As prospect management professionals, an important part of our role is implementing and continuously improving a relationship management (also sometimes called moves management) system for frontline staff. This system tracks progress with donors in staff portfolios, creating a record of past interactions and future plans that the gift officer and team leadership can reflect on and use to guide donor strategy.

While the implementation of this system falls to prospect management staff, its success depends on quality data entry from frontline staff.  This is a struggle for many organizations; gift officers may say the data entry takes too much time and, after all, the less time they spend in the office, the better, right?

The Apra Content Development Committee (CDC) wanted to hear how Apra members approach this challenge, so we distributed a survey via the Connections newsletter last month. The survey asked respondents to share the methods their organizations use to get contact reports (meetings that have already occurred) and proactive next steps into the CRM. We also asked them to share more about methods that are particularly innovative or successful, as well as their hopes for continuous improvement of their approach this year. After reviewing the 23 responses we received, six things stand out:

1. The most common approach for proactive and reactive data entry — by far — is for frontline staff to work directly in the CRM.

All respondents who have a CRM count direct work in the system by frontline officers among their methods for data entry. As noted above, though, consistency and quality of data entry can be a challenge. Respondents shared a couple keys to their success with this approach:

• “I emphasize specific things to include and encourage [gift officers] to enter things as efficiently as possible. If they can convey all the important information in a series of bullets, that's fine. Perfect is the enemy of good.”
• “Add a ‘template’ to the CRM with prompts for all required information, to make it easier on fundraisers to fill in reports and create uniformity.”

2. Many organizations support multiple means of contact entry.

Ten of the 23 respondents (43%) selected multiple methods among the available options for data entry. As seen in the chart below, a handful of respondents use each of a variety of other tactics including online and word document forms, voice memos and support staff.

 

 

This suggests that prospect management staff are adapting to the needs of their teams and willing to try new approaches to increase the quality and reliability of data entry, as this comment indicates:

• “I'm always seeking to take away friction points for frontline staff. It's not easy, as the tools continue to ‘complexify’.”

3. Tactics in place range from the highly manual to the cutting edge.

Sometimes, relationship management data entry gets done by simply “knocking it out,” name-by-name, meeting-by-meeting in a weekly catch-up session. One respondent shared:

• “At a previous organization, our EVP of philanthropy would call me after each donor meeting and leave me a voicemail of what happened and what her next steps were. Every other week we met together to go through emails and texts she sent as well to make sure everything was recorded and nothing fell through the cracks. It was a ton of manual work on my end, but the information was really valuable, so I was lucky to be able to make this work.”

Others are exploring opportunities to leverage technology for efficiency, such as the respondent who noted:

• “I use an AI wristband for most meetings, and use an AI agent to convert it into a contact report. I have trained it to automatically generate these in the form I like concluding the meeting, and can simply cut and paste them into the CRM.”

Importantly, any use of technology with donors must be used responsibly, with utmost care to protect donors’ personal information. For additional guidance, we encourage you to explore the Ethics in AI for Fundraising Toolkit.

4. It is more difficult to get proactive data entered in the CRM than reactive data.

Three organizations (12.5%) noted struggling to enter reactive data into the CRM; a few more (five, 22%) indicated challenges to enter proactive next steps. This is likely reflective of gift officers’ requirement to document what they’ve done as a minimum expectation, with proactive planning being a “nice-to-have” that helps to drive their to-do lists in the future and ensure that donors don’t fall through the cracks.

Additionally, comments suggest that it can be difficult to calibrate the right level of “next steps” detail when that information is being entered:

• “There is often a gap between ideal next steps you identify immediately after a conversation and the actual actions taken… If you identify five ideal steps after a meeting, but only realistically accomplish 1-2, that's fine! But if you enter all five into your CRM or other task management system, you'll eventually have to delete or otherwise clear 3-4. If you do this for many visits/constituents throughout a year, that's a lot of uncompleted actions to clean up (and potential shame/accountability to reconcile).”
• “I create future actions for next steps. Sometimes I'm over enthusiastic doing this and end up with past due actions.”

These comments suggest that a simpler approach — perhaps just one next step at a time — may be advisable.

5. Meetings are a supportive tactic to improve proactive data entry at some organizations. 

Seven organizations (30%) get proactive data entered through discussions in a live meeting. This may suggest that a team approach to brainstorming an appropriate next step for a donor can be a helpful strategy, and it also reduces the administrative burden of data entry for frontline staff in advance of the meeting. These meetings may also serve as an accountability opportunity, as reflected in these respondent comments:

• “Monthly moves management meetings have been great to review contact reports, talk to gift officers and remind them to enter the reports in the system.”
• “I do quarterly check-ins with [major gifts officers] that focus just on metrics — a breakdown of status, priority, where their prospects are in the pipeline and how they are moving toward a proposal and ask. This helps us notice outliers that either should be removed from the portfolio or need attention. (And also lets them know that someone is paying attention to what they put into the CRM, which I think helps make sure info actually gets recorded!)”

6. Leadership buy-in and support is critical for the success of a moves management system.

In their comments, respondents noted that leadership has to model, endorse and incentivize data-driven practices:

• “It’s a challenge to get some gift officers to enter contact reports when leadership doesn’t make it a priority and often neglect to enter their own contact reports.”
• “Although it is still a struggle, the biggest shift we saw was when we instituted incentive-based metrics. Although we don't have a metric on number of contact reports entered, there are metrics around meaningful moves/visits, opportunities, asks, closures, etc., which have naturally impacted contact report entry.”
• “The research and prospect development team designed a monthly ‘award’ for advancement team members who have logged in their data in the CRM. This allows for both acknowledgement and a friendly competition.”

The winning combination of data entry methods and strategies for your organization will be unique to you. Thank you to our survey respondents for sharing their experiences and ideas as inspiration for the continued evolution of your approach to this vital work!