What would happen if researchers adopted the technique of method acting for one week out of every year? What if the researcher “became” a major gift fundraiser? Could this be the kind of training that could differentiate between superstar researchers and all the rest?

Are you familiar with method acting? It’s where the actor stays in the role of the character, even off camera. Jack Nicholson — he starred as Jack Torrance in the Shining, Col. Jessup in A Few Good Men, and too many more to list — was reported to have modestly said, “There’s probably no one who understands method acting better academically than I do, or actually uses it more in his work.”

And I have heard of organizations where the researcher tags along for some donor visits or makes thank you calls to donors. As part of the development department, it’s not unheard of for a researcher to help staff major donor events. I have. All of these interactions shift the researcher out of his or her research mindset and into a donor-facing mindset.

Because whatever research you’re doing – profiles, data mining, prospect lists, verifying a screening – could benefit from one last review by you, but in the mindset or role of major gift officer. When I say “one last review” I mean that there needs to be distance of some kind between performing the work and reviewing the work.

Just as writers will put down their work for a few days or a few weeks, picking it up again with “fresh eyes,” so researchers can put down their work and pick it up again with “major gift officer eyes.”

Reviewing Research through “Major Gift Officer Eyes”

Anyone who routinely reviews donor prospects with talented major gift officers can’t help but to start thinking like one. Imagine that you both have the profiles up on your computers and the major gift officer starts commenting and asking questions in each of the five building blocks of the profile, like this:

1. Institutional Information: Is this the same couple that met while on one of our sponsored donor trips? (Yes, it was, and by golly that level of high affinity changes everything about approaching them for a campaign gift!)
2. Biographical Information: I clicked through to her Twitter account and did you see that in her profile line she describes herself as a “disability advocate, wife, and mother?” I wonder if they have a disabled child! (Obviously, you didn’t read it because you put “none found” under children and didn’t find any connection to your cause beyond her first gift to your organization.)
3. Community Involvement: They gave a million dollars to Sunshine Charity? Really? I wonder what that was about. They’ve only ever given us $1,000 and everything else found shows giving under $5,000. (After tracking down the annual report it turns out it was a typo from the vendor and you need to re-examine the screening capacity rating.)
4. Occupation: His wife is Janita Billingswart? Do you think she’s the celebrity attorney? A name like that, surely… (But you didn’t search her name because the deep relationship has been with the spouse and you were in a hurry.)
5. Wealth and Assets: Can you tell me more about the family limited partnership you mention here? Doesn’t that mean they have a lot of money? (You check it out when you’re off the call and realize it does indicate significant wealth and now you notice it was formed the same year that they sold their first company.)

You might not be able to practice method acting and live the life of your major gift officers to understand them, but you can live their work life vicariously by engaging in frequent conversations about their prospects. It takes dedicated effort, but so does method acting. And you will learn LOADS about doing research better.

Getting Good Without Shock Therapy

It was rumored that Jack Nicholson underwent shock therapy in preparation for his role in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I don’t recommend diving deep into every single research project or you might just go crazy!

Here’s how I described to a client, and an amazing major gift fundraiser, what he could expect from our profiles so he could know when to question us about the work and when he should run off on his own with his questions:

• Our Snap Bios are a quick look, a snapshot, and it is unlikely that we would jump out of our usual process to follow a lead or ask a deeper question about the prospects.
• Our Tactical Briefings are confirming philanthropy and wealth and while we are spending more time and digging deeper, we’re unlikely to wander off following a hunch unless there is an anomaly — unless something looks strange or we want to be sure we are accurate.
• Our Strategic Assessments are the deep dive, following all those questions, untangling ambiguity, and laboriously seeking information not directly related to the prospect, but directly related to the prospect’s philanthropic or wealth story.

Of course, the fewer hours it takes us, the lower the cost, but the less information, too. Sometimes we do get dazzled by a prospect, spend more time, and the inspiration unlocks key information. We love our work and that’s inevitable!

Anything You Do, You Could Do Better

The prospect research field is full of people who are fulfilled in their work because it demands constant learning across, well, everything! We can have confidence in knowing that we don’t know a lot, and this opens us up to learn from everyone, everywhere.

So, even though the examples I’ve given in this article relate to prospect profiles, you could do better in every aspect of your work. Maybe your major gift officer loves Excel and enjoys filtering and sorting a long list of potential prospects for an upcoming trip, but is that the best way to provide the information? Could the process be improved?

If you don’t look at your work product through “major gift officer eyes” you may never know. I’m curious. Aren’t you?

I pivoted my legal assistant career into fundraising and prospect research 22 years ago. Somehow, I’m still in love with the work. Sure, there are brief stints where I fall a little out of love with it, but then I talk to a colleague and we come up with new ideas, or a new tool arrives on the market that shifts how we can perform our work. And I fall in love all over again.

This year for Research Pride month I thought I would share some of my favorite things about Prospect Research Professionals.

Insatiable Learners: When given the opportunity, such as working at a university, researchers do their homework and earn multiple degrees. You might not need a Ph.D. to do prospect research, but I love it that many practitioners have a stack of letters after their names. And if you’re around long enough, you realize that people stumble into the field with those letters already attached, most notably MLIS and JD. How fascinating is that?

Readers and Writers: Karen Osborne and Kate Racculia are more recent examples of fundraising professionals that go seriously all-in to writing. Kate even wrote a novel, Tuesday Mooney Talks to Ghosts, where the protagonist is a prospect research professional! Any mention of authors can’t leave out Cecilia Hogan, who wrote the pioneering text, Prospect Research: A Primer for Growing Nonprofits. And there are so many more books now! Here’s a list of books and bloggers.

Innovators and Change-Makers: Christina Pulawski and John Taylor brought to life the Association for Advancement Services Professionals in 2007 to fill a need in the field. Sharise Harrison was featured in The Chronicle of Philanthropy recently for her groundbreaking work in shifting the culture at her organization to view prospect data differently so as to include more people of color.

People: Sharing a profession with other people is like belonging to a club. For the most part there is a sense of camaraderie and joy in “talking shop” without boring anyone. And there are so many kind, funny, and clever researchers out there. Follow #ProspectResearch on Twitter, join AASP or Apra, attend conferences – connect.

Wishing you another year of continuously falling in love with your work in prospect research!

Additional Resources

• Research Pride: A Common Thread That Binds Us | Patricia (Suzi) Elzie-Tuttle, MLIS | Apra Connections | 3/15/2022 | A wonderful tribute to the prospect research profession with a call to action.
• Prospect Research for Fundraisers: The Essential Handbook | Jennifer Filla and Helen Brown | 2013
• Collection of Prospect Research Books and Bloggers | Prospect Research Institute

You have a strong track-record leading teams. Your fundraising efforts have met or exceeded goal. So why are you struggling so much getting major gifts rolling in your new position? Maybe you have even thrown a good deal of money at the problem by purchasing some data enhancements or predictive scores and you still can’t quite get it to work.

You might even be wondering if other organizations have some kind of major gift fairy dust that they sprinkle over their database to sort out their prospect portfolios!

And maybe they do…

Secret Recipe for Major Gift Fairy Dust

The first step in prospect identification is to find a way to automatically filter or screen new donors as they arrive. Lots of organizations do this by talking to every donor who makes a gift at a certain threshold, such as $100+ or $1,000+. This is good, until it’s not good enough anymore.

Ingredients

The only way to assess your full data base of donors or new donors as they arrive is to define what makes a Best Prospect. To do this, you have to select the right ingredients.

When working with a pool of existing donors, I recommend these ingredients:

Once you understand what the ingredients are, you can now begin to identify those ingredients to create your own major gift fairy dust. There are many choices to make, such as the vendor offering an ingredient or various flavors of the same basic ingredient. I am sure you already have many software companies trying to sell their products to you!

Instructions

In any recipe you have ingredients and then you have instructions. The instructions tell you how to combine everything and turn it into major gift fairy dust. But not everyone succeeds at making a tasty dish or a high-performing major gift prospect list from a recipe. Sometimes it is because the ingredients weren’t of the highest quality and sometimes it is because the instructions assume a certain level of starting experience and knowledge.

For example, one of the best things to happen to me, a very reluctant cook, was Pinterest. I can find all kinds of recipes posted by bloggers and “pinned” to Pinterest. I have food allergies and these bloggers don’t just post ingredients and instructions, they write an entire blog post on how to choose and substitute ingredients, as well as all sorts of additional preparation tips–before they even get to the recipe. This has really taught me how to cook better food for my dietary needs!

When I write up the instructions for turning a combination of ingredients or data points into prioritized prospects, I call it segmentation. I prefer to “flatten” the ingredients into two numbers and present it via some kind of visual, such as the illustration below.

And much like the Pinterest blog post prior to the recipe, my experience has taught me how and when to modify the recipe ingredients and instructions to fit unique scenarios and organizations.

The Prospect Research Professional Chef

In addition to a recipe, baking and cooking takes experience. Identifying prospects and choosing data providers takes experience, too. Sure, anyone can do it, but the results most often reveal exactly how much experience when into it.

How to approach prospect identification is going to vary greatly because organizations are all very different. An organization with a 10-person major gift team is very different from a 100-strong major gift team that has a supporting prospect research department, and both of those are very different from a development officer in charge of a 5-person development team that does everything.

If you decide to embark on a prospect identification project and are not going to hire an experienced professional, you can still use the three ingredients to assess your internal data as well as what external vendors are offering you.

You can ask informed questions, such as the following:

• Do we have affinity markers immediately available from our INTERNAL data (giving data especially!) or can we easily build or buy an affinity marker based on our own data?
• If the vendor is offering EXTERNAL data for affinity, how well does it align with our organization? For example, is affinity for youth causes too broad to be useful to your early intervention programs for pre-school children? Can you have a custom affinity model built?
• Is the data being offered a predictive model (e.g., likelihood to make a major gift) or a data enhancement or append (e.g., largest gift found to others)?
• Exactly what does the ability marker mean? Is it estimated net worth? Is it a gift capacity range over one year or five years?
• If you receive some kind of numerical score, will you be provided with definitions? Such as “80-100 is Very Good” and “60-79 is Good” etc.
• When you receive the data back from the vendor, how will you know which names are the be stand why? Will you be able to filter on a score or data point and relate it back to the database ID number/name of constituent?

Beyond the Recipe

Keep in mind that you can sprinkle all the fairy dust you want, but unless you have the skill to take action, nothing magical is going to happen. On the other hand, if you can recognize and leverage the three main ingredients in major gift fairy dust, and leverage affinity as your “secret sauce,” you will be well on your way.

I know it sounds too simple, and “major gift fairy dust” is a silly way to refer to a best practice, but I’ve seen too many talented development leaders purchase very expensive data only to flounder. There will always be hype around the next and greatest innovation in fundraising, but the fundamentals of what builds strong relationships will stay the same.

If you can focus on the three main ingredients–Affinity (above all), Ability, and Inclination–you can begin to sift through and better understand all of the data purchasing choices that are put in front of you. Because even though data might not be your “thing,” you are a talented fundraiser and leader!

Additional Resources

• Segmentation and Personalization in Fundraising Appeals |John Killoran | Aspire Research Group Fundraising Insights | 2021 | This is a great example of how segmentation to nurture and grow your direct fundraising appeals differs from segmenting for major gifts.
• Can You Spot the HNWIs In Your Database? | Jennifer Filla | 2017
• Net Worth vs. Capacity: What’s The Difference and Why Should You Care? | Jennifer Filla | 2020
• Stupid Is as Stupid Does: On Using Gift Capacity Ratings | Jennifer Filla | 2022

I was talking with a major gift officer and she told me that a couple of years ago, leadership of the major gifts team wanted to push through to a new fundraising goal. Each officer was assigned a fundraising goal that was based on gift capacity ratings that had been recently added to the database through a wealth screening. Spoiler Alert: They came in way under goal that year.

Every day I am thankful that I get to be a prospect research consultant and not a major gifts team leader. It seems to me that it most resembles catching greased pigs!!

Not only must leadership build, train, and manage the staff, but that major gifts team must then build relationships with individuals who possess their own objectives and personalities. Throw in the reality that information technology has been changing very swiftly and it is easy to understand how someone could get sold on a score or rating and forget that all the fundraising fundamentals still apply:

1. Just because someone has a lot of money does not mean they will give big to your organization.
2. Quantifying and rating things like gift capacity and affinity or interest is challenging; not least because the data you need is not always available or collected in your database.
3. The best data can’t bring your team’s skills up to speed or accelerate their adaptation to change.

Should You Even Use Gift Capacity Ratings?

I admit to still being in awe of capacity ratings. After all these years, they still feel magical. Thousands of individual names being ranked in a few hours. And the matching algorithms have gotten better and better, too. I can’t imagine going without wealth screenings and their accompanying gift capacity ratings.

It’s more about what you use capacity ratings with.

You wouldn’t try to bake a cake with only one or two ingredients, would you? And you wouldn’t try to bake a cake without following a recipe – maybe tweaking that recipe from time to time, such as adding instant coffee to chocolate cake? (Yes, I’m all about the cake baking!)

It’s been my experience that every organization is different and as with cakes, recipes lead the way to success. They give you the key ingredients and measure them in relation to one another.

If you are just building your major gifts program, you may only need to segment your prospect pool by capacity rating and RFM scores (recency, frequency, monetary scoring that is based on giving history) to get a really strong start.

If you are working to bridge your major gifts team to much higher fundraising goals, you need a much more robust, ongoing process that is tweaked based on your unique organization and constituency.

And even that more robust process is probably going to do well with gift capacity ratings as one of the pieces.

Keep the Capacity Ratings in Good Company

Machine learning and tech companies focused on the nonprofit sector are really heating up the research space! They promise to deliver a more inclusive and comprehensive approach to fundraising research. But they haven’t made capacity ratings redundant, yet.

Until they do, make sure you keep your capacity ratings in good company. Pair them with insights from your donors’ giving history, any engagement markers in your database, and other stuff you know is important (gift size increasing over time, high lifetime giving, etc.).

And listen to your team members. Sometimes out of the mouths of major gift officers come the most amazing observations. “As soon as I saw she made gifts to those three organizations, I knew she would want to make X gift for $.”

In other words, capacity ratings might seem “stupid” sometimes, but it’s what “stupid” does that matters most. If you pair capacity ratings with other information, you might just break through your fundraising goals!

Additional Resources

• Net Worth Vs. Capacity: What’s The Difference and Why Should You Care? | Jennifer Filla | 2020
• Healthcare Leadership’s $75M Perspective on Prospect Research with Caroline Riseboro | Prospect Research #ChatBytes | Podcast Episode 76
• Why Capacity Ratings are Bunk and What You Can Do About It | Mark Noll | Rhode Warrior Blog | 2014
• Warning! Anyone Can Do Analytics. | Jennifer Filla | 2016

We know that innovation is pretty reliably produced from adversity. When we are comfortable and content there is no pressure to come up with new and better ways of doing things. But when your entire organization suddenly has to go remote, well, you either innovate or sink!

At that moment, it becomes too risky to do things the same way we’ve always done it. Our inhibitions are lowered. We worry less about getting it wrong or embarrassing ourselves and instead we worry more about losing everything.

Did the field of fundraising research experience this lowering of inhibitions and increased risk taking? You bet!

As I reflect on nearly two years of pandemic, I wanted to share with you my experiences with some of the stand out innovators in the fundraising research LEARNING and TRAINING space.

DonorSearch Launched Unbounded

DonorSearch was the first to leap into action. They launched an ambitious, virtual “conference” that was completely free and lasted for many months. It was on a new platform that offered all kinds of ways to interact and provide information.

I wasn’t 100% thrilled with the platform, but I recognized that as the first out in the space, DonorSearch was setting the standard from which others could build. It was because DonorSearch immediately offered interactive content that I could experience and like or dislike aspects of the virtual experience.

And the quality of their speakers and content was (and is) tremendous! I was riveted and immediately wanted to participate.

Apra International All Virtual Conference

The annual Apra Prospect Development conference also moved swiftly to an all-virtual format. I could not have been prouder to be a member of Apra at that conference!

The online website for the conference was incredibly engaging:

• There were opportunities to search who was registered and send them direct messages.
• I could invite people to a zoom meeting on the website.
• Visiting the vendors was simple and intimate – just enter a Zoom room.
• Search capability was (not surprisingly) easy. So, finding a speaker, a session, or a link was easier than in real life. It helped that I could have multiple browser windows open, too.
• The actual sessions took on a whole new dimension with the chat feature. At times the chat was so robust, with so many people, that it was difficult to follow along with the speaker. But fear not! All the sessions could be watched long after the actual conference dates were over.

I researched the platform provider a bit and realized that the price tag on that magnificent experience was not small. I can only hope that an all-virtual signature conference persists as part of Apra’s offerings.  

I speculate that costs overall are indeed lower, and the ability to include so many more people from around the world feels like a critical gain for our profession.

Apra PA All-Discussion Conference

Without access to pricey platform options, could the small Apra chapters compete in the all-virtual space? Yes! Small is nimble and chapters across the U.S. flooded our profession with high-quality content. And having speakers that weren’t super-polished turned out to be a real advantage.

Apra PA showed us that there is no limit to innovating. They adopted a “flipped” conference approach!

Instead of having all of us on Zoom watching talking heads, learning content was provided ahead of time and the Zoom meeting sessions were organized as breakouts where the content was discussed with peers. Content could be in many formats, such as written, graphic, video, or audio.

The results were very intimate, engaging connections with peers around topics of interest. And isn’t that a lot of what we hope for in-person?

Apra FL WINE Downs

My home state of Florida is a special place. As a tourist destination we are surrounded by people who have lowered inhibitions – they are on vacation! When Aisha Maddox of Apra FL began organizing and hosting WINE Downs (Worthwhile Informal Networking Event), it sounded like a fun and informal way to connect with my Florida colleagues. What I did NOT expect were online trivia games!

I’ve always felt that games are a fantastic way to learn about others and can be great for learning content, too. Even though I am horrible at trivia, I happily embarrassed myself with wrong answers for the privilege of getting to know my colleagues in a social setting. The music, laughter, and hearing about people’s families and lives outside of work has been a very meaningful experience.

There’s No Going Back

Now that we continue to face uncertainty with the pandemic, it has become pretty clear that there is no going back to “before COVID.” And I am deeply grateful that there has been a surge in adopting virtual tools such as Zoom, Slack, and file sharing.

Because at the Prospect Research Institute we have always been virtual. We adopted the “flipped” classroom model back in 2014 when we launched. Now the Institute provides both on-demand and live educational opportunities. And, thanks in part to COVID, it has become much easier for people to understand and conceptualize the online experience.

As younger, all-digital generations start entering the workforce I can’t wait to discover some of the innovations that surge generates around technology and human interactions!

But for now, I’m thrilled when most people in a meeting are willing to turn on their video and talk.

Let’s test your wealth instinct and find out if you “get it” or not.

Pretend that your boss comes to you and says: As you know, leadership is taking the company public next year. You can choose how you want to receive your $100,000 annual compensation from the three options below:

1. $25,000 in cash and $75,000 worth of the company’s new stock
2. $75,000 in cash and $25,000 worth of the company’s new stock
3. $80,000 in cash and $0 worth of the company’s new stock

Which one do you choose?

This choice is difficult for you and me!

If the only wealth you have is cash in your bank accounts, maybe some retirement funds like a 401(k), and you are renting or own the home you live in(probably with a mortgage), your options are very limited. Could you survive on $25,000 cash for a year? You are considering the options based on your disposable income.

If you have a dual-income household, a second home, or some reasonably liquid investments that you could cash-in, all three choices might become plausible options. You have disposable income plus additional investment wealth.

I know you know that the $75,000 worth of stock could take off and double or triple in value-or even more. You want that stock!

Now, what if suddenly your parents passed away and you inherited the house they owned for 50 years, which sells for $800,000. Would that make it easier to accept $25,000 in cash with $75,000 in stock?

Of course it would!

And this is the shift in thinking that you need to make when you are researching and cultivating major gift prospects.

You do not want a cash gift.

Check out the asset allocation chart below. This chart is telling you many things, but among them is that in the first quarter of 2021, the high-net-worth individuals (HNWIs) surveyed were holding 24% of all of their wealth in cash and cash equivalents. A cash equivalent is something like a certificate of deposit (CD) or money market account–things that you can very easily turn into cash.

When you ask your donor prospect for a gift, do you want her to think:

Or would you rather ask for a gift of appreciated stock and have her think:

But you shouldn’t just believe me.

What do I know? Instead, you should believe Dr. Russell James who took the time to review a million nonprofit tax returns filed between 2010 and 2015. Numbers don’t lie. Dr. James discovered that nonprofits that received asset gifts raised more money. Check out the figure below for a snapshot of his findings.

Note: If you want to find whether your organization has a history of accepting asset gifts, you can check Schedule Min its public IRS Form 990.

Evaluating your donor prospects for wealth

If you want to grow your fundraising in major gifts, a key strategy is to ask for non-cash gifts. Understanding the asset allocation model from Capgemini featured above allows us to quantify this shift in thinking. We can now estimate the relative size of the cash vs. non-cash wealth held by our donor prospect.

Once you have estimated the value of the cash and non-cash wealth of your prospect, you can better understand how your prospect might view your ask amount relative to those values.

Below is an example of what this allocation looks like if we use the Capgemini asset allocation percentages on someone research has determined has an estimated net worth of $5 million.

Assets	Value
Cash and Cash Equivalents	$850,000
Non-Cash	$4,150,000
Total	$5,000,000

Imagine for a moment that you want to ask the prospect for $250,000. How does that stack up against each of the two categories, cash or non-cash?

Lean-in to the psychology of giving

Why would you want to fight against human nature and continue asking very wealthy donors for cash gifts when you could switch to asking for non-cash and raise more money overall? Lots of reasons. Maybe you feel much more comfortable asking for cash gifts.

I’m suggesting that it’s time to get comfortable with being uncomfortable.

To help you get more comfortable, check out this collection of work by Dr. James for more insights into the psychology of giving and techniques and tactics you can use in your work:

http://www.protopage.com/prospectresearch#Planned_Giving_(Dr._James)

There are those donor prospects where there is simply an overwhelming amount of information. And then there are those prospects whose digital footprint exhibits a strict minimalist aesthetic! I want to tell you a story about the latter.

Identification and Qualification

In the beginning, there was a donor couple. The woman had volunteered with the organization and the total of their three gifts was under $1,000. But, alas, the screening rating popped at $1M to $5M! And so, the prospects were called upon by a development officer (“DO”).

In that first discussion the DO learned about the woman’s volunteering and what her philanthropic interests were. There was so much affinity for the organization’s mission! Off to the prospect research professional for a profile!

Note: In that research request the DO shared the information from her qualification call. This really helped us understand why research was needed.

But their Digital Footprint is… an Outline

At first glance, the prospects are member managers of a hot mess of limited liability companies (LLCs) and there are pretty clear indicators that it is all about real estate.

With care, a list is compiled of companies and real estate owned. There isn’t time to really dive down every rabbit hole, but this is Florida. And the Florida Government-in-the-Sunshine law means that it’s really quite simple to search state incorporation records.

But there is no company website. No news articles or interviews or much of anything about any of those companies or the family. No LinkedIn profiles. No public giving whatsoever. No board service. No foundation. No mention in a church bulletin. No alumni mention. Nada.

(And it takes so long to look for information that doesn’t exist! >>sigh<<)

Incorporation Records and Real Estate Can Yield Clues

But we have those incorporation records and sometimes we can get them to talk–even without advanced interrogation techniques!

For self-made business owners, there is usually a primary business that behaves like a parent to the other LLCs, even if there is technically no legal relationship. Below is an example of our company table:

Company Name	Incorporation Years	Managers	State
Aspire Research Group LLC	2009-Present	Jennifer Filla	FL

And sure enough, there was one LLC with an incorporation date in the early 1990s, while the rest of the companies were incorporated in the 2000s. Also, a rough glance at the types of real estate owned personally and by the various entities was suggestive of a variety of revenue sources.

There were commercial properties such as warehouses, as well as residential addresses. It seemed like they might be owning and renting. I’d guess they are doing some property management as well. The last company incorporated in this year, 2021, had two unknown individuals as member managers, but the prospect was the registered agent for service of legal process.

How can we assess their capacity?

If you have ever performed prospect research, then you know that private company ownership can be difficult to value because there are so few things we can know with any degree of certainty. And here,the couple didn’t even bless us with a company website and corresponding business description. Forget about revenue numbers or employees.

This is where we grabbed our Q-tip and duct tape and built a capacity rating!

We knew one value: Excluding the primary residence, personal and company-owned real estate had a total estimated market value of around $12M. According to the Capgemini World Wealth Report, in 2019 Q1, 15.8% of a HNWI’s household wealth in North America was invested in real estate.

$12,000,000 * 15.8% =$75,949,367 estimated net worth

This rough calculation led us to place the prospects into our Ultra-HNW Wealth Tier, suggesting a gift capacity of $3M to $10M.

Prospect Research Value-Add

We didn’t find a lot of information, but thankfully, the prospects used their home address on the incorporation records and real estate mailing addresses, and they did not hide their identities behind a state like Delaware, which does not require that the LLC member managers’ names be disclosed.

The DO had done a great job of qualifying for philanthropy, interest, and affinity. We found just enough information to make an educated guess on capacity.

The story ends with the DO being handed the profile to create a strategy to make a first significant ask for a gift from the prospects.

If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and waddles like a duck…

Sometimes prospect research professionals get lost in the details. I’ve heard conversations about rigid guidelines for creating “highly defensible” capacity ratings. I propose that prospect research can better support major gifts fundraising if it views the prospect management process as more like a relay race.

• In the story told here, research identified a high-capacity donor–and passed the prospect “baton” to the DO for in-person qualification.
• The DO did a great job of learning what research often cannot, the passions and feelings of the prospect–and then passed the prospect “baton” back to research.
• Research translated the data discovered (minimalist as it was) into a story of wealth–and passed the prospect “baton” back to the DO for a first solicitation.

There are many donor prospects out there in the world who value their privacy, or who otherwise don’t have a huge digital footprint for researchers to discover. That doesn’t mean they aren’t great prospects.

It means we didn’t find a lot of information…

(And it takes so long to look for information that doesn’t exist! >>double sigh<<)

… and we need to better leverage the little bit of information we did find.

By working like a relay team with the DO, we can still uncover and qualify those prospects who don’t have a lot of public data, but who look like a “duck”–who walk and talk like a philanthropic individual with high capacity who cares about our organization and its mission.

There is a shift happening in the world of fundraising research tools. The tools that once felt so incredibly innovative are beginning to feel a bit restrictive. Why are women and minorities consistently overlooked in wealth screenings? And the promise of machine learning has long felt distant and unaffordable.

Beyond the tools, fundraising practices are shifting, too. Diversity, equity, and inclusion are receiving emphasis and are changing the face of our constituencies and maybe even our co-workers, even though it may feel like it’s happening in slow motion.

To place these shifts into context, we need to start at the last major innovations and move forward. My intention isn’t to evaluate specific tools or to cover the field in anything more than very broad strokes. And yet, I still hope to surprise you!

The (brief) history of research tools

The field of prospect research truly began to thrive and grow with some key technological achievements.

1. Relational Databases gave us accessible data
   
   In 1970, E. F. Codd published a research paper while at IBM that described a relational database, which allowed multiple tables to be connected or related to each other by a key field. This meant that tables did not have to contain duplicate data. In 1974 IBM developed a prototype and over the years this has led to continual improvements, such as the customer relationship management (CRM) databases in use today.
   
   No more paper ledgers! Relational databases made the giving and other information we collect on our donors highly accessible.
   
   And this enabled new data mining techniques such as Recency, Frequency, Monetary (RFM), which make it possible to identify the top 20% of donors who give 80% of fundraising revenue.
   
2. The internet exploded
   
   Once the internet became searchable with Google, the world of prospect research became transformed! Sure, there were still paid subscription tools to databases, such as the Who’s Who directories and Dialog, but Google opened up a new level of information to fundraising researchers.
   
   And this opening of the internet in turn was fueled by the digitizing of data. For example, Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings and real estate could now be matched to the donor names in your database. Prospect screening companies were formed and the data sources and the companies’ algorithms improved. In shockingly little time you could discover who made a small gift to you, but had great wealth!
   
3. Social Media gave us personal data
   
   Prospect research was reluctant to accept social media as a valid data source, but folks came around. Once the parallel between LinkedIn and Who’s Who information was made, the debate fizzled. Now we researchers can find as much personal data as donor prospects are willing to make public. And that is a whole lot.
   
   Personality, donor motivations, interests, hobbies, and much more is often revealed!

What is happening now with research tools?

There has been a shift going on in our research tools for years now that has recently been gaining momentum and is completely changing the way I think about our “tools.”

1. Databases are no longer sufficient – we need analytics
   
   This is where you yawn and say, “Really Jen, everyone knows about analytics as a trend!” And it’s true. But to date, the push in research has been to learn Excel, and now there are debates about which analysis software program you should learn, R or Python?
   
   What we need to look out for are nonprofit CRMs that have built-in analytics. It will take time andlot of investment money to present a competitive threat to the behemoth incumbents in the field, but there are new donor CRMs being developed specifically for the nonprofit sector and [spoiler alert!] they have some analytics built right inside.
   
   Take Virtuous CRM. Their CRM product provides RFM data right on the homepage of a constituent record. Companies building software with a focus on the nonprofit sector should know the key stats and activities we want to do with our donor data. But beyond that, there is a growing recognition or remembering of the value of a donor’s history with your organization through giving and other engagement.
   
   Having wealth was never enough, but it feels like we became mesmerized by the wealth screening tools and may have forgotten just how important it is for prospects to have a love for and connection to our organization. The donor CRM is a primary source for this kind of information. Companies like Virtuous CRM understand this.
   
2. BIG data is becoming more accessible–even for little nonprofits
   
   I won’t say it’s happened yet, exactly, but companies are hard at work building models from external BIG data to apply to your organization’s donor CRM. We learned from the wealth screenings that external data, such as SEC filings, can yield tremendous fundraising insights that can be turned into efficient actions.
   
   Machine learning models hold the promise of a new world of external data. Perhaps a world that includes many more people than the traditional wealth screenings.
   
3. Social media is becoming a key donor acquisition strategy
   
   Researchers tend to focus on major gifts, because that’s where the biggest return on investment is. But that may change in some surprising ways. According to NextAfter, donors acquired digitally crossover more easily to multiple-channel giving, and multiple-channel donors give more. And when it comes to being online, social media is where the people are.
   
   Your machine learning company might help you with donor acquisition and retention across all giving levels, as well as data enhancement and major gift prospecting. If the company is leveraging big data for insights, it makes sense that the same company can help you navigate that big data across the gift cycle – especially for your digital first donors.

How can researchers be best positioned for the future of research tools?

There are those who proclaim that you need to learn a program like R or Python to stay relevant, others who insist it’s about developing internal relationship skills to manage people and portfolios, and then there’s me – a prospect research generalist.

If I were to distill a pathway through and among the throng of fundraising research tools, it would be this:

• Know your fundraising. Researchers are fundraisers and it’s key that we understand how relationships with donors are created and maintained. This informs everything!
• Understand the theory behind new tools, how things work, even if you can’t quite execute it in something like Excel or Python. This gives you the perspective to notice how your work process – and the fundraising process – could benefit and achievemore from shiny new tools.
• Make the time to learn about new tools from existing vendors or brand-new companies. This may inspire to you to launch yourself into a specialty like programming, but even if it doesn’t, it improves your chances of getting in on the beta testing level. This translates into big opportunity for lower cost!
• Question everything! How will we use that score to take what action? How is it better than what we use now? There’s a lot of competing companies out there and sales talk is sweet. Your analytical approach to research applies equally to evaluating new research tools. Your organization is counting on it.
  

It’s difficult for us humans to imagine things we’ve never seen or heard of before, but having an open mind is a good start. Donors are not numbers, they are people. And yet, machine learning can provide meaningful insights into the often-elusive indicators such as affinity and engagement.

Will you be able to spot the next best tool? Or will you be the one to say it isn’t possible?

Or will you be the one to share your predictions or tell me I missed something critical or overlooked an important innovation? I’d love to hear from you! Comment here, email, or call.

All of us carry money baggage. We learn attitudes about money from our parents, neighbors, school… everywhere! Growing up in my family, I was told explicitly not to ask my parents about money and especially not about how much my father was paid. One simply did not talk about money.

And when I went to work, this was reinforced. No-one shared salary information.

Why not?

And yet, when I was working for the attorney in charge of providing salary information for a company as part of a legal filing, I saw the salary information for the entire company, including myself and everyone in my department.

It was shocking.

My colleague, one of the most impressive legal assistants I’ve ever known with the most years of company service, was the lowest paid. She also happened to be a woman of color. And I knew that she came to our department because in her previous role she was overlooked for promotion at least TWICE to people less qualified.

I’ve never felt the same about salary.

Inequity is baked into the system. Human Resource departments create structures to justify company wages with salary bands and any other manner of objective-sounding techniques to make executives feel okay that people of color, women, and other minorities are consistently paid less.

The numbers don’t lie.

So, when AFP president, Mike Geiger, announced that AFP would require job postings to provide salary information I was THRILLED! It is a welcome step toward shining a light on how companies pay all people. It automatically puts a floor on how low the offering salary can be.

And yet, recently in the Chronicle of Philanthropy, Vincent Robinson, founder and managing partner of the 360 Group, an executive search company, wrote an op-ed that the #ShowTheSalary effort was misplaced. In the op-end he writes: “I’ve counseled numerous candidates who, when informed of the salary range for a position, ask whether they should even apply because the role paid substantially more than they currently earned, and they didn’t want to waste anyone’s time.” His primary argument is that too many “diverse candidates” place such a low value on their work that they would stop applying for jobs that paid too much.

I can’t help but be offended.

Yes, lots of people who are systematically oppressed and abused are paid painfully low salaries for important work. Plenty of them internalize a low self-worth. But preventing those who want, and are ready, for higher salaries from having the opportunity to see and know what the market value for their work actually is, feels particularly cruel.

How many generations need to repeat these painfully low salaries because salary amounts are withheld?

If you have ever learned that a colleague with comparable or fewer qualifications is paid quite a bit more than you, you probably experienced feelings of betrayal. Because it is betrayal. And if you cross the salary secrecy line and call it out to a supervisor, well, the reply might be “you really need to focus on more than the number” or “try to get yourself more exposure.” In other words, it’s your fault. You didn’t ask for more at the start and/or your money demands are culturally vulgar. If you have trouble paying your electricity bill, you have only yourself to blame.

I’m sure there are bosses out there who immediately apologize and demand you receive more pay, but I’m going to go with my gut on this and say it’s not a common reaction.

Salary secrecy firmly places the power in the hands of the employer, who deliberately withholds this information to its benefit. If withholding the information did not benefit the employer, it wouldn’t happen. But it does happen.

And it does benefit the employer, especially at the expense of those who are the most vulnerable and worst-placed to negotiate a higher salary–the diverse candidates.

I will stop preaching now.

I have been guilty of narrowing the candidate pool in a different way. In the past I have hired contractors and my sole employee through my close network. Mr. Robinson may be misguided on salary disclosure, but he is spot on in other respects, and it is time that I took some of his excellent advice:

• “Don’t stop looking until your candidate pool is diverse.
• Go beyond mainstream job posting platforms.”

As it happens, my firm, Aspire Research Group LLC, is hiring an executive assistant. I hope you’ll share the posting widely!

Executive Assistant Position: https://www.aspireresearchgroup.com/careers/

Additional Resources

• Collecting Courage: Joy, Pain, Freedom, Love | Editors, Nneka Allen, Camila Vital Nunes Pereira, and Nicole Salmon | 2020 | This book is a collection of stories documenting racism and survival by 14 accomplished Black fundraisers working in charities across North America.
• The ‘Show the Salary’ Campaign Is the Wrong Battle for Achieving Nonprofit Workplace Diversity | Vincent Robinson | The Chronicle of Philanthropy: Opinion | 2021
• Disclosing Salaries Is Good for the Fundraising Profession and Society as a Whole | Mike Geiger | The Chronicle of Philanthropy: Letter to the Editor | 2021
• Nonprofit ‘Salary Secrecy’ Targeted in the Name of Pay Equity | Drew Lindsay | The Chronicle of Philanthropy | 2021 | Paywall
• 4 Reasons It Pays to Share Salary Ranges, According to Companies That Do | Samantha McLaren | LinkedIn Talent Blog | 2019
• Exploring the Role of Gender and Race in Salary Negotiations | Chelsea D. Hightower, Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College | 2019 | “Thus, there is evidence that women negotiators tend to receive multiple forms of social and economic punishment (i.e., backlash) for engaging in behavior that is inconsistent with stereotype-based expectations of women in the context of salary negotiations, including lower offers, decreased likeability and share ability, and declined requests for pay increases.”

In the 1980s and into the 1990s, prospect research was a hunter-gatherer task. We went to libraries and gathered, and maybe summarized, lots of information about our prospects. Peer review – when social peers such as campaign committee members, reviewed prospect lists — was the best way to identify and prioritize campaign major gift prospects.

Flash forward and information technology has catapulted us into an almost unrecognizable space. We now have data modeling scores at our fingertips together with external wealth data matched directly to our prospect names – thousands upon thousands of names – within hours. Machine learning models are telling development officers when to reach out to donors and writing the first email draft!

Conversation among fundraising research professionals now inevitably includes a discussion of analytics and machine learning. Should I learn Python or R or SPSS? Will I be made irrelevant if I don’t know how to build a predictive model?

But before you or your staff sign up for data science or programming classes on Coursera, consider for a moment where the gaps in this growth are occurring and if there might be a better fit in a “gap” role.

Prospect Research Generalists Have (Validated) Value

Harvard Business Review published an article by Scott Berinato in early 2019 titled “Data Science and the Art of Persuasion.” In the article Berinato states that for-profit companies have been disappointed with the results of their investment in data scientist talent. Why isn’t the investment yielding better business results?

Berinato argues that this is because processing the data to extract insights only takes you halfway to realizing gains. The final leg of the race is communicating what these insights mean for the business. This holds true for nonprofit organizations, too.

Who might be on staff that understands much about the information technology and is good at communicating how development can take action on the insights to raise more money?

Why your friendly prospect researcher, of course!

The prospect research generalist is frequently the person who enjoys bridging between the IT department responsible for database maintenance and the development team responsible for using the database to fundraise, or creating profile masterpieces that tell the story of how a prospect’s complex financial wealth and giving translates into a gift cultivation strategy for your organization.

If this sounds like you or your staff member, you might be or have a diamond in the rough!

Mind the Gap | Training your way to deliver

As you look ahead at the future of your development department, who on staff will be able to understand the data insights and be able to communicate and persuade top leadership? What kinds of skills will that person need?

In a recent Master Class at the Prospect Research Institute, we considered how to present wealth screening results to skeptical leadership. One new researcher shared how the screening ratings were in their database, but not being used because they weren’t helpful.

We walked through a presentation that blended the wealth rating with an affinity rating to produce five distinct prospect segments. The presentation used words and graphics related to the possible uses of each segment and provided some summary data to demonstrate the “lost” dollar potential. We then discussed how this could apply to development officer portfolio assignments.

For this new researcher, this was the missing piece! It is also the piece most unlikely to be provided by the vendor supplying these valuable data insights.

Translating the data insights into action often follows best practices in the field and this is readily taught. However, presenting insights for leadership decision-making requires some additional skills:

Skillfully apply known psychological principles of persuasion and negotiation. Using persuasive techniques is not equal to being manipulative or misleading. It does mean accepting human psychology and creating an environment your audience will relate to. Seek out sales and marketing training to increase your skill level.

Present with confidence. Unfortunately, confidence is not something that can be trained, but it can be deliberately cultivated. Learn and practice presenting, writing, and storytelling. You will become comfortable with being uncomfortable, which is at least half of the battle!

Tell stories from data. This is probably the most important “bridging” skill. This combines an understanding of the data insights with the skill of translating that into a relatable story. It means doing things like using words and pictures – not just graphs and charts – to explain potential impact, such as creating multiple scenarios.

Managing Change

Prospect research is often a role that provides recommendations without the authority to demand implementation. We have to navigate and negotiate across multiple areas in our organization, such as IT, development operations, fundraising, leadership, and others.

Researchers have taken various pathways of career development, including development operations, data science, frontline major gifts, and executive leadership. The insatiable curiosity that drops us into the field sometimes leads us in and around or even completely out of the field. Kate Racculia became a successful mystery novelist!

So, even though the field of prospect research and fundraising is changing rapidly as technology transforms our personal and professional lives, you can manage that change by evaluating your strengths – the skills and talents you enjoy and are good at – against the trends in the field to plan for your continuing education.

And you might just become the prospect research persuader of the future!

Additional Resources

• Data Science and the Art of Persuasion | Harvard Business Review | 2019
• Master Classes at the Institute | Research Focused Membership | Prospect Research Institute
• Can Gravyty get development officers to make more prospect discovery visits? | #ChatBytes & Learning Edge Blog | 2019
• Prospect Research Poised for Leadership? You Bet! | Jennifer Filla | 2019
• Persuading The Uncooperative: A Tale of Influence | Jennifer Filla | 2020