Your database is full of all kinds of supporters, donors, and prospects. Some of them are known to be major donor prospects and your gift officers are pursuing them and building trust. But what about all the others?
Who is qualified for outreach? Who might be qualified soon but isn’t yet? How many can you manage at one time?
Determining which major donor prospects, and how many, are prioritized for outreach at any given time is what determines how many gift officers you need on your team. More importantly, it also informs those gift officers who to reach out to, and when.
You want to reach out to prospects who are interested in hearing from you. To figure out who those people are, MarketSmart suggests creating a prioritization pipeline.
4 Categories of Supporters in the Prioritization Pipeline
The prioritization pipeline exists between unengaged people and every prospect who is interacting with a gift officer or some other qualified person from your organization. Those are the two extremes.
The purpose of the pipeline is to help people move themselves from being unengaged to building a trusting relationship with a gift officer. This is your blueprint, your schematic, your flowchart for how you help people move from stranger to trusting supporter.
The key distinction between this approach and every other approach is that the supporters are categorizing themselves. They move themselves from one category to the next, until they are ready for outreach.
That means your team of gift officers doesn’t have to do a thing until supporters emerge from the other end of the pipeline. It’s ultra-efficient, more cost-effective, and produces far better results because your gift officers no longer have to run off on wild goose chases with leads that were never going to become anything.
Here are the four stages of the pipeline.
Supporters
These are people who are involved in your organization in some way, but you know very little about their ability or interest in making a major gift.
These could be email subscribers, social media followers, volunteers, or even occasional or monthly donors. But you don’t know their status as a major donor prospect, because you haven’t asked them yet.
You haven’t yet begun to send surveys and interact with them on a more personal and ongoing level that builds trust and bonds them more deeply to your organization.
Could these people make a major gift? Do they even have capacity to do so, let alone interest? You don’t know. It’s likely a small handful of them do, but finding these would be like pulling a needle from a haystack, and you don’t have the time or ability to justify that search using human employees. Only automated software can do that efficiently.
So these are your supporters. Again – they have gotten involved. They are not unengaged. You just don’t yet know much about them. And this is probably the biggest share of people in your database.
Pre-qualified and not in cultivation
Once you begin sending automated surveys and other communication to your supporters, some of them will respond. They still start sharing personal information that gives you a clearer picture of who they are, what they care about, and how they think about your organization.
As this process continues, you’re looking for supporters who can check five boxes in what we call the prioritization pentagon. These five boxes are what pre-qualify a supporter for outreach.
When they have checked four of these five boxes, they are now pre-qualified but not yet in cultivation. The four they need to check include:
- Have a powerful emotional reason to support your organization
- Have the wealth capacity to make a major gift
- Have a good history of past engagement
- Revealed the time is right in their life to consider a meaningful gift
Any supporter who has voluntarily shared information that meets these four criteria is pre-qualified for outreach, but they are not yet in cultivation because you haven’t yet done anything with this information.
But this is far more powerful than what you’ll get from traditional wealth screening data. This is current, active, qualitative as well as numerical data, and most importantly it comes right from the supporter’s own mouth, via digital communication.
Pre-qualified and in cultivation
The one difference between this and the previous category is that these supporters have given you permission to reach out to them with one-on-one communication.
Using MarketSmart, you can automate all the communication at this point so it still requires no work from your gift officers. The goal of that communication is to build trust by delivering value while honoring your commitment to not solicit them until they’re ready. This part of the cultivation process can take a while, or it can go very fast. It depends on the supporter.
But the key here is, supporters in this category meet all five criteria in the prioritization pentagon.
They have wealth capacity, a reason to give, a history of engagement, and the timing is right. And, they have given you permission to communicate in a personal manner.
Our software can do all this – including sending out the surveys and ongoing communications.
Point of clarification
It’s possible to jump from supporter straight to this stage. This can happen if a supporter gives permission for personalized outreach while at the same time meeting the other four criteria through a survey.
It’s also possible to get permission for communication, but not yet meet other criteria in the pentagon.
For example, a supporter might give permission for you to communicate with them, and they might have wealth capacity and a powerful reason to give. But, maybe the timing isn’t right in their life right now, and they are relatively new to your circle of influence and don’t have much history of engagement.
That supporter would remain in the ‘supporter’ category until they meet the remaining two criteria. At that point, they would bump up to this one and continue to be cultivated until they advance to the fourth and final category in the prioritization pipeline.
Pre-qualified and assigned for outreach
When you see supporters who meet all five pre-qualification criteria and who are actively engaging with your organization, you can safely assign them for outreach from a live person.
These supporters are able and willing to make a gift. They have given you permission to reach out. And they are continuing to engage with what you send them. This engagement can take many forms:
- Clicking on links
- Responding to emails
- Watching videos
- Downloading reports or content you send them
- Making a donation
- Registering for an event
- Sharing legal language from an estate plan or will
- Giving from a donor advised fund
The specifics of the behavior are less important than the fact that they are doing something. Any supporter who meets all five criteria in the pentagon and who is actively engaged can be safely assigned to a gift officer for outreach.
How Many Supporters Are Coming Through the Pipeline?
When you have this process working, you can expect to see a fairly predictable number of people emerging from the end and being assigned to a gift officer.
If your gift officers are getting too many good leads – a good problem, to be sure – this is a sign you may need to hire an additional gift officer.
The other option is to reduce the number of supporters you are feeding into the other end of the pipeline. If you can’t or don’t want to hire another gift officer, simply reduce the number of supporters receiving your initial survey communications and offers.
For example, let’s say you’re reaching out digitally to 5000 supporters per month, and this is leading to 20 new pre-qualified prospects who are assigned to a gift officer for outreach, per year.
If your gift officer team can’t handle 20 new highly qualified leads per year in addition to managing their existing caseloads, you could simply reduce the digital outreach to something like 3000 supporters per month.
But again, if you’re getting that many good leads, it may be more rewarding to just hire another gift officer and let the new gift officer build up a caseload.
You can make those decisions when the time comes.
The point of all this is – using automated software to communicate with far more supporters than you could ever manage doing all this with human employees – you can pre-qualify a consistent stream of major and planned giving prospects who are ready for outreach.
This is how you sustain a thriving major gifts fundraising program.
Let prospects self-identify, and move themselves through your pipeline, signaling when they are ready for outreach.
See how MarketSmart’s software makes this possible
Related Resources:
- 5 Tips to Being Persistent in Outreach to Major Donors
- The Secret to Raising More Money: Focus on Impact, Not Just Strategies
- Fundraisers Share What Obstacles They Encounter When Making Outreach Plus How to Overcome Them
- Why Nonprofit Fundraising Gift Officers Quit Their Jobs