Moves Management Tracker Template
Free Excel prospect pipeline. One row per prospect with stage, owner, next move and last contact. Days since and days until calculate themselves, so a portfolio review is a sort rather than an afternoon. Four sheets including stage definitions and a menu of next moves.
A prospect pipeline you can run from a spreadsheet, with the two calculations that make a portfolio review take ten minutes instead of an afternoon: days since last contact, and days until the next move is due.
Free Excel download, four sheets, no email required.
What is in it
| Sheet | What it does |
|---|---|
| Pipeline | One row per prospect. Stage, owner, capacity, ask amount, last contact, next move and its date. Days since and days until calculate themselves. |
| Portfolio summary | Counts and pipeline value by stage, plus four health checks that should all read zero |
| Stages | What each of the six stages means, so a team uses the words the same way |
| Move menu | Seventeen concrete next moves by stage, for when you are staring at a name with no idea what to do |
The four health checks
On the summary sheet, and they are the reason to open the file rather than admire it.
| Check | What a number above zero means |
|---|---|
| No contact in 90 days | These relationships are cooling and nobody has noticed |
| Next move overdue | The plan exists and is not being executed |
| No next move set | These prospects are not being managed at all |
| No owner | Nobody is accountable, so nothing will happen |
The last two should always be zero. A prospect with no next move and no owner is not in a portfolio, it is on a list, and the distinction is the whole subject.
The six stages
The tracker uses six stages rather than the more common five, with a briefing step between cultivation and solicitation. Briefing is where you tell the prospect what the money would be for and ask what they think, before asking for it.
It is the stage most guides omit and most organizations skip, and skipping it is the reason asks get deferred rather than answered. The full argument is in our guide to moves management.
How to use it
Agree the stages first. Ten minutes with the Stages sheet, as a team. Most disagreement inside a development office is two people using the word cultivation to mean different things.
Put in fewer names than you want to. A portfolio is a capacity calculation, not an ambition. Four hours a week of genuine donor time supports roughly 22 active prospects at four contacts a year. If you enter 120 names, about a hundred of them will receive nothing and you will not know which hundred.
Fill last contact and next move for every row. These two columns are the whole system. Stage without a next move is decoration.
Sort by days since, monthly. That is the review. Anything over 90 gets a decision: act, reassign, or remove from the portfolio.
Write the contact report the same day. Not in this file, in your donor record. The tracker manages the process. The record holds the knowledge, and the knowledge is what survives a resignation.
Running the monthly review
The file is worth nothing without the meeting. Thirty minutes, monthly, same slot, named owner.
| Step | What you do | Time |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Health checks | Read the four numbers on the summary sheet. Fix any missing owners and missing next moves before discussing anything else. | 5 min |
| 2. Overdue moves | Sort by days until. For each negative number: did it happen and go unrecorded, or did it not happen? Reschedule with a real date. | 10 min |
| 3. Gone quiet | Sort by days since. Anything over 90 gets a decision: act, reassign, or remove from the portfolio. | 10 min |
| 4. Shape | Glance at the stage counts. Is the top wider than the bottom? | 5 min |
Notice what is not on that list: discussing individual donors at length. That is a different meeting. This one is about whether the process is running, and it should feel almost mechanical. Reviews that turn into an hour of storytelling about three favourite prospects are the ones that quietly stop happening.
Four ways this goes wrong
Updating from memory. Contact dates entered once a quarter from recollection make the most valuable column in the file a guess. Enter the date the day the contact happens, or accept that days-since means nothing.
Everything at Cultivate. When most of a portfolio sits at one stage, the stages are not being applied, they are being defaulted. Cultivate is where prospects go when nobody has decided what is actually happening.
Ask amounts that are all round numbers. A column of $10,000s and $25,000s means nobody has estimated capacity, they have guessed. That is fine as a placeholder and misleading as a pipeline total, and pipeline totals end up in board papers.
Two versions. The moment someone emails a copy, there are two files and within a month they disagree. One file, one location, everyone edits the same one.
Why last contact is the column that matters
Everything else in a pipeline can be reconstructed. Capacity can be re-estimated, stages can be reassigned, ask amounts revised. The date somebody last heard from you cannot be recovered and it is the single best predictor of whether a relationship is alive.
It is also the column most often left blank, because filling it in is an admission. A prospect at Cultivate whose last contact was fourteen months ago is not being cultivated, and the sheet says so in a way a stage label never will.
Adapting it
It is an unlocked Excel file with no macros. Change whatever does not fit.
Common adaptations worth making. Add a column for the source of the relationship, which becomes useful when you want to know whether board referrals or event attendance produces better prospects. Add a probability column if your board wants a weighted pipeline total, though be careful: a weighted figure invites false precision in papers that get read as forecasts.
Split the pipeline sheet by officer if more than three people are using it, keeping the summary pointed at all of them. And if you run capital campaign prospects alongside annual major gifts, keep them in separate files. They move at different speeds and mixing them makes the stage counts meaningless.
What not to remove: last contact, next move, next move date, and owner. Those four are the system. Everything else is reporting.
One structural warning. The formulas reference rows 5 to 64, so inserting rows inside that range is safe and adding rows below row 64 will silently fall outside the summary counts. If you need more than 60 prospects, extend the ranges on the summary sheet to match, or accept that the health checks are reading a subset.
Once the portfolio is large enough that scanning the sheet stops being quick, the same job can be automated. Gratefully treats moves management progress as one of its scoring signals and produces the ranked daily version of this file with the reasoning attached, at $4,800 a year for five seats. Worth knowing about and not worth buying yet: it reads what you recorded, so a tracker nobody updates becomes an automated report nobody updates.
For a time-limited effort with a defined target rather than an ongoing portfolio, the planning works differently: see capital campaigns.
What this does not do
It does not hold your donor records. Gift history, contact details and receipts belong in a CRM, and this sits alongside one rather than replacing it. If you have no donor database at all, that is the thing to fix first.
It does not survive turnover on its own either. The tracker records that a move happened; it does not record what was said. That belongs in the contact report, and the handover of it belongs in a donor handover document, which we also publish free.
And it will not tell you who to prioritise beyond what you enter. Tools that read your CRM and correspondence can rank a portfolio and suggest the next move with reasoning attached, which is a real capability at a real price. We cover that in AI tools for nonprofit fundraising. Start here, and move on when the volume justifies it.
Download this template
Free, no email address, no signup. The full text is on this page as well, so you can read it before you download it.
Questions people ask
What is a moves management tracker?
A working document listing every prospect with their stage, their owner, the next planned action and its date, and the date of last contact. It is the operational half of moves management: the pipeline tells you what you have, the tracker makes sure something happens to it.
The two calculated columns are what make it useful. Days since last contact finds the relationships going quiet. Days until next move finds what is overdue. Sorting on those two is the whole of a monthly portfolio review.
Can you do moves management in Excel?
Yes, and most organizations under a few million dollars should. The practice needs one row per prospect with a stage, an owner, a next move with a date, and a last contact date. A spreadsheet does that perfectly well.
Software helps when the portfolio grows past the point where scanning it is quick, or when several officers need a shared live view. It does not add discipline. A CRM with moves management fields that nobody updates is worse than a spreadsheet somebody actually opens.
What should be in a donor pipeline?
Five things are essential: the prospect, the stage, the owner, the next move with a date, and the date of last contact. Everything else is useful rather than necessary.
Worth adding: a capacity estimate and an intended ask amount, so the pipeline can be totalled by expected value for board reporting. Notes, for the one line of context that explains the last move.
What not to put in it: anything that belongs in the donor record. Gift history, addresses and receipts live in the CRM. Duplicating them creates two versions that disagree within a month.
How many stages should a pipeline have?
Six works better than the more common five. Identify, qualify, cultivate, brief, solicit, steward.
The briefing stage, between cultivation and solicitation, is where you tell the prospect what the money would be for and ask their reaction before you ask for it. Most published models omit it. Organizations that omit it in practice tend to have asks that go quiet rather than getting a straight answer, because nobody checked in advance whether the project was one this person cared about.
More stages than six starts to be bureaucracy. Fewer than five stops distinguishing usefully between finding someone and knowing them.
What counts as a move?
Anything deliberate that advances the relationship and is worth recording. A qualifying phone call, a site visit, an introduction to a board member, sending something specific and useful, asking their advice on something you genuinely need advice about, a briefing conversation about a project.
What does not count: a newsletter, a mass appeal, an event invitation sent to everyone. If it went to a list, it is not a move. The test is whether it was chosen for this person.
The tracker includes a menu of seventeen concrete moves by stage, because the commonest reason a prospect stalls is a gift officer looking at a name and not knowing what to do next.
How often should the tracker be updated?
Contact dates on the day the contact happens. Everything else at a monthly review.
Same-day updating is the part that decides whether this works. A tracker updated from memory once a quarter is a work of fiction, and the last contact column, which is the most valuable one in the file, becomes an estimate.
Put the monthly review in the calendar with a named owner. Reviews that happen when someone remembers stop happening within about two months.
What is a healthy pipeline shape?
Wider at the top than the bottom. More prospects in qualification than in cultivation, more in cultivation than at solicitation.
If solicitation is your largest stage, the pipeline is being harvested rather than built and next year will be worse than this one. That single comparison is the most reliable early warning a development operation has, and the summary sheet shows it at a glance.
Also watch disqualification. If nobody is ever removed at the qualify stage, qualification is not really happening and effort is being spread across people who were never going to give.
Does this replace our CRM?
No. It sits alongside one. Your CRM holds donor records, gift history and receipts, and remains the system of record. The tracker manages a process the CRM usually models badly in practice, because moves management fields in a database tend to be filled in once and abandoned.
If your CRM has moves management functionality your team genuinely uses, use it. If it has the fields and everyone ignores them, a spreadsheet somebody opens weekly is worth more than a module nobody touches.
If you have no donor database at all, fix that first. This assumes the records exist somewhere.
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.