Do your fundraisers use Planned Actions?

Lucy Match

Hello! I am a prospect manager for a team of 26 fundraisers. I'm trying to get the fundraisers to use Planned Actions (just future-dated regular actions) to be more proactive in their moves management. Most are resistant to this idea as up until recently, RE records have been a place of historical action. Does anyone have an organization that utilizes Planned Actions in the way I am referring to? If so, I would love to hear about your journey, successes, and places of opportunity.

Alex Wong

@Lucy Match
Yes we try to implement this as well. Fundraiser most are rejective of this idea.

We got maybe 2 out of ~30 that is actually working it and they benefits from the organized fundraising effort. Others are not following suite even seeing the success of those that does.

Lucy Match

@Alex Wong thank you for your reply! I understand and I feel the pain or the non-listeners.

Dan Snyder

@Lucy Match I have worked with a number of fundraisers over the years and while we have tried to explain the benefit of the method you described, none of them have taken advantage. I think some of it is that they are not used to planning that far in advance but as the relationship develops they record the actions (hopefully) when necessary.

Lucy Match

@Dan Snyder thank you for your reply. What a frustrating issue…I'm holding out hope I'll hear from one organization that is using this proactive method successfully. ?

Dan Snyder

@Lucy Match Honestly, I suspect that unless there are some performance metrics or other “incentive” to add them it is hard to get buy-in.

Karen Diener

@Lucy Match I honestly think that Dan nailed it. I've worked with a few dozen major gift teams, and very few individuals adopt this.

It can be hard to change habits, and that is probably the biggest issue. So what incentivizes change? Metrics, management, expectations, organization culture, etc. I used to talk about it being a top-down management issue, but I really do think that teams need to hold each other accountable.

Bill Connors has an excellent video on this, from one of his BBCON sessions. It is more about using the Work Center of webview, but Actions are a part of that. It might be a useful resource helping fundraisers and their managers understand how to leverage RENXT.

Good luck!!

Lucy Match

@Dan Snyder you are probably correct!

Lucy Match

@Karen Diener thank you, Karen! I will check this video out.

Dariel Dixon

@Lucy Match Creating planned actions is cool in theory, but things change so often and quickly that sometimes in our situation it create more work than normal. That said, we do sometimes use planned actions to populate reminders for our fundraisers. All of these are some type of mass action that are generally imported in, and aren't super specific.

I agree with most of the other posters. Changing culture takes time. What incentive do the fundraisers have to creating these actions proactively, especially if those actions change? Is this part of a new way of reporting or will it just make someone else's job easier?

Vered Siegel

@Lucy Match This has been one of the hardest types of reticence to crack in my time in consulting - at Blackbaud and outside of it. I've never completely understood why, since the Work Center and working out of one's portfolio makes it so easy.

One thing I can say with certainty is that organizations that are doing this work well have an established culture of portfolio management that will remove a prospect from a portfolio if a fundraiser doesn't have a plan for them - and the way RENXT shows that plan is with a minimum of one future Action. I've said enough times that my clients can probably chant it with me: a portfolio is not a parking lot. If there's a constituent in a portfolio without a plan, that's not a portfolio, that's a wishlist. You need a plan to turn those wishes into fundraising revenue.

If there is leadership buy-in and there's reticence on the part of the fundraisers, one option is to sit everyone down together in a room with their laptops and go through everyone's portfolios on a big screen one by one, and put next Actions in place at that time, so they can maintain those over the next year. Monthly, you have a meeting with all the fundraisers with a portfolio and do it again and again. It takes a lot of time, and your fundraisers would perhaps prefer not to be in that meeting. But if they kept all the constituents in their portfolios updated with next Actions, the meeting would take zero minutes because there'd be nothing to update as a group with oversight. I have seen organizations go from agonizing all day meetings to a quick touch base and out, within the span of a year, but it takes discipline and strong leadership.

Lucy Match

@Dariel Dixon thanks for your reply. I have heard this as a reason not to add planned actions from my fundraisers before, I understand that view, but it's good to know it's not just my team saying this.

Lucy Match

@Vered Siegel these are great suggestions on how to help change the culture around actions. I would love to implement something similar to these meetings, perhaps in a smaller shop it's possible. Unfortunately, most likely 1 or 2 of my 5 leaders will support this push so I need to decide if the juice is worth the squeeze!

Kathy Savory

@Lucy Match The Grants & Institutional Giving team at my org robustly uses Planned Actions to record application deadlines, reporting deadlines, RFP open dates, and future check-ins. I think their work lends itself to this kind of forward-thinking and tracking. Our Individual Giving Team only adds future actions sporadically.

Lucy Match

@Kathy Savory, thank you. This makes a lot of sense. We have a grants team; I'll check in with them and see if they are using actions in this way.

Cheryl Cummings

@Lucy Match
We use Planned Actions heavily - some fundraising teams more than others - but all our fundraisers use them to some degree. Because we are always planning strategic next touches with donors and prospects, this is a great tool to generate and manage one's “to do” list. It sounds like your fundraisers must be using something outside of RE to manage their fundraising strategy, which we culturally discourage. Some fundraisers were more comfortable working off their calendars, but now with a click of a button in Actions, one can add a planned Action to your own (& others') calendar.

Of course, for grant management, planned Actions are essential. Once a grant agreement is signed all future narrative and financial reports are added into the constituent record as planned Actions. Much of the culture toward working this way has cemented over time from the fundraising team's benefit of the “Action Detail Report” that can and is regularly run out of RE NXT database view. This report is used for team meetings as well as strategic conversations by our fundraisers.

There is also a monthly Action snapshot report run out of webview that is automatically emailed to our VP of Dev the 1st of every month that shows Action numbers for each fundraiser. Between the reports available for value added meetings and some sense of accountability, there is fairly consistent buy in. Training is also part of the cultural shift. Even though adding Actions is fairly intuitive, it is important to make sure everyone is trained on when, how, and why to enter them and what fields are key to accurate reporting. It is also key to customize the Action “Type” table so it is meaningful to all users.