6 Essential Prospect Management Best Practices

Nonprofit development is a complicated undertaking. Sourcing and researching new prospects and funders, conducting initial and ongoing outreach, regularly re-qualifying prospects, and developing solicitation strategies—your major gift officers have a lot on their plates!

What unifies all these separate tasks? Effective relationship management.

The Type A personalities among us might be naturals at staying organized, juggling complex relationships, and keeping track of touchpoints. But even then, all these tasks are undoubtedly challenging. Thankfully, these are learnable skills—you just need the right resources and strategies. 

One particular strategy can make a massive difference in staying organized: Development professionals at nonprofits of all sizes should create and rely on prospect portfolios to achieve their goals. 

What are prospect portfolios? How do you use them to drive impact for your organization? Let’s take a closer look.

What is prospect management?

Prospect portfolio management is how a nonprofit’s development staff keeps track of and manages relationships with donors and prospects at various giving levels. Organized portfolios ensure that all donors and prospects can be properly prioritized and assigned to gift officers who will own and manage the relationships.

Utilizing prospect management best practices brings a few important benefits:

• A more organized, less cluttered moves management process for your team

• Consistency for donors and prospects

• Clearer views of the state of relationships, the progress of solicitations, and other key details about individuals

• An improved ability to sort and organize donors by their priority and likelihood to give

Together, these benefits translate to more efficient and effective fundraising. Plus, by taking a similar approach to organizing and assigning your relationships with grantmakers, you can drastically improve your efforts to manage relationships with funders, too.

Review our guide to prospect portfolio management for a deeper dive into these development tools, why they matter, and how to use them.

Portfolio management best practices

Let’s say you’re tasked with improving your nonprofit’s prospect portfolio management process or implementing one for the first time. What information and strategic necessities should you keep in mind?

Consider these essential elements of an effective approach:

• Appropriate Portfolio Size

• Clearly Defined Policies

• Ongoing Research

• Up-to-Date Metrics

• Consistent Donor Qualification

• Collaboration and Communication

1. Appropriate Portfolio Size

Gift officers use prospect portfolios to organize and manage their stewardship priorities. Still, careful thought needs to go into exactly how many prospects are sorted into each portfolio.

Start with your organization’s list of all prospects at various giving levels. Then, divide them into individual portfolios based on these potential factors:

• Team capacity. The size of your development team will naturally limit the number of individual portfolios that you can feasibly create and manage. 

• Time constraints. How much time can your development staff devote to stewardship? Are their roles focused solely on fundraising, or do they wear many hats? For some organizations, like independent schools or smaller nonprofits, the mix of fundraisers’ responsibilities should certainly be taken into account when assigning portfolios.

• Organizational and individual priorities. What are your organization’s current or long-term strategic fundraising priorities? For example, are you focused on securing more planned gifts? Is one gift officer tasked specifically with mid-level giving? These considerations can impact how prospects are divvied up among fundraisers.

It’s recommended that portfolios range in size from 25 to 200 prospects, depending on the factors above. It’s important to recognize that while smaller teams may need to take on larger portfolios, it doesn’t mean they’ll have time to stay in touch with all those prospects. Finding an efficient, sustainable balance without overloading your team is key to success. Your qualification process will play a critical role in ensuring staff can most effectively manage their time.

2. Clearly Defined Policies

Concrete guidelines will keep the entire prospect management process organized and efficient, especially in organizations with larger development teams. For example, as part of your portfolio management process, you should define:

• Data input protocols to ensure consistency

• Qualification schedules or cadences

• Qualification and disqualification criteria for particular portfolios (more on qualification and criteria below)

• Protocols for adding new prospects to portfolios as they’re discovered

• Protocols for moving prospects between portfolios as your team learns more about them

• Gift crediting policies that encourage fundraisers to collaborate on relationship-building

Clearing up gray areas around exactly how you’ll use and manage your portfolios will allow your team to better focus on outreach, stewardship, and laying out a compelling case for support rather than getting bogged down in logistics.

3. Ongoing Research

Once you establish prospect portfolios and policies for using them effectively, how do you source new prospects for gift officers to engage and steward? Through ongoing prospect research.

Researchers (whether dedicated in-house staff, development staff who handle a variety of tasks, or outsourced professionals) should regularly screen and rate your nonprofit’s new donors to identify those qualified for particular portfolios. Wealth screening is an easy first step, followed by deeper research into prospect connections and affinities. By the time a prospect is sorted into a gift officer’s portfolio, it should be clear that that individual warrants personalized attention.

It’s also essential at this stage to integrate sector-specific insights. Giving habits and ideal prospect personas can vary greatly among different types of organizations. Not to mention, the relationships that donors have with different organizations and the giving motivations they bring to the table naturally differ based on the role that the organization plays or has played in their lives.

For example, higher education institutions see high rates of non-cash giving, particularly gifts of stock. Alumni giving programs target past grads who may be especially tuned into and interested in financially savvy ways of giving. Alternately, hospitals’ grateful patient fundraising programs tap into very nuanced giving motivations that require a distinct prospecting approach.

Whatever your nonprofit’s sector or mission area, take the time to consider how it might shape donors’ relationships with your giving programs. Look at your past fundraising data, read industry resources, and talk to current major donors to continually refine your understanding of who chooses to give and why.

4. Up-to-Date Metrics

Along with using prospect research and wealth screening insights to initially source prospects, make sure to keep this information up to date over time. Review your current prospect research approach and protocols to ensure you actively collect and update information like:

• Employer and job title

• Address and contact info

• Duration of relationship with organization

• Number of gifts given

• Current lifetime value

• Capacity (via wealth screening or in-house scoring)

• Date and value of last gift

• Date and value of largest gift

These metrics will cover your bases when creating donor profiles for prospect portfolio management, but there are many others you can include. Sources for this information include your own engagement data from interactions with prospects, external research and wealth screening services, and anecdotal takeaways from conversations.

The key point, however, is that successful long-term portfolio management is built on updated, well-organized, and truly useful data. Invest in your organization’s data management and hygiene capabilities if needed—it will pay off!

5. Consistent Donor Qualification

Ongoing screening and research provide you with a steady pipeline of prospects to add to portfolios, but what about maintaining and updating your portfolios once they’re full? 

Your gift officers must consistently revisit prospects to ensure they’re still interested and can give a gift of the intended size and type.

This process is called donor qualification and should be ongoing. Effective qualification ensures that portfolios include prospects who are truly able and interested in giving in a particular way at any given time, improving fundraising efficiency and prospect experiences. 

Use specific criteria to roughly gauge a prospect’s current capacity and likelihood to give. These criteria might include:

• Specific wealth markers that are pre-determined by your organization and recently gathered

• Active engagement with the organization, like having had a meaningful touchpoint (event attendance, conversation with a gift officer, etc.) within a specific timeframe

• Length of relationship with the organization

• Lack of developments in their personal lives that might prohibit a large gift right now, like losing a job or suffering a major health issue

• Current commitment to the mission, or how the prospect currently prioritizes it among their other philanthropic priorities

Some of these criteria can be easily quantified and gathered, while others will require gift officers to ask strategic questions during meetings to learn more about prospects’ lives at the current moment. When you develop qualification and disqualification criteria, train your development staff to stay on the lookout for relevant insights and anecdotes as they arise, as well.

Again, we highly recommend making re-qualification an ongoing practice at your organization. 

A quarterly refresh of prospect portfolios using wealth screening tools and your CRM, plus a concerted push to ask key questions about how things are currently going in prospects’ lives, should help immensely. It’s a recurring investment of your time but one that pays dividends in fundraising efficiency and revenue down the line!

6. Collaboration and Communication

Fostering and tracking donor relationships can get complicated, with multiple teams and various tools at your organization all playing different roles over time. Open lines of communication and effective use of technology are essential for driving development results with prospect portfolios.

Consider the full lifecycle of this example prospect relationship:

1. The donor is acquired through consistent lower-level giving.

2. They are then identified by researchers using wealth screening tools as a prospect for mid-level or major giving.

3. The donor is sorted into a mid-level giving stewardship cadence and begins giving larger gifts as their relationship with the organization grows.

4. The donor’s strong affinity then makes them a qualified major prospect.

5. After building a relationship with a gift officer, the organization determines that the prospect will likely be more interested in making a planned gift.

6. The prospect is introduced to a gift officer tasked with stewarding planned gifts.

7. They later meet with the planned gift officer and an organizational leader to formalize a bequest to the organization.

Think of everyone at the nonprofit who helped develop this relationship: frontline fundraisers, researchers, fundraisers focused on mid-level stewardship, a major gift officer, a planned gift officer, a developmental director, and an organizational leader. Wealth screening tools, various prospecting data sources, and a central database also play pivotal roles.

Breaking Down Development Silos

This brings us to one key pitfall that commonly hampers organizations’ attempts to strengthen their portfolio management processes: Communication silos.

When the flow of information between teams is blocked, or different teams are misaligned on the purpose of certain activities, the entire workflow will suffer. Consider these silo-busting best practices for creating more open lines of communication:

• Ensure that your internal technology, workflows, and data reporting protocols actively support cross-team communication rather than hinder it. Every team should speak the same tech language.

• Clearly assign program and prospect ownership so that anyone can quickly determine who should be given what information.

• Educate your entire organization on how prospect relationships will be identified, elevated, and collaborated on. For example, communications should clearly understand what the development team does and why, and vice-versa.

• Regularly reinforce this understanding and check that technology is being used correctly. Actively identify communication silos as they emerge over time.

When the necessary teams are fully aligned on what’s needed for effective development processes, the entire organization benefits—not only through improved fundraising results and efficiency but also through improved employee satisfaction and retention. Less time spent chasing down data, sending emails, and feeling frustrated means more time driving impact for your shared mission.

Prospect portfolios are how nonprofits stay organized when tackling the complexities of major gift fundraising, moves management, and donor stewardship. And as with any complex undertaking, an organized approach plays a huge role in your ultimate success.

It’s always worthwhile to revisit your current development protocols and systems to check for gaps, redundancies, internal silos, and other efficiency blockers.

This blog is an original work of the attributed author and is shared with permission via Foundant Technologies' website for informative purposes only as part of our educational content in the philanthropic sector. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in this text belong solely to the author and do not necessarily reflect Foundant's stance on this topic. If you have questions or comments, please reach out to our team.