Portfolio Size and Visits

Shelly Van Peursem

I would love to know if anyone would share how large their Major Gift Officers portfolios are and how many visits are expected each month for the MGO's. 

We have roughly 150 in a MGO portfolio and 16 visits a month. Is that low or high?  How did your organization come up with # of visits? 

thanks in advance for any information!

Phil Payne

Hi Shelly,

We are a smaller organization, so our MGOs have 60 to 100 prospects in their portfolios and we track their metrics by Actions - so they are expected to have 30 Assessment actions, 15 Cultivation actions, 3-5 Solicitation actions and 30 Stewardship actions a month. These actions can range from vistis to phone calls to letters, etc. We came up with this based on past data and a projected increase of 5% in the activity for each officer.

When I was an MGO at a major university, we were expected to have a minimum of 100 prospects in our portfolio an make at least 15 in person visits a month. That was a directive from our centeral office, so I'm not sure how they came up with that.

Hope this helps.

Faith Murray

Our situation is probably not a good comparison for you, since our MGO's hold a dozen other different hats as well, and so are not full-time MGO's. But, generally, we have several staff assigned for visiting, and each of those gets between 15-30 assigned donors. We don't really assign a certain number of contacts per se, but rather, we coordinate timed communications as an office (Christmas gifts/visits, Easter, Annual Appeal season, Events, etc.) and each MGO works with his own donors during those coordinated efforts, or as a unique situation comes up.

Rachel Kave

What is your workflow/process for removing prospects and adding new ones to keep portfolios same size.?  We have trouble with portfolios becoming too large as prospects are added and others are not removed.  Are there certain prospects that you manage with just opportunities and not solicitor assignments?