Herding Cats: The Art of Prospect Management

Ruthie Giles
Senior Researcher for Prospect Management, Mount Holyoke College

About the Topic:
At the end of their last major fundraising campaign, Mount Holyoke College was faced with bloated prospect assignment lists, data inconsistencies, and new post-campaign fundraising priorities.  In light of this situation, prospect research was tasked with finding a better way to manage the prospect portfolios.  

In 2014 Mount Holyoke College embarked on the development and implementation of a prospect management system.  With the guidance of prospect management system expert, Ruthie Giles, Mount Holyoke College has created and implemented a portfolio management system that has allowed them to move away from bloated portfolios, ineffective meetings, and an unstructured system of managing portfolios.  They have moved to a streamlined, efficient, effective system where prospect management drives their fundraising strategies.

Implementing these changes was not, however, an entirely smooth process.  Ruthie will share Mount Holyoke’s successes as well as their pitfalls, missteps, and the course corrections that were made along the way.  She will share how they structure their strategy meetings and use portfolio analytics to make prospect research and management the go-to resource for creating successful prospect strategies that result in optimal outcomes for their team.

This session will provide you with an overview of Mount Holyoke College’s efforts to define, document and embed a standardized system within our Leadership Gifs team that would enable them to identify and move the best prospect through the stages of cultivation in a thoughtful, timely and highly successful manner.  You will walk away with actual steps for how to create a similar system in your own office that you can act upon today.

Learning Objectives:

• Be able to the annual departmental goals as a guide for how you incorporate analytics in assisting the gift officers as they map out how they can achieve those goals within their current portfolios.  
• Be able to use descriptive analytics to identify areas that need more attention from the GO
• Reorganize the structure for team meetings as well as one-on-one meetings to allow for more effective meetings with definitive outcomes and next steps.
• Use your data to determine if you have enough prospects at the right place in their cultivation who can help you reach certain goals within a given time frame.
• Discover how a prospect management system will allow GOs be more strategic about who they visit and who they solicit, as well as who they remove from their portfolios and why they remove them.

About the Speaker:
Ruthie Giles is the Senior Researcher for Prospect Management at Mount Holyoke College, and has worked in prospect research and management since 2000.  Ruthie has created and successfully implemented prospect management systems at several organizations, tailoring each one to the organization’s unique needs.  Prior to working at Mount Holyoke College, she worked at Harold Grinspoon Foundation, The Loomis Chaffee School, and The Williston Northampton School.  Ruthie holds a BA from Smith College, an MBA from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst - Isenberg School of Management, and a MS in Nonprofit Management and Philanthropy from Bay Path University. 

Info on WiP's cancellation, refund, and media policies can be seen here.