How many Actions do your Major Donors have in RE?

Chantel Kuli

This is just for curiosity's sake.

On average, how many actions do your major donors have logged? Tens? Hundreds?

Ryan Hyde

@Chantel Kuli Depends on the length of the relationship. I think a better metric is how many actions per year or month are your MG officers entering? I would suggest that a relationship that is being actively worked should have a minimum of maybe 8 actions per year (ymmv). If an officer has a full capacity donor load (125-ish), then you should see 1,000 actions per year entered per officer.

That's a rough estimate and is going to depend a lot on the nature of the relationships with each donor (some only want to be contacted at certain times of year) as well as the style of data entry the officer does (if they're integrated with gmail/outlook, does every email get recorded as a separate action? maybe!). But for back-of-the-napkin calculations, I think that's a decent starting point.

I'd love to see some other thoughts on this though

Faith Murray

@Chantel Kuli, I'd second what @Ryan Hyde suggested in terms of measuring per year. I also think his estimates are about on par. But, as he said, it depends on what kinds of actions you record. Do you record phone messages? Attempted calls? Each individual email or do you lump an entire email thread into one action?

Also, do you use Actions for anything besides major donor work? Many orgs use Actions to record events, minor stewardship mailings, data cleanup tasks, etc.

I would estimate that our major donors each get at least 3-10 actions each year, just from major donor work alone.

Chantel Kuli

@Faith Murray @Ryan Hyde thank you both - that's very interesting!

I'm currently grouping actions that are all based on the same basic “event” (like when in a 3-day span I received 4 calls from the same donor for the same donation).

Dariel Dixon

Like @Ryan Hyde and @Faith Murray mentioned, I think there are better metrics. It also determines on how you record actions. Faith mentioned email, but there's so many actions that may have follow up messages.

We have a lot of actions on our major donors, but a good percentage of those are playing phone tag. We also have a lot of automated actions such as bulk emails as well.

Trent Smither

@Ryan Hyde:

@Chantel Kuli Depends on the length of the relationship. I think a better metric is how many actions per year or month are your MG officers entering? I would suggest that a relationship that is being actively worked should have a minimum of maybe 8 actions per year (ymmv). If an officer has a full capacity donor load (125-ish), then you should see 1,000 actions per year entered per officer.

That's a rough estimate and is going to depend a lot on the nature of the relationships with each donor (some only want to be contacted at certain times of year) as well as the style of data entry the officer does (if they're integrated with gmail/outlook, does every email get recorded as a separate action? maybe!). But for back-of-the-napkin calculations, I think that's a decent starting point.

I'd love to see some other thoughts on this though

So, rough math, 1,000/officer = 1,000 / 48 work weeks = 20.83 per week. Rounding down to 20 for ease of calculation, 20 / 5 work days = 4 actions per day. Is that the/a right way to think about it? This seems totally doable, BUT, time consuming to enter or record, and will inevitably be hard to maintain seasonally. Maybe pad the numbers during busy months and seek out higher quality conversations during slower ones?