Cultivation Process

To increase donations, you need more than just new donors. You also need stronger relationships with your existing constituents. To help you identify when and how to ask these constituents for a donation, we recommend you follow a cultivation process.

  1. Create the following user-defined fields. For information about how to create user defined fields, refer to User-Defined Fields,

    • Solicitor 1 and Solicitor 2 - These fields should apply to Account Constituent and Journal Transaction. For each field, include the values of each current solicitor. The gift entry is the historical record and reflects the solicitors at the time of the gift.

    • Contact Purpose - For this field, include values of prospect cultivation, prospect identification, and prospect solicitation. Contact Purpose applies to Journal Transaction. Later, you can query based on this field.

    • Cultivation Step - This field will apply to Account Constituent and Journal Transaction. This should be a single select field with values 1-10, Current or Last and Next. They are numbered due to the fact that the actual step action will differ from individual to individual. Until the functionality of exporting the last or last 2 entries in a query range is incorporated into eTapestry, the utilization of Cultivation Steps of Current or Last and Next are necessary. After the step is completed, you will change the cultivation step to corresponding number. The step on the account screen will reflect the number. Current, Last, or Next will be meaningless there.

  2. Create a journal query with qualifying a date range and Cultivation step of Current and Next. For information about how to create a basic query, refer to Basic Queries.

  3. Create a journal type report. Include these fields: account number, name, sort name, voice, account last gift date, and account last gift amount, account first gift date, and account first gift amount, account largest gift date, and account largest gift amount, Solicitor 1 and 2, journal date, journal cultivation step, journal subject, and journal note. For information about how to create a report, refer to Standard Reports. To open the report, use Microsoft Excel.

Tip: Moves management is another concept for cultivating donors. For information about this concept and how to implement it, refer to Moves Management Overview.