Our approach here at Monad is to try to focus on doing one thing - selling tickets - well, and rather than allowing the system to become bloated trying to be the jack-of-all-trades and master-of-none, and to partner and integrate with the best-of-breed in other products instead of developing our own version.
So it is with some trepidation that I am announcing that we are now properly into Fundraising.
This is obviously something we’ve thought about carefully, because it would be ridiculous for us to attempt to compete with a company like Blackbaud, and if you need enterprise grade fundraising tools that will orchestrate campaigns that will raise you millions of pounds, then Raiser’s Edge is still the way to go.
But we heard from our customers over and over again that they don’t need - and certainly can’t afford - all of Raiser’s Edge. And when we looked at our existing CRM functionality, the customer-centric view of data we already offer, the tools for tagging and segmenting audiences, for soliciting small donations at checkout, for selling memberships and recording Gift Aid declarations… it seemed like we were very nearly there, with just one of two pieces of the jigsaw puzzle left before we could say that we “did” fundraising, in a small but simple and flexible and fast way.
One of those pieces was being able to record “prospects” - prospective donations (or sales; if you are in a more commercially minded organisation, all of this works for tracking sales prospects, but I’m just going to use the language of donations to keep it simple here). The key properties of a prospect are a value, and a date, and a probability. You might have one donor who you’re 100% sure will give you £1000 next month, and you might have 10 donors you’re 10% sure will give you £100 the month after, and you might have 100 donors you’re 1% confident might give you £100 the month after that. And so you expect donations of £100 / month for the next 3 months.
These prospects move though a “donations funnel” with increasing probability - some drop out, and those that remain go to the next level
and the idea is that by being able to track who is at which stage of the funnel and what the predicted dates are, you can get a handle on the future donations that you can expect. You don’t know which of the 100 prospects at 1% will end up giving you money, but you can count on one of them probably doing so.
So: when the new functionality is switched on, customer profiles have prospects:
that you can view
and edit
and transition to the next state,
and when you click one of the buttons to change the state of the prospect it updates the probability (and therefore the expected value)
And in Admin you can configure multiple types of prospect and multiple states that prospects can be in
and you can configure which states you can transition to from which starting state, and what probability to set whilst doing so:
and report on Prospects in a variety of ways
and use them as a search criteria in the List Segmentation tool
and bulk-add prospects to List Members:
And so on.
How this fits into our pricing policy is TBD, but if you’re paying at the basic level you probably shouldn’t expect Prospects to be available after the introductory trial period. If you are interested in using this functionality, please contact Support!