Proposal Statuses: Keeping Your Efforts on Track

Steve Stegelin

With Prospect Research Management, you use proposals to track your efforts to culitvate relationships with prospects and secure major gift opportunities. With this week's update to Raiser's Edge NXT, you can now track not only a proposal's current status but also a history of its previous statuses, for a full picture of the effort.

 

On a proposal's record, its status now appears under Proposal status (previously it appeared in the summary at the top of the record). From here, you can now view and manage the proposal's current status — such as Initial contact, Pending, or Accepted — as it moves through your solicitation process. To update the proposal's status, simply select Change status. When you update the status, you can choose where the proposal is in your solicitation process and when it entered that stage, and save any additional info about the change.

In addition to the current status, you can also quickly track — at a glance — previous statuses on a timeline. For details about a previous status, select Show status history. For each status, you can view when the proposal entered that stage (and for how long). To edit the details of a previous status, such as when it came into effect, select Edit this status from its menu. To remove a previous status, such as one added by accident, select Delete this status.

Admins: In the database view, you can set up the available proposal statuses from Tables in Configuration. In future releases, however, you'll be able to manage them in the web view, set how long a proposal should have each status, and automatically alert fundraisers when a proposal's stalled out in the solicitation process! To get ready, we recommend you determine the stages of your organization's solicitation process to help decide the available proposal statuses and how long each stage should take.


For more information about this feature, see the Proposal Status Help. For an explanation of the difference between proposal statuses in the web and database views, check out Proposal Status: Web or Database View? Help.