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How to Succeed at Moves Management

December 23, 2022

Moves management is the process of identifying and qualifying your constituents or donors in an attempt to “move” them to a higher level of giving through strategic communication and engagement. It requires a strategic and dedicated effort to secure a major gift as you convert one time donors into lifelong donors. However, this process can be very custom to your organization. In this blog we are outlining the key steps that help you establish and succeed in your own Moves Management strategy.

Define your objective

Organizations typically focus their Moves Management efforts to cultivate donors towards a Major Gift or Planned Giving. You can also have a separate process to move your one-time donors into repeat donors. But it is extremely important to outline your objective and define SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-Bound) goals to create an effective plan to achieve your Moves Management objectives.

Identify your Donors

Next step is to identify the donors who you want to consider for your Moves Management process. This is where defining your objective helps to narrow down your donors for your process. For example, if the objective of your Moves Management process is to secure a major gift, you should consider your regular donors who have the capacity.

Now this is not as straightforward as it seems since organizations typically have a large donor base and for your Moves Management to be focused you need to have a well researched list of donors.

Here are some key things to consider while identifying the donors:

  • Capacity: This is where it is important to know your donors and it can help you identify their capacity. Information like address in an upscale neighborhood, a senior designation, education, employment and income details will certainly help. Being able to combine this data with their giving history with your organization can help you gauge the capacity of your donors.
  • Giving History: What has been the giving trend of these donors, how often they give, how much they give, is there a seasonality to their gifts.
  • Specific Interests: Are these donors specifically interested in certain programs or causes. It becomes important here to have the ability to track giving of a donor across fundraisers, causes and specific programs.
  • Planned Giving (Legacy Giving): Both Major Gifts and Planned Giving involve planning on Donor’s part but prospects for Planned Giving will have different qualities than prospects for single major gift. A very deep and long term engagement with the organization is generally a key factor in donors choosing your organization for Planned Giving. So look for consistent year-on-year giving, multiple gifts in a year, volunteering association and affinity towards the organization or a specific cause. Age is another criteria to qualify prospects for your Legacy Giving as these gifts are planned near retirement age. Legacy Gift are not necessarily dependent on donor’s current income and also include sources like life insurance, equity, real-estate holdings.

Compiling this data could take months if you do not have a robust and integrated donor management system. LiveImpact’s rich donor profiles, powerful reports and smart grid help you conduct this research easily and add these donors to your Moves Management pipeline. Planning & Executing This is the crucial step in the process and all the research you did about your donors will help you create a targeted plan with specific timelines and milestones.