Tag Archives: donor prospect

Lowering the Prospect-to-Donor Ratio

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Do you dream of creating the perfect prospecting system? A system so flawless that the ratio of prospects to donors drops to 2:1 or even (gasp) 1:1? I do! And yet, barring advances in ESP, a 1:1 ratio feels quite out of reach. We simply don’t have access to people’s complex, internal motivations for giving until they get visited and share. Even so, we still have plenty of room to achieve better prospect-to-donor ratios.

Interview with a Donor

I had the joy of interviewing Tim Horton, a venture capitalist for the Prospect Research Institute’s #ChatBytes podcast. About halfway through the interview he shared some of his philanthropic motivations with me.
  • Childhood sentiment – He gave to the March of Dimes as a child and still gives.
  • Family culture of giving – He was taught to give while young and now gives his time and money to mentor youth.
  • Political passions – He feels strongly that Africa has been left out of the capitalist economy and wants to remedy this.

Mr. Horton is a very private person and his giving is anonymous. If you research him you will find all of the usual public information, especially businesses where he is a listed officer. Isn’t it natural for us fundraising researchers to consider that given his venture capital history he might view his giving as an investment or wish to be involved in giving to entrepreneurial issues or causes? And yet, if we deduced his giving motivations from the data collected we would be all wrong.

Insights and Integration

Whether we are sourcing a fresh list of prospects or taking a deeper dive to qualify already identified prospects, achieving a lower prospect-to-donor ratio requires insights and integration.
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As an instructor at the Prospect Research Institute I have introduced “insights” as a capstone project in any course where it makes sense – because crafting insights takes practice. Usually we researchers are happy to craft insights from community involvement information. We can look at patterns of giving, nonprofit board service, and family foundation histories and provide suggestions about where and how a prospective donor might want to make a gift. But we often stumble over providing insights from wealth information.
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And yet, wealth information is where we researchers can really shine a light in the darkness! When we begin to learn and imagine how wealth and assets could affect a prospective donor’s ability to make a major or transformational gift we offer a tremendous service to the gift officer. Suddenly the multi-millionaire with 85% of her wealth tied up in her business becomes recognized for life stage and likely liquidity, opening up a long-term relationship that yields some major gifts now and an eight or nine-figure gift fifteen years later.
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So if your gift officer comes to you asking for estimated net worth or a liquidity percentage on his prospect’s wealth, take a deep breath and resist the urge to say that it isn’t possible. Instead consider this the perfect opportunity to integrate prospect research into front-line fundraising. Open the conversation. Discuss how we collect wealth information and how we might better inform the gift officer. Look to other fields, such as financial services, to find out how they evaluate liquidity or other facets of wealth. And provide those insights in some evolving format.
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Because once you become part of the team conversation around how a prospective donor’s wealth impacts ability and motivation for giving, you are providing the kind of insights your team desperately needs to bring the prospect-to-donor ratio down and to build deeper and more respectful relationships with constituents. You begin to drop the “cost center” designation and become integrated with the “revenue center” designation.
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And even better, you get to learn. You get to hear what happened after that visit. You get to find out how right or wrong your guesses were and speculate with the team on why that might be. You get to discover great new ideas on how to perform even better in the future.
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It’s time to step-up and lean-in to a new relationship with your data, your fundraising team, and your profession. It will take some practice, and perhaps a few mistakes along the way, but you’ve got this!

More Resources You Might Like

 

Researching Public Company Wealth

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golden-dollar-1703161_1280Public companies create an enormous amount of wealth in the United States. Having the designation as a public company insider is a neon-lit indicator for high net worth!

According to the McKinsey Global Institute, the consultancy’s research arm, 10% of the world’s public companies generate 80% of all profits. In 2013, the Fortune 100 biggest American companies were responsible for 46% of nominal U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

Where are the Public Company Insiders?

That is a lot of wealth! But the reality for most prospect research professionals is that the majority of our major gift prospects are going to generate their wealth through private companies. Why is this true? There are many reasons, but the chart below is a fun visual for one big reason!

 

 

Most nonprofit organizations are small relative to the heavy-weights at the top of the nonprofit sector. Universities also have the advantage of teaching the extremely successful to become that way, which frequently creates a strong affinity.

The combination of smaller operating budgets and a weaker path to affinity means that unless you research at a big organization or institution of higher education, you probably won’t come across too many public company insider prospects. There just aren’t that many of them to go around.

However, within this reality, public company prospects are a gold mine of learning opportunity!

The Old Way of Learning Donor Profile Research

Most of us entered the prospect research field as generalists. We have earned a wide variety of graduate degrees, have held jobs in a wide range of industries, and we often find financial filings to be incredibly opaque and confusing! To top it off, we have to learn how to do profile research on our own, with a hodgepodge of brief trainings if any at all.

The result is that we often face a topic as complex as public company executive and director compensation packages as a checklist task. We learn a series of actions to take to value and present the information and approach each prospect the same way, occasionally adding new learning when prospects differ.

Public companies provide us with the opportunity for a new approach.

The New Way of Learning Donor Profile Research

Public companies offer us an unfettered view of the compensation structures for their directors and executives. We can also make qualitative and quantitative comparisons of the company and its compensation packages. These two facts create a rich learning opportunity for the fundraising research professional.

When you take the time to learn and understand the reasons behind the compensation packages for public companies you can begin to apply this understanding to the ways private companies create wealth for their share owners. You can compare and contrast the public company with the private company.

Most of us in the prospect research field are not ultra-wealthy. It can be extremely difficult to imagine the wealth of a public or private company share owner. Learning how public companies create wealth for their executives through compensation packages, including company stock, gives you a strong foundation to improve and build upon your ability to value all company holdings and calculate capacity ratings.

Where Can I Learn This Kind of Information?

You can find all manner of free learning online. Khan Academy offers a free Finance and Capital Markets series. Coursera offers a free Business Finance series of courses. There is no shortage of ad hoc material on YouTube as well!

The downside to what is available for free is that it is not focused on fundraising. Because of this, the concepts being taught can feel mostly irrelevant. While you want more than cursory learning, you probably don’t need to learn everything there is to know about buying and selling stock and bonds.

There are fundraising-focused webinars, articles, and blog posts from the Association of Professional Researchers for Advancement and consultants in the field, but these often don’t explain the reasoning behind the compensation structures or how this kind of wealth can turn into a gift. They are by nature brief and not comprehensive.

Out of frustration with this situation, I helped create a comprehensive, 5-week course introducing prospect research professionals to the world of public company compensation. It was exciting to pull all the pieces together and create a safe space in an online classroom to have conversations about researching and fundraising with public company prospects.

Public company insiders may not show up on your prospect list terribly often, but I’m suggesting that if you view them as an opportunity to deepen your knowledge about wealth creation, they can be a rich learning experience that will deepen your research and fundraising skills generally. What are your thoughts? Do you agree?

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Organization Loses Donor Trust – With Data Breach!

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keyboard-895556_1920Whether it’s a personal story or a media headline, we’ve all heard of incidents where data was mishandled or misunderstood and donors felt betrayed. And yet, many development and advancement offices continue to place little value on their information and data.
When I followed up with one of the beta testers for the Prospect Research Institute’s first-ever online class, Introduction to Prospect Profiles, she told me how thankful she was for the opportunity to take the class. Now she knew for certain that prospect research was NOT for her and she would seek a different career. Why? She couldn’t delve into other people’s lives that much. Privacy was sacred to her.
I didn’t think too much of it, but since then two more students have expressed discomfort about privacy issues. Because, of course, we cover this in the class; we walk right out there to examine the legal and ethical edges of privacy in fundraising research.
Why are prospective prospect research professionals nervous about privacy?
Could it be they don’t trust organizations to do the right thing with information? You know fundraising is predicated on trust – donors trust us to use their money for the greater good. Staff must also trust the organization to use its data and resources appropriately.
When prospect research is treated as a clerical function, anyone can do it, low-paid, and not heard – that translates to the same message about the information prospect research finds. Quite a few of my course participants are self-paid. And then they learn how deep we researchers can go. And then they see the dark edges of ethics. And they get uncomfortable.

If you are in the development or fundraising office, you are in a position to begin changing the culture of respect and trust toward your organization’s data.

You can leverage prospect research to (a) manage information legally and ethically, (b) lead with diversity and inclusion, and (c) use data persuasively to raise more money. How? Let me count the ways!
  1. Data Management: Prospect Research Professionals are uniquely positioned to research and be a part of the team creating information management policies that ensure your data is used and maintained effectively. This is the era of Big Data and your researcher is versed in mining the gold from it.
  2. Data Protection:The more important data becomes, the higher the risk that it will be breached and erode your donors’ faith in your organization’s ability to protect their information. Your prospect research professional is your trusted guide, helping you to navigate and translate vendor and IT products and jargon. S/he is also the voice helping you to create different levels of data access, such as who can print profiles, with how much information in them, and do what with them.
  3. Non-Traditional Donors: We’ve been using wealth screenings effectively, but it’s time to recognize that this identification method is limited. Encourage your researcher to work with you to identify non-traditional indicators of wealth. That means conversations, but it also means assigning and actively pursuing those minority prospects, too. If there is wealth there, why are you ignoring them?
  4. Relationship Mapping: This is a broad term for what requires a great deal of sweat equity, but software is inching forward to make it better and faster. Understanding the relationships among your major gift donors could be a healthy disruption to your usual processes. Understanding and learning to leverage the power of your other donor groups’ relationships could transform your organization’s fundraising reach! If you are not building the capacity for fundraising analytics to discover patterns such as these relationships, you will be left behind.
  5. Persuade with Data: Yes, you can work with your prospect research professional to illustrate the data that answers questions and use this to persuade donors to give. Infographics are particularly popular. But let’s use data to put a stop to fickle fundraising. How many times do you change strategies based on “I feel” or “s/he said” or “they say”? Use your prospect research professional’s analytical prowess to methodically gather data of all kinds to help leadership form a strategy it can stick to – and win. Jason Briggs outlines this brilliantly in his article on international research.
I’ve had clients learn the hard way. Initially shocked by my prices, they come back when they receive shoddy work from someone who has low rates, but lacks the skills and resources. The value of really good prospect research becomes clear when you receive synthesized information that gives you direction to raise more money.
Your organization needs a well-trained prospect research professional with an excellent ethical compass. Are you driving your best hiring prospects away by sending the message that information is cheap and anyone can turn that information into fundraising action?

Can You Trust Gift Capacity Ratings? 5 Things Fundraisers Should Know

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capacityGift capacity ratings were a marketing moment for wealth screening companies. Suddenly thousands of records could be matched individually to wealth records and assigned a score. Your constituents could be assessed by their potential capacity – in the form of dollars. And everybody loves money. Have gift capacity ratings lived up to the hype? Yes!
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With the sophistication of fundraising analytics we now have ever more ways to evaluate our prospect portfolios, but gift capacity ratings remain an important tool for the fundraiser. To get the most out of your gift capacity ratings, following are five things you should know.
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1. Prioritizing your prospect pool saves you from yourself.

We are all human and that means we prefer to call upon and visit people we like – people who are more like us. Unless you are a major gift donor yourself, your prospects are not like you. Assigning numbers, gift capacity ratings, to your prospect pool helps you overcome your natural tendencies and allocate your time based upon the impact someone can have on your organization.

You will spend as much (or more) time on someone who can give $10,000 as someone who can give $100,000 or $1 million. If you want to excel in major gifts, capacity ratings will help you focus.

2. Ratings and scores are never exact unless it’s the Olympics.

Gift capacity ratings don’t have decimal points! Or at least they shouldn’t. Typically a gift capacity is expressed as a range, such as $250,000 to $499,999. The range should clue you in that this is not an exact science. The goal is NOT to pinpoint a solicitation amount. The goal is to categorize your prospects by their capacity or ability to give.
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A successful solicitation strategy requires much more than a gift capacity rating. A $1 million+ capacity rating is exciting … until you visit and discover he believes philanthropy is bad for the economy. A $1 million+ capacity rating is exciting … until you discover she has been harboring fantasies of making a transformational gift to your cause. Then it’s a DREAM COME TRUE!

3. You must know your prospect types.

You and your prospect research professional are not usually high-net-worth-individuals (HNWIs). You are not usually doctors, lawyers, or investment bankers either. Recognizing and being able to categorize how different prospect types accumulate, manage, and give away their wealth is for you and your researcher to discover together.

Know that HNWIs are generally UNDER-valued by gift capacity ratings. The more wealth there is, the more likely that wealth is hidden from view. Prospects outside the U.S. frequently have wealth indicators that can’t be assigned a number.

4. Not knowing produces anxiety. Embrace the unknown.

Before you get frustrated with how little we can really know about the prospects we want the most – HNWIs – remember that gift capacity ratings were never meant to be the final word. As you evaluate your prospect pool by its capacity ratings and any other tools available to you, embrace what you don’t know.

Create a checklist of what clues you in to prospects of great wealth. Use this to create a strategy for your discovery and cultivation visits. Use what you don’t know as a roadmap to discover your prospect. If you know a fundraiser that came of age pre-internet, find out how s/he prepares for visits!

5. Your researcher is your best ally.

Prospect research professionals have as much fear of ambiguity as gift officers. Calculating capacity ratings fills us with anxiety and angst! This is also to your advantage. Engaging your researcher in conversations about gift capacity ratings, wealth indicators, and what you might discover in your visits will only make you both better in your professions.

Some of my best conversations have been with confident fundraisers who wanted to better understand how I arrived at a gift capacity rating or how a particular type of wealth factored in to the prospect’s ability to give. Prospect research professionals want the donor to give a major gift, too!

Gift capacity ratings are not going anywhere anytime soon. Learning to use them to your advantage will help you achieve success as a fundraiser.

Do you have advice for others on pitfalls to avoid, or tips on how best to use gift capacity ratings? I hope you’ll share!

More Resources You Might Like

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Join the Resource Collections online community to access this handout. Use it to facilitate discussion with prospect researchers, gift officers, and leadership

Net Worth: Nasty, Nice, or Neutral?

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cash-1169650_1280There was a cry for help on the PRSPCT-L list-serv: “I’m a new researcher and my boss wants me to provide net worth on a prospect. He says it was the previous practice to do this and I can get what I need to calculate it from Dun & Bradstreet.” What would your response be?

To begin, a simple definition of net worth follows:

Assets – Liabilities = Net Worth

The Three Common Responses to Net Worth

If you mention “net worth” in the prospect research field, you will likely hear one of the following three responses:

  1. Don’t do it! Or you will be voted off the prospect research island!
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    The argument against estimating net worth is usually this: If we cannot find or know the values of all assets and liabilities (which of course we cannot), then we have no business estimating net worth. This is often a strong, unequivocally held opinion.
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  2. Hide that you are doing it by using another term or keep it behind the capacity rating calculation.
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    This is the most common practice in our field. Instead of using the words “estimated net worth”, researchers rephrase with a term such as “estimated wealth”. Even more common is to use the results of wealth surveys, such as the chart on page 19 of the Capgemini 2016 World Wealth Report, to estimate net worth based on a known asset such as real estate and then take a percentage of estimated net worth as the gift capacity.
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  3. Boldly present estimated net worth.
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    There are researchers who feel comfortable presenting estimated net worth. Some provide disclaimers or educational explanations to communicate better generally or to clarify outlier situations.

Easy Formula, Tricky Calculation

Assets – Liabilities = Net Worth

The formula looks so simple, but this is deceptive. As prospect research professionals we know that we can’t discover and value all of a prospect’s assets or liabilities. It is the reason we use the word “estimated.”

Among the challenges in estimating net worth, there are two that jump out quickly:

  1. Many assets (and liabilities) are troublesome to value – none more than private company ownership.
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    I have discussed the difficulty of private company valuation before. A common route to wealth is to start a private business, and many of these successful entrepreneurs want to “give back”, among other motivations for giving.
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    And it brings us back to our fellow researcher’s list-serv plea. Dun & Bradstreet (DNB) sells data, including estimated values of a private companies. Assuming we know how much of that company our prospect owns, we could use the DNB dollar amount to estimate the prospect’s ownership value. Or could we? DNB uses its own formulas to estimate and can be very far off the mark.
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  2. Are we talking about titled ownership such as a name on the deed, or influence over money, such as sitting on a grant-giving family foundation board?
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    Our prospect could be a child of a wealthy family with very few public assets identified. And yet, we may find she has influence over millions of dollars in a family foundation. Estimated net worth and gift capacity clearly diverge at this point. You might estimate a low net worth, but still consider her to have a million dollar gift capacity because of her influence over grant giving.

Logic and Emotion – Let them Collaborate!

There is nothing simple about money. Money is one of the most emotionally volatile topics you can discuss, and those emotions flow into the workplace. Addressing your own emotions and biases about money is the first step.

You might want to seriously consider whether your difficulty imagining the wealth of multi-billionaires is affecting your ability to logically estimate net worth or gift capacity – and whether you have negative emotions attached to great wealth accumulation. Emotions are not your enemy. Ignoring them is.

Now you are ready to balance how you and your gift officers “feel” about your prospect’s potential wealth with the logical, quantifiable assets and liabilities found in the public domain.

Following are the most frequently used tools or ratings:

  • Estimated Net Worth
  • Gift Capacity Range
  • Affinity (how close they feel to your organization)
  • Philanthropic Inclination (do they give at all?)
  • Linkage (how are they connected to your organization)

When used responsibly, estimated net worth is one more tool prospect research professionals can provide to assist frontline fundraisers in creating major gift solicitation strategies. Don’t be afraid to use it!

More Resources You Might Like

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Join the Resource Collections online community to access this handout. Use it to facilitate discussion with your gift officers and leadership.

 

Fire your Prospect Researcher! Artificial Intelligence (AI) has arrived.

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For years now we’ve been told that Artificial Intelligence was going to take over prospect research tasks. Truth is, it has. Well, some of them anyway.

Consider wealth screenings. What used to take month after month of tedious, routine, baseline capacity rating work now takes less than an hour. Upload your file, it processes, and presto! You have gift capacity ratings on your prospects based on external wealth matches.

Or how about the user-friendly lookup tools, such as iWave’s PRO, that remove the first step of searching that prospect research professionals used to perform?

Does all of this mean prospect research is on the fast track for complete takeover by the machines? Should you fire your researcher? No way!

Artificial Intelligence has had a lot of hype over the years and very little real action – until now. A few events have led to some breakthroughs:

  • The internet has made vast amounts of data available, which can be used to train computers.
  • Graphical Processing Units (GPUs), the specialized chips used in PCs and video-game consoles to generate graphics, have been applied to the algorithms used in deep learning, a type of Artificial Intelligence.
  • Capacity to run GPUs can be rented from cloud providers such as Amazon and Microsoft, allowing start-ups to innovate.

Self-driving cars may still be on the horizon, but the bots are on the road already! They can schedule appointments on your calendar, draft replies to emails, and even read radiology imaging studies more accurately than a radiologist. The Economist describes the opportunity and threat quite succinctly as follows:

 “What determines vulnerability to automation is not so much whether the work concerned is manual or white-collar, but whether or not it is routine.” (6/25/2016)

 

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It’s easy to leap to the conclusion that prospect research professionals will lose their jobs to the machine – much of what we researchers do is routine – but that would be forgetting how machines have changed the world in the past.

Across the centuries, people have feared the march of the machines. In the late 1700’s to early 1800’s the Industrial Revolution rocked our world. As recently as the 1980’s, the rise of personal computers revolutionized the way we work. And with every introduction, much hand-wringing and predictions of unemployment were had.

How will prospect research professionals likely weather the advancing army of machine algorithms and programs?

Much the same as we adapted to wealth screenings and tools like iWave’s PRO. We learn new skills that wrap around the new technology. We leverage the new technology to work for us and for our fundraising team. We change the tasks we perform.

Prospect research professionals have a unique blend of skills. We can scan mountains of information and pull it together in a way that is meaningful for your specific need, whether that is creating a $5M gift strategy or a $5B campaign. We recognize the opportunities for our organizations in the data patterns the machine discovers.

If you want your organization to keep in step with the advances of machine learning, do NOT fire your researcher! Instead, reassure your prospect research professional of her value and insist that she take advantage of training that will give her the skills to use new technology. If you do this, she will be better able to guide you into new worlds, such as fundraising analytics … and beyond!

More Resources You Might Like

 

Prospect Profiles and Private Co. Valuation

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customer-563967_1920How many times have you lamented: “Yet another prospect involved in the family business. The family’s privately-held business, that is. What valuation number am I going to pick out the air this time?!” We’ve all been there. Valuing private companies is a tricky business indeed (pun intended).

We know why so many of our prospects have ownership interest in private companies. According to a 2013 Forbes article:

  • Out of the 27 million firms in the U.S., nearly all are privately held.
  • Among the 5.7 million firms with employees, less than 1% have shares listed on a U.S. exchange.

So it’s no surprise that there are many firms specializing in valuing private companies. The need for a valuation could be a desire to buy or sell, investments looking to exit, or in anticipation of an initial public offering (IPO), among other reasons. Hoovers and Dun & Bradstreet may be among the best known search tools in our field, but there are many others. For example, Prospect Research Review did a product review report on PrivCo.

Law of Diminishing Returns

Before you dive deeply into any specialized research, consider the law of diminishing returns. At what point are the time and resources you spend going to outweigh the benefit? If your prospect qualification to gift ratio is 7:1, you could be spending twelve hours on a dud. Then again, if you are researching a prospect likely to give her largest gift ever to your organization, you want to be gung-ho!

You also want to consider the full wealth picture before you dive deeply into one piece of that wealth. If the prospect is listed on Forbes Richest People in America are you certain you need to spend hours valuing one or more companies owned by him or her?

Return on Education

You also want to consider your return on education. Why value one private company, when you could give yourself the foundation to value all kinds of companies in the future?

When you have a prospect that demands a deep dive into company valuation, do your research on how to make a valuation and keep notes so that you can apply what you learn to the next private-company-owner prospect.

Top 3 Private Company Valuation Resources

Following are some of my favorite resources for deciding how to create a valuation and a jump-start of links to get you finding the data:

  1. ARTICLE: Jarmuz, Bill. “Private Company Valuation for the Prospect Researcher” APRA Connections magazine, Jun 23, 2006, Membership Paywall
  2. WEBINAR: Lamb, David. “Refresh: How to Estimate Private Company Value – And Rate A Prospect With The Information” APRA on-demand, Members $49 | Non-members $79
  3. LINK LIST: Aspire Research Group LLC, Favorite Link List-Business, Free

 

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4 Tips for Finding Major Donors for Your Next Capital Campaign

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Guest Post by Ryan Woroniecki, Vice President of Strategic Partnerships at DonorSearch

Before we dive headfirst into tips for finding major donors for a capital campaign, let’s briefly back up and discuss capital campaigns on the whole.

On a very general level, “A capital campaign is a combination of fundraising and outreach strategies that is designed to raise money for a specific need.”

On a more practical and concrete level, capital campaigns are most commonly associated with funding such projects as:

  • Building renovations
  • Purchasing pricey equipment and/or supplies
  • Acquiring new land
  • Fresh construction
  • Adding to an endowment
  • And other similar, large-scale endeavors

Needless to say, you can’t really think about organizing a capital campaign without having a strong system in place for securing major gifts. And that’s when you need prospect research.

This site is already brimming with excellent information about prospect research, so we’re not going to retread well-covered territory here.

Instead, we’re going to propose four key tips to help your organization find and cultivate major donors for your next capital campaign.

The four tips are as follows:

  1. Look to your annual fund.
  2. Reach out to your feasibility study participants.
  3. Seek out donors whose interests align with your campaign.
  4. Come up with creative ways of engaging your candidates.

Let’s get started.

1. Look to your annual fund.

DS_Aspire_Look to your annual fund

For the first point on this list, we’re going back to the basics.

We know that past giving is the greatest indicator of future giving. In fact, DonorSearch’s research found that a donor who has made a gift between $5k-$10k to a nonprofit organization is 5 times as likely to donate in the future as an average person is.

That correlation trickles down to donors of all giving levels, including your annual fund.

As you embark on your campaign’s quiet phase and attempt to secure roughly 70% of your goal before going public with your efforts, you should start your search by looking inwards. The proof is in the data.

Loyal, annual fund donors might be just the prospects you’re looking for. Cross-reference your list of annual fund donors with databases that can clue you in on donor wealth, and you could discover that some of your best major giving candidates were right under your nose.

For instance, someone who donates $500 regularly to your cause might have donated $5,000 to a political campaign. You won’t know until you look.

And once you find those donors, you can leverage the momentum behind your capital campaign’s timeline to encourage them to make those kinds of contributions towards your organization.

2. Reach out to your feasibility study participants.

DS_Aspire_Reach out to your feasibility study participants

A feasibility study is performed prior to an organization ever launching a capital campaign. During the study, the nonprofit surveys a group of around 40 community members to test the interest in and likelihood of success of their possible capital campaign.

What does this have to do with major donors?

A portion of the people you’ll be surveying for your feasibility study will be major giving prospects.

After the report is complete and you’ve decided to move forward with your campaign, consider reaching out to the study participants who:

  • Had a positive reaction to your campaign.
  • Are high-quality prospects.

In order to sift through the group and figure out whom your major gift officers should reach out to:

  • Perform a screening of your participants.
  • Find out who meets the wealth and affinity requirements.
  • Complete prospect profiles on those donors.
  • Pass the information along to the right fundraisers.

The donors on that list will have already given you affirmative feedback; don’t let their enthusiasm go unchanneled.

3. Seek out donors whose interests align with your campaign.

DS_Aspire_Seek out donors whose interests align with your campaign

One of the biggest benefits of fundraising for a capital campaign is that you are fundraising for a very specific purpose.

That specificity can make a huge difference in your ability to sway donors to contribute.

Take stock of your major donors and prospects. Then, use the information you’ve collected about them to segment them into groups that would or wouldn’t be interested in supporting your capital campaign’s particular cause.

Once you’ve done that, solicit major gifts from those who are most likely to be open to contributing to your campaign.

There are two benefits to this kind of selective segmentation:

  1. You’re making better use of the limited time and resources of your major gifts team.
  2. You’re offering support opportunities to those who are most likely to want to hear about them.

If you study your donor data with an eye for past giving patterns such as:

  • Frequency of giving
  • Average gift size
  • Common reason for giving
  • And so on

You’ll be able to piece together a solid list of prospects for your capital campaign’s major gift efforts.

Just remember, in order for this kind of selection to work, your prospect profiles are going to have to be top notch!

4. Come up with creative ways of engaging your candidates.

DS_Aspire_Come up with creative ways of engaging your candidates

The truth of the matter is, even when you find major giving prospects for your capital campaign, you’ll then have the challenge of cultivating and soliciting them.

You should certainly employ the standard solicitation best practices, but, as well all know, you really need to go the extra mile when it comes to major donors.

Especially with a capital campaign, where you’re under a strict timeline and chasing a firm goal, major gift solicitation is of the utmost importance.

That’s why this last tip emphasizes the need to find inventive ways of engaging your major donors.

What qualifies as creative is in the eye of the beholder, but suggestions include:

  • Asking your major donors to volunteer.
  • Seeing if they’re open to advocating for your cause.
  • Inviting them to special events.
  • And generally, any step you can take to make their time with your organization more meaningful.

When you go out of your way to engage with your major donors in a manner that other nonprofits aren’t taking the time to do, you set your capital campaign apart from the crowd.

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Capital campaigns take careful planning and a strong focus on the future. And your capital campaign simply won’t survive without a strong major gift showing during the quiet phase.

Take these tips, mix them with the ideas you’re already using, and go forth to secure that 70% of your fundraising total!

About the Author

ryanRyan Woroniecki is the Vice President of Strategic Partnerships at DonorSearch, a prospect research, screening, and analytics company that focuses on proven philanthropy. He has worked with hundreds of nonprofits and is a member of APRA-MD. When he isn’t working, he is an avid kickball player.

 

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3 Steps To Social Media Major Gift Prowess

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Were you aware that social media is a competitive edge in major gift fundraising? You must have heard by now how organizations are leveraging giving days and crowdfunding as well as incorporating social media into annual fund drives – but what about major gifts?

As a fundraiser who asks wealthy individuals to make gifts to your organization, deliberate and professional use of social media will not only separate you from the pack, it could put you in league with your prospects. It’s time to own your participation in social media!

Start with Prospect Research

If you have a prospect research professional on staff, it’s time to have a talk about social media. Agree on the social media sites you want to know about and ask your researcher if channel participation and user ID can be added to the profile, or better yet, put into a database field that can be pulled into a report.

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To get on the same page with your colleagues, you could order copies of the Prospect Research Perspectives: On Social Media and have informal discussions about articles over lunch or coffee.

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Every organization has a unique constituency. Global and national statistics on social media use may or may not apply to your donors. As your prospects get researched, you will begin to see which social media channels are preferred.

Audit Your Personal Social Media Presence

You are probably on social media already. It’s time to audit your presence. Accept that there is no privacy online, no matter how diligent you are with your privacy settings. Decide how you want to be perceived – what your personal brand is – and make that uniform across every platform from LinkedIn to Facebook and beyond. Don’t underestimate the power of a professional head shot.

Consider what would happen if a seven-figure prospect invited you to connect on Facebook. What will your Facebook presence communicate to the prospect? You should also expect that prospects will explore your work history in places like LinkedIn.

You can get ahead of the requests and craft an action plan that will best demonstrate your personal brand and interests and your organization’s brand and giving priorities.

What does that mean? Take one channel at a time. Following are two easily accomplished examples that demonstrate channel-appropriate activity:

  • LinkedIn: Liz picks two days a week when she catches up on industry reading, posts about something she has read, and links to the article or commentary. Whenever she learns new information about a giving priority, she shares the related press release, video, or other content. She decides to write a short article this year about integrity in major gift fundraising to post on Pulse and have it show on her profile page.
  • Facebook: Liz uses Facebook to connect with friends and family, but colleagues and donors have requested to friend her. She’s a foodie and a country music fan so she decides that each time she goes out to eat or hear music she will find something unusual about the experience to share on Facebook. She also shares related articles, videos, and pictures on those topics. She still shares things like family and vacation items, but she’s careful not to share deeply personal information, saving that for offline. She posts occasional pictures from work events and office fun, too.

Now Get Your Edge On!

Once you know which social media channels have a critical mass of your prospects and donors, make sure you have an account on those social media sites. You can’t be everywhere, so choose carefully based on the data.

Now you are poised to use social media for cultivation. Many fundraisers successfully reach prospects through LinkedIn, but you could do much more.

When you discover a prospect is very active on one or more social media channels, connect with him or her there and regularly post content that is of interest to the prospect, as well as engage the prospect by sharing his or her content and making comments. This builds trust and rapport through genuine interactions – and all from your laptop, tablet, or smart phone.

Social media isn’t the way to reach out to every prospect, but if you polish your online brand and use prospect research to guide your social media activity you can sharpen your major gift edge.

3 Steps to Building a More Comprehensive Prospect Profile

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By Jill McCarville, Marketing and Communication Manager, iWave Information Systems

head-746550_1920It’s almost lunchtime when a fundraiser comes to you with a new assignment:  They have a meeting with Suzie in two weeks and need to know who this person is – does she have a history of giving, does she have a connection to your cause, how much does she have to give?  Next stop, your prospect research tool.

The 3 fundamental steps to building a prospect profile remain the same: Create, customize, complete.  Okay, so those may not come as a surprise to you.  But from a software company’s point of view, there may be some profile building features within your tool that you haven’t been leveraging.  Use these features to gain deeper insight into your prospect and make your job easier. At iWave we recognize that there are many different research tools, each with different functionalities.  However, some of the features highlighted below may exist in your tool and you just didn’t know about them or haven’t had a chance to try them.  Try these steps to make your profile building easier and faster and -who knows- maybe even in time for lunch.

Creating

Our data tells us that the majority of users begin with a general integrated search (360search) across all datasets at one time.  In fact, in our tool, there were over 1.3 million 360searches done last year alone.  This broad search will help you identify which datasets/categories contain lots of information on your prospect and in which datasets you’ll need to dive deeper.  Now you can start painting the picture of your prospect’s employment, income, real estate holdings, board affiliations, net worth, stock holdings, history of charitable giving and political giving, etc.  Simply start selecting the records that you know, or are pretty confident, are your Suzie and add them to her profile.

Now, you might be saying, “But what if it’s a common name?”  No problem.  Once you’ve done a broad search across all of your tool’s datasets, you can narrow your search to find more information about your prospect, their spouse, and even their private companies or trusts. Exploring individual datasets with additional filters might even uncover key information you weren’t able to find using a broad, high-level search.

For example, if you’re trying to find Suzie’s real estate holdings, but your initial search didn’t turn up any property, that doesn’t mean she doesn’t own real estate.  As you know, it’s much more likely that she does.  After all, real estate accounted for about 20% of a HNWI’s total assets globally (CapGemini World Wealth Report 2013).  It’s possible that the property is listed in someone else’s name, a trust, or LLC.  Time to check the real estate database.  Try reverse searching by Suzie’s mailing address (rather than her name) because in many cases people link all of their properties to a primary residence for billing and other mail.  You can find additional search tips for other datasets here.

As you explore each of the datasets and “tease out” real matches to your prospect, select those records and add them to the profile you created in the broad search.  But first, ensure your tool automatically filters out duplicate records to maintain the accuracy of your scores and ratings.

Customizing

A common perception we hear in the industry is that profiles must be created externally because tools simply don’t deliver the quality of profile you need.  For some tools though, this isn’t the case.  In our tool alone, researchers create over 40,000 profiles each year containing over 1.8 million records.  One of the keys to creating so many profiles is customizing your research tool.

In the first step, you chose which records to add to Suzie’s profile.  Now, you need to add and delete records as you validate them.  This will eliminate false positives so you can be confident in the accuracy of the profile and the scores/ratings within it.  Depending on your tool’s features, you’ll also want to select your own capacity ranges (used to determine Suzie’s capacity rating), and the proper affinity ranges (so the score accurately reflects Suzie’s connection to your specific cause).

Completing

Almost there!  Once you’ve sketched out the prospect profile, it’s time to add the finishing touches.  Consider adding Suzie’s picture to the front for easy identification.  Then add any articles you may have found on her from other sources.

Jen Filla, along with other industry leaders, also suggests you add additional value to a profile by synthesizing the data you’ve gathered.  As a researcher, you are the expert on your prospects.  This is your chance to analyze the records and provide observations.  For example, what do Suzie’s SEC transactions tell you about her?  Do you see any patterns or trends in her charitable giving?  What clues can you find from her board affiliations?

Use the front page lead summary section to summarize your prospect’s current situation and provide recommendations.  In fact, in our tool, this lead summary was created based on the requests of researchers. A front and center spot to highlight the one thing the fundraiser needs to know about Suzie.  You can then use the built-in notes sections to tell the full story about Suzie as a prospect – who she likes to give to, when she likes to give, and how much she can give at one particular time.

Many people like to create and use the profile, score, and notes built within the tool.  However, this isn’t the only option.  Feel free to export the profile in a Word document for further treatment, or print a short summary profile to share right away.  And don’t forget to set an alert on the profile so you receive updates when there are any changes to Suzie’s records.

You are the expert at creating prospect profiles for your organization, and hopefully these tips will help you leverage your research tool to build better, smarter profiles.  Happy profiling!

Now, what’s for lunch?

About the Author
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Jill McCarville is the marketing and communication manager at iWave Information Systems, a company that delivers software solutions to education, healthcare and nonprofit organizations to help them raise more major gifts.  iWave’s solutions are an asset to fundraising departments of any size. From Ivy league schools like Yale and Stanford, to healthcare and arts organizations like Doctors Without Borders and the Smithsonian Institution, iWave has assisted organizations in the United States, Canada, and overseas.

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