Tips for a Successful Moves Management System

Do you know if a fundraising shortfall or windfall is coming?

Savvy organizations are using moves management systems to track important milestones for high touch prospects to measure how many you have, how much you hope to raise, and the distribution of stages to identify shortfalls/windfalls in funding.

Moves management is a set system of policies, procedures, and practices that guide staff use of relationship management software to increase the success rate of your fundraising efforts.

Here are some tips to get your organization started in its moves management journey:

Assemble the Right Team

A solid system requires buy-in. All too often, management makes decisions and staff are left to work with those decisions. And since nearly everyone on a fundraising team works within the system, all affected roles should be part of the decision-making process.

  • Gift processors enter the gifts
  • Development officers manage the steps
  • Researchers track information
  • Management (both in development and finance ) compare against goals and projections

If you are working with a fairly new staff or you are implementing a high-touch fundraising program for the first time, you may want to involve outside help who can consult on best practices and identify the structure that would work best with your team and your software.

Establish Goals

  • What do you want to measure? Many organizations look at number of prospects in the pipeline by stage. The number and value of asks (opportunities) is also a common metric.
  • Does our current coding structure support these metrics? If not, reevalutate.
  • Does the staff have buy-in to these metrics? Encourage staff to set their own reach goals.

Establish the Coding Structure

A standard coding structure is like goals. Without it you can’t determine what is working and what needs reworking.

Solicitors: By determining standard solicitor types, you have can help with Prospect Clearance.

  • Relationship Manager: responsible for the overall relationship with the prospect, this role acts as gatekeeper for the prospect.
  • Staff Solicitor: plays a role in solicitation or assists with gathering information for solicitation; they also are soliciting the prospect for event sponsorship or other donations.
  • Volunteer Solicitor: for volunteers that play a role in solicitation.
  • Researcher: organizations with a researcher, assign the prospects until the research is complete and before the prospect has been assigned a solicitor.

Opportunities: Entering all opportunities as part of your moves management system will help you to manage your goals, staff, and prospects. There are several elements that should be considered to maximize results. Important elements are naming conventions, deadline date, purposes, and opportunity status.

Naming Convention: be consistent and have the fiscal year included. For example, Major Gift 2020/21 or Gala 2020/21.

Deadline Date: opportunities should have a date that can establish fiscal year to enable metrics, how many opportunities you hope to close this fiscal, and the value of these opportunities.

Purpose: segment into the types of opportunities. Example: Major Gift; Event Sponsorship; Mid-Level High Touch; or be more specific Major Gift – Corporate; Major Gift – Individual; Foundations etc.

Opportunity Status: consider metrics – what stages do prospects move through?  This varies from organization to organization. Be able to identify how many prospects you have in each stage.

Final Thoughts

Take the time to plan through all the steps and ensure you have buy-in.  Establish how you are going to report your metrics.

Join Wendy Smith for her bbcon session Rocking Your World with Moves Management in Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT® to learn more about moves management and how it has powered success for Saint John’s Regional Hospital Foundation. Register today!