Prospect Tab in RE

Emily Russell

Hello everyone!

We have the prospects tab in Raiser's Edge but my organization has never used it. My boss wants us to learn how it works. Does anyone have any suggestions where to start?

Austen Brown

@Emily Russell - Here's a KB Article with more info on what the tab can do:

If you have RE NXT, proposals become “Opportunities” and have some of the fields listed in the DBV Proposal. Since most gift officers are likely to work out of Web View, I recommend creating a standard data process around what's available in that view.

Faith Murray

@Emily Russell, Austen is right - most MGOs work out of webview. So you'll need to partially orient that direction for this feature. That being said, your Gift entry personnel might need to function here, as well as possibly append importing, so you'll need to be fluent in database view as well.

There are a ton of ways to use the Prospect tab. We have experimented with all of the below, but of course some features will be more useful for some orgs than for others.

• The Proposal sub-tab is really the workhorse function here. When you plan to solicit a major donor, you enter the ask here along with the Solicitor. You can link the Proposal to Actions as you go through solicitation steps. When the gift is made, that also gets linked to the Proposal and marked completed. It acts as a full tracking mechanism for MGO work. There have been other conversations in the Community about how to set up the fields in a Proposal. For status, we generally use Planning, Pending, Realized, and Declined. So you can also track the ratio of realized to declined asks when evaluating your MGO performance.
• Keep custom ratings info in the Ratings sub-tab. NXT provides its own ratings, but you can add your own here, including DonorSearch info, wealth screening, Persona profiles, affinity ratings, etc. Useful for capital campaign prospecting or major gift ask estimation.
• Gifts to other organizations, and Philanthropic Interests. This is where you would import data from wealth search engines about gifts to political organizations and advocacy groups. You could also manually enter data if you see that your donor has given on a fellow org's public annual report or sponsor page. Useful for determining donor interests if a relationship is not yet strong.
• Financial Information. This is where you will import or add information about a donor's real estate value, estimated annual salary, or stock holdings … again, usually imported from wealth screening info. Useful for bequest solicitations.
• Chronology is a buried and oft overlooked spot, but it shows a timeline of appeals, actions, and events in the donor's record so that you can ascertain how the donor is responding to your interactions. I'm not sure you can really enter anything here, and I don't think this feature is visible in webview.

Lucy Ruiz

@Emily Russell If you are new to opportunities, you will definitely want to make yourself familiar with the fields and options available. I would say the primary fields are purpose, status, rating and dates. Become familiar with the types of outputs available in NXT. If you go to report centre you will see all the metrics related to opportunities.

If your team uses moves management, these stages are Opportunity statuses. Actions help will move the stages/statuses along.

Lee Grisham

@Faith Murray The Chronology is now the Timeline tile. We discovered this the other day. It isn't very clear at first, but if you take a look at dbv and NXT side by side, you can see how they overlap. Not really very useful at a glance as it is in NXT. ?

Joe Moretti

@Lee Grisham I have not found that much regarding opportunities/proposals training. I have 4 Status Steps (Step 1 Planning, Step 2 Asked/Pending, Step 3 Approved/Accepted, Step 4 Completed/Closed and two more Withdrawn & Declined. In Database View, I have made the Name, Purpose, Fundraiser, Status, Ask Amount and Ask Date REQUIRED (you cannot do this in RE NXT). Each step the Ask Date gets changed to that date. Once the Gift comes in, the gift is linked to the proposal and moves to Step 4. My rule is that all opportunities/proposals should be done in Database View, since RE NXT only has two required fields and uploading any media to the proposal does not carry over to database view if it is done in RE NXT. Below is a sample. I am not a fan of RE NXT, but the Opportunity List in RE NXT is a good reporting tool for this.

Emily Russell

@Faith Murray
Thank you so much! This is very helpful.

Miki Martin

@Emily Russell I would definitely go off suggestions here. I know my old organization was in the same boat this past fall. I did take a couple of courses from Blackbaud U (I would share links or names but I currently do not have access to it since I am not under an org) that did help with the generalities. You will definitely want to set up some standards and such before jumping into using Opportunities.

Faith Murray

@Lee Grisham, oh I see! I had not had reason to ever expand the Timeline panel in NXT and so had not made the connection. Thanks for the tip. I wonder if they plan to eventually expand the dots in NXT timeline view to make them hoverable.

Karen Diener

@Emily Russell:

Hello everyone!

We have the prospects tab in Raiser's Edge but my organization has never used it. My boss wants us to learn how it works. Does anyone have any suggestions where to start?

Do you have webview or only database view? The Prospects tab in database view has been broken up and reorganized a bit in webview, but I think webview is the better place to use it.

This is a fabulous webinar that Blackbaud offered a couple of years ago. Although it has been awhile, the content is still relevant. While the focus is all on webview, I believe it references database view as well.

I would definitely stat with this, and then review some of the great suggestions in this thread. The webinar will help you understand the structure and how the Prospects / Opportunities tab was designed to be used along with actions and gifts, and the suggestions here will give you a little more context for how to apply everything in your work.

Karen

Delphine Rocher-Lewis

@Emily Russell As Miki mentioned, I highly recommend taking a few Blackbaud University courses such as Prospect Management, Best Practices : Moves Management and Fundraising : Major Giving. A good intro to the Prospect Tab!

Karen Diener

@Emily Russell I realized that I wrote a lengthy response and then never identified the webinar I mentioned. It is here:

Emily Russell

@Karen Diener

I have access to web view and database view. Do you remember the name of the webinar?

Karen Diener

@Emily Russell:

@Karen Diener

I have access to web view and database view. Do you remember the name of the webinar?

I just posted that this morning, so you'll see it if you review the thread in the Community.