If you’ve been reading our recent #WiserWithWisely posts on fundraising strategy and Wisely portfolio management software then you know we’ve mentioned moves management quite a few times over the last few weeks.
Wisely’s Moves Management strategy is driven by best practices and assisted by AI to give your fundraising team a boost to manage donors relationships and turn prospects into donors.
In this two-part series, we’ll tell you all you need to know about moves management, why it’s important, and outline a step-by-step guide to equip your fundraising team for success with Wisely’s portfolio management software.
What is Moves Management?
To understand moves management, you first need to understand “moves” as it pertains to the process of fundraising. “Moves” are the various connections and steps a nonprofit takes to usher a donor toward giving.
“Moves” relates to the donor life cycle from an individual to prospective donor to first-time donor and on — hopefully to an upgraded, renewing, or major donor. “Moves” are the actions and touches your organization takes to advance these relationships and bring prospective donors closer to your cause, mission.
| Moves Management is the process of taking prospects and moving them through specific and deliberate steps to ensure they become life-long major gift donors. |
Why is Moves Management Important?
Moves Management helps convert unknown prospects into life-long donors. If your end goal is an engaged donor base and a high donor retention rate then you need to have a strong moves management process in place.
Before building a moves management process within your nonprofit organization, it’s important to know the fundraising moves management steps. The following 6 steps make up the moves management cycle:
- Identification: Find new opportunities or prospects
- Qualification: Conduct initial research to evaluate the ability and inclination to give
- Cultivation: Advancing relationship with prospective donor and establishing the opportunity
- Solicitation: Making an informed gift ask
- Stewardship: Advancing the donor relationship by managing gift outcome communications
- Disqualification: Donor doesn’t have the inclination or ability to make a targeted gift
In this #WiserWithWisely post, we talk about identification, qualification, and cultivation. Come back next week for solicitation, stewardship, and disqualification. These steps together make your moves management process– ensuring an engaged donor base and continued giving.
Step One: Prospect Identification
Identification is the stage where your fundraising team identifies a new donor prospect through prospect research or tools like Wisely and adds them to your fundraising portfolio.
Your fundraising team can start their prospect research with an internet search to ensure that this prospect can meet minimum requirements, for example, wealth and also an interest in your mission.
When you’re ready to identify a new prospect, create or update their profile with biographical information and other information you have such as family members, businesses, and any past solicitation from your nonprofit. If they have had contact with your nonprofit in the past, make sure you close out any outdated proposals or actions.
Wisely Prospecting Tool
Wisely portfolio management software uses artificial intelligence to help your fundraising team identify new prospects from within your nonprofit’s database and inform prospect qualification based on past giving.
The Wisely Prospecting Tool helps find valuable existing donors in your database that are not currently assigned to any fundraisers on the team. Wisely prospecting helps you customize how you want to look at your portfolio and find exactly who you’re looking for. You can filter through targeted giving levels, next gift range, individuals or organizations, and narrow down geographically.
Step Two: Prospect Qualification
Once you have identified a new prospect, your fundraising team needs to go through the process of qualifying the prospect to define their capacity and ensure they are the right prospect for your nonprofit.
Your fundraising team can use an internal rating system to record how qualified a prospect is based on their
- Capacity to make a major gift to your nonprofit.
- Affinity to your nonprofit’s mission.
- Past giving to your nonprofit or other organizations.
- Next gift amount from Wisely’s prediction engine
At the qualification stage, your fundraising team should be making an introduction to the prospect and having a valid interaction with them. A valid interaction is one where your fundraisers receive a response from the prospect that shows interest in learning more about your nonprofit.
A great way to start Qualification is to connect with a past donor and ask what motivated them to give in the first place. Listening closely to the answer will often answer your qualification question.
Once your fundraising team has qualified a prospect they can update the estimated ask amount, timeline, and proposal ratings in the prospect record and begin to move the prospect to the cultivation and solicitation stages.
In order to move a prospect to cultivation, they must meet the minimum requirements to make a major gift to your nonprofit and your fundraising team must have at least one valid interaction with the prospect.
Step Three: Cultivation
In the cultivation stage, your fundraising team will begin building a meaningful relationship with the prospect, with the purpose of securing a donation. At this stage, every action that your fundraising team takes is with the intent to advance the relationship.
During cultivation, your fundraising team should be updating the prospect record with additional information that they uncover while getting to know this prospective donor. This includes updating the estimated ask amount, timeline, and status, as well as the prospect rating.
Not to be forgotten, is the need to really understand what inspires your prospect about your mission. The closer you are able to create a proposal that suits the donors wishes, the more likely it is to close successfully.
Once a meaningful relationship has been built, your fundraising team can prepare a formal ask proposal or a letter of intent to share with the prospect and move this prospective donor to the next stage – solicitation.
Some prospects may be ready for the next stage after just a couple of meetings, while others could need a longer cultivation period until they’re ready to be solicited. Wisely nonprofit fundraising software can help your fundraising team manage and track prospects through the cultivation stage and AI insights can help guide your fundraisers to the appropriate ask amount.
Wisely Fundraising Portfolio Management Software: Product Dashboard
Wisely syncs with your Raiser’s Edge NXT and Silent Partner Software (and DonorPerfect) system so any donors that are assigned to you in your RE NXT CRM, will show up in your Wisely profile.
The top half of your profile page on the Wisely dashboard (video above) gives you a snapshot of your activity, tasks for the day and the week. The individual fundraising tracking bar – a user favorite feature – tells you the $$$ you’ve raised, open opportunities, AND potential gifts still available in YOUR portfolio. You can start your FREE trial today by signing up here.
Wisely Dashboard & Customizations
By default, Wisely shows you the top prospects in your portfolio but you can re-arrange this list with the help of the drop-down helping you prioritize the right donors and mapping out a strategy for them. You can filter your portfolio by top prospects and donors who are newly assigned. The Wisely dashboard is customizable and is created by fundraisers for fundraisers to set you and your fundraising team up for success and increased giving.
| A new fundraiser at Kelowna’s Gospel Mission used Wisely for their portfolio management raised $68K in less than two months using the insights and tips as recommended by Wisely. |
Fundraising is about building long-lasting relationships with your donors and Wisely helps you do just that by freeing up your time to focus on what matters most while we sort through your donor portfolio on a regular basis and give you insights such as whom to contact and when for the best ask.
I was a fundraiser myself and I know how time-consuming and difficult it can be to fundraise and meet goals consistently so when we created the Wisely portfolio management software we thought about what fundraisers needed the most and the two features that took top spot were: 1.ease of sorting through your donor portfolio and 2. getting real-time insights on which donor to contact and when. We built our Wisely product to do that plus take you through the entire moves management process with each donor.
Come back next week to read about the next steps in moves management – solicitation, stewardship, and disqualification.
Wisely’s Moves Management System assigns and prioritizes donors in the fundraiser’s portfolio at every stage of the moves management process Our customer success team is always standing by to help 🙂
Click on the link below to watch Wisely in Action!
