Moves Management: Steps Toward Donor Acquisition

Set goals. To help motivate fundraisers and track their progress, define a series of short, intermediate, and long-term benchmarks for your moves management process. Determine what you're trying to accomplish with moves management — such as total dollars rasied or the total number of moves per prospect within a specific time frame — and set measurable, quantifiable goals to track their progress and verify completion.

Plan which information to track. After you set benchmarks and define your objectives, determine whether the information your development officers currently track helps achieve those goals, and whether additional details would help cultivate relationships with donors and prospects. For more personal relationships, consider a constituent's biographical details, hobbies and interests, relationships, and giving history. With these details, you can personalize interactions and tailor moves to each prospect or donor. You can view and track a constituent's personal information (and much more!) on their record. For more details, see the Constituent Records Help.

Track actions taken. In addition to a prospect's personal information, we recommend you track the actions a fundraiser takes to cultivate the relationship, such as phone calls and correspondence, personal meetings, and any tasks performed. These details help provide an overview of the constituent's relationship with your organization and can help plan and personalize their next moves. On a constituent's record, you can view and manage these tasks and interactions as actions. For more information, check out the Actions Help.

Establish your moves management process. After you determine which information to track, implement procedures to ensure its accuracy. Design a policy to save all constituent interactions and moves, and ensure everyone knows what to track. To help create an accurate, comprehensive view of your constituents, consolidate external information — such as spreadsheets of last year's donors and who attended a gala event — into Raiser's Edge NXT, where everyone can access and share. Once you implement a policy to track accurate information, build on that foundation for a full moves management process.

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  Determine how your organization identifies prospects, such as through giving history, wealth analytics, or word of mouth. Once prospects are identified, use internal and external research to rate their inclination and capacity to give, and keep their ratings current based on interactions and additional research. For more information, see the Prospect Research Help.
• To help transition prospects to engaged donors, assign them to fundraisers to cultivate their relationships. For more information, see the Fundraiser Assignments Help.
• To track constituents as they transition through your moves management process, set up statuses for each stage of your prospect pipeline, such as Identification, Qualification, and Cultivation. For more information, check out the Prospect Status Help.

For personal, attentive relationships and effective moves management, don't overload your fundraisers with too many relationships. to balance assignments, determine a fundraiser-to-prospect ratio based on your organization's goals, resources, time constraints, and needs. For example, to successfully manage their moves, we recommend each fundraiser have a certain number of prospects at various stages of the pipeline.