Best practices: defining prospects & entering in RE

Megan Monaghan-Hughes

How do your fundraisers define who is and who is not a prospect? Is it anyone that the fundraiser talks to about your org that they meet on the street, and all they have is a name and no contact info? Someone who wants to learn more for whom we have a mailing address? What's your minimum requirement to be considered a prospect?



Our development department does no formal prospecting and has no prospecting tools at our disposal, but is wanting to start adding prospects to the database. These prospects are essentially people/companies that someone on our team thinks our fundraiser should be getting in contact with or is someone our fundraiser spoke with for the first time. We have no moves management system in place, so the question of how the fundraiser will know to follow up with them and what the next steps are is up to them to figure out. In a perfect world, we'd implement a system at the same time or before prospects start going into RE so there's a track that they're on. But I digress...



I would love to hear everyone's thoughts on this, as we have no internal guidance on best practices.

Stephanie Ulmer

If someone has the potential to support your organization, then yes, they should be entered into the database and a gift officer can utilize the tools to develop the relationship with them. I would use the actions tab for notes and moves management, as well as follow-up reminders on visits.  I would also implement a rating system where the fundraiser could identify if they are or are not a prospect, and also how important of a prospect they are. This can be achieved in the prospect tab, if you have it. If you do not, it can also be accomplished in attributes.



Who are is currently in your database and how do they get there?  You can do some simple prospect identification based on canned reports of giving.



Good luck

Leslie Parker

Shortly before I came on board, the rights to add constituents in RE was severely restricted to just a few people as our DOs were adding folks willy-nilly. I have found records for Bill Gates, Prince Charles, the Queen of England and other celebrities with little or no information other than if they liked animals or not. Now we only allow solid prospects to be added to RE. A solid prospect is one that the DO has had direct communication with and more communication is likely in the near future. These are added with a constituent code of Prospect and the DO is added as the assigned solicitor. Our policy is that all prospects must have an assigned solicitor - I don't want any more orphan records; ones that were added for some reason or another but no one remembers why. If a prospect need to be dropped from the DO's portfolio we either delete the record from the database or we change the constituent code to Former Prospect if the record should be retained.

Cindi Stewart

In our organization, we use the prospect tab to identify and track the donor by status and campaign/event.  Normally, a new proposal is set up for a specific campaign (and sometimes an event).  Within that proposal, we can tract the solicitor and add notes regarding any contact information if it is specific to that campaign.  On the attributes tab of the proposal, we have an attibute category for each year of the campaign with the donor status by year.  Status choices are prospect,member, donor, declined and so forth.  If the donor was included on our mailing list for that campaign, they have a proposal to match.  From proposal, we track the status, pull our mailing list and manage an annual purge to keep the mailing or appeal letters manageable.  We find it works very well especially since query and export work well with this set up.