We are just starting to implement the Proposal module and we're faced with some high level decisions that I'm not sure how to proceed with.  Hopefully some of you folks out there can share what you've done and what decisions you made. 

How do you define the Prospect Status?  The issue that I'm facing here is that one constituent might have various prospect statuses depending on the underlying status of the proposals.  For example in any given fund raising cycle they might have a proposal pending, a denied proposal and a proposal that they have responded positively to.  Given that, they could be in Solicitation, Cultivation or Stewardship.

I'm just a DBA and not a development professional so my insights into the subject have been limited.  My suggestion was to use the Prospect Status as an extremely high level view.  A prospect can either be Identified, Viable or Non-Viable.  The fine tuning will come at the Proposal level and reports can be generated based on the Proposal Status.

Any thoughts, comments or opinions on the best way to proceed?

We had this same issue with prospect status and for a long time never even used it.  I recently began using it for Assigned, Not Assigned and Do Not Assign.  Assigned = has a solicitor and is basically duplicating the relationship but not assigned and do not assign is I guess similar to your Viable/Not Viable.  Do not Assign is Not viable and Not Assigned is needs a solicitor but one has not been assigned yet.  Once assigned then the solicitor creates proposals and maintains the status of proposals there.

Hi David,

I just worked this out with our development department last week, and we've arrived at similar conclusions you have.  I've attached a document that has helped us better understand these two fields.  We've actually renamed the prospect status field to readiness tier to avoid confusion with the proposal status field.   Hope this helps.

jwant