As the zeroes on mega gifts grow as fast as ants on fallen candy, the methods, and vehicles for giving continue to diversify. First, it was the trusty (pun intended) family foundation. Now there is the handy and potentially anonymous donor-advised fund. Along the way, the Zuckerberg Chan Initiative LLC in 2015 brought worldwide attention to the LLC structure, which was also the choice du jour for Jeff Bezos and his Bezos Earth Fund LLC in 2021.

Continue reading Image Conscious Philanthropists →

If you’re reading this blog, I suspect you are probably a researcher or really like data and research. But imagine you are vice president at a nonprofit. You took the job because you are an awesome major gift fundraiser, you know how to lead a team, and you love the mission. But inevitably, you arrive and have to overcome a million big and small hurdles, mostly with data and process.

Continue reading Making Magic with Pivot Tables →

When I first moved to Greater Tampa Bay, Florida from Greater Philadelphia, the big excitement was spotting dolphins and manatees. It was so cool! After years on the beach, I could tell just by the way the water was moving which marine life was causing it, including dolphins and manatees. Spotting the dolphin fin or hearing a manatee “snort” clinched the identification. In prospect research, I’ve learned to spot the whales – the major gift prospects that are capable of gifts of $10M or even $100M or more.

Continue reading HNWIs: Whale Sightings and Capacity Ratings →

Do you remember back when there were live luncheons? Or maybe you’re already starting to attend them again. The kind where there is a speaker and everyone is seated to eat their meal while hearing the talk. Often, when you sit down to eat, the table is already set with the salad AND the dessert.

Continue reading Creating a Balanced Profile →

Visit the exhibitor hall at a live conference!

I am headed out to Atlanta to attend the Apra Prospect Development conference, July 26-29, 2022. My primary goal? Connect with some of the new vendors on the scene and re-connect with my favorite vendors to learn about what’s new.

Conferences provide a very relaxed space to explore and be curious. All of us attending are away from our desks and the pressure of email and deadlines (well, mostly).

Continue reading What is The BEST way to know which research tool to buy? →

If you’ve been in the prospect research field a while, you are probably on the Apra forums (known as PRSPCT-L from the list-serv days). And it was there that someone mentioned The Morning Brew newsletter. A year later I’m still hooked! It’s a great read over breakfast (sorry The Economist, you’re relegated to lunch). THIS is my Morning-Brew-inspired attempt for prospect research.

Why the break in the usual format? It’s all because summer slammed into Florida – and everywhere else. What could I possibly write about that would be interesting in skyrocketing temperatures? Thank heavens for past content and a growing nonprofit sector!

Continue reading Subject: Research Brew →

Remember when you were six years old and you walked into the toy store? A huge building chock full of every toy imaginable! Now imagine that your favorite uncle says you can pick out any toy you want, so long as it’s under $50. The sheer awesomeness of this proposition for your six-year-old self is overwhelming. Without some additional guidance, it’s almost mean.

Now imagine that you have even $10,000 to buy data and research tools to support your fundraising efforts. I’m thrilled to suggest that it can be just as overwhelming as that toy store! So many tech companies are starting-up with a focus on nonprofits first that it’s amazing, but also challenging. There is so much happening it can be difficult to even know what is available.

The marketplace isn’t the only thing changing. Naturally, best practices are changing along with the tools new to market. It is a truly exciting time to be in prospect research as the data world shifts beneath our CRM databases!

Today I want to talk about a new kind of toy, I mean, tool. There are a lot of different monikers out there hoping to snag a customer–insight, score, intelligence–but these machine learning algorithms–sometimes lumped in with AI (artificial intelligence)–are decidedly different from what has been available to us in the past two decades.

What is machine learning vs. artificial intelligence? For an explainer article, click here. For an explainer video, click here.

Machine Learning (“ML”) Algorithms

Whether you are doing your ongoing prospect identification or seeking to segment or filter your donor prospect pool for any number of fundraising reasons, ML Algorithms essentially score your constituent records on request. These scores answer questions such as the following:

• Who likes to receive phone calls?
• Who has an affinity for children’s healthcare?
• Who is likely to have higher education and not have children?

The fundraising questions can be endless in variety…

But you’ve heard all of this before, haven’t you? And for years and years, right? It’s predictive modeling or some variety of statistical data modeling and you may even be using these models right now to provide you with great scores.

So, what makes ML Algorithms different?

Data Mining on Steroids

All of the activity we perform to identify, segment, and filter our constituents falls under the term “data mining.” It’s cool and absolutely everyone does it! Every time you ask for a report with multiple criteria, such as “all donors who have given more than $5,000 in the past year,” you are doing data mining.

But ML Algorithms are different. They are BIGGER. But does that make them better? And how is this different from a common best practice, such as wealth screening?

The figure below is a simplified distinction between the three groups of activities we perform on constituent data for fundraising purposes.

All three groups of activities could involve strictly internal data, such as your donor names, giving history, etc. Or they could include external data such as matching and appending real estate addresses and market values, gifts to other organizations, nonprofit board leadership, private foundations, and much more. Traditional prospect wealth screenings match external data to internal data and provide some scores, most often mathematical calculations such as capacity ratings based on visible asset values.

It has been a best practice to match external information to our donor prospects AND have statistical data modeling performed on the information in our database. We prospect research professionals then leverage the additional information about wealth and philanthropy and the modeled score, to identify new major gift prospects.

Sounds familiar so far, right?

ML Algorithms can be applied to your internal data, but for now, are often way more effective if they take your constituent data and match it out to the world of BIG data. Because, if your organization is like the majority of organizations in the US, your CRM is small data. BIG data are the huge datasets collected and constantly growing in social media, marketing, and so many more places.

Statistical data modeling is limited by the number of data points that can go into a model. However, ML Algorithms can handle this massive mess of data and build somewhat shockingly accurate insights or scores.

My favorite example of ML Algorithms being right is when Target began mailing coupons for baby items to a household in 2012 where the teen daughter was pregnant – but had not yet told her family. Yikes!

Is Bigger Always Better?

Now that you understand the basic differences between simple data mining, statistical data modeling, and ML Algorithms, how does that help you decide what to buy? Is the BIG data available to ML Algorithms make it better?

Of course, your purchasing decision is going to depend on what you are trying to accomplish with the tool. But my hope is that you are now equipped to read the company marketing materials and ask the important questions to make the best purchasing decision.

For example, your internal data is GOLD! You can get very far using it better in fundraising. But if that is no longer enough for you and your team, you can still do quite well to add the traditional prospect wealth screening (especially if there is an ML Algorithm add-on available).

If traditional screenings are not enough for your constituency – and this is often the case if your donors contain a lot of diversity – then ML Algorithms based on external data can be an exciting breakthrough! Diverse donors are often overlooked when considering visible asset values – for lots of reasons.

One last tip on when big is better: if your organization does not have its own big data, be sure that the tool you purchase is offering an ML Algorithm score based on EXTERNAL data, and not your own INTERNAL data. You need a boost, not a belly flop!

Beyond the Tool

Taking you back to the beginning of this article, remember how I mentioned that it was almost mean to drop a six-year-old into a store with $50 and no guidance on how to choose a toy? All of these new tools on the market have deep implications for the field of prospect research. And one of them is that the trained prospect research professional takes on a new role, guiding its organization to make great purchasing decisions, but more importantly, to then use these tools effectively so that the organization’s fundraising can reach a new level of efficiency and growth.

I don’t know about you, but I get just as excited as that six-year-old in the toy store when contemplating the world of information technology that is unfolding before us!

Additional Resources

• Predictive Insights a la carte with Shawn Olds at boodleAI | Prospect Research #ChatBytes | 2022
• Is Gratitude a Feeling or an Algorithm (or both)? | Nathan Chappell on Prospect Research #ChatBytes | 2019
• A.I. Prospect Research Links Collection | Aspire Research Group LLC
• Artificial Intelligence 101 for Nonprofits | boodleAI | undated
• Top 5 Statistical Data Analysis Techniques: Statistical Modelling vs Machine Learning | AnalyticSteps.com | 2020
• How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did | Forbes | 2012

What would happen if researchers adopted the technique of method acting for one week out of every year? What if the researcher “became” a major gift fundraiser? Could this be the kind of training that could differentiate between superstar researchers and all the rest?

Are you familiar with method acting? It’s where the actor stays in the role of the character, even off camera. Jack Nicholson — he starred as Jack Torrance in the Shining, Col. Jessup in A Few Good Men, and too many more to list — was reported to have modestly said, “There’s probably no one who understands method acting better academically than I do, or actually uses it more in his work.”

And I have heard of organizations where the researcher tags along for some donor visits or makes thank you calls to donors. As part of the development department, it’s not unheard of for a researcher to help staff major donor events. I have. All of these interactions shift the researcher out of his or her research mindset and into a donor-facing mindset.

Because whatever research you’re doing – profiles, data mining, prospect lists, verifying a screening – could benefit from one last review by you, but in the mindset or role of major gift officer. When I say “one last review” I mean that there needs to be distance of some kind between performing the work and reviewing the work.

Just as writers will put down their work for a few days or a few weeks, picking it up again with “fresh eyes,” so researchers can put down their work and pick it up again with “major gift officer eyes.”

Reviewing Research through “Major Gift Officer Eyes”

Anyone who routinely reviews donor prospects with talented major gift officers can’t help but to start thinking like one. Imagine that you both have the profiles up on your computers and the major gift officer starts commenting and asking questions in each of the five building blocks of the profile, like this:

1. Institutional Information: Is this the same couple that met while on one of our sponsored donor trips? (Yes, it was, and by golly that level of high affinity changes everything about approaching them for a campaign gift!)
2. Biographical Information: I clicked through to her Twitter account and did you see that in her profile line she describes herself as a “disability advocate, wife, and mother?” I wonder if they have a disabled child! (Obviously, you didn’t read it because you put “none found” under children and didn’t find any connection to your cause beyond her first gift to your organization.)
3. Community Involvement: They gave a million dollars to Sunshine Charity? Really? I wonder what that was about. They’ve only ever given us $1,000 and everything else found shows giving under $5,000. (After tracking down the annual report it turns out it was a typo from the vendor and you need to re-examine the screening capacity rating.)
4. Occupation: His wife is Janita Billingswart? Do you think she’s the celebrity attorney? A name like that, surely… (But you didn’t search her name because the deep relationship has been with the spouse and you were in a hurry.)
5. Wealth and Assets: Can you tell me more about the family limited partnership you mention here? Doesn’t that mean they have a lot of money? (You check it out when you’re off the call and realize it does indicate significant wealth and now you notice it was formed the same year that they sold their first company.)

You might not be able to practice method acting and live the life of your major gift officers to understand them, but you can live their work life vicariously by engaging in frequent conversations about their prospects. It takes dedicated effort, but so does method acting. And you will learn LOADS about doing research better.

Getting Good Without Shock Therapy

It was rumored that Jack Nicholson underwent shock therapy in preparation for his role in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I don’t recommend diving deep into every single research project or you might just go crazy!

Here’s how I described to a client, and an amazing major gift fundraiser, what he could expect from our profiles so he could know when to question us about the work and when he should run off on his own with his questions:

• Our Snap Bios are a quick look, a snapshot, and it is unlikely that we would jump out of our usual process to follow a lead or ask a deeper question about the prospects.
• Our Tactical Briefings are confirming philanthropy and wealth and while we are spending more time and digging deeper, we’re unlikely to wander off following a hunch unless there is an anomaly — unless something looks strange or we want to be sure we are accurate.
• Our Strategic Assessments are the deep dive, following all those questions, untangling ambiguity, and laboriously seeking information not directly related to the prospect, but directly related to the prospect’s philanthropic or wealth story.

Of course, the fewer hours it takes us, the lower the cost, but the less information, too. Sometimes we do get dazzled by a prospect, spend more time, and the inspiration unlocks key information. We love our work and that’s inevitable!

Anything You Do, You Could Do Better

The prospect research field is full of people who are fulfilled in their work because it demands constant learning across, well, everything! We can have confidence in knowing that we don’t know a lot, and this opens us up to learn from everyone, everywhere.

So, even though the examples I’ve given in this article relate to prospect profiles, you could do better in every aspect of your work. Maybe your major gift officer loves Excel and enjoys filtering and sorting a long list of potential prospects for an upcoming trip, but is that the best way to provide the information? Could the process be improved?

If you don’t look at your work product through “major gift officer eyes” you may never know. I’m curious. Aren’t you?