Welcome everyone, we're glad you could join us for the how to prioritize your major gift prospect list webinar. This webinar is about 30 minutes long and we hope you'll come out of it with some specific next steps for your own portfolio. As we were creating this presentation, we determined that we needed to make a few assumptions about the audience and the skill level of those who are watching. So here are the assumptions that we made. One as a major gift officer, you have an assigned portfolio, and within your data, you have some indication of capacity, whether this be a score research job or career information or at least giving history. You have some basic knowledge of major gift fundraising, and you go out and you meet your constituents in person, whenever possible. My name is Jennifer Williams. I'm the director of philanthropic strategies and gift planning at Northfield Mount Hermon. We are an almost 150 year old school 650 students and grades nine through 12 private secondary school located in rural Massachusetts. I am an alumni of the school and I've been on the staff for 16 years, began my career in development managing campaign fundraising for congregational churches in New England, prior to that. NMH, I manage a team of three major gift officers and one plan giving officer and the gift officers are assigned regionally. My pleasure to introduce my co presenter and colleague, Perrine Meunier-Jones. Thank you, Dan. It's wonderful to be here. My name is Perrine Meunier-Jones, I am the senior regional engagement officer here at Northfield Mount Hermon. My portfolio consists of mostly international fundraising from both parents and alumni. I began my career almost 10 years ago in advancement at the University of Chicago and have been in educational philanthropy ever since. Good. So, good presentation etiquette tells us that we should tell you what we're going to tell you before we tell you it. So here's a brief topic list of what we're going to cover in this webinar. There's really a lot to cover in 30 minutes so we're going to get right to it. Parine. Thanks, Dan. When we're thinking about this topic, it occurred to us that if we're trying to prioritize our portfolios, we first need to be able to define what we're looking for in a good prospect. Dan, do all prospects look the same? That's a really good question, Parine, because philanthropy is lifelong. Things change over time. Our donors financial responsibilities, their family makeup, how they spend their time, the level of their professional experience, and not the least of which their income. So we also know that engagement is linked to giving. So understanding what the data points are and what you should be looking for is really important. And the data points may look different for different types of prospects. So, for example, a good major gift prospect has capacity to give. They have wealth. They've supported your institution or elsewhere in the past, so they're charitable. And they've shown growth in their giving over time. Ideally, they're engaged with the organization and connected to your mission. A major gift portfolio might not just include major gift prospects. Does a good plan giving prospect look the same as a major gift prospect? Maybe. I mean, some major gift donors would make a planned gift as part of a larger blended gift, perhaps. But the majority of donors who support nonprofits through their estates tend to be your most loyal donors, as opposed to your most wealthy donors. They also tend to be older, as the average age that a person first creates a will is 42 years old. If they're unmarried and they don't have children, they could potentially be a really strong planned giving prospect. You might also identify people in your portfolio who have potential but they're a longer term prospect for a major gift. Or maybe they just made a major gift and you have a longer runway to solicit them for another major gift. It's important that these people are still in your portfolio, as you should always be building for the future. However, you might not prioritize them in any given year. Rather, you want to engage them along the way so that when the time is right, they'll be ready for an ask. So Parin, maybe we can dive deeper into a few examples of strong prospects to explain what we mean here. Your portfolio is mostly parents. How do you recognize a potential, a really good potential parent? Let's talk about what a strong parent profile looks like. Here's an example of someone who might be considered a major gift parent. We take a look at the capacity rating of half a million to a million. That's high enough that we want to get to know these people a little bit more. At least one of the parents is in a lucrative field. Their child is in their second year at our school and the family made a five-figure gift during their daughter's first year. The parents are engaged and they came to campus frequently and we can tell that they read the emails the school sends. This is a parent that I would want to prioritize for a visit. They've indicated with early giving that they are philanthropic. It might be too early to ask for a major gift this year, but perhaps a conversation about a significant graduation gift would be more appropriate. In the meantime, I would try to get to know them and encourage continued high-level annual fund support. Alternatively, here's the profile of someone a bit older. What are we seeing here? Lucy is rated to give 50,000 to 100,000. She graduated 66 years ago and she's a person that's rated quite a bit lower than the parents that Parine just looked at. She's in a field as an artist that likely doesn't pay as regularly and maybe not as generously as someone in finance. However, Lucy here has given every single year since at least 1980. Her gifts were modest, but they did grow over time. She's been somewhat involved. She attended four reunions, but she lives far away and that could explain the lack of more involvement. She doesn't really present as a major gift prospect, but she's the perfect plan giving prospect. What about a special occasion donor report? Here we're talking about someone who is celebrating a milestone with our institution, a reunion, a graduation, or is possibly commemorating a lost loved one or even the retirement of a beloved teacher or professor. In this example, Pamela has an upcoming 50th reunion in two years. She's been giving, but not significantly. She has met with a gift officer, her capacity rating and career indicate wealth, and she has been engaged coming back to campus in the past. Pamela is someone I would prioritize meeting, even though she has not given much yet. Oftentimes, the excitement and enthusiasm from classmates around a milestone reunion can open the conversation for giving in a way that Pamela might not have even considered. There's also the potential for a planned gift from someone with a 50th reunion. And here is Mr. Young. He graduated from our institution about 20 years ago, and I can see that he's been moving up the ladder in finance and he's landed at a large notable financial institution about two years ago. He's mid-30s. He isn't married. He doesn't have children. I see he's engaged with event attendance, steady and increased giving, and he's interested in networking with other alumni and learning about the school's finances. All really good signs. Not only does he seem like a good candidate for volunteerism, perhaps the board, but he likely has disposable income. He's not saving for college for his kids or buying a family home, so he's definitely a strong major gift prospect. So that was a deep dive into some of the specific prospects, their giving potential, and the signs and the signals that might indicate potential. Recognizing who might be a good prospect is the first step. It's also important to understand the big picture of your portfolio, the view from space, so to speak. So Parin, when you're slicing and dicing your portfolio, what are some of the ways that you do that? Well, let's help make setting your portfolio a little less daunting by looking through different lenses. What is the makeup of your portfolio and what approach will be best based on the profile of your prospects? Do you have expectations of frequent travel or are you trying to encourage more class giving during reunion? Are you expected to move a certain percentage of your portfolio through the gift cycle each year? The ways in which your pool can be segmented can help you focus on the work you want to accomplish and the specific goals of your institution. So just depending on the expectation of your role, you might want to start with geographically segmenting your pool. This will help you understand where you want to travel and who you might want to meet. What type of constituents make up your portfolio? Some institutions focus solely on alumni, some have families, and yet others also include friends. Knowing constituent type will help when it comes time for outreach. What is the giving history like in your portfolio? Perhaps consider looking at libunds and sibunds first. Are there people who need to be contacted for an annual gift soon? Are there people in stewardship from a larger gift and you need to make sure they don't feel forgotten after making that meaningful gift? Are there others who are consistent givers and you want to encourage increased giving or know more about their philanthropy? Why might there be someone in your portfolio who's never given? If your institution has a research team, it's possible you will have a rating or a capacity number associated with your prospects. Who in your pool is highly rated for capacity to give and inclination? Of those highly rated prospects, who is giving? Coupled with giving history, a capacity rating will help you understand the potential of your pool and possibly who to start with when you reach out for visits. If your institution is savvy at capturing cycles, it is very helpful to know what percentage of your pool is in each stage, from discovery, qualification, cultivation, solicitation, and all the way through to stewardship. This can help you understand the expectations from your pool and to target your visits accordingly. What about recent engagement? Have your prospects attended an in-person or online event recently? Did a previous prospect meet or germinate with them? Have they visited campus? If they're engaged with the institution, it is not always, but often much easier to get a visit with someone. Is there a special occasion coming up for people in your pool? Who are the people in the reunion cycle? Who has a birthday coming up? These are some ways we like to think about segmenting our portfolios. Now that we've wrapped our head around segmenting our pool, let's talk about the ways to help you visualize this data. There's a tool that we use to aid us in the segmenting that Pareen is talking about. It's called a landscape report. I love landscape photography and a landscape report is a bit like that in that it gives you a big picture view with a lot of small details if you zoom in. So I want to share an example. As you can see, this report breaks up a portfolio in a number of different ways that Pareen talked about. In here, we've talked about geographic region on the top left. We've looked at age and we've looked at capacity rating, constituent type, and giving and more. So understanding where your constituents live helps you figure out where you need to travel. Looking at their ratings and giving tells you how much giving potential exists in your portfolio. This type of information can also help you set goals for yourself. So for example, if you see that only 11% of your prospects here are in your giving society, you might set a goal to increase that to 25% next year. Perhaps you want to increase your percentage of recurring gift donors or those who have your organization in their estate plans. If you don't know where you are, you can't make a plan for where you want to go. So you might be looking at this and wondering, how hard is it to take your list and chart it like this? I just want to point out there is a link on this page that when you download the slides from the CASE website, this and a few of the other upcoming slides are available for you to click through and get to the actual documents and use those as templates if you'd like. So we have some tips and tricks for you. First, you need to get an export of your data in a way in which you can analyze it. If you're not able to do this yourself, ask for help. You likely have someone in your IT group or advancement services group who can help you export it. Excel tends to be the most helpful way to be able to slice and dice your data. There is certainly the novice method, which is just sort and count. And that is very easy to do. But then if you are a little bit more of an expert in Excel or willing to just learn a little bit about Excel and pivot tables, then you can go a little bit deeper and it might not take you quite as long. So what's a pivot table? Pivot table is an Excel tool. It's built in and it allows you to reorganize and summarize information. There are a lot of tutorials available on YouTube and you can just go to YouTube and search pivot table training. But I'll do a couple of quick examples for you to show you how easy this is. So give me a minute. I'll switch over to our data. So we created this fake data sheet. These aren't real people. They are not real gift officers. They're not real gifts. It's just a bunch of fake data to give us a tool to use as we're working together today for this webinar. As you can see on this data, there are one, two, three gift officers lists here in front of us. And the lists contain all of that data information that we want to be able to analyze. So when I exported it, I said, give me all the giving, give me their donor segment, give me their constituent type, give me their locations. I've got all the information here that I want to slice and dice. And using filters is the easiest way to start to sort and to count if you are the person who's not very experienced with Excel. The one thing that I would say that's really important is if you're going to use filters, make sure you always filter the entire spreadsheet, because if you filter just one column, then you will sort that column, but all the other information stays in the same place and you lose the integrity of your data. So to do a filter, you want to select your entire spreadsheet, which you could do a couple of different ways. I like to just click this upper left box that gives selects everything. And you go to the data pull down and you turn off or on the filter. If I'm ever unclear of whether I have everything filtered, I go back and I turn it off and then I turn it back on again. And that way I know I have the whole sheet selected and I have filtered every single column. So the easiest way here for me to see if I would just want to look at one of my gift officers is select just one of them. In this case, I'm going to select Peter Jones. I'm just looking at Peter Jones's list here and I want to see where his people are. And I can sort this by state. I can say sort A to Z through state. And here's where I can count. So I can just look at California and I could physically just count these to see how many I have. I can also highlight the ones in California and down the bottom of my spreadsheet, it shows me a count. So there's 16 people from California. There's three people from Connecticut. There's two people in Hong Kong and in Massachusetts. A bunch of people in Massachusetts here, 18 people in Massachusetts. So that's the easiest way to do that. And I can do that for all of the different types of data here. I can look at the donor segment and sort that and count it. I can look at the internal ratings, sort that and count it. And then I just plug this information into my summary spreadsheet. The other thing is the pivot tables. And I'm going to give you a quick lesson on pivot tables. They don't have to be complicated. But the more you know about them, the more helpful that they become. So to start with a pivot table, I have just Peter Jones information here. I'm going to highlight the state and country because I want to know geographically where are the people in Peter's portfolio. And I'm going to go up to recommended pivot table. And Excel will push one suggestion out to me here. And I'm going to say, OK, I'll take that suggestion. And it automatically analyzes this by country. What I can do, though, is these fields over here, I want to add the state into the mix so that it breaks it down a little bit more. And I can see now that in Hong Kong, I've got two in Kowloon. But it shows me the US as well. And I can see the biggest places geographically in Peter's portfolio are California and Massachusetts. So right there, we can see where Peter is going to travel. Let's try another slice of data. Let's say we want to look at the internal ratings of Peter's portfolio. Now, there's a few that are blank. And that's because they're not rated. There's a big question mark for those people. Doesn't mean he shouldn't see them. It just means we don't know that there's a rating or they don't have capacity. But maybe they do. And it just didn't match up in your search for data and research. I highlight the internal rating column, go back to Insert, Recommended Pivot Table, and select the first one. And Excel gives us a breakdown of the capacity scores. So I can see in the portfolio that there are 28 people with capacity scores. The rest are blank, not pulling in. But if I go back and look at Peter's information here on Peter's sheet with his prospects, that those are all blank. So that's just a quick training here on pivot tables. I'm going to go back to the presentation. Let's see. Get that slide back up here. Here we go. Good. So taking into account all of your analysis that you've done, and you want to identify who were your top prospects. And so to figure that out, those are people who tick multiple boxes. Perhaps they have urgency. They also have capacity. And they're loyal. They come and engage through events and they give regularly. And you know they're connected to the mission maybe because of a prior conversation. When people tick multiple boxes, they should rise to the top and become part of your top prospect pool. I also like to factor in the size of the ask and the timing of the ask when I'm figuring out the top 20% of my list. So we use proposals or opportunities here at our school to help us make a plan for the year on what we'll ask for, what is the priority, you know what is the gift for, and when are we asking for it, and how much are we asking for. So I also take that into account when I'm figuring out who my top prospects are. If they are coming up and I want to make an ask this year of a significant amount, they're going to be a top prospect for me. And once you've identified all of your top prospects, then it's time to get on the road. So how do you prioritize your plan for the upcoming year? A great question, Jen. How do you prioritize your plan? Well here at MH, we're lucky that we have a database where we can view our prospects on a map. A lot of databases don't have this functionality. Don't worry, there's an easy workaround. But using this tool, mapping either through your database or the way I'm going to show you, is really helpful for you to start visualizing where do you need to be in the upcoming year. So I'm going to switch over and show you how to import the data into Google Maps to make this really easy for you. So we're going to presume that you have an export of your data. We'll navigate over to mymaps.google.com, like I said, and when you do that, you'll like create a new map and you'll be brought to this screen. It'll ask you then to import your data. I've saved my data as Excel spreadsheet, but you'll see that you can import this also as a Google Sheet, which is just as simple. So you can choose a drive file or an album, but I'm going to upload my data from Excel and I have saved it right here for us. Once you have your data imported, it's going to ask you a couple questions to help you be able to make this as effective as possible. So it wants to know where are these people. You should have columns in your data with your city, state, or country identifying markers. I'm just going to choose city, state, and country, those three. That's how I have imported my data. Then I'll continue. From there, it wants to know how I want to title my data. So what is the most useful way for me to look at these folks? We have first name and last name, but I like to use their full name because you might have a prospect of similar names in your portfolio. Then I'm finished. We will have taken all of the data from our spreadsheet and imported it onto this map. As you can see, like in our data that Jen shared, there's a large concentration both in the New England area and in the West Coast. I think one of the most helpful functions of Google Maps is being able to style the data in different ways. So I can click this little button here that says uniform style and see how these data points are visualized. I can ask it to give me different colors and show me different people based on either their inclination, their rating, or different cycles, and it'll give me a visualization a little bit more in-depth. So I like to look at folks based on their rating. This is really helpful for me to say, where are my most wealthy donors? As you can see, I have 250,000 rated donors are highlighted in yellow. I have families of wealth. Those are families, there may be one hiding on this map. Those are families that we've identified where the student is here and we're working with them as potential families. There's the couple million dollar donors that are in this portfolio. That's a really helpful tool. If you click on any of these, you'll then get all the data that you had imported from that Excel spreadsheet into their little brief profile. I think this can be very helpful for you looking at, okay, where do I want to go and how do I find those best prospects, top donors that I might want to start seeing when I travel. I'm going to stop sharing this screen and go back to our presentation. That's really helpful, Perrine, and I think we're lucky here at Northamont Hermann that we have a tool in our database that does this for us, but if you don't, mapping your portfolio that way can be helpful not only for understanding your portfolio, but planning a trip. So that's what we're going to talk about next is planning a trip. After you've analyzed your portfolio, it's time to get on the road, and that's what we're here to do. So let's explore some tools that can help you plan out your travel throughout the year. So as we saw in the mapping exercise, the portfolio fake data we're using has large concentrations of prospects in the New England area, which is where we are located, and many prospects who are in the greater Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay areas. So to make a plan of the top prospects you identify, you want to start filling them in on this planning grid, which is each of the areas that are in your portfolio. This will help show you where the top prospects are and help start building where you need to travel in this year in order to maximize the efficiency of your portfolio. Just because you have many people in one area doesn't mean that you have the highest concentration of top prospects in that same area, so this exercise helps you figure out where those top prospects are. Right, and your top prospects should guide where you go, and you can certainly see, and you should see, all your other prospects in that area while you're there. The other thing that you can do, and I recommend that you do, is that you break your geographic areas down even more specifically than what is shown on this sheet in front of us. So for New England, there's lots of, New England is large, you could break it down by state, you could even break it down by eastern Massachusetts and western Massachusetts and southern Connecticut, which is closer to New York City, might be part of a New York City trip instead of, you know, all of Connecticut together. So even New York City, people who live in New York City, they could be in Manhattan, they could be in Brooklyn, they could be in upstate New York, which is really a completely different geographic area, so it's okay to be very specific. And a reminder that this is a Google Doc template that you can link to if you download the slides from CASE. So now that we know who the top prospects are and where they are, it's time to make a plan to travel. That's all the fun of our jobs, at least I think so. So in the example, the list of top prospects, we saw that there's a large concentration of northern California. I think it'd be very prudent for this person to start their travel in that area, and it's possible that you would want to take two or three trips to that area in order to cultivate your portfolio in the most efficient way, and that way you're not missing out on folks. If you start, you know, you start in an area where you don't have as many concentrations of prospects, you might miss cultivating along throughout the year the people in California because you want to go there more than once. So this also helps you identify who maybe needs a higher touch, who needs to be seen for different reasons, or maybe you want to bring somebody higher up in your organization, a plans-giving professional or your head of school to come with you on a trip. If you travel early and you know that you need to travel to those areas early, you can make that plan. In between these bigger travel pieces, local travel. For us, that's western Massachusetts, so that's what we would fill in for local when we don't have bigger trips. So you now have sort of a strong foundational plan for approaching a portfolio. Let's review what we went over. It's a lot. So as a reminder, here's what we covered today. Before you start diving into your portfolio, you want to understand the priorities of your institution and what a good prospect in your pool looks like. Get a full comprehensive list of your prospects with key information so you can sort your data to maximize efficiency. What areas do you want to look at? What segments are important for your constituents? Get to analyzing. It's important to understand your portfolio makeup to be able to effectively move prospects through the pipeline. Through your analysis, you should be able to identify the top prospects. Maybe it's your top 25, maybe it's your top 20 percent, but it should definitely be people that you want to make a significant ask of in the next 12 months. This will help guide your travel and keep your work focused. Now plan your travel and local work around key prospects. You're less likely to miss an opportunity if you've identified the important people early and made a plan for the full year. We know plans change as soon as you make a plan, but it should help guide and frame your work for the year. As always, you can find lots of resources through the CASE website at case.org slash resources. From there, you'll find links to articles and webinars just like this. I would highly recommend the Advancement Resource Catalog, and that is the ARC Advancement Resource Catalog. So thank you for joining us today. Karine and I are very happy to be helpful to you if you have any questions about prioritizing your portfolio. A word of caution, it can be easy to get stuck here in this analysis paralysis, and it is important to take time to understand your portfolio, but do so with an eye toward action. Get yourself to the travel grids and make a plan and then act. You will learn the most from having conversations with people. You don't need to know everything about them before you visit them. That would leave you with nothing to talk about. Look for those people with the multiple box checked and go see them. Get out on the road, get on the phone, talk to people. Thank you again, and please be in touch with either one of us if you have any questions. Thank you. Bye for now.

prioritize major gift prospects

define good prospect

segment portfolio

visualize data

plan travel

engage with prospects

practical tips