Moves Management: A Practical Guide for Fundraising Teams

What is moves management?

Moves management is the practice of planning and tracking every meaningful interaction, every move, that advances a donor or prospect toward a gift, and then toward the next one. A move can be a discovery visit, a campus tour, a call from a board member, a proposal. What separates a system from a to-do list is one rule: each prospect always has a next move, an owner, and a due date.

The concept comes from higher education. G.T. "Buck" Smith and David Dunlop developed it at Cornell in the 1970s to describe how the university's most significant gifts actually happened: not through appeals, but through years of deliberate, individually planned steps. A detail most guides get wrong is that Dunlop's own model had seven stages (identification, information, awareness, knowledge, caring, involvement, commitment). Today's five-stage pipeline is a later simplification. Advancement teams have run on some version of it ever since, and nonprofit development teams use the same system under the same name.

Two terms worth separating, because most guides blur them:

• Stages describe where the relationship is (identification through stewardship).
• Moves are the actions that push a relationship from one stage to the next.

Smith and Dunlop's original framework drew a further distinction that has mostly been lost. Foreground moves are planned steps that advance a specific relationship: a qualification call, an ask. Background moves keep you visible without advancing anything: newsletters, holiday cards, event invitations. Both matter, but only foreground moves count when you measure activity. A prospect who received twelve newsletters has not been moved.

The five moves management stages

The five stages of moves management are identification, qualification, cultivation, solicitation, and stewardship. Every guide lists them; most won't commit to how long each takes or when you're done with one. The table does both:

*Rules of thumb for a five-to-six-figure ask, not laws. A capital campaign compresses these and a planned gift stretches them. We commit to numbers because a pipeline report will hold you to them anyway.

Two stages carry most of the discipline. Qualification is the most skipped and the most expensive to skip. Expect, and want, a meaningful share of the names entering it to leave the portfolio. That means the stage is working. An officer who never disqualifies is carrying dead weight that looks like a pipeline. Cultivation is where most of the calendar goes, and the rule there is that every move has a purpose you could say out loud. This dinner is where she meets the dean whose program she'd fund. If you can't say what a move is for, it's a background move wearing a foreground badge.

The other stages in a line each: identification is prospect research's job (in a small shop, an afternoon sorting the database by giving consistency, not size); solicitation is a stage, not a moment, and includes the pre-ask, the proposal, and the negotiation; stewardship is the first stage of the next gift, not the last stage of this one.

Moves management template

The tracker below is the whole system in one table. Run it in your CRM if you have portfolio functionality. Run it in a spreadsheet if you don't. The tool matters far less than the rule: every row has a next move with a date, or the row is red.

Download the tracker template (Google Sheets, free, no email required) and make a copy. Delete the example rows.

How to use it without drowning in it:

1. Review weekly, not quarterly, and ask the same two questions every time. Which rows changed stage last week? Which rows have no next move? The point is catching stalls while they're two weeks old.
2. Keep the Trigger column. Most teams don't. Over a year it becomes a record of what actually prompted your successful moves, which is how you learn what readiness looks like for your donors.
3. Set exit rules, not just entry rules. Most guides skip removal entirely, but a portfolio only stays honest if removal is as routine as entry. Deciding who earns a place and when to let go is its own discipline, and the published university policies on it disagree in useful ways: see our guide to donor qualification and portfolio exit. (Portfolio sizes and cadence are in the FAQ below.)

Worked example: a university advancement team

(Composite example: invented to be realistic, not a customer story.)

A gift officer at a public research university carries a portfolio of 120. One row, call her the alumna, is a 1996 business school graduate: a consistent but modest donor at $1,000 a year for a decade, capacity-rated in a screening two years ago, sitting in cultivation with no scheduled next move. A stalled row.

In March, a trade publication reports her appointment to the board of a publicly traded retailer. Her second public board seat.

• March: Prospect research flags the appointment. The move: a congratulations note. No ask, no meeting request. (A foreground move: individually planned, at a moment that matters to her.)
• April: She replies warmly. Move: a call, in which she mentions the leadership program that shaped her first job, and that in twenty years nobody from the school has asked her to do anything but give.
• May-September: Three moves. An invitation to speak at the school's student leadership summit (involvement, the move most portfolios never make), dinner with the dean afterward, then a follow-up where the officer mostly listens. Stage advanced to late cultivation.
• October: Pre-ask: "Would a proposal to name the summit's keynote series be welcome, and is six figures the right neighborhood to be thinking in?" Yes.
• December: Solicitation: $150,000 over three years. Committed in January.

Eleven months, but the arc turned on one trade-press item in March. Without the trigger, she is still a stalled row rated on two-year-old data.

Worked example: a regional nonprofit

(Composite example: invented to be realistic, not a customer story.)

A food bank's development director carries 40 major prospects alongside everything else. One is a local business owner: gave $2,500 after a warehouse tour three years ago, friendly at events, never asked again.

Her family business announces its sale to a regional chain in June. The director sees it in the local paper, ten days late but in time.

• June: Move: a handwritten note recalling the tour and congratulating her on the sale.
• July: Move: coffee. She raises legacy herself. The business was her father's, and she wants the family name to mean something locally.
• August-October: Two moves: a tour of the new distribution program, then a conversation with the board chair, a peer she respects.
• November: Solicitation: $25,000 to name the program's delivery fleet for her father. Yes. And she asks about joining the board.

Same system as the university, at one third the portfolio size, with no prospect research department. The stages don't care how big your shop is.

Three sentences that do the work

The standard guides will occasionally hand you a solicitation script, and almost never the sentences that do the quieter, earlier work. Steal and adapt these:

The event-triggered note (no ask):

"Congratulations on the sale of the company. That's twenty years of work in one headline. No agenda here, I just didn't want the moment to pass unmarked from all of us at [organization]."

The discipline is the last sentence. An ask within days of a liquidity event reads as exactly what it is.

The pre-ask (permission plus a range test):

"Would a proposal for [the thing they told you they care about] be welcome, and is [range] the right neighborhood to be thinking in?"

The second clause earns its place. A "yes, but lower" here costs you nothing. The same answer at solicitation costs you the ask.

The stalled-prospect reopener:

"It's been over a year since we really talked, and a lot has changed here since. I'd love twenty minutes to show you what your [earlier gift] turned into."

Reporting back is the only reopener that doesn't sound like a pipeline cleanup call. Which is what it is.

How to measure it

Five numbers, in order of how much they tell you:

1. Portfolio penetration. The share of the portfolio with a next move scheduled. This is the single best health metric, and a reasonable floor to hold yourself to is 80%.
2. Time in stage. Flags the prospect who has been "in cultivation" for three years, which is a stall wearing a stage label.
3. Foreground moves per officer per month. Activity, honestly counted. A routine bulk newsletter does not count by itself.
4. Stage conversion rates. What fraction of qualified prospects reach solicitation? Of solicitations, how many close?
5. Dollars against activity. Last, deliberately. Dollars lag the work by 12-18 months; managing officers on dollars alone punishes exactly the cultivation the dollars come from.

What actually triggers a move: timing

Here is the gap in most moves-management systems, including well-run ones: the moves are calendar-driven, but readiness is event-driven.

A wealth screening tells you what a donor could give, as of the day of the screening. It says nothing about when. Readiness announces itself in events. A company sale. A promotion or retirement. A board appointment, an award, a bequest-signaling life change, a major gift to another organization. In both examples above, the arc turned on a single event, and the move that mattered was the one made within days of it.

Most teams cover this manually: Google Alerts on top names, local business journals, board members who happen to hear things. It is what the standard playbooks themselves recommend, and it works about as well as it sounds. It covers the 20 names someone remembers to watch, out of a portfolio of 120.

The systematic version is continuous prospect monitoring, software that watches news and public records across an entire portfolio and flags these events as they happen. That's the category AlmaConnect News operates in: monitoring your full prospect and alumni base and alerting the assigned officer when one of their rows has news. Disclosure: that's our product. This guide's system works whether or not you automate the watching.

However it's covered, the practice belongs in the tracker, in the Trigger column. A moves-management system with timing signals feeding it is the difference between "we call everyone twice a year" and "we called her the week it mattered."

One rule keeps this both ethical and effective: a trigger is a reason to review the relationship, not permission to solicit. In both examples above, the first move after the trigger carried no ask at all.

Frequently asked questions