Opportunities in Spektrix link customers to specific Campaigns, allowing you to keep track of your prospects and their journeys towards making donations. An Opportunity simply means that you believe an individual or organisation has the capacity to give towards a particular fundraising initiative.
We covered what Opportunities are useful and how to set them up in our Understanding and Creating Opportunities article, so in this article we’re looking at the following:
Once you’ve added your Opportunities, you can begin the process of moving each Opportunity through the Campaign Stages. You’ll be updating and moving Opportunities on a regular basis – as you learn more about a prospective donor and carry out various Activities relating to them, you’ll probably want to amend their Opportunity’s target donation amount and likelihood of success, and change the Current Stage of the Opportunity to progress it along the Pipeline.
NOTE: the numbers in the image above represent the number of Opportunities open at each Campaign Stage.
There are two places from where you can edit an Opportunity:
The Opportunities Dashboard: click on the blue pencil icon next to the Opportunity that you want to edit.
The Customer Record: select the Opportunities tab and then click on the name of the Opportunity you want to edit.
Both of these options will take you to the same Edit Opportunity screen, which you can see below:
This screen allows you to update any of your original Opportunity settings.
There are various reasons why you might need to edit an Opportunity, including (but not limited to):
- Changing the Campaign associated with this Opportunity
- Changing the Owner associated with this Opportunity
- Updating the Target and/or Asked Amount if you decide the Opportunity is likely to give a higher or lower amount than first estimated
- Changing the Current Stage to move the Opportunity along the pipeline
- You can also move Opportunities between Campaign Stages from the Opportunities Dashboard, by clicking on the Opportunity and dragging and dropping it into a new Stage
- To close an Opportunity, once you’ve had a successful donation (or decided not to continue with your ask). See more about Closing Opportunities below
Editing Opportunities in bulk
If you have several Opportunities which you need to edit, and you’re making identical changes on each one, then instead of editing them individually you can update them in bulk using the Update multiple opportunities option. As with creating Opportunities in bulk, if you need to make different tweaks to each one then you’ll need to do it manually, but this tool is a great way of saving time if you’re making the same changes across a broad range of Opportunities.
Here’s where you can find the Update multiple opportunities option:
The first step is to select your Opportunities from the list presented.
NOTE: this list will be filtered depending on what you searched for in the Opportunity Dashboard - so if you’ve searched for specific donors, the Opportunities you can choose from will be based on that search.
For example, if you’ve filtered to just a single Campaign stage, you will only see the available Opportunities which relate to that stage. If you would like to update Opportunities for all stages, just go back to the Opportunity Dashboard and click on again on the selected stage to remove that filter.
Once you’ve selected the Opportunities you want to update, click the Next button to see the fields which are available to update:
Tick one or more of these fields and enter or select the information you would like to update, then click the Finish button to make the updates.
Keeping track of Opportunities
Viewing and keeping track of your open Opportunities should be easy, using a combination of tools in the Opportunities Interface.
To see the Opportunities which are associated with a particular customer, head to their Customer Record in the Opportunities Interface by clicking on the People icon in the menu, then searching for the customer in question. From there, just click the Opportunities tab in their record and you’ll see a full list of all of their Opportunities:
To see the different changes to an Opportunity associated with a single customer, stay in the Customer Record and jump over to the Timeline tab:
NOTE: you can filter what displays in the timeline by using the tick-boxes at the top of the page. In this example, we’re only looking at Opportunity Stage Changes.
If you want to see a comprehensive record of all open and closed Opportunities against a particular customer, you can find this in the donor profile report. You can run this report from within the Customer Record by clicking on the Actions drop-down and selecting Download Donor Profile. This is only possible with individuals, not organisations.
To see all of your Opportunities, head to the Opportunities Dashboard.
If you aren’t yet familiar with how to navigate the Opportunities Dashboard, have a read of this article.
Day-to-day, you may not want to view all of your open Opportunities at the same time, so we’ve made it possible to set up and save common searches as Custom Tabs. This will make it easy for you to prioritise which Opportunities require attention according to things like expected close date, or linked Campaign. Have a read of this article to find out how to set up Custom Tabs.
Here are some examples of Custom Tabs based on saved searches:
Finally, you'll want to report on your open Opportunities – this is particularly useful for sharing information about Opportunities and Campaigns with people who may not be regular Spektrix users, such as board members.
Opportunities reports
The Opportunities Interface comes with a suite of Standard Reports which can be used for analysis and forecasting. You can see your reports by clicking on the Reports icon (the sheet of paper) in the menu on the left-hand side of your screen:
As with Insights & Mailings, Standard Reports are denoted by the blue tool box icon and Custom Reports by a white sheet of paper icon. See this article for more information on reports if you’re not familiar with how they work, including how to:
- Search for specific reports.
- Create shortcut folders.
- Understand and create Criteria Sets (also see this article).
- Choose output formats.
There are lots of reports which you can use for general fundraising purposes, but here we’ve provided details of a couple of particularly useful reports for use with Opportunities.
Campaign Summary
The Campaign Summary Report is useful for giving a clear idea of the current status of all your Campaigns, based on the Opportunities within them.
The Forecast column comes from the Target Amount set against each Opportunity, minus anything they have already donated or pledged.
Read more about the Campaign Summary Report.
Campaign Detail
The Campaign Detail Report breaks things down to show you in more granular detail all of the items in your selected Campaigns, split out into stages. Opportunities will appear under the stage they are currently sitting at in the pipeline.
Read more about the Campaign Detail Report.
Once you’re ready to close an Opportunity, just edit the Opportunity (as described above) and tick the Closed box:
Ideally, you'll be closing an Opportunity as the result of successfully moving it to the final Campaign Stage, having received a donation and thanked the donor. In this scenario, you would likely want to create another Opportunity (perhaps going towards a different Campaign) for the same person – you might not begin the process of cultivating a donation right away, but opening an Opportunity for a future financial year is a useful reminder for when you want to begin the process again. For example, after a successful funding bid, you might want to add an Opportunity to re-apply in the following financial year. You could also add a future Activity to remind you when you need to begin the application process in future.
Of course, there will be times when you decide not to continue with cultivating a prospect, either because they have indicated they don’t wish to donate, or because you’ve changed your mind about asking them. In this case, it’s important that you close the Opportunity at the stage you decided to discontinue – this way, you’ll be able to get an idea of which stage tends to have the greatest drop-off of potential donors and use this to improve your chances next time!
Stewarding
It’s worth making a note on the Opportunity when closing it to provide some further context about when and why it was closed. You can make notes on an Opportunity by clicking the blue sticky note:
This will help you to make your future asks more tailored.
Here are a couple of questions to ask yourself when adding a note:
- Did the donor express an interest in donating again?
- Did they give an indication of why they did not wish to donate?
Having this information available will help make your future asks more tailored and effective.
Lastly, why not bulk apply Tags to all of the people who donated as the result of an Opportunity (i.e. a ‘2019 Donors’ Tag)? You can bulk apply Tags directly from a Customer List in Insights & Mailings – simply segment every customer who had an Opportunity in a given Campaign and donated as a result, and then apply Tags to all of them at once.
You can then use this Tag as the main criteria when setting up Customer Lists to power stewardship emails to your donors. You can also search for customers by Tag in the Opportunities Interface to help you identify prospective donors for future Campaigns.
Further reading
If you need a reminder about setting up Opportunities, check out our Understand and Creating Opportunities article for more information about what they’re useful for and how to add them either individually or in bulk. For further reading about how to navigate, understand and use the Opportunities Interface in Spektrix, have a look at some of these articles:
- Getting Started With the Opportunities Interface
- Navigating the Opportunities Interface
- Activities
- Campaigns
- Pledges and Legacies
If you’re looking for more detailed advice on how the Opportunities Interface functionality in Spektrix can help you in your day to day fundraising work, check out or selection of Best Practice guides.
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Please don’t hesitate to get in touch with the Spektrix Support team if have any questions about what’s been covered here, or would like to talk in more detail about anything fundraising-related.