Hi Tessiturians:),
The Development team in my organisation is pretty new to using Tessitura.
After a very long process of restructuring our campaigns and funds, we have closed old plans, and set up plans for each and every donor on our data base- assigned to the various development team members.
Moving forward I was wondering if you can maybe share best practices in plans project management.
It's great that the infrastructure is finally in, but I'm not really sure how to use the plans summary and step detail report successfully after pulling out the report.
I'm worried that if I don't manage the stage of implementation correctly , plans will be inserted but not used- and months worth of work will go down the drain.
Wisdom in DEV/Plans project management will be really appreciated..
Thank you in advance,
Yasmin
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