Today on #WiserWithWisely we’re going to cover how to build and grow your fundraising portfolio. Building and growing your fundraising portfolio will help your fundraising team achieve higher revenue goals and will help scale the growth of your fundraising program at a rate that’s manageable for your fundraisers.
It’s important for your fundraising team to understand how to grow a fundraising portfolio because the size of your fundraising portfolio determines how much revenue growth your nonprofit can achieve. It can take a few years to really grow your fundraising portfolio, especially if you are starting from scratch with major gift fundraising. Using a fundraising portfolio management software like Wisely can help your fundraising team grow their fundraising portfolio to achieve greater revenue.
Identify New Prospects
Identifying new prospects is one of the best ways that you can grow your fundraising portfolio. Out of the prospects that you identify it is normal that there will be some that don’t become donors to your nonprofit, and there will be past donors who decide not to make another gift. The only way to continue to grow your portfolio is to replace these people with new prospects.
How do you identify new prospects for your fundraising portfolio? Through prospect research that looks for qualified prospects for your nonprofit, these are prospects who have the capacity to make a major gift, and ones who have an interest in your nonprofit’s mission.
You can also find new prospects from within your database. Look at annual and mid-level donors who have shown their commitment through many consecutive years of giving and who could have the capacity to make a larger gift if they were asked.
Focus on Donor Retention
It’s much easier to retain a current donor than it is to get a new one, so focusing on donor retention is an excellent way to build and grow your fundraising portfolio. The fewer donors you lose the less you have to replace, so any new prospects you identify are bringing revenue growth.
To retain donors your fundraising team needs to focus on building meaningful relationships with donors and continue to cultivate them even after they have made a donation. Stewardship is also really important to donor retention, donors who can see the impact of their donations are more likely to want to give again.
Use your fundraising portfolio to keep an eye on past donors and track the trends in their giving, look out for at-risk donors who may become lapsed, and have your fundraising team focus on building up that relationship with more stewardship and presenting an exciting new opportunity to give.
Use Moves Management Strategy
Following a moves management strategy is the best way to ensure you build and grow your fundraising portfolio by converting prospects and retaining donors.
Moves management will help your fundraising team build a meaningful relationship with prospects through prospect qualification, cultivation, and eventually solicitation. When your fundraisers build a relationship with a prospect they’re more likely to secure a donation now as well as future gifts.
Cycling your current donors through the moves management cycle will increase donor retention because your fundraising team will consistently be stewarding and cultivating your donors, creating stronger relationships. This will increase their giving and decrease the number of donors who lapse.
How Wisely Can Help Build Your Fundraising Portfolio
Wisely fundraising portfolio management software can help your fundraising team build and grow their fundraising portfolio effectively and support revenue growth.
Prospect Identification
Wisely uses artificial intelligence to identify prospects from within your database who have the capacity and the characteristics to make a major gift. This saves your fundraisers hours of time looking through reports and donors’ records in our nonprofit’s CRM. Wisely syncs directly with your CRM so its insights are always up-to-date.
Wisely’s built-in moves management strategy will also help your fundraisers qualify and cultivate prospects after they’ve added them to their portfolio. Easily see unassigned prospects and assign them to a fundraiser right in Wisely. When a new prospect is assigned your fundraisers will have a built-in moves management tasklist to start cultivating the relationship.
Donor Retention
Using AI insights, Wisely fundraising portfolio management software can help your fundraising team retain more donors to build and grow your fundraising portfolio and revenue.
With Wisely your fundraising team can see which donors are ready to make their next gift, and which donors are at risk of lapsing. This ensures they can reach out to these at-risk donors to deepen their relationship with your nonprofit before they stop giving.
Wisely’s moves management strategy will ensure your donors are stewarded and cultivated accordingly until they’re ready to make another donation. Wisely helps your build and grow your fundraising portfolio by increasing donor retention so you don’t have to replace as many lapsed donors with new prospects.
Revenue Growth
Wisely’s dashboard will give your fundraising team real-time updates on their revenue goals, both on the team level and individually. This information is always up-to-date because Wisely integrates directly with your nonprofit’s CRM. Wisely will show your fundraising team their revenue goals and the gap between realized revenue and the goal.
The revenue information that is shown in Wisely can help your fundraising team determine if their goals are realistic or if they need to re-project if the gap is more than then can make up with the current fundraising portfolio size.
Wisely helps you plan revenue growth alongside fundraising portfolio growth so that you are building and growing your fundraising portfolio at scale to ensure revenue success.
If you want to read more about fundraising portfolios and how Wisely can help your fundraising team with portfolio management check out these #WiserWithWisely posts.
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