Having a pile of data is in itself no guarantee of success. Similarly, having a boatload of prospects is not much without having some idea about getting the most out of those prospects.

During the Association of Fundraising Professionals (AFP) International Conference on Fundraising, Ryan Perry and Shannon Jager of All Children’s Hospital Foundation and Steve Beshuk of JCA discussed the benefits of creating a prospect management model to focus on the rights prospects at the right time and in general get a better result from prospects.

They said that developing a prospect management model requires six basic parts. They are:

• Know what you want to know. Set the destination before starting the trip, for example, where are prospects in their lifecycle with the organization.
• Determine the data you need. The data needed is determined by the questions that need to be asked, for example, about people, solicitation, the team or communication and interaction.
• Ready the database. Think like a relational database. Build the model on paper, and work with someone who knows the cost relationship model really well.
• Ready the business intelligence (BI). Write specifications for the questions that were asked.
• Deploy and support it. It won’t be perfect in the beginning, but be OK with that.
• Monitor and manage. Be prepared for and handle challenges.