[Tcassi]

Is anyone using metrics to track the effectiveness of your major gift officers (MGOs) beyond number of dollars raised? Is there a trend toward tracking MGOs' number of asks, number of actions, substantial actions, etc? Many here think there is...and they want us to start tracking that in Raiser's Edge. Is anyone doing that? I'd love your input.

I'm looking to add an Action Attribute to track substantive actions on the part of the MGO/solicitor. But it's opening up a whole other can of worms...is the donor's response, action or lack of action what determines that it's "substantive"? Or is it the effort put forth by the MGO that counts?

[Melissa Siobhan]

What are your action types now? Can you use action types to track this rather than an attribute. Our Action Types are:

Cultivation
Solicitation
Stewardship
Grant Proposal
Grant Report
Task

As far as substantive I believe our criteria is that you would only enter an action if it was substantive. It is already enough work to get GOs to enter their own actions and so insubstantial actions are not necessary in our system.

The Gift Officer gets to decide what is substantive and I would say they use a combination of progress made with the prospect and effort made by the GO as their criteria.

[stancliff]

We track a number of MGO metrics. We track primary gifts closed, secondary gifts closed, meetings, and asks. Planned Giving officers are also tracked by assists made to MGOs, and by their responses to PG requests from prospects. Our C&F team is also tracked by prosposals submitted, and a few other metrics.

We track these via Actions. We require that the action be linked to an open Proposal. We use distinct Action Types and Action Notepad Types to determine which metric the action meets. We held three training sessions to train over 25 gift officers (each gift officer had to attend one - the sessions were all the same) to teach them how to correctly enter an action so that it would appear on the Metrics report. All our Metrics reports are custom, back-end Crystal reports.

It is up for the MGO leadership to educate the team on what truly qualifies as a meeting, etc.

P.S. Have a nice day! I like your avitar.