How to Track Campaign Commitments
In all stages of a campaign, an organizational system is essential for tracking prospects, and donor proposals and commitments. We propose tracking prospect and donor activity in five distinct categories to keep you organized as you strive to reach that campaign goal. These stages are: potential, pending, confirmed, completed, and denied; here’s why each is uniquely important.
Potential
All prospective donors live here. A prospect will remain in potential throughout the introductory, and cultivation stages of building a relationship. This category should be organized in descending order of “ask amount” and you should establish a range or potential solicitation for each individual or foundation listed so you can always understand the sum of your potential solicitations in total!
Pending
This represents solicitations that are out, awaiting reply. Once you make an ask, send a proposal or commitment letter, the donor will be considered pending at that exact level of support. Once you get an answer, they’ll move to the next category – in the meantime, you know which tab to click on if your colleagues or board members ask who they can help “nudge” along!
Confirmed
Here we breathe easy knowing the commitment to which our donor has agreed. At this point, you may have verbal or email confirmation of the pledge or gift amount and allocation, and to finalize it (and get it to the completed category), you need to work on paperwork and/or payment. The fruits of your labor are obvious here!
Completed
Support is in hand or a formal commitment has been signed with a payment schedule established in writing – time to celebrate! If you don’t have a sophisticated process established for stewarding gifts, now would be the time. While your work to get this support secured landed you in this celebratory spot, the work is not done; thanking people consistently, sharing updates, and showing them the outcomes they generated is of equal importance!
*PSA: you can add together the confirmed and completed tabs (better yet – automate that on your excel sheet) to know your gifts-raised-to-date as you track against your campaign goal.
Denied
We want to look organized and coordinated, and sometimes that means documenting for your group who said No. You must record and track progress and info about your donors in your database – and for those who don’t want to be involved, it’s just as important. We usually like to think of No as bad timing for a whole host of reasons, but either way, listen up to their wishes to be left out of communication and make sure your colleagues and board members know the same.
OK – you are set to tackle this campaign with an organized tracking system – now you just need to fill the categories! Of course, the first tab will be the longest list at the onset, but once you start to get meetings and meet regularly, you’ll notice people being moved to the next category on an individual and systematic basis!
