The short answer: if your major gifts program is sputtering — missed goals, capacity ratings nobody can explain, a research function nobody quite understands — yes, an assessment helps. The more useful answer is that the right assessment tells you what’s urgent now and what can wait, instead of handing you an overwhelming list of everything that’s wrong.
Imagine you’re three weeks into a four-week road trip. For the past week the car has been slow to accelerate, sputtering on the highway, running a little hot, and occasionally coughing black smoke out the tailpipe. You pull into a mechanic’s shop to get it looked at.
The mechanic hands you a long list of everything wrong with the car. Every item on it real. None of it triaged. What do you do — turn around and go home? Empty your wallet before dinner?
Now picture a different ending. The mechanic still hands you a long list, but because you mentioned you have two more weeks on the road, they’ve flagged the handful of items that are genuinely urgent and told you the rest can wait until you’re home with your usual mechanic.
That’s the version worth having.
What Is a Research and Prospect Management Assessment?
This is exactly what a research and prospect management assessment does for your fundraising shop. Fundraising is part art, part science, and if you’re running major gifts or keeping fundraising operations moving, a sputtering prospect research and prospect management function is a problem you don’t have time to diagnose on your own — let alone fix.
An assessment isn’t just a diagnosis, either. You have a goal to hit, whether it’s this year’s number, a campaign, or both. The hard part is telling the urgent items apart from the ones that can wait for phase two — and that’s a lot like staring under the hood of a car when you don’t know how the engine works.
How Is Aspire’s Approach Different?
At Aspire Research Group, we built a destination-focused approach to research and prospect management assessments. Instead of starting with a checklist of best practices to measure you against, we start with where you’re trying to go:
- We use appreciative inquiry to help leadership clarify how they want prospect development to support fundraising.
- We interview key stakeholders — gift officers, database staff, leadership — to surface obstacles and opportunities.
- We focus on the team’s existing strengths and map the route from where you are to where you’re headed.
And because we’ve peered inside dozens of fundraising research operations, and trained hundreds of researchers through the Prospect Research Institute, we do something most consultants won’t take the time to do.
We document current practices.
Why Do We Document Current Practices First?
Stay with me — this is the unglamorous part that turns out to matter most. Documentation is like flipping the light on in a dark room. Leadership suddenly sees, in writing, how a major gift is actually defined, what capacity rating levels are being used and how they were set, and all the other small decisions that can reveal a development team rowing in different directions.
No wonder forward movement has been sputtering.
Prospect research and prospect management can look boring and tedious to a people-focused fundraiser. But it’s the lynchpin that keeps major gifts moving smoothly.
What Does This Actually Affect?
Some examples show how much rides on decisions that rarely get written down:
- How capacity ratings are created, verified, and stored in the database shapes pipeline development and portfolio assignments – and matched to other criteria for assignments.
- The minimum gift size that warrants a proposal on a prospect’s record — and counts toward an officer’s goal — shapes the size of the asks your team is actually making.
- How the balance of prospects in a portfolio should differ across team member skill levels, geography, and even program areas.
Get these wrong, or leave them undocumented and inconsistent across the team, and the whole program can begin to drag.
Is an Assessment Right for You Right Now?
It’s probably time if:
- Your research and prospect management function feels disconnected from fundraising strategy.
- You are struggling with capacity ratings, forecasting major gifts, or inactive, bulging portfolios.
- You have a goal — this year’s number, a campaign, or both — and can’t tell which fixes are urgent.
- Nobody could hand a new hire a clear picture of how prospect development currently works.
It’s probably not the moment if you’re mid-database migration or on a major push to close campaign and can’t absorb any process change until after close — though even then, it’s worth a conversation about timing.
The Bottom Line
Don’t let your research and prospect management program keep sputtering. Left alone, your development team works harder and raises less. With an assessment, you can address what’s urgent quickly and uncover the strengths that will carry you to goal — this year and next.
It’s not your fault if a disconnect has grown between research and development; most programs get there gradually, one workaround at a time. But if you don’t address it — or don’t take the car into the mechanic — you may find yourself stranded on the shoulder of the road or campaign instead of pulling in ahead of schedule.
Wondering whether a research and prospect management assessment is the right next step for your team? Schedule a discovery call with Aspire and let’s talk through it.