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 are your minimum requirements 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.

JoAnn Strommen

We don't really have any minimum requirements beyond a name.  I hate to say that but I have entered a record with only a name at the request of a campaigner.  We have a form for campaigners to complete for people/companies that are not in our database that they wish to contact.  We ask for bio info (name, gender, address, phones, company etc.) but once in a while I only get a name.  (I document on our source attribute why name got entered and who requested it so that if absolutely nothing comes thru from the campaigner I have option to purge record down the road.)



As I said I hate entering with only minimal info but if I don't I have no way to track solicitor assignments and verify that that prospect has been requested and assigned.

Marcy Potter

If they are already donors or members we add a profile code to their file as "prospect". This way you can pull a report when you want to start contacting them.



If it was a prospect off the street, with no file created, then yes we would add all their info and mark them down as a prospect and probably at least contact them to become a member or a small donation to start off with thus being the beginning of the relationship...

basics!