By: Anne Melton, Senior Consultant
Anne Melton
This past May, I had the opportunity to present at the NEDRA conference in beautiful Providence, Rhode Island. My comrade and colleague Amy Caldarelli and I co-presented on translating capacity ratings for your audience, and we decided it would be a fun challenge to turn that session into a blog post. Below is part one of a two-part series: I’ll take a macro view and share where disconnect on ratings may happen, as well as some proactive ways to counteract that disconnect. In part two, Amy will provide tangible examples of feedback from others, and ideas on how to respond.
When I became a consultant, a skill I worked to refine when partnering with clients was how to communicate capacity ratings to audiences who were at times unfamiliar with prospect research. Capacity ratings are one of the most, if not the most, visible work of prospect researchers. Despite their visibility, there’s a lot of room for misunderstanding about what a capacity rating really means.
At first glance, capacity ratings seem like a simple number: they are an estimate of the amount an individual can or will give to all charities they support over five years. However, capacity ratings can be complex, as they consider many different variables. While ratings are just one number, people often want or expect them to do many things. Not everyone speaks capacity rating, and our work requires some translation.
You may get pushback, confusion, or frustration from your audience on the rating you have decided upon, which can fall into the following overarching categories:
Use case disconnect: when there’s a disconnect between how your audience is using or wants to use a capacity rating and what the rating actually can or should do.
Terminology/language: where you and your audience are using different terms or not understanding the meaning of terms the same way.
Methodology variations: where your audience may be familiar with a different way of formulating capacity ratings, which are a potential source of confusion.
External pressures: frustration and criticism of a capacity rating really might not be about your work or your audience’s understanding at all, but instead may be more about their external pressures, such as the need to meet a fundraising goal or a member of leadership who is convinced that a prospect is capable of giving a major gift.
While it’s never fun to experience critical feedback, these strategies may help ground you in ways to respond:
Listen with curiosity: First, hear what your audience is saying and try to understand it. Approach feedback with curiosity (not defensiveness). Your audience has a valuable perspective that is worth hearing. What do they need or need to know? Do they have information that you don’t have that would be helpful for you to know? And sometimes, just the act of truly listening can be helpful—your audience, in some cases, may just want to know that you are listening to them.
Value in questions and feedback: Getting questions in the first place demonstrates a researcher’s value and means that our audience cares enough to ask! It means the person asking a question or even challenging our work has engaged with it, wants to use it, and cares that it is accurate, which means it is valuable to them. Questions and comments also show us exactly where to focus our response for clarification.
Demonstrate usefulness: Questions and feedback give us insight into how others see and use our work, and answering questions can be an opportunity to demonstrate the value of research. Answering questions is exactly what researchers do best—this is our time to shine!
While the above are reactionary responses to those questioning the rating, there are also proactive steps we can take to minimize pushback and help improve clarification. We can set a foundation of better understanding by finding or refining ways to share understanding of what capacity ratings mean, how they are defined, and other terms we are using to align on definitions, share meaning, and work to set realistic expectations with those we interact with.
Some ways you might be able to accomplish this include:
Reference materials: Do you have a resource library, or can you make one? For example, a research terms glossary defining capacity ratings and other terms and concepts important to prospect research; a one-pager about your team and what you can and can’t do; hover text in the CRM or footnotes in research materials.
Formal training or onboarding sessions with new and existing staff who will use capacity ratings and other research to help set expectations and to establish relationships.
Regular meetings and interactions with colleagues who put research into action to launch and maintain two-way communication, collaboration, and trust. You might have regular dedicated check-ins, join portfolio reviews, or join frontline fundraisers’ meetings. These conversations present the opportunity for research to be visible and have our voices heard, but it also gives us the chance to hear and stay up to date with what’s happening outside of our team. Maybe there’s a gap between what capacity ratings are expected to do and what they can do, and we can be part of larger changes that need to happen to address them.
Within the prospect research or prospect development team, conduct an internal review of how you calculate capacity ratings along with other policies and methodologies, especially if it has been a while since you made any updates and/or if there have been any major organizational changes recently. Do your methods and policies align with your organization’s current needs and systems? Even if your team ends up deciding you want to keep doing things exactly the way you’ve been doing them, it may help you to better understand why, which could inform conversations with others when you get questions or pushback.
Stay tuned for part two by Amy, who will share real-life examples to put these ideas and suggestions into practice!
