Category Archives: Focused Fundraising

Re-Wiring the Trusty Profile

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There’s a bit of buzz about whether prospect research is going to get dumbed down by smart software products or if it will get lifted into the realm of strategy and management. The reality is probably a bit of both. Today I thought I’d bite off one little piece of the bigger conversation. I want to take a tried and true prospect research task – the trusty profile – and toss it up in the air to discover a new perspective on its utility and value.

Conversation Starter

Sabine Schuller jump-started the dialogue on the PRSPCT-L list-serv with an article,Is a Googlized Workplace Replacing Dedicated Competitive Intelligence Resources? Substitute “prospect research” for “competitive intelligence” and you can join in the exchange. Helen Brown did! She opined on the topic with a blog post, Prospect Research’s Strategic Advantage, suggesting that prospect researchers offer “experience, context, and strategy”. Mark Noll and Chris Mildner commented about the need for prospect research to concern itself with ROI. They told us we have to demonstrate how research translates into increased gift levels.

Can We Re-Wire the Humble Profile?

As you might have noticed, the topic has many layers of discussion points and profiles are somewhere amongst them. Can we re-wire the humble profile to make it more strategic and cost efficient? What does that mean?

I’ve heard conversations along these lines:

  • The paper profile is dead. It should all go into the database.
  • Research should be finding the basics – ability, inclination, linkage/affinity – and spend not a minute more.
  • My gift officer was struggling to connect with a prospect and I dug deep and found some nuggets of interest that helped him to solicit and receive a multi-million dollar gift.

My two cents? They are all correct! Prospect research is positioned differently at each organization depending upon the structure and culture of its fundraising operations. But sometimes people are so excited about their success with their hammer that they begin to view every problem as a nail, even if it’s a screw.

My favorite type of client to work with has no research staff and is tasked with raising million-dollar gifts. She relies on the paper profiles to give her really deep insight into what makes this prospect tick because the pressure is high to get the largest gift possible for her organization. She doesn’t hesitate to call me and question the information so she can feel confident in her ask amount.

It’s my job to know how much and what kind of detail to include.

That’s a big sentence. And it leads me to an interesting interaction I had recently with another client. We were talking about her need for corporate research. She wanted all the usual info, but they had specific strategies they were focused on for corporate prospects. My profiles are typically organized to best present the information collected, but what I was hearing was that she wanted to know exactly how to approach the company for each strategy.

So I reorganized the profile to highlight info relevant to each strategy first and then other sections to hold traditional, but necessary, information second. I did the first couple of profiles to be sure it worked and, well, it felt awkward. It took extra effort to parse the information into the right spots. I truly had to think first about the strategy and second about the information I was scanning. But it kept the profile laser-focused on what was most important to creating the cultivation and solicitation strategy. That felt good!

But, What About You and Your Office?

When deciding how much and what kind of profile types your prospect research department should be producing, I recommend engaging your fundraising staff in dialogue around these big questions:

Does everyone understand…

  • What the three main functions of prospect research areas are? (Prospect Identification or proactive, Prospect Profiling or reactive, and Relationship Management)
  • How those functions affect and support their specific specialty (events, annual fund, major and planned gifts, alumni relations, etc.)?
  • Where they fit within the strategic goals for the organization’s overall fundraising?

(Just remember that, as in search technique, less is often more. We’re not talking two weeks of training, but a simple, framework discussion.)

With everyone on the same page, now you can begin to have a discussion about things like if and when prospect research should be doing in-depth, six to twelve hour individual research profiles or who should be preparing bullet points for major gift prospects at events.

Now everyone knows where the priorities lie and how prospect research is going to be used to support them. It might not make everyone happy, but hey, happiness is a personal journey, right?

Onward to the Future!

Yes, the world is a-changing. We need to have the confidence and courage to re-engineer our services. We need to become more competitive and tie what we do to its impact on giving. And as we pursue big-picture discussions about the future of our profession, we need to recognize the diversity of our experience, context and strategies to create best practices focused on problem-solving.

With professionals like Sabine Schuller, Helen Brown, Mark Noll, Chris Mildner and You, I have no doubt we can ride these waves of changes with aplomb. I can’t wait to hear what you have to say!

Relationship Mapping for New Prospects

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I just can’t stop thinking about relationship mapping! Probably because I am deep within a project to use relationship mapping to generate new prospects and illuminate the path to identified prospects within a campaign. A soft touch for new software, I really, really want the product I’m using, Prospect Visual, to deliver the goods. But will it?

The Many Shades of Relationship Mapping

Relationship mapping is not new, but some of the tools used to find relationships are new. Essentially, you create a visual (think family tree style) or data map (like in Excel or a database) or both of someone’s relationships. Many organizations collect this information in the donor database as an afterthought or “extra”. Relationships might be mapped to family members, boards served, club memberships, religious involvement and others. Why, you could even map all of the interrelated relationships of the Mad Men television show characters…

Mad Men Relationships

In higher education there may be a wealth of information from the school that connects individuals to one another, such as club membership, degree majors, and sports participation among many others. In 2012, Queens University presented at a CASE conference on their use of TouchGraph to map relationships within their own database.

What some new products, such as Prospect Visual and Relationship Science, are attempting to do is allow you to take the relationships you have collected on one individual and find paths to reach other individuals “out in the wild”.

LinkedIn does a reasonable job of this for prospecting within business networks. I have used LinkedIn, in combination with verbally asking people in my network, to identify paths to prospects I would like to cultivate for business. A personal introduction by someone with a strong relationship is much preferable to a cold call!

A nonprofit organization can use a trustee or engaged volunteer to introduce it to new prospects who are likely to have an affinity for the organization. Nothing new about that!

The Missing Piece: Spheres of Influence

What is new is identifying, perhaps by visualizing, someone’s sphere of influence. Some people are connected to more people and some people have many people in their network that are strong or deep connections. Strong connections suggest that the person can influence the other person. In the triad of Linkage-Ability-Inclination, relationship mapping provides the piece research has not always been so good at delivering in the past: Linkage.

In our book, Prospect Research for Fundraisers, Helen Brown and I discuss relationship mapping in the last chapter. Helen provides a great example of an organization that used its alumni group on LinkedIn to identify individuals who were highly connected and then qualified them for affinity. This process uncovered some great new prospects.

Jen Filla’s Facebook Spheres

I attended a course at the Nonprofit Leadership Center of Tampa Bay led by social media expert Bryn Warner, and I created a visual representation of my relationships from my personal Facebook page, which I have included here. Just look at all the connections around my husband and my favorite live-music venue, Mahuffer’s! Clearly this represents a sphere of influence. And it’s a messy, tangled ball of yarn, yes? I did not take the time to manipulate the graph results to make it pleasing to the eye or to make the names all readable. Make no mistake, these tools may be powerful, but they are time-hungry beasts!

Analyzing and Verifying

My experience so far using Prospect Visual is two-fold: (1) Visualizing spheres of influence is effective in identifying promising paths to new prospects; and (2) Just as in a wealth screening, this big relationship database is great at prioritizing, but I still have to analyze and verify the information.

What I have been doing so far in Prospect Visual is identifying clusters of relationships – spheres of influence – inside and outside the defined group of individual, foundation and corporation prospects in our project space. While one trustee may have strong relationships to identified prospects, another trustee may have a deep and wide network with organizations and people that my client has not considered before.

Once we see a sphere of influence, the next step is to confirm it truly exists and then discover whether there is any ability or inclination. Because there are errors in the underlying database of relationships – such as duplicate records and connections that are just plain wrong – the connections must be verified. And once the connections are verified, further research is needed to discover those shiny glimmers of affinity.

Getting Results

As with wealth screenings, moving the process from mass prioritization all the way through cultivation and solicitation takes time. It will likely be at least a year before any results, let alone gifts, are realized from the effort. And this project is not exactly number one on everyone’s to-do list. Prospects and donors in active cultivation and solicitation create the crisis of time that vacillate the prospect identification project between hot and cold attention.

Who is at the Watering Hole?

Are you actively using relationship mapping techniques and tools? Do you plan to? Do you wish you could be a fly on the wall hearing about it? Join the conversation! In a geographically dispersed environment where many of us perform prospect research solo, sharing our work successes and challenges builds our profession and ourselves.

Relationship Mapping Work Group

Aspire Research Group has created a free-to-participate work group that meets online. You can join the conversation – or lurk about listening – by signing-up for the email list. I’m looking forward to sharing with you!

Yikes! Donor Personality Traits Can be Predicted?

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Who’s watching your brain?

Wouldn’t it be great if we could discover the personalities, values and needs of our donors and prospects? Now we have access to demographic information – things like age, sex, marital status, residence, average income. But what if we could really *know* what makes our prospects tick?

Of course, businesses would love this deeper layer of extremely personal information too. And a group of researchers at IBM’s Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California are getting much closer to making this information accessible. How? Well, just for fun, let’s use the current buzzword – Big Data!

But it’s a little more nuanced than that. Really it’s social media. That’s the place where we bare ourselves the most. We talk with our friends candidly and share our feelings along with facts. Led by Eben Haber, the IBMers are capitalizing on research done by Tal Yarkoni at the University of Colorado on how certain words correlate with certain personality traits. Dr. Yarkoni looked at blogs. Dr. Haber and crew are looking at Twitter.

What do you say in your Twitter feed? A new product created by Dr. Haber and his team is being tested by a financial services company. The claim is that in just 50 tweets it can describe your personality reasonably well. In 200 tweets it gets uncomfortably accurate.

The big question is: Could we use information about personality traits to raise more money?

Up until now, the big data sets have been pretty exclusive to higher education and sometimes other large institutions. This is not because they have so many individual records (although they often do), but because universities have so many pieces of data on each of their alums. They keep track of things like what clubs they belonged to, how many degrees received, events attended, participation in directories and more recently, online alum communities. The local food bank is not likely to ever have that much information about each of its donors. But could organizations have more information in the future?

Multi-channel fundraising – print, email, website, Facebook, Twitter, etc. – means that organizations have access to multi-channels of data. This data is attached to specific individuals. Before you can blink your eyes, the software to ride the big social media data beast will drop in price and become more accessible to the masses of nonprofit organizations. Okay, maybe it will take a few eye blinks, but if the past is a good predictor of the future, it is definitely coming.

Right now the most common piece of data we use to determine whether someone has an affinity (likes our org) is giving. We want to see things like frequency, recency and longevity. We can do a wealth screening to identify people capable of giving a lot, but that does not help us turn them into donors – into people who have an affinity for our organization and its work.

Now close your eyes and imagine … wait! read this first before closing your eyes … that you can run your database through a screening that assigns rated personality traits to each constituent record. Ahhhh! Now you can group people by personality traits and create messaging that resonates with who they are – resonates with the core of their personality. WOW! People would convert to donors at amazing rates! Right?

Until that magical day, let’s see if we can’t work on our current messaging. Little things like communicating with donors in the medium in which they like to give. No more of this sending paper to people who have demonstrated online giving. Many organizations are still struggling with what feels like “traditional” message segments, but are quite new to many. Messaging. It’s like exercise and good nutrition. There’s no magic pill (or database screening) that will ever replace it.

Which brings us back to the heart of fundraising – relationship building. Some organizations are better at it than others – regardless of budget size or the depth of data.

So although it is always fun to play with new technology and to imagine a day when science will turn “magic” into a software product, the feet on the ground (you and I) need to stay focused on what builds the best and most relationships with our organizations and missions. The right messages. The phone calls and face-to-face visits. Being real with real people.

P.S. Are you on Twitter? Let’s connect! You can find me @jenfilla I promise I won’t try to predict your personality!!

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5 Tips for Finding Your Prospect’s Children

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Knowing whether a donor prospect has children is a critical piece of information, but even more important for planned giving prospects. According to a study by Russell N. James III, J.D., Ph.D., Assistant Professor at the University of Georgia*, the absence of grandchildren as an indicator of likelihood to make a planned gift trumped even giving history – by a wide margin. Yes, go ahead and read that sentence again!

After those findings were presented at AFP’s International Conference I received multiple inquiries asking if there was a way to append child relationships to the donor database. Thank goodness the answer is “no”! I’m not confident that a centralized database of familial relationships is in our best interest generally. But it sure would be a powerful piece of information in our ability to predict inclination to give.

Whether you are a frontline fundraiser or a dedicated prospect researcher, there are a few ways to tease out information about children when it might not otherwise be obvious.

1.  Biographical Sources

The first places to look are biographies, obituaries and wedding notices – any place where family information is described. Sometimes it is tucked at the end of the executive’s company biography and may or may not include names. Sometimes the Who’s Who listing is detailed. Other times a search engine might find a genealogy page for your prospect’s family.

2.  In the News

Many of you have access to newspaper and other news databases online with the use of your public library card. Other news articles show up in search engine results. This is often a good place to find references to children and grandchildren.

3.  Search on Address

I like to use Lexis Nexis for Development Professionals (LNDP) and perform a “People” search using only the home address – especially when the prospect has lived there for a long time. But you can also use a site like www.switchboard.com and do a reverse search by address. Any search that will give you a list of the names of the people who have been associated with that specific address is useful. The bonus from the LNDP search is that those addresses are referenced against voter’s registration and other sources and a birth year is often included in the search results. This gets me closer to uncovering how likely those associated names are to being children, instead of other family members.

4.  Giving and Private Schools

When a prospect gives regularly to a private school, especially one from which s/he did *not* receive a diploma, I like to perform a search in Google of the school’s website. You can use the Google Advanced Search form, or type in your own. It looks like this:  LastName site:schoolname.edu   Many times I have found likely children’s names, and sometimes even grandchildren who are attending or have attended that school.

5.  Social Media

If your prospect is active on Facebook, Twitter, or other social media websites, you might be able to tease out family relationships. Many times the prospect has tight privacy controls, but it is surprising how much can still be discovered in the public domain. I have even encountered prospects who keep detailed, and very public, blogs online.

Once I have found a likely child’s name, I have often been rewarded by doing a couple of searches on only the child’s name. The younger generation is more comfortable sharing online and the child, especially if post high school, might share parent names and pictures more publicly. This helps us with making an accurate match, but we need to be careful when approaching the donor prospect.

Children are special and protected relationships, and the last thing we want to do is make the donor prospect feel like we are stalking her with our prospect research techniques! Without trust there will be no gift. Because of this, we as fundraisers need to be skilled at opening the conversational door to allow the prospect to tell us what we already know.

There is always room for error when we search for information anonymously. If you are a prospect researcher working with a new frontline fundraiser, it is worth having a conversation with him about how important it is to allow the prospect to confirm the information we find.

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* “Causes and correlates of charitable giving in estate planning: A cross-sectional and longitudinal examination of older adults”, a study conducted by Russell N. James III, J.D., Ph.D., Assistant Professor at the University of Georgia and published in 2008 (data from 1996-2007 collected by the University of Michigan Health and Retirement Study)

Are Your Numbers Lying To You?

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Whether you are a frontline fundraiser or a prospect researcher, at some point you are faced with decisions about how much time and effort to put into measuring your fundraising success. But watch out! It’s all too easy to be deceived by the numbers you measure. You might be measuring the wrong items, get the wrong numbers altogether or get slowed down with numbers that don’t move you forward.

Are you measuring the right things?

No matter what size our organization, time and resources are limited. So where do you start in your fundraising office? With your donors, of course!

We know that we need to acquire and keep donors in order to provide sustaining income to support our organization’s mission. A recent client of mine was excited to tell me that his direct mail acquisition had a high rate of return. Nice!

But where were those donors now? It turned out that he had retained 14% of them. Ouch. Measuring acquisition without measuring retention is a mistake. Be careful that your measurements tell you the whole story about your donors.

Do you have the right numbers?

As you decide what to measure, keep asking yourself if the resulting number means better fundraising. For example, it might be exciting to count the number of people attending your event as it grows, but wouldn’t dollar-raised-per-person reveal whether your goal of raising more money was met? You may have a lot of attendees, but more people do not always translate into more dollars raised.

Are your numbers slowing you down?

Take the time to think about your goals and choose measurements that will reveal whether you are reaching your goals. Most of us have goals more or less like these:

  • Acquire X number of new donors = more dollars raised
  • Retain/renew X percent of all donors = more dollars raised
  • X number new major gift prospects identified/assigned = more dollars raised
  • Raise X dollars = more dollars raised

This is a very basic description, and your office may need a more complex set of measurements. For example, you may want to track different kind of dollars raised – direct appeals, major gifts, events. But don’t get caught in the trap of measuring too many things! You want to choose the most critical elements that will move everything else forward.

For example, my client decided to measure the retention rate of all donors instead of breaking it down to the retention of new donors acquired through direct mail. With a staff of three they only have time to focus on the most important measurements.

Ask yourself, “What are the key items that will move all of our efforts forward”? Set goals and measure those items religiously.

If you try to measure too many things or perform more complex analysis all of the time, you run the risk of bogging down your fundraising energy and effort.

No matter what your fundraising role you play, your actions should result in more money raised. As fundraising leadership, you need to determine the key goals that will move everything forward. As a prospect researcher you often play the role of “data translator”, helping frontline fundraising to translate goals into measurements. No matter what your role is, always ask if the items being measured and the numbers being reviewed translate into more money raised.

When Should You Look for Cold Prospects?

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It's COLD out there!

It’s easy to tell fundraisers to look at their donors first, but are there times when it makes sense to look outside the donor pool? If so, when and how should you do it?

This may sound obvious, but usually the best time to go after cold prospects is after you have looked in your donor pool and need more. Apart from general donor acquisition, this might happen for a few reasons including:

(1) You need more major gifts than your current donor pool can support

(2) You need qualified prospects to fill board member positions

(3) You are strategically reaching out to a new constituency

Branching Out

When you are looking for more major gifts or new board members, a great technique is Branching. This technique is described in Prospect Research for Fundraisers: The Essential Handbook (p.26) and you might also hear it described as Relationship Mapping (p.175). The idea is that you take your high-powered, well-connected donors and trustees and put them at the center, branching their connections outward.

A simple, but great example, of this technique is demonstrated by Dan Blakemore in his blog post, “How One Web Search Led to a $20,000 Gift”. When the board chairman passed away and he needed to find donors for a named fund in his memory, Dan branched out from the board chairman’s connections to identify a donor who made a first gift of $20,000. Dan started with his existing donors, but he took an extra step outward and was successful. You don’t have to start with a huge project to get results.

Strategic New Direction

Branching exercises sometimes result in more of the same prospects because you are working within a network of connections. There are organizations that do not want more of the same. They make a deliberate decision to reach out to new and different constituencies. This might take the form of populating the board of directors with people who are more similar to the people they serve. It might also be a concerted effort to engage an entirely new group with the organization in a meaningful way.

In the book, Prospect Research for Fundraisers, we tell the story of Jeff Lee at Wycliffe Bible Translators (p.164). He was hired to build stronger fundraising efforts in Asian countries where Wycliffe operates, but also to build engagement with the U.S. Asian-American community, hopefully at some point in the future linking that engagement back to the home countries. Some institutes of higher education and other organizations are strategically building engagement with countries where new wealth is emerging, such as China and India. When you are starting out new there are usually few existing donors and relationships, so how do you go about it?

Building Up and In

In the U.S. there are many sources of information specific to industries, ethnic communities and more. For example, local Business Journals usually publish a “Book of Lists” each year. You can build a list of the top philanthropists in your community, the top business leaders and more. You can ask a researcher to build you a specific list, or as a frontline fundraiser you might start by, for example, joining a local association of Chinese business owners and using a researcher to help you get more information after you have identified specific individuals.

First you build up your list of cold prospects (some people call them targets, but that often sounds harsh to a fundraiser’s friendly ears) and then you make the inside, face to face connections, getting prospect profiles on individuals once you have made a connection.

Cold Prospecting Takes Effort

No matter how you go about it, cold prospecting consumes a lot of time and resources. Make sure you set yourself up for success. Following are some tips:

Plan & Track:
Make sure you have a plan in place. You wouldn’t just show up on a plot of land and build a house willy-nilly. Draw up a plan and track your progress periodically.

Polish Skills:
You may find it takes a different set of skills to engage a new group of people. Be sure to get any training you need. Network with colleagues who have done similar work successfully.

Educate Yourself:
You may need to broaden your knowledge of the culture and history, inside or outside of the U.S. Researchers can help you gather this information as well.

There are good reasons to do cold prospecting, but it needs to be treated with careful respect because of its expense. Just as you nurture donors acquired through direct mail to ensure you raise much more money in the long-term than the initial cost of acquisition, likewise you need to plan your major gift prospecting projects to ensure that they lead to large gifts and deep relationships.

About the Author

Jen Filla is president of Aspire Research Group LLC where she works with organizations worried about finding their next big donor, concerned about what size gift to ask for, or frustrated that they aren’t meeting their major gift goals. She is also co-author of Prospect Research for Fundraisers: The Essential Handbook.

Got retention? You'll need it for major gifts!

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When the conversation turns to identifying major gift prospects out of a base of donors, we usually hear how a wealth screening will highlight those annual fund donors who have capacity. Presto! Like magic. And there is quite a bit of truth in that wealth screening picture. But what if your organization is small, your development staff number fewer than five, your ability to cultivate major gift prospects is limited by staff availability and you know most of your best donors? Paying for a wealth screening may or may not be a good investment right now.

And let’s be honest. Is your major gift program actually based on annual cumulative giving at your highest giving level? Is mastery of your database still in on the to-do list? If this is your world, then a focus on annual fund donor retention could go a long way toward improving your higher-end giving and prepare you for a future campaign or multiple-year, major gifts.

What you Want to Know

Most organizations have a system in place to provide extra attention to donors who give at or above a certain dollar amount. And most of us have heard about reporting on the following:

  • Lybunts – last year but unfortunately not this year
  • Sybunts – some year but unfortunately not this year

These are donors you will want to pick up the phone and call – most especially if your numbers are small, such as under 100. Make sure your calls are at least loosely scripted and sincere.

You might also want to consider keeping track of the following:

  • New Donors – What about knowing who all of your brand new donors were last year and what they are doing this year? New donors are expensive and we need to spend extra care to make them feel welcomed to the family. Don’t be afraid of calling on the phone.
  • Upgraded and Downgraded – What about knowing who gave a higher or lower gift? Either action begs for a response.

How this Helps you Raise More Money

Really good stewardship, the kind that is timely and genuine, depends upon an efficient use of your time. You need to know which people on the list should get additional attention. If you can learn how to use your database to track information like this about your appeals, then the following are likely to happen:

  • Your donors will tell you what they want to know and how they want to hear it.
  • You will find out why people drop out and why some become even more excited about your organization.
  • You will get much better at using and maintaining your database.
  • You will learn about common wealth indicators (luxury vacations, multiple homes, etc.) from actually talking with your donors.
  • You will have conversations that deepen donors’ engagement with your organization and open up opportunities to discuss planned and major gifts.

When these things happen on a regular basis, you will be able to respond to your organization’s donor trends, which may not be the same as other organizations, and you will raise more money. Practice this kind of donor tracking and touching and your donors will be ready to support you when the next big fundraising adventure – like a capital campaign – comes knocking on your door.

Originally Posted on the Blog of the Nonprofit Leadership Center of Tampa Bay

Jen Filla was guest blogger for the Nonprofit Leadership Center in support of her upcoming workshop: Using Prospect Research to Boost Giving. Join Jen for this interactive program as she demystifies prospect research and teaches you to use prospect research tools and resources efficiently and effectively to boost giving. Click here to register for this program on 2/20/2013 from 9am-noon.

Jen is is president of Aspire Research Group LLC where she works with organizations worried about finding their next big donor, concerned about what size gift to ask for, or frustrated that they aren’t meeting their major gift goals.

Looking for Annual Appeal Examples?

  • ClickLinks posted a contest for the best annual appeal. View their results by clicking here.
  • SOFII.org is an all-around useful resource for everything annual appeal.

Making Analytics Accessible to All

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In “Geek Philanthropy: Data Huggers”, the Economist (10/20/2012) tells the story of DataKind, an organization dedicated to using data analytics to help nonprofits. As the Economist points out, businesses are actively using advanced analytics to improve their efficiency. Nonprofit organizations have lots of data too, but usually not so much money. Could the benefits of data analysis – improved program and fundraising outcomes – be within your organization’s reach?

According to their website, DataKind organizes three distinct efforts to share analytics with nonprofits:

  • DataDive™ – a weekend event that teams three selected social organizations that have well-defined data problems with volunteer data scientists to tackle their data challenges. These events are completely free and voluntary and serve to energize the base, provide direct services to organizations, and to enlighten social sector groups to the power of using data in their programs.
  • DataCorps™ – a select group of data scientists who work on volunteer or contract data projects part-time. These members work for one to six months on targeted data projects that they flesh out with the organizations that apply. Our volunteers are paid by the organization or are housed within private companies who take on the projects (e.g. Google gives 20% time to three scientists for a month to execute a project).
  • In-House Data Staff – We maintain a full-time staff of data scientists that take on the most pressing and high-impact problems for a variable length of time. These full-time employees are paid directly for their services by the organizations involved.

The Economist described a DataDive, affectionately called a “hackathon”, in San Francisco. DataKind volunteers analyzed the data from Mobilising Health, a non-profit group that connects rural patients in India with doctors in far-away cities via cell phone. Among other things, DataKind helped Mobilising Health to take more account of urgency and to direct requests to the most responsive doctors.

Improving efficiencies and outcomes of an organization’s programs using a dataset like the cell phone records and text messages was great for all involved. The organization received the results, plus the ability to better track and respond to information going forward. The data scientists worked on a project that challenged their skills and taught them new skills.

We might call Mobilising Health a very “ripe” subject for data analysis. They had an organized, well recorded set of data. Thank you cell phone companies! But what about organizations that are offering after school programs or programs at domestic abuse shelters? And what about fundraising operations?

Notice that the only free service DataKind offers is the hackathon weekend for “well-defined data problems” such as Mobilising Health. What do we know about the majority of nonprofit organizations? If the information is even recorded, the data is often “dirty” and leadership unaware of what types of problems data analysis can help them solve. The potential for improved mission performance through data analysis is exciting and very, very real! But so is the underwhelming enthusiasm for data collection and maintenance.

Not all of us are born as philanthropy geeks and for many people, the care and maintenance of data is about as thrilling as watching grass grow. But understanding the value and potential of data collection – significantly improved mission outcomes – is pretty glamorous.

When it comes to fundraising, Joshua Birkholz wrote a very friendly read – Fundraising Analytics – for the Wiley/AFP Fund Development Series. The most important part of the book is the beginning where he talks about translating your fundraising goals into questions that can be answered with data. Once you understand what it is you want to know, recording, maintaining and analyzing the data can be done by others. Maybe even a DataKind hackathon crew!

Prospect research professionals are your neighborhood philanthropy geeks. We help you translate your goals into questions and translate your questions in data recording and reporting. The ability to monitor your fundraising performance and react to external and internal donor trends can lead to impressive dollars raised – and transform your ability to perform your mission.

Have you worked with a friendly neighborhood philanthropy geek today?

About the Author

Jen Filla is president of Aspire Research Group LLC where she works with organizations worried about finding their next big donor, concerned about what size gift to ask for, or frustrated that they aren’t meeting their major gift goals.

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Who are "Asian-Americans"?

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According to the Economist article, “Racial classification: All together now” published in December of 2012, the two big surprises in 2012 were that Asian-Americans outnumbered Latinos in immigrating to the U.S. and that 71% of Asian-Americans voted for President Obama in the last election – roughly equivalent to Latinos.

Fundraising organizations in the U.S. have become very interested cultivating Asian-Americans. But who are they? The largest subgroup are Chinese-Americans, but they represent just 23% of Asian Americans. As a group, Asian-Americans are wealthier and better educated than other groups including whites. But the differences run deep including different religions and very different languages.

According to the Economist, only 19% of Asian-Americans use the term to describe themselves. Not too surprisingly, many second-generation Asian-Americans (median age of 17 years) are okay with the term and less concerned about their heritage. What is surprising and a bit revealing is that in some cases, Asian-Americans can unite as a much larger group and demand attention and power in civic life.

If you are considering different fundraising strategies that involve pursuing specific ethnic groups like Asian-Americans, this is a reminder that some of the names we assign to ethnic groups are purely inventions that may not resonate with those individuals. When considering donor motivations, passions and priorities, targeting such a diverse group as Asian-Americans is not likely to be effective. You will need to get more specific. Doing the research on your donors’ communities to discover how they interact within them is critical to creating and executing a strategy that focuses on a specific group.

Prospect research is always important, but when you are looking to reach out to new ethnic groups with ties to their home countries, prospect research takes on a different flavor. We need to discover more than what we can learn about a specific individual. We need to learn how the donor prospect fits into the local community and how cultural differences affect philanthropy.

Got Software. Got Research?

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Many fundraisers know they need research on donors and prospects, but what is the best way to get it? Should you buy a software subscription? Are there any other options? Let’s answer those questions with a story.

A Software Tale
November has most of us thinking about Thanksgiving and other holidays around the corner. But many accountants are thinking about closing out the books and the approaching tax season. Imagine for a minute that you overhear two guests talking at one of the numerous holiday parties you find yourself attending. Bob Business Owner tells Ann Accountant all about how complicated his finances are for the past year now that his small business is growing and expresses some concern about how it will impact his taxes.

“What are you going to do to make sure your tax filings best reflect those changes?” Ann Accountant asks.

“Oh, I splurged and purchased the latest version of TurboTax this year,” says Bob.

Ann looks genuinely confused. “How does that help you make decisions?”

Important Outcomes
TurboTax is great software, but when your finances are complex a software package is not going to help you make key decisions about your tax filings. When the outcomes are truly important, software doesn’t usually make the grade. Software can’t think, strategize or get creative about its approach.

There are many wonderful software options that meet prospect research needs. I have my own favorite subscriptions and purchases. Software speeds up the time it takes me to research individuals by grouping important resources together. Software makes data analysis possible, and fast.

But software does not recognize that what seems like a random company incorporated by your prospect is likely to be a family limited partnership with at least $10 million in invested assets. Software does not recognize that you were not able to mail your usual spring appeal two years ago and that is why giving frequency went down.

What About You – The Fundraiser?
So how do you know when to buy software? Or when you need a person who has expertise? Or some combination? Whenever you have a fundraising goal or objective, ask any potential vendor or consultant whether their solution will get you where you want to go. The answers may surprise you. But let’s illustrate it with another story.

An organization wants to launch its first campaign. They have campaign counsel to coach them through, but they need to prioritize their database and get detailed information on their best prospects. This campaign is very important to the future of their organization and they have a tight budget. The CEO is a visionary and she knows that spending a little more in the right places can have transformative results. She hires a prospect research consultant who makes sure they get as much out of their database screening as possible.

The consultant works closely with the fundraising team, including campaign counsel, to segment their best prospects and code them in the database to work in tandem with their relationship management system. Through this process the team recognizes that they need to restructure their approach based on the giving potential found. Instead of struggling near the end of the campaign, the team knows exactly when to change gears and re-focus their energy on a different prospect segment. It works!

At this point you might be saying to yourself:

“That’s all well and good, Jen, but how do I pick a good prospect research consultant? I’ve heard of organizations who have suffered with bad advice and bad information. I don’t want to be one of them!”

Choosing a prospect research consultant – any consultant really – can be confusing and risky. Take the time to communicate clearly what you want to accomplish. Is the consultant listening? Or doing all of the talking? Did you check references? Look for posts in the future on how to choose and manage a consultant.

Other Articles You Might Like

5 Ways You know You Need a Research Consultant

Mistakes That Nonprofit Organizations Make Hiring Consultants – Karen Eber Davis

3 Consultant Relationship Types that Succeed. Which One for You?

The Shocking Truth About Prospect Research Consultants

About Aspire Research Group LLC

Headquartered in Tampa Bay, Florida, Aspire Research Group was founded so that every development office could have the benefits of professional prospect research. Known for our creativity and clear communications, we work with organizations who are worried about finding their next big donor, concerned about what size gift to ask for, and frustrated that they aren’t meeting their major gift goals. Do you need to close more major gifts?

www.AspireResearchGroup.com 727 231 0516