Prospecting Using Interests

Hello,

The Science Museum of Minnesota is about to come out of a capital campaign and we're looking for new ways to track prospects for major gifts. Currently, we create solicitations in the records of constituents who we believe would be good prospects for a specific gift and just use the designations to track what the solicitation is for. Unfortunately, when our capital campaign is over we won’t have a campaign to put solicitations in – and will instead need to be able to come up with lists of constituents which gift officers will sort through to come up with those who we will solicit.

Going forward, we are looking at using the "interests" section of Tessitura to track our prospects, and I am wondering if anyone else has used this area of Tessitura for this function yet. I am planning on creating a custom report that we can use to pull interest value, interest weight (we have yet to determine how we will weight our interests), giving capacity, giving history to the organization, and several other values so that our gift officers can evaluate the prospects. In the past, we have done wealth screenings on our database and have uploaded giving capacities into attributes but we are looking at being able to combine that information with knowledge gained by our program officers in order to pull more specified lists.

Does anyone have any insight on using this area of Tessitura? Our organization has pretty much left it alone in the past so we’re starting from scratch and any help you have would be much appreciated.

Thanks,

Laine

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Laine Kyllonen

Database Application Specialist

Science Museum of Minnesota

(651) 221-2515