(4 min read)
As you cultivate donor relationships, you will find that sustained, quality contact reaps rewards. Use follow-ups to track which donors need attention and assign next steps to other staff members.
Read more about scheduling and using contact follow-ups
Your Major Giving Portfolio is the easiest and most intuitive tool for managing follow-ups, but you can also manually add and assign follow-ups in all your Moves Management Action Plans, Planned Giving Plans, or Grant Action Plans.
Add follow-ups to individual contact records or to action plans. When you add a follow-up to a plan, only staff members with permission to view the plan can see them. Follow-ups added on individual contact records are visible to anyone able to see that contact.
You can also use Automation to help automatically assign staff and add follow-ups to individual contact records.
Assigning follow-ups in the Major Giving Portfolio
The Major Giving Portfolio helps you manage all your Moves Management Action Plans using an intuitive interface. You can schedule or resolve follow-ups from almost every screen of the portfolio.
At the top of the Cultivate page, you will see a Summary of follow-ups (or Moves) upcoming, overdue, and completed.
You can select Run report to see the Follow Ups Report filtered to the Portfolio Owner (assigned staff) you selected to view in the portfolio.
Below the summary area, you will see details on the six most urgent donor follow-ups scheduled for that Portfolio Owner.
If you tab over to the Action plans page, you will see a list of all the plans assigned to the Portfolio Owner you selected. From the action menu next to each name, you can add new follow-ups, complete the next move, or edit the action plan.
From the Prospect queue, you can select which staff member to assign to each donor and then schedule the next follow-up. You can select Request Research to assign a staff member to follow up on the research request.
Read more about the Major Giving Portfolio
Manually assigning follow-ups on action plans
To add follow-ups directly to your Moves Management, Planned Giving, or Grants action plans, you can Schedule Follow Up, Edit, or Cancel follow-ups from the Follow Ups box to the right of the contact information.
The dropdown menu to the right of the Follow Ups title allows you to choose whether you want to see all the follow-ups scheduled for this contact or only the ones that are part of the current action plan. Because prospects may be a part of several campaigns, viewing all the follow-ups scheduled can help you coordinate your outreach efforts with others.
View My Follow Ups narrows your search to just those follow-ups that have been assigned to you. The next screen shows you all your follow-ups until the end of the current month. You can change the time period at the top of the report if you need to see further into the future.
Adding follow-ups from the contact record
You can also Schedule Follow Ups from the contact record by selecting the Schedule icon.
At the bottom of the follow-up details entry screen, choose Link to an Action Plan and select the plan where you want to add your follow-up.
Manage overdue and upcoming follow ups from the Activity tab of the contact record.
When you click the follow up hyperlink, a window opens with the option to complete, edit, or cancel the appointment.
Using Automation to assign follow-ups
There are several pre-designed Automation templates you can use to make it easier to automate prospect research, relationship building, and donor tracking. These automations can run every day to help you identify contacts who should enter your prospect pool or who are ready for you or your staff to reach out to them. They will automatically assign staff members to the contacts and add the next follow-ups needed to continue cultivating that prospect.
Read more about using automation templates
Using the Follow Ups Report with action plans
You can customize the Follow Ups Report by adding Action Plan Details columns that will give you more information for each follow-up. This will make it easier to see all the history and details you need whenever you are contacting your major donors.