Nonprofit development is a complicated undertaking. Between sourcing and researching new prospects and funders, conducting initial and ongoing outreach, regularly re-qualifying prospects, and developing solicitation strategies, your major gift officers have a lot on their plates!
What unifies all these separate tasks? Effective relationship management.
While the Type A personalities among us might be naturals at staying organized, juggling complex relationships, and keeping track of continuous touchpoints, it’s all still undoubtedly challenging. These are thankfully learnable skills—you just need the right resources and strategies on your side.
Development professionals at nonprofits of all sizes should create and rely on prospect portfolios to stay organized and achieve their goals. What are prospect portfolios? How do you use them to drive impact for your organization? Let’s take a closer look.
Prospect portfolio management is the process through which a nonprofit’s development staff keeps track of and manages its relationships with donors and prospects at various giving levels. Organized portfolios ensure that all donors and prospects can be properly prioritized and assigned to gift officers who will own and manage the relationships.
Effective portfolio management brings a few important benefits:
Together, these benefits translate to more efficient and effective fundraising. And by taking a similar approach to organizing and assigning your relationships with grantmakers, you can drastically improve your efforts to manage relationships with funders, too.
Review our guide to prospect portfolio management for a deeper dive into these development tools and why they matter.
Let’s say you’re tasked with improving your nonprofit’s prospect portfolio management process or implementing one for the first time. Consider these essential elements of an effective approach:
Gift officers use prospect portfolios to organize and manage their stewardship priorities. Still, careful thought needs to go into exactly how many prospects are sorted into each portfolio.
You’ll start with your organization’s list of all prospects at various giving levels. They should then be divided into individual portfolios based on a number of potential factors:
It’s recommended that portfolios range in size from 25-200 prospects, depending on the factors above. It’s important to recognize that while smaller teams may need to take on larger portfolios, it doesn’t mean they’ll have time to stay in touch with all those prospects. Finding an efficient, sustainable balance without overloading your team is key to success.
Concrete guidelines are important for keeping the entire prospect management process organized and efficient, especially in organizations with larger development teams. For example, as part of your portfolio management process, you should define:
Clearing up gray areas around exactly how your portfolios are to be used and managed will allow your team to better focus on outreach, stewardship, and laying out a compelling case for support rather than getting bogged down in logistics.
Once you establish prospect portfolios and policies for using them effectively, how do you source new prospects for gift officers to engage and steward? Through ongoing prospect research.
Researchers (whether dedicated in-house staff, development staff who handle a variety of tasks, or outsourced professionals) should regularly screen and rate your nonprofit’s new donors to identify those qualified for particular portfolios. Wealth screening is an easy first step, followed by deeper research into prospect connections and affinities. By the time a prospect is sorted into a gift officer’s portfolio, it should be clear that that individual warrants personalized attention.
Along with using prospect research and wealth screening insights to initially source prospects, make sure to keep this information up to date over time. Review your current prospect research approach and protocols to ensure you’re actively collecting and updating information like:
These metrics will cover your bases when creating donor profiles for prospect portfolio management, but there are many others you can include. Sources for this information include your own engagement data from interactions with prospects, external research and wealth screening services, and anecdotal takeaways from conversations.
The key point, however, is that successful long-term portfolio management is built on updated, well-organized, and truly useful data.
Ongoing screening and research provide you with a steady pipeline of prospects to add to portfolios, but what about maintaining and updating your portfolios once they’re full? Your gift officers will need to consistently revisit prospects to ensure they’re still interested and able to give a gift of the intended size and type.
This process is called donor qualification and should be an ongoing activity conducted by gift officers. This ensures that portfolios are made up of prospects who are truly able and interested in giving in a particular way at any given time, improving fundraising efficiency and prospect experiences.
Fostering and tracking donor relationships can get complicated, with multiple teams and various tools at your organization all playing different roles over time. Open lines of communication and effective use of technology are essential for driving development results with prospect portfolios.
Consider the full lifecycle of this example prospect relationship:
Think of everyone at the nonprofit who had a hand in developing this relationship: frontline fundraisers, researchers, fundraisers focused on mid-level stewardship, a major gift officer, a planned gift officer, a developmental director, and an organizational leader. Wealth screening tools, various prospecting data sources, and a central database all play pivotal roles along the way, as well.
Create open lines of communication between teams and educate your organization on how prospect relationships are to be identified, elevated, and collaborated on. Regularly reinforce this understanding and check that technology is being used correctly. Making these standard parts of your overall portfolio management process will go a long way to support your efforts.
As with any complex undertaking, taking an organized approach plays a huge role in your ultimate success. Prospect portfolios are how nonprofits stay organized when tackling the complexities of major gift fundraising, moves management, and donor stewardship.
It’s always worthwhile to revisit your current development protocols and systems to check for gaps, redundancies, internal silos, and other efficiency blockers.
This blog is an original work of the attributed author and is shared with permission via Foundant Technologies' website for informative purposes only as part of our educational content in the philanthropic sector. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in this text belong solely to the author and do not necessarily reflect Foundant's stance on this topic. If you have questions or comments, please reach out to our team.
Aaron Dahlstrom is the Vice President of Digital Marketing at Graham-Pelton. Creative and considerate, Aaron plans and executes Graham-Pelton’s presence across all digital mediums, ensuring that those who invest their time engaging with the firm experience the timely thought leadership and bold approach audiences have come to appreciate.
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