Wealth screenings have been around for over a decade now and we all pretty much know how helpful a screening is to prioritize donors, but what’s inside a screening? Usually the answer is a long list of names of sources, but DonorSearch has turned that into an engaging visual description of why those sources are important. I hope you enjoy the InfoGraphic below as much as I did!
Guest Post by Joe ClementsFor many of America’s wealthy, politics is a central part of their identity.
A recent study by Pew Research revealed that 60 percent of wealthy American’s give money to political campaigns and causes. A 2011 University of Chicago study further showed radically disproportionate political participation levels among the wealthy. Whereas only 26 percent of Americans follow politics “most of the time,” 84 percent of the wealthy attend to politics daily.
Evidence also suggests that America’s wealthy are politically polarized. Pew Research shows that 44 percent of highly engaged Democrats and 51 percent of highly engaged Republicans view the other party as a “threat to the nation.”
Maybe you remember grandma’s advice not to discuss politics at the dinner table? Well, today’s politically engaged classes don’t really have to worry about such “mixed company”. About a third of partisans report that they prefer to live in close proximity to and befriend people who share their political view.
For many of your donors, politics is a part of their identity and daily lives. In fact, you are competing directly for their dollars with presidents and governors.
If your research only includes information about wealth, then you are not flagging some of the most intense passion points of your prospects. Worse, your development officers may be inadvertently stepping on political landmines they never knew existed.
Fortunately, if you know a prospect’s federal and state level donor history and some basics from her voting record, you can convert even the most intense ideologues into lifelong donors. Below are a few tips for approaching politically engaged prospects.
You’ll find additional benefits from political persuasion research. For example, in voter records we often find useful information not only about political participation but also vacation home address, family members in the prospect’s household and leads on whether the prospect has children in college or the military.
The good news is that most of the data you need to determine political identity is public record – from political contribution records to voter files. Researchers can find political information manually or use a tool like CivicBridge that analyzes a prospect’s political and civic engagement.
When it comes to a prospect’s political passions, a few moments of research can mean the difference between losing a prospect because of a political faux pas during the ask and winning a major contribution because the development officer connected on an issue important to the prospect.
About the Author
Joe Clements is a Florida-based political data analyst and founder of Strategic Digital Services (SDS) and CivicBridge. CivicBridge is a platform for helping researchers evaluate the civic engagement of prospects and connect those prospects with their relevant public records. Connect with Joe via email at Joe@chooseSDS.com
Did you have a chance to read the Chronicle of Philanthropy in April? The one titled “Science Unlocks the Secrets of Giving”? Because it was … provocative!
I am a prospect research professional. I love data! Poring over the latest wealth study and pulling out bullet points and formulas to use in researching prospects brings me joy! So why did the Chronicle of Philanthropy’s coverage in April make me uncomfortable?
First, I’d like to say that being uncomfortable is not altogether a bad thing. Pushing outside the comfort zone can yield growth and innovation. And I really hope that happens when it comes to applying science to fundraising. But something isn’t lined up properly.
As I argued in my Innovate or Die article, fundraising must change in response to the economic, cultural and other shifts occurring. What the Chronicle of Philanthropy articles were suggesting was that fundraising should be using the human research and fundraising-specific research studies to craft fundraising strategies and programs.
Human research? Yes really! Such as neuroscientific research delving into what is happening in the brain when someone gives. Research into “how the body’s hormones can affect the reward-giving dopamine levels in our brains that create feelings of generosity and trust”.
There was also a short story on how an organization gave up on an experimental fundraising strategy that involved direct mail with a do-not-solicit-option for the donor that promised not to solicit ever again if a gift was made. The organization was uncomfortable with having no way to build a relationship with the 46% who had made a gift under the do-not-solicit-option … even though they were raising more money from those gifts than with the traditional approach.
I understand the discomfort, but I don’t understand mailing to all those people who will never give again anyway. (Don’t be over-optimistic here; how many of your donors have permanently lapsed after the first gift? Do you even know? And do you continue to mail to them for years, hoping?)
A slight shift in our perspective on donors can better align our organization with reality. We can maintain the same mission and values, but when we recognize that our donors are not “our donors”, but “people who have a made a gift to our organization” we have room to see things differently.
The science might be saying that we are raising more dollars by not stewarding people who don’t want to be stewarded, but from a new perspective we can translate that into … we will respect the wishes of people not to be contacted and we will honor those who do want to be contacted by spending more of our resources building relationships with them.
The science says we will and are raising more money with a specific strategy. Our shift in perspective allows us to say we will and are raising more money using the same integrity and values we have espoused all along – the donor’s right to make choices.
Sure, neuroscientific research studies can be a little bit difficult to decipher and boil down to actionable bullet points. Yes, fundraising research can be in opposition to long-standing traditions and beliefs about donors.
It can make us uncomfortable.
We have to question our resistance. We have to change the angle from which we view the situation. Why would we not want to respect the wishes of someone who has made a gift to us? Even when it is a wish not to be contacted.
Research is suggesting, nigh, demanding that we do our fundraising differently. Innovate or Die!
But we must do ‘different’ with a balanced approach. We must shift our perspective so that we can make decisions that accept reality and yet still align with our mission, values and the trust the public has for our organizations. The trust they have in us.
Guest Post by Sarah Tedesco
Think of your nonprofit like a light bulb and money as the filament. You’ve got plenty of conducting wire to glow for a long time, but are you shining as bright as possible? Is your light reaching as far as it could or are you casting shadows upon donors just out of reach?
Prospect research provides philanthropic and wealth data that helps you to spot the major gift prospects who will donate the additional funds that you need.
Below are five ways to convince the head honchos of your organization to make a strategic investment in prospect research.
Does your prospect have a good poker face? Does he enjoy bubble baths with a glass of red wine? Is he an ancient Greek pottery aficionado? Prospect research won’t answer those questions, but it will deliver the sort of information that you need to improve your major gift fundraising.
Prospect research provides:
The fundraising experience becomes more personalized when you know more about donors. Your loyal donors are your most important donors, and remaining abreast of who they are and how to best continue to solicit donations ensures that your relationships will last.
While you’re busy hosting events, managing staff, and taking care of other tasks, your most valuable resource is always tick, tick, ticking away… Time.
With prospect research, you can pick out the highest quality major gift prospects on your list and dedicate your time, staff, and resources accordingly. Your fundraising efforts will be focused on the prospects who can deliver the biggest impacts for your organization.
Prospect research methods include:
While modest donations help, major gifts deliver big, immediate impacts for your nonprofit, and finding more major gift donors is the fastest way to increase fundraising. However, when it comes to increasing your number of significant donors, new isn’t always better.
The top indicator of a major gift prospect is previous giving to your nonprofit, but that doesn’t mean that the previous giving is in the $5,000+ range of a major gift. Despite only giving modest amounts, your loyal donors are your most fertile source of new major gift prospects.
Annual donors, no matter how little they give, have a demonstrated, consistent affinity for your organization. Some of these donors can’t give more, but prospect research can reveal which ones can. However, if loyal donors have the capacities to give more, and care so much about your organization, then why don’t they give more?
The explanation may be as simple as that you’ve never asked these prospects to give more, so they’ve never thought to do so. There may be other reasons, and a thorough job of prospect research can help to solve the mystery, so you can turn these annual fund donors into major gift donors.
An old rule of prospect research is that 80% of funds are raised from 20% of the donations, although many organizations claim that it’s more like 90% of funds from 10% of donations, and others find that an even larger portion of their money comes from an even smaller contingency of major donors. You likely have several major donors, but the more the merrier, as these are the people who will provide most of your annual revenue.
Ring. Ring. Ri…
Prospect: Hello?
You: Hi! Is this Mr. Major Donor?
Prospect: I think you have a wrong number.
Fundraising doesn’t have to be like that phone call. You can call the right numbers more often than not, but only if you have up-to-date information.
Prospect research keeps crucial contact information up to date, such as:
Don’t just take this new information and throw it into a cluttered closet. Embrace the opportunity to clean up your database, so that your donor records are easily searchable and accessible.
You know that you can find new major gift prospects among your current donors, and that you shouldn’t overlook even low-level donors, but there’s also a specific type of major gift to be aware of.
Many donors save their biggest donations to be planned or deferred gifts, and, according to a planned giving expert, planned gifts typically come from regular, modest donors.
Prospect research provides the data that reveals potential planned giving donors.
Landing donations, and especially planned gifts, can be a long game, and donors have long-term value that might be patient to reveal itself. Prospect research helps you to find all of these people and delivers comprehensive information that allows you to make more individualized pitches that will better resonate with prospects and land more major gifts, even if they’re gifts that you have to wait a little longer to receive.
These tips should help you make the case at your organization for the importance of investing in prospect research! You’re a nonprofit with a bold heart and an important mission, so increase your fundraising with prospect research in order to focus on what you’re meant to do.
Sarah Tedesco is Executive Vice President at DonorSearch, a prospect research and wealth screening company that focuses on proven philanthropy. Sarah is responsible for managing the production and customer support department concerning client contract fulfillment, increasing retention rate and customer satisfaction. She collaborates with other team members on a variety of issues including sales, marketing and product development ideas.
Connect with Sarah:
Women may be just under half of the world’s population, but they represent 11% of the 2015 Forbes World’s Billionaires List. Of the 197 women on the list, 29 are self-made billionaires. These may not sound like inspiring numbers, but consider the women on the rise.
Elizabeth A. Holmes is the youngest self-made woman billionaire – ever.
And she happens to be female. And she founded a company using her scientific prowess. So if you’ve been reading all the nasty headlines about how women suffer from misogynists harassing them in the tech field, consider that some uber-successful women have simply stepped around that hot mess!
Ms. Holmes is 31 years old, has retained 50% ownership of her company Theranos valued at around $9 billion, and makes time for philanthropy:
The real question is this: If Ms. Holmes wasn’t on the Forbes list, would you even know she existed?
Because I bet there are many sweet major gift prospect gems inside your databases and within your organization’s social circle, but you have no clue.
Of the 168 non-self-made female billionaires on the list, many inherited their wealth from fathers and husbands. But don’t let that fool you. They own it! Did you pay attention to those women before their fathers and husbands died? You should have.
Even before they are widowed these women are usually the influencers and even the drivers behind household philanthropic decisions.
In her debut publication What About Women? prospect research professional Preeti Gill suggests you take a walk through your database …as a woman.
Perhaps the easiest way wealthy women are hidden and not recognized by the organizations they love is when they are never entered into the database to begin with. Way too many organizations do not track and include volunteers in their fundraising vision and plans. Your prospect research professional can’t find major gift prospects in your database if they aren’t in there.
And what do we know about women? They do their due diligence before investing! And part of that due diligence is often volunteering for the organization.
Ignore women in your fundraising at your own peril! Women are different from men. They think about money differently. They want different interactions with your organization from men. And they might even give differently from men.
Fundraising with a focus on women will require adjustments and adjustments require time, money and resources.
But very wealthy women are on the rise and they bring rewards:
Are you interested in learning more and staying current on women in philanthropy? Click here to sign-up for the What About Women? email list.
Looking back on 2014 I realize that I’ve done quite a few screenings and research verification projects. And that means I’ve had lots of conversations with fundraisers who ask a lot of the same questions. I thought you might like to eavesdrop on some of those Q&A’s!
Very soon after I get into a conversation with a fundraiser about prospect screenings, this question gets asked in some form or another:
Every organization has different needs, but generally speaking, verifying results is necessary for at least three reasons:
Once we start talking about where the data comes from and why there are bound to be some errors and omissions, the next question is this one:
Verify means deciding which pieces of information are most important and then checking or verifying those pieces of information. It’s like a quality control check in manufacturing. Instead of each garment getting a sticker that says “Inspector #32”, each name gets a once-over by a prospect research professional.
Following are some illustrations of how this might differ from organization to organization:
Why such variation in approach? Always look for the money! Spend the most time and resources where it will bring in the most gift dollars. Common sense tells us that there should be a different approach for verifying results where the highest gift capacity is $500,000 from verifying results where the highest gift capacity is $100 million.
And then people always want to know:
By now you will probably understand when I say, “It depends”. How long depends on how much you are verifying and at what capacity rating levels. Sometimes there are lots of assets and hundreds of possible gifts – that could take a while. On the other hand, prospects with less capacity can sometimes verify quite quickly.
Take a name or two in each category you plan to verify and time yourself. Now you have a good idea of timing.
Everyone in the fundraising office needs to know a few things about data these days. We need to turn data into information and information into actionable insight. That requires both fundraising and research knowledge. But you knew that, right? Because you are the future of fundraising!
The future has a way of entering slowly, day-by-day. But sometimes the writing is on the wall. The words I see on the fundraising wall are Data Analytics. Sure, you say, we all know that. But what does it mean to your organization? To you? Answer: Innovate or die.
That may sound extreme. And it is. But it doesn’t make it any less possible. Before you dismiss that answer, let me tell you how I arrived at it.
My favorite magazine of all time is The Economist. Lately they have been writing frequently about the growing inequality around the world and in America. How capital is taking a far greater share of wealth and how income, in the form of wages, is stagnating. Companies froze wages pre-recession, but even though profits have returned wages have not risen.
In his blog post “Where have all the donors gone?” Mark Noll makes the case that the result of these economics is the missing middle donor. Post-recession, people may be employed again, but too often at a lower wage. Where will our gifts come from?
In her book, Nonprofit Essentials: The Development Plan (2007), Linda Lysakowski, ACFRE is but one of many fundraisers talking about how Pareto’s 80/20 principle has turned into the 95/5 principle or worse. Way too much of our funding is coming from a tiny sliver of very wealthy. And where do the very wealthy like to give their gifts?
According to the Million Dollar List maintained by the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, fifteen of the twenty largest multi-million dollar gifts by value were from individuals to private foundations associated with their families. Higher education receives the highest number of million dollar gifts.
In the Agitator blog, Roger Craver writes:
“Giving USA 2013 is but the latest report to make pretty clear that sitting on the sidelines waiting for recovery [from the Great Recession] is a strategy only for the suicidally inclined…demands on charities [is] rising at the same time giving is nearly flat….”
It’s pretty clear that if fundraisers fail to innovate the organizations they serve will suffer.
Data analytics is the cold method behind a warm philosophy: listen to people when they tell you something. And when thousands of people are telling you something, not only listen, but start digging deeper and ask more questions.
Data analytics allows us to “hear” from our constituents in ways we are physically incapable of hearing. If the data tells us that a large number of constituents click through on messages about one of our program outcomes regardless of where we put those messages (social media, print, etc.), but are not responding to messages about another program we planned to make our strategic direction for the next year – we should re-think that direction, right? Maybe.
It’s pretty amazing that we can “hear” our constituents through data, but don’t be mesmerized by all that glitters. We also need innovation in our approach to attracting donors, finding the “best” out of those and asking them for gifts. If the reality is that we will mostly have very large and very small gifts, how can we change our approach?
In 2012 the Chronicle of Philanthropy featured the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts in Missouri, which raised $416-million, in part by attracting modest gifts such as $1,000 multi-year pledges. This gave smaller donors the opportunity to express their interest and commitment and to be recognized. Crowdfunding is a similar approach, but might be improved upon to become less transactional. People want to give; people take pride in giving. It’s our job to figure out how to make it easy to give while building affinity.
In addition to gift size there are other changes we need to adapt to. Population changes cannot be ignored. Preeti Gill has written a provocative piece about identifying women philanthropists. In “Hey, Ladies! Thanks for giving. Sorry we missed you,” she notes that many multi-million dollar bequests come from women who are “outside of our databases and away from the corporate and media glare”. In other words, traditional prospect research techniques are failing to identify them.
International donors can’t be ignored either. Harvard University just announced a $350 million dollar gift from a wealthy Hong Kong family. Have you looked at population trends and predictions for your organization?
Are your donors from the local community? Are they international graduating students? You need fundraising programs that meet the needs of the constituents you have and will have in the future, not the ones you wish you could have. Data has to come from outside your organization as well as inside.
Data analytics helps us find answers and sometimes it can even help us ask questions, but most of the time data analytics requires someone with curiosity and creative problem-solving skills to direct it.
Fundraisers need to shake themselves awake from the traditional and begin interacting with the data so that they can better meet the philanthropic desires of (all) real people.
Organizations need to be willing to take risks, fail a little and ultimately win.
Ask Kodak or IBM about listening and innovating in the face of change. Innovate or die. It doesn’t sound so extreme now does it? And it is doable.
I dare you to try this search! Go to the search engine of your choice and type in…
CRM “change agent”
Are you surprised how many relevant results you get? There are many similar if not the same names for the process of putting the customer, or in our case the donor, first. Here’s a few:
So what’s this about being a change agent? How could anyone reasonably expect CRM software to be a change agent?!
Obviously CRM software is not a magic wand capable of implementing change. But creating or changing your relationship management system is a powerful opportunity to raise the bar in your fundraising efforts. Unfortunately, all too often this opportunity is missed because its role as a change agent is not recognized.
No matter what size your organization and no matter how many people in your fundraising office, any change to your relationship management system is going to affect a number of different players on your team – most potently when it changes performance assessments and incentives.
Following are five tips to help make your relationship management system a successful change agent:
You are listening for a few critical items: (a) Are you using the same language as the key players? (b) Do your proposed changes match their values? (c) Might any of the proposed changes create undesired consequences? This is Internal Relationship Building 101. Yes, we must do it internally, not just externally with our donors.
Have fun with this. Go all out. Create simple explanations you can recite in your sleep. Give it a brand and tagline. Use color. No person’s role is too small not to be an advocate of your change. If staff don’t want it or even know what it is, how successful do you think you’ll be?
Whether you network with your colleagues, read vendor and association research studies, scan for blogs and articles online, or all of the above, do your homework so you can make as few mistakes as possible. Don’t get stuck on research, but don’t be skimpy. If you are recommending a smaller portfolio size, you’d better know the philosophy behind that approach or you may risk raising fewer dollars while you figure it out.
Why not find a way to test-run some or all of your changes before a full rollout? I’m not talking just the technology – a person should walk through the whole process too. Consider all the phases of your rollout and don’t forget to include training and re-training.
Your relationship management system will always face two persistent threats: (1) Change in the external fundraising environment such as donor behavior and the economy, and (2) Change in the internal organizational environment, such as changes in leadership and finances. Hopefully you won’t need to make big changes frequently, but if you regularly audit the performance of the system you will be better placed to react.
No matter how big or how small your fundraising office is, your relationship management system is a tool to help you get focused on your donors and prospects. One of the biggest obstacles to achieving success with any technology or system is getting everyone trained and willing to use it.
I am thrilled to share a guest post from Gil Israeli, Director of Prospect Research and Senior Writer for the American Technion Society.
Let’s say you’re a front-line fundraiser and your organization is providing a prospect researcher to support your work. If you’re new to this professional collaboration, what should you look for when you’re interviewing candidates?
Every fundraiser knows that an ongoing normal part of their business involves rejection – rejection by prospective donors. Initially, most researchers are unaware of the challenges faced by fundraisers (be they professionals or volunteers). In an earlier position, one grant-seeking professor soberly told me that his (better-than-average) rate of success was one funded proposal for every five that he submitted to government agencies.
It takes an incredible level of optimism to be a fundraiser and this also applies to the researcher who is one degree removed from direct contact with the prospect. Sometimes an inexperienced researcher has limited contact with the fundraisers. This type of isolation can make it challenging to keep abreast of the broader issues which affect the organization. A good dose of optimism may be the most important trait in a good researcher. It starts the researcher on a solid path to acquiring essential skills and supports him or her in the next career activity: branching out into their organization to know its people and learn its processes.
There are three types of knowledge that are critical to a researcher’s success: knowledge of research methods and data; knowledge of one’s organization and its projects; and knowledge of the overall fundraising process and the actual industry. The best researchers go well beyond the first realm.
Not only do they know how to “drill down” deep to find a level of data that provides a detailed research-based story of the prospect, they need to make connections for the fundraiser that will apply the data to his cultivation efforts. This requires that the researcher understand how the fundraiser strategizes and even interacts with prospects. It also requires organizational knowledge, e.g., in a university operation (and most others), a capital project requires a cash gift to break ground. This information would figure into your analysis of a prospect’s liquidity for a capital gift. A researcher needs to have genuine curiosity that extends beyond the mere data.
Understanding all aspects of the organization’s work enables the researcher to prepare actionable research for the fundraiser. Having a second set of eyes – “fundraiser eyes” – enables the researcher to envision how a prospect’s data may ideally fit into the mission of the organization.
Good interpersonal skills also come into play which aid the researcher as he or she gets to know one’s colleagues and the rich world of fundraising practices, policies and prospect interactions.
Perseverance, the high-octane extension of curiosity and another critical characteristic, is going the extra distance in your work in the most calculated way. It is fueled by curiosity and the knowledge it brings. And perseverance is exhibited best in the type of research reports that researchers produce.
Today, generally, you’ll find two types of prospect reports. One, via the profile template, is organized in sections, which is particularly useful for exporting data from your database. However, it may lack certain types of information which can only be expressed in anecdotal reports of actionable information. This type of information comes out especially in the narrative report and can appear in a database’s open text field. You can also generate a final product that combines these two types of reports. So, what are the benefits of this?
I recently reported on a Boston-based technology magnate. My own position supports a major university with interests in science, technology, medicine, engineering and education programs. As the president of the university was to meet with this individual, I prepared a hybrid report which combined the template (with an estimated capacity rating, assets, boards, etc.) and additional, necessary, narrative sections. These required “insider knowledge,” which I had developed through 13 years of experience with the organization.
In the narrative parts, I was able to draw inferences and connect relevant information such as the prospect’s boards and past gifts to the immediate interests and current project needs of the university. For example, the prospect was critically involved in developing a national database to record comprehensive data about students in U.S. public school systems. Accordingly, I was able to discuss and recommend technology infrastructure projects that would enhance the university’s services to all students and also library projects that would serve the entire university community. The report helped the president strategize at a much higher level before even meeting the prospect. This type of “added-value” research requires real perseverance as it requires that the researcher maintain the most up-to-date knowledge of your organization’s work and the provision that you productively integrate it into your research reports.
Over time, perseverance will also bring the researcher experience to better evaluate the “cash value” of his or her own work. It’s also important to be able to recognize when research doesn’t meet the test of practicality. On one occasion, I identified a family that owned a lucrative multigenerational business with several dozen restaurants on the east coast. After my excitement peaked, I noted that their corporate headquarters and residences were located in a locale that made fundraiser visits exorbitantly expensive when compared with our usual visits to prospects. Even more so, allocating funds for these visits would have diverted the monies from other good uses, e.g., special events where several major gift prospects could be gathered and engaged. In this case, my knowledge of the fundraising operation (a business perspective) also helped me determine that this proactive research was simply not practical and actionable. I had gained this knowledge over years as I became involved in additional meetings and had the opportunity to converse more with my fundraiser colleagues. And it made me better at my job.
Prospect research reports can become homogeneous and suffer the problem of omission when we allow ourselves to be limited by our tools. For example, researchers need a reasonable level of comfort with numbers and formula to effectively calculate capacity ranges and ratings. Most of these measures of prospect capacity are then augmented with advanced knowledge that we have gained by analyzing other types of assets such as the value of private companies, pensions, collections, etc. Again, curiosity comes into play and in multiple ways.
Because each prospect is unique, each prospect research report may also need to be unique and require its own creative approach. Creativity turns out to be the critical characteristic for the researcher who can adapt to different prospect types. Learn the rules and then break them at the right time in a practical way for insightful returns.
We all know the litany: computer-writing-communication-analytical skills are essential to high performance in nearly all of today’s urban-based information-processing desk jobs.
I’ve focused on strong optimism, expansive curiosity, unflagging perseverance and practical creativity because they are often not given the explicit attention that they should receive when hiring a prospect researcher. A really good prospect researcher has these characteristics with the skill sets we expect and a social aptitude for connecting with fundraising colleagues. Without these characteristics, he or she remains tied to the first literal level of discovered data and is unable to further contextualize it for strategic use for his or her fundraiser colleagues.
The best news is that when the sparks of these four qualities exist, they can be nurtured with one’s colleagues for mutual professional development and fruitful collaboration. Finally, these qualities are akin to sustainable energy: they can keep the prospect researcher growing throughout his or her career.
Gil Israeli serves as the Director of Prospect Research and Senior Writer for the American Technion Society, which supports the Technion, Israel’s premier university advancing science, technology and medicine. He holds degrees from Johns Hopkins, Columbia University and the University of Virginia. He edits fundraisingcompass.com , a blog which presents pieces by seasoned fundraising professionals.
Yes! Relationship mapping is a disruptive technology with the power to change our relationship management process and procedures. But, no worries! Change will probably come slowly.
Disruptive technology makes for great headlines, but most technology slips into our life a little bit at a time. We don’t have small computers; we have smart phones. We don’t have a wired house; we have a phone app to adjust our heating and air conditioning system.
Mapping out the connections between our prospects gives us linkage. This is one of the three pillars of a good prospect: Linkage – Ability – Inclination.
So far the technology has worked best in for-profit situations like the financial management industry. But companies like Prospect Visual and Relationship Science are nimbly adjusting their products to provide value for the nonprofit industry.
How might relationship mapping be disruptive?
Right now, higher education has the biggest opportunity to make relationship mapping a disruptive – and competitive – edge to their fundraising. Why? Because they have a natural prospect pool (their alumni) and an avalanche of data on those prospects.
Data points include degree, club membership, event attendance, birth date, and so much more! And they have year upon year of graduating (and non-graduating) students. All of this means that higher education can deeply analyze relationships between their alumni.
It’s disruptive because that university might discover that the way they have typically assigned prospects to gift officers is counter-productive. Most organizations segment the prospect pool by geography and/or school of study. It all made sense because that was the data that was available to use for segmenting. Throw in relationship maps and you now have a new perspective.
For example, if my prospect is densely connected – has the most connections to other people – why wouldn’t I assign the densely connected prospect *and his connections* to the same gift officer regardless of where they live? That is a game changer!
And that’s just a shallow view. Deeper analysis will likely reveal other more meaningful ways to assign prospects to gift officers based on how they are connected and other data modeling.
But I work for a smaller institution. What about me?
Huge institutions are always on the trending edge. And while it’s exciting to hear about, it’s not terribly applicable to the majority of nonprofit organizations. Or is it?
Recently I have had some thrilling moments using the relationship mapping tool offered by Prospect Visual. We’ve been working with a client who is trying hard to get a fundraising initiative off the ground with corporations and foundations. But it’s new so everyone is a bit unsure about where to start and how to make the cold calls. And then staff turned over. A familiar scenario to most of us!
So when they asked me to do some deeper research on their top prospects I really wanted to give them confidence to approach the prospect. I really wanted my research to persuade them to pick up the telephone. But how? By giving them a name of one of their own that is connected to the prospect, of course.
And I did it!! It didn’t work for every prospect and sometimes the connections seemed tenuous, but I found connections I would never have found otherwise. I delivered an obvious, and much more comfortable, first phone call to make – to one of their own.
Not so very long ago, finding connections was limited in scope and extremely tedious. Now, using Prospect Visual, I can identify possible connections and then dig a little deeper to verify them. It’s as transformative to my work in research as the microwave was to home cooking!
What Should Every Nonprofit Do Right Now?
Maybe you don’t have a prospect researcher on staff, are not in a position to purchase a subscription to a product like Prospect Visual, or don’t have the resources to outsource research. Even that should not stop you from getting on board the data wagon. And make no mistake – success in the game of life has always been about information!
Eventually relationship mapping and other data tools will become incorporated into your donor database or in some other way made easily accessible. When that happens, you need to be ready. Here’s what you can do:
Of course it’s all about the Relationship!
Relationship management, prospect management, or moves management – whatever we call our system of engaging and staying in touch with our supporters and prospective supporters – starts with a connection.
Relationship mapping can give us a whole new perspective on how we are connected to our prospects and donors. First we climbed a tree to get a good view -we used a database to view our donors- and now suddenly we are looking down from a helicopter -with relationship mapping.
At first it can be a bit disorienting to be able to see so many connections, especially because false connections are mixed in with true connections. But best practices are being developed and tested.
If you are interested to learn more about how relationship mapping can add new perspective to your prospect management efforts, contact Aspire Research Group, sign-up for the relationship mapping work group, or check out the resources and videos below.
