All posts by Jen Filla

A *Middle Child* Donor Speaks Out

Focused Fundraising, Fundraising Analytics, , , , ,

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!

Can business learn from your organization?

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In early July the YMCA announced a name change to “the Y”. Following for-profit protocol they spent two years of analysis before launching their re-branding strategy. The Economist wrote an article titled “Profiting from non-profits” suggesting that sometimes the learning might flow best in the opposite direction – from non-profits to for-profits.

So many non-profits do an incredibly good job of growing deep relationships with all of their constituents – recipients, employees and donors. My job as a prospect researcher is such a joy because everything I do is about bringing donors and prospects closer to the organization. Not so many for-profits operate with such a successful emphasis on all of their relationships.

So tell me, what could the for-profit world learn from your organization?

6-item checklist for screening data

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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!

Content creators-are they throwing rules out the window?

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YouTube just launched a $5 million grant program. They want to fund amateur video creators and help them drive visitors to their YouTube pages. Hmmm. I get that they want to fund people who will give them more eyeballs – that’s like paying someone for business development services. But there is more and I’ve heard it before.

The article states that many of these amateurs have been able to “generate substantial revenues and command an audience that rivals those of the broadcast networks”. The grants will help these amateurs get more professional. Because these underdogs have leaped higher with less the conclusion is that “the game has changed” and people are “throwing the rules out the window”.

You’ve probably heard it before too. Social media has broken so many rules that content, organized information, will never be the same. George Strompolos at YouTube tells the New York Times that “these people [are] the next content creators”.

Is it just me or does this appear to be silly rhetoric? If YouTube and others like it provide the capital for these upstarts to get professional, then have they simply shaped them in the same mold as the broadcast networks? The business model changes from broadcast to on-demand, but we’re even using the same television set. Well, I am. Plug the cord into my laptop and TV and presto! I’ve got a big screen.

And so it is that prospect researchers have gotten caught up in some silliness. At first it was panic about prospects’ self-reported information on blogs, Facebook and Twitter. Could we trust that it was correct? Were we invading our prospects’ privacy by looking at the information they post so freely?

LinkedIn is not Who’s Who. After all it isn’t exclusive, edited, printed and you don’t have to pay for it. But they are both self-reported with the awareness that anyone can read the information. And the information is a veritable GOLD MINE of biographical data we could not get elsewhere.

But even for all the silliness that happens when something new gets digested, I do think George got it right about the new “content creators”. I don’t believe that we’ve thrown the rules out the window, but the Cool Data Blog by Kevin MacDonell, a researcher at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, is a fabulous example of how the road to content creation has been re-directed. If he had tried to write a book and get it published the old fashioned way we might not benefit, if at all, until long after his techniques were showing some age. Technology is changing everything rapidly right down to the data we collect about our donors.

Instead we get the benefit of Kevin’s expertise for free and as he works through it. This makes it more fun and he’s good at including visuals. After a year he might think about turning his blog into a book. He could do this himself and sell it on Amazon or maybe even get a publisher to jump in. More than a blog he could develop an email format, video demonstrations and more.

Whatever he does, he could probably use some cash to do it better. So I hope to discover that the WordPress Foundation wins the donor lottery, jumps on the bandwagon and announces this kind of “professionalizing the amateurs” grant funding soon!

Moves Management = Money

Focused Fundraising, , , ,

In the business world it’s called Customer Relationship Management or CRM. In fundraising we usually call it moves management or prospect tracking. Whatever we name our system, we use it to keep our prospects on track to a gift and to steward our donors to keep giving.

In larger shops there are prospect research positions devoted to the data maintenance involved in moves management. Small shops do not have the luxury of prospect research staff, but have the same need to bring in gifts. I have a free publication on my website that describes in some detail how to build a moves management system.

So I thought I would use this space to share with you great solutions that some small and mid-size development shops are using successfully.

  • A woman at the Planet Philanthropy conference in Boca Raton, Florida, described how she exports her top prospects to a spreadsheet. Because she does not have the time or staff to input all of the data into her database, she tracks her progress in Excel. Gifts and significant pieces of information go in the database, but the tracking does not.
  • Another person I spoke to uses the free individual version of Salesforce.com because her donor database does not have a function to track actions taken with a prospect. This online software allows her to get reminders and document the contacts she has made with prospects and donors. It even has a tracking mechanism she uses to print reports on just her proposals and solicitations.
  • More than one fundraiser I have spoken to uses Outlook to manage top prospects and donors. By making notes in the address book and marking actions to be taken on the calendar, people have been crafting their own methods of tracking. Whatever works to keep you in contact with your prospects!
  • And for those very special donors and prospects, people do all sorts of things to keep them on their minds. A post-it note on the computer as a daily reminder is my favorite.

Creating a moves management system that uses the full potential of your donor database is the most effective and efficient way to go, but there are alternatives when database functionality is limited. Aspire Research Group helps organizations create custom moves management systems that work for you, your organization and most importantly, your donors. If you have questions about creating a moves management system, call us at (727) 231-0516.

Whether you have 10 top prospects or 110, if you stay in touch with them consistently the gifts will arrive. So get moving!

Someone is Always Making Money

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As Florida waits and wonders if BP’s oil disaster is going to visit its beaches, most people are thinking about the environmental damage and the whammy it will bring to the just-thinking-about-recovering tourism industry. Those impacted the most so far, Louisiana, found people making a rush on the fresh fish markets, fearing stalls would be empty soon.

But as a prospect researcher, every time I hear of a downturn I know that someone is making money. Every crisis, every market crash, and yes, every environmental disaster means someone is going to be rolling in dough. Wouldn’t you have wanted the company manufacturing and distributing face masks during the SARS crisis to be your best donor? Well at this moment BP is paying folks to try to stop the oil leak, to clean up the spilled oil and for all of the services that wrap around those activities. Are any of those companies on your donor prospect list? I hope so!

I attended the Association of Professional Researchers for Advancement-Florida chapter conference last week and was favored with a presentation by Lori and David Lawson of DonorTrends. This couple is always full of usable advice on prospect research and last week was no exception!

The Lawsons pointed out that the economy is always going up or down and that someone is always making money along the way. I’ve talked about “recession proof” businesses before such as waste disposal and funeral homes, but the Lawsons talked about those businesses that do even better when the economy is going down. Companies like repossessors, second-hand stores, junkyards and auctions are on the list. I could almost hear everyone in the room slapping their foreheads and saying “duh!” Yes, it sounds obvious once you hear it, but most of us are not viewing the economy from this perspective.

But the Lawsons didn’t just talk at us, they pointed us to some fabulous resources like Industry Trends information from a financial analysis company called Sageworks. Find out which private companies were doing the best and worst. Or maybe you have a donor prospect in one of the businesses that people are willing to indulge in when money is tight.

As a nonprofit it is in your best interest to diversify your portfolio of donors as much as possible. Prospect research can help you do this.  Take a peek into your donor database and start searching for donors whose business or industry might be doing even better right now and give them some special attention while you are waiting for other donors to recover.

Cultivation and Research: Salting the Prospect Soup

4Fundraisers, ,

saltshakersmI’d like you to imagine that prospect research is like salt. Too little salt and your food tastes bland, but too much and you end up bloated with water. No matter what the size of your budget or development shop you should always be using prospect research. The trick is using just the right amount. So how much research do you need when a prospect is in the cultivation phase?

Some of the best information comes from face-to-face contact with prospects. Before going on a visit or making a phone call decide what you want to find out next. Do they have children and grandchildren? This affects estate planning. Do they give to others? Where is your organization on their top ten list? Where is their wealth coming from?

As you are gathering critical information in-person, back at the office a prospect researcher can help you connect the pieces. You might ask your researcher to:

  • Get initial wealth/asset verification before continuing visits
  • Investigate likely compensation or confirm company ownership
  • Look for a family foundation or confirm a directorship

Sometimes development staff make the mistake of wanting “everything you get” on a prospect before even picking up the phone. In many cases over-researching in the beginning of a relationship is really procrastination, which can lead to lots of information and not enough gifts!

During cultivation you need just enough information to keep the relationship progressing toward a major gift. In July we will discuss how to keep track of all this information during cultivation.

Supporting Advancement

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ToolFingersHave you heard of SupportingAdvancement.com? Well, if you’re in the nonprofit world I hope so! It has been a resource I’ve had on my Favorite Link List from its inception! Here’s what the website says about itself:

“We provide resources of interest to those supporting advancement and development targeted primarily to the higher education space. However, many of the lessons, tips, tricks and techniques can be applied throughout the nonprofit sector.”

But I would put it a bit differently. I would say that Supporting advancement provides nonprofit professionals with the practical tools and real-life examples that lead to success!

And I have been honored with the privilege of being included! Check out my two contributions here:

Comprehensive Profile

Three Simple Steps to a Prospect Management System

A big, hearty thanks to Brian Dowling, Principal and Founder of Supporting Advancement!

Effective Relationship Management Systems

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SandboxA relationship management system goes beyond moves management or prospect tracking. At the Association of Fundraising Professionals international conference in Baltimore last week Lisa Howley from Johns Hopkins University presented on Effective Relationship Management Systems.

She created a system for Wheaton College in Massachusetts with a development shop of ten and is creating one at Johns Hopkins where there is significantly more staff. The relationship management system goes beyond moving major gift prospects through the giving cycle by incorporating policies, such as privacy and gift policies, actual practices, the database and overall procedures. This addresses all sorts of issues around the kind of contact any donor might receive from the organization.

At Hopkins there are complications such as multiple schools and numerous development staff touching the same donor who may have multiple interests and affiliations with the school. However, even in a small shop it can be useful to create a smaller relationship management system addressing issues such as who, if anyone, must approve a solicitation before the donor is approached, what and how much data is recorded and tracked in the database, and what role volunteers such as board members have in touching donors. Creating a policy communicates expectations to everyone affected.

I view creating a relationship management system as a way of organizing development efforts so that everyone plays nicely in the nonprofit sandbox!

Facebook and your Database

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HubSMThe Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) group on LinkedIn had a recent discussion posted. A fundraiser was wondering if there was an automated or easy way to get a list of her organization’s fans so she could add this information into the donor database.

As it turns out someone commented that his organization has a direct update from Facebook to its Harris Connect online alumni community. From there the data is exported in and out of the donor database.

Are you looking for ways to keep track of your different methods of engagement?