To share this article with a colleague, use this link:
Moves Management Part 2: Cultivate Relationships: https://help.pm.leapevent.tech/a/1693660
Now that you've identified your prospective donors, it's time to cultivate your relationships with them! As a CRM, or Customer Relationship Management, system, PatronManager is designed to help you oversee your interactions with your patrons and donors. So what tools can you harness in PatronManager to cultivate relationships with prospective donors?
In this article, we'll go through some examples of the following:
- Tools to track your cultivation efforts
- Tools to help your team quickly identify which patrons are prospects
Let's take a look!
Before you get started, make sure you've discussed how you'll conduct and track outreach with your team. We cover this in detail in the Strategy section of our article on Getting Started With Moves Management.
Track your cultivation efforts
Before you start the cultivation process, decide when to create a Pledge record to track your eventual ask.
We recommend creating this record at the start, so that it becomes the home for all your various tracking activities outlined below. That way you can easily look back later at the gift record (whether the ask is ultimately successful or not) to help you understand what led to the outcome!
Learn more about creating the gift record here.
Logging Calls
The "log a call" feature in PatronManager helps you keep track of interactions with your donors and patrons. You can harness this tool for Moves Management by logging calls, meetings, and conversations that you have with your prospects.
Tasks
Tasks are a great way to keep track of next steps and set reminders for your interactions with prospects. You can assign a task to a specific user and set a due date.
For example, you can schedule a follow up Task after logging a call in PatronManager to help you remember what to do next to further cultivate the relationship!
Action Plans
Action Plans is a free third-party app which you can use to create templated sets of tasks and reminders for different purposes, like various steps in your donor outreach plan. You can then quickly apply that series of tasks to an Account, Contact, or Donation record, helping you streamline your processes.
Since this is a third-party app, you'd need to install and configure it yourself, ideally with help from your PatronManager Certified Admin. PatronManager does not provide support for third-party apps.
Emailing from PatronManager
Similar to logging calls, you can email a prospect right from PatronManager! This will keep a log of your communication right on the prospect's Contact record, helping you to track who you reached out to and when.
Additionally, since these email records will be in PatronManager, you can get a colleague or your executive director up to speed on your cultivation quickly.
Chatter
You may already be familiar with Chatter to communicate with your colleagues about specific records in PatronManager. Chatter can also be helpful as you press forward with your Moves Management plan, allowing your team to coordinate efforts and outreach to different prospects, and keep track of what's happening with whom.
Help your teammates tell who's a prospect
Badges
Placing a badge on the Contact record (and the Account, if you wish) can help your team quickly identify prospects when interacting with those patrons. Badges can be triggered by a custom field (like the Prospect Status picklist we mentioned in the last article, or a custom rollup field that tracks active Pledges), by built-in fields like Lifetime Donation Amount, or by a combination of factors using a custom formula field with some "OR" logic.
You can even set a Contact badge to appear in PatronManager Box Office so your ticketing staff can help those patrons have an especially great experience when they attend your venue.
Click these links to more about creating badges and displaying them in the box office.
Entry Notes
Entry Notes are a field on the Ticket Order that allow you to quickly see information about a patron when you scan their tickets with the PatronTicket Barcode Scanning App. The note will appear on the screen of your scanning device to show you information about the attendee.
You can use Entry Notes to mark attendees who are donor prospects in your Moves Management plan, allowing your box office staff and ushers to give them a special greeting when they arrive!
You're doing great! In the next article in our Moves Management series, we'll dive into the details of tracking a major gift or pledge through the various stages.