Category Archives: Resource Links

Curious About Canada? A Primer for Prospect Researchers Who Don’t Own Hockey Sticks

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Guest post by Preeti Gill

On this April morning, it’s -5 Celsius and the snow is blowing lightly.

I saunter in to my local Timmies, order a double double and a honey crueller, drop a few loonies on the counter and sit down for a while. It is tax time and I need to netfile before the CRA deadline. I look up from my keyboard and there’s Tony, the local hockey sensation, carrying his pet beaver on his shoulder…

Eh?

Oh, Canada, where donughts (not donuts), yoga pants and timed tweets were perfected. The land where conservative fiscal policy helped our big five banks cushion Canadians (somewhat) from the economic downtown of 2007/08.

I find that where we’re from makes us exotic, especially for other Prospect Research professionals who are always on the lookout for new resources.  When Jen and I brainstormed around blog ideas, she seemed intrigued by my Canadianness.

“How far is Ottawa from Toronto?” she asked this Vancouverite who is ill-equipped to comment on any Ontario-related matters.

What I can offer is a quick primer on today’s Canada for Prospect Researchers outside my homeland, strong and free.  Here you’ll find some interesting “Timbits” about what’s new and where to access information about your friendly Canuck prospects and donors.

We are accomplished

Our Government hands out accolades to everyday and high-profile brave and successful Canadians.

Our peers also honour each other.

We are diverse

Immigration is primarily driving population growth. Environics intelligence notes that in our major urban centres, Toronto and Vancouver, nearly half of the population identify as members of a visible minority group. So the minorities are fast becoming the majority.

Canadian Immigrant magazine profiles successful new Canadians in business and other areas.

We are rich

  • Well, they are (not me) –> Canadian Business Rich 100 2014 [List]
  • The left-leaning Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives studied the wealth gap in Canada and discovered that the wealthiest 86 Canadians could purchase an entire province today. [News release]
  • How much did Canada’s top 100 CEOs get paid last year? The Globe & Mail is due to update this list with 2013 figures soon. [List]

We give back in a big way

  • The late Doc Seaman left $117 million from his estate to the Calgary Foundation last year. It’s the largest ever gift to a Canadian community foundation.  (Did I mention we’re getting older, as well?)
  • The Slaight family gave $50 million to a consortium of five hospitals in Toronto.
  • An impressive 13.3 million Canadians volunteer 2.1 billion hours, according to Volunteer Canada.
  • KCI provides an addictive scroll of recent Canadian giving by individuals, corporations and foundations.
  • Blackbaud’s new Giving Index provides a monthly snapshot of our generosity. (Things are looking up.)

We are social

…but slightly more conservative in our approach to shameless self-promotion!

  • There are 8 million+ LinkedIn users, as of 2013. [Infographic]
  • Twitter opened a Canadian branch in Toronto primarily to drive advertising and sales.
  • Planning timed tweets? You may be using HootSuite which was born in Vancouver and is rapidly expanding, thanks to securing $165 million in financing.
  • Can’t get enough of Canada? Consider attending the upcoming APRA-Canada conference in Toronto this fall. This is a highly-anticipated and well-organized biennial conference with a focus on Canadian-based research resources, issues and trends.

About Preeti Gill

Preeti-2Preeti Gill is passionate about all things prospect research, pipeline management and charity capacity-building. She works at Canada’s largest community foundation in Vancouver and blogs at Sole Searcher [preetigillyvr.blogspot.ca]. With true patriot love, she welcomes social contact here and there:

Top Secret! How to Bulk up your Prospect Pool

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HappyKeySMIn this article I’m going to share the secrets of finding great prospects. Maybe you’re one of those fundraisers who is always reading the Business Journal scouting for a lead, but they don’t pan out. Do you wonder how those other organizations pull in the big gifts? Or maybe you’re new and all the best prospects are assigned to senior fundraisers. You can get great prospects too!

If you read a lot of blogs (like I do) now is where you get skeptical. Is she just going to give me theory I already know (and hasn’t yet helped me find good prospects) or will I get at least a couple of nuggets I can actually use? I’m aiming for the latter. The “trick” is that you still have to work hard!

Fundraising research theory tells us that you need to know who you are looking for so you can spot them. We use jargon like linkage, ability and affinity. And there are tools that give you a competitive edge with that. But you can do it even without bright, shiny tools.

The First Thing…

The first thing any good fundraiser (and prospect researcher) needs to do is learn what it looks like to be wealthy. Watching soap operas may seem like a good education here, but much better is reading through some of the wealth reports like the Knight Frank Wealth Report 2014. You’ll find links for other reports in the sidebar on your right.

And the second first-thing-any-good-fundraiser-needs -to-do is get in front of people, especially donors. You should read and get in front of donors at the same time. Start with known donors because they are the most likely to give (again) and it’s always better to get a gift, right?

Call, visit, and read.

When you are reading about the wealthy at the same time as you visit prospects you’ll start making the connections. When the prospect talks about how he and his wife are taking classes in gemology and he has a watch collection, you’ll remember what you read about this being an investment hobby for the very wealthy. And when a different prospect brags about taking regular trips to Europe on mileage points you’ll recognize that what you thought were luxury vacations probably aren’t.

You can do that without any tools except your eyes and ears. Well, I guess you need to use your mouth to place the phone call…and, okay, guide the conversation. But you get it, right? Recognizing the wealthy – the truly wealthy – takes an education.

Get Your Toolbox Dirty

Getting an education on spotting the wealthy still isn’t likely to fill your prospect pool with GREAT donors – those with linkage, ability and affinity. If you have tools that assign ratings to the prospects in your database, use them! Don’t be discouraged if it doesn’t work out perfectly the first few times.

For example, you might pull a report of people who rate high for ability and likelihood to make a gift, but find most won’t take your phone call. You may need to add additional criteria depending on your organization. Maybe it’s “donor within the past two years” or “attended an event in the past two years” or some other criteria that makes it more likely they will let you visit with them.

Keep track of your efforts so you can repeat what works best. And, yes, this does mean you will have to make a lot of phone calls that end in “no thank you I don’t want a visit”.

It’s the same even if you don’t have tools that provide ratings. Without tools you have to get more of an education. You might use a free tool like the Washington Post’s interactive map** of the nation’s super zips to identify wealthy zip codes to search for in your donor database and combine that with “donor within the past two years” or other criteria that suggest a “warmness” toward your organization.

The Secret Weapon

If you are really lucky, you have a trained prospect researcher on staff. Use all your fundraising powers of relationship building to get this prospect research wizard on your side!

HOT TIP: your researcher is likely to get the most excited about searching out top prospects if you reward her with feedback from your calls and face-to-face visits.

With a prospect researcher on your team you are more likely to out-produce even seasoned professionals in the race for fundraised dollars. Really, really!

…and if you can’t support a trained prospect researcher full-time, you can always outsource. Just sayin’!

**Julie, Prospect Research Analyst in Pennsylvania and Groundbreaking Student at the Prospect Research Institute, shared this fantastic resource with the class!

Did you get a nugget or two?

I hope you found a useful tip you can apply in your office. Maybe you have great suggestions you’d like to share with others. Please comment and share!

Jenz Favorite Wealth Reports

Watch out Prospects! Got a Photo? Gotcha!

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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

Join the Relationship Mapping Workgroup:  Click Here to Sign Up

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

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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.

Other Posts You Might Like

Why Use a Researcher When There’s Google?

3 Actions That Demonstrate Your High Prospect Research IQ

* “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)

Are You Making These 5 Donor Research Mistakes?

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Whether you are a prospect researcher or a front-line fundraiser, you need to find accurate and relevant information about your donor prospects. As an individual living in the information-age, you need to avoid data pitfalls. How well are you doing this? Check out these five donor profiling mistakes to find out.

1.  Misleading Estimates
We often use estimates when reporting on our prospect’s assets. Zillow.com gives us a Z-estimate on the value of residential real estate. Dun & Bradstreet gives us an estimate of private company earnings. The Forbes’ Rich Lists provide estimates of net worth. Don’t make the mistake of presenting these figures as true or exact. Be sure to round your numbers. For example, use $433,000 instead of $432,951. Exact numbers often mislead people to believe they are true, even when you state them as estimates. And Forbes cannot know Bill Gates’ true net worth (net worth = all assets minus all liabilities) unless Bill personally discloses that information.

2. Portraying a Secondary Source as Primary
A primary source is the original producer of the information, like the tax-assessor’s office for real estate ownership or the university that bestowed a degree. A secondary source is someone else who tells you about the information, like an online website reporting on real estate sales or an online data aggregator listing an honorary degree for your prospect. As you might imagine, newspapers and magazines are usually secondary sources as well. Be suspicious of secondary sources. When you record the information, especially if you only found it in one place, cite the source so everyone knows it is not primary. For example, you might lead the sentence with the following: In 2004 The New York Times reported that Pauline Prospect…

3.  Not Checking Self-Reported Information
Who’s Who has been a fabulous source of information for decades, and it is all self-reported information not verified by an independent source. With the popularity of social media and the ease of online publication, our prospects often create a lot of public information about themselves. Be careful to disclose the source of your information if you cannot verify the information elsewhere. Use an asterisk (*) or quote within the text to alert the reader the information is not confirmed. For example, sometimes the data is just too dated to be confirmed online. You might provide a footnote like this one: *These volunteer leadership positions were provided in various biographies, but were not otherwise able to be confirmed.

4.  Overlooking the Deep Web
The majority of the public uses search engines to find information online, but sometimes we need to visit a specific website to access the information in the “deep web”. For example, if you want to check that your airplane flight is on time and that you are still on it, you must visit the airline website and search its database. You cannot search on Google to find this information. As prospect researchers, we need to know when to visit a website directly, especially to find primary or original sources of information. Examples include political contributions, real estate data, incorporation records, and public company filings. Start collecting key links and link lists.

5.  Omitting Dates
We scan through hundreds of data sources to extract relevant information about our donor prospects. It can be easy to forget to check the date of the source. Keeping track of the chronology of the data you are collecting is critical to providing an accurate picture. For example, you might come across information confirming your prospect’s occupation only to discover the source is dated five years ago. It can also be critical to know that the multi-million dollar named endowment was only last year.

Online search sources and methods change swiftly. Stay curious and keep reading!

Some other post you might find helpful:

How to Find Giving History
Can You Really Trust Prospect Research?
What I Like About Google

We're Writing a Book!

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Helen Brown of The Helen Brown Group and I have just signed a deal with John Wiley & Sons to write Prospect Research for Fundraisers: The Essential Handbook.  We’re thrilled!

This book is going to be handy for every single front-line development officer, from the solo fundraiser in a one-person shop to the VP for Advancement overseeing a large university research department.

We’re going to highlight the successful partnerships, the innovative ground-breakers and the hair-tearing learning experiences, and our findings just may surprise you.

If you’ve ever wondered…

…then this book is for you!

We’re interviewing fundraisers and researchers to gain lots of perspectives, and the book will be chock-full of case studies and examples.  We still have some space, so if you’d like to be featured for your great front-line/research collaborations, let us know!

Visit www.Research4Fundraisers.com and sign-up to be included in book announcements, or email questions or comments to  me directly at: jen at aspireresearchgroup.com. I’m looking forward to hearing from you!

Mission Brilliant Podcasts

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Karen Eber Davis is a consultant on a mission to ensure fully resourced, creative and effective nonprofit organizations. On her website she features some free resources including her Mission Brilliant Podcasts. These podcasts are interviews with experts on topics such as events, tax, auctions, using video …and even prospect research.

Check out her podcasts and I bet you’ll find something relevant to your organization!

What I like about Google Searching

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"Sherlock" Kate goes Google

As a new prospect researcher with Aspire Research Group I am constantly reading and learning new techniques. I recently came across a very helpful document on the internet: Google and Beyond: Making the Most of Search Engines for Prospect Research by Steven Hupp. He explains many useful search options within Google Search and expands upon the topic to speak about other search engine and meta search engine options. I thought I would share the search techniques that I found most useful while reading his presentation.

When using Google Search, you can use the ordinary Google search box or click the Advanced Search link near the box. I am describing how to use the everyday Google search box.

Using Quotes
The first advanced operator (otherwise known as useful thing to help make your searching more productive) is one that most people who have used Google already know about. When searching for a prospect (Jane Doe) put her name in quotes: “Jane Doe”. This weeds out all the search results that have Jane and Doe but not together. I use quotes for all the known combinations of the donor prospect’s name (e.g., Jane Doe, Jane E. Doe, Jane Evermand Doe)

The Asterisk
You can also use the asterisk with quotes. If you put “Jane Doe * Pennsylvania”, the * acts as a wild card and will produce search results that include all Jane Doe “any word at all” Pennsylvania. This can be helpful if you are not sure where in Pennsylvania a prospect lives or want to find all the places she might be involved within the state.

The Minus Sign
Another advanced operator that can be very time-saving is the minus sign (-). When you are searching a prospect’s name and it is relatively common or there is another specific person who is not your prospect who keeps showing up and taking over all the search results, simply put “Jane Doe” –ski ball and all the ski ball results will go away.

Domain Search
One can also use Google search to look specifically at a single website. Site searching looks like this: “Jane Doe” site: aspireresearchgroup.com. This will produce search results that only include Jane Doe’s name when it shows up on the website in question.

Type of File
The final search function that Mr. Hupp mentions that I think could be really helpful to people doing prospect research is the filetype search. In order to do this search type: “Jane Doe” filetype: pdf (or whatever file type you want) and the Google search results will only include documents of that particular file type where Jane Doe is mentioned. This would be particularly useful when used with PDF documents, as so often they include foundation reports and donor lists.

Happy Searching!
By using these tips on more productive Google searching, I hope that your searches will become less like searching for a needle in a haystack and more like searching for a colorful drinking straw in a haystack. 😀

Go Ask Aspire
And of course you can always ask Aspire Research Group to find your donor prospect in the haystack for you! We provide some of the most thorough donor prospect profiles in the business! Click here for more information.

Estimating Hedge Fund Manager Compensation

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Kate is detailed and thorough and I know you won’t be disappointed with her first article on Estimating Hedge Fund Manager Compensation. We have added it to Aspire Research Group’s library of free articles here.

Kate Rapoport officially signed on in March as our new research associate. From time to time she will write about solutions to various research questions she encounters.

She wrote her debut blog post about Millenial Donors. Check it out here.

Research 101 Workshop in Tampa

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Want to know where to look for information online? Do you wonder if you are asking for the largest gift amount appropriate? Maybe you want to understand how prospect research fits into fundraising and how to leverage it to maximize your fundraising?

APRA Florida has teamed up with the Nonprofit Leadership Center of Tampa Bay to answer your questions with a Prospect Research 101 course the morning on the first day of the APRA Florida annual conference on May 19, 2011. Click here for more info about Research 101 and click here for more info about the conference.

I am so excited to be presenting the Research 101 Workshop with my friend and colleague, Debbie Menoher, Director of Research for the University of Florida Foundation. During her tenure, UF completed an $850 million dollar capital campaign, and UF is currently in a $1.5 billion dollar campaign.  She is also one of the founding members of the APRA Florida chapter!

The conference and workshop will be held at The Children’s Board in downtown Tampa. Workshop cost is $59 and conference is $125 for two days. The theme this year is The New Philanthropists: Prospecting in the 21st Century.   

I will be presenting at the workshop and attending the conference. If you are in Florida, I hope you will too!