Donor Major Gift Moves Management Stage Update

A move is any intentional, documented action taken to advance a prospect through the cultivation-to-solicitation pipeline — a discovery call, a site visit, a proposal delivery, or a stewardship touchpoint. This template records the move type, the current cultivation stage, the outcome, and the next planned action as discrete checklist items. Each completed task becomes a timestamped record in the prospect's history, replacing informal notes or memory-dependent tracking.

The assigned gift officer who owns the prospect relationship should be the DRI (directly responsible individual) for each task instance. Development directors typically review completed tasks in aggregate to assess pipeline health and coach officers on cadence. Do not assign this template to a shared team inbox — ambiguous ownership is the most common reason moves go undocumented.

Create one task instance per discrete move — not one per prospect per month. A prospect who receives a cultivation dinner, a follow-up call, and a proposal review in one month should generate three separate task records. This granularity lets you reconstruct the full cultivation timeline and calculate average moves-to-close for future forecasting.

The moves management framework is widely used in major gift fundraising and is compatible with the qualification-cultivation-solicitation-stewardship pipeline model taught by AFP (Association of Fundraising Professionals) and embedded in CRMs like Raiser's Edge, Salesforce NPSP, and Bloomerang. This template operationalizes that framework as a repeatable task so the process is consistent regardless of which officer handles the prospect.

It is designed to complement, not replace, a CRM contact report. Use this template to drive the action and capture the structured checklist of what must be verified or recorded during a move; then log the narrative summary in your CRM. The task record provides accountability and recurrence discipline; the CRM stores the relationship history. Linking the completed task to the CRM record (by pasting the task URL in the contact report) closes the loop.

Common stages are Identification, Qualification, Cultivation, Solicitation, and Stewardship. You can add a stage field as a dropdown custom property or encode the stage in the task title (e.g., 'Cultivation — Smith, J. — Discovery Lunch'). Standardizing stage labels across all gift officers is critical; inconsistent naming makes pipeline reporting unreliable.

Designate one primary gift officer as the DRI for each task even when a prospect has a secondary relationship manager. Use the task description or a custom field to note the secondary officer. Dual ownership without a clear DRI is a common pitfall that leads to duplicate moves or missed follow-ups.

Yes, with minor customization. Planned giving moves tend to have longer intervals between actions and may require additional verification steps around estate documentation or beneficiary designations. Mid-level pipelines often have higher prospect volumes, so consider whether individual task-per-move tracking is sustainable or whether a batch review cadence makes more sense at that tier.

The most common pitfall is logging moves after the fact in bulk rather than creating the task before the move occurs. When tasks are created prospectively, they function as commitments and reminders; when created retrospectively, they become administrative overhead with no accountability value. Require gift officers to create the next-move task at the moment they complete the current one.