If you’re reading this blog, I suspect you are probably a researcher or really like data and research. But imagine you are vice president at a nonprofit. You took the job because you are an awesome major gift fundraiser, you know how to lead a team, and you love the mission. But inevitably, you arrive and have to overcome a million big and small hurdles, mostly with data and process.

You persist.

Finally, you are ready to focus on major gift prospects from the donor pool, but egads! The data confounds you again. You hire a consultant. You ask her to find your top 100 prospects.

And the consultant says, “I would be delighted to!”

But the consultant does not deliver your top 100. She goes on about how important it is to define what that means for your organization. She starts giving you all kinds of blah, blah, blah about ratings and giving.

You need your top prospects so that you can show the CEO – who is breathing down your neck about budget – that you have at least the possibility of big dollars coming in soon. The research department at your last employer routinely delivered top prospects, why is this consultant giving you so much bother?

Well, at least that’s how I imagine it playing out. I mean, how many times have I asked my husband to do something and he gives me 20 questions and I think “can’t he just DO it?”

Just Do It

Of course, as the researcher, the dialog in this scenario is entirely different. We aren’t mind-readers and the data we get handed often requires a lot of work to make it remotely usable. And all that is just getting the project prepped for the actual research, which is a time-consuming process that can only go so fast.

The tension is real. And I LOVE it!

Because today was the moment I could finally get my client’s attention and show her the results of our prospect identification research. We reached a mutual understanding. She feels confident in her top 112 prospects and knows that the next step is to read through those generated profiles and choose which prospects should be qualified by which of her development officers.

How did I do it? Did I finally pick up my magic wand from the magic repair shop? No, but I did use a little magic!

Pivot Table Magic

I feel like I should know by now exactly how to present these data projects, but every data set, every organization, every leader, is different. What is going to best portray what that person needs to make an informed decision?

Sometimes my pivot table is behind the scenes, feeding a visual that I create separately, but today it was a pivot table – pure and simple – with a few slicers. The pivot table did all the counting for me – how many were in each category. The slicers let me show her how those counts changed by things like state of residence.

The magic of this pivot table was that it concentrated our discussion on those categories and numbers.

If I had simply handed over names and said “here’s your top 100 prospects,” when she began calling them and problems arose, she might come to the conclusion that I had given her bad names. In the end, she recognized where the best place to focus her time and energy was – and WHY that was so.

Excel Spreadsheets are Not Enough

As prospect research professionals, we are data lovers. And when that data is in an Excel spreadsheet it hums to us. But I don’t care how much your development officer loves to get a spreadsheet to play with, delivering a spreadsheet is rarely ever good enough.

Your job is to help your development officers understand, ask questions about, and make informed decisions from the data. Every time you interact with your development officers the two of you learn so many important things about each other’s work and your donors.

And every time you take time to facilitate an understanding of an Excel spreadsheet (that you anguished over) you are practicing a little bit of data magic. Have you practiced any magic lately?