The Development team is doing an exercise to map our "inputs" and "outputs" to the donor lifecycle to be able to gauge effectiveness and show how resources impact our results. Some of it is about the time people spend on various activities, and some of it about the budget line behind any activity. There is some debate as to how to map my Operations team's work to the lifecycle and I'd love your thoughts on how you have done this and/or if there are already best practices for how to allocate.
Although I agree that our work touches all aspects of the donor lifecycle, functionally about 60% of my team's staff time and budget is directly related to gift processing, from lockbox, bank and credit card processing fees to temp help at peak EOY season. Ideally I think I'd like to see most of my team's work in a separate Foundational/Systems line, but for now I've allocated that 60% to the Solicitation stage which is an imperfect proxy to show that donations that are solicited result in gifts to be processed. Development's senior leadership would prefer to see the team's work spread across the lifecycle and not be so concentrated on the Solicitation stage.
The lifecycle we're using is:
1. Identification
2. Qualification
3. Cultivation
4. Solicitation
5. Acknowledgment
6. Stewardship
7. And then we have added a Support/Management/Strategic Planning/Foundational Infrastructure bucket to catch manager's time and other foundational work of each team.
My Operations Team is responsible for Gift Processing, State Charitable Registrations, Database Administration, light reporting, and Acknowledgments for Annual Giving and lower-end Mid Level donors. Our budget mostly covers non-sexy line items for systems and gift processing fees like database and software licensing/maintenance fees, state charitable registration fees, data enrichment such as annual wealth screenings/ratings (which I've allocated to Identification stage), age appends, NCOA, lockbox fees, credit card fees, online giving platform fees, postage (for lockbox BRE and acknowledgments) etc.
We process over 150,000 transactions a year, and maintain a database with 70,000 active annual donors. A huge amount of my and my staff's time is focused on gift processing, even the database admin helps with online platform gift imports regularly during the busy end of calendar year season, and I spend a fair amount of time reviewing gift batches myself throughout the year as well as take over EOY stock gift management including tracking incoming transfer, valuing them and entering them into our CRM. Two separate teams with their won Directors handle Stewardship and Prospect Management/Research.
Any thoughts and feedback is appreciated!
-t
Tracey Mullane
Director, Development Operations | Partners In Health
800 Boylston St. Suite 300 | Boston, MA 02199-8190
(857) 880-5729 |
tmullane@pih.org<mailto:
tmullane@pih.org>
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