Prospect Management and Segmentation

Hi Erik,
We use Source in Plans to record where the prospect came from with the options of:
Appeal (gave to a mass-marketing appeal),
Existing (existing low-level donor or has a membership),
Lapsed (previous donor or member),
Referral (a board member or other donor recommended them),
Research (came across them through prospect research),
Self-identified (prospect approached us/made an enquiry)

All prospects that are not assigned to a gift officer sit under the Status of Identification and have the Worker "Arts Centre Melbourne" assigned to them (our org's Tessi record) so that we can view this prospect pool easily using Reports and Utilities, as well as using Analytics Dashboards. We also try and assign Donor Interests relevant to our philanthropic goals to prospects where known (e.g. based on giving elsewhere) which sit under Attributes, that way we could easily pull a list of all prospects interested in X which we may wish to engage.

Happy to talk further,

Stephanie

This is great Stephanie, thank you! Two quick questions:

For those that are no longer a prospect, do you track that via the Plan status or other ways?

For the philanthropic goals using Attributes, how are you grouping them?  Is each interest an Attribute Value?

Thanks again for all the help!

Erik

No worries Erik.
Once they are assigned to a gift officer they move into the Status of Qualification where the gift officer is then responsible for meeting with the prospect and determining whether they should be moved forward in the donor journey (signified by moving through to other statuses). If it becomes clear that they are going to become a donor for a specific campaign, the Campaign is changed within this existing plan from "Philanthropy Prospect" to whatever campaign is appropriate.
If things don't work out in Qualification, we have three statuses that the plan can move into:
On Hold (e.g. the prospect may have made some indication that they are not ready to be engaged for a certain period as they are in the middle of something in their personal life)
Disqualified (e.g. they have no interest in being engaged philanthropically)
No Response (the gift officer has made several attempts to meet with the prospect but they have not heard back from them
This way, if their name comes up again in a few years time and there have been staffing changes, it is clear that we have already considered this constituent as a prospect as the plan using the "Philanthropy Prospect" Campaign remains on their record.

Re attributes, they sit under a category called "Philanthropy Interests" that has been created within the Interests radio button (Attributes>Interests). We have kept them broad, e.g. one interest is "commissions", rather than made them specific to our philanthropic goals for a particular year. It is more just a general guide that we have noticed that X has supported commissions somewhere in the past, so they may be interested again. We can then pull a List of all prospects who may be interested in that area when thinking about potential donors to engage for a project. 

Thank you Stephanie, this is amazing.  I've been thinking about these things and you have helped me solidify my plan - thank you!

Thank you Stephanie, this is amazing.  I've been thinking about these things and you have helped me solidify my plan - thank you!