Donor Portfolio Management Best Practices - Help

Allison Bergeron

Curious to know other charities best practices for managing donor portfolios using RE7.  We are a large Catholic High School and have a major gifts team of 5. Currently, we track assigned donor portfolios through an attribute and run a query to generate the lists.  Is this the best way?  Any tips or insights? Thanks in advance. 

John Heizer

Assign them as a Solicitor.

Allison Bergeron

Thanks. We do that.  What are your procedures beyond that?

John Heizer

You assign them as a Solicitor Relationship AND an Attribute?


What more are you looking for?  We run a variety of reports, as needed, based on that Solicitor Relationship.

Allison Bergeron

Right now, yes they have a solicitor relationship and an attribute that we call "Advancement Donor Portfolio."

We run the query to see the list of who is assigned to whom and we also classify them as suspect/prospect/donor in the comments section under the attribute. 


We don't have a true protocol for portfolio management and are looking to establish one.  For me, as a MGO, I want to be able to pull "my" list and provide updates on a weekly basis of the actions I've take to engage my people. Make sense?  Appreciate feedback and insights.  

Brian Davies

It sounds like you do not have the prospect tab. If that is the case I would suggest creating a "Classification" attribute and "Prospect Status" attribute. These are fields found on the prospect tab. For Classification we use: Major Gift Prospect, Annual Fund Only, Not a Prospect, Corp/Foundation Prospect, etc. For Prospect Status we use moves management stages: Needs Assignment, Identification, Qualification, Cultivation, Stewardship, Decline, Disqualify. By using solicitor assignments and these attributes you can track who is assigned vs who needs assignments and were they are in the fundraising cycle. If you have the prospect tab you can open proposals for the managed solicitations which will include ask amounts, expected amounts, deadlines, etc.

Allison Bergeron

We don't have the Prospect Tab. Is that something you'd recommend?  


thanks for your feedback. 

Tom Klimchak

We've had the Prospect Module (which includes the prospect tab) for years, but we only really started using it about 5 years ago.  If you already have a shop of 5 fundraisers I'd say it's definitely worth looking into.  The prospect module/tab includes a lot of things specifically for major gift prospecting and it does reduce the number of attributes you end up needing to use.


Here's a PDF guide to the Prospect Module so you can get an idea of all the functionality: https://www.blackbaud.com/files/support/guides/re7ent/prospect.pdf


It allows you to track various prospect and wealth ratings, statuses, financial information, giving preferences, gifts to other organizations and has a pretty thorough proposal tracking system built in. 


I don't remember it being that expensive in the grand scheme of things.  It is, generally, pretty easy to create queries off most of that data.  Proposals are not a "top level" data record (they're attached to Constituent records) so you sometimes get duplicate records when pulling those.  We a team of about 7 Development Officers and we can't imagine running our major gifts without it.  Good luck!

Judy Spigarelli

Does anyone without the Prospect Module use Actions for tracking?

Kim Raftery

We used the Actions tab for a $12 million campaign from 2012 - 2016.  It works, but you have to assign a solicitor for each action if you want any of your canned action reports to make sense.  We have since added the Prospect tab, but if people aren't entering their contact reports, etc. it doesn't matter what you are using - it will be a struggle.