Category Archives: 4Researchers

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.

 

 

 

.

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

Let’s Talk Research Life, Not Your Job

4Researchers, , ,

Many of the important decisions about your life are made when you are not in the room.

Don’t believe me? Tell me, were you there when…

  • Your spouse decided whether or not to keep dating you early on?
  • The sellers decided to accept your bid on the house?
  • Your mortgage company decided to risk a loan on you?
  • Your boss decided to hire you over other candidates?

Who is going to be in the room when you go for a pay raise or a promotion? Who decides whether your department has enough in the budget to send you to an industry conference?

The recent APRA Prospect Development conference in New Orleans demonstrated with gusto that our field is alive and thriving. Many in our profession have become a driving force for success in their fundraising departments. How did those individuals get to the place where the decision makers felt really good about fundraising research?

Maybe you feel a bit like Dorothy when she first approached the Wizard of Oz – a little intimidated by leadership. But let me take you behind the curtain…

The Influencers

In social media we hear a lot of talk about finding the influencer – the person with the biggest following and the highest engagement.  In your office, many of the same rules apply. Influencers are those who interact with a lot of people and have direct control or influence over decision making.

Make a list of how many people you interact with. How many of them directly control or influence decisions that are important to you?

You might be surprised who turns up on your list. What about the president’s assistant? She might interact with a large number of people, including you. Does the president listen to her when she has an opinion?

The Plan Man

Now that you have the list of people you interact with in your organization, pull out a fresh sheet of paper and make a list of all of the people who influence the decision that is most important to you. Maybe that’s training and using analytics tools, attending a conference, or implementing a new process.

Take your two lists and identify a few people that are on both lists – not too many – that you could develop a better relationship with. Treat them the same way you know how to treat donors. Create a cultivation plan that builds rapport, engages the person on relevant topics of interest, and gives the person more of what s/he wants. Ask good questions. What is her biggest pain point? Help her somehow.

You might also find that by developing a deeper relationship with a few key people, you meet more of the decision makers in your office.

Now that you have your cultivation plans, decide what three words you want people to think of when they think of you or your department. Think it through carefully. Now use those words when you talk about yourself and your work. I don’t mean to go bragging on yourself, but in regular conversation consciously use those words.

Not only will people begin using those very same words to describe you and your work, but you will begin more closely aligning your behaviors with those descriptors.

For more than 15 years , my three words have been:
Integrity | Accountability | Growth

And, yes, I need to be reminded to use them more!

Relationship Time

At conferences like APRA’s Prospect Development conference, the visionary ideas presented, the cross-pollination of ideas and sentiments with colleagues, and the new skills learned can be transformational.

But this year, my biggest takeaway was how important it is to choose time spent on relationships very thoughtfully.

We all know in life that not everyone will like us. But making decisions about who to spend our precious time with is never easy. If there are people in your life who energize you, who excite your curiosity by being different, who bring out the best in you (add your own criteria), then invest in them. If there are people who don’t do all those good things for you (or you for them), then gently step away.

When you deliberately examine your social networks both inside and outside the office, strategically choose the people to invest your relationship energy with, and understand and promote your own core values, you will succeed. Paths will illuminate. Opportunities will arise you couldn’t have dreamed up.

Your Job or Your Research Life?

It’s up to you to define success in all aspects of your life. For me, research infuses almost every part of my life. Methodically approaching any kind of problem – treating it like a research project – has been my modus operandi since I was a child. Back when it felt like I could learn about anything just by reading books in the library. Nothing is too difficult if you have a method, an approach.

If you want more out of your research job, consider tweaking the phrase to research career – or even research life!

More Resources

Takeaways from other APRA peeps:

CareerInspirationSM

Carla Harris has been inspiring my career for years! Maybe she will inspire you too.

 

 

 

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!

Sweating it out in New Orleans with APRA

4Researchers, , , , , ,

APRApd2015ButtonsThe APRA International Prospect Development conference is about to begin with the Analytics Symposium,  Researcher’s Boot Camp and pre-conference workshops starting tomorrow.

And WHEW! is it ever hot out! (this coming from a Floridian who loves summer)

I’ve been reading hints on Twitter about the cool (and cooling) swag the APRA chapters have on offer at the chapters table. I will be scooping up my conference treasure, but I have some conference doubloons of my own! Check out the photo for a picture of the pins I have to give away – but only to those who can catch me and ask about #gogirlresearch!

HINT: Take a peek at who is presenting on 7/25 at 8:30am!

How To Keep From Being Automated Out Of A Job

4Researchers, , ,

robot clockLet’s not be shortsighted. Information technology has improved rapidly and many of the tasks that fall under the prospect research umbrella are automated. They are. Wealth screenings have replaced me as the first course of action in a small organization. They have. No use crying over it. And it’s not going to stop there. So how do we stay relevant in our field?

Find >> Analyze >> Synthesize

We researchers like to use the word analysis to justify our role, but we need to do even more than that. According to Merriam Webster, analysis is an explanation of the nature and meaning of something. But synthesis is something that is made by combining different things such as ideas.

Yes, we need to analyze information to point out the pieces that are relevant to fundraising – whether that is in a profile, trends in our relationship management system, or statistical analysis of our database.

But what if we could learn to take it a step further and routinely synthesize the information, churning out insights that our development officers can act on? It would be another step towards job security, that’s what!

What might that look like?

Charlie is a good prospect for a legacy gift. He has announced he will be retiring in five years. When he retires he will receive a lump sum payment of all of his restricted stock units in the company’s deferred compensation plan, which is currently valued at around $45 million. He has been a top executive for fifteen years and is not likely to be relying upon that sum for retirement and may be interested in ways to offset tax liabilities.

You are not just analyzing and preparing the pieces of information in that profile, you are doing that PLUS putting the different pieces together to create a new idea: he is a good legacy gift prospect.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

Janice is a good prospect to leverage for peer giving. She is past president of the local Chamber of Commerce and has the most relationships with others in your prospect pool. She has a high wealth rating and served as co-chair for the campaign of Local Organization.

Applying external data to evaluate the prospects in your development officer’s pipeline is not enough anymore. Not if you are capable of pulling those external pieces together into a recommended action that will move her entire pipeline forward.

.

.

.

.

.

We should run an additional analysis to identify women major gift prospects. In this table are the prospects that have the highest predictive value for making a major gift to our campaign, but only one percent of them are women. Sixty-five percent of our active donors are women and as of 2009 women controlled 39% of U.S. wealth with predictions of that number increasing.

Sometimes the method of analysis is technically accurate and perfectly defective. It takes a curious mind and some sincere synthesis to process information in both micro and macro environments and make a recommendation.

.

.

.

.

.

.

Practice, Practice, Practice … and Be Bold!

It’s likely that no-one has ever explicitly taught you to synthesize the information and provide recommendations. You may have even been made to feel foolish or been chided for providing recommendations in the past.

Be Bold! Oil your feathers and let the water roll off of them! You won’t get better at this skill if you don’t practice. And when your insights and recommendations are shot down (and they will be at least once because development officers don’t always share what they know with us), shake off the embarrassment and write down what you learned.

When you recognize that you, I mean you the individual, are a really amazing person, then you can also recognize that you may or may not be good at providing insights and recommendations. That’s okay. You weren’t good at cursive either, until you practiced. (Do children still learn cursive in school?).

So forget your fear of failure and start practicing the art and science of providing insights and recommendations. Synthesize that data baby!

More Articles You Might Like

Female Fundraisers Talk About Wealthy Women Philanthropists

4Researchers, , , , , , ,

World Map VectorI’ve selected three recent articles written by female fundraisers about wealthy women philanthropists. Enjoy!

Understanding High Net Worth Women’s Philanthropy

By Marge King, InfoRich Group

Lately, I have been seeing a lot of research studies on the topics of how women save money, invest money, and spend money-studies done by Fidelity Investments, U.S. Trust, and similar financial services organizations, on a regular basis.

It doesn’t take the proverbial rocket scientist to understand why the financial industry is spending money on studies analyzing women’s money habits.  A significant number of women-often the financial decision makers in their families-now contribute to the economy with their earnings. >>>Keep Reading

What Women Donors Want

By Adrienne A. Rulnick, Ed.D., Grenzebach Glier + Associates

Fundraisers need to broaden their “toolkits” in thinking about what motivates and incentivizes women donors. Recently, a fundraiser from my undergraduate alma mater called me in the lead up to our quinquennial reunion celebration at the recommendation, she told me, of two classmates who were also friends.  They wanted me to complete the funding for a scholarship that they had seeded in honor of our reunion. Although the ask represented a stretch gift for me, I immediately agreed. >>>Keep Reading

Rating Girls

By Preeti Gill, Sole Searcher Blog

Did my headline grab your attention? Good. Here’s my contribution to the prospect development community’s great capacity ratings debate. This post isn’t about how to rate prospects. Nope, not going there. This post is about who gets the rating inside your database, once you’ve crunched the financials on an individual, couple or household. The one who gets the rating then gets pulled into your prospect pipeline for closer consideration. >>>Keep Reading

More Articles You Might Like

The Prospect Research Institute has been creating resource collections you might like:

5 Benefits to Make the Case for Prospect Research at Your Organization

4Fundraisers, 4Researchers, Focused Fundraising, , , , , ,

Guest Post by Sarah Tedesco

bulbpencilSMThink of your nonprofit like a light bulb and money as the filament. You’ve got plenty of conducting wire to glow for a long time, but are you shining as bright as possible? Is your light reaching as far as it could or are you casting shadows upon donors just out of reach?

Prospect research provides philanthropic and wealth data that helps you to spot the major gift prospects who will donate the additional funds that you need.

Below are five ways to convince the head honchos of your organization to make a strategic investment in prospect research.

Benefit #1 – Receive more information about existing major donors

Does your prospect have a good poker face? Does he enjoy bubble baths with a glass of red wine? Is he an ancient Greek pottery aficionado? Prospect research won’t answer those questions, but it will deliver the sort of information that you need to improve your major gift fundraising.

Prospect research provides:

  • Philanthropic histories – Know who your donors have given to and how much.
  • Wealth markers – Discover what your donors invest in, such as stocks, real estate, etc.
  • Group analysis of long donor lists – Receive comprehensive reports that summarize donor lists according to where they donate, how much, and more.
  • Business relationships – Discover your donors’ employers to discover if they work for companies that offer matching gift programs.
  • And more! – Different prospect research companies and consultants can deliver different types of information in different ways, so be sure to conduct research before you commit to a company or private researcher.

The fundraising experience becomes more personalized when you know more about donors. Your loyal donors are your most important donors, and remaining abreast of who they are and how to best continue to solicit donations ensures that your relationships will last.

Benefit #2 – Fundraise more efficiently!

While you’re busy hosting events, managing staff, and taking care of other tasks, your most valuable resource is always tick, tick, ticking away… Time.

With prospect research, you can pick out the highest quality major gift prospects on your list and dedicate your time, staff, and resources accordingly. Your fundraising efforts will be focused on the prospects who can deliver the biggest impacts for your organization.

Prospect research methods include:

  • Screening companies – After compiling data from a plethora of databases, screening companies return comprehensive philanthropy and wealth data to help you identify your major gift prospects.
  • Prospect research consultants – Consultants can provide you with a deeper level of research and fundraising insights on specific prospects. They can also help you streamline and coordinate all of your prospect research efforts. It’s important to know what you want from your consultant to achieve the best results.
  • Do it yourself – There is an abundance of search tools out there, and you can teach yourself or get training for yourself or a staff member on how to conduct and manage prospect research.

Benefit #3 – Find and convert new major gift prospects

While modest donations help, major gifts deliver big, immediate impacts for your nonprofit, and finding more major gift donors is the fastest way to increase fundraising. However, when it comes to increasing your number of significant donors, new isn’t always better.

The top indicator of a major gift prospect is previous giving to your nonprofit, but that doesn’t mean that the previous giving is in the $5,000+ range of a major gift. Despite only giving modest amounts, your loyal donors are your most fertile source of new major gift prospects.

Annual donors, no matter how little they give, have a demonstrated, consistent affinity for your organization. Some of these donors can’t give more, but prospect research can reveal which ones can. However, if loyal donors have the capacities to give more, and care so much about your organization, then why don’t they give more?

The explanation may be as simple as that you’ve never asked these prospects to give more, so they’ve never thought to do so. There may be other reasons, and a thorough job of prospect research can help to solve the mystery, so you can turn these annual fund donors into major gift donors.

An old rule of prospect research is that 80% of funds are raised from 20% of the donations, although many organizations claim that it’s more like 90% of funds from 10% of donations, and others find that an even larger portion of their money comes from an even smaller contingency of major donors. You likely have several major donors, but the more the merrier, as these are the people who will provide most of your annual revenue.

Benefit #4 – Clean up your donor databases

Ring. Ring. Ri…

Prospect: Hello?

You: Hi! Is this Mr. Major Donor?

Prospect: I think you have a wrong number.

Fundraising doesn’t have to be like that phone call. You can call the right numbers more often than not, but only if you have up-to-date information.

Prospect research keeps crucial contact information up to date, such as:

  • Phones numbers
  • Email addresses
  • Mailing addresses
  • Spousal information
  • Hobbies and preferred activities
  • And more!

Don’t just take this new information and throw it into a cluttered closet. Embrace the opportunity to clean up your database, so that your donor records are easily searchable and accessible.

Benefit #5 – Identify planned or deferred giving prospects

You know that you can find new major gift prospects among your current donors, and that you shouldn’t overlook even low-level donors, but there’s also a specific type of major gift to be aware of.

Many donors save their biggest donations to be planned or deferred gifts, and, according to a planned giving expert, planned gifts typically come from regular, modest donors.

Prospect research provides the data that reveals potential planned giving donors.

Landing donations, and especially planned gifts, can be a long game, and donors have long-term value that might be patient to reveal itself. Prospect research helps you to find all of these people and delivers comprehensive information that allows you to make more individualized pitches that will better resonate with prospects and land more major gifts, even if they’re gifts that you have to wait a little longer to receive.

These tips should help you make the case at your organization for the importance of investing in prospect research! You’re a nonprofit with a bold heart and an important mission, so increase your fundraising with prospect research in order to focus on what you’re meant to do.

About Sarah Tedesco

TedescoSarahSarah Tedesco is Executive Vice President at DonorSearch, a prospect research and wealth screening company that focuses on proven philanthropy. Sarah is responsible for managing the production and customer support department concerning client contract fulfillment, increasing retention rate and customer satisfaction. She collaborates with other team members on a variety of issues including sales, marketing and product development ideas.

Connect with Sarah:

 

Researcher Sued for Scraping!

4Researchers, , , , , ,

Can you imagine if that headline was about you? How would that impact your organization and your fundraising career? Would it be fatal or a blip in the radar?

I’m an emotional person. Because of this I could easily spend hours chatting about the law and ethics. But when I talk with a highly analytical, logical person, the conversation is usually quite short. Is it legal? Is it public? What’s the problem? Emotions! That’s what!

No matter what your personality type, the only thing that really matters is what your donors and the community believe. Because if they perceive that you have done something unethical and possibly illegal it can be very damaging to your fundraising revenue, not to mention the organization as a whole.

Sarah Bernstein did a very good job of examining the APRA Social Media Ethics Statement so I won’t go over that here. Instead I’d like to have a very specific conversation evaluating a specific situation – scraping on LinkedIn.

Scraping LinkedIn

I’m not starting this conversation. That already happened on the PRSPCT-L list-serv. You can search the archives for these threads:

  • Using Scraper with LinkedIn
  • Experience with ProspectVisual’s LinkedIn Alumni Employment Info?
  • INFO: LinkedIn.com and permitted uses

As a prospect research professional I would love to have a way to get all that wonderful LinkedIn data in a format that I could use for analysis!

According to Wikipedia, Web Scraping is a software technique that simulates human exploration of the web and transforms unstructured data on the web, typically in HTML format, into structured data that can be stored and analyzed in a central local database or spreadsheet. Because it is automated the software can process large amounts of information.

An example of successful scraping we take for granted are the giving databases we subscribe to. We know that the vendor scours the web for giving recognition reports and other public information about giving. The vendor indexes the information and we merrily search the resulting database.

LinkedIn Public Profiles

The first question in the LinkedIn Scraping discussion is whether the information being scraped is from the outside of the service – the public-facing side – or whether it is being scraped from behind the login – the private-facing side.

ProspectVisual, a relationship mapping software, scrapes LinkedIn data from the public-facing side. ProspectVisual never logs in to the software. It doesn’t have to. For example, my LinkedIn profile is almost 100% public. You can find my LinkedIn profile on a Google search and never login.

At the very beginning of the LinkedIn User Agreement in Section 1.2 it states:

You agree that by clicking “Join Now” “Join LinkedIn”, “Sign Up” or similar, registering, accessing or using our services…you are entering into a legally binding agreement.

 

 

 

 

ProspectVisual never enters into the agreement. That’s quite clear and simple from a legal perspective. And given the prospect research field’s warm embrace of many other vendors who scrape the web, it would seem it passes the ethical test too.

LinkedIn Private Profiles

Once you login to LinkedIn you are now bound by the LinkedIn User Agreement.  A search in the agreement for the word “scrape” brings up this line under Section 8.2, the things you promise NOT to do:

Scrape or copy profiles and information of others through any means (including crawlers, browser plugins and add-ons, and any other technology or manual work);

 

 

 

 

The question on the list-serv was whether it was okay to login and scrape small amounts of data for the purpose of identifying new prospects for the nonprofit organization.

Illegal

It could easily be argued that this scraping is illegal and violates the user agreement because scraping, automated or manual, implies taking a bulk of data from LinkedIn and transferring it for another purpose.

Legal

But how much data or at what frequency crosses the line into scraping territory? And if you are not scraping information to re-sell it, but instead to further your fundraising, is that a use that is either appropriate or unlikely to be prosecuted?

Ethical or Unethical?

If it is unclear whether our scraping data when bound by the user agreement is illegal or not, is it ethical to continue scraping? How would our donors and network feel about the way we are accessing the data they have placed behind the LinkedIn login?

Healthy Conversation

Ethics stirs emotions. But that doesn’t mean we can’t engage in healthy conversation. I was delighted that the most recent thread had all the hallmarks of a mature debate:

  • Asking lots of questions
  • Making statements based on found information, not pure emotion
  • Not disagreeing quickly, but working to be sure you understood the other person
  • Recognizing that others may disagree in part or in whole and that’s okay

Now at your next staff meeting you have a juicy topic to bring up under “New Business”. And if you are a blogger, maybe there’s a piece of this conversation you’d like to take on?

More Articles You Might Like

Prioritizing Corp & Fdn Prospects

4Researchers, , , , , , , ,

1334987_68502097Corporate and foundation research is different from individual research. Could it be so simple? About as simple as stating that boys are different from girls! They are different, but also the same in many ways. It’s complicated! Let’s take a quick peek at how corporate and foundation prospects differ when we need to identify new prospects or prioritize a long list.

Identifying Corporate and Foundation Prospects

There are some great tools out there for creating a good list of corporate and foundation prospects. Foundation Center Online and Foundation Search immediately come to mind. Pretty quickly you can create a long list of good prospects that fit some general criteria. Unlike individuals, many corporations and foundations don’t require a deep, personal connection to make a substantial gift.

And yet many times when you start digging deeper to craft your proposal, you realize that the prospects on your list aren’t as good a fit as you originally thought. For example, maybe they are listed as giving nationally but have only ever made gifts in Pennsylvania and Delaware. Or maybe they give to education, but only scholarships and not program.

Early on in my Aspire Research Group LLC career I was not interested in generating corporate and foundation prospects lists. There were plenty of grant writers around who could do that very well – and write the grants too!

But later on I started getting calls from people who had received a long and very broad list from a consultant or sourced the list themselves using products like Foundation Center Online. Now they were facing 100 or more prospects with no idea where to start and the pressure of meeting a fundraising goal.

When it comes to individuals, there are some great tools for narrowing a list like this. We have wealth screenings, predictive modeling scores and often, some giving history to our own organizations. As the Giving USA research has made quite clear, individuals provide the clear majority of overall fundraised dollars and it’s not surprising that the industry has invested in developing great tools for individual prospects.

Nevertheless, corporate and foundation partners are important players for many reasons, not the least of which because they help us engage with the individuals they employ and sell services to. And starting with the letter “A” and working through to “Z” is rarely ever the best use of time and resources.

I wanted to help people prioritize their corporate and foundation prospect lists, but in a way that would give them a good return on investment. In other words, I needed a way to prioritize that wouldn’t take much time so I could charge less. So I got creative. Maybe you have done this too?

Simple Scoring Scores!

Whenever I take on a prospect ID or prioritization project now, I create a simple worksheet based on my first interview with the client. Then we walk through the worksheet together answering the questions about what a really good prospect should look like. A fundraiser might want a prospect who will give to a certain project, but I make sure we get specific.

“Gives to after-school education” becomes “Has made a gift to a similar initiative of $5,000 or more”. I will probably try to define “after-school education” more specifically too. Are we talking science, computer literacy, reading or all of them?

While we are going through the questions on the worksheet I might add or delete some of my questions as I learn more about the projects and needs. I also keep my ears open on which criteria are the most important. When we are finished with the questions I summarize and confirm which criteria are simply preferable and which ones will disqualify the prospect entirely.

An easy example is geography. If the foundation only makes gifts in New York City and the client organization is in New Jersey, the foundation is not a prospect.

The next step is to translate the worksheet answers into a rating legend. And by playing a little bit and giving some criteria extra weight – a higher rating value – I can get the prospects to sort out in a very obvious way based on the client’s funding needs.

By taking time up-front to determine what disqualifies the prospect and what is most important, I can zip right through the project. Doesn’t give where my client is located? Done with that one. Next!

CFRlegend

All’s Well that Ends Well

Some of my prospect ID projects have gone stunningly well and others not so much. The difference has usually been the quality of communication with the client and how early I discover that what the client wants just doesn’t exist. I’m careful now to do an initial search and communicate quickly if I am struggling to identify prospects that meet the agreed criteria.

Your organization might have a straightforward relationship with corporate and foundation funders such as asking for a grant and getting a grant, or you might have many layers to your corporate and foundation relationships such as providing the funder with volunteering, cause-marketing, or fulfilling other needs.

If you are tasked with corporate and foundation research you know you have just as much opportunity to help create wonderful and rewarding relationships as with individual prospects. Maybe you have helped the frontline fundraiser connect with your organization’s vendors, sourced donor relationships with corporate foundation executives or leveraged your organization’s constituency in other ways to identify prospects.

However you do it, identifying corporate and foundation prospects is different from individuals. And as is usual when working with together with other humans, success often requires good communication matched with the creative application of skills!

Do you have a prospect identification success story? Have you heard about new technology solutions for corporate and foundation prospecting? I hope you’ll share with us!

Other Articles You Might Like

Research Strategy: Qualification vs. Solicitation

4Researchers, , , , , , ,

digital world webI’ve been all about the prospect profile for a while – presenting at APRA’s conference in Las Vegas, teaching at the Prospect Research Institute, and creating a profile collection. The one question that has come up repeatedly is “What’s the difference between qualification and solicitation research?”

Many people that have just transitioned into prospect research, especially if they have other duties as well, are often not asked to do a lot of actual research. They are asked to pull reports from products like DonorSearch, iWave PRO,Blackbaud’s ResearchPoint and WealthEngine, verify and distribute the results.

Which points out the direction of the prospect development field, doesn’t it? Knowing how to effectively manage the information is becoming just as important as being able to research to find information. Those research screening tools are getting very good! They are so good that you might be wondering if qualification research is even necessary. It is.

The Big Picture – Strategy

The premise behind qualification research is that we need to determine if a prospect is indeed capable of giving at an amount we decide is a major gift and if the prospect is philanthropically inclined. It’s a bit like a home inspection. Before I bought my house I paid for a home inspection and was so glad I did. There’s nothing like a trained professional to point out what you missed, but more importantly, to pull it together intelligently so you can make decisions. Qualification research should do that for your gift officer.

Solicitation research is prepping to ask a prospect for a gift and although the effort varies depending on what kind of research was done prior to this stage, generally we are laser focused on what information will help the gift officer ask for the largest, most appropriate gift. For example, we don’t need to list every gift found. Instead we need to provide as much detail as possible on the kinds of gifts made that relate to the gift we are planning to ask for.

Actions to Achieve the Strategy

So what does the difference look like in terms of actual searching behavior? Qualification means QUICK. Solicitation means FOCUSED.

Qualification is QUICK when you…

1)  Know what you want and need to find

Do you know what will qualify your prospect? This is where a good profile template or in the case of entering directly into the database, a good checklist, will save you time and sanity.

2)  Know exactly where to find that information

Now that you have a template, what is the fastest way to fill in the blanks? My strategy is to start with what I know already (your own database and your organization’s website), then your paid tools and then your collection of frequently used websites. I usually save giving for last because we can only match the gift to our prospect based on his name and what we know about him, such as where he went to school, what state he lives in, his service on nonprofit boards, etc.

3)  Have the discipline to stop looking

Sometimes this is the biggest obstacle for the prospect research professional. We love researching! But nine times out of ten this is NOT the time to follow clues, detail her family history and read countless news articles. If your prospect is listed on the Forbes Billionaire List, why would you detail her real estate holdings? Find her home and favorite vacation spot, but heck, she’s a billionaire! Write a quick summary sentence for the rest. For the majority of nonprofit organizations, being a billionaire qualifies her for capacity to give. End of story.

Solicitation, on the other hand, builds on qualification, including information discovered by the gift officer through cultivation visits. Yes, it usually takes a lot longer, but you should take a very different approach from your qualification research.

Solicitation is FOCUSED when you…

1)  Communicate well with the frontline fundraising staff

If you don’t know what kind of gift is anticipated or what the fundraising priorities are at your institution, you may end up including all kinds of data and spending countless hours being “comprehensive” when that is not what is needed – or even wanted.

2)  Are educated about giving vehicles and trends

If you don’t understand the general concepts of how the very wealthy can make gifts you might overlook important clues. For example, if a prospect owns a few apartment buildings as a way to invest his retirement money, but he still brings in a significant earned income from his job, he might consider giving the apartment buildings’ income to your organization while he retains ownership of the buildings. Now you know that beyond the value of the real estate, estimated apartment rental income could be a valuable piece of information!

3)  Dig deep on relevant clues

So many of us were trained to be comprehensive in our solicitation research, which means that we take as much time as we need to detail every asset and every gift. The closer you work with a gift officer, the more likely you will find that this is not often a useful approach. If I am about to ask a large corporation for a multi-pronged, multi-million dollar gift, what do I want to know the most about? Every division within the company and estimated earnings? Or every detail on how another organization received a very similar relationship and gift? I sincerely hope the answer is obvious!

 Search strategy and experience

 If you are new to prospect research you may be wondering how you will ever be able to learn all there is to know. The good news is you won’t! Part of the joy of our profession is the continual learning. It never ends. Aim for some balance. Learn the nuances of public information and wealth, but also fundraising principles and techniques.

If you are not new to prospect research you might have different ideas on search strategies or stories to tell. Don’t be shy! Why not share?

Other Resources You Might Like