Relationship management Archives

November 17, 2016 By Helen Brown Leave a Comment

Why wealth screenings – and prospect researchers – are so reliant on real estate

Here’s the complaint I hear frequently about wealth screenings, prospect research, and real estate: Knowing what our prospect holds in real estate is useless! She’s never going to give any of those houses to our organization!(*)

That’s absolutely right. She’s probably not. But that completely misses the point of why real estate is key.

Here’s why:

Imagine with me that you’re on a lovely sailboat. You’re out for the day with friends in the Caribbean enjoying the sun and the breeze. You’re moving along at a pretty fast clip with the wind, but all of a sudden an unexpected gust causes the boom to flip from one side of the boat to the other, and somehow you’re overboard.

The water’s warm but it’s going to take a few minutes for your friends to turn the boat around and get you. That thin orange ring they tossed you is by no means reliably holding up your weight, but it’ll help keep you up while you tread water until the boat comes back. That orange ring may be crummy, but it’s the most solid thing you’ve got right now. [Read more…]

September 3, 2015 By Helen Brown Leave a Comment

Relationship Management Rules!

What makes a successful relationship management program? What are the traits that great managers overseeing the process must have?

You may remember that two weeks ago, I interviewed Janna Holm, Director of Relationship Management at Johns Hopkins University to get her insight on these questions. We learned from her that it’s an alchemy of art and science that helps build a great RM system. [Read more…]

August 20, 2015 By Helen Brown Leave a Comment

The alchemy behind fundraising success

It’s no secret that the most important thing about major gift fundraising is relationship building. No matter whether you’re talking about raising money from individuals, companies, or foundations, the key is building honest, authentic relationships to bring about positive change. [Read more…]

May 28, 2015 By Helen Brown 7 Comments

Going beyond capacity ratings

In case you missed it (and click here if you did), last week on this blog Melissa Bank Stepno shared her knowledge and some wise words from her colleague, David Lamb, on capacity ratings.

Capacity ratings are an important factor in every major gift effort. They will not be perfect, (let me repeat that – they will never be perfect) and capacity rating are just one of several data points we use, but they are an important tool to help us rank our very top prospects.

One of the common misconceptions of capacity codes is that some folks new to the profession might think that capacity means “How much will they give us?” It doesn’t.

A capacity rating says, “what is this person’s total ‘wallet’ for philanthropic giving in a year to every organization they support?” [Read more…]

May 21, 2015 By Helen Brown 5 Comments

The Artful Science of Capacity Ratings

It is a great pleasure to welcome Melissa Bank Stepno as this week’s guest writer on The Intelligent Edge. I’ve long admired Melissa’s gift in seeing the big picture in prospect development and her ability to eloquently communicate and train on its finer details. So when she and I were chatting between sessions at the recent NEDRA conference, I grabbed the opportunity to ask her to share her thoughts here on capacity ratings, which has been a hot topic lately on the prospect research discussion forum, prspct-l.

How much can they give? What should we ask for? How rich is she? What’s his net worth?

Such short questions. Such common questions. Such important questions. [Read more…]

December 11, 2014 By Helen Brown 5 Comments

Capacity Ratings, 747s, and Volvos

Mark Noll, AVP of Research and Development Services at the University of Rhode Island started a conversation earlier this week in an article titled “Why Capacity Ratings are Bunk and What You Can Do About It.” In the post, Noll discusses the difficulties of assigning an accurate capacity rating to prospects. There’s just too much we prospect researchers – and frontline fundraisers – will never know about the totality of someone’s assets and their liabilities. Noll provides a solid lesson on what actually goes into a capacity rating. And what is logically missing. [Read more…]

June 5, 2014 By Helen Brown Leave a Comment

The Fair, the handwriting analysis booth, and relationship management

When I was a kid, we went to the Bloomsburg Fair every year, rain or shine. The Fair has been a magical place for generations of kids (no matter their age) and a place of hope as well. It’s been held in late September since 1855, and hundreds of thousands of people come every year for miles around, making it the biggest fair in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

It’s an agricultural/exhibit fair, and my mom tells me that during the Great Depression, many folks relied (some fairly desperately) on winning cash prizes for things they grew, bottled, jarred, knitted, sewed and showed at the Fair. Slightly more recently, the Bloomsburg Fair was the place where Taylor Swift made her concert debut. So I suppose it’s always been a place where dreams (and money) are made.

Every year as we [Read more…]

May 29, 2014 By Helen Brown 1 Comment

Ratings: What happens when you drop a prospect status ball

Keeping track of one or two major gift prospects isn’t too difficult, but when there are scores of donors you need a system to make sure that no one gets forgotten.

Imagine your horror to discover that a loyal donor [Read more…]

May 22, 2014 By Helen Brown 2 Comments

Ratings – Measuring inclination

In fundraising when we are trying to measure how close a prospective donor feels to our organization or cause we call it their inclination to give (or to be involved as a volunteer). Sometimes it’s also described as a prospective donor’s affinity or interest.

[Read more…]

May 15, 2014 By Helen Brown 2 Comments

What you need to know about ratings

Over the weekend I realized that I had just launched right into this series on ratings assuming that they are a given in every fundraising office. That everyone is already clear on the types of ratings that are out there and how they are used in a relationship management system for fundraising.