Moves Management Template: Building Personalized Relationships With Your Donors

As humans, we’re naturally drawn to relationship building. We seek out friends and partners who share common interests and values with us, and we spend time nurturing those connections. We crave friendship, companionship, and camaraderie.

All this leads me to the relationship between a nonprofit and its donors— a topic we’ve touched upon a lot on this blog.

During my tenure working at a medium-sized nonprofit with thousands of donors, I quickly realized that it was easy just to assign everyone a number and not necessarily nurture these relationships to the fullest extent.

After all, there was just not enough time to truly make an effort with every single person. But because of this mentality, I wasn’t even scratching the surface of a donor’s potential, and as a nonprofit fundraiser, I was leaving far too much money on the table.

When my manager suggested we try moves management, a method that could help us deepen relationships with key donors, our development team jumped on board. After all, we were obviously missing out on a lot of potential and we knew it!

Moves management worked for us and it very well may work for you too. Here’s everything you need to know to get started.

What Is Moves Management?

Moves management is a way to be systematic about cultivating your donors. At its heart, it’s simply a fundraising plan, but it’s one that allows you to replicate the same steps for each donor. It is a way for your nonprofit to create a set of predefined steps (or moves) that will shepherd your donors to give more often or higher amounts. It also lets you map out what a typical donor journey will look like, so that you can understand what you need to do to cultivate a relationship with your donor, whether they’ve just learned about your organization or they’ve been a donor for years.

Because moves management relies on a very specific method mapped out by an organization, it’s usually reserved for key donors, such as potential first-time givers or major donors. It’s also a great way to think about each category of donors and where they could move next: can a one-time donor become a recurring donor? Can a recurring donor increase their gift? Can a long-time supporter become a major donor? 

What Counts as a Move? 

If you’re not sure if your actions are part of the moves management process, ask yourself:

• Is this action donor-centric?
• Does it increase engagement or involvement of my donors?
• Does it improve understanding of my organization?
• Has it resulted in a gift or major donation?

Some great examples of moves could be a social media shout out, a handwritten thank you note, a phone call, or an in-person meeting. For plenty of inspiration, check out our donor recognition ideas.

Of course moves don’t have to be simply recognition. They can include any action you take that builds a relationship with your donor. You could invite them to join your newsletter email list, offer resources, or share success stories. A great place to start with moves management is to brainstorm your list of potential moves. 

What Are The Benefits of Moves Management?

It might sound a bit overwhelming to put together a full moves management plan, so you may be asking yourself why you’d want to do it. There are some major benefits to moves management.

• It’s sustainable: Once you create your moves management plan, you can easily replicate the steps for any donor. That makes it faster and easier for your fundraising team.
• It’s effective: Your donors won’t experience any long gaps between communications and wonder if you’ve forgotten about them. They have consistent, meaningful experiences with your organization.
• It’s accountable: Each person on your team knows what needs to happen and when it needs to happen.
• It’s donor-centric: Instead of focusing exclusively on their next donation, you’re using moves to build a relationship with a donor. This helps you cultivate long-term, committed donors who are the foundation of your organization.
• It’s measurable: You can look at how effective each move is, and make adjustments based on the data you take.

Basically, moves management lets you take all the mess and guesswork of fundraising and organize it into a single plan that is easy to follow, data-driven, and donor-centric. When you put it like that, who wouldn’t want it?

Moves Management: How It Works

1. Identify

The first step in your moves management journey is to identify your target audience. For example, if you struggle with recruiting new, first-time donors, then consider targeting this audience.

On the other hand, if you know there’s potential for some of your recurring donors to transition into a major donor role, focus your efforts here.

Potential audiences include:

• Prospective new donors
• Prospective major donors
• Prospective monthly/recurring donors

You may identify multiple audiences you’d like to grow. To start, pick one and focus on them. Once you’ve set up a plan for this first audience, you can always go back and work with another audience. But trying to create multiple plans at once is a way to get overwhelmed and lost.

2. Gauge Interest/Ability

Next, build out your list. Start by jotting down the names of some prospective moves management candidates and then outline your mutual relationship. Note some of the following:

• How often do they donate?
• What is their average gift amount?
• What are their philanthropic interests?
• When was your last communication?

If possible, do a bit of digging. For instance, some donors with the potential to be major gift givers own businesses or give to other charitable organizations.

Research your candidates to determine if:

1. They can give (or give more)
2. They may be interested in becoming more involved with your organization

If you already have a CRM or database, this is a great time to start using it. You can pull reports of folks who have donated year over year, those who have made donations over a certain amount, or first time donors. As you do the work of researching potential donors, you can also keep track of that information in your CRM. 

3. Set Goals

After you narrow down your audience and propensity to give, note any particular goals you hope to achieve by using moves management. Goals take many forms depending on who you’re targeting, and they can range from engagement-based to financial.

Sometimes, goals are based on the entire group of prospects, while other times, they’re targeted to each individual. You should also try to think “outside the box,” choosing goals that are related to your donor’s influence on others like using peer-to-peer fundraising.

As you start to craft your plan, you’ll find what works for you. A few examples of goals include:

• A particular gift amount for a major donor
• Percentage of donors converted to monthly giving
• Percentage of donors becoming personal fundraisers in a peer-to-peer campaign.
• Number of donors hosting a fundraising activity

From these goals you’ll be able to develop the metrics you want to track. If your goal is for a certain number of donors to host a fundraising activity, you’ll want to make sure you have a way for them to tell you about their activity and somewhere to make a note of it. You may want to have multiple goals: a certain number of new donors as well as a dollar amount. Try not to take on too many at once as it can dilute your message and leave you moving in too many directions at once.

4. Cultivate & Educate

Now that you know what you WANT to accomplish, it’s time to formulate a plan around these goals.

How are you going to get a donor in the position to agree to become a major donor? What are the techniques you want to use to convert annual givers into monthly givers? These strategies are what make moves management a streamlined, traceable process.

A stellar moves management strategy includes a number of action-items performed on a regular basis, such as monthly or quarterly, to encourage consistent participation in the donor engagement cycle.

Keep in mind: every action item is meant to educate your donor about your cause and cultivate your mutual relationship.

The actions you take will look something like this:

• January: Phone call
• February: Event invite
• March: Handwritten thank you
• April: Phone call about participating as a personal fundraiser

5. Ask & Track

Each fundraiser in your organization bears a responsibility to implement the plan. However, your development team isn’t the only group that needs to get on board. Keep everyone in the loop, especially the marketing department, program coordinators, and volunteer coordinators who work directly with and/or communicate with donors.

Keep your strategy document open, both figuratively and literally. This will help to keep the whole team accountable and constantly looking to revise and improve on current methods.

When it’s time to make the “ask,” make sure it’s made by someone the candidate knows. Remember, the “ask” for your moves management candidate is more personal than a traditional fundraising campaign ask. Take your major donors or prospective board members out for a meal, meet at their place of work, or schedule a phone call. Don’t just send an email—make it special.

With everyone organization-wide focusing on the moves management plan, there’s bound to be overlap in communications and responsibilities. To keep everyone informed and on the same page, data tracking is key.

Document all interactions and track donor movement on your nonprofit CRM or even a spreadsheet. Any method is better than no method at all.

6. Next Steps

At the end of the year/quarter or whenever you see fit, schedule a meeting to go over your moves management plan. Note what worked, what didn’t, and how you can improve to continue meeting your strategic goals.

Also, create next steps for your moves management candidate, including ways you will continue to inspire and activate them to become even more connected with your cause.

Moves Management Best Practices

Now that you have all the steps to start your own Moves Management strategy, you might think you’re ready to go. But we’ve got a few more pearls of wisdom to impart before you get started. Across all of these steps, there are some best practices that will help you to be the most effective with your moves management approach.

1. Have clear data hygiene procedures and keep your database clean.

There are plenty of different options when it comes to your CRM or database, but you do need some way to keep track of your donors and how you’ve communicated with them in order to really do moves management well. 

As you start your moves management process, it’s a great time to stop and really clean up your existing database, or select a new one (and clean all that data as you move it in to the new database). 

If you have multiple records of the same person, your moves management strategy is going to get messy very quickly, and people won’t get the right moves, or they may receive them more than once. To keep that from happening, establish strong standards of how your data will be entered and how it will be kept clean over time.

This is also helpful as you work on segmenting your lists to determine who will receive which types of outreach. If you know you can trust the historical data, you’ll feel more confident dividing your lists.

2. Understand the donor and gift lifecycle.

Experienced fundraisers know that our donors (and their gifts) move cyclically. The moves management process is built on those foundations. The steps in the donor cycle are: 

• Acquisition
• Retention
• Upgrading

Each individual gift also follows a “cycle”:

• Identify
• Engage
• Ask
• Thank 

Once you understand these cycles, you’ll have a better handle on which moves to use for each person. It will depend on where they are in both donor and gift lifecycle. Know where each donor is on the cycle so that you can tailor your outreach.

If you’re looking for more details about the donor lifecycle, you can check out our First 60 Days plan for new donors. This is also a great place to look for inspiration about the types of moves you may want to incorporate into your moves management plan.

3. Review your moves management process regularly.

One of the best parts of moves management is that you can easily update it based on your real time data. When you set out your process, make sure you add in a date when you will review the process. Take a look at how well each step is performing. If a particular set of moves isn’t getting you the ROI you’d like, try swapping it out for something new. This is also a great time to step back and look at how well your team is keeping up with the steps and with their documentation. 

4. Solidify your tech stack and moves management software.

As we already mentioned, it’s essential to have a way to track your donors if you’re doing moves management. That’s where technology comes into play. There are plenty of options when it comes to moves management software, and as you start to plan out your strategy, you’ll want to decide what’s important to you in your software. Have it set up before you start implementing your plan, and make sure that everyone on your team feels comfortable using it.

This is also a great time to think about how your software integrates. If you’re using CauseVox, you can integrate with nearly anything through Zapier. Try setting up a Zap that adds information to your database as soon as it comes in through your CauseVox page. With all the technology that exists, you can automate most of your moves management process.

No matter what software you choose, there is some information that is essential to track. That includes:

1. Details on prospect identification
2. Basic donor information, including name and current gift amount
3. Donor interests and affinities
4. Cultivation technique/s
5. Actions/”Touches”, including inspiration/education and engagement opportunities

So how do you decide which software to use? What types of software do you need? Let’s talk about your tech stack.

Using software to facilitate moves management

One of the most important choices to make before you begin your moves management process is what software you’d like to use. Software is what will help you track your donors, take payments, and segment your audiences.

It can be helpful to think about what metrics and information you’d like to track before you begin looking at softwares. That way you’ll know what features you want and can pick a software that meets your needs.

CRM

Your CRM (or customer relationship management) database is where you can keep a contact record for each donor, along with all the information about that person you may need. Ideally, you’ll want a CRM that has customization options so that you can tailor it to your needs. You’ll also want to look for something that is easy for your staff to use and ideally something that integrates with the other software you use, so you don’t need to manually enter data.

Donation Processor and Page

You most likely already have some way to accept donations online, but this is a good time to think about whether your page and processor have all the features you want. Think about looking for a donation platform that has a pledge feature, that accepts mobile wallet payments like Apple Pay, and something that allows you to create descriptive tiers. You may also want to create multiple donation pages tailored to where donors are in the moves management cycle.

Wealth Screening

While you can get a good deal of information about your donors through surveys and questions on your donation form, there are some tools out there to help you get details about their giving potential. Wealth screening is a service that many sites offer, and it can give you information about your donor’s finances and giving potential. You’ll get information like real estate ownership, stock holdings, and previous donations. If you’re ready to really assess whether your donors are ready to increase their gifts, wealth screening can be a very helpful way to segment donors.

Get Started With Moves Management

Moves management is a tried-and-true formula to establish relationships with donors who ultimately feel closer to your cause and are more committed in terms of engagement and finances.

To help you keep your moves management organized with less manual tracking and more automation, check out CauseVox’s nonprofit CRM.