It is no secret that non-dues revenue opportunities are on the rise and are essential to the growth of nonprofit organizations.
It is also true that nonprofit organizations offer highly desirable platforms for targeted advertisments being among the highest authorities in a segment of industry or culture. Many nonprofit organizations do not fully leverage this lucrative source of revenue in part due to a lack of an opportunity pipeline management system.
Creating an opportunity management system in iMIS offers numerous benefits. First of all, iMIS provides the tools to build a quality opportunity system as this article seeks to demonstrate. Secondly, your new system can be tailored to your specific needs! Thirdly, all of your organizational data is right there and ready to go and finally, iMIS has analytical & engagement tools for continuous improvement.
Incorporating a new opportunity system into your “single source of truth” iMIS EMS allows you to streamline workflows, leverage existing reporting & analytics tools, measure engagement and build process automations. This article describes an opportunity management system we created in iMIS using standard tools and we hope it inspires you to think of new ways that you can make the most of your iMIS system.
Opportunity Data Structure
To begin with, you need to define what information you wish to collect in your system. In iMIS EMS you have the flexibility to create new data structures called “Panel Sources” to hold the information you need to record, value, segment and track new opportunities. New panels can be stand alone, single instance contact, multi-instance contact, single instance event or multi-instance event. These options provide you with the building blocks to store the data needed for most any new system.
In our prototype opportunity system, we created 2 multi-instance contact panels: Opportunities and Opportunity Interactions. The Opportunity panel contains several dates including initial engagement, follow up, reminder and completed. It also has several drop-down lists of iMIS data including potential opportunity partners & contacts, available opportunities in Space Master (Advertising Module), opportunity status, interaction type, win probability and more. Additional text fields are added including estimated monetary value, interaction details, follow up, etc. Supplementing the Opportunity panel is the Opportunity Follow up panel which provides a sales log entry for more protracted engagements.
Creating Opportunity Interfaces
iMIS Forms and IQA are great tools for building system interfaces for any new iMIS solution. In our system we created iMIS forms to add an opportunity, edit an existing opportunity, add an opportunity interaction or edit an opportunity interaction. iMIS forms allows for complete control over the appearance and provess flow as well as enforcing referential integrity of related structures.
For viewing existing opportunities, we use designed IQAs showing the information laid out in the desired format with quick links to related resources like the partner profile, contact profile, email contact, account owner and editing the opportunity.
External Sales Representatives & iMIS Security
Often it makes sense to hire external consultants on a commission-based plan to manage and close opportunities. To this end, we opened up most of the features of the opportunity portal to trusted public users with no additional licensing cost required.
Adding external sales users was accomplished by adding the external sales organization to iMIS and then adding sales representative to the company roster. The next step was creating a security group that automatically includes all employees of this organization. Now all staff added to this company roster are automatically added to the “Opportunity Portal” security group. Additionally, we do not want all iMIS staff users to access to this portal so we also created a role “Opportunity Administrator” and assigned it to appropriate staff who will be managing this system.
Adding Prospects
iMIS has a standard demographic field “Is a Sponsor”. We used this to flag existing records as a potential opportunity partner. Next we created an IQA search query for searching all organizations in the system. Each record returned is flagged as currently being part of the opportunity system or not. A quick link to each organization profile makes it easy to add or remove any record as a potential partner in the system.
Opportunity Portal Website
The final piece of this new system that ties everything together is a new "Opportunity Portal" website build in the iMIS content management system RiSE. This is readily accomplished by making a copy of the Member Responsive quick start site. The new website is then tailored with its own sitemap and profile pages. Next we integrated the iMIS forms and search pages we created to tie the entire setup together. Finally, the website is secured so only those allowed to access it may see it.
Additional Options in iMIS
What we have built for iMIS clients described in this article is an affordable starting point but as part of your larger iMIS EMS system there are many more ways to improve. Some examples include creating automated email follow-ups to both prospects and sales staff, automate pushing successful sales into Space Master (iMIS Advertising) and segmenting opportunity partners based on closing ratios and total sales with engagement scoring.
Opportunities Your Way in iMIS
Our hope is this article illustrates how you can build your own opportunity management system in iMIS that is tailored to your exact needs. Pulling this important information into your centralized data management system is a very powerful and cost effective way to manage your sales opportunity pipeline. If you are interested to learn more about this system and how it could benefit your organization, please feel free to email me at joe@johnconsulting.net. Thanks for reading and best of luck growing your non-dues revenue in 2025!
