Category Archives: Prospect Research

Top Secret! How to Bulk up your Prospect Pool

Prospect Identification, Prospect Research, Resource Links, , , , , , , , , , , , ,

HappyKeySMIn this article I’m going to share the secrets of finding great prospects. Maybe you’re one of those fundraisers who is always reading the Business Journal scouting for a lead, but they don’t pan out. Do you wonder how those other organizations pull in the big gifts? Or maybe you’re new and all the best prospects are assigned to senior fundraisers. You can get great prospects too!

If you read a lot of blogs (like I do) now is where you get skeptical. Is she just going to give me theory I already know (and hasn’t yet helped me find good prospects) or will I get at least a couple of nuggets I can actually use? I’m aiming for the latter. The “trick” is that you still have to work hard!

Fundraising research theory tells us that you need to know who you are looking for so you can spot them. We use jargon like linkage, ability and affinity. And there are tools that give you a competitive edge with that. But you can do it even without bright, shiny tools.

The First Thing…

The first thing any good fundraiser (and prospect researcher) needs to do is learn what it looks like to be wealthy. Watching soap operas may seem like a good education here, but much better is reading through some of the wealth reports like the Knight Frank Wealth Report 2014. You’ll find links for other reports in the sidebar on your right.

And the second first-thing-any-good-fundraiser-needs -to-do is get in front of people, especially donors. You should read and get in front of donors at the same time. Start with known donors because they are the most likely to give (again) and it’s always better to get a gift, right?

Call, visit, and read.

When you are reading about the wealthy at the same time as you visit prospects you’ll start making the connections. When the prospect talks about how he and his wife are taking classes in gemology and he has a watch collection, you’ll remember what you read about this being an investment hobby for the very wealthy. And when a different prospect brags about taking regular trips to Europe on mileage points you’ll recognize that what you thought were luxury vacations probably aren’t.

You can do that without any tools except your eyes and ears. Well, I guess you need to use your mouth to place the phone call…and, okay, guide the conversation. But you get it, right? Recognizing the wealthy – the truly wealthy – takes an education.

Get Your Toolbox Dirty

Getting an education on spotting the wealthy still isn’t likely to fill your prospect pool with GREAT donors – those with linkage, ability and affinity. If you have tools that assign ratings to the prospects in your database, use them! Don’t be discouraged if it doesn’t work out perfectly the first few times.

For example, you might pull a report of people who rate high for ability and likelihood to make a gift, but find most won’t take your phone call. You may need to add additional criteria depending on your organization. Maybe it’s “donor within the past two years” or “attended an event in the past two years” or some other criteria that makes it more likely they will let you visit with them.

Keep track of your efforts so you can repeat what works best. And, yes, this does mean you will have to make a lot of phone calls that end in “no thank you I don’t want a visit”.

It’s the same even if you don’t have tools that provide ratings. Without tools you have to get more of an education. You might use a free tool like the Washington Post’s interactive map** of the nation’s super zips to identify wealthy zip codes to search for in your donor database and combine that with “donor within the past two years” or other criteria that suggest a “warmness” toward your organization.

The Secret Weapon

If you are really lucky, you have a trained prospect researcher on staff. Use all your fundraising powers of relationship building to get this prospect research wizard on your side!

HOT TIP: your researcher is likely to get the most excited about searching out top prospects if you reward her with feedback from your calls and face-to-face visits.

With a prospect researcher on your team you are more likely to out-produce even seasoned professionals in the race for fundraised dollars. Really, really!

…and if you can’t support a trained prospect researcher full-time, you can always outsource. Just sayin’!

**Julie, Prospect Research Analyst in Pennsylvania and Groundbreaking Student at the Prospect Research Institute, shared this fantastic resource with the class!

Did you get a nugget or two?

I hope you found a useful tip you can apply in your office. Maybe you have great suggestions you’d like to share with others. Please comment and share!

Jenz Favorite Wealth Reports

Watch out Prospects! Got a Photo? Gotcha!

Profiles, Prospect Research, Resource Links, , , , , , , , , ,

Do you know how it is when you find a new tool and suddenly it appears EVERYWHERE?! This is how I feel about relationship mapping. Ever since I purchased a subscription to Prospect Visual, I have started to notice different relationship mapping techniques and applications all over the place. My recent quest for facial recognition searches on photos is a case in point.

My typical nonprofit client doesn’t have a huge warehouse of internal data and often feels an urgency to add to its current donor pool to meet special fundraising initiatives. Relationship mapping holds such promise for identifying prospect gold in uncharted territories! Or does it? Yet?

My feel for the technologies involved is that it is early days. Some of what is currently being commercialized could be easily disrupted by what we might now consider ancillary or “extra” services. Facial recognition is a good example.

Technologies like facial recognition are both shockingly advanced and woefully inadequate. Most things start out expensive and, especially with technology, can become affordable in a remarkably short period of time. Here’s hoping that happens with facial recognition. Unless of course you are searching on me!

Here’s how my facial recognition quest began. I was working on a difficult prospect assignment. Not many donor lists out in the public domain in this particular city, and board members with limited profiles and middle-income wealth. And then I stumbled on a Flickr account with gala pictures from a past event of a similar organization. Eureka!

But no captions on the photos. And I am not personally familiar with the who’s who of that city. Bummer! Or is there a way? To find out I consulted the best talent around – the research list-serv hosted by APRA – and received two good sources:

Google Images

Did you know that you could search for other images using an existing image? You can! And it did make good *exact* matches to find pages where my picture was located (because, of course, I tested it on myself first). But when it came to similar matches…wildly differing pictures appeared. But, ahem, it did find one of Julia Roberts, which I agree is very similar to mine.

TinEye.com

This site seemed so promising, but it didn’t find any matches on my photo, which was disappointing.

These sites were not enough to help me identify the pictures on that Flickr account. But apparently there is some seriously powerful software available that has the potential to make a prospect researcher’s dream come true and find out way more than just linkage or connection.

Social media maven and all-around talented researcher, Lori Hood Lawson, pointed out a 60 Minutes episode that demonstrated the power of some maturing technologies – and has me even more determined to vote at every possible opportunity!

Check out the 60 Minutes episode here: http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=50153673n

With the proliferation and popularity of photos and videos all over the public domain, it creates an opportunity not currently considered in the text-based products such as Prospect Visual and Relationship Science that are on the market for nonprofits right now.

Relationship mapping and other prospect research techniques often follow behind competitive intelligence and other for-profit efforts. The uses are similar, but not the same, and as prospect researchers, we often find ourselves getting “creative” to make products work for us. However, with the nonprofit industry growing to such a powerful size, we might see a shift.

But don’t worry donors, prospect researchers have a code of ethics we take incredibly seriously!

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.

Other Posts You Might Like

Why Use a Researcher When There’s Google?

3 Actions That Demonstrate Your High Prospect Research IQ

* “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)

Top Tips for Everyone: Power Searching with Google

Profiles, Prospect Research, , ,
Kate Rapoport, Research Associate

In July I attended an online class Google offered called “Power Searching with Google.” The class reminded me of a bunch of tricks to Google searching, and taught me some new ones as well.  Here are a few that I think will be useful for prospect researchers.

Patent searching

If the prospect that you are researching has been involved in research and you want to gather information on what patents she may hold, Google can help with that. On the left hand panel in the search page, under the word “Shopping” click on the word “More”.  The list will expand and you will see “Patents”. Now you can search for your prospect’s name and Google will find patents that contain that name.

Site and Filetype Operators

These operators allow you to narrow your search significantly. The site operator confines your search to one website or domain. For example:

“Jazzy Jay Jefferson” Site:Stanford.edu

…would produce only results that included Jazzy Jay Jefferson on the Stanford.edu website.

“Jazzy Jay Jefferson” Site:.edu

…would find every instance of Jazzy Jay Jefferson on every website that ended in “.edu”.

The filetype operator confines your search to a type of file. For example:

“Jazzy Jay Jefferson” Filetype:pdf

…would produce only results that include Jazzy Jay Jefferson and are PDF documents. (Think: online donor recognition reports!)

Date Range Limiting

If your prospect created a great deal of news in 2008 because of a controversy that you already have sufficient information about and you are now only interested in search results that give you information about your prospect from 2009 to the present, Google offers date range limiting. On the left hand panel of the search page at the bottom is the option “Show search tools.” Once clicked on, the first option is for date range. I can search SlideShare founder “Rashmi Sinha”, click “Show search tools”, select “Custom range”, enter 2009 to 2012, and receive search results from that time frame only.

Search Translated Foreign Pages

If your prospect is an immigrant from or has an interest in a company from another country, you can try to find more information by using the Translated Foreign Pages search function. Type in your search keywords, go to the left hand panel, select “Show Search Tools”, and then select “Translated Foreign Pages”. This will bring up searches for your prospect in available translated pages. You can customize the languages you wish to look through at the top of the search page once you have made the search request.

Conversions

This one is clearly not just for prospect researchers. I can never remember the correct ways to convert feet into meters, for example. Google has a really neat tool that does that for you. Enter “16 feet in meters” into the search box and it immediately gives you the answer (4.8768, just in case you were curious). You can use Google to convert any measurement as long as you use the formula “Number units in units.”

I hope you found these top tips informative, or at least a helpful refresher!

About the Author, Kate Rapoport:

Kate graduated from Smith College with a B.A. in Women’s Studies. She began her career in non-profit administration, became a mother and now, at Aspire Research Group LLC, applies her intelligence and curiosity to preparing prospect profiles that tell the stories that lead to major gifts.

Power Searching with Google Course: A Review

Prospect Research, , , ,
Kate Rapoport, Research Associate

In July, Google invited the public to take a free course entitled “Power Searching with Google.” Google offers many easy ways to find information that the general public doesn’t know about. This course offered anyone the opportunity to learn about the advanced tools Google provides to help search the internet.

As a prospect researcher, I’m always looking for new ways to find things. Also, I was curious to see how Google was going to present the information and how accessible it would be. I signed up for the course and over two weeks completed the six classes and the review exams.

The classes were very easy to follow. The lessons were recorded as video lectures given by a Senior Research Scientist at Google, Daniel Russell. The videos were never longer than ten minutes, and many of them were only five minutes. After each video I completed an exercise to demonstrate that I had learned the material. Usually five short videos made up one class.

Structuring the classes as a series of short videos made it much easier to grasp each concept quickly, but didn’t allow my attention to wander the way a longer video lecture might have done. Also, each class session had an overarching theme, such as interpreting results, advanced techniques and finding facts faster. I found Mr. Russell to be an engaging lecturer, which kept me from wandering away, which I have been known to do in other online lecture classes.

I recommend that other researchers take this course if it is offered again. Although I already knew at least fifty percent of the material, the course clarified things and introduced new ideas on how to perform searches. In a later blog post, I’ll talk about the most useful search skills that the class taught.

About the Author, Kate Rapoport:

Kate graduated from Smith College with a B.A. in Women’s Studies. She began her career in non-profit administration, became a mother and now, at Aspire Research Group LLC, applies her intelligence and curiosity to preparing prospect profiles that tell the stories that lead to major gifts.