Ask any good fundraiser why it is important for an organization to maintain a healthy pipeline of prospects and they will basically give you the same answer. While the words may be different, the key theme is that as a fundraising operation, your pipeline is your lifeblood.

It, along with your case for support, is the foundation upon which the success of your fundraising operation is built.

How do you know if your pipeline is healthy?

In exploring this question with our experts across the country and considering it here among our staff at KCI, we have identified certain core characteristics of a healthy prospect pipeline.

1. Active prospects at all gift levels

A healthy pipeline is one that has a good mix of prospects at all gift levels, from annual fund to mid-level gifts to the top level of your giving pyramid. It is important for organizations to examine their pipelines on a regular basis to ensure there are prospects that match all gift levels. One tool that can be helpful in this analysis is a gift chart of standards. While commonly associated with campaigns, they can also be created to support annual fundraising targets by setting out the number and size of gifts required to meet your financial goal. Comparing your pipeline against a chart of standards gives you the opportunity to know where your gaps are and can therefore provide focus to your identification activities.

2. Active prospects at all stages of the development cycle

Another key indicator of a healthy prospect pipeline is having prospects in each stage of the development cycle: identification, cultivation, solicitation and stewardship. There are two ways that KCI proposes to assess your pipeline’s health on this metric — number of prospects and prospective revenue represented by these prospects. While the percentages can (and should) change depending on where you are in the development of your fundraising programs, as well as where you are in a campaign cycle, it is important to keep a watchful eye in this area.

3. Mechanisms to feed new prospects into the pipeline

This is your prospect identification strategy. In order to maintain a healthy pipeline, new prospects must be constantly fed into it. There are a variety of methods available to organizations, including tools like data mining and screening, as well as the “old-fashioned” way of having staff and volunteers bring forward names.

4. Means for measuring progress

Another key to a healthy pipeline is movement of the prospects through the different stages of the development cycle. All too often, we see organizations with a large number of prospects that get stuck in the identification/qualification stage. While there are a variety of reasons for this phenomenon, many of which are solvable, if you can’t track whether your prospects are moving, you can’t address the problem. As a result, it is crucial to create reports that enable fundraising staff and management to monitor prospects to see if they are moving through the cycle.

5. Access to good data

The health of your pipeline is only as good as your ability to analyze it. And your ability to analyze will only be as good as the quality of your data as well as your ability to access it. It is critical that fundraising staff be encouraged to keep information about their progress with prospects up to date. And getting it into the system is only step one. You also have to have the means to pull it out in a way that will provide useful information. The key here is determining what you want to know and working with your IT or database professional to create reports that will pull it out.

This article originally appeared in KCI’s Philanthropic Trends Quarterly (2011: Issue 1) and is reprinted with permission.