When I first moved to Greater Tampa Bay, Florida from Greater Philadelphia, the big excitement was spotting dolphins and manatees. It was so cool! After years on the beach, I could tell just by the way the water was moving which marine life was causing it, including dolphins and manatees. Spotting the dolphin fin or hearing a manatee “snort” clinched the identification. In prospect research, I’ve learned to spot the whales – the major gift prospects that are capable of gifts of $10M or even $100M or more.
Do you remember back when there were live luncheons? Or maybe you’re already starting to attend them again. The kind where there is a speaker and everyone is seated to eat their meal while hearing the talk. Often, when you sit down to eat, the table is already set with the salad AND the dessert.
I am headed out to Atlanta to attend the Apra Prospect Development conference, July 26-29, 2022. My primary goal? Connect with some of the new vendors on the scene and re-connect with my favorite vendors to learn about what’s new.
Conferences provide a very relaxed space to explore and be curious. All of us attending are away from our desks and the pressure of email and deadlines (well, mostly).
If you’ve been in the prospect research field a while, you are probably on the Apra forums (known as PRSPCT-L from the list-serv days). And it was there that someone mentioned The Morning Brew newsletter. A year later I’m still hooked! It’s a great read over breakfast (sorry The Economist, you’re relegated to lunch). THIS is my Morning-Brew-inspired attempt for prospect research.
Why the break in the usual format? It’s all because summer slammed into Florida – and everywhere else. What could I possibly write about that would be interesting in skyrocketing temperatures? Thank heavens for past content and a growing nonprofit sector!
Remember when you were six years old and you walked into the toy store? A huge building chock full of every toy imaginable! Now imagine that your favorite uncle says you can pick out any toy you want, so long as it’s under $50. The sheer awesomeness of this proposition for your six-year-old self is overwhelming. Without some additional guidance, it’s almost mean.
Now imagine that you have even $10,000 to buy data and research tools to support your fundraising efforts. I’m thrilled to suggest that it can be just as overwhelming as that toy store! So many tech companies are starting-up with a focus on nonprofits first that it’s amazing, but also challenging. There is so much happening it can be difficult to even know what is available.
The marketplace isn’t the only thing changing. Naturally, best practices are changing along with the tools new to market. It is a truly exciting time to be in prospect research as the data world shifts beneath our CRM databases!
Today I want to talk about a new kind of toy, I mean, tool. There are a lot of different monikers out there hoping to snag a customer–insight, score, intelligence–but these machine learning algorithms–sometimes lumped in with AI (artificial intelligence)–are decidedly different from what has been available to us in the past two decades.
What is machine learning vs. artificial intelligence? For an explainer article, click here. For an explainer video, click here.
Machine Learning (“ML”) Algorithms
Whether you are doing your ongoing prospect identification or seeking to segment or filter your donor prospect pool for any number of fundraising reasons, ML Algorithms essentially score your constituent records on request. These scores answer questions such as the following:
Who likes to receive phone calls?
Who has an affinity for children’s healthcare?
Who is likely to have higher education and not have children?
The fundraising questions can be endless in variety…
But you’ve heard all of this before, haven’t you? And for years and years, right? It’s predictive modeling or some variety of statistical data modeling and you may even be using these models right now to provide you with great scores.
So, what makes ML Algorithms different?
Data Mining on Steroids
All of the activity we perform to identify, segment, and filter our constituents falls under the term “data mining.” It’s cool and absolutely everyone does it! Every time you ask for a report with multiple criteria, such as “all donors who have given more than $5,000 in the past year,” you are doing data mining.
But ML Algorithms are different. They are BIGGER. But does that make them better? And how is this different from a common best practice, such as wealth screening?
The figure below is a simplified distinction between the three groups of activities we perform on constituent data for fundraising purposes.
All three groups of activities could involve strictly internal data, such as your donor names, giving history, etc. Or they could include external data such as matching and appending real estate addresses and market values, gifts to other organizations, nonprofit board leadership, private foundations, and much more. Traditional prospect wealth screenings match external data to internal data and provide some scores, most often mathematical calculations such as capacity ratings based on visible asset values.
It has been a best practice to match external information to our donor prospects AND have statistical data modeling performed on the information in our database. We prospect research professionals then leverage the additional information about wealth and philanthropy and the modeled score, to identify new major gift prospects.
Sounds familiar so far, right?
ML Algorithms can be applied to your internal data, but for now, are often way more effective if they take your constituent data and match it out to the world of BIG data. Because, if your organization is like the majority of organizations in the US, your CRM is small data. BIG data are the huge datasets collected and constantly growing in social media, marketing, and so many more places.
Statistical data modeling is limited by the number of data points that can go into a model. However, ML Algorithms can handle this massive mess of data and build somewhat shockingly accurate insights or scores.
My favorite example of ML Algorithms being right is when Target began mailing coupons for baby items to a household in 2012 where the teen daughter was pregnant – but had not yet told her family. Yikes!
Is Bigger Always Better?
Now that you understand the basic differences between simple data mining, statistical data modeling, and ML Algorithms, how does that help you decide what to buy? Is the BIG data available to ML Algorithms make it better?
Of course, your purchasing decision is going to depend on what you are trying to accomplish with the tool. But my hope is that you are now equipped to read the company marketing materials and ask the important questions to make the best purchasing decision.
For example, your internal data is GOLD! You can get very far using it better in fundraising. But if that is no longer enough for you and your team, you can still do quite well to add the traditional prospect wealth screening (especially if there is an ML Algorithm add-on available).
If traditional screenings are not enough for your constituency – and this is often the case if your donors contain a lot of diversity – then ML Algorithms based on external data can be an exciting breakthrough! Diverse donors are often overlooked when considering visible asset values – for lots of reasons.
One last tip on when big is better: if your organization does not have its own big data, be sure that the tool you purchase is offering an ML Algorithm score based on EXTERNAL data, and not your own INTERNAL data. You need a boost, not a belly flop!
Beyond the Tool
Taking you back to the beginning of this article, remember how I mentioned that it was almost mean to drop a six-year-old into a store with $50 and no guidance on how to choose a toy? All of these new tools on the market have deep implications for the field of prospect research. And one of them is that the trained prospect research professional takes on a new role, guiding its organization to make great purchasing decisions, but more importantly, to then use these tools effectively so that the organization’s fundraising can reach a new level of efficiency and growth.
I don’t know about you, but I get just as excited as that six-year-old in the toy store when contemplating the world of information technology that is unfolding before us!
What would happen if researchers adopted the technique of method acting for one week out of every year? What if the researcher “became” a major gift fundraiser? Could this be the kind of training that could differentiate between superstar researchers and all the rest?
Are you familiar with method acting? It’s where the actor stays in the role of the character, even off camera. Jack Nicholson — he starred as Jack Torrance in the Shining, Col. Jessup in A Few Good Men, and too many more to list — was reported to have modestly said, “There’s probably no one who understands method acting better academically than I do, or actually uses it more in his work.”
And I have heard of organizations where the researcher tags along for some donor visits or makes thank you calls to donors. As part of the development department, it’s not unheard of for a researcher to help staff major donor events. I have. All of these interactions shift the researcher out of his or her research mindset and into a donor-facing mindset.
Because whatever research you’re doing – profiles, data mining, prospect lists, verifying a screening – could benefit from one last review by you, but in the mindset or role of major gift officer. When I say “one last review” I mean that there needs to be distance of some kind between performing the work and reviewing the work.
Just as writers will put down their work for a few days or a few weeks, picking it up again with “fresh eyes,” so researchers can put down their work and pick it up again with “major gift officer eyes.”
Reviewing Research through “Major Gift Officer Eyes”
Anyone who routinely reviews donor prospects with talented major gift officers can’t help but to start thinking like one. Imagine that you both have the profiles up on your computers and the major gift officer starts commenting and asking questions in each of the five building blocks of the profile, like this:
Institutional Information: Is this the same couple that met while on one of our sponsored donor trips? (Yes, it was, and by golly that level of high affinity changes everything about approaching them for a campaign gift!)
Biographical Information: I clicked through to her Twitter account and did you see that in her profile line she describes herself as a “disability advocate, wife, and mother?” I wonder if they have a disabled child! (Obviously, you didn’t read it because you put “none found” under children and didn’t find any connection to your cause beyond her first gift to your organization.)
Community Involvement: They gave a million dollars to Sunshine Charity? Really? I wonder what that was about. They’ve only ever given us $1,000 and everything else found shows giving under $5,000. (After tracking down the annual report it turns out it was a typo from the vendor and you need to re-examine the screening capacity rating.)
Occupation: His wife is Janita Billingswart? Do you think she’s the celebrity attorney? A name like that, surely… (But you didn’t search her name because the deep relationship has been with the spouse and you were in a hurry.)
Wealth and Assets: Can you tell me more about the family limited partnership you mention here? Doesn’t that mean they have a lot of money? (You check it out when you’re off the call and realize it does indicate significant wealth and now you notice it was formed the same year that they sold their first company.)
You might not be able to practice method acting and live the life of your major gift officers to understand them, but you can live their work life vicariously by engaging in frequent conversations about their prospects. It takes dedicated effort, but so does method acting. And you will learn LOADS about doing research better.
Getting Good Without Shock Therapy
It was rumored that Jack Nicholson underwent shock therapy in preparation for his role in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I don’t recommend diving deep into every single research project or you might just go crazy!
Here’s how I described to a client, and an amazing major gift fundraiser, what he could expect from our profiles so he could know when to question us about the work and when he should run off on his own with his questions:
Our Snap Bios are a quick look, a snapshot, and it is unlikely that we would jump out of our usual process to follow a lead or ask a deeper question about the prospects.
Our Tactical Briefings are confirming philanthropy and wealth and while we are spending more time and digging deeper, we’re unlikely to wander off following a hunch unless there is an anomaly — unless something looks strange or we want to be sure we are accurate.
Our Strategic Assessments are the deep dive, following all those questions, untangling ambiguity, and laboriously seeking information not directly related to the prospect, but directly related to the prospect’s philanthropic or wealth story.
Of course, the fewer hours it takes us, the lower the cost, but the less information, too. Sometimes we do get dazzled by a prospect, spend more time, and the inspiration unlocks key information. We love our work and that’s inevitable!
Anything You Do, You Could Do Better
The prospect research field is full of people who are fulfilled in their work because it demands constant learning across, well, everything! We can have confidence in knowing that we don’t know a lot, and this opens us up to learn from everyone, everywhere.
So, even though the examples I’ve given in this article relate to prospect profiles, you could do better in every aspect of your work. Maybe your major gift officer loves Excel and enjoys filtering and sorting a long list of potential prospects for an upcoming trip, but is that the best way to provide the information? Could the process be improved?
If you don’t look at your work product through “major gift officer eyes” you may never know. I’m curious. Aren’t you?
I pivoted my legal assistant career into fundraising and prospect research 22 years ago. Somehow, I’m still in love with the work. Sure, there are brief stints where I fall a little out of love with it, but then I talk to a colleague and we come up with new ideas, or a new tool arrives on the market that shifts how we can perform our work. And I fall in love all over again.
This year for Research Pride month I thought I would share some of my favorite things about Prospect Research Professionals.
Insatiable Learners: When given the opportunity, such as working at a university, researchers do their homework and earn multiple degrees. You might not need a Ph.D. to do prospect research, but I love it that many practitioners have a stack of letters after their names. And if you’re around long enough, you realize that people stumble into the field with those letters already attached, most notably MLIS and JD. How fascinating is that?
Readers and Writers: Karen Osborne and Kate Racculia are more recent examples of fundraising professionals that go seriously all-in to writing. Kate even wrote a novel, Tuesday Mooney Talks to Ghosts, where the protagonist is a prospect research professional! Any mention of authors can’t leave out Cecilia Hogan, who wrote the pioneering text, Prospect Research: A Primer for Growing Nonprofits. And there are so many more books now! Here’s a list of books and bloggers.
Innovators and Change-Makers: Christina Pulawski and John Taylor brought to life the Association for Advancement Services Professionals in 2007 to fill a need in the field. Sharise Harrison was featured in The Chronicle of Philanthropy recently for her groundbreaking work in shifting the culture at her organization to view prospect data differently so as to include more people of color.
People: Sharing a profession with other people is like belonging to a club. For the most part there is a sense of camaraderie and joy in “talking shop” without boring anyone. And there are so many kind, funny, and clever researchers out there. Follow #ProspectResearch on Twitter, join AASP or Apra, attend conferences – connect.
Wishing you another year of continuously falling in love with your work in prospect research!
Additional Resources
Research Pride: A Common Thread That Binds Us | Patricia (Suzi) Elzie-Tuttle, MLIS | Apra Connections | 3/15/2022 | A wonderful tribute to the prospect research profession with a call to action.
You have a strong track-record leading teams. Your fundraising efforts have met or exceeded goal. So why are you struggling so much getting major gifts rolling in your new position? Maybe you have even thrown a good deal of money at the problem by purchasing some data enhancements or predictive scores and you still can’t quite get it to work.
You might even be wondering if other organizations have some kind of major gift fairy dust that they sprinkle over their database to sort out their prospect portfolios!
And maybe they do…
Secret Recipe for Major Gift Fairy Dust
The first step in prospect identification is to find a way to automatically filter or screen new donors as they arrive. Lots of organizations do this by talking to every donor who makes a gift at a certain threshold, such as $100+ or $1,000+. This is good, until it’s not good enough anymore.
Ingredients
The only way to assess your full data base of donors or new donors as they arrive is to define what makes a Best Prospect. To do this, you have to select the right ingredients.
When working with a pool of existing donors, I recommend these ingredients:
Affinity: Affinity is really the secret sauce in this recipe. What data points are a measure of the donor’s alignment or love or engagement with your organization? If you can add this to your recipe, you will do very well!
Ability: Knowing a measure of the wealth available to give, even with a pretty wide margin of error, is super helpful.
Inclination: Data is available to show whether someone has philanthropic interest. The donor may have given to other organizations and been publicly recognized for those gifts or s/he might serve on nonprofit boards or have a foundation. By definition, philanthropic individuals are much more likely to give than non-philanthropic individuals.
Once you understand what the ingredients are, you can now begin to identify those ingredients to create your own major gift fairy dust. There are many choices to make, such as the vendor offering an ingredient or various flavors of the same basic ingredient. I am sure you already have many software companies trying to sell their products to you!
Instructions
In any recipe you have ingredients and then you have instructions. The instructions tell you how to combine everything and turn it into major gift fairy dust. But not everyone succeeds at making a tasty dish or a high-performing major gift prospect list from a recipe. Sometimes it is because the ingredients weren’t of the highest quality and sometimes it is because the instructions assume a certain level of starting experience and knowledge.
For example, one of the best things to happen to me, a very reluctant cook, was Pinterest. I can find all kinds of recipes posted by bloggers and “pinned” to Pinterest. I have food allergies and these bloggers don’t just post ingredients and instructions, they write an entire blog post on how to choose and substitute ingredients, as well as all sorts of additional preparation tips–before they even get to the recipe. This has really taught me how to cook better food for my dietary needs!
When I write up the instructions for turning a combination of ingredients or data points into prioritized prospects, I call it segmentation. I prefer to “flatten” the ingredients into two numbers and present it via some kind of visual, such as the illustration below.
Note: In this illustration, the DonorSearch score (DS1) has flattened Ability and Inclination into one score and RFM (Recency, Frequency, Magnitude) represents Affinity
And much like the Pinterest blog post prior to the recipe, my experience has taught me how and when to modify the recipe ingredients and instructions to fit unique scenarios and organizations.
The Prospect Research Professional Chef
In addition to a recipe, baking and cooking takes experience. Identifying prospects and choosing data providers takes experience, too. Sure, anyone can do it, but the results most often reveal exactly how much experience when into it.
How to approach prospect identification is going to vary greatly because organizations are all very different. An organization with a 10-person major gift team is very different from a 100-strong major gift team that has a supporting prospect research department, and both of those are very different from a development officer in charge of a 5-person development team that does everything.
If you decide to embark on a prospect identification project and are not going to hire an experienced professional, you can still use the three ingredients to assess your internal data as well as what external vendors are offering you.
You can ask informed questions, such as the following:
Do we have affinity markers immediately available from our INTERNAL data (giving data especially!) or can we easily build or buy an affinity marker based on our own data?
If the vendor is offering EXTERNAL data for affinity, how well does it align with our organization? For example, is affinity for youth causes too broad to be useful to your early intervention programs for pre-school children? Can you have a custom affinity model built?
Is the data being offered a predictive model (e.g., likelihood to make a major gift) or a data enhancement or append (e.g., largest gift found to others)?
Exactly what does the ability marker mean? Is it estimated net worth? Is it a gift capacity range over one year or five years?
If you receive some kind of numerical score, will you be provided with definitions? Such as “80-100 is Very Good” and “60-79 is Good” etc.
When you receive the data back from the vendor, how will you know which names are the be stand why? Will you be able to filter on a score or data point and relate it back to the database ID number/name of constituent?
Beyond the Recipe
Keep in mind that you can sprinkle all the fairy dust you want, but unless you have the skill to take action, nothing magical is going to happen. On the other hand, if you can recognize and leverage the three main ingredients in major gift fairy dust, and leverage affinity as your “secret sauce,” you will be well on your way.
I know it sounds too simple, and “major gift fairy dust” is a silly way to refer to a best practice, but I’ve seen too many talented development leaders purchase very expensive data only to flounder. There will always be hype around the next and greatest innovation in fundraising, but the fundamentals of what builds strong relationships will stay the same.
If you can focus on the three main ingredients–Affinity (above all), Ability, and Inclination–you can begin to sift through and better understand all of the data purchasing choices that are put in front of you. Because even though data might not be your “thing,” you are a talented fundraiser and leader!
Additional Resources
Segmentation and Personalization in Fundraising Appeals |John Killoran | Aspire Research Group Fundraising Insights | 2021 | This is a great example of how segmentation to nurture and grow your direct fundraising appeals differs from segmenting for major gifts.
I was talking with a major gift officer and she told me that a couple of years ago, leadership of the major gifts team wanted to push through to a new fundraising goal. Each officer was assigned a fundraising goal that was based on gift capacity ratings that had been recently added to the database through a wealth screening. Spoiler Alert: They came in way under goal that year.
Every day I am thankful that I get to be a prospect research consultant and not a major gifts team leader. It seems to me that it most resembles catching greased pigs!!
Not only must leadership build, train, and manage the staff, but that major gifts team must then build relationships with individuals who possess their own objectives and personalities. Throw in the reality that information technology has been changing very swiftly and it is easy to understand how someone could get sold on a score or rating and forget that all the fundraising fundamentals still apply:
Just because someone has a lot of money does not mean they will give big to your organization.
Quantifying and rating things like gift capacity and affinity or interest is challenging; not least because the data you need is not always available or collected in your database.
The best data can’t bring your team’s skills up to speed or accelerate their adaptation to change.
Should You Even Use Gift Capacity Ratings?
I admit to still being in awe of capacity ratings. After all these years, they still feel magical. Thousands of individual names being ranked in a few hours. And the matching algorithms have gotten better and better, too. I can’t imagine going without wealth screenings and their accompanying gift capacity ratings.
It’s more about what you use capacity ratings with.
You wouldn’t try to bake a cake with only one or two ingredients, would you? And you wouldn’t try to bake a cake without following a recipe – maybe tweaking that recipe from time to time, such as adding instant coffee to chocolate cake? (Yes, I’m all about the cake baking!)
It’s been my experience that every organization is different and as with cakes, recipes lead the way to success. They give you the key ingredients and measure them in relation to one another.
If you are just building your major gifts program, you may only need to segment your prospect pool by capacity rating and RFM scores (recency, frequency, monetary scoring that is based on giving history) to get a really strong start.
If you are working to bridge your major gifts team to much higher fundraising goals, you need a much more robust, ongoing process that is tweaked based on your unique organization and constituency.
And even that more robust process is probably going to do well with gift capacity ratings as one of the pieces.
Keep the Capacity Ratings in Good Company
Machine learning and tech companies focused on the nonprofit sector are really heating up the research space! They promise to deliver a more inclusive and comprehensive approach to fundraising research. But they haven’t made capacity ratings redundant, yet.
Until they do, make sure you keep your capacity ratings in good company. Pair them with insights from your donors’ giving history, any engagement markers in your database, and other stuff you know is important (gift size increasing over time, high lifetime giving, etc.).
And listen to your team members. Sometimes out of the mouths of major gift officers come the most amazing observations. “As soon as I saw she made gifts to those three organizations, I knew she would want to make X gift for $.”
In other words, capacity ratings might seem “stupid” sometimes, but it’s what “stupid” does that matters most. If you pair capacity ratings with other information, you might just break through your fundraising goals!
We know that innovation is pretty reliably produced from adversity. When we are comfortable and content there is no pressure to come up with new and better ways of doing things. But when your entire organization suddenly has to go remote, well, you either innovate or sink!
At that moment, it becomes too risky to do things the same way we’ve always done it. Our inhibitions are lowered. We worry less about getting it wrong or embarrassing ourselves and instead we worry more about losing everything.
Did the field of fundraising research experience this lowering of inhibitions and increased risk taking? You bet!
As I reflect on nearly two years of pandemic, I wanted to share with you my experiences with some of the stand out innovators in the fundraising research LEARNING and TRAINING space.
DonorSearch Launched Unbounded
DonorSearch was the first to leap into action. They launched an ambitious, virtual “conference” that was completely free and lasted for many months. It was on a new platform that offered all kinds of ways to interact and provide information.
I wasn’t 100% thrilled with the platform, but I recognized that as the first out in the space, DonorSearch was setting the standard from which others could build. It was because DonorSearch immediately offered interactive content that I could experience and like or dislike aspects of the virtual experience.
And the quality of their speakers and content was (and is) tremendous! I was riveted and immediately wanted to participate.
Apra International All Virtual Conference
The annual Apra Prospect Development conference also moved swiftly to an all-virtual format. I could not have been prouder to be a member of Apra at that conference!
The online website for the conference was incredibly engaging:
There were opportunities to search who was registered and send them direct messages.
I could invite people to a zoom meeting on the website.
Visiting the vendors was simple and intimate – just enter a Zoom room.
Search capability was (not surprisingly) easy. So, finding a speaker, a session, or a link was easier than in real life. It helped that I could have multiple browser windows open, too.
The actual sessions took on a whole new dimension with the chat feature. At times the chat was so robust, with so many people, that it was difficult to follow along with the speaker. But fear not! All the sessions could be watched long after the actual conference dates were over.
I researched the platform provider a bit and realized that the price tag on that magnificent experience was not small. I can only hope that an all-virtual signature conference persists as part of Apra’s offerings.
I speculate that costs overall are indeed lower, and the ability to include so many more people from around the world feels like a critical gain for our profession.
Apra PA All-Discussion Conference
Without access to pricey platform options, could the small Apra chapters compete in the all-virtual space? Yes! Small is nimble and chapters across the U.S. flooded our profession with high-quality content. And having speakers that weren’t super-polished turned out to be a real advantage.
Apra PA showed us that there is no limit to innovating. They adopted a “flipped” conference approach!
Instead of having all of us on Zoom watching talking heads, learning content was provided ahead of time and the Zoom meeting sessions were organized as breakouts where the content was discussed with peers. Content could be in many formats, such as written, graphic, video, or audio.
The results were very intimate, engaging connections with peers around topics of interest. And isn’t that a lot of what we hope for in-person?
Apra FL WINE Downs
My home state of Florida is a special place. As a tourist destination we are surrounded by people who have lowered inhibitions – they are on vacation! When Aisha Maddox of Apra FL began organizing and hosting WINE Downs (Worthwhile Informal Networking Event), it sounded like a fun and informal way to connect with my Florida colleagues. What I did NOT expect were online trivia games!
I’ve always felt that games are a fantastic way to learn about others and can be great for learning content, too. Even though I am horrible at trivia, I happily embarrassed myself with wrong answers for the privilege of getting to know my colleagues in a social setting. The music, laughter, and hearing about people’s families and lives outside of work has been a very meaningful experience.
There’s No Going Back
Now that we continue to face uncertainty with the pandemic, it has become pretty clear that there is no going back to “before COVID.” And I am deeply grateful that there has been a surge in adopting virtual tools such as Zoom, Slack, and file sharing.
Because at the Prospect Research Institute we have always been virtual. We adopted the “flipped” classroom model back in 2014 when we launched. Now the Institute provides both on-demand and live educational opportunities. And, thanks in part to COVID, it has become much easier for people to understand and conceptualize the online experience.
As younger, all-digital generations start entering the workforce I can’t wait to discover some of the innovations that surge generates around technology and human interactions!
But for now, I’m thrilled when most people in a meeting are willing to turn on their video and talk.
