Nonprofit donor relationship planner

What goes in and out

You give it

• Donor records, giving history, relationship notes, fundraising goal, and available staff time.
• Document (optional)
• Spreadsheet (optional)

You get

• A donor stage guide, next-step table, and review schedule.

How the task works

• Set clear stages. Define what must happen before a donor moves from a new lead to a gift and follow-up care.
• Check stalled relationships. Review records for missing next steps, unclear owners, and long gaps between contacts.
• Plan the next contact. Write each action with its purpose, owner, and date. Show stage counts and gaps against your goal.

Full instructions

• Open a chat AI such as Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini. Paste in the skill text from this page. It names other skills, such as major gifts and donor retention. They are not included, so your AI will skip those hand-offs.
• Prepare your records first. Replace names and contact details with IDs, and check your data policy before you paste anything.
• Paste your records, your fundraising goal and your team's available time. A spreadsheet export pasted as text works.
• Ask your AI to build the stage matrix, the move plan and the pipeline report.
• Check the stalled list and the next moves. Fix any stage that looks wrong before your team uses the plan.
• The numbers in the skill (a 30 to 50 percent close rate, 100 to 150 prospects per officer, 60 to 90 days stalled) are rules of thumb. Swap in your own figures when you have them.
• Hand stalled prospects to a major-gifts fundraiser, or move them to a low-touch appeal list. Run it again each quarter with fresh records to see which stage is slowing you down.

Full instruction file

Donor Pipeline & Moves Management

Added by AI Blocks: donor records hold personal information. Before the person pastes any records, ask them to replace names, emails, phone numbers and addresses with IDs, and to check their organisation's data policy. If records arrive with names or contact details, do not repeat them in your answer. Use the IDs or row numbers instead.

Before you start

Use the material below to do this job. If facts or tool access are missing, explain what you can finish and what must wait.

What you need (use your own material or the linked skill):

• Your question (yours): the decision or problem, and what a good outcome looks like.

Makes it better (optional):

• A document (yours): a finished document, such as a Word file, a PDF or a page of notes.
• A spreadsheet (yours): a spreadsheet with its data, formulas and charts.

How to start:

1. Look first. Use what they've already attached, pasted or put in their about-me note. In a coding assistant with file access, look in the project too for these by name.
2. Check what's missing. Look for your question, a document, a spreadsheet. They can attach files, paste the details, or share a file path your assistant can read. Ask only for missing facts that change the result. If they ask you to start with what they have, complete the parts you can and mark the gaps.
3. Do the job. Follow the skill below with the facts and tools you have. Mark each gap with MISSING: where it belongs and never invent a fact to fill it.

Tools that do this best:

• A chat AI that can read your files: The skill works from records and drafts you provide. Research tasks also need current, checked public sources.

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.

Added by AI Blocks: the numbers in this skill (a 30-50% close rate, 100-150 prospects per officer, a 60-90 day stall window) are rules of thumb with no source. Replace them with your own history when you have it, and say so in the plan. The skills named here (nonprofit-major-gifts, nonprofit-donor-retention, nonprofit-annual-appeals) are not included. Tell the person which hand-offs you skipped.

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.

After this

When you've handed it back, suggest what they could do next in one short question. It's a suggestion: if they're done, that's fine. Offer these, and say they can type their own:

• The Weekly work review planner. It takes the plan. If they pick one and that skill is added here, carry straight on with what you just made. If not, give the link and say what to bring.