As prospect researchers and portfolio managers, one of our biggest challenges isn’t finding prospects or analyzing data—it’s getting our gift officers to embrace the strategies we develop. After years of working in this field, I’ve learned that successful prospect strategy implementation is as much about… Read More »Getting Gift Officers On Board With Your Prospect Strategy
Machine learning is changing how we build and manage major gifts portfolios, especially for bloated portfolios where gift officers struggle to build relationships with all of the prospects. Unlike traditional methods that rely on simple linear models, machine learning algorithms can identify clusters of donors… Read More »How Machine Learning Makes Major Gifts Portfolios More Effective
The holiday season is not only a time for joy and celebration but also an opportunity to effectively manage your prospects and continue your outreach efforts. Balancing the festive spirit with your prospecting goals can be challenging, but with the right strategies, you can make… Read More »Managing Your Prospects During the Holiday Season
Know Where You Are Going When I was a kid, my dad loved to get us all in the car on a beautiful summer day and go for a drive. This was back in the days before cell phones, so there was no GPS to… Read More »Mapping Out Your Fiscal Year Begins with Preparing Your Portfolios
We always want to create the best portfolios for our front-line fundraisers, to position them for success. In our quest to create high quality portfolios, we often encounter obstacles that make it challenging or even halt our progress entirely. Three of the most common obstacles… Read More »Overcoming Obstacles to Position Portfolios for Success
While driving home from Apra Prospect Development, I listened to this TED talk: https://www.npr.org/2017/01/13/509358157/is-there-a-limit-to-how-many-friends-we-can-have . The article brought my mind back to some work I’m doing on estimating the number of gift officers needed to meet a campaign goal. For analytics projects like this, I… Read More »Of William the Conqueror and Gift Officers: A Look Again at Portfolio Size
This article was first published as “Marianne’s Mining Minute” in the APRA Upstate New York chapter’s newsletter, 2010. Reporting isn’t always data mining, but knowing what’s in your database can help you develop models of future prospects, whether or not you have the training and… Read More »Just in Time Prospect Management: Trigger Reporting