Moves Management: A Practical Guide

Moves management is the practice of moving a prospective donor through defined stages towards a gift, with each step planned rather than improvised. CCS Fundraising defines it as the process by which representatives of an organization lead a donor through a strategic engagement process towards giving.

The term is generally credited to G.T. Smith and David Dunlop, who developed the approach in American higher education, with Dunlop refining it at Cornell through the 1980s. Dunlop’s framing is worth keeping: the point is to help someone act on what they already value, not to manoeuvre them into a gift.

The six stages, including the one most guides omit

Almost every article on this subject lists five stages: identify, qualify, cultivate, solicit, steward. The CCS model uses six, and the extra one is the interesting part.

Why the brief matters more than anything else on this page

The briefing stage is where you tell someone what you are going to ask them for, before you ask, and listen to what they say about it.

Skip it and the ask arrives as a surprise. The donor has been to three events and had lunch twice, and now there is a number in front of them they have never heard before, attached to a project they were never consulted about. The honest answer to that is usually a polite deferral, and the officer records it as a timing problem.

It is not a timing problem. Nobody found out, in advance, whether the thing being funded was the thing this person cared about. The brief is cheap, it takes one conversation, and it converts a cold ask into a confirmation of something already discussed.

If your organization has a pattern of asks that go quiet rather than being refused, this is the first place to look.

What actually breaks moves management

Not the model. Organizations rarely fail because they chose five stages instead of six. Four things do the damage.

No next move. A prospect with a stage but no scheduled next action is not being managed. They sit at Cultivate for two years and quietly stop being a prospect. This is the most common single fault and it is visible in any pipeline in about ten seconds.

No owner. A name that belongs to everyone belongs to nobody. Every prospect needs one person accountable for the next step, even in a two person shop where the answer is obvious.

The cultivation spiral. CCS names this directly: the endless cultivation of someone who is never asked, because the moment never feels right. Set a deadline for the ask at the point you enter cultivation, and move it deliberately rather than by drift.

Turnover. This is the structural one. Median tenure in a fundraising job is two years and 20 percent of fundraisers intend to leave their organization within the year, while the relationships in a major gift pipeline routinely take longer than that to mature. A pipeline where the context lives in one person’s head resets every time someone resigns.

The fix for the last one is not software, at least not first. It is contact reports written the same day, in the record rather than in an inbox, and a handover process that exists before anyone gives notice. We publish a free donor handover template built for exactly that.

How many prospects can one person actually move

The number circulating in vendor content is 25 to 50 per officer, and it traces back to blog posts rather than to research. Rather than repeat it, do the arithmetic, because the honest answer depends on your own numbers.

Decide how often each prospect needs meaningful contact. Four times a year is a reasonable floor for an active major gift prospect. Then count the hours actually available for donor work in a week, after meetings, reporting, events and the rest of the job, and assume a substantive contact plus its preparation and its written record costs around two hours.

Assumes 45 working weeks. The point is not the numbers in the table, it is that a portfolio is a capacity calculation and most organizations have never done it. A development director with four hours a week of genuine donor time and 120 names in their portfolio does not have a portfolio. They have a list, and roughly a hundred of those relationships are receiving nothing.

Cut it to what can actually be moved. The names you remove were not being cultivated anyway.

Running it in a spreadsheet

Most organizations under a few million dollars will run this in a spreadsheet regardless of what their CRM can do, and that is a perfectly respectable answer.

What it needs: one row per prospect, a stage, an owner, a next move with a date, and the date of last contact. Everything else is optional. Two calculated columns do most of the work, days since last contact and days until the next move, because the two questions in a portfolio review are who has gone quiet and what is overdue.

Our free moves management tracker is that spreadsheet, with the stage definitions, a menu of next moves for when you are staring at a name with no idea what to do, and a summary that counts your portfolio by stage.

Before any solicitation visit, the pipeline row becomes a briefing document. Our free donor profile template is the page and a half somebody will actually read in the car, and it is the one artefact that makes a board member useful in a meeting they did not prepare for.

All of this assumes the records live somewhere usable. If that is the weak point, our roundup of nonprofit CRM software covers what to choose and, more usefully, what a CRM will not fix.

Reading a pipeline

A healthy pipeline is wider at the top than the bottom. More prospects in qualification than in cultivation, more in cultivation than at solicitation.

When solicitation is the largest stage, the pipeline is being harvested rather than built, and next year will be worse than this one. It is the most reliable early warning available to a development operation and it takes one glance at a stage count.

The other number to watch is disqualification. If nobody is ever removed at the qualify stage, qualification is not happening. Most identified names should not survive it, and a team that disqualifies nothing is spreading its effort across people who were never going to give.

Stewardship is the first move of the next gift

The cycle does not end at the gift. Stewardship is where the next one begins, and it is the stage most often under-resourced because it produces no immediate income.

The Association of Donor Relations Professionals recommends acknowledging gifts within 48 to 72 hours. Beyond the receipt, the thing that matters is reporting back with something specific: what the money did, with a number in it, sent to a person who will recognise their own gift in the description.

Sector donor retention sits around 43 percent, so more than half of last year’s donors will not give again. Stewardship is the cheapest available response to that, and it is also the reason a well-run pipeline compounds while a badly run one has to be refilled from scratch each year.

One category of prospect this model handles badly is the legacy donor. The strongest predictor of a bequest is consecutive years of giving rather than capacity, so the best legacy prospects are frequently people a capacity-ranked portfolio would never include. Run them as a separate list. Our guide to planned giving covers how that conversation differs, and it is not a solicitation.

Stewardship deserves its own plan rather than being the last stage of this cycle, because it is the stage that decides whether the next gift happens at all. See donor stewardship and our free stewardship plan template.

Where software helps

Every nonprofit CRM has moves management fields. Having the fields is not the same as running the process, and a pipeline nobody reviews weekly is a set of dropdowns.

The newer AI tools in this space work on the gap this page keeps returning to: they read the CRM, the documents and the email, and produce a ranked list of who needs attention with the reasoning attached, so the next move is suggested rather than invented. Gratefully treats moves management progress as one of its scoring signals and generates handover documents from the same underlying record. We cover that category and what it costs in AI tools for nonprofit fundraising.

Be clear about the sequence. Software reads what was recorded. If contact reports are not being written, an automated pipeline will be as empty as the manual one and considerably more confident about it. Get the discipline first, then buy the thing that lowers its cost.

Questions people ask

What is moves management in fundraising?

A structured process for moving a prospective donor through defined stages towards a gift, with each step planned and recorded rather than improvised. CCS Fundraising defines it as leading a donor through a strategic engagement process towards giving.

Each 'move' is a deliberate step that advances the relationship: a qualifying phone call, a site visit, an introduction to the executive director, a conversation about what a specific project would cost.

The term is generally credited to G.T. Smith and David Dunlop, developed in American higher education and refined by Dunlop at Cornell in the 1980s. The intent was never manipulation. It was to help someone act on what they already care about.

What are the stages of moves management?

Most published guides list five: identify, qualify, cultivate, solicit, steward. CCS Fundraising uses six, adding a briefing stage between cultivation and solicitation.

The six stage version is more useful. Briefing is where you tell the prospect specifically what the money would be for and ask what they think of it, before making the ask. It is the stage most organizations skip, and skipping it is why asks arrive as a surprise and get deferred rather than refused.

Stewardship is not the end. A stewarded gift is the first move of the next one.

How many prospects should a gift officer manage?

Work it out rather than adopting a published number. The 25 to 50 figure common in vendor content traces to blog posts, not research, and the real answer depends on your contact frequency and how much of the week is genuinely available for donor work.

The arithmetic: decide how often each prospect needs meaningful contact, four times a year is a reasonable floor. Assume roughly two hours per contact including preparation and writing it up. Divide the hours actually available.

Four hours a week of real donor time supports roughly 22 active prospects. Not 120. A portfolio larger than the capacity to move it is a list, and most of the names on it are receiving nothing.

What is the difference between moves management and a donor pipeline?

The pipeline is the artefact. Moves management is the practice.

A pipeline is the list of prospects with their stages and values, which tells you what you have. Moves management is the discipline of deciding the next action for each one, doing it, recording it and reviewing it on a cadence.

Plenty of organizations have a pipeline and no moves management. The tell is prospects sitting at the same stage for a year with no scheduled next action. The pipeline looks healthy in a board report and nothing is moving.

How often should you review the pipeline?

Monthly at minimum for the whole portfolio, and weekly for anything at the briefing or solicitation stage where timing genuinely matters.

Two questions carry most of the value. Who has had no contact in 90 days, and what next moves are past their date. Both are calculable if the sheet records last contact and next move date, which is why those two columns matter more than any others.

Make it a standing meeting with a named owner. A pipeline review that happens when someone remembers is a pipeline review that stops happening in about two months.

What is a cultivation spiral?

Endlessly cultivating a prospect who never gets asked, because the moment never feels quite right. CCS names it directly as a failure mode, and it is extremely common in organizations where the fundraiser is uncomfortable asking.

The prospect gets invited to everything, has lunch twice a year, receives the annual report, and is never solicited. From the outside it looks like an active relationship. It produces nothing.

The fix is to set a target date for the ask at the moment you enter cultivation, and to move that date deliberately rather than by drift. If the date has moved three times, the honest question is whether this is a prospect or a friend of the organization.

What happens to the pipeline when a fundraiser leaves?

Usually most of it is lost, and this is structural rather than unlucky. Median tenure in a fundraising job is two years, with 20 percent of fundraisers intending to leave their organization within the year, while major gift relationships routinely take longer than that to mature.

The gifts stay in the database. The reasons leave with the person: what was discussed, what was promised informally, what the prospect asked you never to do.

Two things prevent it, and neither requires software. Contact reports written the same day, in the record rather than in an inbox. And a handover document completed for every prospect annually, not during the notice period when nobody has the motivation to write forty of them.

Do you need software for moves management?

No. A spreadsheet with one row per prospect, a stage, an owner, a next move with a date and the last contact date covers the whole practice, and most organizations under a few million dollars will run it that way regardless of what their CRM offers.

Every nonprofit CRM has moves management fields, and having fields is not the same as running the process. Software becomes worth it when the portfolio is large enough that finding who has gone quiet is genuinely hard, or when several officers need a shared view.

Whatever you use, it reads what was recorded. Neither a spreadsheet nor a five figure platform can surface a conversation nobody wrote down.

This is reference information, not legal or tax advice. Rules vary by state and change over time. For a decision that carries real consequences, check the current text at irs.gov or your state registry, and talk to a nonprofit attorney or CPA.