Well, okay, maybe Clarity can’t help fix your personal relationships. But if you feel like your prospect relationships could be stronger, Clarity–Signal by EverTrue’s powerhouse analytics engine—can help you diagnose and treat the issue!
When it comes to analytics, getting facts and figures straight is the easy part. Our Clarity customers love being able to track their fundraising success in real-time. But Clarity offers much more than just measuring outcomes. When you use it frequently throughout the year, it’s your secret weapon for diagnosing and fixing the issues that might be holding you back.
Major gift fundraising is about more than just numbers; it’s a relationship business. You probably know that Signal is revolutionizing the frequency and quality of donor engagement. But did you know Clarity gives you unparalleled insights on how to understand and manage prospect relationships? Once you know what to look for, Clarity helps you spot signs of relationship trouble early enough that you can use Signal to correct course.
Here are three ways Clarity helps you find roadblocks between you and your prospects’ most transformational gifts.
Problem One: Partial Portfolio Management
Do you ever feel like you’re running in place but not going anywhere? Making sure you’re managing your entire portfolio can be a challenge, and it’s not always easy to sense based solely on effort. If you’re only tracking the number of actions you take in a given month, quarter, or year, it can be hard to tell whether your prospects as a whole are getting enough attention. Without the right focus, you might be incredibly busy but still not making any meaningful progress.
Clarity helps you see this through the Portfolio Engagement dashboard. Open the dashboard and filter down to your portfolio by changing the radial button from “Team” to “Solicitor” and clicking on your own name in the list of fundraisers that displays on the left. (See below.)
Doing this allows you to see the percentage of prospects you’ve contacted recently. Now run the following checks:
- What percentage of your portfolio is listed in the “Never” category? These are the prospects who have no interactions on file. Not with you, and not with anyone else at your organization. Real talk: do you need to be assigned to these folks? Can you hand them off to a DXO to warm them up first? If no one at your institution has ever contacted your prospects, you don’t have enough information to develop a successful major gift strategy. This is just setting yourself up to fail.
- Next, notice the proportional spread of prospects you’ve contacted recently (in purple) versus those you haven’t (in gray). Note: you can use the filter to change the number of months you consider “recent.” Are you surprised by the number of prospects you haven’t been able to reach recently? Hover over the gray bar and click on “View List” to see their names. Better yet, consider putting them into a Signal cadence. Simply being assigned to prospects doesn’t help. In fact, if it keeps your colleagues from building relationships with them, it’s probably hurting.
It’s normal to spend extra time and attention on a subset of your prospects—hopefully, these are the folks who are accelerating toward making a major gift. But consider whether you are making full use of the cadences in Signal, or perhaps carrying more prospects than you can manage effectively. Your Prospect Management colleagues can help you strategize and adjust your portfolio to help you succeed.
Problem Two: Shallow Prospect Relationships
Yes, you need to ensure you’re connecting with everyone in your portfolio. But it’s just as important to make sure that the quality of your engagement is strong enough to move those relationships forward. To maximize a prospect’s philanthropic potential, you need to have deepened the relationship to the point that they feel like a stakeholder in your organization’s mission. Ask yourself, are you building their trust in your institution—so much so that they are willing to invest a substantial amount of their own resources to help your mission thrive? That kind of relationship isn’t something that happens through email alone.
How can you tell whether you might not be engaging prospects deeply enough? Use Clarity’s Portfolio Contacts dashboard. Portfolio Contacts is designed to show you how long each of your prospects has been in their current stage, how frequently they have been contacted while in that stage, and what the nature of the contact has been. So open the dashboard, select your name from the drop-down filter, and perform the following checks on your portfolio:
- Are there prospects who are “stuck” in the same stage without any interactions? You can spot these folks by the telltale long line with no icons on it (see above, where it’s taking 25 months and counting to “qualify” a prospect). The longer these “blank” lines are, the more momentum you are losing with your prospects. Don’t wait: drop them into the “Book a Meeting” cadence in Signal before you close the dashboard.
Are there prospects who have been contacted many times (as you’ll know from lots of “interaction” icons) but are still stuck in their current stage? Look at each icon to see what type of interactions you’re having. Interactions over email or other correspondence could be a sign that you’re just having a one-way conversation. Consider a different approach: call them, text them, send them a 1:1 ThankView video, etc. As funny as it sounds, you can email someone 100 times and still not reach them.
Keep monitoring this dashboard over time. Except for the prospects in stewardship, aim to keep these timelines shorter rather than longer. And, needless to say, none of the prospects should be going a long time without any touchpoints at all—especially the ones in the “Solicitation” and “Stewardship” stages. If you’re struggling, your Prospect Management and Donor Relations colleagues would be happy to help out.
Problem Three: “Where Is This Relationship Going?”
If you want to ensure you exceed your major gift fundraising goals, you need to have a thoughtful strategy for each of your prospects. The larger the ultimate gift, the more critical it is that your prospect has experiences reinforcing their connection to your organization and its leadership. Think about it: would you trust a stranger to spend a substantial amount of your money the way you would like them to? Of course not.
Here are a few questions to ask:
- Have they been introduced to the leaders who make decisions impacting the success of the organization?
- Have they physically been onsite and seen your mission in action? If that’s impractical, have you sent them a personalized video that shows them a day in the life of your organization?
- Have they heard engaging stories about those who directly benefit from charitable giving?
- Have they seen philanthropic outcomes like physical space, performances, research findings, rescued animals, etc.?
Each step is crucial for securing a large gift, and none are achievable by merely assigning yourself to the prospect and hoping for the best. You must have a plan to tick off these boxes.
To ensure that you’re doing this work, it’s important to keep an eye on the Signal Task Tracker dashboard. The lower left corner of the dashboard lists the names of development team members and shows their associated tasks. Click on your own name to filter the dashboard down to just the tasks assigned to you.
Once you click to filter, what do you see? Ideally, you should see a timeline with most of the tasks represented in gray, meaning that they are tasks you’ve planned for the future. The below example shows a fundraiser with 127 tasks in total, 13 of which are overdue.
Yes, this dashboard is great for finishing tasks that are overdue. But the larger question might be this: overall, does the number of tasks you see support a whole-portfolio engagement strategy? Are there people you’re leaving behind? See this second example. The fundraiser only has eight portfolio tasks, two of which are overdue.
This type of task overview is your best way to quickly assess whether your prospect strategies are sufficient and documented. (Unfortunately, Signal can’t help remind you to complete the Tasks that only exist in your head.)
Here’s something you can do for extra credit—it’s especially helpful if just a few proposals will “make or break” your fundraising goal.
From Signal, search for the profiles of, say, your five biggest prospects. From the prospect’s summary page, click the Tasks tab on the right. Now take a look at the list of tasks that appear. This is a comprehensive view that shows all touchpoints planned and documented for your prospect, including the ones associated with cadences and including the ones assigned to your colleagues.
When you click on this tab, you want to see a list of detailed tasks, like this:
If you see few/no tasks, you can create them right from this window (“+ Add Task”), and you can even add them to your calendar so you don’t forget them (click on this icon: ). Adding these tasks to Signal and your calendar will ensure that you’re not forgetting something. But documenting your strategy helps in lots of other ways:
- It helps you “zoom out” and consider the overall experiences your prospects need to have before they make a gift. (Tip: visiting this page occasionally helps you evaluate how things are going and whether you might need to adjust the plan.)
- It helps your colleagues understand your strategy so they can collaborate with you.
- It gives your manager insight into your plan and its effectiveness.
Years ago, we could only dream of tools like Signal and Clarity. But as sophisticated as these tools are, they’re really just like a sports car: they can’t help if they’re just parked in your driveway. So today, not tomorrow, start using Clarity to run “health checks” on your portfolio. Just a few minutes a week will help strengthen your prospect relationships immensely, yielding greater investments in the long run.
If you’re ready to see what Clarity could look like in action at your organization, let’s chat! Book time with a member of the EverCrew here.