Recording Funding Applications in CiviCRM
I would recommend against using contribution type or contribution status as those have specific system uses for actually received contributions. Instead, you might try creating groups of contacts that have received your mailings or phone calls asking for contributions, perhaps based on whether the contact has specific activities under advanced search. If you want to target prospect contacts for donations of a specific amount I might create a custom field to contain the amount for the ask. You might want to make a Prospect contact type, add this contact type to the relevant contacts, and make the Target Ask' field a custom field of Prospects.