Moves Management: The Stages, the Benchmarks, and Who You Actually Move This Week

• What moves management is, and where it came from
• A move and a stage are not the same thing
• The five stages, and why every guide gives a different list
• Cultivation and stewardship: where the line actually falls
• What the benchmark data says
• Portfolio size: the number everyone repeats has no source
• Deciding who moves this week
• Why moves management goes stale, and what its inventor warned about
• The donor pyramid underneath all this, and how it is changing
• What to track
• Where Gratefully fits
• Frequently asked questions

What moves management is, and where it came from

Moves management is the practice of planning, sequencing and recording the deliberate interactions that carry a prospective donor toward a gift. Each interaction is a "move." The method assumes that major gifts are not asked for so much as arrived at, and that the arriving can be organized.

One clarification first, because search engines conflate them. Outside fundraising, "move management" means corporate relocation, the business of moving an office. This page is about the fundraising discipline, which is almost always written in the plural: moves management.

The term comes from David Dunlop, a senior development officer at Cornell University, who developed the approach with G.T. "Buck" Smith. Most guides omit this, which matters more than it sounds, because Dunlop's own description of what he was doing is nothing like the way the method is usually taught. He described the work as changing people's attitudes so they want to give. Not advancing them through stages. Changing how they feel.

We will come back to what he thinks went wrong.

A move and a stage are not the same thing

This distinction is missing from most guides and it is the one that makes the rest usable.

A stage is where a donor currently is. Cultivation, for example. It is a status, it changes rarely, and it lives in a field in your database.

A move is a single deliberate action you take to advance them. A coffee, a site visit, a handwritten note, an introduction to a board member, a call to ask their advice about something you genuinely want their advice on. It is an event, it has a date, and there are many of them inside one stage.

Gratefully, August 2026. This distinction is our own framing rather than a sector standard.

	Stage	Move
What it is	Where the relationship stands	A single deliberate action
How often it changes	Rarely, and deliberately	Constantly
Example	Cultivation	Invited them to tour the new facility
Where it lives	A field on the donor record	A dated entry in the activity log
Who should change it	Whoever owns the relationship, on purpose	Whoever did the thing

Teams that confuse the two end up doing one of two things. They log every email as a stage change, so the pipeline reports movement that never happened. Or they set the stage once and never record the moves, so a year later nobody can reconstruct why the donor is where they are. The first produces optimism. The second produces amnesia. Both are common.

The five stages, and why every guide gives a different list

The moves management steps, in the sequence most sources use, are these.

1. Identification. Finding people whose interests and capacity suggest they could become significant supporters. Usually from your own file first: volunteers, event attendees, long term small donors, board connections.
2. Qualification. Establishing whether the prospect is genuinely worth a fundraiser's time. This is the stage teams skip, and skipping it is how portfolios fill with people who will never give. A qualification is usually one direct conversation whose purpose is to find out whether there is anything there. If you are working out who deserves that conversation, our guide to RFM analysis sets out the simplest way to rank a file on data you already hold.
3. Cultivation. Building the relationship. The longest stage, and the one that consists almost entirely of moves. Donor cultivation events belong here: site visits, small dinners, briefings with a program lead, anything that lets someone see the work rather than hear about it. Their value is not the event, it is the conversation you can have afterward because of it.
4. Solicitation. The ask. A specific amount, for a specific purpose, from the right person, at a moment you have reason to believe is right.
5. Stewardship. Thanking, reporting, and demonstrating that the gift did what you said it would.

Now the part no other guide mentions: the published sources do not agree on this list. We read eight of them. Between them they describe five different frameworks.

Eight published guides compared, August 2026.

Source	Stages given
Blackbaud, Keela, WildApricot	Identification, Qualification, Cultivation, Solicitation, Stewardship
Givebutter	Awareness, Identification, Cultivation, Solicitation, Stewardship. Qualification is absent
Kindsight	The five above, plus Discovery between Qualification and Cultivation
DonorSearch	Acquisition, Cultivation, Solicitation, Stewardship, Retention, Upgrade
Wikipedia	Two phases only: prospecting, then engagement

None of these is wrong. They are describing the same relationship at different resolutions, and each vendor's version tends to match the fields in its own software. But a fundraiser reading three guides before configuring their CRM will conclude the sector has a standard, and it does not.

The practical rule: fewer stages than you think. Every stage you add is a field somebody has to maintain forever. If you cannot say out loud what specifically has to be true for a donor to move from one stage to the next, that boundary will not survive contact with a busy week. Five is already ambitious for a two-person team. Three, meaning qualify, cultivate, ask, is a perfectly respectable system that people will actually keep current.

Cultivation and stewardship: where the line actually falls

These two get used interchangeably and they are not the same.

Donor cultivation is the work of building a relationship before a gift. Its purpose is to understand what the donor cares about and to let them understand what you do, so that an eventual ask is a reasonable next step rather than an interruption.

Donor stewardship is the work that follows a gift. Its purpose is to demonstrate that the money did what you said it would, and to make the donor feel like a participant rather than a source.

The distinction that actually matters in practice is not chronological, it is about what you are asking of the person. Cultivation asks for their attention. Stewardship gives them a return on it.

And the loop closes: good stewardship is the most effective cultivation there is for the next gift. A donor who has seen exactly what their last gift did needs far less convincing about the next one, which is the argument we make at length in stewardship versus acquisition. This is why treating stewardship as the end of a linear pipeline is a mistake. It is the beginning of the next one.

What the benchmark data says

Here is what makes this topic unusual. There is a real study of how major gift fundraising actually performs, and none of the eight guides we examined cites it.

The 2020 Major Gifts Fundraising Benchmark Study surveyed 580 people working in nonprofit organizations. It was funded by MarketSmart, with research conducted by Melissa S. Brown & Associates, in collaboration with DonorSearch, the Association of Fundraising Professionals, and the Association of Philanthropic Counsel. It reports on 2019 activity, so it is six years old and should be read as the best available rather than the current picture.

What it found:

2020 Major Gifts Fundraising Benchmark Study, 580 respondents, reporting on 2019 activity.

Finding	Figure
Organizations that met their major gift goal	43%
Have a process to identify major gift prospects	58%
Use that process consistently	30%
Could report how long identification to close takes	30%
Of those, said it took one to two years	48%
Spend 60% or more of their time on major gifts	19%
Of that group, met or got close to goal	90%
Of those spending under 20% of their time, met or got close	68%

How long the whole cycle takes, as far as anyone has measured it: one to two years from identifying a prospect to closing a major gift, according to the 48% of organizations in the 2020 Major Gifts Fundraising Benchmark Study that were able to report it.

Four things worth drawing out.

Most organizations cannot measure their own cycle. In the 2020 Major Gifts Fundraising Benchmark Study, only 30% of the 580 organizations surveyed could say how long it takes to go from identifying a prospect to closing a gift. That is the central number in a staged process, and seven in ten do not have it. Among those that could report it, 48% said one to two years, which is the closest thing to a cultivation-length benchmark the sector has.

Having a process is not the same as running one. The same 2020 study found 58% of organizations had a prospect identification process while only 30% used it consistently, meaning roughly half of those that built a system do not actually operate it. This is the failure mode of moves management, not a lack of frameworks.

Time concentration beats effort. In the 2020 study, the 19% of respondents who spent 60% or more of their time on major gifts met or got close to goal 90% of the time, against 68% among those giving it under a fifth of their week. That is unsurprising, but it reframes what a moves management system is for: it is a device for protecting a small amount of concentrated attention, not for capturing a large amount of activity.

More tooling correlated with better outcomes. In the 2020 study, 86% of organizations using five or more technology-supported methods to identify prospects met or got close to goal, against 49% of those using one or two and 25% of those using none. Correlation, in a survey, and the study does not establish direction. Organizations that hit their goals may simply be the ones that could afford tools.

Portfolio size: the number everyone repeats has no source

Ask how many prospects one fundraiser should carry and the answer comes back with unusual confidence, usually 150 or a range ending in 150. Keela's guide, the top organic result when we checked in August 2026, states that a major gift officer "can typically manage 80 to 150 active relationships effectively." No source is attached to it.

There are three positions in circulation and they do not agree.

Positions as published by each source, compared August 2026.

Source	Recommended portfolio	Basis given
Keela, top organic result, August 2026	80 to 150	None stated
2020 Major Gifts Benchmark Study	Under 50, for organizations raising under $3 million	Survey of 580 organizations; smaller portfolios were associated with meeting goal
David Lively, Northwestern University, via MarketSmart	About 40	Time available divided by time required per donor strategy

The study's finding is the interesting one because it points the opposite way to the convention: organizations raising less than $3 million that had a portfolio of fewer than 50 major gift prospects were far more likely than those with larger portfolios to meet their major gift goals. The study is careful about this. It notes the effect may reflect that staff at smaller organizations are doing several jobs at once rather than proving that small portfolios cause success, and says plainly that from this research it cannot supply the answer.

The Lively formula is worth knowing because it explains where the conventional number may have come from. Take the hours a gift officer genuinely has for donor strategy, divide by the time one donor's strategy takes, and you get something closer to 40 than 150. The argument is that 150 was borrowed from Dunbar's number, the anthropological estimate of how many people one person can maintain social relationships with, and that a fundraising portfolio is a different thing from a social circle.

What to do with this. Do not adopt any of the three as a target. Count how many people in your current portfolio have had a substantive contact in the last 90 days. That number is your real portfolio. The rest is a list.

Deciding who moves this week

Every guide ends where the actual job begins. You have a portfolio, the stages are configured, and it is Monday. You have time for perhaps six real conversations. Who?

Ranking by capacity is the common answer and it is the wrong one, because capacity does not change week to week. What changes is timing. These are the signals worth sorting on, roughly in order of how much they should move someone up your list.

1. Something happened. A liquidity event, a promotion, a retirement, a death in the family, a child's graduation, an award. Any change in circumstance is a reason to make contact that is not about you.
2. They did something. Opened every email this month, attended an event, renewed early, increased a recurring gift, replied to something. Engagement that has just risen is the shortest lived signal on this list and the most wasted.
3. A commitment is coming due. A pledge instalment, a grant report, a promise you made to send them something. Missing these is the cheapest possible way to lose a major donor.
4. The relationship has gone quiet past its own pattern. Not quiet in general, quiet relative to how this particular donor normally behaves. Working out where that line falls is its own discipline, covered in how to know which donors are at risk of lapsing. Someone who always gives in November and has not, by early December, is a different case from someone who gives irregularly.
5. They are stuck. In the same stage for longer than your own median, with no move logged. This is the one that requires a decision rather than a contact: either advance them, or return them to the general file and free the slot. Returning someone is not a failure. Carrying a name you never call is, given what replacing a donor actually costs.

Notice that four of the five are about time rather than about the donor's wealth. A moves management system that only sorts by capacity will hand you the same six names every week, and they will be the same six names it handed you last quarter.

A workable weekly rhythm. Thirty minutes, once a week, same slot. It is the habit development directors tell us is hardest to protect and most costly to lose. Review anything that fired on signals one to three and act on it. Look at the five oldest untouched records and decide, rather than defer. Log what you did the same day, because a move you cannot remember accurately is worth less than no move at all. Blackbaud's guidance of logging within 48 hours is a reasonable ceiling.

Why moves management goes stale, and what its inventor warned about

Moves management fails in a predictable way, and it is not usually because the framework was wrong.

The stages get configured with enthusiasm. For a few months they are current. Then a busy quarter arrives, the stage field stops being updated, and the pipeline report starts describing an organization that no longer exists. Nobody announces this. The report keeps generating. Six months later somebody notices that a donor has been in cultivation since two development directors ago and that no one alive remembers why.

The 2020 study puts a number on this: 58% of organizations had a process and 30% used it consistently. The gap between those two figures is where moves management actually dies.

Three things make the difference.

Make the stage boundary a sentence, not a feeling. Write down what must be true to move someone from qualification to cultivation. If it takes a paragraph, the boundary is not real.

Give the pipeline one owner and one review. Someone has to be responsible for the file being accurate, and there has to be a recurring moment when it gets looked at. Without both, decay is guaranteed.

Log the reasoning, not just the event. "Coffee, 14 March" tells the next person nothing. "Coffee, 14 March. Wants to fund scholarships specifically, not general operating. Wife is the decision maker" tells them everything. This is the part that walks out of the door when a fundraiser leaves, and it is the difference between a successor inheriting relationships and inheriting a list of names. We have written separately on why nonprofits lose donors when staff leave.

And the warning from the person who built it. Asked whether moves management is misunderstood, David Dunlop said it can be, and described the failure this way: people "start making moves and making a game of moves, rather than really recognizing the process." His framing of the real work was about inspiring people to do the things they would want to do anyway, and helping them accomplish what is consistent with their own values and interests.

That is a warning about scoreboards. A system that counts moves will get you moves. Whether those moves were worth making to the person on the receiving end is a separate question, and it is the one Dunlop thought the method was actually about.

The donor pyramid underneath all this, and how it is changing

Moves management assumes a shape. The donor pyramid is the traditional model: a wide base of many small donors, a middle of regular and mid-level supporters, and a narrow top of major and legacy donors. The theory is that people enter at the bottom and are cultivated upward, which is what the stages are for.

Two things are worth knowing about it.

The shape is flattening. Giving USA published research by BDI covering 50 rescue missions across the United States over the past decade, concluding that "our pyramid has become top heavy." In that data, mass donors giving under $1,000 a year still make up over 93% of the donor base but contribute roughly 34% of revenue, while major donors giving $10,US$10,000 or more account for less than 1% of donors and deliver approximately 33% of giving. That is one sector, and rescue missions are not representative of all nonprofits, but the direction is consistent with what most development teams report seeing.

The upward path is not how most people behave. The pyramid implies a linear climb. Real donors give, stop, return, volunteer, attend, lapse and come back, often without ever moving up a tier. If your stages assume a one-way escalator, they will misdescribe most of your file.

On the related question of the four types of donors, there is no single accepted answer, and it is worth saying so plainly because the phrase gets used as though there were. Two frameworks circulate. One sorts by who is giving: individuals, corporations, foundations, and legacy or planned givers. The other sorts by how people give: planned, habitual, selective and impulsive givers. The first is about legal entity and is useful for revenue planning. The second is about behavior and is more useful for moves management, because it tells you something about how a person is likely to respond to being asked.

Annual giving and major gifts are the two ends this all runs between. Annual giving is high volume, lower value, mostly unrestricted, solicited through mass channels, and it funds operations. Major gifts are low volume, high value, often restricted, solicited in person, and they fund ambitions. The old shorthand is that annual giving is money to live on and major gifts are money to grow on. Moves management is overwhelmingly a major gifts discipline, though the qualification and stewardship habits are worth borrowing at every level.

What to track

Most guides list metrics without saying which ones will tell you something. Four will.

1. Moves per donor per stage. Not total activity. If your cultivation stage averages two logged moves before solicitation, you are asking too early.
2. Time in stage, and your own median. You need this to know what "stuck" means at your organization. One to two years from identification to close, reported by 48% of the organizations able to measure it in the 2020 Major Gifts Fundraising Benchmark Study, is the only sector reference available.
3. Stage-to-stage conversion. What share of qualified prospects reach solicitation, and what share of solicitations close. Nobody publishes benchmarks for these, so yours is measured against your own prior year.
4. Portfolio coverage. The share of your portfolio with a substantive contact in the last 90 days. This is the single most honest number in the system and the one most likely to be uncomfortable.

For the metrics that sit around this, including current donor retention benchmarks and which fundraising figures have a defensible sector number behind them, see our fundraising metrics and benchmarks guide. It is also worth knowing that gift frequency predicts future retention considerably better than gift size does, which has direct consequences for how you rank a portfolio.

Where Gratefully fits

Moves management asks two things of an organization that are hard to sustain by hand: keeping the record current, and turning the record into a decision each week.

Gratefully connects to the systems you already use, including Salesforce for Nonprofits and Bloomerang, and builds them into a single picture of each donor. The Action Center reviews the portfolio nightly and surfaces what has changed, ranked by stakes, urgency and confidence, with one card per donor and a suggested next step. Donors are classified into living segments that update as behavior changes, so a relationship going quiet is something you are told about rather than something you notice later. Every figure is retrieved from your own records and cited to them, and nothing reaches a donor without a person approving it.

What it does not do is decide who is worth cultivating. That is judgment, and it stays with the fundraiser. The system's job is to make sure the judgment is made on time and with the full history in front of you, including the parts that were recorded by somebody who has since left.