Fundamentals of Staying Organized
Have you read the Major Gift Checklist? If not, give it a read! It outlines, for lack of better works, Meg & Phil’s secret sauce. As a refresher, the checklist walks you through a step-by-step process of securing major gifts for your nonprofit. For this blog, I’ll be focusing on step five:
“Be ready to stay organized and document your work. Information about your donors and prospects need to live in a well maintained database. Your meeting details need to be written down and circulated. Before you even head out on your first visits, get your group in the habit of documenting what you know.”
No matter what type of nonprofit sector you work in, the fundamentals of organization are key to keeping donors stewarded and gifts accounted for. Everyone in the development office must adopt organizational best practices.
Rule #1 Documentation is key
You are juggling multiple relationships, and no one expects you to remember everything about them all. But things start to feel messy when you rely solely on your memory or past email chains for information that is critical to the next steps. That is why documentation is key. Whether that’s handwriting, typing up notes, or recording conversations, have some sort of tangible notes you can look back to, ensuring you are at the top of your game when the time comes to refer back to a relationship that needs its next touchpoint or another visit.
Rule #2 Use a system to house information
Now that you have records, where will they live? Filing cabinets and file folders have become a thing of the past. With different options of saving files on your computer and using online platforms, it’s much easier to locate things you need with a simple search. Investing in a donor database is incredibly important -- not only does it house all of your pledges and gifts, but it's the central point for contact reports and donor activity, too. If you're out of the office and something important happens with a relationship, your team knows where to find it. If you want to know what happened with a specific family two years ago, your fingers are crossed that you can find it there, too. We have a rule of thumb at our firm: if it's not in the database, it didn't happen; make those meetings count! (PS: if you like to record notes on your phone or handwrite them, ask for help in typing them up to live in your central database at least once every other week; if that resource isn't available to you, mark your calendar for a typically "slow time," like every Friday afternoon, when you can type them up and input them into donor records.)
Rule #3 Maintenance
To reach your full organizational potential, you must maintain the documents and systems you have created. Commit to being consistent with whatever you have put in place. For example, if you have an excel spreadsheet devoted to tracking prospect movement, dedicate time to editing this as changes are made. If not, you will forget things and it will feel impossible to keep up with the different prospects and donor activities going on. If you're tasked with keeping yourself and teammates (board members, leadership, other gift officers), on track, too, making changes to a spreadsheet and uploading contact reports will position you to lead by (motivational) example, and keep everyone moving in the same direction at a great pace, too.
