How to Measure Your Prospect Management System: Part Two

A couple of weeks back 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 (for example, $1K, $5K, $10K, $25K, $50K, $100K, $250K, $500K, $1M+, and so on.)

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.

This guest post was authored by Carol Belair. She is a consultant for Target Analytics at Blackbaud. You may reach her at carol.belair [at] blackbaud [dot] com.

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How to Measure Your Prospect Management System: Part Two

How to Measure Your Prospect Management System: Part Two

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