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Effective Ways to use Likelihood Field in Opportunities

Clarissa Rice Hampton

Our MGOs use opportunities to track outstanding and planned asks to their donors. Our opportunity tracking process is robust, but we've yet to define how we use the Likelihood field on Opportunities.

Would appreciate examples of how other teams use this field, why, and other ways of using this field that your team has considered/tried.

Thanks!

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Joe Moretti

We use it as percentages, that is 100%, 80%, 70% and so on. But to be truthful, it has no bearing on anything and most times, no one even wants to see it.

Elizabeth Johnson

We use 1_High, 2_Moderate, 3_Low. Numbers help us sort. We used to have 5 codes but chosing between High and Very Likely, and Unlikely and Low was not worth the time so about 7 months ago I dropped it to 3 and it was very easy to clean that up retroactively. It helps us in our reporting and prioritization.

Clarissa Rice Hampton

Thank you @Joe Moretti and @Elizabeth Johnson.

It sounds like a more limited range is more likely to be used than a wider range of options. @Elizabeth Johnson I'm wondering if the Likelihood for each Opportunity is fixed or if it is updated based on gift officer actions or donor engagement. Like, if in conversation with an MGO, a longtime donor shares that they're going to be reducing giving or directing giving elsewhere this year, would your team downgrade Likelihood from High to Low? Or, is the Likelihood static once entered?

Bill Connors

My experience is comparable to Joe's. As a consultant, my typical recommendation is to not use the field at all. Unlike some other systems that do forecasting or pipeline management by multiplying this value, like Joe's percentages, times an amount, RE doesn't work that way. Instead, it focuses its pipeline forecasting from the Expected Amount field and does nothing with Likelihood. As we want our fundraisers fundraising and not doing data entry, as I said I like to make Likelihood an unnecessary field and instead ask fundraisers to focus that kind of thinking into giving us (really, management) a thoughtful Expected Amount value.

Elizabeth Johnson

https://community.blackbaud.com/discussion/comment/316424#Comment_316424

It is relatively static. If someone was High or Moderate and we find out they aren't going to give to that particular ask it gets closed out rather than dropping it down.

I will say the place where it is most helpful - when it is low our expected amount is zero. This allows me to look for issues with data entry. These are typically moonshot or prospects that haven't given and no longer have children attending out school. We also use opportunities to store our annual fund ask amounts and without the likelihood score the amount expected when running reports would be wildly over estimated.

I think there is a lot of truth in what @Joe Moretti and @Bill Connors say for most organizations, but our system has been working for years and now that I have taken out that one minor pain point it has gotten even better.

Robin Griffin

Similar to some of the others, we use percentage ranges: Unlikely/Unknown 0-24%, Low 25-49%, Good 50-74%, and Excellent 75-100%. And we use it in the way Bill says would be ideal—as a multiplier of Ask Amount to determine/align with Expected Amount (managed manually, of course). But, instead of requiring our fundraisers to provide a random Expected Amount, we ask them to provide one of those four range terms, then utilize the lowest percentage in that range as a default value. Fundraisers are still welcome to provide a dollar amount even up to 100% of the Ask Amount, but most find it easier to just pick one of those terms and let us data folks take care of the math. We then utilize the Expected Amount for all of our projections/forecasting.

Teddi Taylor

We use a similar scoring system as @Elizabeth Johnson. We have 4:
A - Very Likely
B - Likely
C - Unsure
D - Very Unlikely.

We do not currently do any calculations based on likelihood, though our Dev Director uses it in conjunction with Expected Amount for forecasting.

Heather Jewell

This is the guidance we give, leaving it up to fundraisers to select:

100%: proposal has been accepted. Gift agreement is signed.
75%: proposal is submitted and is currently in negotiation.
50%: prospect is in cultivation with the proposal to be submitted within the next 3-6 months.
25%: prospect is in cultivation, but progress has stalled; proposal has been submitted but there is no feedback from the prospect, etc.
5%: prospect has been qualified but no cultivation has taken place

We then weight opportunities for projections in external models.