Project Management of Plans

Hi Yasmin, 

I'm in much the same boat--I've moved our development team completely onto plans for the first time starting 2018, and we're still gradually working through how to use them in practice. 

A couple things that have helped us: 

1) Development leadership is 100% on board and bringing summary reports (and other documents that I prepare, more on that below) to 1:1 meetings with gift officers. 

2) Gift officers are really digging into the portfolio feature and using it to filter to view open plans, pending steps, etc. for their own donors/prospects. 

3) I'm exporting the plans detail and summary reports into .csv files so I can manipulate them more easily, and using excel's visualization tools to ensure gift officers and managers can quickly see data points like the number of prospects in each stage of development, number of dollars by goal in portfolios, and whether their activity pace is on track to meet goals. This visualization has proven to be the most helpful for strategic conversations and is demonstrating to everyone involved the value of using plans. 

Hope this helps you! Good luck! 

Stephanie

Thanks for this Stephanie!! I will try all of the above:) 

I have to ask given point number 3- are you using T-stats Plans Cube? Seems like it could really help you!

I use an Excel template that I created a million years ago when Plans were known as Solicitations.  It helps me look at the most recent step, or see how long it has been since there has been a step.  We don't use the portfolio feature, but it is on my summer project list.  Currently, we track our portfolios through Attributes.  It's not super sophisticated but it works for us.  

Good morning Yasmin,

This isn't anything that you could implement immediately since it isn't coming until Tessitura Analytics launches with v14.2 of the application, but there is going to be an entire pre-made Dashboard of Analytics that deals with Plans and actually will include some pivot table elements in the dashboard itself. Very exciting to think about the possibilities for.

If you didn't have a chance to catch the webinar, you can find it here: https://www.tessituranetwork.com/Items/Videos/Webinars/2018/Tessitura_Analytics_and_You

Thank you,

Brian

Yasmin,

One thing I would agree with is what Stephanie said about leadership buy-in. That was the biggest step in getting our Dev department to start and continue to use plans. We also developed a step-by-step guide for how to access plans, add plans (one or two, not bulk), and how to look at worker portfolios. And the other two things I found helpful was sitting down with each person who would be using Plans and asking them what they needed to see in Plans (status, types, steps) to help them succeed, and just talking about Plans constantly. It's now how we do the majority of our fundraising not to mention it's a great source of history as people transition out of an organization.

As for the reports, we don't really use them. I don't like them but our Dev people know how to run them so they can find the info they need. I prefer a combination of dashboards and T-Stats to get Plans data.

Melissa

Thanks Melissa! Would you be able to share the step by step guide you used? Might save me a lot of work on my end if that is possible!

Thanks Brian

Thanks Larissa!

Thank you Stephanie, What a helpful response. Have you ever tried the plans cube on t-stats? do you find the exporting of plans easier? 

I'd be happy to, can you send me your email?

Thanks! it's Yasmin@jw3development.org.uk 

Hi Yasmin! 

This sounds exciting. I just finished re-tooling and documenting our procedures for plans. We use plans to track qualification through solicitation for our campaign, annual fund, government/foundation, and corporate work (all separate plans), and here in the next month, I will be adding plans specifically for planned giving. We also have plans specifically to track prospects that we don't know yet which funding opportunity is most appropriate for them. Also currently, I am re-tooling some of our plans management to allow us to distinguish whether a plan is ear-marked for broad-based solicitation or is being worked by a relationship manager. The Seattle Symphony has been using plans for multiple years, which has allowed us to pretty much find all of the pitfalls and things to avoid, but we're now at a point where the frontline fundraisers are seeing the benefits and are using them as a tool to help them be successful. 

We've customized the Plan Summary and Step Detail reports to meet some of our specific needs and include our custom plan fields. And I'm now to the point (after about 1.5 years) where I can use these two reports to create almost every report the Major Gifts team or our VP wants to review (I LOVE the plan summary report). I'd be happy to share more if you're interested. 

This fiscal year, I've also started doing 1:1 portfolio review meetings with the gift officers so that a) I can increase data literacy and data cleanliness b) we can make sure we're prioritizing the right prospects and c) I can meet each person where they're at in their highly unique portfolios and fundraising styles. It is working really well, and I would be happy to share with you more about the reports I've created to facilitate this. 

All in all, my point to all of this is that I am very passionate about this whole plans/prospect management topic and I would be very happy to share more details with you (or anyone) on what's working and how we've defined things for our organization. 

Let me know! 

Hi Betsy,

I am new to my organization and we are building out our plans/prospect management program. I would love to know the details of how you are doing this in your organization. I am new to Tessitura, and it is only a year old at our museum so everyone is still learning. My role as prospect researcher is brand new, so needless to say a lot of change is happening.

My email is mtodd@nelson-atkins.org.

Thanks,

Marissa Todd

Hi Melissa. We're starting to use plans ourselves to track donor records. We recently had a turnover of staff and a lot of institutional knowledge of our processes and donors left with that. To avoid this, we're trying to find the best way to record touches, gifts, and plans. If you are willing,  I'd love to look at your step-by-step guide. My emails is sbyrne@imaginationstage.org. Thanks!

This would be helpful to Liberty Science Center as well tgbrown@lsc.org.