Corporate Giving

Jesse Calagna

I have been asked to import a prospect list of 50-60 companies that we want to target for corporate giving.  How should these be coded in RE?  Const. Attribute?  What nuances should i think about when putting something in an individual contact record as opposed to a corporate record?



thanks

Christine Armstrong

Are you using the prospect tab?



If so, they should be added there as proposals.

Jesse Calagna

We do not currently use the Prospect tab but I'm open to anything.  Can you go into more detail

Jen Claudy

If you do not have the Prospect/Search module, you would need to talk to your Account Manager about purchasing that in order to use Proposals.  Assuming that that will at least take more time than you've got, I would recommend an Attribute for now, because you can easily remove it with a Global Change later, and it will help you keep everything query-able.  As for what to put on the Relationship record for the contact, that really depends on what information you have available to enter.  And you'll also want to be sure you stay in line with any existing organizational policies as far as how Relationships work.

Jesse Calagna

I do have the Prospect tab in RE but we do not currently utilize it as we should.  I will bring it up to my team and see what they think. 

Christine Armstrong

Having recently migrated from a mammoth spreadsheet across to the prospect tab and with one team member who is a technophobe we've worked hard to make it as easy as possible to input data.



My recommendations would be:

a) Ignore the ratings part of the tab (it's not helpful and painstaking to work with) and using Proposal attributes instead.  The issues with using ratings are as follows:

• Ratings are not tied to a specific proposal and they may change over time which leads to outdated information
• Ratings must be added individually - ie, if you have 10 things ratings to compare each proposal on,  they must be individually added against each prospect which is a lot of effort.
• Ratings notepads cannot be output individually into a query for reporting- you either get all or none.

b) Proposal Attributes

Use proposal attributes and set up a default set for each type of prospect. We have two defaults: Charity of the year and Strategic partnership.  We measure a whole range of criteria - value range, duration, male customer profile, recent support for cancer charity etc etc.  A lot of the attributes have simple yes/no/unknown selection.



Any detail such as responses to e-mails or meeting summaries go into either action notes and proposal notes.



Finally, I found it really helpful to get a big piece of blank paper and draw flow diagrams and brain storming to get all the information that I want to collect into a logical framework.



Good luck!