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Every nonprofit is concerned about the economy’s impact on fundraising efforts. There’s no doubt that you’ll need to work harder than ever to cultivate strong relationships with your constituents if you’re going to compete effectively for donor dollars.

But unless you’re strategic about constituent relationship management, you might find that you:

Have disparate records of your constituent interactions. You find everything from sticky notes and Excel spreadsheets to an offline database and distant memories of phone conversations. It’s all valuable information if it was accessible from a single place.
Miss opportunities because prospective donors slip through the cracks. Without a comprehensive view of your donors’ interactions with your organization, you will undoubtedly miss some important opportunities to solicit donations.
Waste valuable time and effort on the wrong people. You probably spend too much time on supporters with little potential, rather than on those who are the most promising.

“Any or all of these issues can prevent you from cultivating the most promising major giving prospects,” said Rachel English, Common Ground, program manager for Convio in Austin. “That’s why it’s becoming increasingly important to identify these individuals and develop a strategy to move your relationship with them along the continuum toward major donations.”

The key to successful major gifts fundraising is having the right solicitor ask the right donor or prospect for the right amount for the right campaign at the right time. That’s easier said than done, unless you have the right strategy and the right applications in place.

Moves Management is the set of processes nonprofits rely on to develop constituent relationships and move them toward major giving. By developing a Moves Management protocol that enables you to focus on developing donors -- rather than simply securing donations -- you can:

Be a good steward of your donor relationships
Enhance your organization’s fundraising strategy
Improve individual accountability around fundraising by measuring success

There are two key components to Moves Management: prospecting and cultivation. Successful prospecting involves collecting information about your constituents to help identify potential major donors. With respect to prospecting, the “right” prospects for major gifts usually fall into one of two camps: ability to give or affinity. Those individuals with the ability to give have the financial capacity to support your organization. Those individuals with affinity feel connected to your organization and have participated in your mission through both non-financial contributions and monetary gifts.

After you’ve identified which individuals are prospective major donors, you need to move them through the lifecycle of a gift. How? You need to carefully nurture the relationship by having the appropriate person contact the individual to make the right ask. But the challenge is figuring out who should make “the ask” and what it should be.

To reach its full potential, Moves Management is best supported by a tool that helps you identify and foster the personal relationship essential to giving. Constituent Relationship Management (CRM) is the technology that facilitates moves management by enabling you to manage relationships with major giving prospects, and helping you to nurture the best prospects and move the giving process along through all stages - from cultivation and solicitation to stewardship of the gift.

Success requires that you document the relationships between your organization and its donors, and ensure that all of the related data is available to anyone at any time. A brief phone conversation, a wall post on Facebook, an email exchange, a lengthy discussion at an event -- all of this information and more can be easily tracked and stored in your database, accessible to all staff. And with a better view of your constituents’ relationships and activities, your development staff can easily identify the most promising donors and cultivate them more effectively through better tracking, quicker response time and tactful, timely communications.

“Today’s technology allows you to have a historical view of your gift officers’ activities,” added English. “This insight will give you concrete data to highlight what’s working and what isn’t. You can also benchmark the performance of staff so that you can share best practices of individuals who have the most success converting prospects into major donors.”

There’s no one size fits all answer for how to engage in moves management. The bottom line: A moves management strategy, when supported by a modern database, will put you in sync with your major donors. And by empowering your staff to nurture donor relationships more effectively, you can take your major gifts fundraising to a new level.