Best Practice for Assigning Fundraiser to constituent

Terrie Priest

I am looking for a policy or guideline for assigning employee fundraiser to specific constituents.   Does anyone have a policy they would be willing to share?? 

Thanks!

JoAnn Strommen

Our gift officers are assigned by geographic areas. While they already have a relationship with many of their prospects, our prospect researcher also suggests additional names based on her work.

Jason Chmura

Our donors are generally assigned based on geographic area, however we also take into account the prospect/donor's level of capacity based on input from our researcher (if the level of donor merits such input) 


Other factors that we utilize are:

Type of fundraiser (are they focused on fundraising efforts at a principal gift level, or major gift level.

Size of fundraiser's portfolio vs their peers.

Personality of fundraiser comparative to donor's (what is known about the donor)

Fundraiser's goals and composition of portfolio. Are they working primarily with most trusted long-term donors, or are they working with a lot of prospective donors?


Obviously no donor comes with a manual as to what their interests, relationships, and capacity/inclination are, but its good to consider what you know and be flexible to how you assign a donor by looking at the whole picture. 


You don't want to end up with one fundraiser who just so happens to manage say New York, New Jersey and Connecticut (where a bulk of donors may be coming from) end up with hundreds of donors and prospects and not effectively be able to cultivate and steward them. 


Portfolio value and equity are important for team dynamics, as well as fundraiser experience, tenure with organization, and their interpersonal dynamics.

Faith Murray

Our fundraisers are assigned primarily by the donor's interest in giving. We are a just a mid-size org, so we don't have a ton of solicitors to split up geographic areas. Our CEO gets our top major donors (above a certain dollar amount) within the limits of his portfolio size. Our college President takes the top College-focused donors, with an assistant staff assigned to help in stewardship calls. Our Planned Giving officer gets any prospects that have a dual-tag of Major Gift and Planned Gift prospect. The rest are up to me and another part-time staff person I recruit occasionally for assistance. As the only dedicated Major Gifts person in our org, there's no way I can do it all myself; so I rely heavily on building team participation across the campus: recruiting volunteer solicitors, assigning each person's portfolio, creating Action plans for everyone's portfolios, and then filling in any gaps left over.