How One University Used Data to Eliminate ‘Zombie Proposals’ and Improve Big-Gift Fundraising

Twice a year I sit down with my Northwestern colleague Brock Silvey, director of prospect research and management, and each of the fundraisers on my team to review their major-gift solicitation plans. I oversee several teams of big-gift officers, so my top management priority is identifying and removing obstacles in their way. This biennial proposal audit is designed to uncover such obstacles, and, as you might expect, many of them are self-inflicted.

If you know major-gift officers, you might agree we’re an optimistic bunch. That optimism is key to our success. Unfortunately, it also gets in our way. It makes it almost impossible for us to relinquish the hope that one day, maybe tomorrow, every prospective donor will respond to our proposals with a resounding “yes.” We delay the solicitations we have planned, trusting that one day soon a perfect time will emerge to get in front of the potential supporter. However, for many of these individuals, we keep pushing that perfect day further into the future.

‘Lifeless Proposals Refusing to Die’

So there these prospective donors sit, languishing in our database, complicating our projections, cluttering our calendars, and teasing our dreams of surpassing our fundraising goals. At some point, we must come to terms with the fact that these stalled proposals are, in fact, zombies. They look somewhat alive, and they behave like living proposals, but they are lifeless, refusing to die. As difficult as it is, we must deal with them before they sabotage our fundraising goals.

Frankly, it’s often very hard to give up on these “zombie proposals.” In some cases, we solicited our prospective donors more than a year ago and still wait for an answer. Other times we never even asked for a gift, continually delaying plans to do so. And despite any evidence to the contrary, fundraisers remain convinced that they will get that donation if they reach out just once more, usually via email.

When I ask big-gift fundraisers about these proposals, they often maintain optimism despite any signs that their prospective supporters even remember being solicited for a gift. True, some donations take a long time to land, especially complex planned gifts, but zombie proposals persist without even a hint of movement.

Identifying ‘Zombie Proposals’

After years of observing countless cases like these at Northwestern, it became clear that a zombie-proposal apocalypse was near. And like all zombies, if they are to be vanquished, we will need to attack them with a powerful weapon. What better weapon is there than data?

Realizing this, Brock and I approached our colleague Brijesh Jani, a member of Northwestern’s Alumni Relations and Development Reporting and Analytics team, to help us understand what was happening so we could intervene. Our goal was to provide compelling evidence that proposal stagnation was a growing problem that adversely affected our collective performance — and to find a path toward salvaging what proposals we could.

We peppered Brijesh with nagging questions: When does a proposal become a zombie? When it’s open for 30 days? Ninety days? A year? What circumstantial factors should we consider? How do we dislodge these proposals from their lifeless state? Should complex proposals be allowed extra time before being declared zombies? Would the probability of a proposal closing with a gift commitment also be a part of this definition?

Brijesh quickly recognized an opportunity to incorporate predictive, and potentially prescriptive, modeling techniques. By understanding three factors — the probability of securing a gift, the proposal timeline, and the complexity involved in each case — we could highlight the most problematic proposals and perhaps pinpoint strategies to bring them back to life.

Digging Into the Data

To transform a predictive model into a prescriptive one, Brijesh isolated the factors Northwestern’s fundraisers could control. For example, a prospective donor’s age may have a strong correlation to his or her giving behavior, but it isn’t something fundraisers can influence. However, the number of times they reach out to that person is something fundraisers can control. It could even inform a strategy to improve our chances of success.

Northwestern in 2021 completed a 10-year, multibillion-dollar “comprehensive” campaign — encompassing all gifts to the university during that period — which yielded Brijesh a wealth of data. To develop his model, Brijesh sampled roughly 8,500 proposals. Digging into that data, he identified the fundraiser-driven behaviors that made the biggest impact on proposal outcomes.

This much was clear: The strongest correlation to a proposal’s success was the length of its timeline. The longer proposals take to close, the lower the odds they’ll result in a major gift. But other factors played a role, too, including the amount requested, the number of times a fundraiser visited or called the potential supporters in their portfolios, and the total number of fundraisers involved in the strategy. Together, these were the biggest factors that determined the probability of getting a gift.

Then again, some factors seemed to have little to no effect, most notably the number of emails fundraisers sent over the course of the proposal’s timeline. While visits and phone calls clearly increased the probability that a proposal would lead to a donation, emails were essentially irrelevant. This underscored the importance of communication channels when engaging potential major donors. The more personal the outreach, the more receptive these individuals became.

Persistence Is Key

With these correlations in mind, Brijesh used his predictive model to test how changing certain variables might affect the probability of securing a gift. He found that — holding all other factors constant — a formal solicitation followed by a month with no outreach or collaboration decreased the likelihood of a big gift by 4 or 5 percent. And while that may not seem like much, a proposal’s chance of producing a gift degraded each month without a direct interaction.

But if fundraisers made a single phone call in that same first month, or if just one more gift officer was involved in the solicitation, the probability of success instead increased by 1 to 2 percent.

This finding revealed that persistent outreach and collaboration among fundraisers, especially after a solicitation, can significantly offset the negative impact stagnation has on the probability of success. The key is persistence. Even if a proposal is open for a long time, if fundraisers engage the prospective donor well and approach the solicitation as a team, they greatly improve their chances of landing a major gift.

Conversely, if an open proposal has little history of subsequent personal engagement, the odds of a successful outcome keep plummeting over time. By removing such proposals, we could help fundraisers focus on higher-likelihood ones, eliminating wasted efforts and decreasing clutter in our database.

How to Prioritize

Of course, there is only so much time in a day, so fundraiser bandwidth plays a large role in determining how many zombie proposals might be salvaged. For each proposal where fundraisers can increase their engagement, they would need to close another stagnant one. This begged the question of how exactly to prioritize zombie proposals.

Cross-referencing the model with historical data, Brijesh determined that we should address any proposal with a less than 50 percent chance of succeeding. We would need to scrutinize these proposals carefully and remove many from the pipeline. Once we tackled those, any proposal with a 50- to 70-percent probability of success would merit less stringent review, and those above 70 percent would simply be counted among the living.

Using that framework, Melanie Pozdol, a colleague on the prospect research and management team, created a dynamic, user-friendly Tableau dashboard so fundraisers could easily view all open proposals and separate the living from the zombies. This clarity sparked candid discussions in portfolio-review meetings that led to a shared understanding of each proposal’s viability. Once this viability became clear, it was easier to determine which should be saved and which should be withdrawn.

With Brijesh’s rigorous assessment, we effectively staved off a zombie-proposal apocalypse, saving ourselves much time and improving our long-term likelihood of success. We also deepened our understanding of how to engage prospects during a proposal’s lifetime, enabling us to create thoughtful strategies to keep such proposals “in play.” All the while we improved our ability to forecast outcomes, making it easier to set goals and plan future campaigns.

Several years ago we used data analytics to inform our then-radical strategy of reducing fundraising portfolios by roughly two-thirds to improve efficiency and overall results. The gains we saw in our fundraising help us to continue to break records today. Now a data analysis has once again led us to the counterintuitive notion that we must reduce, not increase, fundraisers’ workloads to improve results. By eliminating the zombie proposals that plague us, we increase the likelihood that we will realize our goals.