Fundraising portfolio management helps your fundraising team see past current fiscal year goals to build your fundraising program over time. This week on #WiserWithWisely we’ll cover how to manage your portfolio year on year and how Wisely fundraising portfolio management software can help cultivate and steward donors and prospects with multi-year moves management.
Make sure your team is participating in best practices for fundraising portfolio management year on year with these tips to get the most revenue growth out of your fundraising portfolio.
Clean-Up Your Data
Clean data and good data management policies are critical for maintaining your fundraising portfolio over time. It’s natural that you may have donors and prospects in your fundraising portfolio who have lapsed, or you’ve failed to convert them, or your fundraising team just didn’t have time to connect with those prospects.
At the start of each year, you should review any unassigned or inactive prospects and donors to determine if they should be kept in your fundraising portfolio, or if it’s time to take them out. Ensure all other donor information is updated like contact info, profile basics like relationships and pledges, and giving information.
Add New Qualified Prospects
As time goes on, you’ll need to keep adding new qualified prospects to your fundraising portfolio in order to keep growing your fundraising program. You are probably going to lose some donors over time and there will always be prospects who don’t end up making a gift, so it’s important to maintain your portfolio size year on year with new prospects.
It’s also important that you learn from experience to refine your prospect qualifications over time to identify better prospects. Don’t forget to look within your database at loyal annual donors and mid-level donors to find new major gift prospects who are already invested in your mission.
Multi-year Moves Management
Wouldn’t it be nice if the donor lifecycle and your calendar or fiscal year were on the same schedule? Unfortunately, this is hardly ever the case and your fundraising team will probably find themselves needing to track moves management steps across two or more years.
Your fundraising portfolio should help your fundraising team stay on top of their donors and prospects at every stage of the donor lifecycle, including year on year.
Cultivating Relationships Over Time
We’ve been discussing cultivation quite a bit recently as that’s the step in moves management that secures a major gift from a donor or prospect in your fundraising portfolio. And while sometimes cultivating a donor can be quick and easy, especially for someone who has been giving to your nonprofit for a while. In other cases, cultivation can be a multi-year activity.
As you manage your fundraising portfolio year on year make sure you are properly using your portfolio to help cultivate donor relationships over time. Update a donor or prospect record with notes after every meeting so you can remember details later and schedule follow-ups in your fundraising portfolio so your fundraising team doesn’t forget!
Stewarding Donors
Just like cultivation, stewardship can be an ongoing process. As you manage your fundraising portfolio year on year you’ll need to keep stewarding your donors and building meaningful relationships so they see the impact of their donations.
When someone makes a major gift to your organization, it may be a couple of years until they are ready to make another donation of that size. Use your fundraising portfolio to keep up with stewarding your major donors and to find out when they will be ready to give again.
Wisely makes year on year moves management a breeze
Wisely’s strategic moves management strategy, driven by AI, ensures your fundraisers know which stage all of their donors are at, and can help track the donor lifecycle year on year.
Wisely fundraising portfolio management software can help you manage donor relationships year on year by:
- Giving your fundraisers more time to meet with donors while Wisely takes care of tracking the details
- AI-powered prediction engine that indicates when a donor will be ready to give again
- Portfolio management that includes to-do lists and detailed donor records
- Identifying new prospects for your nonprofit using AI, including donors from within your database who are ready to make a bigger impact
Wisely fundraising portfolio management software will help your fundraising team stay on top of cultivation and stewardship year on year. Giving them more time to spend building donor relationships, and less time spent tracking moves management steps and looking through reports.
Next week on #WiserWithWisely we’ll cover stewardship strategies for different types of donors in your fundraising portfolio including major donors, mid-level donors, and planned giving donors as well!
Stewardship is a big part of creating meaningful donor relationships and your year-on-year strategy, so you won’t want to miss next week’s post!
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