Every Prospect is Different. If Your Organization Behaves Like This, You’re in Trouble

So often, organizations find themselves crafting individual strategies for every person, foundation, and corporation who is a prospect or donor.  Organizations oftentimes aren’t sure they are focusing the right kind of attention, in the right amount, at the right moments for donors and prospects.

What if there was a way that your organization had an agreed upon way to interact with some of your most valuable constituents?  How would a set of unifying interaction and engagement strategies help better focus resources in your organization?

An Operating Model can help.  While they take time to develop and must include multiple stakeholder groups, they answer important pragmatic and operational questions.  Let's consider a ficticious organization, Save the Trees.  Here's a way to visualize their Operating Model - one that defines how Save the Trees will interact with major donors and prospects based on the maturity of Save the Trees' relationship with the constituent.

How does this impact Save the Trees operationally?  Let's see how it impacts their push eNewsletters:

SEEDLING: Growth eNews (Monthly), Treelerts (As created)

GROWING: Treelerts (As created), Conservation Monthly (Monthly)

MATURE: Conservation (Monthly), Executive Treehouse (Monthly)

While this example is just limited to push eNewsletters, an Operating Model would then inform everything from event invitations to the value of traveling to a constituents home to make a personalized ask.

The Operating Model helps the entire organization understand how major donors and prospects are cultivated.  It helps mitigate the need to have a different strategy for each constituent. Based on what Save the Trees knows about a constituent, it can assign them to a maturity group - and then interact with the group (Seedling, Growing, Mature) effectively.  

An Operating Model can pay huge dividends for your organization by helping everyone work from a common playbook - rather than a seperate playbook for each constituent.