Moves Management Program Quiz & Guide
Congratulations on finishing your Moves Management Program Quiz! (And if you haven’t, you should fill out the form above and download the quiz before reading on.)
This Moves Management Program Quiz Guide provides best practice informed actionable steps your team can take to strengthen your moves management program. This guide is based on your responses per core functional area: Strategy, Structure, Systems, Story, Style, Staff and Skills.
If you answered “Yes!” to all of the questions, congratulations! You are working in a strong and established moves management program.
If you answered “Yes!” to most components throughout the quiz, Alford Group recommends reviewing all relevant practices and procedures for the components where you answered “In Progress” or “Not Yet”, ensuring those are prioritized, resourced and effectively established.
However, if you answered “In Progress” or “Not Yet” to most components within each functional area, read on to learn more about what you may need to consider and put into practice as you work to reorganize and refresh your development program.
Key Elements: The 7 S’s (Strategy, Structure, Systems, Story, Style, Staff and Skills)
STRATEGY:
To create and/or strengthen a moves management program, all development departments need to have established, contributed revenue goals and aligned annual fundraising plans (often managed by source of giving). This ensures intentionality, accountability and collaboration.
If your fundraisers are struggling to achieve results and reach new constituents:
Alford Group recommends first conducting an assessment on all current fundraising practices and development infrastructure. This process will re-affirm your organizational vision for contributed revenue and constituent engagement, identify opportunities to re-energize relationship management practices and increase revenue, refresh related policies and procedures, data management and reporting and re-align staffing and supporting resources.
If you are starting from a place with established goals and defined team member accountabilities:
Your next key priority will be to redefine moves management stages for department adoption. Implementing simplified moves management stages will focus frontline fundraisers on activating strong strategies that lead to successful solicitations, continuously convert prospects to donors, strategically encourage donors, funders, alumni and prospects to give at their highest capacity and provides consistent and clear expectations for staff performance, benchmarking and evaluation. Alford Group recommends defining each stage with a definition, a description of the donor or prospect’s readiness (which qualifies them for this stage) and identified entry and exit points.
STRUCTURE:
In Alford Group’s experience, development team structures vary by size and roles. However, all share a minimum, foundational baseline of professional experience centered on the skills needed to manage infrastructure, strategy and frontline fundraising and relationship management efforts.
If your team’s roles are not clear, team members are duplicating work, crossing lanes of accountability or spending too much time managing administrative tasks rather than engaging with donors and prospects, you may need to start with a staffing audit.
Consider and redefine time allocations, refresh position expectations and set strict annual key performance indicators (KPIs) aligned to area of responsibility and moves management program to organize your department to maximize efficiencies and effectiveness.
If you are starting from a place with clear roles and responsibilities and aligned development fundraising goals:
Your starting place may be to review and confirm all fundraising ambassadors (those who serve as partners and/or volunteer solicitors for the fundraising process, including but not limited to staff leadership, board members, committee and/or other donor partners). Working with your ambassadors to ensure they have the resources they need to successfully connect, share and solicit is time well invested.
If you haven’t already formalized your donor and prospect pool into a structured pipeline:
We strongly recommend doing so. Establishing a pipeline inclusive of all sources of giving (individual, foundation, corporate and/or organizations) with clearly defined qualifications, giving tiers, target ask amounts and corresponding portfolio management assignments and stewardship levels will promote clearer and prioritized engagement strategies aligned to donor journeys, affirm a diverse and active list of supporters and prospects at all stages within your moves management program and inform stronger and more accurate giving projections. Alford Group recommends activating ongoing pipeline development, prospect strategy and prospect research with dedicated staff support.
SYSTEMS:
If you have portfolios assigned, are they appropriately sized and well balanced?
Emphasizing quality, not quantity, Alford Group recommends all assigned portfolios contain a balance of donors and prospects, and represent a mixed composition of moves management stages (identification to stewardship) across all active relationships.
Ideally, we recommend smaller portfolios that operate dynamically and are evolving year-over-year. Reviewing and refreshing portfolios on an annual basis ensures that assigned households and funder relationships continue to qualify for portfolio assignment based on their responsiveness and engagement within intentional cultivation and stewardship. Anyone who does not qualify should be appropriately moved to a more automated stewardship cycle appropriate to their level of giving, and re-evaluated/re-qualified should their behavior become more engaged.
Rather than establishing KPIs solely on dollars raised, a best practice is to track quality contacts – meaningful donor cultivation touchpoints. Year-over-year adoption and tracking will yield an increase in giving and support stronger budget projections. One way to ensure traction towards KPI’s is to activate relationship action plans. Before making a philanthropic gift, donors progress through phases of interest. Relationship action plans designed by relationship managers (and informed by donor/prospect habits and research) create an outline of intention, creating focus to the activity needed to guide a donor/prospect’s engagement, ensures alignment with strategic priorities, provides gratitude and impact updates and builds respect and trust between donor/prospect and organization.
If your team is running into a barrier between frontline fundraising practices and the donor database:
Consider auditing all policies and standard operating procedures (SOPs) to ensure they capably address best practices for your organization and are consistently implemented within your department. This should include gift counting policies, pledge and gift agreement templates and data entry SOPs. You might also wish to sit down with your Finance colleagues and confirm that all gift entry and reporting practices are aligned. Fundraising CRMs now specialize in modules that promote moves management stages, tracking and reporting. If your donor and prospect data is not being consistently entered into the database, you cannot rely on effectively reporting your fundraising practices.
STORY:
It may be time to refresh your organization’s central value proposition.
Whether you want to re-align it with current vision, impact and strategic priorities or simply add new energy into the narrative, be sure your revised case for support utilizes strength-based messaging to share the needs that drive your organization’s mission and work, how your organization is making a difference, why philanthropic support is critical and why now. Consider bringing colleagues from across the organization together to share news, highlights, impact stories and their “why we do this work” statements. Brainstorm what could be different with deepened philanthropy and what could be lost without support.
Alford Group recommends consolidating all funding opportunities into a central opportunities list with identified giving levels, impact descriptions and formalized recognition/stewardship plans. This giving menu is part of a larger fundraiser toolkit, greatly aiding relationship managers with their cultivation and solicitation efforts and design messaging for key donors, funders and prospects based on their motivation, interests and affinity.
If you have strong and compelling central narratives and a well-defined giving menu:
You might consider hosting workshops with relationship managers and volunteer leaders/ambassadors that focus on re-vitalizing and practicing their ‘elevator pitch’ (a concise, persuasive summary of their role with the organization, why they are involved and an invitation to their audience to engage.
STYLE:
If you are working to improve your organization’s culture of philanthropy:
Continue to emphasize the importance of building and maintaining a culture of philanthropy. Growing the culture of philanthropy will deepen engagement and support contributed revenue growth. No organization can raise major gifts without support from board members, volunteers, leadership and staff. Ensure that fundraising is a role shared across ALL staff; demystify fundraising and create advancement goals within all appropriate departments, specifically finance, marketing and communications, and your program, admissions or academics. Host workshops, training sessions and/or team-building activities that bring together staff from development and other departments to foster trust, understanding and a culture of collaboration. Through cross-departmental learning and interaction, these initiatives can break down silos, encourage knowledge sharing and build a unified approach to fundraising. Prepare, train and empower executive leadership and board members/key volunteers to be the face of fundraising efforts and ensure to recruit new board members who offer diverse experiences in fundraising and other nonprofit board service.
If you need support reaching more prospective donors and community members:
Broaden and build personal connections through relationship mapping exercises to support building your pipeline. Expand the definition of philanthropy to include time, talent and testimony in addition to treasure. Shift organizational storytelling narratives, expanding visibility and educating all prospective audiences on your history and impact. Include donor-centric narrative in non-fundraising material. Everyone with an affinity for your organization should be given the opportunity to engage and support regardless of their point of entry.
STAFF & SKILLS:
If you have a team or team members that are not meeting expectations:
Consider your processes that elevate and acknowledge their performance and results. As noted, it is paramount to set goals and key performance indicators that are well defined and clear for the whole team. Alford Group recommends tracking through your database and transparently reporting established fundraising KPI’s and financial milestones on a regular and consistent basis. Staff should have ongoing opportunities to reflect on their portfolios and their progress and momentum with donors and funders so that there is space to assess and address issues and barriers, as well as celebrate successes. With clear reporting and transparent tracking systems, we can more appropriately determine if the right people are in the right roles with sufficient capacity and expertise to be effective.
If your team has great talent but you are observing dips in their performance and/or they are demonstrating symptoms of fatigue, overwhelm and/or disengagement:
It is likely well past time to invest in professional development. Professional development as an investment in staff validates the importance of a staff member’s contributions, presence and professional journey while fueling advanced innovation, sharpening team members skills and energizing collaboration – characteristics that benefit the whole fundraising program. Adding more positions to manage more relationships will not yield increased, strategically aligned and transformational gifts and may do more harm if your internal culture is not uplifting team member wellbeing. Greater results will be realized when there is a corresponding investment in the time, tools and resources development staff need to thrive in their roles.
We hope this quiz guide has helped you identify where to best start as you revamp your moves management program. If you would like to chat with Alexis Cooke about your organization’s specific needs, feel free to schedule a free 30-minute consultation.