How to Measure Your Prospect Management System
Last week we explored how to effectively collect data for your prospect management system. But now the question is: once your nonprofit has consistent and relevant prospect data at your disposal, what should you measure?
I have some ideas on metrics that might prove helpful, and for each item below I would measure this for each gift officer and then your nonprofit and/or fundraising department as a whole:
- How many prospects are in the pipeline?
- How many of these prospects are active and well-known?
- How many need initial discovery?
- How many prospects are at various stages?
- How long have they been at these stages?
- How many contacts are made at each stage and what is the average for each stage?
- How long does it take on average, whether it be in days, weeks, months, or years, from initial discovery of a prospect to realization of a gift?
- What is your average gift amount?
- What is the average time it takes to receive certain gift amount thresholds? The amounts will depend upon how your organization defines a major or managed gift prospect (i.e., $1K, $5K, $10K, $25K, $50K, $100K, $250K, $500K, $1M+, etc.)
With these above metrics in place you can also measure the differences between each capital campaign, or you can measure the results between a specific campaign and your on-going major gifts program.
There are a lot of ideas provided here, so pick a few to start with and see what works for your organization.
