Category Archives: 4Researchers

Re-Wiring the Trusty Profile

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There’s a bit of buzz about whether prospect research is going to get dumbed down by smart software products or if it will get lifted into the realm of strategy and management. The reality is probably a bit of both. Today I thought I’d bite off one little piece of the bigger conversation. I want to take a tried and true prospect research task – the trusty profile – and toss it up in the air to discover a new perspective on its utility and value.

Conversation Starter

Sabine Schuller jump-started the dialogue on the PRSPCT-L list-serv with an article,Is a Googlized Workplace Replacing Dedicated Competitive Intelligence Resources? Substitute “prospect research” for “competitive intelligence” and you can join in the exchange. Helen Brown did! She opined on the topic with a blog post, Prospect Research’s Strategic Advantage, suggesting that prospect researchers offer “experience, context, and strategy”. Mark Noll and Chris Mildner commented about the need for prospect research to concern itself with ROI. They told us we have to demonstrate how research translates into increased gift levels.

Can We Re-Wire the Humble Profile?

As you might have noticed, the topic has many layers of discussion points and profiles are somewhere amongst them. Can we re-wire the humble profile to make it more strategic and cost efficient? What does that mean?

I’ve heard conversations along these lines:

  • The paper profile is dead. It should all go into the database.
  • Research should be finding the basics – ability, inclination, linkage/affinity – and spend not a minute more.
  • My gift officer was struggling to connect with a prospect and I dug deep and found some nuggets of interest that helped him to solicit and receive a multi-million dollar gift.

My two cents? They are all correct! Prospect research is positioned differently at each organization depending upon the structure and culture of its fundraising operations. But sometimes people are so excited about their success with their hammer that they begin to view every problem as a nail, even if it’s a screw.

My favorite type of client to work with has no research staff and is tasked with raising million-dollar gifts. She relies on the paper profiles to give her really deep insight into what makes this prospect tick because the pressure is high to get the largest gift possible for her organization. She doesn’t hesitate to call me and question the information so she can feel confident in her ask amount.

It’s my job to know how much and what kind of detail to include.

That’s a big sentence. And it leads me to an interesting interaction I had recently with another client. We were talking about her need for corporate research. She wanted all the usual info, but they had specific strategies they were focused on for corporate prospects. My profiles are typically organized to best present the information collected, but what I was hearing was that she wanted to know exactly how to approach the company for each strategy.

So I reorganized the profile to highlight info relevant to each strategy first and then other sections to hold traditional, but necessary, information second. I did the first couple of profiles to be sure it worked and, well, it felt awkward. It took extra effort to parse the information into the right spots. I truly had to think first about the strategy and second about the information I was scanning. But it kept the profile laser-focused on what was most important to creating the cultivation and solicitation strategy. That felt good!

But, What About You and Your Office?

When deciding how much and what kind of profile types your prospect research department should be producing, I recommend engaging your fundraising staff in dialogue around these big questions:

Does everyone understand…

  • What the three main functions of prospect research areas are? (Prospect Identification or proactive, Prospect Profiling or reactive, and Relationship Management)
  • How those functions affect and support their specific specialty (events, annual fund, major and planned gifts, alumni relations, etc.)?
  • Where they fit within the strategic goals for the organization’s overall fundraising?

(Just remember that, as in search technique, less is often more. We’re not talking two weeks of training, but a simple, framework discussion.)

With everyone on the same page, now you can begin to have a discussion about things like if and when prospect research should be doing in-depth, six to twelve hour individual research profiles or who should be preparing bullet points for major gift prospects at events.

Now everyone knows where the priorities lie and how prospect research is going to be used to support them. It might not make everyone happy, but hey, happiness is a personal journey, right?

Onward to the Future!

Yes, the world is a-changing. We need to have the confidence and courage to re-engineer our services. We need to become more competitive and tie what we do to its impact on giving. And as we pursue big-picture discussions about the future of our profession, we need to recognize the diversity of our experience, context and strategies to create best practices focused on problem-solving.

With professionals like Sabine Schuller, Helen Brown, Mark Noll, Chris Mildner and You, I have no doubt we can ride these waves of changes with aplomb. I can’t wait to hear what you have to say!

Relationship Mapping for New Prospects

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I just can’t stop thinking about relationship mapping! Probably because I am deep within a project to use relationship mapping to generate new prospects and illuminate the path to identified prospects within a campaign. A soft touch for new software, I really, really want the product I’m using, Prospect Visual, to deliver the goods. But will it?

The Many Shades of Relationship Mapping

Relationship mapping is not new, but some of the tools used to find relationships are new. Essentially, you create a visual (think family tree style) or data map (like in Excel or a database) or both of someone’s relationships. Many organizations collect this information in the donor database as an afterthought or “extra”. Relationships might be mapped to family members, boards served, club memberships, religious involvement and others. Why, you could even map all of the interrelated relationships of the Mad Men television show characters…

Mad Men Relationships

In higher education there may be a wealth of information from the school that connects individuals to one another, such as club membership, degree majors, and sports participation among many others. In 2012, Queens University presented at a CASE conference on their use of TouchGraph to map relationships within their own database.

What some new products, such as Prospect Visual and Relationship Science, are attempting to do is allow you to take the relationships you have collected on one individual and find paths to reach other individuals “out in the wild”.

LinkedIn does a reasonable job of this for prospecting within business networks. I have used LinkedIn, in combination with verbally asking people in my network, to identify paths to prospects I would like to cultivate for business. A personal introduction by someone with a strong relationship is much preferable to a cold call!

A nonprofit organization can use a trustee or engaged volunteer to introduce it to new prospects who are likely to have an affinity for the organization. Nothing new about that!

The Missing Piece: Spheres of Influence

What is new is identifying, perhaps by visualizing, someone’s sphere of influence. Some people are connected to more people and some people have many people in their network that are strong or deep connections. Strong connections suggest that the person can influence the other person. In the triad of Linkage-Ability-Inclination, relationship mapping provides the piece research has not always been so good at delivering in the past: Linkage.

In our book, Prospect Research for Fundraisers, Helen Brown and I discuss relationship mapping in the last chapter. Helen provides a great example of an organization that used its alumni group on LinkedIn to identify individuals who were highly connected and then qualified them for affinity. This process uncovered some great new prospects.

Jen Filla’s Facebook Spheres

I attended a course at the Nonprofit Leadership Center of Tampa Bay led by social media expert Bryn Warner, and I created a visual representation of my relationships from my personal Facebook page, which I have included here. Just look at all the connections around my husband and my favorite live-music venue, Mahuffer’s! Clearly this represents a sphere of influence. And it’s a messy, tangled ball of yarn, yes? I did not take the time to manipulate the graph results to make it pleasing to the eye or to make the names all readable. Make no mistake, these tools may be powerful, but they are time-hungry beasts!

Analyzing and Verifying

My experience so far using Prospect Visual is two-fold: (1) Visualizing spheres of influence is effective in identifying promising paths to new prospects; and (2) Just as in a wealth screening, this big relationship database is great at prioritizing, but I still have to analyze and verify the information.

What I have been doing so far in Prospect Visual is identifying clusters of relationships – spheres of influence – inside and outside the defined group of individual, foundation and corporation prospects in our project space. While one trustee may have strong relationships to identified prospects, another trustee may have a deep and wide network with organizations and people that my client has not considered before.

Once we see a sphere of influence, the next step is to confirm it truly exists and then discover whether there is any ability or inclination. Because there are errors in the underlying database of relationships – such as duplicate records and connections that are just plain wrong – the connections must be verified. And once the connections are verified, further research is needed to discover those shiny glimmers of affinity.

Getting Results

As with wealth screenings, moving the process from mass prioritization all the way through cultivation and solicitation takes time. It will likely be at least a year before any results, let alone gifts, are realized from the effort. And this project is not exactly number one on everyone’s to-do list. Prospects and donors in active cultivation and solicitation create the crisis of time that vacillate the prospect identification project between hot and cold attention.

Who is at the Watering Hole?

Are you actively using relationship mapping techniques and tools? Do you plan to? Do you wish you could be a fly on the wall hearing about it? Join the conversation! In a geographically dispersed environment where many of us perform prospect research solo, sharing our work successes and challenges builds our profession and ourselves.

Relationship Mapping Work Group

Aspire Research Group has created a free-to-participate work group that meets online. You can join the conversation – or lurk about listening – by signing-up for the email list. I’m looking forward to sharing with you!

Getting Real with Residential Real Estate

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This post debuts the InfoSeeking4Researchers series! I decided residential real estate would provide a great conversation starter. It appears simple, but is laced with multiple perspectives depending upon organization size, skill levels, prospect capacities and more. As in, a deceptively simple topic!

I have started the conversation here, but I’m expecting you to finish it. Each conversation starter I write will be emailed to InfoSeeking 4Researchers subscribers and posted here on the InfoSeeking blog under the 4Researchers category. You can subscribe to the e-newsletter to get extra tips and resources, or follow the blog category. Wherever you read it, I encourage you to post your experiences, tips, and questions as blog comments so everyone can benefit.

Residential real estate is one of the first things we researchers look for and yet sometimes we overlook the nuanced information it can provide. I was reminded of just how much it can shape prospect strategy as I was reviewing a prospect profile with a new client… but I’m getting ahead of myself. First, let’s discuss presenting the information. Second, I’ll give an example analysis. And third, I’ll start a list of examples that I hope you will add to!

Presenting Residential Real Estate

As the years roll forward, I have moved to presenting more of my researched information in tables. It ensures that no matter who does the work, everything looks the same, and it also helps me remember the pieces we need to check for. My real estate table looks like something like this:

Property Year Valuation
[depending on the level, I might include a picture here]

1234 Best Vista Drive, Indian Shores FL 33785

  • Pinellas County Gulf-front residence; 5-bed, 4776 sq ft interior
  • Purchased in 2002 for $8 million
  • Owned by Pillsbury and Jane Dough
  • Revolving line of credit recorded in 2007 for $1 million
 2013 $11 million

I choose to present an estimated market value, which I round so the end user doesn’t interpret it as an exact value.

  • Are you presenting your research in a document or does everything go directly into the database?
  • Are there places in your database to include the bullet points above that will print in a database generated profile?

A Quick Analysis

So what do I now know about Mr. and Mrs. Dough?

  • They own a big house on the beach.
  • They purchased before the real estate market tanked and paid cash (no mortgage).
  • They took out a loan during the recession, which happened to coincide with when Mrs. Dough launched her new and very successful business.

And that means…

  • They already had wealth when they bought the house and leveraged that wealth during the recession to launch a business when the business market was quiet. I’d say they likely have significant capacity.

Other examples of things I have learned through real estate

  • When the property is owned in a trust named after the prospects and listing them as trustees, I want see if the trust name on the deed record states exactly what kind of trust it is. Holding the family home in trust suggests to me that they have done some estate planning, which the gift officer will want to take into consideration.
  • One prospect held a property in trust in his name and yet he was living in a retirement home. When this was pointed out to the gift officer, he told me that he had heard the prospect’s daughter was having troubles and that this house was likely bought for her use. So it’s not likely the property is going to factor into a gift, is it? Good to know.
  • When a prospect has owned the property 10+ years and still resides in the home, even if only part-time, it suggests a different approach to life and wealth than someone who buys and sells the primary residence as often as you might sign a car lease.
  • When there is a mortgage, and especially if it is a large one, it suggests that there must be a certain amount of income to support those mortgage payments. A mortgage calculator is a handy tool to get an estimate.
  • There’s a big difference between a successful real estate investor who sits on vacant land through the downturn (because she paid cash) and one who is stuck holding vacant land (because she has debt)!

Now it’s Your Turn!

Our profession is rife with experienced, intelligent and very creative people who also share. Won’t you share too?

  • Do you have examples to share like the ones above?
  • What nuggets of info routinely gets ignored, but shouldn’t?
  • Or should we spend less time on real estate and more on something else?

Click on “Leave a Comment” below or any of the social media buttons.

How to Find Giving History

4Fundraisers, 4Researchers, , , ,

A great way to qualify a prospect and gain insight on a donor is to learn about the person’s giving history with other organizations. This demonstrates philanthropic inclination and aids in determining how much to ask for. But where do you find this lucrative information?

The Vendors
There are vendors who crawl through the web and/or scan and index printed donor recognition reports (NOZA, DonorSearch, iWave, WealthEngine). You type in the name and maybe some other criteria, and the software lists all the gifts found that match that name as a donor.

Do it Yourself
You can do the same thing using search engines, but it can be a bit hairy if your prospect has a very common name. And you won’t find old listings that have been removed from the internet. Using Google, click on the Advanced Search link found somewhere near the search box. This gives you a form to complete. Fill in the blanks under Find web pages that have… as needed. Try different combinations of the prospect name, including maiden and nicknames. But the real magic happens under the Need More Tools? options.

Search within a site or domain
You have a few ways to play with the Search within a site or domain option. You can choose just “.edu” or “.org” or you might choose the domain of an organization you know your prospect has an affinity with such as “afpsuncoast.org”. Once you start to fool around with these options you will find what you want much more quickly.

What if I don’t find any giving?
Just because a vendor or your own searches do not turn up any record of giving does NOT mean your prospect does not make gifts. Many organizations never publish the names of their donors. Does your organization publish donor lists? If you do not find any giving, and even if you do, you have a few options still available to you to determine philanthropic inclination.

  1. Does the person volunteer, serve as board member or is involved in some other way with charitable organizations? (Don’t forget church membership here.) People who are involved are more likely to give.
  2. Does the person attend lots of charity benefits and events? Sometimes an area has a culture of charity events and donors are not really asked for other gifts.
  3. Check for Federal Election Campaign Contributions (www.opensecrets.org) because these donations are correlated positively with charitable giving.
  4. If you know where she went to school, search that domain for your prospect’s name. Many schools publish every alumni donor, regardless of gift size.

Should I Do it Myself?
If you are a fundraiser, using these tools can give you a quick information edge as you qualify and cultivate your donor prospects. But you will find that if you get carried away trying to do all your own donor research two things are likely to happen:

  1. You will spend less time cultivating, asking and stewarding your gifts, which results in fewer gifts; and
  2. You will be much more likely to ask for smaller gifts than you might if you were better informed about your prospect.

Do I think you should know some basic prospect research techniques? You betcha! It’s a life skill these days. Just make sure you spend most of your time with your donors, not behind your computer screen.
(Re-printed from the July 2011 e-news: Information Seeking)