Solicitor Types

@Ellen Callahan How likely will it be that someone would have 3 or more solicitors? Will you be able to easily use all of these types in your reporting?

@Ellen Callahan:

Hi all, I saw some previous threads from 2013/2016/2017 about Solicitor Types that were helpful, but wanted to see if there is more recent advice on Solicitor Types best practices.

I work for a university and right now, we are going to start a larger moves management system. I understand it was advised in the past to potentially use “Prospect Manager," “Secondary Prospect Manager," and former PM/SPM as solicitor types and then use constituent attributes to code a person as a major gift prospect, etc. That won't really work for our needs because a person in our office could be managing a prospect to maintain the relationship we have with them on their scholarship, but another person in our office could be managing/solicitating the same prospect for a major gift. So, we were thinking to add a variety of solicitor types, but I don't want to create a mess in the database and have too many different solicitor types. We were brainstorming the following types:

• Major Gift Prospect Manager
• Scholarship Prospect Manager
• Planned Gift Prospect Manager
• Alumni Engagement Prospect Manager
• Campaign Prospect Manager (we are going into a campaign and want to code potential major donors to the campaign)
• Annual Gift Prospect Manager
• Athletics Gift Prospect Manager
• Secondary Major Gift Prospect Manager (believe there should only be a secondary for major gift reasons)
• Volunteer Manger (to manage constituents that may want to volunteer as guest speakers, etc. at the university)

How do you all handle a prospect needing relationships with multiple solicitors for various reasons?

Thank you!!

This feels like a lot to me, and my gut reaction is that you will do exactly what you are trying to avoid. I've typically worked with organizations who end up moving away from a highly specialized set of solicitor types because it is too much to manage (a lot of turnover and internal transfers), and the specificity of types ends up being meaningless.

Some context might help, such as how many people (both staff and volunteers) would be solicitors, and how many would possibly be assigned to a prospect at one time. Do you have enough communication with, for instance, the Athletics department to know when staff turns over? Is the expectation that the Major Gift Prospect Manager will check the solicitor tab to see every other assignment, and reach out to them before communicating with the donor? What are the roles / responsibilities for each the solicitors with these types right now, relative to the donor and relative to each other? I'm working with an organization right now that only has a small number of types, but there is confusion about how each should interact with the donor / prospect.

Just a few things to consider! Setting up a structure is one thing, but operationalizing it tends to be quite another.

@Ellen Callahan I can't agree with @Karen Diener much more. This seems like a lot. It's unclear as to your goal here. Are you planning for these roles or do they already exist? I also think that it may not be necessary to attach solicitor types to all fundraisers; some solicitations come outside of a portfolio or an assignment and may just be due to the type of solicitation. A lot of this is based off your structure. With so many types of fundraisers, I would find this structure very confusing, and I'm not sure if it matters for reporting purposes, but may have more impact on portfolio management.