Tag Archives: prospect screening

Why a Really Good Prospect Profile Isn’t Good Enough

4Researchers, , , ,

chess-454098_1920I don’t know if this has happened to you, but all too often I find an amazing product – a special soap or leak-proof mug – only to discover a few years later that the company is out of business and the amazing product is gone forever. Good products perform, but successful companies steward their customers.

We researchers provide great products – such as prospect profiles – that perform, but are we stewarding and listening to our end-users? All too often we are not.

We complain that our end-users think we can press a button and print a profile; that people tell us we should just Google it; or that gift officers demand every prospect be deeply researched before making the first phone call.

You are not going to want to hear this, but I’ll tell you anyway. It’s our own fault!

We accept work requests without any conversation. Sometimes we even create complicated forms to avoid contact. If we really fall down the rabbit-hole we obsess over the process of requesting, completing and delivering. And then we deliver as if we dropped the profile over the cliff never, ever to be seen again.

Okay, I am being dramatic.

But imagine if we did things a little differently…

  • We talked to the requestor. “Gosh, Jan, this prospect just made a $10M gift to us two years ago. Was there something specific you were hoping I’d find? Oh, you are looking for planned gift opportunities. Sure thing.”
  • We talked to the requestor. “Hello Josh. Do you have a few minutes to talk? Great! I wanted to ask you about Mr. Bucketloads. I had so much fun researching a hedge fund manager. It doesn’t happen every day. So I wanted to be sure I presented his information clearly. What did you think of the occupation section?”
  • We talked to the requestor. “Liz, thank you for taking time to meet with me. Another year has passed and as I was reviewing my work I realized that you have asked for twice as many profiles as anyone else. I’d love to know what you like best, what we could change to make them better, and how you feel it helps you raise more money.”
Are you noticing a pattern here? Talk to the requestor.
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Mass Produced vs. Fine Art Masterpiece
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When we ignore our end-users, our prospect profiles become a mass-produced item. We are training end-users to ask these kinds of questions:
  • This is cookie-cutter stuff so why can’t I get more faster?
  • Why are we spending so much on research? I bet we could find a way to do it cheaper.
  • A specific piece of information is missing. I’m not sure we’re even getting quality.
  • There is an error here. How many other errors are in the work?

When we talk with our end-users – creating relationships where questions are regularly asked, ongoing dialogue occurs, and improvements are made to the product – trust builds and our prospect profiles become perceived as fine art masterpieces!

We are training our end-users to ask these kinds of questions:

  • I really want to see a specific item on the first page to help make decisions in the prospect meeting. I wonder if the researchers can add that?
  • The vendor at the conference says many research departments use their tool. It’s amazing! I have to ask our researchers about it. They would know if it’s hype or not.
  • This profile is fantastic! I feel so much more confident about my gift proposal.
  • Geez. There is an error here. It’s probably just a mistake, but I’d better mention it.
This is Chess, not Uno.
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Building relationships and trust is a slow process with setbacks and triumphs along the way. You need the focus and attention required for a game of chess, not the immediate gratification from a card game of Uno.
And the reality is that sometimes our ability to build relationships is complicated by the hierarchical staffing structures of our organizations. If we have no contact with the vice president, it’s tough to build a relationship.
We can find a million (mass-produced) reasons why we can’t build relationships. It’s the top performer who collects (fine art masterpiece) relationships. Make no doubt about it, you can too. One conversation at a time.

More Resources You Might Like

3 Strategies to Choose a Research Tool

4Researchers, , , ,

austria-sign-2-1489248Whether I’m teaching the Introduction to Prospect Profiles course at the Prospect Research Institute or talking to an Aspire Research Group client, I get asked the impossible question: “What’s the difference among research tools and which one should I buy?”

Information technology has been good to the prospect research profession and that means we have a wild array of tools from which to choose. And equally wild can be the price ranges! This makes it tough to assess the value of each and if they will meet your needs.

My crystal ball is in the repair shop so I can’t predict the perfect suite of tools for you, but I can give you three strategies to approach your decision-making challenge.

Strategy 1: Linkage – Ability – Inclination (“LAI”)

In prospect research it boils down to three key categories of information you want a tool to help you with:

  • Linkage: How can we connect to this prospect through peers? How is our organization linked to this prospect?
  • Ability: Does this prospect have enough wealth to make a large gift or increase her/his giving?
  • Inclination: Is this prospect philanthropically inclined? Is s/he willing to give her money to nonprofit organizations and institutions?

You already know about LAI, right? But have you considered narrowing down your research tool choices by those three categories? If you had to number them in order of priority in your fundraising efforts and/or weakness in your ability to research, how would those categories shake down?

Whether you need a tool to help you with all three LAI categories or just one can help you narrow the field considerably.

Strategy 2: The Five Profile Building Blocks

Once you know how the LAI categories rank in importance, you can begin to dig into exactly what types of information you want to find in a particular category.

This is where the five building blocks of the profile come in handy. No matter how your profile template is organized, there are five major categories of information a fundraising profile might have. Check out the Anatomy of a Profile illustration below to see if you agree.

AnatomyOfProfile.White

  • Linkage would fall under the Institutional Information Is the prospect an alum, donor, or volunteer? Is s/he serving on the same company board as your trustee? Vendors you evaluate might include ProspectVisual, RelationshipScience, and WealthX, among others.
  • Ability can be found in the Occupation and Assets What kind of wealth is being earned and how is acquired wealth being held? You might evaluate vendors who aggregate sources such as iWave PRO, Lexis Nexis, DonorScape, DonorSearch, ResearchPoint and WealthEngine, as well as specific vendors for ability such as LinkedIn or J3DonorWatch.
  • Philanthropic Inclination is in the Biographical and Community Involvement Did her child die of the disease you are on a mission to eradicate? Does he make gifts to other organizations or organizations like yours? You might evaluate the same vendors above who aggregate sources, as well as specific vendors such as Foundation Center Online, Guidestar, NOZA, and NewsBank.

Examining your needs in more granular detail through the profile building blocks will identify whether a potential product can give you the information you need most. For example, if you have a lot of public company insider prospects you may need a subscription tool that can make your research faster and better. On the other hand, if you are a lawyers’ association, you might shell out for the current AM Law 100 from The American Lawyer to make better estimates of capacity.

Strategy 3: Free Trials and Peer Review

Even after you know exactly what you want in a tool you will want to evaluate its usability. Taking advantage of free trials and asking your peers for their candid comments is a great way to test the user-interface of a product and what information you will really get from its sources. One of my favorite places at conferences is the exhibit hall so I can learn about new products and tools on the spot.

You might have questions such as:

  • Will it integrate with my donor database?
  • Can I print a reasonable looking profile right from the tool?
  • Can I look at the “raw” search results or will it only show me results matched with its proprietary filter or algorithm?

And, of course, you always have to consider what kind of learning curve users will likely have. Is it easy to figure out? Is there live and DIY training available? What is customer service like?

The Process of Choosing Never Really Ends

Choosing the right product or suite of products doesn’t happen just once and then you are finished forever. Instead, it’s more like eating. Sure, you have your favorite recipes, but you go to restaurants or cook new dishes. Sometimes the new meal – or the new research tool – becomes a new favorite.

Information technology is an ever-growing field globally, not just in fundraising research. We can’t hope to keep up with every tool that enters the market, but we can be strategic about evaluating whether a tool is likely to be a good investment.

More Resources

VendorComparisonChart

Click here to get your copy of the Profile Search Tool Comparison Chart. Be smart. Choose well.

 

 

 

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PRRgraphicProspect Research Review offers in-depth, comprehensive, and unbiased reviews of your favorite tools. Learn more>>>

What’s in your Wealth Screening?

4Fundraisers, 4Researchers, , , , , , ,

Wealth screenings have been around for over a decade now and we all pretty much know how helpful a screening is to prioritize donors, but what’s inside a screening? Usually the answer is a long list of names of sources, but DonorSearch has turned that into an engaging visual description of why those sources are important. I hope you enjoy the InfoGraphic below as much as I did!

Get Worried! About Asking for Too Little

4Fundraisers, Focused Fundraising, major gifts, , , , , , , ,

When was the last time you had a knot in your stomach because you were worried you were going to ask for too small of a gift? If you are like many fundraisers, the answer is not often enough!

  • $8 Million gift from Glenn Korff to University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s School of Music.
  • $2 Million gift from Gene Feaster, an inventor of Superflab to the University of Kansas.

How badly do you want gifts like these?

The wealth screening companies tell us – perhaps with some bias – that organizations which raise more money and get whopping big gifts, screen their donor database for wealth regularly. This does not surprise me. Does it surprise you?

Bias aside, large organizations are much more likely to worry about asking for too little. It’s a high-pressure, go-get-the-gift environment and the winners are those receiving the largest gifts. And large organizations invest in fundraising, including prospect research.

Research gives them the facts that can validate what they suspect, or disqualify a prospect, or find new information that impacts gift type and size.

But what can I do?
Hey! I heard that! “But we have no money for a screening.” “We can’t hire a prospect researcher anytime soon.” “Our leadership won’t invest in research.”

And I have a response! (It wouldn’t be much of an article if I didn’t, would it?)

Whether you are a smaller organization dreaming big or one of a hundred gift officers, you are in control of your own behaviors. And here’s a few winning behaviors to adopt – and maybe even influence others, like your leadership.

Get worried about asking for too little.
Words matter. When you talk strategy for a gift, state your target ask amount and then say, “But I’m worried that might be too low.” (That was easy!)

Get wealth-educated.
Pay attention to articles, blog posts, studies and conversations about wealth. Because when someone asks you – “why do you think that ask is too low? – you will need an answer.

  • He sold one company. Could there be others?
  • He seems like the kind of guy to have a vacation home, but I don’t have the tools to find out.
  • Jane board member says he owns a number of restaurants, but I don’t know for sure.

Get search savvy.

No, you don’t have to be a full-fledged prospect researcher, but every fundraiser should be able to find key information online about prospects. When was the last time you visited your county tax assessor’s online database? How about Zillow.com? Do you have rule-of-thumb formulas to create capacity ratings?

Wealth screenings are one tool in the research toolbox. Even so, I hope you are actively thinking about a future budget that includes a screening. You might not need it now, but you will need it sometime soon.

Your mission and the people and causes you serve deserve funding. And if for no other reason, that should get you concerned about asking for too little.

If you want help finding information about your prospects, click here to contact Aspire Research Group.


Other Resources You Might Like:

Fall Fundraising Trends by Preeti

Filla Fast Favorite Links – a categorized list with wealth studies at the bottom

5 ways to use donor ratings

Focused Fundraising, , , , ,

No matter how we get donor ratings into our databases (vendors like DonorSearch or WealthEngine or even *gasp* Aspire Research Group :-)) sometimes we forget to use them. It’s sort of like carefully selecting coupons for the store and then forgetting to pull them out when you get to the cashier. We all do it. Okay, I can’t speak for you but I have certainly done that!

Let’s start with the most forgotten and work our way to the least forgotten:

(1)  Choosing people to solicit a gift from for a specific project or initiative

(2)  Choosing people to invite to a specific event

(3)  Pulling a list of planned gift prospects or high-end annual appeal prospects to schedule visits with

(4)  Pulling a list of best prospects for an annual appeal (fewer people, less cost, higher return)

(5)  Populating a major gift or campaign prospect pool

For some tasks, combining the best rating scores with other criteria in your database, such as event attendance or interest in a program, gets you the sweetest list. Whenever you pull a list out of your database, ask yourself if you should include donor ratings as part of your strategy. The results will delight you!

Fundraisers like you are busy, creative people.

Have you ever used donor ratings to raise more money and maybe even lessen expenses at the same time?

We’d love to hear about it – please share!

A *Middle Child* Donor Speaks Out

Data Mining, Focused Fundraising, , , , ,

The Chronicle of Philanthropy held a live discussion with Jill Warren – a self-described middle class donor – and then wrote an article about it for readers. The moral of the story was that some people with middle-class incomes are passionate enough to make annual gifts representing $10,000 or more – in Jill’s case, up to 60% of household income. That’s a major gift for many organizations.

I worked for an organization who had a “Jill” on staff. The fundraising team did not want to put her on the major gift track because her income was not great, but her passion for the organization was inspiring and she gave a high percentage of her income to demonstrate that passion. I found it confusing. Based upon her demonstrated giving and absolutely by her lifetime giving she was a significant donor to the organization. But she was never assigned a solicitor or specifically cultivated and nurtured as a donor.

An analogy might be a Mercedes customer who drives a Ford. She drives her Ford into the Mercedes dealership and routinely purchases Mercedes for her chauffer business, but the dealership treats her the same as a customer who has only ever once purchased a Mercedes. Why? Because she drives a Ford. Ridiculous? Absolutely!

Wealth or perceived ability to give should not be our *primary* indicator for a best donor prospect. Sometimes the prospect screening and software vendors lead us astray. Vendors are looking to make a profit and focus on those organizations with the biggest budgets to buy their products.

Nonprofit organizations are not looking for only the biggest wallets to give to their organizations. Nonprofits are looking for the most philanthropic people, the people most passionate about their mission AND THEN of those people, the ones who have the ability to support that mission. Passion trumps wealth.

Passion provides us with donors who:

  • give recurring or monthly gifts that pay keep our organization running every day
  • give us multiple major gifts and challenge other donors to stretch their gifts
  • leave us part or all of their estate
  • inspire our program recipients, our donors, and ourselves

If you look for wealth first you will miss the passionate “Jill”s in your database.

You can use common sense prospect research techniques to identify those people in your database with passion. Affinity searches can be as simple as filtering for recency, frequency and longevity of giving or you can invest in a more sophisticated statistical analysis to take into account event attendance and other data points.

Get your list together and then get out there!

6-item checklist for screening data

Data Mining, , ,

Jay Frost does it again with his blog post: “To Screen or Not to Screen” He provides a simple 6-item checklist for determining whether you want to do a prospect screening on your donor database. Sweet!

And I couldn’t agree with him more. Especially when he tells us that prospect screenings often fail to achieve results because of “poor planning and communications”. I recommend reading his blog post if you haven’t done a prospect screening and think you want to – and even if you have done one!