of Pledges differently than others. In fact, the word “pledge” seems to have a few meanings in the nonprofit world, and each group I’ve worked with so far has treated them slightly differently.
In general, I treat a Pledge as a Type of Opportunity. In one case I created an opportunity record type for pledges so that the page layouts could be different than a regular straight-forward donation, and in another case I just did the pledge info on the same page layout but put Pledge in the Type drop-down on the opportunity. Each of these approaches came from running possibilities past my client with the pros and cons of each and letting them decide.
For some, a pledge is just something that is a promised amount of money some time down the road, for others it implies installments, and then there’s recurring donations which some groups think of as pledges but others don’t. So…it’s wacky out there is all I’m sayin’!
March 27th, 2006 at 9:44 pm
I also have a client that uses the Leads tab as their Prospecting tool, which is essentially what leads are…those individuals or groups that you do not currently have a relationship with but would like to establish one.
You could approach your prospects as Leads and customize the leads tab to handle whatever info you track about prospects, and then once they agree to donate/pledge, convert the lead to an Account/Contact/Oppty. This is what the lead conversion process in salesforce is all about.