Written by: Beth Inman, Senior Director of Prospect Management & Research Analysis, University of South Carolina and President of APRA-Carolinas

Picture it: the year was 2015 and the University of South Carolina’s $1B capital campaign, Carolina’s Promise, was coming to an end. And, one of our development officers had 300 prospects in her portfolio.  Yes, 300. I can hear the collective gasps as you read this and wonder how a portfolio could be that big! In the development officer’s defense, there had been turnover in her department and she inherited a lot of prospects.  That being said, 300 is an unreasonable amount of prospects in a portfolio and it was one of the primary motivations to get started on a large scale portfolio review project.

In the past, portfolio “reviews” in my shop were very one-sided and there was very little actual reviewing going on. A list of their prospects was sent to the development officers requesting they review it and let us know if there were any changes. You can imagine how many changes were sent back to us; not many. I knew the process wasn’t working but I honestly had a hard time wrapping my head around how to do a project like this for 40 development officers. We decided reviewing one prospect manager category for each development officer was a good beginning; every Primary Manager assignment (approx. 3,400) would be reviewed.

In February 2015, I convened a Prospect Management Committee to discuss the idea of a portfolio review project and came to the meeting prepared with stats to illustrate the project’s importance. I created graphs to show the total number of Primary Manager assignments and from there, broke down how many of those were individual constituents and how many were corporate and foundation constituents. To help make my case, I also included the % of constituents who had not been contacted in the last 12 months (28%) and, without sharing names, included the high and low number of prospects in the portfolios. In proposing the project, I shared that the Primary Manager assignments would be reviewed and one of three recommendations would be made: keep, release or needs attention. The committee saw this as a positive step in helping them manage their portfolios and suggested that my team approaching it from a positive approach would go a long way in the project being successful. At that point, we made the decision to refer to the review process as a ‘portfolio consultation.’  Getting the support of this committee was a huge boost to getting the project started officially.

One lucky development officer agreed to be our guinea pig; we did a practice review of her Primary Manager assignments and scheduled a meeting with her to discuss. For each Primary Manager assignment, each record was reviewed for information in the contact reports, total giving, date of last gift, # of years giving to Carolina and the status of any major gift asks. We also reviewed the constituent’s philanthropic giving outside of Carolina and their gift capacity rating was reviewed for any changes. This first consultation clocked in at an hour and a half because we discussed every prospect on her list. While this was very informative, we knew it wasn’t logical for each consultation to last 90 minutes. From there, we made the decision to sort the spreadsheet by the recommendation for the prospect – the prospects recommended they keep would be grouped at the top, the prospects needing attention would be grouped in the middle and the prospects recommended for release would be grouped at the bottom of the list.  This helped with the efficiency of our reviews; we would only discuss the ‘keep’ prospects if the development officer wanted to release a prospect we recommended they keep.  This way, our time was spent delving into the ‘needs attention’ and the ‘releases.’

Other time savers were to have a template email to send out to the development officer when it was time to schedule their consultation meeting and a template in Excel for the review and its results/recommendations.  In the email, we explained the project overall, what data was being reviewed and what we were requesting they do prior to the meeting.  The Excel template ensured the data and recommendations we were providing were aesthetically and analytically consistent; an example of the template is pictured below.

This project took approximately 7 months; we met with 39 development officers and reviewed 3,545 manager assignments. We recommended that 61% of the manager assignments be kept and 39% of them be released.  After the project was complete, we calculated that, in the end, 59% of the assignments were kept and 41% were released.  It was validating to know that the development officers agreed with almost all of our recommendations.  From the development officers’ view, they often told us how helpful this process was and that they really appreciated our input on their prospects. There were even some who said they had forgotten about a few of their prospects.

Why bother with a portfolio review project? We learned a LOT! By meeting with every development officer about their portfolio, there was valuable dialogue about their prospects and their strategies and we also heard some really great stories!  We updated a lot of solicitations, we adjusted manager assignments when the development officer felt like their prospect was better suited for another division, we updated a lot of records with information on divorces, deaths and we now have a much more accurate picture of the total number of real prospects under management.  This helps with gift forecasting, campaign planning and staffing requests.

This project was also a good opportunity for my team to show how valuable we are to the division of development. We have access to a lot of information and we are the experts on finding, interpreting and analyzing this information.  Our hope is the directors of development will continue to utilize our expertise and view us as the valuable partners we are in the University’s fundraising efforts.

*This project would not have been possible without Kristin Richardson, Vicki O’Brien, Abigail Mann and Matt Bundrick.  This was an enormous project for my team and they were invaluable throughout the entire process.