2025-11-13 Apra-IL Webinar: Everything You've Ever Needed to Know About Proposal Forecasting

Apra-IL Webinar: Everything You’ve Ever Needed to Know About Proposal Forecasting Like clockwork, just about every fundraising organization large or small must answer some version of the “What’s in our pipeline?” or “How much are we going to raise?” question during the year. But while the use of predictive prospect scoring models has become industry commonplace in recent years, similar efforts for proposal pipeline forecasting have seemingly lagged in adoption. Even many otherwise robust and forward-thinking organizations still rely on gut feel and “back-of-the-napkin math” to set their yearly dollars raised target and evaluate their gift officers’ proposal activity. In an industry where most teams live or die by meeting their fundraising goal for the year, how can organizations harness their data to create more accurate pipeline forecasts? This presentation will detail one individual's work to develop a machine learning system for predicting which proposals are likely to close, and how much an organization can expect to raise for the year based on its existing pipeline. It will introduce attendees to the data science process, explain the fundamentals of a common machine learning approach in decision trees, and propose a new gift pipeline metric: Proposal Probability. Along the way, it will present several statistical findings on proposal outcomes that even non-technical shops and professionals can use to inform their own forecasting systems. Speaker Bio: Andrew Gutierrez is a fundraising professional and data scientist who has worked primarily in the healthcare philanthropy space since 2018, having held roles such as Data Scientist and Systems Analyst at Cleveland Clinic’s Philanthropy Institute, and Associate Director of Development Operations at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. His work primarily focuses on using predictive modeling to identify and segment prospects, quantify donors’ capacity and affinity, and project gift revenue outcomes.