Category Archives: Profiles

Watch out Prospects! Got a Photo? Gotcha!

Do you know how it is when you find a new tool and suddenly it appears EVERYWHERE?! This is how I feel about relationship mapping. Ever since I purchased a subscription to Prospect Visual, I have started to notice different relationship mapping techniques and applications all over the place. My recent quest for facial recognition searches on photos is a case in point.

My typical nonprofit client doesn’t have a huge warehouse of internal data and often feels an urgency to add to its current donor pool to meet special fundraising initiatives. Relationship mapping holds such promise for identifying prospect gold in uncharted territories! Or does it? Yet?

My feel for the technologies involved is that it is early days. Some of what is currently being commercialized could be easily disrupted by what we might now consider ancillary or “extra” services. Facial recognition is a good example.

Technologies like facial recognition are both shockingly advanced and woefully inadequate. Most things start out expensive and, especially with technology, can become affordable in a remarkably short period of time. Here’s hoping that happens with facial recognition. Unless of course you are searching on me!

Here’s how my facial recognition quest began. I was working on a difficult prospect assignment. Not many donor lists out in the public domain in this particular city, and board members with limited profiles and middle-income wealth. And then I stumbled on a Flickr account with gala pictures from a past event of a similar organization. Eureka!

But no captions on the photos. And I am not personally familiar with the who’s who of that city. Bummer! Or is there a way? To find out I consulted the best talent around – the research list-serv hosted by APRA – and received two good sources:

Google Images

Did you know that you could search for other images using an existing image? You can! And it did make good *exact* matches to find pages where my picture was located (because, of course, I tested it on myself first). But when it came to similar matches…wildly differing pictures appeared. But, ahem, it did find one of Julia Roberts, which I agree is very similar to mine.

TinEye.com

This site seemed so promising, but it didn’t find any matches on my photo, which was disappointing.

These sites were not enough to help me identify the pictures on that Flickr account. But apparently there is some seriously powerful software available that has the potential to make a prospect researcher’s dream come true and find out way more than just linkage or connection.

Social media maven and all-around talented researcher, Lori Hood Lawson, pointed out a 60 Minutes episode that demonstrated the power of some maturing technologies – and has me even more determined to vote at every possible opportunity!

Check out the 60 Minutes episode here: http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=50153673n

With the proliferation and popularity of photos and videos all over the public domain, it creates an opportunity not currently considered in the text-based products such as Prospect Visual and Relationship Science that are on the market for nonprofits right now.

Relationship mapping and other prospect research techniques often follow behind competitive intelligence and other for-profit efforts. The uses are similar, but not the same, and as prospect researchers, we often find ourselves getting “creative” to make products work for us. However, with the nonprofit industry growing to such a powerful size, we might see a shift.

But don’t worry donors, prospect researchers have a code of ethics we take incredibly seriously!

Other Articles You Might Like: Relationship Mapping for New Prospects

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Questions? Want to talk about this post? Call Jen Filla at 727 202 3405 or email jen at aspireresearchgroup dot com.

5 Tips for Finding Your Prospect’s Children

Knowing whether a donor prospect has children is a critical piece of information, but even more important for planned giving prospects. According to a study by Russell N. James III, J.D., Ph.D., Assistant Professor at the University of Georgia*, the absence of grandchildren as an indicator of likelihood to make a planned gift trumped even giving history – by a wide margin. Yes, go ahead and read that sentence again!

After those findings were presented at AFP’s International Conference I received multiple inquiries asking if there was a way to append child relationships to the donor database. Thank goodness the answer is “no”! I’m not confident that a centralized database of familial relationships is in our best interest generally. But it sure would be a powerful piece of information in our ability to predict inclination to give.

Whether you are a frontline fundraiser or a dedicated prospect researcher, there are a few ways to tease out information about children when it might not otherwise be obvious.

1.  Biographical Sources

The first places to look are biographies, obituaries and wedding notices – any place where family information is described. Sometimes it is tucked at the end of the executive’s company biography and may or may not include names. Sometimes the Who’s Who listing is detailed. Other times a search engine might find a genealogy page for your prospect’s family.

2.  In the News

Many of you have access to newspaper and other news databases online with the use of your public library card. Other news articles show up in search engine results. This is often a good place to find references to children and grandchildren.

3.  Search on Address

I like to use Lexis Nexis for Development Professionals (LNDP) and perform a “People” search using only the home address – especially when the prospect has lived there for a long time. But you can also use a site like www.switchboard.com and do a reverse search by address. Any search that will give you a list of the names of the people who have been associated with that specific address is useful. The bonus from the LNDP search is that those addresses are referenced against voter’s registration and other sources and a birth year is often included in the search results. This gets me closer to uncovering how likely those associated names are to being children, instead of other family members.

4.  Giving and Private Schools

When a prospect gives regularly to a private school, especially one from which s/he did *not* receive a diploma, I like to perform a search in Google of the school’s website. You can use the Google Advanced Search form, or type in your own. It looks like this:  LastName site:schoolname.edu   Many times I have found likely children’s names, and sometimes even grandchildren who are attending or have attended that school.

5.  Social Media

If your prospect is active on Facebook, Twitter, or other social media websites, you might be able to tease out family relationships. Many times the prospect has tight privacy controls, but it is surprising how much can still be discovered in the public domain. I have even encountered prospects who keep detailed, and very public, blogs online.

Once I have found a likely child’s name, I have often been rewarded by doing a couple of searches on only the child’s name. The younger generation is more comfortable sharing online and the child, especially if post high school, might share parent names and pictures more publicly. This helps us with making an accurate match, but we need to be careful when approaching the donor prospect.

Children are special and protected relationships, and the last thing we want to do is make the donor prospect feel like we are stalking her with our prospect research techniques! Without trust there will be no gift. Because of this, we as fundraisers need to be skilled at opening the conversational door to allow the prospect to tell us what we already know.

There is always room for error when we search for information anonymously. If you are a prospect researcher working with a new frontline fundraiser, it is worth having a conversation with him about how important it is to allow the prospect to confirm the information we find.

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* “Causes and correlates of charitable giving in estate planning: A cross-sectional and longitudinal examination of older adults”, a study conducted by Russell N. James III, J.D., Ph.D., Assistant Professor at the University of Georgia and published in 2008 (data from 1996-2007 collected by the University of Michigan Health and Retirement Study)

Top Tips for Everyone: Power Searching with Google

Kate Rapoport, Research Associate

In July I attended an online class Google offered called “Power Searching with Google.” The class reminded me of a bunch of tricks to Google searching, and taught me some new ones as well.  Here are a few that I think will be useful for prospect researchers.

Patent searching

If the prospect that you are researching has been involved in research and you want to gather information on what patents she may hold, Google can help with that. On the left hand panel in the search page, under the word “Shopping” click on the word “More”.  The list will expand and you will see “Patents”. Now you can search for your prospect’s name and Google will find patents that contain that name.

Site and Filetype Operators

These operators allow you to narrow your search significantly. The site operator confines your search to one website or domain. For example:

“Jazzy Jay Jefferson” Site:Stanford.edu

…would produce only results that included Jazzy Jay Jefferson on the Stanford.edu website.

“Jazzy Jay Jefferson” Site:.edu

…would find every instance of Jazzy Jay Jefferson on every website that ended in “.edu”.

The filetype operator confines your search to a type of file. For example:

“Jazzy Jay Jefferson” Filetype:pdf

…would produce only results that include Jazzy Jay Jefferson and are PDF documents. (Think: online donor recognition reports!)

Date Range Limiting

If your prospect created a great deal of news in 2008 because of a controversy that you already have sufficient information about and you are now only interested in search results that give you information about your prospect from 2009 to the present, Google offers date range limiting. On the left hand panel of the search page at the bottom is the option “Show search tools.” Once clicked on, the first option is for date range. I can search SlideShare founder “Rashmi Sinha”, click “Show search tools”, select “Custom range”, enter 2009 to 2012, and receive search results from that time frame only.

Search Translated Foreign Pages

If your prospect is an immigrant from or has an interest in a company from another country, you can try to find more information by using the Translated Foreign Pages search function. Type in your search keywords, go to the left hand panel, select “Show Search Tools”, and then select “Translated Foreign Pages”. This will bring up searches for your prospect in available translated pages. You can customize the languages you wish to look through at the top of the search page once you have made the search request.

Conversions

This one is clearly not just for prospect researchers. I can never remember the correct ways to convert feet into meters, for example. Google has a really neat tool that does that for you. Enter “16 feet in meters” into the search box and it immediately gives you the answer (4.8768, just in case you were curious). You can use Google to convert any measurement as long as you use the formula “Number units in units.”

I hope you found these top tips informative, or at least a helpful refresher!

About the Author, Kate Rapoport:

Kate graduated from Smith College with a B.A. in Women’s Studies. She began her career in non-profit administration, became a mother and now, at Aspire Research Group LLC, applies her intelligence and curiosity to preparing prospect profiles that tell the stories that lead to major gifts.