I was talking through a complex wealth situation with a member of the Prospect Research Institute. While the prospect was clearly wealthy, there were some transactions and entities mentioned in a public company filing that were curious. I said, “Why not look up the LLC to find the names of the members?” Wouldn’t you know… it was an LLC incorporated in Delaware.

“Sure, you have to pay for it, but the members of an LLC are public information,” I told her with certainty. So, she pursued the matter. The website told her that this information was available on the annual reports filed each year, and to obtain these documents you must call the Delaware Division of Corporations.

She called. The man who answered looked up the record and told her that the names and addresses were not on file. They would be known to the company itself (of course) and to the company that handled the registration.

What? Could this anonymity be legal?

Turns out that it is, and has been, legal to incorporate an LLC and have the owners remain 100% anonymous. “How is it accomplished?” you might ask.

I included a source below with states who do and don’t require public disclosure of LLC members, and I didn’t look into every state, but in the state of Delaware, when you form an LLC (limited liability company) there are three places where the members or managers might be listed and available to the public. However, if you authorize someone to create the LLC on your behalf, you can circumvent any public listing of the members or manager.

1. Certificate of Formation: The person creating and filing the Certificate of Formation is the one listed in the public record. This person does not have to be the member or manager of the LLC, and Delaware does not require recording the members or managers anywhere.
2. Registered Agent: Every incorporated entity must have a registered agent. The registered agent is the official representative of the company who can receive service of lawsuits or any other official business. It does not have to be a member or manager. The registered agent must have a contact at the LLC, but even that person does not have to be a member or manager.
3. Franchise Tax: The owner of an LLC may elect an agent to pay the franchise tax so that there is no record of the member or manager name.

While a Delaware LLC can avoid any public listing of members or managers, this does not extend to creating a bank account. In order to prove ownership to open a bank account, the member can present an Operating Agreement for the LLC. The Operating Agreement is a legal, governing document and includes the names of the members and managers.

And while the members and managers of an LLC can remain anonymous to the public, officers and directors of corporations must be revealed when making franchise tax payments.

“U.S. Congress bans anonymous shell companies”

Tantalizingly, this headline appeared on Reuters.com just as the Institute member and I were investigating Delaware LLCs.

Could this be the end of anonymity? …not so fast!

Turns out that the Corporate Transparency Act passed the Senate and the House with a veto-proof, bipartisan margin in December, but it doesn’t really change anything for the general public.

According to the FACT Coalition, “The Corporate Transparency Act takes the simple, yet effective step to require corporations and limited liability companies (LLCs) to disclose to law enforcement and others with legally mandated anti-money laundering responsibilities (e.g. financial institutions) information on who is the real, natural person (a.k.a. beneficial owner) who owns and controls an entity at the point of formation and update such information upon any change.”

There are many reasons why the individuals behind an LLC might want to remain anonymous. Most often in the field of fundraising I hear people describe how donors are “hiding their wealth.” This has a negative connotation, and I would encourage you to consider and speak publicly in a way that recognizes that there are other reasons for being anonymous.

To name a few: family drama; competitive edge; and people who are private in every way, not just money.

And yet, there is at least one trick to finding those elusive LLC member owners. If the LLC is incorporated in Delaware – has a domestic incorporation record in Delaware – but is doing business in another state that does NOT allow anonymity, you might find the member names in a required foreign incorporation filing.

Of course, as prospect research professionals we like to be able to assemble as many of the facts as reasonably possible, but we know that the best information is going to come directly from the donor prospect.

Hopefully, this micro investigation into Delaware LLCs helps save you time by knowing whether you might be able to find owner member names… or not!

Additional Resources

• Which States Allow LLC Owners to be Anonymous?| Total Legal, a service of Pro Se Planning Inc.
• Delaware LLC Privacy: What’s on Public Record?| Harvard Business Services, Inc. | 7/2/2010 |This company is in the business of filing LLC paperwork to keep owners anonymous and the blog post outlines in detail how
• U.S. Congress bans anonymous shell companies| Reuters | 12/11/2020
• Congress bans anonymous shell companies after long campaign by anti-corruption groups| The Washington Post | 12/11/2020
• News Feed| FACT Coalition| Details on how and why they pushed for the Corporate Transparency Act
• Limited Liability Corporation Definition| Investopedia

No matter who you are, whether you are the CEO of a Fortune 500 company or the development coordinator at a local animal shelter, there comes a time when you need to work with someone who is uncooperative. Maybe even someone who isn’t “nice.” (It could even be a donor – gasp!)

And, of course, this is usually the exact same person you have zero authority to bend to your will.

Most of us understand the concept of reciprocity in relationships. If I do something for you, then you’ll do something for me. But knowing how to do that well in the (sometimes toxic) workplace can be really challenging for a lot of us. What works well in one workplace can bomb in another. And when the person you need to cooperate is hostile? Yikes!

What can you do about this? Go ask Deborah Drucker.

Deborah was a participant in the Prospect Research Institute’s Approach to Prospecting course and during a class discussion on communication with development officers she recommended the book, Influence Without Authority by Allan R. Cohen and David L. Bradford.

(Nota bene: This often happens in the Institute’s class meetings. The robust life experiences of participants interact with course materials and discussion to create unique learning opportunities.)

I bought the book. It’s pretty dry. And yet, the first chapter has been revelatory!

Step one on being persuasive? “Assume all are potential allies.”

It sounds so simple. And yet, it felt like being cattle-branded!

(Disclaimer: I don’t really know what that feels like, but recognizing past mistakes can be acutely painful.)

One thing I had not considered before is that my failure to persuade an uncooperative person could have been my own fault. (Ouch!)

Here are some of the things that have gone through my head at various points in my career:

• She will NEVER help me with anything!
• How can he NOT understand that this has to be done? Is he stupid? Doesn’t he care about making this project successful?
• Look how she gives him whatever he wants, just because he flatters her. That is disgusting! I will NEVER do that.
• That report had NOTHING of value in it–just a pretty cover. Mine was full of real insights and actions to take. How could he fall for a pretty cover? That’s just ridiculous!
• I’ve seen him humiliate people who put ideas forward. My idea would work, but there is NO WAY I am going to say a word. It’s not worth it.

Every single one of those statements is pretty close to things I have actually thought. And hopefully it’s( painfully) obvious how I was the one standing in the way of getting what I wanted.

“Assume all are potential allies.”

How ambitious are you? How passionate are you about your mission or your career, really?

The next time you have to get a report from IT and the person is uncooperative, or you need another team member to step-up to complete a project on time who has sabotaged you before, seriously consider whether your attitude or perception of the situation could be the problem.

If you are able to set aside your emotions (don’t throw them away; they are still valuable) and become curious about what motivates the other person, you will have begun stepping out of your own way.

And if you are eager and in a good mindset to learn more about how to Influence Without Authority, Deborah and I highly recommend the book!

Additional Resources

• Influence Without Authority by Allan R. Cohen and David L. Bradford
• How To Influence When You Don’t Have Authority| Keller Institute | If you’re really into this, you can get use the Keller Influence Indicator to measure your influence
• Your Career: The Hidden Costs of Working From Home|Jennifer Filla

You need new donor prospects. Every organization needs to acquire new donors and upgrade existing donors in order to sustain and grow its programming. If you don’t have a researcher on staff, or even if you do, at some point you may need to identify new major gift prospects at a greater scale than you have in the past. It could be a new project or campaign, or it could be an even bigger shift in program or mission implementation in response to a changing environment.

Whatever your situation, you are probably prospecting under pressure.

And that is how many clients find their way to me at Aspire Research Group LLC. You need to raise a certain amount of money and you want me to find the people who will make those gifts. How hard can it be?

To identify prospects, we could…

• Take the top-rated names from a screening and verify them [confirming the match is pretty quick, but confirming the rating takes deeper digging]
• Find out who gives to similar organizations and whip up a list [donor recognition lists don’t provide addresses; this is a time-intensive task]
• …and other tactics

Many times, I’ve received inquiries from fundraisers already in a campaign. They never included research time in their original budgeting, so exactly how low can I go on price?

Better, Faster, Cheaper. Pick Two.

Information technology has made it incredibly fast to sift through thousands of names at a time, with solutions such as prospect screenings. And over the years, the cost of these solutions has become very affordable for many organizations. But it can’t deliver the same level of accuracy as research done by a trained professional.

Sometimes the faster and cheaper aspects of a screening are enough to accomplish all or some of your fundraising goal. As long as you can contact a prospective donor, you have enough to get started. But when you need to raise more in a shorter period of time, you need greater efficiencies. You need to have prospects prioritized.

Is it okay for your development officer to call on five prospects who were mismatched and don’t have the ability to give, before reaching one person who is capable of giving the amount you need?

When you need more than an algorithm can provide, when you need the next step of deeper research, you need a person.

When you ask a trained person to research a name, it takes time.

Early in my career I wanted to know exactly how much time it took to do research. I tracked every single minute. If you’ve never done this, I recommend it–even if only for a day. Getting up for a glass of water. Bathroom breaks. Writing emails (and blog posts). It is very revealing how much time everything takes!

And research does take time, which can be averaged across a task, such as prospecting. If you are employing someone to perform research for you, or if you are employed to research, and you are not aware of the actual hours it takes to accomplish the research tasks required, how can you know how much this should cost or whether you can reach your goal on time? You don’t know.

Embrace the numbers.

It’s true. You might call that billionaire, catch her on the phone, and she says, “I’d love to give $5M even though I have never heard of you before!” Heck, MacKenzie Scott wasn’t identified or asked by many of the organizations to which she made gifts. But hope isn’t a strong strategy.

Once you understand what kind of time is involved, you can begin building that simple, but oh-so-useful, campaign-style gift table. The following gift table extends to include “outside the box” prospecting to bridge a gap in the base of donors for our fictional scenario. Read the table from left to right.

With your assumptions plainly placed in a spreadsheet like this, research and frontline fundraising can have meaningful conversations about the kind of effort–and cost–it is going to take to reach goal.

For example, the above table assumes that the lead gift will come from a board member. It also assumes that the donor base contains more than 156 donor prospects capable of a gift of up to $125,000. That leaves a gap of 8 gifts/40 prospects to be filled by external prospecting (the gap numbers are highlighted in red in the table).

Our fictional organization decides to use small events to engage people from the community. The assumption is that 200 people will need to be invited to these small engagement events to ultimately yield 8 gifts. If it took an average of an hour per name for a researcher to source one qualified name from outside your donor base, that would be 200 hours of work. No bathroom breaks or email writing included. 200 hours of prospecting research.

Assumptions can go wrong – positively or negatively. You might get an unexpected million from MacKenzie Scott, or you might stall during a pandemic. You might find a board member willing to work closely with you to leverage his network and need fewer research hours. But if your assumptions are based on your organization’s past performance or other likely scenarios, you are much more likely to reach goal.

Work with researchers who care about your success.

Time is expensive. What if you sign a contract with a researcher and discover that the prospects you want just don’t exist? Or there aren’t as many of them as you need? What if your needs change or you run out of money or lose a key employee? Things happen.

Working with nonprofit organizations as part of the development team has been an amazing experience that I am deeply grateful for. Fundraising is built on trust and at Aspire that extends to the consulting relationship.

If you need to reach your fundraising goals, why shouldn’t your research team be just as committed to reaching those goals? It’s not about getting paid to deliver a certain number of prospects each month regardless of whether you can use them. It’s about getting you the right prospects, on your schedule, and at your budget pace.

And that’s how I figure Aspire can deliver on all three improvements: Better, Faster, and Cheaper. Because there is nothing cheap about research that never turns into donors!

Additional Resources

• The Results are in! Common Wealth Screening Questions| Elisa Shoenberger at Aspire Research Group| 2019
• Relational Mapping with Wealth Quotient| Prospect Research Institute | 2020
• When Should You Look For Cold Prospects?| Jennifer Filla | 2013

“There is no health without mental health.”

-Center for Workplace Mental Health, Canada

When I worked in an office all day, I would come home and want to stay home. When I started working from home, by Friday I needed to escape the house. I learned to create room in my schedule for networking with colleagues and to enjoy my lunch outside on the balcony. Little things!

Six months into the workplace shutdown caused by the pandemic, many people were able to create a new schedule working from home. Now August brings the new school year and the chaos of children returning to school, or not, threatens to upend any calm that may have been found.

In the first four parts of this series, I talked about the opportunity to adjust how you provide online training and data security in the virtual office, and being mindful to protect your career aspirations and your physical health.

Disruption, while uncomfortable and sometimes tragic, can provide opportunities to create change. For your nonprofit, it could be the moment where you can mirror your mission through the better treatment of your employees.

In this post, I’d like to suggest how you might use social connection and proactive communication to protect your mental health and that of your employees – and even your family members! But mostly I want to give you lots of resources.

Create Social Connections

“Keep in mind that social distancing does not mean social isolation.”

-Center for Workplace Mental Health, U.S.

If you were working in an environment where you interacted routinely, if not daily, with your team members and others, socially and professionally, working from home doesn’t mean you have to stop being social. But it often means you have to be deliberate and creative about how to have social connections.

From networking to connecting with your team, the alternatives to face-to-face meetings sometimes requires a bit of extra structure to engage people, especially when it is all new. It’s not enough to have everyone on video on Zoom for a happy hour. There needs to be a game or a more formal sharing of something specific and tagging the next person.

For example, I attended a Happy Hour with my association chapter and our host customized a “Family Feud” style game using information from a popular industry report. We divided into teams and competed. It was really fun, brought up some good conversation, helped us to get to know each other, and yet was relevant to our work.

Being social online requires adapting the tried and true activities and games for the online world and for you. Likewise, it means accommodating the communication styles of others. If you’re not sure, test things out. It’s okay if it isn’t a glorious success first time. Just try again.

If people are awkward on video, use online meetings to share a game screen and let people participate via audio. If your group is large, create activities that leverage the chat or breakout rooms. If you have people who love video, create activities that emphasize the visual, such as using props.

Can’t figure it out yourself? Hire a creative concierge like Jackie Botelho! My alma mater, Neumann University, had Jackie create an online alumni networking experience. It was the first time I could ever participate in such an event from Florida. She guided us through introductions, breakouts to discuss a question, and encouraged us all to share connection information, such as LinkedIn. I connected with more people than I usually do at a live networking event!

The U.S. Center for Disease Control has a great recommendation: “Try to keep up with regular routines. If schools are closed, create a schedule for learning activities and relaxing or fun activities.” Just realize that while it sounds simple, it’s not always easy to implement and you might need to be persistent to find a schedule and activities that work for your group – whether that is your children, family, or co-workers.

Don’t Wait! Now is the Time to be Pro-Active

“In these stressful times, it is not enough to post benefit information on your company website.”

-National Safety Council

If your organization does not address mental health currently, this could be the best time to have the discussion. With most people experiencing some kind of stress, people are less likely to feel stigmatized by having a problem.

Right now, we are being faced with such a variety of stressful challenges: sudden routine changes, a barrage of new software to learn, children at home, isolation from family and friends, racism and resulting unrest, and so many more.

What elevates your stress levels might reduce someone else’s. High stress levels, especially over an extended period of time, can have profoundly negative effects on physical and mental health – which of course is going to affect work performance.

As a manager, you can proactively and frequently communicate the mental health and other services available for your employees. Even if you don’t have formal benefits like this, you can help your team create a collection of resources available. I’ve given you a head-start on that in the additional resources below.

When you ask “how are you doing?” be sure to listen carefully to the response. If you ask the question routinely you are more likely to notice changes over time. Managers and co-workers are not therapists, but proactively communicating how to access help, asking, and listening can make a difference.

There really is no health without mental health. You work for a nonprofit on a mission. Proactive communication and staying socially connected are just two ways you can help fulfill your nonprofit’s mission by taking care of your employees.

Additional Resources

• The Hidden Costs of Working from Home | Part 1 of 5 | Jennifer Filla | 2020
• Your Career: The Hidden Costs of Working from Home | Part 2 of 5 | Jennifer Filla | 2020
• Your Physical Health: The Hidden Costs of Working from Home | Part 3 of 5 | Jennifer Filla | 2020
• Your Mental Health: The Hidden Costs of Working from Home | Part 4 of 5 | Jennifer Filla | 2020
• Your Resiliency: The Hidden Costs of Working from Home | Part 5 of 5 | Jennifer Filla | 2020

• 10 Tips to Manage Re-Entry Anxiety Related to the COVID-19 Pandemic | Anxiety and Depression Association of America | 2020
• How to Soothe Your ‘Re-Entry Anxiety’ as COVID-19 Lockdowns Lift | Time magazine | 2020
• How Nature Can Make You Kinder, Happier, and More Creative | Greater Good Magazine
• 10 Team Building Games for Remote Workers | ConnectTeam.com
• Working Remotely During COVID-19: Your Mental Health & Well-Being | Center for Workplace Mental Health, U.S. | Specific suggestions and common-sense advice for employees and managers.
• Helping Children Cope [with COVID-19] | U.S. Center for Disease Control | This is a surprisingly readable and helpful article that helps to give parents perspective on their children’s behavior and includes a list of resource links
• There is No Health Without Mental Health | Poster | Workplace Safety and Prevention Services, Canada
• The Employer Role: Mental Health During COVID-19 | National Safety Council, U.S.
• Working With Benefits Providers: Mental Health Issues Checklist | National Safety Council, U.S.
• How to Collaborate Effectively If Your Team Is Remote | Harvard Business Review | 2018

How is your work from home transition going? Has your organization been able to re-think and re-route some of its processes and procedures to reflect your new reality? As I mentioned in Part 1 of this blog series, COVID-19 could be your great opportunity to mirror your mission through the better treatment of your employees.

In this five-part series, I’m examining some of the hidden costs of working from home. My goal is to give you – an individual, or a manager, or a leader – the opportunity to recognize and begin to address these hidden costs.

As an individual, as a manager, or as a governing board, crisis is your opportunity to get it right. Now is the time to think it through and be the shining role model you always knew your nonprofit could be!

Protect your Career Aspirations!

Another hidden cost of working from home is the damaging effect it can have on one’s career. According to one study, working from home lowered promotion rates by 50% (Stanford University, 2014). You need only listen to #ChatBytes episode 18 for how this issue plays out in the prospect research field.

The Stanford study did not have any data collected to conclude why or how working from home affected promotions. However, the researchers did speculate, based on comments from participants, that some of the negative effect on promotion rates could be attributed to home-based employees being ‘‘out of sight, out of mind.’’ Another theory was that the call center employees working at home in the study whose performance was high were well compensated, and this might make promotion less attractive.

The panel of prospect research professionals interviewed for the #ChatBytes podcast discussed the importance of communication, but also the challenges of being the only work from home employee or one of very few at home. For example, being able to communicate performance and achievements is related to promotion and positive performance reviews in the office, but has additional challenges or changes when communicating remotely. When no-one else is remote, this challenge is magnified.

As many companies and organizations consider a post-pandemic world where people work from home wholly, routinely, or partly, it presents a fantastic opportunity to re-evaluate your communications – as an individual, manager, and organization.

Decisions have to be made about things such as which software to adopt. The larger you are, the more likely there will be some who are unhappy with those choices, but even that doesn’t preclude your ability to consider how to train and use good communication strategies to help each employee achieve her or his potential.

When we choose software or decide on a process, we rarely consider how we humans will actually perform the tasks specific to our roles. For example, good communication practices are rarely taught as a component of software training. But even if you can’t impact practices organization-wide, you can impact yourself and your team.

Following are some examples of how you might communicate in different scenarios, especially if you are working remotely:

• Before we get started, could we add to the agenda? I’m wondering how folks are doing with the new login fix that got rolled out last week. (Ensure no-one is left behind or is implementing a DIY workaround that’s not secure.)
• Could I share a great tip I learned about this week? (Helping everyone get better at a new software or process and letting power-users shine.)
• Would it be okay if I added a #Friday channel to Slack so we can all share what we accomplished this week? (Encourages a level playing field for sharing accomplishments.)
• Manager: I’m considering implementing a new video-conferencing practice for all staff meetings. Everyone will login to the staff meeting from their computers, even if they are in the office. Thoughts? (Eliminates the side-lining of remote staff in favor of face-to-face staff.)

And you don’t have to make sudden, sweeping changes all at once. Efforts at better communication – anything really – takes practice and tweaking. Making fewer changes as part of annual strategies or goals will likely yield better results. It also reflects the concept that communication goes two ways.

Here again, crisis can help us step back and identify ways to improve. Recently, I experienced the magnification of intent that crisis can bring. It pushed me to focus on some newly acquired listening tactics that did not require meeting face to face.

If you want see movement in your career, hearing and understanding your supervisor’s or other advocate’s needs is critical. If you want to have your employee perform up to potential, hearing and understanding your employee is critical. Doing this without access to body language requires new skills.

Communicating effectively with your team remotely is not likely to happen without deliberate effort. Where will you and your team learn these new skills? There is no shortage of great free and fee opportunities to learn. I’ve included a few of my favorites below.

If you have great ideas and tips on how you have grown your remote communication skills, please share by commenting or emailing me so others can benefit from your experience!

Additional Resources

• The Hidden Costs of Working from Home: Part 1 of 5 | Jennifer Filla | 2020
• Your Career: The Hidden Costs of Working from Home | Part 2 of 5 | Jennifer Filla | 2020
• Your Physical Health: The Hidden Costs of Working from Home | Part 3 of 5 | Jennifer Filla | 2020
• Your Mental Health: The Hidden Costs of Working from Home | Part 4 of 5 | Jennifer Filla | 2020
• Your Resiliency: The Hidden Costs of Working from Home | Part 5 of 5 | Jennifer Filla | 2020

• #ChatBytes Episode 18: #CareerCurious Telecommuting: Prospect Research from the Home Office 2017 | Sandra Kent, Charity Jovanovic, and Lara Arlan-Wier share their tips and stories about telecommuting as prospect research professionals.
• Does working from home work? Evidence from a Chinese Experiment | Stanford University | 2014
• 6 Communication Habits of Successful Remote Teams | Ian Giles on Medium | 2017
• How to Embrace Remote Work: The Ultimate Guide | Trello | Undated
• Influence Without Authority | Bradford and Cohen | 3^rd Ed. 2017
• Chris Voss Teaches the Art of Negotiation | MasterClass.com

By now you’ve probably read a lot of articles about working from home. At first it was a temporary, emergency reaction to the pandemic. Four months later, it’s beginning to feel less temporary. And people have adjusted to the most immediate changes. Now is when the hidden costs begin to emerge.

From an individual perspective, you’ve had to carve out a workspace at home, adjust your hours to accommodate children at home, learn to avoid the kitchen, and figure out how to stay focused and prioritize amidst the chaos. Bravo!

But as the adjustment period wanes, the irritating and unarticulated issues arise–haphazardly and intermittently. It was Mark Zuckerberg’s callous remarks about Facebook’s impending work from home pay policy that got me thinking about the subject.

As an individual, as a manager, or as a governing board, crisis is your opportunity to get it right. Crisis is when your sins, inefficiencies, and weaknesses are bare for the world to see. If you relied primarily on in-person events, you are facing a cash flow crisis right now. If you lack equitable pay policies, you may face a moral reckoning with your employees and your donors.

From this context, if you are considering broadening your work from home policy long after the COVID-19 shutdown is over, now is the time to think it through and be the shining role model you always knew your nonprofit could be!

COVID-19 could be your great opportunity to mirror your mission through the better treatment of your employees.

In this five-part series, I’m going to examine some of the hidden costs of working from home. My goal is to give you–an individual or a manager or a leader–the opportunity to recognize and begin to address these hidden costs. And quick! Before the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world cut your pay!

Beware the Dual Dangers to Productivity: Training and Security

Technology and productivity can often be at odds of one another in any environment, but especially at home. At home, the trade-offs in technology choices are often not deliberated or voiced as frequently as in the office environment.

I might work with two monitor screens at the office, but prefer the one laptop screen at home because it means I can change rooms easily in a small space with children. Or I might be stressed and significantly less productive with a laptop and no-one has made it an option to take the office hardware home.

And then there is the reality that some of us adapt to new software and hardware much easier than others. Assuming that everyone will find the right YouTube DIY video for them and quickly learn is begging for a productivity dip!

Shortcuts to learning software are risky. Technology glitches always happen at the worst possible moment!

Managing software takes TIME. I’m not getting any younger, but I am on the receiving end of exponentially more software to learn. If you want people to work from home (or, heck, in the office), how can you better accommodate the learning needs of all ages and types of employees? You have the perfect testing grounds during a crisis.

Unfortunately, it’s also the perfect predatory playground for sinister, unknown forces just waiting to capture your organization’s data for ransom, or worse.

Don’t fool yourself that the risk is low. Digital Guardian examined the data of nearly 200 customers in its Managed Security Program and issued a Data Trends Report that will have you biting your fingernails.

There are plenty of resources and software solutions you can purchase to help secure your organization and its in-office and remote employees, but during shelter-in-place, you are in the perfect training grounds to realize that is not nearly enough.

Yes, of course, you need better passwords, but for example, have you given employees a password manager and created a culture of tip-sharing on how to use it well on all devices? Especially in chaos, something as simple as password protection will break down at the user level. When my dog is going bezerk over the doorbell ringing and I’m creating a new password before I answer the door, rest assured it will not be the best encryption effort.

Another example of how easily security breaks down is actual software use practices.

Sometimes these breaches are poor training, but sometimes it’s that the secure process is less efficient for a particular employee, or the hardware they are using does not support the software you want them to use.

When everyone is thrust into a new environment at once, it is the perfect time to uncover these hidden security breaches and create pathways to reduce the issues. Your solution could be better and more varied training. It could be access to IT consults to help employees configure (and use) their devices appropriately and securely. Or it could be as simple as having the conversation and explaining the risk. Behavior might be the biggest security risk–working from home or the office. Better communications go a long way to averting and solving problems, significantly lowering risk.

Summary

Working from home can lower costs for employer and employee, but if the hidden costs are not recognized and addressed, both parties might not realize some of those savings.

Many times, you can use free or existing systems, such as leveraging your internal intranet to create curated learning resources for different types of learners. If you use Slack for messaging, you can create a #SoftwareTips channel to help everyone stay safe and secure.

Like so many things, the solutions don’t have to be expensive. If you take the time out to plan, you can create a remote environment that provides significant autonomy and customization, with lower costs and higher productivity.

Additional Resources

• Your Career: The Hidden Costs of Working from Home | Part 2 of 5 | Jennifer Filla | 2020
• Your Physical Health: The Hidden Costs of Working from Home | Part 3 of 5 | Jennifer Filla | 2020
• Your Mental Health: The Hidden Costs of Working from Home | Part 4 of 5 | Jennifer Filla | 2020
• Your Resiliency: The Hidden Costs of Working from Home | Part 5 of 5 | Jennifer Filla | 2020

• Data Trends Report| Digital Guardian | 2020
• Google will give every employee $1,000 to WFH. Its head of wellness explains why| CNNBusiness | 2020
• Best Password Managers for 2020| PC Magazine
• 3 Tools I can’t Do Without for Remote Working| Jen Filla at Aspire Research Group | 2020
• Real or Perceived? Risk! And What the Zoom to do About It| Jen Filla | 2020

If you had asked me this question a month ago, I would probably have argued that fundraising strategy usually comes first and data and research support the strategy. Now, in the middle of uncertainty, it’s easier to recognize that it’s not even a valid question.

I was co-presenting a webinar on relationship mapping hosted by Apra Pennsylvania and as my co-presenter, Marianne Pelletier, was walking through the mapping process in Excel, questions were popping up in the chat. How did she know what kind of file to pull? How did she decide which constituent to focus on?

It reminded me how important it is to understand the purpose or the problem we are trying to solve.When we’re learning a tool or technique, we aren’t focused on the problem or scenario. Similarly, in primary school we had to learn the mathematical principles before we could solve word problems.

In real life, research projects start with the problem to solve or the fundraising strategy. Then we explore the data so that we can understand and focus on which data will solve the problem or fuel the fundraising strategy. But mostly this is a loop that gets repeated iteratively.

Let me give you an example

Let’s say Sweet Charity is implementing its donor outreach plan and asks the research department to identify donors who have stable or increasing wealth during the pandemic. Why? Because leadership has created a COVID-19 emergency fund and identified the organization’s new funding priorities and needs to ask the right people for gifts.

Strategy is driving research.

Using industry segmentation, research identifies donors with stable or increasing wealth. And during the presentation, the results are sliced and diced into many different views in response to leadership questions. This is exploratory.

As a result of this exploration, leadership fine-tunes its strategies based on the potential revealed from the research results. One of the discoveries was that the donors with the most potential were the least likely to have email addresses.

Instead of producing a video series as planned, leadership decides that everybody is trying to get online eyeball attention. They will play to their strengths and do a letter campaign for their key priority–children’s education. They have their program participants submit original artwork and craft inspirational messaging.

Research is now driving strategy.

Next research is asked to identify everyone in this smaller donor segment who has children and those who do not. The refinement continues!

Be an active part of the solution

Prospect research professionals are not always asked for their expert opinions on how the data can inform fundraising strategy. Most of us have been told at one time or another that this is, indeed, NOT our role.

And yet the use of data to inform strategy and enhance performance is a very real competitive edge. It’s time for fundraising research professionals to actively engage leadership in exploring the data, acting as translator and co-strategist.

Engaging leadership can be as simple as saying “yes” a lot more often. When leadership asks you to print a report five different times, it’s annoying and feels like there is no method, just madness. But what if you say “yes,” and “by the way, I could use the conference room projector to create these data views in real time as you think through the results.”

Hopefully, if you are involved nonprofit fundraising you can use this time of disruption to think differently.

In the example above, Sweet Charity could have insisted on pursuing its original video strategy and spent money, resources, and time sourcing email addresses. Viewing snail mail as a strength took a shift in perspective brought on by the uncomfortable stress of dwindling funds and rising demand for services.

May disruption work for you, not against you!

Additional Resources

• To Build Strategy, Start with the Future| HBR IdeaCast | 2020
• Have We Forgotten How To Research? Does It Matter?| Jen Filla | 2019
• The Bots Are Coming! So What?| Jen Filla | 2019

As Covid-19 continues to ravage the globe, managers are facing an involuntary move into digital training–a shotgun marriage, as it were. Although it is a somewhat inauspicious beginning, it could still turn into a love story. Outsourced, on-demand training now has better, and more user-friendly platforms. And the learning content has moved from clumsy to engaging.

You Can’t Learn to Drive in a Seminar

Employee training is not the same thing as pursuing a college degree. Employees are more like new automobile drivers:

• Some things are pretty intuitive and easy to master, such as how to turn the car on or operate the windshield wipers.
• Other things can be learned through reading, such as what the street signs mean and not to drink and drive.
• While other things must be learned through practice, such as how hard to press the brake, safe speeds for different turns, and where the passenger edge of the car is relative to the car parked on that side.

You Can Fall in Love at the Car Park

Whether you are a new hire or the hiring manager, teams can have an even better chance at bonding when you are able to leverage outsourced on-demand training, especially for prospect research. Adding a new team member is always additional work. You need to focus on integrating and building rapport.

You can let the outsourced prospect research trainer free your time by helping to build strong skills through independent study and practice.

This works especially well when the training provides opportunities to bridge generalized learning to the specific ways you do things at your organization.

Choose outsourced prospect research training that offers you clear advantages, such as:

• Comprehensive coverage of the subject material. You shouldn’t have to spend a lot of time tracking down and curating the training on research topics. You have to do enough cobbling things together already when you are onboarding someone new.
• Clear outline of the material being covered. When you know exactly what’s in the curriculum, you can incorporate prospect research training appropriately with other internal learning, such as human resources, database software, and specific research subscriptions.
• Student Practice and feedback. Outsourced training can get your new hire on the ground running when there is homework with instructor feedback. This frees up your time for one-on-one or group discussion about applying new skills at your organization.

And Live Happily Ever After

There are many different kinds of training available to the fundraising researcher, but there is nothing quite like the hybrid, on-demand training available at the Prospect Research Institute.

You will find a wide range of support, such as:

• Comprehensive online courses on subjects like prospect profiles, all with a detailed syllabus and capstone projects to demonstrate competency.
• Homework options that include using your organization’s prospects and data, as well as suggestions for discussing with team members and reflecting.
• Instructor feedback, monthly Master Classes and virtual office hours, as well as a Slack community, accommodate different learning needs and preferences.
• Downloadable materials for team discussion and future reference, because no-one should ever stop learning.

Onboarding a new hire doesn’t have to be painful. High quality remote learning can let you enjoy the new employee “honeymoon” period without the tension of trying to find even more time in your schedule to teach prospect research skills.

Wish you could sneak “behind the scenes” and see for yourself how membership at the Prospect Research Institute could help your new hire? You can!

I do regularly scheduled tours via Zoom where you can ask questions and get answers. Check out the schedule and register: https://member.prospectresearchinstitute.org/pages/events

Can’t wait that long? Email me or watch a video: https://member.prospectresearchinstitute.org/pages/get-started