Let’s test your wealth instinct and find out if you “get it” or not.

Pretend that your boss comes to you and says: As you know, leadership is taking the company public next year. You can choose how you want to receive your $100,000 annual compensation from the three options below:

1. $25,000 in cash and $75,000 worth of the company’s new stock
2. $75,000 in cash and $25,000 worth of the company’s new stock
3. $80,000 in cash and $0 worth of the company’s new stock

Which one do you choose?

This choice is difficult for you and me!

If the only wealth you have is cash in your bank accounts, maybe some retirement funds like a 401(k), and you are renting or own the home you live in(probably with a mortgage), your options are very limited. Could you survive on $25,000 cash for a year? You are considering the options based on your disposable income.

If you have a dual-income household, a second home, or some reasonably liquid investments that you could cash-in, all three choices might become plausible options. You have disposable income plus additional investment wealth.

I know you know that the $75,000 worth of stock could take off and double or triple in value-or even more. You want that stock!

Now, what if suddenly your parents passed away and you inherited the house they owned for 50 years, which sells for $800,000. Would that make it easier to accept $25,000 in cash with $75,000 in stock?

Of course it would!

And this is the shift in thinking that you need to make when you are researching and cultivating major gift prospects.

You do not want a cash gift.

Check out the asset allocation chart below. This chart is telling you many things, but among them is that in the first quarter of 2021, the high-net-worth individuals (HNWIs) surveyed were holding 24% of all of their wealth in cash and cash equivalents. A cash equivalent is something like a certificate of deposit (CD) or money market account–things that you can very easily turn into cash.

When you ask your donor prospect for a gift, do you want her to think:

Or would you rather ask for a gift of appreciated stock and have her think:

But you shouldn’t just believe me.

What do I know? Instead, you should believe Dr. Russell James who took the time to review a million nonprofit tax returns filed between 2010 and 2015. Numbers don’t lie. Dr. James discovered that nonprofits that received asset gifts raised more money. Check out the figure below for a snapshot of his findings.

Note: If you want to find whether your organization has a history of accepting asset gifts, you can check Schedule Min its public IRS Form 990.

Evaluating your donor prospects for wealth

If you want to grow your fundraising in major gifts, a key strategy is to ask for non-cash gifts. Understanding the asset allocation model from Capgemini featured above allows us to quantify this shift in thinking. We can now estimate the relative size of the cash vs. non-cash wealth held by our donor prospect.

Once you have estimated the value of the cash and non-cash wealth of your prospect, you can better understand how your prospect might view your ask amount relative to those values.

Below is an example of what this allocation looks like if we use the Capgemini asset allocation percentages on someone research has determined has an estimated net worth of $5 million.

Assets	Value
Cash and Cash Equivalents	$850,000
Non-Cash	$4,150,000
Total	$5,000,000

Imagine for a moment that you want to ask the prospect for $250,000. How does that stack up against each of the two categories, cash or non-cash?

Lean-in to the psychology of giving

Why would you want to fight against human nature and continue asking very wealthy donors for cash gifts when you could switch to asking for non-cash and raise more money overall? Lots of reasons. Maybe you feel much more comfortable asking for cash gifts.

I’m suggesting that it’s time to get comfortable with being uncomfortable.

To help you get more comfortable, check out this collection of work by Dr. James for more insights into the psychology of giving and techniques and tactics you can use in your work:

http://www.protopage.com/prospectresearch#Planned_Giving_(Dr._James)

There are those donor prospects where there is simply an overwhelming amount of information. And then there are those prospects whose digital footprint exhibits a strict minimalist aesthetic! I want to tell you a story about the latter.

Identification and Qualification

In the beginning, there was a donor couple. The woman had volunteered with the organization and the total of their three gifts was under $1,000. But, alas, the screening rating popped at $1M to $5M! And so, the prospects were called upon by a development officer (“DO”).

In that first discussion the DO learned about the woman’s volunteering and what her philanthropic interests were. There was so much affinity for the organization’s mission! Off to the prospect research professional for a profile!

Note: In that research request the DO shared the information from her qualification call. This really helped us understand why research was needed.

But their Digital Footprint is… an Outline

At first glance, the prospects are member managers of a hot mess of limited liability companies (LLCs) and there are pretty clear indicators that it is all about real estate.

With care, a list is compiled of companies and real estate owned. There isn’t time to really dive down every rabbit hole, but this is Florida. And the Florida Government-in-the-Sunshine law means that it’s really quite simple to search state incorporation records.

But there is no company website. No news articles or interviews or much of anything about any of those companies or the family. No LinkedIn profiles. No public giving whatsoever. No board service. No foundation. No mention in a church bulletin. No alumni mention. Nada.

(And it takes so long to look for information that doesn’t exist! >>sigh<<)

Incorporation Records and Real Estate Can Yield Clues

But we have those incorporation records and sometimes we can get them to talk–even without advanced interrogation techniques!

For self-made business owners, there is usually a primary business that behaves like a parent to the other LLCs, even if there is technically no legal relationship. Below is an example of our company table:

Company Name	Incorporation Years	Managers	State
Aspire Research Group LLC	2009-Present	Jennifer Filla	FL

And sure enough, there was one LLC with an incorporation date in the early 1990s, while the rest of the companies were incorporated in the 2000s. Also, a rough glance at the types of real estate owned personally and by the various entities was suggestive of a variety of revenue sources.

There were commercial properties such as warehouses, as well as residential addresses. It seemed like they might be owning and renting. I’d guess they are doing some property management as well. The last company incorporated in this year, 2021, had two unknown individuals as member managers, but the prospect was the registered agent for service of legal process.

How can we assess their capacity?

If you have ever performed prospect research, then you know that private company ownership can be difficult to value because there are so few things we can know with any degree of certainty. And here,the couple didn’t even bless us with a company website and corresponding business description. Forget about revenue numbers or employees.

This is where we grabbed our Q-tip and duct tape and built a capacity rating!

We knew one value: Excluding the primary residence, personal and company-owned real estate had a total estimated market value of around $12M. According to the Capgemini World Wealth Report, in 2019 Q1, 15.8% of a HNWI’s household wealth in North America was invested in real estate.

$12,000,000 * 15.8% =$75,949,367 estimated net worth

This rough calculation led us to place the prospects into our Ultra-HNW Wealth Tier, suggesting a gift capacity of $3M to $10M.

Prospect Research Value-Add

We didn’t find a lot of information, but thankfully, the prospects used their home address on the incorporation records and real estate mailing addresses, and they did not hide their identities behind a state like Delaware, which does not require that the LLC member managers’ names be disclosed.

The DO had done a great job of qualifying for philanthropy, interest, and affinity. We found just enough information to make an educated guess on capacity.

The story ends with the DO being handed the profile to create a strategy to make a first significant ask for a gift from the prospects.

If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and waddles like a duck…

Sometimes prospect research professionals get lost in the details. I’ve heard conversations about rigid guidelines for creating “highly defensible” capacity ratings. I propose that prospect research can better support major gifts fundraising if it views the prospect management process as more like a relay race.

• In the story told here, research identified a high-capacity donor–and passed the prospect “baton” to the DO for in-person qualification.
• The DO did a great job of learning what research often cannot, the passions and feelings of the prospect–and then passed the prospect “baton” back to research.
• Research translated the data discovered (minimalist as it was) into a story of wealth–and passed the prospect “baton” back to the DO for a first solicitation.

There are many donor prospects out there in the world who value their privacy, or who otherwise don’t have a huge digital footprint for researchers to discover. That doesn’t mean they aren’t great prospects.

It means we didn’t find a lot of information…

(And it takes so long to look for information that doesn’t exist! >>double sigh<<)

… and we need to better leverage the little bit of information we did find.

By working like a relay team with the DO, we can still uncover and qualify those prospects who don’t have a lot of public data, but who look like a “duck”–who walk and talk like a philanthropic individual with high capacity who cares about our organization and its mission.

There is a shift happening in the world of fundraising research tools. The tools that once felt so incredibly innovative are beginning to feel a bit restrictive. Why are women and minorities consistently overlooked in wealth screenings? And the promise of machine learning has long felt distant and unaffordable.

Beyond the tools, fundraising practices are shifting, too. Diversity, equity, and inclusion are receiving emphasis and are changing the face of our constituencies and maybe even our co-workers, even though it may feel like it’s happening in slow motion.

To place these shifts into context, we need to start at the last major innovations and move forward. My intention isn’t to evaluate specific tools or to cover the field in anything more than very broad strokes. And yet, I still hope to surprise you!

The (brief) history of research tools

The field of prospect research truly began to thrive and grow with some key technological achievements.

1. Relational Databases gave us accessible data
   
   In 1970, E. F. Codd published a research paper while at IBM that described a relational database, which allowed multiple tables to be connected or related to each other by a key field. This meant that tables did not have to contain duplicate data. In 1974 IBM developed a prototype and over the years this has led to continual improvements, such as the customer relationship management (CRM) databases in use today.
   
   No more paper ledgers! Relational databases made the giving and other information we collect on our donors highly accessible.
   
   And this enabled new data mining techniques such as Recency, Frequency, Monetary (RFM), which make it possible to identify the top 20% of donors who give 80% of fundraising revenue.
   
2. The internet exploded
   
   Once the internet became searchable with Google, the world of prospect research became transformed! Sure, there were still paid subscription tools to databases, such as the Who’s Who directories and Dialog, but Google opened up a new level of information to fundraising researchers.
   
   And this opening of the internet in turn was fueled by the digitizing of data. For example, Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings and real estate could now be matched to the donor names in your database. Prospect screening companies were formed and the data sources and the companies’ algorithms improved. In shockingly little time you could discover who made a small gift to you, but had great wealth!
   
3. Social Media gave us personal data
   
   Prospect research was reluctant to accept social media as a valid data source, but folks came around. Once the parallel between LinkedIn and Who’s Who information was made, the debate fizzled. Now we researchers can find as much personal data as donor prospects are willing to make public. And that is a whole lot.
   
   Personality, donor motivations, interests, hobbies, and much more is often revealed!

What is happening now with research tools?

There has been a shift going on in our research tools for years now that has recently been gaining momentum and is completely changing the way I think about our “tools.”

1. Databases are no longer sufficient – we need analytics
   
   This is where you yawn and say, “Really Jen, everyone knows about analytics as a trend!” And it’s true. But to date, the push in research has been to learn Excel, and now there are debates about which analysis software program you should learn, R or Python?
   
   What we need to look out for are nonprofit CRMs that have built-in analytics. It will take time andlot of investment money to present a competitive threat to the behemoth incumbents in the field, but there are new donor CRMs being developed specifically for the nonprofit sector and [spoiler alert!] they have some analytics built right inside.
   
   Take Virtuous CRM. Their CRM product provides RFM data right on the homepage of a constituent record. Companies building software with a focus on the nonprofit sector should know the key stats and activities we want to do with our donor data. But beyond that, there is a growing recognition or remembering of the value of a donor’s history with your organization through giving and other engagement.
   
   Having wealth was never enough, but it feels like we became mesmerized by the wealth screening tools and may have forgotten just how important it is for prospects to have a love for and connection to our organization. The donor CRM is a primary source for this kind of information. Companies like Virtuous CRM understand this.
   
2. BIG data is becoming more accessible–even for little nonprofits
   
   I won’t say it’s happened yet, exactly, but companies are hard at work building models from external BIG data to apply to your organization’s donor CRM. We learned from the wealth screenings that external data, such as SEC filings, can yield tremendous fundraising insights that can be turned into efficient actions.
   
   Machine learning models hold the promise of a new world of external data. Perhaps a world that includes many more people than the traditional wealth screenings.
   
3. Social media is becoming a key donor acquisition strategy
   
   Researchers tend to focus on major gifts, because that’s where the biggest return on investment is. But that may change in some surprising ways. According to NextAfter, donors acquired digitally crossover more easily to multiple-channel giving, and multiple-channel donors give more. And when it comes to being online, social media is where the people are.
   
   Your machine learning company might help you with donor acquisition and retention across all giving levels, as well as data enhancement and major gift prospecting. If the company is leveraging big data for insights, it makes sense that the same company can help you navigate that big data across the gift cycle – especially for your digital first donors.

How can researchers be best positioned for the future of research tools?

There are those who proclaim that you need to learn a program like R or Python to stay relevant, others who insist it’s about developing internal relationship skills to manage people and portfolios, and then there’s me – a prospect research generalist.

If I were to distill a pathway through and among the throng of fundraising research tools, it would be this:

• Know your fundraising. Researchers are fundraisers and it’s key that we understand how relationships with donors are created and maintained. This informs everything!
• Understand the theory behind new tools, how things work, even if you can’t quite execute it in something like Excel or Python. This gives you the perspective to notice how your work process – and the fundraising process – could benefit and achievemore from shiny new tools.
• Make the time to learn about new tools from existing vendors or brand-new companies. This may inspire to you to launch yourself into a specialty like programming, but even if it doesn’t, it improves your chances of getting in on the beta testing level. This translates into big opportunity for lower cost!
• Question everything! How will we use that score to take what action? How is it better than what we use now? There’s a lot of competing companies out there and sales talk is sweet. Your analytical approach to research applies equally to evaluating new research tools. Your organization is counting on it.
  

It’s difficult for us humans to imagine things we’ve never seen or heard of before, but having an open mind is a good start. Donors are not numbers, they are people. And yet, machine learning can provide meaningful insights into the often-elusive indicators such as affinity and engagement.

Will you be able to spot the next best tool? Or will you be the one to say it isn’t possible?

Or will you be the one to share your predictions or tell me I missed something critical or overlooked an important innovation? I’d love to hear from you! Comment here, email, or call.

All of us carry money baggage. We learn attitudes about money from our parents, neighbors, school… everywhere! Growing up in my family, I was told explicitly not to ask my parents about money and especially not about how much my father was paid. One simply did not talk about money.

And when I went to work, this was reinforced. No-one shared salary information.

Why not?

And yet, when I was working for the attorney in charge of providing salary information for a company as part of a legal filing, I saw the salary information for the entire company, including myself and everyone in my department.

It was shocking.

My colleague, one of the most impressive legal assistants I’ve ever known with the most years of company service, was the lowest paid. She also happened to be a woman of color. And I knew that she came to our department because in her previous role she was overlooked for promotion at least TWICE to people less qualified.

I’ve never felt the same about salary.

Inequity is baked into the system. Human Resource departments create structures to justify company wages with salary bands and any other manner of objective-sounding techniques to make executives feel okay that people of color, women, and other minorities are consistently paid less.

The numbers don’t lie.

So, when AFP president, Mike Geiger, announced that AFP would require job postings to provide salary information I was THRILLED! It is a welcome step toward shining a light on how companies pay all people. It automatically puts a floor on how low the offering salary can be.

And yet, recently in the Chronicle of Philanthropy, Vincent Robinson, founder and managing partner of the 360 Group, an executive search company, wrote an op-ed that the #ShowTheSalary effort was misplaced. In the op-end he writes: “I’ve counseled numerous candidates who, when informed of the salary range for a position, ask whether they should even apply because the role paid substantially more than they currently earned, and they didn’t want to waste anyone’s time.” His primary argument is that too many “diverse candidates” place such a low value on their work that they would stop applying for jobs that paid too much.

I can’t help but be offended.

Yes, lots of people who are systematically oppressed and abused are paid painfully low salaries for important work. Plenty of them internalize a low self-worth. But preventing those who want, and are ready, for higher salaries from having the opportunity to see and know what the market value for their work actually is, feels particularly cruel.

How many generations need to repeat these painfully low salaries because salary amounts are withheld?

If you have ever learned that a colleague with comparable or fewer qualifications is paid quite a bit more than you, you probably experienced feelings of betrayal. Because it is betrayal. And if you cross the salary secrecy line and call it out to a supervisor, well, the reply might be “you really need to focus on more than the number” or “try to get yourself more exposure.” In other words, it’s your fault. You didn’t ask for more at the start and/or your money demands are culturally vulgar. If you have trouble paying your electricity bill, you have only yourself to blame.

I’m sure there are bosses out there who immediately apologize and demand you receive more pay, but I’m going to go with my gut on this and say it’s not a common reaction.

Salary secrecy firmly places the power in the hands of the employer, who deliberately withholds this information to its benefit. If withholding the information did not benefit the employer, it wouldn’t happen. But it does happen.

And it does benefit the employer, especially at the expense of those who are the most vulnerable and worst-placed to negotiate a higher salary–the diverse candidates.

I will stop preaching now.

I have been guilty of narrowing the candidate pool in a different way. In the past I have hired contractors and my sole employee through my close network. Mr. Robinson may be misguided on salary disclosure, but he is spot on in other respects, and it is time that I took some of his excellent advice:

• “Don’t stop looking until your candidate pool is diverse.
• Go beyond mainstream job posting platforms.”

As it happens, my firm, Aspire Research Group LLC, is hiring an executive assistant. I hope you’ll share the posting widely!

Executive Assistant Position: https://www.aspireresearchgroup.com/careers/

Additional Resources

• Collecting Courage: Joy, Pain, Freedom, Love | Editors, Nneka Allen, Camila Vital Nunes Pereira, and Nicole Salmon | 2020 | This book is a collection of stories documenting racism and survival by 14 accomplished Black fundraisers working in charities across North America.
• The ‘Show the Salary’ Campaign Is the Wrong Battle for Achieving Nonprofit Workplace Diversity | Vincent Robinson | The Chronicle of Philanthropy: Opinion | 2021
• Disclosing Salaries Is Good for the Fundraising Profession and Society as a Whole | Mike Geiger | The Chronicle of Philanthropy: Letter to the Editor | 2021
• Nonprofit ‘Salary Secrecy’ Targeted in the Name of Pay Equity | Drew Lindsay | The Chronicle of Philanthropy | 2021 | Paywall
• 4 Reasons It Pays to Share Salary Ranges, According to Companies That Do | Samantha McLaren | LinkedIn Talent Blog | 2019
• Exploring the Role of Gender and Race in Salary Negotiations | Chelsea D. Hightower, Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College | 2019 | “Thus, there is evidence that women negotiators tend to receive multiple forms of social and economic punishment (i.e., backlash) for engaging in behavior that is inconsistent with stereotype-based expectations of women in the context of salary negotiations, including lower offers, decreased likeability and share ability, and declined requests for pay increases.”

In the 1980s and into the 1990s, prospect research was a hunter-gatherer task. We went to libraries and gathered, and maybe summarized, lots of information about our prospects. Peer review – when social peers such as campaign committee members, reviewed prospect lists — was the best way to identify and prioritize campaign major gift prospects.

Flash forward and information technology has catapulted us into an almost unrecognizable space. We now have data modeling scores at our fingertips together with external wealth data matched directly to our prospect names – thousands upon thousands of names – within hours. Machine learning models are telling development officers when to reach out to donors and writing the first email draft!

Conversation among fundraising research professionals now inevitably includes a discussion of analytics and machine learning. Should I learn Python or R or SPSS? Will I be made irrelevant if I don’t know how to build a predictive model?

But before you or your staff sign up for data science or programming classes on Coursera, consider for a moment where the gaps in this growth are occurring and if there might be a better fit in a “gap” role.

Prospect Research Generalists Have (Validated) Value

Harvard Business Review published an article by Scott Berinato in early 2019 titled “Data Science and the Art of Persuasion.” In the article Berinato states that for-profit companies have been disappointed with the results of their investment in data scientist talent. Why isn’t the investment yielding better business results?

Berinato argues that this is because processing the data to extract insights only takes you halfway to realizing gains. The final leg of the race is communicating what these insights mean for the business. This holds true for nonprofit organizations, too.

Who might be on staff that understands much about the information technology and is good at communicating how development can take action on the insights to raise more money?

Why your friendly prospect researcher, of course!

The prospect research generalist is frequently the person who enjoys bridging between the IT department responsible for database maintenance and the development team responsible for using the database to fundraise, or creating profile masterpieces that tell the story of how a prospect’s complex financial wealth and giving translates into a gift cultivation strategy for your organization.

If this sounds like you or your staff member, you might be or have a diamond in the rough!

Mind the Gap | Training your way to deliver

As you look ahead at the future of your development department, who on staff will be able to understand the data insights and be able to communicate and persuade top leadership? What kinds of skills will that person need?

In a recent Master Class at the Prospect Research Institute, we considered how to present wealth screening results to skeptical leadership. One new researcher shared how the screening ratings were in their database, but not being used because they weren’t helpful.

We walked through a presentation that blended the wealth rating with an affinity rating to produce five distinct prospect segments. The presentation used words and graphics related to the possible uses of each segment and provided some summary data to demonstrate the “lost” dollar potential. We then discussed how this could apply to development officer portfolio assignments.

For this new researcher, this was the missing piece! It is also the piece most unlikely to be provided by the vendor supplying these valuable data insights.

Translating the data insights into action often follows best practices in the field and this is readily taught. However, presenting insights for leadership decision-making requires some additional skills:

Skillfully apply known psychological principles of persuasion and negotiation. Using persuasive techniques is not equal to being manipulative or misleading. It does mean accepting human psychology and creating an environment your audience will relate to. Seek out sales and marketing training to increase your skill level.

Present with confidence. Unfortunately, confidence is not something that can be trained, but it can be deliberately cultivated. Learn and practice presenting, writing, and storytelling. You will become comfortable with being uncomfortable, which is at least half of the battle!

Tell stories from data. This is probably the most important “bridging” skill. This combines an understanding of the data insights with the skill of translating that into a relatable story. It means doing things like using words and pictures – not just graphs and charts – to explain potential impact, such as creating multiple scenarios.

Managing Change

Prospect research is often a role that provides recommendations without the authority to demand implementation. We have to navigate and negotiate across multiple areas in our organization, such as IT, development operations, fundraising, leadership, and others.

Researchers have taken various pathways of career development, including development operations, data science, frontline major gifts, and executive leadership. The insatiable curiosity that drops us into the field sometimes leads us in and around or even completely out of the field. Kate Racculia became a successful mystery novelist!

So, even though the field of prospect research and fundraising is changing rapidly as technology transforms our personal and professional lives, you can manage that change by evaluating your strengths – the skills and talents you enjoy and are good at – against the trends in the field to plan for your continuing education.

And you might just become the prospect research persuader of the future!

Additional Resources

• Data Science and the Art of Persuasion | Harvard Business Review | 2019
• Master Classes at the Institute | Research Focused Membership | Prospect Research Institute
• Can Gravyty get development officers to make more prospect discovery visits? | #ChatBytes & Learning Edge Blog | 2019
• Prospect Research Poised for Leadership? You Bet! | Jennifer Filla | 2019
• Persuading The Uncooperative: A Tale of Influence | Jennifer Filla | 2020

There is a lot of discussion and opinions about donor advised funds in the US. Some people suggest that it is the democratization of philanthropy and others suggest it is just another way the very wealthy can wield influence and power anonymously.

I found myself wondering how Donor Advised Funds (DAFs) might be operating in other countries. I discovered two fascinating aspects of DAFs that I want to share with you.

1 – Another motivation behind establishing DAFs is international giving.

If you are a person of means and serious about philanthropy, you might want to have a global impact on a particular issue or cause. Making gifts outside of your home country can become complex pretty quickly, whether you want to make an individual or private foundation gift. Currency exchange rates, taxes, local regulations, due diligence and more can make giving challenging.

Another hindrance to giving globally can be the destination country’s rules about how much money an NGO (non-governmental organization) can receive from a foreign donor.

On its website, the National Philanthropic Trust (NPT) describes the services it can provide to philanthropists who want to give internationally through a DAF:

What can philanthropists do to maximize the amount of money they can give, and the corresponding influence they might have, outside home country borders? Add a DAF to the mix of giving vehicles, of course!

The DAF takes care of the complexities for the donor, and gifts made from the DAF are not attributable to the original donor, extending limitations on amounts received from foreign donors.

2 – The excitement over DAFs has been contagious, spreading rapidly around the globe.

While anonymity is one aspect of DAFs, the often relatively low minimum amount of money required to open a DAF, especially when combined with the philanthropic objectives of a community foundation,can make DAFs an attractively democratic giving vehicle.

Certainly, DAFs have gained in popularity in wealthy Western countries, such as Canada, the UK, and elsewhere in Europe, but even in Australia, Firstlinks reported in 2019 that assets held in sub-funds (the equivalent of DAFs) totaled over $1 billion.

In a 2020 podcast interview, Catherine Loh, CEO of The Community Foundation of Singapore shared that the foundation was one of the only community foundations established in Southeast Asia. Creating a DAF there requires a donation of$200,000, but this can be made in $50,000 pledge payments.

If you are researching a prospector a country, and want to learn if DAFs are a possibility, a great place to look is the Community Foundation Atlas directory. Community Foundations are often the first charitable partners that local and foreign donors seek to fulfill charitable ambitions.

For example, the Community Foundation of Western Zimbabwe, Africa, was the first grant making institution established in the country in 1998. The 3 million people who live in the three provinces of Western Zimbabwe–Matabeleland North and South and the Midlands — are the country’s poorest.

The foundation’s website specifically mentions that it can manage donor advised funds for a specific organization of the donor’s choice, offering local expertise to assist in making the right decision.

Focusing on local donors can be difficult when a community foundation’s community is not wealthy, but not impossible. Alliance Magazine published a working paper, Philanthropy in the Arab Region, that specifically mentions the use of DAFs to garner local support.

Don’t overlook the international aspects of DAFs

Whether you are focused on the affluent, high net worth, or ultra-high net worth donor population, don’t forget that your donors could be motivated to have a philanthropic impact globally. DAFs can help them fulfill those aspirations.

And if you are researching a prospect outside of your home country, consider how community foundations and DAFs might play a part in their philanthropic activity.

Additional Resources

• International Grantmaking | National Philanthropic Trust
• The 2019 DAF Report | National Philanthropic Trust UK
• The $1 billion quiet achiever in Australian philanthropy | Firstlinks, a financial services publishing company | 2019
• The rise of Donor Advised Funds in Singapore | MoneyFM 89.3 podcast | 2020
• Community Foundation Atlas | Directory
• Community Foundation of Western Zimbabwe | comfoundzim.org | NOTE: This website was marked as unsafe by malware, but you can safely view pages through the Google cache option
• Philanthropy in the Arab Region: A working paper by Caroline Hartnell | Alliance Magazine
• Dalia Association | “A community foundation founded in 2007 by diverse members of the Palestinian community committed to mobilize, invest and distribute resources according to local Palestinian priorities using community-based decision-making.”

There are many software tools for prospect research these days. Especially for newer researchers, how do you decide which one, or whether you should purchase more than one? The prices and offerings vary considerably and can make choosing feel random and confusing! There is a general rule that can help guide you and illuminate key distinctions between choices. It also happens to be very similar to a key distinction between what makes a good and credible information source.

But first, let’s talk cake!

As I was growing up in the 70’s and 80’s, my mother’s hobby was baking and decorating elaborate cakes. Sharks chased people, dolls wore cascading dresses of flowers, and cornucopias overflowed with abundance. And underneath all of the creative icing-packed designs was a delicious, moist and fluffy cake. People had to be coaxed to cut through her gorgeous designs – this demanded a great taste to complete the experience!

Did my mother bake her cakes from scratch, or did she use a boxed cake mix?

Why, she used a boxed cake mix, of course!

Her favorite brand was Duncan Hines boxed cake mixes. And the proof was in the tasting. She did bake some cakes from scratch and I could tell the difference. I know there are some amazing bakers out there who can make a moist, fluffy, delicious cake from scratch, but my mom could make one every single time — with the boxed mix.

Because boxed cake mixes are a lot like algorithms…

When you need a reliable outcome for a simple task, there is usually an automated solution available or on its way. Information solution companies can reliably give us the equivalent of a moist, fluffy, delicious chocolate or vanilla cake. The ingredients in a wealth screening, for example, are similar across products and the algorithms are always getting better. They give us a meaningful segmentation of our constituent base.

Then it’s up to us prospect research professionals to add the icing — the fundraising insight and action.

But the minute you stray from needing a simple cake, the boxed cake mixes fall short and we are back to baking from scratch with good recipes.

And herein lies the biggest distinction in and among prospect research tools.

When we use the boxed mix equivalent of a research tool, the algorithm makes the choices over what information is best matched to our prospect. This works really well, until it doesn’t.

For example, we know that a wealth screening typically underestimates the wealthiest, because the algorithm needs visible asset values to calculate a capacity rating. And yet we know that the higher the net worth the fewer the visible assets.

So, if we want to be sure we don’t underestimate our prospect’s capacity, we use the wealth screening to segment our thousands of constituents and then focus on a highly rated segment to manually research. And once again we are faced with which tool(s) to use or purchase.

If you are serious about doing serious research, you need a tool that lets you choose the ingredients for your own recipe. In other words, you need to be able to search the original source databases to craft your own customized profile.

A basic tenet of research is that you want to get as close to the primary or originating source of information as you can. Because we know that information can get corrupted as it passes through multiple sources.

Maybe your prospect uses a nickname or has other quirks that an algorithm isn’t trained to untangle. Searching through the database sources yourself will allow you to create a better profile than the algorithm alone.

As you might imagine now, hybrid opportunities for creating great tasting cakes and master piece profiles abound. But they don’t have to confuse you as you try to decide what to buy.

Many research tools offer you the option to use the information matching algorithm AND search independently within the same software platform. This is like having your boxed cake mix AND all the key ingredients available to mix and match with your mix (like chocolate chips or instant coffee, yum!).

If I drop the cake mix talk, here’s how I might lay out some of the products available to us along a normal distribution illustrated below.

This isn’t a perfect, or even scientific, illustration, but hopefully it helps you begin to sort the tools into different types. Once you are able to do this at the fundamental level of access to source information, you can now add different layers of evaluation.

You will want to do your usual assessment of items such as the following:

• How easy is the tool to navigate and use based on who will be using it?
• Can I manipulate the information the way I need to for the products I deliver internally?
• Does it have the source databases for the type of constituency we have?
• Does it test well when I enter our typical best prospects?
• Is the pricing structure a good fit for my organization?
• How responsive is their customer service?
• …and more

Machine learning has entered our field and that will add a layer of complexity to tool choices. I expect that algorithms or models created using big data will be offered for use to organizations with smaller data sets. And as this practice spreads and competition pushes prices downward, I’m going to have to eat my cake and come up with a new analogy!

As a fundraising prospect research professional, how would you approach this question:

Companies House in the UK was founded in which year? 1844, 2001, or 2015

Would you approach it differently if I told you first that Toby Savin had written on the Helen Brown blog about a fantastic resource in the UK? If you just said, “yes,” then you are in good company!

Now, just for a bit of fun, stop reading and go ahead and find the answer. Then come back to see if you’re right.

If you were part of the #ResearchPride Global Scavenger Hunt this year, you’ve already been on this quest. And like it or not, many of you got the wrong answer. Hang in there! I’m going to share why that’s okay.

The ‘Year of the Founding’ Plot Thickens!

At first this really confounded me. People gave me three different answers: 1844, 2001, or 2015. I couldn’t figure out where some of those years were coming from. So, I asked one of the most precise and detail-oriented researchers I know – Bryan Campbell – who is a member of the Prospect Research Institute.

Bryan tackled this in classic Miss Marple style. Much like Agatha Christie’s fictional detective, he used his past experiences to approach the current problem. While Bryan never lived in Miss Marple’s St. Mary Mead, he did work as a librarian. And he had to manage the “stacks” and find missing items.

At the library, he had to think like someone harried and new to the classification systems. What are the common mistakes they would make in shelving the books? Tasked with helping me figure out where these unidentified years the Companies House was founded came from, he approached it much the same way.

What was his theory?

Bryan speculated that people started by going to the Helen Brown blog post written by Toby Savin. If you were viewing the blog post in search-engine-results-style you might see these clips:

…astonishingly popular across many sectors of the economy since being introduced in the UK in 2001,

What’s more, it’s free to access this data: in 2015, a Beta version of the register – freely available to anyone with an internet connection – was launched as part of the UK…

How often are we guilty of scanning the search results and not clicking through the links to fully read the reference? How carefully do we seek out corroborating sources that are unique and not simply citing each other?

I’m not saying there isn’t a time and place to stop and take the search results at face value, but we aren’t finding a restaurant or birthday party venue. Researching gift prospects or finding scavenger hunt answers is not the time or place.

Because… it was limited liability partnerships (LLPs) that were introduced in the UK in 2001, and while internet access was opened up in 2015, Companies House was not founded in 2015. It was founded in 1844.

And really, if you stop for a second and think about it, as old and historied as the UK is, it would never have made sense for Companies House, a repository of company data, to have been founded after the year 2000.

Which brings us to Wikipedia, of all places! Wikipedia had a great article on Companies House, complete with the founding year and generous citations. And if you wanted to corroborate beyond Wikipedia, it gave you plenty of avenues to pursue.

Finding and Feeling the Research Pride

At first, I thought it was a bad idea to write about a common research error from the scavenger hunt. I don’t ever want people to feel stupid or inadequate. We researchers usually suffer from enough angst! Every one of us, myself included, make mistakes all the time.

I will never forget an exchange with a client in my first few years as a research consultant. I had delivered a profile with a pretty low capacity rating. He wanted to talk about it. He felt there was more money there. As we walked through the profile, he pointed out the very big mortgage. I had considered the mortgage as a sign of less wealth. He pointed out that the prospect had to have a pretty high income to get approved for that big of a mortgage.

Of course, he was right! I admitted as much and added another nugget of knowledge to my ever-increasing experience as a prospect researcher.

Research Pride isn’t about being perfect or 100% accurate. Research Pride is about belonging to a profession that mentors, teaches, develops best practices, and nurtures and encourages continual growth and improvement – a profession that fosters excellence.

We live in the internet age and it is both glorious and fulfilling, and also rife with misleading and inaccurate (dare I say dangerous?) information. Information technology introduces swift and significant changes to our tools and our work processes on a daily basis.

All of this can be disruptive and difficult to navigate. We need to own our mistakes, take time to untangle them, make changes, and share with others. Because we have Research Pride!

Thank you to everyone who participated in the 2021 Research Pride Global Scavenger Hunt, from the brains behind the event, to the clue holders, to the hunters. The talent in our field is jaw-dropping I am proud and honored to be considered a part of this profession.

Additional Resources

• 2021 #ResearchPride Scavenger Hunt | Learning Edge Blog | 2021 | The winners, the clues, and the answers are detailed here.
• #CareerCurious Interview with Helen Brown | #ChatBytes Podcast | 2021 | Helen shares her #ResearchPride story and more.
• Companies House: a treasure trove of info on UK companies | Toby Savin | Helen Brown Blog | 2020 | Find out about a UK research resource that might surprise you with its depth of information.

Does this statement make you cringe? “Hey! There’s a happy hour networking event in the conference center lobby tonight. Wanna go?” Or does it compel you to extend an invite to your friends? Or does it make you jump up energized and ready to meet new people?

Surprise! No matter what your answer is, you could be a networker.

According to Marissa King who wrote the book, Social Chemistry: Decoding the Patterns of Human Connection, there are three main types of networks people form:

• Conveners: Deep, close connections to a smaller group of people who are all friends with each other
• Brokers: Not quite as deep of connections, but connections among different groups of people
• Expansionists: Shallower relationships, but with exponentially more people

And I couldn’t help agree with her that networking – professional or personal – was never really about going into big crowds of unknown, strange people and collecting business cards. Networking is about creating authentic connections with other people that you want to know better.

And if you jump at the opportunity to go to that hypothetical happy hour in the conference center lobby, it probably has less to do with whether you are an extrovert or an introvert and more about yourgoals.

Here are three examples to illustrate the point of who might want to go to that hypothetical happy hour:

• Recent college graduate headed into second year of first full-time career job who wants to move out of nonprofit work with animals and into nonprofit work focused on climate change.
• Parent who just had third child that doesn’t sleep through the night and really wants to get dressed professionally and talk to other adults about the work that s/he loves!
• Accomplished professional who is exploring going solo as a consultant and wants to find out what problems people have that s/he could solve at a price they could pay.

Network for Goal

Happy Hours are the quintessential networking event, but networking happens every day in a million different ways. There is every reason to ditch the cliched happy hour and focus in on the kind of people you want to meet and in places where you feel more comfortable.

Sometimes you can even create your own places!

For example, let’s say you need to become a power user of your Salesforce database, but you haven’t found people online talking about the prospect research topics you need to learn the most. You could volunteer to host a Salesforce working group for your association chapter (like Apra) that meets quarterly on topics you need to tackle.

Now the full organizing power of your chapter is available to you. Is this selfish? Heck, no!

If you have the time and talent to offer your association chapter to organize and facilitate meetings, it becomes a win/win, not a win/lose. And it can give you the opportunity to create a convener network as you seek the skills and confidence to move forward in your career.

As an adult, developing close relationships requires more effort over a longer time because the opportunity to interact frequently, such as when attending school together, isn’t as available. To add to this barrier, in the world of prospect research, many times the people we want to connect with are geographically distant.

Creating the group you need and want to be a part of can help to
overcome these barriers. In the Salesforce working group example above, you might find that you become close to a handful of researchers, interacting socially and professionally, and meeting up live at conferences.

If you don’t want to create your own group, you can always join somebody else’s group. The Master Classes and group coaching calls at the Prospect Research Institute provide adult researchers with low pressure opportunities to connect with peers.

At the Institute you can get to know other members through video meetings and on Slack. Meetings are monthly, small, and have guided discussion, making it easy for you to participate. You share common interests and there is an expectation that you will ask for help and share great resources.

If you find yourself benefitting from different networks at the same time, you might be a broker. For example, you might be (a) active in a vendor online forum where you meet peers, (b) volunteer for your association chapter where you meet fellow members from a range of organizations, and (c) attend a course where you interact frequently with other learners.
You may have career goals that have you looking for skill building opportunities or exposure to multiple industry sectors.

Most professionals probably don’t cultivate expansionist networks, but if
you have ideas to share with the world, social media makes huge networks possible. And if you are looking for more exposure, but to the tune of thousands, not millions, you can craft content of interest to the audience you wish to attract and expand your career options considerably.

Convener, Broker, Expansionist – or a Hybrid

As prospect researchers we know all about isolating key criteria to help us identify the best prospects. Same goes with networking. Your goals could be as simple as knowing and talking research with other researchers or as complex as identifying potential mentors so you can move into a specific role, such as prospect management or fundraising analytics, or something in between.

In fact, you probably have multiple and overlapping goals. Networking can help you learn new skills, explore your profession, build confidence, and gain access to career opportunities. Think through and write down your goals, observe and experiment in different places, online and offline, and network your way to professional and social fulfillment!

Additional Resources

• Book: Social Chemistry: Decoding the Patterns of Human Connection
• Personal Website: www.marissaking.com
• Discover your own network signature: www.assessyournetwork.com
• What kind of networker are you? | Marissa King on HBR Ideacast (podcast)

If you are a prospect research professional, odds are that you have searched for the beneficial ownership of securities table in a proxy filing with the SEC. But do you really know what beneficial ownership means Why do insiders sometimes disclaim the beneficial ownership they reported? Should you care? Maybe. If you have to explain it to others, such as development officers, then definitely!

The proxy (Form Def 14a) is the document a public company files each year to explain and be transparent about the securities or stock it has on offer for purchase by the public. After all, the SEC came into existence in 1933 to restore investor confidence in our capital markets after the stock market crash of 1929. From that perspective, beneficial ownership makes a little more sense.

A beneficial owner is…

1. A person who enjoys the BENEFITS of ownership even though the stock is not directly owned in his/her name.
   
   For example, I may change the title of my stock to a trust, or a foundation, or an LLC, but still, maintain the benefit of ownership as a trustee or beneficiary or both.
   .
2. A person (individually or as part of group) who has the power to vote on shares, or who wields influence over a shareholder’s vote.

Fundraising research is less concerned with whether the prospect can influence the votes of shareholders, but we do care about enjoying the BENEFITS of ownership, because this can have an impact on our prospect’s wealth picture.

James Dimon Example

Let’s look at an example: James “Jamie” Dimon is CEO of JP Morgan Chase & Co. (JPM). According to the beneficial ownership table in the proxy filed on 4/6/2020, he owns 9,538,667 shares of company stock. Or does he?

If Mr. Dimon BENEFITS from those 115,800 shares, but DISCLAIMS this beneficial ownership, who might have legal and direct ownership of them?

A Form 4, Statement of Changes in Beneficial Ownership, must be filed every time an insider has a change in the number of beneficially owned shares. It often gives us greater detail on who owns exactly what shares. Could it help us with Mr. Dimon’s disclaimed, mystery 115,800 shares? Indeed, it does!

Form 4| Filing date 10/14/2020(much later than the proxy filing

Note the footnote #1 next to ownership by “LLC”? This savvy guy doesn’t want us to know the name of the LLC, just that it is an LLC.

Mystery solved?

An LLC of undetermined name legally owns title to 143,388 shares of JP Morgan Chase & Co. stock. And Mr. Dimon DISCLAIMS that ownership, even though he is legally required to report it because he benefits from the ownership.

Translation / Interpretation

In Mr. Dimon’s example above, we are discussing fewer than 200,000 shares out of more than 9 million shares. From that perspective I care a lot less about that mystery LLC. But I have researched more than one prospect where the mystery LLC owns the lion’s share of stock. Sometimes I even know the full name of that LLC.

And too often, even knowing the company name doesn’t help.

As I have described before, someone like Mr. Dimon could be a member of an LLC in Delaware and the public (and even the Delaware Division of Corporations) wouldn’t know it!

The DISCLAIMING of beneficial ownership in Mr. Dimon’s case feels interesting because he benefits from a laundry list of indirect ownership that he does not disclaim: 401(k), family trusts, spouse, etc. Since he does indicate a pecuniary (financial) interest in the LLC shares, we might speculate that he expects to profit from whatever the mystery LLC is going to do with his shares, but that he argues that he is not influencing the investment.

Is Speculation Warranted?

Speculating is fun! And sometimes it does help to put numbers into perspective, especially if you are fussing over exactly how much and what kind of gift proposal to put together for a prospect.

Following is my completely fictional speculation about Mr. Dimon’s mystery shares as written for the prospect profile. For this fictional example, assume that I discovered the name of the LLC was MiamiBeach LLC and that I knew his daughter started a real estate venture in Miami Beach.

We know that Mr. Dimon’s 32-year-old daughter recently began a real estate venture in Miami Beach, Florida. We do not know who owns Miami Beach LLC because it was incorporated anonymously in Delaware. Since Mr. Dimon disclaims ownership of the shares owned by Miami Beach LLC, we might speculate that it is his daughter’s company, and that Mr. Dimon invested those shares in his daughter’s company, expecting a financial return.

We can speculate, be we can’t actually KNOW this to be true. The information about the true disposition of those shares is NOT available to confirm our speculation.

Be Clear. Be Firm. Have Fun!

If you are going to pick apart stock holdings and speculate, just be sure to use very clear language. Words such as the following are useful:

• We do NOT know if this is true, but we are GUESSING based on…
• We can NOT know who owns this company, but we SPECULATE…
• Mr. Dimon disclaims his ownership of these shares and although we can NOT know the details of exactly who owns the shares, we SPECULATE…
• Because this is SPECULATION, you might want to consider these shares as NOT available for gifting.

The pressure on your development officers to raise the most money possible to further your mission is real and it is powerful. If you are comfortable speculating, it can help your development officer to put the stockholdings into perspective relative to the full philanthropic and wealth picture of the prospect.

But there is a limit to what we can know. And when the prospect has deliberately placed information beyond public viewing, it is worth stating. After all, our prospects are just as entitled to their privacy as we are. To attempt to pull back the veil of privacy could be construed as disrespectful with the potential to damage the relationship.

I enjoy the tangled web of financial filings and the constant rebalancing of how exact to attempt to be when presenting the information. I hope this example made beneficial ownership just a little bit clearer.

Additional Resources

• Want to dive in deep to insider SEC filings? Become a member and enroll in the Insider Stock and Compensation Course. >>Learn More
• Wish you had an SEC filings reference book handy? Purchase the Insider Stock and Compensation Workbook and focus on filings and information that matters for fundraising. >>Learn More
• Can You Really Hide LLC Ownership? You Betcha!| Jennifer Filla | 2020