Prospect Tracking

Molly Umberger

I was wondering how others use their Prospect tab. Specifically:



1) Status of prospect - where they are in the pipeline. Have they been researched, contacted, asked for a gift, etc...



2) Capacity - after doing wealth screening (we use Prospect Research), how do you record their financial capacity?



The prospect tab has two drop-downs in the General area: Prospect Status and Classification. Have you adjusted these to suit your purposes?

Keri Eadie

We defined the status but ended up using actions instead to track the status.  This is because we do not add a proposal until we are actually ready to make an ask - but wanted to be able to report on the number of prospect in the pipeline (including those who are just identified).  And we reset it each year.  Therefore we created a Major Gift action type that could be globally added with the status of Identified.  Then as they move through the cycle we change it in the action.  We use the proposal to track the ask amount, exected amount and funded amount and dates.  It is not perfect but it gave us a way to manage our Major Gifts with the processes that we have (instead of tracking who we intend to ask in Excel).

Sheri OlanderWaters

We also use action status rather than the Prospect status to define status. We have four foundations, so a particular prospect could be in a different status for each foundation. We are currently using "Classification" to house a rating for purposes of building campaign pyramids, and then "Philanthropic Interests" to denote a giving area. It is definitely stil in its infancy as a tracking tool here. I am interested to hear what other people do!

Rachel Slager 2

We use classification to identify Top Prospects - those who need the most attention and also need to be excluded from generic solicitations.  We limit each solicitor to 25 top prospects.



We add wealth screening on the Ratings tab.



We don't classify prospects by where they are in the moves managment, we do that through each Proposal.  That's because we might have multiple active proposals for a single prospect, each project might be in very different stages of securing the gift.

Jenny Kleintop

We use Classifications to put prospects into different groups.  We use Suspect, Prospect, Campaign Prospect, Planned Giving Prospect, Grant Prospect, Chairman’s Forum Prospect, No Longer a Prospect.  We renamed Status to Stage and use Identification, Qualification, Strategy, Cultivation, Solicitation, Stewardship, Dropped.  We house our screening results in Ratings and for ease of getting results out of the system we defined one Source/Rating for each rating we want to track.  It’s tweaked so it works easier in Export.  For example we have P2G in Source and Category field.