Donor Pipeline & Moves Management

When to Use This Skill

Use this skill to build, run, or audit the system that moves individual donors and prospects through fundraising stages — not to decide what to ask them for (that's nonprofit-major-gifts) and not to design the thank-you/retention mechanics after a gift lands (that's nonprofit-donor-retention). Typical triggers:

• "Build a moves-management pipeline for our major-donor prospects"
• "Set up gift-range/pipeline stages for our development team"
• "Review this prospect list and tell me who's stalled"
• "Write next-move plans for a portfolio of 40 prospects"
• "What's our stage-to-stage conversion rate and where's the bottleneck?"
• "How many qualified prospects do we need to hit our fundraising goal?"

Core Framework: Moves Management

Moves management (a term coined at Cornell's fundraising program, dating to David Dunlop) is the discipline of deliberately advancing a prospect's relationship with the organization through a sequence of stages via specific, planned actions ("moves"). Treat every prospect as sitting in exactly one stage at a time:

1. Identification — Suspect enters the pipeline from a data source: wealth screening flags, board/staff referral, event sign-in, volunteer roster, grateful-client list, digital engagement score. Not yet a "prospect" until minimally qualified.
2. Qualification — Confirm capacity (ability to give), affinity (connection to mission), and propensity (giving history/philanthropic behavior) — the standard "linkage, ability, interest" (LAI) triage used by prospect researchers. Assign a qualification rating (e.g., A/B/C or $ capacity band) and a suggested portfolio owner.
3. Cultivation — A sequence of relationship-building moves (1:1 visits, tours, small convenings, briefings, volunteer roles) intended to deepen affinity and confirm interest area. Each move should have a stated purpose tied to what you still need to learn or build.
4. Solicitation — The ask itself. Pipeline work ends at "ready to solicit" and hands off ask strategy, amount-setting, and proposal structure to nonprofit-major-gifts; for pipeline purposes, track only that the ask stage was entered, the date, and the outcome.
5. Stewardship — Post-gift relationship maintenance and impact reporting. Pipeline tracking should log that a donor moved to stewardship, but acknowledgment workflows, thank-you SLAs, and the donor journey itself belong to nonprofit-donor-retention.

Standard Deliverables

1. Pipeline stage matrix — columns: Stage, Definition, Entry Criteria, Exit Criteria, Typical Duration, Required Moves, Owner. Set explicit time-in-stage caps (e.g., no prospect sits in Qualification longer than 90 days without a disposition) so stalls are visible, not implicit.
2. Portfolio move plan — per prospect: current stage, last move date, next move (specific action + date + purpose), rating, portfolio owner. Standard portfolio size for a major-gift officer is 100-150 active prospects (fewer if the portfolio skews principal-gift).
3. Pipeline/funnel report — count and $ value of prospects at each stage, converted to a funnel visual, run monthly at minimum. Pair with a stage conversion rate (% moving Identification→Qualification→Cultivation→Solicitation→Closed) to find the leaking stage.
4. Prospect rating scale — document the capacity bands and LAI scoring rubric used, so ratings are consistent across gift officers.

Concrete Steps

1. Pull all active donor/prospect records and bucket each into exactly one current stage using the entry/exit criteria above — do not allow a prospect to sit unassigned.
2. For each prospect with no move logged in the last 60-90 days (a "stalled" prospect), flag for triage: either assign a next move with a date, downgrade the rating, or move to a low-touch/annual-appeal track (handoff point to nonprofit-annual-appeals mass channels).
3. Calculate the pipeline math backward from the goal: if the major-gift goal is $2M and average major gift is $25K, you need roughly 80 closed asks; at a typical 30-50% solicitation-to-close rate, you need 160-270 prospects actively in Solicitation-ready status, which in turn requires a qualification pipeline several multiples larger — build this ratio table explicitly rather than asserting a headcount.
4. Assign portfolios by rating and relationship fit, capping each officer near 100-150 prospects.
5. Draft next-move plans: each move must specify purpose (what question it answers or what relationship step it advances), not just an activity ("coffee meeting" is not a move; "coffee meeting to gauge interest in the new clinic building before drafting a proposal" is).
6. Set a recurring pipeline review cadence (weekly for officers, monthly for the ED/board development committee) reporting stage counts, $ value by stage, and stalled-prospect counts.
7. Recalculate conversion rates quarterly and diagnose the weakest stage transition before adding more top-of-funnel volume — a common failure mode is chasing more suspects while Cultivation→Solicitation conversion is the actual bottleneck.

Common Failure Modes

• Ghost pipeline: prospects listed in the CRM with no stage movement in 6+ months and no disposition decision — audit and clear these quarterly.
• Stage skipping: soliciting a prospect who was never truly qualified, producing low close rates and donor fatigue; enforce exit criteria before allowing a stage transition.
• Officer hoarding: gift officers holding oversized portfolios "just in case," diluting attention; cap portfolio size and require a reassignment trigger after a set stall period.
• No move specificity: "keep in touch" logged as a move — reject vague moves; require a stated purpose and next action date.
• Conflating qualification with wealth alone: capacity without affinity or propensity produces wasted cultivation time; always score all three legs of LAI.

For Advisors

When engaging as a consultant, open with a pipeline health audit before recommending new tactics: pull stage counts, time-in-stage, and conversion rates first — a client asking for "more major donor training" often actually has a stalled-Cultivation problem that no amount of training fixes. Present findings to the board/ED as a funnel diagram with the weakest transition highlighted, and frame recommendations as capacity questions ("you have enough suspects; you lack qualification bandwidth") rather than generic best-practice lists. Recommend the client formalize the stage matrix and portfolio caps in a written gift officer job aid — the unwritten pipeline is the single most common root cause of inconsistent major-gift performance in small-to-mid shops.